Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  War crimes must be a lot more interesting to him than summer-squash contests, because Owen is present with us now. Hands on hips, head cocked to the side, he is all in.

  And I want to tell him to mind his own damn business. Even in front of his friends. I want to tell him that his brothers and I are having an important political discussion and that he is off topic. And I would, except that this is his business, and this is the topic.

  The divorce, as much as I’ve been trying to pretend otherwise, is five people’s business—mine, Mr. Wonderful’s, and the boys’, too. It has stretched beyond what I wanted or expected, out into the world around us. It isn’t just happening to me, it is happening to all five of us. We are getting divorced.

  And amid the anger, the disappointment, the current events, the squash bombs, the grocery bill, and the grief, we are going to have to find a way to live with it.

  · · ·

  Later that day I settle back into my flowered chair in front of the window. Not for good this time, just for a few quiet minutes. The band has gone home and the boys are in bed. I’m raising three opinionated young men, and discussing life with them wears me out. When they were little, I had all the answers—or if I didn’t, I could at least buffalo my way through. Now I sometimes feel like I don’t even know the questions.

  I bought a Zen book from the library’s used-book sale, and when times get tough the author suggests this two-step solution: be aware of your surroundings, and inventory your immediate blessings. This advice from A Deeper Beauty sounds easy and harmless enough; I might as well give it a try.

  My little farm is almost within sight of the 45th parallel, and this far north the September light late in the day has a golden cast to it. I watch the last of this light drench the slope from the house to the pasture and color my life’s present fortunes. A solidly built house. Land I’ve come to make fertile. Sons who love me and love each other, war games and verbal sparring and gaps of historical knowledge aside.

  I take a deep, cleansing breath and ask Someone to please let us win the contest, and then I relax back into the safety of my chair. Movement outside in the near dark catches my eye. Tiptoeing past the window in their pajamas are two figures: Will and Luke. They each carry what looks like a rectangular piece of cloth in their hands. What are they up to now?

  I walk out onto the front porch and close the screen door very, very quietly. I have no idea where they are going or what they are doing, but I do know that mothers often see the best stuff when our children don’t know we’re watching them. My two younger boys head for the pasture and slip, like the slim and shaggy-haired shadows of coyotes, behind the barn. In just a few minutes, they retrace their steps and run back toward the house. I press myself flat against the wall by the front door and watch as they run through the mudroom door and then back inside.

  I’m not sure if they’ve seen me here or not, but I wait a few more minutes and hear them both run upstairs and jump back into their beds. Their bedside lights click off, and there is giggling, then whispering, then quiet, then crickets. Right now, two of my immediate blessings are pretty darn obvious.

  Full dark comes on quickly, I grab a flashlight and walk out to the pasture. There are lightning bugs twinkling above the vines like low-lying stars, and in two spots on the ground the leaves are disturbed and flattened. I find Will’s adopted squash and, nearby, Luke’s, too. Each one is still connected to its vine like a beating heart to a vein, but underneath them are two plaid flannel pillowcases, folded in half. The prisoners, I see, are not only completely safe, but warm and comfy, too.

  It’s this small kindness that finally cracks me open. “You’ve changed,” Mr. Wonderful observed the last time he dropped off the boys.

  I am alone now, so I let myself cry, really cry, for the first time since my husband moved out. It’s one thing to inventory your blessings; it’s another to care for, love, and nurture them in all of the ways they deserve. Money, time, energy, and resolve all feel so finite. So much depends on me now, and I wonder if I am tough enough to shoulder all of it alone. I wonder if I can keep my promise to give them everything by myself.

  Last week while Owen was driving with his new learner’s permit, a wild turkey flew right into our windshield. We were on a busy four-lane throughway, and I made Owen pull over—not to check for damage to the car but to check for damage to the bird. If the encounter was fatal, maybe we could eat the thing.

  There was no carcass in sight, but still, looking at possible roadkill as food is something I never would have done in the early, middle, or even declining years of my marriage. Make a pet of it? Yes. Tape its wing and nurse it back to health with an eyedropper of sugar water? Yes. Pluck it and eat it? Eww.

  “If it runs, a Bean will shoot it. If it falls, a Bean will eat it,” wrote Carolyn Chute, about her fictional backwoods family. This isn’t fiction, though. This is our actual life now. And if it flies into their green minivan’s windshield, a Link will pluck it.

  I guess Mr. Wonderful is right: I have changed. I’m no longer the tree-hugging, agnostic nature lover he married. Now I look at nature in a brand-new way—as something to eat.

  With the image of my two sons making their vegetable squashes comfortable on this chilly September night, I hold tight to the knowledge that there is still a bit of goodness in our world. That I find that goodness in the same spot where Major’s life unraveled is fitting, I suppose. Abu Ghraib was real and people are suffering and Major is dead and Pepper is gone and I am getting divorced and my children are hurting and we are broke. And I really don’t know if I’m tough enough to handle all of it. But inside our sturdy house my three immediate blessings are sleeping the sleep of the innocent. And I am still standing, looking out at our pasture, surrounded, for the time being, by goodness.

  · · ·

  From Monday to Friday Luke and Will care well for their squashes, and it shows. Each soil torpedo has thrived under all the special attention it is receiving and has nearly doubled in length and girth. Their skins have a green cast, but they are mostly white, with a few remaining dark-green speckles. These are not whistling-Dixie, citified, greenhorn, subdivision-garden squashes—oh, no! These are full-scale, all-out, extreme down-a-country-lane squashes, to the max. Whether or not they are zucchini squashes is for Popeye the baker to decide. On Friday morning, he gets his chance.

  I’ve told the boys that they can be late for school today, even though the possibility exists that our squashes might not be zucchini and could be disqualified. They refuse to consider this. They refuse to consider anything but victory. And so, wrapped in beach towels and riding on the boys’ laps is how the vegetable contestants arrive at the bakery.

  “Resistance,” Luke cheers from the passenger seat, “is futile!”

  We enter the bakery single-file, and Will, grinning happily and straining under his burden, announces to no one in particular, “We got two giant zucchinis here!”

  With a flourish that would make any magician proud, the boys whip the beach towels off their squashes in unison. There is an intake of breath behind the counter, and three women customers considering the pastry case turn and stare.

  The bakery is silent, except for the sound of industrial-grade mixers coming from the kitchen.

  “Mike!” the old woman behind the counter yells, not taking her eyes off the squashes. “Better come out!”

  Popeye Mike appears, wiping his hands on the front of his apron. He looks at me, then at the boys; then his dark eyes widen as they come to rest on the two squashes. The boys strain and hold them up for inspection, turning them this way and that. Their pale rinds catch the light and they begin to gleam.

  “We’d really like to enter both of these into your contest,” I tell him. “We’re just not sure that they’re zucchinis.”

  My sons purse their lips and frown, as if I were revealing military secrets. Popeye Mike comes out from around the counter and kneels down in front of both the boys and runs his hands over each of th
eir squashes. He squints, he flicks them with his thumb and forefinger, he bends down and sniffs them.

  “May I?” he asks Luke. Luke nods his assent. Popeye needs both hands to grip my middle son’s squash and heft it up into the light. He turns it first one way, then another, then hands it back to its owner.

  “May I?” he asks Will, who cannot hold his in his arms any longer but is sitting on the floor cross-legged with his squash in his lap. Will nods too, and Popeye Mike repeats his inspection … then makes his one-word determination: “Zucchini.”

  “Yesssss!” Will says, making a fist and bringing it down to rest near his waist like a pendulum.

  “Who’s your daddy!” Luke shouts.

  “These are the rarest of the rare, the white zucchini, and they only appear every seven years,” explains Popeye Mike. “They make a zucchini bread like no other.”

  The old woman behind the counter looks down suspiciously over her cat-eye glasses but smiles in spite of herself. The shoppers forget all about pastries and gather around my sons, admiring their squashes. Popeye Mike is talking now of zucchini muffins and zucchini bread and even mulling the viability of chocolate-frosted zucchini bars.

  This is all well and good, but what I want is the store credit. That’s what victory means to me.

  “Did we win?” I ask.

  “Did you win?! Did you win?!” Popeye Mike stands up guffawing, and walks back to the counter. “Look!”

  Displayed in a basket on top of the counter is our competition. They are so inconsequential that I haven’t even noticed them. A dozen or so dark-green zucchinis no bigger than a small submarine sandwich. Popeye Mike takes our squashes and puts them on the counter next to the basket. They are bigger than all of their competitors combined. They are bigger, by far, than the basket. Popeye Mike holds his paunch and laughs harder.

  “You just won first and second place! Boys, why don’t you pick out a cookie while I settle up with your ma.”

  On the ride home, the boys’ laps are empty, but their hands each hold a giant chocolate-chip cookie. They are a two-man army now, for a few minutes at least, not distant enemies at war with each other, and this makes me feel good.

  There was a flaw in our battle plan. If we had entered three zucchinis instead of just two, I’m convinced, we would have won first, second, and third place.

  Still, for once I—no, we—have done something right.

  I bungled our finances and allowed my own sadness to infect my sons. Our horses are gone and so is most of our money. But this, this growing of secret-weapon zucchini over a single moon phase with the discipline and hard work of my sons, we’ve done just about perfectly.

  4

  October 2005

  REAPING MOON

  A fool I was to sleep at noon,

  And wake when night is chilly

  Beneath the comfortless cold moon;

  A fool to pluck my rose too soon,

  A fool to snap my lily.

  My garden-plot I have not kept;

  Faded and all-forsaken,

  I weep as I have never wept:

  Oh it was summer when I slept,

  It’s winter now I waken.

  —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, “A Daughter of Eve”

  September’s warm days are gone; there’s frost on the pumpkins in the mornings now, and my shoulder is tight to the wheel of the rhythms that dominate our days. It’s a restless cold I feel under my jean jacket and work gloves. Work is getting done, though; and moping, in any form, is a distant memory. But so is the summer garden.

  While the boys are at school I come home early from work and can tomatoes and dilly beans, harvest spinach, peas, beets, cauliflower, and heavy armloads of squash. Not the unexpected and freaky squash that won the bakery contest, but the regular varieties I planned for and sowed just before the full planting moon back in May. That feels like someone else’s life now, someone else’s plan.

  At the bus stop one morning, Luke informs me that Einstein believed the concept of time was a fiction, dependent on our silly human need for a past, a present, and a future.

  “Don’t think about that for too long,” Luke warns, climbing the steps of the school bus and about to recede behind the louvered door, “or your head will explode.”

  With Will in elementary school, Luke in middle school, and Owen in high school this year, for the first time the boys now ride three different school buses, have three different start and end times to their day, and I am wooed by three different PTAs. If anything is going to make my head explode, it’s contemplating all of that.

  Though I am not, it turns out, exactly PTA material.

  The elementary school’s parent group is mulling field-trip opportunities when I show up to their meeting, fresh from muddy garden chores and eager to help. I missed the curriculum committee, but I can at least plan a field trip, can’t I?

  I think of those dozens of sets of idle hands and young backs with willing dispositions, cafeteria-provided snacks, and free transportation. And are you kidding me, of course I have an idea. They can spend the day at the Big Valley and learn how to weed, muck out empty stalls, compost aging horse manure, and shell overgrown beans. They can core tomatoes, blanch broccoli, and trim back perennials. They can work. It’s perfect!

  My obvious excitement at this brilliant use of public-school resources is, surprisingly, not returned by the rest of the parents, and a vote is taken. All in favor of a puppet show say aye, there’s a full chorus of ayes, and I never attend another PTA meeting.

  While the boys are at school, I stay away, and today mull over Luke’s advice about time and know that Einstein must not have been a gardener. He must not have had to put food by for his family for the winter. If he did, he’d know that time is as real as dirt and rain, and in the north you need four good months of it to turn a dime-sized seed into a blue Hubbard squash the size of a Thanksgiving turkey.

  If time really is just a fiction, then why do I feel like there’s never enough of it?

  I snap the blue Hubbard off its frost-wilted vine and carry it downstairs to join its colleagues in the root cellar. Stacked in pyramids in the cool dark like swollen bottles of fine wine are a couple dozen butternut, acorn, and delicata squash. Carrots will stay sweet in the garden until the soil around them takes a hard freeze, but then I’ll pull them up, trim their tops, and pack them in cardboard boxes filled with bags of sawdust left over from the stalled remodeling project and store them down here, too.

  Last night the boys and I picked all the green beans that grew too large and tough to eat whole, then I spent an hour sliding my thumbnail along their seam and plucking out the seeds. These are much like the dried beans you can buy at the grocery store, but softer and better tasting. They can be sautéed in olive oil for succotash, added to soups, mixed into stir-frys.

  In just a few short weeks I’ve gone from contemplating the beauty of mythical TV ranches to finding a use for old string beans. Two months ago I fancied myself the Victoria Barkley of the north, striding through my range-riding life. Today I’m sitting on my front porch, big toes poking out of wool socks, shelling beans into a jar. These changes happened so fast, it almost feels like time travel.

  And this day speeds by too, just like the others before it, but at four o’clock Owen bursts in the door, the first one home from school, grinning wide, his face flushed with excitement.

  “Aberration’s got a show!”

  His band has been invited to play “a show,” he says, this very night. Usually when my sons use terms I don’t understand I just give a nod and hone my ears, sure that an understandable meaning will eventually make itself known without my having to reveal my unhipness. And although I gather from his body language that “a show” is something to take pride in, I don’t. Not yet, anyway.

  “A show” sounds suspiciously like something public. I’ve been trying so hard to keep us within target range of normal that I really don’t want anyone to know that my oldest son, my pride and heir, not only
thinks that he is an aberration but aligns himself with a posse who share this worldview and even name their band in honor of it.

  You’re supposed to feel like an aberration in your teenage years, I gently prompt, when they’re here practicing together in the Quonset hut. That’s the point. It’s normal, I assure them. If there’s anything at all abnormal about these boy musicians, it’s that for a high-school death-metal band, they are actually pretty good.

  “What kind of a show?” I boldly ask Owen, who looks at me with what can only be pity.

  When I was a teenager, going to a show meant going to see a movie at the movie theater. But in today’s teen parlance it means paying a cover charge to go into a basement, a parking lot, a VFW hall, or a farmer’s field to hear local bands play. And tonight, just a regular old Wednesday night with school tomorrow, Aberration has been booked to perform at one of these events for the first time.

  Owen even pulls a homemade poster out of his backpack with the band’s name on it as proof.

  “Will you drive us?” he asks. Not “Can I go, Mom?” because he knows me, and knows that letting him go, and letting him stay out late on a school night, won’t really be an issue for me where something as important to him as music is concerned. Because he is my oldest, and has plenty of experience to draw upon, he also knows that this is how I mother: it does not even occur to me to say no.

  Even though according to the poster they don’t go on until 10 p.m., and even though that means they might not get to bed until 1 a.m., and even though Owen has to be at the bus stop by 6:35 tomorrow morning for school, and even though if I agree to drive them Luke and Will are going to be home all alone, and will have to put themselves to bed, it still does not occur to me to say no.

  Which son has a better chance of encountering danger? The fifteen-year-old out with his friends onstage at a late-night, coed, teenage rock “show”? Or an eight-year-old and his middle brother, who just turned thirteen, home alone with two loyal dogs, a microwave oven, and homework?