Excerpt: Alice and Dave In The Land of Xemwencio

Chapter One

Last thing before they went to sleep every night for as long as they could remember, Alice and Dave had been entertained by a bedtime story. They were lucky that way. No matter how tired she was after a day of teaching kick-boxing and yoga, Freeda still lay down on the bottom bunk next to Dave and told a tale of a faraway exotic land called Xemwencio, where people rode on shaggy yaks, where animals showed surprising talents, where an evil witch named Quah held power, where magic portals allowed you to jump from place to place, a land from where a rightful leader had been unfairly exiled. They had heard about Xemwencio for so long that, though they knew on the surface that it was fantasy, it seemed to the children much more real than any other place they had never visited outside of New York City, which meant just about everywhere. They had each come to the conclusion independently that Xemwencio must not be discussed with kids at school, but when the two played alone together they often pretended they were there. And when they lay in bed at night unable to fall asleep, Xemwencio is where they took their minds to lead them into the land of nod.
Like many other children, at least here in New York City, Alice and Dave had no father at home, only a mother—Freeda—and to pick them up from school each day they had a babysitter, Doina, who was from an unknowable land called Romania.
On the Friday before everything changed, Doina picked the children up from school per usual. And seeing as they didn’t know that everything was about the change, Alice and Dave felt quite normal and Friday-ish. Tonight they would eat Freeda’s casserole (Alice had requested it) and maybe watch a DVD if it wasn’t too late and they begged enough. And at bedtime, of course, they would have their story.
But first they played in the playground with a few other after school stragglers, including Princess Alvarez who was always full of questions and seemed to be fully versed on how things were supposed to be.
“Are you poor?” Princess asked Alice. They were in third grade together and had been in the same class every year since the first grade and Princess knew the answers to almost all the questions already by now. But still she asked. It was what Freeda called a ritual.
“No,” Alice said. “We’re not rich, but we’re not poor.”
Princess let go of the bar she’d been holding and let herself dangle by her knees. Alice did the same on her side and the two girls were now facing one another. Princess’s pigtails stuck out from her head. Alice’s hair fell in one big very long mass of light brown. They pointed at one another and laughed.
“If you’re not poor then why do you live in this neighborhood?” asked Princess.
“Freeda likes to be close to the school,” said Alice.
Princess swung her body and flipped her feet down in a penny drop. Alice reached up and took the bar and eased her feet down while gripping the bar. She wasn’t ready for penny drops.
“You are not supposed to call your mother her name,” said Princess. “You’re supposed to call her Mommy or Mom or Ma or Mama. And if you’re not poor you should move to Brooklyn. It’s a better place for children to grow up. And where’s your Daddy live?”
“Florida,” said Alice. “Miami, I think.”
“My dad lives in Brooklyn too. Dad’s should live close by so that they can pick you up from school sometimes.”
Alice was glad that Dave didn’t hear this. Their dad was a bit of a sore point with him.
Doina called to Alice and Dave from the park bench where she sat daintily with her handbag in her lap.
“Alice and Dave, time to go!” she called.
Dave was busy making his way across the monkey bars. He was monkey bar crazy and had just today mastered them going backwards.
“David!” cried Doina. “You will have the blisters. You must stop.”
Dave doggedly finished his backward trip across the bars and dropped to the rubber surface, falling to his knees. He stood and dusted himself off, wishing that Freeda were there to cheer this feat. It felt kind of deflating that she wasn’t. And Doina only worried about blisters and dirty knees. And Alice was too busy gabbing with Princess to notice. He looked at his hands. His hands were calloused where the old blisters had been, but backwards made blisters in new places, he discovered, and they hurt but they hadn’t burst open yet. He could probably do one more trip across the monkey bars.
He ran back to the platform. Doina went nuts as she did when he did not mind her. She stood up now and used her threats.
“Dave! Stop that right now. I will tell your mother that you do not behave. Dave!”
But Dave had already started another time across. As he did, he realized that his hands hurt terribly. But now that he’d started he didn’t want to stop, so bar by painful bar, he made his way across.
On the walk home Doina’s face was pinched and angry, but Dave ignored her and kept his hands in his pockets. Alice was singing a song in a high airy voice and playing with a leaf she’d found on the playground, it was the leaf singing, in her mind. At their corner where the deli was, per usual, there were a handful of people hanging out, people who did not seem to notice them nor stand aside to let them through.
“Excuse me please!” Doina said loudly and a narrow way opened as the people moved a little this way and that to make room for the three to pass. Before they were inside their building, Doina started in on her usual litany of complaints about where they lived. “This neighborhood is loud and dirty and nobody respects. Your building looks like a prison with this ugly gate in front. It smells in here with garbage inside and not in cans.”
“Look, a water bug!” yelled Dave. It was there on the stair, dead, and had been there all week, and to be honest it had lost its attraction to Dave, but he enjoyed Doina’s disgust and wanted to keep it fueled as long as he could.
“Insects!” she said, not disappointing Dave. “Dirty halls!”
“Ew,” exclaimed Alice, not to be outdone, she pointed to what looked to be a dried puddle of something pink and sticky-looking. “What is that?”
“Don’t step in it!” cried Doina. “Children, get upstairs. This place is health hazard. And don’t get dirty.”
Their apartment, which was on the fourth floor, number thirteen, was neat and clean since along with watching the kids when they finished school, it was Doina’s job to clean it. “Doina has a clean gene,” is what Freeda said. Her hands were always active, always picking up, folding, wiping something off, and when she was done with everything and there was nothing left to do, she would sit down in the rocking chair and rock as if it were her mode of transportation and she was determinedly making her way somewhere.
But now she picked up the kids’ book bags that they had flung on the floor, and their shoes (same), and their socks (same). The shoes she lined neatly under the rack of jackets. The socks went in the laundry. By this time Dave was already constructing a marble machine from his wooden marble machine kit and Alice had climbed up on the top bunk and was reading a book—one of the Narnian adventures.
“Do you know what is for dinner?” Doina asked.
Dave looked up from his work.
“Your favorite!” he exclaimed. “Xemwencian casserole!”
“Xem nothing. It is tuna casserole. What is it Xemwencian? Where did you get this?”
“Freeda says that it’s much better with Xemwencian yak milk and Xemwencian mega fish.”
“And what is it, Xemwencian? Is there a place, Xemwencia?”
“Xemwencio,” Dave said.
“Xemwencio? Okay, you have told me this before. What is it, Xemwencio?” she asked.
Dave shrugged and continued constructing his marble machine.
“Silly,” Doina muttered as she left the room. “Freeda’s tuna casserole,” she whispered to herself. “Delicious.”
She washed her hands and opened the refrigerator and removed a white oven dish. She lifted the lid just to be sure that it was the casserole and then closed the fridge and then spun on her heel and turned on the oven.
This might be a good place to describe apartment thirteen at 85 Pitt Street on the not-no-low Lower East Side of New York City, where Alice and Dave lived. Outside of Pitt Street, the overall neighborhood was in the process of transformation from what had been twenty years before a rather dangerous area, but one also filled with working class and poor people. Now things had changed in this section of the Lower East Side, which was not so low but quite a bit east, so that there were many shops and restaurants that poor and working class folks couldn’t afford to frequent. And to be sure, many people had had to move away when their rents had gone up and there was a new sort of face down here, young and professional, marching off to the subway each morning to go to their jobs in other parts of town.
But Pitt Street was a throwback to the old not-so-low Lower East Side. There were poor and working class honest good people living there, walking that street going to and from home and work and school. But, though it wasn’t as dangerous as in the bad old days, there were the riff raff. These were the people who had nothing better to do than to hang out on Pitt Street, talking loudly and being unpleasant. I mention them because, aside from clogging up the sidewalk in the evening as the children made their way home from school, the noise they made at the children’s bedtime and indeed late, late at night or in the wee hours of the morning—this noise made its way into the apartment, particularly at this time of year—the early summer, when all the windows were open to the street.
Aside from being noisy, Apartment Thirteen was very, very small. You entered through the kitchen, took about two steps and you were out of the kitchen again--that’s how small the kitchen was. From the kitchen you found yourself in the main room. It was basically a square with an odd column occupying one corner and rendering that area more or less useless, or at least awkward. Freeda had put bookshelves there. In the opposite corner, just to your left as you walked in from the kitchen was a long table with a bench on one side, against the wall, and two rectangular sway-topped Chinese stools on the other, and this is where the family spent much of their time, gathering for meals, sitting to do homework, or to color, or do an art project or to watch a movie on the T.V. screen that Freeda’d stuck on top of a cabinet across the room (to the right as you walked in from the kitchen). Walk a tiny bit further and you could look into both of the two small bedrooms. Freeda’s was the first and had a bed that was up on stilts to make room for a desk and dresser underneath. The children’s room had bunk beds, shelves and a dresser and hardly enough floor space to turn around in. Across from their room was the bathroom, which sufficed.
As I’ve said, Doina kept the apartment neat and clean, so that though it was very, very small, it was pleasant and aside from the noise, the children liked it there, and indeed it was the only home they could remember, since Dave was brought home here when he was born and Alice wasn’t quite two when Freeda moved in.
There was, however, one unsightly, unpleasant item in the apartment, and that was the hole.
There had been a terrible leak. Alice, Dave and Freeda had gotten home from a Saturday out and on the ceiling outside the bathroom a giant water bubble had formed. When Freeda poked the taut stretched paint skin of the bubble, it had burst and water went everywhere. They could hear water still running upstairs. Freeda zoomed into action and dashed out of the apartment to alert the neighbors, who’d been running the bath, though they said that it had not overflowed and there must have been a leak.
The plumbers came the next day and made the hole. They fixed the leak and left, and never returned to patch the hole.
The hole was rectangular and looked big enough for a person to fit through—a thin grown up or a child. You could see up into the space between the ceiling of Apartment Thirteen and the floor of the apartment upstairs. It was dark, filled with barely visible wires and pipes, and emitted a faint dank, damp odor. Freeda had spoken to the landlord repeatedly in the first weeks after the hole was made, to no avail. And then she had stopped. And then when Doina would ask about the hole, Freeda said, “I’m working on it.” And sometimes then Dave or Alice would notice their mother staring at the hole thoughtfully. It seemed as though she had accepted its presence.
I’ll also mention here, while we’re on the subject of the children’s home, the pets. The Joneses—that was the children’s last name: Jones—the Joneses had two pets. There was Oskar, a small, old, toothless dog that Freeda had had since he was a pup. He was black and white, fluffy and sweet, with a fox like pointed nose, friendly black ears and a black patch over just one eye. They also had a young cat that was mostly black with a white patch on one side of his upper lip, as if he had only half a stubby white mustache. His name was Pinkle and Pinkle was a devil. His favorite place to sit was on the top of the cupboard above the refrigerator and from there he would leap suddenly, in two or three bounds, capsizing items, knocking open the freezer door, and causing a commotion. If the children turned their backs for a moment when they were eating, they would turn back to find Pinkle nibbling from their plates or lapping milk from their glasses. “Devil!” Freeda would say, but as she said so he would pick him up and plant a kiss on his head. They all loved both of their animals. They were members of the family.

Doina put the casserole in the oven and just as the mouthwatering aroma was filling the apartment there was a jangling at the door and Freeda walked in.