by Andrea Lewis
We ate in the dining room on a mint-condition, gold-linoleum dinette set, circa 1952, with Mexican silver candelabra and a bowl of fat zucchini as a centerpiece. Mona padded heavily in and out from the kitchen on her dangerously swollen ankles, bearing Fiesta-ware platters of food made from recipes also frozen in 1952—frankfurter casserole topped with crumbled potato chips, creamed peas with pearl onions, and orange Jell-O that held suspended bits of canned pineapple and diced celery like insects trapped in amber. Angelica insisted on putting the aquarium on the table. Mid-meal the mossy-looking earth stirred and Mabel’s red- and yellow-striped legs poked into the air, where they waved and tentacled blindly before her entire hirsute body emerged, sloughing shreds of sawdust and dried grass.
“Look!” Angelica cried, as if we weren’t already transfixed. She reached in and picked up the tarantula, which was twice the size of her five-year-old hand. I finished off my third glass of wine, trying to appear calm. Angelica offered the spider to Iris, who held out her cupped palms in the manner of a communicant receiving a wafer.
“She’s beautiful,” Iris said.
Mabel, for her part, sat motionless in Iris’s hands, then sluggishly raised and lowered her jointed, hairy legs in a creepy ballet of eight-part grotesquery that took her a few tentative steps up Iris’s arm.
“Angelica, put that thing away,” Mona huffed.
Iris tilted her arm toward her plate, trying to interest the spider in her frankfurters. “Mabel, do you like processed animal products?”
“I mean it, child,” Mona said.
“Come on, Mabel.” Angelica retrieved the tarantula and plopped her back in the aquarium. Mabel began burrowing and quickly disappeared.
Dessert was lemon meringue pie that looked like it had been standing in the heat of the kitchen for a while. My gelatinous slab of meringue kept sliding off its gelatinous slab of lemon custard. Iris started cheerfully describing the bacteria that grew in room-temperature egg-whites.
“There’s a group of Salmonella enterica that are subdivided by phage type,” she said. “Enteritidis is the most common one for food poisoning.” She went on to cover Staphylococcus aureus and the often-fatal Clostridium botulinum.
Rick forked pie into his mouth and listened closely. “Are you some kind of scientist?” he asked.
“No, I just like to read,” Iris said.
After dessert, Mona cradled her head on the table and began to snore deeply. Iris made up a game with Angelica involving a world atlas and some crayons. In the kitchen I drank more wine and helped Rick with the dishes. By the time we left, I was embarrassingly drunk and Rick felt it necessary to guide Iris and me back to our front door. I went to my room, leaving them on the step discussing tarantulas and food-borne illness.
* * *
The following week I got a job at a medical testing lab doing comforting, mindless work. As I sat among the pap smears and PCB panels, I had plenty of time to reflect. The year of no men was not working out. I was starved for companionship, starved for sex, starved for something new. Even Rick was starting to look okay to me. In fact, he looked great compared to the yellow-complected head chemist who had asked me out on my first day of work. But if I got serious about any man, what would happen to Iris? She was all right with me around, but she still seemed so helpless. If she were living alone, I pictured her hunkering down in the house for years while it crumbled around her and she ate from the out-of-date jars of pimientos and anchovies that were shoved to the back of the pantry.
By mid-July, Rick’s pellets had eradicated the powdery mildew, but the garden suffered under a plague of squash bugs. They had reduced the leaves to feathery gray doilies, and the budding straightnecks looked naked and afraid. While I stood in the hundred degree heat wondering if I should forget the whole enterprise, Rick waved from his backyard where he strode between his luxuriant green plants in their perfectly groomed raised beds. I decided to run over there, rather than let him view the shame of the squash bugs. He ushered me into his garden like an elder letting a sinner back in church. Angelica was playing in her sandbox by the back steps. She always played alone but talked nonstop in strict, assertive tones, as if her imaginary friends required a lot of guidance.
Rick began a tour of the beds. “Costata romanesco,” he said, fondling a heavy zucchini about to drop off its vine. “They’re the best eating. These are Embassies.” He waved off the less-impressive zucchini and moved on. He had beautiful Sierra Blanca onions, as well as a new hybrid called Numex José Fernández. He saved the pumpkin beds for last. The bulbous orange vegetables reclined this way and that all over the ground, inviting and obscene, like bored hookers in a whorehouse. I read the varieties off the row labels: Oktoberfest, Cinderella, Sorcerer.
“These are your ribs.” Rick knelt to indicate between thumb and forefinger the longitudinal sections of a Cinderella pumpkin. “You want good rib definition and good rib uniformity.” The pumpkin, lounging there in the blazing heat of his garden, radiated carotene and vitality under the caress of his fingertips. “The handle’s important too.” He slid his hand from the ribs to the fat green stem and grasped it in a vaguely sexual way. “A weak handle can be a sign of overall malaise, or too much fertilizer.” He rocked the pumpkin gently by the handle. “This one’s nice and stiff.”
Angelica came up behind us. “Where is Iris?” she demanded.
“She’s inside,” I said.
“Can I get her?” Angelica didn’t wait for an answer, but trotted toward our house.
“I’ve got a little secret,” Rick said. He stood up and dropped a conspiratorial paw on my shoulder, as if we were comrades in the pumpkin underground. “I’m going to enter one of these Cinderellas in the Doña Ana County Fair. Wish me luck.”
“That’s great.” I felt a surprising twist of jealousy in my chest. “Why is it a secret?”
Rick looked offended that I should question the clandestine aspect of his plan. “Their cucurbit competition is quite extensive,” he said, as if that explained it.
Angelica and Iris came over, hand in hand.
“Daddy, Iris is going to teach me about the birds,” Angelica called out. “She knows everything.” I was surprised to see that Angelica had Iris’s nine-hundred-dollar Zeiss-Ikon binoculars hanging around her neck. She scanned a Chinese elm for sparrows. Iris looked at the pumpkins. “These are beautiful,” she said. “The ribs are so well-defined.”
“Daddy’s going to enter a contest,” Angelica announced.
* * *
By August, I was ready to give up on the garden. Not wanting to abandon the plants entirely to the full fury of the summer sun, I continued to water most mornings, muttering encouragement to my valiant, all-but-defeated cucurbits. A few plants struggled to maturity. I struggled with questions about where life was taking me. Why was I wasting time in a dead-end job? Why was my past full of men I couldn’t hang on to? Why was I letting Iris depend on me when she should be getting out on her own? Had I been too hard on Rick? When I thought about it, he had a good heart and he was gentle and loving with Angelica. Maybe one of my answers was right next door. Meanwhile, I turned to home improvement on the weekends. I painted the kitchen cabinets and installed fancy wrought-iron curtain rods and new drapes throughout the house. On the second Saturday in September, I was laying a new tile backsplash in the bathroom when a knock came at the front screen door.
It was Rick. He looked overheated in a suit and tie—the temperature was in the nineties—and had a green canvas backpack on his back. In his arms he held a gigantic, glowing pumpkin with a stout green handle.
I opened the screen and he strode in, set the pumpkin on the coffee table, took off the backpack and his jacket, and sat down, hands on knees, as if we had a scheduled appointment.
“Rick—” He held up a hand to silence me and drew from the backpack a foot-long blue satin ribbon. He propped it against the pumpkin, trying to look proud and humble at the same time.
“Congratulations,�
� I said. The top of the ribbon was a ruffled blue button with gold lettering: First Place—Mid-Size Pumpkins—Doña Ana County Fair 1977.
“Is Iris here?”
“She’s at the library, Rick, but I’m sure she’ll be happy for you too.”
“Actually, I saw her leave,” Rick admitted. “I wanted to talk to you.”
I froze. I had known this was coming. I had thought about it for a month, and I still had no idea what I wanted. At least I could stall with the truth. “Rick, right at this moment, I’m laying tile. I’ve got adhesive spread all over the bathroom.”
“Latex-modified or dry-set?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just something I got at Mondragon’s.”
“I could’ve helped you with that.” Rick pulled a cardboard folder stuffed with papers from the backpack and placed it on his knees. “I know you and Iris have lost your parents,” he began.
“Rick—”
“Please, hear me out. I’m just an old-fashioned guy and I want to do things right.”
“What things?”
“Well, you’re the closest relative Iris has, so I felt I should ask you first.”
“Ask me what?”
“For permission. To court her. To ‘pursue’ Iris.” He put fingertip quotation marks around “pursue.” His fingernails were still dark with garden dirt.
My whole brain rolled over like one of those screens at the airport displaying all new arrival times for delayed flights. “That’s very … kind of you….”
“I have great admiration for Iris. And Angelica loves her.”
My eyes went to the folder on his lap.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t want you to think I was taking advantage. Financial advantage, I mean. I brought some of my portfolio.”
He opened the folder and a few papers slid to the floor. Others spilled out on the coffee table. “The bankers call it a portfolio. I just call it my money.” He showed me some statements that looked a lot like the ones the bankers and lawyers were always sending Iris and me. “When I sold the Staggerwing and my other airplanes, I made some good investments.” He pointed with a pen at some columns I had no interest in reading.
The screen door squeaked open and Iris came in with an armload of books. Her gaze went from the pumpkin to the ribbon to Rick.
“You won?” She knelt by the coffee table, dropped her books, and sort of embraced the pumpkin.
“Iris, Rick has come to ask my permission to pursue you in courtship.” I was worried how she would handle this, but I couldn’t protect her now. “Isn’t that sweet?”
Iris put her cheek against one of the well-defined ribs. “It’s warm,” she said.
“Is that a yes?” Rick asked.
* * *
Rick and Iris were married two months later. They left on a trip to Mazatlán with Angelica and Mona in tow. Near dusk on a November day, I wandered into the garden to turn over the dead squash plants and cover the beds for winter. I found one of the discarded, desiccated straightnecks that had died early in the summer. The pale ivory oval fit in my hand. I tossed it aside and made a few more half-hearted stabs with my spade. A cottonwood leaf beetle scuttled out of the loosened earth, frantic legs working the sandy dirt, orange and black body desperate for a new hiding place. The sunset was fading, and an ocher moon pushed its way into the dark blue sky.
Credits
“Rancho Cielito” appeared in Ontario Review, No. 65, Fall/Winter 2006–07.
“What My Last Man Did” appeared in Harpur Palate, Volume 7 No. 2, Winter 2008.
“Tierra Blanca” appeared in Bryant Literary Review, Volume 11, 2010.
“Family Cucurbita” appeared in The MacGuffin, Volume XXVII No. 1, Fall 2010.
“Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me” appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Volume 40 No. 2, Spring 2012.
“The Empire Pool” appeared in Conclave, Issue 5, Spring, 2013.
“Tchoupitoulas” appeared in Prairie Schooner, Volume 89 No. 1, Spring, 2015.
ANDREA LEWIS’s stories, essays and prose poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Catamaran Literary Reader, Cutthroat, and many other literary journals. She lives with her husband on Vashon Island, Washington. She is a founding member of Richard Hugo House, a place for writers in Seattle.