by Bill Barich
“Then you’re in luck. Because I’m not planning to die any time soon.”
“Nobody wants you to die, Pop.”
“That’s good. Because I’m not going to.”
“I’ll start getting things ready for you out at the farm tomorrow,” Anna interrupted, again with undue haste. Her mind was churning. “It shouldn’t take me more than a week.”
“You can save yourself the trouble, Anna. I’m not going back out there,” the old man told her.
“Sure you are. You’re just too tired to think about it right now.”
“Don’t you be telling me how I feel! I’ve had it with that goddam valley. Can’t you see that it’s got nothing to offer me anymore? I’ll stay where I am.” He banged the tabletop with a fist. “In town.”
Anna tried to reason with him. “But you can’t just let that lovely old house rot and fall apart, can you?”
The old man glared at her. His eyes were cold. “I can do whatever the hell I please.”
“Well, I won’t let you!” She was on the verge of losing her temper. “It’s just plain stupid. The house, the vineyard, you’re letting everything slide. I won’t stand for it! You’re not the only one involved here.”
“But I’m the one who makes the decisions.”
“Not anymore. You’re wrong about that. We’re all in this together now. Aren’t we, Roger?”
“I don’t know,” Roger said, still staring at the TV.
“Of course you know!” Anna shouted at him. “Jesus, you’re a wimp! Why can’t you ever take a position?”
“It isn’t up to me.”
“You’re such a fucking coward, Roger.” Anna was whipped into a frenzy, on the attack, and though she hated herself for it, she couldn’t stop. “You’ll own that farm someday! Give me a little support here, will you?”
“We’ll discuss this in the morning,” the old man said.
“No, we won’t,” Anna told him. “You’ll ignore me. That’s what you always do. You’ll pretend that it never happened!”
Her father smashed down his glass in a fury, and it shattered into fragments and bloodied his index finger. “I’ve heard enough of this bullshit for one night,” he shouted, spitting out the words. “No more of it now! Have some respect for your mother’s memory.”
“I’ll get you a Band-Aid.”
He was staunching the cut with a paper napkin. “I don’t need anything from you, Anna! I can take care of myself.” Down the hallway he rolled, heading off to bed as wobbly as a sailor on a storm-tossed deck, his hands braced against the hallway walls to keep himself from collapsing.
Anna’s cheeks were hot. She looked at herself in an ornate mirror over the fireplace and saw a mad flame burning in her eyes. Oh, Anna, you lost it there, you were out of control! How badly she had underestimated the power of grief! She sat for a time in the vacant kitchen and talked herself down. She was a capable person and would eventually figure out a way to resolve the situation to everyone’s advantage. That’s what she told herself, and slowly her anger subsided. The anger was about so many things—not only the disposition of the house but also about her mother’s pain and the various injustices that would be shoved down her own throat as long as she was alive—but it still had no chance against sorrow. Sorrow would always outlast anger, Anna thought. Sorrow was eternal.
After she had cleaned up the broken glass, she went searching for her brother to apologize for her outburst and found him in the backyard. The evening was mild, and he was stargazing and smoking a joint. He extended a languorous arm.
“Want some?” he asked.
“Yes, I want some. I haven’t smoked dope in years.” Anna pulled a lawn chair next to his, pried the joint from his fingers, and took a deep drag. “This is potent stuff,” she said, coughing through the smoke.
“Mendocino homegrown.” Roger had another hit himself. “Guaranteed to cure what ails you.”
“It’s the farmer in you, Roger.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
Anna slunk down and let her head rest against the chairback. The marijuana relaxed her, and she observed her brother as if from a great distance. Roger couldn’t be other than he was, and she knew better than to fight it. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she said. “I just lost control.”
“No, you were right, Anna. I was laying low. I didn’t want to get into it with him.”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Pretty lousy,” he told her. “It really upset me to watch her die like that, wasting away. And then to have to listen to that priest go on and on. What an asshole! I swear, I’ll never set foot inside a church again.”
“You better be careful, Roger. Those priests have big ears. You’re going to burn in hell.”
“I’d just as soon. Try carrying a coffin sometime, too.”
“Was it heavy?”
“No, but I got real paranoid.” He shivered. “I was sure I’d drop the damn thing. I kept having visions of it tumbling downhill to the river and making a huge splash.”
“You would have hit the front page of the Herald.”
“That’s all I need.” Roger gave a sarcastic laugh. “Hey, who was that fat guy chasing you around?”
“Jack Farrell,” Anna said curtly. “He’s with the Chamber of Commerce. Would you like one of his cards? I have about a dozen of them. He had the nerve to ask me for a date.”
“In the middle of a wake?”
“Indeed. He doesn’t give up easily, either.”
“Did you accept?”
“I might have, just to get rid of him,” she said. “I’m unclear on the point. It’s some sort of new low for me.”
“Maybe it’ll be a love connection.”
“Stop it, Roger. You can be quite an asshole yourself, you know?” Anna passed him the joint. “But what about Dad? Is he serious about staying in town?”
“I believe he is. He’s told me the same thing before. He has about six months left on his lease. Maybe he just wants to get his money’s worth.”
“He’d be awfully lonely out there on his own, I guess. I get lonely out there myself,” Anna said. “You think he’ll manage?”
“He should. He’s a tough old bastard. He still eats nails for breakfast.” Roger sucked in more smoke. “When are you going back to New York?”
She thought about it. “I haven’t decided for certain yet. I do want to get the house in decent shape and learn something about the business before I go. It is all going to land in our laps someday, whether or not you’re ready.”
“I wish I cared about it, Anna,” he said. “But I don’t. You can buy me out anytime.”
“Some things never change.” She reached out to ruffle his hair. “You look about sixteen, Roger. Honestly, you do.”
“That’s part of my plan. I’m traveling backward in time. Mentally I’m about twelve.” He made as if to get up from his chair, but then he sank back into it. “Did I tell you Shelley and I might go to Japan if we can save up the money?”
“Is she the girl you’ve been seeing?”
“Woman, Anna. Shelley is a woman. She’s almost thirty.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
Roger seemed alarmed. “Why would I do a thing like that?”
“A fair enough question,” Anna told him. “I should have asked myself the same thing years ago. I doubt that I’ll ever get married again. I may never even fall in love.”
“You believe you can control it?”
“To some extent, yes.”
“What do you do for sex these days?”
She felt herself blushing. “I’m not going to talk with you about that, Roger. I mean, really! You’re my brother. It’s personal.”
“I was just curious,” Roger said slyly.
Anna didn’t return to the farm that night. She was still too unsettled to be out there by herself. She couldn’t bring herself to sleep in her mother’s bedroom, though, and neither could Roger, so he gave her the couch and slept
in a sleeping bag on the floor. They were camped like that when the old man woke them in the morning, grumbling and hacking as he peed thunderously in the hallway bathroom. Roger had to leave right after breakfast. His job awaited him at home in Mendocino, but he was reluctant to go and dragged out his goodbyes. He looked broken in spirit, Anna thought, and would probably be crying the minute he was around the corner. But Roger was fortunate in that his feelings cycled through him quickly. He did not dwell on them the way she did.
Her own day stretched out lazily before her. She sat reading the paper over coffee, uncertain about what to do next, dawdling over the comics until her father startled her by inviting her to his office. They had some things to discuss, he said, and Anna almost keeled over. He was very formal and solicitous and seated her in a chair across from him as he might have seated a prospective client in the enlightened epoch when clients actually came to call and even asked her permission before he lit his cigar. There he is at last, she thought in amusement, the father I always wanted.
“What do you know about Consolidated Vintners?” he began.
“Not a whole lot. I know they’re a big corporation. My liquor store in Manhattan carries their jug wines.”
He explained to her how CV operated, showed her a copy of his contract, and told her why he had signed it. She listened to him without interrupting, and he appeared to be pleased when she agreed with him that it was a good idea, especially in light of his current aversion to growing wine grapes.
“Aversion, hell,” the old man groused. “I hate those sons of bitches.”
“I’m going to try and learn something about the business in the next few days,” Anna told him. “Roger doesn’t seem to have much interest.”
He gave her a funny look. “It might take you a bit longer than that,” he said. He opened drawers and filing cabinets and loaded her up with pamphlets from the University of California’s division of agricultural sciences. The pamphlets covered everything from proper pruning techniques to wine grape varieties and their potential yield. The stack was a foot high.
She was impressed by the volume of material. “Did you read all this?”
“Once upon a time.”
Anna proceeded to throw herself into a flurry of activity. She was hungry for life, bursting with freshened appetites, and gifted with a new awareness of her own mortality. Her senses all felt sharpened, honed to a fine edge. It was as if she were waking to her true self again as the blur of her gray mourning days began to pass. The sorrow still struck her out of nowhere at times and stopped her in her tracks, but it did not go on relentlessly. It didn’t paralyze her. She had expected the job of parceling out her mother’s belongings to be traumatic, but instead the fading scent of powders and perfumes that rose from the garments as she packed them away evoked a string of tender memories. She was at peace with her mother, it seemed. There were no issues to be resolved between them, only love unalloyed. She saw that her soul’s great turmoil would come with her father’s death. They were alike in so many ways that it was bound to affect her like a wounding.
Full spring had captured Carson Valley. Anna luxuriated in its seductive warmth as she shuttled from the farm to town and back again. She found herself dreamily recalling other springs from her adolescence, virginal girlish springs when the sweetness of the air made her nipples tingle on the bus ride to her high school, in weather so heady and frankly sensual that she couldn’t concentrate on anything but boys. She would steal glances at their crotches and buns and wish that she could press up against them and sample them as if they were different flavors of ice cream, particularly Eddie Santini, her first love, a lanky pitcher for the baseball team, who walked with her in the meadow one evening and lay down with her in the grass, his tongue in her mouth as he unzipped her jeans and snaked a hand under her panties. She was fifteen at the time and wildly wet and excited and came before she could push him away. Then she touched him, too, and thrilled to hear him moaning, although it also scared her to be enjoying herself so much and to recognize the extent of her womanly powers.
And where was Eddie Santini now? He had been a horrible student, as dumb as a rock. His sole ambition was to own a hardware store someday. Driving back to the farm one afternoon, Anna smiled to think of him in a red Ace apron with the front of his pants jutting out. Eddie was a human hard-on, a lump of mutant erectile tissue with only one thing on his mind. Surely he would be blind to the poppies and lupine in the fields along Carson Valley Road, all the wild-flowers flowing in a swelling tide of petals to the base of the hills. The budbreak of grapes would soon follow—the growth cycle was that predictable. Anna had witnessed the juicy eruption up close just once, when a field hand had snuck her into the vineyard and showed her a trickle of clear liquid leaking from a pruning cut. She had touched a finger to the stickiness and rubbed it on her lips. The scales around the tiny buds were puffy and white, and the buds themselves looked fragile and not quite ready to emerge, but she could still feel the rampant energy in them, an aura of what was to come.
As she turned into the farm, she had to hit the brakes to let Arthur Atwater squeeze by her in his Jeep. She had not spoken a word to him in the week or so since the funeral. He was always busy these days, constantly in action from dawn until dusk. She had seen him on his tractor earlier that morning dragging a disc harrow along the rows and plowing under the chopped canes, the last of the mustard, and the weeds and grasses that threatened to suck nutrients from his vines. The intruders that he couldn’t reach with his harrow, those in the little spaces between the rootstock, he sprayed with herbicides by hand, wearing a respirator over his nose and mouth and a tank on his back, somewhat Martian in appearance.
“Hello, stranger,” Anna called to him affably. He stank of gasoline, and his hair was powdered with dust. “Where you headed?”
“The frost-protection pump needs a new gasket,” Atwater told her. “I’m already late getting it into the creek. The water’s been too high. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.”
“A hardworking fellow like you deserves a decent meal,” she said, on an impulse. “How about dinner on Friday? We’ll talk about wine grapes. Are you free?”
He paused to compute the question. “Free?” he laughed, scratching his head. “Why, yes, I am. I am free.”
“Seven o’clock, then. Don’t be late.”
When Anna had finished getting rid of her mother’s things, she started in on the house. It turned into a major campaign because of all the junk that her parents had managed to save over the past half century. She came upon objects whose very existence was barely credible, such as a crocheted item in a kitchen drawer that was either an odd-shaped beret or an artistic potholder. In an upstairs bedroom, there was a wooden rack with holes too small for wine bottles that somebody had stuffed with rolled-up magazines, here a Sports Afield from 1969 featuring duck hunting in Wisconsin and there a copy of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower on the cover. To the good, she unearthed a trove of old 78 rpm records from a closet, mostly show tunes and dance music from the big band era, and an antique dealer in town paid cash for them off the books. She split the take with her father, who praised her to the heavens and called her a goddam genius.
There was a pleasant rhythm to the work. Anna felt that she was in gear again after weeks of being stuck. The playing field looked wide open. She had a sense of renewal and self-discovery as she dug up fossils from her teenage years—clothes, record albums, yearbooks, and even a secret journal with a tiny gold key. She had drawn hearts in it and pierced them all with arrows. Could she really have covered five whole pages writing, “Mrs. Eddie Santini, Mrs. Anna Santini, Mrs. Anna Torelli Santini”? Apparently so, judging by the evidence. Her other observations were noted much more succinctly: “Tom H. is cute but stuck-up. He thinks he’s so hot just because he has a fast car. Wait till he has an accident.” “I got the highest grade on the math exam. Too bad for Jenny di Grazia! It serves her right.” Who in the world was Tom H.? Why did she have it in
for Jenny di Grazia? The riddles were plentiful, she admitted, but the answers were few.
Another afternoon, tired of washing windows, she treated herself to a cold can of beer and sat cross-legged on the parlor floor to listen to some of her old albums on the ancient family stereo, a blond mahogany Zenith console. The needle, worn to a nubbin, robbed the records of their fire. Blondie, Talking Heads, and The Clash were made to sound historical, an insult to the very spirit of rock ’n’ roll. But Anna kicked off her shoes and cranked up the volume anyway, remembering how she had idolized Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, coveting the red leather boots, the motorcycle jacket with its hundreds of zippers, and those lace gloves that left Chrissie’s fingers free for obvious reasons. She had shopped for the same dramatic eyeliner and had even tried on a pair of tight black leather pants in Santa Rosa—but no, Mrs. Eddie Santini wasn’t bold enough to shake her ass for the world! Only at Berkeley did Anna have a brief fling as a babe, turning up at frat parties during her sophomore year in a short, semisee-through knit dress from a thrift shop. It was currently on a hanger in her bedroom and still almost fit, she had been satisfied to learn.
She brought in a janitorial service to complete the clean-up operation. Several silent Laotian men in matching orange shirts and brown trousers scrubbed away the last of the dust and grime and left every room smelling fresh and piney. Anna tore down the heavy drapes after they had gone and banished two tattered wing chairs and a pair of Ethan Allan end tables to the basement. She bought a brightly patterned bedspread imported from Malaysia and used it to cover up the scars and cigarette burns on the couch and later stuffed all the aged throw rugs in a garbage bag and replaced them with cotton dhurries. The improvements were minor and cosmetic, but the house took on an airy cheerfulness that even Arthur Atwater remarked on when he arrived for dinner on Friday evening, promptly at seven, before Anna was really ready for him.
“You’ve made it so nice in here!” he said, craning his neck to admire her efforts, a tourist in the Sistine chapel. He had on his dancing Levi’s, the ones with a crease in them, and his shiny cowboy boots.