Squashed (5 page)

Max, being a pumpkin, was not crazy about the rain, and if it didn’t stop soon I was going to have to take drastic action. Cyril had already covered his Atlantic Giant with reemay cloth, a light, gauzy blanket that kept bugs and frost off pumpkins. I always felt waiting longer than Cyril was wise, since the man was technically a sludge and didn’t know the first thing about making an informed decision.

How a pumpkin ever grew on its own is beyond me, because keeping one going is an everyday fight. Any soft place on the skin was the kiss of death in this weather. Absolute doom. I’ve seen giants that could have gone all the way just cave in, full of rot inside because their growers couldn’t read the weather and didn’t know when to fight back. I tapped Max’s skin and inspected his leaves and stem carefully for any signs of rot, beaming healthy, fat thoughts through his vine. He was clean and solid and I planned to keep him that way. He knew it, too.

Richard heard Cyril had another woodchuck problem in his patch. Good news for me, especially if the woodchucks were eating Big Daddy. He was shooting them and cussing them at night, lighting flare guns, and making terrible threats. It was just like Cyril to climb into a tank to fight against woodchucks instead of just putting up a fence. If it wasn’t loud and in bad taste, Cyril wouldn’t try it. Nana said Cyril was blessed with good soil to make up for everything else God didn’t give him. Everybody wanted to beat Cyril real bad, but nobody wanted to as much as me.

Growers are driven by their insides and aren’t afraid of hard work. Mr. Warnock began the fine art of giant pumpkin growing back in 1900. The man had great vision and great vines. His 403-pounder from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair wasn’t beat until 1976. That’s the kind of competitor you want to go up against. He makes the whole process a clean challenge. It bugged me that Cyril turned competition into a hateful thing. Nana said it was because he had so much nastiness inside.

This rain was beginning to worry me, and I had a plastic covering ready to throw over Max if need be. Most growers had a bigger patch of land than me and could grow several giants at once, so losing one wasn’t so bad. Dad didn’t want a lot of land because he’d sold his soul when he left farming. Raising an only pumpkin took guts because you had no fallback position. I just put all my eggs in one basket and killed myself trying.

I was thankful Dad never managed to leave Rock River. He and Mother were going to live in California after they got married, but Grandpa fell off the barn roof fixing a hole and needed someone around to help. Dad stayed, but Nana said it was tough going: “Biggest mistake your grandpa ever made was insisting your father love farming.”

I looked at Max and knew he was feeling the barometric pressure. The rain kept coming, and that sky just sat there looking dark and mean. Another day of showers could make the difference between a blue ribbon and pie filling.

I woke up at 2:00
A.M.
The rain was pounding off the roof. I pulled on my jeans, grabbed my slicker and plastic sheet, and ran outside to dress Max. He was soaked through, puddles surrounded him, the ground
too wet to absorb all the water. I dug three runoff channels, slapped on the plastic, and lay over him like a hen covering her brood. The lightning cracked, the ground rumbled from the thunder. I figured I must be near crazy to love a vegetable this much.

The rain was cold and soaked clear to my bones. A chill flew over me that a grower rarely feels until October. I knew if Dad saw me hanging over Max he’d ground me for life, but Max needed support and warmth, and nobody who grew giant pumpkins ever did it for their health. The rain poured down in sloppy buckets. Lightning lashed the sky, coming in so close I could feel the heat. If this didn’t let up soon I was going to fry or start building an ark.

At dawn the storm broke. I was half dead, but managed to push past it. I cut pieces of hose to suck out the floods of water around Max, running it back down the small hill into the rock garden Nana and I had planted. Nana would understand. You can always find more rocks. Max was drier now and warm under the plastic. I slipped inside for dry clothes, knowing I would have to lie about why I had to stay home from school.

“It’s my throat, Dad,” I said, freshly dressed, dried, and looking miserable. “I feel awful.” Dad felt my clammy forehead and bought in. I am an honest person who doesn’t use sickness as an excuse unless it is absolutely necessary. Missing school meant I couldn’t watch Wes, but today school and honesty were out of the question.

Dad took forever to leave that morning. I lay in bed waiting, groaning appropriately, sipping cranberry juice. The sun was blasting out, and Max was sucking it up. You could be the greatest pumpkin grower in the
world, which I almost was, but without the sun, you might as well be farming radishes. Dad left finally. I ran to the field and began emergency care.

I dried Max off with clean cloths, inspecting him for any sign of beetles or fungus, ran four electrical cord extensions into the house, fired up my hair dryer, and dried his leaves good right there in the field. Between the hot air and sun Max was feeling his old self and stretching to grow. I dug the wet surface dirt away and patted down two bags of my special mixture of soil, peat moss, and pearlite. The breakfast of champions. He was drying fine now. I covered him with a reemay cloth to keep him a few degrees warmer. The hoses had the flooding under control.

It was eleven o’clock. Wes was just getting out of band and cleaning his clarinet. This was a good place to watch him because he took great care cleaning that instrument. I watched Wes whenever I could, which took some doing, since we had no classes together and our lockers were on different floors. Grace wanted to introduce us right away, but I wanted to lose a few more pounds. I’d be wearing my khaki pants, which don’t fit when I’m above 140 pounds, my floppy orange silk blouse, and my mother’s gold dangly earrings, which make me look deeply sophisticated. I ate hardly anything because I was going to get into those khaki pants if it killed me. It probably would.

Grace had sent out invitations to her annual beginning-of-school bash. The only year she didn’t have it was when she got mono from kissing Jimmy Schroeder, but otherwise it was during the fourth week of school, and
everyone
came. Grace didn’t think much about the party, it was really for her mother. Grace was
the youngest of four children by eight years, and Mrs. McKenna was hanging on for dear life.

Mrs. McKenna wanted Grace to attend Drake University in Des Moines to keep an eye on her, but Grace was looking east, far east, to Tokyo or Hong Kong. Grace figured a four-hour flight to Los Angeles followed by twelve hours to Tokyo with all that white rice and no potatoes would finish her mother off good. Mrs. McKenna split a gut when she heard this and refused to pay for any education east of Chicago, a seven-hour car trip if you made two bathroom stops and ate lunch in the car.

It was not good to cross Mrs. McKenna. She was the reigning secretary until death of the Rock River Pumpkin Weigh-In and Harvest Fair—
the
entertainment event of the year, the town’s number one moneymaker, and my only hope for achieving greatness. Mrs. McKenna called it “Probably the Greatest Free Show on Earth (at Least in Iowa)” and talked about it in her sleep. She dressed in orange for the whole four days and personally rang the town bell that closed the schools for the long weekend. The woman was connected. No grower worth his salt would so much as belch in her direction.

Grace’s party was a lesser affair, but a good excuse for Mrs. McKenna to bake, eavesdrop, and interfere, all of which she did very well. I could do without Grace’s party because I did better in small groups, but Dad got worked up when the invitation came. Anything that would get me away from Max for an evening and hopefully propel me to popularity was fine by him.

“Well,” he said, beaming. “Well. Won’t
this
be nice?”

Being popular was important to Dad, since he had achieved it late in life, having been a nerd when he was younger. I knew popularity wasn’t all roses and that Dad was expecting something of me he couldn’t achieve in his own youth. Richard said this was typical of parents—wanting Willie Mays to
also
take piano lessons so he’d be popular at parties in case his career went belly up.

Nana said to be patient with Dad because a part of him died when Mother did: “He used all those motivating words to build a hedge around himself” was how Nana described it. “Kept the hurt from oozing out.”

So I chewed my lip as Dad kept yakking about Grace’s party. Who was going? What was I going to wear? Maybe some nice boy and I would hit it off. I chewed until I drew blood.

“Everyone’s going and I don’t know what I’m going to wear,” I said finally. “Maybe a gorilla suit.”

“Ellie,” my father droned, “I am not your enemy. I simply mean to suggest that this dress-for-success business works. I have seen it transform dreary lives. We project to others what we really feel about ourselves. If our clothes shout dull, not interested—”

“I do not have a ‘dreary’ life.” Usually.

“I didn’t say you did, honey. I simply meant that fragile self-esteem can be corrected and that—”

“I don’t have ‘fragile self-esteem,’” I insisted, looking at my broken fingernails and mud-caked jeans. I hated it when he sounded like one of his motivational tapes. “
Fragile people
do not grow giant pumpkins, Dad.”

“Ellie,” he continued, “as your father who loves you and who is also a specialist in success and motivating others, it is my professional opinion that you are standing
at the end of the line when you could be out in front leading the big parade.”

By “end of the line” he meant agriculture—the Absolute Dead-End Existence, according to Dad. I bet if I’d picked anything outside of farming he’d support me. Reptile Research: “Well,” he’d say, “that’s certainly a motivated lizard you’ve got there, Ellie. Keep up the good work.” As for “leading the big parade,” I’d done that once. I was a sixth-grade Girl Scout and dropped the American flag on Porter McIntyre’s grave in the Memorial Day ceremony. It lay on the ground as the high school band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Two shaky old VFW guys hauled it away to burn it.

“Leading the parade is one of life’s great thrills,” he continued. “It is not only a great honor, but a responsibility as well.”

Now, the articles I’ve read about getting along with your parents say that when the battle’s lost,
do not
start another war. But being a grower, I took special pride in doing things myself and wasn’t too keen on turning outside for help. When you can nurture a plant and turn a seed into a giant, you get your strength from the land, something impossible for nongrowers to understand. Which is why Wes fit the boyfriend bill, but I sure wasn’t going to tell Dad that.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

Dad sighed and gave me his Old Abe stare. He took off his reading glasses, folded them like they were made of diamonds, and put them in his breast pocket. He patted me on the shoulder and walked away, slowly for emphasis.

I checked Max, who looked good despite the pressure. His vine had lifted two feet off the ground. I felt clunky and dumb and misunderstood. I covered his
leaves with insecticide and wondered if the spray worked on fathers.

I weighed 144 pounds and was dreaming about chocolate chip cheesecake. Max weighed 430 pounds and was dreaming about victory. I hadn’t had any sugar for three weeks and was going through withdrawal—the heavy emotional variety. I watched a Sara Lee pound cake commercial on TV and burst into tears. At midnight I hacked a frozen fudge pie with an ice pick before tossing it in the garbage. I stole Richard’s Twinkie from his backpack, and he caught me tearing the wrapper off with my teeth. Richard said this was a sign that my diet should end. He could say that because his khaki slacks always fit. Grace’s party was three days off.

I’d found a new hairdo that involved braiding the hair with a ribbon and letting it drape elegantly over one shoulder. I had a thick ribbon that matched my orange blouse and began perfecting the braiding process to one hour and twenty minutes. Richard felt hair was for putting under baseball caps and didn’t understand the concept of glamour.

“What’s that?” he said, eating a Snickers as I emerged from the bathroom after my first trial run.

“A
braid
,” I said, eyeing the candy. Milk chocolate, peanuts, caramel.

“You look different.”

“I’m
supposed
to look different.”

Richard considered this, eating his Snickers slowly. He did not cope well with change and often slept in the last row of Mrs. Vernon’s seventh-period freshman study hall, where he had snoozed all last year, forgetting he was now a sophomore.

“Richard,” Mrs. Vernon would say, “how old are
you?” Richard would think before he replied, because age to him was relative, and he’d been awakened from a deep coma. The little freshman girls would start giggling, and Richard would shuffle out to seventh-period sophomore study hall, where the desks weren’t nearly as comfortable, feeling that school was tough enough without having your sleep patterns interrupted.