The saskiad, p.29
The Saskiad, page 29
Suddenly he is getting up. She holds on desperately. "No," he says gently, pulling her hands away. "No, no." She goes limp. He folds her arms in front of her and wraps the blanket tightly around her up to her neck and holds it under her chin in a hard grip. She would never escape from this cocoon. "No." He kisses her forehead, then presses her firmly down into the mattress. He is heaving himself up. He is gone.
She lies for a long time in the cocoon, not moving.
Later, she has a dream. She is locked in a room. She is dressed skimpily, and her captors are slavering over her. "Get your fucking hands off me!" she screams at them. A rage like she has never felt before fills her, her head will explode if she doesn't vent the pressure
by screaming. She fights them off while parts of her voluptuous body reveal themselves through the skimpy clothes. They are in agony they want her so badly, but they can't have her, or any of her secrets, either! She grabs a whip with which to whip them. But then she sees it's a you-know-what, right in her hand.
The talk at school on Monday is that Marie drank so much at the party she had to have her stomach pumped while Sue Walsh gave Danny Rizzuto a blowjob in the bathroom where Marie and Saskia made themselves up.
15
On Wednesday the schools close at noon and everyone goes home for Thanksgiving. That afternoon Thomas finishes installing the solar panels and climbs down from the roof. In the basement he oils and stores the tools. Then Saskia spies him in the common room, where he sits tugging at his beard, his face gone spookily blank again.
Is it her fault?
On Monday John came to Wholeworld while Saskia was in school, and when she got off the bus that afternoon Thomas was in the common room saying to Lauren, "I've been a gold mine for the White Corporation, they ought to be thanking me for all the Kruger-rands I've put in their coffers. But they just can't stand it that I did it, it drove them up the wall when they shunted the crazy hippies over here and waited for the whole thing to collapse and we made it work. John doesn't even have the guts to show up when I'm here."
"He's afraid of you."
"That's insulting."
"But what are we going to do about the money?"
"The charges are in your name, they'll bail you out. I'm saving them money in the long run."
On Tuesday Thomas announced that Wholeworld would not be celebrating Thanksgiving, and everyone let him down. They gaped stupidly at each other, with "does not compute" blinking on their faces. To be fair, since Christmas has never been celebrated at Wholeworld (on the grounds that it is hollow, commercial, and narrowly Western), Thanksgiving has always been their biggest holiday. Lauren has traditionally baked a delicious casserole of maize, yams, onions, buttermilk, and sage, blanketed with cheddar cheese. Saskia can't remember a time when Lauren did not do this, and she always got an indescribably hyggelig feeling at the contemplation of that casserole. Since Lauren made it only once a year, it became a marker of time passing. Saskia can distinctly remember sitting at the two-ton oak table and saying to herself, as the casserole grandly steamed: "Now I'm six years old. Next year I'll be seven." Imagine! So few things, so very few things, have been more or less constant at Won-derland/Godhead/White-on-the-Water/Wholeworld.
Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that Lauren and Saskia gaped at each other. "It's a harvest holiday," Lauren said. You could practically hear her gears grinding. "Everybody has them."
"As a matter of fact," Thomas pointed out, "it's not a harvest holiday. You're a farmer — have you harvested anything lately? Real harvest holidays are in October." He was so earnest he went up on his toes, endeavoring to get closer to Lauren's face so that he could more effectively pour the truth into it. "The timing of Thanksgiving is the proof! The Pilgrims were late! They suckered the Indians into helping them survive the first winter. So thanks! Thanks be to Christ, and pass the smallpox blankets. No, I don't feel like celebrating that."
Once Saskia thought about it, she remembered that the much-vaunted casserole included cheese, and since they don't eat cheese anymore, the casserole is irrevocably a thing of the past whether they celebrate Thanksgiving or not. And anyway, Thomas does all the cooking, so if he says there isn't going to be a Thanksgiving, there isn't going to be a Thanksgiving, and arguing about it is as silly as telling the sun not to come up in the morning.
Thursday dawns cold and dark, with chalk-dust flurries of snow blowing in from the lake and whitening the seedpods of the high dead grass. Across the country millions of Novamundians are beheading and eviscerating birds to symbolize their thankfulness for nature. Saskia stands at her window, wrapped tight in a blanket, and silently watches the snow swirl against the pane and retreat, swirl and retreat. She hears Mim go down to the bathroom. Why doesn't she wake Mim anymore? She doesn't know. No, she does know. When Mim took over the milking for the summer she learned to get up on her own, and she still does it, even though the milking is a thing of the past. After all, Mim is in seventh grade now. Seventh grade! Saskia sees her occasionally in the gloomy halls of Tyler Junior, seemingly thriving in her ecological niche. She still has her two friends, she still carries her books adorably in front of her. But one must admit she is older, a different person. Saskia is not sure Mim would be her boatswain again, even if Saskia wanted her to be.
And why doesn't Saskia wake the crew anymore? Because Thomas wakes them. His and Lauren's bedroom is next to their quarters, so it only makes sense. And Thomas in three months has succeeded where Saskia in five years had not: Quentin has stopped wetting his bed. When was the last time she sopped up his slobbery chin? She can't remember. When was the last time Austin or Shannon did a single simple thing Saskia asked them to do?
She dresses and descends. In the deep gloom of the kitchen she finds Thomas brewing coffee. She raises her hand to the light chain, but he says, "Don't." She cringes. No, no.
They sit at the oak table for a few minutes all to themselves. They cup their coffees, dip their faces to the fumes. Speak! She doesn't speak. "Better enjoy this," he says. God how she loves that twinkle in his eye.
He rouses the crew and allows each member a cup of sweet herb tea and a piece of toast slathered with whatever they want. Then he tells everyone to go get blankets. She comes back down to find him out on the porch, where he's moved the couch. "Have a seat." Lauren is already there. The crew straggle down one by one, and he has them dump their blankets before climbing on. He spreads a blanket across laps. Then another, and another, and a quilt, and more blankets, until they are all buried to the chin. He puts his head under and crawls in. The mountain shifts. The crew shriek. He emerges in the middle, with crew under each arm. "There!" he says, looking around. "Hvor hyggeligt!"
All agree. Saskia burrows deeper. Thomas hushes the twins, and everyone holds their breath, waiting for him to speak. But he doesn't speak. He stares at the thin blowing snow, across the driveway to the trees. After his hush, no one would dare say a word.
"Do you hear that?" he says at last, quietly.
Saskia cocks an ear. The hush of snow, the tickle of an old leaf turning over the driveway gravel.
"What?" Austin asks.
"Silence," Thomas says. "Beautiful, isn't it?"
None of the crew answers. "Yeah," Saskia breathes. It's probably too sophisticated a thought for them.
For a long minute they all listen to silence.
"Today we're going to do something that Man never does," he says. "We're going to do nothing. Everywhere else today, the furnaces are going full blast and all the lights are on, so the cold and dark of a real November will be safely outside. When people look at their windows all they see is reflections of themselves. Thanks for this blindness. Thanks for this womb.
"Well, no thanks. We have a responsibility to understand where we are, what we are. Someone has to. So we here, on this porch, we aren't going to eat, we aren't going to turn on lights or heat, we aren't going to impose ourselves on the world today. We are going to let the world enter us. We are going to feel the cold on our faces, the snow on our hands. In our bellies we'll feel hunger, the hunger of winter.
"Silence is the hardest thing to learn. Look around you. See things you've never seen before, right here, where you've been a million times. Don't blot out the world with words."
With that, he stops speaking. Minutes go by. The grass by the driveway slowly whitens, while the gravel remains dark. A mist hovers over the gray lake. Everyone is quiet. Shannon fidgeted a moment ago, but is now still. Saskia steals a glance at Thomas and drinks in his profile, his blue eyes accepting the world. He waited for her, not imposing himself. Snowflakes blow onto the porch and bounce on the quilt before rolling smooth as pinheads into the creases. When a flake strikes her hand she glimpses for a split second the smashed crystal, replaced a moment later by a droplet of water. If only she could be like that snowflake, abandoning herself to the winds of the world, ready to melt into whatever home the winds blew her to.
The minutes melt and run together like the snowflakes. Saskia watches the snow gather against the bottom of the garage door and dozes. She wakes to see a chipmunk crossing the driveway, stopping and starting, raising its nose to twitch at smells humans never smell. "A chipmunk," she blurts out. She bites her tongue.
But Thomas is not angry. "Is it?" he says.
"Isn't it?"
"What does that mean, 'chipmunk'? Does the word mean we know what that life is? Or does it separate us from that life?"
"Urn . . ."
"Chipmunk implies not-chipmunk. If you are not-chipmunk you don't know chipmunk, do you?"
"Urn . . ."
"Of course not," Lauren butts in.
"What do you know?" Saskia says.
"Let's be quiet," Thomas says.
Shannon is half asleep. Austin is looking down under the blankets. He is probably twiddling his thumbs under there. He yawns. None of this would mean anything to him, of course, but he knows better than to cause trouble. Saskia looks back at the driveway. The chipmunk, or whatever it was, is gone.
Jo comes out of her trailer and circles to the back of the house, to enter at the kitchen and secrete in the bathroom. She looks toward the porch, but doesn't speak or wave, and keeps walking. When she comes out again around lunchtime she doesn't even look. Thomas must have warned her to leave them alone. The snow slacks off and the wind picks up. The lake darkens into ripples, and almond eyes of cornflower blue open and close in the sky. Lauren's unprotected ears commune with the cold, turning scarlet, until she gives up rubbing them and raises the quilt over her head. Mim has to go secrete, but Saskia doesn't, she wisely did that when she went up to get her blankets. A couple of lives that Saskia would usually call "squirrels" chase each other with a frantic scratching sound around a tree trunk, up and down like a double helix, and then disappear upward into the needles. Branches dip and shake off snow as the two lives jump to another tree. Gorgon appears on the porch, thinner now that she is a barn cat, jumps up on the quilt and stalks from face to face, waking Shannon with her cold fur, stopping at Thomas and settling down on his chest with a self-encircling curl of her tail. Saskia spends a long time looking at her, until she falls asleep. Gorgon, that is, not Saskia.
Shannon gets permission to go secrete. When she crawls back under the blankets she announces, "I'm hungry."
"So am I," Thomas says. "Isn't it wonderful?"
Saskia is hungry, too. It is easier for her than for the crew to see how wonderful it is, since she has often gone for a day, eating little. And prepared by all the silent and holy meals on Ven, she is much more able to meditate. Wasn't she just minutes ago feeling at one with the two lives on the tree? Didn't she feel that the blue eyes in the clouds were her own eyes, contactless? Saskia thought she wanted the casserole. She was like a cow wanting to go to the same field each morning because it is all she knows. But Thomas knew better, and here they are, hyggelig on the couch, blanketed, their breath grandly steaming. They are themselves the casserole. They have become that which they desired, they have entered into the object of their covet-ousness.
The afternoon goes on forever. The crew start to fidget more and more, and finally Thomas says, "Anyone who can't stand it anymore can go." That settles them down. But he goes on, "This isn't a test. It really is all right if you want to go. I know it's hard to sit still so long." After a few minutes, Mim and the twins creep out, shamefaced. You can hear them in the kitchen. A light goes on upstairs. Quentin stays, murmuring quietly to his diplodocus. Thomas strokes his hair. Saskia makes a long waking dream about Tycho. When she opens her eyes again it is dusk. So soon? She watches the garage door fade away. It is night.
Out of the darkness comes Thomas's voice, mesmerizing after so much silence.
"When I was fourteen years old, we were taught dissection in school. They gave us dead frogs, and we were shown how to cut them open, how to identify and remove the organs. I didn't like the fact that the frogs were dead. They had been stored in formaldehyde, and their whole bodies, all their organs, were gray. I thought, What's the point of this? You learn to do dissections so you can fix something, don't you? A dead frog doesn't need anything except a decent burial. I wanted to be a veterinarian. I imagined myself setting birds' bones in my backyard. Animals would come to me with thorns in their paws. I caught a frog and anesthetized it by wedging chloroform-soaked cotton in the neck of a funnel and holding the funnel over the frog's head. It was easy. When the frog was knocked out, I spread it on its back on a board and dissected it as I had done in school. I did a careful job, folding back the skin and the chest muscles and tacking them to the board. It was like opening a watch, taking the cover off, removing the gears. I exposed the heart, and watched it beat. Just like the spring of a watch. This was what I would do as a vet, I thought. I pretended that there had been something wrong with that heart, and I pretended that I had just fixed it. You're all better! Time to close you up."
The voice pauses. It is pitch black. "It was only then that I realized. They had shown us how to dissect a frog, but they hadn't shown us how to put one back together.
"I stared at that little frog where it lay on the board, its insides open to me, its heart beating. This wasn't a watch with a cover I could snap back on. This was a living creature that I had mutilated. And there was nothing I could do for it. I soaked more cotton in chloroform and put the funnel over the frog's head. It would be easy to tell when it died, since the heart was visible. Here in the dark, right now, in front of me, I can see that heart, the size of a shirt button, slowing . . . slowing . . ."
The voice stops. On the other side of the lake a train is trundling toward the salt mine, sounding clumsy and sad. Then it gets where it is going, and the whole universe seems to be expressed by the whisper of falling snow.
16
The next morning, Saskia luxuriates over her coffee and a slice of toast. Outside the window the weather is warmer, the day glistening with rivulets in the driveway and sunlight sparkling the drops tassel-ing from the roof. Thomas comes in and says in the Old Speech, "That was good, wasn't it?"
"Let's do it every week!"
He smiles and rubs her neck, saying nothing.
But wouldn't you know it, just when the crystal is beginning to hum nicely, the impurity comes over. "It's not even ten," Saskia protests at the front door. But the car is already gone.
"Where's Thomas?" Jane tilts to one side and the other to look over Saskia's shoulders.
"I haven't the slightest idea. Maybe he's in town."
"Betsy's in the driveway."
"So maybe he flew."
"Just tell me where he is."
Thomas is approaching from the garage. Saskia sighs. "He's right behind you."
Thomas mounts the porch, scowling. "You're here early."
"I already tried to tell her," Saskia says.
"I just thought, there's nothing to do at my house and it's such a nice day —"
"We had a nicer day yesterday, without you."
"I don't want to get into this," Thomas says.
"We had a great day, sitting on the porch and meditating, while you were stuffing your face."
Jane turns to Thomas. "Couldn't we —"
"I said I didn't want to get into this!" he says sharply.
"You could drive her home," Saskia says in the Old Speech.
"Why should I?" he grumbles. "It's not my fault she's here."
Jane always gets upset when they talk in the Old Speech. "I could go read for a while, or something. I just thought... But if you're busy. It's no big deal."
"Don't let her stay," Saskia pleads, still in the Old Speech.
"It's none of my concern! I'm going sailing."
"Can I go, too?" It is a measure of how much Jane's untimely arrival has discombobulated Saskia that she blurts out the request at all.
"Not this time."
"Are you going sailing?" Jane asks.
"How did you guess?" Saskia says sarcastically.
"Can I come?"
"For pete's sake, Jane! He goes on his own, don't you know anything? Leave him alone!"
"You're not my mother, Saskia," Thomas says, his face turning deep red. "So shut up."
Air goes out through Saskia's mouth.
"Finally," Jane gloats. "A little peace and quiet around here."
