No animal products were allowed on the commune, and no sugar. Some of the commune members were on food stamps and disability. For a time Arlo’s mother was on disability herself, though Arlo was never sure what her disability was. Something about a bum ankle, but then it was a bad back; often she used the word sciatica.
Soon Arlo’s mother was studying to become a midwife. “I’m getting my midwifery degree.” She laughed when she said this, perhaps because she hadn’t been good at getting degrees—she still had six credits to go at Barnard—perhaps because the commune didn’t confer degrees. “It’s on-the-job training. Though don’t go saying that to the pregnant girls. They might get nervous.”
Afternoons Arlo would hitchhike into town, where he would take out his ukulele and busk. “Hey, there, little man,” someone said. “Take a look at the little man with his little instrument.” Arlo didn’t like being called a little man, and he thought his instrument was big enough, but he was happy to have a few dollars dropped into his case, so he didn’t say anything.
He wore a New York City subway token around his neck, as a reminder of where his father lived and that he could leave whenever he wanted to. But leaving wasn’t easy. There were schedules to coordinate, and his mother needed him.
Soon his mother started to deliver babies. Even now, as an adult, Arlo could still recall the afterbirth, everyone gathering for a celebratory meal, starting with placenta soup. Seitan and soy cheese: he could still taste those, though now he refused to eat them. The commune members grew herbs: echinacea and ginseng and kava and Saint-John’s-wort. Men wore dashikis. The word namaste was used. There was the smell of beeswax. People walked around naked because it was warm out and the body came in all shapes and sizes and all shapes and sizes were beautiful. The commune generator sometimes didn’t work, so there were blackouts, like the one in New York City in 1977, when Arlo’s mother had been on a picnic, the lampposts and streetlights extinguished, mayonnaise oozing through her sandwich bag while on the streets the looting had started. But on the commune there was no looting. Years later, Arlo would think there was nothing to loot—they were piss poor, all of them—but at the time he thought what his mother thought: that no one looted because it was all for one and one for all and everyone loved everyone. “I’m happy here,” he told his mother.
“Oh, darling, I’m so glad to hear that.”
But he’d just said those words because they made his mother brighten, as if a candle had been lit inside her. His mother, with her far-off gazes, cloudy as sea glass, saying, I need some alone time, darling. Or: Darling, I’m doing something for my solitary self. Or: It’s just going to be the three of us now, darling, me, myself, and I. Always that darling attached like a charm to the strand of her words, allowing her to pretend she wasn’t saying what she was saying.
Sometimes Arlo would find his mother not, as she’d claimed, keeping her own company, but keeping company with a man. She’d be sitting by the campfire, her skirt bunched between her thighs, the sounds of the guitar rising with the marijuana smoke.
“I thought you were taking a walk.”
“I was taking a walk, and look what I found while I was walking. Danny, this is my son Arlo.”
“Hello, Arlo,” Danny said, and he laughed, and Arlo’s mother did, too, and so did the man sitting next to Danny, and the woman sitting next to that man, so the laughter was going around the campfire, like the bong.
“I named him after Arlo Guthrie,” Arlo’s mother said.
“Well, hello, Arlo Guthrie,” Danny said, and now the man on the guitar was playing “Ukulele Lady,” and Arlo’s mother said, “That’s funny, because Arlo plays the ukulele, don’t you, darling?” and Arlo had to admit he did.
* * *
—
The year he was thirteen, on his annual Christmas visit, Arlo brought the map he’d drawn with all the states he’d lived in. His sister, Sarah, was only ten, but she was precocious and quick-witted, and she had a copy of the world map puttied to her wall. She had long auburn hair, curls catapulting this way and that, which Arlo detested; he kept finding clumps of hair in the sink. “Can’t you clean up after yourself?”
But Sarah didn’t deign to respond. She just did what she always did, leaving her hair wherever she saw fit, playing Geography with her mother and GHOST with her father, and before she went to sleep, she practiced her violin and ate a snack of three marshmallows and a handful of Wise potato chips.
Arlo was dizzied by the marshmallows and potato chips, by the cans of Fresca that lined his father’s fridge.
“You can bring that food home with you,” his mother said. “We’ll get you a pouch. Or three extra stomachs, like a cow has.”
“But the commune doesn’t allow junk food.”
“True enough. I guess you’ll have to do with your single stomach.”
When Pru served pasta for dinner, Arlo would compete with Sarah, whom he thought of as half his age and half his size so she should get half as much food. It was dumb luck that he’d ended up where he was; just as easily he could have had the potato chips and the marshmallows and the nice home, the bedroom that smelled of lemon, the washcloths in the bathroom hanging like flags. Life was unfair, but in his father’s apartment he would make up for it. If Sarah had two portions of fettuccini, he would have three; if she had three portions, he would have four. He ate as fast as he could because to the fastest eater went the spoils. So when his father said, “Arlo, have you taken up speed-eating?” Arlo just stared back at him uncomprehendingly, thinking, What other kind of eating is there?
Now, as an adult, Arlo could have eaten as much pasta as he liked, but he studiously avoided refined carbohydrates. At six feet tall, he weighed 138 pounds. He did two hundred crunches every morning, followed by two hundred push-ups. His composition of body fat was 8 percent, which put him ahead of most professional athletes. He had become like his father, who had once said that if only he didn’t have to eat and sleep, he would get so much more done. Arlo himself got by on four hours of sleep a night. And he was on a restricted-calorie diet. He ate little and he ate fast—little because he was hoping to achieve immortality (mice and chimpanzees kept on a restricted-calorie diet lived 50 percent longer, and he was out to prove it would work for humans too); fast because, though his will was unassailable, he’d never been able to break the habit born from those visits to his father, when, if he ate faster than his sister, he would get extra food.
It was on that trip to his father’s when he was thirteen that the full extent of his deprivation settled on Arlo. One night, he showed Sarah the map he’d drawn. He’d lived in nine states and Sarah had lived in only one. “My mother has pooped in thirty-nine states. How many states has your mother pooped in?”
Sarah had no idea how many states her mother had pooped in, and she didn’t care. “Here,” she said, grabbing the map. “You drew this all wrong. You’ve got Maine over here where California’s supposed to be, and Illinois might as well be in Europe. And Delaware, where you live? You’ve placed it in the middle of the country, practically in Mountain Time.”
Delaware was in the middle of the country, Arlo wanted to say, because the commune was the center of everything.
That night, Arlo overheard Sarah saying to Pru, “He’s thirteen years old and I’m smarter than him.”
“There are different kinds of knowledge, darling. Different ways of being smart. He hasn’t had the same opportunities as you.”
Lying in bed, Arlo seethed. But he didn’t seethe at Sarah, or at Pru. He seethed at his mother, who had moved him like a chess piece around the country. What good was living in so many places if you put Illinois where Europe was supposed to be, and what kind of mother were you if you claimed to love your son but you didn’t teach him anything?
On the bus back home, Arlo unwrapped the egg salad sandwich Pru had made for him. She’d given him a second sandwich, too,
tucked into a pouch, and he thought of the pouch his mother had talked about, of the cow with its three extra stomachs. Pru had also given him a palmier. “They’re French,” she said, “though in English they’re called elephant ears.” Their size aside—they were, in fact, enormous—Arlo thought they looked nothing like elephants’ ears, but then he realized he didn’t know what elephants’ ears looked like. It was just another thing he didn’t know, and as the bus passed from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, his hatred for his mother grew and grew and he hoped she wouldn’t be there to greet him.
But when he got to the station, she was at the front of the line, such eagerness across her face he thought she might asphyxiate him. “Arlo!”
He hated hearing his name like that, hated being named after Arlo Guthrie. At Barnard, his mother would leave class early to stand in line at the Bitter End. That was why she’d dropped out of college, to follow Arlo Guthrie, the way people were starting to follow the Grateful Dead. She was the original Deadhead, his mother liked to say, though what she really was was an Arlo-Guthrie-head. What a strange, improbable couple his parents had been. He’d once asked his mother how she and his father had ended up together, and she said, “How does anyone end up together? You’re young and you fall in love. I’ll tell you one thing, though. Don’t go marrying your college sweetheart. It’s like driving while impaired.”
* * *
—
One day, when Arlo was fifteen, his mother said, “We’re leaving the commune. It’s time to move on.”
“Why?” When he’d first gotten to the commune he’d been unhappy, but now that he’d lived there for three years, it was home to him.
A few days later, Arlo heard a rumor that his mother was being kicked out. Something had gone wrong at a commune member’s birth. An umbilical cord noosed around a baby’s throat: oxygen loss, a heart rate plummeting. Brain damage, people were saying: the child would be debilitated for life. “Did something happen to a baby you delivered?”
“Oh, Arlo, that’s just awful. Why in the world would you say that?”
“Did it?”
“Do you know how many babies I’ve delivered? I did the best I could with the training I had.”
“So it’s true.” But there were tears in his mother’s eyes, and he knew he had to stop talking.
When he spoke again he said, “I want to go live with my father.”
“What makes you think your father wants to live with you?”
“I just do.”
Arlo was right. The timing was good, his father said. It was June, and this way, Arlo could get settled in New York before the school year started.
“Can I give you some advice?” his mother said. “Don’t go burning bridges.”
As he watched his mother put her clothes in a suitcase, Arlo thought he was destined to live out his life this way, standing there once more while his mother packed her bags, poised between comprehension and incomprehension.
9
The day he moved in, Arlo’s father and stepmother took him straight to Macy’s, where he was allowed to lie down on whatever bed he chose. The beds were covered with quilts, and there was something called a bed skirt and something called a dust ruffle. Should it be this one? Arlo thought, lying down on a bed. Should it be that one? He’d never chosen a bed before, and in moving into his father’s apartment, he was being revealed as a fraud, and this was just the first example of his fraudulence.
“We don’t have all day,” Sarah said.
“We have as long as Arlo needs,” their father said.
Finally, Arlo chose the bed he was lying on. He was just happy the test was over.
“Okay,” Pru told the clerk, “wrap it up,” and for an instant Arlo thought they’d be carrying the bed home, before realizing that, of course, it would be put on a truck.
Arlo’s new bedroom had been his father’s study, but all that remained were the computer and printer. Pru would knock when she needed to print, but Sarah would enter unannounced, until Pru said, “Sarah, honey, you have to knock,” and there emerged from Sarah the faintest of snorts, and Arlo allowed himself to think she was simply breathing heavily. “I don’t care if she knocks. Privacy isn’t important to me.” He’d been living on the commune, where no one knocked, mostly because there was nowhere to knock.
Used to sleeping in the gazebo, Arlo slept with his door open, listening for the sounds of his new family and the noises that came through the open window: a taxi honking on 73rd Street, a woman yodeling in Central Park. But as the weeks passed, he started to close his door at night. Maybe he liked privacy, after all.
July 4th came, and he watched the fireworks from the roof of his new building. One afternoon, Pru took him to Coney Island, where he got a Nathan’s hot dog and went on the rides. He tried to convince her to join him on the Cyclone, but she said, “Not on your life, Arlo. You go get nauseated for both of us.” So he rode the roller coaster on his own, and what remained of his hot dog flew off during the ride, and the rest of his hot dog, already in his stomach, nearly catapulted out of him.
The next day, he took the subway to the East Village, and though he was underage, he sneaked into a club. The day after that, he went to the Statue of Liberty, and on the morning of July 14 his father said, “Happy Bastille Day, Arlo,” and Arlo, having no idea what Bastille Day was, said, “Yes, okay, sounds good to me,” before he finally said, “You too.”
* * *
—
One morning, Arlo said, “Do you know what Mom told me when I said I was moving here? She said, ‘What makes you think your father wants to live with you?’ ”
“Oh, Arlo, of course I want you to live with me.”
“Then why didn’t you ask me sooner?”
His father hesitated.
“Is it because of Pru?” Arlo’s mother was always saying that Pru had stolen his father from her.
“Actually, it was Pru who suggested it.”
“Then what took you so long?”
Arlo’s father didn’t know what to say. After he and Linda divorced, she would write him with requests for money. Money wasn’t worth fighting over; nothing was less important in the world. But Linda’s requests were for much more than child support, and it was money he didn’t have. “It’s pure spite,” Pru said once. “She just wants to bleed us.” One time, in a fit of pique, Pru said, “Sometimes I wish Arlo hadn’t been born. At least then we wouldn’t have to deal with Linda.”
She immediately apologized, but Spence remembered her words. Not counting those first eight months, he’d spent less than two years total with Arlo. How did you take care of a fifteen-year-old? Did you take care of a fifteen-year-old? Less than two years out of fifteen: he didn’t know his own son.
* * *
—
Arlo called his mother in Chicago, where she was sleeping on a friend’s couch. She’d been having a hankering for a bigger city; she thought the anonymity would do her good. “Oh, Arlo, it’s so wonderful to hear from you. I haven’t been this happy in months.”
“Then why didn’t you call me?” Arlo thought he could hear voices through the phone, the sound of something banging. “How’s Chicago?”
“Not as windy as advertised, but then it’s only July.”
“And the anonymity?”
“Too much anonymity and a person gets lost.”
Arlo knew what she meant. He’d never appreciated the phrase packed like sardines, but when he took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, he’d had a boaty, nauseated feeling, as if he were being fished out of New York Harbor. When he got back to the city, he took the subway to Penn Station, where he stood in front of the information booth, then did the same at Grand Central, where, at five o’clock, the terminal was as busy as a wasp hive. He thought if he went to all the busy places at once, New York would come to seem more manageable. But if anythin
g, he felt the opposite, that Grand Central and Penn Station were all New York was and movement was the city’s resting point. Standing in Grand Central, he thought he could park himself there for months at a time and not see anyone he knew. As he took the subway back uptown, he grew convinced that his father and stepmother had disappeared. Even as he stepped into the elevator, he worried that someone had changed the locks and the only people he would know would be the Hansons from across the hall, and the doorman, Maurice, who stood sentinel in front of the building, as immobile as a guard outside an embassy. So when he found Pru in the kitchen, his father in the living room reading a book, he was so relieved he had to stop himself from saying, Thank God you’re still here.
“I went to a Cubs game yesterday,” his mother said.
“I didn’t know you liked baseball.” That morning at the diner, when his mother had asked him about ERAs, her mind had veered off a minute into their lesson.
“Oh, Arlo, I wasn’t going to tell you this.”
“Is something wrong?” Arlo was suddenly convinced his mother was sick—she was dying—and that was why she hadn’t called him.
“Actually, it’s the most wonderful news. I’ve met someone.”
“A man?”
“His name is Oliver and he’s from London. We’ve been spending all our time together.”
“That’s nice,” Arlo said, but he could hear his own insincerity.
“I think I’m in love with him.”
What did that mean? Love was something that enveloped you, and if you had to think about it, the feeling was counterfeit.
“And the sad thing is he’s going back to London in a few weeks.”
“That’s too bad,” Arlo said, but again he sounded dishonest. The men came and the men went, and as soon as he’d accommodated to one, it was time to accommodate to the next one.
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