In school when his teacher asks he tells her: Mommy is in the radio and Daddy sells seeds. He goes to people’s houses door to door. Flowers, he tells her: marigolds and pansies (which means “thinking of you” in France). Vetegebles, too. Vegetables, she corrects him. He says: Radishes. Pink ones, red and white. Even black ones. I’ve never heard of black radishes, she says. Tell your daddy I’d like to buy a package of those black radish seeds.
This is a day unfolding unlike any other. The sensation of Jenny’s hand in his own and his teacher’s interest in his father’s radishes. Then in the afternoon when the bus stops beside the path that leads to his house, Jenny is out front feeding crackers to the ants that live everywhere. Not just under the front porch. Ants, she tells him, like a parade. Ants, she continues, have built a city under the porch, a fantastic city of sand with towers and pyramids and map rooms and museums. They live in the dark; ants have noses for eyes. They sleep under the best smooth stones. There are corridors, more than anyone can count; ants don’t have doorknobs. They fear anteaters. Ant-eating birds. Little boys who do cruel things with mirrors. Understand, she says, that this is a warning. He assures her he loves the ants, too.
At the center of the ants’ city, there is a park and a long table set for community suppers. The plates are made of toenail trimmings people have left unattended on the bathroom floor; the ants go into the house just as soon as people leave to look for them. They look for the things people have abandoned in corners, under the living room couch, behind the crockery, in the breadbox, between the pages of books, in the deep creases of the upholstered rocker, in his father’s sock drawer—My father’s sock drawer! Stub explodes with laughter. And the pantry. Jenny picks up a twig and pushes it around in the grass. Above all, the pantry! Grain by grain they make off with the sugar, the flour, the honey grahams and gingersnaps, the lost buttons. Lost buttons? Yes. A button is a fantastic weapon when you are an ant. When the ants go to war it might look like a game of tiddlywinks to you and me, but a button sent flying into an anteater’s eye will send it packing, let me tell you.
There are islands in my room, Stub tells Jenny. Would you like to see them?
That weekend his father comes home. He carries a small false-leather suitcase for his shirts and underwear and an orange leather valise with brass bumpers and tacks. Inside, packages of seeds are tucked in careful rows. To see the valise open stuns the senses (Jenny). Who could have known how beautiful packages of seeds could be? Even the radishes are a revelation. The purple beets look like people, Jenny says, all tummy with leaves. Things from another, newer world. Somewhere, she decides, vegetables are as prized as rubies. Somewhere people make ruby soup and rings out of radishes.
He can see that Jenny makes his father uncomfortable. Night settles in. Jenny eats a sandwich in her room. Then, even as they are still at supper, she starts sudsing her hands.
That night he dreams of ants overtaking the house. They get into the radio and walk off with his mother’s voice. Outside, the air is thick and fast with fistfuls of greasy snow. The following evening his father is stuck upstate and his mother stranded in Kahontsi. Stranded is sweet sugar on the tongue. He imagines his mother standing alone in a cold room looking out the window with a frown on her face. Fully dressed in her winter coat, muff, fur hat, fur-lined boots and gloves — she has run out of things to say and she is frowning. Wires are down, the streets are still, and Jenny makes rice. They spend the next day at the kitchen table building houses out of stiff paper, held together with tape and glue. A hardware store, a barbershop, a post office, a firehouse, and a water tower. Jenny makes bologna sandwiches with tender Wonder Bread and pungent mustard, and after lunch they build a bell tower because a town needs a bell in case of emergencies. Emergencies, they make a list, consist of: fires, enemy attacks, meteors, people running amok. Wolves can overtake a place and so can outlaws. We need a cemetery, says Jenny. A bakery, says Stub, with pies in the window. They build a water tower with legs made of pencils that refuses to stand up. This water tower, says Jenny, has a mind all its own. I’m putting cracker crumbs in the bakery, says Stub, to make sure the ants come by to check this all out.
Jenny proposes: a hotel for insomniacs. An observatory from which to consider the question: just what sort of cheese is the moon made of? A river that spills all of the world’s anger into a pool where everything sighs.
That night they sleep together like brother and sister. The snow keeps on coming and in the morning there is so much of it banked up against the front door they can’t open it. They eat bologna and rice pudding and spend the day making a library stacked with important books for elephants: The Nature of Trumpeting. How to Protect Your Assets. She figures out a way to keep the water tower from falling over. When the telephone rings they are in the thick of it and cannot, do not, answer. Jenny says: That will be your mother. Stub says: I’d like pygmies to live in this village. We’ll make a jungle, says Jenny. And put the village smack in the middle. That way they can play all day in the jungle and come home at night and eat pie.
Jenny turns up the thermostat. She cleans the house. The bathroom is spotless, the linoleum in Stub’s room has been scrubbed and rinsed many times over and then waxed to a High Shine. Words you can say breathing in and out: breathe in: High; breathe out: Shine. A magical incantation. Jenny and Stub breathe together, stepping from island to island on the sparkling linoleum. Can you, he asks, hear the elephants? Yes. And I can already see them, swimming light as bubbles. Looking at their legs the fish think they are dead heads. Fish have very short memories. If an injustice is done to them, they forget all about it. You can hook a fish over and over. Its mouth bleeds and it wonders why. If you hook it, gut it, clean it, cook it, eat it, digest it, shit it — it will not remember. But elephants remember everything. Just like we do.
Late afternoon. Outside the white witches of the air are busy packing up their needles and bits of unfinished tatting. Mother is trapped in Kahontsi, Stub says. Trapped in Kahontsi, Jenny agrees. Trapped in a teepee! Jenny dares. Trapped in a teepee! laughs Stub. The phone rings and rings and then it stops.
Jenny fetches a book from her room. By Verner Vanderloon, an old man who lives in seclusion somewhere by the river. A book with pictures as strange as the strangest thing you can think of. A small book bound in green leather, almost black, with silver letters pressed into the cover. Stub rubs a finger over them and with Jenny’s help reads: Ancient Roots and Ways. I stole it, Jenny whispers, from the Half Way House. She explains that the Half Way House is where she was when she was halfway here, on her way, although she didn’t know it yet, to him, to Stub. Now, now, she says, putting her arm around him when she sees the familiar troubled look on his face, I’ve always been halfway here, you know? Until I got here! Look at this!
Jenny opens the book and there is a picture of the skulls of apes: baboon, orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee. She reads the names aloud to him. From that moment on he cannot look at the letter B without seeing the skull of a baboon. Jenny turns the page and together they look at the skulls of men from long ago, before they were people, when they were only halfway here.