She took a quick breath and finally looked up and into her father’s widened eyes. He wasn’t used to confrontation. “And I loved preparing them,” she whispered.
Sassafras wiped her runny nose on her sleeve and waited. Her father wouldn’t shed a tear, but his eyes looked glassy with emotion. Emile opened his mouth to speak, then closed it as the waiter reappeared.
“Sorry to interrupt, but I think I have a note for the chef, written on the back of a customer’s bill!”
He handed the wrinkled square of paper to Sassafras, and she turned it over in her hands. The order had been for one menu of the day. She read the message through saucer-like eyes.
Every kitchen needs a Petite Flambée. Don’t ever forget, and don’t ever give up. Share the joy.
Sassafras could have asked “Who gave you this?” or various other questions about the person who dined at that table. But she didn’t. She didn’t have to. She knew where this message came from. She believed in the unbelievable, in the magical. She could feel the energy and love in the air.
And Sassafras believed, in the depths of her heart, that flambéed cinnamon crêpes would soon be back on the menu.
Bound by Water
Maureen Foley
“We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”
-Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
On our Hass avocado ranch, the sky turns dark and my daughter sleeps at the opposite end of our sage green house. I am her air, she breathes, too much pressure. Nostalgia, her upcoming third birthday, and the late afternoon ground fog crawl the land and linger before clearing now, leaving only a faint sadness. The sky becomes night-gray. I am learning to be a sixth-generation California farmer, from my family, from the land, from the accidental death of the two new avocado trees I planted last year that didn’t quite make it. Someday, I will give my baby girl all of our family’s avocado, blood orange, Blenheim apricot and pomegranate trees, along with the boysenberry brambles, hibiscus, Cecile Brunner roses, scented geraniums, rosemary. All of it, every plant named and anonymous, hers.
But first, I want to give her the story of her birth. I will hold her hand to my stomach and show her the cleaved flesh, the light pink and shiny scar like a row of earth rototilled by a man’s hand, surgeon’s knife blade, where the doctor reached a hand in and took her. Too young now, she sleeps in the early evening as I step through the torn screen backdoor to walk the land and think of the day she made me hers. Just before darkness now. Two red-tailed hawks fly over, and I feel an overwhelming wingbeat of apprehension, an elusive unease ever-present since the moment my daughter arrived.
Forget that. She never arrived. She split me open.
Now having her alive in the world, I risk losing so much more. The land continues on without us, cyclical droughts and floods and fires and insects that sting or don’t and never needed any of us. I walk down the three cement steps, away from my house, into the patch of Albion strawberries, where I sunk 75 bare root plants last year. Beyond the weedy rows of fruit and skinny blueberry bushes and wilted rhubarb plants, hundreds of Hass avocado trees span out in neat rows, 10 feet apart, corded at their ankles by irrigation sprinklers.
We are bound by water here in Southern California, tree to tree, rancher to crop. This year my father showed me how to “do the water.” For the first time, he explained how the sections of our family’s ranch are divided by irrigation valves, how lack of water pressure means that the groups of trees must be watered in shifts. The entire parcel takes 10 days, during the summer, to receive its dose, its cure, its feeding of di-hydro oxygen. We pay for the water we use, and this geography is actually coastal desert. My family is the current temporary caretaker here, in this land inhabited for thousands of years by Chumash peoples, hunting, fishing, eating acorns—like the ones littering my driveway with thousands of castoff seeds. Nothing original, no new thoughts. My daughter and I just repeat the breath of those before us. I wonder how soon the water here will run dry.
When or how my baby’s placental water broke is confusing. Nearly 24 hours before my daughter was born, I woke up damp in my own wet bed. Did I pee in the night? Was it the first sign of labor? I’d read so many books and websites about the predictable patterns of birth, that, by that point, I was shocked by the mysterious vagueness of my own labor. My body gave away nothing: no clues, no clear baby pain, no sensation whatsoever. Just the mortification of sleeping in and on my own bodily fluids, not sure what to make of it. Was that really mine? Urine swimming or something else? Water, membranes broken, passive voice, something done to the pregnant mother—me—but by who? My love, I give her credit. The baby busted me down, and that strange, thin water-that-is-not-water gathered around the broken shipwreck of my creaking form. Underneath the physical sensation stirred the patter of concern: Was my baby still alive and well, now that her bathtub home collapsed inside me? I couldn’t feel a child moving any more. Would the baby make it safely into the world?
No matter. Tears now flow. I receive them. I cry, but I try to make no sound because there’s no real reason for this flood on my face. Every baby is born of pain, a woman’s curse, we’re told, and children replace us and a woman’s lot is misery. A Buddhist’s path is one of suffering, pain, but not like this. Three years later, I’m still walking one foot after the other on the ranch, so much slower at the moment because of the recent rain’s overgrowth, through knee-high malva weeds and yellow-bloomed sour grass. Take a left, past the corner of the house, feet crushing dead MacArthur avocado leaves, through tangled, round nasturtium greens and blossoms, past one lit bedroom window and one dark bedroom window where my daughter sleeps. Quietly, I unlatch the waist-high wooden gate into my front yard just as an orchard rat scuttles up the avocado tree behind me, and I flinch.
A mother is born with her baby. I wanted a natural earthbound birth and the chance to collect my daughter’s placenta, to dry and eat it, to bury some of her birth shroud under an avocado tree on the ranch to guarantee her natal pull back to this land. But instead my water broke mysteriously in the night, after I’d taken a Vicodin to calm the strange pain in my hip that capsized my body to a reclined position and left my leg useless, paralyzed. I fell down the birth rabbit hole of medical interventions, exactly the things I’d fought against: epidural for the hip pain, then Pitocin to speed the labor, then full dilation, pushing, the anesthetic ran out, panic, breathing, chanting, droning, a fever rising, infection and a growing panic that led to a come-to-Jesus moment with my husband. The obstetrician demanded a Caesarean, and I fought him at first. I wanted to push some more, until my husband stared me down.
“Mo, we’re having a C-section,” he implored, inches from my face, as if both our bodies were being severed and knifed and slit. I nearly puked from the overripe smell of my husband’s coffee breath, the terror of my worst nightmare becoming flesh.
“Just leave me alone, for a second,” I begged. “Please?” Nurses, doctor, husband. Everyone left the room.
Hand curled around a small metal Thai Buddha statue, I cried and cried because of course I wanted to see my baby as soon as possible—but not by force. I was failing as a mother already, a new statistic in the War Against C-Sections. All of my natural birth class teacher’s advice about the dangers and complications of having a C-section—for mother and baby—tormented me. In that moment of pure reptilian fear, I wanted to die rather than face surgery. One breath, and the urge to hold my first and only child surfaced and blotted out the terror.
When my husband walked back in the darkened labor and delivery room about two minutes later, I agreed to the surgery. And within 20 minutes, they’d segmented my guts, heaved them aside, and found a 10-pound, nine ounce girl inside a marshy bog of my infected birth fluids. There, in the hospital operating room, the surgeon immediately declared my afterbirth a biohazard, infected, like my daughter and me. A mystery virus, a sickness that drove up my fever, made my baby’s
first appearance in the world covered in the green foul meconium filth of newborns, sent her to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and made my already hellish post-partum recovery even thicker with degrees of unease. How I first held my daughter—not when she was born, but later, the next day, in the NICU. We were surrounded by heartbroken parents whose babies were marooned like prisoners in isolettes with tubes and monitors, waiting for the right doctors to OK the right milestones so we could all take our babies home. Finally, home at last.
But before that, just after the C-section, the doctor filled my veins with the morphine derivative fentanyl, and I left my body. I surrendered the heartbreak of abandoning my newborn to well-trained strangers without being able to hold her. I was lost to a deep, drugged-out Hades realm of the unconscious. This made me temporarily postpone any feelings of regret, fear, miserable gloomy anxiety that something serious plagued my new baby, all gone for a few hours, only to become my constant shadow for days and years later, like an aftershock, still felt keenly with each of my daughter’s birthdays. What if? What if something should happen to her? What if her flawed birth has cursed her to larger problems down the line?
My daughter and I fled the hospital six days after her birth and returned to the ranch, and there’s a photograph from her first day at home that I find irresistible. Puffy from the surgery and pregnancy, my round face is framed by hundreds of almond-shaped avocado leaves, in varying shades of yellow-green. I’m wearing a white, button-up maternity blouse, for easy access to breastfeeding. It’s loose to keep any fabric from my fleshy wound, the thin-lined, red five-inch incision just fingertips above my pubic bone. I’m holding my daughter on her land, like the timeless mother of forever, and there is no way not to be in love with everything about this image. My face holds the infinite weight of terror and pride I’m feeling, knowing I’ve just signed myself up for a lifetime of devotion and worry.
“We’ve made it home, to the dirt,” my face says. “To where we’re safe, for now.”
On the ranch, I’m walking by the road near our house, Highway 154, where during the brief periods between the cutting down of one orchard of avocados and the planting and maturing of a new one, a sliver of the Pacific Ocean is visible. Trees hide that gem from view now. Instead, I can see the lit bedroom windows of the little green house, like eyes, glimmering at me kindly in the dark. I could keep walking away, away, down this winding asphalt byway. I want to stroll all night and not look back.
I could escape the relentless anchor of this geography, my family, the sadness of relatives and dreams and time gone to sleepless nights of my daughter’s coughs and wet diapers and money woes and lost jobs. I could, but there is no place except here and no one for me, except my husband, the writer, crouched like a hunting white egret perched still over laptop-marshland, in his office. I could, except my baby girl sleeps, and she needs me, wants me to tell her stories, read her books. And no one knows her like her mother. I’m her mother, dear mother. From a desire to flee, my heart now feels the pull back to her. Like a drug, I am compulsively drawn to peek in on her in the night, that demanding toddler turned still by sleep. Who will give her the real birth story, the truest tale of what it was like to make her and birth her and find her beached onto the shores of her air-trapped new life?
I jog back toward home, cold, between the rows of Hass avocados, careful not to trip in a gopher hole. I can’t see much in the dark, but there’s relief in facts. Term pregnancy, delivered. Early post-partum hemorrhage, chorioamnionitis. Today, I re-read my own medical records. I can hear Dr. Vega’s steady, firm voice transcribing his notes now: “A low-segment transverse incision was made in the uterus with a scalpel and extended both ways using bandage scissors… The baby was delivered onto the field… It was a female infant… The skin was approximated with staples… At the end of the procedure, the needle count, instrument count and sponge count were correct.” It’s shocking to see myself through the eyes of a surgeon, as a project, a victim, a hunk of anesthetized human meat. The language is as sterile as his instruments, his touch is as cold and distant as his emotions, and my body is just an obstacle to the true goal: the healthy baby sealed within my fleshy package. The objectification of my carcass is complete, more than any catcall or sexist remark or look a man can give that says I’m his. I’m nothing but a means to his end. The frigid dismemberment of my female form is complete and wholly disturbing. There is no life left in his words. Not like on the ranch, where every square inch vibrates with organisms. Here, I will build her a tree house, at home, in our orchard, and she can pick whichever tree she wants. I’m back at the front door of my daughter’s sleeping house, and I blink at the cloud of flies and moths pounding the outdoor lamp, threaded over with cobwebs.
This is hers now, all I see, know, think. Soon, we’ll celebrate that third birthday with all-pink everything. I am gone to her, and I will give her my body, my slender scar, my stretch-marked stomach and hours lost to no sleep and no work and no writing and no art nothing because I needed to know her, to know her breath, to rustle her air and become her heartbeat and then to watch her become delivered of this place, her land, my ranch. Ten pounds of baby now 30-some pounds of little girl. I walk inside the quiet house, and the land ignores me again forever. An avocado falls, a mother is born, a child keeps sleeping, and rows of dancing avocado leaves still the night, goodnight.
Romantic Ties
“Live, love, laugh, leave a legacy.”
― Stephen Covey
The Heist
Adriana Tourinho
When Martinha called to tell me she had finally found a way to save our wedding, I immediately felt there was something wrong. My opinion, however, didn’t matter. She was sure I would do anything to find peace.
She’d gone crazy from the moment I accidentally glimpsed her trying on her wedding dress.
“Don’t you know it’s bad luck for the groom to see his bride in her dress before the wedding day?” she screamed.
She blamed me for showing up at her apartment in the first place, even though I was just trying to surprise her to celebrate the anniversary of our first date. She threw a slipper at my head, trampled the flowers I’d brought, and forced me to give her apartment keys back—all while telling me off. Even the dog, who’d always been my friend, barked at me.
Nothing could convince Martinha that our relationship wasn’t hopelessly damned.
She told me she wouldn’t see me until finding a fix for our bad luck. Even though I suspected I was in big trouble with her, I never imagined how far she would go. After talking with priests, ministers, and gypsies, it was an Afro-Brazilian religion priest named Father Doninho who convinced Martinha that he could solve everything. And when I was finally allowed to see Martinha again, she told me—without beating around the bush—that I would have to get the final item Father Doninho needed for his ritual.
“Sweetie,” I pleaded. “Isn’t it better to stay away from this kind of witchcraft? After all, we’re getting married in the Catholic Church!”
“You’re the one who got us into this mess.”
“All right,” I said, to put a stop to that. “What item are you missing?”
“A piece of an Egyptian mummy’s cloth,” she replied, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
“What? What are you talking about? Can’t you see this person is bullshitting you?”
“You are the only one bullshitting me, Zé Carlos. Father Doninho told me he needed the oldest cloth possible to assure our relationship’s longevity. You know Denilson, my friend Zoraide’s husband? He’s a night watchman at the Quinta da Boa Vista Museum, and he was the one who suggested the mummy. When I mentioned it to Father Doninho, he said it would be perfect!”
She was clearly aware of how ridiculous the situation was but pretended to be at ease and used her authoritarian manner to intimidate me. There was no use telling her it was a crime against Federal Heritage. She didn’t listen either when I explained that even touching the mu
mmy would be impossible, so tearing off a piece of it was not an option at all.
I had always done everything Martinha wanted, but this was too much. Once she realized the bossy method wasn’t working, she tried to play on my emotions, saying it would be the biggest proof of love I could ever give her. She insisted we would go together and presented me with a complete action plan.
“Denilson will let us in at night. He told me that this week they transferred the mummies from a plastic cover to a showcase. I visited the museum and talked with one of the employees. I flirted with him, and he told me that the display case of a mummy called Kherima is not completely closed because there were problems with moisture control. I watched a YouTube video of the exhibit, and it showed the placement of the mummy in the case. The unsealed part is on the foot side. We can open it and grab a small piece of the cloth without being seen.”
I listened, astounded. I don’t know if I was more shocked to hear the madness of the proposal or to see how committed she was. Martinha never set foot in exhibitions. She hadn’t even known that the National Museum was at Quinta da Boa Vista, and now she was chatting with a museum technician and calling Egyptian mummies by their first names!
Even though I didn’t like the plan, I ended up succumbing to it. Deep down, I was flattered that she would do anything to marry me. It turned out that my fiancée was very artful, and her determination convinced me to take part in something I considered total nonsense.
I had seen those mummies on a school field trip, and I remembered how they gave me nightmares. It was the first time I’d seen a corpse. Afterward, I read on the Internet that a dangerous fungus could live in the ancient cloth. And to make things worse, that specific mummy, Kherima, had the reputation of putting anyone who touched her into a trance.
Legacy- an Anthology Page 4
