by Lynn Cesar
What was that she was hearing? Hard to separate from the fire’s low noise at first. Far out on the drive… gravel crackling.
Dad. His truck rolling in from a night drinking in town, Mom out of the state, visiting her sister… .
Realer possibilities followed this deep-buried reflex of fear. Marty Carver, on some nasty personal errand. Or more likely that Kyle, a big-sounding man, laying the courtesy on thick, while realizing that now there was only a woman here, a woman alone.
An engine, drawing nearer, then shutting off just out front, as Karen pulled open the hall closet, plucked out the shotgun she’d found. She worked the slide and a shell sprang out. She retrieved it and threaded it back into the magazine as feet mounted the porch steps— thank god that old son of a bitch had at least taught her how to handle weapons.
But the knock on the door was delicate and the voice— calling, “Karen?”— was Susan’s. In her relief, Karen pulled the door open with the shotgun still clutched in one hand.
“Karen, I’m sorry, but I just had to— ” and then she took in the shotgun. Karen laughed, standing it in the corner, and wrapping her arms around her beautiful russet lover.
“Country living, sweetheart. I sit on the porch with my corncob pipe and the scattergun in my lap!” She held Susan at arm’s length and looked at her. Susan smiled back, relieved at her welcome. Still half in the porch shadow, her faint freckles were darker. With her petite sharp chin and her sleeked-back tarnished-copper hair, she always struck Karen as one of those thrusting, searching small mammals, taut and graceful, a mink or marten… so alert to Karen’s moods.
Remembering Susan’s opening apology, Karen also remembered, with shame, those drunken times she had slammed doors in her conciliatory lover’s face. “We’ve fought so much, hon, and I’m so sorry for it.”
Susan smiled. “You’ve fought so much.”
“I’ve fought so much, oh yes, but I’m so glad you’re here.”
Susan grinning now. “So why aren’t you inviting me inside?”
Karen laughed… and yet still did not step aside to admit her. Felt the weight of the house at her back, holding her in place like a barrier. Or was it her own will, holding back the house’s weight from falling on her lover… ? She forced another laugh. “Come on into the haunted manse.”
Once Susan was inside, Karen felt instantaneous relief, felt her lover as a shield, an unclouded spirit that all the past here, her fears and imaginings, could not pierce. “A tour!” she proclaimed. “A grand tour! You will note the predominant decorative motifs— firearms and booze… .”
She saw every room over Susan’s shoulder now and though the downstairs bathroom still gave her a qualm, she found everywhere a wonderful freedom from fear, everywhere saw a sad place where someone else had suffered long ago, a place she herself might soon lock up behind her and leave forever.
Susan responded cautiously, registered but never uttered a word about the gloom, the claustrophobic aura that filled this place, spoke only of Mom’s touches here and there. Up in her sewing room Susan said, “You must have liked it up here. Did she ever teach you how to sew?”
“She tried, but I was never that interested. I did like to be up here, though, when I was small, watching her work. All this— ” she touched the cabinet’s miniature drawers of buttons, findings, needles, spools of thread “— seemed like treasure to me.”
“I once asked my mother to teach me so I could sew clothes for my dolls. She told me it was peasant work— not in so many words, of course.” They both laughed at their shared image of Mrs. Kravnik, a moneyed, oh-so-proper autocrat.
Down in the kitchen, more toast and soup, some canned green beans, strong coffee black, the way they both liked it, while Susan filled her in on the home-front. She had a week off from the law offices. Two of the gay contractors Karen worked for sent their sympathies, and one, DeWitt, a check from her last job. Bonnie and Letty, Karen’s partners in Tongue ‘n’ Groove, had also sent their love and were going to give her a cut from their new remodel job with DeWitt.
While Karen did the dishes, Susan was slicing some peaches from the trees out back. “Want some?” she asked Karen.
“No thanks.”
Susan cracked the seal on some of Dad’s tonic water, splashed out half a tumbler, took a bottle of vodka from the shelf, and added a couple inches to the tonic. Susan drank wine occasionally. Maybe a cocktail at parties. Karen cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Did you want some?” Susan asked her.
“Not right now.” The many times Karen had quit drinking, she never said so, felt it jinxed the resolution. And now, how could she tell her lover why she’d quit? They went into the living room. Karen watched Susan sink into an armchair and take a long pull from her drink.
It almost brought tears to Karen’s eyes. She understood this was an attempt to be with her in her time of trouble. Sweet Susan, so moderate and abstemious, had resolved to abandon this long-standing separation between them, Susan standing outside Karen’s affliction, exhorting her from the shore to come out of the whiskey river that carried them apart. Susan had decided that they would swim together and swim ashore together.
Karen bent to feed the fire and said, “It’s nice to watch you have a drink and not have one myself. It’s a novelty. It’s… neat.”
Susan laughed with pleasure, making Karen grateful and ashamed. Hadn’t she just asked her lover to drink for her? Just like letting her into this house: standing Susan between herself and the demons in her heart. But that was just what her lover wanted to do. So… let her in. Let her help.
“Know what I’ve started doing? Picking plums. It’s kind of fun. We could take some flats to town tomorrow. Maybe sell them.”
“That sounds great! Count me in. Farmer Sue, at your service.”
“Hoed a lot of rows, have you? Kicked a lot of cow-flop, back in old Mill Valley?”
And so they talked about Susan’s mom and her latest phone call— from France, where she had gone on business. Susan mixed another drink and mimicked the formidable Mrs. Kravnik’s latest exhortations that she go to law school, for heaven’s sake, and do something serious with her life. Law school on the East Coast, of course, where the only good ones were (and where the unspeakable Karen-what’s-her-name wasn’t, of course).
Susan sipped, and laughed, and mimicked, and Karen laughed with her, and secretly sorrowed for her lover, this daughter who could always remember every word of her mother’s criticisms.
They laid a pad of blankets on the rug, to sleep in front of the fire. Settling down, guilty Karen feared her generous lover, loosened by drink, would long for love’s reward. They lay in one another’s arms, kissing tenderly, Karen dreading, with each kiss, what more would be asked of her.
But even here, Susan’s generosity shamed her. She sensed Karen’s fear, even through her liquored languor.With a last kiss, she turned to snug her back into Karen’s front. Soon, spoonwise, they slept.
VIII
“We’re gonna whip some plum-tree ass, is what we’re gonna do, Kare!” Susan felt great. She had never done anything like this before. Had never had a beer in the mid-morning, not long after breakfast. Had never helped carry two picking-ladders out into an orchard drenched with morning sun. Had never stood between her lover and a giant bully— and that’s what this place, Karen’s whole past, was— had never squared off with such a bully: Put up your dukes, motherfucker! Susan felt a nice glow from the beer, felt adventurous and more alive for Karen’s sake.
“Steady as she goes, mate!” Karen laughed. “Now we plant this third leg here right amongst the branches.”
This entire farm was the bully, a nightmare forest haunted by a dead ogre. This was the place where Karen’s heart lived… always. No wonder she drank. But now she was here to help her— with the drinking and with cutting her way out of the forest.
Cutting was surely the operative term. They worked opposite sides of the same tree while Susan got the hang of it, th
en worked adjacent trees, Susan gung-ho to cut a wider swath. Her sweat ran and the clippers made her hands sore. Now, in the heat of noon, a beer seemed highly appropriate. She went and brought out the rest of the sixer in the cooler. Slipped one in the pouch of her picking apron, held one up to Karen before re-mounting her own ladder.
“Oh, not right now, thanks.”
Susan recognized Karen’s casual, noncommittal mode from the times she’d tried to quit before. “I’m an idiot! What am I doing?”
“You’re a sweetheart. This is Beer-keg Fox here. It becomes second nature to offer old Fox brewskis.”
“I am an idiot.”
“You’re my inspiration. Shut up and pick, darlin’.”
And Susan did feel like her inspiration. Getting quite skillful at this work, it seemed to her— made those branchlets and suckers fly and each time she went down the ladder, laid new rows of gleaming fruit in the flats. She drained her second beer with gusto and climbed back up with a third in her pouch. She looked at Karen in the next tree over and willed herself to be a gift to Karen. An ally.
The sun was getting awfully hot, though. Wasn’t this autumn, for Christ’s sake? The smell of rot rose from the weeds and, with it, big bumbling flies, relentlessly molesting Susan for her sweat. From up on the ladder, the orchard looked more like an ocean, a perspective of green billows rolling away across the acres, dwarfing their labors.
What an awful place this was, to suffer what Karen had suffered. Susan thought of her own mother’s oh-so-genteel form of abuse, her austere— no, perverse— denial of love. Whenever little Susan craved closeness, a simple, warm burrowing into love’s arms, her mother found some mistake in her, some slovenliness, some violation of what a Young Lady should be. Some excuse to mask her void of love.
But how much more cruel to pour your hate into your child, to maim the organ of her love itself. No wonder Karen had to be half-drunk to make love, to attempt to make love. Now that she wouldn’t drink, she would probably not even make the attempt, like last night. It crossed Susan’s mind that if she were a man, she wouldn’t be so shut out, could enter Karen’s wound, and gently but insistently probe until she liberated that scarred and buried passion… .
Jesus, what was she thinking? Where did that come from? This whole place was sick. It seeped into your brain… .
Finding her bladder full, she climbed down, considered trudging back to the house, then pulled her jeans down and squatted in the lane. “Piss on this place,” she said, feeling daring and slightly tipsy.
Karen laughed. “Amen to that,” she said, looking down from her tree. “You wanna lie in the shade a while? Take a wee nap?”
“The hell with that!” Susan went back to work, a trace more clumsily than before. This was getting more tiring as the heat rose and conjured bigger and more numerous flies— flies and a dozen other breeds of bug the trees swarmed with. The clippers had raised ripe blisters on her palm, which popped. Her sweat stung them. The twigs, which she’d avoided more deftly at the start of her labors, started poking her face, as if counter-attacking from every side.
She grunted and toiled on. These trees— it was like wrestling with huge crabs or lobsters, scaly lower life-forms— the cut twigs yielded with a repellent succulence. They seemed to thrash as they fell and to twitch on the grass, like the sundered tails of lizards or rats.
Then, as she leaned slightly off-balance deep into the branches, something big moved, so close to her face it was out of focus. She flinched back and saw, inches from her eyes, a huge gold-and-black spider seizing a large moth that had just struck its web. With quick, darting movements of its obese abdomen— horribly sexual ass-thrusts they seemed— the spider bound the moth’s wings tight, and pierced its head with its fangs.
Susan’s revulsion exploded. She swung a blow with her clippers that tipped her off-balance and seized the ladder one-handed as she felt it topple. They came down together with a snapping of branches, Susan desperately extending one leg as they fell sideways. Her foot took the impact, her ankle awry, and buckled under her weight with a sickening crackle.
* * * *
It wasn’t broken, they decided. Seriously swollen and mottling with purple, yes. Excruciating to put her weight on, yes… but it would take her weight and with none of that grinding twinge that betokened a fracture. One of the closets yielded a cane, probably from Mrs. Fox’s final, arthritic years. They applied some ice. Susan considered and thought that a glass of something might perhaps ease the pain. They finally settled on a Bloody Mary. Susan found it tasty and soothing.
She bent to stroke the hot eggplant of her ankle. It answered her heartbeat with echoes of pain. “You know what this orchard really needs, Karen? A forest fire.” Said this devoutly— imagined, with bitter longing, the reptilian trees in flames.
“I think that’s a swell idea, but let’s sell it first. Come on, hon. While those aspirin kick in we’ll scoot up to Gravenstein. Get meds, ice packs, Ace bandages. We’ll sell some flats, too, and have some cheeseburgers.”
Susan felt her habitual irritation at Karen’s patch-it-and-truck-on attitude towards injuries. In Susan’s Mill Valley homeland, all injuries required the sacrament of a doctor’s visit. She felt some irritation too at Karen’s simple perennial faith in cheeseburgers as potent antidotes to all misfortune. But Susan mainly brooded on the thought that this whole foul place had done this damage to her in its spite. How right the Inquisition had been, to purge its demons with the stake and torch!
“That sounds great, Kare. Cheeseburgers. But could we drive around the orchard before we go? I haven’t really seen it yet.”
As they wound downslope in Karen’s truck, the land’s curvature slowly swallowed the house and sheds, and Susan felt herself in a sea of trees. And found it all a bit intimidating, really, the brute will and labor manifested by all these regimented trees, all this shackled, captive life. Agriculture. Look at it: an army of tamed trees. This was really Titan’s work. Susan remembered her childhood fear of the troll in Billy Goats Gruff. Farmer Jack Fox was a monster just like that troll. That big, black-souled son of a bitch… .
“What’s that? Compost?”
They had a view of a great worm-shape wrapped in black plastic and weighted with tires: a tube of compost fifteen feet high and stretching a full hundred feet to one side of Dad’s still-shed.
“Why are those tires on it? I’ve seen that before… ”
“Their weight keeps a tight seal on the plastic, keeps the heat in, it rots even faster.”
“Boy. You could start a whole new farm on that much.”
“And next to it there is the still-shed. Dad read there. And made brandy from those fruit trees back up in the yard. When the screen door of that shed slammed, I could hear it all the way up at the house… .”
Karen began telling about it, still meandering the truck through the lanes as she talked. Susan watched her lover’s profile as she listened and saw that Karen could not quite believe she was saying these things out loud.
“Oh, Karen,” said Susan softly at the end.
Karen swung them back upslope and shortly had them on the highway. After a visible hesitation, she said, “I think I understand what you’re doing with this drinking and I love you for it. But hon, you don’t have to drink for me to help me stop,” saying this, she reached out and touched her lover’s cheek.
“Hey, who says it’s all about you? You always get to be the drunk and rowdy one. Asskicker. I’m little Miss Sweetness-and-Light. I keep our checkbook balanced and get you out of trouble. Maybe I like this. Maybe I just want to have some fun and kick some ass!”
A rusty laugh jumped out of Karen. “Girl, you may be kicking ass, but you sure fucked up your foot doing it.”
Karen had really laughed. Sober. Susan blinked at sudden tears and thought: Daddy Fox, I am gonna kick your ass. You’re through hurting her.
The highway to Gravenstein showed Susan a lot of countryside, twenty miles of it. The green life here
was like a conflagration. Between the beef-lots and walnut orchards, everything was grass and wild trees to the horizon. Ivy clothed those trees, mistletoe studded them, and mosses and lichens bearded them. The undergrowth poured down both banks of every stream they crossed, as if stampeding for a drink. Here and there the vegetation was reclaiming clearings where decayed sheds, long-spined and roofed with shakes, buckled and sagged at the roof-beam, settling like supple-backed scaly old dragons into dense garments of blackberry vine. The dairy-farms, with their piss-rich hills of compost under the hot sun, packed a stench that was almost ethereal, the incense of a Natural Mystery, life’s metamorphosis into organic soup.
And the roadkill! Animals in impossible flat postures flashed by. They looked like Cubist dancers, all their three dimensions, teeth, spines, tails ribs and paws, presented in a single plane. The highway was like a long narrow battlefield starred with red smears whose very species her eyes recoiled from determining.
“Boy, the country is so real.”
“Rich, isn’t it?”
“Hey! Are those eagles up there? They’re so huge.”
“Actually, sweetie, they’re turkey vultures. Noble when aloft, but mo-fugly up close. Bald wrinkly red heads for rooting in carrion.”
As they entered Gravenstein, Karen pronounced it “a lot bigger” than it used to be and told Susan what was new to her: outlying “townhouse” developments for the upper-middle, two new gas stations going in, new office buildings… .
“Lemme just hook through here for a look before the drugstore.”
“I’m fine, Karen.”
It was the older residential half of town, blocks sunk in big old trees, with overflowing gardens and root-buckled sidewalks where tricycles lay toppled. “Most of my friends lived around here. Girls I really liked. But when I went to their houses, I’d wear out my welcome with their parents, I felt so safe there. It was always hard to leave, get on the bus home.”