by Michael Lund
Tricia and I had bent spoons at home trying to carve out bowlfuls. And my father always frowned when we banged our spoons into our bowls, trying to cut through those rigid blocks. With the soft stuff you could just lick with your tongue and get as much as a spoon would dig out of the other kind.
Of course, you could let regular ice cream soften by leaving it out of the freezer for a while, before or after you served it. But, as kids, we seldom had the necessary foresight or patience.
"Now the knock against soft-serve ice cream is that it's not as good for you," Sandy went on. "It's not got all the stuff regular ice cream does, they say."
"I think it tastes as good."
"Well, it is a complete food with carbohydrates, minerals, and vitamins. It doesn't have as much fat or sugar as regular ice cream, and it's higher in protein."
I had to laugh. She was sounding like a commercial, or a recent convert.
Still, I'd sought her out today to ask about something else and had gotten nowhere in that endeavor. Yes, ice cream satisfied a certain craving. And the act of eating definitely gave pleasure. But what about the craving inspired by Juliet's order, "Pet me"? Was doing that as good for you as eating soft ice cream? And exactly what was Mr. Pierce craving?
5
The next night I followed through on my promise to let Larry show me the secrets of worm farming. But when he picked me up at my house, I had the charm bracelet tucked inside my jacket pocket and a plan to return it.
This evening with worms stands out in my memory many years later, a landmark on my romantic journey. I learned I had a serious suitor. But the whole night also had an eerie feeling to it, largely because we did what we did pretty much in the dark.
Another part of that surreal feeling I experienced was no doubt a reflection of the tension I was feeling about Sally's sleepover the next evening and about the pageant competition.
Underlying my apprehension about these events was the unsettling figure of Mr. Pierce and his scary proposal. I worried that, somehow, he'd get me off to the side during the pageant and resume his offer. Or before the show he'd find me alone in a dressing room. I imagined him popping up unexpectedly, just when I wouldn't be ready to deal with him.
As Larry and I pulled into the parking lot of Dr. Staff's Bait Garden, I wondered why in the world I had added one more difficult event to this week! Why was I letting him take one step closer to a date with me? Why didn't I just tuck that stupid bracelet away in my sock drawer and pretend nothing had ever happened?
"I'm not going to turn on the lights," Larry said, opening the car door for me. He held up a flashlight with tissue paper over the end, generating a glow but not a precise beam of light. "We want to sneak up on these worm guys while they're active."
"They're nocturnal?"
"Not exactly, but they tend to stay out of the light."
The worm farm was a low cinder-block building, square and squat on a dead-end street at the south end of town. The nearest streetlight was a block away, so, once the car's headlights had been extinguished, I could make out only shadowy shapes around me.
"What you're coming to see, remember, are Lumbricus Terrestris," Larry explained. Now he was whispering, as if the worms might hear us approaching.
I remembered they had a Latin name that began with "L," but that's as much as I had retained from his science project questionnaire. "Yes, the care and feeding of Lumbricus Terrestris," I confirmed.
He unlocked the door and swung it open. "A rule of thumb," he whispered, "is one square yard of surface for every 1,000 nightcrawlers. They get their oxygen from the surface."
A "rule of thumb." It made me think of the demonstration worm that had been squirming on Larry's fingers the day he explained his science project. Unfortunately, it also brought to mind Mr. Pierce's finger on a Coke glass. And Randy's mouth organ.
"They jump into the air to breathe like porpoises or whales?" I asked, my nervousness making me into a joker, a clown.
"No. The oxygen works its way into the soil. But that's why it can't be too deep. We use these plastic pickle buckets." I could see the floor was covered with twenty-gallon buckets arranged in orderly rows.
"Pickles?"
"Staff gets them at a reduced rate from a pickle factory in Texas. Don't ask me how. Anyway, we fill them with moist peat moss, up to a depth of 6 to 7 inches. Then add the worms."
"They're all for bait, right? Fishermen?
"Right. They spit on them for luck, the fishermen. Did you know that?"
"No. I guess it's better than kissing them." Now, why did I say that? This wasn't a topic I wanted to be bringing up on a dark night in an empty building on a dead-end street!
"Or eating them," Larry added with a soft laugh. "But we have to feed them, not eat them. Let's take a look."
He propped the flashlight up on a shelf so one row of buckets was dimly illuminated. Then he picked up a large sack and a hand scoop.
"This is called 'laying mash.' You get it from the feed store. It's higher in protein than chicken starter, so the worms like it better."
I wasn't really following him in this explanation. But I assumed he was adding to the soil the same thing you might feed chickens. I recalled that he'd told me how worms would eat the rotten pear mush in my neighborhood. Larry sprinkled a thin layer over the soil in each bucket and then lightly sprayed the mash with water from a hose.
"The water makes it easier for the worms to consume the food. You'll see them start moving in a minute," he whispered and went to get the flashlight.
"Don't you mix the food in with the soil, where they can get at it easier?"
"Oh, no. You'll get 'protein poisoning' in your soil, and you'll find your worms dying in a matter of days. It's acid buildup."
"I guess there is a science to this."
"That's why you don't harvest worms after feeding, but before. You let them eat up what's in the soil, then take them."
"Speaking of giving things to worms and all, I. . . ."
I was about to say, "I have something for you," meaning the bracelet. But I realized this would sound more like "I have a gift for you," something to match the bracelet.
So I said instead, "I, um, have to give you credit for . . . taking care of these worms so well. Of course, they're all headed for a fish's gullet."
"They have a full life before that," he countered. "Watch this." He motioned me over to another row of buckets, ones to which he hadn't added the laying mash.
"Every ten days, we toss the beds. It gets air in there. What was on the top goes to the bottom, and vice versa."
Larry took a miniature pitchfork and dug into three or four of the buckets, turning the soil over and, I assume, lifting worms up into the air. The light was fainter here away from the flashlight.
"We bore small holes in the sides of the buckets before we put the worms in there, but this gives them much more of what they need. It has to be absorbed through their skin, the oxygen."
"OK. Yes, you're good to them." I was stuck on this track, but still trying to figure out a way to bring up the bracelet.
"Now watch," he said. And he cut on a bright overhead light.
I looked over his shoulder into one of the buckets and saw that the soil was still moving, though he was no longer turning it with his little fork. It was like a simmering stew or some dark volcanic lake, moving toward a rolling boil or settling down after an eruption.
"Ooh! They're moving in there."
"Yes, trying to get away from the light. They want to be down under the surface. Look at them through this glass."
He had a large, hand-held magnifying glass, probably something he'd used in his science project. He stepped aside so I could have a closer look, putting one arm around my waist to usher me forward.
I gasped with surprise at what I saw magnified to ten times its original size. It was a sea of snake bodies, writhing and twisting, arching and dipping. There were so many tangled up together than I didn't see heads or tails--and c
ouldn't have told the difference between them! The peat moss under the glass resembled a gravel pit, though the worms moved through it so easily the individual pieces seemed light, like cardboard or plastic. It might have been a magician's potion or the intertwining fingers of a hundred hidden spell casters.
"Neat, huh?" asked Larry with genuine earnestness.
"Wow!" was all I could come up with.
But I took one more look anyway, perhaps to show I had not been frightened by what he was showing me. The teeming mass of worms and earth and mash was like some elemental soup of creation, the beginning of all living things, a reproductive soup.
"Susan," asked Larry. "Will you go out with me?"
6
I'm not sure why I agreed to the date with Larry. Partly, I felt guilty that Paul had been invited to my concert in his place. Too, I still had the bracelet Larry had given me, and I felt I should acknowledge the gift in some way. And maybe I was starting to appreciate his work ethic, his commitment to taking projects through to completion.
But probably most of all I was just worn down by all the things that were building toward climaxes in my life: the pageant competition; Sally's threat and the slumber party; Mr. Pierce's advances. Why not have something to take advantage of after all these things were over? Who wouldn't want an interested young man to take her to the movies, buy her a soda, pay her compliments? This was not a bad thing to have in your future, especially if you were going to lose a beauty contest.
You see, my confidence had started to sag a bit in the last few days. There had been too many sessions in front of the mirror in Tricia's room. And perhaps Sandy's projected career as an ice cream historian/manufacturer was beginning to make more sense to me than my imagined life as a beauty contest queen.
I did tell Larry our date would have to be the following weekend, since I had the competition on Saturday. He agreed, offering to help me at the pageant, though, if needed. And he promised to be out in the auditorium rooting for me. I wasn't unhappy to have more than my parents in a little fan club.
My mother's support of a blossoming new me had been evident ever since she first realized the flute resting on her dining room table was not the property of one of my friends, but instead my very own purchase. While she didn't think I had to win the pageant, she did want me to develop my musical ability. All through the preliminaries, she spent time every day critiquing my solo and helping me with the outfits I would wear.
My father, though, seemed even more distant than usual in this process. I had assumed it was his work, the regular pressures of business. But it turns out there were other factors leading to his current state of mind.
Before I headed off for Sally's and the fateful slumber party, I found him out in the back yard holding a golf club.
"You're taking up golf?" I asked with obvious surprise. I had been carrying an overnight case out to the Rambler.
He looked up at me and grinned shyly. "Well now, I might. Don't you think I could?"
"Well, sure you could, I guess. If you wanted to. But, I don't know, you don't seem the type."
He held up a hand, waved me back a step. Then he settled himself into a golfer's stance, though there was no ball teed up for him to hit. He took a swing, and I saw immediately it was the stroke of someone who knew what he was doing. His middle-aged paunch, though, didn't belong with the easy swing.
"I've played this game," he offered simply.
"I can see! But I never knew that." I set my bag down.
"Yes. It was some years ago." He sighed, recalling, I suppose, that earlier time. "But I've been feeling out of shape recently. And I wondered if I took up golf again, could I lose a little of this extra weight." He patted his pear-shaped middle.
"Did you learn to play when you were in high school?" I asked. And that prompted him to explain something I'd never known. He had played golf, oddly, in the war.
My father had served with the Signal Corps in England during World War II, getting some of the training that would inspire his civilian career later. His several years on a base in the countryside near Newcastle had been a mixture, 95 parts tedium and five parts serious danger. Communications centers were always targets for Nazi air raids, but his unit was small enough that it escaped heavy, repeated bombardment.
And for the months before and after D-Day, his tour settled into a surreal routine of logging communication data related to the aerial bombing of the German army on the Continent and learning, of all things, the game of golf.
The threat of air raids was always highest at night, and so his most regular shifts were from late afternoon to midnight or from midnight to midmorning. In the calmer daylight hours he and some others took up the sport.
There was a modest nine-hole course near the base, open to GIs stationed in the area. And he and several buddies played a round nearly every day, all using the same set of secondhand clubs they had purchased collectively in the village.
"I can remember every hole on that course," he told me laughing. "The par-three's and the par-five's, the sand traps, the high rough. It was an awfully well-designed course for such an out-of-the-way place. And pretty country, not that far from the coast. No one playing but the elderly and off-duty troops."
I had not played any sports outside of neighborhood softball myself. And I knew few girls who took sports seriously. Elizabeth Rogers, the Miss Route 66 contestant and Fairfield High's best female athlete, was unusual for the time. Sports just wasn't something most of us did once we'd entered puberty. Except for cheerleading or baton twirling or dancing, we avoided strenuous physical activity.
"What's the fun of golf?" I asked my dad.
"Hmm," he thought a minute, using the club as a cane to lean on. "I think it has to do with the round you play. Now some people think it's the hole-in-one you're after, the great single stroke. But not me, not that one great shot. I like the rhythm and progress of the whole round, playing each hole and adding to your score. Then, at the end, you've taken a little journey."
"OK."
"Every nine holes is a combination of odd situations and challenges. What you have to do is put them all together into a single experience, the round you play that day. There's a total of strokes--as close to par as you can--but in that total is a process that goes from beginning through middle to end."
"I bet you were pretty good!" I offered. He smiled. "It's kind of how I feel playing a concert."
He thought a minute. "I can see that. But in England, in the war, it might even have been more, um, satisfying, in a funny sort of way."
"How's that?"
"There was the war, you see, in the background all the time. We had air raids and our own planes going out. Most of the time enemy bombers were flying past us, going after more important targets. But they were always there. And for some months we worried about an invasion, so there were drills, alerts. There were even some pretty terrible scenarios we had to consider."
Dad had gotten a funny, faraway look in his eyes as he remembered. He'd never told me much about his time in England.
"And in some ways it seemed like the war would never end. We'd keep bombing, and they'd keep bombing. My buddies and I kept tracking the communication, before and after D-Day."
"Yeah."
"But in the pauses of the war, mostly through the middle of the day, we'd play golf. Me and Freddy and Josh and Sam mostly, a foursome. It was outside, pretty country like I said. Separate from our work, from the war. And it had its own enclosed, finished feel, something we started, continued, completed."
I recalled my father's courtship of my mother, the proposal by telephone. He had shown a certain flair in using the material of his profession to reach his ladylove. And he lit up now, talking of this almost forgotten experience, of fellowship and pleasure and accomplishment. What had happened to his energy and enthusiasm since then?
In the years of his children's growing up, the force of his personality seemed to have evaporated, leaving him a balding, overweight, middle-ag
ed man slumped in an easy chair before the television set. I can see now that he had begun to realize how stale and uneventful his life had become. He'd concluded that returning to golf might also bring back the same spirit he'd possessed as a young man.
It was many days later that I realized his immediate inspiration for change came from seeing change in his wife.
7
The slumber party at Sally Winchester's was mostly fun, despite an underlying tension that, I think, all the girls felt.
We were, after all, competitors for the same crown, and there was always the feeling that, if you admitted something or revealed something, it might give others an advantage.
The whole event also had a somewhat disjointed feel to it, coming in stages that didn't follow one after the other. I think this had to do with Sally's plan for the night and what seemed to be a minor rebellion by the other girls in the form of an energetic pillow fight.
