Death Benefits

Chapter 2-1

Chapter Two

--1--Yardena was most alone in the busy crowds of school. The colors and patterns of her cut-down clothes, the flotsam of second-hand shops and the detritus of thriftiques, actively thrust in different directions. She seemed a smudge as she walked down the hall or sat among the shiny others in their crisp school clothes and polished shoes. She was an antithetical person, a plain stick clothed in rummage. And there was about her the slightly sour smell of unwashed body. Students made way for her.

Yardena didn't notice or, if she noticed, didn't care. She did not think of herself as moving on the fringes of a society that despised her, nor as consciously removed from a world that she despised -- though the isolation, in either case, was the same. If she thought of herself in terms of her society at all, it was as a person cut off, separated by poverty and the workings of her mind from the inanities of adolescence, and isolated by ignorance and her imagination from the television dreams of her peers.

Yardena was most alive in the society exiled to the catacombs of the dingy house on Lane End. That's where she was most whole, one of three, separate among equals. Though less athletic than the others, she contributed to the health of the whole, because her mind was retentive and her command of mathematics superior to that of her sister and brother. She could teach them as they could teach her.

In school Yardena had a temporary friend, the boy who ate by himself, scattering more food than he swallowed. Yardena found him abandoned on the playground. Never selected for playground games, he wandered by himself on the margin of the world and played in dirt. When Yardena dropped from the horizontal ladder, he was sitting on one knee with the other leg thrown carelessly out before him. He was fashioning a mud man on a frame of pipe cleaners from the dirt that surrounded the hole where the supporting upright disappeared into earth. As Yardena swung across the horizontal ladder, the upright moved in the ground and pumped up murky liquid which the boy mixed with the dirt to make a muck in which his hands were busy.

He looked up at her when she dropped beside him. He had sandy hair atop a sunny face and a crooked smile that looked insincere but was only the result of improperly functioning facial muscles. He talked funny, his contorted nasal passages refusing to allow initial consonants to escape without the expense of energy he was often incapable of providing.

"'woe," he said.

"Hello, Jew-Jew-Julian."

"My name is just Julian," he said with the energy needed to pronounce his name.

"I thought your name was Jew-Jew-Julian."

"It's not."

"Why do they call you Jew-Jew-Julian?"

"It's a sobriquet."

Yardena didn't know what a "sobre-kay" was, but she would ask Barengaria that evening in the basement.

She liked Julian. He reminded her of the squirrel.

Yardena had discovered the squirrel beneath the noisy gum tree in the yard near the storm door that led to the basement. Other squirrels scattered as she came near, chittering, darting half way up the gum tree, tails signaling in frantic alarm. But the squirrel on the ground didn't move. It glared at her. She recognized the look in the black eyes. Patience. Resignation.

"Look," she said to Thane and Barengaria. "There's a tame squirrel under the tree. He doesn't run."

The squirrel remained in place as they approached it, stopping, crouching down with hands extended, creeping toward it.

"Nice squirrel," they said.

It didn't move.

"Maybe it's dead," said Thane, but as he reached, it bared its teeth.

"Maybe it's hungry," said Yardena. She quickly gathered a handful of acorns and piled them in front of the cautious squirrel.

"Here, squirrel, have something to eat."

But the squirrel did not respond except to flick its tail limply to the side. Yardena reached to stroke the tail.

"I think it's sick," said Barengaria.

"What have we here?" He said striding among them. "Haa-haaa, a pre(f*****g)posterous squirrel, down from the tree-tops, full of disease and corruption. Look, it's covered with fleas. The fleas are infected. They jump on your skin and hide in your clothes and bite you when you sleep."

The children stood away and looked at Him with horror. They scratched their skin through their clothes.

"Ha-haaaaaa," He brayed. "Well, let's bring it into the house for you to play with. Wait. I have a better idea. Look! This is the end to all earthly care."

He brought His heel sharply down and crushed the squirrel's head into the ground. He stood on it. The head rose again slowly when the heel was removed and the grass reasserted itself. The eyes were open. Twig and grit attached to them.

Yardena looked in fascination at death.

"What! Are you filthy children still outside? Get into the basement where you belong. I want you all to die. Or run away. When will you learn to run away?"

But Yardena didn't forget the squirrel. It offered the possibility of care, the cat she never stroked, the dog she never fed or walked. The squirrel told her that someone in this world might need her. It was something firm to search for, a purpose, like the answer to a problem in geometry. She thought she had found it again in Julian.

"What are you making?" she asked.

"'eople."

She crouched and looked at the figure in his hands. The chest was made of two pipe cleaners twisted together into four stems that made a hollow vault; four pipe cleaners, knotted in pairs at each side of the hip, became femur; then one knotted at the knee became the shinbone of the lower leg. The same knotted complication formed the shoulders, elbow, and arms. He twisted a pipe cleaner into a ball that he attached between the shoulders. He covered the wire skeleton with mud, then set the mud man on a piece of aluminum foil.

"What's that for?"

"'ake it."

She followed him to the far corner of the grass field at the end of the playground. He laid the figure in the field and curled up the aluminum edges.

"Why do you want to bake it?" she asked at last.

"So I 'an 'reak it."

When the alarm rang to end recess, Julian stopped beside the horizontal ladder and dipped his hands in mud. As they approached the school, Julian lifted his muddy hands before him and the crowds cleared away.

"Julian!"

"Really! Julian."

"That boy is coming again, Sylvia, watch out."

"Too disgusting."

"Well, if it isn't Jew-Jew-Julian," said Jefferson Davis Crowe, striding along, trailing clouds of groupies.

"Mr. Clean and Miss Piggy."

"Who's your girlfriend, M-M-Mud-bag?"

"Watch him, Jeff!"

"Oh, there's nothing to worry about here. I'll clean him up tomorrow."

The others looked at him expectantly.

"I'll bring a can of Raid," he said.

"Raid!"

"Ha-haa."

"Your days are numbered, B-B-Bug-boy."

"Watch out! It's Raid!"

"RAAAAIIIIIIID," they shouted.

--2--One day Julian surprised her.

"'ome to my house to 'lay," he said.

"Why?"

"I want to show you what I made. Out of 'lasticine."

"I can't," she said.

He c****d his head to the side and peered at her. Accustomed to disappointment, he had not expected to be disappointed by her.

"Why not?"

"I can't come to your house."

"Why not?"

"I can't come to anyone's house."

"Why not?"

She was going to say she was not allowed, because she knew, though she had never been told, that it was forbidden. Her life was circumscribed. He would punish her. He would tie her up and flog her with a leather strap as He had flogged Thane until he stopped crying. But it was also something that none of them had ever done before. Barengaria, who was older, had never gone to anyone's house. She had always come to the basement to share who she was and what she learned with them.

And Yardena realized that she didn't want to go to Julian's house. She wanted to preserve the consistency of her life as it was. She didn't want to miss the moment of touching hands with Thane and Barengaria, the comforting mantra of their history, the eager exchange of the afternoon's lessons in the basement. She looked forward to hearing what was happening in eighth-grade civics and tenth-grade French. She wanted to explain what she had learned in advanced geometry and math. She wanted to do her exercises and review what Thane and Barengaria told her. She wanted to be surprised by the light, as she always was, and go into the darkling kitchen for her cold hard egg and cold hard toast. And she thought it would be awkward to learn Julian's history and explain her own to him. And so she was silent.

"Ask," said Julian.

"Ask what?"

"Ask your 'arents if you 'an 'ome."

That evening in the basement, as Barengaria explained what chez meant, Yardena said in the best French she knew, "Julian asks me to come to his chez."

"Why?"

"He wants to show me something he made out of clay."

"What?" asked Thane, and "Do you want to go?" asked Barengaria at the same time.

"No. I want to stay here."

"Why?"

"I … don't want to miss what you two learned in school and I want to tell you what I learned. That's what we always do."

"Then don't go," she said.

"But," said Thane, and they turned to look at him for, as much as they loved him, he often saw things differently. He was less fearful of pain.

"If you go," he continued, "you can tell us what it is like."

"What do you mean?" asked Yardena, but Barengaria knew what he meant because she knew things about her own body that she hadn't told them yet.

"You can tell us something that doesn't come out of school but comes out of your own experience," Barengaria said.

What a surprise to think she could learn something outside of school. So contradictory. School was the place to learn. The possibility that she could learn anything outside never occurred to her. There was, for example, no geometry outside of school, no algebra. French was for the French and only an exercise in memory for her. There was no connection between the poems they learned and the language they spoke, just as their own histories were unlike any history they ever studied. School was the place for learning, and the time outside of school provided the occasion for studying whatever one needed to learn for school.

To think now that her personal experience could be a source of information to the others was inconsistent with everything she knew about school and life. She was the recipient of information, not the source of it. She acquired, conserved, and remembered; her job was to learn and repeat, learn and transmit; initiate nothing.

For her to be otherwise would distinguish her from the others and lead to separation, force her to assume an authority she neither desired nor deserved. And for her now to have experiences, to acquire knowledge outside of school, denied the validity of school. It affirmed that something else was equally the source of information and reality.

It seemed absurd.

But suddenly, as lightning forks, she saw her relationship to school and experience as identical. Both were the fonts of information for which she was the conduit through which both could flow to Thane and Barengaria. Both branches met in her and led to them. That made sense. It was balanced, beautiful. It was almost mathematical.

But what she said was, "He will know."

They thought for a moment.

"But if you can get back before we go upstairs," said Thane, "He won't know. He'll think you were in the basement all the time because He'll hear you going up with Gari and me."

"He'll know and He'll punish us," she said again.

"If He does," said Barengaria, "it won't be the first time and it won't be the last time. At least this time there'll be a reason."

They were silent for a moment, and then Thane said, "It only hurts for a while and then it doesn't hurt any more, even while He does it."

Barengaria and Yardena turned to look at him, but it was Barengaria who asked, "Is it worth the pain?"

Thane pressed his lips together. He saw what they wanted. "Yes," he said finally, "Okay."