May 1976
With Blue at the helm of the kitchen, things took a decidedly positive turn for the group. First, it got a good cleaning.
There were dozens of half-full cans of food in the barely operational refrigerator, each guarded by a buzz-saw blade of a
lid poking up from the top. Blue staggered back a step from the smell. The grime on the surfaces had congealed to a thick,
tar-like substance. There were carbonized remains in the oven of past meals. The flour was full of weevils, the sugar full
of ants.
“I have to get rid of it all,” she told Dean, who was sitting on the ground with Sweet Jane, getting his tarot cards read.
“Start over.”
“I told you,” Sweet Jane said with a smile. She held up a card she had just drawn from the deck: the Tower. A horrific image
of a building and people falling headfirst to their death. “It means start over. Build up new foundations.”
“Okay,” Dean said with a laugh. “We have to follow the signs.”
Blue requested, and received, money to buy Murphy’s wood soap, bleach, and a bucket and mop from the general store in town.
Then, with the help of Sweet Jane and Sally, she took the kitchen apart.
The refrigerator was emptied and scrubbed, the roaches behind it chased out with a broom.
The contents of the cabinets were examined.
Some of the pans had been damaged beyond use, but there was a cast-iron frying pan that cleaned up well. The food was most unusable.
“What have you been eating?” Blue asked as she pulled out another box of cereal full of bugs.
“We buy soup,” Sally said. “Chocolate milk. Dean gets stuff for us. We’ve been waiting for the garden to grow.”
Blue had already gotten the tour of the scrappy bit of garden under the command of Sweet Jane, who more or less knew what
she was doing.
“We’re getting some lettuce in now,” she’d told Blue. “And we have a few little strawberries. But soon we’ll have a lot—tomatoes,
zucchini, peppers, watermelon . . .”
Those things were far away, and the group had been running on this garbage-filled room and a handful of tiny strawberries
and the occasional lettuce for too long. They looked hungry.
There was a tiny natural foods co-op down in Ellenville, running out of the back of a house. As soon as Blue heard about it,
she walked down with Sweet Jane and Sally, barefoot, along the side of the road.
“Maybe we could have driven the van?” Blue said as they plodded on in the sun. “It’s going to be hard to carry groceries back
up the hill.”
“We don’t drive the van,” Sally said, walking along the hot edge of the asphalt on her toes. “Only Dean does.”
“It’s his van?” Blue said.
“It’s our van,” Sally explained. “It belongs to all of us. I mean, it came through Denver. She brought it to us.”
“So it was Denver’s,” Blue said.
“Yeah. Before. But now it’s all of ours.”
Except it didn’t seem to be all of theirs. Blue didn’t want to ask stupid questions, but she didn’t get how that worked.
“So, we ask Dean about stuff,” Blue said. “Right?”
“He usually knows what we need before we ask,” Sweet Jane said, smiling beatifically. “He handles things so we don’t have
to get ourselves stuck.”
“Stuck how?”
“In the money game,” Sally said. “In the job game. In the family game. In all the games people play.”
“He carries the weight so we don’t have to,” Sweet Jane said, her face pious under a ragged red bandanna.
“Because he’s played the game and beat the game,” Sally said.
“You—we—really give away all the money?”
“Yup,” Sally said. “I mean, we keep a little for food, but the rest, Dean gives to the kids back in the city.”
“Where were you all before here?” Blue asked.
Sally and Jane looked at each other.
“We weren’t,” Sweet Jane said.
“Weren’t what?”
“We weren’t before here. We started when we met Dean. Now starts now, like Dean says.”
“Oh.” Blue considered this for a moment. It was kind of self-evident that now started now. She felt stupid for not getting it beyond that.
“But where . . .”
“Blue,” Sally said sharply. “That’s the one thing you need to get right now. We don’t talk about before. We don’t talk about
old names and old families.”
“Sorry,” Blue said, stricken. She fumbled off the edge of the asphalt in her dismay, her foot sliding down into the grass.
“A correction,” Sally said, and Sweet Jane nodded.
“What?”
“When you absorb a lesson,” Sweet Jane said with a smile, “and you get it on a deep level, sometimes you correct. You just
twisted your foot a little. That means you took it in. That’s good. That’s so good.”
Buoyed by the good news about her not-really-twisted ankle getting her out of any awkwardness, Blue smiled as they continued
to the store.
Every health food store was essentially the same—had the same feel of raw walls, hand-drawn signs, the smell of yeast and
patchouli, massive jars full of beans and tea and seeds. The selection was basic, but it would work.
A new era of delicious food began. Hot oatmeal in the morning.
For lunch or dinner, fresh bread topped with eggs fried in the cast-iron skillet and slices from their now-fecund tomato plant.
They made butter by shaking fresh milk in a jar, passing it around when their arms got tired, and pouring off the buttermilk as they went; later there would be buttermilk pancakes, heavy with plump blueberries and sticky with butter and honey.
They shared the plates and cups and forks, rinsed them clean using a bottle of Ivory dish soap that somehow lasted all summer.
Between them all, there were enough clothes, washed occasionally in a tub in the yard on an old-fashioned washboard and left
to dry in the sun. Soon, Blue looked like the rest of the group—cutoff shorts, colorful halter tops, a scarf around her blond
hair. She would often be the first awake, still on a baker’s schedule, and loved the feeling of the cool linoleum under her
bare feet as she prepped her kitchen for the day to feed what she had come to think of as her family. There was always enough.
Enough to eat, if not too much. Enough to wear. Enough to share. If you were warm, you slept on the lawn. If you were cold,
you cuddled up to someone. There was no loneliness, and they worked and played too hard to ever be bored.
The others would go to the city once or twice a week, leaving Blue to her baking. Someone always stayed behind with her—often
Sweet Jane, but sometimes Sally. No one was ever alone. When they came back, Blue was aware that there was more money, but
she never knew how much or where it was kept. If she needed anything, she went to Dean and spelled out the costs. He usually
gave her what she asked for.
For a few weeks, this was enough, but Blue’s curiosity about what went down in the city grew.
“Could I come with you next time?” she asked Dean one evening after dinner. “To New York? Could I go on a run, to see how
it works?”
“I’ve been saying, Dean!” Denver tipped back her chair and balanced against the wall. “Blue’s ready.”
“You’ve been saying, all right. But we needed to wait for her to ask.”
“Should I get it ready?” Sweet Jane asked, looking up from the butterfly she was embroidering on a pair of old green shorts.
“Go do it,” Dean said.
Jane grinned as she set the sewing down and hurried out the kitchen door. The others began to take on an air of gleeful anticipation.
“Get what ready?” Blue asked, looking around. “What’s going on?”
“You want to learn?” Dean said, his lips twisting into a smile. “Then it’s time for your first lesson.”