Page 137 of Under Story

“I guess that’s what I thought of,” Eli said. “When you love someone, you’re attached, no matter what. You couldn’t separate yourself if you wanted to.”

May 1999

Laurel carries beets from the garden to the Hub. Now that the latest batch of tinctures is steeping, she goes where help is needed. All week she has flitted between work groups: kitchen, harvest, cleaning, carpentry. She picks and chops, vacuums and dusts.

And all day the same march in her head.

Eli is coming. Eli is coming. It plays while Laurel does dishes, while she makes her bed and sweeps the floor. She’s told the other members that Eli is just an ex. Though Esther seems to know the truth—or sense it. At seventy, she is girlish, and always getting crushes. She recognizes the disease in someone else.

Then again, Laurel’s claim is also true. She and Eli haven’t spoken in years. She doesn’t know what he is to her now.

Eli is coming. Laurel walks through the Longhall and deposits the beets in the kitchen. Rox waves in acknowledgment.

“Dishes?” she calls, and Laurel weaves between bodies to the bus tubs.

Yes: five years since she’s seen Eli and four since she’s been here. Laurel is nineteen years old. While apprenticed to Olive, she has learned enough to fill a college course load. That reishi buffers stress, for example, and lion’s mane bolsters the brain. Elderberry and rose hips keep viral loads low, and nettle relieves muscle pain. Roots should be gathered in late fall or winter; bark is harvested in spring, and only from fallen branches. Flowers they pick, sparingly, as soon as the morning’s dew lifts.

The more bitter a plant, the more it gives.

Laurel takes the washing station beside Hetty, who hands her a pair of gloves. When the dishes from breakfast are done, they’ll prepare for lunch. Right now, the Center has roughly eighty residents. Some, like Laurel, are former scientists. Others were teachers or bus drivers or accountants. A portion are activists, drawn to the Center’s ethos; many came for company after raising children or parents. Some people join the Center simply because they have nowhere else to go.

New arrivals live in the Hub. Three years after Laurel’s arrival, Tess followed, but she only stayed for months: the summer of 2000, like her double. Other members have lived here for decades. A leadership circle of six, randomly chosen, rotates annually. By design, there are no men.

Every Sunday night, they gather to share news, ask for help, and air concerns. The most recent meeting was a heated one. Rox, who runs the kitchen, raised the idea of selling mushroom coffee. Customers had asked for it at the farmers’ market, she explained. It wouldn’t be hard to make a powder extract, with chaga or lion’s mane for focus.

Joanie disagreed with the concept. “We don’t need more mushroom products. We need people sitting with the mushrooms, talking to the mycelium.”

“We also need to support ourselves,” said Ha-yoon.

The meeting ran into the early hours of the morning. Any decision requires consensus. Those who disagree are heard, no matter how lengthy their objections. If opposition persists, dissenters must be brought to comfort with the choice of the majority; it is the majority’s responsibility to listen—and amend the proposal—until this is so. Particularly fractious issues are tabled for a fortnight, as many times as necessary, and Laurel is often struck by the alchemy that time performs, turning resistance into curiosity, or anger to grief, or grief to healing.

An editorial team issues a monthly newsletter, though it is closer to a zine, as the Center has no computers. Articles are submitted by anyone who wishes to contribute, then copied out in Juanita’s careful penmanship. Joanie and Noor add drawings: portraits of Center landmarks, meandering botanical borders, caricatures of ignominious public figures. Meeting notes appear in Peg’s loose dramaturgy.

Rox & Dana have moved to the cabin off Crescent Trail. Their cabin is now occupied by Peg, whose place has been filled by Noor & Hetty, whose old room is now taken by CK. Jaz has left for a month of soul-searching out West: bon voyage. Christi is back from organizing in Chicago: welcome home.

5/9: Carpools leave first thing for the antiwar protest in Milwaukee. No blood for oil!! If you need a sign, see Joanie.

Hub issues:

Who is going to fix Rainbow’s door—and when???

Discussion: Maeve & Tori. Lack of contribution & messiness their delinquencies (respectively). Noor—do we really want people living in the Hub? Rox—Maeve doesn’t live in the Hub. She lives in her head. Dana—everyone has a right to be here. Bev—my only grudge against you Maeve is you don’t lift a finger. Aisha—Tori’s clutter attracts pests. CK—just clean up your act a little. Tori—has been trying. Maeve—I’m not good with conflict. I want to be a lotus in a pond. Ha-yoon—well, Maeve isn’t a lotus and Tori could be a little tidier. Maeve—what if I help Tori be tidier? Rox—and take a kitchen shift. General enthusiasm. Meeting adjourned.

Everything at the Center has a name. A pond, fringed by cattails, is the Swamp. There are two meadows, Big and Small. The Hub is in the frontlands, and everything behind it—the cliffs and trails, the yurts and cottages—is the backlands. Most residents move to the backlands eventually, but Laurel has always lived in the Hub. She knew that her time at the Center would be limited, because of the date that she and Eli had agreed on.

Eli is coming. It is a miracle that Laurel hasn’t contacted him. The first six months were hardest: she would lie on her bed with her knees drawn up, swiping through photos on her iPhone. During the middle years, she kept herself distracted, but recently, the temptation became unbearable. She slipped out to the road, for phone service, and pulled up her favorited contacts. He was still there, along with Clare and Maisie, Tess and Gloria. Her finger hovered over his name. One tap and she could hear his voice. Then a car rounded the curve, and she stuffed the phone in her pocket, slinking back, thinking: Idiot.

The Hub houses the Longhall, where meals are served and meetings are held, as well as a barn full of beds. Light filters through tall windows. Garlands swoop from wall to wall. There are multicolored rag rugs, braided from old sheets and T-shirts, and quilts sewn from similar scraps. When a new member arrives, she chooses her own quilt from an old cedar chest. Laurel picked a yellow one, soft and faded, though she could still make out the tiny floral patterns in some of its squares.

“Oh, that was Susie’s,” someone said, and there were sighs from everyone who remembered Susie.

Laurel was not as crafty as the members who sewed or built new items for the Center, but she did know how to mend. In her spare time, she operated a quilt hospital, repairing holes and frayed edges. She knit, too, making hats and scarves and socks so that there were plenty on hand in the winter. There was comfort in numbers; the web of community acted like a safety net. Without her roommates, she would have fallen through the hole of loneliness.

She sometimes woke up, half asleep and confused, and thought she was back at McMurdo.

2006–2005

The underworld was desolate, and cold, and it did not matter that Eli and Laurel had been there before.