She remembered every grower for two hundred miles and every prize pumpkin that had ever slid onto the giant scale her father donated to the festival in 1953. Adelaide McKenna was a big woman of big gestures, and she walked the grounds like a queen touring her kingdom, kissing babies, tasting pies, and patting pumpkins. She did this pretty much at Grace’s party, too.
Nana said Mrs. McKenna was a great community servant, but for my money no woman is truly great if her house has only one bathroom. The door finally opened and out scurried Justin Julee, the smallest boy in school, who had to sit on the Greater Des Moines white and yellow pages just to pass driver’s ed.
I slipped inside and checked the damage. Richard was right: My eyes were clumpy. I tried peeling the mascara off, but the lashes stuck together, a look Wes wouldn’t go for. I washed the remainder of a once-perfect makeup job off my face and considered spending the evening in the linen closet. But growing giant pumpkins had prepared me for life’s bad weather: When it hit, you fought back, that’s all.
I heard a knock on the door and Sharrell Upton’s twinkling voice. “I just hate to be a pain, but I’m gonna have to get in there soon!”
Sharrell was the cheerleading cocaptain of the Rock River Belles and a Sweet Corn Coquette contestant. We weren’t close. I opened the door to her look, which said she had to go bad. I lingered at the door making small talk, so she’d have to hold it longer. Sharrell had Bambi eyes with long, curly lashes that didn’t clump, and a small waist that she always put one hand on for emphasis. Since I couldn’t be the prettiest girl at the party I could at least make it uncomfortable for the one who was.
Sharrell was about to lose it and flung herself toward the toilet. I crept toward the living room, positioning myself behind Mrs. McKenna’s plastic palm, which I had never seen any use for until now. I felt common and ugly. A fungus in a land of flowers.
Richard would never hide behind a fake tree. He was in the thick of it, talking to two soccer players about how Iowa needed a professional baseball team. The soccer players could clearly care less, but Richard’s feeling was if people didn’t like baseball, tough. The boys were looking at the pretty girls, who were pretending not to notice. Sharrell entered like no big deal that everyone was watching her. Just once I would like to walk into a room and have people notice. Was that too much to ask, God? I threw my braid over my left shoulder and tossed Mother’s earrings for effect. Mrs. McKenna’s clammy hand was on my shoulder, jingling with gold bracelets.
“Ellie dear, why don’t you have something to eat?”
“I’m sort of on a diet.”
“Nonsense,” she said, and dragged me to a table of food that bulged with empty calories. I chucked my diet, cut a giant wedge of butter pecan cake, and dug in. Grace ran up to me and pointed to Wes, who was dressed in jeans and a work shirt and leaning against the fireplace, talking to a group of kids in fancier clothes. Seeing him put a knot in my stomach. Was I ready for the introduction?
“No,” I told her, scarfing down cake and holding in my stomach (not easy, trust me). “I’m not.”
Grace pulled me to the fireplace, yanked Wes’s elbow, and announced to him and the world: “This is Ellie. You know. The one with the pumpkin.”
This was not the quiet introduction Grace had promised. Wes and I looked at each other uncomfortably as the others smirked. I had never thought of myself as the One with the Pumpkin. I had other qualities I felt Grace could have brought out. The One with the Gift for Growing, the One with the Pretty Good Skin, the One with a Deep Love and Respect for Nature. I checked my upper lip for frosting. Wes smiled at me. I had never seen him close up before. He was not handsome really, but had very nice gray eyes. He grinned wider and said he’d heard about Max.
“He’s big,” I said.
“Yeah. I heard.”
This was my usual brilliant beginning when I talked to a boy. I can never think of anything interesting to say, so I keep going, hoping he won’t notice.
“He’s about four hundred pounds by now so, you know, he could really be something, maybe, or it could all go away. You know.”
“How could it all go away?” he asked.
I didn’t know why I said that. Sometimes I was afraid I’d wake up and Max would be gone. “Gypsies,” I offered. “Nuclear war.” Wes laughed, not out of politeness. I laughed back.
“Do you think they’ll drop the bomb on Des Moines?” he joked. He was leaning against the fireplace, looking directly at me. He was cute close up.
I laughed some more and was feeling pretty good even though my face was bare. I made Mother’s earrings tinkle as I talked and could feel my eyes sparkle. I put my hand on my waist for emphasis, not because Sharrell did it but because it was the right thing to do. We talked about corn, how Texas A&M had developed a sweet onion with a taste nobody could believe, and some things that didn’t matter. I went numb. Wes’s eyes crackled and didn’t miss a thing. He told me how his aunt had grown a 481-pound squash, the biggest one he’d ever met personally.
“It took my father and three other men to lift it onto the truck,” he remembered. “They wrapped it in blankets, and my aunt rode all the way to the fair in the back with it because she said if it broke, she’d die. Won first prize.”
“I’m hoping to enter,” I said, humbly.
“Enter? Just enter? What about winning?”
Well, of course I wanted to win. You don’t go entering contests you don’t hope to win. “Cyril Pool’s got one bigger than mine already,” I said, “and he’s been at this much longer than me and…” I stopped because I hated it when I put myself down around people I wanted to like me. I wanted to tell him how important Max was to me. How I’d covered him in the storm all night and given him the best months of my life, and how I had, as Nana said, a grower’s soul.
“I’d like to win,” I said quietly.
Wes looked at me like he was angry. “Well, what are you going to do to make yours bigger? What are you going to do to win?” He said “win” like it was everything.
I was defensive now: “I’m going to water him, and feed him, and—”
“Well, don’t you think this Cyril’s going to do that, too?”
Of course I knew that. I was three-time winner of the Rock River Young Growers’ Competition. I hadn’t seen him up there collecting any ribbons for giant corn. I could smell the Tide detergent on his lumberjack shirt and gulped. He was sizing me up, and I was acting like a loser.
“Ellie,” he said leaning closer, “you’ve gotta do something more than this Cyril would ever think about or have the guts to do.”
“I’ve got guts. Plenty of guts.”
Wes scooped a carrot curl from a nearby plate, pointed it in the air, and watched me like he was trying to figure something out.
“You’ve got to have guts to grow giant pumpkins,” I declared. “And heart.” I thumped mine. “I’ve got a lot of heart.”
I took a carrot curl and pointed it in response, waiting for him to tell me what Cyril wouldn’t have the guts to do. His eyes were far off now. He wasn’t talking.
“Are you going to tell me?” I asked.
“I’m thinking.” His eyes narrowed. “I just met you and don’t know if you can handle it.”
I’m getting mad now because I’ve already invested a lot in this relationship and this guy is playing games. I’ve got better things to do than stand here holding this carrot curl and sucking in my stomach.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m sixteen years old and I’ve grown five three-hundred-plus pounders, so don’t go telling me what I can handle.”
That was a gamble, but definitely the right thing to say because Wes’s face broke into a grin. He motioned me forward and whispered: “You’ve got to talk to it.”
I waited for more, but there wasn’t any. He ate his carrot curl. I ate mine. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the secret.”
“Talk to it,” I repeated, and he looked at me like he was the champion grower and I was
a hack.
“It’s your pumpkin, Ellie. You grew it. You’ve got to talk to it. My aunt Izzy talked to hers every day and it just popped out. Never seen such a thing. She patted it, you know? Treated it just like she wanted people to treat her.”
“I talk to it.” I said this quietly because you never knew who was listening.
“How?” Wes challenged. Thought he was big stuff, this guy, a real control freak.
How? I didn’t know how, I just did. Sometimes I’d say “Good morning,” but mostly I beamed messages to Max’s core. I didn’t talk to him like he was a person because my feelings went deeper than that. So I said, “We communicate. Trust me,” and was going to change the subject to corn and the American farmer.
“You probably think I’m crazy,” Wes said.
Yes, I did. And pushy. “No,” I lied.
“I mean really talk to it. You know…like a mother talks to a baby,” he explained, getting real emotional now. “Have you seen what they do, new mothers?”
I hadn’t been living in a cave all these years. I had read my mother’s journal straight through four times and understood this total devotion. “I’ve seen mothers with babies,” I assured him.
He was on another planet now: “They take the baby and cuddle it and talk to it and tell it everything they’re doing and how much they love it. The little kid lies there and soaks up all that attention. Well, my aunt Izzy did that with two of her pumpkins and three of her children. She even read to those pumpkins out in the field—told them about herself—what she was aiming to do with them, the whole nine yards. And I swear, those pumpkins heard her and did what she said.”
I wanted to excuse myself and go somewhere to breathe because something about this guy made me very nervous. He had a real grower’s soul and wasn’t afraid to show it. I’d never seen that in anyone my age. When he talked he used his hands big and wide. There was energy coming out of him that scared me to death. He understood the land, probably never wanted to be anything else but a farmer, year after year, working the earth. Suddenly the most important thing in my life was standing right there and not moving.
“Do you know how to do this?” I asked. “This talking thing?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, smiling. “I sure do.”
Mrs. McKenna was passing around a bowl of peanuts, breaking into everyone’s conversations, asking, “Would you like a peanut, dear?” I took one, hoping she’d go away. I tried to crack it open ladylike, but the shell wouldn’t budge. I forced the top off, tossed the nuts to my mouth, missed, and with Wes watching, dropped the whole thing down my blouse. I stood there frozen, pretending it didn’t happen. Wes looked at his shoes, I looked at my shoes. We looked at everything except each other, which was just as well, because my face was burning red. The peanut shell started itching you know where, and I didn’t want to leave because I didn’t want to give up my place near Wes, who was talking again about his aunt’s squash because there wasn’t anything else to do.
“And when she finally cut into it,” he explained into the carpet, “the meat wasn’t tough like most Big Maxes’. It was sweet, you couldn’t believe it.”
The peanut was scratching and moving. I pretended to cough to shake it free but it just lodged deeper as Wes went on and on about talking to vegetables, which sounded like it would take some practice to get good at.
“Have you hugged your pumpkin today?” I offered.
“Right,” Wes said.
The shell was burrowing in deep now. I tried a queer little hop and a twist while coughing to loosen it, which didn’t work either. It was itching bad and growing to the size of a goiter. Soon I would need surgery. I excused myself, ran down the hall, and prayed that God would punish anyone who tried to take my place.
The line at the bathroom was two deep, which would have pleased Mrs. McKenna, who maintained that one bathroom promoted family unity. The facts were not in her favor. Her two oldest daughters married men in the plumbing business and moved out of town.
I found a closet, inched inside, and brushed the peanut remains from my chest—scarred for life. I shook myself to get any particles off, and cracked the door. Mr. McKenna was hiding in the hall, smoking his pipe. Mr. McKenna manufactured grain elevators and never knew what to say to a roomful of teenagers, so the hall was a pretty good place for him. I liked Mr. McKenna because he knew who he was and didn’t try to be someone else. Being an elevator man, he respected a person’s privacy.
He was puffing away in his favorite corner, his face fogged by smoke, in direct sight of my closet. Wes’s laugh rose from the living room, and I knew I had to go for it. I walked from the closet; Mr. McKenna lowered his pipe in surprise.
“Ellie,” he said. “You were in the closet.”
“Yes, sir.” I saw no use lying.
He considered this. “Everything…all right?”
I smiled. “Yes, sir. You know how it is.”
Mr. McKenna did indeed, dug his heels into his corner, and resumed puffing. I moved toward the living room and Wes’s laugh. JoAnn Clark grabbed me.
“You’d better get in there!” she whispered, pushing me ahead.
“What?”
“Just walk over like you belong there and don’t panic.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
JoAnn looked at me like I was a baby animal alone in the wild, and pointed to the living room just beyond the plastic palm. There stood Wes, laughing as big and wide as the whole outdoors, and at his elbow wiggled Sharrell, probably the next Sweet Corn Coquette, batting her eyes, gazing up at him. Sharrell, with her perfect makeup and tiny waist, who couldn’t fertilize her way out of a starter box. In my place!
I backed from the scene, stunned.
“Listen,” said JoAnn, “just go over there and—”
“I can’t!”
“Yes, you can. Just test it, you know? I’ll go with you and—”
I ran from the room, my eyes stinging, past Mr. McKenna and his cloud of smoke, past the closet, and into the bathroom, which was, mercifully, empty. Where the evening had begun.
I sat on the McKennas’ soft pink toilet seat remembering the messages from Dad’s motivational tapes on success, inner strength, and self-esteem. He had drilled them into me two years ago hoping I would become a different person. It didn’t work.
The trick was to repeat positive phrases about yourself until you believed them even if they were lies, which they usually were: “I look forward to each new day with anticipation and joy.” “I believe in myself. I really do.”
There were fifty phrases on each tape; Dad said it took a normal person thirty days for the messages to really sink in—longer if you were a total loser.
“I am an interesting person,” I quoted from memory. “My life has worth and meaning. I enjoy my life.” I twisted a pink Kleenex into a gruesome shape and stood before the towel rack gritting my teeth as positive reprogramming messages filled my mind. “I look forward to each new day with anticipation and love for all humanity.” I shook with frustration, beating the towel rack with my Kleenex. “I respond to life’s challenges with hope and determination. I am not afraid of change, for it is change that makes me stronger.”
I was whipping the tissue now, pounding the soap dish. So much for strength and hope. “I believe in myself,” I growled. “I enjoy being me.” The Kleenex was mangled and shredded. Wes and Sharrell were together, probably in love, and planning their wedding. “I will deal with this like a reasonable person,” I shrieked. “I will not forsake reason for emotion. I will kick Sharrell in her flat little stomach and enjoy being me. I really will!”
I stomped the Kleenex to death and flushed it down Mrs. McKenna’s happy pink toilet.
Richard wouldn’t have let this happen to him. He was always in charge. When Dad passed out his WHERE I WANT TO BE IN TEN YEARS AND HOW I’M GOING TO GET THERE goal cards at the Rotary Club dinner for promising young athletes, Richard knew exactly where he wanted to be. Center field at Wr
igley Field. In twenty-five years? The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Richard made the best of things because for him there was always another game. Luck follows you when you’re a partial baseball star. Life gives you breaks. When you grow giant pumpkins you sit on a lot of soft pink toilet seats, believe me.
An angry crowd was gathering outside the bathroom. I walked out, head high, and knew what any grower worth her salt must do when faced with an insect like Sharrell messing up her garden. The only way to deal with bugs is all-out attack. But before you spray, you’ve got to identify them.
There’s a professor at the University of Massachusetts who is the greatest insect specialist in the entire country probably. You can send him a bug, in a crushproof container, that’s bothering your garden or you, and he will tell you more than you’d ever want to know about the thing for $12.50. I didn’t think I had a crushproof container big enough to shove Sharrell into, so as far as identifying her went, I was on my own.
Bugs never attack a garden without reason, and I figured Sharrell didn’t, either. She could handpick any boyfriend she wanted, so her interest in Wes didn’t figure. It was plain he was not her type and that they’d make each other and me miserable. Wes did not play football, or have a varsity sweater or a thick neck. His clothes weren’t with it, his truck was ten years old, and I’d bet this month’s allowance he’d never danced a step in his life. I watched them from the hall, trying to read lips. It didn’t work. I decided to crash the party.
JoAnn saw me, and being my absolute best friend plus a great eavesdropper, walked with me to Wes and Sharrell’s cozy corner. Sharrell was fluttering the lashes of her Bambi eyes, and Wes had a gooey look on his face.