The Grounding of Group 6

by Julian F. Thompson

  When Roz discovered, three weeks after that, that she and Jack duVivier were “very much in love,” she felt that Marigold would understand (if ever she found out). After all, her daughter was a woman now, and as a woman she would need love, too, and understand how there could be two people in the world who really truly—yes!—were made for one another. Jack had told her how he’d searched for her so long, so hungrily, and she had told him back how long she’d been there, waiting.

  But neither one told Marigold they planned to find each other, once again, beside the indoor pool at her house, the early April day she missed the bus that took her class to Washington, D.C. She’d come on home, decided on a swim; she’d nothing much to do for two whole days, so maybe she would start to really get in shape, she thought. She undressed in her room and got a towel; a suit would not be needed. It was lucky she was barefoot. Roz and Jack were barefoot, too, all over, and busy on the double chaise beside the pool. So Marigold retreated noiselessly. She went back to her room, and dressed, and left the house. She spent the next two days at O.D.’s mother’s place, waiting to be able to come back from Washington.

  Two weeks later, Miss Marino, drama coach at school, told her that the Harlequins were looking for a juvenile to work in summer stock. It seemed that Mr. (Jack) duVivier had seen the play at school, and wondered if, by any chance, she might be interested.

  Miss Marino made the introductions, and on the fourth of May, in the master bedroom of that lovely old Colonial on the corner of Maple and Prospect, Marigold tried out for a place in the Harlequins. If Jack duVivier had been the type to kiss and tell, he would have told the world she was “a little hell cat.” Marigold made sure she left some marks on him.

  On June twenty-eighth, she told her mother she was pregnant and wanted an abortion. She said she’d been “a little dope”; she certainly knew better. But, she said, she thought her mother’d understand: she had been swept away. It was just that she was so in love, she said.

  Roz was very understanding; she signed the forms the doctor’d given Marigold—the procedure would be done within the week. And just as Marigold was going out the door, Roz asked her if she knew the “boy” by any chance. Not that she was asking for the name, but, naturally, she wondered if she knew him, this “boy” her daughter loved so much.

  Marigold had waited for that question. She smiled and said she thought Roz maybe did. “He’s not a boy,” she said, “exactly. He’s a man. I think I may have seen him at a party here, the first time. A Mr. Jack duVivier.” And with that, she slowly closed the door behind her.

  If Roz had not been “hopelessly in love,” it might have been a different story. But, as it was, it meant that Marigold was entered in Group 6, at Coldbrook Country School.

  “In lots of ways,” she’d told O.D., before she took that bus, September first, “I’m glad I’m getting out of here.”

  O.D. agreed with that. She’d been sent to boarding school herself, in jolly old Virginia.

  6

  Nat’s roommate senior year at UVM had been a girl named Jen Maloney. Jen Maloney studied nursing. She thought that all B.A.’s were bores and bullshitters, except for Nat, most of the time.

  “You’re the best B.A. I’ve ever known,” said Jen Maloney to her roommate, Nat, one day in May, “so please don’t take this personal. But—have you learned one single thing the last four years that you would call important? From reading all those bullshit books, I mean.” Jen Maloney was leaving for Cambodia in June.

  “Why, yes,” said Nat, “I’ve learned two things, I think.” He held two fingers up, to show he came in peace, and had important things to say. He wiggled them: two things. He also smiled. “I learned that everything is pretty much like everything else. And I also learned that nothing is the same as anything.”

  Jen Maloney rolled her eyes around.

  “Your witness, God,” she said.

  Nat and Jen Maloney had talked like that a lot, and so he was a little bit surprised when he thought of what he’d said that day in May, in Burlington, when he was sitting in the woods in mid-September. It was like all of a sudden remembering that there was a purple towel buried in the dirty laundry on your closet floor.

  What brought it back, of course, was his discovery that while living in the woods with these five kids in such peculiar circumstances was certainly unique as an experience, it was also loaded with the same old set of stresses and conflicts and disagreements that always was a part of “ordinary” life.

  For instance: Freedom vs. Control (or, if you will, spontaneity vs. planning, improvisation vs. discipline, excitement vs. boredom, my way vs. your way, or however else you want to put it).

  Example 1:

  “Well, I guess it’s Friday morning,” said Sully, the second morning they’d been back from Boynton Falls.

  “Is it?” said Ludi.

  “So what?” said Coke.

  “You know what I think’d be fun?” said Marigold. “To try to just live by body moods, or your biological clock, or whatever they call it. I mean, eat when you’re hungry, instead of at three specific times during the day. And sleep when you’re tired, maybe only three or four hours at a time, like that.”

  “I knew a guy at college who tried to get completely into his body for a whole month,” Nat said. “What happened was, he gained twenty pounds, picked up a case of VD, and almost flunked two courses. He was a psych major. So what he did was, he wrote it all up as an independent study next term, and got an A out of it anyway. By then he’d dieted the weight off and gotten cured of his dose, and the A averaged in with the low grades he’d gotten to leave him with his usual B minus. So it all worked out in the end. It was almost as if nothing had happened, he said.”

  Ludi laughed. “I bet you made that up,” she said. “I bet none of that happened at all.” She pushed at his shoulder. “Get out of here,” she said.

  “I guess that’s what we all have to do,” said Sara.

  Nat nodded, looked at his watch.

  “What?” said Coke. “What for?”

  “Because it’s Friday,” said Sully. “The Robinsons, remember? They could be coming for the weekend.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Coke. The day before, they hadn’t done an awful lot, other than to paint the Pumpkin olive green, with streaks, and make one trip to Spring Lake Lodge with some of their supplies. Coke was feeling sort of reckless, fatalistic; more than ever, he wished for a mustache. He thought he was in love with Marigold—“just blown away,” he would have said, if he’d had someone he could talk about it with. And then he’d have grinned a little grin and gone “Phee-ew!” and shook his head respectfully. Sully wasn’t right for talk like that, and Nat was just as bad, for altogether different reasons.

  “What a pain in the ass,” said Coke. Spring Lake Lodge was not set up for romance, so it seemed to him.

  When all of them announced their readiness to go, Nat suggested one more final check of all the rooms, to see if there was any tiny thing they’d missed, some clue that they’d been in the place for days. They found a towel behind the bathroom door (“Yeah, Sully”) and shampoo and conditioner beside the tub and a razor on the edge of it (“Marigold!”). Plus a compass on the mantelpiece (“That must be Sara’s”), a sock beneath the sofa (“Nat—no, Coke!”), and in the freezer section of the gas refrigerator, maybe half a quart of chocolate chip (“Let’s blame that on Nat, O.K.?”).

  “God, I can’t remember how this kitchen was,” said Ludi, “I think there were glasses on the drain board, those old-fashioneds—but maybe it was tall ones. And how about that coffee pot? Was it sitting on the burner in the back, or what?”

  No one could remember, quite. And no one really liked the thought of two trips up to Spring Lake Lodge, or maybe three, getting the supplies up there. Plus Nat would have to hide the Pumpkin somewhere.

  There seemed to be a lot of sentences with words like “have-to,” “ought-to,” “double-check,” and “be-real-careful” in them.

&nbs
p; Example 2:

  “Well,” said Nat, on Friday night. “I guess we’d better get our act together.”

  He didn’t know he’d used a different tone of voice in saying that, but he soon knew something’d happened. Suddenly, the Group took on a wariness it never had before: the sort of sullen and defensive style you often find in classrooms in a high school, when teachers speak of major tests to come, or dare to claim that students aren’t working to “capacity.”

  “Huh?” said Marigold and Sara.

  “How d’you mean?” said Sully.

  Ludi looked at Nat and raised her eyebrows. Coke watched his own right foot move back and forth along the ground.

  Nat laughed a nervous laugh and did a kind of wiggle with his elbows. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

  “But what?” said Ludi, smiling now.

  Nat laughed again, but this time he felt different, so it sounded different. Other people smiled, and shifted in their seats a little. Nat had got his white hat back again.

  “But… well… it seems to me we’ve got to maybe do some things that aren’t altogether fun …, “ Nat started.

  “O.K., O.K., just tell us what it is,” said Coke. “It’s obvious you’ve got a list. Let’s get it over with.”

  “I haven’t got a list,” said Nat, a little bit offended. His father was the one for lists. He wrote them down in tiny little writing, in a tiny little leather book he carried in a pocket in his vest. “It’s just sort of a bunch of things that are all more or less part of the same thing….”

  That incoherence got him sympathetic nods, so he felt better and talked on.

  The “same thing” he’d referred to was how to keep from getting killed, and so he called it that, in just those words. Might just as well, he thought. It was funny, the way people’s minds worked. The thought that anyone would try to kill them was, on the one hand, very real: a fact that they believed, the main fact in their lives, the reason they were where they were, with just this group of people. But, on the other hand, it was also so far-out, remote, impossible, they couldn’t take it in, or dwell on it. At sixteen—even twenty-two—death was still a whole career away, some other people’s business altogether. “This can’t be happening to me,” is what some inner portion of their selves kept saying. And here was Nat insisting that it was.

  Coke hated listening to Nat. Whenever he was forced to think about… this “mess” (he always called it to himself), he’d always think, We’ve had it. Sooner or later, Coke had learned in life, the other people always won. You never got away with it, whatever it was. He and Nat and the others in Group 6 could plan and scheme and practice all they wanted to, but in the end they’d lose. The best thing, as far as he was concerned, was to just try not to think about it, and have the best time he could for as long as he could. Really.

  What Nat was suggesting now was that they organize their lives in such a way that (a) they’d have an early-warning system of some sort, no matter how imperfect, and that (b) each of them would always know exactly where he was (or she) and how to get to somewhere else where there’d be food and shelter. That was for openers. It’d also be good, he said, if everyone learned some rudiments of chopping, tracking, hiding, shooting bows and arrows, and first aid.

  “Say, how about kung fu and calculus?” asked Marigold. “Or making lamps out of household waste? Not to mention modem dance and whitewater canoeing. Natty, you slay me,” she said. “It sounds as if you want us to have seminars and sentries, and run around in the woods all day with contour maps and compasses.”

  “Well, I’d say it’s either that or go completely native,” Nat replied. “Try to pass for some lost Stone Age tribe that still ekes out a bare existence eating snails and grubs and one another’s body lice. Of course, we’d have to mat our hair and bury all our clothes and not talk smart to strangers. …”

  Sully and the girls all smiled, and even Coke made one quick semi-snorting sound that could have been a humorous reaction.

  “It sounds,” said Sara, “very much as if we’ve got a lot to do. And a lot to learn.” She didn’t sound displeased at all. Sully nodded, wrinkling his brow.

  “I think we’re going to need alarm clocks.” Ludi smiled. “A schedule, perhaps. You really do mean posting lookouts and all that?”

  “Yeah,” said Nat. “I think we ought to. Certain places, certain times. It never will be foolproof, that’s for sure. But we can make it harder to surprise us. As for a schedule”—he grinned—“I don’t know. But I guess it’d make sense if we agreed on, you know, what we’re going to do, and when.”

  “Wouldn’t you know it?” said Coke. “It’s bad enough that we have people trying to kill us, maybe. But at least it gets us out of all that chickenshit routine you always have at school. So what do we turn around and do? Set up a fucking schedule that’s just as bad as school, or worse. Jesus Christ.”

  “Well, what do you want to do?” said Marigold. “Sit around on your ass and wait for them to find us? Doing what, all day, may I ask? There isn’t any dope”—she counted on her fingers—“or any soaps to watch or any booze to drink except what the Robinsons are sure to miss. Or any phones, or any magazines, or stereos, or delis. The least thing we can do, until we’ve got a—whachacallit?—long-range plan, is be a little hard to find.”

  “All right, already.” Coke waved a hand at her. “I get the point. But we’ll see how you like it when it’s four A.M. in the middle of a rainstorm and you’re the one that’s watching Cow-shit Canyon, waiting for the other flop to fall, heh-heh.”

  He ducked the piece of kindling she flipped in his direction.

  Example 3:

  Group 6 went into training right away. Every day they rose at dawn and spent the morning doing map and compass work and traipsing through the woods, going out from Spring Lake Lodge in all directions. On these trips, they’d practice recognizing trees and tracks, and learning how to go a little quieter, or climb a tree with confidence, and copy certain birdcalls.

  Afternoons they’d work on skills: shelters, fire-starting, ax-work, bow-and-arrow, carpentry (like building boxes they could cache their food in). At Spring Lake Lodge, they always had a lookout in a tree below the spruces. From that tree, there was a splendid northern view, looking down the side that anyone who wasn’t partly mountain goat would come from, if they came. A sentry-turn would last two hours, and they’d sometimes try to test the person, one or more of them, by sneaking down the back side of their hill and coming up where he or she should see them. The sentry’d make a blue jay’s call any time that something seemed suspicious; a second call was red-alert. The sentry would come down and join the rest of them at Spring Lake Lodge, and all of them would then evacuate. Packs for that were always packed and ready.

  After spending four days at the Lodge, they decided to move down to the Robinsons’ early Wednesday morning and, if all went well, stay on till early Friday afternoon again. That way, they could color in some large new sections on their maps, places nearer to the school and roads than Spring Lake Lodge was. And also take hot showers. They discovered that the Robinsons had not come up to spend the weekend after all; maybe they were strictly summer folks and skiers. Down there, the Group went out together in the woods all day, and so they didn’t use a lookout. And then, when they got back, they merely kept a person on the porch, to look and listen down the driveway. In some peculiar way, they all felt safer in a house like that, and quite absurdly sure that anyone who looked for them would have to use the road. During supper, all of them were lookouts: they ate out on the porch.

  So, Thursday evening they were eating brownies in the twilight when Marigold demanded their attention: three good knuckle-raps laid down upon the wooden railing she was sitting on. It seemed to Nat that everyone was talking softer than they used to and was sort of more alert for other sounds. Nat also knew that he’d been known to kid himself. He turned to Marigold.

  “What I wanted to ask,” she said, “was what other people we
re feeling about… well, about…” She looked at Ludi. “I don’t know how to say this.”

  “Seeing as I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ludi said, “I don’t either. Why don’t you just say it?”

  “O.K.,” said Marigold—and, oops, there went a giggle, half a one, a gig. She choked it off ferociously and said, “I think we ought to cool it with a lot of the boy-girl business we’re doing. Like, I don’t put my body in Spring Lake unless the guys are all half a mile away, and Sully can’t take a piss if he isn’t fifty trees away from Ludi, and isn’t-it-a-dreadful-thing if Sara goes into the boys’ room when Coke is changing clothes. That all just doesn’t make much sense to me, in the situation we’re in here. It seems to me there may be times when we’re just going to have to be a little more…I don’t know, relaxed with one another. So maybe we ought to start now. Get used to it. I’d like to know what other people think.”

  Nat looked around the porch. Sully was looking at the deck and smiling; Coke was looking at the deck and frowning. Sara was looking at Ludi, and Ludi was looking at Marigold and scratching the side of her head, but also smiling. Nat was looking around at everybody, and so was Marigold. They smiled at one another.

  “You’re probably right,” said Ludi. “I know that I’d feel funny at first, but I guess I’d get over it. I guess we all would.”

  “I don’t know,” said Sully, still smiling and looking at the floor, but also shaking his head.

  “It might be just a little harder on the guys,” said Coke. “Heh-heh. If you know what I mean.”

  “Gee, no,” said Marigold, a finger on her cheek. “I don’t believe I do. Maybe you could tell us, Coke. Or show us, better still.”

  Coke got up and grabbed her, and made as if to throw her off the porch.

  Nat said, “That whole thing scared me to death when I went away to college. Coed bathrooms and all. But it turned out it really isn’t all that big a deal.”