The Excellent Lombards(42)
On Blossom Day in that spring right after Philip’s visit, William and I as usual set up our camp in the hollow underneath a towering wild tree, a brute that produced a tart pulpy apple that was good for about a week in mid-September. We’d named it Savage Sauce-Burger—hilarious. The south orchard was fifteen acres of mature trees, most of them well over twenty feet tall, planted by our Great-Aunt Florence and Great-Uncle Jim in the era before dwarf and trellis trees were the rage. My father and Sherwood weren’t able to prune them all every year and some of them were impossibly overgrown, gothic subjects for a photographer rather than productive fruit trees. We had our books, the chessboard, cheese sandwiches, oranges, a thermos of lemonade, gingersnaps, trail mix, the usual goods for an expedition. William had his current Capsela robot masterpiece, half built, the motors and wires and bolts in his toolbox. But soon into our encampment it—or we—started to feel strange. We’d already stood close to smell the lacy petals, we’d lifted our faces to the sunshine, we’d talked about maybe playing pioneers, building a fire, roasting our own sandwiches on a stick. We’d discussed constructing a fort, with levels in the tree this time, a few different stories. We’d said maybe we should take a canoe ride.
Somehow, though, those old amusements didn’t seem interesting. Had they ever been interesting? I wondered what Mrs. Kraselnik was doing without me, wondered if Amanda was answering questions that should have gone to Mary Frances. William mentioned that Bert Plumly called being outside The Nature. As in, Don’t make me go to The Nature. That was just dumb, I said.
“It’s funny,” William said.
I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. I felt a tick in the fold of my ear, William removed it, we lit a match and watched it sizzle into a dark strand. Even that old satisfaction wasn’t fun. We weren’t just bored with the world; we were bored with ourselves, or we were hardly in our selves anymore. It was hard to tell what was going on. Maybe, if we could remember one little trick about how we used to be, we could get there, get back, as if we ourselves were a country we’d left.
We were on our blanket, scratching our arms and legs. William was reading Swallows and Amazons, one of his old bibles, with Calvin and Hobbes and Gary Larson as backup. We didn’t look like twins anymore. His hair remained light where mine had darkened, and his face was a longer version of itself now, his nose still turned up, and his teeth, recently so enormous and separate, had settled into his mouth, all of them somehow a modest size, no more spaces between. He took up the length of the blanket, about a foot more of him than I remembered from the previous year. He shouldn’t grow another millimeter, I thought; he’d done enough. His lips as usual were bunched into one pluckable bud, and his eyes, dark brown as the river.
Under our tree I took the time to make a vow. When we ran the orchard we wouldn’t work on the blossom holiday the way my father always did. No, we’d declare a feast day for our crew. Hot bubbling rhubarb pies would materialize, a haunch of a goat on a spit, loaves of braided bread, and a bucket of marshmallow fluff, all set on planks by the tool house. I thought about how Amanda and Adam were not allowed to stay home on Blossom Day, something we’d never discussed with them, Blossom Day our secret.
I was absorbed in the holiday menu when through the aisle of the orchard I saw a girl, a girl who looked like Brianna Kraselnik. And behind her came a boy—was it one of the Bershek twins? The arresting thing about this boy and girl in the orchard, however, wasn’t the sandy hair or the big eyes or the small glasses frames. It wasn’t that they were probably Brianna Kraselnik and one of the Bersheks. The arresting thing was the fact that each was wearing no clothing. No article of any kind. They both did have tennis shoes on their feet, but no socks.
They were floating along between the trees, coming in and out of my field of vision. The girl’s breasts were small, nothing much to notice not least because the feature that leapt out at you, that stunned your brain, was the huge patch of hair, a black version of the muskrat’s straw houses, in her private spot. That was all there was to see of her. I understood in that moment that underpants must have been the first invention of mankind because without them you would never look into your companion’s eyes or face, and therefore it would be impossible to invent other necessary tools or think up ideas. But wait, another horror. The penis of the twin swinging into view. I think I made a noise. It was—how long? I couldn’t say, couldn’t tell, it defied measurement. He walked as if he wasn’t aware of it, as if it required no concentration to have such an organ. He kept scratching his back, trying to get at a place that was no doubt a sting of some kind. I was too startled and certainly too amazed to notify William.
Some time passed. I began to wonder if I’d seen them. If they’d been real. They couldn’t be real because it was a very stupid idea and scary, too, to take your clothes off and walk around outside. No one would want to perform that stunt. The Lombard Orchard, a nudist colony, ha ha. But then why would I dream them up? Why give Brianna so much hair, far more than my mother had? Furthermore, I could never have imagined a penis that long. I wondered if Mrs. Kraselnik had told her daughter to take the day off from school, appropriating our holiday, maybe the reason they’d wanted to live next to an orchard in the first place. If the couple was real, where were they going? Did it occur to the exhibitionists that the Lombard men might be doing farmwork, that they might bump into the owners of the property? There was then this question: Do I tell Mrs. Kraselnik?