Delta Girls

by Gayle Brandeis

  “It’s harder to get into the country these days,” he said. “Crackdowns at the border. Crackdowns over paperwork once they do get in. You know.”

  I nodded, trying to keep an eye on Quinn.

  “Plus the Lake County pears came in early this year,” he said. “Usually the Delta pears are the first on the market. Delta, then Lake, then Oregon, then Washington, then Canada. The crew follows them up the coast. Now they’re split in half.”

  “I suppose you’re firing me.” I missed the houseboat already. I knew Quinn would miss it even more.

  “I’m firing you from the crew,” he said, “not from the farm.”

  Before he could elaborate, Quinn called for me, her voice frantic, and my heart caught in my throat. I ran toward her voice, pear branches smacking me in the face.

  She wasn’t bleeding when I found her, thank God; there were no bee stings, no coyotes cornering her, no men with stickers. She was simply standing, awestruck, beneath a tree; clear long-necked wine bottles rose upside down from its branches like candelabras. A pear hovered inverted inside the widest curve of each, like a pale green lightbulb. It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen.

  “How’d they get the pears in there?” Quinn peered up at the tiny mouths of the bottles. When the glass caught the sun, I had to shield my eyes.

  “They grow in there.” Mr. Vieira ambled over.

  “Upside down?” I asked. It seemed impossible that gravity would let the bottom of the fruit swell on top like that.

  He nodded and pointed out the intricate contraption around every bottle—netting and string connecting it to the branch above, gauze plugged loosely inside each neck to keep bugs away. They put the bottles over the baby pears right after the blossoms fall off. Only one pear per branch—only the “king,” the one with the biggest blossom; the rest they trim away, along with all the leaves around it, so the tree can channel its nutrients into the bottle.

  “How do you get the pears out?” Quinn asked.

  “You don’t,” said Mr. Vieira. “You pour booze in the bottles and sell them, pear and all.”

  “That must be quite a sight,” I said, my face still stinging from the branches.

  “Eighty bucks a pop,” said Mr. Vieira proudly. “Eau-de-vie, distilled right here.”

  I knew enough French to make out “water of life.”

  “I’ll have to try it sometime,” I said, even though I never drank when Quinn was around. Which was always. And before she was born, I had only had a few sips of champagne.

  “You got eighty bucks on you, you can.”

  “You should put all your pears in bottles if they make that much money.” Mr. Vieira sold his commercial pears for about twelve cents a pound. The ones he sold directly to markets brought in a bit more.

  “Too much work.” Mr. Vieira tapped one of the bottles. “Besides, we only do it with our Comice trees.”

  I took a closer look. The pears were rounder than the Bartletts, more squat. Some of them blushed a sexy pink on parts of their smooth skin.

  “These need to be picked in the next few days,” he said. “You got to be more careful with the glass. Don’t want to bruise them pears.”

  “Or cut yourself,” said Quinn.

  “Or cut yourself,” said Mr. Vieira. “You have to be slower with the bottles. Think you can handle it?”

  “Of course.” My shoulders felt like they were about to shatter, but I could stretch to work out some of the tension. I hadn’t been stretching enough. And I could pace myself.

  “We need help in the distillery, too.”

  “Thank you.” Some tears, embarrassingly, sprang to my eyes. Mr. Vieira looked away.

  “Gotta go tell them guys they don’t have to quit.” He turned and walked toward the crew. The light bouncing off the bottles made the back of his plaid shirt shimmer like water.

  The woman who had been driving the trailer, the one with the walleye, stepped out from behind a tree, making Quinn jump. She wore another formless housedress, and men’s brown corduroy slippers with hard soles. Her hair had a life of its own—short salt-and-pepper waves that rose and fell in uneven tufts.

  “Mrs. Vieira?” I had guessed before, but it had not been confirmed.

  She nodded and shook my hand. Her palm was dry and callused, like the bottom of a foot.

  “It’s very kind of you and your husband to let me work here,” I said, blinking hard.

  She nodded again and smiled. It was a bit disconcerting, not knowing which eye to look into when I smiled back. Without saying a word, she pointed to the tree, then showed me how some of the pears had pulled away from their branches inside the bottles. All we had to do was cut off the string and netting, gently turn the bottle right side up, and set it in a sectioned wooden crate. If the pear was still attached to the branch but looked perfect, we needed to unhook the bottle from its string, tip it slowly so the pear slid down as close to the mouth as possible, and snip the stem off the spur.

  The work was slow, methodical, but it still scratched up my arms.

  ———

  “HOW DO THEY know how to do it?” asked Quinn later as we walked through the orchard to our car. “How do all the pears know to grow at the same time?”

  “They just do,” I said.

  “But how?” She touched a trunk as if it could tell her, and I realized I hadn’t really thought about it before. It was a remarkable feat of choreography, all the Bartletts in the orchard, in the whole region, burgeoning in sync.

  “Maybe they whisper to each other underground,” I said. “Like friends planning to wear the same shirt on the same day.”

  I caught myself, knowing she didn’t know what that was like—calling friends, coordinating outfits—but she nodded as if she did. Then again, I had said it as if I knew what it was like, myself. We were both good at pretending we were part of the normal world.

  THE PICKERS WERE heading out, too. They kept their distance, but at least they didn’t look like they wanted to murder me. Maybe I could practice picking more so I could join them after we got all the bottles down. So many pears would rot without my hands. As we drove around the edge of the orchard, I felt a wave of protectiveness, almost maternal, for the trees. I didn’t want all their hard work to be for nothing.

  QUINN AND I parked and walked toward the metal staircase leading down to the pier. The Delta breezes were starting to pick up; I welcomed the touch of chill.

  Across the water lay the remains of an old pear orchard. The trees had been chopped down and stacked in enormous gray piles all over the field, like some sort of bonfire site for giants. The cows that grazed there were dwarfed next to the huge stacks—they looked like miniature critters, like something that could crawl onto your palm. I felt small looking at the heaps of wood, too. They threw the scale of everything off.

  A whiff of the dead wood crossed the water, a dry, dusty scent. I felt a little chill even though the wind wasn’t cold. I glanced back at the Vieiras’ pear trees, just to make sure they were still there, that they, too, hadn’t turned gray and toppled over. It wouldn’t take much for the orchard to fail.

  I found myself wanting to say something to Quinn about how we were perched on a levee between life and death, green and gray; I wanted to tell her what a precarious edge it was, how easy it would be to slip over to the other side. Then she took my hand before we went down the steps, and I decided to let her believe we were safe.

  KAREN LOOKED DOWN THE FRONT OF HER RED DRESS as she bent over to lace her skates. Shocking to see skin after years of high-collared costumes, a big swath of it down the front. Not that it was skin, exactly—it was nylon covered with netting; the approximation of skin. The promise of it. A plunging neckline. A daring peek at her shoulder blades.

  Deena had finished making the costumes just a few days before Regionals. Karen and Nathan didn’t have much time to test them out on the ice, to make sure they could move and breathe with them, that they wouldn’t slice up each other’s h
ands.

  Paillettes and Swarovski crystals studded the dress like seeds on a strawberry; they had the same intricate pattern, too—whorls and honeycombs that seemed so organic, it was as if the cloth, what little there was of it, had been plucked from some glamorous vine. Deena had farmed out the beadwork, but had done all the stitching herself.

  “You’ll get them hoping for a nip slip.” Nathan walked into the dressing room, and Karen kicked her skate at him. There was no chance of a wardrobe malfunction—the dress cinched her in tight, plus she had tape over her nipples to avoid any poking in the cold. Nathan did, too, beneath his one-sleeved, elaborately beaded unitard. His left shoulder rose from it, smooth and muscled.

  Karen’s breasts ached beneath the adhesive. Her period had just started, always a bummer at competition time. She wondered if she should follow what some of the girls did and go on birth control pills to regulate her cycle, to plan the pills so she wouldn’t bleed during competition season. When she suggested it, though, her mother said, “They’ll make you fat.” Karen thought that was the end of the conversation until Deena said, “If you diet enough, your period stops altogether. Few elite athletes bleed.”

  Karen rolled her tights down over her skates, secured the elastic strap underneath. She liked the new trend of wearing tights over skates—they made her legs look longer, the line not broken by a chunky white boot. Her feet looked like Herman Munster’s, but that was a small price to pay for slightly more elegant stems.

  “You look great,” Nathan said as they stood next to each other in the mirror.

  “We look great,” she said. She couldn’t help but reach up to his shoulder, rest her hand briefly on his warm naked skin.

  THE ONE BAD THING ABOUT THE HOUSEBOAT WAS THE mosquitoes. We kept all the screens closed, but we were still riddled with bites, ones that swelled into fierce pink mounds. The sorter women had told Quinn mud would make the bites feel better; she kept slapping it on herself until she looked like some sort of swamp creature. After her shower each night, I replaced the mud with calamine lotion, but the bites were so bad, she found it hard to sleep. That wasn’t a problem for me anymore. Working in the pear orchard, even with the slower pace of the bottles, somehow made me more tired than anything I had done before. Or maybe just having a comfortable bed helped knock me out. Even the whine of the most persistent mosquito couldn’t keep me awake.

  “Eema!” Quinn’s voice managed to pull me out of sleep. She was standing at the edge of the bed. “There’s a monster outside!”

  “It’s just a dream,” I mumbled. The houseboat was rocking, as if a barge was passing by. That sometimes happened during the night. And the Delta breezes could get pretty intense.

  “No, it’s a monster! I saw it!”

  “Here, get into bed with me.” I lifted the sheets and Quinn crawled in, her whole body trembling in her thin nightgown. The top of her head smelled like sunbaked dirt.

  “I’m scared, Eema.” Quinn wrapped her arms tightly around my waist, hooked one leg over both of mine.

  “Dreams can be scary.” I closed my eyes again, felt my body rise and fall with the waves. “It’s probably from all the myths you’ve been reading. Go back to sleep.”

  “Do you think it was Kraken?” she asked.

  Kraken was a Norse sea creature with many arms, like the roots of an upturned tree. He would wrap those arms around ships and pull them underwater.

  “It wasn’t Kraken.” A mosquito whined in my ear.

  “It came out of the water and looked at me.” Her heart raced against my side.

  “Just tell yourself that when you fall back to sleep, you won’t dream about it again.” I could feel sleep tugging at me, wanting to pull me back under.

  “You never believe me.” Quinn’s words sent a shock through my chest. I wanted to tell her that wasn’t true, that she was the only thing I believed, the only thing I believed in, but then sleep closed over me again and sealed me away.

  I WOKE WHEN something brushed against the back of my leg. Something bigger than Quinn, who was sound asleep on my other side, wedged between me and the wall. Something hairy. It burrowed in closer, pressed against my back, leaking heat. Was this the monster Quinn had warned me about?

  I sat up screaming. So did Quinn. So did the strange man in our bed.

  “What the hell?” He jumped out and turned on the overhead light. He was just wearing striped boxers, his legs and chest furred. His hair flopped onto his olive-skinned face; a soul patch sprouted below his lower lip.

  “Get out of here, you pervert!” I yelled, kicking at the sheets, my voice both higher and raspier than I thought it could get.

  “Wait a second,” said the man. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” I shouted. Quinn clung to me, shaking.

  “This is my boat.” The guy looked more puzzled than dangerous.

  “No it’s not,” said Quinn into my shoulder. “It’s Mr. Vieira’s boat.”

  “I’m Mr. Vieira,” he said.

  “No you’re not,” said Quinn. I tried to shush her as I pulled the sheet back up over my nightgown, knees drawn to my chest, pulse still pounding in my ears. I looked at his bushy eyebrows, his generous nose. Relief flooded in.

  “You must be the son.” My voice had almost fallen back into its normal register.

  “Benjamim Vieira.” He held out his hand. Ben-ha-meem. He looked exhausted. “Ben.”

  “Izzy.” His hand was damp but firm when I shook it. My leg prickled where his leg had brushed against it. “And my daughter, Quinn. We’re helping at the orchard.”

  “I’m sure it’s appreciated.” He pulled his pants back on, tugged a shirt over his head.

  I could feel my cheeks flush. Watching him zip up his fly somehow felt more intimate than seeing him in his underwear.

  “I guess I’ll head over to the house, then,” he said. “Didn’t want to scare the folks—they weren’t expecting me for another week. Sorry I scared you instead. I honestly had no idea you were there—I was so tired; I just thought the sheets were bunched up.”

  “At least you’re not a monster,” said Quinn.

  “I try not to be.” Ben picked up his backpack.

  ———

  “SO YOU MET my son,” Mr. Vieira said as we unhooked more bottles from the tree the next morning. I felt my face get hot again. “Scared the hell out of my wife last night. She wakes if she hears a pear drop—thought someone was breaking in.”

  “He gave us a pretty good scare, too.” I looked at a pear inside one of the bottles. It had grown against the glass; one side of the fruit was completely flat. No one would buy it for eighty dollars.

  “Didn’t mean nothing by it,” said Mr. Vieira. “He just wanted to come down for the festa.”

  I handed Quinn a bottle, which she placed carefully in a section of the wooden crate. She looked serious, nervous. A couple of wasps started to buzz around the bottles and she jumped back, almost knocking the crate over. She hadn’t mentioned the monster or Ben’s visit all day, but I could tell both were weighing on her.

  “Say”—Mr. Vieira reached for another bottle, carefully untying it from the branch—“why don’t you come to the festa with us? Get out a little. It would be good for the girl to have some sopa.”

  I had no idea what a festa was, or a sopa. He spread out his arms and said, “Nine thousand pounds of beef!” and I was even more confused.

  “Is it a big crowd?” Maybe it would be better to just stay in the orchard, on the boat.

  “Only all the Portuguese in the Delta,” he said, but that didn’t help.

  “Can we go, Eema?” Quinn looked so earnest, her eyes bright, her mind not on monsters for the first time all day.

  “Do you really want to?” I handed her another bottle. “You don’t even know what it is.”

  “I do, Eema,” she said. “I really really want to go.”

  Mr. Vieira looked at me as if to say See? I told you.

  “We’
ll miss the mass,” he said, “but if we clean up fast when we’re done picking, we might make the parade.”

  ———

  MRS. VIEIRA WAS loading cases of her homemade pear preserves in the back of their silver pickup truck when we drove back to their house, freshly showered and changed. Quinn had put on what she considered her best outfit—a plaid dress shirt and a floral skirt, with green penny loafers; I had thrown on clean jeans and a black tank top, some worn huaraches, large sunglasses. A slash of lip gloss, which I hadn’t done in ages.

  Ben came out of the house, carrying another box of preserves to add to the stack. His cargo shorts gave me a good glimpse of his hairy legs. I blushed as I remembered their tickly heft.

  “So we meet out of bed,” he said as he walked down the steps, and I felt my blush grow deeper.

  He set the box in the back of the truck. The jars clanked and settled inside. “Need anything else, Ma?” he asked. She shook her head.

  He walked over and bent down next to Quinn. “Sorry I scared you last night,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” she said, but leaned hard into my side.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. I couldn’t seem to look him in the eye as he stood back up, but I could feel him the way you feel static electricity, a thick buzz all over my skin.

  WE PILED INTO the Vieiras’ truck—Mr. and Mrs. Vieira in the front bucket seats, Quinn squeezed between me and Ben in the bench seat behind them. The center of Comice wasn’t too far away—just about a mile after crossing the yellow bridge—but the road was so uncharacteristically full of cars, it took almost fifteen minutes to get there. I stared out the window the whole time, too embarrassed to look in Ben’s direction.

  Downtown Comice wasn’t much to speak of—just a couple of blocks of worn brick and wooden storefronts, many of them vacant, most built by Portuguese immigrants in the late 1800s, the Vieiras among them. The majority of the Portuguese settlers in the Delta had become dairy farmers, but a few, like the Vieiras, had turned to pears. You could still buy Portuguese sweet bread and wine and cheese and linguica from little shops that also sold Twinkies and Bud Light. The street, normally quiet, was bustling with families and packs of teenagers as we drove slowly past.