Perfect Little World(64)

Though she found most of her time was devoted to her work in the kitchen, Izzy had, perhaps stupidly, declared a major in art. She wasn’t so clueless that she didn’t understand, on some level, that this was connected to Hal and his influence on her in high school, but she found that she still desired the specific pleasure of creating an object that existed beyond something as ephemeral as food. Her current art course, where she was the only student who wasn’t a senior, having begged the professor to let her in, focused on three-dimensional work, and Izzy was now feverishly working on her final project. While other students were making intricately knitted covers that would fit over a truck or making plaster casts of dead animals to be suspended from ropes, Izzy had focused on woodworking, a talent she had continued since joining the Infinite Family.

Her original plan was to take a famous poem and then whittle individual letters that she would affix to a large wooden plank to be hung on a wall. However, there were two problems that seemed to work against each other as Izzy started on the project. First, she was not as skilled a whittler as the work required. It seemed impossible that she would be able to whittle the letters necessary to complete the poem. Second, the work seemed too small, too minor, not impressive enough to make up for the fact that she was pretty much making a cut-rate physical representation of a Joyce Kilmer poem about trees. It felt embarrassing, now that she looked back on it, to imagine how silly it would have looked at the art show, her family standing around her, praising her in the most polite way possible.

Jeremy had told her about band saws, the way she could more easily make the necessary curves of each letter. “Heck,” he said at dinner one night, using his knife on a piece of beef tenderloin to demonstrate, “you could knock out a lot of letters in the time it’d take you to whittle just one.” Izzy spent long hours in the general sculpture area of the university studio, working with the school’s band saw and her professor until she could make each letter from the stencil set with some ease. The next step was to expand the work.

Eliza, Link and Julie’s daughter, had awoken one morning from a dream and told Izzy about it while they were playing in the pool. “I dreamed that I was on a boat,” the little girl said to Izzy, her voice calm and measured, “and I put my hand in the water and I pulled out all kinds of stuff. I pulled out a star and then I pulled out a little bird and then I started pulling letters out of the water, until my boat was filled with stuff.” Izzy immediately had a vision of dipping her hands into a lake and the water turning into wooden letters, so many possible words and sentences. She imagined that the lake was a story and each letter contributed to it. She hugged Eliza, who accepted the affection without surprise, as if every recollection of a dream should be met with hugs. She needed something larger. Not a novel, not Moby-Dick, but something more than a poem.

Izzy started thinking of her favorite stories, books she’d read at the library on summer breaks. There was “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, her mother’s favorite story, as if the actions of this fictional village more than proved her own agoraphobic tendencies. Her mother also loved “Hands” from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which was devastating and lonely. Were all of her favorite stories about fucked-up groups, lonely people living in broken-down villages?

It didn’t take long for Izzy to think of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” which had terrified her in the eighth grade, the story of a spinster and her isolation from the town, ending with her death and the revelation that she had been sleeping with the decomposing body of her former love. Izzy had always loved the story, rereading it over and over even as it scared her. And, wonderfully, the story was told in the first person plural, using a “we” voice to encompass the entire town of Jefferson, Mississippi. It reminded her of how everyone in the complex began to use “we” in place of “I,” the way it seemed that your own desires were somehow those of the people around you. She downloaded a Word document of the story and used the word count feature to check the number of characters in the story. When the number came back, more than fifteen thousand, a quick shock of breath flew from her mouth, as if she had been pricked with a pin, and yet she did not turn away. She would do it, she decided in that moment. She imagined all the children of the complex reaching their hands into a pile of letters, letting them fall from their fingers like coins.


To be truthful, Izzy was grateful to have the art project, something that seemed completely separate from the day-to-day events of the complex. The children, ten divine constellations at birth, had turned into something altogether feral, ten hyenas after sunset. Cap had begun an awkward phase of biting any available piece of human flesh, as did several of the other children. Even the most innocent of games ended with scratches or unintentional injuries as the children swarmed over each other to recover a ball or a stuffed animal. They became defiant, which stunned the parents and caused them a greater sense of awkwardness as they realized that these children, while born to separate parents, were raised collectively. It was easy to hug another person’s child, to rock them to sleep as they smiled in their dreamlike states. It was altogether something else to punish another person’s child after they had dug their claws into your face. They handled this with what they believed was great patience, stern but fair, all the while silently holding grudges, blaming the parents of the child, no matter how collective the project was. “Genes,” Carmen once whispered to Izzy, “genes still count for something.” And Izzy tried to smile, knowing that her own DNA was as frayed and flawed as anyone else’s.