The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  This new approach served her well when weeks later, Erin missed her period. Ben walked with her to the student health center, talking the whole way about how much he enjoyed Frisbee golf. When Erin came out of the examination room grasping a negative pregnancy test, he was gone. She didn’t see him again until just before graduation when he showed up at her doorstep with a bouquet of carnations and tried to tell her that he was in love with her, that he’d always been in love with her. She slept with him, and the night was a disaster. He cried and then as she held him, patting his back, she got the worst case of the giggles. One that left her gasping for breath and Ben shooting her angry looks, his wet eyes finally blinking back actual tears as he grabbed his wilted bouquet and left.

  She thought that she’d cured herself of the sincerity that her grandmothers had instilled in her. And then, five months earlier, in Rome, all of her earnestness came back to her when the pregnancy test turned up positive. She was the one who cried during sex, and although her lover wiped away the tears and promised that he’d make everything between them right when the baby came, all she saw in him was a reflection of her despair. That look and the letter that came two days later from the parole board gave her a reason to leave.

  She should have told him she was going back to California, but she couldn’t bring herself to cry in front of him in the daytime. Plus, she was still angry that after she’d told him she was late he’d still wanted to go to dinner.

  “But I think I’m pregnant,” she’d said to him as a shopkeeper swept around their feet.

  He took her elbow and steered her away from the pregnancy tests. “Of course, of course.”

  “I’m not even hungry,” she said, trying to get him to slow his pace.

  “We all need to eat, and The Swan has such lovely food.”

  She’d eaten dinner with him that night and they didn’t speak once about the pregnancy. She put the unopened test on the table, and he never once asked about it—instead speaking the entire night about his problems with the orchestra and asking her opinion about an alto who was also an American. They discussed plans for an upcoming performance, and despite her frustration, she found herself agreeing to a weekend in Milan.

  The next morning, on the way to the airport, she considered that part of his callousness was that he and his wife had never had children. The cabdriver had a picture of an elderly woman and a young girl taped to his dashboard. “She’s lovely,” Erin commented as she paid him. He took her money and held her hand for an extra few seconds while he described his wife and daughter. He referred to them as the “women of my heart.” Erin lifted the handle on her suitcase and considered what he’d said. In the anonymity of the crowded airport, she let her hand rest on her stomach and for the first time in her life stopped wishing for her mother and started to consider what type of mother she would be.

  In the months since returning to Hill House, Erin found herself still trying to answer that question. The day before the parole hearing, she filched her grandmother’s sewing scissors and cut heavy bangs. “Just wanted a change,” she’d said when Callie witnessed her slipping the shears back into the older woman’s mending basket. In trying to explain, Erin’s voice took on the same thin quality it had when, as a child, she’d been caught getting into any one of her grandmothers’ belongings. Callie took Erin’s chin in her hand and turned her head toward her. Erin shut her eyes against the late winter sun that filtered in the front room.

  “I never did like you with bangs. Reminds me of when Bets took you down to Supercuts for a six-dollar haircut and you came back crying, saying you didn’t realize it would stay short.”

  Erin pulled away and sat in Anna’s chair. “I was eight. I thought bangs would make me look like a princess.”

  “You look all of eight now,” said Callie, taking her knitting from the basket. “Next time use the kitchen shears, you’ll dull the blade on these.”

  Erin’s forehead itched. “Fine.”

  “Did you clean up the mess in the bathroom? Hair has a way of getting everywhere. Especially with the furnace going all the time, blowing dust onto every surface of this house.”

  “I’ll get to it. Thought I’d have some time to myself.” Erin listened to the click of her grandmother’s needles for a bit. She knew Callie expected her to get up immediately and clean the bathroom, but Erin didn’t move. Now that she was having her own child, she felt less compelled to respond to commands. Instead, she tried to get Callie to talk with her about the hearing. “You’re home early. Bets took Anna with her to see Frank. Wanted to get a second visit in, since she can’t go tomorrow.”

  Callie didn’t look up from her knitting. “It was a slow day. No one feels like going out after lunch—it gets dark too early. I’m surprised Bets went, she doesn’t drive as well when it is dusk.”

  In all the years Deb had been in jail, Callie had never visited, written, or so much as sent a word of greeting, not even when Bets or Anna made their monthly trek to Chowchilla. Erin considered asking again if Callie would come to the hearing. She thought of all the ways she’d asked before, of overhearing Bets tell her that God doesn’t give do-overs—even to mothers. The baby turned somersaults in her uterus, and Erin moved to the edge of the chair and stretched her spine. She’d never understood Callie’s decision to excise Deb, her own daughter, from her life.

  “Baby’s moving,” she said and reached for her grandmother’s hand. Callie counted out the last row of stitches and set the beginning of a delicate pink bootie aside. They sat quietly with Erin’s hand on Callie’s—moving it when the baby changed places—for several minutes.

  “How far along are you now?”

  “Doctor said about five months.”

  “Have you talked to the father?”

  Erin felt herself blush. “A bit. I’m just not ready.”

  “They would never say it, but it does bother them. You know this, right? That Anna and Bets just can’t understand how you got yourself into this situation.”

  “I guess you understand, though, how people get themselves into this type of situation?” Erin had learned, living with her grandmothers, to meet an attack with an attack.

  Callie looked much smaller. “We all understand that. Each one of us, and you’ve gone and grown up on us.”

  Erin wasn’t sure whether Callie felt deflated by Erin being an adult or by the reminder that her daughter had also gotten herself knocked up. She considered that there might be sadness in her grandmother that she might never know the cause of. “Had the ultrasound last week,” she said, offering a truce.

  “And you still won’t find out whether it’s a girl or not? It would be good to know, for the publicity. I mean, it’s a girl. But to know for sure might help.”

  Erin wasn’t frustrated with this push to find out the sex of the baby. The grandmothers had all been anxious to let modern medicine prove their suspicions correct. None of them could understand Erin’s reluctance. The absurdity of lying on the table while the technician slid the sonogram wand around her belly made her laugh. “What’s the use of knowing? You, Anna, and Bets have told me to expect a little girl. It’s in our genes—besides, everything you’ve made the baby is pink. Who would dare mess with all that work? Not even God.”

  Callie reached into her pocket for the vial of pills she kept with her and swallowed one. Then she stretched her bad leg out and after leaning back into her chair spoke. “I’m sorry I can’t go. It’s our busiest season, with the casino buses coming in nearly every hour, and I’ve just hired some men to work in the orchard. They’ll need supervising and I—”

  “You just said it was slow.”

  “Slow today. It gets busier.”

  “It’ll always be there. The store isn’t going anyplace, but—” The look of panic that crossed Callie’s face made Erin swallow what she was going to say next. “—It’ll be fine. Just fine.” It wouldn’t be, but she knew when to quit.

  Callie rubbed at her leg. “Did you hear about that Linds
ey grandchild?”

  Erin shook her head and looked out the window as the sun made its slow, steady descent toward the coastal mountains. They gossiped and traded stories about babies and knitting. It was nice to sit and talk as equals, and for a moment she felt a glimmer of hope about becoming a mother. She realized that the light in the room had all but disappeared and pulled the cord to the reading lamp. As she did, her hair came loose from the twist she’d spun it into while they’d been talking.

  Callie came at the hearing sideways. “You’ll look even younger if you braid your hair.”

  “Gotta pee,” said Erin and left the living room. She hadn’t understood that Callie knew her so well.

  She stood in front of the bathroom mirror, plaiting her hair into a single braid and then into two low, loose twists. She worked on different expressions, moving her eyes and mouth around and trying to settle on a look she could wear in the hearing room. One that made her appear vulnerable, like a girl who needed taking care of. The bangs did make her look much younger than twenty-four. It helped that the pregnancy had plumped up her face—gotten rid of her sharp angles. With the darkness of her hair so close to her brow, her own normally light gray eyes appeared darker and, Erin thought, needier.

  She started to recite her statement as she brushed bits of black hair that had fallen on the lip of the sink into the bowl. It was important that it not be too rehearsed, but she knew that the appearance of effortlessness took work. She could not trust herself to speak from the heart, which was the only advice Deb’s lawyer had given her. She’d sat in his leatherette chair, staring at his liver-spotted face, and thought that despite the fifty years between them, she knew what he didn’t. The heart was as likely to be full of treachery as of love.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Chowchilla

  The pregnant and the old have weak bladders. Erin confirmed this during the four-hour drive to Chowchilla. She remembered from her teenage years the constant torture of stopping, but this time around, because the baby seemed to be using her bladder as a punching bag, she was grateful for each of the five gas stations they pulled into. Neither Bets nor Anna responded to Erin’s one-sided chatter, and so after the third stop in Yuba City, Erin kept her mouth busy snapping chewing gum and kept her mind off the monotony of the drive by chasing one pop music station after another down the whole of state route 99.

  Erin still wasn’t used to the special treatment often afforded her because of the pregnancy. As she approached the guard gate at the Central California Women’s Facility, she steeled herself for the hostile appraisal of the guard. The gaze they always gave her, with hard eyes that seemed to be assessing the worst acts Erin was capable of, had made her itch when she was a teenager. This morning though, when she’d handed the sentry the papers indicating their intent to attend the parole hearing, he’d looked into her eyes as he raised the gates and given her a nod, which to Erin seemed to say “you’re right to do this.” The unexpected welcome made the cool January day seem a bit warmer.

  At check-in, the women were assigned a corrections officer, who was overweight in the way that sometimes happens to college athletes as they age. They followed the heavyset man into the nearly empty hearing room and settled themselves in the row of chairs reserved for civilians. The air in the small room had a stale, sour odor that reminded Erin of the smell of the alleyways of Rome. A blue weave that was more burlap than fabric and felt scratchy to bare skin covered the chairs. Anna adjusted herself several times and then took off the yellow scarf she’d tied carefully around her neck that morning, and draped it over the back of her chair. She moved as easily as a person half her age and her voice was still strong. “I expected it to be more Perry Mason and less—” Anna paused, searching for the right comparison.

  “DMV,” said Erin.

  “It’s all scripted anyway,” said Bets, grimacing. “You should have been here for the last one. The district attorney, the commissioners, Deb—they all will play their parts, the parts they’ve always played, enforcer, judge, petitioner. It’s all a farce.”

  Anna patted Erin’s knee. “Except for our lovely granddaughter. Erin is most certainly not part of their script.”

  There was no script, Erin thought. For a moment, she wished she were back in Rome, or that she’d even once considered not having the baby. Her face burned with shame when she thought of how rash her decisions had been since peeing on that plastic stick. She wanted to blame some other force for her actions. Her mouth trembled, and not wanting to draw any attention to how truly vulnerable she felt, Erin turned her eyes to the paperwork that had made her presence at the hearing possible. Normally parolees weren’t allowed to have anyone testify on their behalf and instead their supporters were encouraged to write letters. It took Erin weeks to craft her letter. She believed that she fully supported her mother’s release, but no matter what she wrote, her pleas to have her mother with her for the birth of her first child felt empty when put on paper. Then, in December, as the hearing neared, she discovered a loophole that would allow her to have the last word at the parole hearing.

  Erin’s thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of two male members of the Board of Parole Hearing. They strode to the front of the room, took their places on the far side of the folding table, and were then joined by a tiny woman of indeterminate age who set up a portable stenography machine. Erin looked at the two commissioners and worried about what Bets had said earlier. Sitting there, she felt as if she were involved in a first-class hoax—a pseudotrial to determine whether after nearly twenty years in prison Deb was suitable to reenter society. Too much time in an institution made it impossible to be suited for life outside. Erin studied the men who would decide Deb’s fate. They each had a stack of papers more than a foot thick in front of them along with a tabletop microphone. The larger of the two commissioners wore a short-sleeve dress shirt without a tie. He had a substantial white mustache that was yellow at the ends and a scar that zigzagged up his left forearm. His eyebrows were as thick as his mustache and they nearly covered his small brown eyes. He was not looking through his file but scanning the handful of observers, relatives, and staff who were installed in the hearing room. Erin blushed when his gaze landed on her, and she looked quickly away toward the other man, who had not yet lifted his head from the papers.

  The second commissioner was thin, like a long-distance runner, and wore a yellow polo shirt with khaki trousers. His blond hair was cut unevenly and his fingernails were bitten to the quick. He paged through the file with speed and randomness. Anna, when she saw Erin watching the man, leaned over and whispered, “He’s a good-looking one, no ring.”

  “I’m not looking,” said Erin louder than she’d intended and the guard left his post near the door to stand behind them.

  Erin felt that pregnancy had not heightened her beauty but obscured it. The swelling overwhelmed her delicate bone structure and gave her skin a mottled appearance. Overall the effect was one of a ripe tomato on the verge of splitting its skin. This change altered how men now reacted to her—before, they’d let their eyes linger on her breasts or the curve of her waist and now they could find nowhere to rest their gaze. She knew her best strategy would be to appear to the commissioners like a motherless girl. She’d taken Callie’s advice and tied her black hair into braids, put on a touch of mascara and a glancing sweep of lip gloss. She kept her eyes on her shoes while they settled themselves into the first row of seats behind a folding table set up at the front of the room. She thought of the mannerisms of schoolgirls—their hesitations, their habits. And now, as the commissioners watched, she crossed one arm over her stomach and brought the other to her mouth and began to tear at her thumbnail with her teeth.

  “Stop that,” said Bets and grabbed her hand, bringing it to her lap.

  “Don’t be nervous,” said Anna.

  Erin willed the men to keep their eyes on her—she needed them to look up and see a young girl comforted by women too old to take care of her.

&n
bsp; Bets waved an embroidered handkerchief in front of her face and sighed. “It’s too hot in here.” She directed this at their corrections officer, who had visible sweat rings under the arms of his short-sleeved uniform shirt. Then she turned to Anna. “Mother. This heat can’t be good for you. You look peaked.”

  Anna dismissed her daughter’s worry with a slight shake of her head and pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders. “I’m fine.”

  “Erin?”

  She shrugged. And then seeing the concern that settled into the mustached-commissioner’s eyes, she said, “It is stuffy. Maybe if there were a fan or—”

  “A fan!” Bets clapped her hands together, and the two commissioners looked up. The guard nodded at Bets but didn’t make eye contact. Before Bets could push the issue further, the door opened and Deb and her lawyer entered the room.

  Instead of her prison blues, Deb wore a yellow cotton jumper covered in delicate pink roses over a long-sleeve pink shirt that was badly stained at the cuffs. This was the first time Erin had seen her mother outside of visiting hours at Chowchilla, and she had never considered that her mother’s plainness had not been by choice, but by regulation. She studied her as she crossed the length of the small room to sit in a folding chair placed on the opposite side of the same table the commissioners occupied. With her black hair carefully curled into ringlets, blush that was too orange and applied too low on the left cheek and too high on the right, and eyes obliterated by blue shadow and clumpy mascara, Deb looked like she belonged in a mental institution.

  “Didn’t someone give her a mirror?” asked Bets. “Maybe she can rub some of it off before they get started.” She leaned forward and tried to get Deb’s attention by waving her handkerchief and clearing her throat.

  “No communication with the prisoner,” said the guard who had escorted Deb into the room.

  Deb turned her head and shook it quickly, but forcefully, at the three of them. Then she glanced at Erin, who looked away and then brought her hands to her belly. She’d written her mother about the pregnancy, but they’d not spoken about it.