The Peacock Feast, page 18
How remarkable it would have seemed to his father’s parents that a grandson of theirs grew up as a prince in Presidio Heights, attending a school with the sons of the wealthiest families of San Francisco, his meals prepared and his school shirts ironed by Angela, beloved but still their maid. How heartbreaking it must be for his father that his son now chooses to live like a laborer in a one-room cabin in the woods of Northern California with a girlfriend who dresses in what must look to his father like rags.
* * *
The first winter is terrible. No matter how many layers she wears, Jacie cannot get rid of the chill in the marrow of her bones. Morning to night, her hands and feet are freezing and she feels as though she is trembling beneath her clothes. The children pass between them a perpetual cold that keeps Fellini up at night with a hacking cough. Jacie has barely recovered when the second winter, harsher than the first, arrives. By summer, she can’t button her jeans. She throws up in the mornings and is so tired, she is back in bed by noon.
Susan takes Jacie to the Fort Bragg hospital for a pregnancy test. Five days later, Jacie returns with Leo, who squeezes her hand too hard while a Dr. Knight inserts three gloved fingers in her vagina and puts a stethoscope on her abdomen.
“Any history of twins in either of your families?” Dr. Knight asks.
Jacie shakes her head no.
“She’s pregnant?” Leo says.
“Twins?” Jacie murmurs.
“Pregnant, that’s definite. Twins, I can’t be sure. We don’t have ultrasound equipment here. You’d have to go down to the city for that. But I’ve been doing this for longer than you young folks want to know, and I’d say get yourself two cribs.”
Jacie’s eyes open wide. She feels gripped with terror. Terror at the thought of caring for one much less two babies in the dead of winter when she is due. How will she nurse two babies? How will they keep the cabin warm? How will she wash so many diapers? When she starts to cry, Dr. Knight mistakes her tears for overwhelming happiness.
Leo drives them back to Riva Krik. She leans against the window on the passenger side of the VW, fighting off nausea and more tears. She wants to go back to Houston and lie on a chaise lounge by her parents’ kidney-shaped swimming pool reading Anaïs Nin while her mother flips through her Smithsonian magazine. She wants to sit on the grass drawing unicorns and mermaids with the Jackson twins. She wants Bubba to bring her red grapes and the Stella D’oro cookies with the chocolate-button centers.
When the cowbell rings in the afternoon, Jacie drags herself out of bed and walks to the field in front of Goddess’s tepee. Peter gestures for Leo and her to join Goddess and him on a bamboo mat in the middle of the circle. Again, Jacie thinks. Weren’t they just here, being massaged into paying the tax bill?
No. Not just. Nearly two years ago.
She lowers herself onto the mat. She can no longer sit crossed-legged, all of her appendages, it seems, having swollen to half again their size, and her skin has an unpleasant smell, like dried blood mixed with the decomposing leaves and goat dung littering the field. A few drops of rain fall on her head.
“Riva Krik Tribe,” Peter begins. “Leo and Jacie are taking the next turn on the life wheel. They have made a baby and their baby is two.” Peter smiles benevolently at Jacie. “Goddess tells me it is a blessing for Riva Krik to have twins come to us.” From here, Peter launches a sermon on Castor and Pollux, how one of them was conceived by a mortal father, the other by the rape of Leda by Zeus disguised as a swan. With the thought of being mounted by an oily swan, Jacie feels a rush of nausea and fear. She inhales deeply and looks up at the gray sky and then out at the giant trees beyond the clearing.
“And now, kiddos, is there anything you would like to say?”
Leo stands. Jacie squints at the father of her children. His hair has fallen over his eyes and his jeans are loose on his butt. “Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Goddess. Wow. Castor and Pollux. That’s wild.” Leo brings his hands together and lowers his chin, as though bowing to them.
Only Susan addresses what is on Jacie’s mind. “Don’t worry, Jacie. You’ve been so generous with us. Now it’s our turn to help you.” Jacie thinks about Lake, how she got the guys who lived in her house on Ashbury Street to get off their lazy backsides and scrub the tub and mop the kitchen and pick their crap up from the floor. But Susan is not Lake. Nights, she washes diapers while Tim sits by a campfire, passing a pipe with Peter and now Leo too.
* * *
Jacie goes into labor on a Sunday in February, two weeks after Leo’s twenty-second birthday. It is a record-breaking cold for this date in Mendocino: twenty degrees, according to the thermometer Gardner has hung outside his and Helen’s cabin. Leo drives Jacie to the Fort Bragg hospital, where after nineteen hours of labor, Dr. Knight does a C-section.
The nurses wipe the cheesecake film off the babies and wrap them in blue and pink blankets. The girl is six pounds three ounces. They hand her to Jacie. The boy is five pounds eight ounces. They hand him to Leo.
Jacie kisses the forehead of their tiny baby girl. For the first time since she learned she was pregnant, she is flooded with a joy so intense it fills her all the way to her throat. “Grace,” she whispers. “‘Darkly Smiling.’”
Leo kisses the forehead of their tiny baby boy. “Garcia,” he whispers. “‘On the Road Again.’”
* * *
When the sun finally arrives in April and it’s warm enough to take the babies outside, Jacie is not much smaller than she was before she delivered, her stomach still so distended, she barely fits into the loose dresses she’d worn when she was pregnant. Getting up three, four times each night to feed the twins, shaking Leo to rouse him to help, sometimes successfully but too often not, she tries to find the joy she’d felt seeing her son and daughter for the first time, but all happiness seems to have remained in the hospital in Fort Bragg. She cries while she nurses Grace. She cries while she burps Garcia. She cries while she rocks the one, then the other, to sleep.
Cathy makes a schedule so that every afternoon one of the men comes to help Jacie, which mostly means they carry the babies around in a double sling Gardner has fashioned while they do whatever they usually do, and then every evening one of the women arrives to assist with baths and bottles and washing clothes and diapers.
All spring, Leo blasts Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers album from a record player in the music shed he and Tim built and Gardner then wired with electricity from a used generator he found at the Fort Bragg swap meet. Even from inside their cabin, Jacie can make out the lyrics from “The Farm,” a song with Jerry Garcia on guitar and Grace Slick doing vocals.
Leo sings along: “‘Yes it’s good livin’ on the farm.’” An unlit joint hangs like a cigarette from between his lips. He dances across the cabin, holding a baby in each arm. “‘Ah so good livin’ on the farm.’”
Jacie watches the babies nuzzle into Leo’s chest. She takes the boiling water with which she’s sterilizing bottles off the wood-burning stove and climbs back into bed. The sheets stink from sweat and baby throw-up and what smells like shit. She hates the song. She hates Jerry Garcia. She hates Grace Slick. She hates living on the farm.
* * *
In August, Kitty, a skinny girl with stringy blonde hair and a hollow between her bottom ribs and the snap of her cutoff jean shorts, arrives at Riva Krik carrying a huge backpack with a pup tent and sleeping bag strapped to the top. She tells Peter she’s nineteen and taking a break before she moves to San Francisco to join a dance company, but Goddess, who considers everything on what is her land to be her business, goes through Kitty’s tent one morning while Kitty is on Karma Kookhouse duty. “Seventeen,” she announces to Peter.
Peter tokes on his pipe. “How do you know?”
“Delaware driver’s license. Ninety-two dollars in her wallet and a teddy bear inside her sleeping bag.”
Peter raises his eyebrows.
“That ridiculous tent is probably from her kid brother’s Boy Scout camp.”
“And?”
“Runaway,” Goddess proclaims.
Kitty’s second week at Riva Krik, Leo volunteers to play his bongos while she does her daily hour-long dancer’s stretches. The exercises begin with Kitty flat on her back and a leg stretched upward so her knee grazes her nose, and they end with her legs flipped over her head and her knees hugging her ears.
The babies are now six months old and eating cereal and mashed fruits and vegetables. After Jacie gives them breakfast, she takes them outside, Grace in an outward-facing carrier strapped over Jacie’s still-huge belly, Garcia in her arms. Kitty is arching her spine in a yoga cat-cow while Leo sways and drums behind her. She undulates, her tiny stomach lowering as she offers up her tiny butt.
Jacie can smell her own acrid breath. A wet stink spreads from her armpits to between her heavy breasts. She imagines Leo’s tongue poking into Kitty’s tight vagina and Kitty moaning the way she does when she straddles her legs and leans forward, resting her forehead on the ground.
* * *
A week later, there’s a night Leo tells Jacie that he’s going to the music shed to listen to records and play his drums. When Jacie wakes at three and finds herself still alone in the bed, she leaves the babies asleep in the cribs Tim helped Leo build and runs to the field where Kitty’s pup tent is set up, not far from the creek.
Jacie pounds with her fists on the canvas opening, zipped closed from the inside. She can hear Kitty’s voice: “What is it? What’s happening?” And then Leo’s: “Shhh, just be quiet.”
Jacie tries to rip open the zipper, but succeeds only in dislodging one of the tent pegs. Still screaming, “Leo, cheater,” she throws herself face-first into the creek.
Susan and Tim take the babies into their cabin while Leo and Gardner lift Jacie from the creek and Goddess and Peter watch.
Goddess points at Kitty, her naked body wrapped in the Mexican blanket she lays on the ground each morning while she does her stretching exercises. “The cops could arrest you,” Goddess tells Peter, “for harboring a minor.”
Gardner takes off his shirt and drapes it over Jacie’s wet shoulders. Her nose and chin are scraped and she’s no longer crying, just staring straight ahead.
Leo cups Jacie’s elbow. He walks her across the field to the music shed. He takes a Jefferson Airplane album from a milk crate, places the needle on the track where Slick covers Crosby’s “Triad.”
Holding Jacie’s hands in his, Leo accompanies Slick: “‘I don’t really see why we can’t go on as three. We love each other—it’s plain to see.’”
She stares at him. So much noise is in her head, she can’t hear her own thoughts.
Leo stops singing. He lifts the needle from the record and looks squarely at her. “Jacie, I’m twenty-two. I’d never been with anyone except you.”
She sees herself slitting her throat. Her blood running onto the ground like a fat pig’s at slaughter.
She grabs the record from the turntable and stomps on it.
* * *
Peter calls a Riva Krik meeting to address “the tensions brewing now in our tribe.”
“In our family,” he adds.
Goddess leads Jacie to the middle of the circle, then beckons for Leo and Kitty to follow. Drawing a vial of ayurvedic scent from inside the folds of her skirt, Goddess places a drop on each of their foreheads and massages the scent into their temples. Kitty lasciviously lifts and lowers her shoulders. She points her toes and touches her nose to her knees, her tiny tank top riding up her narrow rib cage.
Jacie follows Leo’s eyes as they lock on the band of tight skin between the bottom of Kitty’s top and the top of her jeans. Jacie can feel the rolls of fat on her own middle, can hear her babies crying in Gardner and Helen’s cabin, where ten-year-old Alda is watching them.
Peter addresses Kitty. “Your kundalini is flowing.” He means every male on the commune and a few of the females too want to fuck her, though only Leo has actually done so. “But we are in a cycle of tending to babies and plants. We are not good soil for you,” by which he means someone is going to get seriously hurt if they don’t get her out of there. Kitty, he announces, will be given a hundred dollars and driven to Pippy’s women’s collective, where she can stay while she figures out where to go next.
How it happens that Leo ends up driving Kitty in the VW with the two car seats in back, not to Pippy’s women’s land but to the town of Mendocino, where he checks into an inn at the edge of town, no one will be able to say. Only that he does not return that night.
In the morning, Jacie leaves the babies with Susan. Knowing Leo and what he would do, she hitchhikes to Mendocino, where she goes to every bed-and-breakfast and every inn until she sees the VW. She finds Leo and Kitty in a room they’ve not even bothered to lock, fucking in an armchair with Kitty’s legs looped over Leo’s shoulders at the precise moment Jacie arrives.
From under her shirt, Jacie takes a penknife she uses to open paint cans. She lunges at Kitty, driving the knife into her child-size thigh. Jacie stares at the extraordinary amount of blood that sluices down Kitty’s leg—thankfully lifted, or Kitty, whose screams bring the innkeeper, might have gone into shock—then bolts out the door.
In the evening, the sheriff and his deputy follow Leo, who has spent the afternoon in the Fort Bragg emergency room with Kitty, back to Riva Krik. The sheriff blasts his siren as they bump down the rutted road. “The little scrape—Skinny Boy says it happened while he and Skinny Girl were quote playing around,” the sheriff tells Peter, who meets him at the patrol car. “Required thirteen stitches. Skinny Girl says she’s nineteen and was living here this past month, but I’m betting sixteen—and if I’m right, I hope you got yourself a good lawyer.”
Peter asks if they have a warrant, at which point the sheriff, who’s muttering, “Stinking, dirty hippies,” under his breath, lets his jacket fall open to expose that what he has is a gun.
The sheriff and the deputy walk the property, making a list of everyone who lives on it. “Who did the plumbing?” the sheriff asks when he sees the pipe running from the well to the Karma Kookhouse and Shiva Spa.
“Licensed plumber,” Peter says.
“Electric?”
“Licensed electrician.”
“You filed with the county.”
“In duplicate.”
“Bullshit,” the sheriff says.
“Bullshit you got a warrant.”
When the sheriff and his deputy get to Leo and Jacie’s cabin, the deputy leans down to look at the babies.
“How old are they?” he asks.
“They just turned seven months,” Jacie says.
“Twins?” the sheriff asks.
“Yeah,” Leo says.
“Yes, sir,” Jacie adds. She sees the sheriff sizing up the babies and her: the crust on the edge of Grace’s nose, Garcia’s stained onesie, the raw scrape on her chin from when she threw herself into the creek two nights ago.
“Listen up, Mama. You listen good to me. I got my eyes on you now. I’m giving you and Skinny Boy a break, and you should be kissing my ass for that. Next time I see these babies, they better be looking like a Gerber ad. Otherwise, you’re going to be explaining what’s going on here to Child Protective Services.”
* * *
Leo cries. He doesn’t want to lose the babies, doesn’t want his children growing up as he did without a mother. He tells Jacie that he loves her. Kitty was nothing, just a slutty runaway girl. It was the drugs. He’s going clean again. He’ll tell Peter that he can’t share pipes anymore. He and Jacie have sex for the first time since the babies were born. It’s been so long, she bellows when she comes and then sobs afterward.
At the commune’s sunrise meeting, Leo repeats in front of everyone what he’s told Jacie. He chops wood to prepare for the coming cold weather. He caulks the cracks in the cabin the way Tim has shown him. He brings all their sheets and blankets to a laundromat in town. He changes diapers. He washes diapers.
The babies pull themselves up. Grace takes a step with Jacie holding both of her arms. Garcia claps his hands in time with the beat of his father’s bongos.
They let the babies sleep in the bed with them. Leo spoons one and Jacie spoons the other. They wait for the babies to fall asleep, then spread a blanket on the floor to make love.
* * *
In January, at eleven months, Garcia and then Grace come down with bad colds. The colds turn into coughs so violent they throw up their food and cannot sleep. The babies get rashes on their faces. Then they get fevers. No one has a medical thermometer, but Susan says she can tell their fevers are high.
Leo and Jacie bring the twins to the emergency room. The pediatrician on call diagnoses Grace with a bronchial infection and Garcia with pneumonia. They both have severe diaper rash and are dehydrated. Leo holds Jacie while she weeps. With the freezing weather, she hasn’t washed her hair in a week. It hangs around her face in greasy clumps.
The babies are admitted. A woman from Child Protective Services arrives. She has white hair shorn like a sheep’s and a clipboard with carbon-copy papers. A full minute passes each time she reaches the bottom of a page and prepares to move to the next one.
Jacie answers each question “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am.”
When the forms are completed, the woman says she will do a home visit once the babies are released from the hospital. Then she will write her report.
“What happens after that?” Leo is scared but his fear sounds like belligerence.
“That, young man, depends on the report.”
After four nights in the hospital, the twins are released. Jacie is given an appointment card with the name of the woman from Child Protective Services who will come the following Monday at nine.
