Every Little Thing in the World

by Nina de Gramont

  Of course none of that made the food any more appetizing. Aside from being uncooked, the bacon—after an entire sunny day in the cooler—was only slightly refrigerated. But I felt too hungry for my stomach even to growl. The sound it made was more like a knocking, a begging and urgent command. So I peeled off a slice and nibbled the fatty white edge. It tasted salty and fine, a thicker version of the kind of proscuitto Mrs. Miksa wrapped around asparagus spears when she had company. I peeled off another slice to hold in my fingers while I ate the first, then passed the package to Natalia. The truth was, I could easily have sat there and eaten every single slice of that bacon.

  Natalia immediately dug into the raw bacon, which surprised me. Usually she was very dainty and picky about her food. About everything, in fact. But last night she hadn’t uttered a word of complaint about sleeping on the ground, or using a sleeping bag case stuffed with clothes for a pillow. She seemed committed to diving into every part of this experience, and she dangled the bacon above her lips, then dropped it into her mouth like a strand of spaghetti.

  “Yum,” she said, her mouth full, only partially joking. Mick sat next to her—not a foot away, like a normal person who’d just met her yesterday, but close enough so that their legs and haunches touched. It was the way a boyfriend would sit next to her, and I expected Natalia to move away, or at least shoot me an incredulous glance. But she just kept laughing and munching on her bacon.

  Lori appeared, having just washed her face in the lake. She had her hair back in a headband, and it spiked directly skyward in slightly crazed disarray. Her skin looked red and irritated as she scowled at us.

  “Hey,” she said. From her tone you would have thought we’d caught and skinned a chipmunk. “That’s disgusting. You’re all going to get worms.”

  We looked up at her, our fingers coated in fatty grease. Mick, Natalia, and I burst out laughing. “It’s not funny,” Lori said. I thought for a minute she might break down and cry. She picked up the soggy bacon package and stared forlornly at the raw slices.

  “What are the rest of us supposed to eat?” she said.

  Jane stood up, not bothering to point out the war-relic toaster. Clearly Lori’s breakfast was not her problem.

  “Okay,” Jane said. “It’s got to be the middle of the morning! And we need to make some serious time today.”

  Truthfully, I didn’t think Jane cared about making serious time any more than we did. She just yelled out these orders because Silas had no interest in them. The occasional shout of authority seemed like a necessary part of the whole experience, like the guitar music around the fire.

  When I was a kid river rafting in Colorado, it used to feel like visiting another planet. The gray rocks and the red soil, the jagged river banks and eddies, the lack of man-made sprawl and motors, the quivering aspens—everything seemed so far away from suburban New Jersey. Here on Lake Keewaytinook, the air that surrounded us felt much more familiar. The muddy banks of the lake and its small colored pebbles matched the banks of Flat Rock Brook and the creek that ran by the railroad tracks in Overpeck. The pine and mulch that wafted from the surrounding woods was the first fragrance I would have thought of, if someone asked me to describe what Earth smelled like.

  But while the broad, blue lake did not suggest interplanetary travel, the lack of any other humans made me feel as if the world had ended. There should have been camps lining the banks, and other people boating. But we paddled for what seemed like hours, establishing a rhythm without sound other than the dipping of our paddles, and without seeing any sign of life other than ourselves. Even Natalia and I had slowed our usually nonstop communication. At home we stayed in constant contact: a stream of conversation when we were together, continued by text message, cell phones, and the Internet when we were apart. Even in class at school, we would pass notes to each other. Last year I had Dr. Berman for second-period algebra, and she had him for fifth-period calculus. We would sit in the same seat, drawing pictures and writing colorful notes to each other. At the end of the year we snuck into the classroom and screwed the desk off its chair. Natalia had it at home now, nailed to her bedroom wall.

  But on the lake, with no cell phones or desktops, we barely communicated. Maybe it was an awareness of how our words would stand out and echo in all this natural quiet. The usual topics—Steve, Greg, our parents—somehow did not seem so pressing, so desperately in need of dissection and analysis. We didn’t mention my pregnancy at all, as if in the face of all that had ended—civilization—it didn’t matter or exist. Oddly enough, it was this very feel of apocalypse that I liked most: the notion of us ten, the lone tribe left in this glossy green wilderness. It didn’t seem to matter that except for Natalia I barely knew any of these people. Rowing along the lake, my arms ached and my heart swelled with illogical fondness. Especially toward Meredith, who rode valiantly in the bow of Sam’s canoe, wearing a navy blue tank suit and a gigantic pair of nylon running shorts. Her hair had a pretty sheen, ginger and flaxen intersecting in her long braids, and her perfect skin was bright pink from the exertion. She looked game and earnest. I even noticed that Lori had a good, trim body, and I thought that if the two girls could be combined into one person, using only their good qualities, you would end up with the most beautiful girl in the world.

  “I kind of love Meredith,” I admitted to Natalia, my first words in what seemed like hours. Natalia nodded, Meredith’s opposite in a striped bikini and a frayed denim skirt.

  “Then I do too,” she said.

  I saw her eyes search the water for Brendan and Mick, who had rowed ahead of us, out of sight. I waited for her to amend her Final Four, but she didn’t say anything else. Only the second day of our trip, and pop culture had already started to fade away. We could live without the world of pixels and radio waves, we could even immediately forget it, replacing television with campfires, and iPods with old John Denver tunes and Silas’s gorgeous, silken picking. I felt something inside me relax for the first time since my dad had told me his post-oil, post-civilization theory. If all the cities in the world shut down tomorrow, we—this group, here now—would be okay, paddling around Lake Keewaytinook. The thought was such a revelation that I shared it with Natalia. At first she nodded in agreement. Then she said, “But of course in that case you’d have to have the baby.”

  I let my oar drag in the water. The bow of our canoe drifted, barely perceptibly, toward shore. It was weird how Natalia thought about my pregnancy more than I did.

  “Think of it,” she said. “We’d all be out here, living in our tents, foraging for food. And you’d have this baby, and we’d all take care of it. It would belong to all of us.”

  The idea was so fanciful, so beyond anything that would actually ever happen, I took a moment to consider it. I pictured the ten of us like some kind of Native American tribe, tending to a baby that we’d take turns carrying around in a little papoose. It would be a very cute baby, with Tommy’s glossy hair and my big brown eyes. Maybe we’d eventually run into Cody’s group: He, the baby, and I could form a postapocalyptic family. We would be brave and idyllic in the wilderness. There was something beautiful about the scenario. I imagined myself the most necessary member of a family unit. Mother. Wife. Uxorious.

  Then I pictured myself, nine months pregnant, squatting and screaming in the bushes. “I can’t say I like the idea of giving birth out here,” I said, happier to mention this image than the brave-new-world version.

  Natalia cringed, then nodded. “That would be bad,” she said. “And it would get cold in winter.”

  I started to make a joke about Mick, how if the apocalypse came he would be in charge of running down deer and skinning rabbits for our fur coats. But from up ahead we heard Jane shout that it was time to stop, so we picked up speed again, concentrating on just paddling.

  At lunch everyone seemed caught up in the calm and quiet of the day, newly and strangely familiar with one another. Lori even plopped herself down next to Brendan. “I’ve done a bit of
acting myself,” she said, in a voice that sounded slightly, suspiciously British.

  Everyone stopped talking and stared at the two of them. So far, nobody had mentioned Brendan’s acting career. It seemed rude, somehow, like asking Mick about his juvenile record or his tattoos.

  But Brendan just smiled and said, “Really?” He seemed very at ease, and very respectful as Lori rattled off the minor roles she had played in school productions of Our Town and Guys and Dolls.

  When she mentioned The Vagina Monologues, Mick barked, “Hey! Keep it clean!” Then he, Natalia, and I fell off our log, laughing hysterically. Brendan just reached over and patted Lori’s shapely knee. His touch allowed her furious red blush to settle into a smile, and I thought how really nice Brendan was, much nicer than he had to be.

  Jane handed out peanut butter sandwiches, and I realized that the three people who didn’t know about Brendan’s career—her, Silas, and Mick—now only knew about Lori’s. So funny, the obvious things we didn’t know about one another. I sat next to Charlie, his silence suddenly not seeming peculiar, but stoic and companionable. I liked his Clint Eastwood squint, and the square freckles across his face. Who needed to talk? There was so much to listen to instead, the whole world rustling around us. I thought how much better this was than lifeguarding, my muscles moving instead of lolling, the smell of dirt and algae instead of chlorine and artificial coconut.

  By the time we got back on the water the wind had picked up. Natalia, Brendan, Mick, and I paddled together. Brendan was getting better at his J strokes, and this time the four of us manage to pull ahead as the others struggled against the waves.

  “I can’t believe what a difference this makes,” Natalia shouted back to me, her head bent into the wind. Not far behind, with Lori in his bow, Silas yelled that we should continue on straight and hug the shore to keep out of the wind.

  The going was tough. We ducked our heads and paddled. As the afternoon wore on, Natalia’s slender arms became more and more sinewy before my eyes. At one point we were overtaken by a duck, swimming against the wind with five ducklings behind her.

  “Oh,” Natalia said, as she had the day before. “So sweet.”

  It was a beautiful bird, dark with a circle of white on either side of its face, and a crazy plume of feathers on top of its head. It looked like something out of Dr. Seuss. Remembering the bird book, I called back to Silas, “What kind of duck is that?”

  “Hooded merganser,” he yelled. I could barely hear him over the wind, though his canoe floated less than a yard away.

  “Look at that bird,” Mick said. “It’s making it so easy over the waves. Let’s race it.”

  “No,” said Natalia. “You’ll frighten her.”

  Mick had an expression on his face that I had already come to recognize. He looked crazed and intent, possessed by a force inside him, unable to hear what any of us said. Despite cries of protest from every direction, he took off, paddling furiously in the bow. Brendan, for his part, obediently picked up his pace. I couldn’t understand why he would listen to Mick, but they seemed to have established a pecking order, if not quite a friendship. It struck me as very odd that Brendan—with all his obvious status—should so instantly go along with Mick.

  Natalia and I raced after them, not to join the chase but to try to stop it. We could see the duck’s face, eyes wide with determination—recognizing a predator. And we laughed when she did the sensible, intelligent thing when Brendan and Mick caught up with her. She turned around and headed in the other direction, the wind and her ducklings at her back.

  Natalia and I watched as the merganser headed toward us, her frantic expression matching the mad professor’s shock of feathers on top of her head. Four of the ducklings kept up, but one struggled as it backpedaled over the waves. Soon the canoe stood between the duck and its lost baby.

  “Look,” Mick yelled. “This one’s the slow, fat kid. He can’t keep up.”

  “It’s not funny,” Natalia screamed. The duck had shepherded her babies close to the bank, into a small inlet. With distinct, rapid nods of her head, she counted them—one, two, three, four. At the lack of number five, her eyes widened in further panic. She squawked at the ducklings, who waddled up on shore. Then she set off after the lost one, whom I now identified in my mind—despite my sudden hatred of Mick—as the slow, fat kid.

  “Just don’t move,” Natalia yelled at Mick. “Just let her get it!”

  Mick stopped paddling, suddenly returning to obedience, and stood up in the bow of his canoe. The surge that had driven his chase seemed to be seeping out of him; his face looked calmer but slightly perplexed, as if his actions were as mysterious to him as they were to us. Brendan rested his paddle across his knees, panting, while Silas and Lori floated up beside us and stopped, giving the duck plenty of room to bring her baby back to safety.

  I watched Mick. If he could sense the heavy disapproval coming from every direction, he didn’t give any sign. He wore faded gym shorts and no shirt, a bandanna tied around his bald head. Maybe he had forgotten sunscreen, because the pale skin across his nose and shoulders had turned a deep pink. The skin around his tattoos looked red, irritated, and I wondered if a tattoo could get infected after it had healed. I noticed for the first time, even from my distance across the sunlit stretch of water, that his eyes were a deep, dark blue, much like the color of the lake itself. He was broad and muscular, with chiseled and regular features that quivered like a hunter’s.

  Mick, I realized with a start, was hot. Not just hot, but handsome. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before this second.

  The wind seemed to die down as the mother duck and her lost duckling joined the others. Mick sat down and started paddling. We all continued our efforts against the headwinds. My arms and shoulders ached.

  “Hey, Mick,” Silas said. His canoe was just alongside ours, on the other side of Mick and Brendan. “You’re really an asshole, you know?” His voice sounded calm and laid-back as ever, no hint of anger other than the words themselves. “If you ever do anything like that again,” Silas said, “I’ll kick your ass.”

  “I’d like to see you try,” said Mick, almost but not quite under his breath. He didn’t seem to put much heart into the retort. The wind blew just as he spoke. I could barely hear him, and if Silas registered the words he didn’t give any indication.

  Mick’s shoulders sagged in defeat. He looked as if he knew he’d just exposed himself and been found sorely wanting by all of us—including and maybe especially Natalia. As we paddled on into the afternoon, even though I agreed he’d shown himself to be a complete asshole, I couldn’t help it. I felt sorry for him.

  That night after dinner, when Silas and Jane had disappeared into their tent, Sam told us that smoking deer moss would make a person sterile.

  “A guy at base camp told me,” he said. He looked so happy to have all our attention, the youngest kid in the family finding a way to steal the spotlight. “If you smoke deer moss,” he told us, “you’re sterile for, like, seven years.”

  “Does it work for just guys, or girls, too?” Natalia asked.

  “Both,” Sam promised, though he didn’t look sure. Everyone but Brendan and I left the fire to scrape the stiff green moss from the rocks. Brendan came around from the opposite side to sit next to me. My stomach lurched. The chicken Jane had roasted in the reflector oven had looked slightly gray before she smothered it with barbecue sauce. I worried that we’d all wake up in the middle of the night with salmonella.

  “Is it okay if I keep you company?” Brendan asked. “The smoke keeps getting in my eyes over there.” At that very moment the wind shifted and a thick gust of smoke from the fire whipped our faces. We laughed.

  “It’s your fault,” I said. “Smoke follows beauty.” I didn’t worry that Brendan would take this as a come-on. Since even Lori had tried to flirt with him, this seemed like the new and accepted course of action. Anyway, I already felt firmly sisterly. Brendan’s good looks were too overblown, almo
st caricature: He was so perfect, he couldn’t possibly be sexy. All I could think of when I looked at him were my own flaws, my buck teeth and the zits that were no doubt multiplying on my forehead in spite of the Stri-Dex pads. Since waving good-bye to Cody at the dock, I had felt totally unflirtatious. Commenting on Brendan’s beauty was more like stating the obvious then delivering a compliment.

  Brendan himself didn’t sound flirtatious, only diplomatic enough to float the words back to me when he said, “The smoke must be following you, then.”

  “Yeah, right.” I laughed. The interaction was so without sexual tension that it made us friends in a final and comfortable way. We sat quietly for a minute, staring into the fire. Then, because I was tired of nobody directly addressing the other elephant on the lake, I said, “Natalia and I used to watch you on The New Mill River.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said, as if this were a big surprise.

  “You were good,” I said. “We totally thought you were English.”

  “Thanks.”

  I asked questions about the various actors on The New Mill River, whether they were nice or stuck-up. He gave me a little rundown on everybody. The star, he said, was a self-obsessed bitch who spent most of her time primping in front of the mirror and putting other people down. Although she played a very saintly and loving character, this information did not surprise me in the slightest.

  “So why are you here?” I said. “Shouldn’t you be in Holly-wood making a movie or something?”

  “I’ve been trying out for parts since I was four,” he said. “I wanted to take a break this summer. Do something outdoors.”

  Mick’s voice broke into our conversation. “We got the stuff,” he said, holding up fistfuls of deer moss. The others trailed behind him, each with a mossy little stash. There was some discussion of letting it dry out over a few days, but they decided to go ahead and smoke it wet. Natalia reasoned that if it didn’t work, they could always try again. From what we could tell, every rock in the area was covered with a thick blanket of the supposed birth control.