Lauren Groff - Arcadia

How was Vermont? Hannah says.

Abe envelops Hannah in his arms and whispers in her ear. He is tall, she is tall, and between them Bit is pressed as if by the warm trunks of old trees. He doesn’t want the hug to end, but after a minute it does. Their bodies fall apart. His parents turn away.

On top of everything else, the women must do the sugaring: the men work up in Arcadia House from sunrise to sunset and often beyond. They scrape and hammer, put in pipes and plaster, roll on the oopsie paint they got from a store in Ilium in exchange for Sweetie Fox and Kitty posing provocatively with rollerbrushes in the store’s advertisements.

The Kid Herd follows the sugaring ladies out one day to learn. The huge maples are hung with icicles, roots so intertwined they form a mat above the ground. There is no wind here, and when the sun finally touches the copse, it glows softly as a kerosene lamp.

Like a church, breathes Maria and turns away to privately make a four-pointed sign from head to belly to shoulder to shoulder, which Bit mimics again and again behind a tree, loving the gesture’s solemnity. He doesn’t want the others to see. Superstition, snorts Hannah when the others talk about God. Though people here have private rituals, Muhammad kneeling on a bit of carpet during the day, Jewish Seders and Christmas trees, religion here is seen much like hygiene: a personal concern best kept in check so as to not bully the others.

Mikele drills holes into trunk after trunk, and Eden screws in the spouts. The trees bleed clear blood into the buckets. The ping-ping-ping on metal is a sound like warm rain on the Bread Truck roof. But this sound feels different; sweetness will come of it.

Language has begun to shift in Bit. There are small explosions of comprehension every day. He remembers last August, when he lay in the sun-warmed shallows of the Pond while under the water he was nibbled by things unseen. With his Grimm book, it is as if he has his eyes below the surface and can at last see the tiny fish there. Speech splinters into words, each phrase with its own order: Scuseme becomes Excuse me, Pawurduthpepel becomes Power to the People, all words he understands both alone and combined.

Separate drawers emerge in his mind, now, to sort people into. Handy is a frog king. Titus is a lonely ogre in the Gatehouse, keeping out the Pigs and gawkers. Tall Abe, with his tools, his ax, his beard, is a woodsman. Eden, with her bright coppery hair and pale skin, eating the succulent greens raised in the south window of the Henhouse for the Pregnant Ladies, is a queen. He hopes she is not the good mother who must die to make way for the wicked stepmother. He hopes she is not the bad mother who sells her baby for the herbs. Wonder Bill, with his mobile face, with his monkey clambers, had been a fool. Astrid is difficult: her hair shines like a princess’s, but her face is old and her teeth terrible like a witch’s; she delivers babies and gives people medicines like a witch, but she’s married to the Frog King, like a queen. He will decide on her later.

Most clearly, though: Hannah. In her bed as the day rises and falls around her, she is a sleeping princess, under a spell.

Bit puts the book back in its place and feeds another log to the woodstove. If he didn’t, his nose would drip and Abe would come home from a terrible long day on the cold roof to frown at Hannah on her pallet. She would close her eyes and let his disapproving silence wash over her. Bit closes the stove and eats a piece of dried pineapple and watches the lump of Hannah for a long time.

Will she wake on her own? The day begins to go shadowy. The wind picks up within the forest, and Bit can hear its dark rush toward them.

At last, Bit washes his hands carefully and brushes his teeth three times with baking soda. He kneels behind his mother’s pillow. He cups her cheeks. Slowly, he lowers his mouth to hers, kissing with all he has within him, pressing his lips hard against hers until he can feel the shape of her teeth behind her lips and taste the bad tang of her breath.

She doesn’t awaken when he lifts his head away. He takes his hands back sadly. This is what he’d feared. Bit is not the one. He is not her prince.

The women boil down the sap in a water heater Tarzan welded into a huge double boiler, and the air all over Arcadia smells sweet and a little burnt at the edges. Bit can almost taste the sugar when he puts out his tongue. One morning, when Sweetie brings the Kid Herd over the fresh drifts of snow to the Sugarshack, Mikele and Suzie, who have boiled all night long, are giddy, and paint the soft snow with streaks of syrup. The syrup sinks as it cools, and when they fish it out, it has hardened into candy.

Don’t tell Astrid, says Suzie. She hacks the syrup taffy into pieces and hands them out to the kids. His piece is so sweet that Bit gags, but to not hurt their feelings he swallows it anyway and pretends to want more.

Abe’s clothes stink with sweat and sawdust; the men are finished with the entire roof. Tomorrow, the joints of Abe’s hands won’t have ice in them all the time, and Bit won’t startle when he accidentally brushes them in his sleep. Tomorrow, Abe will start to put in bathrooms and plumbing to the Eatery, and the huge heap of salvaged copper pipes down at the Motor Pool will shrink to nothing.

When we’re in Arcadia House, people say all the time now, longing writ on their faces. Always, the dream of when . Things will be better, we will be warmer, people won’t argue, we will send extra aid into the world, we will start the publishing company, nobody will have vitamin D deficiencies, the kidlets will go to school, the midwives will be on hand, the bears won’t come out of the woods and ransack the garbage pails and scatter the unwashed diapers or Menstru-fleeces all across the Quad, there will be no loos.

Muffin, who once lived with her mothers in an apartment in Albany, tries to describe toilets to the kids: You turn a knob, she says, and water gushes out and swallows up your poop.

Helle begins to cry. Like a monster, she sobs. It eats your shit!

The others sigh and shift away, as they usually do when Helle cries. But Bit goes to her and hugs her to him, this squishy hard girl, all elbows and pudge. At first she pulls back, but when he lets go of her, she sinks against him. She is bigger than he is, but sometimes he thinks she’s younger, even, than the toddlers. She is strange. She smells like a vanilla bean. Bit always feels a little sick for her.

Not like a monster, says Muffin with disdain. It’s like the loos. But it doesn’t stink and isn’t cold and there aren’t spiders and the Sanitation Crew doesn’t have to pump them, and you don’t have to spread lye. You just turn the knob and it goes away.

Where’s away? says Leif.

I don’t know, says Muffin.

They look at one another, thinking. At last, Erik, who is eleven, says, I think the ocean. Yes, they all agree, away must be the ocean, which Bit pictures as the Pond on a windy day, people in strange outfits waiting on the opposite side: women in kimonos and wooden shoes, men in paddy hats and dashikis like Muhammad’s, little flotillas of shit rushing over the surface toward them, scrap-paper sails and all.

As they sleep, a cloud dumps snow upon them. Ersatz Arcadia has become a smooth pretty village of white, poked with playful, smoking chimneys, like the old-timey picture in Hannah’s book on Russian serfs. Today, again, Hannah doesn’t get up. Every part of her is filmy with oils. She murmurs and grabs Bit and pulls him in gently under the blankets, against her warmth. When he is very still and breathes with her and drifts off to sleep in her wake, he sees pieces of her dreams: a gray street that Bit has never seen, a tree with coppery bark, a fountain under oaks draped in dusk, a huge black bird with its beak cracked to a red tongue. Deeper, and he is in the belly of a closet and something soft brushes his temple and voices are raised outside. There is a dinner table with many forks and spoons laid out in rows and a tiny silver bowl into which a white hand dabbles. There is a return to something private, slippery, that tips and spills. When he wakes, he is drenched with sweat but shivering.