The Oregon Experiment Read Online Free

kitchen, a little girl, three or four years old, steered toward them. She climbed up onto Sequoia’s lap, then eyed Naomi across the table. “I’m Trinity,” she said.
    “I’m Naomi.” She touched her belly where her baby’s head sat. “He’s just starting this fall. Scanlon Pratt.”
    The little girl unbuttoned the top of Sequoia’s shirt. She removed a breast with two chubby hands.
    “And he studies secessionism?” Sequoia asked.
    The girl lifted Sequoia’s breast to her mouth and started to suckle, her eyes darting between Naomi and her mother as she listened to the conversation, her lips and jaw pumping at high speed.
    Naomi wasn’t a prude. She believed in nursing at the workplace, in restaurants, government buildings, even Wal-Mart. And she believed in nursing for a long time, giving the baby a fair shot at various antibodies and an intimate mother-child bond. “Secessionism,” she heard herself saying. “Mass movements, radical action.” But this seemed really bizarre. The girl dropped the breast and reached across the table to pluck a napkin from a basket. Maybe it was the girl’s Converse high-tops. Or the skull tattoo—it
had
to be temporary—on her arm. Or maybe that the girl nursing across the table was wearing a watch.
    “Urge him to come,” Sequoia said. “I’d be grateful.”
    The girl licked her lips and wiped them with the napkin, then said, “That was tasty.”
    It had been nearly an hour, and Naomi still wasn’t back. Through a dull caffeine-withdrawal headache pushing at his temples, Scanlon watched his new neighbors back out the driveway, their brake lights glowing red through the fog. The movers were jimmying the couch through the front door.
    Following them inside, he showed them where to set the couch, and then fell back onto the cushions. The fireplace with its raised hearth and jagged bricks set a retro tone for the whole house. Frank Lloyd Wright meets Dick Van Dyke. Ceiling lights were frosted glass, spraying out gold stars and zeniths. In the kitchen, curving white steel with chrome pulls formed the ’59 Eldorado of cabinets. But the prize here was an orange Formica built-in table shaped like a teardrop with matching swivel chairs of molded white plastic and orange vinyl padding. Buying a house from old people who’d preserved their last remodel so long had endowed them with a museum piece.
    The old folks had planted fruit years ago, too, and now he and Naomi would be harvesting from mature trees and bushes, each one identified on a hand-drawn map passed along by the realtor. Scanlon had immediately set himself on an internet crash course so he could productively prune and cultivate their little city lot of apples, pears, and blueberries. He’d learned about soil amendments for the marionberries and figs, and planned to build a new trellis to encourage pollination between the male and female kiwi vines.
    He opened the back door and dropped down the steps to the concrete patio, covered carport-style with green corrugated fiberglass. They’d get a table and chairs, and have grad students over to drink wine from short tumblers. Kids would ride trikes in circles while Scanlon grilled kebobs on the barbecue, another item to add to the list.
    He kicked through the long wet grass—he needed a mower, too—and at the edge of the yard he came to the apple trees: overgrown and wild, they hadn’t been pruned in years. He touched an apple, small and tight, no bigger than an apricot. In another couple months they’d have bushels of juicy crisp Galas.
    Feeling as if he were in a dream, he took a few steps through the fog and the next bunch of leaves and fruit came into resolve: marionberries, the prickly vines heaped up over a sagging trellis. Standing there, eating plump berries, he wondered what else they’d need to buy. He’d heard that lots of baby stuff simply materialized either as gifts from relatives or from a network of mothers—their instinct smelling a coming