Perfect Little World(41)
Once dinner was ready, the adults gathered around the long oak table and placed the babies in their high chairs. Izzy set out the bowls of vegetables and a few loaves of bread while Kenny handed each made-to-order burger to the intended eater. Benjamin, who had been a car salesman in Knoxville, told a fairly long and complicated story about a difficult customer who, after finally buying a car, drove it into a ditch less than thirty yards from the dealership. Jill told the family about forgetting to put her car into reverse when leaving a drive-in hamburger stand, and smashing into a set of unoccupied picnic tables. It seemed that everyone had a ridiculous car crash story and that took up most of dinner, while the babies made their own strange sounds, occasionally demanding to be picked up and walked around the room or placed on the floor. Izzy fed the softest cubes of carrots to Marnie, Harris and Ellen’s baby, the orange of the carrots so bright that they seemed to be rare gems. Izzy couldn’t help but look down the table to where Cap was being fed by Callie, who cooed and smiled as Cap fixed his gaze on Callie’s smile. There was the sharpest, smallest pain in Izzy’s heart, and then she recovered and returned her attention to Marnie, who had managed to put her fingers in some mashed avocado and had rubbed it into her hair.
She had come to understand that her past life, all those years of living without, of removing emotion from her makeup, had prepared her for this new situation. She tried so hard to dismiss her desire to be Cap’s entire world, telling herself again and again, with increasing forcefulness, that it would not change anything. Instead, she would open her heart to the world and hope that good came from it, even if there was the recurring stab of regret. She kissed Marnie on the cheek and the baby squinted and smiled, her hands reaching for Izzy, who pulled her close, the muck of the baby’s dinner rubbing into Izzy’s own clothes. Good enough, she told herself, almost as good.
After all the babies were washed and freshly clothed, a seemingly endless process that left Izzy wrung out and tired, she took Cap in her arms and fed him, then handed him to Carmen, one of the three parents who would take over night duties with the children. Truthfully, though she barely got any sleep, she preferred night duty, the chance to be near the children, the odd sensation of hearing them breathe in unison, the feeling that your mere presence was protecting them. Izzy kissed a few of the other babies and then bid farewell to the parents who were staying behind.
Back outside, she thought of the endless pool, but opted instead to return to her own home. When she opened the front door, she was startled by the emptiness of it, not a single sound of occupancy. She went up to her bedroom on the second floor and fell onto the bed, not even bothering to get under the covers. Another day had passed, she had seen her way clear to another morning, and now she waited for the sleep she had fought off for hours to overtake her. As the complex shifted and expanded around her, she hugged herself and let everything inside her own body become still and perfect.
Finally alone, she allowed herself to uncoil, to become ragged, and she cried without effort, almost without any emotion powering it. She cried and cried, and she pictured every single person in the Infinite Family surrounding her, watching her, telling her it would be okay. And she tried, sleep still not coming, to believe that this was good, that this was the right thing for her.
But it was a mistake. Even if it worked out, she had made a mistake, joining this project. The strangeness of it, and the way everyone worked so hard to pretend that it was perfectly normal, was going to change Izzy in ways that she would not recover from.
But Izzy was used to making mistakes. She was used to living inside it. The key, she knew, was to bend and shape and worry the mistake until it turned into something else, something that would allow her to survive.
Then she forced herself to sit up, to become tough. She willed it to happen.
She thought of where she’d be if not for the complex, living in that tiny bedroom at her father’s house, her mother long dead, her father drunk and useless. She thought of how impossible it would be to sleep, the baby crib wedged so tightly into the room that Izzy could hardly move. She thought of her hair smelling of wood smoke, her eyes red with irritation. She’d have to take on another job, extra hours, a job so bad, the only thing she was qualified for, that would stretch her out so much she’d be flattened by the end of the night. She would have to leave Cap with old ladies who ran nurseries out of their own ramshackle houses, women so burned out by life that they swatted the kids into submission, charging so much that Izzy could barely afford to feed herself and her son, eating food that only slowed them down more. People in town would wonder who the father was, poor Izzy Poole, a smart girl, but such bad circumstances. Pity, she hated it. She’d come to regret Cap like she’d regretted Hal and damn near most of her life.
She would not allow that to happen, she told herself, now sitting up so straight in bed that it felt military or like very perfect yoga. She’d fought her way out of that life, had traveled so far to this place in the woods. She was scared. She was terrified of fucking everything up. It didn’t matter. She would make it work. Izzy would find tiny ways to make herself essential, to succeed when it seemed so unlikely. Ten years, that’s what she had. She would mine every essential element out of these ten years and she would be transformed. “Infinite,” she said to herself. “Infinite. I am infinite.” And so she was, and so she would be.
chapter ten