The Children(66)

* * *




“What are you reading?”

Guinevere startled. The fictional scents of steam engine and Earl Grey gave way to peach blossom. Her brother stood below her, leaning on the axe with the nicked red head. He must’ve been sharpening it. In the grass his witch toes flexed, the third ones longer than the second. He was so skinny these days, you could string his ribs like a lyre.

She closed the book and showed its cover.

Ennis scowled. “Arthur Borelli. Edith’s new boyfriend? With the stupid hair?”

“He’s not her boyfriend.”

He gave her a look. “Don’t be a dumbass.”

“I’m not.”

“Whatever.” He made a careless gesture. “Is it any good?”

It was good. It was so good. It sent her heart flying along roller-coaster tracks. It made her thirsty for something that wasn’t water. When she stopped reading everything around her looked flat. She had to blink for a moment, eyes watering, before it rebounded.

She glanced at the book’s cover like she’d never seen it before. “Not really.”

Ennis’s shoulders eased. The motion was slight, but she saw it.

“I figured. Meet me at the house soon, okay? We can’t get lazy.”

He didn’t mean the Farmhouse, he meant their house. The one they’d been building and rebuilding, each time making it better, more houselike. He waited for her nod before walking away, swinging the axe up onto his shoulder in a gesture so quick it made her flinch. Guinevere watched until he was a shape between trees, then a blur among shadows, then gone.

She opened the book and kept reading.



* * *




There were two kinds of visitors at the Farmhouse.

The first came from the city or from artsy little enclaves around Vermont. They pulled up in cars that rutted the grass along the drive, to drink wine and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and kiss among the peach trees. They played records and turned on all the lamps in Llewellyn’s studio and danced on the places where light hit the grass. They filled the Farmhouse, talking and talking and talking. They never seemed to shut up. They hung around for a few hours or a few days, and then one morning they were gone before breakfast.

Then there was the second kind. The ones who stayed.

Llewellyn’s models, mainly. They spent weeks folding themselves into the life of the house, picking fruit, making coffee, driving the family’s blue pickup to the nearest town for groceries and books and cigarettes. They argued about things they’d read or heard or seen and picked through vinyl stacks, carrying records with them when they went to pose for Llewellyn in Art Church. They ate Guinevere’s cereal and left the coffeepot on until it burned. They ranged over the Farmhouse like it belonged to them, Tam Lins and Lady Isabels with paint in their hair, smelling of smoke and unwashed skin and something deeper, more suggestive than that.

Worse than them, far worse, were Edith’s acolytes—Llewellyn’s word. Guinevere had to look it up.

The first was a folk singer from Virginia who smelled so bad you could trace her path through the rooms after she’d left them. She was given to fits of pale staring, like a character in a gothic novel, and subsisted on what she tersely described as the optimal human diet: potatoes, oranges, and milk.

After that came the waitress. A former 4-H kid with a shaved head and a powerful R. Crumb body she flatly refused to let Llewellyn paint. She was writing an epic poem in longhand in a notebook. She liked Ennis fine but was blatantly contemptuous of Guinevere, who despised her right back until the day she snuck a peek at the notebook.

The poetry in its pages played music over the knobs of her spine. It blew smoke in her face and plunged her into cold water. For days her own writing was stained by its fluorescence. After that she had a dreadful crush on the girl, who flicked her on the forehead and said, “Staring is rude, rabbit.”

The one thing they, and now Arthur, had in common was talent, so bright it stood out like gilt on a Bible. Both women had departed without fanfare or goodbye. Run up, she guessed, against the end of Edith’s attention span.

It was weird, though. The waitress’s precious notebook, always cradled in her arms like a spiral-bound infanta. When she left the Farmhouse, she left the notebook, too.





Thirty-Five

2003




Falling in love was not a thing you could describe.

Guinevere wanted to, she tried. She wrote of hearts and hands and flowers. She reread key bits of books with love stories in them and grew frustrated by the limits of language.

The world had been muffled and now it was not, that was all. Some protective layer had peeled away, and she could feel everything.

It was thrilling and faintly sickening. She felt her brother’s suspicion, tinting the air a cold yellow. Sensed the invisible power lines that ran between her parents, crackling with resentment and need. Even the breeze was different, tingling over her skin like mouthwash. The alteration was so apparent, so complete, it never struck her that it wasn’t the world but herself that had changed.

She was in love with his book. Guinevere kept telling herself this, and she almost believed it. Until Arthur found her in the grass beyond the orchard, making a dandelion chain.

This was by design. She’d pictured him seeing her there, a May Queen among the wildflowers. But nothing plays out like it does in your head. Her fingers were bitter with dandelion milk, sunburn scratched at her nose. As he approached, she could see slashes of red pen on the pages in his hand. Her pages. He didn’t comment on the pretty picture she made, only absently said, “There you are. So I read your story, and look. You’ve got a lot to unlearn.”