by Ruth Ozeki
She exhaled and smiled. “It’s good to see you, Yummy. Good to have you back.”
Hearing her words, though, I felt another wave of panic. “It’s good to see you, too, Cass,” I said. “I just wish I could stay for longer.”
I didn’t wish any such thing, and she knew it. She looked at me evenly, as she pulled Poo from his high chair.
“I mean, I’ve got to get back to teach, and the kids have their school and all. . . .” I took another drag of the cigarette, passed it back to her, and changed the subject. “God, that tastes good. I quit fourteen years ago, when I was pregnant with Phoenix.”
“Oh.”
“You ever quit?”
“Oh, sure. A bunch of times. Every time I got pregnant, in fact.” She had Poo on her lap now, and she was careful to direct the smoke away from his curls, into the air above his head. Her jaw jutted upward, tightening the muscles in her throat. She paused and watched the smoke disperse, as though she were remembering something, and when she spoke again, her voice was quiet.
“I’d get pregnant, quit, miscarry. Then do it all over again.” She ground out the cigarette in the saucer, pressing the filter down to extinguish every last spark.
“Oh, Cassie, I’m sorry. Do you know why? I mean, was there a reason, or—”
“Oh, jeez, Yummy.” She looked at her watch over the hump of Poo’s back. He was on the edge of sleep. There was a finality in her voice, as though she wanted to wrap up the conversation, get to her feet, and leave, but instead she shifted and sighed.
“Could be anything,” she said, rocking the baby gently back and forth. “At first we thought nitrates in the groundwater, so we got the well tested and got filters and everything, but it didn’t help. Then we thought it might be one of the other inputs—stuff we use around the farm. For a while Will even thought it might be some kind of chemical exposure from overseas or something.”
“Overseas?”
“He fought in Vietnam,” she said. “And it could be any of these things, or none of them, or maybe even some combination. It’s just impossible to know for sure. And even if we could prove it was something we were using, what could we do?”
“Can’t you stop using it?”
She looked pityingly at me. “You really don’t know shit about potatoes, do you? We got three thousand acres, it’s not that easy.”
“But if it’s poisoning you . . .”
Poo had fallen asleep and started to slump. Now she hauled him higher on her lap. “Banks don’t lend money to farmers who don’t use inputs. Not sound farming practice.”
Poo woke and started to make little mewling noises. Cass bounced him and smiled. “Mind you, we haven’t stopped trying. We’ve still got hope.”
The baby butted her with his big, sleepy head, burying his face in her chest.
I held out my arms. “I’m just weaning him,” I told her. “He’ll go back to sleep. You want me to take him?”
But Cass shook her head. I watched my son’s dark, pudgy fingers knead the front of her pink sweatshirt, looking for my breast, her breast, any breast. Not finding—
“He likes you,” I said, then I realized what was wrong.
Cass was resting her chin on the crown of Poo’s head, watching me. When she saw the look on my face, she nodded. “Both of ’em.” She spoke into Poo’s soft baby curls. “It’s been seven years now and no sign of reoccurrence, so they think they got it all.”
“Oh, Cass.” The sounds of a car chase seeped in from the living room. I tried to say something else, but I’d run out of words.
“I told you my mom died of it,” she said. “I’m the lucky one. As soon as we found the lump, I decided to have them take everything, just in case. The whole shebang.” She smiled and looked down at her chest. “Remember how I used to complain about my cup size? All through high school I was saving up for a boob reduction. Guess you gotta watch out what you ask for.”
She rocked back and forth, quieting the baby, who smacked his lips, sleeping again. Her chair leg creaked against the linoleum. She tapped another cigarette from the pack and lit it. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” she mused on the exhale.
“Cass, maybe you shouldn’t . . .”
She shrugged and handed me the butt. “Must be your bad influence. I don’t usually smoke this much. Will won’t let me.”
The cigarette tasted stale now. I took a drag and put it out.
“It’s funny,” Cass continued. “Every time I miscarried, I thought of you. Thought of that horrible trip to Pocatello with that teacher—what was his name?”
I felt my heart start to race. She was opening the door to the past, and I was stepping through it. “Elliot,” I said. It had been years since I’d spoken his name, and the syllables tasted as stale and acrid as smoke.
“That’s right. Mr. Rhodes. He was an okay teacher, but what a creep!”
“Whatever happened to him?” I asked, nudging the door open wider. “Did he keep on teaching or . . . ?”
She looked surprised and shook her head. “I don’t know. He disappeared. I figured you guys had it all planned out and lived happily ever after.”
“I never saw him again. Not after that night.” After that night there was no happily ever after.
Cass nodded. “Maybe they ran him out of town or something. He just kind of disappeared. You know, it wasn’t so bad taking a licking for you from Pa over that business, but I never forgave you for leaving without me. I waited for you, but you never even wrote.”
“But I did! I wrote as soon as I got there.” My mind was racing. I wanted to explain. I was living on the street. I had to steal a pen. I panhandled to buy stamps. “I wrote lots of letters. You’re the one who never wrote back!”
Cass shrugged. “My parents must have burned them. I never got a single one.”
“I thought you’d turned against me, like everyone else.”
“Honestly, Yummy, I did. I started to think it was all your fault. Each time I miscarried and saw the blood, it just brought it all back. I felt like God was punishing me for helping you out. Crazy, huh? But if that’s the case, then how come you’re here now with three great kids? You know what I mean? It doesn’t make sense. If anyone deserved to get punished, it was you, right?”
I felt I’d been punished plenty. I started to answer, then realized she was talking mostly to herself, musing into the top of Poo’s head, and when he twitched in his sleep, it occurred to me to wonder how much the infant mind absorbed, and whether this talk of retribution might seep through his thin skull, to haunt me later on. Her voice grew quiet and still.
“My daddy used to say you were a bad seed. You took all the luck away from here, Yummy.” Her breath disturbed my baby’s silky curls. “All the life and the luck. You didn’t leave any behind.”
“Cass, that’s not true,” I started to say, but just then Ocean appeared in the doorway, nose in the air, sniffing.
“Phew,” she said, looking straight at Cass. “It stinks in here. Have you been smoking cigarettes again?”
“Ocean, shut up. This is grown-up time. Go away.”
But Ocean ignored me and walked right up to Cass, pausing to examine the two butts in the saucer on the way. “Listen,” she said, frowning over her baby brother’s head. “I don’t think you should smoke around us.”
“Ocean, I mean it!”
“It’s not good for Poo,” she persisted.
“Damn it, Ocean—”
“And you’re a bad influence on my mother.”
“I was the one who was smoking.”
Ocean turned slowly and stared at me, then looked back at Cass. “See?” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “See what you’ve done?”
“That’s it.” I grabbed her under the arm, fed up with her uncontrollable mouth. She cried out, but I dragged her toward the doorway until Cass spoke.
“Ocean, you’re absolutely right.”
I stopped and looked back.
“She’s right, Yummy.
I shouldn’t smoke around all of you. I shouldn’t smoke at all. So how about I quit? Okay? Right now.”
She took the pack of cigarettes and held it out to Ocean, who was sniveling and rubbing her armpit. “Here, you take them. Throw them away for me.”
Ocean looked up, vindicated but still a bit scared, not quite sure this wasn’t some nasty grown-up joke with a punch line waiting to happen to her, but I gave her a little push between the shoulder blades, pitching her forward, and she took the cigarette pack. She looked at it like it contained a great and evil power.
“Where should I throw it?” she asked, voice hushed.
“How about in the garbage?” Cass whispered back.
“Okay.” She tiptoed forward, then stopped. “Where’s the garbage?”
“Under the sink,” I whispered. We were all whispering now.
She carefully opened the cabinet and deposited the cigarette pack in the garbage container, then closed it firmly and whirled around. She leaned her small bottom up against the door, breathless, as though the cigarettes might try to escape again, might pound and scrabble against the inside of the cabinet like wild things. She waited, but all was quiet, so she wiped her hands together with a great sense of closure. Task completed. Job well done.
“There,” she said in a normal voice. “I guess that’s that.” She gave us a great, beaming smile. “I’m so proud of both of you!”
“Oh, God, Ocean! Give it a rest.”
“Mommy, you have a bad attitude,” she said, frowning at me. She walked over to Cass and examined her face.
“Hey!” she said. “I saved your life!” Then she skipped off to watch some more TV.
“Want them back?” I asked, but Cass was staring toward the living room. “You want your cigarettes back?” I repeated, getting up and walking to the sink.
“No,” Cass said. “She’s right. I may as well try and quit for good.”
“You don’t have to, you know.”
“Might as well. It won’t kill me.”
So I sat down, but later, after Cass had left and the kids were asleep, I sneaked back into the kitchen and rummaged through the garbage until I found the pack, a little soggy from a wet coffee filter, but smokable still. I pocketed it and walked outside into the frostbitten landscape. The moon was shining against the ice-covered fields, and the windows of the house glowed yellow. Next to the house, Momoko’s garden was nothing but spectral stumps and stalks and mounds of tumular snow, like the site of ancient burials. Skeletal poplars bordered the garden, and beyond, the white fields stretched out forever.
The snow underfoot made a sound like chalk on a blackboard. It had iced over during the day, but that morning it had still been fresh and soft. When Ocean woke, she was enchanted. She ran to the window and announced her immediate intention to go outside and play, but I caught her at the door. She was a tropical child, with no understanding of the bitterness of cold. I took her to the mudroom and stuffed her into an old pink snowsuit I’d found, and she stood there, straining like small sausage. She was whimpering by the time I shoved a knit cap onto her head, pulling it down low to cover her ears. I zipped her up, catching her throat skin in the metal teeth and drawing a speck of blood, which I wiped off with spit on my thumb. I wrapped her neck in a scarf and knotted it, then clipped mittens onto her cuffs. I made her put Baggies on her double-socked feet and step into felt-lined galoshes. I sat back on my heels and looked at her with grim satisfaction. It’s amazing, the routines you remember.
“There. Go on outside.”
Ocean’s face, what I could see of it, twisted in despair. “But I can’t moooooooooove,” she wailed.
Go. Play, girl, play. I shoved her, sniffling, out onto the porch, and she descended the steps like an ancient woman, feeble and tentative. When she reached the ground, her rubberized feet flew out from under her and she fell down hard on her well-padded bottom. She lay there pinkly in the snow, face up, immobile. I watched her from inside the door. Phoenix joined me.
“Yummy, she’s not moving.”
“Mmm.”
“Aren’t you going to help her?”
“She’s all right. She’s dressed for the weather.”
He sighed and then pushed past me. He was wearing his surfing jams. It was zero degrees out. He ran down the steps, hauled his plug-shaped sister to her feet, and brushed her off. “Come on, Puddle,” he said. “Stand up.” He was wearing flip-flops and a T-shirt with a skateboard logo.
Now I lit the soggy cigarette in the dark and shivered. When you’re seven years old, you think you know everything. When you’re fourteen, you’re certain you do. When you’re pushing forty, if you’re honest with yourself, you realize that your omniscience is wearing thin. If I’d had any foreknowledge at all, I would never have come back here. Now that I was back, I was feeling as restless as if I’d never left in the first place.
Fourteen. It seemed impossible that I had ever been so young, or so in love. So sure of everything. I exhaled and the acrid smoke mixed with the frozen air. I’d forgotten about Idaho winters, how long and punishing they could be.
elliot
It was not just bad luck that led to Elliot’s transfer to potatoes. Rather it was an ironic twist of fate, and one he found very unpleasant when his boss pointed it out. The conversation took place in Duncan’s office, on the northeast corner of the twenty-third floor of the D&W building. Twenty-three was an auspicious number. The northeast corner balanced Dragon energy with the Tortoise, auguring material wealth.
“Of course we had the offices feng shui-ed,” Duncan explained. “Powerful stuff. Do you know there’s a feng shui index in the Hong Kong stock market?”
Elliot shook his head. Clear water trickled down a craggy rock face located against the far wall of the room, gurgling as it spilled into a limpid pond. The sound was playful yet serene. A small Japanese lantern sat on the edge of the pond, and fish flickered below the water’s surface. A residue of incense hung in the air.
Elliot sat before the black marble expanse of Duncan’s desk, watching his boss finger a floret carved from a Japanese radish. Behind him in the distance, through the polarized glass, Elliot could see the ghostly architecture of the nation’s capital glimmering in the twilight.
“Sorry to keep you so late,” Duncan said, nudging a plate of seaweed across the sleek desk with the lacquered tip of his chopsticks. “You sure you won’t join me?”
“No thanks, Duncan.” Elliot eyed the mound of dark, twiglike shapes, glistening in a muddy dressing and dotted with seeds. “I’m going out for dinner.”
“Gotta watch it in restaurants, Elliot. Never eat in them myself. Not unless I know the owners.”
“That’s very . . . careful of you.”
“Can’t be too careful these days. Never know where your food is coming from.” He lifted a ruffled leaf of lettuce to his lips. “Food is sacred, Elliot. Food is life.”
“Yes, I can see that.” Elliot watched his boss chew the leaf for what seemed like a very long time. Duncan was the junior partner in the firm. Wiley, the senior partner, was an old-school PR man. Duncan was the young eccentric, the wild card, the one Wiley counted on to think out of the box.
“Just got back from a raw retreat in Maui,” Duncan said when he finally swallowed. “Fantastic. All the food was exquisitely uncooked, but the power locked in those legumes! The purity! The unadulterated energy! It was life altering.” He bowed over a slice of avocado, then speared it with his chopsticks. “You really should go. I’ll have Sedona send you the contacts.”
“That would be just great.”
“It clears the head,” Duncan added. “Balances the yang. Equilibrium is the key, Elliot. It enables one to accept what the Universe offers.”
Elliot was trying to look open and enthusiastic. He didn’t quite know how to interpret the general direction the conversation was taking, never mind predict when Duncan would get to the point. The man had two methods, one a smooth shift into a higher gear, the other
a sudden, clutch-less grind into reverse.
“I’ve got some rather fortuitous news, Elliot.”
Elliot braced while Duncan took a sip of frothy green tea from a ceramic bowl. He watched his employer’s tongue flick quickly against the rough-glazed edge. Duncan had a large collection of historically important raku tea bowls, about which Elliot had learned much during his five-year tenure at Duncan & Wiley. Duncan liked to recount the provenance of each bowl, just before dropping a bomb. The most recent had been the merger of D&W with a prominent Japanese public relations firm, but this news Elliot had greeted with genuine enthusiasm. He’d always had a thing for Asia. He started dreaming of a transfer to Tokyo, maybe a meditation pond of his own.
“. . . a divisional reorganization,” Duncan was saying. “We’re beefing up our Cynaco task force in response to all the recent protests. What we had in mind was developing a proactive management strategy geared toward their NuLife Potato line.”
Elliot watched as Duncan rotated the tea bowl slowly in his hands, studying its pocks and careful imperfections. He tried to focus on his equilibrium, to quell the panic that was rising in his gut. He had a bad feeling.
“And this is where it gets uncanny, Elliot. We were casting about for the right talent for the job, when someone from Human Resources remembered that you had taught school in Idaho once upon a time. So we had her pull your file, and there it was. Liberty Falls. As I said to the guys from Cynaco, who would have thought that we’d have right here, on staff in D.C., someone who actually hailed from the Idaho heartland! Who’d actually lived among the People of the Potatoes. Who’d taught their children.”
“Duncan,” Elliot interrupted, “I appreciate your thinking of me, but I was only there for a year. . . .”
Duncan held up his hand. “A year? Or two? Or ten? A single minute, even? It’s all the same.”
“But what about Tokyo . . . ?”
