Now back in the kitchen, Izzy pulled the muffins out of the oven and then quickly cooked the collard greens in batches until the leaves just barely wilted, the bacon fat leaving a perfect gloss on the dish. She broke the candied bacon into tiny pieces and sprinkled it over the purpled deviled eggs, so many of them it felt like a White House Easter egg hunt. She and Chef Nicole placed these and the other side dishes into the wheeled food transporter and took it down to the courtyard, where the casters bounced unevenly along the ground, the sound producing a reaction in the parents like children hearing the jingle of an ice-cream truck.
While Chef Nicole set out the children’s meal, Izzy let Asean and Link distribute the side dishes on the picnic tables and then she returned to the smoker, where she asked Jeremy to help her place the finished pig on the chopping block. Some of the parents lifted the children up and let them observe the now steaming carcass, its skin the most perfect color of fine leather. The children’s eyes were wide, and Izzy felt embarrassed when she shoved her gloved hands into the pig and began to tear it apart, deconstruction at its finest, the children engrossed in the act. In less than ten minutes, she had separated and then chopped up a fair portion of the pork and the parents now filled their plates with the meat. The reporter came over to the chopping block and took a chunk of pork and placed it in his mouth, a look of instant surprise forming on his face. “This is incredible,” he said. Izzy looked down at the meat, unable to return his gaze. “Thank you,” she said, and she was once again grateful for this project that she’d lucked into, the opportunity, over and over again, to do something that someone, anyone, would notice, to have people think she was special.
Praise for Izzy’s pork came from every member of the family, each person more enthusiastic than the last. Paul proclaimed, after his third helping, that it was the best thing he’d ever eaten. The photographer hovered over the remains of the pig, snapping photo after photo as if it were a crime scene. Even with the awkwardness, the surreal experience of being watched by outsiders, the party was a great success, the food disappearing from the tables, everyone happy. The children particularly loved the deviled eggs, the pretty color and the softness of the whipped egg yolks. All of their fingertips were stained the faintest shade of purple and their faces were smeared with the mashed yolk mixture. Izzy herself, so nauseous from the night before, did not eat and not one person noticed.
Once the children were freed from their seats, Dr. Grind hooked up the complex’s iPod to the sound system and shuffled the music. The iPod held a playlist specifically for the children, new songs added daily based on what they were listening to in the nursery. The songs usually had some kind of dance or action associated with them, and Izzy was always shocked to watch the children, still babies almost, so young, instantly performing their own variation on the dance, as if each child was in their own music video. The reporter and photographer from Time seemed fascinated by the spastic dancing as the playlist shifted from the Wiggles’ “Taba Naba” to Pretty Tony’s “Get Buck.” After only a few songs, the children had moved on to other interests, but they occasionally stomped their feet in appreciation of a song they particularly liked.
As the party wound down, Izzy prepared a plate of food for both the reporter and photographer to take back to the hotel. “I’m sure you can understand why I was intrigued by this place,” the reporter told her as she handed over his covered dish of food. “It just sounds so strange in practice. But it was really wonderful to witness. You’re a part of something special here.”
For a split second, she felt an unknown and yet unmistakable dread settle in her stomach and she wanted to tell the reporter that Jeremy didn’t want Eli to have his nails painted pink with the other kids, or that Carlos and Nina had brought up several times that they thought it wasn’t fair that the kids couldn’t play with weapons like swords or toy guns and that they thought it cut them off from a necessary part of childhood. Or that sometimes the children all sounded exactly the same, their cadence and vocabulary like a professor’s lecture that’s been given many times with great success, and the parents, late at night, worried that Dr. Grind was going to somehow make all their children in the Infinite Family supremely autistic. She wanted to tell him that her mother had struggled for her entire adult life with mental instability and morbid obesity, and she worried that the stress of living with all these strangers would somehow pull these aspects out of her genes and ruin her. She wanted to tell him that sometimes everything was so perfect, that she worried that the rest of the world might have been wiped out in a nuclear event, and no one had told them. She wanted to tell him how terrified she was of what would happen when it was over, that this project would both save and ruin her. She wanted to tell him how stupid they all were, how easily they could break the delicate thing that they all held in their clumsy hands. Instead, she simply said, “I think so. It’s really special.”
“Best of luck,” the reporter said, and as he left, walking side by side with Dr. Grind toward the entrance of the complex, Nina and Susan came up to her. “You’re going to be the star of the article,” Nina said, poking Izzy in the ribs.
“Just don’t read the comments,” Susan said.
“I know, I know,” Izzy replied.