Delta Girls Read online

  “We’ll sail right past them,” Nathan said as they stretched in the holding area.

  “You better.” Deena laughed, but it sounded more like a bark, sending tingles up Karen’s neck. Karen’s heart did its normal pre-competition hummingbird dance. She took a few deep breaths, told herself, Just skate, just skate, just skate.

  When she and Nathan stepped onto the ice, the crowd erupted, and Karen’s heart threatened to jump out of her dress. As soon as the music started, though, the throbbing settled into her rib cage and her body went into autopilot. The audience clapped along with the jazzy rhythm, squealing when Nathan shook his narrow hips in time to the drums. Karen doubted anyone was screaming for her hips—the little shake always felt awkward to her, like she was pretending to be something she wasn’t. Her mother had often said, “You need to get your center lower, Karen. You’re too upright. Sink into your knees and your hips will be freer,” but it was hard to subvert all those years of being told to reach her spine up to the ceiling.

  Karen kept her mouth stretched into a smile. That took more effort than any of the jumps or spins or combinations; her muscles knew the choreography. Only her face felt strained. It was all she was aware of—not Nathan, not the edges of her blades digging into the ice; only the tightness of her cheeks, the set of her jaw. Then, before she knew it, the number was over, and she felt her face relax into a genuine smile of relief. Fans tossed more flowers and lingerie and stuffed toys onto the ice.

  “We did it,” Nathan whispered as they grabbed hands and lifted their arms in the air.

  Not yet, she thought.

  I FOUND MYSELF LOOKING FOR BEN WHEN QUINN AND I walked from our car to the distillery, when we stopped at the chicken coop and Quinn said hello to her favorite hen, the Araucana she had named Buttercup, the one who laid pale green eggs. The chickens had made Quinn a bit nervous at first—especially the rooster, who she worried might be Vidofnir, the Norse rooster whose crowing announces the battle that ends the world—but after Mrs. Vieira let her gather eggs and fill their waters, she grew to love them, even when they chased her around the coop, pecked at her ankles, pulled at her shoelaces.

  I tried not to read too much into the fact that Ben had gone searching for us, that he had given us a ride home—he just has his parents’ generosity, I told myself. We hadn’t talked much in the truck on the way home; he hadn’t walked us to the houseboat, just waved from the cab and went back to the festa. But I found myself wanting another glimpse of those dark eyes, those furry legs.

  Mr. Vieira walked up to us as Quinn was pointing out what looked like pom-poms of leaves high in the oaks that served as a windbreak for the orchard. At first I thought they were nests.

  “Not nests,” said Mr. Vieira after blowing into his cup of coffee. “Mistletoe.”

  I had a sudden image of Ben, of dragging him toward the line of trees, kissing him beneath each puffy-berried plant.

  “Mistletoe’s a parasite,” said Mr. Vieira. “It sucks the life right out of the oak.”

  I looked more carefully at the trees—they did look a bit peaked, their leaves less robust than they should be in the middle of summer. Kisses can do that, though. Drain you until you’re just a pale shell of yourself.

  “READY TO CLEAN some bottles?” Mr. Vieira ushered us inside the distillery. The room was cold, to keep the pears from ripening too fast. “You.” He pointed to me. “Not you.” He pointed to Quinn. She lifted her book to show him that she already had plans.

  The bottles were lined up like beakers in a lab, the pears specimens inside.

  “Ben went off to get our labels,” he said, and I felt a little flutter. Cool it, I told myself. You’re not a teenager anymore. “Printer’s over in Rio Vista.”

  I walked over to the large map of the Delta framed on one of the distillery walls. The complicated maze of waterways and land made me a bit dizzy. Comice Island looked like a tiny pea on a tangled plate of pasta. Rio Vista was about ten miles away.

  “So the houseboat is on Paddleboat Slough?” I pointed to the waterway that arced behind the island.

  “Sloo,” Mr. Vieira corrected me. “You say it ‘sloo,’ not ‘sluff.’”

  I couldn’t make his pronunciation jibe with the word on the map—I saw slough and I heard “sluff” in my head, like “tough,” “rough,” “enough.” Like sloughing off old skin, making way for the new.

  “Old steamboats used to come through here.” He traced the slough with his finger.

  “The water’s deep enough for that?” I asked.

  “It’s plenty deep,” he said. “Near twenty feet at the bottom.”

  The slough was particularly wide by our pier—wide enough for steamboats to use it as a turnaround, but we had the whole stretch of it to ourselves. Ourselves and the barn swallows and egrets and occasional beaver. And occasional hairy-legged man.

  “Thanks again for letting us stay,” I said.

  He grunted and handed me a bottle with a pear resting inside. “We need to get these eighty dollars’ worth of pretty,” he said.

  THE RHYTHM IN the distillery was different from picking, but satisfying in its own way. Pouring cooled boiled water into the slender-necked bottle, clear water into clear glass, made me feel clear inside myself, gleaming and empty. A pale green pear pulsing in the center like a heart.

  I eased the soft, flexible brush into the bottle and lightly scrubbed any lingering dirt off the pear and the sides of the bottle. When I turned the bottle over gently to drain it and the pear landed with a soft thud at the base of the neck, I felt a thud in my own body, like Quinn kicking my cervix when she was still inside. I looked at Quinn sitting on a metal stool, swinging her legs, reading Harriet the Spy for the thousandth time, and wondered how it was possible my girl once fit inside my skin. She seemed almost back to her old self; she hadn’t mentioned the monster once all day.

  I rinsed the bottle out once more with the boiled water—water straight from the tap could leave a residue—then set it carefully on a rack to drain. Mrs. Vieira tipped the bottles upright again when they were ready and poured in the eau-de-vie by funnel. The essence of pear filled the room; it took thirty pounds of pears to make one bottle of clear brandy, their fragrance condensed into a singular heady perfume.

  Mrs. Vieira poured a bit of the liquid into a shot glass and handed it to me.

  I scanned Mrs. Vieira’s face to make sure she wanted me to drink it. Mrs. Vieira nodded and tilted her head up sharply to mimic tossing one back.

  I took a sip. The flavor nearly knocked me over; it was as if the whole orchard had been boiled down to the very soul of pear. I could feel the alcohol rise immediately to my head, some of it creating a warm channel down the center of my body.

  “Amazing,” I said.

  Mrs. Vieira laughed gruffly and took a sip herself.

  “I wanna try.” Quinn had put down her book. I wasn’t surprised—it would be impossible to focus on anything but the intense scent filling the air.

  “It’s a grown-up drink,” I told her. “You can have some pear nectar later.”

  Quinn scowled. Mrs. Vieira poured a tiny bit, less than a thimbleful, into another glass and passed it to her, then looked at me with her eyebrows raised.

  “I don’t know …” I started. Quinn scowled at me again. “I guess one little sip is okay.”

  Quinn took a taste; I searched for a light switched on in her eyes, some chromosomal voice that said At last; this is what my body’s been waiting for all these years, but all Quinn did was cough. “Strong,” she said, to my relief, and passed the rest of the glass back to Mrs. Vieira.

  BEN RETURNED WITH long white boxes full of labels. They were self-adhesive, elegant, designed to curve right below the neck of the bottle—the background the same pale green as the pears, the lettering simple and white. Eau de Vieira.

  “What does that mean?” asked Quinn.

  “‘Water of Vieira,’” I said.

  “Ew,” Quinn said to Ben. I was glad she did
n’t still seem afraid of him. “Like your pee!”

  “Hadn’t thought of it that way before.” His smile loosened something inside me. “It’s a play on eau de vie. Water of life.”

  “Did you design the labels?” I asked.

  “An old girlfriend did,” he said, and I felt a surprising flare of jealousy.

  “Hey,” he said. “You want to see the old pear crate labels?” Before we could answer, he ran off to the house.

  “We drank his pee,” Quinn whispered, cracking up, as I started to clean another bottle.

  BEN CAME BACK with a brown leather photo album full of labels. The front had a hand-lettered page taped to it: Vieira Pears Through the Ages!

  “I wrote that when I was about your age,” he told Quinn. “I always loved looking through this book.”

  How would Quinn be different, I wondered, if we had stayed in the same place all her life? If she had been tied to a specific piece of land?

  Mr. Vieira had told me it takes ten years to get a viable pear orchard going. Ten years of waiting to see if the roots will take, if the fruit will be big enough, healthy enough. Ten years to get it to stand on its own. Some of the trees at Vieira Pears were ten times that old. Enough to confirm this place could grow a good, lasting pear.

  Quinn would be ten next year; it was amazing to see how she had grown, often on sandy, shifting soil, often without much ground to latch onto at all. Somehow, she had flourished. My sweet miracle fruit.

  ———

  BEN CRACKED OPEN the book. It sent a musty library tang into the air.

  “This has always been my favorite.” He pointed to a light blue Vieira Pears label that featured a large green pear with a slightly sinister-looking face: pencil-thin mustache, one eyebrow cocked, a smarmy smile showing lots of teeth. The pear wore a flat black sombrero, like the matador’s at the bullfight. “I think it scared customers away, though.”

  “I wouldn’t want to eat that pear.” Quinn grimaced.

  He flipped the page. “This one’s prettier,” he said. “It’s from the forties.” The label featured a single pear tree, light beaming off of each piece of fruit. “This one, too.” He turned to a gorgeous detailed label with a bird’s-eye view of the orchard—including the Vieiras’ house, the glimmering slough.

  “Who painted it?” I asked.

  “My grandmother,” he said.

  He showed me more labels she had designed—close-ups of pears so lifelike you could almost smell them; women holding pears, looking ecstatic; a donkey with baskets of pears on its back. The colors soothing and vibrant all at once. Her name wasn’t on any of them.

  “My family stopped using labels in the fifties, when cardboard came around,” he said, “and you could print the necessary info right on the box.”

  “You should resurrect them,” I said.

  “Sometimes we do.” He ruffled through labels of rivers and trees, a pear painted like a baby with one little curl on the top of its head, a large pear on someone’s hand, the command Eat One! in yellow movie-poster letters above it. “When we approach a new store to sell to, we use a label, a wooden box, the whole deal.”

  “You should give your grandmother credit,” I said.

  “I like that idea,” he said.

  He turned a page to a black-and-white photograph. I recognized Mr. and Mrs. Vieira standing in front of their house, even though they were younger and thinner. Mrs. Vieira was turned slightly to the side, probably so her walleye wouldn’t show. Both were beaming. They were flanked by older relatives, the women in black dresses, men in button-down shirts and fedoras.

  “This is her.” He brushed his grandmother’s face. She looked severe, bitter. I never would have guessed she was an artist, especially such a gifted one. Sometimes as I walked past people, I thought about how I could be looking at someone who was the best violinist in the history of the world or the greatest cheese-maker ever and I would never know. I would just see a normal person going about their life; I would be unaware of the brilliance beneath their skin. I looked at Ben and bit my lip, wondering about his hidden talents.

  “So you work with slugs, huh?” I asked, trying to derail my thoughts.

  “Pear slugs,” he said, nodding. “But they’re not really slugs.”

  “Ah,” I said, glad to hear it.

  “They’re the larvae of sawflies,” he said. That didn’t sound a whole lot better.

  “Are they sluggish?” Quinn asked without looking up from her book.

  “They are indeed.” He laughed. “Slimy green little things. They’ll eat the life out of a tree. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much to get them off. Throw some dust at them, spray them with a hose …”

  “If that’s what does it for them,” I said and immediately blushed. I hadn’t used an innuendo in years. I didn’t know I was still capable of it. A sly smile of recognition spread across his face.

  “Well.” I took a deep breath. “I should probably get back to work.” It was the last thing I wanted to do, but Ben’s parents would be back any moment and I still had a load of bottles to wash. Ben stood to leave, then lingered.

  “Have you two had a chance to explore the area much?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said, heart pounding.

  “Well then,” he said. “We’ll have to remedy that.”

  I told myself not to get too excited.

  “Maybe we can drive around when we’re done for the day,” he said. “I’ve shown you the history of the orchard. Might as well show you the history of the Delta.”

  AFTER BEN TOOK off, I held a bottle to the light. The Comice inside, like most pears, had freckles all over its skin, but the specks didn’t appear to be on the surface. They looked like they were just underneath, like someone wearing a sheer blouse over a camisole spattered with tiny polka dots. Like the red and blue hockey circles below a fresh layer of ice. Like the past breathing directly under the skin of the present, sometimes so sharply, you imagine it’s right there with you.

  AFTER THE FIRST ROUND OF JUDGING, KAREN AND Nathan found themselves in second place.

  Karen squealed and hugged Nathan tighter than she ever had. He hugged back, but she could feel him looking around the rink, not pouring all his attention into her inside his arms.

  “Don’t get too excited,” said Deena. “You still have the free skate tomorrow.”

  “And we’re going to nail it!” Nathan broke away from Karen and raised his hand for a high five. She had to jump to hit his palm. When her skate guards landed back on the rubbery floor, her teeth clacked together.

  “We should have been on top after the short,” Deena said.

  “You like being on top, do you?” Nathan raised his eyebrows at her.

  “You know it.” She smiled at him in a way that made Karen’s stomach clench.

  “We should do something to celebrate.” Karen stepped in between them.

  Nathan waved to someone coming through the stadium doors; Karen realized it was the skater from Rhode Island. “I know what I’m doing,” he said, and wrapped his arm around the woman, now in a tight ribbed turtleneck sweater, pointy-toed high heels poking out beneath dark narrow jeans, her face still in performance makeup. She laughed and pressed her grown-up body against him, looking straight into Karen’s eyes.

  KAREN COULDN’T SLEEP that night, even though her mother warned her she needed at least eight hours.

  She tortured herself, imagining Nathan with Miss Rhode Island. Were they naked right now? Was her lipstick all over his skin? Had she let her hair come undone, the top of it still crispy with gel, the rest flowing around her shoulders, around his face? Did they do pairs moves together as a joke? Did he lift her, nude, above his head, taking her nipple into his mouth as he lowered her back down? Was that what people did when they were naked together?

  Karen hugged a dozen fan-tossed stuffed animals to her chest, comforted by the fact that Nathan had briefly touched their fur.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Karen couldn’t look at
Miss Rhode Island. She tried not to listen as the woman recounted her night, as she talked about Nathan’s apartment, which Karen herself hadn’t seen, as she talked about Nathan taking her to the “big O”—“and I don’t mean Olympics, ladies,” she said, to a chorus of locker room “oooOOOoo’s.”

  Karen tried not to notice that Miss Rhode Island was looking in her direction the entire time she spoke, sending laser beams into the back of Karen’s neck, trying to get under her skin, rattle her, throw her off her game. She tried to pretend she didn’t notice Miss Rhode Island’s untied skate lace draped on the floor like a tapeworm, tried to pretend she didn’t know what she was doing as she stepped on it with her own skate, slicing it neatly in two with her blade.

  AFTER I WAS DONE CLEANING BOTTLES, BEN DROVE US to Locke, a tiny town about ten miles down the levee from Comice. It had been founded by Chinese immigrants, farmworkers mostly. One of the first towns built “by the Chinese for the Chinese” in the country, and the only one still on the map. Chinese immigrants were not allowed to own land, so they leased it from George Locke in 1915 and built gambling halls and restaurants and shops along a one-block street, the flat-faced wooden two-story buildings fronted with awnings that shaded the sidewalk, propped up with slender rectangular wood pillars. A few people sat on the second-floor balconies of apartments that used to be rooming houses for pear and asparagus pickers. Not to mention whorehouses staffed by white women. Locke was filled mostly with white folks now—only about ten of the eighty or so people living there were Chinese American.

  The town had been named a National Historic Landmark, but it was dusty and neglected-feeling, as if no one cared whether or not it hung around. Many buildings tilted sharply, leading to a general air of precariousness. Then again, maybe I just felt precarious being out in the world, being out with Ben, walking so close beside him the hair of our arms sometimes brushed.