No Book but the World: A Novel (21 page)

Also in attendance were the extended Manseau family, a few former Batter Hollowans, and a substantial number of the bride’s and groom’s new friends: Dennis’s colleagues from Greensleeves, Ava’s from the music conservatory, various others they’d met in school or through work. The new friends, taken as a whole, were ethnically and professionally diverse, yet comprised a single aesthetic, Kitty thought. She had the odd notion they’d been chosen and assembled in order to signal a specific message, something to do with how Dennis and Ava were choosing to regard themselves, or how they themselves wanted to be regarded.

Kitty did feel some pleasure for her friend. It was the pleasure of relief. After so many years spent striving for normalcy, for acceptance by the normal, Ava seemed radiant with achievement. Still, what Kitty remembered most indelibly about the day were the goose bumps on the bride’s arms.

Yet now, these seven years later, she had to admit their marriage worked. Or seemed to—for what can you ever know of a marriage from the outside? Not that it matched her ideal. Compared with hers and Tariq’s, or Don’s and Meg’s, or even Neel’s and June’s, Ava’s and Dennis’s relationship seemed careful, modest, polite. Almost
enacted
, rather than messily lived. Like a child’s notion of the institution, safe and steady. A pageant played in dress-up clothes. Yet she could not deny that the kindness between them was palpable. So, too, the love.

And today, tromping through the woods with her daughter on her back and her old friend at her side, drawing the tinseled air into her lungs, she found she could not summon her old indignation at their having moved back to the obsolete school grounds. The absence of the familiar cottages was sad, but Dennis and Ava had made a snug home of the former Annex, and the woods was clean and grand. Dilly had begun to sing, quietly, interiorly, some barely recognizable version of one of the Singalong Lady songs from yesterday, and Kitty could tell by the way the baby carrier jounced softly on her back that her daughter must also be trying to replicate the hand gestures Ava had done. The path rounded a bend and led them into a shadier part of the woods. Instantly it was chillier, bluer, the firs more closely clumped, a heavier mosaic of snow patterning the ground.

“It’s great here,” said Kitty, stopping to rest. Walking with Dilly was a workout. “I forget how peaceful it is.”

Ava gave her an odd look.

“What?”

“Do you ever think about it? What we did out here, what we did with Fred?”

A kind of blankness came over Kitty, a blankness that was necessary if she wished to mute her irritation, for Ava was always saying odd things without warning, unreasonably expecting others to think and feel the same as her.

“Don’t you know where we are?” Ava asked, and there was an expectancy in her tone that irritated Kitty further.

“Er . . . nature?”

Ava looked at her levelly. “You don’t recognize it,” she said, without humor, without bitterness. And she turned and faced the area to the left of the path.

Kitty followed her gaze. Trees, bushes, rocks, leaves. Then she spied a kind of platform thing half hidden in one of the hardwoods. A tree house, she thought. But why should she recognize a tree house? They’d never had one in childhood.

“Um, no?” Kitty shrugged, laboring to keep it light.

“This is where we had it.” Ava continued to look not at her friend but at the snow-dusted patch of woods. “This was Midgetropolis.”

•   •   •

T
HEY HAD PLAYED HERE
nearly every day the year the Manseaus moved into the Art Barn. Once Kitty started going to Freyburg Primary, the time she had for their games back at Batter Hollow was more limited, but she and Ava and Freddy had still spent many long Saturdays and Sundays in Midgetropolis. And they kept this up even after Ava joined her in public school. Fred joined them, too—for a bit, anyway.

During the brief period when all three attended Freyburg Primary, they would set off together down Batter Hollow Lane in the early morning, kicking up loose stones when it was dry, squelching through mud when it was not, swinging their canvas schoolbags and plastic lunch boxes at their sides. The girls walked down the middle of the lane, while Freddy always went down the side, running a stick along the trunks of trees, his attention held by the arrhythmic pattern of bumps traveling from the stick up his arm. By late fall the morning sunlight would cut almost sideways through the leaf-purged branches, and their own movement past the trees created strobing light, which seemed to excite Freddy: he’d speed up his walk, break into a trot and then a run, still holding out his stick so it smacked the trunks, bumpity-bumpity-bump, working himself up into a ululating yell, a sound Kitty found unnervingly indeterminate, pitched midway between euphoria and distress.

At the bottom of Batter Hollow Lane, where they waited for the school bus, Freddy would use his stick to strike the row of mailboxes, going up and down in no particular order, sometimes slowly and sometimes practically in a frenzy. Kitty and Ava would stand several feet away, “smoking” twigs they’d snap off a juniper bush and “light” with pine needle matches, affecting world-weary, hip-jutting slouches and puffing out wisps of ersatz smoke. “Will you shut up?” Kitty would sometimes call over her shoulder, “you’re giving me a headache.” But both the words and jaded tone were as transparently artificial as her cigarette and stance; it was all charade, and anyway she knew Freddy wouldn’t pay her any notice. For all the gaps in his mental faculties, whenever he was engrossed in something he had really singular powers of concentration. Plenty of times Kitty had tried to get his attention only to give up with a disconcerting sense of her own inadequacy.

The school bus driver would not allow Freddy to bring his stick on the bus, setting off a series of tantrums. The first day, the driver, a sinewy older man with one cauliflower ear, wound up forcefully wresting the stick from Freddy’s hand and throwing it out the door. Freddy had wailed and rocked and hit his head with his fists all the way to school while Kitty, seated with Ava across the aisle, burned with embarrassment, some pity for Freddy, and anger—this last divided between the bus driver and Freddy. The second day, despite their having rehearsed a more favorable scenario with Neel and June the night before, Ava and Freddy together in tears declined to board the bus, leaving Kitty to slink on singly and ride to school by herself, burning once again with embarrassment, pity and anger—this time, more of the pity directed toward herself and the anger divided now between Freddy and Ava. The third day saw Freddy left behind alone, bellowing, jumping up and down, waving his stick and behaving generally so much like Rumpelstiltskin at the end of that tale, that as they pulled away and he got smaller and smaller through the bus’s rear windows, Kitty could not choke back a hot throatful of laughter, and Ava refused to speak to her for the rest of the day.

By the second week of school, Neel and June had worked out an arrangement with Freddy. It involved his depositing his stick in a kind of quiver constructed of cardboard and attached to the mailbox post with pieces of twine. Each afternoon when the bus brought them home, the stick would be waiting there for him, so that he could return up Batter Hollow Lane repeating his tree-knocking ritual in reverse.

Kitty was nine then, nearly ten, and felt confused admiration for the vast patience Neel and June and Ava afforded Freddy. The confusion had to do with her belief that she could never muster such patience, and a measure of scorn that they did. Why put up with all Freddy’s shenanigans? Why give in to his ridiculous insistences? She felt sorry for them, and this gave her an elevated feeling, the impression of being more knowing and sensible than the Robbinses, yet she derived no pleasure from this feeling of superiority.

She tried some exploratory complaining. “Why does Freddy have to ride the bus with us?” she asked her parents. “He’s always kicking the seat in front of him and he makes weird sounds. Humming and stuff. Why can’t Neel and June just drive him?” Don and Meg would answer, as she had known they would, “It may be good for him to be around other kids more”; “Just ignore him if it bothers you”; “Perhaps Neel and June think it’ll help him adjust.” It wasn’t that Kitty expected them to solve the school bus problem, but she hoped for some sign that her parents, too, harbored doubts about the wisdom of the Robbinses’ choices. Some sign that they, too, disapproved.

Certainly someone ought to disapprove. Someone ought to tell them how bad things were at school. Kitty and Ava were in fifth grade that year, the year Freddy, for a handful of months, attended the second grade. Kitty and Ava were up in the portables, a cluster of classrooms separated from the rest of the building by a gravel path and flight of steps. It was great being in the portables, great being the oldest kids in the school. They got to go straight from the lunchroom to recess whenever they were ready, without having to line up and be dismissed like the lower grades. And they had the best teacher, Mr. Yeltsov, who called all the kids by their last names and who played music while they did their math modules—not children’s music but his own tapes that he actually listened to in the car on the way to work (he’d told them this), things like Kate Bush and the Talking Heads and The Police.

But several times a week an aide would come up to their portable and interrupt class, asking if she could “just borrow Ava Robbins a sec?” Mr. Yeltsov’s jaw would jut sideways and he’d give a brusque nod, and then Ava would go off with one hand gripping the other, the bunched fingers twisting slowly to and fro. She’d return ten or twenty or forty minutes later, her face somehow narrower and paler, and she’d shake off Kitty’s questions, her demonstrations of sympathy, even her most general efforts to provide good cheer. After a month or so they stopped pulling Ava out of class, but then it was worse because Ava (along with all the other fifth-graders) would still hear about whatever trouble Freddy had gotten into, only now it was through gossip and Ava could do little but sit helpless, cheeks burning, while the whispers flew. Among the Freddy stories that circulated around the school were these: he’d been made to sit out in gym for the entire class and then cried so hard he threw up on the wrestling mats; he poured a foil dish of tempera paint on one classmate and spat on another; he got caught pocketing coins from the Estimate Jar on his teacher’s desk; he wandered away from recess and turned up fifteen minutes later banging away on the metallophones in the music room; he wandered away from recess and turned up four hours later in a residential neighborhood over a mile from school.

He got a reputation for being violent (or as the kids repeated to one another,
That Freddy Robbins is vicious
). Kitty knew what they meant but also that they were wrong. It was more that he was unbiddable. When allowed the freedom to which he was accustomed, Freddy was peaceful almost all the time. Only when made to comply with order and rules, systems and rigor, did it become impossible for him to keep still. The final straw occurred in December. While lined up in the hall with his class, about to head to music—his favorite part of the school day, especially when they got to use the rhythm instruments—Freddy, with no apparent provocation, turned and pushed the girl behind him. She landed face-first on the buffed linoleum and broke her nose.

The school requested parental consent to have Freddy evaluated for an Individualized Education Plan, consent Neel and June declined to grant. Instead they withdrew him from Freyburg Primary, forevermore to be schooled (or unschooled) at home.

Ava, asked to make a choice, said she wanted to continue in public school.

“Now I feel rotten about it,” she confided to Kitty, right after announcing her decision to Neel and June.

They’d come out to Midgetropolis, where they were sitting on the slab, Kitty trying to start a fire in the hearth with a pile of pine needles and a magnifying glass stolen from Mr. Yeltsov’s room. All autumn the girls had been practicing their pyro skills, experimenting with different forms of tinder and different types of lenses.

Freddy played by himself a few yards away, spinning himself round and round down by the swale. Every so often he’d lose his balance and topple over onto his back, where he’d lie serenely a minute before rousing himself to spin again. It was a cold day and bright in the startling way of the shortest days of the year. Wood smoke stippled the air. One of the cottages must be having a fire—evidence that another world, the real one, existed just through the woods—but the smell blended happily with the girls’ thus far unfruitful efforts to kindle their own; instead of undermining the validity of their imaginary domain, it seemed to enhance it.

“Neel’s mad.” Ava looked miserable.

“Did he say that?”

“Of course not. He just got all stiff and polite. And then he was ‘busy’ all of a sudden, and he went in his office and shut the door. He never shuts the door all the way, not unless he’s on the phone and Freddy’s having a tantrum.”

“It’s silly for him to be mad,” said Kitty. She’d never ventured direct criticism of Ava’s parents before, not even in its mildest, commiserating form. “After all, they said you could choose.”

“Guess I was supposed to choose what
he’d
like.”

“It’s your life.”

“I know. I told him that!” Ava wiped a tear furiously. “You’d think he’d be happy! ‘People should be free so long as they’re not hurting anyone or themselves.’” She quoted Neel in a bilious, mincing voice, then picked up a handful of pine needles and flung them.

“Watch the fire,” Kitty protested, neatening the remaining needles with the side of her palm.

“He’s such a hypocrite! He can’t even admit I’m right. He can’t admit I might genuinely have a different choice than him. I hate Neel! People should be free so long as they think and feel exactly like him, is what he means! Fuck him! Fuck Neel!”

Kitty was scandalized and exhilarated by this open rebellion, but before she could think how to respond, a great whooping sounded behind them. They looked over to where Freddy stood, and he flapped his arms at them violently and fell backward, plank-like, his body sending bits of dry, rotted leaf into the air. For a moment all was still. Then a decidedly festive chortle issued forth, and Ava and Kitty turned back to their as yet imaginary fire.