“I get it,” said Karma, dropping her hillbilly act. “I was just curious. We like to get things clear around here, you know? Lay it all out in the open!” With a friendly wink, she sliced her shovel deeper into the ditch. Gripping the pick again, I wondered if staying at Zendik would make me anywhere near as sexy as she was.
Later that morning, Toba, one of just a few older women on the Farm, recruited me to help her build a cinder-block furnace house for the Addition, a new, two-story building at the crest of a hill opposite the one I’d climbed the night before. The sun rose behind the Addition and set behind the barns, passing at midday over the Farmhouse.
Toba stopped by the Farmhouse porch to load two fifty-pound sacks of Portland cement into a rusted blue wheelbarrow. She grabbed its shafts, and I followed her up a dirt track, past a manufactured home on stilts—the Mobile. I’d heard it was overcrowded and that its residents would ascend to the much larger Addition once it was finished.
At the construction site, Toba dropped both sacks on a patch of mortar-stained grass, then slit one open and emptied it into the wheelbarrow. Behind her a chop saw whined through siding, sending off the burnt-sugar scent of fresh sawdust. Hammers rang against nail heads as a half-dozen men fixed planks to the building’s last bare flank. I crimped and straightened the hose at Toba’s command, watching her pull the mixing hoe through the moistening glop with swift, sure strokes. She was lean, slim, tanned, and at least as macha as the younger women on my trenching crew. Her T-shirt’s plunging V-neck revealed a deeply hollowed collarbone. Lips pressed into a thin line, she focused on her work.
With the mortar moist and smooth as cookie dough, Toba handed me a trowel and showed me how to lay it in twin tracks along the inner and outer edges of the top layer of cinder blocks. I asked how she’d wound up at Zendik.
Her journey had begun twenty years earlier, when she’d left Winnipeg—her hometown—to study psychology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. She’d abandoned academia in search of something better after ending her marriage to an aspiring professor.
“He was always in his head, you know?” she said, rounding the long “o” into a northern “awh.” “My biggest problem is that I’m so shut down emotionally. I needed to be in a place where people would call me on my bullshit. Force me to get in touch with what’s in here.” She stabbed the point of her mortaring trowel toward her heart. “People just get so hard, they build so many walls, living in the Deathculture. You have to, to survive, you know? And then you can’t let anybody in, not even the people who love you. I wouldn’t even think of raising Eave out there.” Toba had given birth to Eave, now three, at Zendik. She was one of the Farm’s three children. “Deathculture,” I knew from the Zendiks’ magazine and website, was their term for the outside world, where competition and lying were killing everything: humans, animals, ecosystems, joy, love, friendship. I neither shared this view nor shied away from it. I had yet to firm a story of why we hurt each other and ourselves.
As we laid track and set blocks, Toba sped through the questions I’d answered a half-dozen times since arriving at Zendik: Where was I from, how had I heard about the Farm, how long was I planning to stay? Then she picked up the line of questioning Karma had started.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.
“No, I don’t,” I said, blood flooding my cheeks. Like her, I’d come to Zendik untethered by romance. No man would tug me back home.
“Ay,” she said, with a quick nod. “Have you ever had a boyfriend?”
“Yeah, once, in high school.”
Toba nodded again, urging me on.
“We lasted about two months. He dumped me the day I called to say I’d gotten into Harvard. I asked him why, and he said we were too different. I was too eccentric.”
I paused, recalling the helpless sobs of that breakup. I’d met the boy—Frank—by matching his pace in an undeclared footrace. I was a senior at Dominican Academy, a rigorous but modest Catholic girls’ school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He was a junior at Regis, the city’s most prestigious school for Catholic boys. Each October, to raise funds, DA and Regis staged a joint walkathon. Almost all the girls and some of the boys strolled the ten- or twelve-mile route, immersed in flirtation and gossip. I, like many of the Regis guys, speed-walked. It didn’t matter that there was no prize. We wanted to win.
Stopped short by a DON’T WALK sign on Central Park West, Frank introduced himself and I reciprocated. Later that day, back at Regis, we slipped out of the thronged courtyard to wander the school’s cavernous halls. He described the calisthenic feats he’d need to perform to make the cut at West Point; I told him I’d applied early action to Harvard. It was then—before we’d even started dating—that he posed his condemning hypotheticaclass="underline" “So, if you got into Harvard but you were going out with a guy who couldn’t do better than, say, some SUNY school, would you ditch Harvard for SUNY to be with him?”
“No way!” I said. If I heard the doom in his words, I dismissed it. Plenty of couples in books stayed in love long-distance.
“It was fitting that he called me eccentric, I guess,” I told Toba, “since ‘eccentric’ also means ‘elliptical’ and I have the same birthday as Johannes Kepler—the guy who discovered that the planets orbit in ellipses.”
Kepler’s predecessor Nicolas Copernicus had correctly posited that the planets orbit the sun—while perpetuating the fallacy that they move in circles. To cement his story against contradictory observations, he added dozens of circular suborbits. Sixty-odd years after Copernicus died, Kepler rolled out elliptical motion and cleared the suborbits away.
If Toba found my Kepler comment funny, or dorky, she didn’t show it.
“So that was it, ay? You haven’t done anything since?”
“Actually, I have,” I said, flipping my trowel too quickly and dropping a glop of cement. Hardly anyone knew what I’d done since Frank. Within my family, I sensed—imagined? created?—a taboo on discussing sexual experience. I was too shy to mention my escapades to my girlfriends, and only one or two had ever drawn them out.
“I fooled around with a couple guys I met on the road. In Arizona and Key West.”
I’d met JJ in March 1998, toward the end of a yearlong break between my junior and senior years at Harvard. Wandering the Sonoran desert south of Tucson, afraid my detour from school had been a mistake, I’d befriended a trio of locals at Arivaca Lake. One of them set me up with a place to stay. I’d be sleeping—by myself, he assured me—in his friend JJ’s extra trailer.
JJ had other plans. That night, after treating me to dinner at the Feed Barn and taking me four-wheel driving to the local catfish pond, he brought me to the crest of FM Hill—so called because from here, a car radio could pick up the Tucson music stations. Through the windshield I glimpsed the shadowy hulk of the Santa Rita Mountains and the lights of Arivaca, sprinkled across the sleeping valley. I felt the chill caress of winter on the cusp of spring through the pickup’s rolled-down windows; the nubbly weave of the dingy bench seat; and a callused hand, suddenly clutching my knee.
JJ had made his move, as I’d been hoping he would. My touch-starved skin tingled in gratitude. He leaned in to kiss me, his dank cigarette breath slithering up my nostrils, his coarse beard and mustache rasping my cheeks and chin. Back at his trailer, he came to bed scrubbed and nude under a bear-skin rug. I luxuriated in his sinuous heat and the wonder of being entirely unclothed with a man for the first time. Maybe this was what I’d been wandering toward. Maybe this was how I’d dissolve my doubts and settle into now.