by Tatjana Soli
“The oranges are blooming. I’ve grown up with this smell every spring of my life. I’d be lost without it.” She looked at him more closely. His clothes—khakis and polo shirt—were old but quality. As he was oblivious to what he wore, they seemed picked out by someone else, maybe a mother?
“Tell me about your farm,” she said.
“I’ll tell you about the whole valley. My great-grandfather got the first seeds from a tree on the Agua Clara ranch. He started all the stock on our ranch, and the whole county borrowed from it. So there is a single patriarch tree that generated the whole county.” His family had owned the large farm for three generations, including other land besides; he had never considered any other life. Development was encroaching, and with record droughts over the past years and subpar crop yields, the family had had to cannibalize and sell the other pieces of land to keep the main citrus operation going. Instead of being past its prime, he saw the valley where his family’s farm lay as a place of promise still not consummated. He envisioned making the farm larger, more productive, being at the forefront of new trends in agriculture.
It seemed an old-fashioned, nostalgic way to live, one that appealed to her. She dreaded the idea of working in an office. He reminded her of a poet or maybe a preacher, not a farmer, so his endless talk of planting schedules and load counts seemed out of character, quixotic, until she realized he was simply stalling. Although the patio light was dim, she looked slyly at his ear and saw that it was pink and clean.
“What are you smiling about?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Because he sensed her interest was real, he had grown bolder and more expansive. Even to the edge of passionate. No one else had seen this side, which she had brought out. Part of what she fell in love with was her own creation of him. “Are you going to ask me out on a date?”
* * *
Over the months of their courtship—the first boy she went on a date with, the first she kissed—Forster explained the life to her, but she was simply looking into his eyes, dreaming of their life together. She had never been in love before, didn’t know if this was it, but she liked the feeling of being a small ship riding in the wake of a larger one. He took her to the lake on the edge of the ranch, and they lay together on the hood of the car, the warm, ticking engine beneath them substituting for contact.
They walked through the rows of groves, and the beauty and silence were like being in a cathedral. She stood still, feeling her legs anchored to the earth. The quiet was like a hum, like the earth’s own metronome, a sound she had not even known she hungered for.
Forster picked an orange off a tree, then took his pocketknife out of his pants and cut a helix of peel from the blossom end. “This is the part you always eat for taste,” he said. After they had eaten half of the fruit—sugary, dripping—he tossed the other half away.
The quiet was so intense they heard the splash of a fish in the lake. If she wanted this, she would have to be the one to make a move. She took his hand and placed it on her breast.
After graduation, he returned to the ranch, worked from dawn till dusk, tirelessly, and bragged at being the luckiest man ever to have such work. Not wanting to be separated, she stopped her studies, a temporary state that turned permanent, giving up her dreams of becoming a teacher like her mother, content to share Forster’s vision. Or maybe the desires of the ranch itself seeped into her dreams, usurped others, and became her obsession as well. Regardless, she was unprepared for the demands her new life would make on her.
“I don’t know anything about farming,” she said.
“You don’t need to know anything. You plant a tree and pick the fruit.” A truth that contained a thousand steps in between.
* * *
His family paid for the large wedding, while her mother sewed her wedding gown, an old-world dress of ivoried lace and seed pearls that all the women marveled over. Overwhelmed, Claire was aware of having come from a more tenuous background, less anchored, and that of course was the precise attraction of the ranch. Her parents had lived in their new country like polite relatives overstaying their welcome, even though they had been there thirty years. They didn’t want to take up too much room. They always spoke of the old country as the real life, of California as some kind of purgatory, although they had long ago given up on leaving.
“Are you okay, mézes?” her mother asked Claire as they dressed in her future bedroom, overlooking the backyard filled with impatient guests. Most of them were ranchers and still intended to get work done before sundown. Leisure didn’t come easily. Her mother, a schoolteacher, was unfazed by the Baumsarg family’s relative affluence, counted in acres of land rather than degrees. Her father, a scholar and book dealer, couldn’t reconcile himself to his only daughter’s choosing a life of farming over that of the intellect.
“I love him, Mama.”
Her mother looked at her shrewdly, realizing too late that they had made a mistake sheltering her so much. “Sometimes love isn’t enough.”
A thing to say to a bride on her wedding day, yet Claire knew not to take it personally. Her mother believed in keeping expectations low to avoid future disappointment, an immigrant’s philosophy.
After the ceremony, food was laid out on wooden picnic tables along the lawn as far as the edge of the orchard. At one point during the evening, Forster’s great-uncle, white-haired, mustachioed, stood up and started to sing, joined by his friends who formed a barbershop quartet. They looked out of the forties in their old-fashioned striped shirts and straw hats; they were a nostalgia act, singing at Independence Day events, football games, and once even appearing on a TV show in Hollywood.
I love you truly, tru-ly dear
Life with its sorrow, life with its tear
They honeymooned in Hawaii, not on the beach, but in the interior of the Big Island, on a friend’s ranch surrounded with cattle and fields where Forster felt comfortable—farms, always farms. One night, Claire woke to an empty bed and open door. She went out and found Forster curled on a deck chair. The dew was heavy as drizzle, and he was shivering in the moonlight.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, an alarm going off inside her.
“Look at you,” he said, accusing, jutting his chin at her. She looked down, saw the moonlight rendering her gauzy nightdress almost sheer. “So beautiful. And I’m supposed to make you happy.”
She laughed—relieved and troubled in equal parts—and knelt down to hold him. Her mother’s words echoed.
* * *
Claire moved directly from her parents’ house to her marriage house. Forster’s mother, Hanni, laughed at her cosseted ways—the silver samovar and the large collection of books as a kind of dowry.
“We have a teakettle,” Hanni said. “Don’t need that big thing.”
Claire shrugged, shocked by the rudeness of her new mother-in-law.
“Why all these books?” she asked, as Claire carried in the heavy boxes, unaided.
“Because there are none here for me to read.”
“I tell my son to bring me a tractor, instead he brings me a shiny bicycle.”
* * *
Hanni had been an attorney’s daughter before marrying Forster’s father, but the years had honed her into a rancher, with browned, wrinkled skin, sharp, angular cheekbones that reminded Claire of a hawk, a look in her eyes devoid of any vanity.
“You are so lovely,” she said, stroking her new daughter-in-law’s plump cheek with her calloused hand, accusing. “No wonder my son went crazy over you.”
“We went crazy for each other.” She would never become like Hanni. She would apply moisturizer, wear hats, would read every day, and practice the piano. She would write. The idea of losing the nascent life of the mind for a life of physical labor frightened her. She had told Forster that she wasn’t ready yet to have children, that she would make an appointment with her gynecologist for contraceptives.
Hanni winked. “When I was your age, I went to parties. Had so many beaux. I cried every nig
ht for a year when I first moved here. What are you going to do out in the middle of nowhere?”
Claire’s heart sank. The other girls at college laughed at her, leaving Los Angeles for a rural life, said she was from another age, a pioneer, a pilgrim. Taunted her that she would be barefoot and pregnant in no time. They didn’t understand that she wanted more than anything else to be rooted, and the ranch gave her that. Eventually she would have her own family, one that would not be lost. She could always go back to her books eventually.
“My mother’s parents had a farm in Hungary. My mother says without land, you are nothing.” An exaggeration, the farm had belonged to cousins, but that quieted the old woman.
“It is a hard, narrow life,” Hanni conceded. “But it can nourish. For the right person.” Neither of them at all sure that Claire was that person.
* * *
Under Hanni’s niggling supervision, Claire took care of the sprawling house herself, deciding this would be her domain. She washed dishes, ironed clothes, and mopped floors, partly drudgery but also a kind of communion. Forster taught her to take over the ranch’s bookkeeping.
Exhausted, she would play scales on the piano late each afternoon. She read a chapter of a book each night before Forster came to bed and began to stroke the hem of her nightgown. Mornings she sat on the patio and filled notebooks with descriptions of the orchards, of the clouds, of the physical labors of her days and the sensual pleasures of her nights. But the demands of the house and ranch defeated her efforts. She never made it to the doctor. Within months, she was pregnant with their first child.
* * *
The original farmhouse had been built in the twenties by Forster’s paternal grandparents, who lost a fortune in the shipping yards of Hamburg and had to emigrate to avoid creditors. Each successive birth and handing over from generation to generation had resulted in more rooms, more painted adobe brick and wood. The house meandered, organic to the demands made on it, much like a nest cradled in branches of a tree, or the underground warrens of gophers. Forster’s uncle from back East had visited one summer and had the inspiration to build the only wraparound, screened porch in the area, not believing the neighboring farmers who told him there were no pests to hide away from in the dry, subtropical climate.
Hanni made a point to show Claire the details of the kitchen, commercial in size, with a ten-burner stove, brick fireplace, cast-iron spits to roast large cuts of meat, double refrigerators, and thick, deep, hammered-copper sinks, imported from Germany in a brief flash of affluence thirty years before, that had to be scoured with a special mix of lemon juice and salt that stung the hands.
Ugly and practical, this was not a modern, status-seeking, unused kitchen, but rather the center of a working ranch. Forster’s grandmother and Hanni had served up three meals a day to a working crew of fifty men during the height of picking season.
In the early days, before the advent of the commercial loncherías, the women, with the help of half a dozen of the Mexican laborers’ wives, had become adept at making homemade tortillas, large pots of beans and rice, great vats of chili con carne, or chili verde, long aluminum trays of enchiladas and burritos, with bowls of whole jalapeños and zanahoria en escabeche, marinated carrots, on the side. The women in Forster’s family ghettoized their German recipes to Sunday dinner, with their Kartoffelkloesse, spaetzle, and Schweineschnitzel. The heavy old-world food became synonymous in the minds of their children and grandchildren with the boredom of rote church attendance, the tightness of clothes not meant for everyday, with dry ritual and starched table linen not meant to be spilled on.
Claire fingered the faucets that had cross handles with porcelain inserts that read HEIβE on one side and KÄLTE on the other. She resisted the urge to run out of the room with her swelling belly, to return to her parents’ apartment, to her books. Frightened she had made a mistake, was losing herself before there was even a self to lose.
“This was all here before I came,” Hanni confessed.
“Didn’t you want to make it your own?”
“The ranch changes you, not the other way around.”
Already Claire was growing tired of these homilies, but she did not run out of the kitchen that day. Slowly, over time, she came to love the sensibleness of the house, how it stripped her of small vanities one by one, made her come to hate waste and ostentation.
* * *
For the first months of the marriage, Hanni sat back and watched her new daughter-in-law work. The only half compliment she gave her was “Well, at least you don’t have time to read all those books.”
It was true that Claire felt herself losing a battle. She spent an hour trying to write about the sunlight through the leaves of orange trees, and it read like a student’s clumsy primer with no hint of the real experience. But Hanni was wrong that she didn’t read. Every moment she could, she stole away and spent it in books—the reading kept her from chafing over the narrowing of her current life.
Saturday afternoons, frustrated by her writing, tired of having only her mother-in-law for company, Claire began a tradition of baking a cake or pastries, lighting the samovar, and brewing tea. She sent out invitations to all the neighbors. At first Hanni resisted the fuss, not willing to put on nice clothes and waste time sitting in the living room, but when the ladies of the surrounding ranches began to stop by, the reintroduction of community, she relented. Saturday teatime became a staple over the years. In this way Claire met Mrs. Girbaldi, the biggest land dowager in the area, both shrewder and kinder than Hanni, who became Claire’s confidant. Her platinum-dyed hair and powdered-white skin created a monochromatic palette, a paleness broken only by the features she chose to paint on, maroon lips and heavily lined eyes, which aspired to a standard of fifties bygone beauty that hid her sharp, businesslike mind.
Hanni complained privately that Mrs. Girbaldi liked to “play poor.” Her father had been a ruthless businessman and acquired land cheaply; her husband was even more ruthless and greedy. When he passed away, everyone was surprised that Mrs. Girbaldi was tougher than either of the men. Talk was that not only did she want to break up her family’s holdings, she wanted to zone for high density to maximize profits. Claire circled, only half listening to the gossip.
“Did you hear about the Hahn ranch?”
“No, what?”
“I shouldn’t talk.”
“Tell!”
“An actor—”
“Bought it?”
“Cheap. Some teenage heartthrob named Don Richards. Got it as a tax shelter. Old Hahn couldn’t grow a weed.”
“A pity.”
“Too much time nursing the bottle.”
“But another actor. When one comes, they all start to follow.”
“That’s the end of the place.”
* * *
After their first, Gwen, was born, the couple walked the orchards each evening. At a leisurely pace, Forster carrying the baby, it took almost an hour to reach the lake. They usually watched the ducks swimming back and forth in the last of the sun. Claire was too new to notice that the water level was low, reeds were overtaking a larger and larger part of the lake, a drought that meant even higher water prices and rationing. Forster spread a blanket beneath the large lemon tree, and Claire nursed Gwen while he paced back and forth. Sometimes, midsentence, he stopped and stared at her. “What?” “I never knew it would be like this,” he said, cradling the baby’s delicate skull in his big palm.
In quick succession, two daughters were born: Gwen, then Lucy. Claire and Hanni had their days full with the duties of two babies. With each birth, Claire felt more happily anchored, rooted, into her new life. She forgot her former reluctance, forgot also her books, but the joy she took in mothering reassured her that she had made the right decision. Still, some nights, walking a crying child, she did have a sense of being swallowed up. In time, she promised, she would return to her books, keep digging for that deeper vein of life that she had abandoned.
Claire and Fo
rster discussed this being the end of their childbearing, but both of them were so exhausted most days that contraception didn’t seem necessary. The moment she knew she was pregnant a third time, she also sensed it was a boy. Joshua. Unlike the first two, this birth was difficult, and the baby was kept in intensive care for a few weeks. When they brought him home at last, he was colicky, hardly ever sleeping through the night, something Claire hadn’t experienced with the girls.
One adult had to sacrifice sleep each night, or the whole house would. As Joshua grew older, he didn’t like to eat, and it took all Hanni’s ingenuity to feed him. But from the first moment, he was clearly the last piece of the puzzle, making the family complete. Not knowing that life was less than perfect before, after Joshua’s birth life could be described in no other way than balanced. Perfectly, miraculously balanced.
With three small children, Claire insisted that Forster take Sundays off to spend with the family. They would load up the used station wagon with toys and food, then drive down to a quiet stretch of beach. Setting up under the shade of trees and umbrellas, Forster would take turns carrying the girls down to the water, where they shrieked and giggled, by turns terrified and happy. Faces striped with zinc oxide that faded with the hours. Claire watched Joshua, read, and dozed. At the end of the day, dazed by sun and salt, they piled back into the car. Tired, sticky, content.
Chapter 4
But even as their domestic life grew richer, it became clear that the lifeblood of the place was out in the fields, and conditions were growing more difficult.
After the Girbaldi ranch, developers had turned their voracious attentions on the Baumsarg land, with proposals for communities of houses, condos, midrises, and high-rises. Forster and Hanni held out—a small, stubborn blemish with their strawberry fields skirting the new highways, windbreaks of eucalyptus and pine, rolling acres of avocado and orange and lemon. Now the local politicians were getting in on the act, claiming that the water table was being depleted, that agricultural water rates would need to be raised, all at the behest of the well-heeled developers.
