The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  Somehow, though, those old amusements didn’t seem interesting. Had they ever been interesting? I wondered what Mrs. Kraselnik was doing without me, wondered if Amanda was answering questions that should have gone to Mary Frances. William mentioned that Bert Plumly called being outside The Nature. As in, Don’t make me go to The Nature. That was just dumb, I said.

  “It’s funny,” William said.

  I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. I felt a tick in the fold of my ear, William removed it, we lit a match and watched it sizzle into a dark strand. Even that old satisfaction wasn’t fun. We weren’t just bored with the world; we were bored with ourselves, or we were hardly in our selves anymore. It was hard to tell what was going on. Maybe, if we could remember one little trick about how we used to be, we could get there, get back, as if we ourselves were a country we’d left.

  We were on our blanket, scratching our arms and legs. William was reading Swallows and Amazons, one of his old bibles, with Calvin and Hobbes and Gary Larson as backup. We didn’t look like twins anymore. His hair remained light where mine had darkened, and his face was a longer version of itself now, his nose still turned up, and his teeth, recently so enormous and separate, had settled into his mouth, all of them somehow a modest size, no more spaces between. He took up the length of the blanket, about a foot more of him than I remembered from the previous year. He shouldn’t grow another millimeter, I thought; he’d done enough. His lips as usual were bunched into one pluckable bud, and his eyes, dark brown as the river.

  Under our tree I took the time to make a vow. When we ran the orchard we wouldn’t work on the blossom holiday the way my father always did. No, we’d declare a feast day for our crew. Hot bubbling rhubarb pies would materialize, a haunch of a goat on a spit, loaves of braided bread, and a bucket of marshmallow fluff, all set on planks by the tool house. I thought about how Amanda and Adam were not allowed to stay home on Blossom Day, something we’d never discussed with them, Blossom Day our secret.

  I was absorbed in the holiday menu when through the aisle of the orchard I saw a girl, a girl who looked like Brianna Kraselnik. And behind her came a boy—was it one of the Bershek twins? The arresting thing about this boy and girl in the orchard, however, wasn’t the sandy hair or the big eyes or the small glasses frames. It wasn’t that they were probably Brianna Kraselnik and one of the Bersheks. The arresting thing was the fact that each was wearing no clothing. No article of any kind. They both did have tennis shoes on their feet, but no socks.

  They were floating along between the trees, coming in and out of my field of vision. The girl’s breasts were small, nothing much to notice not least because the feature that leapt out at you, that stunned your brain, was the huge patch of hair, a black version of the muskrat’s straw houses, in her private spot. That was all there was to see of her. I understood in that moment that underpants must have been the first invention of mankind because without them you would never look into your companion’s eyes or face, and therefore it would be impossible to invent other necessary tools or think up ideas. But wait, another horror. The penis of the twin swinging into view. I think I made a noise. It was—how long? I couldn’t say, couldn’t tell, it defied measurement. He walked as if he wasn’t aware of it, as if it required no concentration to have such an organ. He kept scratching his back, trying to get at a place that was no doubt a sting of some kind. I was too startled and certainly too amazed to notify William.

  Some time passed. I began to wonder if I’d seen them. If they’d been real. They couldn’t be real because it was a very stupid idea and scary, too, to take your clothes off and walk around outside. No one would want to perform that stunt. The Lombard Orchard, a nudist colony, ha ha. But then why would I dream them up? Why give Brianna so much hair, far more than my mother had? Furthermore, I could never have imagined a penis that long. I wondered if Mrs. Kraselnik had told her daughter to take the day off from school, appropriating our holiday, maybe the reason they’d wanted to live next to an orchard in the first place. If the couple was real, where were they going? Did it occur to the exhibitionists that the Lombard men might be doing farmwork, that they might bump into the owners of the property? There was then this question: Do I tell Mrs. Kraselnik?

  That was a stunner. Mary Frances, darling, how can I thank you for coming to me? Brianna has been a handful since the day we adopted her. Yes, it’s true, I’ve never told anyone that she is not my own—and that I’ve never loved her. My own real child would never do such a terrible thing, nor would she have so much of that…hair.

  But again: Wait! Another shocking question was coming to me. Did Brianna know which Bershek twin was hers or were they interchangeable? I almost—almost right then cried out. Did the Bersheks even know which one of themselves was the real boyfriend?

  William calmly went on reading while on my side of the blanket the earth kept quaking. The last shock: What if May Hill was in the orchard and saw them?

  I said to William, “What do you want to do?” What I really meant was, We should get out of here. We had to leave in case Adam&Eve floated past again. And yet it was our property and so we should build a fort. We had every right to throw stones at the marauders. All my questions and knowledge were like beats within my head, a drumming. I started to pick the grass furiously without even knowing what my hands were doing, trying to outsmart the rhythm.

  William muttered, “Reading is okay.”

  “What what what what time is it?”

  He looked at me, his book closing, his place lost. “What is the matter with you?”

  I wanted to tell him everything, wanted especially to tell him about being held prisoner by May Hill, and how every time I saw her I became terrified, my heart always racing even if she was in the far distance. I wanted to cry when I thought of being trapped in her room, the event having grown more harrowing, so that I’d started to believe I’d been there for a few days and then a week had passed. But instead of describing my captivity I said, “I just saw Brianna and one of the Bershek twins naked.”

  He was staring at me, ARE YOU CRAZY? I wondered if I was crazy, if I’d have to be carted away to an asylum. Why did the worst, the most unspeakable things happen only to me? William had not ever been the prisoner of May Hill—that was something I could guarantee. William did not “accidentally” lose the Geography Bee. He did not see naked teenagers strolling through the orchard. I rolled up into the blanket and shut my eyes, and not for the first time that spring I wanted to die.

  Deep into the misery, unaccountably desiring more, in a terrible leap forward I saw that any number of disasters could destroy the crop that was here and now in its perfect beauty. There might be freeze or drought or hail or wind. The trees smashed and withered, the apples stunted or pocked.

  William said, “I think I’m going to see if Pa will drive me to school for the afternoon.”

  “What?” I said, turning my head so I wasn’t facedown in the grass. Neither one of us had ever thought to go to school for any part of Blossom Day. “What,” I inquired, “do you mean?” I’d forgotten all about Brianna. He was gathering up our things without saying a word, and then he unrolled my part of the blanket. Even as he worked to clear the campsite I couldn’t believe what he was doing. Next he was walking away with the basket and the bundle in his arms. When he was far down the path, when he was almost home I was still sitting there asking What?

  15.

  The Historical Beginning of the Infinite World

  So, one minute we were children in the orchard, and the next it was decided by someone, somehow, that William and I were too old to share a room. We were eleven and twelve. I couldn’t believe it, the bunk beds ripped apart, the steel web that held his mattress no longer my nighttime ceiling, my sky. He swept up everything he loved in our room, all the Lego embedded in the carpet, every tangled wire, every connector and specialized wrench, all his comics, his books, his long tube socks, his two plastic banks heavy with quarters, and he moved down the hall
to my mother’s office. I stood by the bed, holding on to the post after the top bunk was removed, feeling as if the injury to the furniture had been done to me, as if something of myself had been lopped off. He wouldn’t look in my direction as he packed up his possessions, the Tintin compendium stacked on top of The Complete HyperCard Handbook.

  “Don’t go,” I managed on his last load.

  He was standing in the door with a laundry basket filled with fat white pipes, a dismantled radio, and a samovar-type thing he’d taught me was a carburetor. “You can spread out,” he suggested, nodding his head at my doll junk and dozens of pulpy books about the babysitters.

  “Don’t—” I tried again.

  “Francie, don’t be silly.” My mother swooping in, offering up her idea of comfort. “He’s just down the hall. He’s ten steps away.”

  “Don’t go,” I said once more.

  “He needs more space”—the twentieth time for the explanation. “And you do, too.”

  “I don’t. I have plenty.”

  William turned the basket lengthwise to get it through the door, and out of the room he went.

  That night it was impossible to even close my eyes with so much light, so much air above me. I had curled up by William’s bed in his new room but my mother had flapped me away, the arms of her black sweater like wings. “Good night, William, good night!” I called through those wings. “Good night,” I cried, “good night.”

  “Okay, Imp,” he had to say, “good night.”

  There was nothing to be done about the situation but wait until the house was still and take those ten steps back down the hall, pillow and blanket in hand.

  His arm was draped over the side of the bed, William now so close to the floor, his knuckles in the pile of the rug. I was still wearing zip-up fuzzy one-piece pajamas all the long way down to the enormous plastic feet, mine in red, William’s, before he’d forsaken them, in blue. Already the room smelled of him, of us, I couldn’t tell which part of our smell he’d taken with him. It seemed important to let him know that I would never ever leave him, and also that I was fine, I was near, a pull of his toe before I covered his bare leg. He did lift his head, his lids fluttering, his eyes open for an instant. I lay myself down in the corner of the hard floor, the smallest bare place between the shelf and the desk, no crib for my head. But it was all right now because his breathing, his adenoidal inhalations, that syncopated stuffiness, was my breathing, too, and mine his. And so we could safely sleep.

  Did I not know, had I not been able to see that the separation, the long slow pull, had begun years before there was fuzz on his upper lip? What a stealth maneuver he had to make, that perhaps he was making deliberately, his quietness and his absorption in his projects a step-by-step, a careful tiptoe, past me. It was our first computer, a Macintosh—funny, the name of an apple—that started the marching of time.

  Nineteen ninety: The computer arrived in a white carton, the cardboard itself shiny, polished, and there on the side the logo that should have been ours, the psychedelic apple with the smooth bite out of it, and the single leaf on top. It was my mother’s outrageous gift to my father, something he didn’t think they could afford. He was trying to refuse it, attempting to carry it back into the hall from the kitchen, but William was obstructing his path, arms flailing, legs doing a jig, crying, “P-p-please Papa. P-please. Maps and charts—charts!” He yanked on my father’s hand, wouldn’t let go. “You’ll see, graphs, you like graphs, and charts and maps. You have to—you can do maps, you can map every tree, you can—” He put his finger in his mouth, bit down, the dream so near. William, five years old, having witnessed the automation of the library card catalog, was the prophet.

  My father said, “William! It’s all right.”

  “No, no, maps and charts!”

  How to explain that my father could track weather patterns, he could invent weather patterns, he could organize the family archives, he could get rid of the ledger book, he could use email, a recent household invention, he could precisely record the spray program—how to make all of that clear before it was too late?

  My father said, “It doesn’t seem fair, Nellie, if we have a computer, and Sherwood doesn’t.”

  “He can hallucinate one,” my mother replied. “He can build a system from a bushel basket and a piece of copper tubing.”

  My father said, “This isn’t something we really can—”

  “Please!” William screeched. Never in his life had he needed anything so urgently.

  They carefully unwrapped it together, the decision not yet firmly made, or so my father thought. They plugged it in. William took the chair in front of the small square screen, the 512K whirring like a knife sharpener. In the glow of the soft gray light he clicked on the mouse, and down, down he fell into the infinite world.

  He had Adam as his forever friend, just as Amanda was for me, and in addition there was Bert Plumly, who lived in the subdivision beyond the south end of the woods. The Plumly house may have seemed the perfect idea of a house to William, two stories with white siding, blue shutters with cutout hearts, and window boxes, and in the back sliding glass doors out to the deck. And on that deck there was a hot tub, a gas grill as long as our canoe, and an iron table with a white-and-red-striped umbrella, the Plumlys at the ready for relaxation. In the kitchen Ma Plumly served Pac-Man mac and cheese in blue plastic bowls and for a treat Dr Pepper in frosted green glasses with pink bendy straws, and for dessert she put the gluey Rice Krispie squares on holiday napkins. Also there were carrot sticks.

  The rooms in that paradise opened up, one to the next, the carpet starting in the family room right where the faux-oak flooring of the kitchen stopped, the fans overhead keeping the cool air moving across the different areas that were empty except for the sofas, the chairs. When the Plumlys got tired of outdoor recreation they could enjoy the offerings of their satellite dish, the screens of their many televisions growing larger by the year, like children, until the one in the living room was nearly the length of the far wall. The poor Lombards had the single old TV that got two channels, Mary Frances and William dependent on the kindness of the neighbors. Despite the Plumly riches aboveground, the boys chose the bunker, everything important, as it turned out, taking place down the basement. That was where they lived, where, hour after hour, they sat at the long counter with the two computers, one for Bert and one for his older brother, Max. When William went to the Plumlys for an overnight he took his own terminal, his hard drives, a bag of cables, boxes of disks, and his office chair.

  Ma Plumly, passing through the dark cavity in those early days of the Gaming Epoch, on her way to the laundry room, would occasionally suggest an alternative activity. “A game of basketball?” she’d say with little conviction. “Dad fixed the hoop.” As if all that stood between the boys and exercise was a repair of the court. “It’s a nice day out there.” They’d look up at her with an expression so blank she felt compelled to remind them of her identity. “It’s your mother speaking. Melissa R. Plumly. Did you want to have a little lunch?”

  “In…a…minute,” one of them might say. Hours later, finally registering hunger, the three of them, William, Bert, Max, pounded up the stairs. I was occasionally in the family room amusing Crystal Plumly, a girl three years my junior, she and I playing Pretty Pretty Princess and watching Oprah. The boys sat at the island, waiting for Ma Plumly to produce the blue bowls. While she busied herself they tracked the robotic vacuum cleaner spinning through the living area, the disk bumping into the wall, the red light blinking, the boys narrating in Gregorian tones, “I meant to do that, I am not an idiot, who put this frigging table leg here.”

  At the library Ma Plumly said to my mother, “At least the boys aren’t into drugs.”

  “Or women,” my mother said.

  Their faces, those boys, were puffy, and they wore heavy canvas pants several sizes too big, the bottoms frayed from dragging along the ground, their black T-shirts with a human-type man on the front b
ut no irises in the eyes.

  There was the seminal night when William, twelve or so, went to Bert’s house, my father shuttling him over there with all the usual requirements in the back of the van, including his new chair, an ergonomic wonder he’d gotten for his birthday. Max had acquired a game called Posse through a quasi-legal file share, a new game that he handed off to Bert and William, the two of them playing until eight in the morning, tipping over to sleep on the nubbly carpet for forty-five minutes and waking to continue. They knew their lives were forever changed, the thing that would mark them arrived.

  In order to develop their skills they had to play Posse starting in the late afternoon and going through the night, William abruptly nocturnal. They were soon recruited by a kid in Iceland to be on his most excellent team and not long after—so dedicated and talented were they—positions of responsibility were conferred upon them. They were in the lineup to be Posse Executives, to someday be the CEOs of their own teams, hiring players, assessing their gifts, firing them if necessary. What, really, Ma Plumly said, could be a better education?

  Through July and August she as usual went down the basement, laundry basket in hand, walking slowly past the bank of computers to see if anything had changed. Always the virtual missiles were sighted on metal-plated hulks looming in the bleak distance, each live boy wearing a headset, speaking in a new language to similarly afflicted boys out in the ether.

  “It’s a nice day,” Ma Plumly said in her vain attempt. She’d bring them liquids. She made cupcakes in pastel fluted papers. “You do need fuel,” she’d remind them. When she spilled some milk she used one of their Posse swear-words, shouting theatrically, “Shazbot!” She sprang on the puddle with a dishcloth, “Gotta go fast”—another of their memes. When I said Shazbot at the dinner table William looked up from his hamburger and told me, “You did not just say that.” I was not even allowed to speak his language.