“Hey.” The little boy’s hot wet fingers knead Ivy’s arm.
Other solar crew voices are now murmuring and snickering like frolicking background music. The term “Btus” is repeated many times in squeaky voices, voices that normally discuss teddy bears. Well, maybe not that young. How about Little League scores? Ivy sneaks a peek at the world’s best cook. Bonnie Loo’s shirt has been changed since breakfast to a fresh soft-looking pink with the Settlement’s trademark embroidery, but the large breasts and dark nipples and surrounding areolas clearly defined against the fabric still make her a cheap show.
Ivy tries some pasty stuff that looks like cheese mixed with raw chive. She chews . . . yes, cheese and chive . . . nods toward the various solar crew kids who are explaining more of their theories and some details on their alternative energy projects. In real school terms, they are mixing their current events class with industrial arts. And philosophy. And intro psych. All mixed and mooshed. Oh phew. But it’s their ZEAL that gives Ivy the creeps. A few facts wouldn’t bother her at all. A few facts. Short and sweet, like one placid kid at a time at the chalkboard.
Bonnie Loo’s voice is still advising the pregnant Dee Dee about the perils of dognapping.
Ivy’s eyes slide over toward that part of the porch again.
Pregnant Dee Dee has been chortling with great feeling over Bonnie Loo’s worries. “Tell Dad that!”
Ivy can’t see the dog now. It must be under one of the tables or headed over through one of the open shop doors. Maybe the kitchens.
“I don’t tell Willie Lancaster anything,” Bonnie Loo says disgustedly. Then she laughs. “When’d he ever listen to sane people?”
Ivy’s ears REALLY perk up now. WILLIE LANCASTER.
Ivy now has scopes up on this Dee Dee person, quite light on her feet for being so pregnant. Dee Dee hops happily straight over to a guy at the other end of Ivy’s table. It’s the blue-eyed troll with the carroty beard and hair who Ivy has heard people calling “Stuart.” The smiling Dee Dee places the newspaper in his lap, but not till after she whacks him on top of his head with it and each of his shoulders and pointing at the portion of his belly exposed below his dark green T-shirt, she says, “Cute,” then bounds off to poke and prod and humidly love-up half the people on this piazza and then the next.
“Hey, Inee. You want to see my kittens?”
Ivy looks down into the eyes of the pale-haired doleful Rhett. “After lunch,” she tells him.
“Lunch?” He squints.
All these hot adhesive-to-the-touch kids still hover and press and prod Ivy, even as solar talk has mercifully ended. The seated teen girls are chomping down food and gulping water or milk. There are certainly enough empty seats on these big porches for those milling about to sit down in. Sit! Stay! School is supposed to be law and order, correct?
Claire is done. Wipes her mouth on a cloth napkin, which is more like a frazzled rag.
Ivy is thinking how the solar crew enjoys some prestige here, though she wonders how much time they spend on wacky politics. Well, it all fits. Gordon has wacky ideas. Some of the women here talk kind of funny. And so the little critters just sail along in their wake.
Suddenly, Ivy speaks right into Claire’s eyes, “Is Lily okay?” (Remember Lily? Tour guide who told of Gordon as computer-phobe. And pig. Pregnant apple-eating Lily.)
Claire’s left hand is palm up on the table, a carrot stick in her fingers (her dessert?). She replies calmly, “She’s fine.”
“Good.” Ivy takes some salad and fills her own mouth. She imagines the empty computer room and down below the earth’s crust in the flames of hell, the devil and many sticky blue demons are manufacturing computers for humanity in order to steer them wrong. Steer them toward Peak Oil? Whatever Peak Oil actually izzzz if it actually is. She wants a thorough explanation. A nonchaos explanation. But chaos is what she’ll get from this gang if she sets them off again with THE QUESTION.
Sorting it out, all this that they swear is true, it is this: Rome is burning and Americans are fiddling. But the Settlement heroes will save the day. Hallelujah! The new life. The life of w . . . o . . . r . . . k. Never-ending labor. Rickshaws? Pots of water carried on the head?
Whatever. Ivy has to go along with things a bit here if she wants to be a FRIEND. Jolly Ivy.
Ivy smiles down at the little boy Rhett who is still close but not attached anymore to Ivy’s arm or her shoulder bag. She smiles at Claire. She smiles high and low, far and near.
Claire and Gail are now telling Ivy about some of the shops they will visit next.
Ivy wants to suggest visiting the secret dungeons. HAW! HAW!
Ivy keeps hearing voices call to Dee Dee. Ivy’s ears are perked to the max in the direction of this Lancaster bunch, though her fleshy sweaty corral of solar crew tykes and teens are making some genuine din, making references to names of Settlementites whom she can never keep straight, but Ivy is remembering that soft happy voice on the Lancasters’ phone, the voice that would give her no interview because she claimed to be sick.
The tall weasel-shaped young man with the big hat, beautiful eyes, scraggly black beard, and gun doesn’t mingle much, just leans himself against the screen door’s frame.
“Lou-EE! Food!” Bonnie Loo throws this command toward his shy profile. She points at the table. “Eat up, boy!”
Lou-EE, Ivy notes is, of course, the way French pronounce Louis.
Now Ivy sees the Scottish terrier, Cannonball, who is standing as if she is ready to declare war on somebody but her mouth is ajar like a smile, tongue fluttering. The chest on this dog is like a bulldog. Her tail trembles. Her sagacious-looking eyebrows flicker. Her mustaches and profuse beard are wet. When this dog turns to observe in another direction, it’s a Muhammad Ali pivot.
Ivy is studying Lou-EE’s gun now. Dark handled. Many ready cartridges on his belt. He looks like a Zapatista–Matt Dillon cross.
And maybe a bit of West Virginia. Johnny-Bob Zapata Dillon. But then there are those green work pants that almost balloon on his long, long slim legs. So hipless. So tall. His expression as he scans the faces of the piazza crowd is hard to decipher. Could be shrewdness, could be tenderness, could be tiredness. Cannonball’s attitude is easier to read.
When Lou-EE finally finds a place at the table, he eats ravenously. And he pitches stuff to his sidekick (Cannonball) whose open mouth and white teeth are as large as a Dobie’s. Jesus. And again, like an army tank, the Scottie constantly swivels, eyes sweeping the porches for enemies. No wonder this breed is not popular.
Ivy remembers again to smile. Oh, yes. She turns her smiling face back to Claire. Claire is smiling back at Ivy in a sisterly way. Does Claire have to keep working on that smile, too?
“Hey.” It’s the snowy-haired little Rhett again. He rests his little hot paw lightly but completely on Ivy’s forearm. “You like rhubarb pie?”
“I sure do.”
“Ten rhubarb pies.” He points to the kitchen door.
Bonnie Loo makes a special pie for the press. Full of razor blades. (Nobody hears this but our Ivy, of course. She smiles her most huge, painfully stretched smile.) “All for me?”
“Sure!” The boy, now beaming (see what Peak Oil did to him? Now the Peak Pie look.) His face has actually changed shape. Eyes crinkled. Eyes full of light. Knowledge makes kids sick. Knowledge makes everybody sick. Better to be dumb as a snow tire.
Up on a low stage at the end of the piazza, a little stage that was covered with costumes and papier-mâché heads on solstice morning, classy Ricardo now arranges a little pine stool. He peers down at a guitar as he strums the first chords of something complicated and classical. A gifted boy, yes. Okay, so this place is absolutely rich. But the chaos cornucopia spilleth over.
The grays.
Today our awe is also captured by the specimen on our study bench, curled and cruel, still alive. Pulled from a ditch. Somewhat vine. Somewhat root. Leaves huddle in triplet, drooping.
Rhus Radicans.<
br />
Yes, the three oily scoundrel leaf tips reaching muscularly for human skin, now shrink to discover our rubbery gray.
One of us and all of us suggests the categorizing of this sample with the “Honor Student” bumper sticker, in part because both are green, and in part because of the misery both strew.
The green leaves bleat. We are in sync with its terror and decide to let it go. After all, the ivy isn’t as sly as the bumper sticker. No, not at all. The ivy is forthright and humble and plump with ancient ghosts and only fights back when brutelike stomping bears upon it. We open the hatch and gently replace it by the roadside. Such earthly paradoxes cause our heads to spin around forty times.
Meanwhile, back at Gordon’s house, Secret Agent Jane tells us about HUNGER.
Bev and Barbara, who are two ladies who don’t live all night at the Settlement, talk Gordie into letting me have a few more “healing days.” Meaning I don’t have to eat the giant meals with all the weirdos up at their “school.”
So today I’m still here at Gordie’s house.
Bev fixes me lunch. It is the worst color. Like it might be made of something sick. Bev says, “That’s just the color of the cheese, dear.”
I say, “I’m not hungry.” I flop my hands down into my lap. I say, “Probably any minute my Mum is going to call on the phone and say she’s going to come get me.” I look over at the phone, which is on the wall. Guess what!! It is black. And it is OLD. The kind where your finger gets tired of turning the round thing.
Bev is smiling and she says, “It’s good, dear. Especially the cheese part. Try it.” She is really cute. A cute round lady like the other one, Barbara. Both cute with their haircuts. They kinda look like two little men. Or two little women. You can imagine either way.
Barbara, who is “fluey” today and stayed home, she knows all the words of a funny language, not like Gordie’s cousin Oh-RELL’s funny language. It’s another one. Also Barbara does math. She did number stuff all her life for the government, yes the government. Some kids like number stuff called calcules, but only one likes the physilix stuff. That’s Whitney. A kid named Max says if you know physilix, you could make bombs. What if Whitney made a bomb and she let it go off? That would be funny.
I say, “I don’t like cheese.”
Bev says, “You’ve eaten cheese. The other day. This same kind.”
“This stuff might be made of throw up,” I explain. “It smells funny.”
“Do you want a sausage?”
I say, “Sure.”
She gets up and gets sausages out of the refrigerator. She promises they are store-bought, not the ones made by hands. Those from hands are really big really hard sausages and are wicked hot like hot spice. No way will I eat hot spice. Bev says these store ones are regular “and full of fat.” Bev looks so cute and round bent over like that in the refrigerator. Now she goes over and stands by the stove, fixing the sausage. I get next to her and watch and I say, “Don’t let a line get on it. A brown line.”
But it gets a brown line.
She starts another one. I say, “Watch out. I don’t really even want one small line.”
But there it is, a little brownish line.
She says, “Don’t stand too close,” but I have to stand close to make sure she does it right.
She is plopping another sausage into the pan and with my special secret agent pink-heart-shapes glasses, I can see that this is never going to work out. I am starving here at Gordie’s cuz nobody can do stuff right and “McDonald’s is out of the question.”
She says, “Be careful. Dear, you really muss’n’t stand so close.”
“I’m okay,” I says.
She, of course, ruins the next sausage with even a more worse line. Some sausage sparks make greasish spots on my face and secret agent glasses, so I wipe with my smiley face T-shirt.
She says, “See, you need to stand back.”
“No, I don’t,” I tell her. “You’ve just got it all too hot. It shouldn’t be real hot.”
She says in a weird way, “I’m thinking of boiling one.”
“No,” I says. “I hate boiled. I want fried.”
“You know, Jane. You can try it yourself. You have got to get started sometime. You’d be a better cook than you are my foreman.” She laughs funnyish to herself.
I says, “I told you. I cook at my house. Only at my house. Guests do not cook.”
She says in a real bubbly way, “Nobody will mind, dear. And up at the Settlement . . . like next week, you’ll love to cook with the kids . . . they make wonderful pastries and things called birds nests out of toast and eggs, and fun salads made with wild violet leaves and plantain leaf.”
I says very evenishly, “But. I Am. Not. Going. There. Ever. My. Mum. Will. Come. Get. Me. Soon. I. Want. You. To. Cook. This. Now.”
She is really nice and fries another one. But this next one gets a line on it. And more grease on my face and hearts glasses. She is very, very careful but the NEXT sausage gets a place on one end just as disgusting as a line.
Finally she gets one without a line and we both cheer and cheer. She is getting a bright sweaty look and undoes one of her little shirt buttons. She is a very short lady. Exactly my size almost. I am tall for age six everyone says. Anyway, the perfect sausage makes us both so happy.
But this sausage is cold in the middle. I say in a real nice way, “It’s kinda cold in the middle.” And I push my plate away and it is a sad thing. As usual I am going to have to starve.
She says, “It’s okay. These have already been boiled through for our sauce last night. It’s not really raw. You can go ahead and eat a little of it.” She smiles. Her teeth are real for an oldish lady. But they are very little teeth. Like a cute Halloween pun’kin. She says, “You know, Jane. There’s never any such thing as perfect.”
“My Mum is perfect,” I say.
She says stiffishly, “If you could just settle for this for now and—”
“I guess I’m not hungry.”
“Just try a little,” she says.
“No thanks,” I say.
Sun over Ivy.
The last leg of the tour is in slow drizzly motion, the sky, white wax, the sun a flaming pool of margarine. Faces, breath, shoulders, eyeballs especially, voices that squeak ESPECIALLY are all too CLOSE, stuck to Ivy Morelli’s forehead.
She trudges from one tour highlight to another, following the wide aqua-blue-green T-shirt point man, Claire. And Ivy feels pissed off at these happily sweaty feverish 78-rpm-voiced kids who shame her with junk science and all sorts of anarchist-sounding politics and with their pale hauteur. Ivy HATES these kids. Ivy hates KIDS.
Heft that bag, Ivy. Death. Death. Death. Death by grease. Leaping dead lizard guts. Leaping dead Lincolns. The long gasoline-powered wheeled ones.
And sooooo from solar collectors to sugaring house to MORE gardens and shops, the kidzzzzz, superior brats and their weird mothers or aunts or whatever they are, scrape along, proud proud proud of this world they have made to wrap around themselves, this disorderly, too toooooo sweet accomplished THING. Does it seem all too perfect? Perfect as punch. Yeah, where is the punch? Pow. Ow. Where is verity? Hiding it doesn’t make it go away. Where is the PAIN here?
Our Ivy will find it.
Time to go.
Ivy looks at her watch. Nearly quarter of five. When Ivy announces she has to get back home to get ready for a meeting, the witchy early-gray-haired Lee Lynn takes Ivy’s wrist. She humidly kneads this wrist as if to feel for a pulse and she smiles into Ivy’s eyes saying, in her keening police car siren voice, “You can’t leave here until he talks with you.” She’s not smiling, but then she is again smiling.
Funny, these people, the way they say things.
Ivy snorts. “An audience with his Highness,” she says, testing their humor at this. There are a few smiles but Ivy thinks they aren’t the right kind of smiles.
Out on the piazza now, Ivy sees a lot of elderly men and women grouped arou
nd doorways and tables in wheelchairs or rocking chairs, waiting.
A trio of white-haired men with stick necks and heads as small as children’s are playing cards in total silence.
Each and every member of the tour guide crew and some of the solar crew give Ivy quick, sticky good-bye hugs. “I love you,” Heather, Ivy’s old sentry, burbles and gives Ivy’s cheek (the scratched but scabbed over one) a shy kiss.
A hefty young boy (twelvish) with a not-fashionable-anymore tiny pigtail and a Settlement-made-looking aqua and yellow Hawaiian shirt is Ivy’s escort to the west parlor.
The west parlor.
She is left here alone to wait. The boy even shuts the door. It is nearly five o’clock. No philosophical discussions in those big deep chairs now, no talk of municipal law by wee tykes as she had observed early on in her tour.
The room smells strongly of damp aromatic cedar. Ivy looks up. Cedar ceilings. The smell is heady, compelling, dreamy. Like a former life. Since her first visit here, Ivy has had too many flashes of déjà vu.
Most of the rooms and shops and work spaces here at the Settlement have multiple doors, doors that open out onto the piazzas and boardwalks. But this parlor does not. Deep and quiet and secret as a rabbit hole. Ivy doesn’t sit. She just gives her shoulder bag another adjustment and studies the two love seats and four divans with torn upholstery and heaps of afghans and old embroidered pillows. A rough, homemade, short-legged crib for babies, also heaped with pillows and afghans and rag dolls with smiles sewed on.
The floors aren’t radiant heat tiles here, as they were in the kitchens, but orangey pine layered with hooked rugs and braided rugs. She’s never seen so many little rugs. This ocean of rugs is high tide! If you’re a foot-dragger, you’re in mighty trouble.
A handwritten sign beside a wall of shelves: DOUBT EVERYTHING. Rene Descartes.
This ain’t Waco, she tells herself with a big sigh and studies a row of tall pictures, variations of a frontal view of the human body. Looks like someone ran a drawing of human organs through a copy machine. The organs were cut out, colored with crayons in personalized ways, then pasted onto identical smiling human specimens. Seems one of these “physiology students” found no need to place the brain in its matching cranium. (There is a maverick in every crowd.) He or she pasted the brain on top, so it is worn like a hat.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 20
