My mother, a month shy of fifty-seven, had been pinning her hair back in a neat bun for as long as I could remember and teaching Catholic school for nearly twenty years. She preferred the wings to the spotlight. Yet it was my trust in her that primed me to trust Arol. Had Wulf been alive and giving orders, I might have fled the Farm within days.
Arol was murmuring what seemed like instructions to a flint-chipped man crouched at her elbow. A dark, billed cap obscured his eyes. He nodded every few seconds. Her lips almost grazed his ear. This was Prophet, Arol’s consort. He was a year older than I, and just six months older than Swan, Arol and Wulf’s daughter. They’d gotten together a few months after Wulf’s death.
When Arol finished, Prophet nodded once more and gently squeezed her forearm. He rose to leave the room, never raising his gaze to reveal his eyes. Cap brim, nose, mustache, goatee—a study, in living quartz, of precision focus.
The room filled with the clatter and click of fork against bowl, fork against plate. Arol looked up. At me.
“You’re Helen, right? The Harvard chick. Where’d you come here from?”
“New York City. Brooklyn.”
“Ha! That’s where I grew up. The projects. Williamsburg, Hell’s Kitchen.” She laughed. “New York’s a real shithole, isn’t it?”
I smiled at her bluntness. I, too, loathed New York, in moments, for its crowds and concrete, its everyday brutality; I welcomed the idea that it didn’t suit humans. If that was true, then I was right to bail out. On the other hand, it was home, the place I knew best. I’d long thought that if there were a footrace up Broadway, complete with real-life rush-hour throngs, ill-timed DON’T WALK signs, and motor vehicles threatening pedestrians in the crosswalk, I’d win. I was that skilled at the dance of the city. And I’d been lucky enough to grow up in a large apartment on Prospect Park West—affordable for a family on food stamps because we’d moved to Brooklyn in 1977, when the South Slope was rowdy and rents were low. I tried for a compromise between contradicting Arol and unduly dissing my roots.
“Well, yeah, it can get pretty ugly. But I didn’t mind living there when I was a kid.”
Arol lifted one corner of her mouth in a sardonic smile, then switched subjects. “You know, we work pretty hard here. It’s not like college. It’s a much deeper commitment. You have to be smart to make it, but that’s not all. You have to put your heart in it. You think you can do that?”
She stared at me, her eyes storming mine. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but she seemed to know, and I was intrigued by the story taking form: At Zendik I’d grow in new ways, working toward rewards at once more real and mysterious than grants and grades. Revive sweetness in romance. Practice the mating dance without leaving home.
[ chapter 2 ]
Moving In
I’D JUST PULLED ON MY shirt and underpants, and was stepping into my overalls, when I heard a knock on the door to the Farmhouse bathroom. Thinking the knocker was next in the shower line snaking through the living room, I opened my mouth to say, “I’ll be right out!” But before I could speak, the knob turned. My heart lurched. The door swung open, and Cayta strode in. I stepped back into a patch of morning sunshine and yanked my pants up to my waist.
In her Woodstock story, Karma had said that Cayta was in charge, if anyone was—and she looked it now, the corners of her mouth drawn down in half-moon grooves. Though she was seven days my junior, her five years at Zendik made her seem older and wiser than I was. She reminded me of Miss Clavel, the spinster headmistress in the Madeline children’s book who marched her “twelve little girls” in “two straight lines.” Except that Cayta—like most of the Zendik women—glowed with youth and health. Freckles sprinkled her creamy skin. From a deep widow’s peak, her thick, dark locks flowed into a single, smooth braid. Woven to a vanishing point, the braid, though unbound, stayed fast.
Cayta looked at me and shook her head. “Helen, you’re a dirty girl,” she said.
I tugged the bib of my overalls up over my shirt and fastened the straps. The trickle of resistance raised by Cayta’s invasion disappeared in a flush of shame. She was right. For the past week, I’d been turning compost, shoveling goat muck, denailing boards, prying siding off a derelict house in a nearby town. In the three or four days I’d been allowing between showers, grime shadows had crept up my calves and around my neck. But bathing was a challenge. All forty-plus of us bunking in the barn and Farmhouse were expected to be on call for work crews from breakfast till dinner—which translated into morning and evening rushes on the one shower we all shared. Under these circumstances, bathing twice a week seemed reasonable. I didn’t mind, and it hadn’t occurred to me that the Zendiks might. Hadn’t the website warned visitors to bring work boots and clothes that could get dirty, since these were “pioneer times”? Wasn’t I—weren’t many of us—living in a barn?
“Yeah, I know,” I said, studying a swirl of white flecks in the viridian linoleum. “But the shower line is always so long, and—”
Cayta cut me off. “If you wanna stay here, you’re gonna have to get used to sharing a hell of a lot more than you did out there.” I thought to defend myself: But I don’t mind sharing. I’m happy to let other people use the shower, instead of me. Before I could speak, Cayta continued: “There are a bunch of us. We live close to each other. It’s not like out in the world, where everyone has their own house, their own car, their own everything.”
She softened her salvo with a half smile and leaned back against the toilet tank, folding her hands in her lap. Her fingernails, I noted, were filed into ovals—and clean. They were clean. Cayta lived in the Mobile. “Seems like you have a pretty strong body odor,” she said.
The flush of shame returned, deeper this time. Dirt layered my surface; scent seeped from within. What other betrayals lurked beneath my skin?
“Yeah, I guess so.” I reached for my deodorant.
She wrinkled her nose and sniffed. “What kind of deodorant is that?”
“Mint julep. Queen Helene.” I held the stick out to her—riddled with chemicals, jungle green. I hadn’t used another brand in years.
“That stuff is stinky,” she said. “Y’know, you can use the communal deodorant.”
She pointed to a Tom’s of Maine regiment on a spruce-green shelf: neat rows of evergreen (for men) and unscented (unisex). Above the deodorant stood two wide-mouthed mason jars jammed with mongrel packs of toothbrushes, bristles gnawed and ragged.
“Yeah, other people have noticed your odor, too,” she warned, as she rose from the toilet and made for the door. “Even the guys. So you need to work on that, okay?”
“Okay.” Which guys? Is one of them Estero?
Alone again, I extracted my toothbrush from one of the packs and squeezed out a gob of chalky tan paste, tasting of clay and licorice. In the mirror as I brushed, I saw a shaggy-headed woman with an anxious gaze. “Don’t worry, Helen,” I began—before recalling that someone sitting near the door in the living room might be listening. You’re gonna be okay. Sometimes you have to change a few things to make it in a new place.