Some kids never had to be vegetables at all. Some kids got to be human beings—Pilgrims or Indians—and eat the rest of the kids for dinner.
Like Yummy Fuller. As Cass recalled it, Yummy was always the Indian princess, even in first grade, when everybody else in their class was still playing gravy.
“Noble Pilgrims,” Princess Yummy used to say, “my people and I welcome you to our land. We know that your journey has been a hard one, and we will help you. Pray, take our seeds and plant them—”
It wasn’t like they didn’t have real Indians in school. They did. But back then even the Shoshone kids didn’t seem to mind, or maybe they just knew better than to care. Year after year Yummy’s lines stayed the same, while slowly she grew into her role. Tall and slim, wearing love beads, a buckskin miniskirt, and a headband with a jaunty hawk feather stuck in the back—by the time she entered ninth grade, Yummy made a luscious ambassador.
“Pray, take our seeds and plant them—”
From her position, curled on the dusty stage in her burlap sack, Cass listened to Yummy recite her lines and tried not to sneeze.
That year Yummy started wearing peasant blouses to school, and hip-hugging jeans that she’d turned into bell-bottoms with wedges of upholstery fabric. Sometimes she wore a gold dot, the kind you stick on filing folders, in the middle of her forehead. “It’s my third eye,” she told Cass. “It’s called a bindi. Indians wear them.”
Cass didn’t recall any of the Shoshone kids with filing dots on their faces, and she said so. Yummy rolled her eyes. “Real Indians. The ones from India.”
She would lean against the mailboxes at the end of their road, smoking an Old Gold Filter. They used to meet there after dinner when the summer sun lingered at the edge of the fields, low in the sky. Dump their bikes in the dirt at the side of the road and smoke, while the sun’s oblique rays stretched their shadows out long. Cass used to love her summer shadow. Even next to Yummy’s it was tall and slim, with legs that just went on and on forever.
It was safe there at the crossroads. The fields spread out in all directions, as far as the eye could see, some dark green with potatoes, some light green with wheat. There was nobody around, and if someone did show up, you could see them coming for miles by the dust they raised. Plenty of time to stub out a butt and flick it into the field, unless it was a truckload of Mexican farmhands, in which case you usually didn’t bother. Yummy would squint at Cass and offer up the cigarette, filter first, and Cass would take it between her thumb and forefinger, narrow her eyes, and drag deep. Then she’d hand it back the same way. When the sun set, taking her shadow with it, she’d sit on a large chunk of black stone at Yummy’s feet. They’d continue to smoke until the tip of the cigarette glowed red against the indigo sky. Yummy would take a foot out of her sneaker—she’d stopped wearing socks that summer—and place it, storklike, against the inside of her thigh. It’s a yoga pose, she told Cass. Her bare feet were long and slender. She wore a silver ring on her second toe, where dirt collected.
Cass had a brainload of pictures like that, even now, twenty-five years later.
“You don’t have to keep on with it,” Will said. “If it gets too much.”
He was sitting at the table with his morning coffee, looking over some specs on seed potatoes for the spring. He put down the pages and watched as she bundled up a few eggs, still warm from the chickens, tucking them in next to a bread loaf.
Cassie shrugged. “Jeez, Will. What else do I have to do with my day?” The sarcasm was lost on him.
“There’s always plenty to do around a farm—”
Cass straightened her back, rotating her fists into her kidneys. She eyed her husband, the stolid, broad-shouldered bulk of him, and tried to breathe away impatience. Of course there was plenty to do. Too much. There always had been, and ever since she and Will had bought up the last of Fuller’s acres, and she’d taken on the old man and his crazy wife, there was more to do than ever.
Cass sighed and went back to her packing, slipping a small jar of preserves in with the loaf. It wasn’t worth the breathing for an answer.
Will knew when he’d got something wrong. “I didn’t mean to criticize,” he said, catching her wrist as she passed. “It’s real sweet of you to look after them.”
That’s right, thought Cass. She looked down at his wide face. His hair was pulled back tight into a blond ponytail and fastened with a rubber band. She gave it a tug, then bent to plant a kiss on the top of his head. I am sweet. Why not? You could always count on Will to find the good in things. But if this was comfort, it quickly passed. Because it wasn’t just about sweet, although some sweetness did enter into it. Curiosity? Pity? Cass pulled away and went back to her packing. Resignation. Too many years spent as a potato.
“Maybe you should write to that daughter of theirs,” Will said. “Tell her she has to come home.”
“Sure thing.” Never mind that she hadn’t heard a word from Yummy in close to twenty-five years, or had any idea where she lived. “That’ll make her hop right to.” She gave Will a look as she headed out the door. “You don’t know Yummy Fuller.”
“Yummy, yummy, yummy, I got love in my tummy,
And I feel like a-lovin’ you. . . .”
It was her theme song. You could almost hear it playing in the corridors at school when she walked by. Pigtails swinging. It stuck in your head. Cass could still catch its boppy little melody on the cold fall wind. She swung her basket onto the passenger’s seat of the Suburban and set off down the road.
The screen door at the Fullers’ house had slumped off its hinges, and the mesh was clogged. The aluminum was dull and spotted with age. The old Japanese woman shuffled through the kitchen. She peered up through the dirty screen.
“Yes? May I hel-pu you?” After fifty years in Idaho she still spoke with the deliberateness of a foreigner, carefully pronouncing words, lining them up one after another, and launching them tentatively into the air.
“Hi, Momoko. It’s me, Cassie. Can I come in?”
The old woman backed away from the door and held it open.
“Yes. Plee-su.”
All the lamps in the house were off, and the shades were drawn. Cass set the basket of food on the kitchen table and yanked the cord on the roll-up blinds, letting in the cold, dim light of the morning. The plastic blinds were torn in places and patched with Scotch tape that had turned yellow and brittle. She could hear Momoko saying something in Japanese behind her. She talked to herself, always had.
Cass looked around. “Did you and Lloyd have breakfast?” she asked, hoping to see crumbs on the counter or dishes in the sink, some sign that a meal had been eaten, but the kitchen looked barren, like a dusty exhibit in a wax museum that no one visited anymore. It was the labels. Lloyd had written them out in black marker on index cards and taped them to the furniture and the various appliances. TOASTER, read one. MR. COFFEE, read another. Momoko was forgetting the names of things. Cass went to the REFRIGERATOR and took out a macaroni casserole she’d left a few days before. Some of the cheese had been picked off the top, but mostly it had not been touched. The old woman watched.
“You want to play with Yumi-chan? Maybe she is in her room. I call her.”
A bad day for Momoko, Cass thought. The woman was having more and more of them, days that dissolved backward, dragging Cass with her until she could almost believe she was six years old with pigtails and had come over to play. It was the air in the house. Smelled funny. Maybe a gas leak? No, not gas. Something unpleasant. She opened a window.
“Mrs.