Perfect Little World(85)
Brenda interjected, “This is Dr. Preston’s show; he chose the families and he chose the fellows. Everything comes through him. That’s how we’ve done it and I aim to keep it that way. He’s the one I trust.”
“Okay, Gramma,” Patricia said, smiling so hard that it erased the frown Dr. Grind could see if he looked hard enough. “You’re the boss. We do it your way. I was just trying to open lines of communication for more effective management.”
“Never mind that,” Brenda said, done with the subject. There was a moment of silence, the awkwardness settling in the air.
“What will you do when it’s over?” Patricia suddenly asked him, as if she’d been waiting to offer this question the entire day.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“What are your plans once the project ends and the families disperse?”
“I haven’t thought about it very much, to be honest. I suppose I’ll look into continuing the study, setting up more rigorous testing to decide the outcomes. And the families won’t truly disperse, I believe. They’ll stay in contact with each other, remain a large part of each other’s lives. That’s the hope.”
“And you’ll continue to be a part of their lives?” she asked, as if the idea was slightly troubling to her.
“In some way, perhaps,” he said, embarrassed to be saying this aloud. He had truthfully not discussed the end of the project with any kind of definitive outlook for the future. He had avoided the strangeness of what would happen to these children, to their parents, once the families left the complex and began their own lives.
“Of course he’ll be a part of their lives,” Mrs. Acklen said, smiling, reaching for Dr. Grind’s hand. “It won’t end, will it, Dr. Grind? It will keep going, just in different ways.”
“That’s right, Mrs. Acklen,” Dr. Grind replied.
“I wondered if Infinite was just a kind of grandiose word,” Patricia said.
“It’s not,” he said, surprising himself by how certain he sounded.
chapter fourteen
the infinite family project (year six)
Izzy woke to find Cap sitting on the floor by her bed. He was reading a book, taking bites of an apple, completely oblivious to her presence. Izzy leaned over the bed and rubbed his hair to get his attention. His hair, sandy blond and wild, hanging down over his face, hadn’t been cut in years. Izzy remembered when the children had experienced their first haircut at age two, driving them all to a hair salon in Murfreesboro. One by one, the children had climbed into the chair and watched, almost stricken with bewilderment, their own reflection in the mirror as the stylist clipped their hair into new shapes and styles. Each child was then given the clipped hair in a plastic bag for their memory boxes. Izzy remembered that Cap, on the way back home as he placed his hand inside the open plastic bag, rubbing the hair between his fingers, had forcefully declared that he did not want to experience a haircut ever again. And since the children were still being collectively raised, no single parent to decide that their own child needed a haircut, the decision had been left to the children. Some of the kids wanted monthly haircuts, while a few, Cap being one of them, opted to never have their hair cut again. As a result, Izzy had always loved watching Cap’s hair whip around when he played with the other children, the way he would frantically sweep his bangs out of his eyes as he chased after another kid. He looked slightly feral, but his calmness, his thoughtfulness, belied that wild look. Now, Izzy lifted his bangs so that she could make eye contact with him. Looking into his light brown eyes, she smiled, and he returned the expression.
“How long have you been there, buddy?” she asked him, and he thought for a moment and then flipped through the pages of his book. Holding the read pages between his thumb and index finger, he held up the book for her inspection. “This long,” he said.
In the first month after being reunited with Izzy, Cap had trouble sleeping on his own, which was a common problem for all the children, so used to sleeping in the communal bedroom with each other, and so he would often crawl into her bed at some point in the night. A therapist had worked with all the kids, using a Sleepeasy program involving books and night-lights and noise machines and “sleep zones,” but the children were used to the sound of ten bodies sleeping in unison, of waking to find their brothers and sisters surrounding them. As Dr. Grind emphasized, only the passage of time would alleviate the stress and, in time, it did. The first time Cap slept through the night in his own bed, Izzy was surprised by how saddened she was to not find him beside her, however necessary the development was.
Izzy lay on the bed, watching her son as he returned to his book. They had a little more than an hour before Izzy would take him to the main building to meet up with the other children, all of them now in kindergarten, for their lessons. “You want some breakfast?” she asked him. He nodded and then offered, “Fruity Pebbles?”
“When did you have them last?” she asked him.
“Last week,” he said, and so she nodded. Though the complex stressed healthy eating, and Izzy herself was responsible for setting up the weekly menus, she had managed to bring a box of Fruity Pebbles into the house, her favorite cereal as a child, and shared it with Cap, who was instantly mesmerized by the radiant, neon colors of the cereal. A single bowl of the cereal was more sugar than he’d probably had in his entire life up to that point, but she had wanted something special for him, a treat. And it wasn’t as if sugared cereals were forbidden. There were no restrictions on diet, but most of the parents seemed set on continuing the healthy eating that had been stressed when the children were living communally. No candy or fast food, obviously, but Link and Julie admitted that they gave Eliza Kit Kat bars on special occasions and Irene once informed some of the family that her dad had given her a packet of Pop Rocks one time and the other children were immediately jealous. Of course, this was the new way of living, the way the children and their parents, while still part of the larger family, had made a hidden life for themselves within the complex’s homes. And so, Izzy allowed Fruity Pebbles and felt no less a good mother for it.