The Bread We Eat in Dreams (8 page)

Far up into the hills above the stretch of land between Cobscook and Passamaquoddy Bay, if you go looking for it, you’ll find a house all by itself in the middle of a brambly field of good straight corn and green garlic. It’s an old place, but kept up, the whitewash fresh and the windows clean. The roof needs mending, it groans under the weight of hensbane and mustard and rue. There’s tomatoes coming in under the kitchen sill in the kitchen, a basil plant that may or may not come back next year.

Jenny Sazarin comes by Sunday afternoons for Latin lessons and to trade a basket of cranberries from her uncle’s bog down in Lincolnville for a loaf of bread with a sugar-crust that makes her heart beat faster when she eats it. She looks forward to it all week. It’s quiet up there. You can hear the potatoes growing down in the dark earth. When October acorns drop down into the old lady’s soot-colored wheelbarrow, they make a sound like guns firing. Agnes starts the preserves right away, boiling the bright, sour berries in her great huge pot until they pop.

“D’you know they used to burn witches here? I read about it last week,” she says while she munches on a trifle piled up with cream.

“No,” the demon says. “I’ve never heard that.”

“They
did
. It must have been awful. I wonder if there really are witches? Pastor Dryland says there’s demons, but that seems wrong to me. Demons live in Hell. Why would they leave and come here? Surely there’s work enough for them to do with all the damned souls and pagans and gluttons and such.”

“Perhaps they get punished, from time to time, and have to come into this world,” the demon says, and stirs the wrinkling cranberries. The house smells of red fruit.

“What would a demon have to do to get kicked out of Hell?” wonders little Jenny, her schoolbooks at her feet, the warm autumn sun lighting up her face so that she looks so much like Hubert Sazarin and Thomas Dryland, both of whom can claim a fair portion of this bookish, gentle girl, that Gemegishkirihallat tightens her grip on her wooden spoon, stained crimson by the bloody sugar it tends.

The demon shuts her eyes. The orange coal of the sun lights up the skin and the bones of her skull show through. “Perhaps, for one moment, only one, so quick it might pass between two beats of a sparrow’s wings, she had all her folk around her, and they ate of her table, and called her by her own name, and did not vie against the other, and for that one moment, she was joyful, and did not mourn her separation from a God she had never seen.”

Cranberries pop and steam in the iron pot; Jenny swallows her achingly sweet bread. The sun goes down over Bald Moose mountain, and the lights come on down in the soft black valley of Sauve-Majeure.

The trouble is, I ran away when I was fifteen. Everyone knows you run away when you’re sixteen. That’s the proper age. At sixteen, a long golden road opens up before you, and at the end of it is this amazing life. A sixteen year old runaway walks with an invisible crown—boys want to rescue her and they don’t even know why. Girls want her to rescue them. She smells like peaches or strawberries or something. She’s got that skittish, panicky beauty that makes circuses spontaneously sprout out of the tomato field outside of town, just to carry her off, just to be the thing she runs away to. Everyone knows: you run away at sixteen, and it all works itself out. But I couldn’t even get that right, which is more or less why I’m sitting here with a Vietnamese coffee telling you all this, and more thanks to you for the caffeine.

My name is Fig. Not short for anything, just Fig. See, in eighth grade my school did
Midsummer Night’s Dream
and for some reason Billy Shakes didn’t write that thing for fifty over-stimulated thirteen-year-olds, so once all the parts were cast, the talent-free got to be non-speaking fairies. I’m not actually talent-free. I could do Hermia for you right now. But I was so shy back then. The idea of auditioning, even for Cobweb who barely gets to say: “Hail!” felt like volunteering to be shot. Auditioning meant you might get chosen or you might not, and some kids were always chosen and some weren’t, and I knew which one I was, so why bother?

I asked the drama teacher:
what can I be without trying out?

She said:
you can be a fairy
.

So to pass the time while Oberon and Titania practiced their pentameters, the lot of us extraneous pixies made up fairy names for each other like the ones in the play: Peaseblossom and Mustardseed and Moth. I got Fig. It stuck. By the time I ran away, nobody called me by my real name anymore.

Talking to a runaway is a little like talking to a murderer. There was a time before you did it and a time after and between them there’s just this
space
, this monstrous
thing
, and it’s so heavy. It all could have gone so differently, if only. And there’s always the question, haunting your talk, the rhinoceros in the room.
Why did you do it?

Because having a wicked stepmother isn’t such a great gig, outside of fairy tales. She doesn’t lay elaborate traps involving apples or spindles. She’s just a big fist, and you’re just weak and small. In a story, if you have a stepmother, then you’re special. Hell, you’re the protagonist. A stepmother means you’re strong and beautiful and innocent, and you can survive her—just long enough until shit gets real and candy houses and glass coffins start turning up. There’s no tale where the stepmother just crushes her daughter to death and that’s the end. But I didn’t live in a story and I had to go or it was going to be over for me. I can’t tell you how I knew that. I just did. The instinctive way a kid knows she doesn’t really love you, because she’s not really your mother—that’s the same way the kid knows she’ll never stop until you’re gone.

So I went. I hopped a ride with a friend across the causeway into the city. The thing I like best about Sacramento is that I don’t live there anymore, but I’ll tell you, crossing the floodplain in that Datsun with a guy whose name I don’t even remember now—it was beautiful. The slanty sun and the water and the FM stuck on mariachi. Just beautiful, that’s all.

My national resources sat in a green backpack wedged between my knees: an all-in-one
Lord of the Rings
, the
Complete Keats
, a thrashed orange and white Edith Hamilton, a black skirt that hardly warranted the title, little more than a piece of fabric and a safety pin, two shirts, also black, $10.16, and a corn muffin. Yes, this represented the sum total of what I believed necessary for survival on Planet Earth.

I forgot my toothbrush.

So here’s Fig’s Comprehensive Guide for Runaways and Other Invisibles: during the day, I slept in libraries. If questioned, I pretended to be a college student run ragged by midterms or finals or whatever. I’ve always looked older, and libraries always have couches or at least an armchair to flop on. I flopped in shifts, so as not to arouse suspicion. Couple of hours asleep, an hour of reading, rinse, repeat. I got through
Les Miserables
,
Madame Bovary
, and
Simulacra and Simulation
before anyone even asked me what school I went to. Don’t just drop out—if you bag one life, you have to replace it with something, and old French men usually have the good stuff: R-rated for nudity and adult concepts.

It’s best to stay off email and computers. They can find you that way. Just let it go, that whole world of tapping keys and instant updates:
poof
. Like dandelion seeds. I could say: don’t do drugs, don’t do anything for money you wouldn’t have done before you ran away. But the truth is drugs are expensive, and you kind of have to want to crack your head open with those things, to get in trouble. You have to set out to do it. Save your pennies, like for the ice cream man. And hell, I just didn’t have the discipline.

At night, I stayed up. All things considered, as a teen wastrel you could do worse than Sacramento, California: warm, lots of grass and trees and open spaces. But not if you run away in February, like I did. Then you’re stuck with cold and rain and nowhere to go. So I went where everyone my age ends up: Denny’s.

See, Denny’s won’t kick you out, even if you’re obviously an undesirable—making it the beloved haunt of goths, theatre kids, and truckers alike. You’re always welcome under the big yellow sign—so long as you don’t fall asleep. If you nod off, you’re out. So I availed myself of their unlimited $1.10 coffee and stayed awake, listening to conversation rise and fall around me, writing on the backs of napkins and in the blank pages in the backs of Tolkien, Keats, Hamilton. I never got those pages, why they left them blank. I fit in; before I left home I had the means to dye my hair a pretty choice shade of deep red-purple, and nobody looks twice at a girl in black with Crayola hair scribbling in a Denny’s booth. But as time went by, my roots took over. It’s naturally kind of blah dark brown, and it kept on growing all dark and ugly on top of my head, like a stair back home,getting longer and longer, more and more impossible to take.

Around 6 am, the commuter light rails start running and back then you could get on without a ticket and dodge the hole-punch man from car to car. Or if you don’t give a shit and are a somewhat pretty girl who doesn’t look like trouble, just sleep by the heater and take the fine the man gives you. It’s not like I was ever going to pay it. He could write out all the tissuey violation tickets he wanted. The morning March light came shining through the windows, and the train chugged and rattled along, and even though I was always so hungry it took my breath, I thought that was beautiful, too. Just beautiful. That’s all.

And so I went, day in and day out. Eventually my $10.16 ran out, and I was faced with the necessity of finding some other way to pick up that $1.10 for the bottomless coffee cup, sitting there like a ceramic grail night after night on my formica diner table—
drink of me and never sleep, never die
. At sixteen, you can get a work permit. At fifteen, you’re out of luck. I didn’t want to do it—but sometimes a girl doesn’t have any nice choices. Remember—I said I wasn’t talent-free.

I could always sing.

Not for a teacher, not in front of parents at talent night, not for Oberon and Titania. For a mirror, maybe. For an empty baseball diamond after school. For a forest. And when I say I could sing, I don’t mean I could sing like a Disney girl, or a church choir. I mean I could sing like I was dying and if you got just close enough you could catch my soul as I fell. It’s not a perfect voice, maybe not even a pretty one. A voice like a hole. People just toppled in. I stood outside the Denny’s and god, the first time it was so hard, it hurt so much, like a ripping and a tearing inside of me, like the hole would take me, too, my face so hot and ashamed, so afraid, still Fig the non-speaking fairy, can’t even say
hail!
, can’t even talk back, can’t even duck when she sees a blow coming down.

And I opened my mouth, and I turned my face up to the sunset, and I sang. I don’t even know what I sang about. I just made it up, brain to mouth to song. Seemed better than singing some love song belonging to somebody else. I don’t know anything about music in a technical sense, and I hated the jolt of it, hearing my own voice break the air, to stand up there and sing down the streetlights like I was better than them, like it mattered, like I deserved to be heard at all. So I just kind of went somewhere else when I sang. Somewhere dark and safe and quiet, and when I came back the song was over and my feet were covered in coins. Usually. Sometimes I got a dollar or two.

That was my life. Sleep, read, sing, stay awake, stay awake, stay awake. Ride the train, all the way around the circuit and back to Starfire Station. I’m not even kidding, that’s what it was called, the station nearest my Denny’s and my library. I’d get on the train with the morning sun all molten and orange on a beaten-up blue sign:
Starfire Station
. The rails glowed white. I thought:
maybe something wonderful will happen here, and I could tell people about it later, but no one would believe me, because who names a train station that
?

I didn’t talk to other runaways much. It was always awkward, dancing around how bad you had it in some kind of gross Olympic event. And even if I made a friend, we’re sort of a transitory race by nature. It got repetitive:

Fig. That’s a stupid name.

Thank you.

Where’d you come from?

Over the causeway.

Where’re you going?

I don’t know.

I didn’t see the point. I had my routine. But I heard about it. Of course I heard about it. There used to be a place for kids like us. Some kind of magical city half-full of runaways, where anything could happen. Elves lived there. Wizards. Impossible stuff: unicorns and rock singers with hearts of gold. A girl told me about it at this shelter once—and let me tell you shelters are fucking mousetraps. A warm bed and a meal and a cage overhead. All they want is to send you back to your parents on the quick, so they rate your crisis level and if you’re below their threshold they up and call the cops on you. I went to one called Diogenes. I liked the name. I knew it from books—I’d moved on to Greeks by then. Diogenes searched the world for one good soul.

They called my stepmother. I didn’t have bruises anymore. Not bad enough. But she didn’t come to get me. No one ever came for me. She thanked them and hung up the phone and the next morning they sent me on my way. I guess I wasn’t their one good soul.

But the night before my expulsion from particle-board paradise, this girl Maria talked to me, bunk to bunk, through the 1 am shadows:

“It’s like this place between us and the place where fairies come from,” she said dreamily, looking up at me from her thin bottom bunk. She had black curly hair all over the place, like wild thorny raspberry vines. “And there’s like rock bands with elves in them and no one gives you any shit just for
being
, and there’s
real magic
. Ok, supposedly it’s kind of broken and doesn’t work right, but still, if it’s not working right, that still means it
works
, right?” She sighed like a little kid, even though I figured her for my age, and emphasized her words like she was underlining them in a diary. How did this kid last five minutes out of a pink bedroom? Whatever happened to her must have been really bad—I don’t even know what kind of bad, to make some girl still drawing unicorns in her spiral notebooks take off. She sighed dramatically, enjoying the luxury of being the source of information. “But it disappeared or something, years ago. No one’s been there in ages. Sometimes I think the city ran away, just like me. Something happened to it and it couldn’t bear anything anymore, and so one night it just took off without leaving a note. But I’ll get there, somehow. I will. And I’ll
dance
, you’ll see. I’ll dance with the fairies.”

One of the other kids hissed at her from the second bunk in our four-loser room. “They don’t like to be called that.”

“What do you know about it, Esteban? Fuck off,” Maria spat, all the pink bedrooms gone from her voice.

“More than you,” snarled the boy. “Hey, chica. You know how in school they said we’d never get social security, because by the time we get old, our parents will have used it all up?”

“Sure,” I said. Esteban was seventeen, too late, where I was too early. Too old.

“Well, it’s like that,” he sighed, and I could almost see him frown in the dark. “It’s all used up. Nothing left for us kittens.”

“You don’t really believe this stuff, do you?”

Maria’s face colored darkly and she scowled up at me. After a long, pointed silence, she said:

“Fig is a stupid name.”

I rolled back over on my miserable striped mattress. I didn’t believe even half of it. I remembered when those homeless kids in Florida started talking crazy about the Blue Lady and how she’d come and save them? I thought it was like that. Something pretty to think about when you’re cold and hungry. It’s nice to think someone beautiful is protecting you. It’s nice to think there’s a place you can go if you want it bad enough. A place where everything you ever read about is real.