by Bill Barich
The field hands on the farm were baffled by her dedication. Eloy Hidalgo, Hector Cruz, and even Antonio Lopez couldn’t fathom why a woman of means, a gringa with plenty of pesos, would voluntarily spend such long hours on her hands and knees in the same punishing dust that was their element. They seemed to believe that Anna was under the influence of a dark and compelling force and felt obligated as gentlemen and knights-errant of Mexico to offer their assistance.
“I can pull some weeds for you, missus.”
“Would you like to borrow my hoe, Anna?”
“Buenas tardes, señora. I can do the watering. Why don’t you rest yourself?”
She rejected them all. They were embarrassed for her and attributed her weird behavior to a configuration of galloping hormones and planetary alignment that was beyond the ken of any man. They began teasing her, too, muttering whenever they walked by the garden that she was “un poco loca, una mujer peligrosa,” and Anna would smile amiably and think, Yes, it’s true, I am a little crazy, I am a dangerous woman.
Atwater reaped the benefits of her labors. She fixed him supper three or four times a week, often vegetarian meals that he ate without any protest over the absence of meat. She would sit with him on the porch afterward, neither of them talking very much, each grateful for the other’s presence, in balance and harmony and pretending that the end was not in sight. Why isn’t this enough? Anna asked herself time and again. Sweetly cradled in the imperturbable quiet of the farm, she listened for the sparrows that began singing just at dusk, birds whose sorrowful music had a peculiar quality of resignation, even of vespers, about it.
“That must be the saddest creature God ever made,” Atwater said one evening, sprawled in his Adirondack chair—his chair and her chair, Anna realized, wishing she had never noticed. “They must have broken hearts. Every last sparrow.”
Anna took his hand. “Dear Arthur,” she said fondly, looking at this unlikely man who had become her partner through fate or by accident or plain desire and wishing that she could love him as he needed to be loved, unconditionally, as another woman must once have loved him, maybe his lost wife. “You’re my own personal Saint Francis.”
“I don’t know about that. But if I could talk to the birds, I wouldn’t mind.”
“But you have a penis.”
He seemed puzzled. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” she said, touching him. “Unless you’re trying to be a saint. You remember Saint Augustine among the fleshpots.”
“We didn’t study him over in Napa.”
“Come to bed, Arthur.”
In the middle of the night, Anna woke to the rustle of Atwater rising from her side. She was accustomed to his nocturnal ramblings by now. He was an accepted thing, a pale shape in the moonlight, his body abnormally white except for his arms, which were tanned to the T-shirt line on each bicep, and his face and neck. He looked lean and fit and full of purpose. That he had no awareness of his own masculine beauty only added to his appeal, she thought, letting her fingers trail idly over her breasts and her nipples, which were exquisitely tender. Her hand slid lower and nested languidly between her thighs.
“Arthur?” she asked him. “Are you going dusting?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Have a good time, dear.”
He laughed softly. “I’ll try.”
She watched him leave, off to spray the grapes with sulfur dust to protect them from powdery mildew, a job best done in the dead black hours when no wind blew. Dusting was an essential part of the vineyard routine, and Atwater’s sleep would be interrupted every ten days or so until the crop was ripe. She imagined him moving through the dark fields with a flashlight and waited until she heard the sound of his tractor, a dull gnawing, a severance, before she went back to sleep.
The next morning dawned with an awesome power. Anna stood naked by an open bedroom window, a gauzy curtain tickling her skin, and looked out at a hostile sky that was brown with haze and chemical residue. It would be one of those days in early June when the sun baked the farm with a blistering ferocity. The smell of sulfur dust was everywhere, an odor she remembered from Roger’s experiments with his chemistry set, that stink of rotten eggs all red-blooded boys feel duty-bound to concoct if only to disgust their parents and siblings. She saw, too, that the hills had lost their last trace of springtime green and were thoroughly dry now, gone to shades of tan and gold, a thatch of wheat-colored tinder at the mercy of any random spark.
She had a tennis date with Betty Chambers at ten o’clock. They played on a court at Carson Valley High once or twice a week, whenever Betty could shake free from her family. The temperature was in the nineties when they began volleying, though, and they were worn out after a single set and sat in the shade to chat instead.
“I like your bracelet,” Anna joked, sipping a lukewarm soda from her tennis bag.
Betty had a frayed lanyard on one wrist. She was a short, chunky woman in a white visor and a standard tennis outfit. “I forgot all about it.” She stared at it bemusedly. “It’s from arts and crafts class. If you don’t wear what a Brownie makes for you, the Brownie gets pissed off.”
The Chambers were busy preparing for summer, looking into camps and recreational programs. “How’re your vacation plans going?” Anna asked.
“Not so great. I got voted down. Nobody else wants to lie on a beach in Maui for three weeks.”
“Nobody else takes care of the children every day, do they?”
“That’s a nonstarter, Anna,” Betty said, shaking her head. “I tried that argument already. The kids are on Lloyd’s side. He got them all cranked up for a wilderness expedition. He’s a terrible man, really. He even read aloud to them from Eddie Bauer catalogs. Don’t laugh, it’s true.”
Anna put her racket into a press. “Where will you go, then?”
“To Yosemite in August. The same as last year and the year before that. Lloyd is an accountant, honey. He does everything by rote.” Betty grinned over a fresh insight. “Maybe he likes to count up all the people in the park.”
“I wish I were more that way,” Anna told her. “I envy you two sometimes. You’re both so secure. You’ve made peace with your choices.”
“I’d swap with you in two seconds flat!” Betty’s earnestness was impressive. “All the freedom you have, what I wouldn’t do with it!”
“Champagne and oysters, eh?”
“To begin with.”
“It’s strange that I don’t feel free,” Anna said. “And freedom was what I wanted most when I split up with Bud.”
“Well, Lloyd and I will never get a divorce.” Betty had a swig of the soda. “I’m stuck with him for life.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“I’ve tried it on my own. We were separated once for about three months. I actually slept with another guy for a while.”
“It wasn’t any good?” Anna asked.
“No, it was fabulous! He was terrific in bed. A Lithuanian, if you can believe it.”
“You must have missed the kids.”
“Not that much. There weren’t so many of them then! But I came back anyway, didn’t I?”
“Why?”
“Time passed,” Betty said wistfully.
The heat continued unabated through the day. Anna slept alone that night, restless and sweaty beneath a single sheet, with a dime store fan to circulate the still and sulfury air, and woke to another blazing morning. When the porch thermometer topped 100 degrees in the early afternoon, she went down to the river for a swim, eager for the cool and soothing caress of water on her skin. The dogs tagged after her, all three. Daisy was fatter, furrier, and even goofier now, always covered with ticks, burrs, brambles, and fleas. Prince and Rosie appeared to regard the pup as an object of fun, romping with her and forcing her to chase them. Anna led them along the path at the edge of the vineyard where the trellised shoots had hardened into canes heavy with fruit. Grapes in bunches showed beneath the lush awning of leaves,
still tiny, hard, and green, but they were ripening by subtle increments as they captured energy from the sun and turned it into carbohydrates.
An outcrop of serpentine, grayish green and splattered with bird droppings, marked the spot where the Torelli clan had always gone swimming. Fishermen parked themselves on the rock in steelhead season and often forgot the gear they had stowed in its crannies—bobbers, lures, and sinkers that Anna had searched for as a child, encouraged by her angler uncles, who paid her a nickel for anything of value she found. The river eddied up against the serpentine, its force curtailed, and poured out into a deep bowl-shaped pool, and there was a scallop of pebbly sand and gravel that passed for a beach. Thick vegetation grew around it, not only the usual cottonwoods and willows but also some maidenhair ferns, wild roses, and a stand of ragged bamboo.
Anna stripped off her clothes behind the bamboo. She had never been one to test the water with a toe and instead plunged right in, diving from a ledge of the rock. The river was every bit as delicious as she had imagined it would be. She floated on her back for a while and remembered how on torrid summer days she used to beseech her mother to let her go skinny-dipping without a chaperone. She always had to plead her case, dragging out the certificate that she had earned in a Red Cross safety class, and if that didn’t work she would whine repeatedly, her head drooping at a pitiful angle, like a wilting flower, “But, Mom, it’s so hot!” until Claire relented.
Sometimes she got to invite her friends to skinny-dip with her, townie girls who had never been naked in public before. The girls would squeal with delight as they undressed, giggling and pinching each other, liberated from the tyranny of little boys and eager to compare their boobs-to-be and later their first sprinkling of pubic hair, inconceivably wiry and dark. The di Grazia sisters were especially forward. Once, when they were all in their teens, the sisters had tricked Anna into hiding with them in the bushes, while Roger and his jock pals were having a kegger party and drunkenly cavorting by a bonfire without their bathing trunks. The di Grazias observed the jocks with clinical detachment and rated each set of genitals, saying “dick,” “cock,” and “prick” without blushing, identifying this one as “just right” and that one as “really gross,” as if they were infinitely experienced and well-versed in every particular.
Those di Grazias were bold, all right. It was Jenny who had jumped on that motor scooter in Montalcino, Anna wryly recalled, smiling at the thought of Guido the Renaissance faun in his crotch-hugging bell-bottoms. The sisters had both attended first-rate colleges, Susan to study political science and Jenny botany, and they would turn up in the valley every Christmas during those years with a handsome new boyfriend in tow, one per holiday season. And Anna Torelli, who lacked their talent for serendipity, would bring home her steady boyfriend from Berkeley, Bud Wright, a Phi Beta Kappa straight arrow whose dick was perfectly nice but unspectacular in action. From the very first, Bud was a panting lover and much too quick to satisfy her, able to leap from his bed to the formality of tort law with an amazing facility, but Anna would never have presumed to mention anything to him, assuming that the fault must be hers.
She swam laps to the opposite shore until her arms began to tire. Scrambling to her feet in the shallows, she noticed again how tender her nipples were, disconcertingly so. When was her period due? She did some mental arithmetic and figured that she was late by a few days. How many? Four, maybe five. She would have to consult a calendar to be sure, since she had never been especially punctual in that regard. She dressed, whistled for the dogs, and walked with them uphill, delivering Rosie and Prince to their master’s trailer, where Rosie nudged at the front door with her nose.
“What do you want, girl?” Anna asked. She tried the knob and found that the door was unlocked. “Are you hungry?”
As if in reply, Rosie padded to the kitchen and bent her head to her empty food bowl. Anna followed her inside. Never before had she been in the trailer alone, without Atwater there to mitigate its shabbiness. She saw with a sad heart how diligently he had worked to remedy its condition, his paperback mysteries arranged in neat rows on a shelf and a quilt tossed over the stained cushions of his couch. He had left his vineyard log out on a table, and she picked it up and thumbed idly through the flat, data-rich entries, irrigated Zinfandel block, sprayed for spider mites, until she came to a few pages at the back with their corners folded down. The reason was immediately apparent to her.
Why am I so crazy about this woman? Two lonely people, etc. Don’t play the sap for her. We have nothing in common.
What if you tell her you love her? Do you? Yes and no. You liar. You’d walk six miles barefoot over broken glass just to get a glimpse of her.
Worry about falling into the creek, and you’ll fall into it.
There were a dozen such jottings, all obviously scribbled in haste and probably against their author’s will, if Anna were to judge by the cramped and very nearly illegible handwriting. She skimmed through them a second time, ashamed at her transgression and wishing that she had never peeked at the log. Atwater stood before her revealed, his confusion matching her own.
He called that evening, of course, and asked if he could drop by, but Anna put him off with various excuses. She could hear the ache in his voice when he hung up. She ate only a salad for dinner because of the heat and drank most of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in a leisurely fashion, while she wrote a belated thank-you note to Jane Weiss.
Dear Jane,
Sorry to be so late in writing. I’m behind in everything, just like the farmers. Thank you so much for your gift. It’s too perfect! Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d own a serving platter with a goddam leaping bass on it. (I’ve been here so long I’m starting to talk like them. I really am.) Only you could have found such a precious object in Manhattan and at Bloomingdale’s, no less. I love you for it, and I love you even more for not being angrier at me than you already are.
We’re in the midst of one of our notorious heat waves here. They always last for exactly three days. This is day two, and I’m suffering. I went skinny-dipping this afternoon and got sunburned where it counts, and my period is late and I feel bloated and too fat for any of my clothes, plus the dog ate my shoes. No, I’m kidding about the dog. But I am lounging around in my underwear and have almost killed a bottle of wine. Probably that says it all.
I’m looking forward to getting back to New York. I tell myself that at least, but I don’t know what to do about goddam Arthur Atwater or even if there is anything to be done. Why can’t I be a sophisticated lady for once and admit that I’ve had a sexy little fling that was great for my self-esteem at a time when I needed it and just let it go at that? Arthur’s been good about not pressuring me to stay, but sometimes I wish he would, or is that my ego talking? I don’t belong here, but it’s so hard to leave! I spent most of my youth running away from my father, and now I worry about how much I’m going to miss him. Maybe we should move our operation out here and sell my vegetables on the side. We could wear bonnets and gingham dresses. I’ll even toss in half of Atwater.
Don’t mind me, Jane. It’s just the wine talking. I’ll be home by the end of the month. I’m looking forward to it, honest—
Your pal in Carson Valley,
Anna
The heat wave broke as Anna had predicted it would after one more sweltering day, but her period didn’t start. She had some spotting, but nothing more. When another few days went by without anything happening, she became seriously anxious for the first time. She felt strange—light-headed, moody, and distant from herself—and yet she refused to believe that she could really be pregnant until the undeniable physical changes began. One morning, she looked in the mirror and saw that the lines on her face were much fainter and that her skin had a new vibrancy. Beauty of a special kind was taking hold of her, and it made her feel both invincible and terribly vulnerable. Often she gave in to brief crying jags that blew through her in minutes and left her trembling.
E
ven Arthur registered her altered appearance. While they were walking by the creek of an evening, he remarked in his offhand way that she had never looked prettier. Anna knew that it was true. She had put on some makeup and worn a favorite green silk blouse. In the nearness of her lover, a frightening thought came to her, I am going to betray him.
“You’re awfully quiet tonight,” Atwater said as they returned to the big house through the meadow. “You seem far away.”
“I’m here. Really, I am.”
“I brought you a present.” He pulled a booklet from his back pocket, another of his dog-eared Boy Scout pamphlets, this one a manual on canoeing.
Anna took it in hand. “It’s from the authentic private collection,” she said, brushing dust from the cover.
“You better study it if we’re going down the river.”
“I will, captain. You’re turning me into a first-class scout. Maybe we’ll become blood brothers someday.”
“Sorry, Anna. I already have a blood brother. His name is Junior Thompson. He was in my troop.”
“What about a blood sister?”
“Blood sisters are like fourth chances.” Atwater threw an arm around her and pulled her close. “There aren’t any.”
The next morning, Anna bought an EPT kit at a pharmacy, but she never opened it. Instead, for the sake of absolute certainty, she made an appointment with Ed Sawyer for later in the week. She had always liked him. Sawyer was the first gynecologist ever to examine her, gentle with his hands and aware of the absurdity and even perversity of the specialty he had no doubt chosen blindly in med school. He was in his sixties now, bearded and outgoing, and after some small talk he got her up on a table and eased her feet into the stirrups. Anna let her mind drift as she did when she was gardening.