by Ruth Ozeki
“Insect infestations are one of the greatest threats to the production of high-quality tubers,” Lloyd used to say in the introduction to the speech that he gave every year to the Young Potato Growers of Idaho. “It is crucial to plan the applications of pesticides to harmonize with seasonable cultural practices.”
“Seasonable cultural practices”—how he liked the sound of that! I remember him practicing the phrase, standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, and when I stood there and looked at my reflection, I would practice saying it, too. Fuller Farms seemed living proof to us all that with the cooperation of God and science, and the diligent application of seasonable cultural practices, man could work in harmony with nature to create a relationship of perfect symbiotic mutualism. The first five hundred acres had grown to a holding of three thousand by the time I turned fourteen.
That was 1974, the year Nixon resigned, the year Patty Hearst was kidnapped and Evel Knievel attempted his historic leap across the Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle. But most important of all, it was the year of the Nine-Dollar Potato.
Consider the economics. Year after year you teeter along in a stable ’tater market, breaking even at $3.50 per hundred pounds of premium grade. When the price goes up to $4.00, you make a little, when it goes down to $3.00, you lose a little, but generally you fall in the balance and scrape by. Then, out of the blue, nature blesses you by cursing others. She sends an early frost to Maine, too much rain to California—1974 was certainly an odd year for weather, everywhere except Idaho. The failure of the nation’s crops, combined with the explosive demand for french fries created by the burgeoning fast-food market, resulted in a potato shortage that sent prices rocketing into the clear blue heavens. Across the country, housewives who paid $1.29 for a ten-pound bag last year were now paying $2.39, and all of this translated into an unheard-of, unbelievable bonanza, the $9.00 per hundredweight that made my father a rich, albeit flabbergasted, farmer.
So there was Lloyd, in his prime, a Depression-born agriculturalist exercising pride in his new capitalist muscle. And who gives a flying fuck what happened after that? That’s what you would have thought anyway, if you were me, on a predawn winter morning in 1974, stuffing your clothes and diary into your father’s army duffel, lifting the keys to his pickup truck from the hook in the kitchen, and creeping down the porch stairs, out into the frigid night, careful not to slam the door behind you.
cass
Every year in November, as Thanksgiving approached, Cass Quinn would find herself wondering about Yummy Fuller. There was a reason for this. When they were growing up, Liberty Falls Elementary School put on a yearly Pilgrims’ Pageant. It was supposed to represent a big feast, and every kid had to play a different food in it. Cassie had started out as a pea. Up through the third grade she was content in this role, but by the time she got to fourth, she had gained so much weight they made her a potato. She said it was fine, said really she didn’t mind—that’s just the kind of girl she was—but inside she minded a lot. You’d think in Idaho playing the potato wouldn’t be so bad—in fact, might even be an honor, but it wasn’t. Everyone knew that the side dishes were typecast. The carrot was a tall redhead named Rusty. The green beans were a pair of skinny twins. The cherry tomato went to a rosy second-grader with shiny cheeks. The corn was a tawny kid named Kellogg. Face it. What is a potato? A potato is a fat, round, dumpy white thing, wrapped in burlap, rolling around on a dirty stage.
Some kids never had to be vegetables at all. Some kids got to be human beings—Pilgrims or Indians—and eat the rest of the kids for dinner.
Like Yummy Fuller. As Cass recalled it, Yummy was always the Indian princess, even in first grade, when everybody else in their class was still playing gravy.
“Noble Pilgrims,” Princess Yummy used to say, “my people and I welcome you to our land. We know that your journey has been a hard one, and we will help you. Pray, take our seeds and plant them—”
It wasn’t like they didn’t have real Indians in school. They did. But back then even the Shoshone kids didn’t seem to mind, or maybe they just knew better than to care. Year after year Yummy’s lines stayed the same, while slowly she grew into her role. Tall and slim, wearing love beads, a buckskin miniskirt, and a headband with a jaunty hawk feather stuck in the back—by the time she entered ninth grade, Yummy made a luscious ambassador.
“Pray, take our seeds and plant them—”
From her position, curled on the dusty stage in her burlap sack, Cass listened to Yummy recite her lines and tried not to sneeze.
That year Yummy started wearing peasant blouses to school, and hip-hugging jeans that she’d turned into bell-bottoms with wedges of upholstery fabric. Sometimes she wore a gold dot, the kind you stick on filing folders, in the middle of her forehead. “It’s my third eye,” she told Cass. “It’s called a bindi. Indians wear them.”
Cass didn’t recall any of the Shoshone kids with filing dots on their faces, and she said so. Yummy rolled her eyes. “Real Indians. The ones from India.”
She would lean against the mailboxes at the end of their road, smoking an Old Gold Filter. They used to meet there after dinner when the summer sun lingered at the edge of the fields, low in the sky. Dump their bikes in the dirt at the side of the road and smoke, while the sun’s oblique rays stretched their shadows out long. Cass used to love her summer shadow. Even next to Yummy’s it was tall and slim, with legs that just went on and on forever.
It was safe there at the crossroads. The fields spread out in all directions, as far as the eye could see, some dark green with potatoes, some light green with wheat. There was nobody around, and if someone did show up, you could see them coming for miles by the dust they raised. Plenty of time to stub out a butt and flick it into the field, unless it was a truckload of Mexican farmhands, in which case you usually didn’t bother. Yummy would squint at Cass and offer up the cigarette, filter first, and Cass would take it between her thumb and forefinger, narrow her eyes, and drag deep. Then she’d hand it back the same way. When the sun set, taking her shadow with it, she’d sit on a large chunk of black stone at Yummy’s feet. They’d continue to smoke until the tip of the cigarette glowed red against the indigo sky. Yummy would take a foot out of her sneaker—she’d stopped wearing socks that summer—and place it, storklike, against the inside of her thigh. It’s a yoga pose, she told Cass. Her bare feet were long and slender. She wore a silver ring on her second toe, where dirt collected.
Cass had a brainload of pictures like that, even now, twenty-five years later.
“You don’t have to keep on with it,” Will said. “If it gets too much.”
He was sitting at the table with his morning coffee, looking over some specs on seed potatoes for the spring. He put down the pages and watched as she bundled up a few eggs, still warm from the chickens, tucking them in next to a bread loaf.
Cassie shrugged. “Jeez, Will. What else do I have to do with my day?” The sarcasm was lost on him.
“There’s always plenty to do around a farm—”
Cass straightened her back, rotating her fists into her kidneys. She eyed her husband, the stolid, broad-shouldered bulk of him, and tried to breathe away impatience. Of course there was plenty to do. Too much. There always had been, and ever since she and Will had bought up the last of Fuller’s acres, and she’d taken on the old man and his crazy wife, there was more to do than ever.
Cass sighed and went back to her packing, slipping a small jar of preserves in with the loaf. It wasn’t worth the breathing for an answer.
Will knew when he’d got something wrong. “I didn’t mean to criticize,” he said, catching her wrist as she passed. “It’s real sweet of you to look after them.”
That’s right, thought Cass. She looked down at his wide face. His hair was pulled back tight into a blond ponytail and fastened with a rubber band. She gave it a tug, then bent to plant a kiss on the top of his head. I am sweet. Why not? You could always count on Will to find
the good in things. But if this was comfort, it quickly passed. Because it wasn’t just about sweet, although some sweetness did enter into it. Curiosity? Pity? Cass pulled away and went back to her packing. Resignation. Too many years spent as a potato.
“Maybe you should write to that daughter of theirs,” Will said. “Tell her she has to come home.”
“Sure thing.” Never mind that she hadn’t heard a word from Yummy in close to twenty-five years, or had any idea where she lived. “That’ll make her hop right to.” She gave Will a look as she headed out the door. “You don’t know Yummy Fuller.”
“Yummy, yummy, yummy, I got love in my tummy,
And I feel like a-lovin’ you. . . .”
It was her theme song. You could almost hear it playing in the corridors at school when she walked by. Pigtails swinging. It stuck in your head. Cass could still catch its boppy little melody on the cold fall wind. She swung her basket onto the passenger’s seat of the Suburban and set off down the road.
The screen door at the Fullers’ house had slumped off its hinges, and the mesh was clogged. The aluminum was dull and spotted with age. The old Japanese woman shuffled through the kitchen. She peered up through the dirty screen.
“Yes? May I hel-pu you?” After fifty years in Idaho she still spoke with the deliberateness of a foreigner, carefully pronouncing words, lining them up one after another, and launching them tentatively into the air.
“Hi, Momoko. It’s me, Cassie. Can I come in?”
The old woman backed away from the door and held it open.
“Yes. Plee-su.”
All the lamps in the house were off, and the shades were drawn. Cass set the basket of food on the kitchen table and yanked the cord on the roll-up blinds, letting in the cold, dim light of the morning. The plastic blinds were torn in places and patched with Scotch tape that had turned yellow and brittle. She could hear Momoko saying something in Japanese behind her. She talked to herself, always had.
Cass looked around. “Did you and Lloyd have breakfast?” she asked, hoping to see crumbs on the counter or dishes in the sink, some sign that a meal had been eaten, but the kitchen looked barren, like a dusty exhibit in a wax museum that no one visited anymore. It was the labels. Lloyd had written them out in black marker on index cards and taped them to the furniture and the various appliances. TOASTER, read one. MR. COFFEE, read another. Momoko was forgetting the names of things. Cass went to the REFRIGERATOR and took out a macaroni casserole she’d left a few days before. Some of the cheese had been picked off the top, but mostly it had not been touched. The old woman watched.
“You want to play with Yumi-chan? Maybe she is in her room. I call her.”
A bad day for Momoko, Cass thought. The woman was having more and more of them, days that dissolved backward, dragging Cass with her until she could almost believe she was six years old with pigtails and had come over to play. It was the air in the house. Smelled funny. Maybe a gas leak? No, not gas. Something unpleasant. She opened a window.
“Mrs. Fuller, didn’t you fix your supper last night?”
Momoko nodded her head. “Oh, yes, thank you very much.”
“What did you have?”
She blinked, slid her eyes from side to side behind her glasses, looking for clues. She pointed to the casserole dish in Cassie’s hands.
“I make that one. Nice whatchamacallit. Lloyd’s favorite.” She nodded.
Cass took the lid off the macaroni casserole and showed it to Momoko.
“Yes,” Momoko agreed, looking in. “Pot roast. He like it very much. He is meat-and-potatoes kinda guy.”
Cass sighed. “Good for you. I’m glad you had a nice supper. Now, how about some breakfast?”
“Okay. I go upstairs to call Yumi.”
“I don’t think Yummy’s here, Mrs. Fuller. Why don’t you go up and get Lloyd? See if he wants to come down for breakfast.”
“Okay,” said Momoko. “Then you go out and play.”
The old woman shuffled from the room. Cass poached up some eggs and heated water for coffee. She sliced the bread, annoyed with herself for forgetting to buy Wonder. The crusts of her home-baked loaves were too hard for Lloyd. She had seen him struggling one day, sucking on the crust to soften it and then mashing it between his gums. She was out of the habit of store-bought since Will had gotten her the bread machine for Christmas several years back, when potato prices were up. What she’d wanted was a new oven. What she’d really wanted was a whole new kitchen, but that was another story.
She heard Momoko upstairs, talking to her husband. He wasn’t bedridden, but he liked to take his time getting up. Mornings were difficult. It was hard for him to get downstairs, and he liked it when Cass could give him a hand.
“You’re a big, strong girl,” he joked. “Momoko’s too small. She’ll just buckle. Look! I’m afraid I’ve bent her in half already!”
“Ooooooh, he is so big man!” Momo said, slapping him. “I carry him all the time on my back! How you say? Like on back of piggy? See? He make me crooked all over!”
Sometimes the three of them could share a laugh.
“You so old man!” Momoko would scold him. “How you get so old?”
And Lloyd would smile. “How’d you get so pretty?”
Sometimes it wasn’t so bad.
“Breakfast is ready!” Cass called. “Lloyd, do you need a hand?”
She walked to the foot of the stairs in the living room and waited. The room was still and close. It was a nice room and had potential, but it would have to be entirely redone. She rubbed the shiny banister. She could still hear Momoko, muttering upstairs.
“Lloyd?” she called again.
The heavy curtains shut out the morning sun, except for a single shaft of light that shot through the gap where the fabric panels didn’t quite meet in the middle. The light touched the air, made it substantial, made it come to life with motes and particles, flying things. Maybe it was the tilt of the shaft, but Cass felt the room shift, no longer familiar. She held on to the banister. Probably just hunger, she hadn’t had her own breakfast yet. Still, there was a feeling.
The light came to rest on a dusty horsehair love seat. She had a history with that chair. The last time she’d sat there, feeling oversize, was a year ago, when she and Will signed the last of the documents that Duggin had brought over for the closing. Lloyd sat across from them, sunk deep in his ancient recliner. Momoko had brought them all coffee in stained cups, then joined them, sitting on a small, hard-backed chair, her worn flip-flops dangling a few inches from the floor.
“My colon this time,” Lloyd told the lawyer. “Cancer. Nipped it in the bud, but they took out close to a foot of the darn thing. Have to wear a contraption now.”
He paused, contemplating his breached innards, then continued, with something like pride. “Always thought my heart would kill me. Never expected this—”
He looked around for confirmation, but no one would agree, or even answer. No one would say, Yes Lloyd, it sure is funny. Or, Absolutely right, Lloyd, with a trigger heart like yours. Will was looking down at his lap. Duggin was aligning the edges of the contract of sale. Cass stroked the upholstery on the arm of the love seat. She found a hard bit lodged in the nap and worried it with her fingernail. The silence was long, until she broke it.
“You’re doing great, Lloyd,” she said, too late to be quite convincing. She’d had a run-in with cancer herself, so she could sympathize, but while she was doing great, she knew he wasn’t. Recently she had taken over helping him with his colon bags, too. His thick, hardened fingers had trouble with the snaps, and Momoko couldn’t remember how the appliances got attached.
Lloyd sighed. “Not likely I’ll ever be up to running three thousand acres again, eh, Will?”
“No, sir,” said Will, looking up. Blunt. Honest. The old man hadn’t run three thousand acres for years.
“It’s a lot of work—” Duggin said.
“Don’t mind the work,” Lloyd said. “That’
s never been the problem. God knows I worked hard when I could, and we surely were rewarded.” He looked over at Will. “Ever tell you about that year? 1974, it was. We got nine dollars per hundredweight. . . .” Then all of a sudden his shoulders sagged. “Don’t know what we were thinking, eh, Momo? What were we thinking?”
Momoko didn’t hear him. She was watching Cass. “You are Yumi’s friend?”
Cass nodded. “I used to be.”
“She not here, you know.”
“I know. Have you heard from her . . . ?”
“She was too-pretty girl,” the old woman said. “If she was more ugly, maybe she not get into trouble.”
“Momoko!” Lloyd struggled to stand, but the old chair seemed to stick to his buttocks. His skinny knees flapped open and closed and he looked like some long-legged marsh bird caught in a sump pond, throwing his weight forward again and again. Finally, breathless, he sat back. His bony chest heaved. He closed his eyes.
Will coughed. “If this isn’t a good time, we can take a break—”
Cass frowned at him. No point in putting it off.
“Good time?” asked Lloyd, voice tight, speaking to no one at all. “There’s no good time. There’s no time at all.”
He opened his eyes and spoke to Will. “My wife and I want it guaranteed that we can go on living here in this house. That is nonnegotiable, Will. And we keep five acres for Momo’s seeds.” He turned to the lawyer. “We’ve made quite a nice little business out of the seeds in the past few years. All Momo’s doing, really. Haven’t been much use, ever since my heart . . .”
“Of course, Lloyd,” Duggin said. “The house and five acres are guaranteed. For as long as you like. Or until—”
Lloyd closed his eyes again and let his head fall back against the upholstery. “I’d always hoped . . .” He rolled his head from side to side as though his hopes were a muscle he could loosen. “Don’t know who we’re going to get to take over our seed stock. We got hundreds of varieties, some of ’em quite rare.”