Delta Girls (5 page)

Quinn insisted the Delta, with all its waterways, must be just like the Elivagar, the eleven rivers in Ginnungagap at the beginning of the world.

“This water’s probably warmer,” I said, my eyes wanting to close, my shoulder blades aching against the mattress. “The Elivagar were frigid.”

She perked up. “Can we go swimming?”

“Right now?” I wished I had kept my mouth shut. “I’m so tired, Quinn.”

“But the water’s right here!”

She looked at me with such pleading eyes, I said, “Fine. Get your suit on. But just for a few minutes.”

QUINN AND I
lowered ourselves over the edge of the deck. She had wanted to jump in, but I didn’t know if the water was deep enough. Quinn’s yellow bathing suit was getting too small; mine, a vintage granny suit with a brown and aqua tiki pattern, was a bit too roomy. We’d have to look for good thrift shops in the area.

Quinn let go of the railing first, squealing with joy. The water was surprisingly warm right next to the boat, probably from the generator. When we got outside its reach, there was a big drop in temperature, but it still felt wonderful—it had been a while since I had been immersed, since my entire body had felt embraced. The shower in the boat was barely a trickle, and that was
better than any we’d had for a while. We treaded water, splashing each other, noticing the little fish darting around us. At some point, I thought I felt my foot touch the slick bottom of the river, but when I tried to find it again, my toes just moved through watery space. Then the water suddenly rose in a big gentle swell. It felt kind of like how the ground had ballooned under my sea legs that morning, but I was inside the wave, not on top of it.

“There might be a boat coming,” I told Quinn. I couldn’t think of anything else that could make the water move like that. “We should probably get out.”

“Already?” she asked.

“I’m exhausted, sweetheart,” I said. “But we can go swimming again soon, I promise.”

Pulling myself back onto the deck was much harder than I would have hoped, all the strength wrung out of my muscles. We sat outside for a while and waited for the big ship, but it never came.

THE NEXT MORNING
, I could barely lift my arms.

“You’ll get used to it,” one of the sorters told me when I walked over to hand Quinn a water bottle. Her English was surprisingly good. Her hair was still wet from a shower. There was a large gap between her two front teeth. “My Ernesto said it takes a couple weeks.”

Many of the sorters were girlfriends of the pickers. All year or just during pear season, I didn’t know. There were a couple of wives, too. Sorting was no easy job, either—you got to sit down, sure, but your arms and wrists were constantly going. Quinn wanted to sort again, looking carefully for the biggest pears. The women didn’t mind if she was going slow, but the pickers minded that I was. After a couple of hours, when I had dumped just six agonizing bags of pears into the bins as opposed to their twenty or so each, a group went to talk to Mr. Vieira.

He pulled me aside when they dispersed and said, “I can’t afford to lose you, but I really can’t afford to lose all of them. They won’t pick if you stay on their crew.”

I rubbed my forearm, fingers digging deep.

“Why are you so pressed for pickers?” I asked. A cottontail hopped between some rows. Quinn jumped off the trailer and chased after it.

“It’s harder to get into the country these days,” he said. “Crackdowns at the border. Crackdowns over paperwork once they do get in. You know.”

I nodded, trying to keep an eye on Quinn.

“Plus the Lake County pears came in early this year,” he said. “Usually the Delta pears are the first on the market. Delta, then Lake, then Oregon, then Washington, then Canada. The crew follows them up the coast. Now they’re split in half.”

“I suppose you’re firing me.” I missed the houseboat already. I knew Quinn would miss it even more.

“I’m firing you from the crew,” he said, “not from the farm.”

Before he could elaborate, Quinn called for me, her voice frantic, and my heart caught in my throat. I ran toward her voice, pear branches smacking me in the face.

She wasn’t bleeding when I found her, thank God; there were no bee stings, no coyotes cornering her, no men with stickers. She was simply standing, awestruck, beneath a tree; clear long-necked wine bottles rose upside down from its branches like candelabras. A pear hovered inverted inside the widest curve of each, like a pale green lightbulb. It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen.

“How’d they get the pears in there?” Quinn peered up at the tiny mouths of the bottles. When the glass caught the sun, I had to shield my eyes.

“They grow in there.” Mr. Vieira ambled over.

“Upside down?” I asked. It seemed impossible that gravity would let the bottom of the fruit swell on top like that.

He nodded and pointed out the intricate contraption around
every bottle—netting and string connecting it to the branch above, gauze plugged loosely inside each neck to keep bugs away. They put the bottles over the baby pears right after the blossoms fall off. Only one pear per branch—only the “king,” the one with the biggest blossom; the rest they trim away, along with all the leaves around it, so the tree can channel its nutrients into the bottle.

“How do you get the pears out?” Quinn asked.

“You don’t,” said Mr. Vieira. “You pour booze in the bottles and sell them, pear and all.”

“That must be quite a sight,” I said, my face still stinging from the branches.

“Eighty bucks a pop,” said Mr. Vieira proudly.
“Eau-de-vie
, distilled right here.”

I knew enough French to make out “water of life.”

“I’ll have to try it sometime,” I said, even though I never drank when Quinn was around. Which was always. And before she was born, I had only had a few sips of champagne.

“You got eighty bucks on you, you can.”

“You should put all your pears in bottles if they make that much money.” Mr. Vieira sold his commercial pears for about twelve cents a pound. The ones he sold directly to markets brought in a bit more.

“Too much work.” Mr. Vieira tapped one of the bottles. “Besides, we only do it with our Comice trees.”

I took a closer look. The pears were rounder than the Bartletts, more squat. Some of them blushed a sexy pink on parts of their smooth skin.

“These need to be picked in the next few days,” he said. “You got to be more careful with the glass. Don’t want to bruise them pears.”

“Or cut yourself,” said Quinn.

“Or cut yourself,” said Mr. Vieira. “You have to be slower with the bottles. Think you can handle it?”

“Of course.” My shoulders felt like they were about to shatter,
but I could stretch to work out some of the tension. I hadn’t been stretching enough. And I could pace myself.

“We need help in the distillery, too.”

“Thank you.” Some tears, embarrassingly, sprang to my eyes. Mr. Vieira looked away.

“Gotta go tell them guys they don’t have to quit.” He turned and walked toward the crew. The light bouncing off the bottles made the back of his plaid shirt shimmer like water.

The woman who had been driving the trailer, the one with the walleye, stepped out from behind a tree, making Quinn jump. She wore another formless housedress, and men’s brown corduroy slippers with hard soles. Her hair had a life of its own—short salt-and-pepper waves that rose and fell in uneven tufts.

“Mrs. Vieira?” I had guessed before, but it had not been confirmed.

She nodded and shook my hand. Her palm was dry and callused, like the bottom of a foot.

“It’s very kind of you and your husband to let me work here,” I said, blinking hard.

She nodded again and smiled. It was a bit disconcerting, not knowing which eye to look into when I smiled back. Without saying a word, she pointed to the tree, then showed me how some of the pears had pulled away from their branches inside the bottles. All we had to do was cut off the string and netting, gently turn the bottle right side up, and set it in a sectioned wooden crate. If the pear was still attached to the branch but looked perfect, we needed to unhook the bottle from its string, tip it slowly so the pear slid down as close to the mouth as possible, and snip the stem off the spur.

The work was slow, methodical, but it still scratched up my arms.

———

“HOW DO THEY
know how to do it?” asked Quinn later as we walked through the orchard to our car. “How do all the pears know to grow at the same time?”

“They just do,” I said.

“But how?” She touched a trunk as if it could tell her, and I realized I hadn’t really thought about it before. It was a remarkable feat of choreography, all the Bartletts in the orchard, in the whole region, burgeoning in sync.

“Maybe they whisper to each other underground,” I said. “Like friends planning to wear the same shirt on the same day.”

I caught myself, knowing she didn’t know what that was like—calling friends, coordinating outfits—but she nodded as if she did. Then again, I had said it as if I knew what it was like, myself. We were both good at pretending we were part of the normal world.

THE PICKERS WERE
heading out, too. They kept their distance, but at least they didn’t look like they wanted to murder me. Maybe I could practice picking more so I could join them after we got all the bottles down. So many pears would rot without my hands. As we drove around the edge of the orchard, I felt a wave of protectiveness, almost maternal, for the trees. I didn’t want all their hard work to be for nothing.

QUINN AND I
parked and walked toward the metal staircase leading down to the pier. The Delta breezes were starting to pick up; I welcomed the touch of chill.

Across the water lay the remains of an old pear orchard. The trees had been chopped down and stacked in enormous gray piles all over the field, like some sort of bonfire site for giants. The cows that grazed there were dwarfed next to the huge stacks—they looked like miniature critters, like something that
could crawl onto your palm. I felt small looking at the heaps of wood, too. They threw the scale of everything off.

A whiff of the dead wood crossed the water, a dry, dusty scent. I felt a little chill even though the wind wasn’t cold. I glanced back at the Vieiras’ pear trees, just to make sure they were still there, that they, too, hadn’t turned gray and toppled over. It wouldn’t take much for the orchard to fail.

I found myself wanting to say something to Quinn about how we were perched on a levee between life and death, green and gray; I wanted to tell her what a precarious edge it was, how easy it would be to slip over to the other side. Then she took my hand before we went down the steps, and I decided to let her believe we were safe.

K
AREN LOOKED DOWN THE FRONT OF HER RED DRESS
as she bent over to lace her skates. Shocking to see skin after years of high-collared costumes, a big swath of it down the front. Not that it was skin, exactly—it was nylon covered with netting; the approximation of skin. The promise of it. A plunging neckline. A daring peek at her shoulder blades.

Deena had finished making the costumes just a few days before Regionals. Karen and Nathan didn’t have much time to test them out on the ice, to make sure they could move and breathe with them, that they wouldn’t slice up each other’s hands.

Paillettes and Swarovski crystals studded the dress like seeds on a strawberry; they had the same intricate pattern, too—whorls and honeycombs that seemed so organic, it was as if the cloth, what little there was of it, had been plucked from some glamorous vine. Deena had farmed out the beadwork, but had done all the stitching herself.

“You’ll get them hoping for a nip slip.” Nathan walked into the dressing room, and Karen kicked her skate at him. There was
no chance of a wardrobe malfunction—the dress cinched her in tight, plus she had tape over her nipples to avoid any poking in the cold. Nathan did, too, beneath his one-sleeved, elaborately beaded unitard. His left shoulder rose from it, smooth and muscled.

Karen’s breasts ached beneath the adhesive. Her period had just started, always a bummer at competition time. She wondered if she should follow what some of the girls did and go on birth control pills to regulate her cycle, to plan the pills so she wouldn’t bleed during competition season. When she suggested it, though, her mother said, “They’ll make you fat.” Karen thought that was the end of the conversation until Deena said, “If you diet enough, your period stops altogether. Few elite athletes bleed.”

Karen rolled her tights down over her skates, secured the elastic strap underneath. She liked the new trend of wearing tights over skates—they made her legs look longer, the line not broken by a chunky white boot. Her feet looked like Herman Munster’s, but that was a small price to pay for slightly more elegant stems.

“You look great,” Nathan said as they stood next to each other in the mirror.

“We
look great,” she said. She couldn’t help but reach up to his shoulder, rest her hand briefly on his warm naked skin.