Delta Girls Read online

  “My daughter is not a ripe pear.”

  Quinn laughed out loud but stopped when I threw her a look.

  “Let me go talk to the men,” he said.

  I SAT IN the dark car with Quinn, engine turned off to save gas. The moon was full—it hugged the trees, outlined them like a highlighter pen. Bats darted in and out between the rows, wings snapping like flags in the wind. A white owl swooped and gleamed like some sort of angel. Quinn fell asleep, her dark hair splayed against the window, her legs spread open on the seat. I was glad no pervert was there to see her shorts riding up, a sliver of panties peeking out one leg.

  Mr. Vieira appeared, making me jump.

  “Jorge didn’t know what it said.” He leaned into my window. “Forget English—he can’t even read Spanish. Just thought she’d like a sticker. Kids like stickers.”

  “He can’t go around sticking things on a little girl’s body.”

  Mr. Vieira shrugged. “Where you gonna go?”

  “There’s a berry farm up in Washington.” The thought of so much road suddenly exhausted me.

  “All them berries will be picked by the time you get up there,” he said.

  “We can’t stay here,” I told him.

  “I need all the pickers I can get,” he said.

  “I can’t take her back to a barn full of men.”

  He looked off into the distance. “I have an option,” he said, rubbing his bristly chin. “If you want some privacy.”

  “How much privacy?” I looked at Quinn again.

  “You have to drive there,” he said. “It’s on the water.”

  I forced myself to stay skeptical.

  “Let me get my truck,” he said. “You can follow me.”

  We drove through the dark orchard out into untamed fields, up a curved dirt hill. When Mr. Vieira said the place was on the water, he meant it. He pointed to a houseboat down on the other side of the levee, circa 1975, anchored at a small pier. I could hear rustling in the tule grass, sudden flapping of wings as we walked to the edge of the hill, Quinn still asleep in the car. The pear orchard lay in the field behind us, thirty feet beneath us; the trees hulked in formation like kneeling monks. A swath of river lay before us, twenty feet down, shimmering with moon.

  “If this levee ever breaks,” said Mr. Vieira, “the water would drown every last tree. But if you’re in the boat, you’ll go sailing right over us. Your own Noah’s ark.”

  A couple of short, puffy sheep trotted over, as if they wanted to get on board. “What are you doing all the way over here, you batatas?” Mr. Vieira bent down to say to them. “These are our lawn mowers,” he told me. Quinn woke up and got out of the car as Mr. Vieira was hoisting the sheep into the back of his truck to take them back to the orchard; she looked startled by the animals’ thrashing and bleating.

  I wrapped my arm around Quinn and pointed at the houseboat in the water below. “What do you think?” She nodded, her hair crackling with static electricity against my shirt.

  We followed Mr. Vieira down the rickety metal steps to the small pier.

  “I have to turn on the generator,” he said. “And a guy’ll come around to pump the septic in a day or two.”

  The houseboat was a blocky metal thing, like an old trailer plunked on top of a deck, a large A/C unit parked on top of it. The whole thing bobbed a bit when we stepped inside, and I wondered if I had the stomach to live right on the water.

  The interior had a tweedy, earth-tone, Brady Bunch vibe. An olive green cooktop in the small kitchen. A brown dorm-size fridge under the counter. A stacked washer/dryer in the shade of marigolds. The booth in the dinette set that opened into a bed combined all those colors into a nubby weave. The plastic shower liner was the same color as the stove, the toilet the same color as the laundry machines.

  Mr. Vieira checked the sinks to make sure they worked. “You probably don’t want to drink the water,” he said. “Comes straight from the slough.”

  The bedspread on the double bed in the back offered the only nod to the last couple of decades—a really nice bedspread, deep burgundy with eggplant piping. It smelled a little musty, but looked inviting; I couldn’t wait to fall onto it. I wondered if the Vieiras had a similar bedspread in their house. It was hard to imagine—they would probably sleep under something more utilitarian: a navy woolen blanket, maybe a quilt one of their grandmothers had patched together. I doubted they gave themselves the luxury of high thread counts, luxe fabrics. They probably got the bedspread as a gift and couldn’t bear its pretension, so they shuttled it out to the houseboat to gather dust. “It’s a queen’s bedspread,” Quinn said. It was the fanciest bed she had ever seen.

  I had memories of feather beds in Paris, mints on pillows, maids coming in the evening to turn down sheets, but I didn’t share those with her. She didn’t need to know.

  “This going to work for you?” Mr. Vieira said. The generator was loud; I hoped we’d get used to its whir.

  “We really get to live here?” Quinn looked ecstatic. It certainly beat sleeping on a cot in a horse stall or curled inside the car. Other than the occasional motel, we hadn’t had a place with a real bed in ages. Not a place we could call our own.

  “For now,” I told her, and watched her face fall when she remembered that this, like every other place we’d stayed, was just a way station. We were just stopping through.

  THE ELECTRIC GUITAR MADE KAREN’S HEAD FEEL LIKE IT was about to burst. Nathan liked to blast his CD collection over the rink’s sound system when they had the place to themselves at 4 a.m. She complained to her mom, but Deena said that it would get their energy going while they warmed up. More often than not, Nathan hadn’t slept all night, and he needed Jane’s Addiction or Jimi Hendrix to keep him awake. Karen knew he’d sleep in the afternoon after their three hours of skating, their hour of joint ballet lessons, their hour of Pilates mixed with weight training and off-ice lift practice, his wrangling with Deena over choreography while Karen spent time with her tutor. Sometimes when Karen was going to bed at 9 p.m., she pictured Nathan just getting up for the night. She wondered what it would be like to wake up and do whatever you wanted rather than getting out of bed to eat your twenty grams of protein and hit the ice.

  It was hard to keep her focus with the male voices screaming through the speakers. Nathan’s music was so different from the songs that usually played during club sessions—the classical pieces and show-tune overtures that made up her fellow skaters’ long and short programs, the only music Karen really listened to. One of her friends at the rink had skated to a Muzak medley of “Eleanor Rigby” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer;” the first time Karen heard the original versions coming through the radio at the vitamin store, they sounded wrong to her. Too jangly and raw.

  Deena chose the instrumental version of “Let Me Entertain You” for their short program, something with a little jazz, a little sass. For their long program, though, she chose Wagner—Tristan und Isolde. Karen had skated to instrumental Disney tunes with her last partner, Brian; Wagner’s dark, intense orchestration was a major shift. “Isolde means ‘rules over the ice.’” Deena winked at Karen over her cup of coffee.

  “That’s what Tristan should mean,” mugged Nathan.

  “Tristan means ‘tumult,’” Deena said, her voice deliberately flat.

  “I’ll show you tumult.” Nathan shook his fist at Deena, and she laughed.

  “Plus the judges will take you more seriously now,” Deena said to Karen. “They’ll see you as more mature.”

  “And you know what that means.” Nathan waggled his eyebrows. “They’ll think you’re fair game. Fresh meat.”

  “I’m not eighteen yet,” she said. She didn’t like to think of herself as meat, but that’s what she felt like, slabs of muscle aching on her bones.

  “You will be soon enough.” He bit his lip, swept his eyes over her body. She smacked his arm and he pretended to swoon.

  Nathan had been behaving himself for the most part. A few inn
uendos here and there. A few temper tantrums. Nothing serious. He had taken to wearing gloves during practice. The feel of his hand against her body was muffled now. She found herself missing the sharpness of his touch.

  ———

  THEY HAD TO condense the arc of Tristan und Isolde’s story within a four-and-a-half-minute sample of the opera: Isolde’s rage at Tristan for killing her first fiancé; their mutual drinking of a poison that turns out to be a love potion; the flaring of Tristan and Isolde’s love; Tristan being slayed by her new fiancé, the king; Tristan staying alive until Isolde arrives, then dying with her name on his lips; Isolde imagining Tristan rising to the heavens, then dying heartbroken in his arms.

  Deena didn’t want them to pantomime the story, just bring its energy into their movements—anger, then passion, then grief.

  “Listen to what Nietzsche said about the opera,” she said. “‘Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan—I have sought in vain, in every art.’” She put down the computer printout and closed her eyes.

  “We’ll create that in our own art,” she said. “Dangerous fascination. Tingling spines.”

  “Dangerous.” Nathan nodded, smiling slyly. “I like that.”

  “It’s true.” Deena turned on the boom box, let the overture swell into the air. “Two different conductors died right in the middle of the production. The original Tristan died weeks after opening night.”

  “Are you saying this song is going to kill us?” asked Karen.

  “It’s going to kill the audience.” Nathan gave her knee a quick squeeze, sending electricity through her whole body.

  I DIDN’T SLEEP VERY WELL; I SOMEHOW FELT LIKE AN intruder in the boat. I found myself a touch seasick even though the boat barely moved at all, homesick even though I had no home to return to. Quinn, however, slept better than she had in ages.

  In the morning, when we climbed the metal steps back up to the levee to head out to my first real day of picking, my legs wobbled. At the top, I felt as if the ground was bobbing up and down.

  “I think we’re having an earthquake,” I said to Quinn, pulling her away from the edge of the levee.

  “Eema,” she laughed, “it’s sea legs.” I was always astonished by how much more she knew than me. “It’s fun!” She walked around, weaving like a drunk, her arms out tightrope-style.

  I STILL FELT a touch woozy as I drove around the edge of the island, as I joined the rest of the pickers, sat with them and the sorters on the back of the trailer and headed into the orchard. No one said anything to me, but a couple of the sorter women cooed over Quinn and offered her part of their pink-frosted pan dulce, which she politely declined even though we hadn’t had much of a breakfast—just some dry cereal straight out of little individual boxes.

  Mrs. Vieira let us off in the middle of the orchard. There was a huge clacking, like firecrackers, as everyone opened up their ladders. I struggled with mine, but no one offered to help. They already had their bags strapped on, were already reaching into the branches.

  I TRIED TO keep up, but those guys could pick fast. Their hands were blurs in the trees. In the time I had spent picking plants close to the ground, I’d never seen anyone move like that—pickpickpickpickpickpick, like a speeded-up tape, all those hands lifting as if in frenzied prayer. I thought I had built up a decent rhythm, but they blew me away. Every once in a while, one of them glared over at me as if he hoped I would die on the spot, but Jorge didn’t look at me once. It seemed like he might be afraid of me after the sticker incident; I could see his shoulders hunch whenever I looked in his direction. Fine, I thought. It’s better that way.

  It was fine, too, that no one spoke to me or Quinn; we didn’t need to talk to anyone but each other. That’s how it had been at my other jobs—people all around me, but Quinn the only one who mattered. She had brought a book of math problems into the field. There was plenty of math all around her—a certain number of pears per bag, a certain number of bags per bin, a certain number of bins per trailer. The percentage that went into the gallows box, the percentage that was good enough to sell. She could have worked all of that out, but she preferred the workbook with its floppy yellowed pages.

  Eventually she wandered over to the flatbed trailer where the women were sorting. They showed her how to loop a sorting ring around her wrist, check to make sure the good pears were at least two and a quarter inches around.

  “Remember,” Mr. Vieira said as he wandered by, “I can’t pay her nothing.”

  “I know,” I said, my arms aching. My pace had slowed, even though I tried to will my hands to keep moving. The guys all around me continued their frenzied pitch.

  “Tell her to look for the big ones,” he said. “We wanna win the Big Pear Contest this year.”

  WE FINISHED PICKING at three, just when the heat started to get oppressive. Every cell of my body was exhausted. I could barely push the gas pedal as we drove to the houseboat. Turning the steering wheel felt like too much work.

  STRANGE HOW THE strange becomes familiar, how quickly a new place starts to feel like home. The seasickness, the homesickness, were gone when we stepped into the boat. I knew where the salt was, the silverware with its blue handles. I knew where to keep my panties and shoes. I began to see the same face in the wood grain of the bathroom cabinet every time I sat down to pee. Even the smell of the pillow, at first mildewy and off-putting, became suddenly soothing and known, a welcome harbinger to the hard-won sleep I knew would be coming.

  Quinn adjusted even faster than me, stacking her books on the top shelf of the closet in alphabetical order the first night, devising a quick system for turning the dinette into her bed. She was proud of the fact that she had figured out why all the closet and cabinet doors slid instead of swung open. “It’s so stuff doesn’t fly out when you’re sailing!” she crowed, even though it was likely we’d never leave the dock. She loved living on a boat—“We’re Vikings, Eema,” she said. It was better to read about the giant Aegir, ruler of the sea, on a boat than in a car, she insisted, better to be able to smell the water, feel the humid air. She could picture his wife, Ran, outside our window, protecting us from drowning. Their nine daughters were the “billow maidens,” each named for a different type of wave. Not many of them lived in the Delta, she told me, just the little ripply one, the gently rolling one. I looked out the window; the wind was stamping patterns onto the water like an old-fashioned metal ceiling—elegant squares and swirls. I wondered if they had special names.

  Quinn insisted the Delta, with all its waterways, must be just like the Elivagar, the eleven rivers in Ginnungagap at the beginning of the world.

  “This water’s probably warmer,” I said, my eyes wanting to close, my shoulder blades aching against the mattress. “The Elivagar were frigid.”

  She perked up. “Can we go swimming?”

  “Right now?” I wished I had kept my mouth shut. “I’m so tired, Quinn.”

  “But the water’s right here!”

  She looked at me with such pleading eyes, I said, “Fine. Get your suit on. But just for a few minutes.”

  QUINN AND I lowered ourselves over the edge of the deck. She had wanted to jump in, but I didn’t know if the water was deep enough. Quinn’s yellow bathing suit was getting too small; mine, a vintage granny suit with a brown and aqua tiki pattern, was a bit too roomy. We’d have to look for good thrift shops in the area.

  Quinn let go of the railing first, squealing with joy. The water was surprisingly warm right next to the boat, probably from the generator. When we got outside its reach, there was a big drop in temperature, but it still felt wonderful—it had been a while since I had been immersed, since my entire body had felt embraced. The shower in the boat was barely a trickle, and that was better than any we’d had for a while. We treaded water, splashing each other, noticing the little fish darting around us. At some point, I thought I felt my foot touch the slick bo
ttom of the river, but when I tried to find it again, my toes just moved through watery space. Then the water suddenly rose in a big gentle swell. It felt kind of like how the ground had ballooned under my sea legs that morning, but I was inside the wave, not on top of it.

  “There might be a boat coming,” I told Quinn. I couldn’t think of anything else that could make the water move like that. “We should probably get out.”

  “Already?” she asked.

  “I’m exhausted, sweetheart,” I said. “But we can go swimming again soon, I promise.”

  Pulling myself back onto the deck was much harder than I would have hoped, all the strength wrung out of my muscles. We sat outside for a while and waited for the big ship, but it never came.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I could barely lift my arms.

  “You’ll get used to it,” one of the sorters told me when I walked over to hand Quinn a water bottle. Her English was surprisingly good. Her hair was still wet from a shower. There was a large gap between her two front teeth. “My Ernesto said it takes a couple weeks.”

  Many of the sorters were girlfriends of the pickers. All year or just during pear season, I didn’t know. There were a couple of wives, too. Sorting was no easy job, either—you got to sit down, sure, but your arms and wrists were constantly going. Quinn wanted to sort again, looking carefully for the biggest pears. The women didn’t mind if she was going slow, but the pickers minded that I was. After a couple of hours, when I had dumped just six agonizing bags of pears into the bins as opposed to their twenty or so each, a group went to talk to Mr. Vieira.

  He pulled me aside when they dispersed and said, “I can’t afford to lose you, but I really can’t afford to lose all of them. They won’t pick if you stay on their crew.”

  I rubbed my forearm, fingers digging deep.

  “Why are you so pressed for pickers?” I asked. A cottontail hopped between some rows. Quinn jumped off the trailer and chased after it.