No Book but the World: A Novel

by Cohen, Leah Hager

  They had a circusy air. One was tall, one regular and one short, and they were all built like wrestlers or acrobats: lean and smoothly muscular. They wore loose dark pants and sleeveless undershirts, except the short one, who was shirtless. One was bald and one had a brush cut and one a ponytail no longer than a thumb. They waded through the high grass and clumps of browning clover and began gathering armloads from among the items left out front, and here it was as if my fancy, my idle association with the circus, held prophetic power, for the tall one hefted the gleaming white base of a table lamp and flung it casually toward the medium-sized one, who snatched it out of the air in the manner of a juggler, one-handed and graceful, and tossed it up like a baton so that it twirled, a long white bone against the fading sky, before he caught it again.

  “You see that?” I said to Freddy. We had fought during the car ride so relentlessly that June had at last repositioned a suitcase on the backseat to act as a barrier wall. Our fights tended to follow a certain pattern: Freddy would do something to get on my nerves, generally something in the realm of noise production: tapping things over and over with his fist or foot, or clicking his tongue or vocalizing in some tuneless, tedious way, and I would tell him to stop. He would ignore me. I would instruct him more sharply, to no greater effect. Eventually I’d pinch him, hard, on the back of his neck, upon which he would shriek and windmill his arms at me, or else bang his head against the window.

  On our ride home this day, once the suitcase barricade had been implemented, Freddy had fallen asleep against it. Now one cheek bore the angry-looking mark of its metal latch.

  “Ah?” he said, which was Freddy for what? as well as yeah, as well as a slew of other words.

  “Those men doing tricks.”

  “Ah,” he agreed, speaking thickly around his thumb, and then, “Ah ’ook!” When I looked I saw two of them had hoisted the ornate iron bed frame into the air and were walking it around the side of the Art Barn, and this, too, looked like a circus act, the way the metal slats, aloft and moving, sliced up the blue-gold light of the lowering sun and bobbed along the dusty green of the trees edging the path. We watched the bed disappear and then the third man, the short one with the stub of ponytail, rested the lamp base on top of two large cardboard boxes and finessed them into the air as if they were packed with cotton candy. I didn’t think they’d even taken note of our arrival, but this last man turned his head and gave us a nod as he rounded the side of the building, and even though the movement was limited to his neck, it had the dapper flourish of a bow.

  I looked at Freddy and he blinked a kind of acknowledgment without looking directly at me. He rarely looked directly at anyone. Even when he turned his face to you, his eyes would slide off over your shoulder or, more disconcertingly, focus on something nonexistent around your jaw. Tiny bubbles of spit had gathered between the corners of his lips and thumb. I used his elbow as a lever to yank the thumb out, a motion I had performed hundreds of times. Depending on his mood, it could result in a full-blown fit, but now he simply replaced the thumb, hardly bothering to scowl. We turned toward our parents, who were preoccupied with unloading luggage from the back of the Dasher.

  “What are those people?” I asked.

  Neel finished working the bag of tent poles from its designated space and set it down with a little grunt before turning to Freddy and me, giving us, as usual, his full attention when he did: hands on hips, head tilted contemplatively—not in contemplation of the answer, but in contemplation of the question. He had a way of delaying speech by bringing his lips in tight against his teeth, as if our most basic questions were transmitted materially into his mouth and required parsing with the most intricate and involving work of his tongue before he could answer. This initial hesitation was his response to almost any comment or question put before him, and throughout my childhood I took it for his native temperament; only later did I see it as a habit he had formed consciously, through discipline.

  “What do you think?” Typical Neel answer.

  “Ah-ma, ah-magic thow,” Freddy slurped.

  Neel seemed to consider this possibility with a judicious cocking of his head.

  “Do you know them?” I persisted, and then, too impatient to bother with Neel, appealed directly to June: “Did we know about them?”

  From behind Neel’s shoulder my mother gave a nod. New neighbors, then. No one had lived in the Art Barn for a long time.

  “Who are they? Are they all moving in? Is it just those men? Are there any kids?” What I didn’t let myself say: Is there a girl?

  I had been yearning for a girl for as long as I could remember, had been actively, strenuously awaiting the arrival of a friend. No less romantically than Rapunzel in her tower pined for rescue did I pine for this idealized being, a kind of alternate me, a me outside of me. Sometimes I would pretend my reflection in the bathroom mirror was she, or contained her, or was a conduit to her, that shining one who would somehow at once be my familiar, my deepest intimate, and at the same time exist thrillingly apart, beyond my will and my ken. She’d have a store of knowledge I did not have, and a willingness to convey it, and an appetite to hear my secrets in kind. She haunted me, this figure whose absence I felt physically as a small precise knot in my chest.

  We had a book within whose pages I spent countless childhood hours. It was titled What’s Your Name? and contained twenty-one paintings by Edna Eicke. All of them had originally appeared on the cover of The New Yorker. It was easy to get lost in the images, each of which managed to suggest an entire world and cast of characters with the most particularly observed details: the bent stick with which a rainslickered boy poked the gutter; the placid stance of a lone pumpkin seller watching the empty road at sunset; the tiptoeing excitement of a girl in a party dress as she peered impatiently through the curtained pane of her front door. I spent hours “reading” this book: gazing at each painting until I seemed, in some serious, definite way, to enter it. The experience was mysterious and ecstatic, involving the sensation that, having surrendered myself to the imaginary world, I attained a state of merging with it.

  Looking back now, I am a little mortified by my own sentimentality, for there was something insipid about the art: all those nicely groomed white people full of quaint gentility. All those painted shutters and double chimneys, those wide lawns and spired churches. But the sanitized ideal was part and parcel of what I loved. It fed that part of me that held out an indistinct hope for a more neatly ordered world than that which I knew. Come to think of it, what drew me was not so much the images’ sentimentality as their promise of convention, something I craved throughout childhood, a memory that evokes anger as well as shame.

  The title painting was my favorite. Centered in the foreground stands a girl in a red-striped dress, facing away from us, her hands clasped behind her back. She has for the moment forgotten about the teddy bear in the doll perambulator by her side, and is looking instead through a rather weathered picket fence into the expansive yard next door, where another girl stands, this one in a straw hat and little blue jacket, cradling a doll in the crook of her arm and regarding the first girl with equally open interest. Behind her, two movers are just hefting a bureau up the front steps of a house on whose porch a woman oversees their labors. A third mover heads down the stone walkway toward the street, where (presumably) a moving truck stands ready to disgorge more possessions.

  The title of this painting, as I have mentioned, is What’s Your Name? and the artlessness of this appealed to me, too. It seemed to confirm that despite the rather formal, restrained postures of the key characters, the crux of the matter was friendship. Too, that the slightly grave atmosphere was not a sign of wariness, but rather of the girls’ recognition of the occasion’s enormity: the birth of friendship being no less momentous than the instant of falling in love.

  Something of this enormity rose up in me while I stood outside our tired orange Dasher at the end of
the day at the end of our trip at the end of the summer. The cooling engine pinged. I was gathering myself to receive further information about our new neighbors, information I knew would not be forthcoming from Neel or June, but which I would have to seek out for myself.

  “Come on, Freddy,” I said, again grasping his elbow, but more gently this time, using it not to yank out the thumb but to lead him along as I crossed the gravel crescent and then the thistly grass. When we got within range of what would have been, if this wasn’t Batter Hollow but a regular neighborhood with distinct property lines, the front lawn of the Art Barn, we stopped. Freddy separated from me and went straight for a box of kitchen things set under the sassafras tree. Squatting before it, he extracted a wooden spoon as assuredly as if he’d put it there himself and began banging away on the cookware.

  “Fred-dee,” I admonished in a low growl, but didn’t bother to go on. Any attempt on my part to intervene would be useless. Only June might pull him away from a find like this, and even then the prospect of diverting him peacefully was less likely a scenario than something punctuated by screams and snot and dripping tears and saliva dripping, too. I had watched him once as he succumbed to the vortex of one of his frequent tantrums, regarded him from the doorway with a mixture of disdain and disquiet—for even then I had an inkling that his strange behavior implicated me, too—and witnessed a long, glassine string of saliva stretch across his howling mouth and dangle, languorous, from a shining white eyetooth, until it broke off and landed on the carpet: a dark dot of drool.

  The last thing I wanted on this sultry August afternoon was for a big Freddy flare-up to interfere with my reconnaissance, so I simply stood back and willed him to bang less loudly on the pots. Sunlight shone through the mitten-shaped leaves of the sassafras tree and dappled him where he squatted, wholly absorbed by the sounds he produced. This was what other people failed to see: for all that his noise-making might seem haphazard, imbecilic, there was sense to it, real deliberation in the phrases he sounded out. I knew it from the way he sped up and slowed down, and chose to repeat some patterns and vary others, and also from the lost, listening look on his face. He wore green plaid shorts and a holey T-shirt and curls clung to his nape, sticky with sweat.

  A great splintering crash came from inside the Art Barn. I whipped around to see, but there was only the serene-looking building, with June’s old mural splashed familiarly across the side, and an indecipherable silence. Then: raucous waves of male laughter, impaled by a lance of womanly imprecation. Another, shakier silence descended, this one quickly broken by more laughter. Then footsteps descended the creaky stairs. A woman’s exasperated summons: “Kitty! Kitty!” The voice was somehow low and high at once: deep in pitch but overlaid with a sonorous lilt. It made me think of milk caramel. “Kitty!” the voice cast about. “Where have you gone to now?”

  I thought: At least they have a cat.

  Then the speaker stepped out onto the porch. She was big-bosomed, big-waisted, big-armed, with small feet and a blue and white flowered dress, and her hair lay in pale swirls around her head like buttercream icing on a cake. Almost automatically, I stepped forward so as to put my body between Freddy and the woman’s line of vision, not really to hide him from her notice (the continuing clatter of spoon-on-steel would have made that futile in any case) but perhaps to delay whatever repercussions might ensue. The woman seemed harried, but in the mildest way, as though to be harried was part of her everyday bearing, like a familiar garment she wore comfortably loose. Sighing audibly, she squinted out across the grass, shielding her eyes against the setting sun with one hand. She came to a stop facing in our general direction. “Kitty!” she called more pointedly, peering over our heads. “Are you up a tree?”

  Despite my worry over this woman’s possible remonstrance when she realized Freddy was beating on her cookware (though my worry, like her harriedness, perhaps, was so well worn it made little impression on me), I was interested in what she’d said. A cat up a tree: that was like something out of a book. A fire engine comes and a ladder gets hoisted and a jolly, dependable man in red hat and shiny boots ascends.

  “Kitty,” the woman called again, her voice now sharp and practical. “I see you. I see your shoes plain as day.”

  Overhead the branches gave a rustle. I turned my back to the woman in the flowered dress in order to follow her gaze, searching among the boughs above me, which began dipping this way and that as if the tree itself was responding.

  Then something dropped from the leafy canopy, landed on the ground with a thwack. A shoe. Brown, buckle undone. It raised a little cloud of yellow dust where it fell, and was followed by the other, and then a heavier scrabbling than a cat could cause, and this is how Kitty Manseau entered my life: barefoot, feet first, born of the lower branches of a sassafras tree, metamorphosed before my blinking eyes from feline to human form: a girl my size in pin-striped conductor’s overalls, her flaxen hair cut shorter than Freddy’s yet declaring itself very brightly in little sprigs that stuck out all around her head.

  She landed gracefully, in fact cat-like, on the dirt. She ministered to the sole of one foot by bringing it to waist level, spitting on it, and rubbing at it with her thumb. Only after releasing it back to the ground did she meet my eyes and give a nod. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I echoed. “What’s your name?” If I blushed a little, saying it, hearing it for the parrot job it was, the line in the book, the title of the very painting into which I half did believe I magically had entered, she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Kitty. I live over in that flowered house there.” And then, with studied nonchalance: “My bedroom’s got a sink.”

  I observed her and she stared back, all confidence, her lean arms and her pert, puckish face. Her yellow hair was lighter than her tanned skin. So were her eyebrows, pale as pollen, and her eyes. She was like the inverse of me. Everybody in our family had dark eyes. Hers were chicory blue, and narrowed at this moment; she had her chin angled up so that even though we were the same height she seemed to peer down at me.

  That flowered house.

  “It’s called the Art Barn,” I informed her. “And it isn’t really yours.” I meant to be firm but nice, to assert my own claim without contaminating the chance of friendship, but even as I spoke I felt a queer misgiving. For the first time I wondered who did own the Art Barn, and all the Batter Hollow School buildings, and for that matter the land itself, the great, slovenly meadow that stretched out between the cottages and the dark woods that ringed it. I’d always assumed all this was ours. But were we really the property owners, or had it been just the school itself that belonged to Neel, not the physical buildings but only the idea, only the part that had dwindled to stories and photographs, names and dates, memory’s dry artifacts?

  “Is too,” she said, without any special force.

  For a second I could think only of shoving her. Then I got an inspiration. “My mother,” I told her, “is the one who painted those flowers.”

  Sometime earlier, around when the first shoe had fallen from the tree, Freddy had stopped picking out rhythms on the pots and pans and drifted over to stand nearish me, dragging the long-handled wooden spoon behind him. Now I could hear him breathing in his cloggy way just beside my shoulder. “We’ve been inside it,” I added, “about a hundred times. Me and Freddy here.” I jerked my thumb at him.

  So it was only natural that we transferred our gazes—Kitty and me both, the first thing we ever did together—to him.

  • • •

  PART OF THE PROBLEM with Fred’s being big for his age was that it made people think he was older than he was, which in turn made him seem even slower than he was. Just that day, on our way home from Vermont, we’d stopped for lunch at a roadside diner. While we waited to order, Freddy played with the individual plastic tubs of syrup and jelly that sat in a little basket, emptying a few syrups onto the table before June, taking note just as he wa
s going for another, whisked the basket away.

  You could see the rage boil up inside Freddy. His color rose and a vein stood out blue in his neck. I braced myself for a tantrum, but then Neel mused, in the idlest of tones, “I wonder if a person could paint with that?” and Freddy dropped his gaze to where Neel was looking, and sat back on the seat of the banquette and began to draw his finger through the syrup puddle before him. The tabletop was gold-flecked Formica, and Freddy was quickly engrossed in the whorls of golden syrup he made over the gold flecks. He skated a finger through the viscous stuff, becoming wholly absorbed, his mouth open, his tongue stuffed between his teeth.

  When the waitress came to take our order she took one look, said, “Oh—lovely,” and yanked a damp cloth from her apron. “Don’t you know better than to play with your food?” Her voice was penny-bright with false cheer. Her elbow jerked near my face as she wiped at the sticky mess. “A big boy like you.”

  “He’s only five,” I explained.

  Freddy, against all odds, had not begun to bellow in response to the devastation of his artwork. Apparently shocked into inaction, he only stared up at her, agape.

  “I would’ve thought he was two,” she pronounced, stuffing the rag back in her apron pocket. “Five.” She snorted. “Five’s plenty old not to make a mess.”

  His head bent and his thumb slid into his mouth.

  Now I think she must have just been that way, that brassy with everyone, a no-nonsense sort whose regulars looked forward to being charmed by her rough banter. But at the time I was aghast. Such intolerance, such lack of tact—I wasn’t used to anyone addressing Freddy this way. When he acted out in public, most people carefully ignored it. Sometimes they’d act flustered, embarrassed, as if the transgression were theirs. Later I came to understand this had something to do with Neel’s reputation, the respect people had for him, even if they disagreed with his methods. On the rare occasions when people did express disapproval of his behavior, it was always surreptitious, a comment uttered just beneath their breath or behind the shield of their hand. Never before had I encountered someone brazen enough to pass judgment out loud and in no uncertain terms with Neel and June sitting right there, and the fierce indignation I felt toward the waitress in that moment mingled, confusingly, with admiration.