BACK
Organically Grown
elizabeth lardaro martinez
I.
Heather lived in a small brick house with her grandmother, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. Some
evenings, generally in the summer, Mrs. Fitz could be seen walking to Foodtown in her
underwear or, when the moon was full, mailing letters in the nude. After these episodes we
had to lock her in her room for a few days. We’d slip Swiss cheese and tomato sandwiches
under her door, which, from the empty plates she slid back, we gathered she ate with gusto.
Before his death Heather’s grandfather had left a stockpile of Milwaukee’s Best in the
basement and whenever Mrs. Fitz was on lockdown Heather and I parked ourselves at the
kitchen table and drank it warm, from the can. In between burps Heather would peek out
the kitchen window, her eyes like radars. For sixteen she was strangely paranoid, believing
that at any moment men in uniform were coming to take her away. After four or five beers
she’d leave the window but swear to kill her grandmother and herself before she’d ever live
with a foster family again.
“You could live with us,” I said one day.
“Your mom hates me,” she said. “Besides, I like the crazy I know better than the crazy
I don’t.”
“Where’d you get that line, the movie-of-the-week?”
“No asshole, I read it.”
“Oh,” I conceded, but only because I knew for a fact that she did read a great deal.
There was a period in which she devoured Judy Blume novels, worn copies of “Then Again,
Maybe I Won’t” and “Wifey” over and over. Then there was the entire Jackie Collins
collection, beginning with a stolen library edition of “Hollywood Wives,” something with
which Heather was not shy about confessing she masturbated to (the writing, not the actual
book). One season she got into African-American literature and tried to get me to read stuff
like “Native Son” and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Whenever she finished one of
these books she shoved the paperback under my nose.
“Get away from me,” I’d say. “You’re white.”
“Ain’t no shame in it,” she’d say, sticking out her chest.
One Fourth of July we tied Mrs. Fitz to a chair in front of the television, bought a pack of
Virginia Slims and crunched our way over the railroad tracks and into the adjoining
neighborhood. We had to continuously pick the wedges out of our butt cracks caused by
cheap underwear and do-it-yourself cut-offs.
At another municipal park a trio of drug-users we’d unoriginally dubbed The
Pharmacists were already lounging on the bleachers, passing a joint between them and doing
their best to imitate James Dean, even though if you had asked them who James Dean was
they would have thought you were talking about smoked sausages.
“Hey Fitz,” said Troy when he saw us. In one fluid motion he pushed up the dingy
sleeves of the long johns he wore under his black t-shirt, even in July. “Gimme a blowjob.”
“Fuck you,” Heather said, and everyone laughed.
Our first order of business was to agree that the town sucked. Then we each lit a
cigarette lest one of us be accused of having quit. We passed a bottle back and forth, the
contents of which tasted like hair spray. The feeling that set in moments later was worth the
gagging, though.
The sun set, blanketing us in a milky blue sky. Other kids, kids like us, began to ooze
out of the darkness like horror-movie corpses in search of brains (and to say that some of
these kids were also looking for brains would not be completely unfair). It seemed they too
needed a break from the fact that nobody ever drove them anywhere in a station wagon.
Heather and I, the only girls, squatted against a tree when we had to pee, the forest floor
tickling our bottoms. In time the stars took their place in the sky, and before I knew it
Heather and Troy were gone. I sat on the bleachers with Mike, one of Heather’s other
conquests, who stared at me from under a clap of uneven bangs and lit my cigarette like we
were betrothed royals sailing the Riviera.
“Heather’s wasted,” he said. He bent in half to tie the lace of one of his K-Mart work
boots. “You should go get her.” I stared into the darkness. My body was numb.
“Hey,” he said, poking my arm. “You okay?”
I looked up at the stars and they swirled for me like fireflies, so beautiful and bright that
for a little while I forgot my own name, which made me surprisingly happy.
Heather came back with a head full of leaves.
“Nice,” I told her. Then she vomited on my sneakers, splashing chunks against my
naked shins. I took off my sneakers and threw them in the bushes. Heather thought this
was hysterical and removed her sneakers too. We hobbled home barefoot, clutching each
other like two elderly women on our way to the powder room.
Mrs. Fitz was up when we got in that night, eating sugarless cookies. We didn’t know
how she got the cookies as she was still tied to the chair. On TV Johnny Carson was wearing
a curly black wig and trying not to laugh. The sound was too low to hear what he was
saying.
“You know you’re not supposed to eat this shit,” Heather said, grabbing the cookie from
Mrs. Fitz’s hand and tossing it in the trash. She raised her hand to her grandmother’s face
but I reached forward and grabbed Heather’s wrist.
“Don’t,” I said. “She doesn’t know any better.”
Heather mumbled something before wriggling away from me, walking into the
bathroom and slamming the door. Mrs. Fitz stared at the television. I walked over and
turned up the sound, which did not seem to affect her. When I was sure Heather wouldn’t
be coming out of the bathroom for awhile I gave her grandmother another cookie, which also
did not seem to affect her.
“Big whoop,” I said as we headed out on our first day as high school seniors. I had to say
this, it was the law, even though I was looking forward to my first real acting class which as a
senior I was now allowed to take.
We were halfway down the block when Heather stopped and looked at me. She was
wearing pink satin shorts and a black mesh jersey with the number 69 on the back.
“Joanie,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”
I huffed and started walking. “No you’re not.”
“I am,” she said. “I am knocked up, baby.” Some kid on a dirt bike zoomed between us,
cigarette smoke flying over the top of his head.
I pulled her along carefully for fear of looking like I didn’t want to be late. “Did you take
a test?”
“I don’t need a test. I’m telling you, I know.”
“Well,” I said, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to be somebody’s mother,” she said, and tilted her head angelically.
I rolled my eyes, after which she told me I should get pregnant too. I told her to get
lost, although I must admit that the thought gave me a quick and satisfying shock of glee.
For fun, and because I was already bored with my classes, I let Heather spend our lunch
period picking out names.
“Remington for a boy, Alma for a girl,” she said. “No, Archer for a boy, Madonna for a
girl.”
“You can’t name your baby Madonna,” I said with my mouth full of pizza.
She ignored me until I asked her, somewhat sardonically, what she would do if it turned
out to be twins.
“Twins?” she said, and her face lit up.
As it turned out, Heather was pregnant. In fact, by the time the school nurse confirmed
the pregnancy Heather was already in her fifth month. Too late for an abortion, the nurse
told us. Then she handed us a bunch of pamphlets on adoption and smiled like she gave a
shit.
Heather passed me the literature.
“Have you told your parents?” the nurse asked.
“Yes,” Heather said.
“Good,” said the nurse.
We walked in silence to the park. The sky was dog-ear pink and it had just begun to
snow lightly. We discussed how strange it was that it was snowing over the park but not
over the high school just two blocks away. I lit a cigarette, not knowing if I should share it.
Now that the pregnancy was real I assumed Heather would quit smoking. I also assumed
she would give the baby up for adoption. At least that’s what I thought she should do.
When we reached the park’s edge Heather said, “I wish we could get married.”
I looked at her. Her hair was full of white crystals. “You are so gay.”
“Not like that,” she said. “Not like I want to have sex with you.”
We both shuddered at the thought, then started to giggle.
“Not like that,” she said when our giggling subsided, only this time it came out in a
whisper.
II.
With a beer can wedged between his legs and Led Zeppelin blaring from one crackling
speaker, Troy drove us to the state hospital a few miles away in Pennsylvania. We’d chosen
this particular hospital because we’d heard from some girls at school that it was not only
free, but the staff members were too overworked to ask questions.
Heather and I were crammed in the backseat, which was soaked with amniotic fluid. I
promised myself at that moment that if I ever had children I would reach between my legs
and deliver the kid myself before I ever went to the hospital in the back of a ’79 Firebird
with Robert Plant screeching in my ear.
Seven and a half hours later, sometime after midnight, Josephine Galaxy Fitzpatrick
was born. Because I was still a minor they wouldn’t let me in the delivery room but I did get
to hold her once she was clean. Josephine was warm and familiar, like a recently slept-on
pillow. She had a splotch across her forehead, shaped like Florida, which seemed to pulse
whenever she cried. When I asked the pediatrician on call about it she said the mark was
normal and would eventually disappear. It never did though, and there are times when I
wish I could look up that doctor and give her a piece of my mind. Come to think of it, she
couldn’t be much older than I am now. And look how much I know.
“I’ll cut all afternoon and be back by 1,” Heather said when she told me she was leaving
the baby with her grandmother while she finished her last two months of high school. “They
both sleep till then anyway.”
This arrangement lasted less than one week, and it wasn’t even because Heather had
come home one day to find her grandmother spreading orange marmalade on the baby’s
feet.
“You can’t,” I said, when Heather told me she was dropping out. We were sitting in her
room after school, listening to this new band, Guns N’ Roses. I held Josephine snug against
my chest, something I’d begun to spend entire days dreaming about.
“Fuck it,” Heather said. “I can’t concentrate anyway, I’m worried all the time and my
tits hurt.”
“But it’s so close,” I said. “Maybe we can get jobs after school and put her in day care.”
Heather shook her head. “You don’t understand how it feels to be separated from your
child.”
Just then the baby farted, causing us both to look at her and laugh. She’s my child too, I
thought. This I kept to myself, though. Somehow I knew it was the kind of thing you just
didn’t say, no matter how much you meant it.
“Little stinky ass,” Heather said, reaching for a diaper.
We tried to stay close. After school I would go to see her, help her with the baby and
maybe do some laundry while Heather napped or gave her grandmother a much-needed
bath.
“Why don’t you go for a walk or something?” I told her one late May afternoon. “Get
some fresh air.” She was still padded by the layers of fat she’d put on during the pregnancy.
I didn’t see how she was going to lose the weight either, seeing as she ate constantly, she
claimed, to keep her energy up.
“Fuck it,” she said, picking the gunk from between her front teeth. Then she walked
over and rested her head on my collarbone. Her hair smelled like stale hamburger and she
wheezed on each exhalation. It took all of my strength to hold her up as I waited for her to
say whatever it was that was making her so heavy.
“Hey,” I said finally, trying to look at her face.
She sniffed. “Troy’s mother called me a whore.”
“What do you care?” I said. “You know what she’s like.”
“I called to ask if she would take the baby.”
“Oh,” I said.
In the other room Josephine started to cry, causing Heather to groan and release me.
Her face was arranged in an expression I’d never seen before, something like rage but not
exactly. It was the vagueness in her eyes that caused me to take one step back, the feeling
that for the first time in my life I could not with certainty predict what she would do next.
Once Heather dropped out of school we began to lose touch. I can’t even say whose fault it
was.
III.
I was going to major in business but it seems Wall Street wasn’t in the cards for me
either. Halfway through my freshman year of college I was suspended for drinking. It’s a
long story. Let me just say that what happened was not my fault and that I should have
sued the campus police for unlawful entrapment.
Once my suspension was up I returned to school and promptly started drinking again.
Everybody does it, so what’s the big deal, I asked my on-campus counselor. Have you seen
the way some of those Kappa Sig boys drink?
Apparently he hadn’t because I was suspended again, then expelled not long after that.
My scholarship money was revoked and so I returned home, where my mother, glass of
wine in hand, told me that if I wanted to work in a gas station for the rest of my life that was
fine with her.
Now, the truth of that matter is that I had no intention of staying home. To prove it to
myself I made it a point not to call Heather, even though I had heard that her grandmother
had passed away.
I got a job waiting tables at Schittino’s pizza parlor/restaurant on the other, nicer side of
town. A temporary gig, I told myself, to make some money until I decided what to do. But
there was always something to pay for that got in the way of actually making that decision:
my car, the room and board my mother now charged, somebody’s birthday, drinks, clothes
and a credit card bill that just wouldn’t quit. Someday, I kept telling myself. Someday.
One year passed, then five. A week after my twenty-fourth birthday I married Paul
Schittino Jr. in a ceremony hosted by his parents in the back of their restaurant. I was two
months pregnant. It was a really nice reception, Paul’s dad did everything a la carte. I ate
two bowls of linguini carbonara and danced the Tarantella barefoot on the worn restaurant
rug. My mother gave us $1500 in an envelope, which shocked the hell out of me. People
kissed me and called me Mrs. Schittino. I drank three glasses of red wine, smoked my new
husband’s cigarettes and did a pretty good job of pretending I was a guest in white at
someone else’s party.
Paul Schittino III arrived three days early. Any thoughts I had of returning to school or
work were immediately replaced by midnight feedings, diaper changing and cooking for the
entire Schittino family on Sundays after mass. You might think that as someone who once
dreamed of Broadway but would have settled for Wall Street that I was miserable serving
ziti with meat sauce to a bunch of crazy Italians once a week. You would be wrong. To my
surprise I adored the Schittinos, especially the women, all of whom were teachers. The most
revered among them was Aunt Bernadette, who held a doctorate in art history. The men
were also educated but this did not deter them from arguing over the proper care of parsley
and basil seedlings. Paul’s parents helped us buy our house, which was only a ten-minute
drive from my mother’s. We even had an in-ground pool, something I had to keep looking at
to believe. And that, well, that was pretty much it. Life was not exciting but it was easy and
sometimes, over morning coffee in my canary-yellow dining nook, I allowed myself a
moment of magnificence in which I used the word “happy.” Other times, when no one was
home, I closed the shades, put on one of my husband’s suits, sat at my kitchen table and
pretended to chair a board meeting during which I made million-dollar decisions. I never
masturbated so I figured it all evened out.
As for Heather, I knew for a fact that she still lived three houses from my mother
because I once asked the mailman, Stu.
“I hear she never goes out,” added Stu. “Too big.” Then he handed me my assortment
of bills and started down the walk. He was gone before I could ask about Josephine and for
this I was grateful.
For Christmas one year Paul bought the kids a dog, a mutt with a slit in its tongue.
They called him Stubby Feets McGee. I’d never owned a dog before, as my mother had
always claimed to be allergic, and I fell immediately in love. That a warm-blooded creature
would love you unconditionally and you didn’t have to talk to it? Well, this was a gift from
God.
I was at PetFood Palace with the kids buying another forty-pound bag of organic dog
chow when I saw her. She had stringy hair and plump cheeks scattered with acne. She
waddled under the weight of a parakeet cage as she carried it to the back of the store. My
heart tripled in size.
“Crunchy or chewy, ma’am,” said the boy behind the counter.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Mom,” said my 8-year old, Deirdre. She nudged me, rolling her eyes. “You’re being
dopey again.”
“Crunchy,” I said and my head spun as I tried to figure out how old the girl was.
Sixteen? No, seventeen.
“That’s what you’re going to look like in a few years,” Paul Jr. told his sister as
Josephine approached.
“Shut your hole,” Deirdre said.
“Twenty-four fifty,” said the counter-boy. Josephine stepped behind him and when she
turned to face me I saw, on her forehead, the mark in the shape of Florida.
Deirdre pulled at the leg of my jeans. “Mom, you said this would only take five minutes.”
Josephine looked at me and I froze. I said “Hello” but the word fell out of my mouth in a
puff of silence. She said nothing, just picked up a bottle of glass cleaner and returned to the
rear of the store.
I handed the boy a fifty. He gave me my change and I schlepped the kids and the dog
food out to the car. When everything was safely inside I told Paul to keep an eye on his
sister and ran back to the store. All I had in my wallet was the change from the dog food. It
didn’t seem like enough so I took out my checkbook, thinking that this was one of those
moments in which my husband would accuse me of being irrational. I scribbled a check to
Josephine Galaxy Fitzpatrick and left it under a stapler on the desk anyway.
Back in the car I felt better but the kids were suspiciously silent. It wasn’t until we got
home that I realized they had filled my travel coffee mug with bite-size nuggets of whole
grain kibble, which to their disappointment didn’t really taste all that bad.
In the weeks that followed I waited for a response. A letter in the mail, a phone call, a
visit from Josephine or even her mother. The only evidence I had of even having seen
Josephine was that the check had been cashed. I analyzed her signature for clues to her
personality but the girlish penmanship seemed to be purposefully unremarkable, as if to
mock my curiosity. Subsequent trips to the pet store also proved fruitless. I never saw her
there again and when I asked the counter-boy what happened to her he just shrugged and
said, “Quit.”
Years passed. My husband grew a round hairy belly and the dog got cataracts. I quit
drinking and perfected the art of imaginary board meetings, even going so far as to buy my
own suits and have my hair styled in a French twist once a week. The kids went to college
and my mother moved into our finished basement where she could yell at the television all
she wanted. Stu the mailman was replaced by Valerie the postal worker who, one rainy
afternoon, handed me an envelope addressed to Joan Tucci Schittino.
“What’s this?” I said to no one after Valerie was gone. I stood wedged between the
front and screen doors, tossed the rest of the mail on the floor behind me and opened the
envelope.
Dear Aunt Joan,
It has taken me a long time to find the courage to write this letter. I hope I am not
too late to thank you for your act of generosity. My therapist says it saved my life and not
because $1500 is a lot of money, which it is. It’s because nobody had ever given me
money before. I didn’t think things like that happened in real life, only on TV. I never told
anyone except my therapist about the money because I never thought anyone would
believe me. He did though, and that made me believe that even more good things could
happen on their own. Good things can be organic, he said. I guess I’d never thought of it
that way before.
Anyway, I hope you don’t mind but I’m giving you your money back now, not just
because I can afford it but because I know it’s what my mother would have wanted. I
also know that she would have wanted you to know that she loved you very much—she
talked about you every day.
Love,
Josephine
Just then a check fell out from behind the letter, slipped out of the bottom of the screen
door and onto the walkway. Before I could run after it the wind scooped it up with a mix of
leaves and newspaper scraps. I watched from my doorway as it danced into oncoming
traffic, floated under a passing set of tires and disappeared.
She was on her hands and knees when I pulled up. Thinner than I remembered, she
wore a white tank-top, pressed khaki shorts and a black baseball cap turned backward. Her
shoulders were round and tan. A semi-circle of gazania flats surrounded her. I wondered
how it was that I’d never noticed the flower beds outside Mrs. Fitz’s house before. Or, for
that matter, the dark green ivy growing up the side of the house, next to where Heather
once kept the garbage cans.
I stayed in my car until I began to feel ridiculous. Then I got out and walked up to her.
I didn’t have to say anything, which was good because I didn’t know what to say. You would
think that as the head of an imaginary multi-billion dollar corporation I would have thought
of something ahead of time.
We were good at that though, not using words. That day, when Josephine looked up at
me and smiled I felt something I had never felt with my own children. Maybe it was just
relief, or maybe it was something unclassifiable. Either way when she removed her hat and
stood up to hug me I saw that she still had the mark of Florida on her forehead, though with
time it had faded and was now as light and distant as the state itself.
These days I go over there once a week. When we do talk it’s usually about the garden
she’s started in the back yard. Every time I see her I can’t help but search her face for my
old friend, even though I know she is not there. Truth be told Josephine looks like her great-
grandmother. I can’t bring myself to tell her this yet because I think that if I do we will
break our vow of silence and spend hours talking about the past. I don’t know that I’m
ready to know about Josephine’s past yet. I suppose that if I continue to visit her eventually
I will have no choice. But for now I think mostly about the flowers we’ve planted, the way
their mouths open in the morning to catch the sun and then close again, just at the edge of
daylight.
(c) 2007 by Elizabeth Lardaro Martinez