Squashed (2 page)

The last time I got this way, Richard reminded me of a few things. “You won the Rock River Young Growers’ Competition three times,” he said. Which was
absolutely true and a great honor, but that, I reminded him, was for young people.

“You are a young person,” Richard pointed out.

“But I’m good enough to compete with adults. How am I going to get better if I keep entering contests I already know I can win?” Richard nodded at this and asked when dinner would be ready.

I had stopped crying now and dusted a piece of lint off of Max, ashamed I had doubted him. It was, after all, only August. Forty-six days to go. Anything could happen, as we say in the growing biz.

I grew giant pumpkins because I liked battle, and growing one was an everyday fight. You had to be in it for the long haul. Rain, frost, bugs, and fungus could strike at any time and stop you dead. Only certain growers are cut out to handle this pressure—tough people of steel who can stand against the odds. Richard says giant-pumpkin growers are the spawning salmon of agriculture, since only the strongest make it upstream each year for anything worth mentioning.

Not all vegetables are this draining. Lettuce doesn’t bring heartache. Turnips don’t ask for your soul. Potatoes don’t care where you are or even where they are. Tomatoes cuddle up to anyone who’ll give them mulch and sunshine. But giants like Max need you every second. You can forget about a whiz-bang social life.

My father, who looked like Abraham Lincoln and played him in the Abraham Lincoln community play every February, felt I didn’t have dates because I spent too much time with vegetables. Dad had a theory on everything—God, world hunger, fast food, why I grew giant pumpkins.

“Don’t you see, Ellie,” he said, “they’re big and round and full—”

I sucked in my stomach. “What’s your point, Dad?”

He coughed and went into one of his speeches on how pumpkins symbolize my desire for life’s fullness and reaching my full potential. “You should be nurturing yourself, Ellie, instead of this…vegetable. Spending night and day with a squash is not healthy…or fulfilling.”

“It’s fulfilling to me.”

“I know it seems that way now, honey,” he continued, bending his 6’6” frame over me.

“And it’s fulfilling to Max. Look at him, Dad.”

My father scowled at Max and stroked his beard. It’s hard to cross Abraham Lincoln. Un-American.

“It is simply not appropriate to have a relationship with a pumpkin, Ellie. Shall we get you a pet of some kind…perhaps a dog, a gerbil—”

“I don’t want a pet.”

I wanted to say that I could use some paternal understanding once in a while. I swatted a fly instead. I wanted to say that he wasn’t exactly burning up the dating field either and that maybe social problems ran in the family.

Old Abe gave up for the moment and stood stooped in the field. “I’m afraid your grandmother got you into this,” he mumbled, walking away.

Actually,
Cinderella
got me into this. My grandmother, who I call Nana, had the money. I was five when she took me to see the movie, and I was impressed with the pumpkin’s starring role. It was the pumpkin the fairy godmother changed first. Everybody thinks the ballgown came first. Wrong. Cinderella
drags the pumpkin over, the fairy godmother says, “Salago doola, menchika boola—bibbidi, bobbidi, boo!” Bang, you have your basic magic coach. She couldn’t have done that with a zucchini. It would have looked like a bus. Cinderella needed a royal carriage, not exact change and a seat with gum all over it.

Now, over the years Dad has tried to point out the strength of other vegetables in literature.
Jack and the Beanstalk
, for example, but as I argued, the beanstalk got Jack in nothing but trouble.
The Princess and the Pea
is an insomniac’s nightmare. I don’t think the throne was worth it. Peter Rabbit nearly croaked in the cabbage patch, stumbled home with nausea, heartburn, plus diarrhea,
and
got grounded.

But a pumpkin—now, there was a vegetable with promise.

So it was a love from the very beginning. They were round, I was round. As Nana said, “There’s growing and then there’s
growing.
” You throw some carrot seeds into the ground, when it’s harvest time you yank them up, and no big deal. But when you grow pumpkins, people notice. Up they come, big, tough, and sturdy. You get respect.

I had read an article in
Seventeen
about getting along better with your parents, when this whole issue of respect came up. I talked to Richard about how my father didn’t respect me. How could we have a relationship without it?

“You could have a bad relationship,” Richard suggested, swinging an imaginary bat, which he always did to keep his muscles supple. He was fifteen and a half, but concerned they could go anytime. Athletes are like that.

“I already have a bad relationship with my father,” I said. “I want to have a good relationship with him.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Why not?”

“Actually,” Richard said, swinging to connect with a tricky curve ball, “it is possible. But you’d have to change everything about yourself.”

I looked at my pudgy knees and hands, stained from kneeling and digging in the dirt. I thought of my thin, spotless father in his cottons and tweeds who brushed off a chair before he sat on it whether it needed it or not.

“So what’s the answer?” I said.

Richard put down the bat and wiped off his hands. “I think, Ellie, that people respect people that are either like them or people they want to be like.”

“So?”

“I think it’s a lost cause with your father. Give it up. Be your own person.”

“There’s got to be something I—”

“Do you have anything in common?” Richard asked.

I thought hard. “Ice cream,” I said.

“Then I’d eat a lot of ice cream together and not talk much.”

“I’m on a diet.”

“You could learn Japanese,” he offered, swinging again.

Dad and I sat on the back porch eating coconut ice cream, his favorite. I’d made it by hand with heavy cream, sugar, and lots of Baker’s Angel Flake. Dad’s
face was somewhere in heaven, and my calorie count was enough to sustain a starving Third World nation.

I had wiped Max down with Windex before we went outside so he would sparkle in the moonlight, and placed Dad’s favorite chair at just the right angle to catch the gleam.

“Well,” I said, “this is nice.” My father nodded and kept on eating. “I want you to know, Dad, that I’m starting my diet tomorrow.”

“Ellie,” he said, dishing out another bowl, “I wish you great luck. If there’s anything I can do, I’d like to help. I’ve had my own battle with weight, of course.”

I could hardly remember when he was fat. He was thin now from all that jogging. Two years ago he’d run a marathon at age forty-two and finished in front of a thirty-four-year-old IBM salesman with braces on his teeth.

A wind blew Max’s leaves and lifted the summer smells of purple phlox and wild roses. The wild rose was Iowa’s state flower, and Rock River yards were full of them, since we had more heart than any town in the state. The stars shone down like sparklers from heaven. Looking south, I could see Lyra (the Lyre), a small constellation that lights the summer sky. A pale blue star glowed at the northern tip.

I pointed: “Vega’s out, Dad.”

He looked up and smiled. “The fifth-brightest star seen from earth, Ellie.” Stars always perked Dad up. He knew all about them and taught me when I was small. We hadn’t done much star gazing lately, though, because all of Dad’s motivating made him look inside instead of up. I missed it, too. I watched him from the corner of my eye and figured he’d be up half the night again, battling his sleeping dragons. Nana said the
hardest part about being a widower is the empty bed at night.

From our back porch I could see frame houses with rows of big yards swallowed up by the moonlight. People here pretty much knew who they were and let their yards say it. This all went out the window when folks became parents of teenagers, since parents of teenagers aren’t clear what planet they’re on. Hedges go bushy, lawns get grouchy. This didn’t happen at my house because I was in charge of the yard. I thought Dad should appreciate that. Being a turncoat grower, he didn’t.

We were only a mile from Rock River’s real farm country, where the sunsets went on for miles and where, Nana said, the houses never messed with nature. That’s where Nana lived and where Dad grew up, but he could never appreciate the greatness of being surrounded by growers. He couldn’t understand why anyone would choose a profession that’s dependent on something so undependable—the weather.

Dad saw a tornado level a farmer’s wheat field when he was twelve years old, and he never got over the injustice. Nana said Dad just jumped from the womb hating farming, and it was a big mystery to her and Grandpa where those renegade genes came from. I figured farming genes can’t root in an unresponsive soul. I think what bugs Dad most about me is that I love something he’s always resented.

The once mighty Rock River flowed near Nana’s property, three feet wide and shrinking. The shrinking had begun five years ago because of increased irrigation over the years. It caused quite a stir when a nasty man from a road atlas company in Iowa City said that Rock River no longer qualified for “true river status”
and would be marked on his maps as a “stream.” Mannie Plummer, a local grower, said it was typical of Iowa City foreigners. She led an emotional march around Town Hall and got a petition signed with 396 names of people who knew the Rock River when it was something to see. “It’s just getting old,” Mannie said in her speech in Founders’ Square, “like a lot of us.” The townspeople nodded, and the man at the atlas company called it a stream anyway, which is why you can’t find a decent road atlas in Rock River, Iowa, today.

Our house had been Dad’s compromise. He wanted one far enough away from tractors and farmers without moving out of town, and close enough to people who wore suits to work and ate Chinese food. The house we lived in with Mother was too big for the two of us, and Dad couldn’t handle the memories. He had a soft spot, though, and found us a new house that let me be a grower within the extreme confines of a half acre.

I was nine when we moved from the old Colonial on Farmer’s Road. Dad never goes by it, but I do. I can walk past it now (it’s taken some time) without the ache of Mother’s death crashing in like waves. Nana taught me that avoiding hard things just makes them harder. Time and love are mighty healers.

Our house is mustard yellow with green shutters. Dad and I painted it together last year, and everyone said it looked fine. I wanted to paint it a gentle pumpkin color, but Dad said, nice try,
absolutely
no. We settled for mustard, a color with warm, positive associations unless you happened to be a ketchup or mayonnaise person.

The backyard is filled with good, rich soil; the sunshine hits bright in the morning, which a pumpkin
really appreciates. I had taken most of the space for Max, who was glistening in the moonlight.

Dad was still eating. I should have let the moment be, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Doesn’t Max look great, Dad?”

I knew this was against the rules. Richard said eat ice cream together, not talk, but I couldn’t help it. Dad harrumphed, sitting with his elbow on each armrest like the Lincoln Memorial. A squawking crow flew on top of Max. I bolted up clapping my hands and ran down the path shooing it away as Dad watched silently. I felt a cold chill go through me like an October wind. Strange, since it was only August. Then the miles between Dad and me seemed to race farther apart. I covered Max with an old blanket, patted his stem, and walked back up the porch to eat ice cream with my father.

S
ome jerk at the Board of Education
decided that school should start before Labor Day this year—just in case there were a lot of snow days—so the seniors could graduate the third week of June, before the mosquitoes hit the creek behind the athletic field. Last year had been a nightmare on graduation night, June 30, as the mosquitoes, drawn by the aroma of Jade East, lilac perfume, and Southern Comfort, descended on ninety-seven seniors without bias or mercy. I was a junior, so it didn’t matter to me if the seniors graduated in mid-July wrapped in gauze and the valedictorian got eaten alive by vampire moths. I thought it was stupid and unfair to sit perfectly healthy students in a stifling classroom the last week in August, and I told Richard so.

“You can’t postpone the inevitable,” he said. “Before Labor Day, after Labor Day, it really doesn’t matter.”

Richard could say that because he didn’t have a
world-class pumpkin to develop. All he had to do was get his batting average up to .350. Max was bursting forth in great, glorious spurts. To leave him now was unthinkable. Who would spray the insects, yank the weeds, shriek at the hungry birds and rabbits, monitor weather conditions, and fend off blight? Do you put a racehorse out to pasture before the Kentucky Derby? While I was imprisoned in chemistry lab, Cyril Pool would be boostering his pumpkin to the thrill of victory.

I discussed this with JoAnn Clark, my absolute best friend, and Grace McKenna, my absolute close second. We decided that Dad had to be reasonable about the important things in life. School didn’t work for me right now.