Valley Fever (4 page)

The sun had gone down to the west end of the river. The real beauty of Fresno always pained me. The vibrant sunsets, the magenta and lucid orange only a sky of pesticides and exhaust can make: there is nothing quite like a sunset on fire over a vineyard in July, before the grapes have been picked and the vines are thick, abundant. The orange light reflected off the fruit. I tried to ignore this real beauty. I preferred to think of the stretch of used-car lots in the middle of town and the expensive new homes built side by side around the shallow veneer of a man-made lake.

Uncle Felix poured the last of the bottle into Dad's glass. Anne opened another. “Where's my mother?” Anne said.

“Let's have toast,” Dad said, and he put four slices of bread in the toaster for us. It was exactly what I'd had in mind for dinner.

Uncle Felix asked, “What are you working on now, Ingrid?”

“Nothing I want to talk about, Uncle Felix.” After I'd quit my job and moved to Los Angeles, I got a grant from a human rights organization to finish a screenplay I'd been writing for a while: a comedy about genocide, loosely based on the true story of my father's grandparents. Although I had a good idea of how to write a grant application (I'd had a couple of those jobs, too), I had no idea how to write a screenplay, and I each day learned a little more that I didn't care. I sat at my desk, and had every day for six months, and while I told people who asked that I was at work on my project, in fact I had written nothing, I had been depressed by all the screenwriting books with their embarrassing sentences, and I'd spent nearly the entire grant. It's amazing how fast you can run through $25,000.

When the toast popped up, Dad said, “I cooked you dinner.”

“Thank you, Dad.” Anne can be wonderful, and she can be an asshole, but for the most part she is always sincere. It's when she's being most sincere that she's most an asshole. “You're excellent at making toast.”

“How long are you staying?” Uncle Felix said.

“Just a little bit,” I said. “I don't know.” I opened the kitchen window, so we could smell the ripening fruit of the summer night.

“Let's go hit a few balls.”

“You'll be frustrated golfing with me, Uncle Felix.”

“I'll fix your backswing.”

“Dad, tell him.”

“She's a good golfer,” Dad said. Except that I wasn't.

“Stay for a while,” Uncle Felix said. “Your dad misses you.”

I looked at Dad. “Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, Inky.”

*   *   *

Later, Anne came into my room as I was getting ready for bed, opening the door wide without knocking.

“I'm naked,” I said. The heat seemed to get bigger at night, like a terror. It would come and get you. You had to let it roll over you; you had to sleep underneath a thin sheet with no clothes on. “Could you wait?” I was standing in the middle of my bedroom, in front of the mirror on the closet door, flossing my teeth, admiring my muscular stomach after six days of not eating. “Just a minute.”

She came in anyway. “Do you always use that much dental floss?” she said. “That's, like, a really long string of dental floss.”

“Dental floss: an affordable luxury.”

“Listen, Ingrid. Don't stay here too long, okay?”

“Anne,” I said.

“This place always gives me a sore throat,” she said. It was the air, the fires, the sprays used on fruit. “Don't be one of those people who comes back home to Fresno, Ingrid.”

“Who are those people?”

“Bootsie, for one.” Anne and I had felt gratifyingly superior when we'd heard that Bootsie Calhoun had moved back home. Bootsie had called me in New York a little over a year ago, after she had moved back to Fresno, right after her father died, just before I moved to LA. I didn't return the call. You know how these things go—you don't call right away and then all manner of other distractions impose themselves and then it becomes increasingly impossible to make what could have been a relatively easy phone call. Simple avoidance can shift the burden of guilt. Now I felt so bad for ignoring her grief and despair because the timing was wrong, and because we hadn't spoken since our petty fight, I was too embarrassed to do anything about it.

“Anne,” I said. “Are you trying to rescue me?” I went to brush my teeth.

“If you want money, ask me for it,” she said. “You might need a tiny bit of rescuing.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, about the peaches and everything. It's not good. What do you think?”

“It'll be fine.”

“And Mother's eyelashes. What is going on with Mother's eyelashes? Something is wrong. I mean, with the whole thing, this whole farm, this whole town. Mom looks like a crazy person.”

I didn't answer her. Anne could be thoroughly exhausting.

She said, “Anyway, you can come live with me if you need to.”

“Yes, Anne,” I said. “I have money, Anne.”

“What a rotten sort he is.”

“He is rotten,” I said.

“Rotten.”

“Breaking up with me is very unattractive.” I had to remind myself of Howard's character flaws. I had to forget about his stupid flat stomach, the idiot way he brought me coffee in bed.

“I want you to be okay.”

“Thank you, Annie. I'm okay.”

“Don't stay here too long. I mean, it's comfortable and cozy and everything, but in a
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
sort of way, you know?” She shook out her hair like a whip. It fell in delicate wavy pieces over her white polo. Anne's plain beauty got on my nerves.

“Okay, Anne, all right. I'm naked.” I was done with my teeth and found a San Joaquin Memorial High School T-shirt to wear in bed and slipped underneath the sheet. It occurred to me, anyway, that Anne's house was a little more
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
than the house here with Mom and Dad, who never had cruel words for each other. I wondered all the time how I could repeatedly find myself in mean relationships when my parents were so kind together.

“Your stomach muscles look great,” Anne said. “You should buy a bikini.”

“Anorexia divorsa.”

She smoothed my hair over the pillow. It felt good to have her touch my hair. “You're adorable,” she said. “You're an adorable girl.”

“Will you draw on my back?”

She pulled down the sheet and drew a treasure map on my back, with
X marks the spot
. When we were younger, she would pound her fist really hard when X marked the
spot
. “Four big boulders, one teeny dot,” she said, pounding and pinching, but lightly.

“Annie?”

“Inky.”

“Could you stay here until I fall asleep?”

She crawled onto the sheets and spooned me, Anne who liked everything to be perfect and nice and crisp and clean before bedtime, who scrubbed her face vigorously with ground-up apricot pits every night. She rubbed her nose on the base of my neck. “Soon you will forget you were ever in pain in the first place,” she said. “People forget pain. It's proven.” Anne is like a mother dog: growling most of the time, but then warm when she needs to be.

“It's not that kind of pain,” I said.

“Sure it is. It's physical, isn't it?”

“I can't tell what's physical yet.”

We were quiet for a while and then she started going
tick,
tick, tick
, a sound she makes with her tongue right before she falls asleep, and I heard her light snoring.

I had a tiny bit of a headache from drinking without food and in the dark I started to worry a little about the peaches, about the farm, about how bad Anne thought things were. Everything seems worse in the dark.

“Annie,” I whispered, and she made that light grunty noise she makes that tells me she's really asleep.

I chewed on my knuckle until I went under.

*   *   *

Anne drove back to Los Angeles early the next morning. Her body was set to an internal alarm. Since college she'd had a successful career as an actress, and working actresses don't sleep past 5:00 a.m. For the past four years she'd done the voice of Annie the Cow in a popular children's cartoon. Charlie said the producers had been forced to call the cow Annie so she'd answer to her character's name. This was Charlie's subtle way of suggesting Anne's consuming self-centeredness. She woke at 4:00 to drive to the studio.

In the kitchen sink there were two coffee cups.

“Did you talk to Anne?” I said to Dad, later, home for lunch. I had opened a bag of raw almonds and set them out in one of my grandmother's cut-glass bowls. Dad and I picked at the nuts.

“Annie seems happy, don't you think?” He coughed, and then kept coughing.

“Dad, I can feel that cough in my knees.”

“What cough?” he said.

I said, “I think Annie's almost suspiciously happy. You can never tell with Anne.”

“You don't seem suspiciously happy,” he said.

The first conversations I have with my father after a breakup are always sort of harrowing. I fear he'll see my failure as his own. My father is much too generous and faithful to see a breakup as any failure of mine. “I don't mean she's suspiciously happy. I just mean you can never tell with Anne. She's always got that Annie veneer.” The steadier and more solid Anne's veneer, the more I worried about her. That weekend I came back from Aspen, Annie's veneer had seemed particularly steady.

“It's not suspicious. Your mother and I were that happy for a long time.”

“You're still happy,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Happiness changes all the time,” he said. “You think, What are the other options? You think you're going to be happier somewhere else, with someone else? You're wrong.”

“I like Charlie,” I said. “He's always nice to me.” I didn't want to discuss my parents' happiness, or their options, or Anne's, or my options, for sure.

“You never know what goes on in someone else's marriage,” Dad said. “Don't reprimand me for using a clich
é
.” Dad started a fit of coughing on the word
clich
é
. He had a sharp, wet cough, and he spit his phlegm into the garbage beneath the sink.

I said, “He understands us, our family. Or at least he understands that he doesn't understand us. And he's been with us a long time.”

“That matters,” Dad said, unwinding a package of soft white bread to make himself a ham-and-Swiss sandwich. “What else matters?” He dunked a butter knife into the jar of mayonnaise. He stifled another cough, or tried to stifle it.

“To me?”

“What's important to you?”

“You and Mom and Anne and Charlie.”

He laid wispy pieces of ham on the bread. He waited for more.

“This house a little. Wine and peaches a little. I guess I would like to finish this project I'm trying to work on.” I looked at him. He seemed to be waiting for even more. “I think that's all, Daddy.” It occurred to me I didn't have an awfully long list of things that matter.

“You don't care about how people use words? Art doesn't matter to you at all? You don't care if someone shakes your Manhattan? What about really offensive words?”

“You matter, Daddy, so I care if you use offensive words. I do care a little bit if you shake my Manhattan. Try not to.” He ate some almonds. I said, “As for art, you know. Growing grapes is art. Did I say I cared about grapes?”

“You said wine.”

“Wine and grapes and those things.”

“Listen, Ingrid. I'm glad things are important to you. That's who I hoped you would be. I want you to be happy. But I don't want you to be a Communist.”

“I'm not a Communist, Dad.”

“Let's not talk about politics.”

“No, Daddy. I don't know why anyone talks about politics.”

“I want you to be a happy woman, Ingrid.”

Sometimes my love for my father could cause a little pain in my chest. “I'm happy, Dad. One or two or three breakups, you know, doesn't make a person miserable.”

“No,” he said, “I think you just skipped a couple of really bad divorces.”

“You have orange shoes.”

“The dust.” The dust was everywhere: on shoes, on cars, blown into little dunes against the porch steps. It was worse this year, without any water.

“The dust didn't used to be orange.”

“You girls have this idea about how things used to be. And things were always the same.”

“Dad, your shoes are orange.” The dust used to be a sort of gold.

“It's orange now, then,” he said. Farmers work on the present and on the future. They don't truck with the past.

“Shall you and I play some golf this week?”

“Are you saving your money, Inky?”

“I don't have any money.”

“No money. There's no money.”

“We could hit some balls, while you can still afford the club.”

“I don't know, Inky. I don't know if I'm up to golf anymore.”

“What are you talking about? Don't act like you're old, Dad.”

“I was thinking, golf has ruined my life for twenty years and I'm done with it.” He unwound the rubber band from the
LA Times
on the table, put the sports section in his beaten-raw leather portfolio, and tossed the rest on the kitchen counter. He kept nothing in that portfolio but the sports news and
California Vintner
. Until recently, Dad didn't have a computer in his office—he did everything on paper and by telephone.

“You could just read that online,” I said.

“I'm old, Inky. I like newsprint.”

“Are you having sugar?” I stirred the grounds in the French press.

“No sugar,” he said. “Sugar beets,” he said, and shook his head. “No one's paying anything for those, either.” It was better, sometimes, to let Dad talk to himself.