Our Country Friends(33)
“Go to your house and think about what I’ve said,” the Actor said. “Think about how your own emotions are sabotaging this project. And while you’re at it, think about where you’ve placed me in relation to your other guests.” Senderovsky thought he was being symbolic, but the Actor swept his arm to indicate his dwelling.
“Would you like me to displace one of my friends so that you may have a bungalow more to your liking?” Senderovsky said. “I could ask Dee. Her cottage is meant for writers. You might be inspired. Should I ask her to switch?” The Actor said nothing, but the puma eyes blazed.
3
Karen was running down the hill, her arms windmilling around her. The child flew ahead of her, past the gray short shadows of the oaks and poplars and aspens, onto the parklike central stretch of the lawn, and toward a sentinel line of Christmas trees meant to block out the sheep farm and its inhabitants’ daylong volley of bleats.
“There it is!” Nat shouted. “Aunt Karen, look!” She fell to her knees in front of a hole. She wore a long, featureless yellow skirt over a wide pair of boy’s jeans held up by an ugly elastic band. As Nat fell to the ground, Karen pulled up the sides of the skirt to make sure she wouldn’t get grass stains on it, feeling the phantom movements of her late mother in her arms.
“Look!” Nat said, after she had moved some dirt out of the way. “There’s a box!”
Karen scrunched down next to her. It was impossible to maintain Masha’s prescribed distance, not in any sense. The hole was dug beautifully, a perfect round enclosure that brought to mind the industrious flurry of an animal’s paws. “Steve the Groundhog brought the box here?” Karen asked.
“No. Steve can’t carry boxes. He plants sunflower seeds around the lawn.”
“Steve gardens?”
“He puts sunflower seeds in his mouth and then he sprinkles them all over the lawn, so we’re going to have plenty of sunflowers in case we have to stay up here for many years and never come down to the city.”
Nat continued to rabbit on about Steve and apocalypse while Karen reached into the hole and carefully extracted a wrinkled and partly torn Teva active sandals box in the unfortunately combined colors of tan, yellow, and brown, the v in “Teva” presented as a pair of wings draped over the adjoining letters. Who came up with this typography? And didn’t Masha and Senderovsky get into a discussion about this missing box last night?
“So wait,” Karen said, “if Steve didn’t bring the box down here, who did?”
Nat looked at Karen with worried eyes. Anxiety presented itself as a dry patch at the back of her palate. It made her want to burst out in nervous language, what she had overheard her mother call monologuing. The dilemma: Was it right to share a secret about her daddy with Aunt Karen? At dinner Aunt Karen said many things about her father, the kinds of things the teachers at Nat’s Kindness Academy would consider “out of bounds” and which Nat often overheard with great interest from her square on the Quiet Mat. But Mommy had explained to her before the guests arrived that older people liked to “make fun,” that was how they showed love for one another, by making jokes that sometimes sounded cruel—for example, that Daddy was a “bad dresser.” Karen was very handy with such jokes, but Mommy explained she was a very loving person underneath. (Underneath what?) And probably the Teva box was part of a game, a scavenger hunt for grown-ups. So it was okay to reveal the truth.
“Daddy put it in Steve’s hole.”
“What?”
“And he didn’t even ask Steve’s permission,” Nat whispered.
“Well, that’s very interesting,” Karen said. She stood up, her joints creaking. “You know what we should do?” Nat shook her head, excited to be part of the game. “Let’s take the secret box to my bungalow, make sure it’s safe from Steve, and then figure out our next steps.”
“Yay!” Nat shouted.
“Let’s do it quietly and make sure no one sees us.”
They ran up the hill like spies broaching an enemy compound, sneaking serious looks back and forth. Oh, my heart, thought Karen as she watched Nat run ahead of her, a singular mole at the nape of her neck, her arms engaged in jerky jogging motions she must have picked up from her father on the rare occasion he had to move quickly. Karen didn’t know how to talk to a child. She wasn’t like Masha with her “prairie dog kisses.” And yet the child had sought her out first thing in the morning. Karen and her sister Evelyn also had their version of the Quiet Mat when they were Nat’s age, when English was still as thick as oatmeal in Karen’s mouth, although, unlike Nat, they also had each other.
Karen opened the door to her bungalow, and the breathless child scurried inside, jumping on a beanbag, which must have been Sasha’s or Masha’s attempt to channel the American idea of “families.” There were also several framed Dr. Seuss posters, rough faux-Scandinavian wooden toys, and a board game called Love Is Letting Go of Fear—in other words, the waiting room of a child psychologist.
And so what? Karen thought. Was this not better than growing up in Elmhurst with her own parents, where every word and every gesture was a command, a note of displeasure, an infringement on childhood’s sovereignty? Was this not progress? Who was she to criticize Nat’s parents? At least one of them was trying.