You mean she might get out of bed for good?
Maybe. And if not, well, there’s more than one way to be strong.
She picked the yellow flowers up off the ground and resumed her careful work of weaving the separate, hollow stems into a single dense braid. After sitting quietly for a while, I stretched my body out over the grass and rested my head on Dawn’s leg. I listened to her soft humming, to the frenzied slapping of Jessie and Gracie running through the yard in their sandals. We didn’t say anything for what felt like a long time, and then I told her I was sorry. It’s okay, she said, and nothing more. It made me anxious to leave it like that, with her moving on from the topic and me wondering whether I’d tainted her feelings toward me forever. I was all set to apologize again when she sang out a note of pride and pinned the finished wreath to my hair.
After so many weeks of thinking about the new place in the abstract, it felt strange come August when it finally became real. The co-op papers went through at the end of July, and by the start of the new school year we were all set to relocate to a hundred and twenty-acre spread northeast of Orosi—half nectarine orchards, half apricot, with a small pasture at the center for grazing livestock. The tract had been cobbled together from a half dozen smaller parcels whose previous owners had either cashed out or been forced out by the county for failure to make rent. There were quite a few failed farms in that part of the state, such that the minute we arrived we were greeted with envy and suspicion from nearly every neighbor in a twenty-mile radius. Most went out of their way to avoid us. Others erected brand new barbed wire fences along the property lines and posted signs warning SOLICITORS NOT WELCOME, as if we aimed to expand out further like a cancerous growth and swallow up all the land we could get our hands on. Our first and only visitor that summer was an elder from a local LDS congregation. He drove up unannounced in a refurbished Buick, asked to speak to the man of the house, and left in a state of confusion after Katie came out to meet him.
For all the land that was suddenly ours, there was a surprising shortage of living space to go around. Three of the previous owners had lived out of camper trailers or Winnebagos rather than pay the county’s price to have a proper house constructed. Another had watched a perfectly good home consumed in a brush fire with no insurance or money on hand to replace it. That left two one-story, US-era ranch houses for five families to fit into. Separated by a hundred yards of upturned and sandy topsoil, the houses were too close for privacy and too far away for convenience. Sun-baked hornets’ nests hung plastered under the eaves and behind the rain gutters, and inside the carpets were so matted with dust that in a certain light they appeared to be steaming. After some dispute, it was decided that Claudia’s family would come to live with us and Dawn in the bigger, uglier model while Jennifer and Katie would squeeze their broods into the smaller, slightly nicer one. As soon as the funds were available, we’d file the papers to build a third. From the beginning, all of the major decisions were decided by a vote among the five Temple widows. Us older kids could sit in on the debates and chime in if we wanted, but suffrage was granted only to those who had suffered through marriage to Daddy.
One of the tougher decisions that had to be reached early on was what to do about finding schools for the eight of us that still needed educating. Jennifer was adamant about sending Lewis and Jewel to the private K–12 academy in Visalia, and after all the fuss it had taken just to get her this far, the other wives chose not to begrudge her that privilege. My sisters and Anthony’s brothers were sent to public elementary schools on opposite sides of the county—our mothers had decided on separating them to avoid drawing extra attention to the co-op, and to spare them the embarrassment of having to explain their half-siblings to the other kids. At fifteen, Will was legally old enough to make up his own mind about school, and in the end he opted to stay on the farm and learn machine repair from his brother. That left me, Beth, and Anthony to attend the local high school, to ride the sweltering yellow bus eighty minutes each way in the early morning and late afternoon. Hardly anyone asked about our shared last name, and when they did we said that we were cousins. As popular as she was from the start, Beth had a way of making people take her at her word, and as for me and Anthony, we didn’t talk much.
The high school was situated on a concrete and asphalt slab northwest of Tulare, surrounded on all sides by short, untended grasses that were yellow-brown twelve months out of the year. You could ride the bus for miles in that part of the county and see nothing at all until finally a cluster of green, pagoda-shaped buildings rose up out of the ground and the silver mirage peeled back across the basketball courts. Even though Anthony was two class grades ahead of me, we had the same homeroom every morning and History twice a week after lunch. Beyond that, we each had some version of Math, English, Ag Science, and PE. Some of the classrooms were over twenty years old and still equipped with internet outlets, and gas ranges for science experiments we would never learn. The oldest rooms were sealed-off and used for storage space. Even then, there was no danger of overcrowding. Most of the kids in the area would follow Will’s lead the minute they turned fifteen. Our freshman class was already larger than the rest of the student body combined.
Our History course included students from all four grades. Only one semester of History was required to graduate, but some of the older kids retook it two or three times for the easy elective credits. The teacher was seventy-four years old and kept an American flag pinned to the wall above the whiteboard. He’d talk for thirty minutes on the lesson of the day and spend the rest of the time cursing dead Democrats and explaining how the US had perished through sin, decadence, and decay.
As the welfare state grew more unwieldy, he said, traditional values were torn down and replaced by whatever ideas were popular at the moment. Through the atheist media, millions of people were taught to worship the extravagance of the big cities. Pimps and prostitutes were built up as idols. One in three children was murdered in the womb. Men fornicated with their fathers’ corpses. That’s right. Corpses.
At least once a month we were marched into the cafeteria for special assemblies that were the closest we got to actual health classes. Itinerant speakers—balding, energetic, and middle-aged men—came in to lecture us about the changes that were going in our bodies, about the perils in store for those who didn’t abstain, and about a host of other scandalous topics that left us snickering between slideshows of cankerous private parts. In the same cafeteria, three or four times a semester, the school held Friday night dances to give us the opportunity to socialize properly, to give farm boys and farm girls the chance to slow dance to old country songs while chaperones stood guard to uphold the dress code and check our breath for alcohol and weed. These extracurricular events, more than any of our actual classes, affirmed for us the real lesson we were supposed to take away from our time in school—that the true purpose of youth was coupling, that sexuality was only safe within certain parameters, and that severe consequences awaited those who veered too far outside.
I went to one dance, toward the end of my first term, and never went to another one afterward. Anthony borrowed his mother’s car and drove us down in the early evening dark with shreds of tattered fog obscuring the road for miles at a time. Though neither of us cared about the dance itself—we were both going stag—we were still dressed to fit in with the rest of the preening and awkward teens, him with a stiffly ironed flannel shirt tucked into the waist of his best jeans, me wearing a skirt for the first time since Katie’s barbecue nearly six months earlier. I’d borrowed some of Dawn’s eye shadow and a lacy brassiere from Beth. The cups were two sizes too big for me, and after tugging at the straps the whole ride down, I wound up ditching it in the backseat before we went in.