I didn’t doubt her. Helen sang in the village choir; I stacked chairs after their concerts. “Yeah, but this song is beautiful.”
“I like it too.” Miriam started singing. Our voices together were terrible, but for a moment, speeding up the Taconic, we almost felt like friends.
WE WERE INDEED ON Old MacDonald’s farm. The bright red barn had big Xs crossing the opened windows. The farmhouse was set off on a hill and was surrounded by a low, white picket fence. The grassy field was dotted with picnic benches, and while they weren’t covered with checkered cloths, the raw, worn wood looked just as authentic as I’d imagined. I don’t know who was more excited, Ben or me. He ran ahead, shouting at us to look at everything.
“There’s the barn, Mommy. Grace, look, cows! Old MacDonald had a farm. Mooo!”
I had taken the bag from the car but left my shirt on the front seat. The air was warm, and the sun shone silver bright from a cloudless blue canopy. Miriam waddled over to one of the benches. “What kind of farm is this?” I asked as I took out the sandwiches.
“Mostly fruit, I think,” she said. “Peaches and strawberries—pick your own type deal. They come down to the market in Union Square, but mostly to advertise and to get city folk to come up.”
“But they aren’t city folk,” I said, referring to a group of women nearby.
Miriam spun around and sneered. “Oh, no. Orthodox.”
The Orthodox women sat at many of the benches with lots and lots of children. In a way that my mother would approve of and that so annoyed me, their heads were covered with dull-colored turbans, and even though it was so warm, they wore long-sleeved shirts and gathered skirts that came to the laces on their running shoes.
“Are they Jewish?”
Miriam shaded her eyes. “Ultra. They live in some kind of commune near here.” The Orthodox women had brought plenty of food—jars of gefilte fish, boxes of crackers, and bags of bagels. Their children too ran around, beautiful boys with long eyelashes and side curls, and girls in full-length dresses and flyaway plaits. Their Hebrew was punctuated with calls to Avi and Dov and Gitty.
Miriam said, maybe to me but likely to herself, “Two and I’m done.”
I was surprised to see that the farmer was a black guy in his early twenties. His denim overalls looked like Ben’s, and he wore a plaid shirt and a green bandanna knotted around his neck.
“All right,” he called, “are we all ready?” The Orthodox children scampered up some steps into a wagon hitched to a tractor. Their mothers came behind them, and we followed. The farmer, or maybe he was the farmer’s son, didn’t offer to help any of the women up the steps, but when he saw Miriam in her white short shorts and tented gingham top, he reached for her hand. Ben didn’t want his help, but the farmer placed his hand on the small of my bare back to guide me, even though there were only three steps. He touched my back and said “hi” in a low voice. I grinned and sat on the plank next to Miriam.
“Are you comfortable?” I asked her.
“No. What did that guy say to you?”
“Nothing. Hi.”
“Okay, just know that you’re not up here to make friends, okay? Hold Ben on your lap.”
I guided Ben over, and as the farmer came around to the front of the tractor, he gave me a look with raised eyebrows. I ignored him and said to Ben, “Are you ready, mister?”
“Ready, Grace!”
We drove away from the picnic area, and the Orthodox children started singing. Ben stared. Miriam closed her eyes, and I watched the farm roll by. I loved it. I liked that the trees were planted in straight lines, that the lettuce was evenly spaced, that the scarecrows wore hats, that there were bunnies . . .
Miriam opened her eyes and looked at me. And then she laughed.
“What?”
Ben said, “What so funny, Mommy?”
The roar of the tractor made it difficult to hear much, but Miriam sang in her wobbly voice, “ ‘Gonna pick a bale of cotton, Oh lordy, Gonna pick a bale a day.’ Do you know that song, Grace?”
“Never heard it before.”
“Are you sure?” She was still laughing and had one hand steadying her belly. “My dad used to sing it whenever he drove us out of the city in the summertime.” She closed her eyes again. “This brings back memories.”
When the tractor stopped near a wide shade tree with a bench underneath, the farmer catapulted out of his seat. “Okay, everybody out. Here’s how it works. You can eat as many strawberries as your tummies can hold, and fill your bags to the top. We’re here for”—he checked his watch—“two hours, and then we head back. Get pickin’!”
“Come, Mommy, we have to get our strawberries,” Ben said.
Miriam reached into her handbag and pulled out the sack she had paid for at the barn. “Here, Grace. Try and find ripe ones, big ones. Make sure they’re red, the pale ones aren’t sweet.” She sat down on the bench and took out a fat Danielle Steel novel. I just stared. “What?” she said. “I can’t bend over to pick strawberries. Take Ben with you.”
Ben said, “Come, Grace.”
We walked down the first row, and Miriam called out, “Only ripe ones, remember.”
Now, I thought, my mother would enjoy the farm. If she could see me dressed up in my expensive halter and laboring, she would be satisfied.
Ben and I picked berries. At first, we ate more than we put in the bags; the sweet, warm fruit was like fresh-made jam. Around us the Orthodox women picked too, and their children ran up and down the rows with red juice staining their mouths and faces.
After about forty-five minutes, Ben said, “I tired, Grace.”
“Me too, mister,” I told him. I held up our full sack. “Think we have enough?”
He thought so.
“Hi.” Miriam looked up from her book. “Did you guys have a good time?” She pulled out a fat strawberry by the stem. “Oh, this is so good. Good work, Ben.”
“Grace pick a lot of strawberries,” he said as he crawled into her lap. “Tell Grace good work too, Mommy.”
“Good work too, Grace,” Miriam said as she ate more berries from the bag.
I was about to sit down on the bench when Miriam, her mouth full, said, “Uh-uh.” She took out a second sack and flapped it open. “For Ettie.”
How I wanted to say no. How I wanted to tell her that the pregnant Orthodox women seemed to be able to bend over and pick strawberries just fine and that nowhere on the list of my responsibilities did it say farmhand. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I took the bag and went back to the rows. Ben didn’t come this time. An Orthodox woman bent over in the row next to mine looked at me and smiled. I smiled back at her.
The young farmer had been making his way among the pickers. “Having fun?” he asked, looking down at me.
“Not anymore. This is hard work.”
“You telling me.”
“So”—I glanced over at Miriam, who was absorbed in her book—“this is your family farm?”
“Are you for real?” He grinned. “I’m from Maryland. This is summer work. I’m a senior at Cornell.”
I laughed. “So you’re not the farmer’s son?”
“Hell no. My dad’s a D.C. lawyer. I either had to go caddy at Burning Tree or do this shit this summer. . . . I prefer to not carry other people’s loads.”
“That makes sense to me.”
“So what’s your story?” he asked. “Where you from?”
“Caribbean.”
“And what, you and your girlfriend drove up to the farm for the day? You missing the old country?”
“She’s my boss. I take care of her son.”
He looked at me. “For real? So you’re the mammy?” He pronounced it different from me.
“No, I’m the babysitter.”
He shook his head. “You island people keep setting us back, man. What you doing minding white people’s kids? You need to be reading some books, girl.”
I took a step back from him, and then another, and then I turned
around and walked away fast, crossing over the rows, putting space and strawberries between the two of us as quickly as I could. When I was good and far away, I stooped down again and finished filling up the sack.
On the drive back down, Miriam wanted to know what he’d said to me. “I saw you talking to him.”
“He was talking to everyone. I think it’s part of his job.”
“So, what did he say to you?”
“Nothing, just were we enjoying the farm and were the strawberries sweet.”
“He didn’t want your number?” She glanced away from the Taconic to me.
“No.”
MIRIAM DROVE UP THE rutted road while Ben, tuckered out from his afternoon in the sun, slept peacefully. His red-stained face matched his red hair, and he looked like a boy clown at the end of a party. The car turned in to a dirt driveway with an old wooden sign shaped like a duck, its gray and white feathers weathered and faded. I could make out some letters on its raised wing: DUCK HOLLOW.
Miriam got out. “Stay by the car with Ben,” she told me.
She unlocked the side gate and went around the back. The house was big, with windows stretching away from both sides of the entrance for two stories, up to the attic. A dried wreath hung from the front door. The land off to the right was terraced and banked like the farm in miniature, except the squares held no crops. And the flowers all around—marigolds, dahlias, sunflowers, roses—needed to be pruned and weeded.
I walked off a bit, still close to the car. Some oaks on the property I recognized, but none of the immortelles and poui I knew from the forests back home. But there was a willow. I’d never seen one before, but I knew that’s what the tree had to be. Long branches hung down to the ground like uncombed hair obscuring a crazy face. Hair that needed to be lovingly brushed back and plaited the way my mother did for Helen and me before we were too old to resist. Under the leaves the air was green, the color of the dark walk to my mother’s farm. No matter how hot the day, the forest roof shaded the track and kept you cool until the dry brightness of our fields.
I liked the way the leaves on the willow curled into scrolls, and the way the branches shushed together as the wind blew through. This spot was magic. And then I realized that Dave and Vincent must have thought so too. At the base of the tree’s trunk was a small marble heart with the initials VF. “Oh,” I said out loud and stepped away from this hallowed ground.
I went back and sat in the car. Ben sighed in his sleep. The leaves of the willow writhed like something alive. Miriam came around the way she had gone, walking slowly, and I could see old Mrs. Forgione stamped on her. She got into the car, took a tissue from her purse, and blew her slender nose hard. She’d been crying.
She hesitated before putting the key in the ignition. I hesitated too. I wanted to reach out to her, to ask if she was all right.
“Miriam, are you—”
“Huh, Grace. Your nice top got stained with strawberry juice. That’ll never come out.”
I’d seen the drops dotting the front of my halter, plus Ben’s small red handprint. Maybe the cleaners downstairs could make the fabric clean again. And even if he couldn’t I realized that I wasn’t upset. It had been a beautiful day. As Miriam drove away from Duck Hollow I pulled the paperback out of her handbag.
“What page are you on, Miriam?”
Her eyes were red. “It’s bent in. Why?”
“I’ll read out loud while you drive?” She could only say no.
She looked at me again and shrugged. Then she laughed a little. And I started to read.
Chapter 30
Not two weeks later Dave rang the Bruckners’ doorbell. It was early, nine o’clock in the morning. “Hey, Maria full of Grace,” he said in an exaggerated Brooklyn accent. “How ya doin’?”
“I’m doin’ good,” she Brooklyned back. Dave had his arm around her neck as they walked to where I sat on the floor with Ben. He obviously hadn’t combed his hair yet, and Miriam tried to fluff the flattened side with her fingers. “What are you doing here this early?”
Ben ran over to Dave. “Hi, zio, Grace and I are going to the playground. Want to come with the doggies?”
Dave flipped him onto his back. Miriam covered her eyes. “No, I do not want to go to your baby playground,” he told his nephew, “but that’s why I’m here.” He kept Ben upside down. “Mir, I’m going to Brooklyn to the gardens, and I wanted to see if you wouldn’t let Ben and Grace Jones come along.”
Dave winked at me, and my heart did a jump. I needed a break from the summertime routine. Lately, I’d been doing what my mother called taking stock and had realized that I was tremendously bored. Being in the towers was far better than being at Sylvia’s, but still, day in and out, I minded Ben. This was my job, and the luster of going to Union Square almost every day was beginning to dull. I waited to hear what Miriam would say.
“Do you have a car seat in that truck?” she asked.
“Oh, come on, Miriam. What’s going to happen? Grace can sit in the back and hold him if you’re scared. Plus”—he looked at his bare wrist—“we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Or have you forgotten the way to Brooklyn? And, got ya, he doesn’t use car seats in cabs.”
She made a face. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to keep him out of Brooklyn as much as possible.”
“Oh, Sister Maria Forgione”—Dave sounded scandalized—“you are such a hypocrite.”
Miriam shook her blond and black hair. “The opposite of a hypocrite, actually. But okay, they can go.”
Dave grinned. “How long till you’re ready, Grace?”
I was ready now. “Whenever you are. I just need to pack Ben’s bag.”
He checked the time on the sunflower clock. “Okay, let’s meet up in the lobby in fifteen.” Twenty minutes later, as we headed downtown in Dave’s truck that was meant for hauling garden supplies, he looked over at me. “So, Ms. Jones, how are you going to thank me for making your day?”
I rooted around in Ben’s bag for the comb and hairbrush. “I’m going to work on your hedge.”
When we got out, Dave said, “Do you know where you are?”
I laughed and opened the back door to get Ben. “Dave, I stay right down the road on weekends.”
“You do? Down by the Lubavitchers? Then you go to the garden all the time. And here I was thinking I was giving you a treat.”
We crossed the parkway. “You know what,” I said as I held Ben on my hip, “I’ve never been to the gardens.”
“Well, good,” Dave said. “Or maybe not good that you haven’t gone, but good still. I get to take you to one of the most beautiful places in Brooklyn.”
The gates revealed a secret world hidden in plain sight, and it was just blocks from Sylvia’s apartment. Noisy Eastern Parkway fell away, and suddenly we were in paradise. Ben ran along the paths ahead of us, and I stopped and turned to Dave. “You must be kidding me.”
He put both hands on his waist and laughed. “What?”
“How come I didn’t know this place existed? Dave, look.”
We’d come to the lookout. Spread below us were rows of trees set on trim lawns and a rambling rose garden in full bloom, all bordered with forest trees that kept the Brooklyn I had come to know at bay. Ben ran to us and back, checking out the water fountains and doing cartwheels on the grass—trying to, anyway. Dave, happy to be showing me around, watched and waited patiently as I gaped at every leaf and flower.
“How long has this been here, Dave?”
He shrugged. “A hundred years? From the early nineteen hundreds, at least. Vincent would have known exactly.”
“He liked coming here?”
“He used to be a gardener here.”
“Oh.”
“Okay”—Dave started walking downhill—“let’s go down to the back. I need to order magic muck.”
The muck turned out to be compost, and since the guys were still turning the heap, Dave ordered some bags to be delivered when the rot was at its peak.
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“Want to go sit in the cherry orchard before it gets too hot?” he asked.
While Ben wove in and out of the shady trees with twin boys he had met, I got my comb and brush and knelt behind Dave.
“Okay, I’m going to plait your hair.”
He leaned his head back. “I’m game. How are you going to do it?”
“Cane rows.”
“You mean cornrows?”
“That’s what they call it in America, but I guess on the island slaves planted rows of cane, so we ended up with a different name.”
“Huh.” Dave looked at me. “That’s so very, very plausible, Grace.”
“Thank you. Now stop turning around.” His curls were not easy to part. “Dave, you need to use conditioner.”
He tried to look around again, and I tapped him with the comb. “Ow, Grace. You know, since Vincent died, I don’t think I’ve bought a single grooming product not meant for a dog or a plant.”
I decided to go ahead and ask him. “How long ago did he die, Dave? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“No, no, it’s okay. It’ll be two years now come December.”
December would also make it two years since I had come to America. I thought that, exactly when I had been at the airport and afterward, Dave had been dealing with Vincent dying. “And he was sick?”
Dave took a big inhale. He waited until Ben and the twins ran past and said, “Leukemia.”
“Oh, I thought—” I shushed myself before I said it.
“What? Did you think he died of AIDS?”
I nodded because I had thought so, and I had wondered if Dave wasn’t also sick.
“Don’t worry. Everyone thinks he died of AIDS, but it was cancer. As if it should make a difference. Gone is gone.”
“So how come the Forgiones didn’t come to see him, then?”
“Because, Grace, it had nothing to do with him being sick. They cut him off because he was gay. They just couldn’t deal with that in that family. The only reason they deal with Miriam’s conversion is because the old bastard of a father can’t stand to lose two children.”
He stopped when Ben ran up for a drink, and I had a chance to think about what he’d said. Ben stared at the plaits I’d made in his zio’s head as he drank the juice and then wandered off again. Dave said, “I am forever making you depressed, Grace Jones.”
Minding Ben Page 29