Apricot brandy (6 page)

Not long after, though, her parents stopped joining the pickers. In his fifties, Dad began spending more time reading in the shed. He was still physically powerful and did everything necessary around the orchard, but no more than that.

Karen must put her hand to this place, must treat it as she willed and drive its ghosts back into the ground. She would mess with those plum trees, pick some of them. See if Fratelli’s was still operating in Gravenstein and might give her a few bucks a flat.

There was bread in the pantry, old, but toastable. She made toast and coffee, ate greedily, enjoying how the house felt simply like a house. A place where she planned a day’s work, a place she could change any part of she chose. Eager— with the sun declining— to be outside, she almost forgot to call Susan before rushing out.

Karen was glad to get their answering machine, to make this quick. “Hey hon, sorry for not calling, it was… overwhelming here at first. But listen, it’s going well now. I feel like I’ve crossed a line. It’s going better than I hoped. I’ve got to rush out before dark. I’m gonna pick some plums! I love you. I’ll call you.”

The Big Shed, they’d called this, the roof’s rafters twelve feet high. The picking ladders covered one whole wall and the others were hung with long-handled pruners and branch saws, the props also leaning there in standing stacks— notched planks for supporting branches getting too heavy with fruit. Packing flats were stacked on one end of the long central bench. The cardboard separators, dimpled like egg cartons, were there, too. Karen still liked the feel of this big interior, its dust-motes shot with rays of late sun through gaps in the siding. It felt full of a benevolent, earth-loving energy.

A pouch on her hip, some flats and separators, some parrot-beak shears for all the wild twigs and suckers— she brought these out to the nearest tree and went back for the ladder. Despite having years of experience carrying extension ladders hooked on her shoulder, she found the picking ladder, which flared at the base, a more awkward matter and was running sweat by the time she had set it, its third leg slanting through the bristly branches, and finally climbed up into the tree.

Karen kept on sweating after that, a good two hours and more. Wherever she leaned in, she was assailed by ear-poking, eye-poking, mouth-poking twigs. You thought you saw them, then
poke
— there was another one you hadn’t seen. Her relationship to the tree quickly became one of attack and counter-attack, and repeated assaults with the parrot-beaks. Each time she climbed down with some plums, she stood in a litter of twigs and her tennis shoes trod a muck of fallen fruit mouldering in the deep weeds. Each time she re-set the ladder, she fought a new battle with the clippers, the smell of decay floating up around her.

When the sun set, there were four flats of plums to carry back into the big shed. And, under a sky half rose, half violet, she was glad she’d stuck with the struggle. She felt sweat-drenched and purged, felt so much herself, with the night coming on.

She’d get up first thing tomorrow. Could pick
Dad’s
special trees in the yard, yeah— peaches and apricots should fetch more than plums. Go into Gravenstein in the afternoon with seven or eight flats. See how the town had changed.

Time for a shower. What the hell, she’d rinse down right here under the hose… . A little afraid of that bathroom at night, are we? Well, so what? Take things at your own pace, get your mind back, get strong.

Dropping her clothes on the ground, turning the hose onto her scalp, Karen sent cool water spiraling down her nakedness. Wonderful, this garment of water. She stood wearing it, stroking it on her skin.

She carefully wrung out her hair and scraped the wet from her skin, watching the dark just beginning to congeal around her. Suddenly it seemed terribly blatant, terribly reckless of her, standing naked in front of the trees like this. It seemed the whole two hundred acres, and everything in them, beheld her,
discovered
her there in its midst.

She shook her fist at the orchard and carried her clothes into the house. A nice clean T-shirt and jeans. Hot tomato soup, more toast, and a dish of plums.

Next, another fire. The night was cool, but it was really the movement and the noise of the blaze she wanted most. Karen settled into the couch with her thriller.

The story seemed terribly thin, but that was okay. She clung to the sketchy characters, their faint voices and unlikely actions, while underneath hearing and feeling the house around her, its shadows and silences testing her calm. This was to be expected. She would conquer the place one night at a time, by enduring it, defying it, coldly sober—

What was that she was hearing? Hard to separate from the fire’s low noise at first. Far out on the drive… gravel crackling.

Dad. His truck rolling in from a night drinking in town, Mom out of the state, visiting her sister… .

Realer possibilities followed this deep-buried reflex of fear. Marty Carver, on some nasty personal errand. Or more likely that Kyle, a big-sounding man, laying the courtesy on thick, while realizing that now there was only a woman here, a woman alone.

An engine, drawing nearer, then shutting off just out front, as Karen pulled open the hall closet, plucked out the shotgun she’d found. She worked the slide and a shell sprang out. She retrieved it and threaded it back into the magazine as feet mounted the porch steps— thank god that old son of a bitch had at least taught her how to handle weapons.

But the knock on the door was delicate and the voice— calling, “Karen?”— was Susan’s. In her relief, Karen pulled the door open with the shotgun still clutched in one hand.

“Karen, I’m sorry, but I just had to— ” and then she took in the shotgun. Karen laughed, standing it in the corner, and wrapping her arms around her beautiful russet lover.

“Country living, sweetheart. I sit on the porch with my corncob pipe and the scattergun in my lap!” She held Susan at arm’s length and looked at her. Susan smiled back, relieved at her welcome. Still half in the porch shadow, her faint freckles were darker. With her petite sharp chin and her sleeked-back tarnished-copper hair, she always struck Karen as one of those thrusting, searching small mammals, taut and graceful, a mink or marten… so alert to Karen’s moods.

Remembering Susan’s opening apology, Karen also remembered, with shame, those drunken times she had slammed doors in her conciliatory lover’s face. “We’ve fought so much, hon, and I’m so sorry for it.”

Susan smiled. “
You’ve
fought so much.”

“
I’ve
fought so much, oh yes, but I’m so glad you’re here.”

Susan grinning now. “So why aren’t you inviting me inside?”

Karen laughed… and yet still did not step aside to admit her. Felt the weight of the house at her back, holding her in place like a barrier. Or was it her own will, holding back the house’s weight from falling on her lover… ? She forced another laugh. “Come on into the haunted manse.”

Once Susan was inside, Karen felt instantaneous relief, felt her lover as a shield, an unclouded spirit that all the past here, her fears and imaginings, could not pierce. “A tour!” she proclaimed. “A grand tour! You will note the predominant decorative motifs— firearms and booze… .”

She saw every room over Susan’s shoulder now and though the downstairs bathroom still gave her a qualm, she found everywhere a wonderful freedom from fear, everywhere saw a sad place where someone else had suffered long ago, a place she herself might soon lock up behind her and leave forever.

Susan responded cautiously, registered but never uttered a word about the gloom, the claustrophobic aura that filled this place, spoke only of Mom’s touches here and there. Up in her sewing room Susan said, “You must have liked it up here. Did she ever teach you how to sew?”

“She tried, but I was never that interested. I did like to be up here, though, when I was small, watching her work. All this— ” she touched the cabinet’s miniature drawers of buttons, findings, needles, spools of thread “— seemed like treasure to me.”

“I once asked my mother to teach me so I could sew clothes for my dolls. She told me it was peasant work— not in so many words, of course.” They both laughed at their shared image of Mrs. Kravnik, a moneyed, oh-so-proper autocrat.

Down in the kitchen, more toast and soup, some canned green beans, strong coffee black, the way they both liked it, while Susan filled her in on the home-front. She had a week off from the law offices. Two of the gay contractors Karen worked for sent their sympathies, and one, DeWitt, a check from her last job. Bonnie and Letty, Karen’s partners in Tongue ‘n’ Groove, had also sent their love and were going to give her a cut from their new remodel job with DeWitt.

While Karen did the dishes, Susan was slicing some peaches from the trees out back. “Want some?” she asked Karen.

“No thanks.”

Susan cracked the seal on some of Dad’s tonic water, splashed out half a tumbler, took a bottle of vodka from the shelf, and added a couple inches to the tonic. Susan drank wine occasionally. Maybe a cocktail at parties. Karen cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Did you want some?” Susan asked her.

“Not right now.” The many times Karen had quit drinking, she never said so, felt it jinxed the resolution. And now, how could she tell her lover
why
she’d quit? They went into the living room. Karen watched Susan sink into an armchair and take a long pull from her drink.

It almost brought tears to Karen’s eyes. She understood this was an attempt to be
with
her in her time of trouble. Sweet Susan, so moderate and abstemious, had resolved to abandon this long-standing separation between them, Susan standing outside Karen’s affliction, exhorting her from the shore to come out of the whiskey river that carried them apart. Susan had decided that they would swim together and swim ashore together.

Karen bent to feed the fire and said, “It’s nice to watch you have a drink and not have one myself. It’s a novelty. It’s… neat.”

Susan laughed with pleasure, making Karen grateful and ashamed. Hadn’t she just asked her lover to drink
for
her? Just like letting her into this house: standing Susan between herself and the demons in her heart. But that was just what her lover wanted to do. So… let her in. Let her help.

“Know what I’ve started doing? Picking plums. It’s kind of fun. We could take some flats to town tomorrow. Maybe sell them.”

“That sounds great! Count me in. Farmer Sue, at your service.”

“Hoed a lot of rows, have you? Kicked a lot of cow-flop, back in old Mill Valley?”

And so they talked about Susan’s mom and her latest phone call— from France, where she had gone on business. Susan mixed another drink and mimicked the formidable Mrs. Kravnik’s latest exhortations that she go to law school, for heaven’s sake, and do something serious with her life. Law school on the East Coast, of course, where the only good ones were (and where the unspeakable Karen-what’s-her-name
wasn’t
, of course).

Susan sipped, and laughed, and mimicked, and Karen laughed with her, and secretly sorrowed for her lover, this daughter who could always remember every word of her mother’s criticisms.

They laid a pad of blankets on the rug, to sleep in front of the fire. Settling down, guilty Karen feared her generous lover, loosened by drink, would long for love’s reward. They lay in one another’s arms, kissing tenderly, Karen dreading, with each kiss, what more would be asked of her.

But even here, Susan’s generosity shamed her. She sensed Karen’s fear, even through her liquored languor.With a last kiss, she turned to snug her back into Karen’s front. Soon, spoonwise, they slept.

“We’re gonna whip some plum-tree ass, is what we’re gonna
do
, Kare!” Susan felt great. She had never done anything like this before. Had never had a beer in the mid-morning, not long after breakfast. Had never helped carry two picking-ladders out into an orchard drenched with morning sun. Had never stood between her lover and a giant bully— and that’s what this place, Karen’s whole past,
was
— had never squared off with such a bully:
Put up your dukes, motherfucker!
Susan felt a nice glow from the beer, felt adventurous and more alive for Karen’s sake.

“Steady as she goes, mate!” Karen laughed. “Now we plant this third leg here right amongst the branches.”

This entire farm was the bully, a nightmare forest haunted by a dead ogre. This was the place where Karen’s heart lived… always. No wonder she drank. But now she was here to help her— with the drinking and with cutting her way out of the forest.

Cutting was surely the operative term. They worked opposite sides of the same tree while Susan got the hang of it, then worked adjacent trees, Susan gung-ho to cut a wider swath. Her sweat ran and the clippers made her hands sore. Now, in the heat of noon, a beer seemed highly appropriate. She went and brought out the rest of the sixer in the cooler. Slipped one in the pouch of her picking apron, held one up to Karen before re-mounting her own ladder.

“Oh, not right now, thanks.”

Susan recognized Karen’s casual, noncommittal mode from the times she’d tried to quit before. “I’m an idiot! What am I
doing
?”

“You’re a sweetheart. This is Beer-keg Fox here. It becomes second nature to offer old Fox brewskis.”

“I
am
an idiot.”

“You’re my inspiration. Shut up and pick, darlin’.”

And Susan did feel like her inspiration. Getting quite skillful at this work, it seemed to her— made those branchlets and suckers fly and each time she went down the ladder, laid new rows of gleaming fruit in the flats. She drained her second beer with gusto and climbed back up with a third in her pouch. She looked at Karen in the next tree over and willed herself to be a gift to Karen. An ally.

The sun was getting awfully hot, though. Wasn’t this
autumn
, for Christ’s sake? The smell of rot rose from the weeds and, with it, big bumbling flies, relentlessly molesting Susan for her sweat. From up on the ladder, the orchard looked more like an ocean, a perspective of green billows rolling away across the acres, dwarfing their labors.