Dry Creek Valley

Dry Creek Valley My parents announced their divorce the same summer the vines contracted Phylloxera, a root louse, and began to shed their rich green leaves, revealing the sea of gnarled brown stumps below. For weeks, the groundskeeper had taken soil samples, leaves, bits of debris from all the vineyards and slowly, methodically produced a timeline of the spread. The disease, he concluded had begun in a single source, a strain of Malbec grapes grown only in our vineyard, and had moved outward until the whole valley was contaminated. The divorce, too, began with a single source: my father having sex with a nineteen year old he met at the Pic N’ Save, and soon festered into his running away with the nineteen year old because he loved her and because she was pregnant with his child. I would learn the details of his relationship later when a letter arrived in the mail, sent from a PO Box in Boca Raton. But at the time, I could not tell that anything was amiss until one day I awoke to find two meticulously packed suitcases by the door and my mother chasing him down the narrow hallway screaming “Fuck you,” over and over again. It was not an entirely uncommon scene, as fighting was a constant feature of life in a house as small as ours. There were two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a common room, all laid out in a perfect rectangle with one hallway serving as the only means of getting from one end to the other. You could be at the entrance of the common room and look down the hallway all the way out the window in the furthest bedroom. And from that window, all you would see were vines extending into the distance in perfect parallel rows, giving the impression that there was nothing separate from this place, only an extension of the narrow cream hallway stretching into the distance. My mother nicknamed the house “The Shoebox” when they purchased it fifteen years

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prior, a year before I was born. At the time, she told me, the name was given affectionately, a tender term capturing the coziness and perfect symmetry of the fading yellow home. But this was before the hallway was too narrow to accommodate my father’s great gut and she would have to lean against the wall to let him pass, his belly moving like a marble through a narrow tube. This was before the kitchen sink and the toilet began to leak on a regular basis and before the hinges on the front door became rusted and worn, making it difficult to get in and even harder to get out. Over time, she used the term with more and more aggravation. “This place is a fucking shoebox,” she would say to me as she retrieved the plunger to unclog the toilet for the fifth time that week. She would emphasize the last syllable as if the word itself, box, referred not only to the house, but also to the town, to the valley, to life. I had just woken up when I heard the commotion, and I came to my door to see this week’s offense. I was standing in my doorframe when I saw the two cream suitcases stacked by the door with care and my parents sprinting down the hallway, my father moving with an agility that finally validated his claims of high school track stardom. As he reached for his tan canvas bags, my mother lunged for his waist, falling instead into the depressed square of carpet where his bags had been a moment before. He was already out the door, running to the gold Buick that idled in our driveway with his young lover sitting in the passenger seat rubbing her belly and staring blankly out the window, not even turning to see what was going on. I ran to the living room window, jumping over my mother’s felled frame to see him. As he lumbered into the drivers seat, the girl with the blonde side ponytail and the dangly gold earrings recoiled slightly in what, perhaps, was reality setting in. My mother righted herself behind me. She ran out the door, pulling her pink terry cloth robe tighter around her thin frame as she stepped onto the stoop. The car was already gone. It

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had disappeared onto the country road shrouded in oak trees and was making its way towards some unknown destination. She stood in front of the house, staring into the empty space. Her hair was wrapped taught in pink foam curlers, as it had been every morning since I was a little girl. I knew that they hurt her scalp because she would cringe each time she rolled an inch wide section of hair. My father would always mock her, asking her what ball she was attending today. She would ignore him and continue on silently. I wondered if he could see how she flinched when she rolled each strand, and I wondered if he realized why she did it.

My mother had grown up in the South wearing pearls and attending debutante balls before she up and left for California and met my father, a successful insurance salesman in San Francisco. She did not know what she wanted to do, but her greatest dream was to paint the Golden Gate Bridge in all four seasons, and for that, she was willing to sacrifice the Ionic columns and sprawling yards of her family’s estate. Only after she arrived did she realize that she had miscalculated; San Francisco only had one season, foggy and grey. So she created fallacies, productions of white snow drifts swirling furiously around the jaunty red bridge. One hung in my room. It was so real that I couldn’t imagine the scene was not drawn from life. The small huddled frames of people shuffling across the bridge so vivid that it was impossible that they did not live in this snow-covered world. But to her, the art was preposterous. She had come to see snow; she had come to see summer leaves turn to rich oranges and reds and float to the ground. It had been her understanding that these things happened on the coast, but she must have been thinking of the wrong one. She admitted to me once as she peeled an onion in the kitchen, giving her an excuse for tears, that she tried to paint the bridge as it was, cloaked in fog so thick that one could only see half of it at once, but she could not. She had meant to find the seasons

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and had made it to the wrong side of the country instead. Then she met my father in a bar downtown and fell in love and stopped painting altogether because she had finally found her purpose for being there in that fog cloaked city. And besides, he told her, it was very confusing to paint a California bridge in the midst of a New England fall. And after a year of dating, she accepted his proposal and followed his dream of growing wine two hours north of the city to Dry Creek Valley, where I was born a year later.

That winter, my father gained twenty pounds and it snowed in San Francisco for the very first time.

Standing now on the front step of our home, my mother seemed hopelessly out of place. She was tall and stately, her back perfectly straight and arms limp by her side. She would have looked at home among Eucalyptus trees, fragrant and willowy but among the squatty vines with their twisted branches and thick middles, she was an oddity, a snowflake falling softly on the streets of San Francisco. She folded her arms, now, across her chest. I watched the back of her head, waiting for movement, convulsions of tears, any sign of life at all, but she looked unflinchingly forward. What she thought during the time that elapsed, perhaps three minutes, I do not profess to know. Without bowing her head, she removed the simple gold band that she had received fifteen years before and cast it into the vineyard. It arched gracefully through the air, the metal catching the sunlight as it returned to the earth, an act of great significance and passion resulting in some tiny unseen crash. One day, perhaps, it would be implanted there and grow into something horrible, a vine with rotting fruit and withered leaves. She turned back to the screen door and for

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a moment we stood there, examining each other through the glass window. I searched her blue eyes for some form of shared experience or pain, but she looked into my face with neither acknowledgment nor recognition. I would later try to imagine the depth of pain, the absolute bleakness and despair that must have motivated that look, and I would try to forgive her for it. The moment passed and she turned now, moving through the front door, through the common room, where I sat, and into the kitchen. She walked directly to the metal wine rack in the corner of the room. The rack held twenty bottles, all ours, each sorted according to year and type. It was as close to a scrapbook as our family had ever produced. She reached out and took a bottle off the shelf. She ran her fingered over the beveled paper as if it were the skin of a newborn child, delicate and pure. Today, I knew, a crew was coming to rip every last disease riddled vine from the ground. There would be no new wine for several years. Perhaps she wondered if he had planned this, plotting his own escape to coincide with the destruction of the vines in hopes of creating some greater metaphor. Perhaps she felt deceived by him and was furious with herself for miscalculating the sort of man he was. Or perhaps she had known what sort of man he was all along and simply hadn’t done anything. Her body language, her gracefully curled spine and impassive stance, revealed none of these possibilities. And the ambiguity of the situation, the lack of definitive emotional response, was terrifying. Without warning, she flung the bottle to the linoleum floor with such force that the cork popped and wine burst from the bottle. Her body became fluid again, and it must have felt good to create that type of crash. The wine flowed outward from the point of contact, soaking the white floor in burgundy. Examining her work, she took another bottle and hurled it against the wall, grunting with exertion. The wine burst in a tremendous arc and coagulated in a puddle filled with shattered glass. She reached out to the wine rack again and again, her arms moving

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gracefully as a dancer as she reached across her body to retrieve another bottle and flung it outward into the space. I was crying now, but I did not say a word. I was not really there. Like a wedding or a funeral, I could not claim ownership over the events that were transpiring, and so I bore witness.

Twenty bottles, in sum. My mother stood barefoot, surrounded by a sea of crimson red. She was a sea goddess, her legs smeared with wine and her sallow cheeks full and alive with color, the passion of the moment igniting her very being. The curlers had distended, unraveling tangled tresses of long brown hair that had, in recent years, become tinged with grey. She was fiercely gorgeous, a savage woman shown on the cover of National Geographic. I could have imagined her hunting down caribou or migrating across deserted lands. She could have painted the Golden Gate Bridge in a typhoon and no one would have questioned her vision. I cried harder now, and I was shocked to discover that my cries were not silent. I, in fact, inhabited space in the same scene as she. My mother caught my eye and held my gaze for a second. And though her blood was coursing with adrenaline, though her stance was that of a warrior, stiff-legged and brazen, her eyes showed only fear in its most basic form. It was the fear of the unknown, the fear of time passing without any logical sequence at all. It was the same fear of the savage woman in uncharted lands and the same fear that I had experienced when my mother told me as a young girl that Clancy, our Golden Retriever, was dying. It was a fear that one learns to suppress when it is no longer appropriate to ask questions such as “Where are we going?” or “Is there a God?” anymore. “Don’t cry.” It was neither a command nor a placation. I nodded once as she turned her head and walked unflinchingly through the puddle and

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down the narrow hallway, leaving perfectly formed red footprints of wine and blood on the cream carpet.

In such a small space, there is no room for chaos or calamity. Everything must be contained, compartmentalized, controlled. Spills were cleaned immediately because there was no way to avoid them, surfaces kept tidy because one could not work around them. Now, with my father’s absence, there was suddenly room for disaster, and the house seemed empty for the first time I could remember. Slowly, I set my feet down on the floor. They had been coiled tightly under me, and now they were numb. I tested each leg, putting a bit of pressure on it followed by a bit more. Finally, I stood and got a mop from the kitchen closet. It was solid in my hands, the feeling of wood between my fingers telling me that this was real. This is a mop I thought to myself I am holding a mop and I am going to clean the kitchen. I knelt down and nicked my finger on a piece of broken glass. I watched coolly as a small bubble of blood formed and ran down the length of my index finger. I brought the finger to my lips and licked it off. This is blood. This is blood and that means that I am alive. I righted myself and dropped the mop into the center of the wine, sending ripples through the placid lake. I moved the mop to the left, which merely extended the puddle outwards in that direction. I moved the mop to the right, but this created a similar phenomenon on the opposite side. I had never mopped before, but I knew that this did not happen when my mother did. I pushed the mop franticly now, swinging it from left to right, and with each movement the mess seemed to grow in size, becoming more and more impossible to contain. I stopped. I dropped the mop and sunk to my knees, alcohol seeping into cuts and scrapes with a tingling burn that feel prickly and good. The shorts I wore had been white but were now turned a deep

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crimson. They would never be white again, but I didn’t care; the line between tidiness and disorder seemed too solid, and we had crossed from one side of it to the other. Everything in this house would be stained now, somehow. Cupping my hands, I brought some of the wine to my lips; I wanted to taste what rage felt like. I had tasted wine all my life, and I had come to finally appreciate the taste, the undertones and blending of flavors that not only set each bottle apart, but each sip apart. Everything about a good wine, my father had once told me, changes. No sip should ever evoke quite the same response. The pooled wine tasted strongly of decay. I took another sip and could taste the disease, the acrid taste of death which would soon be all there was. Surely the taste of rot had been there for years, growing with each successive crop, waiting to be discovered. A good wine changes, but it does not decay. I lay down in the warm wine. Fruit flies buzzed hungrily around my arms and legs, and I watched as one rogue fly dipped down into the mess and became caught, its wings growing heavy with wine until it sank slowly, inexorably to the bottom.

Perhaps I dozed off then, or perhaps I was conscious, the boundary between the two so dissolved that it hardly mattered. Consciousness, as I understood the term, was the state of understanding your surroundings and affecting change through action. By this definition, I had not been conscious at all that morning. Now, lying in the pooled wine, the burn of my skin becoming duller, more distant by the moment, I was not sure that I had been conscious for a very long time. Perhaps the last night I was conscious was when I was ten, a girl in pigtails whose favorite hobby was running between the winding rows of grapes with arms outstretched in either direction. I would grab at the leaves as I flew past, tearing them from the vines and clasping

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them like wings. My father would see me from the bedroom window and yell at me to stop, but I would not. I would flap my wings until I could felt as though I could take flight. Perhaps that is how it is to be truly awake: exhilarating and a bit destructive, always at someone or something’s expense. Was the girl in the passenger seat of the Buick alive? Did she feel as though the driveway held infinite possibilities at its end? More than my father, I thought of her. I would be haunted for years by her blank expression and wonder if whether, as an adult, she would wear her hair in a side ponytail if only to bring back the fleeting feeling of how she was as a girl. I wanted more than anything to have seen her face as she drove away and know if she was happy, if she was sorry, if she was conscious.

I was roused by the sound of footfalls. The oven clock told me that and hour had passed, though I could not believe it. It had been days since he had left. Soon, my mother stood in the doorway. Her hair had unraveled, the pink curlers bobbed uselessly at the ends. Her eyes were wide but vacant, and in her hand was a cigarette, which she moved methodically in and out of her lips. There was something sinister about the forcefulness of her inhales, the slight quivering of pleasure as she released a white curlicue of smoke. The sight of my mother with a cigarette was as incongruous to me as would be the sight of our land without vines. My favorite memory of my mother was when we went to the lake one oppressively hot summer weekend. We were on the edge of the boat with our big toes skimming the surface when, without warning, she rose and swan dove into the lake, making no splash at all. She was under for so long, diving deeper and deeper, seconds passing with no sign of her. And just at the moment when it first crossed my mind to worry, the very instant when some reflexive fear began

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to kick in, she came to the surface, treading water and laughing to herself, her face radiant in the reflected sunlight. “Come in!” she said and I jumped in and swam to her. I had never been more thankful to her as I was for knowing to surface at the exact moment I began to panic. The very act solidified my trust in her and my certainty that she would always care for me. I did not know, now, how to reconcile this water goddess with the woman who stood before me, oblivious to my tremendous need. She brought the cigarette to her lips once more and I looked away, ashamed to have seen her in such an intimate act. I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck, sizing up my jaw line and determining how much it resembled his, how much of him was still in this room. “Did you know I smoked?” “No.” There was silence. She was waiting for more, perhaps an admonishment or some statistic about the consequences learned in sixth grade health class. She stood waiting for anything she could fight against. “When did you pick it up?” “Years ago.” She waved her hand in front of her face to illustrate this. “I promised your father I’d quit, but I guess neither of us paid much attention to our vows.” “Does Dad know you smoke?” I said this, I think, to hurt her. Does he know, not did he. He wasn’t coming back. She shrugged. “What does it matter now?” “I was just wondering if you lied to him.” Her mouth contorted in pain. “I never lied to your father, Lindsay. There are private matters and there are lies and you should damn well know the difference. “Which was the girl?” I wanted to take back the words as soon as I spoke them. “You shut your fucking mouth.” She looked as though she could have hit me, and I

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started back a little on instinct. But she stood perfectly still, the muscles in her neck tense with rage. “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt the sting of tears coming to my eyes, and in a way it was comforting to feel such a familiar response to pain. She sighed and extended her arm down to me, but the act was just a gesture, an indication that it was time to rise; she put no effort behind the outstretched hand, and I pulled myself up from the ground, my legs trembling under the weight. We stood very close now, my eyes hitting the top of her chin. She released my hand and flicked her cigarette into the puddle of wine. She began to walk down the cream hallway towards her bedroom, and I followed. “Pretty dirty, huh?” She said of the carpet with a sort of reverence, as though she herself had planned those footprints. Upon entering the bedroom, she opened the top drawer of her nightstand and took out a carton of cigarettes, placing it on the bed. The nightstand had been a wedding gift from a family friend, and in the corner was a painted grape leaf with the wedding date written in elegant white letters, “June 4, 1980.” Surely she must have tried harder at some point to hide her cigarettes, maybe burying them outside or shoving them in the ventilation ducts. My father may have been oblivious to her transgression, but more likely, she stopped trying to hide it from him because it ceased to matter either way. It must have been tragic for my mother to abandon the elaborate plan to hide her secret and instead, place it beside the bed she shared for her husband to find or not find. And yet, however crassly and indifferently she hid her secret, I did not know. She reached for a fresh box and opened it, pulling out two white cylinders. One she put between her pursed lips, and the other she extended towards me, raising an eyebrow in invitation.

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My heart lurched as I examined the cigarette held between her trembling fingers. Had she acted out in grief or rage, I would have forgiven her, but all I knew in the pit of my stomach was disgust. “No,” I said. “I don’t smoke.” “I know you don’t.” She smiled as if to say that I was incapable of such secrecy. “I’m asking you if you’d like to try.” “Why?” “You don’t have to.” The cigarette bobbed like a pendulum in her mouth counting off the rhythm of her words. “It’s just I’d like a little a company and, well, who the fuck am I to tell you anything anymore?” “You’re my mother.” I tried to put as much weight behind those words as I could, but even I could feel them dissipate into nothingness. She took a lighter from the pocket of her robe and brought it to the tip of her cigarette. The end glowed red and smoldered. She closed her eyes for a moment as if contemplating the validity of my previous statement; was she? I reached out and took the cigarette, which was still extended towards me. It felt too light, too insubstantial to be anything at all. Shouldn’t the manifestation of fourteen years of deception be heavy? This felt no more harmful than an autumn leaf, yellowed and crackling on the ground; I could crush it if I wanted to. I rolled it over between my fingers, and I could feel the heat from my mother’s hands. I placed the cigarette between two pale lips, leaned forward, and waited while she lifted a purple plastic lighter to the tip.

The first inhale burned my lungs like a fire poker and I couldn’t suppress a wave of coughs. My mother cocked her head in bland concern, and I blushed. I brought the cigarette to

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my lips again and this time, took a tiny, tentative puff. The taste was bitter but a bit sweet, and I let the smoke eddy in my mouth for a moment before releasing it, trying to taste the different undertones as I had been taught to do with wine. I walked past my mother to the bedroom window. It was noon, and outside, the migrant workers were beginning to descend upon the barren grapevines, rolling into the base of the driveway in pickup trucks with windows down and Mariachi music blasting. Pretty soon, there were about twenty of them clustered at the left-hand corner of the vines, far enough that I could not make out individual features, dark skinned and dressed almost identically in torn jeans and flannels. One stood in the middle of the group, gesturing towards the rows behind them. On command, the group split apart and each man grabbed a pick ax from the back of a white pickup truck and approached a separate row of grapes. The destruction process seemed sadder, crueler somehow, when meticulously organized. Each man started at the closest vine and, raising a rusted pick ax overhead, cast it down onto the vine without any ceremony. It took three strikes, on average, to uproot each vine. After these three, it would topple to the ground, pulling up an intricate system of roots, thick and pale like gnarled appendages. The worker would then move onto the next, leaving the felled vine in the dirt to await the arrival of a white pickup truck that would take it away. And in this way, carefully, methodically, rows of once fleshy vines became battlefields, the forms of fallen soldiers unresisting to the Mexican who hopped out of the passenger side of the pickup truck and scooped their lifeless bodies into the back. I brought the cigarette to my lips once more, this time filling my lungs with the sour smoke. I could feel my mother’s presence behind me coming closer to the window, and my body tingled with the foreignness both of the chemicals and of her. She came to the window and

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we stood shoulder to shoulder. “What are we going to do?” “About the grapes?” “About everything.” I shrugged. “Everyone’s going to know.” Our simple country house on the hill, our small happy family, all this would be revealed as a fraud; my mother could go into town with a cigarette in hand now, it hardly mattered anymore. “Did you know about Dad?” I asked suddenly, surprising myself. She stood still for a moment, her cigarette suspended in midair. She turned to me, and for the first time, looked at me. She opened her mouth tentatively, as if debating the correct word to use. “Yes,” she decided on. I began to cry softly, not for her, but this time, for myself. Misdeeds, indiscretions, bad habits: the Marlboro box hidden in my mother’s nightstand, the nights my father spent with the blonde girl, all these things had been there, visible, all along, and I was the only one not to know. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I failed you.” I watched as the rows of grapes outside peeled back to reveal their secret, the barren ground below. “Do you remember Sonoma Lake?” I asked. “What about it?” I wanted to tell her about the time she rose at the exact right moment. I wanted to tell her how I had trusted her so wholly and how I hadn’t been afraid since then. “Nothing.” I said. And then, “You should paint the vineyard.” She shook her head. “The plot will be empty soon.” “You always painted what wasn’t there.”

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She considered this for a long moment, eyes staring unflinchingly forward. Her hand trembled as she put the cigarette out on the windowsill.

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