“Yes, I have a son, just about your age, maybe a little younger. His name is Benno.”
“What kind of a name is Benno?”
“It’s short for Bennett.”
“Why isn’t he with you?”
“He’s on vacation.”
“Vacation?”
“A holiday. With his grandmother.”
They looked horrified, their faces smudged with dirt, their fingers sticky with strawberry juice.
“Then why are you here? Why didn’t you go with him?”
Why, indeed? Suddenly I was hungry. I stuffed three strawberries in my mouth.
After lunch I graduated to tomato picking. Nobody spoke to me for an hour. Finally a woman who looked to be in her fifties said, “You don’t have to be so gentle.”
She was referring to the way I was handling the tomatoes. Tenderly placing them in the basket, being careful not to bruise them, which slowed my picking down quite a bit.
“They’re just going in the pot,” she explained. “Those”—she pointed a few rows away—“we baby.”
She walked over to the other row, picked a tomato, came back, and handed it to me. “Taste.”
“I don’t have a knife.”
“Just bite into it,” she instructed me.
I bit into it like an apple; juice splattered on my chin. The skin was warm. It tasted of sun and earth and rain.
“Now eat this,” she said, handing me one of the tomatoes I’d picked.
Even though it was a deep red, it had none of the depth of flavor. It didn’t explode on my tongue, it just sort of sat there.
“You see the difference? These are for canning. Those are for eating.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She knelt down again. “My name is Ilsa.”
“Hi, Ilsa, I’m Lux.”
“I know. You don’t have to introduce yourself. Everybody knows who you are.”
My basket was nearly full. I picked more tomatoes, quickly this time, and stood. The wagon was a good quarter mile away. I arched my back and stretched, preparing for the walk. The basket weighed at least twenty pounds.
“Do you have moving pavements in San Francisco?” asked Ilsa.
“Moving pavements?”
“Sidewalks that carry you everywhere so you don’t have to walk,” she explained. “You just step on them and—whoosh!—off you go.”
This was what people in the early twentieth century thought the future would bring? I guess it was similar to me wishing that one day there’d be a tiny record player I could carry around in my pocket so I could have music wherever I went.
“Oh. God. No. That would be nice, though, wouldn’t it? There are so many hills in the city. But there is something close. Moving stairs. Escalators.”
“What about personal flying machines?” asked a man who’d been eavesdropping on our conversation.
“You mean like a car—an automobile that flies?”
He nodded.
“No, but we have commercial airlines. TWA. Pan Am. They fly hundreds of people in one airplane. You can travel from San Francisco to Boston in around five hours.”
He cried out in surprise. From then on, the rest of the afternoon flew by. I was deluged with questions. People gasped at what they heard. They also laughed and made fun. How strange. Why would anybody need to blow-dry their hair? Or use an electrified toothbrush? Or sit in front of a small screen in their living room watching something called The Rockford Files?
At the end of the day, the garden crew climbed into the empty wagon. I didn’t know what time it was, but it had to be well after six; the sun was low in the sky and the air had a hint of coolness in it. Slowly we made our way back to the dining hall. My fingernails were edged with dirt, my back was tight and my calves sore from all the bending and lifting, but I felt a kind of grounded satisfaction that I hadn’t felt in years. A pleasant ache in my solar plexus. The steady thrum that only comes from working outside.
We were packed into the wagon, sitting thigh to thigh. I now knew everybody’s name. Claudette, a six-year-old girl with a red birthmark on her neck in the shape of China, crawled into my lap, and in the ten minutes it took us to get to the dining hall, she fell asleep.
“Do you mind?” asked Ilsa.
“Not at all.” I enjoyed the weight of her head on my shoulder. It reminded me of my sweet Benno. I wondered what he was doing this very minute. How many days was it until I’d see him again? Eleven? Twelve?
“Is she yours?” I asked.
“She’s my granddaughter.”
“Oh, your daughter is here, too?”
Ilsa looked off into the distance. “She was.”
Later I’d learn that Ilsa’s daughter had left Greengage the night before the earthquake to spend a few days with her cousins in Alameda. Would Claudette ever see her mother again? No matter how enchanting a place Greengage was, what had happened to them was ghastly.
After dinner that night, when nobody was looking, I stepped into the fog. I was anxious to confirm that nothing had changed—that time was still passing regularly in my world. Once again, I heard the hum of the highway. And once again, I caught the briefest snippet of a song from a car radio. “The Hustle.” An image of Benno and me in the kitchen popped into my mind, the two of us doing the bump. The happiest of memories. He was fine. I was fine.
I would ask Joseph if I could stay a few more days.
I woke at midnight. Unable to fall back asleep, I went out on the porch. Joseph was there. We’d barely spoken at dinner, although I’d caught him looking at me a few times.
The red tip of his cigarette glowed in the dark.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“Can I have a puff?” I asked.
He handed the cigarette to me. I took a drag and tried to give it back to him. “Keep it,” he said. “How did it go today?”
I didn’t realize until he asked me the question how I’d been longing for him to inquire about my day.
“Good. I like the garden crew.”
“Do you?”
“You sound surprised.”
“You didn’t mind laboring in the heat for eight hours?”
“I loved it.”
“You loved it?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I doubt you’re used to this kind of life.”
What kind of life was he referring to? The kind of life where you spent the day outside, playing and working alongside people who knew you, really knew you?
“When I was a kid, my father would take me to Lapis Lake in New Hampshire,” I said. “Greengage reminds me of there.”
Joseph held his hand out for the cigarette.
I gave it back to him, surprised that he didn’t mind sharing with me.
“Were you happy at Lapis Lake?” he asked.
“I