Brittle Ecologies
Emily Finan
My arms ache at the wrists. He is fatter than he was at the start of the summer, less pliant, and he squirms with the wish to join his brothers in the wet grass. They are the children of intellectuals-turned-farmers, people with advanced degrees and overdeveloped moral imaginations who moved to Vermont in pursuit of what you might call “honest work.” I let the baby go, and he drags his fat thighs through the rutted yard, glorying in the feel of watery mud on his haunches.
I am here alone for the summer, having rented a cottage to share with a man who has since left me. The deposit was nonrefundable, so I was glad when I found an ad for a nannying job posted on the wall of the general store.
I have been working four days a week for three months now, chasing blond boys through mossy woods. Their parents, Genevieve and Patrick, hired me for the summer, when their work as heritage pig farmers is especially demanding.
I am thirty-two and I have just quit the only real job I have ever had. I was a teacher at the kind of school where students—most of them poor, all of them Black or Latinx—walk silently through the hallway on masking-taped lines and receive demerits for overusing bathroom breaks. I told the principal that I was quitting for ethical reasons, but mostly I was just tired. It’s okay, she told me with a thin smile, this work isn’t for everyone. Like many schools of its kind, this one was a revolving door for privileged, white idealists, recent college grads who wanted to do something good the quick and dirty way. There’s no certification requirement to work at a place like this, no commitment to a long-term career in public education. When the college kids invariably move on to consulting jobs or medical school, people like me—chronic underperformers with advanced degrees—backfill their positions. It goes about as poorly as you might imagine.
These days, we—the blond boys and I—spend afternoons at their grandmother’s cabin by the lake searching for slugs and insects under rocks. Their upbringing has been stubbornly old-fashioned—they have never used iPads, they’ve never seen a city, and there are only twelve children in their multiple-grade-level class at a school they can walk to safely from their sturdy 19th Century farmhouse.
Theo, the oldest, deposits a green beetle into the palm of my hand, informing me that it is a jewel beetle, of the metallic woodborer family. Like many children his age, he is capable of obsession so total as to verge on scholarly. He knows everything about bugs, and as a result he reveres them. I made the mistake of killing a horsefly on the dock once, and Theo erupted in inconsolable tears. It was only after I pointed out a pair of mating dragonflies that he allowed himself to be soothed.
“Where did you find this guy?” I ask.
“Landed on my arm,” he whispers, stroking its iridescent shell with a cautious finger.
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The first time I asked Genevieve and Patrick about their work, they told me that after a decade of vegetarianism, they had done some reading and realized that ecosystems work better with predators in them. “As reassuring as it was to think of myself as this non-violent, low-impact being,” Genevieve explained, peeling a carrot over the compost bin, “all consumption requires destruction of some kind. There is nothing more or less ethical about eating soybeans, really. They’re just less familiar to us because they lack analogous body parts. But they’re as alive as a pig.”
I wondered silently about the differences I had always presumed existed between animals and vegetables—intelligence? consciousness? feeling?—but realized that I had neither the philosophical nor the scientific knowledge to question her logic.
She went on to explain that taking meat out of the American diet would actually be less sustainable than training people to eat small amounts of meat, and to be more judicious about how they purchase it. Not everything the land produces is edible to humans, but cows and pigs have stomachs that can metabolize what she called “fibrous biomass.” She assured me that raising livestock means you can use more of the land than you can when you constrain yourself to edible crops.
“When you treat a farm like a self-contained ecosystem,” Patrick chimed in, “you realize that as the animals consume plants and other animals, they replenish what they take by fertilizing the land. They know how to farm better than we do.”
“The meat is better, too,” Genevieve added. It was clear they had practiced the pitch before, but I was charmed nevertheless. “We like our pigs like we like our kids,” she joked. “Free range!”
When I got home to my cabin that night, I made myself a BLT with bacon they had given me. It was cut thicker than any bacon I’d ever eaten before, and it had been cured in maple syrup tapped from the forest behind their house. The next morning the wooden walls of my tiny cottage still smelled strongly and deliciously of animal fat, and I felt, for the first time since my arrival, glad to be waking up alone.
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Keeping my arms fully extended, I lift the baby from the puddle and try not to get the mud he’s been sitting in all over my jeans. His diaper sags between his legs, and as he kicks gleefully at the air he splatters my shirt with ambiguous filth. His brothers have vanished into their tree house, a gorgeous Swiss Family Robinson-esque wooden structure built by Genevieve’s late father.
The boys’ grandmother allows us to use her backyard and her dock in the afternoons, but she prefers not to be disturbed indoors. When I walk into the kitchen, arms full of the soggy baby, she nods her head and returns to her book, failing to conceal what is surely a look of contempt. I know nothing about her, but I suspect widowhood has made her more comfortable with solitude than she is in the presence of strangers. Genevieve has expressed mild worry to me a few times, but I have never asked her to tell me why.
The door to the room where the diapers are kept is locked, and I hear no answer when I knock. I release the baby from his soiled rag, rinse him off in the bathroom sink, and let him toddle around naked while I try to jiggle the door open. I feel his small fist burrow into my pant leg, and I hoist him up under my arm. “Mrs. Keene?” I call into the kitchen. “Is there a reason why the kids’ room is locked?”
“Lauren is meditating in there,” she replies, and I know she does not care that everything I have brought for the boys is held hostage behind the door.
“Naked it is!” I tell the baby. He looks so pleased with himself that I wonder if this was his plan all along.
Lauren is the boys’ aunt, Genevieve’s sister. She is a few years older than I am and newly divorced. We shared a bottle of wine one evening after I had put the boys to sleep, but the friendship didn’t take. It’s possible my avowed suspicion of the “self-care” craze turned her off.
The baby whacks his belly with a soft hand, knotting the fingers of the other into my braid.
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In the days before he left, my ex-boyfriend said something about the not-enough-ness of our sex that made me give myself to anyone who wanted me for weeks afterward. I felt like one of those grasshoppers that needs to drown in order to rid itself of a parasitic worm. I wouldn’t have put it to myself like that then—I read about it last week in one of Theo’s bug books. Spinochordellis tellini lies dormant in the host’s body until it’s ready to mate, at which point it coerces the insect to drown itself in a swamp, returning the parasite to fecund mating ground.
That was one week after we had decided, in a moment of shared, desperate hope that we still had a future, to rent a cabin in the woods for the summer. “It will be perfect,” he had said, threading his fingers into the hair at the base of my skull, and I agreed.
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The sound of a child crying interrupts my reverie at the bathroom sink. I am, I realize, holding a shit-soaked diaper, and the baby has disappeared. I give my hands a too-hasty wash—spending so much time around small children has made me less scrupulous about hygiene—and run to see what the problem is. The baby has collided with the corner of the coffee table. A red welt is already taking shape on his forehead, and his grandmother—as only grandmothers can—has begun the ritual of offering relief and consolation for problems she is sure she has nothing to do with.
“How did he get out here alone?” she asks.
You were here the whole time, I don’t say.
“Why don’t you go and see how the other two are doing. I’ll stay here and get him settled down.”
▱
In the tree house, Theo—that ardent lover and protector of bugs—is performing a vivisection on his metallic woodborer while his brother looks on in wonder. He has found a pair of tweezers—pilfered from Lauren’s makeup bag, most likely—and used the sharp edge of one of the prongs to split the thorax in two. He is both dazzled and horrified to find that its legs continue to move, and he uses his tweezers to detach them, one by one, placing them gently in his brother’s hand.
“Theo, you’re killing your little friend!” I say.
“I needed to see what was inside of him,” he replies, pressing his instrument back into the carcass. I am struck by the absence of anything resembling human blood.
“What do you guys want for your snack today?” I ask.
“Hotdogs,” Theo says, remaining focused on the surgery. He knows that their grandmother—at the behest of their aunt—keeps no meat in the house. She is conspicuously silent on the issue of her other daughter’s belief in the utopian possibilities of free-range bacon.
“Carrots and hummus?” I ask.
“Hotdogs!” they both insist. Theo sticks out his tongue like a dog and pants loudly, dropping his tweezers unceremoniously to the floor.
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Back in the house, Lauren is washing a bunch of radishes in the sink. She does not acknowledge any of us until Theo pokes her in the hamstring.
“Aunt Lauren, you better get outta here. We’re having hotdogs! No plant eaters allowed!”
“Yuck,” she manages, somehow genially. She shakes the water off her radishes and begins twisting off the root ends, assiduously avoiding my gaze. She does not approve of my eating habits—erratic, appetite-driven, insufficiently political—and she takes even greater issue with what I allow the boys to eat. It has made me relish feeding them cheese-curls and sliced deli-meat all the more.
“We’re dinos, so we really need to eat meat,” Theo says, screwing his hands into tiny claws. His brothers follow suit, roaring and stomping around the center island, transforming the Keene family’s lakeside cottage into a Mesozoic horrorscape. As long as I am here, I cannot feed these raptors what they demand to be fed.
“You’re out of luck, boys!” I say. “It’s carrots or popcorn until we get back to your house.”
“Or radishes!” Lauren tries. “Don’t you know a lot of dinosaurs were vegetarians?”
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Stubbornly as I ignore her admonitions, I recognize Lauren’s judgments like they’re my own, the shoots of some invasive plant buried so deep within me that I’m still feeling around for its roots. As a teacher, I often brought my students tubs of hummus and bags of baby carrots I paid for myself and set them up in the middle of the tables during study halls, an attempt to discourage them from resorting to the vending machine. I listened eagerly when students complained about the rancid meat and bruised fruit offered in the cafeteria, and told them what I knew about empty calories and food justice. I even encouraged them to petition the school for better nutritional options, and signed on as a faculty ally. I caught myself reflecting on the magnanimity of these gestures with astonishing frequency, and told myself that it was the highest expression of my love and devotion to my students.
Powered by this same delusion of moral clarity, I once threw a student’s full can of soda in the trash when she stepped out to use the bathroom. No number of apologies ever made me feel better about this, even after the student insisted she had forgiven me. She was, I now understand, used to the wantonness born of her teachers’ clumsy attempts to “fix” students like her.
When I regaled my ex with stories about the challenges of my job, I always left out the part about the soda can. When he told me he admired what I did, I blushed and insisted that the work gave me more than it asked of me. This was part of a dangerous ritual that I would not understand I was performing until much too late.
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Theo inverts his glass fully, letting the last drops of juice fall into his mouth. His t-shirt is marked with the signs of a day spent in dogged pursuit of a good time—splotches of bug guts, mustard, dirt, and now cheese and cranberry juice. The collar is stretched out where he sucked a glob of strawberry jelly off of it. Knowing Genevieve as I do, I can already imagine what she’ll say when she gets home. Well somebody sure had fun today, didn’t they? Nothing makes her happier than the feeling that her boys are growing up free of the crippling encumbrances of modern American life.
Looking at him now, I try to imagine what the outcome of such a childhood might be. But really, what business is that of mine? Nobody remembers their nannies, especially not the ones who fail to stick around. And next week, when the summer ends and Genevieve hands me my last check and I hug the boys and ignore Lauren’s withering farewell and pack my duffel and move out of my cottage and return to my too-expensive apartment where I now live alone near the school where I no longer work, I won’t think about whether he’ll age out of his sweetness, or lose his curiosity, or nurture his talents, or choose to be vegan, or join the army, or join the family business, or break someone’s heart, or get sick, or get really into running marathons, or decide that he should try to help somebody, somehow, only to discover that he has no idea what that means. I won’t worry that his desire to be good—if he turns out to be equipped with such a desire—will be thwarted by his own inability to learn, to listen, to understand the magnitude and intricacy of the problems he thinks he can solve. I won’t say, either, that he’ll gallop too hastily through the forest of his life, trampling the brittle flora in his path. Will he ever realize nobody is chasing him? Hard to say.
All I know for sure, as I watch him flex and curl his tiny pink dinosaur claws, is that well-fed as he surely will be, he will always be hungry.
Emily Finan is a PhD Candidate in English and American Literature at Boston University. She lives in Harvard, Mass., with her husband, dog, and kitten. This is her debut short story.