A Deeper Love Inside (20 page)

“I like you, Porsche, for many reasons. You remind me of my daughter of many years ago. When she was your age, she had your face and fire. Secondly, you and I both speak to the spirits. Even out here in the dark there are many more sitting besides us than just you and I, right?” she asked me.

“Huh?” I responded.

“And like myself, you prefer to be with the ones you love the most, but if they are not giving you the love that you need and that you crave and the same love that you give them and gave them, you are prepared to be alone.” NanaAnna laughed a little. “Yes, that’s how I
am also. You and I are capable of creating our own little world, a safe place for ourselves,” she said softly.
Oronyatekha
, the second part of my name, means
between villages.
It describes my life journey so well. Always, I am caught between ‘the world of the hunter and the world of the hunted.’ ”

NanaAnna left quietly like she came in the first place.

“Who talks that crazy to little kids?” Siri asked me.

Then Siri began to talk greasy about NanaAnna. But I checked her.

“We shouldn’t say nothing bad about her. She’s strange, but she helped us out when no one else would.”

That night, I decided that anybody who helps me out, I’d pay them back more than they gave me in the first place. I don’t care what nobody says.
Money makes shit happen
, same like Riot’s money made us get free. Same as money made girls on lockdown have anything they needed or do anything to get it. If NanaAnna didn’t have no money, they’d kick her ass right off of this property. She said so herself—“property taxes,” right? And if someone gives you something for free, they can show up anytime and take it back or lie about it and switch it around. She said that, too.

That’s why she didn’t want to live on the land where the government told her to live. But then she didn’t want to leave it either. Caught “between two villages,” she bought the property from “the hunter” that was right next door to the hunted, “the killing fighting people.” She bought the house hidden in the wilderness. That’s gangster to me.

Chapter 18

We were on our hands and knees picking strawberries, in a field of 15,000 strawberry patches, as the sun rose up, incredible.

“You said you wanted to work,” NanaAnna said.

Me and Riot and Siri rose up in the country morning dark without complaint. We had money on our minds. The morning air was chilled. We walked, instead of riding in the pickup truck.

“Walking is good for your heart,” NanaAnna said as she weaved and worked her way leading us through the woods and into the strawberry field.

“Take deep breaths. Inhale, and exhale,” she said. She was wearing a pretty, long denim skirt, with a short apron tied around front. She wore expensive leather walking shoes and a cotton long-sleeve blouse. Her hair was wrapped in a floral scarf and tied beneath a quality hat, not fitted or floppy, and very feminine. Me and Riot had on the cheap shit we got yesterday. Our Walmart jeans were stuffed into our tube socks. Our tube socks were stuffed into our skips. Hoodies protected our skin and us from the early morning breeze. We both wore work gloves that NanaAnna told us to put on. Riot tied down what little hair she had left with a blue bandanna. I tied mine with a black one. We were not going into town, so we were girls today. Riot suggested that me and her should use the names off of a song that her mother used to like. It was written and performed by Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney. The song was called “Ebony and Ivory.” I told her that was fine, but I’m Ivory cause that name was the bomb to me. We agreed. Immediately, we told NanaAnna our new names. She smiled. I said, “It’s the name of my second face.”

Out in the fields nobody bothered too much about names. It was picking those berries and getting them in the wide wooden baskets and how many baskets we could fill by noon.

“Put your hands in the soil,” NanaAnna told us. “Ivory meet Mother Earth,” she said, introducing me to the dirt. “You city girls gotta get country smart. Country smart is more useful than city slick,”
she said. I didn’t mind cause NanaAnna picked while we picked. She taught us how to sort and select the darkest red plump little strawberries and how to handle them carefully so that they wouldn’t bruise.

“The bruised ones are just as good to eat or cook, but harder to sell. Some customers are silly like that,” NanaAnna said. “They think if anything isn’t perfect looking there’s no good inside of it, or use for it.”

After demonstrating how to place each strawberry in the basket, and how high to stack ’em so that the ones on the bottom of the basket didn’t get crushed, we got busy. Me and Siri was slow in the beginning, and dropping strawberries here and there. Before the first half hour disappeared, we were quicker than the others who were mostly older ladies. My body is flexible like that. I crawled easily on my knees up and down the rows. I didn’t care about destroying the jeans. Soon as I left this area headed home, I was dropping every cheap labeled thing in the trash.

We got paid a dollar a basket. I did fifty-four baskets so I had fifty-four dollars. I didn’t think they paid enough cause I counted how many strawberries were in one wooden basket so I could estimate the total in all of my baskets. In the basket I used for the calculation, there were 175 strawberries, so I multiplied that by fifty-four baskets, which equaled 9,450 strawberries. My mind was going crazy with numbers. How many strawberries are in those little green containers in the supermarket? It couldn’t be more than twelve, and how much does a small container in the market sell for?

NanaAnna said her strawberries were natural, organic, and precious. She told us that other farms and farmers were spraying poison on theirs and selling them to innocent unaware families and people to eat. She said the chemicals on those other strawberries would kill people slowly as the cancer crawled and creeped, attached, grew, and then exploded in their insides. I never heard nothing like that before until today. On the walk back from the field through the woods to our house, I ate a pocket full of those natural organic precious bruised strawberries. They were the ones I chose and picked. It was the only food I had all day. They were the only natural organic strawberries I ever ate in my little life. Sweet and juicy, they tasted better than candy. I never thought nothing natural could taste better than candy.

Riot and I raced to the bedroom. We all three fought to get in the bathroom first. When we were cleaned up and wearing our second set of cheap clothes, NanaAnna called us out to the kitchen.

“Time to cook,” she said. “I’m a little hungry and you girls worked on an empty stomach as well.” Riot quickly agreed to cook, but NanaAnna rejected her.

“No, you sit down. Porsche is going to prepare lunch for the two of us,” she said.

Riot laughed. “I guess we’re gonna starve then,” she said, doubting me.

“She’ll do just fine,” NanaAnna said. “And I noticed that she won’t eat anything that anyone else prepares. So from now on, she can prepare the meals,” NanaAnna said softly. “We will gladly eat what her hands prepare for us.”

“It’s okay, you two can eat. I’m not hungry,” I said, declining the cooking offer.

“If you want to pay down your debt, you should accept every decent job and do it well,” NanaAnna said.

She was looking into me, and I was looking back at her.

“I’ll do it. It’s nothing,” Riot stood up volunteering.

NanaAnna touched Riot’s hand, saying, “No, I have something else for you to do.”

NanaAnna asked me, “Where is the journal I gave you?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“You didn’t look inside of the sack I gave you last night? The gifts that the sprits told me to give to you?” she asked. I made a face at Riot then ran to go search the sack that I had thrown on the floor in the closet without opening. I came back with two journals in my hands.

“Which one do you like best?” NanaAnna asked me.

“This one,” I pointed to the purple.

“Okay, so we’ll use the orange one for the recipes. I’ve never written any recipes down before for anyone. So, consider this an introduction to our friendship,” NanaAnna said.

“Thank you, but it’s only forty days and there are only thirty-six days to go,” I reminded her, Riot, and myself.

“Thirty-six days is more than enough,” she said as she wrote out a recipe for strawberry pancakes with maple syrup and beans. Then she
handed me the journal. I liked pancakes and beans but not freaking together.

I was left in the kitchen alone, after she put a flame beneath the griddle, and left the soaking beans in a pot on the stove.

“Gather up your utensils first, then your ingredients. Once you have it all organized, begin cooking.” She placed one hand on my shoulder and left the kitchen confidently with Riot following behind her.

Standing at the center of a large pretty kitchen, in a long and wide wooden house covered with bricks, and ivy leaves, I felt panic. As I watched the flames crawling beneath the iron griddle and sprawled out slightly below the bean pot, I began to sweat some. Realizing I was left with fire, matches, gas, and an entire knife collection, a drawer filled with forks, spoons, and more knives, unlocked see-through cabinets packed with clay and glass plates, unlocked closets filled with foods of my choosing, I felt crazy and unfamiliar. As I looked up to the ceiling it seemed the whole room was swirling. I had never in my life cooked anything before, or received a cooking lesson even. The room spun a little faster. And no one would leave me with all these weapons alone without sending the guards, calling the police, or chaining my wrists and ankles together. Would they? I began to cry. I was alone, so crying was okay. Siri was walking up the hall towards me. It’s always okay for her to see me cry, I thought.

“Come on, let’s try,” Siri said. The spinning kitchen slowed down its spin.

“You can sit, I’ll do it,” Siri said. But I didn’t want to sit.

“Okay, we’ll do it together,” Siri suggested as she pulled over a footstool to stand on to see better. We made small piles of the seasonings because they were all in separate small glass containers. Me and Siri stuck one finger in each in every pile till we tasted seasonings that we both liked. When we agreed on four different tastes I put a tablespoon of each in the boiling beans. The recipe had said, “Season to your taste.” I added chopped onions, which Siri had trouble slicing with a butter knife. The strong onion sting made her spill tears silently.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” I told her, of course. I chose a tomato and washed it then dropped it in the boiling beans. I figured the hot water
would turn something so soft into liquid even if I didn’t chop it up. I considered adding garlic cause Poppa would’ve liked that taste. However, after wakening up the other day with garlic pieces all over my body and bed, I was all garlicked out. Me and Siri held up the sticks and leaves NanaAnna had left there on the counter. “Are we supposed to put those in the boiling bean water?” I asked Siri.

“I don’t know,” she responded. “Let’s smell them,” she suggested. Each stick and leaf had different smells. Siri and I each chose our favorite. Then we hesitated and put them back. “Flowers smell good, but we wouldn’t put flowers in our soup or food, right? So, let’s not put these sticks and things in either,” Siri said. So we didn’t.

Some of the pancakes were really big and others were really small. They all ended up crispy, cause the griddle grew hotter than hot while we were taking our time preparing the beans. None of ’em was burnt though. I had sliced the strawberries up and laid them nicely on the plate where I piled five pancakes each for the four of us, twenty all together.

“Four plates?” NanaAnna asked curiously.

“Everybody’s eating,” I assured her. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t, but after preparing my first meal ever, I was definitely going to test it out.

“It’s so good,” Siri said first.

“I can’t believe it,” Riot said, stuffing a forkful in her mouth, her second one.

“I can,” NanaAnna said. She was watching me eat. I felt a little uncomfortable but the sweet maple syrup—soaked pancakes on my tongue made me too happy to remember that I was uncomfortable.

“What about the beans?” NanaAnna asked me a little while later. She and Riot had eaten all of theirs but me and Siri didn’t.

“I eat beans, but not with pancakes,” I told her.

“Beans are protein and calcium. If you only have sugar, you’ll be out of balance. Protein gives you strength. Calcium is for your bones and teeth.”

“My bones are fine,” I said. “Thank you for caring about me,” I said politely.

“How much did you remove from my debt? How much more
do I owe?” I asked straight-faced. I needed to know how much the cooking job paid.

NanaAnna paused. “Since you have turned me into a debt collector I’ll put a chart right there on the wall. We will keep track of every expense just like you wanted, and credit you for each thing that you agree to do, just as you require.”

I agreed. I needed to keep count on everything in my life and on everything I owed and everything that was owed to me.

“Ivory!” Riot called me as I was leaving the kitchen.

“I fixed the tire on a little bike outside if you wanna ride it,” she said.

I looked at NanaAnna.

“How much for a ride, NanaAnna?” I asked. She took a good look and a long pause and a deep breath, then said, “A dollar a day.”

“No matter how long I ride it for or where I go?” I checked.

“You gotta stay on the reservation with it,” Riot jumped in.

“No matter how long and no matter how short. Even if you take for five minutes or five hours, it cost a dollar,” NanaAnna said.

“No problem,” I said.

I guess she didn’t know that paying was the only way I could ride without feeling like I was child without parents who loved me enough to keep me, and buy me a bike.

“School tomorrow,” NanaAnna said.

“School?” I repeated. Didn’t she understand our situation? I thought.

“Okay, learning tomorrow. First work, then learn, then ride the bicycle,” NanaAnna said, emphasizing each of her requirements.