the infinite family project (year three)
Izzy carefully arranged a series of wooden letters, each one small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, along the floor of the complex’s studio, a thin film of sawdust coating everything around her. As she laid them out, making a sentence, she checked each letter for obvious imperfections. She returned to the band saw, a ridiculous expenditure that Dr. Grind, or a magician or Santa Claus or some other kind of benevolent god, had rented for the complex simply so Izzy could continue working on this project. With a steady hand, a trait that she admired in herself more than almost anything else, she moved the wood around the whirring saw blade, following the deep black lines that served as her guide, until she had a c that was nearly perfect. She placed the letter on the floor and observed her sentence, I want arsenic, before she scooped up all of the letters and dumped them into a blue plastic fifty-five-gallon drum, which was nearly half full of other letters. She took a black marker from the worktable and walked to one of the walls, which was covered in sheets of paper. She found the sentence on the corresponding page and crossed it out with the marker. She looked at the next sentence, The druggist looked down at her, and returned to a fresh piece of wood and a set of stencils to trace the next letters, a chain of words that felt endless to Izzy, though she knew deep down that this was a story and, like all stories, it would eventually end.
Though she found most of her time was devoted to her work in the kitchen, Izzy had, perhaps stupidly, declared a major in art. She wasn’t so clueless that she didn’t understand, on some level, that this was connected to Hal and his influence on her in high school, but she found that she still desired the specific pleasure of creating an object that existed beyond something as ephemeral as food. Her current art course, where she was the only student who wasn’t a senior, having begged the professor to let her in, focused on three-dimensional work, and Izzy was now feverishly working on her final project. While other students were making intricately knitted covers that would fit over a truck or making plaster casts of dead animals to be suspended from ropes, Izzy had focused on woodworking, a talent she had continued since joining the Infinite Family.
Her original plan was to take a famous poem and then whittle individual letters that she would affix to a large wooden plank to be hung on a wall. However, there were two problems that seemed to work against each other as Izzy started on the project. First, she was not as skilled a whittler as the work required. It seemed impossible that she would be able to whittle the letters necessary to complete the poem. Second, the work seemed too small, too minor, not impressive enough to make up for the fact that she was pretty much making a cut-rate physical representation of a Joyce Kilmer poem about trees. It felt embarrassing, now that she looked back on it, to imagine how silly it would have looked at the art show, her family standing around her, praising her in the most polite way possible.
Jeremy had told her about band saws, the way she could more easily make the necessary curves of each letter. “Heck,” he said at dinner one night, using his knife on a piece of beef tenderloin to demonstrate, “you could knock out a lot of letters in the time it’d take you to whittle just one.” Izzy spent long hours in the general sculpture area of the university studio, working with the school’s band saw and her professor until she could make each letter from the stencil set with some ease. The next step was to expand the work.
Eliza, Link and Julie’s daughter, had awoken one morning from a dream and told Izzy about it while they were playing in the pool. “I dreamed that I was on a boat,” the little girl said to Izzy, her voice calm and measured, “and I put my hand in the water and I pulled out all kinds of stuff. I pulled out a star and then I pulled out a little bird and then I started pulling letters out of the water, until my boat was filled with stuff.” Izzy immediately had a vision of dipping her hands into a lake and the water turning into wooden letters, so many possible words and sentences. She imagined that the lake was a story and each letter contributed to it. She hugged Eliza, who accepted the affection without surprise, as if every recollection of a dream should be met with hugs. She needed something larger. Not a novel, not Moby-Dick, but something more than a poem.