Picking Blueberries

Anna Tambour

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Picking Blueberries
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© Anna Tambour 2003, 2011

This story was first published in Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (2003).

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

The moral right of Anna Tambour to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Picking Blueberries

Father carved the joint. "Thin for you, Dick?" he giggled.

"Please, Father." Dick answered. He still hated the taste, and the batter he was mixing was double chocolate to disguise as much as possible even the texture, once mixed in.

Mother was in the bedroom. As usual. Dick wondered who was with her this time.

Today was Dick's birthday. This morning, Jonathon, the ex-psychiatry student, one of Mother's currents, had visited for a couple of hours. Dick opened to door to his knock, and Jonathon held out a gaily wrapped package. "I stole this for you," he smiled, trying to curry favor probably, though Dick was surprised that Jonathon had noticed him.

"How did you know?" Dick asked. But Jonathon's face was blank, looking over his head toward the guts of the house.

"Coincidence," Dick muttered, but he unpeeled the giftwrap to find The Complete Poems of TS Eliot, with a "To Dick 1972, from Jonathon," scrawled on the title page in thick blue ink. He opened it further to The Hollow Men. "Thanks Jonathon," but when he looked up, Jonathon had already disappeared.

Dick took the book up to his room and carefully sliced out the title page. Then he smiled at the book. It was entirely coincidence. Dick remembered other arrival gifts, as Jonathon always had something when he came over. Jonathon's gifts to Mother had been a pound of sirloin, a slinky toy, a package of foam curlers that they both chortled over, then made a mobile of, hanging now from the lamp over the dining room table. To Dick, once before, a gift, some plastic toy that Dick hadn't disguised his disgust over. Jonathon did well on this one, but as usual, it was a within-grab-range impulse. It could as easily have been The Gun Digest 1968 or a Barbie doll.

Dick knew Eliot from the library, and had enjoyed the camaraderie of hopelessness that he felt with Eliot, though he preferred Sassoon. But those were private thoughts not discussed with anyone, least of all Father, Mother, and their friends.

A series of loud gasps and grunts whooshed down the hall and rolled into the kitchen where Dick and his Father were now, Dick with his mixing bowl, Father cutting up the hash cube—in family jargon, "the joint."

Father's brow wrinkled momentarily, and then he went into the living room. In a moment, "Ah! Brown sugar, just like a young girl should ..." blasted over any sound other than a bomb, and Father came prancing back in, neck extended, head bobbing to the music.

Father worked a few more seconds at his task while Dick watched, wondering what took so long to smash up a glob. But that wasn't the way Father looked at it, so Dick kept his thoughts to himself. Then Father scraped the broken up paste into the mixing bowl, and took over the mixing himself, carefully mixing well, then tipping it into the prepared pan, and finally using his fingers and tongue on the mixing bowl to lick the leavings clean.

Dick put the pan in the oven, then went to his room. The party would start soon. Father danced off into the living room.

~

Theirs was only one house of about a dozen in The Community. The Community had a constitution, lots of money from somewhere, and a purpose "to uplift and foster." Dick heard the whole purpose thing read out once, and it sounded noble. He wished he had written it. The houses of The Community were scattered in the middle of a quiet neighborhood, though The Community houses were the only ones not inhabited by black families. The reason there were so many Community houses is that the collection was considered a college, and associated with some famous college in another state, a college with classes and real campus buildings.

Most of the people of Father's and Mother's age had been professors of one kind or another from another fancy college at the other side of town (though in the informal atmosphere of The Community, Professor and Doctor had been dropped, just leaving the plain Mr. Mrs. Miss.) They were all officially the faculty of The Community, though Dick never heard of any classes that he could recognize, like at school. Nor did anyone say "faculty" except at meetings, when they said it a lot.

The recruiting team seemed to be pretty important, though. It was Mr. and Mrs. Fox, who went to universities and sang. Dick heard them once. They sang Puff the Magic Dragon and Hava Nagila. Mrs. Fox didn't look like Mary and Mr. Fox didn't look like Peter or Paul. Mr. Fox's hairy belly showed through his shirt, Mrs. Fox's long Indian-print dress dragged down in the front, and her long tightly corrugated hair had bangs that jutted out in a big curl. But every time Mr. and Mrs. Fox went recruiting, a few weeks later, some new recruits came in, mostly pretty girls. They had to be approved and allocated living quarters, but Dick didn't know of a time anyone was refused. Often though, after a few months, one day a girl was here and the next gone, with no explanation—to Dick, at least. Not that many of them ever said hello to him, but some were nice for a while.

At the Foxes' house, which the Foxes commanded like all the other grownups did their own houses, Mrs. Fox was usually the only one of the Mr. and Mrs. home, always carrying on her wide hips one or two of her children. The house smelled of sour milk, and Mrs. Fox usually had stains on her clothes. When they went on recruiting drives, Ellen who lived in the house took care of the children, but only because it was a few days, and because she didn't do much except put the bottles on the sofa, and diaper once a day.

Ellen was a "life model" in the college. "Rubens" was what Mr. Fox called her. Dick wondered whether that meant that she talked about her model life, and if so, did she tell the college students that her house smelt.

She looked like a startled rabbit most of the time, and had a big belly all the time. She got along well with Mrs. Fox though, although Dick never knew why. No one else would take care of the babies.

Dick knew that Mr. Fox was hardly ever home from what he heard. Mr. Fox had been a professor of English literature, and as Mrs. Fox said to Ellen, and Dick overheard from Sara, who lived in the next door house to Foxes, Mr. Fox had Miss Prescott to stay overnight with, and Miss Prescott lived alone in her Community house, and what could Mrs. Fox complain about. After all, Mrs. Fox had the children, "who were no incentive to come home to." This is what Dick heard from Sara, who wanted to be a life model, too, but possibly next semester, she was told. Dick thought it unfair that she had to wait, because the stories she told were better than Ellen's.

Miss Prescott had been a professor like Mr. Fox—anthropology. She was thin, hard, and smelt like nothing, or at the most, typing paper. She wore wraparound skirts and blouses that looked ironed. Her arms were corded and tan, and her sandy blonde hair was cut off sharply to the top of her neck.

Mr. Fox and Miss Prescott had set up The Community Project, the downtown poor area café. The Community had bought it with some of the grant funds, and deciding on that was a "process of meetings" that permeated Dick's room—not really meetings as such, but more of a lot of talk, and then everyone storming out, and then another meeting, and then, worry about an ultimatum of the money being cut off if they didn't have a Project, and then the café was brought up, as someone found out it was for sale cheap.

The day after The Community bought the café, Dick was one of the work detail driven out in the new van—Mr. Fox driving, Miss Prescott directing when they piled out—to clean up the café from its previous owner, who seemed to be an alcoholic chain smoker.

The place opened up the next day and a work detail went in to cook. Dick didn't know who. Father and Mother were asked to contribute hours, but they were busy. Father couldn't because he was a psychologist for the state, and Mother couldn't because she was busy reading Anais Nin and Henry Miller, and thinking of writing a book about them.

Mostly nobody knew what to cook in the restaurant, and even less, how to clean. This was fine until one day a retired cook got food poisoning, and then there was another meeting at Dick's parents' house. Why Dick's parents' house again, he didn't know, but the house was in the middle, so maybe that was it.

After that, Dick heard Jonathon complain to Mother that he had been rostered, and couldn't get out of working one shift a week. The good thing was that Miss Prescott started making pies, and the place got a good review in the newspaper. She must have liked making pies. And then at the next meeting at Dick's parents' house, when someone said, "The review went well. We're up for renewal," there was clapping, yelling, and suddenly, "Brown sugar" blared out again, and the room stampeded itself into the floorboards till way after Dick went to bed.

Soon after, Father began to stay away longer at work, and Mother was often not home because in the next door, a baby sitter had moved in. Her name was Betsy, and she wore a dress as long as Mrs. Fox, but she didn't smell like milk. And she was curvy, and she didn't curl her hair but wore it in braids curved over her head. She came after the last recruiting trip. The babysitting was for Dick and his little sister, Jane, who was only nine months old.

Mother had been looking for a babysitter. Betsy worked free-of-charge, as all babysitting was, in The Community. Mother called her "the wet nurse" and laughed. Mother was conscientious about not leaving the house with just Dick and Jane in it. She wouldn't do something like that. "The pigs won't help if we get ripped," she explained to Betsy, "so don't leave the house." Mother loved her Sierra dishes, yellow and blue and green. They took years to collect. And no one had the record collection of Mother and Father.

Dick remembered Mother when he was a little boy and she wore lipstick and teased her hair. He wondered why she hadn't thrown out the makeup. She had a picture on the bedroom wall of someone who looked like her, except Mother's hair was free-flowing. Virginia Woolf, she said, a writer. Dick walked to the library and checked out a Virginia Woolf book, but he returned it half-read, as he couldn't understand why the lady was so upset all the time.

Dick liked Betsy. She liked him, and told him stories about creatures she invented. She invited him to play with her and the neighborhood kids, the day after she first babysat, and he had fun. Betsy made something weird, white and hard and soft at the same time. A big tray of it. If you hit it hard, it was like concrete, but if you put your finger into it, your finger would sink down as through batter. It was just cornstarch and water, she said. Dick had a lot of fun and met some neat kids. They all had even more fun when Betsy added food coloring to the white stuff, and she began to throw it around, inviting them to, too. She did something fun every afternoon, and Dick had fun outside after school, something he hadn't before.

When Betsy was with Jane, she got a look on her face. Dick thought it looked like love. He liked to watch her with Jane. She sang lullabies that she made up on the spot, really soft.

One day, just before Father and Mother were to go out again, Dick walked into the kitchen, but Betsy was sitting on a kitchen chair, and Father was kneeling at her feet with his hands on her skirt, cupping her knees.

"She's right with it," Dick heard Father say. Then Father noticed him, and got off the floor, and Betsy smiled at him, and her eyes were wet.

She moved into the house the next day. She brought a big cooking pot with a heavy bottom and a rocking chair. The pot went into the kitchen and the rocking chair, into the living room.

She babysat a lot after that, and she sang so much that Dick was really happy that he could have her so much to herself.

Then she worked in the restaurant during the day, so that the play sessions she had had, were over.

Then she started looking really sad.

Then Dick noticed that she was getting fat. He liked what it did to her breasts, which he almost couldn't stop looking at as the tops of them swelled over that dress she always wore. He thought of it as her Princess Dress.

But then Dick could see her face puffing out, and her waist looked tight.

He didn't know why. He asked her, but she said it was nothing. He kept asking, and one day she said, when they were in the living room, trying to talk over the sound of Mother in her room, "Why doesn't he do something?"

But she was saying it to herself, and not to Dick, as he opened his mouth to ask who what, and she had gotten up already to go to the kitchen to cut herself some bread.

When Betsy picked up Jane now, she made noises just like Mother made to Jane. "Ee ee ee, oo oo ooh" she said.

The sleeves of her Princess dress were dirty.

One day she told Dick a story about rats. He had nightmares that night. He wanted to go to someone, and went up to her room in the attic. He had never been there. It was dirty. She was sleeping on a couch, wearing some sort of dirty kimono that was half open. In a panic, he left.

The next day was Saturday. At breakfast, Father answered the phone. "Sure he can," he said. "He's not doing anything."

In a few minutes, the van beeped, and Father said to Dick, "That's your ride!"

Dick got into the van to find a bunch of girls from The Community already in it. Mr. Fox was driving, with Miss Prescott beside him. She turned around. "We're going to pick blueberries for my pies."

He sat between two girls on one of the side benches. In the middle, the floor was piled with fruit boxes and baskets with handles.

They went out a long way into the country. Dick couldn't remember being out in the country before. He looked out the back window, as the sides were metal. Cows got left behind, red barns, crows, a field of corn. A U-Pick Peaches sign. He wanted to smell, but couldn't smell anything except someone's perfume that reminded him of dust.

Still, this was fun.

They turned off a bumpy road onto a dirt one, drove a few seconds more, and then stopped. Mr. Fox slid open the door. Miss Prescott appeared behind Mr. Fox, and putting her head on his shoulder, spoke into the van. "Take out the picking shit."

Dick and the others pulled out the boxes and baskets, and each took a basket. Miss Prescott directed them all to the blueberries. They grew as an orchard, on a short forest of trees.

"Everyone pick. No eating. Go!" she said. And then she sat down under a tree with Mr. Fox.

Dick and the girls could reach and pick everything, and they picked conscientiously till every tree was empty. Dick didn't eat more than a handful, as it was so much fun seeing the fruit boxes fill.

Some of the girls were putting the last boxes into the van when Miss Prescott yelled, "Into the van!"

They were already putting the boxes into the van, and so one of the girls stood still with her box, looking back with a hurt look at Miss Prescott. But Miss Prescott was looking away, so she sighed, stacked the last box inside, and had just jumped out again when Mr. Fox yelled, "Get in the fucking back!" and he ran to the driver's side door, then must have remembered that the back couldn't close from the inside.

And then Dick heard the sound, and looked behind him.

A pickup truck slewed off the dirt drive at the far end of the orchard. A man stuck his head out of his window as he drove. "Thos'r my trees!"

Mr. Fox shoved Dick's backside into the van and ran to the driver's door. He jumped in and the van jerked away, sliced hard left and bumped once, so hard that blueberries jumped, and pattered on the floor. Dick and the other girls fell off their benches, hitting the wooden fruit boxes with legs and arms. One gashed girl began to cry, but Dick climbed back onto the seat, hanging onto some metal. He looked out, but the pickup man didn't chase.

In the flash before the van spurted out of the orchard, Dick saw the man standing beside his pickup in the middle of the blueberry trees.

The field of corn got left behind also. And the crows, red barns, and cows on the drive back to unload at the café.

Oh, yeah. By this time, Dick and Jane had a new babysitter, but not a live-in one. Dick remembered her as the one who liked playing records at full blast, rocking hard and fast in the rocking chair.

About the author

Anna Tambour's stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Interfictions and Asimov's SF. Her short fiction is collected in Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (described by Rich Horton as "a revelation and a delight") and her first novel is Spotted Lily (described as "a wicked, thoroughly unpredictable romp" by Locus). Both are available from infinity plus ebooks.

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