Valley Fever (8 page)

“I'm not used to having anyone else in the bathroom.”

As a child, I had been forbidden to come into this bathroom after once shattering a bottle of red nail polish on the white tile. Anne could enter the bathroom, but until I was thirteen, I had to stand outside the door. Then I went away to school, and when I stopped sleeping and returned for good, three years later, it was as if everyone had forgotten all the old rules. There were no forbidden rooms, no regulations on drinking or swearing or going to bed. When I came home from school, Mother and Dad didn't even bother with a curfew. George Sweet and I used to spend nights together in the studio apartment above his parents' garage, and no one ever questioned the lies I told as to where I'd been.

“What have you heard about George Sweet?” I said.

“George Sweet?”

“You know, what have you heard? What's the gossip?”

“Well, I think he got married.”

“Did he.”

“I think so. To the Prentiss girl. Prentiss Chevrolet.”

“I know Ellie Prentiss.”

“How do you know her?”

“We went to grade school together, Mother. She played soccer with me.” Ellie Prentiss was tall and wispy and could score on every penalty kick she took. She had a slow, dull voice in which I'd never heard her say anything useful. She went on to play center forward at Stanford. Her family owned car dealerships. She was popular—the kind of unthreateningly pretty girl who made mouth-breathing look attractive. I considered her an aggressive bore.

“I had heard he married the Prentiss girl, but I don't know. You know how the Prentisses are—they'd never want you to know if their daughter married one of the Sweet boys.” Mother tucked black-drenched cotton around her hair line, beneath the plastic coloring cap. “It depresses me when you ask about George Sweet, Inky.”

“It sort of depresses me, too.”

“George Sweet was not right for you. Just think of that family. That mother.”

“Oh yes, and Howard's family would have been so much better.”

“Well, at least his mother was dead.” She scraped a bar of Ivory soap with her fingertips, trying to get the black dye out from underneath her nails. She knew to wear surgical gloves while removing grapes from the stem, but missed the plastic gloves included in the box with the hair dye.

The year after George and I broke up, I let him trounce me over and over and over, under the guise of friendship, while I listened to his travails with different girls. I listened to him pine for the cartoonist (he called her “the illustrator”), and then I sat with him while he dissected the sex-only affair he had with the waitress from his Sunday-morning brunch spot. I waited for him to want to go on the way we had before, thinking he might realize you ought to be in love with the person who knows you the best, but he never did. One evening, he stood me up for drinks. I waited for two hours outside the Sidewalk Café on Sixth and A before walking the eighty blocks home, which gave me an excellent excuse to stop being friends with him.

“What else did Bootsie have to say?” I asked.

“I went there just once, Inky,” Mother said, as close as she would get to apologizing, for anything. “She has the only decent food in this whole damn town.”

“I wasn't accusing you of anything.”

“All you do is criticize me.”

“It was just conversation.”

“Tell me what's happening with you. We never talk.”

“This is talking.”

“I mean really talk. About anything that means anything to anyone. I feel like no one in this family talks and no one listens.”

I thought for a moment of one true thing I could say that wouldn't be construed as an insult. Something honest and plain that Mother didn't already know. I felt that big dark vacuum in my stomach, and didn't know if I was hungry or sad. Maybe the feeling was dread. “I love the way Fresno smells in the summer.” It was plain and true. “I love the way the heat haze makes the orchards look wavy. Even the asphalt is beautiful this time of year.”

She nodded at herself in the mirror. “All right. I get the message. You think I'm boring.”

The bathroom window was open wide, but the heat in the house only traded space with the heat outside. I wanted a drink but didn't want to be scolded for drinking.

Mother said, “I'm not boring. I could tell you things.”

“I don't want to know things,” I said. “Please.”

She said, “Could you open that drawer and get me a new bar of soap? I've ruined this.”

The bathroom drawer was full of hotel soaps in tiny boxes, lined up neatly like a grid. “The Fairmont,” I said. “Smells just like the Marriott.”

“Don't make fun,” she said.

I said, “I wasn't making fun.”

“Those soaps are a record of all my escape attempts.” Mother took the soap and handed me the wrapper. “This is what will become of you if you stay here too long, Inky. You will collect soap.”

The idea of staying in one place appealed to me. Mother had sent me across the country for school twenty years previously because she feared that if I stayed in Fresno any longer, I might never leave. I hadn't stopped leaving places since. “It sounds like Bootsie's been happy here,” I said.

“Don't start,” Mother said. “Poor Bootsie.”

“Not poor Bootsie. Why?”

“All she's got now is that awful brother. What was his name?”

“Fionn.”

“Fionn. Terrible what's become of Fionn. You know, I think they put him in prison last year? Remember how nice and darling he was, Inky?”

I threw out the Fairmont soap wrapper and noticed, in the trash, dry clumps of Mother's hair. “Do you say things like that to make me feel bad?”

“I'm on your side, I'm on your side. It's a boring topic of conversation.” She rubbed the soap across her cuticles, across her knuckles. “I'm boring,” she said. “I didn't used to be boring, but I am now.” We listened to the low hum of the house, and then the approaching sound of a tractor somewhere close by. “You know,” she said, “if you don't want to get your heart broken, you have to break up with them first.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said. There were at least a dozen small black nests in the trash, twisted into circles.

“You and Annie, you think I'm so ignorant. But I'm older than you, I have more experience.”

“I don't think you're ignorant.”

Mother met Dad when she was eight and married him ten years later. Her father was the John Deere distributor in Madera, where my father's father bought the machines for the farm. Everyone had chased the tractor dealer's pretty daughter. Uncle Felix had chased her hardest of all. As far as I knew, Mother's experience in love had been limited to the boys who chased her at her father's shop, and Uncle Felix had been the first.

Uncle Felix was still in love with Mother. Even Aunt Jane used to say so. When I was little, he'd come to dinner with his hair fresh and combed back, still wet from the shower. He'd tell twice as many jokes with Mother in the room. When he felt particularly affectionate or lonely or drunk, he'd call her Muffin. He still sometimes called her Muffin.

Scrubbing her hands, she said, “Why haven't any of your friends phoned you?”

Every question had a way of being a jibe.

“Anne is my friend,” I said. Anne had been calling up to six times a day, with never anything to ask or report. I'd answer the phone and she thought it was very funny, when I said hello, to say, “Who is this?!”

“I mean aside from Anne.”

“What am I going to say to people?”

A tiny river of black dye made its way beside the vein in my mother's temple and emptied into her eyebrow. “I'm getting this everywhere,” she said. She rubbed at her eyebrow with a newly ruined bath towel, removed the drenched black cotton, and replaced it with a fresh piece, which got immediately soaked. “Oh, God,” she said, looking at the cotton and looking at herself. In the mirror I could see her breasts sag beneath her worn white nightgown, now spotted with black. Somehow, inexplicably, she'd got little pieces of old Scotch tape all over the back. She said, looking at herself, her face an undone knot, “Do you think if I had made something of my life that my children would be more successful?”

“I think Dad needs to see a doctor,” I said.

She looked at me in the mirror. “You're a very nice young lady, Ingrid.”

“Thanks, Mother.”

“Except you're not young anymore.”

I stood to leave. “He doesn't look well and the cough is worse and worse.”

“Daddy's fine.”

“He's not fine. He needs to see a doctor.”

“All right, Ingrid. You know everything.”

I went to my room and sat for a while in the closet. I had forgotten the clothes still there: a long black velvet Christmas formal, a tiered violet dress from an Easter fifteen years ago, the deteriorated mink coat Anne had appropriated from our grandmother and abandoned. A fire escape ladder still sealed in the box. I checked the toes of old ballet slippers and sneakers in case I had hidden money or pain pills. In a pink Oilily high-top, barely worn, I found three hundred-dollar bills, rolled together as tightly as a cigarette. Opportunities will present themselves.

The closet, I noticed, was the coolest place in the house, and big enough to lie down flat in, which I did. I fell asleep and had a dream that I had given birth to a soft, cottony, buttery-yellow chick that I left in a box and forgot so that it dried up like a leaf.

 

7.

In the afternoons, those first couple of weeks I was back, I walked and walked. Exhaustion was a good cure for anxiety. I'd walk past the vines near the house (they went on for a half mile up Avenue 7), away from the river through Mr. Ellison's almonds, and past two canals through more grapes to Uncle Felix's house. Uncle Felix lived in the same small, flat clapboard ranch house his parents had given him when he married Aunt Jane forty years ago. It had been a foreman's house before the Griffiths' ranch absorbed the property. Many kids of farming families lived in houses like this, houses originally built to house workers, managers, helpers to sustain the farm. But most people, when parents passed on the operating duties or else died and fortunes were inherited, bought 1920s Spanish mansions commissioned by the lumber barons of Old Fig Garden or built themselves obnoxious palaces on the north side of town, houses with twenty-foot front doors and entire tile floors imported piece by piece from monasteries in France. The small, disintegrating ranch houses got rented to farmworkers and then, eventually, were razed. Uncle Felix didn't go in for that sort of competition. “I prefer my real estate to generate income,” he said. The types of people who built houses on the north side, he thought, were the types of people who turn their family's land into pink stucco shopping centers. “The best reason not to have children,” Uncle Felix said.

The first few times I walked up to Uncle Felix's house, I used the driveway as a destination and then turned around to come home. I liked to walk by myself. But lately I had started ringing the bell, and Uncle Felix would walk me back to the river.

It was nice to walk next to someone.

I said, “You think Wilson's not going to turn a big swath of your land into a housing development?” We took a route along the canal, with vines on one side and trees on the other. Often on these walks, the conversation came back to what would become of the land: Dad's land, Felix's land, the land in general. Pavement can't be reversed.

“I'm working on Wilson,” he said. “He'll need the vineyards to make the wine. If he wants to sell the company, well. Then.”

“Maybe you should sell the company before Wilson gets to it.”

“I'd rather be dead. I wish you'd stay here. I'll teach you everything you need to know about the business. You already know most of it.”

“Please, Uncle Felix.”

“I don't understand you girls. You're going to barely scrape out some meager living for yourself down south, jump from one job to another, using your brains to make money for strangers, when you could come back here and be with your family and work in an honest industry and get rich.” It was evening, late July, and the temperature hadn't yet fallen below 100.

“I hardly see Dad getting rich.” It was a stupid, spoiled thing to say.

“Farming's been very good to your dad. And you. There were a lot of rich years. Your father would have a hell of a lot more money if he'd get rid of Phillip.”

“Phillip has no loyalty.”

“Loyalty isn't Phillip's problem. Embezzling is Phillip's problem.” Phillip was the orchard manager. Everyone in town knew he'd been buying the chemicals for his own two hundred acres on Dad's account, putting the orders in on Dad's peaches. Twenty years of chemicals for two hundred acres of vines and trees costs in the range of $2 million. The only person in town who didn't consider this sort of pilfering embezzlement was my father. My beleaguered, kind, dear father, who never suspected a sinister motive from anyone.

“He won't listen to anyone about that. He thinks everyone is as honest as he is.”

“He's lousy at business, your father.”

“What Dad wants most of all is to be liked.”

“There's no money made in being liked,” Uncle Felix said.

“You'd know.”

“Still. You wouldn't have the luxury to hop around doing nothing without farming.”

“I'm not doing nothing.”

“That's right,” he said, meaning
yes you are
. “If you came back here and worked with me, I'd be sure you got rich.”

“I don't care about money.”

“That's bull. Everyone cares about money.”

“I don't.”

“You'd care if you had to, but you don't know what it's like to be poor.”