The Excellent Lombards (18 page)

Brianna didn’t hang back. She didn’t even wait for my mother to introduce her. “Okay, guys,” she said, clapping, approaching the whiteboard. “Listen up.”

Listen up?
I turned to William, to make our gawking face. He, however, was gazing at our neighbor.

She smoothed her hair only to the base of her neck. “I’m Brianna Kraselnik, your choreographer. I know some of you have worked together before, so, wow, this is awesome, all of you showing up. And we’ve got some new members, right?” She smiled at Ramona Peterson, a third grader, and her friend Brittany Garner. Somehow, like a teacher with a magical list, Brianna knew our names and situations. Before she could say anything more the Bershek twins in their size seventeen tennis shoes came tromping into the room.

“Hola, ballerinas!” she called to them. “Just in time to show off your talents!”

The Bersheks were impossible to tell apart, both of them with sandy hair and glasses, both wearing the same style from head to toe, as if they had no interest in making it easy for anyone to know which was which. They always helped us with our hay, and it seemed a bizarre coincidence that Brianna knew boys that in summer were so important to us. “You,” she said severely, “you bad bad boys, you juvenile delinquents, better behave yourselves.” And then she squealed, a high-pitched mocking laugh, although what she was making fun of wasn’t clear.

One of the twins saluted, snapping his heels together.

“So, like I was saying,” she went on, clearing her throat and stroking her own irresistible hair again, “I’m super jazzed to have the opportunity to create your parade event and to work with you…athletes? Or whatever. A special shout-out to you, Mrs. Lombard, for inviting me here. Really, I just love this wacky formation biznass. Um, so, okay, I’ll show you what I’m thinking, give you”—she made her gigantic eyes bigger—“the grand design, and then we’ll do some warm-ups.”

The older Bushberger daughters were on Cart Drill, and so was Amanda and there were several adults, including Melvin Pogorzelski, my mother’s star patron, the librarian’s pet. Gloria would have been there if she hadn’t had her love attack, if she hadn’t had to leave us. We all nodded at Brianna, except for William. He seemed to have been struck by the lightning that was Brianna Kraselnik herself. A zap just for him.

She was saying, “Is there anyone who would like to demonstrate what this—thing is, for the newcomers, and maybe for review?”

“Good idea, Brianna,” my mother called from the sidelines.

Amanda’s hand shot up. I would have volunteered but a small something stopped me. I wasn’t sure that our choreographer was in fact trustworthy. My mother had invited our neighbors over for dinner back in the fall, but because of the Kraselniks’ school and hospital events, and our harvest, we had so far never gotten together. Cart Drill, then, was our first substantial acquaintance with Brianna. Her squealy voice, her mincing and mugging for the Bershek twins, made me wonder if deep down she didn’t think Cart Drill was
retarded
. That would be her word, one we weren’t allowed to use. And maybe William was arriving at that same suspicion, too, the reason he looked as if, should he be able to move, he might try to slip away.

I could see suddenly the
retarded
aspects of Cart Drill, the outsider’s perspective at once unsettling. There was the embarrassment of Mitchell, for one, the autistic patron, thirty-three years old, whom my mother enlisted to operate the boom box. During rehearsal he cradled the box in his arms as he rocked and groaned, taking the job of operating the
PLAY
/
PAUSE
button with the gravity it required. And there was dumpy old Melvin Pogorzelski, who was overly enthusiastic, too, sliding around in his stockinged feet, and clumsy Mrs. Johnson, always banging into us with her cart, and even my mother was mortification, The Director on a stepladder looking down on our formations as if she thought she were the Almighty.

But was Brianna mocking us, the team? When she described how the carts would be decorated with shiny silver strips that hung from the lip of the shelf, like a hula dancer’s skirt, she did seem sincerely excited. We girls all said, “Ahhhh!” There were fifteen carts that were strictly designated for the drill team, carts that could not be used for ordinary purposes.
Shelvers, stay back.
When Brianna—and not my mother—asked who would like to be on the decorating committee I couldn’t help thrusting my arm into the air, even before Amanda did. And I couldn’t help, either, my pride when Brianna said that I would be the girl hoisted on the shoulders of Melvin and Mrs. Bushberger, my cart minded by William when we got to,
Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I will stay alive
. The key message of the song. Amanda could never have been at the top of any pyramid because she was too chubby to be lifted.

When Brianna first played us the song, played “I Will Survive,” Melvin observed, “That is not the most patriotic number I’ve ever heard.”

Before our choreographer could defend her Memorial Day selection William said, “Yes, it is.” He spoke softly, so that everyone had to turn to see if in fact it was he who had made the comment. His face had turned completely red. He was looking at the floor. “It is,” he said again. “There’s no point to freedom—I mean, you can’t, um, have love if you’re not free.”

What in the world?

“OhmyGhaaaad,” Brianna said. “That, my friend, is so deep.” She shook her head in wonderment. “I can’t believe, Will, how incredibly, amazingly profound that is.”

Will?
Did she already know him? From the middle school and high school bus stop? An acquaintance he’d never mentioned?

“KA-razy deep,” one of the Bersheks said.

“You, boy,” she barked, “no more out of you, you hear me?”

I was confused, still very much unsure if I liked Brianna, if I maybe wanted to tell my mother right then that I was retiring, but also I couldn’t quit when I was going to be the girl riding on the shoulders of the adults. By the end of the hour the Bersheks had decided Cart Drill was too difficult for them, they were too cloddy, and away they went into the library proper. “Oh, too bad,” Brianna said sarcastically. “Whatever will we do without them?” She slapped her hands to her cheeks, her lips in the O of astonishment. Some of the Cart Drillers laughed.

With the irritants gone we were able to get down to work. Although in the end the parade was a sensation, most everyone proud and exhilarated, I was not in that camp because of my private knowledge of Brianna’s character. Beyond her flirty behavior and her obscure jokes in our rehearsals, there was criminal conduct that I, and only I, happened to witness after our first practice, when the orchard came into full bloom.

This is what happened. On Blossom Day my mother always let William and me stay home from school. We were sent from the house in the morning with a basket of necessities, and told not to return until three thirty, the hours of the official school day. If the sky was softly blue and the sun’s radiance everywhere, no dark hole in which to hide, and the air still, nothing in it but bees working, blossom to blossom to blossom, the orchard lit with a snowy brilliance, and the grass plush and shiny, every green blade brimming with light, and here and there a carpet of violets, and swaths of beaming dandelions—then you yourself, you were dazed. You were bumbly and drunk, too, a once-a-year festivity.

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?

That was a stunner.
Mary Frances, darling, how can I thank you for coming to me? Brianna has been a handful since the day we adopted her. Yes, it’s true, I’ve never told anyone that she is not my own—and that I’ve never loved her. My own real child would never do such a terrible thing, nor would she have so much of that…hair
.