Lovelock (21 page)

One person I knew I had to check out was Peter, the kid who put the bee animation on our household computer. He and his sister Diana were sitting with Dolores, their mother, near Penelope. It was tricky getting near them, since both Penelope and Dolores had taken an active dislike to me. But the kids liked me well enough, and Peter would have no way of knowing that I had sussed his anonymous message. To get there I scooted along under the pews until I got behind theirs, then scrambled up the back of the pew by getting a grip on the hymnal holder. I ended up directly between Peter and Diana and held very still, so Dolores and Penelope wouldn’t notice me. This was easy enough, since, like Mamie, they were spending all their effort trying to look pious and cheerful.

Peter and Diana, for their part, didn’t betray by so much as a twitch that they knew I was there. Until Diana wrote on her paper “Hi Lovelock.” Peter, however, merely shielded his—but badly, so I could read it anyway. “Mom never notices anything good I do so stuff it I won’t do her any more favors. Penelope says that thing I did caused a divorce but I don’t care. Marriage is a fake anyway.” Hostile kid.

Diana was trying to be sweet—but there was rage underneath her message, too. “I solemly vow to write to daddy once a week even tho he doesn’t ever write back even tho he promised. I will not think bad thoughts about Certain Person for making us leave daddy.” Children were young enough to tell the truth without realizing how much they were giving away.

Adding today’s clues to what I’d learned from Peter and Diana in the past, it wasn’t hard to piece together the family situation. Their mother was wanted on the Ark; their father would have been a supernumerary like Red. At the last minute he decides not to go, but Dolores insists on going anyway and takes the kids, even though she’s not that loving a mother. She took them because that’s what mothers were supposed to do. Not that the children minded going, not at first. It was a neat space voyage, as far as they knew, not realizing how permanent or painful the separation from their father would be. Now they felt guilty for wanting to go, and it made their anger against their mother and father burn even hotter.

Her message finished, Diana reached up to pet me. The movement drew her mother’s eye, of course—Dolores’s alertness to her image of piety included her children’s behavior in church. So I slipped down off the back of the pew and dangled from the hymnal holder.

The person sitting at the end of this pew was Nancy, the horsefaced girl who had taken Pink home from Odie Lee’s funeral. I had seen her across the common on Freedays and Workdays, and she always came to church. Otherwise, our paths hadn’t crossed much. Up to now, with two grandparents in the house, Carol Jeanne had seen no need for her babysitting services. But it occurred to me that with only Mamie left, Carol Jeanne would probably need to get a good babysitter now and then, and it would be helpful if I had some idea of the kind of person this Nancy was. Besides, I had just been reading kids’ offerings and extrapolating from them about their family life. I was in the mode, so why not keep going?

I had been aware of her before, as I was aware of everyone in Mayflower. She always stood as though she were trying to disappear inside herself, and today, in church, she sat hunched so far toward the edge of the pew that anyone who walked carelessly down the aisle could knock her right off the bench. She leaned over a piece of paper as she wrote her weekly offering, hiding her words from the adults sitting next to her by using her long hair as a screen.

She was one of the believers—the people who wrote at great length, pouring their hearts out. I always thought of them as secret Catholics. They needed the anonymity of a confessional, but the offertory was as close as they could get. She was shielding her paper so thoroughly that it took some real maneuvering to get a good angle. I ended up hanging from one of the arching pipes that held up ceiling light fixtures inside the balloon-structure of the meetinghouse. Even then it took some real effort to see what she wrote without making it obvious to everyone in the room what I was doing.

A holy child? It was sweet and sad, the daydream world she must have created for herself, to allow her to survive in what was obviously an incestuous and abusive family. The mother’s not believing her was a normal response, I knew, but apparently she had told her teachers and they had gone straight to the parents. What kind of idiots were they? Surely there was a prescribed response to a child’s accusation of parental abuse, and surely it didn’t include talking to the parents without protecting the child.

If
she had really made such an accusation. What if she had merely told them about her fears of having a “holy child” by the will of God? Or some other half-formed daydream? They might not have understood what she was telling them. Still, I would take a look in her records.

As to having Nancy babysit Emmy and Lydia, that might be a problem. Abused children were often abusers when they got responsibility. But then, sometimes they were especially tender and nurturing. Both responses were part of the literature. And unless the issue of babysitting came up, it was none of my business. The humans were supposed to take care of this sort of thing. As usual, they were screwing up, but if I tried to fix every case I saw where humans were hurting each other, I’d have no time left for witnessing. I had my priorities—most of them forced on me by my conditioning.

Yet I knew I would still look up Nancy’s records. Was I a person, or not? The equal of the humans, or not? Civilized, or not? And if I was a civilized male person, should I not feel and respond to the same urge toward protection of the female and the child that civilized human males felt? Of course I did not think all this through at the time. I’m not sure I always remember exactly how much I understood or thought about at the time. I only know what I did, and what I think I remember that I felt and thought. It’s not always the most reliable source of information, but it’s the only one I have, and even if my memory is selective or ascribes greater wisdom and self-understanding to me than I had at any particular time, at least I’m not
consciously
trying to make myself look good. When I remember myself doing something stupid or slimy, I write it down along with everything else. Or so I say. You, reading this—if anyone ever reads this—what can you know of me except what I tell you? What will you do, check the computer to verify what I say? That’s a laugh.

When she finished writing her pathetic little offering to an apparently illiterate God, Nancy folded the slip of paper in half and in half again. She waited for the plate to come around, and then she pushed her offering to the bottom of the dish, away from prying eyes.

I found myself wishing that I hadn’t looked. Even though I tried to be hardnosed about it, in fact this was the first time I had realized that human children could be slaves just as I was, forced into living a life that was unlivable. Despite myself, I was momentarily overwhelmed with compassion, with anger, with revulsion. I identified with her, not because she was a human, but because she was a victim of humans. Maybe Nancy didn’t have a plug in the back of her neck, but the result was the same. Her father could do anything he wanted to her, and her only recourse was to ask for forgiveness because she hated him so much.

When the collection bowl had moved on, I dropped down to the back of Nancy’s pew and patted her on the shoulder. She almost jumped through the balloon roof of the chapel. Then, seeing it was just the harmless monkey, she reached up and patted my hand, turning red in embarrassment at having been startled that way. I had no way of telling her I was sorry for startling her, and sorry she was a slave like me, except to give her my sad face and pat her again. She must have got some part of the message because she relaxed back into her hunching posture and let me sit on her shoulder and groom her hair for a few moments. Then her father noticed me. He began trying to get his wife’s attention so she could shoo me away. For Nancy’s sake I did nothing to cause her more trouble than she already had; I scampered away, playing the clown, and got back to Carol Jeanne just as the offertory was ending.

As I jumped across his pew, I noticed that Red had not put his own offering in the collection plate. Instead he was wadding up his slip of paper and putting it in the pocket of his pants as I passed by. I made a mental note to retrieve that slip of paper, if I could do it without Pink’s knowledge. I wanted to see what it was that Red had written and then had been unwilling to give.

The sermon was long and as useless as usual. Basically I thought of sermons as group therapy by an incompetent therapist who subscribed to a psychological theory invented by cows. I spent the time thinking about children and human families. Peter and Diana and Nancy had all had their lives screwed up by their parents. Burdens had been laid on them that they would carry for the rest of their lives. By comparison, Emmy and Lydia had normal, stable lives. I might think Red was an ass, but he was involved with his children and he didn’t beat them or have sex with them. Maybe that wasn’t cause for extraordinary praise but it was something, wasn’t it? And Carol Jeanne was no easy spouse to deal with, but he stayed with her, and she stayed with him even though he wasn’t close to being her intellectual equal and his mother was the queen of hell. Emmy and Lydia were brats, but they’d grow out of most of that, and their parents had given them a stable foundation. Even Mamie, in her smarmy, self-righteous way, had helped surround the children with love and security
—they
had no way of knowing that she only did it in order to maintain her image or get control over other people or make Carol Jeanne look like a bad mother. Compared to some other families, Carol Jeanne’s little household was downright healthy.

But then, even if Red had had a proclivity toward pedophilia or child torture, he couldn’t very well have indulged it, not with Pink dogging his steps. Nor could Carol Jeanne express her impatience or anger at her children or her husband all that readily with little old me on her shoulder. For obvious reasons I had never seen how they would behave without a witness present. Perhaps all families would be healthier if they had an enhanced animal as a slave to watch and record their every word and deed.

It was then that it occurred to me that Carol Jeanne had been sending me away regularly at work, declaring that what she was doing was just routine and giving me assignments that didn’t take me a fraction of the time I pretended to spend doing them. I had been resentful that she didn’t seem to want me near her as much, but grateful as well, since it gave me time to explore the computer system and work on my own projects. What never crossed my mind was the fact that maybe
she
was doing something that she didn’t want her witness to see.

In a way, that was flattering. Carol Jeanne knew that I would never
—could
never—disclose anything I saw her do without her consent. So if she was hiding something from me, it meant that she cared what
I
thought. I found myself, in the midst of a sermon on love and forgiveness of our neighbor’s shortcomings, feeling something like love and forgiveness toward Carol Jeanne, toward Red, toward their miserable bratty little daughters, and even, though I find it hard to write these words, toward Mamie. No wonder Marx called religion the opiate of the people. I was drugged to the gills that day.

At last church ended. We escaped the hordes of Mayflowerites and walked home in clumps. Although most of the family lingered to greet Red’s adoring fans, Carol Jeanne strode ahead of the others with me on her shoulder as if escaping the Protestant contagion she had been forced to endure. I perched on her shoulder, though, and watched the progress of the rest of the family behind us. Sure enough, Red stopped at a trashcan on the common and dropped something from his right pants pocket there.

Garbage wouldn’t be collected on a Sunday; I had the rest of the day to retrieve the promise that Red had made to God and then retracted. I might have been filled with charity toward all men, but I was still a sneaky little spy. You can’t fight your own nature.

Dinner was a silent affair, interrupted only by the prattle of the children. Carol Jeanne cooked spaghetti and meatballs as she frequently did after church, claiming it was an easy meal to cook. Mamie turned up her nose at the plebeian fare. Italian food was beneath Mamie’s station in life, which, I suspected, was one reason Carol Jeanne served it so often. But Mamie had no desire to help cook the family meals, and years ago Red had responded to her hints about hiring “some kitchen help” with a firm
no
that even Mamie understood was final. So Mamie heaped up the pasta on her plate and, while making a show of distaste, ate an ample share.

Visitors arrived as the meal ended. Mamie sprang up to hide the evidence of our Catholic menu, removing plates and mopping spaghetti sauce from the children’s faces as Carol Jeanne answered the knock. Penelope filled the doorway, her face plastered in smiles, with Dolores standing solemnly behind her.

“It’s just us,” said Penelope brightly. “You’ve been here nearly two months now, and we have to make one official visit every other month.”

“
Get
to make,” Dolores prompted.

“Of course. That’s what I said.”

Carol Jeanne frowned. “Penelope, you’ve been in this house a dozen times since we moved in.”

“Not with Dolores. Those were mayoral visits, and
friendly
visits.”

So apparently this was a hostile visit? I had no doubt.

“What she
means
,” said Dolores, “is that she and I are your family’s
fellows
.”

Ah—another word from the famous unread prospectus. Fellows were village visitors, and every family on the Ark got assigned a pair of them. Fellows supposedly looked after the needs and wants of each member of their chosen families, but I was confident that the real purpose was simply to make sure that nobody was able to be cut off socially from their village.
Someone
would come to their house at least six times a year.