Valley Fever (33 page)

“I'm not you,” I said to Bootsie. “I'm antisocial.”

“No one thinks that but you.”

There were two phone calls from Uncle Felix, offering me the same work I did for Dad—managing vineyards, essentially. When Felix called, I let the phone go to voice mail.

“It's just business,” Dad said when Felix's name came up. “He did what people do in business.”

“That's not what people do in business, it's what he does.”

Dad's kind laugh had the wobble of regret. “It's just business, Inky.”

“I want to work with you,” I said. “I think we should continue working together.”

He smiled. I sat on the edge of his bed. The files from the office were still piled beside him. “We have nothing left to do,” he said.

“We have a hundred acres.”

It's so easy, even for someone as humble as Dad, to forget what you started with.

“Farming isn't the same now as it was then,” he warned me. “A hundred acres is less now.”

(“A lot less,” Anne would say.)

“But your acres are good acres,” I reminded him. Good acres come with their own water. Good ground has no stones in the soil. The dirt is soft and fragrant. Good acres couldn't help but be fertile.

“It's just business,” Dad said when he heard through Bint Masterson at the club that Felix had bought every acre of Dad's land, the grapes along the river and the peaches and nectarines farther to the east. “It's not personal.”

*   *   *

Half the cabernet hung through the fall and dried on the vine. Cabernet grapes taste delicious as raisins, but no one buys them. They're small like currants, and no one buys currants anymore, either. Elliot came by to pick some, filling a box with them, and Bootsie made cabernet-raisin ice cream at the restaurant all winter. The grape leaves turned orange and then brown and then fell off and carpeted the rows. Uncle Felix hired most of Dad's crew at much less than what Dad had been paying them. That winter, they shaped and pruned the trees, tied the vines, sprayed their dormant sprays, made the repairs to stakes and crossarms that Dad couldn't afford to make the winter before.

Without being asked to, or discussing it with anyone, Mother started packing her china in bubble wrap, as if packing china in bubble wrap was her hobby, something she did to pass the time, like solitaire. “We don't use it,” she said. “We can go to Anne's for Christmas.”

“Annie wants us for Christmas?”

“When was the last time you spoke to your sister?” Lately Mother's voice had become quick and hard.

“I guess we didn't talk about Christmas.”

“It's time to talk about Christmas,” Mother said. She had lined her shoulders with little slips of wrapping tape so that she could easily pick a piece off and use it to secure the bubbles around a teacup. This was also, incidentally, her method for wrapping presents. “I think we should get the hell out of here.”

“Annie doesn't even have a dining table.”

“Yes she does.”

“Well, chairs, then. I can't remember what Charlie took, but he took part of the dining room.”

“He left the crystal.”

“Yes.” I remembered that, too.

“We can find chairs to sit on,” Mother said. “I mean, God, are things that bad?”

By Christmas Dad was too sick to go to Anne's. Uncle Felix offered to fly us all to LAX in the helicopter, but Mother would no longer take favors from Uncle Felix. “It's bad enough Dad takes his calls,” she said.

“Anyone would have done what he did,” Dad continued to say.

No one believed this but Dad.

Anne came to Fresno and we ate Christmas dinner on Mother's casual red holiday plates. Anne made a crown roast and we did the stuffing from scratch, cutting the bread into cubes and toasting them in the oven, shredding fresh herbs. We were a family of orphans, it seemed, with no Uncle Felix and no Aunt Jane and not even silly Wilson to ruin the holiday. Bootsie came, with Elliot and with her brother—three more orphans—and brought sticky toffee pudding and custard for dessert.

 

26.

“I was too late.”

“For what?”

“I've been too late for everything my whole life. But for this especially. Like a couple of years too late.”

“Your dad thinks you're a Communist.”

“Dad and I don't talk about politics,” I said. “He thinks I'm a Communist because I won't speak to Uncle Felix.”

George tapped his cigarette on the bar. After Bootsie's customers at the front table were gone, she would lock the door and we could smoke with our drinks. George could smoke. Bootsie had stopped smoking once she began to develop a big basketball tummy. I tapped the glass ashtray on the bar.

“Stop,” George said, resting his hand on mine. “You're making me nervous.”

It was New Year's Eve. Bootsie wanted to get everyone out by ten, over to Lorenzo's, where they were handing out free tiny glasses of champagne, but there was this one couple by the window too happy with each other to leave. Bootsie had retired to her office in the back. Elliot had left me and George to watch over the restaurant while he and Boots tallied up the tabs for the night.

“It turns out I'm the kind of girl your mother wouldn't even let you marry,” I said. “That is what we call, in the business, irony.”

“In my business, we call that tragedy,” George said. His kind laugh was so much like Dad's.

“Well.” I clanked the ashtray on the bar.

“I like being the rich one,” he said. “Why don't you write the thrillers and I'll grow the pistachios.”

“I want to grow grapes,” I said. “Why is everyone so resistant to this idea? There are a hundred acres of Thompsons already planted, right on the river, beautifully maintained.”

“I'm not resistant.”

“Yes, you and everyone.” I ran my hand over my hair and smoothed down what was left of my bangs. After Christmas, Anne and I had driven up to San Francisco for the day, and she dragged me to Warren-Lion and I had my hair chopped off like Mia Farrow in
Rosemary's Baby
. I should have done it at the beginning of the summer. “Also, you're not rich,” I told him.

“At least four times richer than you are,” he said.

When I went to tuck my hair behind my ear, there was no hair to tuck. “What's wrong with staying here?”

“Nothing.” He went back to tapping his cigarette. “I don't know if I can believe you'll stay.”

“A hundred acres,” I said. “That sounds like a lot.”

“It's a lot to start with,” he said. “But that's not going to maintain the house and the business both. You have to live like a pauper.”

“I am a pauper,” I said.

“But your parents aren't.”

“No.”

“They'll figure it out,” George said. George did not need to say what everyone knew, which was that a family does not sell the hundred acres a family's three previous generations had managed to collect.

I had consumed a bottle of champagne over the course of a few hours. “I don't know why you don't want to bite me,” I said.

He laughed again and turned his bar stool right toward me. “Ingrid Palamede, you are absolutely not going to break my heart twice.”

“Break your heart?” I looked over to the people at the window. “Just light your cigarette,” I said to George, which he did. “Break your heart,” I said.

“I'm not doing that again,” he said.

“I didn't ask you to do anything.”

Elliot emerged from the office. “George, the cigarette,” he said. He looked toward the couple at the window, the stupidly happy couple. “Do you guys want to join us at the bar?” he said. “We're closing.”

“Ingrid wants to make raisins,” George told Elliot, stamping out the fresh Marlboro.

“Table grapes,” I said. “For tables.”

Bootsie appeared and ambled over to the couple at the window. She spoke softly and sweetly. The couple left, smiling with Bootsie until she clicked the lock to the front door behind them. Bootsie turned back to us. “You know why Ingrid cut her hair?” she said. She took a pack of cigarettes from behind the bar and tossed them toward George, a gift.

“Why?” George said.

“I'm asking you,” said Bootsie.

“Why,” said George.

“Because she decided to be about twenty times hotter than she used to be.”

“The hair,” I said. “It had to go.”

“A lot of change,” Elliot said.

“Change in the hair,” said Bootsie. “Ha ha.”

“You're different,” George said. “You can't help but be different somehow, after the year you had.” He smoothed down my hair at the bottom, where it curled into tendrils and my neck was newly exposed. “The new hair suits this different you,” he said. “You look crazy beautiful.”

“Don't say those things to me,” I said. “You're confusing.”

Elliot and George and I drank a pink Guy Larmandier champagne and Bootsie assembled crostini from what was left in the kitchen. We didn't do a countdown, we told high school stories and Elliot listened, and we didn't notice when the old year slipped into the new.

*   *   *

We decided to cultivate the Thompsons, and to pick them by hand. We partnered with Sarkisian to package the kind of grapes so lovely they had to be sold in a box, one triangular bunch at a time. The Thompsons would give us enough money to keep Miguel employed, although Miguel could have had any management job in the valley.

“I don't want any job,” he said. “I want to collect the eggs.”

Marianela said, “I collect the eggs. You must work elsewhere.”

Above all, Miguel wanted to keep his home and his lifestyle and to take weekends off to see his daughter play soccer.

Miguel and I farmed the hundred acres ourselves, seventeen hours a day, and hired Carlo to help us. None of the people who knew Dad well wanted to work for anyone else. Miguel and Dad and I would split the profits evenly, if there were profits.

*   *   *

“Are we making a living?” Mother asked that spring, over and over. “Are we making a living? How do we live?” This was in March, about the time of bud break. “How do we live?”

Dad's health got worse, would only get worse for a long time. He wouldn't speak much about what had happened that season, and stubbornly refused to place blame on Felix. “Failure is annoying,” he said once that winter, after the trip to the bank.

“What failure?” I said. “Whose failure?”

“It only could have been worse if I'd lost the original land.”

Dad would spend the rest of his life mistakenly believing he wasn't the greatest of the great farmers.

By June, Mother had taken paintings off the walls, packed all the books into boxes, and sent the dining table and its twelve chairs to a consignment shop. She began talking about a new condo development by the club; she had seen units with open kitchens and glossy wood floors and walls of glass that retracted entirely with the touch of a button. “Won't it be better to have a small house?” she said. “Won't it be better to have new appliances and a warming drawer beside the sink? Wait until you see how tall these refrigerators are.”

All I wanted to do was trim vines and watch them mature. I wanted to measure water and weigh brush. I loved my hands all rough from plants and dirt. I loved the focus and exhaustion of real work.

“Are we making a living?” she asked as she browned vermicelli for pilaf, as she folded Dad's undershirts, as she swept orange dust from the kitchen floors at the house on the river.

“Yes,” I would say, although I didn't yet know. “Yes, we're making plenty,” I promised, and then a while later she would ask again.

“How will we be the same?” she asked.

“You're not the same,” I said. “You don't need to be the same.”

Dad continued to rent the harvesters and pickers and tractors and every other machine, but neither he nor I knew exactly how to force people to pay us. All that winter and spring and well into June, I made phone calls to farmers who never did pay us for the rentals from the fall, even after my stupidly cheap deals.

I kept thinking of that happy Mr. Singh driving away from the warehouse in one of Dad's machines, waving to me from Avenue 7.

In the summer I drove to the mini-malls of the Central Valley and sold beautifully bunched grapes to restaurants and specialty shops around town. What I didn't sell at a premium would be packaged by Sarkisian. My grapes were full and perfect, as I had known they would be; even the stems were plump and green. They tasted purely sweet and even, no bitterness. The skins were taut and light and seemed to dissolve in your mouth with the meat of the grape. I sold some to the Vineyard, and soon after I got calls from grocers in Madera and Merced asking for my prices.

Growers all over the valley were pulling out their Thompsons and planting almonds, pistachios, walnuts. There had been more and more instances—not just us—of grapes being left in the field; nuts were more reliable. That first year of my own Thompsons, demand was high. Sarkisian paid me an unprecedented five hundred dollars a ton for those grapes.

At the end of that summer, when Mother and Dad sold the house on the river, I rented a two-bedroom Craftsman in the Tower District, just a few blocks from Lorenzo's. I unpacked my books for the first time in a long time. I bought a silly-expensive Scandinavian down comforter and cool, thick linen sheets. Mother had no room in their new condo for Grandmother's Metlox plates with the vines along the edges, so I took them with me.

We were making a living. George came by the vineyard almost daily to cheer me on. Dad kept good books on one hundred acres, just as he had watched his father do. I needed advice from no one but Dad and Miguel. George, too. George knew things about human beings that my father and Miguel had ignored while paying attention to soil and plants.