11
Lily
WHEN Tom and Lily got to Santa Barbara, they slept in Eleanor’s guest room and borrowed her sedan until Tom’s truck and the Subaru arrived from Vermont. They drove over to their new house, and stood on the deck in the sunshine, looking down at the avocado trees and at the ocean far below, and walking through the empty rooms, thinking of where their furniture would fit and how their lives would be in those rooms. Later that afternoon, Lily offered to drop Tom off at the warehouse while she went out to buy a doormat, a dish drainer, a garbage can, a broom. It was a gorgeous drive along East Valley Road, with its towering eucalyptus trees, fruit trees, and horse ranches, and then they popped out onto the freeway that ran along a cliff above the ocean. The water sparkled in the afternoon sunlight, and across the channel were the islands—Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa.
“Calavo is like a co-op,” Tom had explained. “We agree to sell our fruit to them and they sort it and weigh it and ship it out to retailers. We split the profit, which rises and falls, of course, with demand. Our first harvest should be in about a month.”
“That sounds great,” Lily said, although she wasn’t really paying attention. Her head was full of thoughts about the new house, the drive, the view.
“The Hailwoods didn’t try to maximize yield. Nadine says she thinks I should be able to double it, no problem, and that’s even taking into account a switch to organic, which will cause a drop in yield as a matter of course.”
“Nadine?” Lily asked.
“Our Calavo rep. The one I’ve been talking to on the phone. She seems like a really nice gal.”
Lily knew, before she even stepped into the warehouse, what Nadine would look like. Perhaps not the details, but the type. And she was exactly right. Nadine was about twenty-four years old. Her long red hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her plaid flannel shirt flapped open over a braless blue tank top, her colorless Birkenstocks were caked with mud. She had probably been an environmental studies major, the kind who would hang around Tom’s office, soaking up his knowledge, hoping to win his favor.
“How nice to finally meet you!” Nadine sang out when Tom introduced himself.
“Tom’s been talking about how much you’re helping him learn the ropes,” Lily said.
Nadine beamed. “You’ll love the community of avocado growers. We’re a tight group. We all really look out for each other.”
Lily looked across the warehouse, to the industrial scales, the crates of fruit, the skip loaders. This was a temple, and these were the tools of worship. She understood that. She had been in such places many times before, but they were warehouses where fabric was milled and loomed, or living rooms where quilts were being stitched, and where the language spoken had to do with color and pattern, thread and weave. That was a world she knew and loved. She thought back to the summer when she met Tom, in a tiny town called Gothic, on the western slope of the Rockies. He was interning at the Rocky Mountain Biological Labs, and she was taking a break from her graduate studies in Denver to meet a famous weaver who she thought might have something important to teach her about fabric and geometry. Her name was Jenny Wood, and she wove intricate silk twill in the cramped second story of an unassuming wooden shed. Three large looms were positioned in that space, and when Lily saw them crammed together, with spools of yarn set on shelves up under the eaves, she thought of a ship built in a bottle.
“How did you get your looms up here?” Lily asked, thinking of the dirt road, the narrow staircase.
“We built them in this room. My husband, Jacques, and I.”
“He’s a weaver, too?”
“No, no,” Jenny said, “a biologist. He runs the labs in the summer. That’s why we come.”
Jacques came home that afternoon with one of his graduate students—Tom, a tall, serious young man with a beard and a sunburned face. The moment Tom stepped in the door of the ramshackle house, Lily could feel the high mountain air change, and she wanted to laugh at how improbable it was that in this unassuming cabin in the woods, there were both sophisticated looms and the possibility of love. She smiled at Tom as if she had a secret, and he shook her hand and peered at her. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“From Columbia?”
“No,” she said, and shook her head. “I went to school in Boston.”
“You seem very familiar,” he said.
She smiled again. “I know what you mean.”
They picked lettuce and tomatoes from the sloping garden out the back door, and while Lily washed the lettuce, and dried it and tore it, Tom stood next to her in the tiny, narrow kitchen, slicing the tomatoes with the precision of a surgeon, and sprinkling coarse pepper and rock salt on them as if he were performing some kind of ancient ritual. She wanted to stop and gape at the dirt under his fingernails, at his elegant hands. She wanted to sit and simply watch. She had traveled all over the world with her mother, visiting beautiful hotel properties and soaring cathedrals, but she felt that evening as if she had traveled to the ends of the earth—to another place and time—and she felt, at long last, at home.
They talked about vegetables and garden pests, about research funding and the job market for mathematicians. They argued about Star Wars, and what was going to happen to the relationship between Luke and Leia in the sequel. They stood around Jenny’s looms, and watched her demonstrate how archeologists could prove from the pattern in the weft that as far back as the Neolithic era, women worked together to weave cloth. They sat in chairs on the dirt in the front of the house and watched the last licks of daylight fade out from the sky and the mountains cloak themselves in dark, brooding shadows.
Tom paid Lily no special attention. He was, after all, a somewhat shy young man at dinner with his boss. A little after ten, Tom stood and said that he had to go back to his bunk to get some sleep. Lily stood, too, worried sick that she would never see him again. “I suppose I should be going, too,” she said. Her mind was racing to come up with something to say, some reason for them to have to meet again.
They said their thank-yous and good-byes to Jenny and Jacques, and walked down the dirt path to the dirt road where Lily’s car was parked. While she dug her key out of her bag, Tom looked at his mud-caked shoes. “If, uh, you’re free tomorrow afternoon,” he said, “there is a little waterfall about three miles from the research center. I’ve been following the blooming patterns of the columbines up there.”
She had to try hard not to throw her arms around him. “I’d like that,” she said. “Very much.”
He turned and walked off into the night, and she drove in the other direction through the aspen groves and back to the main town of Crested Butte, singing “Rocky Mountain High” at the top of her lungs.
THAT first week in Santa Barbara reminded Lily of those five days in Gothic. They each had only a suitcase full of clothes, and the few possessions that they had decided to carry with them on the plane. They knew virtually no one in town, had nowhere they had to be. On Monday, they went up to the new house and walked through the orchard and picked a crate full of avocados. On Tuesday morning, when it was still dark, they got up and walked the six blocks from Eleanor’s town house to the Farmer’s Market.
“Why are you going so early?” Eleanor asked.
“That’s when the farmers arrive,” Tom said, “and the chefs. That’s when the real action takes place.”
“How does he know that?” Eleanor asked.
Lily shrugged. “That’s just Tom.”
They picked out yellow heirloom tomatoes with veins of green, tomatillos with paper skin, bulbs of garlic that smelled like heaven, sweet Maui onions, lemons, limes, cilantro, and five kinds of hot peppers. They watched one chef move through the market at the speed of light, buying bushels of vegetables with the flick of his fingers, and another who moved slowly, touching, smelling, tasting everything before she laid down her cash.
Back in Eleanor’s kitchen, Lily made coffee while Tom set out his recipes on the marble countertops.
“Avocados,” he pronounced, “have been prized for centuries for their high fat and protein content.”
Lily minced garlic, grated lemon zest, and listened to Tom go on.
“When the Spaniards came and conquered the Aztecs, they believed guacamole to be an aphrodisiac.”
“Those Spaniards were evil, but clever,” Eleanor said.
Tom sent Lily out to buy organic, full-fat sour cream, fresh tortilla chips, and a six-pack of Tecate. At lunchtime, he had six different types of guacamole arranged on the countertops, and rating cards for each one. How was the texture, the taste, the balance of flavors, the heat? They ate and debated, and could not agree—but later, when it mattered, they would remember exactly the mix of lemon and spice in the particular mix that Tom most adored.
