Squashed Read online

  “Ellie,” he said, dishing out another bowl, “I wish you great luck. If there’s anything I can do, I’d like to help. I’ve had my own battle with weight, of course.”

  I could hardly remember when he was fat. He was thin now from all that jogging. Two years ago he’d run a marathon at age forty-two and finished in front of a thirty-four-year-old IBM salesman with braces on his teeth.

  A wind blew Max’s leaves and lifted the summer smells of purple phlox and wild roses. The wild rose was Iowa’s state flower, and Rock River yards were full of them, since we had more heart than any town in the state. The stars shone down like sparklers from heaven. Looking south, I could see Lyra (the Lyre), a small constellation that lights the summer sky. A pale blue star glowed at the northern tip.

  I pointed: “Vega’s out, Dad.”

  He looked up and smiled. “The fifth-brightest star seen from earth, Ellie.” Stars always perked Dad up. He knew all about them and taught me when I was small. We hadn’t done much star gazing lately, though, because all of Dad’s motivating made him look inside instead of up. I missed it, too. I watched him from the corner of my eye and figured he’d be up half the night again, battling his sleeping dragons. Nana said the hardest part about being a widower is the empty bed at night.

  From our back porch I could see frame houses with rows of big yards swallowed up by the moonlight. People here pretty much knew who they were and let their yards say it. This all went out the window when folks became parents of teenagers, since parents of teenagers aren’t clear what planet they’re on. Hedges go bushy, lawns get grouchy. This didn’t happen at my house because I was in charge of the yard. I thought Dad should appreciate that. Being a turncoat grower, he didn’t.

  We were only a mile from Rock River’s real farm country, where the sunsets went on for miles and where, Nana said, the houses never messed with nature. That’s where Nana lived and where Dad grew up, but he could never appreciate the greatness of being surrounded by growers. He couldn’t understand why anyone would choose a profession that’s dependent on something so undependable—the weather.

  Dad saw a tornado level a farmer’s wheat field when he was twelve years old, and he never got over the injustice. Nana said Dad just jumped from the womb hating farming, and it was a big mystery to her and Grandpa where those renegade genes came from. I figured farming genes can’t root in an unresponsive soul. I think what bugs Dad most about me is that I love something he’s always resented.

  The once mighty Rock River flowed near Nana’s property, three feet wide and shrinking. The shrinking had begun five years ago because of increased irrigation over the years. It caused quite a stir when a nasty man from a road atlas company in Iowa City said that Rock River no longer qualified for “true river status” and would be marked on his maps as a “stream.” Mannie Plummer, a local grower, said it was typical of Iowa City foreigners. She led an emotional march around Town Hall and got a petition signed with 396 names of people who knew the Rock River when it was something to see. “It’s just getting old,” Mannie said in her speech in Founders’ Square, “like a lot of us.” The townspeople nodded, and the man at the atlas company called it a stream anyway, which is why you can’t find a decent road atlas in Rock River, Iowa, today.

  Our house had been Dad’s compromise. He wanted one far enough away from tractors and farmers without moving out of town, and close enough to people who wore suits to work and ate Chinese food. The house we lived in with Mother was too big for the two of us, and Dad couldn’t handle the memories. He had a soft spot, though, and found us a new house that let me be a grower within the extreme confines of a half acre.

  I was nine when we moved from the old Colonial on Farmer’s Road. Dad never goes by it, but I do. I can walk past it now (it’s taken some time) without the ache of Mother’s death crashing in like waves. Nana taught me that avoiding hard things just makes them harder. Time and love are mighty healers.

  Our house is mustard yellow with green shutters. Dad and I painted it together last year, and everyone said it looked fine. I wanted to paint it a gentle pumpkin color, but Dad said, nice try, absolutely no. We settled for mustard, a color with warm, positive associations unless you happened to be a ketchup or mayonnaise person.

  The backyard is filled with good, rich soil; the sunshine hits bright in the morning, which a pumpkin really appreciates. I had taken most of the space for Max, who was glistening in the moonlight.

  Dad was still eating. I should have let the moment be, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Doesn’t Max look great, Dad?”

  I knew this was against the rules. Richard said eat ice cream together, not talk, but I couldn’t help it. Dad harrumphed, sitting with his elbow on each armrest like the Lincoln Memorial. A squawking crow flew on top of Max. I bolted up clapping my hands and ran down the path shooing it away as Dad watched silently. I felt a cold chill go through me like an October wind. Strange, since it was only August. Then the miles between Dad and me seemed to race farther apart. I covered Max with an old blanket, patted his stem, and walked back up the porch to eat ice cream with my father.

  Some jerk at the Board of Education decided that school should start before Labor Day this year—just in case there were a lot of snow days—so the seniors could graduate the third week of June, before the mosquitoes hit the creek behind the athletic field. Last year had been a nightmare on graduation night, June 30, as the mosquitoes, drawn by the aroma of Jade East, lilac perfume, and Southern Comfort, descended on ninety-seven seniors without bias or mercy. I was a junior, so it didn’t matter to me if the seniors graduated in mid-July wrapped in gauze and the valedictorian got eaten alive by vampire moths. I thought it was stupid and unfair to sit perfectly healthy students in a stifling classroom the last week in August, and I told Richard so.

  “You can’t postpone the inevitable,” he said. “Before Labor Day, after Labor Day, it really doesn’t matter.”

  Richard could say that because he didn’t have a world-class pumpkin to develop. All he had to do was get his batting average up to .350. Max was bursting forth in great, glorious spurts. To leave him now was unthinkable. Who would spray the insects, yank the weeds, shriek at the hungry birds and rabbits, monitor weather conditions, and fend off blight? Do you put a racehorse out to pasture before the Kentucky Derby? While I was imprisoned in chemistry lab, Cyril Pool would be boostering his pumpkin to the thrill of victory.

  I discussed this with JoAnn Clark, my absolute best friend, and Grace McKenna, my absolute close second. We decided that Dad had to be reasonable about the important things in life. School didn’t work for me right now.

  “I’d like to drop out of school until the Weigh-In,” I told my father. “I’ll continue to study…maybe we could get a tutor—”

  “Enough!” Dad cried, storming from the garden. He was always irrational when it came to my needs.

  “You leave me no choice!” I shouted after him. “I will get up before dawn to tend him. I will walk through school with buckling knees, weary, bleary-eyed—”

  Dad turned, and in the shadows he loomed like a mammoth scarecrow. “You will,” he boomed, “get eight hours of sleep each night, young lady! Is that clear?”

  Crystal.

  I lay in bed and watched the clock: 11:19 P.M. He could make me be in bed, but he couldn’t make me sleep. Max slumped forlorn outside my window. Noble Max, whose ancestors sustained the Pilgrims through their first winter in America.

  That first winter must have been a bust, and you can bet the pumpkins weren’t appreciated right off.

  Vegetables never are. The Pilgrim children were probably crabbing by December (“Oh, no, pumpkin again!”), never realizing a pumpkin had all those disease-fighting nutrients and was a key dietary staple since it was too big to be lugged off the settlement by wild, rabid bears. It just goes to show you that even ancient people couldn’t appreciate something right under their noses, which is probably why the Pilgrims became extinct. There
’s a lesson here for all of us, especially my father.

  I opened my window and fixed my eyes on Max. He needed me, and I was a prisoner. There is something about a grower’s presence that calls a vegetable to greatness. I waved at him. I would not sleep! Cyril’s squash was probably basking in love and adulation and pushing out beyond good taste.

  But the air at Cyril’s place was polluted with deceit—bad oxygen could work to my advantage. I pictured his pumpkin withering in the patch, lying in defeat; a mere gourd. While this did not show a high sportsmanlike attitude on my part, it felt pretty good. I slept like a baby.

  I was up at five-thirty and hurried out to Max. I watered him, wiped him, and sat with him before Dad’s “ahem” echoed from the porch. I ate seven bite-size Shredded Wheats with half a banana and six ounces of skim milk, which hardly seemed worth the trouble, but I was going for the gaunt look, and severe measures were required. Dad had coffee.

  Richard and I walked to school the long way down Bud DeWitt Memorial Drive, because I wanted to go by Cyril’s place to see if anything was new, if you get my meaning. We rounded the turn by the Bud DeWitt Memorial White Hen, where I could hear the freshly iced doughnuts calling to me from their plastic case. I do not want a French chocolate glazed, I said to myself. I am going to be thin and gorgeous. Money burned in my pocket, but I marched on.

  It was at this very White Hen that realtor Bud DeWitt, who personally sold, rented, and rebuilt two thirds of Rock River, stopped every morning at 8:00 A.M. to pick up three dozen bismarcks to soften up his prospects. He died of unknown causes while closing a deal last fall. When the ambulance came he’d been long dead with a smile on his face and a bismarck in his fist.

  Cyril was the only grower in town who had named his farm and had a slogan. It was a stupid one at that. It hung from two whitewashed posts and swung in the breeze. His aunt had painted it in calligraphy and put butterflies and smiling faces around the letters. Cyril, I was sure, would never marry, which was just as well for future generations, because no one should have to live with a man with a sign that read: POOL’S PUMPKIN PATCH, HOME OF THE WHOPPER. Every time I saw it I wanted to puke. Pumpkins were not cute, they were majestic, and this was not the sign of a champion. The man should be disqualified from all growing competitions for bad taste alone.

  A truck was parked in the field, and Cyril was pouring liquids into a can and shaking it. The can was unmarked, of course. Growers guard their secret booster solutions like McDonald’s protects their special sauce recipe. Cyril saw me, covered his can, and smiled just enough to let all his bad teeth show.

  “Well, Missy,” he said, “come to check out the competition?”

  I hated it when he called me “Missy.” Cyril called every woman under seventy he met “Missy” because he was bad at names. Actually, Cyril was bad at life in general.

  “Just passing through,” I lied, shoving Richard ahead of me.

  “Brought your spy with you, I see,” Cyril said, indicating Richard, who glared back. “Well, feast your eyes on it, Missy, and weep.”

  A man jumped in the truck and drove it a few yards away, revealing the pumpkin, the sight of which made me stop breathing. It was enormous, bigger and fuller than Max, with orange skin so bright it looked like it had been painted on. Knowing Cyril, it probably had been. It had a sign next to it that read BIG DADDY.

  “Whatcha think?” Cyril leered, wiping his hands on his filthy overalls.

  Richard hit me on the back to start me breathing again. I collected myself nice and cool. “You call that a pumpkin?” I said, mocking. Well, you should have seen Cyril’s face. It nearly caved in, and Richard swallowed a laugh so hard he was coughing and bent over just trying to control himself.

  Cyril rose to full 5’4” height and smacked down his oily hair, his eyes on fire. “I call that a champeen pumpkin, Missy,” he spat. “Better’n anything you’ve ever seen.”

  “Make some child a real nice jack-o’-lantern, Cyril,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

  I grabbed Richard, who had dropped his lunch all over the road from the laughing, and we ran off like little kids who had just rung some old codger’s doorbell for the fifteenth time.

  This wasn’t my normal approach with people, but Cyril had it coming, especially since he’d been sticking it to me ever since last year’s Harvest Fair, when he beat me by 91.3 pounds. When he said, loud enough for the world to hear, that maybe I wasn’t ready to enter the adult growing competition and couldn’t they find him a more formidable opponent. Cyril didn’t say “formidable” because he didn’t use words more than six letters long. I was angry, let me tell you, but managed to act like a champion even though I’d lost.

  I learned this from Nana, who said that the way to continue the great Morgan family tradition of growing was to be a winner even when you came in last and wanted to curl up and die. It was up to me to carry the torch, since Dad had walked away from farming when he was twelve, never looking back, and his brother Bill had gone into commercial insurance in Sandusky after flunking out of Buckman’s College of Chiropractics and getting Sue Ann Gleason pregnant.

  Nana and I were cut from the same cloth. When my mother died, Nana bundled me up in her arms and made me her own. It was Nana who taught me how to grow pumpkins and stand up for what you believe in. “Got the easy part,” Nana always said, “growing you in that good soil your mama already worked.”

  Dad stomped down his memories, but Nana never let me forget. On my thirteenth birthday Nana gave me what’s become my most special possession: the journal Mother wrote during the first four months of my life. The inside flap opens to a rose petal drawing, and underneath my mother wrote something that always makes me cry: “To my precious daughter, who will make the world a better place.” I hoped I would. Max and I are sure working on it.

  On those pages are all her thoughts about motherhood and how she loved it. She recorded when I moved my head and made important noises. She said I was an extremely intelligent baby who battled disease like a champion. She wrote about the high fever I had when I was three months old, how she and Dad took turns holding me in a cool shower to bring it down. There were photographs of Dad in an antler hat by the Christmas tree, of Mother putting a little crown of flowers on my bald head. The last page is dated April 3: “Going back to work tomorrow,” it reads. “Bringing Ellie with me.”

  She did, too. Brought me every day to Redmont’s Florist Shop, where I was very well behaved and communed with nature. Mother said I had a grower’s heart. Nana said it takes one to know one.

  I’ve read the journal on each birthday since, and I don’t think it was possible to have been more loved. Mother was always laughing; that’s my best memory of her. Everyone remembered her laugh. She could turn it on Dad and make him not as serious. She’d surprise us with candlelight dinners, and the house seemed to glow in the light of her love. Nana said Mother sometimes hid behind the laughing, afraid of the serious person underneath. Nana wasn’t being critical when she said it, I just know what she meant. I don’t laugh and joke near as much as Mother did, but I hide sometimes, too. I still have an ache when I think about her; Nana said that’s real natural.

  I was in gym class when Mother died. We were running laps around the field when Miss Carroll, the school nurse, took me out of class. She said my aunt and grandmother needed to see me, but her face said it was more than that. I shoved down fear as we walked down the old hall that had seemed friendly just minutes before. Aunt Peg and Nana were waiting for me in the principal’s office, their faces caved in under a deep sadness. Miss Carroll left quietly, and Nana told me Mother had got hit by a car crossing the street in front of Redmont’s Florist Shop. I asked when I could see her, and Aunt Peg started crying bad. I was crying, too, and Nana picked me up with her full strength and said that wasn’t going to happen.

  I remember the tears after that and the absolute deadness. We rode to Nana’s in Aunt Peg’s new Buick. I didn’t believe Mother could be gone, but I was cryi
ng like I did. People were already gathering to share our loss. It was really the loss of the whole town, that’s what Mannie Plummer said. Dad was crumpled and broken. He lifted me up to his giant chest and we cried for days and days.

  The funeral came and went like a blur. Everyone said how sorry they were. Everyone asked if I wanted something to eat. The minister said Mother was “one of the finest lights God had ever made.” Richard gave me his very best baseball. Nana saw I’d had enough and drove me to a hidden field outside of town that was filled with wildflowers. We put together the biggest bouquet you’d ever seen. Nana said she’d always be there for me, no matter what. She has been, too.

  Richard refused to go back to school until I did. When we finally went back, a few kids avoided me, like death was something you could catch. My real friends were there, though, and they stuck to my side, helping me without knowing it to push toward normal. Once I wrote about living without my mother. I said life seemed gray and small—like watching black-and-white TV when you’re used to big-screen color. Dad put my story in a box in his closet where he keeps his special things.

  Memories were part of me, but Nana taught me not to live in them. We’re forever a part of the people who love us, she said. That kind of love is always alive.

  Nana is God’s gift to me. She is unmovable on being your own person and had a lot of practice standing tall on that one, since Grandpa nearly lost the farm four times because he was too stubborn to admit his mistakes. So she had to step in and remind him who he was and who he wasn’t.

  “You’re a farmer, Willard,” she’d say, “not an accountant. If God meant you to be good at numbers, you’d be good at numbers, but for now we’ve got that crop to bring in, and if you say we don’t have the money to do it, then we’re just going to have to sell the piano, that’s all.”

  Nana sold the piano four times and always bought it back when times were good. Grandpa never got an accountant till the day he died. He got a calculator, though, but never believed it could really add.