“We’re lucky, aren’t we, Eema?” Quinn had abandoned her word problems in the face of these bigger, more human problems. If a train leaves Oaxaca at fifty miles an hour, how many people will still be on top by the time it reaches Nogales?
For all the nights we had to sleep in our car, for all the uncertainty and confusion of our lives, we were a lot luckier than I had let myself realize. “That we are, sweetheart,” I said. When I looked at the men a few rows away, picking their hearts out, I felt a wave of admiration, a wave that felt very much like love. I found myself wanting to climb all their ladders, give them all hugs, tell each of them how glad I was they were there.
DEENA TOOK KAREN AND NATHAN OUT TO DINNER TO celebrate their second-place finish. A supper club that had been around for a while, with curved red leather banquettes and flickering chandeliers and a guy in a tux playing frantic classical music on a shiny black baby grand. She even let Karen order whatever she wanted, although she told the waiter “No, thank you” when he brought over a basket of rolls, insisted on vinegar only on the salad, cut the fat off the edge of Karen’s steak, and let her eat only a fraction of her buttery mashed potatoes.
“Here’s to Nationals.” Deena raised her glass of champagne and clinked Nathan’s flute before tapping it against Karen’s glass of diet ginger ale. “Hell, here’s to the Olympics in a year!”
People at a few tables around them clapped politely. Deena beamed in her black strapless dress like some sort of beauty queen. She had given Karen a new dress for the occasion, too—a sundress, smocked at the top, yellow with tiny little flowers, like something a five-year-old would wear. Karen tried to put the competition smile back on her face.
“I have a proposal, Mr. Main,” said Deena after everyone around them had turned back to their own conversations. “I think you should move in with us.” She swatted Nathan’s leg with a napkin.
Karen couldn’t imagine Nathan living across the hall. The thought made the mashed potatoes rise up in her throat.
“You won’t have to worry about rent,” said Deena. “And it will be easier for the two of you to train.” Deena was just about done turning the garage into a Pilates/dance studio, complete with mirrored walls, a ballet barre, and a harness for practicing jumps. It made Karen feel a little claustrophobic to think that she could do everything but skate without leaving her house. And her mom had even been looking into artificial rink surfaces for the backyard.
“We could train all night long.” Nathan met Karen’s eyes, but she quickly looked away, blushing.
“Now, now.” Deena swatted Nathan’s leg again, this time with her hand. Karen was dismayed to see her mom’s breasts jiggle in reverberation, even more dismayed to see how much Nathan seemed to enjoy the sight. Karen’s own breasts were pressed even flatter than normal by her dress; the smocking dug uncomfortably into her nipples, already chafed from the adhesive.
“This is what we’ve been working toward, sweetheart.” Deena cupped Karen’s face with her hands and Karen felt a sudden, unexpected rush of love for her mother.
“Thank God you didn’t find a way to screw it up,” said Nathan. Karen slumped back against the booth as Deena and Nathan clinked champagne flutes once again.
THE HOUSE FELT different with Nathan in it. His male scent seeped into the furniture, sent its musky pheromones into the air.
Karen found herself wishing they had a cooler house—something sleek and modern, full of sharp edges. Not a stodgy Cape Cod with pleated lampshades, etchings of hunt scenes and carriage rides, her great-grandmother’s dishes displayed in the china cabinet. The guest room with its chenille bedspread and fleur-de-lis wallpaper didn’t feel like the right place to keep Nathan. He should have a leather headboard, dark walls, recessed lighting. He should have satin pillowcases, strange metal sculptures, a bear skin on the floor. Still, she liked to poke her head into the room when he was downstairs to see his clothes shucked all over the rag rug, breathe in his mix of sweat and cologne and hair gel.
She found herself keeping her own bedroom door closed, only coming out if she was fully made up, wearing something other than ratty pajamas. She chewed breath mints before going out to brush her teeth in case they crossed paths in the hallway. She found herself posing when he walked into a room, trying to look studiously, sexily casual when she felt anything but, her leg draped over the arm of a chair as she read Jane Eyre, her bottom raised just a little as she lay on the floor, doing math problems. She found herself sitting across the breakfast table from him at 3 a.m., both still groggy over their egg white omelets, and thinking This is what it would be like if we were married. Sometimes she wondered if he thought the same thing when his eyes met hers and he winked, when he ruffled her hair as he walked by, when he chose to come home with her after their evening skate session rather than disappear to wherever he disappeared to at night.
Deena seemed more “on” with Nathan around, too, wearing high-heeled slippers with her cashmere robe, touching his shoulder as she walked past him. At least her mom and Nathan seemed to get on each other’s nerves. Deena was putting together a new short program for them, a jaunty one to “If My Friends Could See Me Now” from Sweet Charity, and she could often hear the two of them arguing over the choreography as she finished up her homework for the night. They were keeping Tristan und Isolde as their free skate—“no need to mess with perfection,” Deena had said after they received 6.0s at Sectionals—but their synthesized hip shaking had, in Deena’s words, grown stale.
“I don’t think anyone’s buying it,” Karen heard Deena say to Nathan. “She doesn’t have the right oomph in her hips.”
“I’ll give her some oomph,” said Nathan, and Karen felt a little thrill.
“Hold your horses, lover boy,” said Deena. “She’s still seventeen, remember?”
“Just for another couple of months,” said Nathan, and Karen had to walk in circles around her room to get all the excitement out of her legs. When she heard footsteps on the stairs, she held her breath, wondering if she should open her door, wondering if she should let Nathan know she heard him, wondering if she looked too much like a little kid in her thermal shirt and plaid pajama pants. But by the time she poked her head into the hallway, Nathan’s door was already closed.
OUR DAYS STARTED TO HAVE AN EASIER RHYTHM ONCE I knew the other workers’ stories.
They must have felt the shift in me. They didn’t say anything, but some of them started to offer me bites of their breakfast as we rode out into the orchards on the backs of the trailers—egg burritos and pan dulce, toast with peanut butter, pieces of banana, sips of thermos coffee. Sometimes the foreman tossed a box of doughnuts into the back and we jokingly fought over the maple bars. Otherwise, we didn’t talk much, but it was a companionable silence. We looked out at the rows of trees as they went by, noticed the different patterns that emerged, the dizzying uniformity of rows that you could look at forwards, sideways, diagonally, the spaces between them regular as gaps on a peg loom, pears blinking everywhere, growing heavier by the day, waiting for our hands.
———
MR. VIEIRA HAD tried to recruit local high school kids to beef up our numbers, but working at McDonald’s in Rio Vista was much easier. You have air-conditioning in McDonald’s. You don’t have to lug hundreds of pounds of fruit.
“Them high school kids will eat our pears,” Mr. Vieira had said, “but they won’t lift a goddamn finger to get them off the tree.”
“I’ll pick your pears,” Quinn told him, but he just ruffled her hair and told her she’d have to wait a few more years. Still, when she found some decent ones on the ground, she put them in the sorting bin.
THAT EVENING, WE sat on the deck and slapped at mosquitoes as we ate some pear bread topped with slabs of jack cheese and potato chips. My muscles rang like glass bowls with exhaustion, but my mouth enjoyed the mix of sweet and salty, soft and crisp.
“Maybe we could build a gentle robot,” said Quinn. “One that could pick pears but not hur
t them.”
“That would be a cool thing to develop.” I peeled a potato chip off the top of the cheese and crunched it alone. “As long as it doesn’t replace people, just helps more pears get picked. Maybe that will be your claim to fame, a gentle pear-picking robot.”
She looked pleased by that idea. “What’s your claim to fame?” she asked, tossing bits of bread to the ducks paddling by.
The question made sweat break out all over my face. I wiped it away and said, simply, “You.”
THAT THANKSGIVING, DEENA BROILED SOME SKINLESS turkey breasts, sprayed butter-flavored Pam over green beans with slivered almonds, cooked raw cranberries with Sweet’N Low, and smushed some boiled cauliflower to resemble mashed potatoes.
“Couldn’t we have some real Thanksgiving food?” Karen pushed the white goop around her plate, stirring up its old-sock smell. It was 4 p.m. but already dark outside, the sky lumpy with rain clouds.
“We can’t afford you getting carb bloat so close to Nationals.” Deena took a decisive bite of turkey. She was already on her third glass of wine; maybe her fourth.
“Nationals is still two months away,” said Karen. “I could work it off in plenty of time.”
Deena turned to Nathan. “Karen has a fat face, don’t you think?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.” His mouth was full of cranberries, red and glistening, like entrails.
“As slim as she is,” Deena said, “people look at her face and know it wouldn’t take much for her to balloon out.”
“It’s my face, Mom! God!” Karen dropped her fork on her plate. “What do you expect me to do about my face?”
“I thought the nose job would help,” Deena said, as if she were talking to herself. “But it only accentuates the problem.”
Karen turned her head away from Deena’s boozy scrutiny. The rain was hammering against the windows, drops bouncing off the back patio, a mad frenzy. Karen tried to imagine it turning to snow, blanketing everything in pure, quiet white.
“It’s probably just baby fat,” said Nathan, and tears stung Karen’s eyes
“If it was baby fat,” said Deena, “it would have been gone by now.”
“Well, happy Thanksgiving to you, too.” Karen threw down her napkin and stomped up to her room.
WHEN SOMEONE KNOCKED on her door an hour later, Karen assumed it was her mother, attempting an apology. She swung the door open, shouting, “What?”
Nathan jumped back. His sweater sleeves were rolled up, a bit wet at the edges; he must have been helping clean the dishes, unless he had put his hands outside to feel the rain. “Sorry,” he said. “I can come back later.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” she said, and he stepped through the doorway.
He had never been inside her room before. She hadn’t pictured it like this—her with red puffy eyes, in old sweats, him with low-fat gravy spattered on his chest. When she had pictured it in her mind, they were dressed up like they had just gone to a ball, her hair swept up (which he would let down), pearls wound around her neck (which he would unclasp, his bow tie hanging crooked, like a door on a bad hinge). He was sitting at the foot of her bed, as she had imagined, but she couldn’t bring herself to sit next to him. She sat on her desk chair instead, facing him, their knees close to touching.
“Do you want to come visit my dad with me tomorrow?” he asked.
“He’s still in the hospital?”
“They moved him to a permanent care facility.” He looked down, bunched her pink comforter in his fist.
“I’m sorry,” she said, flashing on Nathan as Tristan, dead on the ice.
“His body was bound to give out eventually.” He shrugged and yanked the bedspread, making all the stuffed animals on her pillow fall over.
Maybe his dad was an athlete and had trained too hard, she thought. Maybe he was like her mom, someone with a promising career who blew her knees out and had to retire too early.
“Sure, I’ll go.” She inched her leg forward, let it briefly graze his. A blue bolt of static electricity zipped between their feet.
He stood, his hair rising in places from the shock; she was tempted to rest her head against his stomach, let her hair stick to his sweater. Part of the comforter still poked up where he had grabbed it, like a little tent. The satin edge of her inner blanket was exposed by the headboard; it looked racy, somehow, as if her bed’s underwear were showing.
“We should go in the afternoon, after weight training.” He walked to the door, chest more puffed out than before.
“Cool.” She hoped the word sounded casual, grown-up, coming from her mouth.
“By the way,” he said from the hall, “there’s nothing wrong with your pretty little face.”
When he was out of sight, she toppled onto her bed and breathed in the heat his body had left behind. The rain on the roof sounded like fans stomping their feet on metal bleachers, waiting for their star to return.
WE WOKE JUST BEFORE DAWN TO A HORRIBLE CLANGING.
“What is it, Eema?” Quinn clung to me.
“Maybe it’s the guy here to clean the septic tank,” I said. We had been in the orchard when he had come before—it was hard to imagine that would be such a loud job, but I couldn’t think of what else the racket could be. I sat up, hands over my ears, and looked through the window. A small Coast Guard boat floated nearby. A few people dangled pipes into the water and banged on them with metal sticks, like a demented kindergarten music class.
I stumbled out onto the deck. “What’s going on?” I asked.
A woman held up her hand to get everyone to stop their clanging. “Sorry to wake you,” she said. “We’re from the Marine Mammal Institute. We’re trying to drive some whales back to sea.”
“We saw them.” Quinn appeared next to me, blinking the sleep from her eyes.
“When?” the woman asked.
“Over a week ago,” I said.
“And you didn’t report it?” She looked incredulous.
I shook my head.
“You would have been the first,” she said. “We received our first sighting yesterday.”
I felt a little surge of pride that the whales had waited so long to show themselves to anyone else, but when a man said, “This makes it even more urgent. They need to get back to the salt water, where they can feed,” I felt sheepish. I had had a chance to help them, and I hadn’t done a thing.
“They can’t eat here?” asked Quinn.
“We think the baby is still nursing,” said the woman. “A little old for that, but it appears she hasn’t weaned. We’re worried the mom is getting depleted, though.”
The water began to churn. A large black hump, the center spine jutting like a sharply folded napkin, rose out of the water, then slid back under. The people on the boat yelled and started to bang their pipes again. Quinn jumped off the deck onto the pier. Abcde was standing on the levee in a nightgown, no doubt composing a poem in her mind: A big clatter. A baleen congregation. A blistering cacophony. She and I both rushed toward Quinn on the pier. I was pleased that I got there before Abcde climbed down the metal stairs.
“Did I see what I thought I just saw?” Abcde asked, her dark nipples showing through the thin fabric. Her body odor was sharp and yeasty, like a garlic bagel.
“Whales,” said Quinn, and I felt as if she had betrayed our secret even though it was no longer a secret at all.
AFTER THE SUN rose, a small inflatable boat puttered up to the pier; a woman with auburn hair jumped out and knocked on the door of the houseboat.
“Mind if I come in?” she asked. She must have used about a 700 SPF sunscreen—her skin was alabaster, her eyes a clear pale green, like sea glass. “You guys have the best seat in the house.”
She introduced herself as Sam, a member of the animal care team from the Marine Mammal Institute.
“Is it okay for us to be here?” I asked. I was still in my pajamas, still groggy; she looked wide awake, jazzed, even at that early hour. Somehow she made her blue wi
ndbreaker, her khaki pants, her orange life vest, look fashionable, as if she was born to wear them. I wondered what it was like to have that kind of confidence, that kind of ownership of your life.
“I’ll have to talk to my supervisor,” she said. “But as long as you don’t turn on your propeller or do anything to spook the whales, you should be fine. They’ve had some bad run-ins with propellers already.”
She walked out to the deck, leaned over the railing, her hair lifting around her head like fire.
“What are the whales doing here?” I asked.
“No one knows for sure,” she said. “Some of my colleagues think it’s disorientation from Navy sonar, illness, maybe toxic algae. Others think they followed a school of sardines into the river, maybe tried to go someplace safe to heal their wounds …”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Me?” She turned toward me and grinned. “I think they’re on an adventure.”
I liked to think of the whales coming here on purpose—exploration, not discombobulation. It meant they knew what they were doing; it meant they could leave whenever they were ready.
SAM CAME TO give us an update later in the day. When she showed up in her little boat, I felt giddy, like a Southern belle receiving a gentleman caller. The banging didn’t work, she told us, so the Marine Mammal Institute had started to pipe recordings of whales underwater. I couldn’t hear the real whales themselves, but I could hear the tapes, feel them buzzing through the floor of the boat, deep and eerie, like ghosts trapped under the water. The theory was that the sound would attract the whales and they’d follow the boat back to the ocean.
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