but her facial features and expressions seemed, like her body, pared down, as if she’d been constructed for efficiency. “Allyssa Banks,” she said, holding out her hand to Lila. “Welcome to the Grid.”
Allyssa and Eduardo chatted in the driveway for a few minutes—about weather and some new storage system for grain—and Eduardo got back in his truck and drove off. Lila realized it had been years since she’d heard the sound of pebbles under tires.
“Come on in,” Allyssa said.
The kitchen floor was linoleum patterned to look like bricks. The lighting fixture was a frosted square of glass tucked up at the corners like a hankie. The refrigerator was a large white rectangle that hummed. “Incredible,” Lila said. “Just like I remember.”
“Wait until you see one of the villages,” Allyssa said. “They’re real, too. Tomorrow we’ll go over to 88 for breakfast and a tour. I’ll orient you this evening. Your room’s upstairs.”
They passed through a small dining room, its table covered with a white plastic lace overlay on top of a green tablecloth. In the living room sat a long curved sofa, an old-fashioned glass-screened TV, a Stratolounger, and two plastic deck chairs. A lamp with shells pressed into its base stood on an oak coffee table. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, all with double beds, and one narrow bathroom. Electric fans were fitted in the front two windows.
“Your choice,” the woman said. “If you pick the room without the fan I’ll move it.”
Lila picked the room at the back, farthest from the road.
“My room’s off the kitchen,” Allyssa said. “You can clean up and I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“Best food in the world,” Allyssa said at dinner, setting Lila’s plate in front of her. People certainly are prideful here, Lila thought, but as she ate she thought Allyssa might be right. Soy loaf, mashed potatoes, fresh green beans with mushrooms, and lettuce and tomato with Thousand Island dressing. “We grow the green beans and potatoes at Plant City,” Allyssa said. Where’s Plant City? Lila wanted to ask, but something about Allyssa discouraged questions. She did request seconds on her food, thinking Allyssa could only take this as a compliment. She wondered how Allyssa stayed so thin. Knowing Lila was in water, Allyssa spent the dinner talking with clear knowledge about the Grid’s average rainfall, irrigation system, and drainage, sounding, Lila thought, like some educational tape.
“I’ve never seen so much corn,” Lila said at one point.
“That’s just around here,” Allyssa said. “Wheat and soy are the major Grid crops.”
“How long have you been here?” Lila asked during dessert, peaches on soy ice cream, a treat Allyssa didn’t partake of.
“Me? Personally? Almost fourteen years.”
“Since the beginning?” Lila said in surprise, and this question seemed to release a switch inside Allyssa, because suddenly she started to talk like a real person.
There were no other Grid visitors tonight—a relief, Allyssa said. The Consort people had been here three weeks ago and refused to share beds: they needed cots in all three bedrooms. Nothing was right for them. They wanted peas instead of cabbage, decaf coffee, air-conditioning. As if this was a hotel instead of someone’s home. “So you do all the cooking?” Lila asked. “Clean people’s rooms?” She was having a hard time figuring his woman out.
“I do everything,” Allyssa said, her low-pitched voice almost purring.
Lila felt a tug of wistfulness. Lila had said things like that, once. She asked, “If you’ve been here fourteen years, were you in on the planning stage?”
“Of the Grid?” Allyssa gave Lila a respectful look. People didn’t wonder about her, Lila realized. They took her as a simple hostess. “I was at an experimental farm in Australia called Lindisfarne.” Not only Allyssa’s voice, but her whole body was relaxing; she reached with her bangled arm to scratch the cat under the table. When Lila caught her breath, Allyssa looked up sharply. “You’ve heard of it?”
“Vaguely,” Lila said. “Didn’t they develop a good desalination system?” Allyssa nodded vigorously, and Lila had the sensation she had just avoided a landmine. She knew the desalination system had been renowned, but that wasn’t why Lila remembered the farm’s name. Something odd had happened at Lindisfarne, some scandal or crime, but Lila couldn’t quite remember what.
“The government people who were interested in maximal production came to us—it was during the Short Times—and asked us to help plan an agro area. It only took us six weeks to scout possible locations, and another six months to plan. We worked day and night, studying data from all over the U.S., picking the site, planning the crops. I came over here in ’32 with the study group. Basically, we thought it up, and then the government took care of the logistics.”
Bigger than the Hoover Dam, people said. A more ambitious project than the Yangtze flooding. As world-changing as the Panama Canal, as the A-bomb, as the Weather Station. And here Lila sat in the center of it with one of its founders, in a farmhouse designed to look innocuous. The enormity of it made Lila dizzy. Back in Dayton she was being marginalized; she might never sit talking to power again.
“Are there other people here from Lindisfarne?”
Allyssa frowned and counted mentally a moment. “Six others.” Very serious, Lila thought. And, oddly, all one color: her eyebrows and skin and hair were medium beige, broken only by a sprinkling of freckles on her nose. Born in Washington State, she’d said, although her mother was originally from Ireland. “I met my husband at Lindisfarne,” Allyssa said.
“He’s one of the six?”
“No. He lives in Paris.”
“France?” Allyssa flashed a rare smile, and Lila shook her head in surprise. Almost impossible to imagine a man in Paris married to a woman living here. Outside, the crickets had started. “Is he French?”
“American,” Allyssa said. “He visits every couple of months.”
“Do you have children?”
A tiny wince, then Allyssa waved her hand toward the window. “This is a magical place. How could a child compete?”
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