by Ruth Ozeki
She shook her head and sniffled, then tucked the wad back into her cuff, but it fell out again. Wherever she went, she left behind a trail of soggy tissues.
“It’s the death of the land,” he told them. “Soil’s dead now. Water’s dead, too. You should have seen the birds when I was a boy! Oh, my goodness, the sky would be black with ’em!”
“Oh, man!” they said. “You are so cool! ”
I am? Lloyd thought.
He is? his daughter wondered.
She would stand at his bedroom door and hover on the threshold or by the ledge of the windowsill, as though to ensure an escape route should she need one. It made Lloyd nervous.
“Don’t they drive you nuts?” she asked.
“No. I like them. You drive me nuts.”
She looked hurt. “Me? Why?”
“The way you’re standing there. Either come all the way in or get out.”
She hesitated, then came in and sat down on Melvin’s chair. She stared at the same spot on the carpet for a long time, but the effect was not the same as when Melvin sat there. Melvin gave off a sense of calm, which settled around his shoulders as though all the molecules in the air were aligning and coming to rest around him. Yumi’s molecules were just twitching and fidgeting all over the place, the way they always had.
“How can you tolerate them?” she asked at last. “You hate hippies.”
“Is that what they are?”
“Of course that’s what they are! Don’t tell me you didn’t notice. Look at Melvin’s hair!”
“They are respectful,” Lloyd said. “They listen.”
“They take drugs, Dad. They smoke pot—can’t you smell it on them?”
“They smell like the outdoors.”
“Fine. Look at the way they dress, then. You would never have let me out of the house dressed like that.”
“Didn’t seem to stop you. You left anyway.”
“I left because you couldn’t tolerate my lifestyle,” she said.
“You left because you couldn’t face your mother and me after what you’d done.”
She’d been fourteen years old. How can a fourteen-year-old have a lifestyle? But looking at the boy, Phoenix, he saw that one could. The boy skulked around the house wearing a pair of brand-new Carharts, so big they slipped way down around his hipbones, showing a good six inches of his boxer shorts underneath. What was keeping them up? Lloyd wondered. It made him nervous to watch the boy, worrying that he’d lose the whole lot altogether.
“You steal those trousers off of someone’s clothesline, boy?” Lloyd asked, trying to make a joke. “Could fit two of you in there, one in each leg.”
When the boy still refused to answer, Lloyd gave up. “Get a belt,” he said curtly.
The girl was different. She was still just a little thing and dressed in whatever it was that her mother put on her. She was more interested in what was going on inside a person’s body than what the person wore on it. She stuck by Melvin like a burr whenever he was changing Lloyd’s ostomy bag. The operation continued to bother her, and she bothered Melvin, asking questions incessantly:
“What’s a nintestine?”
“Do I have a bowel?”
“How does it get to my butthole?”
Finally Melvin called Lilith, who took the girl into the bathroom. Down the hallway Lloyd could hear them, talking and giggling.
“That tickles! ” Ocean squealed from time to time, and then their voices dropped down again to a murmur.
He had drifted off to sleep when the door to his bedroom flew open and Ocean burst in, buck naked, covered with paint.
“Tutu Lloyd!” she cried. “Look! I’ve got organs! ”
She twirled around as though to show off a party dress, so he could see what had been painted on her skin: great sulfur-colored lungs on either side of a purplish liver; a large, bean-shaped stomach; a loopy mass of gray, serpentine intestine; a pair of small, podlike ovaries.
“I’ve got two,” she explained happily as she traced the fallopian tubes that sprouted from the pods like tentacles. “Phoenix and Poo don’t have any, because they’re boys.” She bent over to inspect her belly. “Don’t they look like flowers?”
Lloyd averted his eyes. “Put some clothes on,” he said. His voice came out sounding harsh and cruel, and instantly he regretted it.
Ocean froze. Her arms dropped to her sides, but just as quickly they rose again to hug her chest, smudging the greasepaint and smearing the carefully drawn twists of her viscera. Desperate and naked, she looked at Lilith, who stood in the doorway holding a paintbrush.
Lloyd panicked, tried to think of something to say. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
“Why don’t you show him your heart?” Lilith suggested.
Lloyd looked at her gratefully. “Yes,” he said. “Show me your heart.”
It was bright red and plump and purple veined, tucked beneath her rib cage.
“Can you feel it beating?” she whispered.
“My goodness,” Lloyd said.
“I can feel yours, too.”
Her small hand on his bare chest was warm and light. When she scampered from the room to show her organs to her mother, Lloyd laid his hand on the spot she’d touched, as though to hold in the warmth, and when he removed it, he noticed the stain on his skin. He turned over his palm. It was smeared with the bloodred paint from her greasy heart.
zesties
“Waffle Fries.”
“Dinner Browns.”
“Simply Shreds.”
“Potato Zesties.”
“What are we going to tell them?” Lilith asked, peeling off a sticky orange label and applying it to the side of the box of frozen Zesties.
“Depends on what we decide to do,” said Y.
“I’m for staying,” Geek said. “I want to learn more about their seed operation.”
Y closed the freezer door and moved on to the next one. “What about our work?”
“This is our work, and what better place to do it? This is the heart of potato country. Awesome place for actions.”
“Criss Cross Fries.”
“Twice Baked Potatoes, three different flavors.”
Y studied the stacks of newly labeled boxes and shook his head. “So we say like, ‘Hey, dudes, I know we just met and all, but do you mind if we live in your driveway?’ ”
“No,” said Geek. “We offer to pitch in and help.” He held out his hand to Frankie for another sheet. The labels were bright safety orange, each carrying Charmey’s illustration of a spud overlaid with the skull and crossbones. Underneath the graphic read a warning: DANGER! BIOHAZARD! THESE POTATOES MAY CONTAIN A GENETICALLY ENGINEERED PESTICIDE! He stepped back and squinted at the freezer shelves. “Hey, these new labels show up great! They pass the squint test.”
“Golden Crinkles.”
“Curley QQQ’s.”
“Lloyd won’t mind,” Lilith said. “He acts crusty, but he’s really sweet inside. Did you hear what he was saying about the death of the land? That blew me away. I want to use that on the Web site.”
“What about the old lady?” asked Frankie. He was acting as lookout, scanning the aisles for stock boys and supermarket management.
Geek rubbed his hands to warm them up. “She’s cool. She showed me the greenhouse and the seed shed. What a collection! It’s like a gold mine in there.”
“So who’s the problem?”
“Yummy,” said Lilith, making a face.
“Yumi,” Geek corrected. “You pronounce it ‘Yumi.’ She’s not so bad. She’s just got a lot going on with her parents and her kids.”
“Whatever. She’s very uncool. You checked out her Web site. Yummy Acres? ”
“I agree that’s dumb, but I like her. She’s a teacher.”
Lilith snorted. “Geek, she’s also a real estate agent. She supports the private ownership of land!”
“Tater Tots.”
“Tater Babies.”
�
�Fast Food Fries.” Y was finishing the last stack. “Can you believe they would name something ‘Fast Food Fries’? Like that’s a selling point?”
“I bet they taste great,” said Frankie wistfully.
“I bet all this shit tastes great,” said Y, closing the freezer. “Okay, Seeds. That’s all twenty-seven different varieties of frozen processed potato products, not including all the flavor variations.”
“Wow.”
They stood back and admired their work. All the boxes and bags of potatoes, stacked on the freezer-section shelves, now carried safety-orange biohazard labels, permanently and prominently displayed on their sides, facing the consumer.
“Excellent work,” Y declared, clapping Frankie on the shoulder. “What the government won’t provide, the citizens must. Stop-N-Save shoppers deserve to know what puts the zest in their Zesties and the curl in their QQQ’s, eh, Frankie? How we doing? You think it’s safe to hit the dairy section?”
Frankie shook his head. “One of the stock boys is looking at us funny. I think we should split.”
“Hey,” said Lilith, glancing around. “Where’s Charmey with my produce?”
They found her in the Fresh Foods section, pushing a shopping cart and digging through a heap of waxy cucumbers. “Quel dommage,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Not one organic vegetable in all of Power Country.”
“I can’t perform with nonorganic,” Lilith complained, picking up a cucumber and looking at it in disgust.
“Can’t be helped,” said Y. “Just wash it real well and say it’s organic.”
“I’m not putting that toxic shit inside my body!” she cried. “And anyway, I can’t believe you’re saying this! Talk about a total sellout! Isn’t it?”
Lilith looked around the group for support. Geek studied a squash. Charmey moved on to the bell peppers. Several shoppers stopped to stare.
“Keep your voice down,” Y said. “It’s not like you’re telling people to buy nonorganic. Your message still has integrity. Consider it advertising.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing? Advertising? This work is sacred to me!” Eyes blazing, she hurled the cucumber at Y’s head. He fielded it expertly, plucking it out of the air like a football, which seemed to make Lilith madder. She stormed down the produce aisle toward the checkout and the exit.
“I’ll talk to her,” said Y. “Go ahead and buy the stuff. She’ll use it.” He tossed the cuke to Charmey, who put it in the shopping cart along with the other vegetables.
“What’s up with this act of hers anyway?” Frankie asked.
Geek sighed. “It’s complex. C’mon. Let’s finish up and get out of here.”
They followed Charmey past the salad greens, toward the root vegetables, and paused while she inspected the turnips.
“You know we have the Web site, right?” Geek said. “Mostly to promote our political agenda, but there’s also a part that Lilith runs. It was her idea. The Internet is so full of porno for men, she wanted to create an erotic site for women.”
“Wow,” Frankie said. “Cool. Why?”
“She envisioned a women-only space where sex could be both fun and sacred. Where women could log on and look at empowering images and exchange stories and get turned on. She wanted the gateway to be nonthreatening, so she chose food production as a theme, because traditionally that’s been woman’s work and as such is a good platform for social critique.”
Geek picked up a parsnip and tossed the turnip into Charmey’s cart. “The food/sex thing’s been done before, but Lilith does it quite literally. The site is called ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights.’ I set it up for her. Lilith does her routines, and we videotape them and upload the material from Internet cafés or public libraries, wherever we can find some decent thruput. Then we invite women to respond—”
There were several shoppers nearby. Geek lowered his voice. “I don’t know. We get a lot of hits, but I don’t know how many are from women.”
From across the aisle, by the onions, Charmey made a snorting sound.
“What do you mean?” Frank asked.
Geek coughed, then wiped his glasses on his sweater. “It’s the e-mail. Maybe it’s because I’m a guy and I recognize the diction, but ‘Oh, yeah, I dig your melons’ or ‘I’m gonna ram my fat yam up your pressure cooker, baby’ does not seem like a feminist sentiment.”
“Oh,” Frankie said. “Right.”
Charmey spun on her heel and took off toward the checkout aisles. They followed, standing in line behind her, but she ignored them. She picked up a folded leaflet from a display at the register and read it with her back turned to them.
“Lilith doesn’t seem to get it,” Geek continued. “She says I’m sexist. Says it’s just healthy role play and that the e-mails prove that women are responding to the site by getting in touch with their machisma.” He shrugged. “Maybe. This year we added the Secret Garden. It’s a membership site. We take Visa, MasterCard, American Express. It’s pretty unbelievable. We’re raking in the dough.”
Charmey turned on him. “Comme tu est bête! Of course Lilith gets it! She is not stupid. Except somebody must work and make the money, no?” She thrust the leaflet at Frankie and left them standing there.
The checkout girl was waiting. Geek started to unload the produce onto the conveyor belt. “Charmey’s right, of course. The site pays for our traveling and actions and helps with legal expenses.”
Frankie looked down at the paper he was holding. It was an information sheet put out by the Idaho Potato Promotions Council. “Fun Facts About Potatoes.” He stuck it in his pocket.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “That’s a good thing, right? I mean, Lilith is doing something she wants to do anyway, plus it pays the bills? What’s the problem?”
Geek nodded. “No problem,” he said, pulling out his wallet. “Sometimes it makes the rest of us feel a little scummy, is all.”
a growing season
“Be careful!” Lloyd said. “You’ll spill all over the bedspread.”
I held my breath and stared at the hole in his stomach that formed the egress of his intestine. It was bright red and shiny, an angry nub. The skin surrounding it was fragile and my hands unsure. I daubed too hard.
“Don’t wipe so hard! Oh, now look what you’ve done!” It was only the tiniest bit of blood, but it horrified us both. “Where’s Melvin?”
I turned away, still holding my breath, and hauled open the window. The cold, fresh air cut the stench from his bowel. I stood there, breathing, while the nub dried, and he lay against the pillows with his eyes closed, recovering from the indignity of depending on his blundering daughter. Looking out his bedroom window I could see all the way from the driveway over to the garden and the greenhouse to the fields beyond. My face burned and the chill air felt good.
“I’m cold,” Lloyd said. “Shut that window and come finish what you started.”
A teal-colored pickup truck with the Sheriff’s Department insignia on the door panel turned into the driveway.
“Who’s that?” Lloyd asked, struggling to sit up. “Is someone here? Is it Melvin? Tell Melvin to come up here. I need him.”
“It’s not Melvin.” I closed the window and stepped away. Two cops climbed down from the truck, scanned the property, then strolled toward the house. The gait was unmistakable, the slow roll of a holstered hip, like they had all the sweet time in the world. Farm bred and big, they were pig-faced motherfuckers—but I was trying not to say this kind of thing out loud anymore. I put my hand to my mouth and bit my knuckle. The children were with Cass, looking at some newly hatched chicks, which is to say they were as safe as they could be and still be on this earth. Poo was napping in my bedroom, still too little to be in trouble with the law.
“Who is it?” asked Lloyd. “Where’s Momoko? Aren’t you going to go downstairs and see who it is?”
“I can see.”
I turned back to the bed and secured the flange on his apparatus. I snapped the bag on ti
ght.
“Ouch,” he said. “Who is it?”
I tossed a bathrobe at him and headed for the door. “It’s the police. Maybe they’ve come to arrest your hippie friends.”
I have a runaway’s fear of the cops. The sight of a uniform triggers a cloaking response—recoil like a mollusk, shrink back against a wall. Cops can smell a runaway, and as soon as they catch a whiff, they start looking. If you let them lock eyes with you, you’re toast. I’ve tried hard to overcome this response. I don’t want my kids growing up cowed by the authority of the state. But no matter how often I assert my own authority—that of a parent, a professor, an abandoned Ph.D.—the time I spent on the street overshadows it all. Fear is catching. When Phoenix was little, I saw his face grow cloudy at the approach of a patrol car, and even Ocean, who is afraid of nothing, fidgets in the presence of an officer of the law.
Then again, perhaps this is not about being a runaway at all. Maybe it’s perfectly normal—a healthy response, even, to the sight of a man with a club and a gun.
When the knock came, it was surprisingly gentle. I expected the house to shake and the shutters to fall to the ground. I went to the door. The flimsy mesh of the screen obscured the details of their faces but offered me little in the way of real protection; it was as insubstantial as a San Francisco fog.
“Miz Fuller?”
Now, who would that be? I glanced over my shoulder, hoping Miz Fuller would stride forth, drying her hands on her apron, and deal with these thugs.
“Yummy Fuller, ain’t it?” said the older of the two. “Mind if we have a word?”
I backed away from the door and let them open it. They followed me into the kitchen. I saw them look around at the stove labeled BREADBOX and the clock labeled MR. COFFEE—the place looked like a nuthouse. Damn Phoenix, I thought, even as the sign reminded me.
“Coffee?” I asked, and was relieved to hear that I sounded almost normal.
They looked at each other. “Yes, ma’am,” said the younger. “If it’s no trouble.”
I got two mugs from the cupboard, trying to keep my hand from shaking as I poured the milk into the pitcher.
