Valley Fever (26 page)

“Clammy,” Felix said.

“It's going to make you click the back of your jaw,” I said.

Gale laughed. “You still got Thompsons on the vine, Felix?”

“I need sugar,” said Uncle Felix. He sat back in the red-leather swiveling club chair. He grinned and rocked.

“Because he must add so much water,” I said to Gale, smiling. “This is why Uncle Felix makes more money than you.”

“There are more reasons than that why Felix makes more money than me,” Gale said.

Fresno was the only place I'd ever been—and still is—where the topic of money was not unreservedly taboo. In fact, during lunch at the Vineyard, the topic of money—who had it and who was losing it, how to make it and how to squander it, where it came from and where it was going—provided the center of every conversation. Even in Hollywood, the gossip between Anne and her friends would skirt around money as if money were a snake you didn't want to poke. Here, though, what was the point of talking about anything if you were not going to talk about where the money was?

“Pistachios,” Uncle Felix said. “Pistachios are the reason I make more money than you.” He kept his hands off the table, patting his big round tummy.

“Why's that, Uncle Felix?”

“Ask Gale. Who gets all your money, Gale?”

Gale shook his head.

“Who does, Mr. Macpherson?”

Uncle Felix tilted his club chair toward me. “The packing house.”

Gale shook his head, as if this were not true.

I said to Felix, “You're a packing house, sort of.”

He nodded, he rocked. “That's why I make all the money.”

We all kind of laughed.

Gale said, “Pick those grapes before they dry on the vine.”

“I am!” I said. “The pickers are already parked.” I held up my glass of wine, as if to toast.

“Are they,” said Uncle Felix, rocking, holding his stomach. The waitress didn't come around to our table once that day to ask how things were.

“I told you, I am picking right now. I'll find someone to buy the juice if you don't want it.”

“I want it,” said Felix.

“I know you do,” I said. “That's why you always buy me artichokes.”

Uncle Felix walked me to the truck afterward in the deep, relentless sun.

“You don't know yet all you think you know,” he said.

“I know all those Thompsons are frying,” I said. And then, “Any other year this would be different. But Dad doesn't need this kind of stress right now.” My scalp itched with dust. My fingernails were full of sand. “I don't know why you're pulling this stuff with him. Pull it with other people, but not your brother.”

He patted the small of my back and opened the driver's door for me. “You really don't know anything about wine,” he said. “And you're trying to make decisions you don't know how to make. I know your father wants you to learn, but this is not the way to learn. You're just lucky, this time, that the Thompsons are ready to come off the vine tonight.”

“I'm lucky?”

“You've always been lucky,” he said.

*   *   *

I slept early that night, easier now that Mother and Dad were running the air conditioner, and woke at 2:00 a.m. to join the harvest in progress. There was nothing for me to do, really, but make an appearance, drive Dad's truck through the blocks of vines and, as the farmers say, leave my shadow on the land.

The Thompsons were high in sugar, meaning the weight was lighter than we'd planned for, or hoped. We would need to harvest a lot of cabernet, I suspected, to make up for what we lost on the Thompsons. But the cabernet looked ample. The stressed vines had produced a strong crop.

Dad grew thirty varieties of grapes. Getting just the first two off the vine had been trickier than it should have been.
You really don't know anything about wine
, Uncle Felix had said. I didn't want to know that much about wine. My job was to know about grapes.

 

19.

When I was young, we were warned not to go near the canals. Canals were full of corpses and old toys and household rubbish. We were not to ride our bicycles on the banks, and never, ever, were we to consider going swimming. As a child, the canals seemed terrifying, a living evil. I thought about this a lot that year—the perceptions of canals, life and death—as I drove through the vineyards where sometimes the canals carried no water at all.

Anne came back to Fresno quite a lot. “It's such a quiet house now,” she said, meaning Beachwood Canyon. “It's too empty. I don't want to live there alone.” Anne had gone to the discount shops at Riverbend, where proper department stores sent the items they couldn't sell, and had purchased dozens of pairs of lacy underwear, new flannel pajamas with monkeys on them, and a bag full of soft T-shirts, the kind that are still expensive even when they're on sale. It was teatime, and I'd come home from my rounds, and she was folding gauzy, bright underpants and placing them carefully in her girlhood dresser. “I'll stay here with you and go back when I have an audition.”

“When will that be?”

“What I'd really like to do is sell the house and go to New York. I don't want to grow old without having lived in New York.”

“You're not growing old.”

“Sure I am. It happens while you don't realize it's happening.” She clipped tags with a pair of kitchen shears, Mother's kitchen shears with the orange handles, which were actually sewing scissors. “I've been thinking for so long that I'm young and things are just beginning, that I'm in the feather-dusting part of the play, where the maid comes out to the drawing room with the duster and the phone rings and then the action begins. But the phone rang a long time ago. I'm in Act Two.”

“I am too, then.”

“Maybe not. Returning home to run the family farm usually happens in Act One.”

“Or the finale,” I said.

The desk beside the window that looked out to the river was strewn with half-used tissues. Anne never blew her nose, only dabbed at it, so her tissues had all these little fingertip imprints on them, a dozen tiny little domes on every tissue. They lay flat on the desk like dry butterflies. Anne wouldn't throw them away until she felt they were all used up.

Anne kept a bottle of regular Tylenol at her bedside. “What do you take this for?” I asked her, holding it up.

“It helps with the pain,” she said.

“I should have thought of that earlier this summer.”

“You shouldn't take Tylenol with booze.”

“Let's get dinner later. I'll take you down to Bootsie's. I have money now, you know.”

“The irony. Now you really are trapped here.”

“I'm not having a bad time.”

“I am,” she said. “I am having a very bad time and I don't want to go out and see people in a restaurant. People who are all having a good time.”

*   *   *

I'd started reading
Middlemarch
for the third time in six months.

When I lived in London with Newton, I read
Hopscotch
over and over for an entire year. I think this is one of the reasons he broke up with me. At his parents' cold stone house in the south of France, when he shocked me one morning with his declaration that the whole relationship had been a mistake, he said, “I think you must be depressed. You've been reading the same book for a year.”

“You have to read it several times,” I tried to explain. “To get it all.”

Newton shook his head in doubt and sympathy. “I just think you're depressed.” There is no explaining
Hopscotch
to a total idiot. Newton was a political consultant. The last book Newton had read was
The Art of War
, and before that, a popular history of importing tulips.

At Bootsie's in the evening, Elliot wore a crisp barman's apron made of blue ticking. He said, “Anyone who reads only one book a year is either an idiot or very depressed.”

“But what if it's
Hopscotch
and you have to read it twice or three times, per the instructions?”

“Then you're just depressed. No one actually does that.”

He was mixing those lovely frozen mojitos for me. He did them in a big silver mixing bowl, pouring in the steaming nitrogen and whisking it all together until it had the texture of sorbet and then scooping it into a dessert glass. Every time someone ordered one, he would scoop a tiny bit more into the glass in front of me.

“I haven't read anything this year except
Middlemarch
and trashy magazines.”

“
Middlemarch
is kind of exactly like a trashy magazine,” he said.

Someone waved to him from the front of the restaurant. He nodded back, arms busy whisking. I looked around and saw, by the window, a flabby young couple laughing and greasy with heat and drinks.

“Who's that?”

“A student,” he said. “Her idiot boyfriend. They all come in here, they think it's funny.”

“Or fun,” I said.

“Or fun, maybe.”

“They get a kick that you're not really paid anything to teach German? I don't get what's funny.”

“I don't, either,” he said.

Elliot took his drinks-making job so seriously, with his own belt of tools and a travel iron he kept in the back of the restaurant to make sure his apron was crisp every night; it was hard for me to picture him in front of a classroom, speaking a foreign language, in charge of the poor or lazy rich young people at Fresno City College.

“What do you teach them, exactly? Basic German? German one, two, and three?”

He nodded at the gimlet as he scooped the last bit into my glass. “One and sometimes two,” he said. He poured another batch into the bowl. “I'll be paying for my PhD the rest of my life.” He used the whisk like a weapon, stabbing and hurling.

This gimlet was thick and froze my teeth. “Maybe Bootsie will pay it all off,” I said.

He stopped whisking and looked at me, surprised or horrified or distressed.

I must have been sort of drunk to say something like that.

Bootsie interrupted. “When I get big and fat, I'll have to hire someone to look after this place for me,” she said. “Maybe you'll do it, Ingrid.”

“I'm already looking after someone's business.”

“Your own,” said Elliot.

“Right,” I said. I hadn't really thought yet of Dad's land as my own business.

“I think we should call the baby Elliot,” Bootsie said. “I don't care whether it's a boy or a girl.” Bootsie smiled that smile that took up her whole face—she seemed really, purely, joyfully, and excitedly happy. “And I hope it looks exactly like you,” she said to him across the bar, “with those dark dark eyes and that big pout mouth.”

“You used to make fun of my fish mouth,” he said.

“You do have a fish mouth,” she told him. “I hope the baby has one, too. A huge wet fish mouth. And your long eyelashes.” Bootsie laughed and touched his arm. “Ingrid, do you think Elliot has a delicious wet fish mouth?”

Elliot ripped drink orders from the printer at the bar and lined them up like cards. “I hope the baby is a baby after all,” he said.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“It means let's not get too excited until you've been pregnant a while and maybe let's not talk about this at work.”

“That's not very nice,” said Bootsie. She took a straw to gnaw on. She got the placid, plain look on her face that I knew was hurt feelings. Bootsie's face always had an expression, even when it had none.

I put my hand on her tiny pointy shoulder. “He's being nice.”

“Some people don't get preggers at all,” she said. “I feel like I'm really lucky.”

“You are really lucky,” Elliot said.

“We're all lucky,” I said.

Then George arrived.

“Ingrid's extra lucky,” Bootsie said as George made his way to the bar. George swayed when he walked, that languid way he had about him. He raised his hand hello.

“George,” Elliot said. “Are you feeling lucky?”

“I'm not especially lucky,” said George.

“You certainly are,” said Bootsie. “You have all of us.”

“It's true,” George corrected himself. “I'll be luckier when I get something to drink and a plate of fritters.”

Bootsie turned to the kitchen to put in the order for fritters. Elliot poured George a tumbler of Famous Grouse. “You picked the Fiestas,” George said.

“You told me to.”

“How did you get him to do that?”

“Just what you said. I told him I'd take the cab somewhere else.”

George smiled and shook his head. “Impressive.”

“Impressive what?”

“Ballsy. And impressive that he did what you asked.”

“My uncle Felix isn't as sinister as all you people think.”

George shrugged. “I don't know what to expect most of the time.”

“I didn't know what else to do,” I confessed. “Those grapes had to come off the vine.”

He laughed a little bit. “You know, you're exactly the person your father needs. You're exactly the person he's needed for a long time.”

“I'm not staying here, Georgie.”

“No one else in this valley can keep Felix in line.”

Elliot put another spoonful of mojito in my glass. “No,” I said. “I have to go.” I meant: I have to go home. I pushed my stool back into its position beside the bar.

“Eat with us,” Bootsie said.

Elliot said, “When she says eat with us, she means stay here and get drunk.”

Bootsie said, “Stay here and Elliot will get you drunk.”

I said, “Someone has to work in this family.”

“George has to work,” Bootsie said.

“But George has no place else to go,” said George, lifting his glass, tilting his scotch from one side to the other. “And no one else to see.”