No Book but the World: A Novel

by Cohen, Leah Hager

  And there Ava sat, straight-backed and still, concentrating with such grave dignity that Kitty couldn’t stand it. Or couldn’t stand something. Some underlying unfairness about the whole thing. Hadn’t Ava also laughed? Hadn’t she just a moment ago been rolling around on her back beside Kitty? How did she manage to switch off so quickly, switch allegiances? What made her and how dare she decide to become, all on her own, serious? And however did she know when it was all right to touch Freddy? For that matter, how did he know her touch was meant to protect him—because wasn’t that it, really? She was protecting him from laughing at his own expense. Protecting him—the realization came in a noxious spurt—from Kitty herself! Kitty and all others who would hurt him: his would-be mockers and judges, the untold legions of the unkind and unknowing.

  Kitty got to her feet. “You’re so self-righteous.” It was a phrase she’d heard her mother once say to Ellie, her older sister now living in Central Africa. “All of you Robbinses are.”

  Ava said nothing. Her face had resolved into an expression of almost consecrated seriousness; her very posture transmitted wordless reproach.

  So Kitty left them there, brother and sister, sitting on the slab as the day grew dark. She turned heel and walked away, but with the vexing feeling that they had turned from her first. She would never forgive them, she decided, threading her way through the trees and over the cold-hardened path, although she might pity them in time; yes, she might eventually grant them that, crippled as they both were by their family’s proud eccentricity, its strange pieties. She stalked out of Midgetropolis and out of the woods and straight back to Batter Hollow, where the chimney smoke turned out to be coming from the Art Barn and her mother turned out to be making kale pie, and she threw herself into the rocking chair by the stove—“I hate the Robbinses,” she muttered—and rocked in it violently until Meg said in her mild way, “Don’t take your anger out on that chair,” upon which she sprung from it and tore up the stairs to her room and threw herself furiously down on the bed, with a great groaning of springs that reminded her despicably of Freddy’s laughter.

  Too often it was like that: Ava being her friend and then pivoting to become Freddy’s sister instead, as if these were two different people, and always, always it contained a kind of censure. For why should being Kitty’s friend prevent her from being Freddy’s sister? What about the one could not accommodate the other? Yet Ava’s actions suggested their incompatibility. Worse, they suggested that Freddy, drooly, tantrumy, stick-beating Freddy, was better, truer and somehow more worthy, than Kitty. Which was crap.

  • • •

  THEY FOUND IN MIDGETROPOLIS, in addition to the kettle and the SAFE SPIRITS bottle, other objects strewn about or half buried in leaves and dirt, and sometimes these discoveries had an enchanted feel, and sometimes they felt sinister. No matter how often they’d hunted out there, exploring and excavating the same patch of woods until it seemed nothing could have escaped their notice, still new objects managed to turn up from month to month and year to year, as if the earth itself was relinquishing them gradually, hesitantly.

  Ava said the items they found must be relics of old Batter Hollow students. She liked to speak as if their ghosts still lingered in the woods, keeping watch from behind the trees. But Kitty scoffed. “How can they be ghosts? They’re not dead, just grown. Think of my dad.” For her, the various objects were clues about something larger and older than Batter Hollow, linked to the fantasy they’d indulged in on the day they founded, or found, Midgetropolis: that of the slab being a giant’s grave marker, evidence of a whole hidden network of behemothic tombs, a vast underground mausoleum, branching beneath the forest floor. In any case, they took pleasure in being a little scared by the items that turned up.

  Once they found something rigid and black and full of holes. “Burnt metal,” said Kitty. “Or plastic,” guessed Ava. “Pick it up, Freddy,” she ordered in that mild, offhanded tone he almost always obeyed, and sure enough he lofted it, dangling the thing by what seemed a tail, so that Kitty screamed, “Rat carcass!” and Freddy, screaming, too, flung it away. On further investigation, digging it up with sticks from the damp leaves among which it had fallen, they decided it was only an old rag petrified by some tarry substance, but even then it made them shudder; there was something in the splayed, stiffened, ruined look of it that seemed not simply grotesque but malevolent. Freddy in particular remained really terrified of the rag, which they left lying where it landed, hidden behind a bush.

  Other artifacts were less patently spooky. Once they found a couple of cans with their labels still mostly legible. SWEETHEART BEANS, one read, and WEARWELL MOTOR OIL. Another time they found the plastic yoke of a six-pack and an empty whiskey bottle small enough for a doll. Another time it was a pair of cat-eye glasses with one earpiece missing. The girls took turns sashaying around Midgetropolis, holding it like a lorgnette and saying, “Jolly good,” and “Where did I put my wellies?”

  One afternoon when Kitty and Ava were finishing up sixth grade, thinking with excitement about the new school they would attend in the fall and getting used to that exotic term, “junior high,” Kitty spied the tip of something pink poking out of the wet earth by the swale. It turned out to be a plastic barrette, the sort a little girl might wear. (Kitty and Ava were by then styling their hair with blow dryers and mousse.) It had two rows of tiny teeth and was shaped like a bow. “Yours?” she joked.

  Ava swiped the object from Kitty’s hand, spit on it, rubbed it on her jeans to remove the more tractable bits of black soil, then leaned over and fastened it roughly to a piece of Kitty’s yellowy-white hair.

  “Hey!” Kitty yanked it out, then called over to Fred—they were just beginning to call him Fred instead of Freddy—“C’mere. Come over here a sec. I want to make you pretty.”

  He did not glance up from where he was sitting, arranging baby pinecones on the slab. At ten he was supposedly showing signs of being gifted at math. This was according to Ava. Kitty remained skeptical. But Ava said no, Neel had noticed something in him, a kind of attentiveness to patterning, and had helped him make certain connections, with the result that Fred was now obsessed with Fibonacci sets, pointing them out wherever he spotted them, in the petals of lilies and asters, the spiraling seed heads of coneflowers, the complex architectures of cauliflower and pineapples and artichokes.

  Now Kitty went over and stood behind him, inspecting the design he’d made for evidence of brilliance. He’d arranged the baby pinecones from small to large. “Wow,” said Kitty, “that’s really good.”

  “Leave him alone,” said Ava.

  “Now don’t freak.” Kitty addressed Fred, ignoring Ava’s admonition. Leaning over, she extended the barrette on the flat of her hand. Fred looked, then reached. Swiftly, Kitty closed her fingers. “It goes in your hair,” she explained. And cajolingly, “Want to look pretty?”

  “Just let him be,” repeated Ava, but she sounded bored and did not stir from where she sat.

  Kitty knelt and gingerly picked up a lock of Fred’s hair. He did not protest. It was thick like June’s and curly like Neel’s and far softer than she had imagined. Fred quivered slightly and lengthened his neck toward her as she combed her fingers through it. “What nice hair you have.” He sat immobile, his very stillness a kind of permission. She began to work out the many tangles, trying not to pull. “When’s the last time anybody combed this?” she murmured. “Or washed it?” The only sound he made was that of his stuffy, clotted breathing. Never before had he submitted to her like this, as he occasionally would with Ava, and Kitty was intoxicated by the novelty of his trust. Once she’d worked through all the snarls, she fastened the barrette on this tuft of hair, and it poked straight up from his crown, a little topknot. “Voilà,” she said. “Now you’re Fredericka.”

  With a loose, spreading grin, he reached up to feel what she had done, but, “No!” she reproached, “you’ll mess it up!” and
seized his hand midair. This, she knew, was risky; he was liable to yank free and strike out at her, but he remained wondrously docile and let her pull him to standing.

  “What are you doing now?” asked Ava apprehensively, but she still lolled on her Throne by the swale.

  “Come,” Kitty coaxed, and as he reached up again with his free hand, she was quick to grasp that one, too. “You’ll ruin it,” she clucked. “Come, we’ll take you to a mirror. Now don’t touch. Isn’t he pretty?” she demanded, leading him toward Ava and then past her, to the edge of the swale. She pushed the back of Fred’s neck and made him bend down toward it. “Look,” she urged, “you can see your reflection in the water.” The swale that day was no more than a muddy trickle; she was play-acting. “Isn’t Fredericka pretty?” she insisted, bending over and pointing at the glistening rocks and leaves as if his image were available there.

  “Ah-yeah!” he agreed, nodding so that the topknot flopped. “Pretty Fred-ah!”

  “Fredericka.”

  And he married his own laugh to hers, his with its wheezy, broken sound, hers glossy and hard, and then he began to dance, comically, maniacally: kicking up his boot-clad feet and pirouetting with an invisible skirt held in his fingertips.

  “Fred.” Ava sighed. “Don’t be a dope.”

  But, “S’ah’m Fredericka,” he corrected her, and laughed with great gusto, a spit-flecked, braying sound, embarrassing yet unembarrassed. So Ava, rolling her eyes, smiled in spite of her disapproval, and when Fred began to urge them, “Come-ah on! Ah-dance-ah!” both girls obeyed, joining Fred in his spastic movements. Distinctions between whose laughter and dancing were forced, falsified, and whose helpless and ingenuous became blurred, even for Kitty, so that by the time they all collapsed, panting, on their Thrones, she was legitimately confused about her own intentions. Had all her participation been in mockery of Fred, and in some way, more to the point, of Ava? Or had it at some moment morphed into them all three just having fun? And how bedeviling not to know her own mind.

  In any case, the “Midgetropowaltz,” as Kitty christened it, established a beginning. The barrette, the dance, the persona of Fredericka—together these formed a blueprint they were bound to follow. The next time they came into the woods, Kitty brought a composition book. “We have to write things down,” she said. “The life and lore of Midgetropolis.” They all signed their names inside the front cover, and she began to keep a record of what they did. “You do the illustrations,” she told Ava, who was good at drawing and who, with finely lettered captions, made a visual inventory of all their most important artifacts and landmarks: the kettle and the SAFE SPIRITS bottle and the scary tarry rag; the Thrones and the Arch and the house itself, drawn with a real fire blazing in the hearth and the pilfered magnifying glass nearby. And she began to do illustrations of the character of Fredericka, who emerged, both in Ava’s drawings and Kitty’s storylines, and also, especially, as enacted by Fred, as a kind of cheery yet hapless maiden, eternally trusting and endlessly susceptible to spine-tingling scrapes. Forever and deliciously at the mercy of evildoers, forever in peril.

  After this, for as long as they continued to play in, or play at, Midgetropolis, they played this game. (How long had they continued? Had the game ended sometime during seventh grade, or eighth? Surely by high school the girls must have outgrown its appeal and begun leaving the woods to Fred alone, not knowing and little contemplating whether their withdrawal relieved or saddened him.) They never gave it a proper name, the game, never mind that it had its own book, its own narrative with a plot that repeated in an endless loop. Never mind that it had its own protagonist, if not quite heroine: Fredericka was too much a victim for that. The game hinged on Fred’s willingness to assume the role, with Kitty and Ava taking on the parts of minor characters, sometimes Fredericka’s tormentors, sometimes her rescuers. They took on, too, the job of encouraging or badgering, whatever might entice Fred to play. Which he did, readily, allowing himself to become the object of both their fawning adulation and their teasing, the membrane between the two kept crucially thin and unstable.

  It was a kind of gentle persecution, what they did to Fred, what he permitted them to do. Fredericka, they persisted in calling him, and he responded as if delighted to be in on the joke. To be the joke. The more he claimed the role for himself the more they showered him with approval, and they wooed him further into the game by promising to make him their sister. One day he let them mousse his hair and make up his face. It fascinated Kitty that here in Midgetropolis, so long as he was being Fredericka, he’d let them touch him unrestrainedly.

  Kitty had him tip back his head and hold still while she painted his full, slightly chapped lips. The sun cast spears through the treetops overhead, making him close his eyes, and she could see through his violet-veined lids the quick darting movements of his eyeballs, like the slippery hearts of small creatures. His skin was as smoothly transparent as a fairy-tale maiden’s; he had no visible pores or oily patches, none of the angry little red spots Kitty and Ava had both lately developed. They considered this absence, then painted them on, pimpling him all over with dabs of scarlet lip gloss, and when he protested—“What-ah, you guys ah-doing? Quit-ah, quit that, guys!”—they leapt, shrieking, out of range of his flailing arms, saying:

  “Look-ah: look-ah your brother’s-ah face-ah!”

  “Gross-ah! Get away-ah from-ah me-ah!”

  Only when he began to tear apart the Midgetropolis house—heaving the kettle into a bush, scattering the leaves they’d laid out to make a bed, kicking and stomping the pinecone-and-pebble border that marked the hearth—did they try to pacify him, clucking, “Freddy, Freddy, don’t be mad, we’ll help you wash it off,” and led him down to the swale, which was flowing this day with spring runoff, so that they could scoop handfuls of cold water and scrub the marks off his face. “See, Fredericka? You’re the prettiest sister of all.”

  Spring set in more deeply. Flowers nosed through the clutter of the forest floor, trees put forth curly young leaves, and the stone slab of their woods house roasted in wanton scraps of sun. Here on a hot day in May, Kitty and Ava persuaded Fred to let them paint his toenails blue. Another day they dug to the bottom of the old steamer trunk where, below the many decades’ worth of former students’ abandoned hats and gloves, they found a pile of brightly colored squares of silk, which they brought to Midgetropolis, thinking of the children who had played with them long ago. They spread these silks on the stone slab, apple green and yellow, purple and rose and peacock blue, and with these slippery squares they draped Fred, tying a turban on his head, a sarong around his middle, a cape around his neck. When he went to scratch his ear and knocked the turban loose, they scolded him in silken voices, guiding his hand back down to his side. They made the turban secure once more and scrutinized him—“Hold still, Fredericka!”—so intently he squirmed.

  “He’s a sheik.”

  “A sheikess.”

  “She’s a sheikess.”

  “Where’s her harem?”

  “That would be us, doll.”

  They lifted their T-shirts and, humming “Streets of Cairo,” did belly dances. The sight of their own flat bellies, recently discovered as assets, delighted them. Kitty pushed her pants low to expose her jutting hip bones; Ava copied. These, too, had recently made their presence known, as had the sparse, coarse, curlicues of hair sprouting on both of them just below. This secret they had shared a few weeks earlier in Kitty’s bedroom, standing before her mirror and comparing subtle differences in color and amount. Now, as they bared their midriffs to each other and to Fred on the stone slab, that private knowledge tinged their song with lewd laughter.

  “We’re Salome,” said Kitty, circling her pelvis.

  “As in lunch meat?”

  “Dolt. As in the dance of the seven veils.”

  “Whatev.”

  They snatched up the extra silks and twirled the
m around their heads and past Fred’s face. The light shone through the cloth and cast colored shade and Fred closed his eyes and smiled his terrible, open-mouthed, trusting smile as they let the silks billow up and fall against his skin.

  “He’s a genie,” said Kitty, grabbing the kettle.

  They rubbed it.

  “Now you have to grant our wishes,” they informed him.

  He laughed in his Fredly way, disorderly and unhinged, and the turban shook loose again from his hair.

  Clicking their tongues, they swooped in to fix it once more. “You keep messing it up—no, no, just . . . hold still,” they repeated, batting his hands away, until, “You hold him while I fasten it,” said Ava, and this time when his hands floated back toward his head, Kitty stepped in and bound them at the wrists. “There, that’s better.” His hands were held fast behind his back with the red silk. Because he was Fredericka he let her, but as soon as she stepped away he began to strain at the knot.

  “You can’t tie him,” said Ava.

  But, “You’re our genie,” explained Kitty, very nicely, too, lilting and sincere, with her pale eyebrows lifted and her chicory eyes wide. “That means you have to do everything we say, okay?”

  “Kitty . . .”

  But Fred stopped straining and nodded. So he was in the game, still in the game, willing to play or willing himself to play, either one, small difference, and either way, willing, as anyone could attest.

  “I don’t think—”

  Kitty spun toward Ava, cutting her off. “What do you want?”