Valley Fever (27 page)

As it turned out, George was getting swindled by Mello, just as he'd predicted. They were threatening to pick before the sugar had fully developed, so the grapes wouldn't weigh quite as much. Plus they wouldn't taste as good as they could, reducing the value of future crop. Mello could get away with this sort of thing; they did every year. If they didn't pick early, they'd pick late. If they picked on time, they'd end up renegotiating your contract to pay less based on the grape glut, the quality of the fruit. Their field guys would find mold where there was no mold. They got away with this because they were big; someday you might need them. “It's predictable, but it's always upsetting,” he said. “They could be really nice grapes if they'd just wait.”

“Maybe they'll wait,” I said.

George resigned himself to the Mello problem by drinking at Bootsie's and by thinking of himself as a gentleman farmer.

“George is writing another book,” Bootsie said.

“A spy thriller,” said Elliot.

“He's writing a spy thriller that takes place in East Germany,” said Bootsie.

I said, “East Germany, George?” George had always known my obsession with East Germany, with how families were divided in the middle of the night.

“It has nothing to do with you,” he said. “Except that your obsession became my own.”

“You guys act like you're interested enough to have actually studied German,” Elliot said.

Bootsie said, “It's a book about a man who knows someone is informing on him, and suspects his wife.” She was very good at ignoring Elliot and putting the focus on herself. This is why she was the boss, I guess.

“Why always the wife?” I asked. “Why can't the husband be the informant?”

George said, “It doesn't necessarily turn out to be his wife in the end, Ingrid.”

“Well, is it or isn't it?”

“You'll have to read and see.”

“I don't want to wait that long.”

He said, “When do I get to read your genocide comedy?”

“I think that was the worst idea I've ever had. But I managed to convince someone to give me living expenses for a year.”

“Not such a bad idea.”

“I don't know. That was a pretty bad idea, too.”

“What about coming back home?” Bootsie said.

“Not such a bad idea, as it turns out.”

“It's all material,” said George.

There was an easiness there, at the bar, with Bootsie and Elliot and George. It was the kind of easiness that caused me to panic.

 

20.

No one was more pleased about the money Uncle Felix paid for the Fiestas than Mother. “We're going to have a party. We'll roast turkeys outside. And we're going to bring Charlie up from LA.”

“A fiesta for the Fiestas,” Dad said.

“Yes,” Mother stopped. “I should have thought of that.” She stood at the stove, quickly shaking a skillet of crabs back and forth over a high flame. She had killed them first, spearing their backs with the point of a chef's knife, so that when she fried them, their little legs lay flat.

“I have to go back home soon,” Anne said.

“Well, you can come back. Or stay. We can have the party in the next few days. You can stay a few days, can't you? Tell Charlie to get a flight so you can drive back down together.” Mother spoke very quickly, in the high, excited voice she gets when she's feeling optimistic. That afternoon she'd had her hair colored at a salon.

Anne said, then, “There is no Charlie.”

Mother placed the crabs on a platter and spooned corn relish on top. “If he argues, tell him we'll buy the ticket. Will we buy the ticket, Ned? I know Charlie hates Fresno.”

Dad watched Anne.

“He won't argue, Mom.” Anne got that flat-line voice. “He moved out of the house.”

My mother said, “Why?”

“Mother,” I said. “Just— They're having a rough patch. Don't ask questions.” I scooped a crab from the platter on the table and placed it in front of Anne. “Here, Annie. Crunchy crabs.”

“We should have nice wine with these crabs,” Dad said. “Ingrid.”

“I think Mom pulled something,” I said.

“No, I didn't. I forgot.”

“I'll get the wine,” Anne said, and as quickly as possible disappeared down the kitchen stairs into the cellar.

Mother stood at the table with the platter of crab. Her hair was perfect: silky and flipped.

“Did you know this already?” Dad said to me.

“I didn't know when she was going to tell you,” I said.

“She has to stay here,” Dad said. “She can't go back to that house alone. It's in the middle of nowhere.”

“It's in the middle of Hollywood, Dad.”

Anne came up the stairs with a bottle of the old Mondavi she'd wanted but I thought we didn't have. Anne is like a truffle pig.

“You have to stay here,” Dad said. “Aren't you on hiatus?”

Anne said, “I have to face that house.” She opened drawers, looking for the wine key. “Daddy, do you want wine?”

“Not by yourself,” he said.

“It's just that first moment I'm afraid of, the one where I walk in and it's all empty, he's all gone.” In one motion she cut the top and removed the foil.

We were quiet for a moment. Dad said, “No wine for me.”

“Think of this as an opportunity,” I said. “There are no expectations.”

“What does that mean?” Mother said. “It's not an opportunity.”

Anne said, “This feels like a dream.”

I said, “Maybe that life was the dream, or the fantasy, and this is real life.”

“Real life,” Anne said.

“Exactly,” said Dad.

“I'm an actress, I have a tenuous relationship with real life.” She filled my glass and her own to the very top.

“Stay here,” Dad said once more.

“We're going to have a party,” Mother said.

*   *   *

When Dr. Parker said Dad needed a biopsy of the spots on his lung, Uncle Felix suggested Dad get down to UCLA for a second opinion.

“What second opinion? I can see the spots myself,” Dad said.

“We'll take you down in the helicopter,” Uncle Felix told him.

Uncle Felix's helicopter had once been Dad's, and Felix had bought it off him during a bad year just a few seasons ago. “I'm happy with Dr. Parker's opinion,” Dad said.

“Your father is as stubborn as your mother,” Uncle Felix told me. He'd come for after-dinner drinks, something he hadn't done in a while, not since the night he'd dumped his car into the canal with poor Debby inside it.

“It's just a biopsy,” I said. “All they do is scrape those dots off.” When I was little, I remember that sometimes Uncle Felix's fingers were stained red from squashing grapes on the vine to see if the juice was ready. Dad could hold a grape or taste it, and other farmers would just look at the grapes, or send their men to look at them, and of course most everyone measured the sugar, but Uncle Felix had to squash grape after grape after grape to see which vineyards were ready for harvest. At dinner he would come with purple-red fingertips, but never a bunch of the grapes for us to taste. Uncle Felix didn't believe in the taste of a grape in relation to the wine it would make. He believed in texture. He believed barrels and process affected taste more than the juice. He had many unconventional opinions on wine.

“Just a biopsy,” Felix said.

Later, I walked Uncle Felix over the canal and out to the gate. “He's tired,” I said. “I think he doesn't want to admit that he's too exhausted to go anywhere.”

Felix said, “Let me give you some advice. For the future. When you have a spot on your lung and someone offers you a ride in his helicopter to see a doctor in Los Angeles, accept the offer.”

“All right,” I said.

*   *   *

Just like the Thompsons, the crop of Fiestas to the north didn't weigh as much as expected. As I knew, as George knew, as we all knew, Felix had waited too long to pick. The grapes shrunk, sugar condensed. White grapes were already down to four hundred dollars a ton, and now there would be even less money than we had anticipated, no matter what the contract said.

“The chardonnay are at their peak. The rest of the grapes look excellent.”

Anne and Mother sat together at the kitchen table, Anne in one of my father's discarded white T-shirts and my mother in her gauzy nightgown. They played backgammon without looking up. They had been playing backgammon when I left in the morning and they were still playing now, well into evening. Dad wore a waffled robe over his pajamas, chilled even in the Fresno night heat.

“If Felix picks them,” Anne said.

“Don't get down on Felix,” Dad said. “We know this is how he does business. We have always known.”

“I don't know why you do business with him,” Anne said.

“Because he's my friend,” Dad said. “And because he's giving me a high price for the cabernet.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Anne said.

“If he doesn't pick that cab on time, I'm selling it to Mello, contract or no,” I said. “Let him sue you, Dad.”

“He wants that cab, and he wants it to be good juice. I've been doing this a long time, you know.”

Anne said, “You employed Phillip a long time, too. He stole from you for fifteen years.”

“If you girls know so much about ranching, why aren't you in the truck so I can retire?”

“I am in the truck,” I said.

Mother went ahead with her plans for a party right away, as if she wanted to get her harvest dinner in before the money was gone. “I guess I'll have to do the flowers myself,” she said.

Anne said, “A penny saved.”

“I save all my pennies,” Mother said. “I buy my lipsticks at the drugstore now.”

The money would be gone either way, she figured.

I said to Dad, “Tell me what this means, exactly, the payment we're getting for the Fiestas.”

“Just work the farm. Let me handle the finances. Just do your job.”

“But I won't have a job to do if we don't work things out with the bank.” I put bread in the toaster.

“Things are fine with the bank.”

Mother said, “Ingrid, don't eat toast for dinner. There's still lasagna in the refrigerator.”

“Tell me, then, what the numbers are, what we're looking at,” I said. “I like toast, Mom. I want toast.”

“The numbers are fine. Everything is fine.”

“You say everything is fine always,” I said. I leaned against the counter, pressing my back against its coolness. “I have to learn about this part, too, Daddy.”

“What for? You say you're leaving once the harvest is through.”

“I am.”

“So don't worry about the money, Inky. Your job is big enough.”

He stood, then, bracing himself thoroughly on the table in order to lift. It was the movement of an old man, a man in pain.

“Go,” Anne said. “Don't stay here with us.”

“I'm tired,” he said. He kissed her head, he kissed Mother's head, he kissed mine. “I love my girls,” he said.

“You haven't eaten,” Mother said, looking up from her position on the backgammon board. “Stay and eat.”

“I had toast earlier. I like toast, too.” He creaked back to his room. Tomorrow he'd have his chest opened up, just a little bit, just a dot.

 

21.

What the doctors had originally missed, what the doctors always missed, apparently, in cases like Dad's, was a tiny fungus living inside his lungs, indigenous spores that grow in the central California soil loosened into the air during dry seasons. It's what causes most of the coughs in the valley. Sometimes it turns brutal or fatal and sometimes it doesn't. It could be as harmless as a cold. Stress seems to feed it. Valley fever could seem like a tumor or MS or heart failure or a disintegration of the joints. It could, sometimes, look and feel like bone cancer. There's no cure, only management through drugs. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they don't.

We had closed the windows and turned on the air. This afternoon everyone felt very optimistic about the future. “It's the luckiest diagnosis,” Mother said. “It's cured with rest and laughing.” She emptied the dishwasher with alacrity, handing glasses over to us while we stacked them in the cupboard.

“I don't know if it's exactly lucky,” said Anne. “Cancer sounds more manageable.”

“Don't say that in front of your father,” said Mother. “What he needs is laughing and no stress. Dr. Parker said he's probably had the fungus for twenty years.”

Mother served the tea from her old glass sun tea jar. She would put tea bags in the water in the morning, set it on the porch, and by afternoon we'd have smooth iced tea with no trace of bitterness.

Anne had booked a ticket to New York and a swell of auditions. Eight auditions in two days. “You guys think I'm just a cow,” she said.

“I never thought that,” Mother said.

“I'll show you, though. I'll show you and everyone.” Anne said this with neck tall, chin tilted up.

“Annie, no one thinks you're just a cow,” I told her. The sun tea jar had a visceral feeling to it—sun tea reminded me of climbing trees—that feeling of stickiness and rough cuts in the palms of the hands and dehydrated blossoms and spiderwebs clumped in my hair.

“I was a good cow, though.”

“The best,” said Mother.

“Is that an insult?” Anne said.

“You could not be a cow,” said Mother. “Because I am your mother.”

Anne's neck is long and straight and has no imperfections. My neck has a protruding knob where it meets my spine.

“People love cows,” I said. “Sad cows that talk.”

Annie would drive directly from Fresno to LAX, bypassing her house. The small patch of lawn in the front had started to go a bit long and wild. Charlie had been the one to coordinate gardeners and chimney maintenance and things like roof repair or tree trimming. The air-conditioning had stopped producing cold air, and Anne didn't know how to contact the climate-control people. Someone had dented the garage door while she'd been away, trying to make a turn in the middle of the narrow hill street, and she couldn't bear the sight of the dimpled door. Rather than figuring out the logistics of having the door fixed, rather than calling a gardener or treating for termites or replacing the picket that had come loose from the fence, Anne had been ignoring the house entirely.