“How can you be on cross-country? You’re not a runner. You have to already be that in high school to compete on a college team.”
He wiped his upper lip, as if he’d been working hard, as if he was sweating. “I mean, I probably won’t, but it’s not out of the question. The team there is pretty lame, which means I might be able to join.” He looked down at the envelope. “You can come and visit sometime, Frankie.”
And I said, “I most certainly would not visit during apple season.”
At that point, who should come to the table with her check to pick up her fruit but Brianna Kraselnik, a girl who was supporting her alma mater. We knew she’d returned to our town after dropping out of college, returned to shack up with not a Bershek twin but another local boy, and she was about to have a baby. Mrs. Kraselnik had gone to Connecticut with her horse and was remarried, and Dr. Kraselnik also had a new wife and was living in Milwaukee. Surely the daughter was a tremendous disappointment to her mother, Brianna an uneducated, small-town, unwed, pregnant twenty-three-year-old.
“Mary Frances and William,” she cried, “ohmyGawd, you’re in high school!” She, with her sleek hair now only midway down her back, and with no makeup, her eyelashes no longer tarred over with mascara, spoke with the astonishment of a gaga adult. “So, how’s it going!”
“Great,” William said, his greatness having just been confirmed by the fat envelope.
I thought to add a fee to her fruits, compensation for all the apples she’d surely stolen through the years.
“Your uniform is so cool,” she said to me, as if she meant it, as if she really did like my dark-blue FFA jacket with the emblem, and the blue tie, the white shirt. She turned to Ashley Klemko, who was also at the table. She said, “Hey! I love your hair.” She said this about starchy bangs teased to look like a fistful of curling ribbon. “So, wow!” she went on. “I ordered some fruit for my little guy.” She actually squealed, patting her grotesque bulge.
William, I noted, was wincing, as if he were three seconds into the future. He had assumed it would be safest to tell me about college in public but he was realizing he’d miscalculated, that wherever he made the announcement there might be surprises. Nothing for me to do then but fulfill his expectations. I heard the questions, posed firmly and yet pleasantly, issuing from my mouth. I said, “You know all those times, Brianna, those times you used to roll around in the grass in our orchard? On our property? Those clothing-optional sessions?”
She made one little startled birdlike cock of her head.
“I just hope,” I said, “that the residue from the spray isn’t still in you, that the toxins won’t affect your—little guy.” I lifted the box onto the table. “Here’s your fruit.”
“Oh, my God, Mary Frances!” She burst out laughing. “OhmyGod, ohmyGod! I’m so sorry. I am so incredibly sorry you ever had to see me like that—you poor thing! We were so crazy, me and that bad old Nick Bershek!” She squealed once more, a piercing awful noise. “OHMYGOD!”
William was looking at her with both gratitude and curiosity.
“I’m more worried about the drugs I did than pesticides, believe me. But you—! We probably scarred you for life, am I right? We were very naughty, really very very deranged.” She turned to William, shaking her steepled hands at him. “Please, please tell me you never saw us.” Mrs. Kraselnik’s daughter, the only token of my beloved teacher, felt compelled to again say, “Oh, my God.”
My urbane brother, so suave, said, “I’m afraid I never had that pleasure.”
Brianna whacked his arm. “Oh, my God, you are a laugh riot!”
William was going to college on September 9, and in college he’d say many witty things to many girls, all of whom would incessantly say OhmyGod, and he would be gone. He would be gone.
23.
Future Farmers of America
When was the last time I’d felt even a little glimmer of happiness? I couldn’t remember. It seemed certain that never again would joy be accorded to me, my mother going as far as to wonder, to my face, if I would consider going to the doctor. She meant a shrink. It was right after the fruit sale when she said to me, “Francie, I want to talk to you.”
I was in my room reading Heart of Darkness, lying on my bed. She wanted to talk to me? Fine, talk away. She pulled up a chair as if I was in a ward and she was a nun paying the patient a visit. In a conversational tone she said, “I’m worried about you.”
Rivets were in short supply in the jungle. I kept reading.
“You seem so unhappy.”
I shut my eyes.