World and Town (35 page)

“What does that mean?”

“It means my dad is right—Sarun has to stop.”

“You mean Sarun is the gap the devil is looking for.”

The curtain lifts and collapses.

“Speaking of whom”—Hattie almost says “of the devil”—“Is he okay?”

“Why shouldn’t he be okay?”

“Well …”

“You’re crazy.” Sophy looks up, her eyes rimmed with makeup. “You’re old. You’re seeing things.”

Seeing things.

A lifelessness of its own
—that leadenness—Hattie feels it return, then, even as she hears,
Don’t you just want to slap that girl?

Is that Lee’s voice?

“Like what do you want from us anyway?” Sophy goes on. “Like who asked you to ask questions? Ginny says I’ve got to ask myself what you want from us, bringing us cookies and giving me free lessons, and now, like, to my mom, too. Getting yourself in the trailer. Like what’s that about?”

“Is that what she says.” Hattie lifts her chin. “Well, and what about the church? Do you ever ask yourself why they give you things, and send a car for you? Do you ever ask yourself that?”

“They want to save me.”

“Ah. So they don’t pretend to do it out of the goodness of their souls.”

“They do it because Mark told them to spread the Good News. It’s not creepy.”

“I see. Well, let me ask you this. Did people ever do things for each other in Cambodia? Because they were living in the same village?”

“How would I know? I never lived in Cambodia.”

“In your old town, then. Did people ever do things because they were all in the same boat, and because it made them feel part of a community?”

“Ginny says you need us,” says Sophy. “She says you need us more than we need you.”

“I’m sure that’s true.”

There’s a noise in the next room—Sarun. Talking in what seems to be a perfectly normal voice to Chhung.

“Ginny says you’re desperate. She says you spy on us, the same as Everett spies on her. It’s not checking up, it’s spying, and you do it because you’re a, a …”

“A lesbian?”

“Ginny says you’re the one who called the police on us.”

“Not
on
you,” Hattie says, but Sophy, starting to stand, isn’t listening.

“It’s true, isn’t it,” says Sophy. “You did—you called the police on us.” One foot gets caught in some bedding, but she kicks it away savagely even as, with a familiar gesture, she tucks her hair behind her ear.

Hattie answers slowly, plainly—as if talking to Mum. “Sophy. Listen to me. Your dad had a knife in his hand.”

Sophy throws a sandal at her but misses, of course. It hits a wall and falls to the floor as Hattie leaves.

D
id you have your driving glasses on?” asks Grace, squinting.

Beth wants to know if they have a social worker. Because they should have one! she says. That is just a fact! Greta is going to call as soon as she gets home to see why they don’t, though the state—she gestures at the eternal nature of the state with a dinner roll. And Candy nods to that—budget cuts, she says. As for what they common citizens can do in the meanwhile, there is much concerned discussion, especially about the van. What is the role of that white van? Hattie tries not to look at Ginny—
When is a snake not a snake?
—as she reports that it stops in Riverlake on its way to Canada. “Where the boys go to eat fruit,” she says. “Cambodians like fruit.”

“And supermarket fruit can be awful, it’s true,” says Grace.

But Beth shakes her head, skeptical. Besides growing out her hair, she’s been trying flowered skirts lately, and Mary Janes—a softer look. Yet still she wields her fork and tomato wedge like a hammer. “I vote we open up that van and see what’s really in there,” she says.

How can they go breaking into the van, though, when they’re not the police and don’t have a warrant, either? Never mind if it’s drugs, as Candy fears. “Fourth Amendment,” says Greta, who before she was a librarian, taught civics; and people do see this. Just as they seem about to move on to another topic, however, Ginny says thoughtfully, “People say there might be terrorists coming in from Canada now,” and all stops.

Terrorists!

People at a far table sing “Happy Birthday”; Ginny sops up what’s left of her soup with some bread.

“We have to do something,” says Beth. “That is just a fact.” They think.

“Maybe someone should talk to Sophy?” Greta looks at Hattie. “See what she knows?”

“You mean, maybe this is all about fruit,” says Hattie. “The rest being so much groundless speculation.”

“Exactly.”

“She’s pretty mad I called 911.”

“But of course you called 911,” says Beth. “I would have called 911. Anyone would have called 911.”

“I don’t think she’s speaking to me,” says Hattie.

“Oh, no.” Greta touches Hattie’s arm. “That’s not fair.”

Hattie shrugs, thinks for a moment, then turns calmly to Ginny. “Maybe you can try?”

It’s what they would do in the lab sometimes—give things rein, and see what happened. Not that she suspects anything in particular. But to suggest that there might be terrorists in the white van—how odd.

Ginny is pleasant. “I’d be happy to ask,” she says.

And her report the next meeting is all sunshine and equanimity: The van is bringing fruit on the way down, she says, and on the way up, plywood.

But of course!—Beth’s tomato pitches forward. They’re the plywood thieves!

Others, though, are slower to relax. No chemicals? No fertilizer?

Ginny shakes her head bemusedly, like a teacher with her innocently mistaken class. As for how Sophy knows, well, how many secrets can really be kept in a trailer that size? “If you ask her, I’m sure she’ll tell you the same thing herself,” she finishes.

Greta presses her fingers to her lips; she looks as if she is about to eat them.

“Ask her.” Ginny turns to Hattie. “Please, be my guest. Honestly, I think it’s God’s plan for you to ask.” Ginny’s green eyes are round and misty. “Honestly, I think she’s ready.”

Ready.

In what you are proud of
, Lee used to say,
you can see in what way you are nuts
.

“Ask,” urges Ginny. She pulls her hair down over her ears. “Ask.”

B
ut what, pray tell, should I talk to Sophy about?” If Carter is surprised to see Hattie at his front door, he doesn’t show it. Neither is he surprised she will not come in. He simply steps forward onto the porch, folds his arms, and listens. A sounding board. He has bags under his eyes, but his nod is crisp; he’s taking things in. Of course, she’s worried about Sarun, he says. And it is indeed high time someone looked into their social worker situation. As for the kitchen knife—while he believes that Hattie saw what she saw—well, what we see … As he knows she knows. He, too, is glad—very—that no one has been hurt. Though what’s this about Ginny? Hattie elaborates: Sophy’s coolness. Her involvement with the church. Her belief in Sarun’s evil. Ginny’s confidence. “She knows what Sophy will say,” Hattie finishes. “And don’t we know that sometimes? What people will say?” Hattie rubs her arms. It’s cool out, drizzly
—plotting weather
, Joe used to say. “Carter. Come on.” She tries again. “It’s the way she said it. As if Sophy were in the bag in some way. ‘Ready,’ as she said.”

Carter’s eyebrows lift as if in concert with invisibly rising antennae. “And this, you believe, is related to the beatings.”

“I’m not sure why Ginny’s interested in the van. But she is, and the van is related to the beatings.”

“So getting Sophy away from Ginny would stop them.”

“I don’t know. But Sophy is mixed up in this somehow and needs help, Carter. Not just Sarun. Sophy, too.”

“Because?” Carter turns a hand up.

“Because she’s on the wrong path.”

“Ah.” His arm swings back in like something on a hinge. He leans against his doorway; Hattie leans against a post.
(Taking your post
, Lee would have said.) Moisture soaks through her flannel shirt; there’s an instant stripe of cold down the back of her shoulder.

“You believe she’s being influenced by Ginny,” he says.

She nods, folding her arms, too; the flannel between her fingers is dry.

“Ginny is at war with Everett, and like combatants the world over displays gracelessness under pressure. That doesn’t make her a danger to Sophy,” he goes on.

“She’s a fundamentalist, Carter.”

“And?”

“Do you really want Sophy growing up questioning evolution?”

“Questioning is fine.”

“Denying, then.”

In the dim light his face is coarse-grained, his features fuzzy and grayed. His eyes, though, drill into her all the same, his pupils huge. “Is Ginny a creationist?”

Hattie hesitates. “She must be.”

“You don’t actually know.”

“No.”

“Has she said anything to suggest that this particular tenet of faith is important to her?”

“No.”

“So it may be critical to public discourse, but less critical to her.”

“She believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, Carter.”

“But you’ve never heard her argue the point.”

“No.”

“Has Sophy said anything to suggest she is becoming a creationist?”

“She may well with time, Carter.”

“With time she may become a Communist. The salient question, it seems to me, is why did you reach for that? You’re not here because of creationism. That was just pressing my buttons, as Maisy used to say.”

The famous Maisy.

“Will you talk to her about creationism if it comes up?” asks Hattie.

“Of course.”

“What about homosexuality?”

“Has she said something homophobic?”

“No, but you know it’s coming. Romans I.”

“If it comes up, I will see what she has to say about it.”

It’s Carter the train—making his stops and moving right on. She is irritated but reassured, too. Reassuringly irritated.

“And what about Ginny? Will you talk to her about Ginny? Tell her to be careful?”

“I cannot tell her with whom to be friends, Hattie. I tried that with my own children and, believe me, it backfired completely.” He grimaces.

“Sophy worships you, Carter. You’re in a position to help.”

“And don’t I always help when I can.”

“I didn’t say it, Carter.”

He takes in the darkening sky. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that that’s even true about my position vis-à-vis Sophy. What do you care? Why are you here?”

“Some of us can’t watch, Carter. Some of us can’t watch people get pushed halfway around the globe only to get plowed under once they get here.”

“Airbrushed out, like you.”

“I didn’t say that, either.”

“You’re holding back.”

“If you’re asking do they matter to me? Yes. Are they part of my picture? Yes.”

“You have come out of retirement to advocate for the vulnerable once more.”

“I suppose I have. Yes. ‘I have risen to fight again.’ ” She rotates her ankle a little, shifting her weight.

“Is that a quote?”

“It is.”

He doesn’t ask from whom or where.

“And what’s this ‘plowed under’? Is Sophy being plowed under? And why weren’t you friends with Meredith? I always wondered that, you know. You two had so much more in common with each other than you ever did with me.”

“Meredith was about justice, capital
J
, Carter. I’m just a person who can’t watch things sometimes.”

“I see. And now Ginny is going to plow Sophy under? Religion is?”

“Sophy’s going to the church school, Carter, not the public school. Do you realize that?”

“Many fine minds have come out of religious schools, Hattie. Think of the Jesuits. That whole line of thinking that believes all truth is God’s truth. Belief in God doesn’t preclude the study of biology or philosophy.”

“Belief in God’s truth is one thing, and belief that He’s acting through you, another. And she’s not being educated, she’s being indoctrinated. She’s being taught who to trust and who not.”

“And let me guess: You are not to be trusted.”

“It’s not right, Carter, and you know it.”

It’s getting colder. The rain is picking up, the wind—all of nature’s gusting. Only they remain locked solid in argument.

“Cutting her off from your fine person is a shame, Hattie, but it’s not a crime.”

“Ginny is teaching her groupthink.”

“She is imparting a culture.”

“A culture that makes its own truths.”

“All cultures make their own truths, Hattie. The question is, Does their world work? Is it adaptive? Does it help us procreate? Or does it obscure so much fact as to be maladaptive?”

He tells a story then about Cotton Mather. A Puritan, he says, who half believed in science but half, still, in witchcraft. “When his newborn child died, he had reason to believe it was due to a curse on his wife. And yet he did an autopsy anyway. Cut up his own dead child, looking for a cause.”

Hattie shudders. “And?”

“He found that his baby had blocked bowels. Can you imagine? What a moment that must have been? To have made such a discovery! And yet his baby is dead all the same. And not even because he mattered to someone—to die of a curse is still to matter to someone, right? To die of blocked bowels is plain arbitrary bad luck.”

“How sad,” says Hattie. “Though couldn’t the block have been an act of God and in that way a sign of mattering, still, to the Almighty?”

“Very good. Either way, though, my point holds: Cause and effect is a story, but it’s not necessarily a story about you. And one way or another, we seem to want stories in which we figure.”

“People, too,” she says, after a moment. Trying not to
combust
, trying to play along—to see where he’s going. “People in whose pictures and stories we appear. Or better yet, gods. A community, imagined or real.”

He nods. “The question being, of course, why.”

The racket of the rain on the porch roof has gotten loud, but Hattie takes up the thread of Carter’s thought as if they’re back in the lab. “And the answer, maybe, that such inclusion fosters cooperation and social cohesion. Which contributes in turn to the survival of the gene pool—that is, to the genes of the individual and of his or her kin.”