by Angela Palm
By summer’s end, my father’s garden had produced more vegetation than our family could hope to consume. He was proud of having cultivated his own garden, having successfully improved our immediate surroundings by getting us away from the river, but that ownership was relative. The land was not ours. Not really. We were there, living on it, but we did not know the implications of its past, nor those of its future. We would not possess it forever. It was connected to everything else around it, not separate, despite the lines of the paper deed that cut it away from the fields. Borders are only real because we say they are real.
One morning, my father burst through the kitchen door lugging a basket of vegetables. “You won’t believe how big the zucchinis are this year. Picked these goddamn sons of bitches first thing this morning.” He pulled one of the zucchinis out of the basket and put it on the countertop next to a butcher’s knife, for scale. “That sucker must be sixteen inches long and six inches thick.”
“They’re supposed to be about seven inches long and barely two inches wide. They taste better that way, too.” It was something I’d recently learned on a cooking show—that zucchinis were meant to be harvested long before my father had picked ours. The plump, overgrown ones held too much water, making them soggy and flavorless when cooked. Yet he insisted they were perfect. It was one of those discoveries made after childhood that, although a seemingly minuscule and unintended deception, made me question what else I’d mislearned from my parents.
“The bigger the better,” he said. My father also used a fully outfitted tractor to mow our one-acre lawn, and he had furnished our new home with plasma televisions in nearly every room; before we moved my mother had obsessively gone on home tours, enviously eyeing homes we still could not afford. I never grasped my parents’ desire for excess. It was one more difference between us. But my brother seemed to have inherited the gene: he lined the shelves of his new closet with a dozen pairs of Jordans, more shoes than any boy could ever need.
I kept arguing with my father, though it was useless. He was going to deep-fry the zucchini and douse it with hot sauce either way, ruining it completely. And besides that, you couldn’t argue with my dad.
“It’s all-natural,” he went on.
“That’s impossible.”
“It sure as shit is. Didn’t put a damn thing on it.”
I reminded him of the planes that had fertilized the fields twice that summer. “Don’t you think that might have something to do with it?”
“This is why they call it Millionaire’s Mile, baby. Richest soil in the Corn Belt right here.”
I counted to ten in my head to calm myself down. Maybe the chemical bath was not only on our food but also in our water, and had spread to our brains. I feared the corn we had eaten all summer, sampled from a dozen genetically experimental strains that bordered our little chunk of land, was a kind of poison that was silently wrecking our DNA. The hostas we’d replanted from our old yard, our old lives, were thriving in their new environment. I had thought they were hardy plants, able to root anywhere and survive. But it was only the fertilizer, the rich soil, the relocation, that had enabled their growth.
THE REGULARS
When I was seven, a babysitter walked me and my brother to the River to buy cigarettes. She stole the money from the old water jug my parents saved change in for vacation. She left us at the water’s edge while she made her purchase. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. But I did. Not because she had taken the money for cigarettes, but because I didn’t like being left outside by all that water with nothing stopping it, or me.
The summer I was twelve, my brother and I would walk to the River from our house and order steak fries and Pepsis while our parents were at work. We would watch the men sitting at the bar, smoking and drinking, most of whom lived nearby and knew our father. We would use half a glass bottle of Heinz ketchup for our fries, licking salt from our fingertips. When the bartender brought the bill, I’d slide it back to her with sticky fingers and tell her to put it on my dad’s tab, that he’d be in later, I was sure of it. And she would, and he would.
I got a job at the River as soon as I was old enough to obtain a work permit. I could have worked anywhere in town, but I wanted to work there. I liked being near my old house, near Corey’s house. It was a rite of passage. Corey had worked there and planted the plants around the restaurant, and I would weed them. He had washed the dishes that I would clear from tables. I liked this continuity. I liked seeing people from my old neighborhood. It was a familiar and comforting place. My father usually sat at the bar when I was working, both to keep an eye on me and to socialize or entertain people from work. At home he seemed to barely speak to me, and when he wasn’t working in the yard, playing golf, or watching television, he swung unpredictably between being a shadow of himself, exhausted from work, and being a battle-ready brute with the vengeance of a wrecking ball. He was unpredictable, throwing hammers and expletives in equal measure. He had left his own dismal past on the banks of another body of water—the Conococheague Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River in Maryland, but I could not name his ghosts. I only sensed their presence in his anger, in his detachment. His father had been a brick tanner, and the tannery had let their family rent an empty home on its property for one dollar per month. Though the home was a large, sprawling plantation, it still had no indoor plumbing in the 1970s, when my father lived there with his family. He had joined the army at eighteen, and he never went back except to visit. At the bar, he was a different person than he was at home. Jovial, pink-cheeked, spirited, and conversant. Generous in his affection toward me. I preferred him half-drunk to sober, in the bar to at home.
At the River, my father celebrated his promotion to general foreman, then later to superintendent of a union construction company. He bought rounds of drinks for everyone, and he called me baby girl when I walked in with a tray full of dirty glasses. Some nights, he ordered prime rib for the two of us, then danced with all of the women in the bar, spinning them silly and singing into their ears. He was still a stranger to me. But he could afford to buy me painting lessons now, and in the bar he squeezed me close and told everyone about my good grades and that I’d received an honorable mention in a painting contest for the national duck stamp, which had something to do with duck hunting. We had the watercolor picture framed and hung in our hallway at home. In it, a sleek male wood duck floated in a pond, water rings spreading out from its richly colored plumage. It was easy enough to do. I copied it from a picture in a book, visually dismantling the duck into its core shapes and allowing myself to see that brown is actually made up of grays, greens, yellows, blacks, blues, purples, and whites. Later, this painting would earn me an academic scholarship to a nearby college— the only one I’d ever consider in my listless search. You’re so smart, everyone insisted. I had the grades to prove it, but I told them I wanted to be average.
At work, I kept waitresses from crying or fighting, inhaled secondhand smoke, and smelled like meat juice. During my first week at my new job, a woman named Toni was canned for giving blow jobs in the men’s bathroom. A woman named Lonnie told me while we were rolling silverware that her new thing was screwing her boyfriend while he was driving, straddling his lap and watching the road get smaller and faster behind the truck. “You have to try it. It’s a rush,” she told me as she slipped a buck from someone else’s tip into her apron.
From the age of sixteen on, my Saturday mornings began as most people’s grandparents’ do: I drove my four-door sedan with the sparkling champagne paint job to the bank to deposit my paycheck, then I bought a cappuccino. My father had brought the car home as a kind of gift. He had put a down payment on it, but I was responsible for making the monthly payments until the $12,000 loan was repaid. I had a checking account with pink and blue pastel checks for a baby, and each month I mailed a few hundred dollars to Ford Motor Credit. My evenings were as strange as my Saturday mornings. I didn’t spend Friday nights at the Pizza Hut in town with kids who wo
re letter jackets, and I rarely went to parties. I spent my weekend nights with the regulars, listening to jokes told in poor taste and wrapping myself in the raucous bellowing of men’s voices and women’s laughter. I caught glimpses of myself in the mirrors that lined the bar’s dark paneled walls—my face puzzled out beneath the Budweiser and Miller and Leinenkugel decals, shadows splitting my cheek crosswise. The curve of my own smile, a mystery. The layers of smoke and grease carried home with me each night like party favors. The way I knew they would never fully wash away.
I bused tables, carried empty glasses to the dishwasher in the bar, lugged trash to the Dumpster, churned the film on the salad dressings, answered the phone in a voice that sounded like my mother’s, and managed the waiting list for the restaurant. I married the ketchup bottles in silence, connecting the bottle necks with a steady hand. I watched the Kankakee River freeze over into big white plates of ice and snow while I washed the restaurant’s windows. I felt they were my windows, the Kankakee my private sanctuary. I enjoyed the peace that came with physical work.
I took baskets of bread to the family of the boy who had broken up with me. They barely spoke to me. Only to say Water, please. More napkins. Trevor, my first real boyfriend, did not once even look at me. I still did not know what I had done wrong. There was no explanation. The brusqueness of that ending was an affront I could not digest, an affection I could not relinquish. I could have hidden in the break room, asked my coworker Shannon to take them bread. Instead I sought the masochism of it—the horror at the lack of conversation when I faced them each Saturday night, the way I could nearly cry each time as an assurance of my own body, alive and feeling. I stared at Trevor until his face turned red. I wanted him to know with certainty that he was a coward and that I was not invisible, hard as he tried to make it so. If he felt anything at all, he was a better actor than me. No one in his family seemed to remember, there in the restaurant, that I had spent the previous Christmas with them or that they had given me an expensive porcelain doll with angel wings, which was still propped up on a metal stand next to my bed. She had blond hair as fake as mine and my same blue eyes. A doll. I still looked at her, with her tailored golden dress, quietly mocking me. I believed this gift was chosen for me as something to aspire to. This was how a girl should be: demure, mute, polished. Should I want to continue dating their son, I ought to discard the resale bell bottoms and men’s polyester pants, the 1950s housedresses and the flowing gypsy skirts I’d sewn myself, and become more like her. But I couldn’t settle on a style. I lacked sophistication. As I had with religions, I cycled through a dozen looks, and nothing seemed to fit, so I would make what I wanted to wear. In the employee bathroom, I retied my apron, wrapping its long black strings around my slim waist. I washed my hands, washed my hands, washed my hands.
I worked harder and faster than most everyone else because it felt good to use my body and to make everything new and clean, to put everything in its proper place. To complete the tasks set before me. For the first time, I began to understand my father’s relationship to work. Physical work offered tangible accomplishment, and it eased a busy mind, almost like a sedative. Working at this pace, lifting and moving, my quads and hamstrings hardened over time. Work left me no time to think about anything other than the dirty dish or phone call at hand. It kept at bay my instinct to question and lament all that seemed wrong in my world. When even the work was not enough, I tried to make a game of it by bettering my wait-time estimates and by doing so much of the work myself that I made the other busers look lazy. And most of them were. Many of them had bigger problems than mine: abortions, anorexia, absent fathers. One night in the dry-storage room, which was really a narrow hallway lined with unstable metal shelves and boxes, a dishwasher named Josh caught me alone. I’d been jumping vertically to grab and pull down reams of white napkins from the top shelf. He put his hand up my shirt and kissed me, without any warning, without even speaking to me. It took me longer than it should have to push him away with both hands. Still, I never said no, although I was not attracted, even remotely, to him and I did not want him to touch me. Later, he followed me to my car after my shift and tried to get me to go to a party with him. For once, I was glad my parents were too strict for that to be a possibility. “My dad’s in the bar,” I said. “He said I have to go straight home.” Away from the river, back to the fields. I didn’t belong there anymore, but I kept holding on anyway.
At sixteen, I was the youngest person on the floor staff, so people were inclined to teach me things. Betty was the head waitress, with fluffy white hair and tiny feet and red lipstick. She told me about her sweet old husband and her sweet old Cadillac. She called me honey and promoted me to head buser, a title for which there was no pay increase, only more work. She taught me to put on lipstick the right way, which meant outside the lines of my already plump lips, in order to attract a man. It was not unlike the showy green and purple feathers of the male wood duck’s crested head. We were not far from our animal instincts.
One night while we were watching the nightly news, a spot ran about the AIDS epidemic. We were loading empties into the glass washer, and Betty said to me, as much as to the television, that AIDS existed because black women couldn’t keep their knees together. Horrified, I told her she was ignorant and a bigot, and she was never kind to me again. She tried to have me fired, and nobody said I was right. I went home in tears and in shock, and I was too embarrassed to speak of it to anyone.
At the River, a waitress who was forty and pregnant asked me to babysit her eight-year-old son. When she came home hours later than the time she promised, she was gone in the eyes and barely on her feet. She never mentioned the little boy’s name, not before she left and not after she returned, but she had told me on her way out the door that there was mac and cheese if I wanted it. The boy was already in bed; his face twitched with sleep in the moonlight. I wanted to hold him, name him, make him meatloaf with green beans and chocolate chip cookies for dessert. But all I did was dab my cheeks with his mother’s CoverGirl powder in the bathroom and wait, playing house in their home. The baby was born with Down syndrome, and everyone at the River loved him and squeezed his chubby hands when she brought him in. I never stopped thinking about how the older boy didn’t know I was there, even as I layered him with extra blankets and thought about how I could save him.
At the River, my friend’s dad came in drunk and ordered prime rib au jus, two inches thick. He ate the monstrous cut of meat with his bare hands, slopping it into the juice like a puppy mauling a rawhide. I watched him from the buser station. He slapped the steak onto the table and tried to speak to me through his wide grin, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. His face was red and his eyes were red and he dumped the juice all over the table, then he rested his face in the mess of food and fell asleep in it. After he was carried out by his friends, I cleaned the mess alone while everyone else smoked. I watched the Kankakee rush by while I mopped, wondering where all that murky water ended up. I called my mom and told her what happened, crying into the pay phone as if it could comfort me, because it seemed like the only thing to do. The more the men at the River surprised me, the more the women seemed to glaze over. They quieted, as if in silent prayer. Their calmness frightened me. My mother called the man’s wife, a friend of hers, to tell her where she could find her husband, and I tried and failed to imagine her surprise. Would I, too, become immune to such spectacles? That day I learned that there were different ways to be a drunk and that a bar was another kind of church.
One day, a man called Muddy who had known me since I was ten fell backward off his bar stool. When I rushed to help him up, he stormed out in horror, the bells on the door jingling after it slammed behind him. He never, ever returned. Sometimes I wondered if he was dead on a couch somewhere, with a bottle of whiskey between his thumb and index finger, sitting in front of a static television, or if he found another place to pray.
I stayed late after my shifts ended because it was
better than going home. After a while, people no longer invited me to go to the Pizza Hut. I didn’t want to go because I felt as though I was between worlds when I was around them. The kids in town didn’t hang out in bars. They didn’t feel more comfortable around men nearly their father’s age than boys their own age. They lived in subdivisions and had golden retrievers and mopeds and crushes on one another, while I was being hit on by men in my father’s work crews when he wasn’t looking.
One night, I played “Strawberry Wine” on the jukebox and sipped a virgin daiquiri at the employee table in the corner. The song reminded me of Corey, of how I had tasted him and, with a few different decisions, he could have been mine. It was homage to our lost chances, what with him in prison. A sort of tribute to my longing for him. As I listened to my song, a man named Tim sat down across from me. He bought me french fries and smelled like mouthwash. His voice was high-pitched, although he was twenty-seven. When I was younger, I had watched him fly by my house on a crotch rocket, his curly blond hair blown back by the speed. I was eighteen now. Fair game. “You want to go for a drive when you’re done with that?” he asked. He came in a few times a week. That night he told me that he was separated, getting a divorce, that I was pretty, that we could go to his house. Maybe for a drive, I said, but we never made it out of the parking lot. His truck was brand-new, the spoils of his job as a carpenter. The bench seat was covered in a red-and-black plaid blanket made of wool, and it scratched against my bare skin.