Delta Girls (3 page)

“THAT WAS BRILLIANT.”
Her mom strode up to her. Somehow even in her puffy down jacket, she looked sleeker than Karen could ever hope to be. “Utterly brilliant.”

“I don’t want to skate with him.” Karen unzipped her sweater. Sweat ran down her sides in sheets.

“Nathan brought something out in you, Karen,” she said. “I’ve never seen you skate like that before.”

Karen brushed past her and ran to the bathroom, her skate guards clapping against her blades. She peeled her skating dress and tights down her body and sat in the stall, head in her hands. The cool air felt wonderful against her flushed skin. She wished she had worn underwear so she’d have something to throw away. She dabbed at the damp crotch of her tights with toilet paper before she pulled everything back up, the fabric cold and clammy between her legs.

Nathan and her mother were sitting with cups of coffee by the snack bar. The morning figure skating session was about to begin—the lobby was now filled with sleepy-eyed skaters, the diehards who were already skating both before school and after. Some of their mothers kneeled before them, tightening their laces; others stood behind them, tightening their buns. Karen forced herself to smile at the girls who waved excitedly in her direction.
She wondered if any of them missed the days when skating was just for fun, when it wasn’t about competition, the endless, impossible quest for perfection.

Before she started on the competitive track, rising up the rungs of the United States Figure Skating Association testing system, Karen took classes at a rink that followed the more recreational Ice Skating Institute program. She started at the most basic Alpha level, then moved on to Beta, then Gamma. She loved learning how to fall, how to swizzle, how to glide on one foot, wiggle backwards. Just being on the ice filled her with joy. But then she couldn’t pass her Delta test. She could do the three turns, the outside edges, and the bunny hop just fine, but she couldn’t seem to get the hang of the Shoot the Duck. Every time she crouched down and tried to lift one leg in front of her like a rifle, she toppled onto her bottom. Her mother got more and more exasperated, especially after Karen failed the test the second time.

“What is wrong with you?” Deena had demanded, her face more fierce than Karen had ever seen it. “If you can’t pass this test, you can’t move up to freestyle. Do you want to be stuck doing bunny hops the rest of your life? Do you want to be a Delta girl forever?”

At the time, Deena made this sound like a fate worse than death, but looking back, it didn’t seem so bad to Karen. What would life be like if she had stayed a Delta girl forever—someone just starting to learn, just moving for the pure joy of it? Someone who skated only for herself, who didn’t have to worry about other people’s judgment, other people’s hands?

She slipped onto a green fiberglass bench next to her mother.

“So,” Deena said, not looking up from her clipboard. “We can rent the rink early on Mondays and Wednesdays. Other days, you’ll have to skate during club time. Three hours a day, minimum. Even more in the beginning. And we’ll have to figure out the dance and Pilates sessions.”

“I look forward to it.” Nathan smiled at Karen and the anger inside her chest unknotted and dissolved. A sudden weakness filled her limbs.

And, as if she had never said or felt anything to the contrary, she took a deep breath and said, “Me too.”

M
R. VIEIRA RETURNED, HAPPY TO SEE ME WITH A FULL
bag. Now I really looked like a pregnant woman, the pears bulging in front of me bigger than I had ever been with Quinn. He showed me how to untie the bottom of the bag, let the pears tumble into a box. All those green puppies—a prolific litter.

“Might as well give you the grand tour,” he said. I slipped the bag off, grateful for the breeze against my sweaty shirt.

It turned out Vieira Pears was actually on its own small island, Comice Island, a three-hundred-acre land mass ringed by wide waterways. Highway 160 crossed bridges to run across its rural edge, leading to the town of Comice on one end, Pecan Grove on the other. Comice was actually pronounced
Co-meese;
it was named for a type of pear, a variety originally from France. Bartlett was king here, though, and just coming into season.

“The water seeps up right through the ground,” Mr. Vieira told me as he walked us around the farm. “We don’t have to irrigate none.”

He showed me trenches they’d dug to keep the island from
getting flooded; Vieira Pears was ten feet below sea level, so water easily saturated the soil and rose into the ditches before it found its way back to the river. The island sank a couple of inches a year as the peat soil settled, so the Vieiras had to keep building up the levees that ringed the island to protect their property. The levees had started out as five-foot mounds of dirt and rocks in the late 1800s, but were over thirty feet tall now, towering over the trees.

“If you don’t have to water, what’s this?” Quinn moved toward a sprayer.

“That’s poison!” I yelled. “Don’t get too close!”

Quinn ran past it, covering her mouth.

“It’s lime and sulfur,” said Mr. Vieira. “We’re not using poison no more. But she should still keep her distance. Not so good for the skin or eyes. Or any other part, unless you’re a tree.”

“You’re organic?” I had worked on a couple of organic farms. Less burning on the hands. Less sharpness in the lungs. I should have guessed the Vieiras were organic; when I looked around, clues were everywhere—the shagginess of the grass between the rows of trees, good for harboring pest-eating insects; the skinny red pheromone dispensers hanging from the top branches like broken kabbalah bracelets; the tanglefoot wrapped around some trunks like Ace bandages to keep ants from climbing to the fruit.

“Not certified yet,” he said. “Next year. You need three years without the poison before they’ll certify you. We’re what they call transitional.”

So are we
, I thought. I watched Quinn twirl between two rows of trees, thankfully away from the spray. I wondered how long she’d be so full of whimsy—even at nine, I could see a subtle swell in her hips. Her belly still looked young, though—wonderfully mushy—and she still had those yummy toddler dimples on the tops of her hands.

“My son’s the one talked me into it, wanted to go back to my grandfather’s ways. He’s in Ag over at Davis, but right now he’s up in Oregon doing research. Pear slugs.”

I winced, hoping not to see anything slimy on the gnarled branches.

“How long has your family been here?” I asked.

“Since the gold rush—1884,” he said. “Straight from the Azores.”

Quinn and I hadn’t stayed in the same place for more than a few months since she was born. “Your family find gold?”

“Golden pears,” Mr. Vieira said, chuckling.

The golden apples in our Norse mythology book granted immortality to the gods. These pears offered a different kind of immortality, it seemed, something to pass from one generation to the next. Hundred-year-old trees that still grew fresh green fruit. Amazing as any legend.

A TRACTOR TRAILER
pulled up, driven by a woman, her body bulky and formless beneath her housedress, the iris of her left eye lolling to the side as if the string that usually held it in the center had snapped. Twelve men and seven women, all brown skinned, sat on the trailer around large white bins filled with pears. Many of them held coolers on their laps. They stared at me warily.

Mr. Vieira said something in Spanish; a couple of them laughed, a few more glared in my direction.

“I pay pickers by the bin,” he said. “They don’t like when anyone slows them down.”

“I won’t slow them down,” I promised, but I could still feel their eyes on my skin after Mr. Vieira kissed the driver on the forehead and she drove them past us toward the barns.

I practiced picking pears without pay the rest of the afternoon, Quinn sitting on the ground beneath the trees as my arms and hands got used to the work, as my shoulders got used to the weight of the pear bag. I worked on increasing my picking speed as the strain settled its steady burn into my muscles. I was starving
and exhausted by the time we pulled some granola bars and string cheese from the car for our dinner.

When I asked Mr. Vieira if we could park for the night on his property, he told me we should stay in the bunkhouse. The Vieiras had converted their old horse barn, turning each stall into an individual sleeping area with a swinging half-door. I was hesitant, but Quinn was excited about the idea of sleeping in a barn. Sleeping in the car had gotten old. It had been especially brutal in Niland, where we had camped at Slab City, an abandoned army base that had been taken over by RVers and squatters. There was no charge to stay, but there was also no running water or electricity, and even at night, the temperature often reached over 100 degrees. The one cool thing about the place was Salvation Mountain, a hill that an old smiley guy had covered entirely with paint and adobe as his own quirky tribute to God and love. I’d like to say we found salvation there, but we mostly found sweaty sleepless nights, especially when hipsters from LA came to check out the place and kept us awake with their guitars and bonfires, their smirking sense of entitlement.

The bunkhouse looked clean, but I could still smell the gamy ghost of horses in the air, along with the body odor of workers who must have worn the same clothes several days in a row. Mr. Vieira had offered me and Quinn separate stalls, but I didn’t want her out of my sight, not in a building full of men. None of the sorting women lived there, but about half the men on the crew did—most of the rest shared small apartments as far away as Stockton, places where they slept three, four to a room but had a full kitchen. The bunkhouse just had a sink, a mini fridge, a microwave, one small bathroom for everyone. I was uneasy—no locks on the doors; no real doors, for that matter.

We brushed our teeth and changed into shorts and T-shirts for the night; when we got to our cot, I noticed something on Quinn’s back. A round green sticker that said “Ripe and Ready.” I ripped it off her shirt, my whole body furious.

“Who the hell put this here?” I marched into the aisle between the stalls and held it up high. A man with a deeply creased face smiled and nodded from behind his half-door. “You put this on my daughter?”

He smiled and nodded again.

“You sick fuck!” I threw the sticker at his face, but it fluttered to the ground before it could reach him. “What kind of pervert puts a sticker like that on a nine-year-old girl?”

His smile dropped. Even if he couldn’t understand English, I knew he could understand me.

“Don’t you dare—don’t any of you dare—lay a finger on her again. No finger, no sticker, no nothing!”

“Shit, lady,” I heard someone say under his breath.

“Quinn, pack your bags,” I yelled. I picked the sticker up off the floor, the back of it encrusted with dirt and dust. Evidence.

WE PILED EVERYTHING
into the car and were bumping along the dirt road when Mr. Vieira appeared in the headlights in his striped pajamas, dragging a hose.

“Where are you two headed?” he asked.

“We’re leaving.” I showed him the crumpled-up sticker. “I found this on my daughter’s shirt.”

He took the sticker and smoothed it in his palm. “That’s for the ripe pears we bring to market,” he said.

“My daughter is not a ripe pear.”

Quinn laughed out loud but stopped when I threw her a look.

“Let me go talk to the men,” he said.

I SAT IN
the dark car with Quinn, engine turned off to save gas. The moon was full—it hugged the trees, outlined them like a highlighter pen. Bats darted in and out between the rows, wings snapping like flags in the wind. A white owl swooped and
gleamed like some sort of angel. Quinn fell asleep, her dark hair splayed against the window, her legs spread open on the seat. I was glad no pervert was there to see her shorts riding up, a sliver of panties peeking out one leg.

Mr. Vieira appeared, making me jump.

“Jorge didn’t know what it said.” He leaned into my window. “Forget English—he can’t even read Spanish. Just thought she’d like a sticker. Kids like stickers.”

“He can’t go around sticking things on a little girl’s body.”

Mr. Vieira shrugged. “Where you gonna go?”

“There’s a berry farm up in Washington.” The thought of so much road suddenly exhausted me.

“All them berries will be picked by the time you get up there,” he said.

“We can’t stay here,” I told him.

“I need all the pickers I can get,” he said.

“I can’t take her back to a barn full of men.”

He looked off into the distance. “I have an option,” he said, rubbing his bristly chin. “If you want some privacy.”

“How much privacy?” I looked at Quinn again.

“You have to drive there,” he said. “It’s on the water.”

I forced myself to stay skeptical.

“Let me get my truck,” he said. “You can follow me.”

We drove through the dark orchard out into untamed fields, up a curved dirt hill. When Mr. Vieira said the place was on the water, he meant it. He pointed to a houseboat down on the other side of the levee, circa 1975, anchored at a small pier. I could hear rustling in the tule grass, sudden flapping of wings as we walked to the edge of the hill, Quinn still asleep in the car. The pear orchard lay in the field behind us, thirty feet beneath us; the trees hulked in formation like kneeling monks. A swath of river lay before us, twenty feet down, shimmering with moon.