Delta Girls (16 page)

“You should probably stay off the ladder,” I told Abcde as we joined the crew in the field. “Your center of gravity is low.”

“Goddess hips,” she said, nodding. She stared up at the tree and took a deep breath, steeling herself for the work.

I cranked my ladder open. I was glad to climb up it, to be able to look down upon her fuzzy, befuddled head. Everything always felt more manageable from high up in the air.

———

ABCDE SURVIVED THE
morning shift a little worse for wear—some of the scratches on her arms looked fierce and swollen and she was clearly exhausted—but to her credit, she didn’t complain. When lunchtime came around, Quinn and I went off for our own picnic, as usual, but Abcde chose to stay and eat with the other workers.

I spied on them later, after I left one of the porta-potties in the middle of the orchard. From behind a tree, I could see Abcde sitting on the ground with the pickers and sorters. They were heating flour tortillas over a small fire they had made with old pear branches between two rows of trees. Blisters and brown spots broke out over the pale discs like some sort of disease, but the toasty scent made my mouth wet. Everyone was laughing and speaking in Spanish, including Abcde, as they spooned beans from a plastic container onto the tortillas, drizzled on salsa from another container. I hid behind a tree and watched. I wished I understood more Spanish; I was familiar with a few words like
ándale
and
más
—“faster,” “more”—words I heard every day in the orchards, but I never would have been able to join a conversation like Abcde. Her Australian accent made Spanish sound like a new language entirely, but everyone seemed to be able to understand her. I wondered if she spoke alphabetically in more than one language.

The Vieiras weren’t around the fire, but when they spoke Spanish, it sounded different, too. The Portuguese pronunciation was more nasal, their vowels longer; a few of their words were different. When they were with the workers, though, everyone still understood each other. Even the ones who spoke Mixtec, Mayan, Zapotec at home. Quinn and I were the odd men out as far as Spanish was concerned.

“Hey, what are you doing back there?” yelled Abcde. I hadn’t done as good a job of camouflaging myself as I had hoped.

A couple of sorter women yelled and gestured for me to join them. Most of the men glanced over at me, then looked away.

“No, it’s okay,” I said with a wave, and went back to join Quinn and our lunch of cheese and crackers and pear preserves.

“DO YOU WANT
to hear one of my poems?” Abcde asked later, after we were back to picking.

“Sure,” I said, even though I didn’t, not really.

“I have one about fruit,” she said. “That would be most appropriate, given the setting.” She stood still for a moment, took a deep breath, then recited the poem from memory:

My mouth watered in spite of itself.

“Do you have more?” asked Quinn, who was sitting beneath the tree doing word problems.

“Hundreds,” said Abcde.

I started picking faster; it was clear she wasn’t going to start working again anytime soon.

“Can I hear another one?” Quinn stood, as if to hear the poetry more clearly.

“Coming up.” Abcde took another deep breath and intoned:

“That one?” I glared at her. “Not so appropriate.”

“You used ‘x-tasy’ twice,” said Quinn, unfazed.

“More times than that.” Abcde winked at me and I felt a little sick. “X is a big challenge—there’s only so much you can do with it.”

“Xylophone,” said Quinn. “Xerxes.”

“Not always easy to fit those in a poem.” She was smiling.

“A Big Challenge,” Quinn said.

“You better get back to work,” I said to both of them. The foreman was walking toward us. Rather than chew Abcde out for not picking, though, he said something in Spanish that made her laugh, and she said something that made him laugh in return. He patted her on the shoulder and she started to gather pears again in her awkward, plodding way.

“YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE
the stories these guys have,” said Abcde after the foreman was out of sight. “What they have to go through just to get here.”

“I want to know,” said Quinn, and Abcde began to give us the litany, thankfully not in alphabetical order.

Jorge had five children. He made enough during the harvest to live comfortably with his family the rest of the year in Guatemala. Back home, he was a carpenter and musician, but he couldn’t find enough work to make ends meet.

Hector came from Michoacán to look for his father, who had left to find work over the border and disappeared. He never found his father but he did find plenty of work. He hoped to bring his mother and sister up soon.

Tomas carved birds out of fallen pear wood. He sent them back to his family in El Salvador, who sold them to tourists at marketplaces.

Vincent had a wife in Jalisco but also had two children with Estrella, one of the sorters.

Several of the sorters were from the Delta area, daughters of former pickers. Most of the men had come from somewhere else; a few of the women had, too.

Gertrudis’s husband was ill with pancreatic cancer; she crossed the border to find work so they could afford his medical bills. She hoped to bring him across for better treatment when he was up to the journey.

Evalina came because her parents had wanted a better future for her, their only child.

They came hidden under onions, under rice, under piles of blankets. They came stuffed into the trunks of cars, packed into the backs of trucks, holding on for dear life atop speeding boxcars. They came through guard dogs and sirens, rivers that rose up to their ribs. They came through desert, through blisters and dehydration and hunger. Some of them had to try two, three, four times, before they made it across the border. Some of them had Social Security cards of those who had come before, who had become legal but had to go back home; some of them had fake cards; some had the cards of dead men and women. Some had worked at farms where there were no porta-potties, no drinking water. Where they were beaten. Some knew people who had died of heatstroke in the fields. Some had worked for farmers who docked so much of their paycheck for food and housing, they had nothing left to send home to their relatives. Some had worked for farmers where no housing was offered, so they slept behind bushes on flattened cardboard boxes. The Vieiras’ horse stable was the cushiest place some of them had lived this side of the border. Some were legal but had been detained anyway, sent to a center where no one read them their rights, where they weren’t allowed to make any phone calls, where they were let go after two months and no one told them why they were released, why they were even held to begin with.

“We’re lucky, aren’t we, Eema?” Quinn had abandoned her
word problems in the face of these bigger, more human problems. If a train leaves Oaxaca at fifty miles an hour, how many people will still be on top by the time it reaches Nogales?

For all the nights we had to sleep in our car, for all the uncertainty and confusion of our lives, we were a lot luckier than I had let myself realize. “That we are, sweetheart,” I said. When I looked at the men a few rows away, picking their hearts out, I felt a wave of admiration, a wave that felt very much like love. I found myself wanting to climb all their ladders, give them all hugs, tell each of them how glad I was they were there.

D
EENA TOOK KAREN AND NATHAN OUT TO DINNER TO
celebrate their second-place finish. A supper club that had been around for a while, with curved red leather banquettes and flickering chandeliers and a guy in a tux playing frantic classical music on a shiny black baby grand. She even let Karen order whatever she wanted, although she told the waiter “No, thank you” when he brought over a basket of rolls, insisted on vinegar only on the salad, cut the fat off the edge of Karen’s steak, and let her eat only a fraction of her buttery mashed potatoes.

“Here’s to Nationals.” Deena raised her glass of champagne and clinked Nathan’s flute before tapping it against Karen’s glass of diet ginger ale. “Hell, here’s to the Olympics in a year!”

People at a few tables around them clapped politely. Deena beamed in her black strapless dress like some sort of beauty queen. She had given Karen a new dress for the occasion, too—a sundress, smocked at the top, yellow with tiny little flowers, like something a five-year-old would wear. Karen tried to put the competition smile back on her face.

“I have a proposal, Mr. Main,” said Deena after everyone around them had turned back to their own conversations. “I think you should move in with us.” She swatted Nathan’s leg with a napkin.

Karen couldn’t imagine Nathan living across the hall. The thought made the mashed potatoes rise up in her throat.

“You won’t have to worry about rent,” said Deena. “And it will be easier for the two of you to train.” Deena was just about done turning the garage into a Pilates/dance studio, complete with mirrored walls, a ballet barre, and a harness for practicing jumps. It made Karen feel a little claustrophobic to think that she could do everything but skate without leaving her house. And her mom had even been looking into artificial rink surfaces for the backyard.

“We could train all night long.” Nathan met Karen’s eyes, but she quickly looked away, blushing.

“Now, now.” Deena swatted Nathan’s leg again, this time with her hand. Karen was dismayed to see her mom’s breasts jiggle in reverberation, even more dismayed to see how much Nathan seemed to enjoy the sight. Karen’s own breasts were pressed even flatter than normal by her dress; the smocking dug uncomfortably into her nipples, already chafed from the adhesive.

“This is what we’ve been working toward, sweetheart.” Deena cupped Karen’s face with her hands and Karen felt a sudden, unexpected rush of love for her mother.

“Thank God you didn’t find a way to screw it up,” said Nathan. Karen slumped back against the booth as Deena and Nathan clinked champagne flutes once again.

THE HOUSE FELT
different with Nathan in it. His male scent seeped into the furniture, sent its musky pheromones into the air.

Karen found herself wishing they had a cooler house—something sleek and modern, full of sharp edges. Not a stodgy
Cape Cod with pleated lampshades, etchings of hunt scenes and carriage rides, her great-grandmother’s dishes displayed in the china cabinet. The guest room with its chenille bedspread and fleur-de-lis wallpaper didn’t feel like the right place to keep Nathan. He should have a leather headboard, dark walls, recessed lighting. He should have satin pillowcases, strange metal sculptures, a bear skin on the floor. Still, she liked to poke her head into the room when he was downstairs to see his clothes shucked all over the rag rug, breathe in his mix of sweat and cologne and hair gel.

She found herself keeping her own bedroom door closed, only coming out if she was fully made up, wearing something other than ratty pajamas. She chewed breath mints before going out to brush her teeth in case they crossed paths in the hallway. She found herself posing when he walked into a room, trying to look studiously, sexily casual when she felt anything but, her leg draped over the arm of a chair as she read
Jane Eyre
, her bottom raised just a little as she lay on the floor, doing math problems. She found herself sitting across the breakfast table from him at 3 a.m., both still groggy over their egg white omelets, and thinking
This is what it would be like if we were married
. Sometimes she wondered if he thought the same thing when his eyes met hers and he winked, when he ruffled her hair as he walked by, when he chose to come home with her after their evening skate session rather than disappear to wherever he disappeared to at night.

Deena seemed more “on” with Nathan around, too, wearing high-heeled slippers with her cashmere robe, touching his shoulder as she walked past him. At least her mom and Nathan seemed to get on each other’s nerves. Deena was putting together a new short program for them, a jaunty one to “If My Friends Could See Me Now” from
Sweet Charity
, and she could often hear the two of them arguing over the choreography as she finished up her homework for the night. They were keeping
Tristan und Isolde
as their free skate—“no need to mess with perfection,” Deena had
said after they received 6.0s at Sectionals—but their synthesized hip shaking had, in Deena’s words, grown stale.

“I don’t think anyone’s buying it,” Karen heard Deena say to Nathan. “She doesn’t have the right oomph in her hips.”