Getting Somewhere

by Beth Neff

  Jenna realizes that Grace will know everyone and that people will be curious about her, and she begins to feel a little self-conscious and uncomfortable. She doesn’t see exactly what her role will be here, though she can certainly hand the baskets out to the people as they come, describe to them what’s inside it if they ask. She had pictured it differently, somehow, had expected more time to carry on her own discussion with Grace. But all the CSA members are anxious to chat with Grace, seem to feel almost compelled to hang around for a bit, show that they come not just for the vegetables but for the contact with an actual farmer. They all ask similar questions as if they’ve been given a script, wondering if there’s been too much rain, how the heat is affecting their crops, try to sound like they know something about the long days and the hard work that has gone into the baskets. Jenna wants to like them but just feels a growing resentment, wishes as soon as each person arrives that they would leave more quickly.

  Finally, there is a break, and Grace collapses beside her shaking her head.

  Jenna can’t restrain herself. “Don’t they just drive you crazy?”

  Grace laughs, nods, smiles at Jenna. “Kind of. They all act sort of entitled, don’t they? Like they’re doing this for us, like charity or something. It’s this culture clash. We’ve got on our T-shirts and cut-offs, driving a junky old pickup, and they’re making this huge sacrifice to step out of their air-conditioned SUVs so they can put a notch on their environmental belt for the week.”

  “I guess I wondered if, well, if you ever worry about, like . . . what people . . . what they think of you?” Jenna thinks again of the woman at the market, wonders if anyone has said anything like that to Grace herself, if it would surprise or just hurt Grace if Jenna told her about it.

  Grace is watching her carefully, hesitates.

  “You mean, because I’m a lesbian?”

  Jenna is trying to look nonchalant. “Yeah, I guess that.”

  It takes a while for Grace to respond.

  “I don’t know if ‘worry’ is the right word. This isn’t the easiest place to be . . . well, anything different. It was one of the reasons it was so hard coming back here. I’m not out about it, like, I don’t announce it or anything, but I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to figure out if people wanted to. But they don’t. I mean, most people are just happy to ignore things they don’t want to see.”

  Grace looks over at Jenna and then back to her hands, rubbing the creases along the edges of her fingers where the dirt has become embedded.

  “These people, they’re anxious to, you know, look accepting and progressive and everything. But that’s not true of everybody and the program really makes us . . . a lot more visible, I guess, kind of blows our cover.”

  Jenna feels a little tightening in her stomach, asks, “How so?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Like the chef at one of the fancy restaurants in town. I contacted him about selling some produce and, at first, he seemed excited, even gave me a list. Then, when I went back with a price sheet, he hemmed and hawed around, finally said he didn’t think it was right for us to be using what he called ‘prison labor,’ didn’t want to support that sort of thing in our community.”

  Grace is shaking her head, doesn’t look at Jenna. “That’s what he said, but I’m sure that wasn’t really it. . . . He just couldn’t bring himself to say the real problem. He must have asked around . . .” Grace pauses, then continues, her tone slicing the air with quiet but fierce rancor.

  “This town, the people in it, well . . . they can be brutal, cruel. They get an idea in their heads about you and then nothing can shake it, whether it’s true or not. And that gets inside of you, like a poison, makes you turn against yourself and sometimes against other people, people . . . that you love, to the point where you can even start hating who you are or hate things about your own family members. So you end up just sort of isolated, trying not to give them anything to use against you.”

  Grace’s face has turned red and her jaw is tightly clenched, making her words come out in sharp bursts as if the thoughts they contain are making her breathless.

  “I guess I just hope that if I mind my own business, they’ll mind theirs, too, but I know from experience that doesn’t always work.” Grace is now gazing across the parking lot, seeing something Jenna is sure exists only in her memory, then seems to remember that Jenna is there.

  “But that might be kind of the same for you.”

  Jenna’s face instantly becomes unbearably warm. She thought they were talking about Grace being a lesbian and now she’s not sure. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that people would know why you’re here, think differently about you because of it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Does that make you uncomfortable?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it until today. I guess I didn’t tell Barbara and Mary. I didn’t know if it was okay, and I just didn’t want them thinking of me that way.”

  “I suppose it is kind of the same, then. People will have their own ideas, and you can’t really change them. You can tell yourself that you’re protecting them from feeling uncomfortable, but it might be that you just want to protect yourself. I know, for me, I just want my private life to stay private.” Grace pauses, considering. “Kind of stupid coming back here if that’s my goal, huh?”

  Jenna looks up and meets Grace’s gaze, is somewhat disconcerted by the reflection she sees there. She doesn’t know how to answer that so just nods.

  She is remembering something Barbara Morgan said at the farmers market, trying to put it together with what Grace has been saying. She asks, “What did your grandfather think about it?”

  A long moment passes in which Grace seems to deflate, her hand swiping a slow pass through her hair and stopping to rest on her neck, then dropping heavily into her lap. Jenna holds herself still, almost holding her breath, wonders what about this question has sent Grace off to a place where Jenna can’t follow.

  Finally, Grace shifts her weight and leans back in her chair but doesn’t look at Jenna. When she speaks, her words are slow and measured, carefully selected, as if she fears they might be too heavy to lift.

  “I think my grandfather believed”—and she pauses, licks her lips—“that if anybody around here found out about me, they’d string me up.” The shadow of a smile briefly lifts the corners of her mouth but her forehead is still deeply furrowed.

  “When my grandma got sick and I was thinking about coming back to help him on the farm, he said to me, ‘Just don’t be bringing any of that crap back into this house or this town. You have to be that way, best keep it in that city of yours. Far from here where I or anybody else won’t have to know about it.’”

  Grace pauses again, looks down at her hands where they are gripping each other tightly, sighs deeply, and looks up at Jenna. “Sometimes I wonder if maybe he was right.”

  Jenna can’t think of anything to say. All she knows is that she feels angry, hates this phantom grandfather with a passion she usually reserves for her own mother. Now she wishes someone would come, break this tension that she knows she is responsible for, wishes she could repair.

  She is so wrapped up in her distress that she almost doesn’t hear Grace say, “Does it bother you?”

  “What?”

  “That I’m a lesbian.”

  Jenna shakes her head adamantly. “No.”

  “Ellie said she thinks Lauren is having a hard time with it. Has she talked to you about it?”

  Jenna is frustrated that the conversation has turned to Lauren. She doesn’t want to talk about her, have to prove that she’s not like her. And leave it to Ellie to make it sound like she knows what’s going on with everybody, as if it takes a rocket scientist to figure out what Lauren is thinking. Now, though, the silence hangs heavy and accusatory between them and Je
nna feels frantic to fill it.

  Cautiously, and with little conviction, she says, “Some. I just think Lauren’s generally unhappy.”

  Grace nods but doesn’t seem very interested in continuing the conversation. She simply says, “I see.”

  Jenna doesn’t know why her heart is beating so hard again, why there is a swirling sensation in her head. She thinks she needs to stand, walk around a bit, and then, like a slug in the belly, she thinks of the letter, an instant later remembering it is already gone.

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 11

  “OKAY. CASSIE. WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR book?”

  They have decided to meet outside today. The weather has cooled considerably, though it is still warm enough to sit in the shade, and they have spread blankets out under an enormous cottonwood tree whose lower branches nearly brush the ground.

  Sarah is leaning back against the tree trunk, her legs folded under her, and Jenna is beside her, slumped forward, plucking at blades of grass peeking out under the edge of the blanket. Ellie seems to be having trouble getting comfortable, has shifted from sitting with her knees bent and her elbows resting on them to leaning back on her arms, her legs stretched toward the middle of the circle. Beside her, Lauren is lying flat on her back, eyes closed, a slight frown on her face as if she is listening carefully, pretending not to. Cassie would have liked to sit beside Jenna but she’s done with that, now that she understands Jenna’s true motives for wanting to spend time with her. Instead, she has selected the wide gap beside Lauren, is sitting upright, tense, her book resting in the triangle made by her folded legs. They all turn to look at her now, even Lauren, one eye closed, squinting in Cassie’s direction.

  Ellie is wearing her most brilliant smile, encouraging with a slight nod.

  “Well, it’s poetry. Um, it’s called Why I Wake Early and it won the Pulitzer Prize, which I guess is a really high honor.” Cassie swallows hard, tries not to hear her own voice, which sounds grating and shaky in her ears.

  This was Ellie’s idea, to read a book, talk about it in group. When Ellie saw Cassie in the library scanning for a book she hadn’t already read, she suggested that Cassie might like to read a book she could talk about, maybe short stories or poetry, share what was meaningful to her with everyone else. She’s said it would “break the ice,” and Cassie had smiled at the image because she feels more hot inside than cold.

  Ellie had then said, as if revealing a secret, “Maybe it would help the others, too, give them the idea that they could read a book of their own to share, participate more in their own recovery.” It had shocked Cassie a little to think that she might be a model for something, and she felt proud and even determined to use Ellie’s suggestion. Together, they had picked out a book of poetry, a slim text Cassie would probably never have noticed or selected otherwise, but Ellie had said she thought it was something Cassie would like.

  And she has liked the book, loved it, in fact, memorized all the poems, amazed at the way the poet paints pictures with words. Though Cassie has never seen many of the things Mary Oliver describes, snow geese and trout lilies, whelks or luna moths, she has seen deer tracks in the snow, once a barn owl, a snake swimming in the creek. The commonality of those images has allowed Cassie to take the poems in the book almost personally, and she finds that her eyes are seeing now in a different way, that a path has been laid from her vision to her mind.

  Now, Cassie flips the book open, thumbs through a few pages, closes it again. She has planned this ahead of time, decided she could just pretend like she is talking to Gram, sees the old woman as she last was, almost curled into herself, barely able to make the trip from bedroom to couch each day. Cassie will tell her grandmother about the poems and then she will tell her what happened, explain to her why they are not together anymore. She raises her head and clears her throat again but nothing comes out.

  After a long pause, Ellie asks, “Would you like to read us one of the poems?”

  “Oh sure.” Cassie feels excessively relieved by the suggestion, looks down at the book lying closed on her lap, spreads her fingers out wide across the cover as if divining something from the pages.

  “Actually, I want to tell you about her, about my baby.”

  Cassie can tell that Ellie wasn’t expecting this, maybe thinks that Cassie should still be talking about her book, but now that she’s said it, she’s not going to stop. She waits while Ellie sits up, tentatively scoots a few inches farther into the circle, and says simply, “Okay.”

  The girls are all paying closer attention now. Even Lauren has pushed up on her elbows and is staring intently at Cassie.

  “She was a girl. Is a girl. She would be over five months old now, six months at the beginning of August. I think I’d still recognize her if I saw her. I think about that all the time, how I could . . . well, anyway, I just remember that she had the most amazing blue eyes, like the color of that chicory that grows along the side of the road in the sunny places. And a little fuzz of really soft brown hair on the top of her head. Her skin was so . . . so, I don’t know, like, creamy, and she was so small with little bitty hands and tiny little fingernails that were already sharp, and when she cried, her face would get all scrunched before any sound came out but when I held her to my breast, she would move her head back and forth like she already knew what was there, and when she sucked, it felt like daggers in my breast but relief at the same time, like I’d been storing up everything for her for so long and then it was pouring out.

  “It was kind of funny—” And Cassie laughs but it sounds more like a lament. “She would suck so hard, she’d make herself exhausted and just fall back asleep like she was knocked out, with this little mustache of bluish milk on her face, but I knew that was okay because I had the book and that’s how they described it.”

  Cassie realizes she is talking too fast, the words spewing out of her mouth, building to an excited crescendo and then tapering off completely but still echoing, like the reverberations of a firecracker after the light has long faded. She doesn’t see the other girls now, or Ellie, has become completely absorbed in something that isn’t there with them. She is startled by another voice.

  “Can I ask a question?”

  Cassie lifts her eyes to Sarah, nods.

  “How did you, like, know what to do? Were you by yourself when she was born?”

  For some reason, the words come easily now.

  “Well, I had this medical guide that belonged to Gram. It was really old and everything, but I guess childbirth doesn’t really change. I remember her getting it out when I was sick as a little kid, looking up chicken pox or the measles or something, though I don’t think I ever actually had any of those things. And then, later, she got kind of obsessed with it, became worried about everything with her own body, you know, anxious, thought she had every disease in there. I finally had to hide it from her because she’d get so upset, tell me she thought she had crazy diseases like mononucleosis when she had a little cough or encephalitis when she had a headache, but I remembered it when I started feeling sick myself.

  “The first thing I looked up in there was fatigue because I was so tired all the time, and they listed pregnancy as one of the possible causes. I knew right away that’s what it was, before I read the other symptoms, even though I don’t think I wanted to believe it at first. I knew how a woman got pregnant from reading that book and one Gram had in a box in the attic that was some old-fashioned guide for women getting married, but when I read it again, where they talked about, well, coitus and the sperm and stuff, I was sure. The more I thought about it, the more surprised I was that I hadn’t gotten pregnant before. I’d been having my periods since I was twelve, and Gordon had been, um, interested in me for most of that time so, I don’t know. Just lucky or something, I guess.

  “Anyway, they told in the book about how your nipples get large and dark and having to pee all the time and
missing your period. And that was me. I tried to hide it for a long time, though Gram was too far gone to really notice, and even Gordon just kept telling me I was getting fat until he finally figured it out. He never said a thing about it, just ignored me for the last couple of months, and I was very grateful for that.

  “And then, the birth went totally according to the book. I had a little blood in the toilet that morning and started having a lot of cramping. It got pretty bad by afternoon, but Gram always took a long nap and so I was able to rest. I’d put soup in the crockpot that Gordon had bought us the Christmas before. I hardly ever used it, but I thought of it then so I wouldn’t have to be in the kitchen fixing supper. I gave Gram her meal that evening and Gordon didn’t come so that was good. I let Gram have the bowl of buttons she loved to sort through. I kind of saved it for times when I wanted her to be occupied for awhile and it was like she forgot about it in between so that was perfect, and I just lay down on the couch and she didn’t even notice me, or notice when my water broke later that evening. I took her into her room and got her ready for bed with my pants all soaking wet and feeling like I was going to collapse. She was kind of grumpy but not that much worse than usual, and she always did pretty well if I was firm with her. The pains got really bad after that, and I just kept reading that part of the book over and over, counted like they said to do and timed the contractions so I could tell that they were progressing and everything.

  “The hardest part was right toward the end. It hurt so bad I wanted to yell out, but I didn’t want to wake Gram up. I just kept telling myself this was what they called transition and everybody feels like they can’t do it anymore even though it’s not that far from being over, and that pretty soon I would want to push and that’s exactly what happened. I don’t think I pushed more than four or five times and there she was. I thought I might think it was kind of disgusting, the blood and the vernix on her and the placenta, which came after awhile, but it wasn’t at all. I felt kind of, I don’t know, sort of businesslike about it. I had everything ready: scissors and string and a soft cloth to wipe her off. I didn’t need bottles or anything because I wanted to feed her myself. I had a pan to put the placenta in and examined it like they said the doctor would do for any inconsistencies or chunks missing out of it, but I had no idea what I was looking for. I just wrapped it in several layers of plastic shopping bags and then in another garbage bag and put it in the trash.