No Book but the World: A Novel (3 page)

They are dead now, both of them, Neel for more than seven years, June for less than two. Even so, it’s Neel I find myself addressing in my head this afternoon, Neel I wish I could call from Mrs. Tremblay’s heavy black phone out on the landing. Not because I care more about what he would think and say than June, but because I long for his certainties, his conviction.

I set the book Kitty gave me on the rattan table and feel in my bag for a pen. The book is exactly the kind you picture when you think of a composition book: the classic black-and-white-marbled cover, the black tape binding, the blue-lined pages. I’ve encountered this exact species of notebook a hundred times over the past twenty years, yet it gave me a turn when Kitty put it in my hands Monday night.

I used to love a new notebook. Kitty and me both. At the beginning of each school year, once I had joined her in attending Freyburg Primary, we’d sit on the braided rug in her bedroom and organize our newly purchased supplies with solemn relish. Virginal pencils and unsullied erasers; blocks of crisp index cards; stiff, unnicked rulers; colored pens whose felt tips were perfectly tight and saturated; mini-staplers, which we loaded with their heavy cartridges of metal teeth. The tools of ordering. The promise of that which could be ordered.

Here in Mrs. Tremblay’s guest bedroom I open the book’s cover, breaking its binding. Kitty and I used to love that sound. Almost despite myself, I bring my nose to the crease, inhale the clean-laundry smell. Then I smooth the book flat on the table.

“I thought it might help.” Kitty’d sounded diffident, dropping it off on Monday night, the eve of my departure.

“Help what?”

“Oh, Bird.” Her longtime nickname for me, ever since we’d looked ourselves up in the tattered book of baby names we found on a low shelf at the foot of her parents’ bed. The fact of its being stored there, bedside, lent it an illicit aura: Were her parents planning more children? Did they alternate between laboring at this effort and consulting the pages of the book? We learned that her given name—Katherine—meant pure, a discovery that sent us into raucous, uncertain laughter (we’d been bumping up against puberty at the time), and mine meant just that: bird. We found the discovery providential: we fit together. Kitty and Ava. Cat and bird.

I stood on Monday night in the front hall of the house that still does not feel quite like home, blinking at Kitty. I had, until her arrival, been sitting in the kitchen, letting it grow dark without getting up from the table to turn on the light, letting the cup of tea Dennis had made me grow cold. The past three days had been long with phone calls, calls at first simply to try to get other phone numbers: numbers that would ring in the right buildings and the right offices, then numbers where a human would actually pick up at the opposite end, then numbers that would lead to someone authorized to talk, someone willing to dispense pieces of practical information such as where Fred was, whether he was all right, what was going to happen next, how I could get in to see him.

So by Monday night, when Kitty drove up from Brooklyn unannounced to see me before I left, I’d been feeling little besides exhaustion. Dennis and I had eaten an early supper, a kind of post-apocalyptic menu—soup from a can, peas from a bag, toast spread with apple butter—after which he’d cleared the table while I sat in a weary stupor, and then he’d gone out while I continued to sit and the sky turned incrementally from purple to black.

When the doorbell rang I went into the front hall to find Kitty already inside, looking faintly dazzling as ever, standing by the door in her dark red wool coat, pink-cheeked, rain glistening on her hair. Her hair is curly as clock springs and made up of every shade of yellow you can think of, from corn silk to yolk, and she has always worn it cropped, which only underscores its allure, as if any more of its glory would be an unbearable excess. She has a wide, graceful prow of a forehead, and high, round cheekbones and a chin with just a whisper of a cleft. When we were girls, Neel, who claimed not to believe in nicknames (he said the term of greatest endearment was a person’s own name, unadorned), and who never had one for me or Freddy, used always to call her “Bonny Kitty.” Or really: “Bonnykitty,” in a single breath, as if it were her given name.

She stood there in the hall, shaking out her salmon-colored scarf, drops arcing in the overhead light, and when she saw me come in her eyes collapsed tenderly at the corners, and I could see her restrain herself from hugging me. “Hi, Ayv.” She sounded almost bashful.

I said hi back, squinting in the sudden brightness of the hall and hugging myself around the middle; I’d only just noticed how cold the house was. Dennis and I moved here a little less than two years ago, on the heels of June’s death, and we’ve done nothing yet about the draftiness, despite the fact that this is Dennis’s line of work: installing eco-friendly insulation.

“Are you okay?” said Kitty. Always, even on a solemn occasion like this, an undercurrent of laughter in her voice. I’ve known her far too long to take offense. The semiquaver riding beneath her words, like the edge of a slip peeking from beneath a skirt, is symptomatic of her particular slant of mind, her ceaselessly amused disposition: a thing I have long both envied and held in faint contempt. Even as a child Kitty seemed to possess a keen sense of the fundamental absurdity of life.

Me, I am the opposite. I have a hard time laughing at anything, even that which is by all accounts patently absurd. If her mind has a glittery radiance, mine is dark and loamy, preternaturally attuned to sorrow.

“I mean—not okay, but okay?” she added.

I nodded.

“Well, I brought you something.” She shrugged, as if a little display of self-deprecation would make me more likely to accept the gift. “I thought it might help.”

And she held it out, the hard-backed composition book with its marble cover, indistinguishable from the ones we used as children in school, the ones all children use in school, ubiquitous, innocuous—and yet I stared to see her extending it so blithely, as though she did not notice it was a replica of the other book, the one in which long ago we had recorded the story of our childhood game, the game we kept coming back to, over and over, the three of us, the game we called Fredericka. I looked at the book she had chosen to bring me on this night and did not take it from her hands.

“Help what?”

“Oh, Bird.” She looked at me for a long moment before dropping her gaze to the book itself. To her credit, her ears grew pink.

Kitty is a clinical psychologist. She sees mostly people with anxiety disorders and specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy. I can easily imagine her giving patients homework assignments like writing down their feelings in a notebook.

Now in the hall she recovered herself, raising her eyes again and giving a snort. “Help
that!
” she said, gesturing with a little vaudevillian stamp, as if my reticence was something visible, concrete. “Really, what does Dennis
do
with you?”

Kitty is not only my oldest friend, she’s also my sister-in-law, a title I can’t quite get used to even though Dennis and I have been married for over seven years. The power of that childhood relationship remains huge, and it occupied my life long before I had any inkling that her much older brother might one day figure in my life, let alone be my husband. For years it was just Kitty and me. Well. Kitty and me and Fred.

I was seven and Fred five when the Manseaus moved to Batter Hollow. The cottages—as everyone called the handful of buildings arrayed in the grassy clearing at the end of a long dirt road—were all that remained of Batter Hollow, the famous experimental school our father started in 1949 and ran, together with his second wife, Margo, until 1973. People referred to our mother as his third wife, but they were never legally married. They met when June joined the faculty during the last year of the school’s existence, and although she wore a gold band on her ring finger, they were in fact only common-law spouses. “What did you wear at your wedding?” I remember asking when I reached an age where I found ceaseless fascination in the whole concept of brides and gowns.

“Oh.” June gave a small laugh. “We didn’t bother with all that.”

Batter Hollow is where we grew up, Fred and me (and later the Manseaus, along with the Gann kids and Noah Salinas-Buchbinder), and perhaps as a result of our having been born so soon after the school’s closing, the grounds held for us the aspect of an echo, as if only recently abandoned by its most significant players, a place whose key chapters had already occurred before we came along.

The Manseaus moved into one of the end cottages. It had been the Art Barn, back in the days of the school, and one side of the building bore the faded results of the community-wide painting project our mother, as art teacher (she’d also taught music, puppetry and movement), had organized. This mural offered a riotous disquisition on scale, with its stumpy trees, colossal flowers, butterflies the size of dogs, and a diminutive hot air balloon that seemed to hang like a fruit from one elongated branch.

Ours was the middle cottage, a gray clapboard two-story with a mansard roof. It had been the Office; in it Neel and Margo had conducted school business and also lived. The other cottages had been the Classrooms (this largest of the buildings, made of whitewashed brick that had gone rosy-bald in places, housed all the redheaded Gann kids along with their parents and a rotating menagerie of dogs, cats and assorted amphibians); the Annex (this smaller version of the Classrooms, hiding as if shyly behind a heavy veil of ivy, was occupied by the quiet, decorous Salinas-Buchbinder family) and the Shed (a simple wooden A-frame, inhabited by Jim and Katinka, a young couple who made their own yogurt and sweaters and beer). All five buildings bore, over their front doors, pine slabs onto which Neel had wood-burned their names decades earlier. Two more of these handmade plaques hung inside our own house, lettered in the same dusky block writing. They featured Neel’s favorite lines from Rousseau’s
Émile
. In the front hall:
LET THERE BE NO BOOK BUT THE WORLD
, and above the towel rack in the downstairs bathroom:
THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY ARE WORTH MANY WOUNDS
.

When Dennis and I first moved back to Freyburg, prompted by my wish to be close to my mother toward the end of her illness, we were tenants at will in a rickety railroad apartment in the center of town. After June died, we surprised ourselves by deciding to stay; that’s when we moved back to Batter Hollow itself. We inquired after the only one of the old cottages still standing, the former Annex. It had stood vacant for years, and the land company sold it to us on the cheap. Once the ivy was cut back and a new roof installed, it proved to be in remarkably sound condition.

“I just thought,” Kitty continued, then stopped short and exhaled impatiently. “Well, if you don’t want to talk to anyone. It might help. Writing stuff down.”

That’s all she’d intended. Something therapeutic, something kind. No double meaning, not a wink at the past. She probably hadn’t thought twice in the drugstore or stationery store, wherever she’d stopped on her way up from the city to purchase the notebook, simply grabbing the first one she saw in all innocence, and why not? Why shouldn’t the object, ubiquitous as it is, have lost its special charge?

She looked down again, her brow pleating almost quizzically, as if trying to work out what the book was still doing in her hands, and at that point I said thanks and tugged it gently from her.

“Dennis home?”

“He took my car in. Said it could use oil.”

At this we exchanged small smiles. We both knew he would return having gotten not only the oil changed but the tank filled, the fluids topped off, the air pressure checked, who knew what else—the tires rotated, the wiper blades replaced? At any rate a bottle of spring water would have materialized in the cup holder, and maybe a chocolate bar on the dash. That was pure Dennis: thoughtful, practical, modest.

“What are you doing about work?” Kitty asked.

Work: I am the Singalong Lady at a dozen area libraries and preschools. I drive around with my guitar and a big red duffel bag bulging with rhythm instruments, some of them relics of the old Batter Hollow School stash, and lead the little children in story-songs, nursery rhymes, handclap games. There are things I love about the job and things I don’t. One of the things I have come to like less and less is the way I am greeted at each venue: with a sense of fraudulent excitement. “Look, it’s the Singalong Lady!” cry the grown-ups. “The Singalong Lady is here!” And the children say, “Hooray!” on cue, and they clap the way babies clap: all their fingers aligned. Sometimes the littlest ones sit on their caregivers’ laps and have their tiny hands clapped for them.

Although I did not choose the name (I inherited it from my first employer, a daycare in a church basement), I don’t mind being called the Singalong Lady. Its flamboyant silliness is so unlike my usual comportment that I think it must be good for me, an antidote to some aspect of myself I think of as flawed.

“Canceled,” I told Kitty. “Called everyone and said I can’t come this week. A family crisis.” A dry little laugh at the grotesquerie of using this stock phrase. At having occasion to use it.

“So you’ll be back next week?”

I shrugged.

“Are you worried, Ayv?”

Too inane to dignify even with a shrug.

“I could still come with you.”

Also inane. Besides her patients she has Dillon at home—thirteen months old, with five white teeth and a bulldog grin, blue-black hair going every which way—yet I knew the offer was real, not simply a gesture, and if I’d said yes she’d have found a way to come with me to Perdu. She still would, even now. If I were to go out into the hall this minute and lift the heavy black receiver of Mrs. Tremblay’s phone and dial Kitty and tell her I need her, she’d figure out how to be here by tomorrow. She’d reschedule her appointments and call in the grandmothers to babysit, or get Tariq to take time off work, or else she’d bring Dilly along, port-a-crib, umbrella stroller and all.