Delta Girls (2 page)

When I saw the sign for the town of Comice, population 472, my breath caught in my throat. The painted green letters were faded on the wooden placard,
COM
barely readable, but
ICE
sharp enough to reach inside my body and rattle around.

“I have to pee, Eema,” said Quinn. We had just crossed a metal bridge with yellow spires, like a miniature, more industrial Golden Gate.

I pulled into the first driveway I could find. A “Pickers Needed” posterboard was duct-taped on the bottom of a sign that read “Vieira Pears.”

“I’ll see if they’ll let you use the bathroom,” I said. Quinn bit her lip and jiggled in her seat. We parked the car in front of a weathered two-story clapboard. To our left, surrounded by old machinery, a large vegetable garden grew kale, carrots, onions, lots of tomatoes in cages, the leaves reaching out through the metal, red fruit drooping down like boxing gloves after a match.

An olive-skinned man who appeared to be in his sixties came onto the porch, wiping his hands on his jeans. His dark hair was slicked back on his head. His eyebrows were bushy, the mustache under his prominent nose thick but neatly trimmed.

“Mr. Vieira?” I asked.

“You got him,” he said. His voice had an accent I couldn’t quite place. When he walked closer, I could see his face was studded with moles, like a chocolate chip cookie.

“I was wondering,” I said, “if my daughter could use your bathroom and you could use me.” His eyebrows went up.

“To pick,” I added quickly. “If you could use me to pick.”

I hadn’t thought about asking until I said it out loud. The orchard seemed as good a place as any to stop. We’d save on gas money. We’d be near water.

“How’s your back?” he asked after he gave Quinn directions to the bathroom.

“Strong,” I assured him, even though it griped constantly.

“Don’t normally hire lady pickers,” he said, “but we’ll take anyone we can get this year.”

Rows of pears stretched out as far as I could see, the trees shaggy vases, flaring open to the sky. The air was just on the edge of humid, the river lending a mossy tang. A few barn swallows dipped and swerved overhead, trilling.

He nodded to Quinn as she disappeared into the house. “I can’t pay her or nothing.” His mustache twitched. “Just make sure she don’t get hurt.”

———

I HAD NEVER
picked fruit from trees before, except to swipe an orange or two—all of my picking experience had been close to the ground. I hoped reaching up instead of down would help balance my back muscles, give them a chance to flex.

Mr. Vieira led me to the edge of the orchard, set up a ladder, and handed me a canvas bag that looped around my shoulders and tied behind my waist, a cross between an apron and one of those fake pregnancy bellies teachers strap onto teenage girls to try to scare them away from sex. He told me the basics of picking—lift the fruit from the tree, don’t pull it. Avoid pears with bruises, sunburn, limb rub. Be on the lookout for thrips, blister mites, red-humped caterpillars, flat-headed borers, pernicious scales. The way he rattled off the pests made them sound like Dr. Seuss creatures, too whimsical to cause any harm, but I knew they were anything but.

If you leave a pear on the tree too long, he told me, it starts to rot from the inside out. It develops stone cells, little places of hardness that feel like grit in the mouth. It starts to get eaten by birds, by bugs. Better to pluck it when it’s green, store it someplace cold, let it forget where it came from.

I CUPPED A
Bartlett and lifted it until the stem separated from the branch. I hadn’t believed Mr. Vieira, but he was right. Pulling left a broken stem, a tired wrist; lifting popped the stem right off. I started to relish the feel of the pears, cool and smooth as I gently raised them and they surrendered their weight into my palm. The branches scratched my arms and the straps of the picking bag bit into my shoulders, made my lower back sway and ache in a whole new way, but my hands enjoyed the work.

Quinn played in the dirt beneath the ladder, arranging dropped fruit into circles. Mr. Vieira had left us to our own devices after he watched me pick the first few pears. “Keep practicing,” he said before he disappeared into the orchard. “Work on speed.”

“You should pick up your book,” I told Quinn. Lucky kid, having a pear orchard for a classroom. There was more shade here than there had been at any of my previous jobs.

Quinn sighed and cracked open the collection of Norse mythology we had bought for a quarter at a library sale in Oklahoma. A wasp flew off the blue cloth cover and circled Quinn’s dark wispy hair before it reeled away. I touched the pocket of my jeans to make sure her EpiPen was safe inside.

“Tell me a story,” I said, and Quinn started in her halting way, stopping to sound out the longer words.

“‘In the beginning was Mus-pel-heim, the world of fire and Nif-l-heim, the world of ice,’” she read. “‘When the warm air hit the cold air, a giant named Ymir—Ymir?—was created and so was an icy cow named Aud-hum-bla.’”

Quinn paused, her blue eyes uncertain. “I don’t know if I’m saying the names right, Eema.”

“You’re doing fine.” My bag was almost full. The heft of it threatened to pull me off the ladder. “It’s the story that matters, not the names.”

“‘In the world of fire, a man was born from Ymir’s foot and a woman was born from his armpit.’ Gross!” She stuck out her tongue. “‘In the world of ice, the cow licked a stone made of salt; the next day, the stone grew hair, then a head, then a body. An entire man emerged from the ice and stone.’ What kind of weirdo story is this, anyway?” Quinn wrinkled her nose, flaky with sunburn. “Men coming out of the ice?”

An angular face started to form in my mind; I shook my head like an Etch-a-Sketch, breaking his features into a flurry of metal shavings. No need to think about him now. Just focus on Quinn, on this work, this new world of pears. Lift, then bag, lift, then bag, sunlight dappling my hands.

L
IFTS WERE HER FAVORITE
.

To the average viewer watching pairs in an ice arena or on TV, it looked as if the guy was doing all the work, as if all the girl had to do was look pretty and let her partner bear her up to heaven. But a partner couldn’t lift a girl who wasn’t lifting herself, too. When she was over her partner’s head, his hand pressed into her ribs or stomach or the side of her thigh, she had to harden herself against his palm, his thumb, lift herself away from it. Otherwise she would end up with hand-shaped bruises on her skin, maybe a cracked rib. And that’s if she didn’t fall.

Karen liked lifts because everything looked smaller, more manageable, from the air. The judges with their score sheets. The television people with their cameras. Her mother in fur boots leaning against the boards. For those few seconds of height, none of them mattered. They were earthbound, finite. She was soaring; she was towering; she was sweetly, briefly above it all. The closest she could get to escape.

———

NATHAN MAIN WAS
different from Karen’s skating partner of five years, Brian. Nathan didn’t treat her like a princess or a butterfly. He didn’t apologize for shoving his hand between her legs during a lift or catching a couple of strands of her hair under his blade during a death spiral. “You can take it,” he said, and she realized that she could. Nathan treated her like a woman. A body. Strong and capable, worthy of desire. Her mom, Deena, treated her like a body, too, but a body that needed to be changed, perfected, a body that was never quite right. Platinum dye since eleven, nose job at thirteen, a countless string of diets. With Nathan, it was “Here we are in our skins. What are we going to do about it?”

Karen was nervous when her mom first suggested pairing with him. His latest partner, Tabitha, was recovering from a concussion and a fractured vertebra. Karen’s partner, Brian, had gone off to Harvard to study French literature and be surrounded by smart boys. Regionals were only two months away. Part of Karen hoped her mom wouldn’t find her a new partner; part of her hoped she could sit this competition cycle out, stay away from the ice long enough to want to get back on, but she knew her mom would never let that happen. Especially not with the Olympics coming up in a little over a year.

“He has the best triple axel of any pairs skater out there,” Deena said. “Just think of it. With your jumps, you’d be brilliant together.”

Deena had groomed her daughter to be a singles champion, but when Karen was twelve and placed sixth at Junior Sectionals, Deena told her she didn’t have the chops to go it alone. “You have the jumps, sweetheart,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact, her eyes calm, “but not the pizzazz.”

Brian had stellar technicality, enough to get them on the podium of most regional competitions and close to placing at Nationals, but Nathan—Nathan had pizzazz. Groupies followed him from town to town—a few raised “Go Tabathan” signs for the
pair, but most held signs like “Marry Me, Nathan” and “Watch Out, Tabitha, Nathan’s Mine!” He and Tabitha had placed third in Nationals the previous year, and had done respectably at Worlds. They were considered America’s next great hope until he dropped her in the middle of a Detroiter—a lift banned from competition—during a summer tour.

Karen was seventeen, Nathan twenty-two when Deena arranged a private early morning tryout session, the sun just starting to send a hint of itself into the sky. Nathan showed up at the rink in Connecticut on a pale green Vespa in jeans and a tight yellow T-shirt, his skates in a black leather backpack, just as Karen and her mom pulled up in their BMW. He wore a multicolored knit beanie instead of a helmet, his dark shaggy hair swooping out in tufts. Karen tried not to look at the nipples poking under his shirt. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days; his blue eyes were bloodshot when he took off his sunglasses.

“Not used to getting up so early,” he said as he shook Deena’s hand. She gave a coquettish shrug that made Karen wince.

“But you’re worth it, sweetheart.” He turned to Karen, looking her up and down. “You’re worth every second of missed sleep.”

NATHAN STEPPED ONTO
the ice before Karen, which startled her; Brian had always given her the courtesy of entering the rink first. Nathan’s hair was a bit flat on top after taking off his beanie, but it streamed up like flames as soon as he started to stroke quickly around the rink. Karen took more-leisurely strokes, waiting for him to catch up with her rather than racing to catch up with him. He held out his hand as he drew near; she grabbed it and he surged ahead, practically ripping her shoulder out of its socket.

“Find your rhythm!” Deena yelled from the penalty box, looking giddy and nervous.

Karen sped up and Nathan slowed down and soon they were
stroking side by side, doing crossovers at the end of the rink, their legs moving in perfect tandem, his left arm behind her back, her right across his front as they held hands. Nathan was taller than her other partners, older. She could feel the difference in the way he held her hand, in his smell of sweat and cigarettes and some sweet musky scent Karen couldn’t name, in his physical presence beside her—Nathan was solidly in the world, every muscle. She felt her own muscle fiber pack into something more dense, grounded, as they skated together. She felt a current of power run through them, a bright circuit through their arms and chests. Maybe this could work, after all.

“Show me what you got,” shouted Deena.

Karen looked at Nathan with her eyebrows raised.

He winked and said, “Let’s blow her little mind.”

THEY TRIED A
few twist lifts. Armpit holds, waist holds, hand-to-hip lifts, lasso lifts, press lifts. Side-by-side camels, then flying camels. Side-by-side jumps, then throws—first doubles, then triples. She loved the air he gave her when he threw her into a triple loop, loved how he held her lower back when they did a pairs sit spin, how her leg pressed against his when they tried a spiral sequence.
This is how it’s supposed to feel
, she thought with wonder as she leaned back into his chest during a spread eagle. With Brian, she always felt as if she were skating with herself, as if she were holding her own hand—comfortable, familiar. Nathan was another creature, maybe even another species. The contrast was invigorating.

“One more lift,” her mother called from the penalty box, “and let’s call it a day.”

This time, Nathan did something with his thumb when she was over his head. A little wiggle between her legs. It caused a zing to go through her body, all the way to the top of her skull. A sudden flood she hoped wouldn’t drip down his arm. She almost
tumbled off his palm, but somehow stayed upright, her one hand clutching his wrist so hard, it left marks.

“What
was
that?” she asked, still catching her breath. She could barely look at him as they slipped on their skate guards and stepped off the ice.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his wrist. She couldn’t tell if he was smiling or smirking.

“Don’t do it again,” she said, as firmly as she could.

He held her gaze until she flushed and looked away. She could hear him chuckle under his breath as he walked toward the lobby.