All Over Creation

by Ruth Ozeki

  Frank looked out the window and realized he was wrong again. Five-O was pulling into the parking lot. Three squad cars. He alerted Y, then stood close to Charmey in case things got rough. Y passed the word on to Mr. Potato Head, who started speaking faster now.

  “Who here drinks milk?” He looked around at the circle of children, then to the mothers behind. There wasn’t a woman without a gallon and a child.

  The assistant manager ran to the door as the police approached.

  “Po-po’s here, dudes,” Y said. “Hang on. Here we go!”

  The Seeds retreated to the center of the circle of carts. Frank secured the opening with the last of the wire, then took Charmey’s hand, forming, along with Lilith and Y, a tight line of defense around Mr. Potato Head, who raised his cane and his voice.

  “That’s right. Even milk! The big corporations have introduced genetically modified food into your supermarkets and therefore into your bodies, without your knowledge or consent. There’s been no long-term testing of their safety, but the government doesn’t make them put warning labels on these foods. . . .”

  The cops approached, six of them, assessing the situation. Frank recognized a couple of faces, but the one he knew best was a sergeant named Meinike who’d busted him and confiscated his board, just for doing nose grinds off the benches by the senior center, a vengeful action seeing as there weren’t even any seniors sitting on the benches at the time. He was a mean mother. The other cops held back, but Meinike charged right over.

  “All right, punks,” he growled. “Party’s over.”

  He grabbed a cart and hauled on it, trying to break through, and looked quite perplexed when it resisted. He began to rattle the carts, trying to pull them apart, but Frank had done a very good job with the wire.

  “Without labels, you don’t even know what you are buying and feeding your families!” Mr. Potato Head shouted, bug eyes popping, jumping up and down. “It is a violation of your consumer’s right to know!”

  Meinike was really pissed now, and the other cops closed in. “You’re under arrest for trespassing and creating a public disturbance!”

  Three of the patrolmen pushed through the crowd of customers and attacked the circle from the other side.

  “We’re not disturbing the public,” Mr. Potato Head said. “We’re educating the people.” He turned back to the crowd. “Learn about the issues!” he shouted over the clatter of carts. “Your children are at risk! Their futures—the future of life itself! ”

  The Seeds began to chant, “Power to the people!” as the police broke through. The first person they reached was Lilith.

  “Police brutality!” she shrieked as soon as the cop touched her. Her body went limp, and she dropped to the floor as though she’d been shot.

  “Oh, my God, they’re hurting her!” a woman cried. The mothers grabbed their kids. They continued to watch from a safe distance.

  One by one the Seeds fell to the ground, until Frank was the only one left standing. His friends lay there, absolutely still and chanting, as the cops tried to haul them to their feet. Meinike approached him.

  “Well, the chicken man. What a surprise.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Meinike.”

  “Oh, sure, Frankie. Anything you say.” He slapped a handcuff on Frank’s wrist. A cop was dragging Charmey up by her armpits. It looked like he was hurting her. Frank pulled away, but Meinike jerked his arm behind his back and attached the second cuff. “Calm down, will you?”

  Charmey threw back her head and screamed. Frank twisted, breaking free from Meinike. He lowered his chin, took aim at the cop who was holding Charmey, and put everything he had into a head butt into the officer’s rib cage. The man staggered. Charmey dropped to the floor. Meinike spun Frankie around, drew back his fist, and delivered a sucker punch, deep into Frankie’s solar plexus.

  “What’s wrong with you, chicken man?” he said as Frankie crumpled. “I said calm the fuck down.”

  “The point of the exercise,” Geek explained later, when they’d finally gotten back to the Spudnik, “is theatrical.” He toweled off his hair, still wet from the snow outside, and watched Charmey wrap an Ace bandage around Frankie’s cracked rib. Frankie flinched. “Passive resistance,” Geek said. “Nonviolence. You make the police look like brutal oppressors in front of the citizens. You’re not supposed to get hurt.”

  “They were hurting Charmey,” Frankie muttered.

  “Mais non,” Charmey said, securing the bandage. “It was only my acting. You must relax your body totally, comme ça.” She stood and fell to the floor of the Spudnik and lay there, grinning up at him. “Tu comprends?”

  They’d been arrested and taken to jail for a couple of hours, but when complaints started coming in from Thrifty Foods shoppers and even the store management, the police had to let them go. It was sweet, especially when Meinike tried to charge them with shoplifting, and the Seeds pulled out their register slips and demanded their groceries back—four ten-pound bags of Idaho potatoes, two pounds of zucchini, a dozen butternut squashes. One of Meinike’s beat cops loaded them back into a paddy wagon. The snow had been falling all afternoon, turning to sleet as it came in off the lake. The cop dumped them at the edge of the Thrifty Foods parking lot and gave them one hour to clear city limits. They howled into the wind as the wagon pulled away, high-fived each other, and chucked icy snowballs at the retreating taillights. They cut through the parking lot. Geek trailed behind, lugging the potato head and tripping on his big burlap diaper.

  Miraculously, the cops had left the Spudnik alone. It was covered with a thick hump of snow. Geek had tied in to a power line in the parking lot before the action, and they’d kept the heaters running, so it was snug and warm inside. Charmey peeled off Frankie’s wet coat, wrapped him in a blanket, and leaned closer to inspect his rib.

  “We got one hour, dude,” said Y. “That doesn’t give you much time.”

  Frankie’s rib cage spasmed again. “I can go over to Mickey D’s,” he offered, “and get your stash for you. While you get ready.”

  “Don’t bother,” Y said. “We’ll stop on the way. We’re ready. What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. You need to pick up stuff from home?”

  “I don’t have a home,” Frank said.

  “You do now, if you want it.”

  Frank stared. Y combed the snow out of his dreadlocks with his fingers. “We’re heading out west, to California. Lots of supermarkets between here and there.”

  “You mean I should come?”

  “Only if you want to.”

  Frank nodded, trying to stay cool, but inside he felt like he was going to explode. Want to? He’d never wanted anything more in his life. He didn’t get half of what they were doing, but they were cool about it. Charmey smiled. She seemed to want him around. Maybe they all did. He sat back, taking in every detail of the Spudnik—the tie-dyed curtains and boxes of flyers, the computers and the cramped kitchenette. Just then the vehicle started to heave. The door burst open with an icy blast, and Geek straggled in. His green tights sagged at the knees, and his burlap diaper was heavy and wet with melting snow. His glasses were completely fogged.

  “Dudes,” he said, teeth chattering. “I juh . . . just gotta say, sometimes I hate being the frig . . . friggin’ potato! ”

  nulife

  “The baby’s daddy is Hawaiian,” Cass said. “A native, which makes sense, ’cause he’s pretty dark.” Will accepted this information with a grunt as he heaved a fifty-pound sack of chicken scratch off the tailgate and onto his shoulder. Inside the truck bed Cass humped another sack over to the edge. “Yummy said he’s a musician—the father, that is. They were living together, but she broke up with him because he can’t hold down a job.”

  Cass hoisted the sack onto his other shoulder and stood. “The little girl’s daddy sells surfboards in Waikiki, and the oldest boy’s father teaches something about plants. He’s Japanese. Yummy said he was still a homosexual when sh
e got pregnant.”

  The words came out of her mouth in a steamy cloud of white. Will was already walking toward the barn, the heavy sacks making his gait seem lighter somehow. She waited until he returned, vaguely aware that she was pushing it.

  “I don’t see how that could be, do you? The homosexual part, I mean. They must have had sex, right? Otherwise how did they do it?”

  “Cass?” Will stood at the tailgate as she wrestled the last heavy bag over to him.

  “I mean, did she seduce him, and then he just converted?” She looked up, panting slightly.

  “That’s a whole lot more than I need to know.”

  “Oh, Will.” She frowned, squatting in front of him. “You’re such a prude.”

  “How am I gonna look her straight in the eye if you go putting thoughts like that in my head?”

  He looked so perturbed she had to laugh. She tipped the deadweight over his back, balanced the two sacks, and gave him a pat on the top of his baseball cap. The cap, from the Spudee Seed Potato Company, was decorated with a cartoon of a cute potato in a diaper. The company’s motto was “We handle ’em like babies.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll shut up.” She removed a work glove and wiped the hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. It was hard to shut up, though. Yummy’s life was just so different from any she knew, and she wanted to tell Will all about it. She wanted to talk and puzzle it out. It was a pity he wasn’t interested. She jumped from the empty truck and went around to the cab. It wasn’t gossip. It was life, and it had been a long time since she’d had a girlfriend to talk to.

  “I’ll take the truck on back, then,” she said.

  “I could use some coffee,” he called over his shoulder.

  She brought up the subject of Yummy again after lunch. “I don’t think she’s planning on staying. She said she can only take a month off from her job. She’s a teacher, you know.”

  Will was having his coffee and reading the mail. “What’s she planning on for Lloyd and Momoko?”

  “Leave him in the nursing home, I guess. Find something for her. They would probably have to split them up because of her dementia. I just hate the idea of it.”

  “Cass . . .” He looked up from the envelope he was opening with a bread knife.

  “I know. I know.” He was right, of course. Pity aside, the whole point was for her not to take on any more, but she couldn’t help saying, “Listen, maybe we should have them over for Christmas. We’ve got a tree anyhow, and it would be nice for the kids. I can’t see Yummy getting around to doing much.”

  “Won’t that be rough? Having all the kids around, I mean.”

  Cass contemplated this observation—like if he’d said the winter is cold or the sky is blue, it was so timeless and true as to merit little more than a shrug of acknowledgment. Of course it would be rough. It was always rough to see people’s beautiful children. Especially rough to see Yummy’s. Will knew that. Why was he even bothering to mention it?

  “Sure, but Christmas is for kids. I think we should. If you don’t mind.”

  It would be rough for him, too. He wanted children as much as she did.

  It had dawned on them slowly. In the first years of their marriage they were busy establishing the farm, and then her parents got sick, but by the time her parents died, it was clear they had a problem. For a while they focused intensively on getting pregnant, timing their lovemaking for months on end, consulting fertility specialists and researching new techniques, but something would always happen, some setback. Usually it was a miscarriage. Sometimes it was a difficult harvest or an onset of blight. Then, when things settled down again, one of them would suggest they try again. Generally it was Cass, because time was running out and she was most aware of it, but sometimes Will brought it up, too, when she got discouraged. They’d even started adoption proceedings, filling out the questionnaires and doing the home visits with the social worker, but just when Cass was starting to let herself get excited, she’d been diagnosed with her cancer. That took the wind right out of their sails.

  It had been awhile since either of them had broached the subject.

  Now Will took a sip of coffee. He was fingering a potato brochure that had come in the mail. “Here,” he said, handing it to her.

  The sudden shift caught her off guard. She took the brochure and studied it.

  “Cynaco’s NuLifes,” he said. “It’s interesting. They genetically engineer the plant with a natural pesticide built right in. The beetles eat the leaf and die. They say you can reduce the chemical inputs by more than half.”

  She took a sip of coffee, settling into her role of skeptic, the cautious one, now that she sensed where he was headed. “I don’t know. It couldn’t be as simple as they make it out. We’d still need some systemics, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yeah, but not as much.”

  She ran her eye down the specs. “Expensive.”

  “No beetles, Cass. And with the NuLife Enhanced, no leaf roll either. Otherwise we’d be doing several sprayings with Monitor, not to mention—”

  She handed him back the brochure and went to the sink. “I don’t know, Will.” She rinsed her cup, then turned, shoulders hunched and arms criss-crossed in front of her chest. She stared at his profile as he studied the specs, scouring them for answers. It was a handsome face, a sturdy, innocent, American sort of face, the kind that ought to live its life and die contented, but instead, now, when he looked up at her, she watched it twist into something more complex than its features were ever built to convey. “How do we know if it’s . . .”

  “We don’t,” he said. “But they say it’s safer than pesticides.” He was trying to reassure but his voice revealed the doubt that had been eating at him, like a root rot, starting with the war and growing deeper with each disaster. “We can start small, do a couple of test fields, say, the ones closest to the house.” He spoke quietly. “At least those . . .”

  She walked over and hugged him into the curve of her body.

  “Cass . . .” He crumpled the paper in his fist and turned his face into her stomach.

  She took a deep breath, stroking the long, faded strands of his hair and tucking them behind his ears. “You really want to go through it all again?”

  “There’s always a chance. We gotta operate on that assumption, right?”

  “Right.” She released him. “Until we don’t.” She started to walk away, but he reached out and grabbed her hand.

  “But safer is better, right?” he insisted. “No matter what.”

  “Safer is better,” she agreed.

  He tugged at her wrist, reeling her back in to the frail comfort of his powerful arms. “We’ll turn over a new leaf,” he said, nuzzling her.

  “A NuLife, you mean.” Resisting, but smiling now.

  “Exactly.” He sat her down so that she straddled his lap. He picked his cap off the table and put it on her head. The visor pointed jauntily to one side. “You game?”

  “Oh, sure. Why not?” She leaned so their foreheads and their noses touched. Her eyes crossed, and his face went all crooked. She gave him a peck of a kiss and stood up. “For a NuLife Enhanced, even.”

  She put his cap back on his head. The little diapered spud smiled at her cutely. We handle ’em like babies.

  christmas

  The phone rang once in the middle of the night.

  “Yumi . . . ?” His voice was as thin as thread, unraveling into the darkness.

  “Who is this?” I cupped the receiver, whispering so as not to wake up the kids. It was Christmas Eve, and Ocean was sleeping lightly. “Dad, is that you?”

  “Yumi—” His old voice broke, choked on spittle. He coughed and swallowed two, three times, then took a deep breath. “I have made up my mind.” Trying to sound firm, resolute. “You must come on home now. Your mother and I have decided . . .”

  My heart was pounding. “Dad, I’m here. I am home.” There was a long silence. Outside I could hear the wind. The little gr
een hands on the clock at my bedside glowed in the dark. “Dad, are you okay? Do you know what time it is?”

  “Why, it’s morning.” He sounded surprised that I should need to know.

  “It’s four o’clock in the morning. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Oh, my!” His resolution crumpled. “Is it?” Thoroughly deflated now. “But I thought—” Breathing harshly, he tried to understand, but then, “Oh, no—” and his voice broke off. “I must have been dreaming. . . .” His words trailed into a low sob that ended in a hiccup.

  “Listen, Dad, we’ll talk later, okay? Will you be all right until morning?”

  “Oh—” he said, the syllable echoing through all the failing chambers of his heart. “Yes. I . . . I suppose so.”

  “I’ll come by tomorrow. I’ll talk to the doctor.”

  “Yumi, wait!” he cried, rallying.

  “What is it?”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “She’s here, Dad. I brought her home. She’s with us. She’s fine.”

  “Bring me home, too. Please! Get me out of here!”

  “I can’t do that. You know I can’t. You can’t manage on your own, and there’s no one here to take care of you.”

  “But you . . .”

  “Dad, this is temporary. I’m only here for a visit. I don’t live here, remember?”

  “Oh . . .”

  “Try to get some sleep.”

  “Oh, Yumi, I can’t sleep! That’s the problem. They keep waking me up. All this fussing. No sleep at all . . .”

  When I hung up the phone, I heard Ocean calling. “Mommy . . . ?” I scooped her up and carried her into bed with me. “Is it Christmas yet?” she asked.

  “Almost, Puddle,” I told her.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Okay. Go back to sleep now.” I had stayed up late stuffing their stockings, and the whiskey I’d been drinking tasted thick on my tongue. I closed my eyes and pulled her in close, to calm her with the authority of my own body’s exhaustion.