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Dry Creek ValleyMy parents announced their divorce the same summer the vines contracted Phylloxera, aroot louse, and began to shed their rich green leaves, revealing the sea of gnarled brown stumps below. For weeks, the groundskeeper had taken soil samples, leaves, bits of debris from all thevineyards and slowly, methodically produced a timeline of the spread. The disease, heconcluded had begun in a single source, a strain of Malbec grapes grown only in our vineyard,and had moved outward until the whole valley was contaminated. The divorce, too, began with asingle source: my father having sex with a nineteen year old he met at the Pic N’ Save, and soonfestered into his running away with the nineteen year old because he loved her and because shewas pregnant with his child. I would learn the details of his relationship later when a letter arrived in the mail, sent from a PO Box in Boca Raton. But at the time, I could not tell thatanything was amiss until one day I awoke to find two meticulously packed suitcases by the door and my mother chasing him down the narrow hallway screaming “Fuck you,” over and over again.It was not an entirely uncommon scene, as fighting was a constant feature of life in ahouse as small as ours. There were two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a commonroom, all laid out in a perfect rectangle with one hallway serving as the only means of gettingfrom one end to the other. You could be at the entrance of the common room and look down thehallway all the way out the window in the furthest bedroom. And from that window, all youwould see were vines extending into the distance in perfect parallel rows, giving the impressionthat there was nothing separate from this place, only an extension of the narrow cream hallwaystretching into the distance.My mother nicknamed the house “The Shoebox” when they purchased it fifteen years1

prior, a year before I was born. At the time, she told me, the name was given affectionately, atender term capturing the coziness and perfect symmetry of the fading yellow home. But this was before the hallway was too narrow to accommodate my father’s great gut and she would have tolean against the wall to let him pass, his belly moving like a marble through a narrow tube. Thiswas before the kitchen sink and the toilet began to leak on a regular basis and before the hingeson the front door became rusted and worn, making it difficult to get in and even harder to get out.Over time, she used the term with more and more aggravation. “This place is a fuckingshoe

box

,” she would say to me as she retrieved the plunger to unclog the toilet for the fifth timethat week. She would emphasize the last syllable as if the word itself, box, referred not only tothe house, but also to the town, to the valley, to life.I had just woken up when I heard the commotion, and I came to my door to see thisweek’s offense. I was standing in my doorframe when I saw the two cream suitcases stacked bythe door with care and my parents sprinting down the hallway, my father moving with an agilitythat finally validated his claims of high school track stardom. As he reached for his tan canvas bags, my mother lunged for his waist, falling instead into the depressed square of carpet wherehis bags had been a moment before. He was already out the door, running to the gold Buick thatidled in our driveway with his young lover sitting in the passenger seat rubbing her belly andstaring blankly out the window, not even turning to see what was going on. I ran to the livingroom window, jumping over my mother’s felled frame to see him. As he lumbered into thedrivers seat, the girl with the blonde side ponytail and the dangly gold earrings recoiled slightlyin what, perhaps, was reality setting in.My mother righted herself behind me. She ran out the door, pulling her pink terry clothrobe tighter around her thin frame as she stepped onto the stoop. The car was already gone. It2

had disappeared onto the country road shrouded in oak trees and was making its way towardssome unknown destination. She stood in front of the house, staring into the empty space. Her hair was wrapped taught in pink foam curlers, as it had been every morning since I was a littlegirl. I knew that they hurt her scalp because she would cringe each time she rolled an inch widesection of hair. My father would always mock her, asking her what ball she was attending today.She would ignore him and continue on silently. I wondered if he could see how she flinchedwhen she rolled each strand, and I wondered if he realized why she did it.My mother had grown up in the South wearing pearls and attending debutante balls before she up and left for California and met my father, a successful insurance salesman in SanFrancisco. She did not know what she wanted to do, but her greatest dream was to paint theGolden Gate Bridge in all four seasons, and for that, she was willing to sacrifice the Ioniccolumns and sprawling yards of her family’s estate. Only after she arrived did she realize thatshe had miscalculated; San Francisco only had one season, foggy and grey. So she createdfallacies, productions of white snow drifts swirling furiously around the jaunty red bridge. Onehung in my room. It was so real that I couldn’t imagine the scene was not drawn from life. Thesmall huddled frames of people shuffling across the bridge so vivid that it was impossible thatthey did not live in this snow-covered world. But to her, the art was preposterous. She had cometo see snow; she had come to see summer leaves turn to rich oranges and reds and float to theground. It had been her understanding that these things happened on the coast, but she must have been thinking of the wrong one. She admitted to me once as she peeled an onion in the kitchen,giving her an excuse for tears, that she tried to paint the bridge as it was, cloaked in fog so thick that one could only see half of it at once, but she could not. She had meant to find the seasons3

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Dry Creek Valley

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Category:	Creative Writing > Short Stories
Rating:	(1 Rating)
Upload Date:	10/06/2009
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Tags:	Family divorce wine Vineyard dry creek valley Family divorce wine Vineyard dry creek valley (fewer)