Valley Fever (3 page)

“What's wrong with the screen door?” It didn't slam behind me the way it usually did. The spring was broken.

“I don't know,” Mom said. “You step into this house and you start complaining. When I ask for your opinion, you don't give it. When I don't want it, you're yakkin' all over the place.” One eyelash extension wobbled independently of the rest.

“This house is falling apart,” Anne said. “Don't you fall apart, Mother.”

“Me,” Mother said, “I am entirely put together.” She smoothed down the front of her wild hair. “I just got up.” Tiny pieces of down were stuck in the dark curls around her face. “How was the drive?” She hugged me. She was damp with sweat and she smelled like sleep.

Anne said, “The rumors are true. There's not a tree full of fruit between here and Ventura.”

“Now the nut guys are worried,” Mother said. “Walter's almonds have started dropping their leaves, the hulls have begun to split too early. A thousand acres or so. Every farmer in town is thrilled.”

“And scared,” I said.

No matter how much love you feel for another farmer, no matter if he's your brother or your best friend, no farmer ever wants another to do well. Walter grew a strain of large, beautiful almonds and, during good years, got a premium from the specialty food people. While all the other nut guys might be delighted at Walter's misfortune (it would mean, after all, higher prices for their own crop), every one of them could be terrorized by the very possibility of early hull split on his own trees.

“Everyone's afraid,” Mother said, and scraped a spot of breakfast from the front of her dressing gown. There was not supposed to be a lot of money this year, or demand, even for the large and lovely almonds. “No one knows if what killed the stone fruit is going to kill the nuts, too.”

“Or all the drupe,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mother.

“We hear this every year,” Anne said.

That June, the peaches didn't grow. The leaves of the peach trees wilted and curled and sprung pits with no flesh. There were no fruit flies, no infestations of worms. That year, the peaches had been stunted by water-stressed trees and a fungus nothing seemed to kill. “But we're fine, you don't want to hear about us,” Mother said. “Or do you want to hear?”

“Yes, we do,” I said.

“You know, those peaches they get from South America are grown in human shit,” Mother said.

“We know about the South American peaches,” I said. When I first moved to Los Angeles, the sewer in Howard's backyard had exploded. Months later, in that patch of grass to the side of the house where the toilet paper and feces and old tampons had come up, tomatoes appeared so plentiful, the vines so tall and abundant, I thought for a week the tomatoes were bougainvillea. Seeds must have made their way through the disposal. The vines grew up the side of the house and over the fence shared with the cranky neighbor. Those tomatoes were more delicious even than the ones my grandmother had grown. They were more delicious than any fruit I had eaten in years.

“Don't get me started on the peaches from Georgia.”

Anne said, “We know the peaches from Georgia, Mom.” The peaches grown in Georgia, like most of the peaches grown in California the years we could grow peaches, were grown for color and for cold-storage endurance. They tasted like nothing, like wood pulp. Dad's peaches were yellowy orange and didn't store very well, but they tasted the way a peach ought to taste, like sun and sugar, and Dad's peaches were so juicy you had to eat them over a sink.

“The Georgia peaches are just not fruit. They're barely drupe. You should see the commercials they're running on television. Have you seen the commercials?”

“Are there commercials?” I didn't mention that this year, and for three years running, the California peaches were barely drupe. I really hadn't seen the commercials.

“They're running commercials with worms coming out of our peaches. We don't even have worms this year.”

Anne said, “You don't even have peaches.”

“You can imagine your father. All those years with that bank, and now what they've done to him. You can imagine.”

“Yes,” Anne said.

“But you don't want to hear about us. What can I make you to eat?” Mother said.

Anne said, “She won't eat.”

“Can't,” I said.

“She might have to see the doctor,” Anne said.

“No one sees a doctor over a breakup,” my mother said. “Do you mean a shrink? Do you have a fever?”

“Ingrid, if you don't start eating, I'm going to take you to the hospital, but a bad hospital. With rats,” Anne said.

“I want to go to the hospital.”

“We can find you a shrink, Ingrid,” Mother said. “I'm sure there must be some decent shrinks here in Fresno.”

“I am not going to see some Fresno shrink,” I said. “I'm going to stay here for a few days and sleep.”

“Do you want to talk about what happened?”

“No, Mother.”

The kitchen window looked out to the yard, terraced down to the river. Each of the terraces indicated a year that peaches and grapes had done well. The tennis court for the year I was in fourth grade and peaches were forty dollars a box. The swimming pool the year I was in seventh and Dad put in the packing plant. The landscaping and floodlights along the river one of the years no one else could grow cabernet. This year, the grass on the terraces had gone brown from neglect and the untended swimming pool was green like the river and canals.

“How about a fried egg?” my mother said. “A fried egg will make you feel better.”

“I told you, she won't do it,” Anne said. “But you should have a slice of nectarine or something, Ingrid.”

“There are no nectarines,” Mother said.

“No nectarines either?”

“You could have grapes,” Mother said. “We have plenty of grapes.”

Vines would save us. That's what the tree fruit people always say—when the tree fruit doesn't work, the vines save you. Years you can't sell your grapes or the rain comes before the raisins are dry, the peaches and nectarines and almonds keep you going.

“Give her a drink,” Anne said to our mother.

“It's not even three.”

“Give her a drink, it's got grain in it.” Anne took a tumbler from the cabinet and piled it with frozen Thompson seedless, one of the earliest grapes to be harvested in the valley, grapes that Mother had probably picked herself from the vines near the house, individually washed and plucked from the rachis and placed in freezer bags to be used instead of ice. “And loads of nutritious fruit,” Anne said, pouring five counts of vodka to the rim. “Eat,” she said, handing me the glass.

Mother said, “I don't like that, Anne. I don't like it.” She went back to her cards.

I drank the vodka and I ate the slushy, vodka-soaked grapes, and then I ate a piece of bread from a loaf open on the counter.

“One piece of bread at a time,” Anne said.

It was easier to eat after I'd had a drink.

“If we have to drink vodka, we drink it with grapes,” Mother said.

“She has to drink vodka,” Anne said.

I ate the bread and went upstairs. The house continued to vibrate with the sound of voices from the kitchen.

Mom and Dad built the house on the river when Anne and I were tiny. It had long 1970s ranch-type lines, open Frank Lloyd Wright spaces finished with red Mexican tiles and dark wood. There was an enormous fireplace in the living room—twelve feet wide and six feet high—large enough so that the huge trunks of felled walnut trees could be brought in to burn. Mr. Ellison next door grew almonds and walnuts, and kept Mom and Dad in giant-sized firewood. Sometimes, in December or January, with the flue left open, the wind would come down that chimney like thunder, like an earthquake, and the white walls of the living room would turn black with ash.

Mother considered building the house on the river the great achievement of her life. On the coffee table in the living room, she kept a thirty-year-old copy of
Sunset
magazine, the cover faded into beige, featuring a six-page spread of the house just after it was finished. Inside, Mother and Dad were thin and glamorous, glossy and coifed in their riverside vineyard.

My old bedroom had framed pictures of me as Helen Keller in the fifth grade and packs of girls at Friday-night football games. (Stella was dead now, killed on the back of her boyfriend's motorcycle; Eileen had developed a cocaine habit to accompany her eating disorders and married the son of a developer in town; I'd heard that Bootsie had returned to Fresno well after our falling out in New York—Bootsie, I missed her the most.) My slouchy high school silhouette, carved by George Sweet from the side of a Kleenex box, still wedged into the windowpane, exactly where he had put it fifteen years ago. Sweet George Sweet.

I liked the heat. You could feel it in your chest, like an emotion. The heat was something you could count on. I took off my clothes and fell asleep, the kind of sleep so heavy you don't know how long you've been under by the time you get up.

 

3.

Uncle Felix drank wine with every meal, including two tablespoons in his coffee at breakfast. He was round and red and always happy. Uncle Felix was Dad's oldest friend. Their parents' and grandparents' vineyards had been side by side. Uncle Felix's big fat stomach was full of muscle, the way it is with some men who spend their lives digging up the stumps of old vines and planting new ones. He wore blue cashmere V-necks, even in the summer. His shoes were all work boots. Recently he had started dating his manicurist, much younger than he was, and from Visalia. Mother didn't like her. Mother said, “All the sluts come from Visalia.” Mother missed Aunt Jane, who just after her fifty-fifth birthday bled to death in her bed from the last stages of bone cancer. Everyone's always got cancer in Fresno.

It was dark out; my room was a box of stale heat. There was the echo of laughter from the kitchen. Uncle Felix and Dad and Anne were having a bottle of wine.

“There she is,” Anne said.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel all right.”

“Would you like me to kill him?” Uncle Felix asked.

“What time is it?”

“I mean have him killed.”

“No, but thank you, Uncle Felix.” Uncle Felix had walked the two miles to our house in the hot evening. He liked to walk.

“Past dinner,” Dad said. “But no one's eaten dinner.”

“I've eaten,” said Uncle Felix.

I opened and closed the pantry door: five-gallon jars of raisins and dried mint and bay leaves and walnuts. I opened and closed the refrigerator.

“This always happens to Ingrid,” Anne said.

“It doesn't always happen to me.”

“Five years ago, Fourth of July, at Newton's parents' house in Cornwall.”

Five years ago, on the Fourth of July, essentially the same thing had happened: I had moved from New York to London to live with Newton Greene, a floppy-haired English political consultant I'd met at a dinner party in New York, and shortly after I'd moved, during a weekend at his parents' house in the country, he told me he thought we'd made a mistake. “That was one other time,” I said.

“I'll make it look like a car accident,” Uncle Felix said.

Dad was quiet. He patted my arm. “You want a vodka?” he said. He got up to pour me a vodka.

“Why don't you come back to Fresno and marry Wilson?” Uncle Felix said. Wilson was Uncle Felix's nephew. He did the accounting for Uncle Felix and my parents and a couple of other growers in the valley.

“Wilson needs to find a nice Fresno girl,” Anne said.

“Ingrid's a nice Fresno girl,” Uncle Felix said.

“Let's leave Ingrid alone,” Dad said, handing me the vodka. He'd poured it over grapes from the freezer.

“Is this how you guys are drinking vodka now?” I said.

“Be happy we're drinking vodka at all,” Anne said. Among farmers in the valley, it's a complicated thing to drink anything but wine. The back of my parents' deep bar cabinet still had a bottle of cognac given to them the year they got married, and bottles of Canadian Club and Beefeater they'd bought, naively, for parties they'd given twenty-five years ago.

“It's a conspiracy to use the grapes,” said Uncle Felix. “Those are my grapes you're eating.”

“You don't buy the Thompsons,” I said.

“I do,” said Uncle Felix.

“He does,” said Dad. “Uncle Felix is making wine you'd be embarrassed to drink.”

“I'm not embarrassed to drink anything,” Anne said.

“I remember,” said Dad.

“What kind of wine, Uncle Felix?”

“The Australians, the Chileans, the Italians are beating us at low-priced wine. With grapes we can grow here. Grapes your father grows.”

“You're going to make cheap wine?” I said. “Cheaper than before?” Uncle Felix's wine went for eight or nine dollars a bottle. He had a huge operation, in vineyards and in wine. The wine part of the business had grown so much in the past twenty years that his vineyards couldn't produce enough, and he bought juice from farmers all over the valley.

“Nice wine,” he said. “But inexpensive.”

“They make nice wine in Napa,” Anne said. “You make plonk.”

“Just because they charge more doesn't mean it's nice, fancy pants.” Uncle Felix liked to say that no bottle of wine was worth more than ten dollars. The Napa guys hated Uncle Felix.

“How low is low?” I asked.

“Four dollars. Five dollars. We'll see.”

“Two dollars,” I said.

“We'll see.”

“A drinkable wine for a dollar fifty a bottle would make you a billionaire,” I said.

“Well,” he said. “We'll see how those Thompsons turn out.”