The saskiad, p.3
The Saskiad, page 3
PART 2
JANE AND
LAUREN
Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
that you will enter ports seen for the first time
with such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,
and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,
buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.
— Cavafy, "Ithaca"
1
Lauren is sitting cross-legged on her meditating pillow in front of a houseplant. She has had a long day, you can tell from the lines in her forehead. Her mud-caked work boots are on newspaper in the corner. Dirt is worked into the creases of her deep-tanned hands.
She is attaining peace. Her lips and eyelids are slightly parted, so that the strong straight teeth and opaque eye-whites gleam through slits. Her hands rest palm-up on her knees, thumbs and middle fingers forming egg-shaped holes, receptors of energy. She is probably pondering a koan like one hand clapping, or a tree falling in the forest when no one is around to hear it. What Saskia would like to know is, if you don't ponder these problems, are they then not problems?
The plant is a magnificent bat-wing begonia, taller than Saskia, its leaves glowing veinily in the purple evening light. Three sprays of frosted red flowers stick out yellow tongues. Lauren's plants and vegetables fetch good prices at the Farmers' Market because she meditates with them, praising them. In return she says they take her out of herself into their alien lives, their calm and undemanding rootedness. "Plants are natural Taoists," she has told Saskia. "People chase illusions. Plants are."
"Mm?" she murmurs now, sensing Saskia's presence.
"Dinner's ready."
White-on-the-Water's communal dinners are a daily ritual, a holdover from when the farm was a commune. If you don't want to come to dinner, Lauren gets on your case for being too individualistic, not vegetable enough. The commune existed back when Saskia was young and Thomas was here, along with many others who have since gone away. Several people worked on the farm then, not just Lauren, and Saskia remembers the chaotic plantings, the crop failures. She also remembers endless talking, poetry readings, vans in the field, people on their way to India or just back from it, folksens and barns walking around buck naked. There were prayer wheels, huts, a guru name Truth. People had names the guru gave them: Laughter, Grass, Star. Lauren was Striding Tree.
At first the commune was called Wonderland, and those were the days of hemp and LSD, endless talks and buck nakedness. Then it was renamed Godhead and drugs were banned. Women covered themselves and talking stopped, though the dances went on, sometimes all night. The guru went to live in a tower the commune built for him on top of a geodesic dome.
Amazingly enough, although she was only four when it ended, Saskia remembers all this. Well, not exactly. She does remember, though, looking at some old photos and having one out of ten questions answered by Lauren. Those grudging answers go back so far, they have become indistinguishable from Saskia's own memories.
Upstairs the twins are a mound of giggles under Mim's covers in the dark and Mim is stalking them, growling. "Wash your hands, everybody, and get to dinner. On the double." Complaints, resentful looks. Crews can be like that, you can't worry overmuch about it. Quinny is on the lower deck, kneeling in a circle with his dinosaurs. "Dinney time, Quinner. Let's get the others."
"Can we tell Austin and — ?"
"I already told them."
"I want to tell Austin and — !"
"Don't whine, Quinny, I already told them. Let's go tell Jo."
She takes his hand and he trips along docilely. "You're slobbering, Quinny." She hasn't got any paper. It's all over his chin, what a mess. She takes him into the bathroom and washes him up. They go out the back door and across the drive to Jo's trailer, a slope-shouldered aluminum hulk huddling sullenly in the weeds. Patches of blue light shift around the curtains. Blatter blatter. Through the door Saskia calls, "Jo?"
"What?"
("Let me say it!" Quinny whispers.)
"What is it?" The blatter quiets.
("Go ahead, go on," Saskia urges.)
"It's dinner, Jo!" Quinny trumpets, on tiptoes. "It's time for dinner!"
"All right."
"Let's get Bill now," Saskia says. She raps on the door of Bluffaroo Bill's trailer. "Dinner!"
"I'm working!"
"Well it's dinner all the same!"
Silence. Typical that he doesn't answer, that he hasn't even got the consideration. "So are you coming or what?"
"I'm coming, I'm coming! Christ!"
"He's coming, he's coming!" Saskia says to Quinny as they head back to the house. She and Marco have been practicing their impersonations. She assumes the retracted and pained expression of Bluffaroo's eyes, the hunch of his shoulders, as if the damp-breathing face of the world were too close, its comradely arm too heavy. "Christ!"
"Not rawhole enough," Marco says. "Look more persecuted."
So here they all come, padding over the troughs and crests of the warped boards of the common room, into the dining room and around the two-ton oak table beneath the spidery brass chandelier with the fake candle-flame bulbs, half of which have been burned out for about a century now. Dinner is brown rice with toasted almonds, scallions, and raisins; fried eggplant with a garlic-potato sauce (an ancient Greek recipe); home-baked beans; a cuke salad with fresh tarragon, straight from the greenhouse. A tasty ribsticking meal for these short and cold Tylerian winter days. Saskia is by miles and miles — let's face it, light-years — the best cook at White-on-the-Water.
Not that anybody notices. Only Lauren, seating herself calmly at the head, utters an automatic "Looks good." The crew is too busy giggling and shoving. "Cut it out," Saskia says. "Austin —" "What?"
"Stop it."
Gravely she sets the good things before them, generous with her provisions. Bill is jutting out his ultra-trimmed beard and looking around him like the whole world and everybody in it is a major letdown. That's a habit of his. He probably keeps his beard ultra-trimmed because he's trying to compensate for his body, which is "going to seed," as they say. He has that sort of lard-butt body type that makes men look high-waisted and elbowy. "Boy, somebody's hungry."
He groans histrionically. "Could I please eat in peace?"
What did she say? "Gee, you're pretty crabby today."
"I'm just in the middle of something, I want to get back to it." Fork fork. His arms are inflating even as Saskia watches.
"You ought to get more exercise."
"Excuse me? Look who's talking! That thing with all the glare up in the sky, that's the sun, you know. In case you were wondering." Hyuck hyuck. Fork fork.
"Bill, you're going to choke on something," Lauren says.
"Ettu, Brute?"
"Just slow down! You're making me lose my appetite."
"This is pretty good, Sas," Bluffaroo says, food pouched in both cheeks. She hates it when he calls her Sas. He has never once called her Saskia. Must be too much work, getting all those syllables out. "Can I tell you, though."
"No."
"If you want to keep the eggplant from getting soggy, you need hotter oil."
"They're soggy because you piled twenty onto your plate at once, Pig of the Universe." It's true. Saskia's three slices are perfectly crispy.
"You're getting ruder every day," Lauren says.
"What about him? I don't insult his cooking!" Which, you may believe, is a token of amazing self-restraint. Whenever it's Bluffaroo's turn to cook, there isn't a pot left east of the Mississippi without a black crust at the bottom. He'll do something Bluffarooish like decide halfway through that maybe he should make his own gourmet doodah croutons for the salad. He tells everyone he's making something that will bury the store-bought croutons under an avalanche of Bluffarooish superiority. But in the meantime, crushing herbs in the pestle, holding open his doodah gourmet cookbook with pudgy fingers, he forgets the casserole in the oven, and since his flesh-blob of a nose is apparently too small to smell anything, it's always Lauren or Saskia who calls from the common room, or down from the second floor, "Is something burning?" Then he has to cook something else in a hurry, so dinner is doodah croutons and boiled soybean franks, and then Lauren has only five minutes to eat because she's going to her waiting job down in Ithaca. She is so hard-working and all Bluffaroo has to do is make her dinner on time, and he screws it up.
So why do they let him cook? Lauren cites empowerment. He's supposed to be learning by doing. But he isn't getting better, Saskia says. You can bring that up during crit/self-crit, Lauren says. That's another communal thing that Lauren tries to get going between Bill, Jo, Saskia, and herself. It's always a disaster. Criticism: Bill, your cooking stinks. Self-criticism: Maybe I should be more patient about Bill's lousy cooking.
"I've figured out how to get into that new section," Bluffaroo is saying to Lauren. "I moved Sam's jump into the gorge before the scene with Rudolph and the transvestite, so now I can open immediately with the discovery of Sam's body under the Cayuga Street bridge. I've got to call the coroner, find out how much they bloat up. Sas, could you pass the salt?"
"You don't need any more salt. Austin!"
"What?"
"Stop it."
"Stop what?"
"I saw you do that."
"You must have forgotten to salt the beans."
"No, everything is salted exactly right."
The patented eye roll. Lord, give him patience. "Please give me the salt."
Saskia hands it to him. "It's just going to make you even more uptight."
"Say what?"
"It'll raise your blood pressure."
"Thanks, you do that just fine." Hyuck hyuck.
Then there is Jo. She has already finished and is sitting quietly, stone-faced. Is she thinking about anything? Saskia tries to calculate the line of her gaze. She seems to be staring at a patch of table between Austin's plate and Mim's glass. If you waved your hand in front of her eyes, would she blink? Jo never eats much, and when she's done she smokes. Not hemp even, but tobacco. She is thin and looks a lot older than she is, which is twenty-eight. She has a lower lip that sort of droops. She looks out of the side of her eyes at people, that lower lip drooping in wonder and dislike, as if to say, "Who the hell are you? Why don't you drop dead?" Perhaps it's an expression she learned for her job, as a cashier in one of Huge Red's cafeterias. Austin can make a perfect Jo face. It's basically his halibut face, without all the mouthing.
Sometimes Jo and Bluffaroo will team up. Bluffaroo will talk about the fifty-two ways the place could be fixed up and Jo will say Wouldn't That Be Nice, with a snort that means it will happen when hell freezes over. The two of them look like circled wagons, defending themselves from the Native Americans. Eventually, though, one of them will decide to yank the rug out from under the other and go solo. "Why don't you just do it yourself," Jo will suddenly say, "instead of pissing and moaning?" Saskia wishes Lauren would say: "You don't like it here? Fine. Live somewhere else." It's not like they pay rent or anything. But Lauren sits through it all calmly, ignoring them as though they were children. And she tells Saskia not to be a martyr.
"Thanks for dinner," Jo says to no one in particular and heads back somnambulently to the blue light. Yes, master. Bill smears a napkin around his lips. "Merci pour zee meal, ma'amzelle."
He's smiling. This must be a little joke. The stubble at the edges of his beard twitches. "Try not to be such a jerk," Saskia says.
Lauren sighs. "Sometimes I feel like throttling both of you."
The crew is straining to bolt, and Saskia releases them even though none of the plates are empty, and Shannon's is nearly full. They stampede toward the stairs, Austin leading: "Last one up is a turd-bucket!" Saskia regards the puddled food dejectedly. Sometimes she just doesn't have the energy. Quinny has remained behind. Obviously, the turdbucket. "Guess what?" he says to Lauren. He has such a high voice. They say boy sopranos turn into basses. Hard to imagine.
Lauren was about to get up. "What?" Quinny hesitates, blank-faced. "Well, what?" Lauren never has enough patience with Quinny. You'd think she'd know better.
Quinny leans close. He cups his hands and whispers confidentially, "I told Jo to come to dinner!"
Lauren pats his head. "I don't know what we'd do without you."
Saskia is cleaning up. "Why don't I help," Lauren says.
"No, it's my turn." That's the system. You clean up after your own dinner.
"You've been a martyr all week," Lauren says coolly, knowing just where the sore spot is.
But it's self-protection, Saskia pleads silently. If we cleaned up after each other, everyone would be in the kitchen all night after a Bluffaroo fest, scouring lava out of pans. I'm not a martyr, I'm not. Lauren has done her disappearing act. Some communal dinner, Saskia thinks, tipping scraps into the compost bucket. A real mess. Ha ha ha.
Rembrandt would look up from his easel and say angrily, "Will you stop fooling around?"
Thomas, of course, is not Novamundian but Phaiakian. The Phaiakians are "the people of the long oar," great seafarers, near the gods in origin. Thomas is blond with wine-blue eyes. The word "Phaiakians" means "The Shining Ones."
Saskia puts down her autobiography and looks for the millionth time at the map of Phaiakia that hangs over her bed: two large islands amid a cloud of smaller ones, and largest of all, a peninsula jutting north, curving eastward like a green mitten with fingers and thumb gently grasping the sea. You can tell it is a wise and good land merely from the cradling shape of it, a land fit for its people. One of the astronomers profiled in her star book was a Phaiakian. He lived in a castle on a green island and looked out of a tower and discovered more stars than any man before him. Near the gods.
She turns off the bedside lamp. In the blackness of predawn, her own stars are like a Rembrandt painting, and like Thomas, too. The Wagon (which farmers call the Plow, for the circle of the seasons and the work that never ceases), the supernova in Bootes, the eternally waxing Moon: their reassuring glow keeps her company for a while, but then fades away into the dark.
3
After some experimentation, the two girls discover that they are the same height only when Saskia stands on her toes on two textbooks on a stairstep above Jane. "How tall are you?" Jane asks, so openly marveling that it's a darn good thing Saskia isn't sensitive about her height.
"That's classified information." Saskia has not gotten taller by a nanometer in two years. All of her growth vectors are horizontal. This explains why, for all their difference in height, Jane weighs only, five pounds more than Saskia. Saskia's breasts are ballast, like the balloon-ist's bags filled with sand. If she could only cut the rope and sling them off, yelling "Bombs away!"
Jane Sing is double-jointed all over. Where other people put hands on their hips, she turns her wrists impossibly and seats them in the middle of her back. She curls one leg several times around the other and collapses her ankles outward so that she's standing on the sides of her feet. Everything about her is vertical: she pushes up the metal bracelets on her arms, they slide back down. Through the long drop from ears to shoulders dangle earrings that jiggle and flash like aspen leaves. And her hair! She has a way of tilting her head when she talks that causes the long black curtain to tassel forward over her shoulders. She throws each side back by dropping a shoulder and sweeping the hair with a flick of her wrist and a toss of her head, pursing her lips in a way that means, "You might be dying of jealousy, but really it's rather a nuisance having such long hair."
She lived in Boston for two years, and before that in England. The Blatt's Indian hypothesis is true to the extent that her parents were born in a town that used to be in India, although now it's in Pakistan. England apparently explains the smooth-sided cedar-box voice. "You've never heard an English accent before?"
Saskia hangs her head. Small-town barn. "I've read English books," she offers. The Captain speaks with a smooth-sided voice? That cannot be right. Perhaps his years at sea roughened it. The salt air corroded his cedar box. The Captain definitely has a gravelly voice. That is why he harrumphs all the time, to rearrange the gravel and have time to ponder, ponder.
Jane is already thirteen, which, of course, is exciting. But Saskia actually kind of likes being twelve. Twelve is a practical number, graciously divisible, a tool kit. Math would be an even more wonderful discipline if we had two extra fingers so that we counted in base twelve. Thirteen, on the other hand, is a prime number. Primes are intractable. You can't mess with them, they go their own ways. Secretly, Saskia worries about turning thirteen this summer. If she has got mooniness and breasts already, what will happen when she's a teenager? God, she'll get moony every other day, her breasts will balloon into medicine balls.
Since Jane turned thirteen last September, why isn't she in the next grade?
It's a sore subject. "I've been moved around so much, I got behind," Jane says crossly. During those years in England, she went to half a dozen different schools. "I would get fed up with one and have to try another."
Saskia understands the feeling, but she never knew you could switch schools. She thought schools were like obnoxious households: they were simply the beds you had to lie in. "How many different schools did your town have?"
She can tell from Jane's face that it's a dumb question. "These were boarding schools."
Perhaps because Jane is older, she smokes cigarettes. She sneaks four or five a day in a stall in the opium den, just like the tough pigs. In class she chews on the ends of her ballpoint pens or sucks on her hair. "I'm oral," she tells Saskia.
"It's really not good for you," Saskia offers hesitantly, meaning the smoking, and not knowing if that's a barnish thing to say or even more folksen than smoking.
