The Anybodies (2 page)

And the other mother, with large brown eyes, wet as pools, lashes soft as moth wings, began to lose blood. She would lose so much, in fact, that she would die.

THE DRUDGERS NAMED THEIR DAUGHTER FERN
. Mr. Drudger had been in the waiting room while his wife was giving birth. He'd had cigars in his pockets, but he'd felt too awkward handing them out to strangers. He wasn't the type to clap other men on the back. He'd spent hours shifting next to a fern, and that's how his daughter got her name. It wasn't even a real fern. It was a fake fern made in China.

By the time Fern was eleven, during that summer I'm getting to right now, she knew this story
well, but every time she asked the Drudgers to go over it, she hoped it would change, somehow magically transform into a better story.

“Are you sure that's the whole story?” Fern asked them again one evening in their pale kitchen with all of its accouterments—neatly stacked sponges, lined-up toasters and magnet-covered refrigerator. Fern knew of a very famous Fern, a girl in a book about a pig, and a spider named Charlotte. She'd lied to friends at school that she was named after the Fern in the book. (Frankly, they hadn't been impressed at all.) Fern now begged the Drudgers, “Is that it? Isn't there something…more?”

“No,” they assured her. “That's it.” Mrs. Drudger was polishing one of the toasters with a yellow sponge. Mr. Drudger was jiggling the coins in his pocket. He knew exactly how many were in each pocket because he was a very good accountant.

They were expecting company to arrive any minute at the front door of their house, number nine Tamed Hedge Road. (Tamed Hedge Road? Yes, that was its name, as if hedges in these parts had once been wild and vicious before brave pioneers like the Drudgers wrastled them into the boxy, subservient hedges they are today.) Fern couldn't smell dinner cooking. Mrs. Drudger made meals so odorless they went undetected. Her dinners were so bland that Fern was the only kid
in her school who praised the cafeteria cook, Mrs. Bullfinch, for her seasoning. “What's your secret?” Fern would ask. “What's your secret ingredient?”

“Salt,” said Mrs. Bullfinch. “And sometimes more salt.”

“Mmmm, I like it,” Fern would tell her. “Very clever. You're quite a cook!”

Fern only knew that Mrs. Drudger was cooking something now because the kitchen was a little warmer than usual. Fern, you see, is a very ingenious eleven-year-old girl. She has very keen senses. To put it simply: she's smart.

This was a special meal. It wasn't just any company: the Beiges were coming for dinner. The Beiges were the Drudgers' bosses. Mr. and Mrs. Drudger wanted the Beiges' son, Milton, to meet Fern. They were hoping that Fern and Milton would hit it off, bond, and one day marry.

Mrs. Drudger had told Fern that morning, “One day it won't be just Beige & Beige Accounting. Milton will join the team. Then it will be Beige, Beige & Beige, and maybe you can be Mrs. Milton Beige!” It was shocking really, this language from Fern's mother. First of all, the exclamation mark isn't exaggerated. Mrs. Drudger was actually exclaiming, which was extremely rare. It also showed that Mrs. Drudger had an inch of imagination. She'd been peeking into a possible future. It took Fern
by such surprise that she promised to be on her best behavior.

But her promise had grown thin. Fern had already had an odd day. That morning when she picked up the newspaper at the end of the driveway, she saw the dark cloud hiding behind the neighbor's hedgerow. She dodged back inside, her heart beating hard in her chest. Then at lunch a man from the census bureau knocked at the door. While Mrs. Drudger answered a few questions about the family's dates of birth, places of birth, exact times of birth on the front stoop, Fern listened from her bedroom window—always interested in the details of her origins—and, when it was over, she watched the man walk to the sidewalk, where he turned sharply and glared at her. Fern couldn't help staring at the man's left hand, which was gray, see-through, one could say: cloudy. He followed her gaze to his left hand, then shoved it in his pocket and shuffled quickly down the street.

One would think that that would be enough for one day. (In fact, my esteemed writing teacher would have scribbled in the margin, “A bit too much.” But if I wrote less, he would make a note like: “A bit too thin.” And if I wrote about sad things, he'd jot, “A bit too depressing!” and if I wrote about being happy, he'd
return with: “Too breezy!” At some point, you have to give up on trying to please and just tell it like it is. And so…) But, in fact, that wasn't all.

There was a bird that liked to watch Fern from a branch outside her window. It was an ordinary robin, nothing special about it except the way it observed her so intently. That afternoon Fern had seen it sitting there, and she'd clapped her hands out the window to see if it would fly off. It did, flapping low over the street. A car was coming, and the bird slapped into the windshield, flipping up over the roof. Fern felt suddenly flooded with guilt for having shooed the bird. She watched with a rising panic. The car went on, and the bird was still alive. Its wing was crumpled, but it quickly hobbled up and danced crookedly before walking on down the sidewalk. This in itself wasn't so strange except at just that moment the neighbor's cat, Jinx, rounded the corner. Fern stuck her head all the way out the window to yell at Jinx, to distract him—even though yelling was strictly barred in the Drudger household. But then the bird shook its head and ballooned into the shape of a large spotted dog. This took all of Fern's breath. The cat darted off and the dog strutted on with only a slight limp, not bothering with the hydrant at the corner as most dogs do. Fern, speechless, watched it go.

Fern told herself that all of this was her imagination.
She tried to believe that the Drudgers were right about her—they were so undeniably sensible. But there were certain things that were hard to deny. For example, Mrs. Lilliopole had seen the small bat turn into a marble, too.

After the marble rolled into the men's locker room, Mrs. Lilliopole, stunned and breathless, turned to Fern. “Did you see that?” she asked.

But by now Fern was used to denying the oddities she saw. “See what?” she asked.

“The bat and the…the…the marble!” Her voice echoed across the water.

“I don't know what you're talking about, ma'am,” Fern said as politely as she could. Adults liked politeness, although they aren't always polite themselves.

“Oh, it was nothing, I guess,” Mrs. Lilliopole said, glancing around at the empty ceiling.

Fern tried to believe the sensible Drudgers. She tried. But there was some part of Fern's mind that was glowing, singing, rowdy, brassy as a marching band with characters so big and cartoonish they seemed to be careening down a parade route like giant
helium balloons. Her only solace was books, and Fern loved books. She read as many books as she could get her hands on. She had an overused library card, now tattered, and she also bought books at garage sales for ten cents a copy. She used her allowance, even though the Drudgers had made it clear that they expected her to use the money on extra school supplies like paste and pencils. Now she had a little library growing in one corner of her room. One day she wanted books to be stacked all the way up to the ceiling along every wall. This, to her, seemed like a heavenly, comforting notion.

Being a Drudger made Fern feel stifled, clamped down, like a whistling kettle building up steam. (Fern had read about whistling kettles; the Drudgers preferred the mute, nonwhistling kind.) When Fern kept asking about the story of her birth while her mother cooked nondescript food items and her father awaited the arrival of the all-too-important Beige family, it was like letting off just a little bit of steam, just a little.

“Can't you make up a more interesting story about my name?” Fern now asked. “Something about a jungle or something?” This, too, was letting off just a little steam, just a little.

Mr. and Mrs. Drudger glanced at each other. “No,” Mrs. Drudger said, her face shining metal in the flat reflection of the toaster. “That would be a lie.”

“And we've talked to you about lying,” Mr. Drudger added, his doughy skin pinking ever so slightly with frustration.

Mrs. Drudger covered the toaster with a cozy the way some cover birdcages at night. (They didn't have pets, birds or otherwise. The toasters were perhaps the closest the Drudgers would ever come to having pets.) She walked to the oven and opened its squeakless door. A scentless steam rose up. Mrs. Drudger turned, catching Fern in a vacant, wide-eyed gaze, and said sternly, “Now narrow your eyes, please.”

Fern often stared at Mr. and Mrs. Drudger with her big eyes. In keeping with the label “overactive dysfunction,” Mr. and Mrs. Drudger referred to Fern's eyes as “the unpleasant deformity.” They didn't like her eyes. They asked her to narrow them so often that Fern felt like she was constantly pulling down the blinds on her own face. Sometimes when Fern looked at Mrs. Drudger, the woman would fiddle with her blouse to make sure it was buttoned to the top button. She'd say, “Fern, stop looking through me like that!” And there was a pinch to her voice that Fern enjoyed. Sometimes Fern would flare her eyes on purpose to make Mrs. Drudger's voice pinch just so.

But now Fern felt guilty for having brought up her birth, for having asked the Drudgers to invent a better story when she knew they couldn't possibly. She needed
to be on her best behavior again. The Beiges were coming and she couldn't afford to go off like a whistling kettle. Fern dutifully squinted.

(Here you should take a sip of water or stretch or look around you to make sure that everything is intact. Hopefully the house isn't on fire or being invaded by a horde of some sort. Sometimes I've gotten caught up in a book, and I would have appreciated a quick reminder from the author concerning the outside world; and I swore that if I ever wrote a book, I would include one. So, here it is. Is everything in order? Okay then. Go on.)

Maybe it goes without saying that the Beiges were on time and that they were, in fact, beige-colored.

Mrs. Drudger said, “Hello, come in. So good to see you.”

Mr. Drudger said, “So glad you could make it.” He hung up their beige overcoats.

Fern watched the Beiges as they were ushered through the living room by Mr. Drudger. They were short and duck-footed. Milton was a pale sausage of a boy. The skin of his neck chubbed up around the tight buttoning of his collar. He had a runny nose, which he rubbed in a small circle. His nose had developed a small ball on the end of it. Because he rubbed it in a circle like Play-Doh? Fern wasn't sure. His mother had a circular, flat-topped hairdo, much like a beige cake, and his father was
imbalanced by a heavy paunch.

Mr. Beige and Milton seemed naturally beige. Their skin, like their pants and blazers, were the exact coloring of Mrs. Drudger's puddings. Mrs. Beige may have once been another color, but she wore beige makeup, so it was impossible to say. (In my tireless research, I did try to get baby pictures of Mrs. Beige, but her mother, who was definitely a pinkish old woman, refused to hand them over. “Go away,” she said. “My daughter is beige now. Isn't that enough for you?”) Fern was watching the Beige family carefully, but they became so deeply camouflaged they seemed to disappear into the beige furniture and wall-to-wall carpeting, even into the painting that hung in the living room (the only painting in the house, it depicted the Drudgers' beige living room, which only further illustrates the Drudgers' dogged lack of imagination). Like camels against a backdrop of sand, the Beiges melted into the living room (and the painting of the living room) so seamlessly that Fern could only see the motion of their beige shoes.