Songs of the Humpback Whale Read online

Joley laughs. “Jane always knew she wanted Oliver. The rest of us just couldn’t understand why.” He leans up on one elbow. “Sam, you gotta see this guy. He’s your classic scientist, you know? In a fog the whole day, and then he sees his daughter, and he’s lucky if he can remember her name. Talks and talks about these fucking tapes he makes of whole songs-”

  “Joley, if I didn’t know better I’d say you were jealous.”

  He pulls a thistle from the ground beside him. “Maybe I am,” he says, sighing. “See, here’s this great person. And Oliver gets to make her over in his own image, you know? He didn’t ever care about what a great person she was to begin with. If she had stayed with me-well, I know it doesn’t work like that, but in theory -she’d be totally different now. She’d be like she used to be. For one thing, she wouldn’t be scared of her own shadow.” He stretches out on his back again. “I’ll put it in your terms. She used to be an Astrachan, and now she’s a crab apple.”

  I smile at him. Crab apples are tart, almost inedible, except in jellies. But Astrachans, well, they’re the best all-arounds-sweet in cooking, sweet when eaten raw. I roll away from Joley, anxious to change the conversation. I feel weird talking like this to him. It is one thing if we are talking about the orchard, or my own life, but he is older than me, and when I remember that, I don’t feel right about giving him advice. About all I can do is listen.

  “So you going to tell us what happened last night?” Joley says, my way out.

  “You heard me.” I sit up and hug my knees, wiping off grass stains on my jeans. “Joellen’s getting married. She tells me this and then she comes on to me.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Would I joke about something like that?” I mean it as a light remark but Joley stares at my face, as if he is trying to evaluate me before making a decision.

  “I’m not going to ask you what happened,” Joley says, laughing.

  “You don’t want to know-”

  “Oh, I don’t?”

  I shake my head, grinning. Getting it out, saying it in the freedom of this great spread of land, my own land, somehow makes it seem all right. Once it is out, I can forget about it. I turn to Joley. “This kind of shit ever happen to you, or is it me?”

  He laughs and stands up, leaning against a tree that he recently grafted. “I only fell in love once in my life,” he says, “so I’m no expert.”

  “Some help you are.” He offers me a hand to pull myself up. We pick up the hose and the spray bottle and head further into the commercial half of the orchard. I walk ahead and stand at the crest of the hill, surveying the four corners of this place. There are men pruning younger trees straight ahead of me, and further along in the commercial section I can make out Hadley, supervising the spraying of more Thiodan. Now that it’s July all the leaves and blossoms are out, reaching against the sky like fingers.

  Joley hands me the fallen branch he picked up earlier, a likely candidate-for late summer bud-grafting. “Cheer up, Sam,” he tells me. “If you’re lucky, I’ll introduce you to my big sister.”

  19 R EBECCA July 22, 1990

  While we are waiting in line for our ice cream, my mother brings up the subject of Sam. “So,” she says to me. “What do you think? Really.”

  I have to say, I have been expecting this. They haven’t argued all day. In fact, most of the times I have seen my mother this morning, she has been in the company of Sam, strolling through the south corner of the orchard, or snapping beans with him on the porch as the sun beats down, or just talking. I’ve wondered what they are saying-Sam having no experience in speech disorders, and my mother knowing next to nothing about agriculture. I figure they talk about Uncle Joley, their common ground. Once or twice, I’ve pretended they are talking about me.

  “I don’t know him really well,” I say. “He seems nice enough.”

  My mother steps in front of my line of vision so that all I can see is her. “Nice enough for what?”

  What does she expect me to say? She stares so hard that I know she demands a better answer, a right answer, and I haven’t any idea what that could be. “If you mean, Should I screw him, then, if you want to, yes.”

  “Rebecca!” My mother says it so loudly that the woman in front of us, Hadley, Joley and Sam himself all turn around. She smiles, and waves them all away. Then she says more quietly, “I don’t know what has gotten into you here. Sometimes I think you aren’t the same kid I brought out East.”

  I’m not, I want to say, I’m crazy in love. But you don’t tell your mother that, especially when she’s all of a sudden best friends with a different guy who happens to be the same age as the guy you love. My mother turns to Uncle Joley. “She wants a small chocolate. I’ll have a javaberry. Can you order, we’re going to walk a ways.”

  I pull my arm away from her grasp. “I don’t want chocolate,” I tell my uncle, although that was what I had planned to order. “She doesn’t know what I want.” I shook a look at my mother. “ Creamsicle sherbert.”

  “Creamsicle? You hate creamsicle. You told me last year it reminds you of St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin.”

  “Creamsicle,” I repeat. “That’s what I want.” To avoid a scene, I walk with my mother. When we leave, Hadley and Sam are pointing at an all-terrain bicycle.

  “What is it?” I say, figuring if I get it out into the open then this will all be over. I know it is about Hadley, and how much time I have been spending with him. For all I know, maybe she found out about us in the barn.

  I have worked this all out in my mind, the product of several nights that I have lain awake missing the sounds of California. You don’t hear passing cars, or Big Wheels on the sidewalk, or the surf from miles away. Instead there are cicadas (peepers, Hadley says), and the wind in the branches and blossoms and the bleating of sheep. I swear you can hear headlights here. I cannot see the drive from my bedroom; at least three times I have run to the window at the end of the upper hall to survey the cars below-count them, and make sure my father hasn’t come yet. The only thing I can imagine worse than confronting my mother about Hadley is confronting my father about this entire trip.

  This is what I am going to say to my mother: I know you think that I am young. But I was old enough to come here with you. And I was old enough to know what was going on between you and Daddy, and what was better for us in the long run. So don’t tell me I don’t know what I am doing. After all, you weren’t any older than I am when you began to date Daddy.

  What my mother says is: “I know you think I’m betraying your father.”

  I stare up at her in amazement. This isn’t about me at all. She hasn’t even noticed me and Hadley.

  “I know that I am still married to him. Don’t you think every time I see you in the morning I think about what I’ve left behind in California? A whole life, Rebecca, I left my whole life. I left a man who, at least in some ways, depends on me. And that’s why sometimes I wonder what I’m doing out here, in this godforsaken farm zone-”She waves her arm in the air, “-with this-”

  When her voice falls off, I interrupt her. “This what?”

  “This absolutely incredible man,” she says.

  An absolutely incredible man?

  My mother stops walking. “You’re pissed off at me.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “I can tell.”

  “I’m not. Really.”

  “You don’t have to lie . . .”

  “Mom,” I say, louder. “I’m not lying.” Am I? I face her and put my hands on my hips. I think, who is the child here? “So what’s been going on between you and Sam, anyway?”

  My mother turns beet red. Beet red, on my own mother! “Nothing,” she admits. “But I’ve been having some crazy thoughts. It’s nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  My own mother. Who would have thought. “I didn’t think you two got along.”

  “Well, neither did I,” she says. “But I guess compatibility isn’t the issue.” She stares in the direction of Hadley and Sam, who are waiting with Uncle Joley at the front of the ice cream line. This place is different from the one we went to yesterday, back when my mother and Sam didn’t like each other. This place makes its own ice cream. It has only seven flav