by P. J. Fox
Luna sighed. “Going apple picking sounds so glamorous.”
The deer park, despite being manmade—or at least man-protected—had the feeling of a primeval forest. Still green undergrowth grew dense and lush and thicker than any carpet. Around them, the beech trees had turned a delicate shade of gold. There was a stillness, too, as though by penetrating the veil of these trees she’d truly gone somewhere else.
Even the sun was colored, as though reaching them through the panes of a stained glass window: gold and warm and somehow alien.
“I can’t imagine why,” Belle said.
There was a rustling as unseen creatures fled their advance.
“It’s a lot more fun than life on my uncle’s farm.” Which was where Luna had spent summers, working. She had nothing good to say about either her uncle or his farm, but until now she hadn’t gone into detail. She pushed an errant branch out of her path. “My mother was firmly of the opinion that I needed wholesome adventures. To get in touch with my roots, before they all disappeared. She’s convinced, you see, that our way of life—which is supposedly so wonderful—is disappearing all around us.” Luna shook her head in disgust. “I wish it would.”
“Why?”
“Whenever anyone comes here, they say the same thing: it’s like stepping back in time! Except who actually wants to step back in time? It’s not all charming cottages, you know. Stepping back in time also means no running water, no electricity, and hours spent in your uncle’s fields building hay stacks by hand.”
Belle had never heard of such a thing.
“It’s easy to wax poetic about honest simplicity when you’re only here on vacation, staying in some posh guesthouse with wireless internet.”
Belle had noticed the sharp contrast on her trip into the village: cafés that served espresso, where idle tourists watched as farmers drove horse-drawn carts filled with dented aluminum milk cans. Sometimes chickens followed along behind. Most of the roads in most of the villages weren’t paved, at least not in the traditional sense. At least not up in the mountains. Once she and Ash had left the main thoroughfare, which was kept in good repair because it was used as a commercial route, it had been all cobblestones and dirt.
“The main road in my family’s village, Viscri, is just a dirt track.” Luna laughed. “I don’t know why I say main road. Only road. And my uncle’s house is easy to spot, because it’s painted bright blue. Old women walk up and down, to visit each other, and in the evenings the cows come home to be milked.
“There’s a man who makes his living by selling miniatures built inside of old palinca bottles.” Palinca was a local liquor, a type of brandy made from apricots or sometimes plums. Belle didn’t care for it much, and couldn’t imagine drinking an entire bottle for any reason. She decided that either Luna’s neighbor mustn’t be doing much business, or was an alcoholic. Or perhaps he had an alcoholic friend, who donated his bottles.
“Everyone romanticizes, too, that kids play outside.” Luna gestured. “And not, you know, on smartphones. Or whatever else is supposed to be rotting their brains. But they do so because they’re poor—there’s nothing else.”
Belle nodded. She understood. Near the Canadian border existed a kind of grinding, soul-crushing poverty that most Americans didn’t believe existed in the United States. Kids there were resourceful, the way homeless people in major cities were resourceful. And Luna was right: there was nothing charming about that.
Only in the case of Belle’s childhood, it had been a different kind of tourist who’d romanticized her life. People from Boston, or sometimes further south. Newark, maybe, or Elizabethtown. Scarsdale. They took great pride in smiling benevolently at the happy peasants. Such simple lives they had, free from the distractions of modern life. Like having a job, or the prospect of finding one. Or dealing with the distraction that was access to things like books. Dreams. Opportunities.
Phrases like honest simplicity always stuck in Belle’s craw. There was nothing honest or simple about poverty. People stole from their neighbors to survive. Every day was a calculus: groceries or medication, medication or the electric bill. School supplies or clothes to wear to school. Underpants or shoes. Enough fuel to survive the winter.
People went on dates to the dump, to root for tarpaper that they could use as insulation. Or maybe an old appliance that could be refurbished and sold to a tourist. It wasn’t all little old ladies in traditional dress, gossiping on their front porches.
“Yes,” she agreed, “the tourists are always desperately worried that your way of life will disappear, leaving them no place to visit.”
Luna laughed. “Exactly! Tourists,” she amended, “and my mother.”
“And your uncle.”
“And my uncle. He’s a terrible man, really. His only hobby is carving wooden spoons.”
“No wonder you wanted to work here.”
“I know, right?” echoed Luna, sounding oddly American.
Belle was reminded, yet again, that she and the other girl were more alike than they were different.
And then she found the clay.
FORTY-SEVEN
Belle hadn’t been entirely certain, when she’d set out, what she was looking for. Only where she’d wanted to go. She’d had a near-overwhelming urge to get outside and explore, but there was more to it than that. She’d felt drawn to this spot in particular, felt something this afternoon that she hadn’t felt in a long time and didn’t quite know how to categorize. But for once, instead of analyzing, she’d just acted.
Here was the brook, its sluggish surface as smooth as glass. She studied the reflection of the trees above: beech and birch and pine, slender and elegant. Moving as if in a dream, she knelt by the bank. “This was probably widened at some point,” she mused, more to herself than to Luna, “to accommodate trout or whatever fish are native to this area.”
Luna sat down nearby on a large, lichen-covered rock.
Belle studied the bank. She was looking for something in particular. She’d noticed, when she’d passed this way before, that the brook bore certain similarities to brooks back home. And to parts of Maine’s northern coast. Where, of course, she’d spent her childhood. Having grown up in the same third world environment as her current neighbors, she’d spent a great deal of time exploring. There hadn’t been much to do except explore.
“The Maine coast was formed by retreating glaciers, which—wrinkled it, I guess. This caused the bedrock under the ice to be pulverized, like flour in a mill. And this rock flour was left behind, mixing with the ocean along the coast and with the rivers inland.”
Belle had a tendency to, as her mother put it, lecture. Lecturing, to Donna, meant discussion of any subject on which Donna was unfamiliar—or uninterested. Donna didn’t think her friends were lecturing, when they sat around smoking menthols and dissecting the latest antics of Kim Kardashian.
But Donna wasn’t here and Belle didn’t care. “Along the coast, it has a natural bluish gray color. Inland, it’s more white. At least near the surface, until you dig down.” She plunged her hands into the bank. They disappeared with a sucking sound that was more like a belch.
“Clay!” she said triumphantly. “We have achieved clay.”
She turned to Luna, who seemed interested in spite of herself. Luna had never struck Belle as the most artistic type, but she could definitely be talked into cheering from the bleachers. “And not just any clay.”
Luna nodded, looking mystified.
Belle returned to the task at hand. Her hands were immersed in a dirty gray-white substance that looked like the flesh of a corpse. She pulled a lump free and it came with a sucking sound, the depression she’d left behind immediately filling with water. She shaped the ball with deft, careful movements. Wet, the flecks of mica and quartz were visible.
It looked so pasty and dull because, as she explained to Luna, the primary component of stoneware was kaolinite. The same chalky substance used in toothpaste and under eye concealer. And, sometimes,
in the whitewash used on traditional houses in Ireland and Nepal and other places where whitewash was still used and traditional houses still existed.
“And this,” she announced triumphantly, “is stoneware. More opaque than porcelain but just as fine, hard enough when fired to resist scratching by a steel point.”
“Oh.” And then, “I had no idea you were an artist.”
Belle shook her head. “It’s not art.” She didn’t feel right, calling her enthusiasm for raw materials art. “I’ve always loved clay, is all. Sculpture of any kind,” she added. “I used to throw on a wheel, in Maine. Mostly simple things: vases, soup bowls. Nothing to write home about.”
She set the ball down in the underbrush beside her and began to dig out another one. “Ceramics are a tourist enterprise in Maine—and everyone’s always making the same things, too. Mostly bowls with blueberries stamped on them and painted in with this ghastly glaze that’s really cheap. It’s not the color of a blueberry, but it is the color of Maine tourism.” She smiled to herself. “And oil burning lamps, too, because according to the tourists everyone in Maine is living like modern is defined by Little House on the Prairie.
“They don’t realize—or choose not to realize—that we shop at Wal-Mart just like they do.”
“I’ve heard of Wal-Mart.” Luna sounded proud of herself.
Belle wiped the bridge of her nose, leaving a smear of clay there. She smiled. At Luna and at the world. Her knees had sunk down into the bank and the same chill water in the growing hole in front of her had soaked through her jeans. With the fading of the light, slight wind had begun to blow. Belle’s thigh muscles, unused to holding such a position, were cramping. Her shoes, as caked in clay as the rest of her, were undoubtedly a total loss.
“Looking for Halloween costumes at Wal-Mart must be so difficult,” she said, holding up another ball of clay. And then, dissolving into a fit of giggles, “there are so many different customers to choose from!”
At Luna’s bewildered stare, her giggles became full on laughter. She laughed so hard that her belly and her thighs hurt, and then she laughed even harder. Another smudge of clay appeared, and then another. She wondered if her legs were going to sleep or if she was just numb from water that felt like ice cubes. She wondered, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything. She couldn’t explain it, even to herself, but she’d never felt such pure joy—such liberation. Not since she was a child, and perhaps not even then.
Here she was, out in the middle of nowhere, elbow-deep in mud and laughing like an idiot and no one cared. There was no Owen to start sobbing, no Donna to tell her that she needed a real job or she’d never be able to care for her parents in their old age. No Charlotte to tell her—like all of Belle’s friends always seemed to have—that everything she did was wrong. That she was too naïve for the real world, or too stupid, or not stupid enough. That she should sleep around, or read romance novels, or go clubbing, or do any of the other hundred and one things that conformed to Charlotte’s idea of fun.
Because surely, Belle’s idea of fun didn’t count at all.
It never had.
She didn’t have to do anything. She woke up every morning, confronted with a vista of open space. Ash was never around. There were books and things to occupy her, but nothing that gripped her interest. Until this moment, she’d seen her boredom as further proof of her incarceration. Except it wasn’t. It was freedom.
She wasn’t trapped.
For the first time in her life, she could do anything she wanted.
She could lie in bed all day and eat. She could go outside. For a run, or maybe a stroll through the rose garden. She could paint the view from the colonnade. She’d spent a few hours sketching, and no one had come along to stop her. No one cared how bad her sketches were. No one lectured her on how she should put her pencil down and get a job at a convenience store, because making minimum wage was so much more valuable than making art.
All Ash expected of her was that she have dinner with him. Sleep with him. And while the prospect still upset her—God knew why, at this point, she’d done it enough—she wasn’t thinking about that right now. She wasn’t thinking about him at all.
She’d amassed a pile of small balls, stacking them like Civil War-era cannonballs beside her.
“I need a bucket,” she said. “Or maybe a wheelbarrow.”
FORTY-EIGHT
Processing the clay was important to make it workable.
Belle knew this, because one of the many odd jobs she’d taken to fund her shoe habit was at a local pottery studio. She’d made the owner coffee, and periodically dusted the pieces he put out on display for tourists in his living room. As his workshop, like that of so many Mainers, was just another part of his home. In this case, his kitchen. Nearly every room did double duty, in that part of the world. Tourists sometimes got confused as to what was for sale, and tried to buy old family mementos. Or sometimes just stole them.
She remembered those lessons now as she labored, having taken over the conservatory for the purpose. Spacious and sparsely furnished, it had proved to be the perfect environment. And no one ever went in there. She’d instructed Luna to bring in a table which, strangely, Luna had done. She’d cadged an old farm table from somewhere and returned, directing the efforts of several burly men. The wheelbarrow had been stationed beside it. Belle was right: she had ended up needing a wheelbarrow.
Ideally for Belle’s purposes, the floor of the conservatory was tile. The windows ranged from floor to ceiling and faced north and would yield glorious light in the morning. She’d asked that Luna and her helpers move the other furniture in the room—just a table and some matching chairs, and a settle, all of which appeared to be antiques—and then thanked them profusely before turning to the task at hand.
The first and most important task was to dry the clay. Which, Belle knew, would take awhile so she had to get to work. She felt a sense of urgency that was new to her, as though she’d started a race ten minutes after the other runners and was now trying to catch up. The sooner she dried the clay, the sooner she could begin processing it and the sooner she could get to work. Because, she knew—and she realized that she knew as she worked, even though there had been no conscious moment of decision on her part—that she had a plan.
Whitish-gray water pooled underneath the wheelbarrow, having dripped out from some failure of the metal seams. It was a comfortingly familiar wheelbarrow, made in China and the same kind she’d grown up with back home. The kind that could be purchased in any Home Depot in America—and evidently in Romania, too.
There was a narrow, wet track leading back to the door, which might give more imaginative minds the impression that the wheelbarrow had somehow arrived under its own power. Leaving a trail of slime, like a snail. Or some trans-dimensional entity.
Belle smiled slightly, to herself. A trans-dimensional entity posing as a wheelbarrow. Jerry Bruckheimer, eat your heart out. Too bad he didn’t have her number; the ideas she came up with while on the toilet were all of them better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
She lifted out the first ball of clay, which was about the size of a softball. Pulling it apart, she reformed it into several golf ball-sized balls. How many golf balls fit into a softball? She remembered how, in class, once, one of her fellow students had announced that 23.5 million golf balls fit into a Boeing 747.
He’d seemed quite proud of that knowledge.
And they said Belle was a repository of useless information.
She lined the balls carefully up along the back edge of the massive table and began again. Wherever Luna had found this thing, it was perfect for the purpose: the boards were unfinished and porous, worn smooth with age. Tens, perhaps hundreds of people had stood here over the years, kneading and chopping. The excess water would be absorbed as it leeched out, speeding up the drying process.
The next step, after the clay dried, would be to slake it: drop the balls in buckets of clean water, enough water to
completely cover them, and then leave them alone until the mixture turned to mush. Belle had learned as a teenager that it was vitally important not to stir the clay during this time, as doing so would actually prevent the hardened clay from becoming totally porous. Stirring, instead, yielded a watery-chunky texture unpleasantly reminiscent of vomit.
The clay was fully slaked when the contents of the bucket, all on their own and through the magic of time, transformed into a velvet-smooth slip. Belle had often, before, compared it to gravy in her mind. Not that her mother was capable of making smooth, lump-free gravy. But she’d seen it in pictures.
In Maine, Belle had stirred the mixture using a toilet plunger. But anything would do. She supposed fancier places had electric equipment, but the man she’d worked for had done alright for himself. And, like most Mainers, been distrustful of machinery. Even machinery as simple as a hand mixer seemed, to her neighbors, the next best thing to a Terminator appearing in the kitchen.
She continued her line of balls. She was now halfway down the table, but still on her first row. The wheelbarrow suddenly seemed very large, much larger than it had when she was filling it. She supposed she’d have to ask Luna, or Diana, or someone for a stirring implement. And a window screen.
The next step was to screen the slip. A window screen worked just fine, although again she supposed that some people paid more for bells and whistles they didn’t really need. The screening process removed stones, roots, and other detritus. In Maine, the biggest culprit was limestone; limestone responded differently to the kiln than the clay around it, causing the piece in question to explode.
She wondered idly what the biggest culprit in the Carpathian Mountains was.
After the first screening, usually another one was performed, once again transferring the clay into the bucket beneath. It was then allowed to sit until the excess water rose to the top, which was then siphoned off with a soup ladle. Or whatever was handy. Tipping the bucket was, Belle had learned early on and to her dismay, a bad idea.