by Ruth Ozeki
When compared to the succulent, rollicking poetry of potatoes, the farming of seeds is a dry and persnickety task. For a spudman like Lloyd, seeds are superfluous. But during that first year of his recovery from the second heart attack, as he watched Momoko cultivate her garden, he realized that for her, seeds were the sole objective. She tended her plants, allowing them to ripen, to flower and die—and only then did she get down to business: shaking the seeds from their brittle pockets or teasing them wet from their flesh, drying them and sorting them, measuring and labeling them, and slipping them into envelopes for dissemination by the U.S. Postal Service to destinations around the world. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night. . . . She was more reliable than the birds and the bees, and with a far greater reach.
Her customers wrote her letters. He discovered the correspondence in my old desk, where Momoko conducted her business. Each of the sheets had been carefully read, and the difficult words were underlined and translated into Japanese.
Dear Mrs. Fuller,
This is the second year we’ve planted your Kyoto Three Feets, and I cannot tell you what pleasure they bring. They’ve done real well in our Nebraska heat. Our neighbors, who teased us at first for growing such spindly cukes, now are begging for seed after sampling how tender, crisp yet densely fleshed they are. So far we’ve refused to tell them who our “supplier” is, but this year we’ve decided to relent. But before we give them your name, we’d like to place our order in case you run out!
Dear Mrs. Fuller,
My wife and I want to thank you for your heroic efforts to preserve the rich diversity of heirloom tomatoes. It was such a thrill to find that you were growing everything from Cherokee Purples to Thai Pinks to Green Zebras. Without people like you, the human race would simply forget what tomatoes ought to taste like. The artifacts sold in supermarkets, that they have the gall to call tomatoes, could just as well be made of wood pulp or cardboard, for all the taste and texture they have. We live in an insipid world. Thank you for making it a little less so.
Dear Mrs. Fuller,
Thank you again for agreeing to take on my grandfather’s seeds. He gave them to me on his deathbed and told me that his father had brought them over from Bavaria sometime in the mid-1800s, sewed into his hatband. Grandpa said they were our family’s only legacy from the old country, and he begged me to take care of them, but I live in a high-rise apartment building in Chicago! I don’t know a thing about gardening! I didn’t even know what kind of vegetable the seeds were for! When we got your letter saying that you were naming them Lott’s Purple Podded Pole Beans, my mother and I just sat down and cried. Grandpa would be so happy to have a bean named after him. So, I just want to say thank you from him and from our whole family.
They were heartwarming letters, but Lloyd found it disconcerting to realize that his wife had a set of connections and friendships, a whole world, about which he’d known little or nothing.
Bedridden again after the second attack, he watched her, first from the bedroom window and then from the parlor, through the heavy drapes. Later, when the weather warmed up, he shuffled out to the back porch and kept an eye on the top of her straw gardening hat as it moved through the dense foliage. Finally, when his legs got stronger, he followed her into the garden.
At first, afraid of seeming invasive, he kept to the outer edges while she moved up and down her rows. Then, when she didn’t appear to mind or to notice, he began to meander around the beds. Even the air here was different—thicker and humid and very much hers. He was careful not to crowd her, observing where she was working so he could stay on the opposite quadrant of the garden plot. He felt like a lesser piece in some large board game—if she was the queen, he was not even a castle. But as he skirted the edges, he noticed she was watching him, too, ducking behind a trellis of peas or turning down a row when he looked her way.
He watched her dig and hoe, weed and whisper to her seedlings. “Gambatte ne, tané-chan! Be strong, little seed!” Slowly, as he succumbed to the allure of her plants, watching them play out the range of their diversity in the fullness of nature’s cycle, Lloyd got over his attachment to spuds.
He started to carry things for her. Tentative at first, he just picked up after her—a trowel she’d left behind or a pair of pruning shears—depositing the tool on the ground nearby where she was working and backing off again. Then he started trailing along behind her with a rake or dragging a hose, and although she hesitated at first, soon she began to accept his being there. Lloyd even fancied it felt a little like the old days when they worked in the potato fields, silently, side by side.
That first season he got hooked on cucurbits. It is a well-known fact that squashes are among the most promiscuous of garden vegetables, and Momoko, when she finally started talking to him, confessed she was having a hell of a time keeping her Shanghai squash from cross-pollinating with her Mammoth Kings, and her Sweetbush from her Whangaporoas. She had resorted to a fastidious regimen of hand pollination, which Lloyd learned about for the first time when he followed her into the garden at dusk to identify the flowers that would open the next morning. He watched her crouching in the dirt, thinking how it was that during their thirty-five years of marriage he’d had no idea she knew so much.
“Better down here,” she said. “Squash very sneaky. Like to hide.” She flipped up a fat, hairy leaf to uncover the papery furls of an unopened flower. It was attached to a slim stem. “This one is boy flower. See?”
There was something about these heat-loving vines, twining and tendril bearing, that appealed to Lloyd, and before he knew it, he had folded his long, stiff legs and was down on his knees in the warm dirt beside her.
“Color just starting to come, so tomorrow he gonna be ready.” She stroked the pale yellow blush that stained the veins on the underside of the petals. She tore off a short piece of three-quarter-inch masking tape from a roll and wrapped the tape around the tips of the petals, then located another flower. This one grew out of a small striped bulb, and the blossom had just begun to break open. “This one a girl flower,” Momoko said. “See? She got little baby squash.” She stroked the shiny swollen ovule at the base of the petals, then tore off another piece of tape. “Her flower just start to open, see? But is too soon. She must wait.” Deftly she sealed the petal’s tips shut. “Bee so quick, maybe he get inside with some other squash’s pollen, then baby is no good. You gotta shut her up tight until the right time.”
The next morning when the dew had dried, they were back, crawling through the garden. Momoko located one of the taped males and plucked it, severing the stem several inches down the peduncle. Then she carefully unwrapped it, tearing off the crepey petals of the flower to reveal the pollen-saturated anther. She handed it to Lloyd, who held it while she prepared another. Then she chose a taped female flower from a neighboring plant. She looked around.
“You hear bee?” she asked, cocking her head and listening for the hum.
“I don’t hear anything.”
She shook her head. “Bee is coming. She so fast, so we gotta hurry up. If you see bee, you must go shoo, okay? Make her go away.”
Lloyd nodded.
Holding the female flower by the fruit, she removed the tape. Lloyd watched as the flower began to unfurl, a blooming in slow motion, but of course it wasn’t slow at all. Just the opposite, because the wrinkled petals, once freed, spread far more eagerly and rapidly than was normal in nature and within minutes had billowed into a raggedy-edged corolla. Inside, revealed, were the plump quadrant lobes of the stigma, sticky and receptive. Lloyd was transfixed. Just then he heard the buzz and felt a slight breeze brush his neck.
“Damé!” Momoko said. “Shoo! Shoo!” She waved her hands at the large bumblebee and plucked the naked, petal-less males from Lloyd’s slow fingers. Holding the first one by the stem like a brush, she swabbed its pollen-covered anthers onto each of the glistening lobes of the female’s stigma. Then, while Lloyd waved his hands over her head, keeping the b
ee at bay, she repeated the process with the second.
“It is better using two boy flowers for one girl,” she said. “Sometimes three.”
As soon as she finished, she drew the female’s petals together again, sealing up the fertilized pistil and taping the flower shut. She took the discarded corollas from the males and draped them over the female bud, creating a layered cocoon of wilted petals.
“Bee so hungry, sometimes she chew right through tape.”
She marked the pollinated flower with a twistie and a tag of aluminum cut from a soda can, onto which she had scratched the date with the sharp tip of a knife. “Gambatte kudasai, ne!” she instructed the blossom. “You try your best for me, ne! ”
The bee had found a discarded male in the dirt and was straddling its anther.
“Is okay,” Momoko said, squatting down beside the next female flower. “She can have leftovers.”
The squashes were stored in the root cellar. There weren’t many, and the cellar steps were thick with cobwebs. I brought up an armful and let them spill onto the counter next to the stove, where Cass was warming some food for Poo.
“What are these?”
Cass took a long, torpedo-shaped one in her palm, hefting and turning it over, then scored the skin with her fingernail.
“Looks like a zucchini, but the skin’s too tough. More squashlike. Maybe it got crossed with an acorn or a butternut. Ask Momoko. She’ll know.”
Momoko was sitting at Lloyd’s desk in the parlor. Phoenix and Ocean were lolling on the rug, watching the television at full volume. It was all they did these days.
“Turn that down,” I told them, stepping over their bodies.
“Momoko doesn’t like it if we turn it down,” Phoenix said.
“Momoko isn’t even watching. She’s doing something else.”
He sighed and turned it down with the remote.
Momoko immediately lifted her head. “More louder, please.”
“See?” said Phoenix. “I told you.” He turned the volume back up.
The living room belonged to the kids and Momoko now; one by one, its ties to any external, verifiable reality were being severed, and it was developing a demented logic of its own. Phoenix had taken to moving around Lloyd’s carefully lettered signs to trip up his grandma. The living room wall now said BEDROOM. The chair had turned into the CEILING. The teapot was a REFRIGERATOR. At first I tried enlisting Ocean’s help, turning her against her brother to change the signs back again, but the fun of befuddling Momoko always won out in the end. As a result Momoko was now sitting on the CEILING, at a desk that was a DOORSTOP. I gave my children a foul look, a real Hawaiian stinkeye, which they ignored, and then I restored the signage. I couldn’t reach the ceiling without standing on Momoko’s chair, so I crumpled that index card and threw it at Phoenix’s head.
“Hey,” he said. “Chill.”
Momoko was poring over an old gas bill.
“Mom, that’s old. We paid that already.” I dropped two of the large vegetables, one round, the other long, in front of her. “What are these?”
Momoko looked at the large, mutant squashes and shook her head. “I don’t know.” Then she started to giggle. “Uri wa iyarashii no yo.”
“What do you mean?”
She picked one up and studied it, turning it over in her crooked hands. “Maybe is a little bit zuke, and little bit Delicata, and little bit . . . whatchamacallit. Sweet Pumpkin.” She handed it back and pointed to Ocean and Phoenix, who were fixated on the screen. “Like them. All mixed up.”
She bent over the stack of old bills again, moving her finger along the surfaces, as though by touching the numbers and letters she might understand.
“What did she say?” Cass asked, guiding Poo’s hand carefully toward his mouth with a spoonful of mashed potatoes.
“She said squashes were promiscuous.” I sat down and started to roll one of the clumsy vegetables from hand to hand, across the kitchen table. Poo was watching me closely, and he began to kick his legs and bounce in his high chair, slapping his palm on the tray in front. Cass wiped his mouth and took the spoon from his hand.
“Here. Let me see that again.”
I rolled the squash over to her, and she examined it. “Too green for a butternut.”
She set it down on the tray in front of Poo. With great concentration he placed a pudgy hand on either side, picked it up, and crowed with delight. He held it over his head like a prizefighter raising his trophy, then hurled it to the floor, where it exploded.
We contemplated the pieces, scattered all over the kitchen.
“I wonder why they call it a squash?” I mused. “Why not a smash or a shatter?”
“Well, I guess because it squashes when it’s cooked?”
“Right.” I started picking up the pieces. “You think the kids will eat it?”
maui wowie
He’d knocked her up the very first time they did it. That’s what Char told him, counting backward on her fingers, eyes glowing in the darkened Spudnik.
“Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three . . . forty-five days. And now it is already two periods that I have missed! It is certain, Frankie!”
She reached out and grabbed his wrist, then pulled his hand beneath her cotton undershirt to her breast.
“Can you feel?”
Her breast felt great, as awesome as ever. “What?”
“It is bigger, no?” Impatient, she pulled off the undershirt. He watched. There was always this moment, as her arms were stretched above her and her head and shoulders were swaddled in the tube of cloth, when her breasts would just be there. He had never forgotten the shock he’d felt when he saw them for the first time, and always, during this moment of her undressing, he felt the same sense of surprise, followed by gratitude. They were the sweetest breasts he had ever seen. Not sweet tasting, like fruit or candy, but sweet like the ache you might feel for a weak thing. He reached out and touched the other breast. He couldn’t tell if they were bigger, but she seemed to want them to be, so he nodded.
“Yeah,” he said, and she beamed.
“Oh, Frankie. It is happening! Aren’t you excited?”
He nodded again. The last couple weeks, driving through the plains, had been hell. She’d been sick and throwing up a lot, and she hadn’t wanted to be touched. Frank figured that was it. He’d knocked her up, and she wasn’t interested in him anymore. The problem was, he was still very interested in her. Now, as he sat in front of her with his hands on her breasts, he felt quite excited, but he suspected his reasons might be different from hers. He took his hands away, embarrassed. He didn’t want to lie to her.
She looked surprised, and then she laughed. “Pauvre petit Frank,” she said, mocking him. She caught his hands again and pulled him toward her. He resisted for about half a second.
“You feeling . . . I mean, is it okay?”
She lay back on the nest of bedding and drew him on top. “Sois gentil,” she whispered.
Carefully he levered his body like a ramp, tilting on the fulcrum of his knees, but he stopped short, afraid of putting any weight on her. She guided him inside. “It is fine. It doesn’t hurt.” She arched her back and pressed against him, to get him started, then giggled. “Frank Perdue, you must relax! You are stiff as the board of wood.”
He attempted a few tentative thrusts, then froze altogether. “Oh, shit!” he said, looking like he’d just seen a ghost.
“What is wrong?”
“You don’t think—”
“What?”
“You don’t think that it’s, like, watching us, do you?” It seemed to him a reasonable fear.
“Watching?”
“You know . . . the baby.”
Charmey started to laugh. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and before he knew it, she had rolled him over and she was on top, riding him like a child on a hobbyhorse. Her smile turned rapt, abstract, and for a moment she looked like the kid he’d first mistaken her for. Then she leaned over
so that the ends of her hair brushed his face and their noses were almost touching.
“Do you know how big is your bébé now?” She held her fingers up in front of his eyes. “This big. Like the bean . . . how do you say? Of the leema.”
“A lima bean?”
“Oui.” She arched her back and took his hands and placed them on her belly. “If our bébé is watching we must teach her, no?” She looked down at him sternly. “We must teach our bébé not to fuck like a plank, Frank.”
That was all fine, Frank thought, and he did his best, but the whole thing seemed unreal. The Seeds seemed to welcome the idea of the baby, so he felt he should, too. The problem was, he had serious doubts. He tried to imagine himself as a father and just drew a blank. He wished Charmey hadn’t said that about the lima bean. It only made things more complicated. Now whenever he thought about the baby, all he could picture was succotash.
The following day they reached Salt Lake City. The Spudnik, like a tropical pod swept along by wintry air masses, came to rest in a parking lot of a mall just outside the city limits. It was warm inside. Geek lit up a fat dube of Maui Wowie.
