The Hungry Season (3 page)
Authors: T. Greenwood
M
ena wishes she had the ingredients to make a real dinner, but she only has the things she bought at Hudson’s and some nonperishables she brought from California. She finds a jar of organic spaghetti sauce and some whole wheat pasta in a box. But she doesn’t even have an onion, garlic. The dusty tin of oregano she finds in the cupboard has lost its potency.
ena wishes she had the ingredients to make a real dinner, but she only has the things she bought at Hudson’s and some nonperishables she brought from California. She finds a jar of organic spaghetti sauce and some whole wheat pasta in a box. But she doesn’t even have an onion, garlic. The dusty tin of oregano she finds in the cupboard has lost its potency.
She can’t see Finn from the kitchen, and this makes her nervous. She feels the same way she did when he and Franny were little. In San Diego, she never let them go outside alone. Not after that string of abductions: little kids snatched right out of their own front yards—the one girl who was abducted when her mother went inside for sunscreen. Mena would bring whatever she was doing outside with her as they played in the sprinkler or in their playhouse: her reading, her knitting, the bills. If she had to go inside for something, they came with her. After the twins were born, the world became dangerous; it seemed that there was always someone waiting, lurking, ready to steal your life out from under you. Mena used to be afraid of how other people might harm her children. She was worried, then, about strangers.
One of the reasons she first loved the lake was because it was the one place where that insidious anxiety would disappear. She, like Sam, had grown up fearless, free. In Flagstaff, she played in the woods alone, took long bike rides without bothering to tell her mother where she was going or when she’d be home. Coming to the lake was like returning to the world of her childhood. At first, the twins were skeptical of this new freedom. Mena remembers the first time Franny took a bike ride by herself, looking back over her shoulder, wary, as she pedaled away from the cottage. And then the furious and joyful way she disappeared down the winding dirt road that led around the lake.
As the water heats in the large pot, Mena goes to the main room where the smudged windows look out over the water. She can see Finn at the shore. He’s smoking a cigarette. She doesn’t know when he started being so brazen. He probably figures he’s got nothing left to lose. In a way, she can understand this. The smoke from his cigarette curls up into the air as the sun sets. She watches him, his slouchy stance, his hair a mop of white blond curls.
Finny. My little boy.
She wants to believe it was a good idea to come here.
Finny. My little boy.
She wants to believe it was a good idea to come here.
When she hears the oil crackling in the pan, she leaves the window and returns to the kitchen. Sam has brought in the box she packed with the spices and staples she knew she would never be able to find here:
Attiki honey, Kalas sea salt, mastiha.
In the morning she will go into town. There’s a Shop’n Save in Quimby, but they probably won’t have the ingredients she needs:
Vine leaves, filo, anthotiro cheese.
She’ll need to order those items. The Athenaeum probably has a computer—there must be someone, somewhere, who can ship her
tarama.
Suddenly she feels disconnected from the entire world. Did she feel this way when they came here before?
Attiki honey, Kalas sea salt, mastiha.
In the morning she will go into town. There’s a Shop’n Save in Quimby, but they probably won’t have the ingredients she needs:
Vine leaves, filo, anthotiro cheese.
She’ll need to order those items. The Athenaeum probably has a computer—there must be someone, somewhere, who can ship her
tarama.
Suddenly she feels disconnected from the entire world. Did she feel this way when they came here before?
She cracks the fistful of pasta in half so that it will fit in the small pot of boiling water. She can’t find the colander; she’ll need to use the lid to drain the water. She pours the sauce over the pasta and dumps everything into a giant bowl. She feels awful about this dinner. No salad, no
bread
. God, she hopes Sam packed a bottle of wine. Remembering the six-pack of beer from Hudson’s, she goes to the refrigerator and grabs one. It is cold and good.
bread
. God, she hopes Sam packed a bottle of wine. Remembering the six-pack of beer from Hudson’s, she goes to the refrigerator and grabs one. It is cold and good.
She clears the long wooden table that separates the kitchen from the living room, grabs four plates from a box and unwraps them from their Bubble Wrap. She circles the table, setting. She digs through another box for four forks, four knives, four spoons. Napkins. Glasses. She arranges the table and then steps back. And then, that choking feeling, the suffocation that comes every single time she forgets. It’s been seven months; how can she keep making this same mistake?
She glances quickly up to the loft where Sam is shuffling around and then out the window at Finn, who is making his way back to the cottage, his hands shoved into his pockets, kicking at the ground. She hurries to the table before anyone can see, and pulls the extra setting from the table. She sits down at the vacant place and closes her eyes, imagines Franny and swallows hard, past the terrible swelling in her throat.
“Dinner!” she says, brushing at the tears in her eyes.
F
inn says he’s not hungry, and he knows this hurts her. He finds himself doing things to hurt her all the time lately. It feels good, and then it feels like shit. He leaves them sitting at the table with not just one, but two empty spaces.
inn says he’s not hungry, and he knows this hurts her. He finds himself doing things to hurt her all the time lately. It feels good, and then it feels like shit. He leaves them sitting at the table with not just one, but two empty spaces.
They told him that he could pick whichever bedroom he wanted. This concession was supposed to make up for them dragging his ass all the way across the country for the summer.
Well, thanks,
he thinks.
That makes up for everything.
He thought about taking his parents’ room, leaving them with the one that he and Franny used to share, but he knew that this was a cruelty that not even he was capable of. And so he drags his duffel bag into the room at the back of the cottage, the one with the small window and the awful peeling fake wood paneling. The last time they were here, he and Franny had peeled one whole panel off, written their names on the battered wall behind it with a Sharpie.
Well, thanks,
he thinks.
That makes up for everything.
He thought about taking his parents’ room, leaving them with the one that he and Franny used to share, but he knew that this was a cruelty that not even he was capable of. And so he drags his duffel bag into the room at the back of the cottage, the one with the small window and the awful peeling fake wood paneling. The last time they were here, he and Franny had peeled one whole panel off, written their names on the battered wall behind it with a Sharpie.
The last time they were here. God, he was still just a little kid then. Twelve seems so far away now. He remembers that at the beginning of that summer he’d fallen off his bike in Jimmy Goldstein’s driveway, and that his knees were raw. Every time he bent them, the scabs cracked open. He hadn’t been able to go surfing afterward, because the salt water made his knees feel like they were on fire. He’d been so happy to get to the lake that summer that he ripped off his clothes as soon as they got out of the car, ran down the path to the dock and threw himself into the water. It had stung too, but only from the cold.
In the house in San Diego, in the house they left behind, Franny and Finn each had their own room. Finn’s room was painted a midnight blue, one entire wall papered with a topographical map of Southern California. He’d used those little pushpin flags to mark every beach he’d surfed: from Encinitas to Baja. Someday he’d go to Costa Rica, Australia, Brazil. Both bedrooms had a view of the beach, though Finn’s was actually a little better.They each had a twin bed. Franny’s was unadorned (none of the stuffed animals or frilly pillows you’d expect of a typical teenage girl), but it was always made. Finn’s, on the other hand, was a catchall, a chaotic mess of blankets and books and whatever else hadn’t fallen to the floor. The sheets on Finn’s bed were the same ones he’d had since he was little, patterned with cowboys and Indians, threadbare but so soft they were mildly pornographic. The Patagonia blanket was also time-worn—something one of Finn’s father’s fans from the Northwest had sent.
Finn’s walls at home were riddled with thumbtack holes. He never bothered to try to put up posters in the same spot when he took the old ones down. He was restless in that room, the holes a testament to his inability to settle on anything, not even a picture on the wall. He must have had a thousand CDs, most of them stacked up in teetering piles on his bureau. His musical taste was also fickle. He was the kind of kid who could never name his favorite color, his favorite food, his favorite anything. Franny, on the other hand, was resolute. She had chosen red as her favorite crayon from the time she knew the names of the colors. She’d picked it and stuck with it. It was the same thing with favorite food (sushi), music (Tchaikovsky, Billie Holiday, Coldplay) and old movie stars (Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck). When she decided on ballet at six years old, their father had installed a barre along one long wall. Franny’s room was an exercise in certainty while Finn’s was a wasteland of abandoned interests.
Their mother said that when they were babies, they would start out at opposite ends of their shared crib every night, but by morning they would be nose to toe, like two little slugs curled into each other.When they were little, Finn never woke up without Franny’s breath being the first thing he smelled. Before coffee, before bacon, there was always the musty sleepy smell of Franny. Of course, they eventually got too old for that, but sometimes Finn missed the way it felt waking up next to his sister. Sometimes he’d wake up and knock on their shared wall just to make sure she was still there, on the other side. His four quiet taps echoed by four more; she always answered back.
He lifts the heavy moth-eaten quilt off the bare mattress and grabs the new package of sheets that his mother has left on a wicker chair by the window. He rips open the package, which are crisp and unyielding. He makes the bed and curls up inside the covers. He can hear the clanking of glasses and silverware, the distant sound of the radio. Quietly, he reaches for himself, closes his eyes and thinks about Misty. About Heidi Klum. About the girl he saw at the gas station somewhere around Little Rock. Afterward, he’s spent and hungry.
“We saved you some.” Mena smiles and motions for him to sit at the table with them. “Come sit.”
He sits down and shovels the pasta into his mouth without speaking. She’s the best cook; even lame old spaghetti tastes amazing. But he doesn’t tell her this. He just eats until his stomach feels full and then drinks a glass of milk in one big gulp. He’s got a bag of weed hidden inside his tennis shoe, and he wonders if he’ll be able to smoke some after they go to bed.
“So here we are,” his father says, forcing a smile.
“Yup,” Finn says. “Back in Butt Fuck Nowhere, U. S. of A.”
“Mouth,”
his father says.
his father says.
“Does anybody want dessert?” Mena asks. Her eyes are brimming with tears. “There are still some blood oranges in the cooler.”
Later, with the window cracked open, Finn rolls a joint and listens to the sound of the paper crackling, feels the sweet smoke fill his lungs. He closes his eyes, holds his breath. He can barely sleep without dope anymore. He doesn’t remember the last time he slept through a whole night without smoking. And even when he does, he almost always wakes up after only a few hours, sweating and panicked.
Tonight when sleep finally comes, he dreams about surfing. He’s at the Cove in La Jolla, by himself, about a hundred yards out, just sitting on his board, waiting. He can hear the seals at the Children’s Pool, barking.
Hey,
she says.
Here comes a big one.
He looks left and then right, sees Franny paddling out to him.
Ready?
she asks, and then the wave comes.
Hey,
she says.
Here comes a big one.
He looks left and then right, sees Franny paddling out to him.
Ready?
she asks, and then the wave comes.
T
he dream is always the same: a table. The curvature of a tarnished spoon in her hand as Dale sips from a white bowl of thick soup.There is wine, both red and white, glasses reflecting the light that emanates from a thick candle dripping wax onto the rough wooden table. There are faces illuminated by the candlelight, laughter, and music, scratchy from an old record in the background. He is sitting next to her (he is always sitting next to her) and the heat of his presence flickers like the heat of the candle. The soup is the best soup she has ever tasted. She cannot get enough; she wants to lift the bowl to her face like a child and drink and drink and drink. There is bread too, crusty sourdough, creamy butter smoothed across its surface. She dips the bread into the soup and puts it to her lips. “Is it good?” he asks, and for the first time she turns away from the feast to look at him. He is smiling, though his eyebrows are raised, waiting for her answer. She looks at the other faces, and they are waiting for her approval too. The woman. The boy. Even the girl, whose face is merely a shadow. A shadow of a shadow. “Is it good?” he repeats, and covers her free hand with his own. She feels his warm skin touching hers. She nods and whispers, “Yes.” All of the faces smile. “It’s delicious.”
he dream is always the same: a table. The curvature of a tarnished spoon in her hand as Dale sips from a white bowl of thick soup.There is wine, both red and white, glasses reflecting the light that emanates from a thick candle dripping wax onto the rough wooden table. There are faces illuminated by the candlelight, laughter, and music, scratchy from an old record in the background. He is sitting next to her (he is always sitting next to her) and the heat of his presence flickers like the heat of the candle. The soup is the best soup she has ever tasted. She cannot get enough; she wants to lift the bowl to her face like a child and drink and drink and drink. There is bread too, crusty sourdough, creamy butter smoothed across its surface. She dips the bread into the soup and puts it to her lips. “Is it good?” he asks, and for the first time she turns away from the feast to look at him. He is smiling, though his eyebrows are raised, waiting for her answer. She looks at the other faces, and they are waiting for her approval too. The woman. The boy. Even the girl, whose face is merely a shadow. A shadow of a shadow. “Is it good?” he repeats, and covers her free hand with his own. She feels his warm skin touching hers. She nods and whispers, “Yes.” All of the faces smile. “It’s delicious.”
Dale Edwards awakens from the dream as she always does, hot and buzzing. She sits up in bed and squints at her clock. It is only seven. She can hear her mother in the kitchen, smell her cooking. Dale’s sense of smell is acute, as if she were an animal, able to discern even the subtle nuances of scent. Today there will be ham steaks pink as babies, fried eggs and frozen crinkled French fries sprinkled with Old Bay seasoning. Since classes let out in May, Dale has awoken to a rotating variety of pungent breakfast aromas, all underscored by the minty scent of her mother’s Kools and weak coffee, heightened by the heat of another Phoenix summer with only a swamp cooler to keep them cool. Her skin is constantly, constantly too hot. Dale had registered for eight o’clock classes every day that spring, managing to avoid the inevitable olfactory by-product of her mother’s cooking and the skin-prickling heat of that house, escaping into the cold classrooms at school. But now she has nowhere to go in the mornings, and the smells and the heat are like a daily assault.
Dale gets out of bed, rubs her hand across her cheek. The deep slumber that comes from her mother’s pilfered sleeping pills inevitably results in a thick crust of saliva trailing from either corner of her mouth to her chin by morning. It is disgusting, she knows, but still. The dream came the first time she took one of the pills, and now she senses that without them she will likely lose the dream, and this is an idea she cannot bear. And besides, without the pills, she is awake all night, her mind racing. Tripping and stumbling over itself in the heat.
She grabs her glasses from her nightstand and vision is restored, making clear all that was hazy. This room, her childhood room, is unchanged in all these years. Pink canopy bed, white painted furniture. Posters of ponies and unicorns and boys who have long since grown into men. She grew up in this room, lived here all through junior college and then left for a while when she got into ASU. She rented a shabby little apartment on campus, but it was too hard. The money, the worry. Her mother needs her. This is the real reason she stays. Because as much as her mother complains (about the extra laundry, the extra groceries, the extra mess), Dale knows that without her, she might finally fall apart.
She keeps telling herself that it’s not her responsibility to keep her mother from going off the deep end, that no twenty-four-year-old woman should be strapped with such a burden. That her needs should come first. And lately, she has so many needs. She can feel the want somewhere at the base of her spine, her whole body yearning for something she can’t articulate. It’s like an itch she can’t locate to scratch.
Dale leaves her computer on all night long; she likes the quiet hum and clicks. If she listens closely, there’s a certain pattern to them, some sort of electric lullaby at work. And when she isn’t able to sleep, the computer is ready and waiting for her. She should be working on the one class she didn’t quite finish last semester. She’d talked her professor into giving her an Incomplete so that she could finish the paper on Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein.
She’d started but quickly became sidetracked. This was a problem she knew she had, and not just at school. She was going into her senior year and all she could think about was her senior thesis. It was the only thing that got her butt out of bed and to school every morning last semester. God, last semester, when everything slowed to a sort of puddly stillness. Thirteen weeks had seemed like thirteen years. Sometimes she thinks she’s like a record playing at the wrong speed: first too slow and then too fast. But she knew then and she knows now that she has to finish her junior year in order to get to her senior year, and then she’ll be free to work on the only project she really cares about. She knows she should just finish the stupid
Frankenstein
paper and e-mail it off to her professor. Take the D she knows it deserves. But she doesn’t care about the Romantics. She only cares about him.
Frankenstein.
She’d started but quickly became sidetracked. This was a problem she knew she had, and not just at school. She was going into her senior year and all she could think about was her senior thesis. It was the only thing that got her butt out of bed and to school every morning last semester. God, last semester, when everything slowed to a sort of puddly stillness. Thirteen weeks had seemed like thirteen years. Sometimes she thinks she’s like a record playing at the wrong speed: first too slow and then too fast. But she knew then and she knows now that she has to finish her junior year in order to get to her senior year, and then she’ll be free to work on the only project she really cares about. She knows she should just finish the stupid
Frankenstein
paper and e-mail it off to her professor. Take the D she knows it deserves. But she doesn’t care about the Romantics. She only cares about him.
So instead of writing, she searches eBay endlessly for artifacts. The key words are saved in the drop-down menu:
Mason, Samuel; Mason novels, The Hour of Lead, Small Sorrows, The Art of Hunting, Paper Rain.
She navigates the stuff for sale: first editions, signed hardcovers, movie posters, tattered scripts. She can’t help herself. She’s not sure exactly what she’s looking for, but she knows she’ll know it when she sees it. This is
research,
she justifies. So far she’s been pretty good ... just a rare signed first edition of his first novel. A review copy of his second. She knows if she’s going to follow through with her plans, she’s going to need to save her money. The temptation is there though. Just last week she bid $800 on one of his high school notebooks. The photos showed a black and white composition book, edges curled. Sam’s name on the cover. The photos of the notebook’s inside pages revealed the notes he’d taken during an English class. His doodles in the margins. And she had to have it. She’d sat rigid-backed at her desk, watching as the auction end time approached, waiting until the last two minutes before she entered her modest bid. But when she was instantly outbid, she suddenly felt that familiar urgency, a need so intense it spread to her tongue. She’d gotten up to $800 when her competitor bid $802 in the final seconds and she lost. She started getting dizzy then, realizing she’d been holding her breath the whole time. She has to be careful. She has to control herself.
Mason, Samuel; Mason novels, The Hour of Lead, Small Sorrows, The Art of Hunting, Paper Rain.
She navigates the stuff for sale: first editions, signed hardcovers, movie posters, tattered scripts. She can’t help herself. She’s not sure exactly what she’s looking for, but she knows she’ll know it when she sees it. This is
research,
she justifies. So far she’s been pretty good ... just a rare signed first edition of his first novel. A review copy of his second. She knows if she’s going to follow through with her plans, she’s going to need to save her money. The temptation is there though. Just last week she bid $800 on one of his high school notebooks. The photos showed a black and white composition book, edges curled. Sam’s name on the cover. The photos of the notebook’s inside pages revealed the notes he’d taken during an English class. His doodles in the margins. And she had to have it. She’d sat rigid-backed at her desk, watching as the auction end time approached, waiting until the last two minutes before she entered her modest bid. But when she was instantly outbid, she suddenly felt that familiar urgency, a need so intense it spread to her tongue. She’d gotten up to $800 when her competitor bid $802 in the final seconds and she lost. She started getting dizzy then, realizing she’d been holding her breath the whole time. She has to be careful. She has to control herself.
This morning, she exhausts each search quickly: no new items up for bid. So she moves to the Web site the publisher set up for Sam. It hasn’t changed in over two years now, not since his last novel came out. She looks at his serious face, his serious eyes. She clicks on the audio button and listens to Sam’s serious voice, the NPR interview she has almost memorized.
Is it good?
he asks. She closes her eyes and listens to the inflections in his voice, wonders at the pauses and spaces between the words. She listens for the sorrow that lurks under the surface. She hears it in his breaths.
Is it good?
he asks. She closes her eyes and listens to the inflections in his voice, wonders at the pauses and spaces between the words. She listens for the sorrow that lurks under the surface. She hears it in his breaths.
There are a zillion reviews but only a handful of news articles that appear when she searches his name on Google. One is an interview, from a decade back, archived on
The New York Times
site. Another is an article Sam wrote for
The New Yorker
about growing up as the child of a single father. This one brings tears to Dale’s eyes every time she reads it. The last one she finds is the small article in the
San Diego Union-Tribune,
published last October. This one, too, is unbearable.
The New York Times
site. Another is an article Sam wrote for
The New Yorker
about growing up as the child of a single father. This one brings tears to Dale’s eyes every time she reads it. The last one she finds is the small article in the
San Diego Union-Tribune,
published last October. This one, too, is unbearable.
While her mother eats, Dale stays inside her room, clicking away at her computer, searching, studying. She thinks of this project as a puzzle, the jigsaw pieces of a life scattered before her, waiting to be assembled. She proposed the thesis to her advisor at the end of the semester, but he was leery. He was leery of all living authors, as if literary value couldn’t possibly be determined until after death. It was here that the lie that set this all into motion was born. When she went from 33 to 78 rpm. Inside his messy office, Dale, feeling the same dizzy feeling she felt whenever she got really upset, blurted out, “I have an interview arranged.We’ve spoken, and he’s agreed to talk to me. About his daughter.”
The truth was that she hadn’t actually spoken to him, but she
had
been writing letters. And he’d written back. His first letter was just a quick note dashed off on a note card. But the one that came later was the letter that lived in her back pocket, the one whose paper was worn as soft as velvet from the constant friction against her jeans. It was the letter she’d read and reread so many times, she knew its contents by heart. Black ink, medium point pen. Careful cursive:
Dear Ms. Edwards, While I am certainly flattered that you have chosen to focus on my work for your project, I think a biography, as you describe it, would be premature at this time. I believe I have much more writing (and living) to do before anyone might find enough biographical information of interest to produce even a slim volume.
Though it frustrated her, she was touched by his modesty; he simply didn’t feel worthy of the attention. She kept sending letters, but he didn’t write back again. She knew she just needed to meet with him in person. Talk to him face to face, and then he might really open up.The longing traveled up the ladder of her spine and settled into the spot at the nape of her neck, throbbing. She had to go to him.
had
been writing letters. And he’d written back. His first letter was just a quick note dashed off on a note card. But the one that came later was the letter that lived in her back pocket, the one whose paper was worn as soft as velvet from the constant friction against her jeans. It was the letter she’d read and reread so many times, she knew its contents by heart. Black ink, medium point pen. Careful cursive:
Dear Ms. Edwards, While I am certainly flattered that you have chosen to focus on my work for your project, I think a biography, as you describe it, would be premature at this time. I believe I have much more writing (and living) to do before anyone might find enough biographical information of interest to produce even a slim volume.
Though it frustrated her, she was touched by his modesty; he simply didn’t feel worthy of the attention. She kept sending letters, but he didn’t write back again. She knew she just needed to meet with him in person. Talk to him face to face, and then he might really open up.The longing traveled up the ladder of her spine and settled into the spot at the nape of her neck, throbbing. She had to go to him.
Now, in her room, she waits for the scent of ham and potatoes and eggs to dissipate. For the telltale shuffle of her mother’s house slippers. For the “Come on down!” on
The Price Is Right.
For the whoosh and whir of the swamp cooler. And she looks for the clues in cyberspace that will tell her where to find him.
The Price Is Right.
For the whoosh and whir of the swamp cooler. And she looks for the clues in cyberspace that will tell her where to find him.
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