Valley Fever (2 page)

The night birds started. I formed half the comforter into the shape of a person. Charlie tapped on his phone outside the open window. I lay there thinking and my head felt swollen and then all right and then swollen again. I tried to cry but didn't feel like crying. What a shocking day. Ten months ago I had a sunny loft on Avenue B and a job with a kind, elderly news anchor who wore bow ties and demanded very little. I had an enormous mirrored armoire with a secret compartment on the bottom and a set of white dishes and twelve matching coffee cups with delicate handles. Stupidly, I had put nothing in storage. I'd sold the armoire for three thousand dollars and given everything else to the nuns who set up apartments for homeless people. Ha.

Outside, I heard Charlie pour another bourbon into his glass. I wondered what he'd given up. I knew he'd given up paying tuition at Yale for a full ride to USC's film school. But then he had not made films, he'd become an entertainment lawyer. Charlie was the most successful compromiser I'd met in my life so far. One had to be a great compromiser to be married to Anne.

Anne had never given up anything at all. She'd won every argument and every raffle she'd ever entered. If Anne could see her losing position, she abandoned the enterprise entirely. But Anne was too lucky to fail at much. One summer during college she bought a scratch-off lottery ticket at the gas station on Blackstone and Gettysburg and won $100,000.

My head swelled and the room seemed to tilt and then I knew I was going to throw up.

*   *   *

In the morning, Anne and I drove down the hill to Howard's house to retrieve my things. He'd left the shades open, and I could see his coffee cup on the kitchen island before we even got out of the car. Howard never rinsed out his coffee cups. Thank goodness I would never have to rinse another of Howard's coffee cups. The house was still warm with his shower, his cologne, the smell of his dry cleaning and rosemary shampoo that already felt repellent to me.

“I hate these sofas,” Anne said. Ample light came in through the south and the skylights. Anne flicked on the lights. “They really are the ugliest sofas. Why do these sofas have to be so ugly?”

“They're awful sofas.”

Howard had chosen these huge sofas for watching the Saturday-afternoon Duke football to which he was devoted. They were deep and soft and feather-filled. I had, previously, appreciated these awful sofas because they were good for naps and for eating guacamole while lying down. But now Howard's love had hit its limit, and he had very bad taste in design and these brown chenille sofas.

“We both should have known a man with these sofas could not be trusted with anything of value,” Anne said.

For a while in New York I had a photographer friend called Gil who, when he was seven, had found his mother in her bedroom with her face blown off and the gun still in her hand. How he had discovered his mother's suicide was one of the first things Gil would tell you about himself. It was years into our friendship that Gil told me the story of his college girlfriend, how she'd been sleeping with someone else on the men's tennis team. We were in Los Angeles on a work assignment, catching a showing of Baz Luhrmann's
Romeo
+
Juliet
, eating Milk Duds in the bright pre-movie space of the Beverly Cinema. I asked him, “Did she break your heart?”

He laughed. He shook his head and showed me his fingernails, with the yellow growth underneath them he'd had since he was eight, shortly after he'd found his mother. “My heart was already broken,” he said.

When my heart is broken, like that first day of shock after Howard told me he didn't love me, I start to think about what happened with George Sweet. Through high school and college and for the year after college we lived together in New York, I had loved George plainly and completely, and he loved me back. But my mother forbade my marrying him. She feared he was lazy and she called his mother an “opportunist.” She may have been right, at least about George being lazy. At any rate, I let her get right into the central artery of George and me, thinking, then, like a child does, that plain and complete love is easy to find. I always think, when I think about it, after each bad breakup, “My heart was already broken.”

Anne said, “And I have always hated this house. Don't you hate this house?”

“Do you think I should take the brandy we bought in France?”

“It's a bachelor pad, Ingrid. There's a bicycle in the guest room.”

“We were going to fix the guest room.”

“I don't know how he thought he could live here with you. I don't know how you thought you could live here with him.”

“I'm taking the brandy. It was my idea to get the brandy, anyway.”

“You were the event in this relationship,” she said, perched on the edge of an ottoman. “I mean, I like Howard and everything, but I sure am glad I'm on your side.”

“You're my sister,” I said.

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“You were born on my side.”

“I'll bet Howard's friends wish they were on your side.”

When I bent over to put a stack of sweaters into my suitcase, I threw up the toast I had eaten for breakfast.

“We're not in a hurry,” Anne said. “Let's sit.” Anne made a cup of chamomile tea, but I threw that up, too. “It would be fun if we had to go to the hospital because of a broken heart,” she said. “It would be dramatic.”

I agreed it would be exceptional if I had to check myself into the emergency room. “I think I'm just hungover,” I said.

“Keep puking,” Anne said. “Then I can call Howard at work and tell him you're at the hospital.”

We sat on the bathroom floor. “I might have to go to the hospital just so I have someplace to stay.”

“You'll stay with me,” Anne said.

“I can't stay with you indefinitely.”

“Yes you can. Where else will you go?”

“I'll check myself into the hospital.”

“Stay with me and Charlie.”

“Too many sisters in one house.”

“Two too many.”

“I overwhelmed him last night.”

“No, I did. Charlie, you know. Charlie has a thing.”

“About too many Palamedes in one house?”

“He says we become very Central Valley when we're together.”

“What's very Central Valley?”

“Don't worry about Charlie.”

But I did. And Anne, them both. I worried about Anne and Charlie like I worried about my parents: always concerned that someone was about to tip something over, to break something valuable.

“I think I want to go home,” I said.

“Home where?”

“Home to the farm home.”

“Home to Fresno?”

“Just home to Mom and Dad for a while.”

“Darling, don't do that.”

“I don't know where else to keep all this stuff, and these boxes of books.”

“Ingrid, just come stay with us for a while.”

“I am so stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“Until you figure out what to do.”

“I know what I want to do.”

“Just stay with us.”

“Will you drive me?” Even the car I drove belonged to Howard.

*   *   *

Charlie opened a bottle of Far Niente and an old bottle of Mondavi, from when Robert was alive and still owned it. He wasn't joking when he said we'd drink our way through his wine cellar. Until the wine got opened, Anne and Charlie didn't speak to each other much. Opening the wine meant the start of a dinner-long truce. Anne put corn on the grill and steamed tiny white potatoes the size of marbles. She saut
é
ed sole in butter with toasted almonds, exactly the way our mother had done it when we were little.

“Annie says you're going back to the farm.”

“Why don't you come with us?” I said.

“Someone has to work in this family.”

“Someone has to buy the wine,” Anne said from the kitchen.

“Someone's got to drink the wine,” I said.

“Yes,” said Anne. “That's our job.”

“You're both very good at your job,” said Charlie.

The sole had crispy little fins and a crispy tail. I let Anne eat my crispy tail. I enjoyed how much she enjoyed it. I enjoyed that she ate off my plate with her fingers.

“Charlie, can I eat your tail?” she said.

“Very funny, Anne.”

“Don't you want to see me happy?” she said.

He ate the tail.

Anne said, “You're not eating, Ingrid.” She put her hand on my shoulder blade and rubbed the knot out of it.

“I've got something stuck in my throat.”

Charlie said, “Let's have bourbon, okay, Ingrid?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “The sole is beautiful, Anne.”

“We all have beautiful soles,” Anne said.

Charlie brought out tumblers and a small bottle of bourbon made in California. “Yankee bourbon,” Charlie said.

“We need more ice,” Anne said.

“One ice cube each,” said Charlie. “You don't want to ruin the bourbon.” He filled our glasses to the very top. “To the free world!” he said.

“Ha!” Anne laughed and grabbed his wrist. “Charlie,” she said.

He leaned over and bit her cheekbone, lightly.

“Charlie,” she said, laughing, “you're funny.” She bit him back on the side of his chin.

“To the free world,” I agreed.

“For tomorrow, we shall return to the farm,” he said.

 

2.

Over the Grapevine down into the Central Valley, you travel through the dried-up hills of the Tejon Pass with the blond grass and parched landscape. You pass the water museum and Pyramid Lake and Smokey Bear Road and you pass through a little town called Gorman split by the highway with two fast-food restaurants and two gas stations and one vintage furniture store. There are signs advising drivers to turn off their air-conditioning to avoid overheating. An hour and a half north of Hollywood, you crest and descend toward a 23,000-square-mile quilted valley floor in varying shades of brown and green. More than twenty thousand acres of the best land in that valley belonged to Dad. He had assembled his ranch entirely on his own, beginning with one hundred acres his parents had bequeathed.

On the road from Bakersfield to Fresno, the farms on either side have small blue signs identifying what's grown there: table grapes, wine grapes, pomegranates. English walnuts, peaches, nectarines, almonds. Apricots, pistachios, plums. For years there were oranges, but the oranges were replaced by clementines and soon after the clementines were replaced by pistachios. Everyone grows pistachios these days, or almonds. Even the packing house that used to bundle small wooden boxes of tangerines now sorts and distributes nuts. I can tell the difference between the peaches and the nectarines before I see the sign: the leaves of the nectarine tree start to go brown earlier in the summer.

Anne can't even tell the almonds from apricots.

Before Gorman there was a sign advertising
GUNS AND WINE
:
THIS EXIT
. Farther on, a billboard with a rejoicing grandmother said
BINGO!
WHERE SHOUTING IS FUN!
Other signs reminded us that
JESUS IS LORD
,
ABORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART
, and
NO WATER = NO JOBS
.

White grapes were getting picked: Thompsons, chardonnay, sauvignon. The chenin blanc and some of the early viognier. Picking started in the south and followed the weather north. From the Grapevine to Bakersfield, pickups and water tents and harvesting trucks lined up against the fences of the highway. When Bakersfield was done, Tulare would get started, and Visalia, and Selma, and then Fresno and the north.

Past the dairies in Hanford, you could smell the cows for twenty miles.

Fresno smelled like dust and the start of rotting fruit. It was afternoon when we arrived and the sun was high and hot. Once we got out of the center of town, off the 99 down Avenue 7 halfway to Firebaugh, through the vineyards on the one-lane road to the house, you could begin to smell the briny river and the algae that grows up the sides of canals. It had been the third bad year in a row for water; the canals were nearly empty. The smell of the river and the dust in the vineyards always made me homesick, homesick while I was standing right there at home.

“I think I'm developing a limp,” I said.

“Okay,” Anne said. She pulled my small suitcase out of the back. “Don't angle for attention when I'm already giving it to you.”

“I can't move.” I sat in the car with the door open. The heat hit you hard enough to make your ears ring, an open-handed smack. The air was sharp with dust.

“You're being pathetic.” She dragged the suitcase through the carport to the kitchen. “You need to get something in you.” Through the screen door I saw our mother playing solitaire at the table in her nightgown, the back of her hair pushed up flat into a pile from sleeping, her free hotel slippers worn through to the soles. Mother had a whole closet full of free hotel slippers still in their canvas bags, but she would keep washing the old ones until they entirely disintegrated. Free hotel slippers last longer than you think. Mother had been collecting them for thirty years.

“Let me finish this game,” Mom said to Anne as she came through the door. “This does not look good!” she said to the cards, shaking her head. “This is not good,” as if she blamed our arrival.

“It's sweltering in here,” Anne said.

“We're conserving electricity,” Mother said.

“It's a hundred degrees out there,” Anne said. “Turn on the air, will you?”

“Have some ice water,” Mother told her. “There she is!” Mother called out to the car. “Don't sit there, Inky. Come inside.”

“It's cooler in the car,” Anne said.

“If you would like to pay the electric bill, Anne, that's fine,” Mother said.