Big Green Country

by Frances Rivetti

  A finer example of a time-warped western country kitchen, way beyond its most chronic need of a makeover, would be hard to find in a still inhabited home, a tawdry dream come true for any television makeover show worth its salt, as close to a lost cause as it gets. We’re talking total interior demolition, a complete and thorough renovation. My one sentimental concession to the general kitsch — the salvage of our grandmother’s pride, a hulking O’Keefe & Merritt stove and range top in want of a remedy for heavyduty rust removal but otherwise in good working order. They don’t make them like this anymore.

  Rainwater dripped teasingly in a musical fashion into the multiple receptacles. A fresh leak was making its debut appearance from a dangerous entry point somewhere within the region of the central overhead light. The metallic, rhythmic dripping sounded like a bunch of dried peas being pelted into a tin can by an invisible tormentor hiding in the rafters. Leaking rainwater splish-splashed onto the ceramic rooster who, in turn, glistened and menaced as he held court in the failing light.

  It was a disaster.

  “Flashing needs replacing, siding too,” Bridget declared, raising her arms above her head as if she’d read my thoughts. My razor sharp sister knew all along all what I was thinking. No fooling the boss. Not then, not now, not ever.

  “Whole place is fit for the junkyard for want of anyone around here taking a notion to fix it up,” she said.

  Even if we had the money, if it floated down from the sky in crisp, green, freshly printed notes, if cash fluttered in through the leaking roof in one hundred dollar bills, neither of us would have had the wherewithal to take it on without some serious offer of help. All I’d done for more than two decades was move my designer-clad ass from one extortionate rental apartment to the next, popping bottles of the priciest wine country bubbly with each new change of address, chasing the best neighborhood, the best kitchen, biggest bathroom, most scenic view for the rent. Sunday brunches by the Bay, weekend city breaks in other overpriced parts of the country, endless happy hours after work, frittering away a small fortune over the years. To be fair, I did call to invite Bridget and Mia to one or two housewarming parties over the years, though I knew full well even if she worked up the courage to brave the drive over the bridge, my sister was way too selfaware to turn up in her jeans and T-shirt, a pair of scuffed old ranch boots on her feet, barefaced, fiercely devoid of mascara or lipstick her whole life long.

  Clearly Bobby wasn’t particularly handy in the home repair department, either.

  “Every goddamn thing needs doing, Maggie,” Bridget said, folding her fragile frame into the sunken well of a wobbly chair. “Place is a downright teardown. Wiring, water heater, bathroom, kitchen, porch, steps, roofing . . . the dang barn is the one thing I’m not beside myself worried about right now.”

  Light was fading fast into the last, desperate throws of a wet and worn-out day. The one kitchen light fixture that appeared still moderately safe to use hung languorously over the countertop, casting its strained, tawny glow across the butt-ugly, pebble brown freckled linoleum floor. Our mood was equally gloomy, hour by hour a reunion more befitting by its miserable design. I registered no sight nor sound of my niece. I figured she must have been out, that she’d likely enrolled in classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, maybe even Sonoma State since graduating high school the previous summer. There wasn’t any news of her getting a job or going away for school, though I hadn’t thought to ask. An old, innate fear of downed power lines sprang to mind. It was no night for an inexperienced driver to be out on the west-country back roads. Did Mia have her license? I had no idea.

  Looking back, my personal and work problems had come to crisis point with the exact same poor timing that Bridget was faced with the knife. While I reeled from rejection and the first throws of early separation, my sister had opted for a double mastectomy. I watched her as she emptied bowls and buckets filled halfway with murky water from the numerous leaking points.

  “I want to say, Bridget,” I gestured, softening my voice. “You’ve kept it real. If it was me dealing with all that you’ve had on your plate, I’d be knee-deep right now in the weirdest damn treatments the world has to offer, all that crazy shit I’ve read about over the years, scorpion venom, Venus flytraps, deep sea sponges . . . I’d be signing up for it, the whole nine yards — and hell, I’d auction off this old leak-ridden shithole to pay for it.”

  My sister was a shrunken version of herself, her tufted head wrapped in an uncharacteristic turban of a raw silk-like scarf of olive green that tempered her stark profile with its soft, earthy hue. Bridget’s pretty, long and wavy, red hair had been her best feature, her number one source of pride since childhood. She’d worn it loose or else braided at the back.

  A pair of camouflage pants was cinched around her tiny waist with an elastic stretch belt. It reminded me of a belt I’d picked out as a teenager when we’d been more than happy to shop for bargain back-to-school gear at the Walmart in Rohnert Park. Come to think, it may well have been that same belt given Bridget’s hoarding tendencies. She’d tucked her baggy pants into a pair of sloppy, well-worn sheepskin boot slippers, the same genuine, pricey Australian brand I’d sent both she and Mia for Christmas the year before, ordered from Nordstrom online in a fit of generosity, after I had cashed out the stock options that I would subsequently lose.

  Now it was Bridget who was lost — in her clothing — a small bag of sticks under a bulky sweater, at sea, all hard, pointed angles where I’d been so jealous of her slender, well-proportioned contours. I took a second look at the chunky sweater that only served to emphasize the skin and bones swimming around in it. The Celtic knit was unmistakable, yet another unnerving blast from the past. It was the same old sweater that Mom had knitted me for my fifteenth birthday, the last thing she’d made for me or for any of us for that matter, a physical reminder of the few material, if not practical indulgences she’d afforded her girls when she was alive.

  The sight of it brought back a flood of memories of Mom seated by the fireside during the long evening hours of the wet winter months, its classic Irish heather cableknit she’d favored to fend off the fog and chill. Mom never could get enough of the sentimental old-world Irish stuff. Me, I hadn’t bothered to hold on to any such obsessions, except for on St. Patrick’s Day, when it felt like half the population of San Francisco would trade their heritage for an ounce of the Irish in me.

  The sweater, like Bridget and me, had seen better days. It was something at least to see my suffering sister ensconced in an item of warm clothing our mother had poured the last of her love into. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was as if she was there in the room, the three of us returned to her tired, old kitchen that dark and rainy February evening, though it was some small comfort to think of her. You still wouldn’t catch me dead in that baggy old rag despite my own reduced circumstances. To think that the last time I’d shopped for winter clothes I was armed with a slew of fat credit cards tucked into my wallet. There’s little chance in the stars for a repeat round of that sort of spending, for the record, not since and not anytime soon. Anyway, I was in good company. I doubted Bridget had bought herself so much as a new pair of socks in years.

  Chapter 4

  Jazmin

  They call us the Dreamers, kids like me whose mom and dad snuck us over the border into the States with zero papers, raising us here in the only country we’ve ever really known. I never thought of myself as a dreamer ‘til it came time to look into how to apply for junior college, put in for a driver’s license and all.

  I know as good as anyone what it is to live in the gray space between two cultures, two languages, two realities, two sets of laws. DACA is short for the official term of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a lifeline of an immigration policy that allows for some of us Dreamers brought here unlawfully as kids to be granted a renewable twoyear period of deferred action from deportation and be allowed to apply for a work permit or student status.

  And so when m
y BFF Mia emailed me asking: “Hey, you wanna earn a stash of cash, babe? Make bank. Change your luck?” I stupidly figured it was my best option to fast-forward my plans to put my paperwork in. Plus, she promised me we’d be home by Christmas with five “G” a piece stuffed into our pockets. After I got going with my DACA paperwork, I planned on treating the familia to a whole bunch of sweet things we’d never been able to afford with the easy money I would make from trimming weed.

  It wasn’t an instant “hell yes”. Despite being all pissed and frustrated on account of my not being able to apply for or pay for school already, my first thought was: “Are you bat shit crazy, bitch?” And yet, I knew this chick — she was most likely grinning all goofy at me as she typed. This one has always been full of surprises. Still is. We don’t have a whole deal to speak of, aside from each other, my folks and me but thank God, we do still have a real strong sense of family and who we are and what we mean to each other. I’m holding on to that. It’s my touchstone with all the shit I’ve gotta wade through now to get myself where I need to be.

  Mom and Dad, all they do is work, work, work. What choice do they have? They work their fingers to the bone and they wouldn’t have it any other way insofar as figuring out how to put food on the table and a way to get the papers for all of us. It’s been this way my whole life. All through high school, I never complained out loud when it was me who was left home come evening hours and weekends, looking after the little ones when I was barely more than a kid myself.

  I graduated high school with a frickin’ 4.0 GPA no less. My mom, she was more than happy for me to go on being her muchacha, the good girl that I was, low profile, picking up the house, helping her out with her early morning jobs before Dad took off for his own long day. And I did it for a few months even after I left school because it was what was expected of me and I love those little ones. I never bitched or moaned. I looked after my little brothers and sisters like I was a third parent.

  My dad on the other hand, he knew I had other ideas. I had been upfront with him about my dream to get myself into nursing school some day. All he’d kept on saying was that he was sorry. It was what it was. There was no money for college and no college without paperwork. I learned to drive his truck the times he’d downed a whole bunch of Coronas after work, me being the oldest and my mom being way too scaredy-cat to take the wheel. I didn’t dare try to get a license once I figured out how slim my chances were, though Dad had somehow managed to swing one back when they were issuing them to the undocumented with proof of identity and residence. I figured it was way too risky for me to apply for a license after the immigration scares started up.

  Mia said I was breaking the mold in getting my life together. “Dare to dream, babe,” she’d rallied and encouraged. Mia is always laughing with me, never at me, despite all the serious crap we’ve been dealt, which is one of the things I love most about that girl. And hey, you know what? She knows. She’s learned the hard way how to free herself from fear and shame.

  The little ones, I figured, they were old enough to make do without me for a short while. I justified what we did as good practice for Mia and me in finding us a sweet apartment of our own some day. Santa Rosa is 45 minutes inland, by car. I pictured a small, affordable place somewhere within walking distance of the junior college, you know the kind of thing — cool coffee shops, thrift stores, music venues, what the heck — a real life of our own for girls of our age. It was totally chill to take our time with all this school stuff, Mia kept on telling me. “The junior college has been there a long time, as far as I know, it sure ain’t going anywhere til we get back, J.”

  I’d fixed my mind on the idea of filling out the paperwork that would enable me to stay on in the system. It was gonna be one heck of a struggle, but I’d heard there are safe haven schools where I’d be able to transfer, later, in my junior year. I wanted to do things the right way. I still plan on it, after all. But OMG, let’s make this clear, there was no way in hell I would have agreed to what happened if I’d had one single fucking clue of what was in store.

  All I know now for sure is that it’s all out in the open, what happened to Mia and me. It feels like the whole darn county is aware of the position I am in with my lack of papers and all, my hoping and praying they’re gonna see how much I have to offer if they let me stay. I’m hell-bent on fully cooperating with whoever and whatever it is I have to do for them to let me out of here, so that I’m free to make a life for myself in California. I’ll figure out how to get on my feet if it kills me. I’m gonna make it into nursing school if it’s the last thing I do, you’ll see.

  It’s not that it’s easy for me to maintain this kind of focus. My heart is in a million pieces ‘til I get to see Mia again. After all the pain and the humiliation the pair of us have endured, shit, something fierce has taken hold inside of me. No man will ever have the strength to smash my spirit again, let me just say. “Swim to the light, babe,” I urge myself, on loop. “Breathe it in, go on, look at all that fresh, clean air up there just hanging around waiting for the intake.” I go about my days like this, as much as I have the strength for, following my compass, shining my light all the way through the trees for Mia to see. In some moments, when I am at more determined than ever, I feel like a greedy little kid who never knew nothing bad in the world. It’s the only way I know how to cope, how to go on with it all.

  Chapter 5

  Maggie

  Rain that started in on Halloween pounded the Northern California coastal communities through the holidays and well into January and February. I had bunkered down in my half empty apartment in gloomy San Francisco, glum and pitiful while I’d still thought I could wait that winter out. Since Andres had swiped way more than his share of its contents, the apartment echoed with the sole sound of silver bullets pelting the single pane windows. Day after day, night after night, I’d drowned my sorrows in his expensive wine and a series of overpriced comfort food deliveries, waiting for something, what, I have no clue in retrospect, to miraculously change inside of me. I had sat and watched the rain as it hit the glass sideways and poured down in sheets.

  It was the city that had made me soft and ever more vulnerable. I wallowed in the misery of those last, self-indulgent months of my life within the nouveau wealth capital of America. I’d already walked away from my work and I’d barricaded myself in the apartment with a Joni Mitchell soundtrack on loop. I made perfectly sure it was loud enough to drown out the sound of police sirens and car alarms. I love my music and it was all I had left. For years I had taken pride in having unwittingly escaped the old man’s humiliating bet on me being the family’s best breeding stock. This false claim of his was frequently and crudely pointed out, much to my humiliation, in my teens — in the form of my pair of wide, so-called “child-bearing hips”. The fact I had not fallen pregnant after Andres and I had come around to thinking we should give it a shot was a topic I revisited countless times in my head that sad, solo, holiday season. I felt like the lone loser.

  The night of the day I’d given notice on my lease, I double-bolted the door, stripped off my clothes and took a long, hot shower. Since I had newly declared my Joni Mitchell moping period over, it was time to revisit my substantially perkier New Wave, ‘80s playlist — first up, Boy George ramped to full blast as the warm suds of the last of my overpriced salon shampoo and conditioner splurge, washed down my back. I stepped out from under the cheap little showerhead Andres had switched out for the luxury version he’d mean spiritedly unscrewed and taken with him as he’d systematically dismantled my life. Who does this to someone? You’ve heard about people who take the light bulbs with them when they move. Well, that’s my ex. I took a good long look at myself in the fulllength mirror fixed on the back of my bedroom door. There was a fresh new batch of cellulite at the top of my inner thighs I hadn’t noticed before and my backside appeared to have built up an extra layer of padding since the last time I’d looked. I sucked in my stomach and took stock of my general overall cond
ition. I made a sort of peace with myself, that night and after carefully ensconcing my naked, overripe 46-year-old body in a fluffy robe for safekeeping, I cranked the music down a tad to the dulcet tones of Duran Duran, kicking back on a pile of pillows on my bed to polish off the last bottle of Cab that I’d started in on earlier that evening.

  The next morning, hungover, I set about bagging up the bulk of the clothes that had served me as a sort of incentive-inducing mid-management motivational suit of armor. I had made the decision while feeling no pain the night before to shed my false and illfitting skin, donate it, the whole lot of it — countless thousands of dollars worth of skirts, pants, jackets, dresses, shirts, shoes, belts and bags. Granted, most of it I’d bought on sale. I’ve never been a complete idiot. I searched online for a program I remembered promoting in one of the internal memos I was in charge of sending out to several thousand fellow employees. It’s a program that provides outfits to underprivileged women being groomed for the workplace. Within hours, they’d efficiently sent two members of their all women collection team over in a van. Two girls in their late teens hauled the substantial stash of designer duds away before I could so much as change my mind.

  “Sign here,” said the one with the most visible ink art. She held the paperwork in her decorated fingers, the back of her hands, her wrists and what I could see of her arms a self-inked journal of what was likely an emotional trip through turbulent teens.