by Edie Meidav
The only stingy part about the harvest was that Kip left Lana alone with the boys, with his father BJ and mother Jennie both on an endless probe about the whereabouts of their son. He’s working with a trucking company, Lana was supposed to tell them and she did, holding the fort, loyal and waiting for her fuming Kip to come back with the stories she loved: the helicopters roving the night, search-lighting the tents and coming so close to the plants that the wind almost destroyed all their hard work.
“Not like it’s the world’s worst substance,” Kip once said to his father, stirring up a vodka gimlet for his dad.
“That’s right. Show me a man who can’t take a drink now and then and I’ll show you a lily-livered snot.”
“I was talking marijuana, dad, not liquor.”
She had stayed to hear this fight, one of the few she did not leave in soundless protest, knowing Kip would never admit to his own harvest connection.
“It’s a gateway drug,” BJ had said, taking the drink with a grunt. “Leads to worse. Kids die.”
“But you know cancer patients get rid of their pain or glaucoma? I mean can anyone argue with glaucoma?”
Kip had told Lana how the trimmers put up little placards regarding doctors’ orders for patients along the rows so that if they ever got busted, the feds would see the trimmers had gone a mostly legal route and received certain exemptions.
Okay, so Lana didn’t like Kip doing work on the rim of legality, because who needed any extra attention? Not to mention BJ’s interrogation of her whenever Kip was gone. But it was clean work and she could see after the three harvest weeks that Kip felt restored, back to the land, massaged, strong, his temper more sensible. He’d done it enough times that he was considered an oldtimer. Plus, his collective was a positive entity, he said, not like the armed Mexican cartels up in the hills. You have to be careful, he warned her, don’t hike the hills with the boys during this season—too many people accidentally get shot by the cartels.
But once BJ discovered what his son was doing for a living, he’d suffered his heart incident and made Kip’s dealings go south.
Kip had been gone a week already, unreachable, since that was the collective’s deal, stripping its workers of GPS devices, phones, even watches. The boys were picking cucumbers outside with their grandmother while Lana in the kitchen was trying to make shepherd’s pie, the great pastoral orgasm.
The call had come from BJ’s close friend, one who used to work in a law alliance against potgrowers. Lana kept stirring butter into the potatoes, halfway listening to the speakerphone BJ liked using, leaned back in his La-Z-Boy, broadcasting all calls as if jetstreamed back to the best of his highway patrol days.
His friend now hinted that BJ must find it hard to have Kip working with marijuana. “But it’s lucrative, what do you expect?” the friend said.
Learning what Kip did for a living, BJ had sunk back into the La-Z-Boy, its leg extension springing up. At the thud and cry, Lana stopped stirring to run in, making her the first to see the death mask stretch across BJ’s face, his eyes animal and vulnerable. He staggered up but she helped him back into the chair, calling to Jen outside, Jen, Jen, like a clicking dolphin.
The grandmother ambled in, the twins after. “Grandpa!” said Sedge, hoisting a cucumber.
All grandpa could say then was winch—wench?—and they understood someone should call the ambulance, Sedge the only one able to get to a phone and dial for help.
Afterward, angel son Kip was not blamed and anyway, he was not coming down from the harvest for a whole nother week.
Instead Lana became the vessel for blame. For a week, Jennie did not grace Lana with a single word, hushing phone conversations whenever this would-be pretender to the family came by holding kids’ plates, a load of laundry, anything Lana could do to earn her keep. It was Jennie who created the consensus that Lana should be excluded from the hospital room after they’d performed BJ’s bypass, as if the bad daughter-in-law were to blame for what had happened not just to Jennie’s son but to Jennie’s husband, Lana the prime ingrate who had ripped the fabric of their pure country life.
When Kip returned, tanned and strong, happy, at first he did not realize the house he came back to was not the one he had left: he lifted his head like a perplexed dog trying to hear far-off keening while Lana hovered, puttering with garden tools by the front door.
“Your father,” Jen said to Kip.
“Where is he?”
Jen waved her arm off as if in contempt toward BJ, seated in the brown recliner, knees buckled, a pale hand up. They’d put a stent into his heart and BJ had lost quarts of blood; there’d been a few nights of hit-or-miss. Now a pig valve kept the patriarch functioning and it would have to be replaced in ten years. Some of this Jen said to Kip if too quickly.
“Dad!” said the son.
For the first time in his son’s life, Trooper Hilson could barely speak so Jen kept speaking for him. Lana only heard parts:
“Your father. His position in the community. She. The boys. You’re a father now.”
“Aw, ma. Don’t put it on Lana. Anyway, dad’s half retired.”
“Honor. When he goes to the store. People look. Son’s a grower?”
“I’m not, ma. Or not exactly. I just helped out.” They stopped there, Kip caught in his lie. Jen burst into tears before retreating to the bathroom and locking the door.
“What’s going on?” Sedge said. “Here grandpa.” He put yet another apple in the lap of BJ, who’d sat a waxwork for days, stunned by the slights family slung on a man.
Then came the afterward: in some kind of hyper-rebellion, Kip went covert. Where before he’d been involved with the natural guys, fledgling hippies concerned about land stewardship and clean crops, the kind to leave their soil better than before, now he slipped around with toters of AK-47s, knives strapped to the thighs leaving dents no one could sleep off. Mercenaries shopped the cross-border economy to truck in any number of famished men with thick necks, usually young Mexicans wanting to provide for their families, people to whom the coyotes had promised employment who found themselves, once over the border, brutalized by the same coyotes, working slave hours and performing in exact fealty with feudal growers’ wishes unless they wanted to become mousebait for la migra.
Lana couldn’t understand what part Kip played in this. Was he trying to make that much more money? Was he taking too many meds for his bad knee? Or had he become one of the guys strapping a knife to his thigh? Not only could she not tell anymore, she did not care, preferring to lock herself deep away. As Vic would have said, her limbic brain had started telling her to flee but some twist in her neocortex made her hang on, addicted to the house and its rituals, the breakfast hush.
For a year she endured their sham, working long hours at the market but sometimes eyeing the angry neocolonial cashier or the married men who seemed promising, thumbworn in a good way, soft at the waist and possessing portals to vulnerability.
Until Kip, the next September, careened his car into the ocean: that was it.
At his funeral, holding each boy’s hand, she had been equivalently dead inside, unable to speak. She could second-guess nothing. Mainly she was unsure whether to stay on in Yalina because of some idea that her boys were so attached to their grandparents or could she just give in to her impulse for flight?
Not to abdicate motherhood. No, instead she could disappear with the boys, take them to find a school where the boys would make friends, all would be better. But days and weeks passed before she could move beyond a few random flings. That last year, in what felt like a final moment of despair, she had signed up for that contact improv seminar at that church—Mary, Star of the Sea—and right after that Dirk had chosen to swoop her up into his life, sweep her down to Hope. So he wasn’t the best mate and she seemed to have bad luck choosing men but nothing is permanent, it’s all about the slash, her new mate had intoned, it’s all about finding temporary connection between any two disparate forces, salsa on i
ce cream, pineapple on pizza, you and me. And what else so far preached any differently?
Part Four
FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 6:10 P.M.
“You’re not eating?” says Rose, picking at a lentil salad. It comes between women sometimes, this thing about hunger and its private rituals. As when once, a teenager, Rose had a beau who had breathed about Lana: she is perfect! Which meant that, unlike other girls whose hips and chests radiated heat, Lana lived in coolness, a promise that if you were with her, you would get to touch that coolness and life would spare you some of its smaller degradations.
They are finishing ice teas when there walks by the rich long-haired man, the fabled computer whiz, deeply tanned, the one who walks everywhere, even the dining hall, with just a string around his waist.
“You know I saw him holding the hand of the yoga instructor after the class,” Lana whispers. “Poor guy.”
“He didn’t hold Dirk’s hand though, right?” Rose whispers back. “Anyway, don’t call him poor guy. You never knew I had a thing about waist-strings?” which does make Lana laugh until she chokes.
Once she recovers, she waves a hand. “Sorry. I probably haven’t laughed like that in forever.”
“Your laugh was always your best part.”
“Nothing else?”
“I said best.”
“That guy though—you used to be so great, you could say exactly who people were.”
Rose flushes at their old game being brought up. “You don’t think he’s just some lonely pathetic boy who wants love?”
“Go on.”
“Maybe he had some little sister who was disabled. Maybe he needed to disclaim his heritage and started being nudist to sort of out-physical her.”
“Your kind of man!”
After Rose takes it the wrong way, frowning, Lana tries going backward. “You know I’ve become a real weirdo magnet. I get weirdos everywhere I go.”
“Me too,” lies Rose. “But now I think insanity is so exhausting. Because it is always just about itself, you know what I mean? It can’t listen to anyone else.”
Lana has to steel herself, tell herself not to escape, because there is something about Rose—is it her readiness to merge?—that reminds her of Lestrion, her son’s space robot.
According to Sedge, on a day when he had dared entrust her with a bit of knowledge about Lestrion, the robot knows holes perforate the skin of the universe and so Lestrion must stay vigilant against the threat of both the holes and also the lightning rods. Holes and rods could mess up Lestrion’s job, which is to keep spheres of stealth knowledge safe.
While Lana can’t fully follow her boy’s cosmology, what she does understand makes sense given that on bad days her anxiety could puncture the universe. Someone like Rose appears friendly enough to take advantage, pretending to be a lightning rod but really coming in sneakily to patch up all exits.
“What did you think when Dirk talked about emotions?” Rose is asking. “You know, during that thing he just did, the benediction or whatever.”
Lana imitates him spot-on, droning: “Emotions have their own processes and needs, their beginnings, their ends.”
“I was sure you were in a deep trance!”
“At this point, I’m good at pretending.”
Rose dares. “You like him a lot?”
After the trance, in the sweaty amber half-light, Lana had seen Dirk’s wrist snake, a dark hallucination, round the waist of a pert blonde married to some old Colorado buddy of his, a chi kung master he admired. She decides to tell Rose this. “I mean who ever wants to see a man attracted to someone so plastic?”
The previous night, Dirk had confided to Lana, cracking at least one edifice, that while he doesn’t envy what Lana had told him about her old closeness with Rose, he envies the self-satisfaction of his old Colorado buddy.
I understand, Lana had lied, wishing she could find more of an opening in Dirk so she too could confide something: she feels recently as if some kind of lava pushes inside, ready to burst.
With Rose, to change the subject, she says that when she’d seen Dirk’s hand at the girl’s waist, Lana had felt a masochistic pleasure.
“You think you’re a masochist? Really?” Now it is Rose who is good at parroting the guru. “Remember Dirk saying emotions have their birth and death and our job is to respect them—you can’t go against flow?”
“You’re better than I am at imitating him.” Lana scrapes at the skin on her knee, flaking off in bits, wishing to unburden herself. She tells Rose she had overheard a gust of bad news, including the chi-kung buddy talking about Lana on the terrace to Dirk, asking Dirk isn’t there more to a mate than six-pack abs?
“What did Dirk say?” Rose leans close, tongue lolling, engaged.
“Dirk said at first it might be hard to see how amazing I was on the inside. Whatever that means!” and in Rose’s answer, the way she rolls her eyes with such quick sympathy, Lana feels some magma cool, just a bit, letting her breathe more freely.
For how many years has Lana kept Rose a possibility, patient in the theater of herself? “You are so great to talk to,” she tells Rose. “I forgot.” Though this isn’t really true. On all those nights in the Yalina garden, when the ruckus inside her family’s cabin threatened to consume her with insignificance, how many times had Lana, smoking, reminded herself that somewhere, at some point, she had a friend so dedicated that everything Lana did or thought became important?
So karmically cathected, as Vic used to say, a little derisive on the topic of the shaggies. Only now does Lana understand it: once she used to be a Vic to Rose. Once Rose had been her prime shaggy and maybe still is. So who cares about karmic cathection? Isn’t the world tough enough that most people just need some kind of friend?
FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER, 2008 9:07 P.M.
At night in the scented dark of a room Lana had tried to make more about romance and less about Hope, one she has embellished with incense holders, fig perfume and scarves, after a day with Rose in which the old friends had talked in great swooping circles around their lives, good at avoiding any core, Lana cannot help her happiness.
Something shifts under the earth, some small good flows her way, and it helps the nocturnal restlessness of her feet with their endless appetite for new turf.
She turns toward Dirk. His hand, both bearish and tapered, flops over her waist, a lazy claim, just the way Rose used to hold her from behind. And while she and Dirk had made a pact not to talk about past sexual misadventures, to come together as a couple of the future, again she wonders: over how many other women’s waists had this hand flopped? Whom has he claimed? How dead is the signifier, as her father loved to say, how debased the currency? Feeling the emptiness of Dirk’s hands—unfortunate, because his face is so rough-hewn and a woman would think he would be a different sort of lover, a sculptor with those thick hands—she starts concocting a story about him, one to save and tell Rose in the morning, a story that Rose will find funny or at least interesting.
On another floe, far from Dirk, she cannot quite locate the swoon of their first moments. They’ve probably cohabited too quickly; this must be the mistake. She had moved in so quickly only with Kip and he had offered truer mooring. To find Dirk, she wants to tell him more about Rose, how just talking with an old friend has reminded her of so much. Yet it is hard for her to speak directly: instead she goes oblique, getting into what Dirk has called her song-and-dance about her boys. That she has been remiss as a mother.
Finally he interrupts. “That’s what’s keeping you awake?”
“I can’t keep those boys from the bad.”
She can’t explain why this topic is the one she keeps beating Dirk over the head with. Maybe it has something to do with his understanding of who her mother and father are. Were.
“I’m just way too insubstantial as a parent. It’s like my body can’t ever really stand between the boys and any fate. Like what happened with the mountain lion and Hogan the other day? I
just stood there. I couldn’t move.”
She has already told most of this to Dirk. What she really wants to confide is how Rose’s presence makes her feel that old dormant quickstep, the glitter of nighttime city lights and walking sidewalks with a beloved, the only destination being fun.
“I should somehow give more to my boys,” she says instead.
Dirk sighs. “They’re nine. What would that be? Calculus kits? Lamb’s Shakespeare?” He may have tidily kept himself from fathering any kids but still knows his supplicants’ shopping lists.
“Other advantages.” She tries to explain. If she had been a better mother in their early years, the boys would find themselves striding through life in some better, smarter way. Because her lacks mean theirs and her chips and flaws will keep them unhappy, never doctors or lawyers, never organizers or future leaders of America. These boys have a mother who loves skirting the center, whose best job so far has been at the local market, a mother who tried giving the boys the bushmama community of Yalina and who now plops them down into weird Hope with its naked spa. Once begun, she cannot stop her prophecies.
“Like instead of becoming, I don’t know, ecoscientists, they’ll end up Scientologists,” she says.
Dirk pats her arm before turning on his bedside light so he may read. As if she were half of a worn-slipper, married couple of many years, in slight bitter spoof she returns the act, picking up a copy of an alternative journal in which an ad about Dirk’s services beams forth at her. THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN.