Quite a Year for Plums (3 page)

“‘Two very large ones attacked me closely’”—Ethel was driving nearly 80 miles per hour down 1-75 and reciting her favorite passages from Bartram's
Travels
by heart— “‘roaring terribly and belching floods of water over me. They struck their jaws together so close to my ears as to almost stun me, and I expected at every moment to be dragged out of the boat and instantly devoured.’ ”

But Hilma couldn't keep her mind on alligators. She kept noticing the billboards rearing up out of the
cow pastures along the side of the road—a skimpily dressed, dyspeptic-looking young woman nine feet high, and the great words towering against the blue sky:
we bare all
. Hilma thought wistfully of the familiar comforts of the Thursday Evenings in May, Mr. Woodhouse with his basin of thin gruel and his frettings about the damp and the dirt and the dangers of sea air. It's spring, and the sap is rising, Ethel had said, but when they finally pulled into the sandy parking lot and heard through the woods the splashes and screams of the spring bathers, Hilma just sat in the car, feeling vulnerable and frail. Now when she thought of sap she remembered the morning sun shining through the chunk of amber she kept on a windowsill at home, and the little million-year-old fly frozen inside, with its bent and folded wings and its crumpled little legs.

“The waters appear of a lucid sea green color,’” Ethel recited, gathering up towels and canvas bags of swimming gear. She stood patiently, holding the car door open for Hilma. “The ebullition is perpendicular upwards from a vast ragged orifice through a bed of rocks.’” And sure enough, around a shady bend in the sandy trail and through the woods, there it was— the Fountain of Youth.

It was dazzling—the brightness of the clear water, the deep new green of the surrounding vegetation, and the turquoise blue of the little spring and its river. The white sand glittered.

“ Tt is amazing and almost incredible, what troops and bands of fish and other water inhabitants are now in sight,’” quoted Ethel.

But there were no fish in sight. The only water inhabitants were people, splashing and shrieking in the shallows or floating down the crystal stream belly-down in inner tubes, their bare feet poking stiffly toward the sky like ghastly plants struggling for sunlight. Something about the sun and the bright clear water and the luxuriant vegetation made the people look vivid and surreal, the white people whiter, the hairy people hairier, the stringy people stringier.

“My goodness,” said Hilma, but Ethel had left the canvas bags in a heap on the shore and was gone. Hilma could see her little head bobbing in the water where she floated, twirling slowly around and around over the boil. Every now and then a little burst of spray would shoot up from her snorkel.

Hilma took her shoes off and waded in gingerly up to her knees, poking at the sandy bottom with the tip of her walking stick. But little sharp rocks gouged her feet and the water was so cold it burned, and after just a minute she crept out. She wrung out her dress tail and carefully spread a towel on the grass in a little glade and sat, hugging her knees. She could feel a sweet aching in her legs and feet from the cold, and the bright glare, the distant shouts of the bathers, and the greenness made her feel dizzy or sleepy, and after a minute she closed her eyes and let her mind wander. For a while she thought about the sleazy motel near exit 73 where she and Ethel were to spend the night. Would there be a hair of the previous guest in the yellowed fiberglass bathtub? Would there be a dark and mysterious stain on the orange shag carpet? Would she and Ethel be able to sleep with the bright
lights blinking
we bare all
through the thin curtains, or, worse, would they both be raped and strangled in their lumpy beds by lusty revelers from the Cafe Risque across the road? Then she thought about Phineas Finn. It was in just such a place of great natural beauty as this, at the top of the falls of the Linter, that he had proposed to Lady Laura Standish in that touching way of his, looking as handsome as a god in his velvet shooting jacket, and kissed her.

When Hilma opened her eyes she saw an old man standing beside her, eating a thin sandwich on white bread. His skin was so pale it looked almost translucent, and his feet were so stringy and knobby that they looked more like mechanical models of feet than real flesh and blood. He stood, chewing his sandwich and looking down into the water for a long time. Then he said, “This your first time to the spring?”

“Yes,” said Hilma in her best schoolteacher voice, “although I have read about this spring. The great naturalist and explorer William Bartram visited here in 1774.”

“Lot of folks come with their families—husbands, wives, the kids,” the old man said, “to ride the tubes.” He took a step closer, and Hilma watched the strings in the tops of his feet tighten and loosen.

“Myself,” he said, “I'm not a married man.” He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. Then he asked, “Are you a married woman?”

Hilma sprang up, snatched her towel off the ground, and flapped it viciously between them. “Sir!” she said. “That is not a civilized question!”

“I was just thinking,” he said. “They say this spring
has powers. And you being here all by yourself and me being an unmarried man, well, I was just thinking, why—”

This time the water didn't feel as cold, and she floundered in deeper and deeper, clutching her skirt with both hands, until she stepped off a little rocky ledge and plunged in over her head. There was the first gasp when she thought she had died, and then, as she began to swim, the gulps for air became more moderate, and she could feel the coldness gradually seeping into her, until the only warmth she had left came from deep inside, and she imagined that she could make out the shapes of her internal organs by their heat: her foamy lungs and her flaccid liver with the little green gallbladder, hot and dense, nestling beneath it. Underwater there was no sound, just color and light. Even the wild dance of the eelgrass in the turbulent surge seemed peaceful in all that silence, and every time she lifted her head to take a breath it was startling to hear a second's burst of sound, like a yelp or a bleat. Hilma floated and gasped and floated and gasped, with her eyes open wide, until Ethel paddled up beside her, and together they climbed out and sat on the bank with their teeth chattering. Hilma wanted to tell Ethel about the flight from the unmarried man, the icy plunge, and how in that silent green and silver world she had felt the last of her anger at Meade and Mr. Knightley seep away along with her body heat until all she could feel was one tiny spot of warmth somewhere near her spleen. But they were both too cold to speak and they just sat on the sand, shivering and grinning.

• • •

“They are spending the night in Micanopy, near the site where Bartram frolicked with Indian maidens,” said Meade, heaping mashed potatoes on Roger's plate, “across the road from the Cafe Risque, where, I understand, women prance around on the countertops stark naked while men eat sloppy joes and poke dollar bills at them through a chain-link fence.”

“I didn't know the part about the chain-link fence,” said Roger.

They sat for a while, eating their civilized meal with a dinner fork and a salad fork, and listened to coffee percolating in the kitchen.

“I do hope Hilma is getting enough to eat,” said Meade. “Ethel is not apt to remember simple things like food.”

The Cafe Risque, painted glossy purple and white, sat in the very center of its shimmering asphalt parking lot surrounded by bright spotlights on tall poles. Fake turquoise shutters framed blank spaces on the walls, and signs had been painted where there might have been windows:

“I can tell by your sunburn you been in the spring,” the woman in the motel office said. “You had
a nice day for it. Yep, that's mostly who we get in here, tubers.” She wagged her head toward the Cafe Risque and raised her eyebrows at Hilma. “And them. The tubers, at least they're clean, been in that icy water all day, and quiet, wore out from all that paddling. Them, they're mostly truckers.”

The room was shabby but clean. There was no stained carpet and no stray hair in the bathroom, just worn-out linoleum and a row of cigarette burns on the edge of the tub.

Ethel was hungry, and as soon as they had gotten settled in, she went off toward Micanopy to try to find something to eat, but Hilma just wanted to sit still and savor the salubrious effects of an afternoon spent in the Fountain of Youth. She lay on the threadbare sheet on the bed beside the window and watched the Cafe Risque grow brighter and brighter as the night came on until it almost seemed to blaze with light. Just like the orchids you see on educational television, she thought, luring species-specific pollinators with elaborate tricks of mimicry. And right before she fell asleep she remembered with pleasure the name the Indians had given William Bartram: Puk Puggy—the Flower Hunter.

I
t was late May, housecleaning season, when Roger fell in love with a woman at the dump. He never saw her. He just liked the way she threw things away. Sometimes she left clothes draped gracefully across a corner of the Dumpster—a nicely laundered shirt, its long sleeves tucked up away from a rusty patch, or a pair of blue jeans folded across slightly worn knees. Sometimes she put things off to the side, arranged in orderly rows in the grassy ditch at the edge of the woods—a white plastic fan, a ceramic container of wooden spoons, a clip-on bedside light, and a whole hummingbird cake wrapped in several layers of plastic wrap and aluminum foil, set up on a stump. She left notes on some items.

“This fan works, but it makes a clicking sound and will not oscillate.”

“I can't eat this whole hummingbird cake.” And Roger's favorite, taped to a Hamilton Beach fourteen-speed blender: “Works good.”

He admired the style of the notes, the generous margins, the almost childish legibility, the careful use of punctuation, and the casual and almost intimate “good” instead of the grammatical but pretentious “well.” He was intrigued by the skewed logic in some of the notes, where her mind seemed to go skittering away from reason and fact, in a direction he could almost follow, but not quite:

“If you are tall, maybe this light won't shine in your eyes.”

“I'm intrigued,” he said to Hilma and Meade, who both seemed horrified. “How many people do you know who can spell Oscillate’?” he asked. “I admire good spellers.”

“O-s-c-i-double 1-a-t-e,” snapped Meade.

“But, Roger,” said Hilma sensibly, “she could be a racist or a thief. She could be cruel to animals. You can't draw conclusions about a person based on nothing more than a fourteen-speed blender and a white plastic fan.”

“No,” said Roger, “of course not.” But still he made a point of stopping by the Dumpster every time he went to Attapulgus to do his thrips counts, just checking. She threw away a radio/tape player: “Squawking in left speaker will stop if you tap the volume knob.” She threw away two plastic chairs.

The absence of things can give a kind of shape to a space, and using his collection of negatives, Roger imagined the inside of her house, silent, light, and spare, without a cheap white fan clicking but not oscillating, without the high scream of an electric blender on Whip, without the ridiculous excess of a
hummingbird cake. He imagined her in the house, padding silently from room to room on big bare feet, looking for things to throw away.

Delia had come to south Georgia to make a yearlong study of her special birds—coots, gallinules, and rails—in the spring-fed rivers and swamps and the salt marshes at the coast. But instead of beginning that serious work, she had found herself falling under the spell of a small flock of chickens at a nearby hatchery.

“America's oldest breed of chickens, ma'am, now endangered,” the poultryman had told her, looking sorrowfully at the big black and white birds scratching in the dust. “A hundred years ago every family had three or four Dominickers in the backyard, and now you can count the registered flocks on one hand.” Before she had even settled into her small apartment, Delia had begun a large watercolor painting of a brace of Dominiques and thrown away most of her household goods.

In the early sketching phase she threw out the fan because the clicking disrupted her concentration. But there was something so satisfying about setting that cheap white fan down in the grass by the Dumpster and driving away from it that a few days later, when the work became more difficult, she threw out several electrical appliances. And when she began the feathers, a week of dizzying black and white, requiring such a light touch, delicate but not tentative, she threw out all of her kitchen utensils and most of her furniture. She ate cold food from the grocery store
out of its plastic wrap, standing over the kitchen sink, and in the evenings, with her head aching slightly from eyestrain, she walked downtown to the Pastime Restaurant and ordered a vegetable plate.

If the work had gone well that day, she would linger over her greasy beans and new potatoes and then sit peacefully for a while, smiling to herself and enjoying the dense white of the old china plates at the Pastime, the shallow dishes of pickles on each table, and the waitresses, who seemed so different from her, big and loud and friendly.

On other days, she would grip her knife and fork in her fists and stab her food around, and then she would shove the whole thing away and make little sketches of difficult bits of the painting on the back of the place mat. When she got home she would pace around and around her apartment ferociously, and pile up stuff by the door to throw away.

It was on one of these bad nights that she first noticed the picture of Roger and the two peanut plants. She was looking at it when Betty handed her her change and said, “You have a nice day now.” But it was nine o'clock at night, she was stuck on the scaly yellow legs of the Dominique rooster, and when she got home she threw away a telephone and a small space heater. It was not a nice day.