Delta Girls

by Gayle Brandeis

  “Jeez, woman,” he said. “Get ahold of yourself.”

  “Take it down!” I could feel my whole face turn red, the veins in my neck bulge.

  “If you take your sign down”—he nodded to my cardboard—“I might be persuaded to get rid of mine.”

  “If I take mine down,” I said, “and you don’t get rid of yours, I’m reporting you.” To who, I wasn’t sure, but it seemed sufficient enough of a threat.

  He glared at me, grabbed my sign, and stomped back to his booth. For a moment, he put my sign up on his counter, mocking me with my own words. I held up a pear, ready to lob it at his throat, when he wagged his finger at me and ferried both signs away.

  THE VICTORY OVER Roberts was short-lived. My little outburst had attracted more attention than I would have liked. A reporter came up to me and asked what the ruckus was all about. Thankfully, Abcde took over. “Organic politics,” she said. “Quite real shit.” She let him lead her over to a quiet place to talk about the situation. I told Quinn to come into the booth with me and help me sell pears.

  My limbs were so full of adrenaline, I could barely stand still inside the little booth. Luckily, a new crowd had formed—people who had spilled out of the auditorium after the latest cooking demonstration—so I was able to keep my hands busy. Quinn was happy to take money and make change, too—her math lesson for the day. I tried not to pay attention as Ben and Shanti emerged from the auditorium—Shanti talking animatedly, waving a bunch of pamphlets around. I tried not to notice when Ben briefly looked over at me before turning his attention back to his girlfriend. I was glad when they disappeared around the corner, most likely for Shanti to expound in some profuse and intelligent way upon all the offerings at the art fair. She was undoubtedly a better conversationalist than me. How did I stand a chance against someone so educated, so confident in her opinions? How could I ever dare to think I could compete with the Shantis and Sams of the world?

  AFTER HER IMPROMPTU interview, Abcde managed to steal the microphone from the stage before the last band of the day performed. I was glad I had a good view from the booth.

  “I have a little pear poem,” she said. “A list, really. Did you know there is a pear for almost every letter of the alphabet?”

  Not many people were paying attention, but a few in the crowd whooped.

  “Here is a sampling,” she said, and read, in very dramatic intonation:

  “Anjou.” A slight smattering of applause.

  “Bartlett.” A huge cheer.

  “Comice.” A cacophony from the Vieira contingent.

  The next pear names didn’t receive as much of a response: “Dana’s Hovey, Easter Beurre, February Butter, Giffard, Hardy, Idaho, Joan of Arc, Kieffer, Lucrative.”

  One person shouted out, “Lucrative, baby!”

  “Marguerite Marillat,” she continued. “No N,” she said with a wink. “Onondaga, Philopena, Rossney, Seckel.” More cheering. “Touraine, Urbaniste, Vicar of Wakefield, White Doyenne.”

  I wondered what every pear on the list tasted like, if each of them was capable of melting flesh.

  She did a little spin on the stage, her dreadlocks and skirt fanning out. “X out X,” she said mischievously. “Y no Y?”

  Then she took a deep breath, and sang, in a surprisingly pure tone, “Zoe.” She gave a little curtsy, said, “Thank you,” and left the stage to a wide round of applause.

  A MAN STEPPED onto the stage and announced that the Big Pear Contest winners were going to be revealed.

  “Can we go over there?” Quinn asked excitedly.

  I looked across to Mrs. Vieira, who nodded, even though the line was fairly long at the booth. I let Quinn pull me over to the tent.

  Someone walked out of the giant papier-mâché pear, holding a basket full of large fruit.

  The third-place winner was the Silveira family.

  “They’re Portuguese, too,” Mr. Vieira said proudly as he stepped up next to me.

  Roberts won second place. He accepted his ribbon with a nod and a wave. I snarled when he looked in my direction.

  Quinn shrieked and jumped up and down when Vieira Pears was named the first-place winner.

  “You wanna go up there and get the prize?” Mr. Vieira asked. Quinn looked at me for confirmation. I nodded and she ran to the podium.

  “I want to thank Jorge for picking the best pear,” she said breathlessly, her mouth a little too close to the microphone. “And the Vieiras for growing the best pear. And my mom for taking us to Vieira Pears, the best place, in the first place.”

  She looked so confident up there, so at home. I wondered what other prizes she could have won if I had let her go to school, if I had let her take some sort of classes—dance or piano or acting or science fairs. What talents had I not encouraged? What unknown gifts had I carelessly let wither away by keeping her tucked so firmly beneath my wing?

  She hoisted the giant blue-ribbon-bedecked pear high in the air, looked at Abcde, and said, exultant, “A Bartlett can do everything!”

  THE YEAR WAS A BLUR OF CITIES, OF COUNTRIES, OF airplanes, tour buses, hotel rooms luxe and dingy, a year of interviews, exhibitions, competitions, public appearances at county fairs and store openings and kids’ sporting events. They had placed fifth in Worlds, the top U.S. team in the rankings, plus fourth in Skate America, again the top U.S. team. They had become a favorite at exhibitions—shows where they could do moves that they weren’t allowed to use in competition: back flips, more daring lifts, sexier clinches. People began to look at them as the great hope for the U.S. Olympic pairs team; the U.S. had never won an Olympic gold in pairs and only two in Worlds, and those were 1950 and 1979. Article after article talked about the “Coronation of Karenathan.” The country was ready for them, their love story, their fairy-tale success.

  WHEN DEENA DIDN’T join their travels, Nathan took over as the food police. He kept a careful eye on Karen’s caloric intake, making sure she stayed away from carbs and refined sugar, anything with too much oil. She had been hoping for a reprieve on the road, a respite from their grueling training schedule, but Nathan made sure they worked out throughout the day—Pilates and choreographic work in their hotel room, cardio in hotel gyms and pools, and jogs around each new city. Interspersed with their favorite form of exercise.

  “We’re burning three hundred calories an hour,” he would say, sweating onto her back, the video camera whirring next to the bed. “We should sell this as a workout tape.”

  She preferred when it didn’t go on for hours, but he lived for those epic encounters, marathons where he twisted her into as many positions as they used during their routines, where she had to take an antibiotic afterward to stave off the urinary tract infection that was sure to follow. Plus a Diflucan to avoid a resulting yeast infection. The medicines made her stomach churn, but made it possible for them to keep going, for her to not worry about Nathan looking elsewhere, despite the constant showers of panties, phone numbers, the constant reaching hands.

  DEENA SET UP one photo shoot after another, one meeting after another—meetings with soup companies, sports drink companies, cereal companies, skating boot manufacturers, condom companies, in search of the most lucrative endorsement. Nathan was the only constant; Karen held on to him like a life preserver. He held on to her, too; he didn’t let her out of his sight, started to accuse her of flirting with other skaters on the circuit.

  “I saw the way you looked at Todd on the bus,” he said in their hotel room.

  “Todd’s married. Jenni’s a sweetheart.” Karen would have loved to have Jenni Meno as a friend, but Nathan didn’t like when she spoke with anyone but him, even the guys who were openly gay.

  “They fell in love on one of these tours,” he reminded her. “They were both with other partners at the time.”

  She knew the other skaters thought she was stuck-up, aloof, but it made things easier to keep to Nathan alone, to not do anything to make him jealous. The closest thing she had to a friendship was the tentat
ive email relationship she had established with Isabelle, but even then, Nathan asked to read every message before she sent it off, and didn’t let her reply when Isabelle asked her what she would do with her life if she couldn’t skate anymore. She didn’t know how she’d answer, anyway. If she tried to think about life without skating now, her mind went snow-blind.

  Karen tried not to worry when she heard whispers behind her back, when other skaters accused Nathan of stealing laces, dulling blades, ripping costumes to make them look bad. She tried not to worry when she found blade marks all over a strop that he had used to tie her wrists to a bedpost—strops could be used for sharpening, she told herself, not just dulling. She tried not to worry when the Russian pair who usually closed the show came down with horrible diarrhea after Nathan had passed them some chocolates on the bus. Karen had wanted one herself, but Nathan waved her off, saying, “Too much sugar.”

  “Did you give them Ex-Lax?” she whispered in their hotel while the Russians were whisked off to an urgent care center just hours before the show was set to open at Madison Square Garden.

  “Now, why ever would you think that?” His voice had a mock tone of shock.

  “Nathan, that’s so stupid. We could get kicked out of the tour. We could get kicked out of the ISU.”

  “I saw how worried you looked about Dmitriev,” he said. “You wanted to nurse him back to health, didn’t you? You wanted to be his little nursemaid.”

  “Nathan—” she started.

  “I’m a one-woman man now,” he said. “I expect you to be the same.”

  “You expect me to be a man?” She wanted to laugh, but his expression made her swallow it down. It’s grief, she told herself. He’s acting this way out of grief.

  Nathan’s father had died while they were in Switzerland; he got the voice mail after they finished their long program. They flew back just in time to see him lowered into the grave. Nathan had fallen to his knees on the damp ground; he tossed a stone so hard against the coffin, it left a nick in the shiny wood.

  “I don’t need anyone but you, baby,” she said, and he looked at her as if to say You better believe you don’t.

  QUINN SKIPPED CIRCLES AROUND ME AND ABCDE AS WE walked back to the booth to help pack everything up; she held the prize-winning pear over her head, chanting all the names of pears that she could remember.

  “How’d you get into this whole alphabet thing, anyway?” I asked Abcde as I tried not to bump into Quinn, who had now latched onto three names in particular, repeating Hardy, Joan of Arc, Luc-ra-tive in a singsong rhythm.

  “My parents fought a lot when I was a girl,” she said. “I would sing the alphabet to myself to drown them out.”

  Hardy, Joan of Arc, Luc-ra-tive. Hardy, Joan of Arc, Luc-ra-tive.

  I wasn’t expecting an answer like that. I tried to picture Abcde as a girl; it was hard to imagine her without the dreadlocks.

  “It was my constant,” she said. “My mantra. It was a known quantity, always there.”

  Hardy, Joan of Arc, Luc-ra-tive. Hardy, Joan of Arc, Luc-ra-tive.

  “So you started writing poems around it?”

  “I started writing poems around it,” she said. “Twenty-six line, twenty-six word, eventually doubles.”

  “What’s that?” Quinn fell into step with us, cradling the giant pear like a baby. Her chant kept running through my head as if she were still saying it. Hardy, Joan of Arc, Luc-ra-tive.

  “Double abcedarians are the hardest,” said Abcde. “You go at the alphabet from both directions—the first line starts with A and ends with Z, the next line starts with B and ends with Y, and so on. I don’t do too many of them.”

  “I want to hear one,” said Quinn.

  Somehow, amazingly, Abcde knew one of these double poems by heart. She stood still by the bucking-bronco machine and recited it with a faraway look on her face, a softness in her voice:

  “A creak in the door’s hinge—that god-damn razzamatazz

  blasting across this neat sleep-tight nighty-night sky

  clear as a wide white waxy moon until that paradox

  dong-dinging my stars awake, that low-below sullen saw

  ever-so-slowly screeching as you, cat, wedge in your fat luv,

  foisting insidious noise toward my sleep-sloppy boys, you,

  gluttonous in your lust for heat, prowling for feet.

  “Heave-ho we’re thrown—one, two, three, onto awake’s bus

  in our going-nowhere-beds, a groaning-growling child-roar

  jaggedly pointed at my dreaming head—strolling sultry Sadiq,

  kneeling, fingering garments massed in a basket … POP!

  Leave me alone, go back to sleep, but they won’t go.

  Mama, up, Up, UP! Lights, Mama, on, On, ON!

  No, I say, stinging the surly dark, the darkling room.”

  She continued on until she ended with “Zounds how you sleep—I, almost as far from Zzzz’s as A.”

  “You have sons?” I asked. It was a poem only a mother could write. I could feel the truth of it all the way to my bones. Quinn’s rhythm had left my ears; now all I could hear was my heart pounding.

  “I haven’t seen them in a while.” She took a deep breath. “I lost custody a couple of years ago. The flighty poet, you know.”

  “Oh, Abcde,” I said, heart aching. “Is there anything you can do?”

  “I want to take my ex back to court,” she said, “but he’s threatening to dig up all the major dirt. As you can imagine, there’s plenty.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “People, they screw you over.” She ran her hand over Quinn’s head; Quinn looked on the verge of tears. “Sometimes the alphabet’s the only thing you can count on.”

  WHEN WE GOT back to the orchard, we learned the whales had returned to Comice Island looking listless, their skin dulled to a chalky gray. The Coast Guard boat hovered, despite their plans to leave the whales alone all weekend. While we were at the Pear Fair, more people had snuck onto the Vieiras’ property to get a better look. More cameras, more reporters. More potential for mayhem.

  After the Vieiras chased most of the nonpaying people away, I went down to the dock to check out the houseboat. I had hoped to move back in that night—I didn’t want to be anywhere near Ben and Shanti—but it was still drenched and dank inside; I still hadn’t cleaned the comforter, plus I had to rewash the laundry that had grown sour sitting in the washer all day. There was no way Quinn and I could stay there.

  After I put everything in the drier, and sent good night wishes to the whales, I lugged the wet bedspread up to the larger washing machine at the main house and tucked Quinn, still holding the prize-winning pear, into bed in the guest room, then crawled under the sheets next to her. I tried not to listen to the giggles and hushed conversation coming from across the hall, the occasional thumps and squeaks of furniture.

  I had barely been able to look at Ben earlier as we broke down the booth at the fair and loaded everything back into the Vieiras’ truck; Shanti was going on and on about the research she and Ben were doing, the difference between California and Oregon pears and pests. Everyone—except me—was nodding and interjecting a word here and there, but she was obviously the queen of the conversation. I declined a post-fair dinner with the Vieiras, picking up some dry last-minute turkey legs for myself and Quinn before the food vendors closed.

  Shanti’s laugh rang out like a bell from Ben’s room, as if she wanted me to hear it. I put my pillow over my head; it was hard to believe it was the same day that Ben and I had been in the kitchen together, our lips so full of juice. I was tempted to bang on Ben’s door, tell him to keep his girlfriend quiet, tell him to keep his pears to himself.

  THERE WAS NO time to recover from the fair; the next day was a normal picking day. I made sure to get up early, before Ben’s door opened again, to get out into the orchard without having to see Ben and Shanti at the breakfast table together. Quinn was still asleep; I left a
note to tell her to stay in the house until I came back for lunch. It was the first time I had left her alone asleep like that. I tried to tell myself I was not a horrible mother for doing such a thing, that she would be safe, even if there were things she shouldn’t know about happening across the hall.

  Shortly before noon, Ben came up to my ladder holding a yellow pear, one that had ripened in his family’s kitchen.

  “You’re not getting me with that trick again,” I said, glad to be standing above him, to be able to look down at his sorry head; he winced as if I had struck him.

  “Pears are in the rose family,” he said, offering up the fruit. “A yellow rose is a sign of friendship.”

  “Did you give Shanti a red pear?” I didn’t take the pear from his hand. I picked some more green pears instead, pears that were starting to get more of a yellowish tinge, starting to get grainy inside from too much waiting.

  “Shanti left this morning,” he said.

  “Are you going to follow her?” I lifted more pears, put them in my bag.

  “She’s going to India, Izzy.”

  “Visiting family?” My shoulders and lower back were starting to ache from the weight of the fruit hanging off my body.

  “She’s getting married.”

  I stopped picking for a moment.

  “It’s why she really came here,” he said. “To let me know.” His hand holding the pear dropped down to his side.

  “Are you okay?” I arched my back to compensate.

  “She’s only met the guy a couple of times,” he said. “Her parents arranged it.”

  “And she didn’t tell you until now?” Shanti seemed too modern, somehow, too headstrong, to agree to an arranged marriage. I thought about pairs skaters, how they were often thrust into arranged marriages of sorts themselves, coaches creating teams based on various compatibilities, hoping they’d have a lasting and fruitful run. I wondered if her future husband knew what he was getting himself into.