by Jodi Picoult
I sit down on a dry patch of grass and stretch out on my back. “You wouldn’t believe the crap that goes on with the commercial crop when you don’t spray. Aphids and worms and scabs and all kinds of other things. There’s just too many of them to take care of individually.” I shade the sun from my eyes. “You leave it up to nature, and the whole thing goes to shit.”
“Yeah,” says Joley. “Tell me about it.” He comes to sit down beside me. “You’ll like her. You remind me of her, a little.”
I think about asking, In what way? but I am not sure that I want to know the answer. Maybe it’s the way I’ve taken him in, I think. I find myself wanting to know more about this Jane, what she looks like and the kinds of books she reads and where she got the nerve to hit her own husband. She sounds like, as my father would say, hell on wheels. “Women don’t know what they want anymore. They tell you they’re getting married, and then they jump you. Go figure.”
Joley laughs. “Jane always knew she wanted Oliver. The rest of us just couldn’t understand why.” He leans up on one elbow. “Sam, you gotta see this guy. He’s your classic scientist, you know? In a fog the whole day, and then he sees his daughter, and he’s lucky if he can remember her name. Talks and talks about these fucking tapes he makes of whale songs—”
“Joley, if I didn’t know better I’d say you were jealous.”
He pulls a thistle from the ground beside him. “Maybe I am,” he says, sighing. “See, here’s this great person. And Oliver gets to make her over in his own image, you know? He didn’t ever care about what a great person she was to begin with. If she had stayed with me—well, I know it doesn’t work like that, but in theory— she’d be totally different now. She’d be like she used to be. For one thing, she wouldn’t be scared of her own shadow.” He stretches out on his back again. “I’ll put it in your terms. She used to be an Astrachan, and now she’s a crab apple.”
I smile at him. Crab apples are tart, almost inedible, except in jellies. But Astrachans, well, they’re the best all-arounds—sweet in cooking, sweet when eaten raw. I roll away from Joley, anxious to change the conversation. I feel weird talking like this to him. It is one thing if we are talking about the orchard, or my own life, but he is older than me, and when I remember that, I don’t feel right about giving him advice. About all I can do is listen.
“So you going to tell us what happened last night?” Joley says, my way out.
“You heard me.” I sit up and hug my knees, wiping off grass stains on my jeans. “Joellen’s getting married. She tells me this and then she comes on to me.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Would I joke about something like that?” I mean it as a light remark but Joley stares at my face, as if he is trying to evaluate me before making a decision.
“I’m not going to ask you what happened,” Joley says, laughing.
“You don’t want to know—”
“Oh, I don’t?”
I shake my head, grinning. Getting it out, saying it in the freedom of this great spread of land, my own land, somehow makes it seem all right. Once it is out, I can forget about it. I turn to Joley. “This kind of shit ever happen to you, or is it me?”
He laughs and stands up, leaning against a tree that he recently grafted. “I only fell in love once in my life,” he says, “so I’m no expert.”
“Some help you are.” He offers me a hand to pull myself up. We pick up the hose and the spray bottle and head farther into the commercial half of the orchard. I walk ahead and stand at the crest of the hill, surveying the four corners of this place. There are men pruning younger trees straight ahead of me, and farther along in the commercial section I can make out Hadley, supervising the spraying of more Thiodan. Now that it’s July all the leaves and blossoms are out, reaching against the sky like fingers.
Joley hands me the fallen branch he picked up earlier, a likely candidate for late-summer bud-grafting. “Cheer up, Sam,” he tells me. “If you’re lucky, I’ll introduce you to my big sister.”
19 REBECCA
July 22, 1990
While we are waiting in line for our ice cream, my mother brings up the subject of Sam. “So,” she says to me. “What do you think? Really.”
I have to say, I have been expecting this. They haven’t argued all day. In fact, most of the times I have seen my mother this morning, she has been in the company of Sam, strolling through the south corner of the orchard, or snapping beans with him on the porch as the sun beats down, or just talking. I’ve wondered what they are saying—Sam having no experience in speech disorders, and my mother knowing next to nothing about agriculture. I figure they talk about Uncle Joley, their common ground. Once or twice, I’ve pretended they are talking about me.
“I don’t know him really well,” I say. “He seems nice enough.”
My mother steps in front of my line of vision so that all I can see is her. “Nice enough for what?”
What does she expect me to say? She stares so hard that I know she demands a better answer, a right answer, and I haven’t any idea what that could be. “If you mean, Should I screw him, then, if you want to, yes.”
“Rebecca!” My mother says it so loudly that the woman in front of us, Hadley, Joley and Sam himself all turn around. She smiles, and waves them all away. Then she says more quietly, “I don’t know what has gotten into you here. Sometimes I think you aren’t the same kid I brought out East.”
I’m not, I want to say, I’m crazy in love. But you don’t tell your mother that, especially when she’s all of a sudden best friends with a different guy who happens to be the same age as the guy you love. My mother turns to Uncle Joley. “She wants a small chocolate. I’ll have a javaberry. Can you order, we’re going to walk a ways.”
I pull my arm away from her grasp. “I don’t want chocolate,” I tell my uncle, although that was what I had planned to order. “She doesn’t know what I want.” I shook a look at my mother. “Creamsicle sherbert.”
“Creamsicle? You hate creamsicle. You told me last year it reminds you of St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin.”
“Creamsicle,” I repeat. “That’s what I want.” To avoid a scene, I walk with my mother. When we leave, Hadley and Sam are pointing at an all-terrain bicycle.
“What is it?” I say, figuring if I get it out into the open then this will all be over. I know it is about Hadley, and how much time I have been spending with him. For all I know, maybe she found out about us in the barn.
I have worked this all out in my mind, the product of several nights that I have lain awake missing the sounds of California. You don’t hear passing cars, or Big Wheels on the sidewalk, or the surf from miles away. Instead there are cicadas (peepers, Hadley says), and the wind in the branches and blossoms and the bleating of sheep. I swear you can hear headlights here. I cannot see the drive from my bedroom; at least three times I have run to the window at the end of the upper hall to survey the cars below—count them, and make sure my father hasn’t come yet. The only thing I can imagine worse than confronting my mother about Hadley is confronting my father about this entire trip.
This is what I am going to say to my mother: I know you think that I am young. But I was old enough to come here with you. And I was old enough to know what was going on between you and Daddy, and what was better for us in the long run. So don’t tell me I don’t know what I am doing. After all, you weren’t any older than I am when you began to date Daddy.
What my mother says is: “I know you think I’m betraying your father.”
I stare up at her in amazement. This isn’t about me at all. She hasn’t even noticed me and Hadley.
“I know that I am still married to him. Don’t you think every time I see you in the morning I think about what I’ve left behind in California? A whole life, Rebecca, I left my whole life. I left a man who, at least in some ways, depends on me. And that’s why sometimes I wonder what I’m doing out here, in this godforsaken farm zone—”she waves her arm in t
he air, “—with this—”
When her voice falls off, I interrupt her. “This what?”
“This absolutely incredible man,” she says.
An absolutely incredible man?
My mother stops walking. “You’re pissed off at me.”
“No I’m not.”
“I can tell.”
“I’m not. Really.”
“You don’t have to lie . . .”
“Mom,” I say, louder. “I’m not lying.” Am I? I face her and put my hands on my hips. I think, who is the child here? “So what’s been going on between you and Sam, anyway?”
My mother turns beet red. Beet red, on my own mother! “Nothing,” she admits. “But I’ve been having some crazy thoughts. It’s nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
My own mother. Who would have thought. “I didn’t think you two got along.”
“Well, neither did I,” she says. “But I guess compatibility isn’t the issue.” She stares in the direction of Hadley and Sam, who are waiting with Uncle Joley at the front of the ice cream line. This place is different from the one we went to yesterday, back when my mother and Sam didn’t like each other. This place makes its own ice cream. It has only seven flavors and Sam says it’s always busy. “We should head back,” my mother says, without any real determination.
When we first got here, Sam wanted nothing to do with my mother. After the whole sheep-shearing fiasco, which was a lousy first impression, he’d told Hadley my mother was some uptown bitch with a lot to learn about real life. And when Hadley told me, and I’d told my mother, she’d snorted and said that an apple farm in East Jesus wasn’t real life.
And then last night they just started hanging around together. When I first saw it I couldn’t believe it; I thought that my mother found Sam to be such a hick, she had to see it for herself. In truth, I didn’t pay much attention. I had been spending time with Hadley—we’d hit it off immediately, and then after last night, well, who knew what would come of this. Hadley, who was so fascinating. He could do things that I had never seen anyone do: make seedlings grow, plane a rough tree into a board, build things that would last forever. He was absolutely incredible.
Absolutely incredible. All this time, whether she knows it or not, my mother has been falling in love.
“I think you’ve got the hots for Sam,” I say, testing the idea out loud.
“Oh, please. I’m a married lady, remember?”
I stare at her. “Do you remember?” I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. I could barely conjure a picture of my father’s face, and I had less of a reason to want to be away from him. When I thought about him really hard, I could see his eyes—wide, blue, unbelievably tired. His eyes, and the lines around his mouth (although not his mouth itself) and the bend of his knuckles holding a pen. That’s it, the memory of fifteen years.
“Of course I remember,” my mother says, annoyed. “I’ve been married to your father for fifteen years. Aren’t you supposed to love the person you marry?”
“You tell me.”
This stops my mother dead in her tracks. “Yes, you are supposed to.” She says the words slowly. She seems to be trying to convince herself. “Sam is just a friend.” She waves her hand in front of us, as if she’s clearing away everything else she’s said. “My friend,” she repeats. Then she looks at me with such confusion I think she’s forgotten that she has been speaking to me all along. “I just wanted you to know that’s where things stand.”
“Well, I appreciate that,” I say, and I try not to laugh. I don’t imagine that’s what she wants to hear. “Our ice cream is going to melt.” She grabs my hand to take me back to the counter. I shake her away, because Hadley is watching. “Please, Mom. I’m not three.”
I walk over to Hadley and offer him some of my cone. He smiles and pulls me to sit on his lap while he winds his tongue along the ridges made by the soft ice cream machine. We end up trading our cones, because after all I do not like creamsicle.
My mother is standing almost diagonally across from us. She is feeding Sam her cone while Sam is feeding her his cone. Sam misjudges the distance and dots a little vanilla on my mother’s nose. She giggles and mashes her cone onto Sam’s chin. Watching them, you have to smile. She’s acting like a kid, I think. She’s acting like me.
• • •
Uncle Joley, Hadley and I ride in the back of the red pickup on our way to Pickerel Pond. It’s the place where Sam learned how to swim when he was a kid, a few miles away from the orchard. In the fifties, Sam yells from the cab of the truck, there was only this one pond. It’s the one we’ll see with lily pads that’s still stocked with fish. But then the residents in the area chipped in and they dug a huge hole beside it, added sand for the bottom, and built swimming docks. For a summer fee, your whole family could come and swim whenever.
It is a perfect Sunday. The sun has scalded the metal of the flatbed and all three of us are sitting on our T-shirts. There isn’t much of a wind, but there seems to be a breeze when you find yourself thinking about it. The air smells like luck. “I think you’ll like this place,” Hadley says over the roar of tires. “No undertow.”
Maybe my mother will even swim. I’ve always assumed that it’s the current of the ocean that keeps her from venturing into the water. In fact, she has been very optimistic about coming here for a picnic. She packed the lunch herself and keeps talking about how nice it will be to cool off.
The sun beats on the crown of my head. I hold my palm up against it for a minute of shade. “It’s like fire,” I tell Hadley, and I make him touch it too.
Uncle Joley, who has brought a ukulele, is trying to play the beginning bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” He has almost got the notes right, but it sounds like sick luau music. To me it is not soothing, but it lulls Hadley to sleep. His head rests in my lap. The entire trip, Uncle Joley strums unlikely songs: “Happy Birthday,” the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, “Blue Velvet,” “Twist and Shout.”
Sam pulls into what looks like a thicket, but it opens up to a dirt path and then becomes a road. At the end is a parking lot with a metal gate and rusted hinges. “They tried to lock up here at night for a few years,” Sam yells to us. “But kids kept jumping the fence to party on the beach. When they left the gates open at night, all the kids stopped coming here.”
Hadley, who has woken up, says, “That’s ‘cause it wasn’t fun anymore. You only want to make trouble at a place that’s off limits.”
Sam leans his head out his window and tries to look at Hadley. “You used to come here?” He laughs. “Figures.”
Sam and my mother carry the cooler to the pond, and I take the towels, the paddle games and the yellow kickball. Uncle Joley brings his ukulele. At a green post, Sam signs his name on a clipboard.
The pond is much larger than I had envisioned. It is almost perfectly square, but then again it was man-made. Adjacent to the swimming pond is the real pond, Pickerel Pond, and it is so large that I cannot see one of its edges. There are two Sunfishes, a muddy paddle-boat and a metal rowboat on the shore of the big pond, all labeled PPA, Pickerel Pond Association.
Sam comes up behind me. “You can take out the boats if no one else is using them.” He turns to my mother, pointing out the sights that are missing at this swimming pond, twenty years after its creation. “There used to be a diving board off that dock. And over here? Second Dock here didn’t always connect to the shore. If you wanted to get to it you had to swim to it. And when you’re a little kid, you have to take a swimming test each summer to be allowed to swim beyond the buoys.”
Hadley and Uncle Joley, who apparently have this all planned, take the towels and the ball from my arms. They grab me, kicking and screaming, and toss me on the count of three off First Dock. Somewhere, a fat lifeguard yells at us. No throwing. Not off that dock.
Hadley jumps in after me and grabs my ankle. He pulls me under. The water is murky, colored with some blue dye, and colder in some spots than others. I tread water, trying to
find a warm place where Hadley will not try to drown me again.
Uncle Joley, who has been speaking with the lifeguard, does a swan-dive into the pond. He surfaces, already talking. “The reason this place looks like a giant Tid-E-Bowl is because of chemicals. They put the blue in to cloud the water so algae doesn’t grow as easily.”
“Algae,” I say, “yuck.” I am sure there is algae or something worse at the beaches of San Diego, but there you rest assured it keeps going out with the tide.
My mother keeps herself busy by spreading our towels on the small stretch of beach. It’s funny, it isn’t a beach at all. It’s more like a couple of bulldozer dumps of sand, raked nicely. These people, I think. We could teach them a thing or two.
My mother creates a colony of towels. She borders the striped with the pink one, the Les Miserables promo towel with the Ralph Lauren. At the edge of all four of these she lays a big plaid blanket. I wonder who will get to lie there. She pays no attention at all to the position of the sun. “Hey,” she calls to Sam, but he is out of her range.
In fact, at the exact moment she calls, Sam’s body hits the water in a double somersault. For someone without the aid of a diving board he has an awfully good amount of height and spring. All the rest of us, already in the water, clap. Sam pulls himself onto Second Dock and takes a bow.
His body, unlike Hadley’s, is compact. He has dark hair on his chest that grows in the shape of a heart. The hair on his legs, surprisingly, isn’t as coarse. Sam has broad shoulders and a small waist, strong arms (all that lifting) and muscular thighs. I remember hearing something at the dinner table about him having trouble buying jeans—the legs always too tight, the waist too big, or something like that.
“Come on,” Hadley says, swimming up behind me. “Let’s race.” He begins to do a vigorous crawl across the pond. He almost collides with Uncle Joley, who is swimming a lazy backstroke and chanting something in another language. Swimming, I remember, is a sort of religious thing for Uncle Joley. My mother says she has no idea where he got that from.