Pasadena (41 page)

Every day at one o’clock in the packinghouse, the rubber belts stopped and the water-spray washer hissed to a trickle and an exhausted silence fell over the sizing bins as Linda arrived with lunch. A packer named Esperanza would help her distribute the
tamales
and the orange soda, passing the stations with a bottle opener. For thirty minutes the packers sat slumped on their stools, their canvas caps askew and their cheeks damp. A few would step outside into the pepper tree’s shade for a cigarette, but most ate inside and gossiped and wiped their throats. Esperanza, whose sister was a wet nurse in the home of a chocolate-bar heiress, aspired to become a seamstress, and practiced her needlework on her apron and the other girls’ aprons too, embroidering them with a bunch of red grapes or a climbing rose or a yellow-sailed schooner cutting a wave. As she helped Linda pack the
tamales
, she told her that one day she hoped to work in the mansion, hemming Miss Poore’s clothes and embroidering Captain Poore’s handkerchiefs with gold stitch.

It seemed like a strange ambition to Linda, who spent more and more time imagining the house’s silent and dark hallways, brocade drapery beating back the sun. Life in a cage, she thought, but Esperanza had heard from her sister that being on a mansion’s staff meant warm meals in winter and cold drinks in summer and a tiled bath shared with only three others and a bed shared with no one at all. Every time Willis passed through the packinghouse, Linda would notice Esperanza tucking her hair up into her cap and shaking out her apron so that he could properly see the navel orange stitched to her breast. Whenever Willis spoke to Linda, she felt Esperanza’s eyes on her, and she slowly realized that more eyes than Esperanza’s studied each interaction between the captain and his ranch-house cook. What they were looking at, she didn’t know.

Just as she didn’t know that no one’s eyes followed her as closely as Bruder’s.

That year’s harvest began as one of the best in memory, and the Naranjo boys and the other teams of hands sent to the packinghouse
hundreds, eventually thousands, of boxes of oranges. In a typical year the Pasadena’s most mature trees each produced enough oranges to fill two field boxes, but this year the boys were clipping from the best trees enough oranges to fill almost three. Slay and Hearts’s wagon was on a constant run between grove and packinghouse, a blue tarp across the boxes to protect them from the sun. At the packinghouse door a mound of oranges almost nine feet tall waited to be processed, and this backlog etched a new crease across Bruder’s brow. He would shout to the girls to work faster, but it was clear to Linda that they were already at capacity, and when she suggested that he hire a few more packers, Bruder told her to stay out of it or he’d put her on the packing line as well. And she would have joined them if she wasn’t so busy in the kitchen, finishing breakfast and turning immediately to lunch, then to supper. Her first quiet hour came just before midnight, her last ended in the pitch-black at a quarter to five.

Once hauled in from the groves, the field boxes stood for two days at the packinghouse, to allow some of the rind moisture to evaporate, enhancing the oranges’ sturdiness. The sight of hundreds of boxes laid out tested Bruder’s patience even more—
Idle!
, as he put it—especially when Willis inspected the boxes, turning the dimpled oranges in the sun: “When will you get to these?” Once, Willis brought Lolly with him. They were on their way to a tennis match, he in a white vest and calico pants and she in a pleated skirt with a white band across her forehead, and she refused to get out of the car, instead peering into the packinghouse with hand-visored eyes.

“He’s a fool,” Bruder would say of Willis.

“He’s got a lot on his mind,” Linda would reply.

“So do I.”

When she wasn’t helping Linda, Esperanza worked as a washer, submerging the oranges in a warm bath and scrubbing the dust from the rinds with a soft brush. She’d rinse the oranges in a cold shower, and then rollers would carry them beneath a blast of hot air, so that they were dry by the time they reached the grading table. At first the packinghouse reminded Linda of the Fleisher gutting house, but the packinghouse was more sophisticated than that, the graders as precise as jewelers sizing orange diamonds. During the harvest, Willis spent much of his time surveying the grading table, for he knew that this was where his money came from. He’d watch the canvas belt carry the oranges
past the graders, who examined them for size and quality, separating them into classes. The graders were experts, trained under the oily eye of Mr. Griffith, and Willis liked to stand behind them and watch how they scooted the different grades of oranges onto the four separate belts that carried them to the proper sizing machines. “These people pay for the ranch,” Willis was known to say. Or, on a bad day, “Those graders are going to make me a poor man one day.” The graders wore white lab coats and gloves, and they inspected the fruit with a seriousness that impressed Linda, in part because they seemed to ignore Willis when he disagreed with them: “That orange was perfectly fine!” One grader, a red-nosed man named Mr. Foote, pretended not to hear Willis at all, and when Willis demanded that he be fired, Bruder refused. “Then I’ll do it myself,” Willis declared, but Mr. Foote remained firmly at his station atop his stool, running his gloved hands over the rolling oranges and pulling out the dross.

After they rolled by the graders, the oranges passed between two wood rollers that ran alongside each other like the arms of a V. Each orange shuffled up between the V’s yawning limbs until it reached the place where it no longer touched either roller, and then it plopped into a canvas bin collecting exactly that size of orange. It was an efficient procedure, refined over the years by Willis’s father, who had always searched for methods to remove manpower from the harvesting process. “He hoped to one day run a handless rancho,” Willis would say. “Get rid of everyone but his family.”

The packers at the collecting bins quickly wrapped each orange in tissue and then carefully placed it in the shipping box. If they were slow, or if the orange haul was too heavy, the bins were emptied in piles on the floor while the girls, their skin reeking of orange oil, packed crate after crate. They would complain about the scent, and Bruder would tell them that there’d been a time in France when no bride would think of marrying without an orange blossom upon her breast. “Think of the French girls,” he’d say, dismissing his packers’ dissatisfaction.

A packer might be expected to fill almost seventy-five boxes in a day, but by the beginning of December, Bruder was telling each girl she’d have to nail lids into ninety crates before the wagon would return her home at dusk. It was Bruder’s idea to require the packers to deposit a ticket in each crate so that he could trace lazy work. More than once on the packinghouse floor he ceremoniously opened a crate returned from
the Growers Exchange, publicly firing the girl whose careless packing had spawned a pretty green wrapping of mold. It was an awful sight, his big hand enclosing the girl’s wrist, holding it up as if she were the winner of some sort of contest, while the other girls stood around in their aprons silently loathing him and the packinghouse and everything about the Rancho Pasadena. Sometimes they wished the pay were worse so they could quit without hearing the screams back home at the kitchen table, the
¡Maldito sea!
from the soft-armed grandmother, from the pencil-mustached brother, from the father in the yellow-collared shirt, from the slutty sister, from the toothless, milky mouth of a newborn. The girls who lived at the Webb House had it even worse: were they to return to the orphanage having lost their job, Mrs. Emily Webb was likely to fold her mole-dotted arms and say, “Well, then. I’ve been thinking a few things over. Perhaps it’s time you thought about leaving the Webb House.” Her narrow shoe-shape face, its leathery texture attacked nightly by a generous application of Ingram’s Milkweed Cream, would remind the unemployed girl what she already knew: that the Webb House shut its doors upon the indolent, the dishonest, the syphilitic, the pregnant, and the whore—not necessarily in that order. It did not occur to Mrs. Emily Webb—and why should it?; she was born in a taffeta-draped nursery on Orange Grove Avenue and married a banker whose only fault was long ago to have stepped in front of a Pacific Electric trolley on New Year’s Day—that a girl could lose her position at the Rancho Pasadena for any reason other than insouciance or laziness; no, Mrs. Emily Webb was unfamiliar with the subtleties of injustice. “Lost jobs are our own faults,” she was known to say, each morning at a quarter to six, ringing her cowbell to wake the girls in the dormered attic. “In our world, a girl is given but one chance in life. After that, her fate is sealed.”

Linda learned this when she took the girls back to the Webb House one night. It was the first time she had driven the buckboard on Pasadena’s streets, and only from the vantage of the plank bench did she see how the city no longer accommodated horse and wagon. The roadsters and the Tin Lizzies buzzed around her; the cow-spotted mare shied from the honking and the tailpipe shots. Linda drove down into the arroyo and up the opposite hill, over toward the intersection of California and Raymond. Esperanza sat on the bench with Linda, and a dozen girls rode in the wagon bed. The early-winter evening blanketed
the valley with timid dusk as the horse clopped along and the yellow lights in the store windows flickered on. The bird rouge on Esperanza’s full cheeks had turned waxy during her packing shift, and her teased bangs sprang from her cap. She was no taller than five feet, but she was one of the older girls at the Webb House, almost twenty, and she was careful to stay in good standing with Mrs. Webb, who thought enough of her to have given her a tiny muffin-size sewing box on her last birthday. “Sometimes Mrs. Webb says I’m the only one of her girls who’ll manage to stay out of trouble,” Esperanza confided to Linda.

The wagon continued down California Street, past the diaper laundry and the enormous window of the P. F. Erwin Electrical Distributorship, where footlights shone on a display of its endless electrical wares: Telechron clocks, plug-in waffle irons, coffee urns, casserole dishes, hot plates, Hoover uprights, lamps with skin shades painted with scenes of hummingbirds, massaging pads, torchères, and silver-plate milk warmers. The store was so modern and brightly lit that it, and all of California Street, felt to Linda like another world. The wagon passed through the pool of yellow light cast from Erwin’s window, and Esperanza leaned in toward Linda and whispered, “You know what’s above Erwin’s, don’t you?”

But Linda did not.

“It’s where Dr. Freeman is,” Esperanza said, pointing at the brick building. “He’s the only one in town, and the trouble is, he charges a month’s wages for a visit.” The three windows on the second floor were blacked out by roller shades, but Linda saw a crack of light at the sill. As the wagon passed the building, a girl in a slip-on sweater emerged from a door in the side alley that Linda guessed led to the upstairs office. The girl was arranging a china-blue beret on her head, and her face was pretty and round and her eyes were turned up. The light from Erwin’s window bathed the girl in a gold glare as she stood in the alley, her arms extended and her palms out—as if she was startled to find herself there. In the golden light the girl seemed to be presenting herself to the alley: a creamy school-age cheek half hidden by mink-brown hair, fluttering eyelids, ankles wobbly in gunmetal-leather shoes. She dug through her purse for a handkerchief, and Esperanza said, “They say that Dr. Freeman was in love with his own sister, and after she died he went into this sort of business. They say he only does it for the money. They say—”

But Linda had stopped listening to Esperanza. Instead, she watched
the girl walk tenderly down the street, her hand against Erwin’s window for balance, her feet spread awkwardly.

“Each night I pray to God I don’t end up at Dr. Freeman’s,” Esperanza chattered on. “Mrs. Webb says it ends up happening to almost every girl at the House. But not me, she says. Mrs. Webb says I’m smarter than the others.”

Again, Linda looked at the girl on the sidewalk, who was tentatively peering up and down California Street, checking her watch, as if expecting someone. Out of the pool of light from Erwin’s, the girl’s face turned dark, and Linda wondered, from the way the girl’s shoulders rolled, if she was crying now.

“Do you suppose she was there getting it done?” said Esperanza. “Why do you think it costs so much?” And then: “What would you do, Linda, if it were you? Would you—”

Again, Linda stopped listening. She snapped the reins and clucked her tongue, and the mare trotted on. Linda looked once back toward the girl: still her eyes were searching up and down the street; but no one came to meet her, and then, as if in resignation, she moved gingerly down the sidewalk, in the opposite direction of the Webb House, and disappeared.

Linda pulled up in front of the Webb House, and Mrs. Emily Webb waited on the porch. Clutched in her hand was a box of the chalky, pellet-shape Dr. Warden’s Female Pills, “for female troubles and diseases peculiar to our sex.” Mrs. Webb patted one pill into each girl’s palm, reminding them to swallow, never chew. Her fingers were sharp and schist-cold, and she waved abruptly to Linda, and Mrs. Webb’s choir-trained voice hooted, “Come in, girls, come in! Hurry up and come in from the night!”

From then on it became part of Linda’s routine to drive the Webb House girls home, while Bruder, meanwhile, crossed town with a truckload of the Titleyville packers, who would wave good-bye and giggle in a manner suggesting that they whispered about him behind cupped palms; and the girls would jump down from his truck and clasp hands and walk down the darkening palm-alleyed street, spinning stories of running away and never returning to the Rancho Pasadena. From behind the wheel he would watch them, silhouettes on the narrow
street where teeth-white porches faced one another, and he enjoyed knowing that the girls who worked for him simultaneously feared him and longed for him. It wasn’t a sadistic impulse, only an efficient one—for Bruder didn’t know a better way to inspire productivity. If he was selfish, his motivation was not greed but self-protection: early this season he had increased by a nickel each girl’s pay for every box packed, and he’d done so without consulting Willis; everyone on the ranch knew it, and they all talked about it: that, once again, Bruder had done as he pleased. One might presume that he never thought of others, but this too wasn’t true: Rosa hadn’t been feeling herself for several weeks now, and in the mornings Bruder would show up at the pantry in the big house and ask what he could do for her: haul the laundry, pack the groceries, carry the ice, he would do anything—for there was nothing around the ranch he hadn’t done. There was a fraternal feeling between them, and once she asked if, on his way home from Titleyville, he could stop at the Owl Drug Company and buy her a box of soda crackers and a bottle of Dr. Petal’s All-Pure Antidote for Female Pain. “I’m not feeling well in the stomach, and down there,” she said, and this caused no awkwardness between them, only sympathy. Bruder sometimes wondered whether if his heart were clear of Linda, would he love Rosa? He never settled the issue—it was too hypothetical—but unlike so many men, his firm, muscle-bound heart had a capacity limited to one, and it never really became a quandary for him; he was as loyal and patient as the ravine that waits patiently for the annual melting snow.