Phillip Dvorak

Every day I went out under gray skies to Netta’s garden patch and sat on my heels and looked down at the rhubarb.

This is a story about rhubarb, not rhubarb as “quarrel, fight, or heated discussion,” but rhubarb the ruby-red stalks that make good pie. It takes a while, though, to get to the rhubarb part.

The children’s father was in his last year of graduate school. We were dirt poor. Some mornings I was so depressed I could barely turn on the flame under the coffeepot. No matter how hard I scrubbed, the stove stayed dirty. The linoleum stayed dirty. Hems undid themselves on the girls’ dresses. They scribbled in their Little Golden Books. Sarah, one morning, hit Rebecca in the eye with a hammer. “I want her to watch me and not Captain Kangaroo” is why she said she did it.

I married too young. I was still wild. How would I tame myself? He couldn’t. Meals cooked, pots scrubbed, floors swept, husband’s huge shirts ironed with no creases on the difficult pockets, vegetable gardens, canning, pickling, preserving, sewing the girls’ dresses, scrub, scrub, scrub: I made myself do it. I made myself figure how I’d stretch a puny on-sale chicken to three suppers plus soup from the bones and rags of skin. I wanted to scream. I wanted to flirt. I wanted to take ballet lessons. I made myself keep my mouth shut. I scribbled bad poems about an old boyfriend; the poems ended, “If only” and “Where, where are you now?”

Weekdays, my husband came home late in the afternoon. He got the television going and slumped down in his easy chair. The chair’s former owner greased his hair; he’d left a head-size black stain on the upholstery. My husband watched the tail end of American Bandstand, then local news, and then Huntley-Brinkley. He did not smile, he did not frown. He only got up to adjust the rabbit ears and vertical hold. He said, “Can’t you shut those kids up?” and sighed, “When’s dinner?” I’d try to guess why, on his knees, the old-fashioned way, he ever said, “Marry me,” why I said, “Yes.” I couldn’t. I wasn’t even 21; already I was an old woman. I stooped and cowered. Out in my garden, the Country Gentleman corn stunted in July. I believed that when my husband looked at me, he thought, “One more mouth to feed.”

We had lived in a series of two-bedroom rent houses. All three were the final home of elderly widows. Two died in the houses and one fell on the back porch steps, hit her head on concrete. An ambulance took her to the hospital, where she died without ever coming to. “Just think,” her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Gib (for “Gibson”) Forrest, said, “Netta must have lay there curled up with rain coming down on her for an hour before I looked out my curtain.”

The houses we rented stood in neighborhoods established during the 1920s, before the Great Depression hit. They’d been built for working-class folks who had jobs in planing mills, for small-business owners and traveling salesmen, for Union Pacific men who got lifetime railroad passes and fat pensions. Women stayed home in these houses. You could feel their traces.

We rented these houses soon after their owners died. The widows’ children cleaned the houses hastily. When you opened the refrigerator, you smelled soured milk; you touched knobs on kitchen cupboards, a last meal’s grease came off on your hand. The widows’ children left behind dented kettles, pink scuffs worn down at the heels, a tattered nightgown, dust balls shining with the widows’ white hairs. Dark back bedrooms, kitchens, cramped bathrooms with footed tubs ringed with shed skin and soap fats, had never quite let the widows go. These women seemed still to circle the rooms, as in late fall, wasps seethe in circles around light bulbs.

Shrubs around the houses were 40 years old; nobody had pruned them for years. When it rained and wind blew, and it always rained, because this was the Pacific Northwest, the shrubs’ skinny branches scraped our window screens. At the farthest edges of back yards, decades earlier, men had heeled in asparagus crowns and rhubarb. Blackberries and huckleberries they planted took hold and spread and grabbed on to plum and pear trees and rail fence. So did the arbor vitae and the small evergreen salal, that in fall put out purple-black berries. “Blackberry,” Mrs. Forrest told me, “it’s as much weed as fruit.”

Pacific Northwest coastal rains don’t so much pour as weep. The skies stay gray. The clouds hang low. Had Southern California’s intransigent sun lit those three years, I’d not have been happier. Glare off outgoing tide, off parking lot asphalt, off oncoming traffic would have hurt my eyes. It’s never weather’s fault. I would have told you, “Light causes sadness.” I would have told you anything if you’d promised you’d take me away.

Don’t get me wrong. This wasn’t that hard poverty you knew would never end. This was exile, and temporary. On a calendar the milkman left I was marking off days until graduation.

Where money was concerned, I was spoiled. I got mad when the twenties my father folded into my birthday card went to pay an overdue light bill. I wanted to buy Pete Seeger and Oscar Brown, Jr., and Odetta LPs. I wanted to buy up whole flocks of chickens and tell Rebecca, “You can eat every drumstick,” because that was the piece she liked, none other. I wanted to waste soap flakes and leave on lights in every room and throw away washcloths when the terry thinned in the center.

We rented this last house from Netta’s son. The other houses, too, we rented from their former owners’ children. Rent was cheap. Nobody papered over the stained wallpaper and rectangles on walls where mirrors and paintings had hung, nobody fixed the warped windowsills or windows sealed shut with paint. I never asked them to; repairs could raise the rent.

Each time, after we lived in the house a year, the widows’ children sold the houses. I’d search classifieds, call landlords, and late afternoon leave the girls with their father, staring at Fabian or Freddie Cannon or the Shirelles in fuzzy black-and-white on American Bandstand. I’d go look at houses.

A son or daughter came to the door. “I grew up here,” they always said. I followed behind, through bedrooms, bath, kitchen, front room. The rooms smelled damp. The son or daughter began sentences, “I remember the time, right here in this house.” As they talked, they twisted faucets off and on, flushed the toilet, raised and shut windows. They turned and showed me faces broken by smiles and bad teeth and eyes widened behind bifocals. They said their mother had been a saint, that they worshipped the ground their father walked on. They said, “They made a good life here, Mom and Pop.” They pointed a finger out the back door and said, “See, there’s the plum trees [or the Seckel pear or the three Macintosh apple] my dad planted when he came back from the war in ’45 [or before the Crash, in ’29].” I half-listened; I was interested, then, in the future, not the past.

I tried to foresee our lives in these rooms, where paint had blistered and peeled and broken and mildew had turned blue an old pair of shoes at the back of a closet. What it would be like to get up in the morning here and go to bed at night. I thought, “Sarah’s goldfish will swim in this corner, Rebecca’s red rocker can go there. I’ll put the couch against that wall.” I thought, I’ll love him again in this house, he’ll love me.

We’d strike a deal. I handed over crumpled bills, usually $40 worth. The most we ever paid was $50. They never asked me to sign anything.

I could pack us up in a day. We moved on Saturdays, when guys from school had time. They made a party of it. Somebody had a joint, and the men hunkered over and passed it. The green odor hung on their jeans and jean jackets all day. They lifted the big couch and grunted while they hauled it onto a pickup bed. Then they took a breather and handed around a quart of Oly. I heard the beer go down their throats. Moving days, with his buddies, my husband was talkative. He seemed young again and muscular. He laughed so hard he choked. “Want to make us some sandwiches?” he called to me from the living room. I spread Miracle Whip and French’s yellow mustard across Wonder Bread and I slapped on bologna and American cheese. I tore open the potato chip bag.

From the kitchen where I stood, Rebecca and Sarah tugging my skirt, I looked at my husband. We gave each other little comfort. I was too afraid of getting pregnant again to enjoy lovemaking.

With each move, I made new resolutions: Be more cheerful, get dust from under beds, give Big Dog a weekly flea bath. I liked fresh starts.

We got settled in Netta’s house by mid-January. I had the concrete-block-and-board bookshelves restacked, dishes set in shelves, the pink Maytag chugging out its daily loads. I found new walks to take, pushing Sarah and Rebecca in their stroller. I met Mrs. Forrest, the 84-year-old widow who told me how Netta slipped and fell. Mrs. Forrest was immensely fat and propelled herself forward with help from two thick rubber-footed canes.

Rebecca got sick a lot. I sat up nights and watched her sleep. I’d open the spiral notebook where I scratched “If only” and “Where are you now?” I multiplied 3 x 365 x 50 to figure out how many times during her married life Netta filled the dishpan. I closed my eyes and guessed where the bed had been when Netta’s Union Pacific husband, shy and raw boned and full of love, scraped the day’s beard against her breasts. Netta lived on alone 12 years after he died. She tossed birdseed out the breakfast nook window. I knew that because, when we moved in, her birds were waiting for us.

This last year my husband was in graduate school we were down to no money.

A friend of my husband’s, an older fellow named Orville who was getting his Ph.D. in philosophy, said he got government farm-surplus food — “commodities,” he called them — for his family.

Orville’s wife, I can’t remember her name, put a match to an oven that leaked gas. It blew up on her and set fire to the house. Her beautiful blue eyes stared out from bumpy scar tissue and shiny skin graft patches. For fingers she had stubs that ended at the knuckles. She wore her wedding ring on her left thumb. I felt sorry for her, not so much because she’d been scarred and chewed aspirin, three at a time, for pain, but because Orville was such a jerk. He was always telling younger guys like my husband how to manage a wife so as not to be pussy-whipped. He criticized my coffee as too weak, said I should take in typing, and, more than once, when drunk on tequila with the worm in it that he bought in Mexico, suggested he could give me a tupping I’d never forget. I thought I knew what tupping meant, but I looked it up anyway.

When you look rhubarb up in the dictionary, you find that the word also means “A quarrel, fight, or heated discussion.” Lexicographers don’t know why the pretty red-stemmed plant ever came to mean quarrel or squabble. Lexicographers do know that back in Shakespeare’s day, “rhubarb” was the word actors used in crowd scenes when crowd metamorphosed to bloodthirsty mob. Bit-players muttered over and over again in the background, “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.”

I would have thought that if rhubarb had any family, it would have been cousin to celery; rhubarb blades look like celery dyed red. But rhubarb is a member of the buckwheat family (buckwheat itself is best when added, as flour, to pancake batter). Rhubarb, like buckwheat, is native to northern Asia and China. Waverly Root notes that it was mentioned in the Pen-king Herbal, believed to date from 2700 BC. The Pen-king’s author described the rhubarb root as a purgative. By the early Christian era, rhubarb had reached the Western world. Its Western name, from the Latin rhabarbarum, describes the route the plant took on its way to the Romans. Rhubarbum roughly translates as “the vegetable of the barbarians, or foreigners, beyond the Rha.” The Rha is the Russian river now known as the Volga, along whose banks, by the early Christian era, rhubarb apparently was growing.

Through the Dark Ages, monastery gardeners cultivated rhubarb in their medicinal gardens. The plant’s beauty also made it sufficiently attractive as an ornamental that it occasionally was taken indoors and grown in conservatories. Monastery gardeners also used the huge leaves to cover baskets. In the 14th Century, when bubonic plague began to spread across Europe and Asia, ground rhubarb root increasingly became in demand as medicine.

Until the 1500s rhubarb was grown solely as a medicinal and ornamental. Food historians suggest that rhubarb took so long to enter the culinary domain because Europeans initially tried to eat the leaves. Loaded with oxalic acid, the leaves, at very least, will bring on violent stomachaches; at worst, they can kill. But, given evidence in cookbooks, by the mid-1500s Western Europeans were eating the rhubarb stalk and making rhubarb wine. The Italians took rhubarb winemaking one step further and made a liqueur called Rabarbaro.

Even after the 1500s, when rhubarb stalks began to be eaten, rhubarb continued to gain popularity as a purgative. Cervantes mentions in Don Quixote, “a little rhubarb [will] purge their excess of bile.” Macbeth asks, “What rhubarb, cyme, or what purgative drug / Would scour these English hence?” In London, March 2, 1784, Samuel Johnson, troubled by stomachache, was thanking a friend for his promise of rhubarb. Dickens’s 1850 novel, The Personal History of David Copperfield, suggests for illness “a little tincture of cardamums mixed with rhubarb, and flavored with seven drops of the essence of cloves.”

Russia sold rhubarb root to Western Europeans, as did the Chinese; rhubarb, together with Chinese porcelain, pepper, silks, and tea, was standard cargo in the China trade. In England alone, by the end of the 19th Century, more than 50,000 tons of dried rhubarb root were imported annually.

Colonists brought rhubarb roots to America. Thomas Jefferson planted rhubarb in his Monticello garden, but one wonders if he did any more than admire its beauty and resilience, because in his Garden Book he describes the leaves as “excellent as spinach,” which of course they’re not. The 1838 American Frugal Housewife lists recipes for rhubarb, also calling it “pie plant” and “Persian apple.”

Rhubarb root’s use as medicament continued in the new colonies. In Moby Dick Melville writes that “spermaceti, used as an ointment, was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb.” Mark Twain mentions that because he was the family pet, he was fed cod liver oil to keep him regular, while the rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb. Not until the early 20th Century, when new chemical laxatives came onto the market, was trade in rhubarb root discontinued. Lydia Pinkham recommended spearmint leaves steeped in water with sugar, rhubarb, and baking soda for gas and belching.

Rhubarb root’s purgative quality carried over in early American housewives’ minds to rhubarb stalks as food. Rhubarb was one of the first perennial plants to produce in springtime and, after long cold winters, often the first fresh food brought to table. A bowl of stewed rhubarb or a thimbleful of rhubarb wine therefore was considered to have a general “spring tonic,” blood-clearing effect.

As to Orville, I was happy to hear, years later, that once their two boys graduated from college, Orville’s wife left him. The way I heard the story, one morning Orville went off to teach, and that afternoon when he came home, his wife was gone. Plus, she stripped their bank account, took savings and checking, stocks and bonds. The person who told me the story said Orville, that very afternoon, had a heart attack. I’m sorry about the heart attack, but I wish I knew where Orville’s now ex-wife is so I could congratulate her.

Orville sent his wife over to take me down to the county courthouse to apply for commodities. I can’t remember what I had to say or do, I only remember I was so embarrassed I broke out in a sweat on a day that was cold enough I was wearing one of my old cashmere sweaters as underwear and that the lady at the desk said sure, we were below the poverty line. Once a month Orville’s wife and I picked up cardboard boxes packed with brown sacks filled with cornmeal and flour and bulgur wheat, kidney beans and dried milk, pound blocks of butter and lard and cheddar cheese, cans of dried eggs, and two-pound tin cans of boiled beef in gravy. The cheese was good, the butter a luxury, the beef stringy and greasy. I mixed it with catsup and vinegar to make sloppy joes. The girls liked sloppy joes.

Every house we lived in, I dug a garden. At the first two, the elderly ladies hadn’t gardened for years. Netta had, right up to the day she cracked open her head. So I didn’t j have to dig out patches of turf and stack them ! to clear ground for a garden plot.

More than ever that last winter and | spring, we needed a garden. The commodities j held out for the first two weeks of the month and silver smelt were selling five pounds for a dollar and fat hamburger three pounds for a dollar. If the girls and I got to the store early in the morning, the butcher had dog bones he’d give me free. Red flesh still clung to the bones, and sawdust from the floor where the butcher had tossed them. I washed off the sawdust and made broth for beef-vegetable soup. After I boiled the bones clean, I hurled them out in the back yard to Big Dog. So

everybody got something. We had peaches and purple plums and pickled beets I put up the year before. But the last two weeks, every month, we ran short on money for milk and fresh vegetables and fruit. Nights I lay awake, figuring how I could mix dried milk into the girls’ oatmeal to get more calcium and vitamin D in them or what I could do to make them eat cabbage.

You must wait until soil dries before you spade a garden plot. If you turn over wet, cold dirt, you end up with hard clumps. I was bad at waiting.

My gardens were pitiful. All my faults were writ into these plots dug out of back lawns. I planted too soon. February I put in Bermuda onion sets and peas and beets. March I knelt by furrows edged in with my hoe. I dribbled radish and carrot seeds into chilly soil. If seeds germinated and produced leaves, the plants dwarfed. They needed warmer soil, sunshine, frost-free nights. They needed somebody with better sense to plant them.

Old yards surprise you. Daffodils and purple crocus buried decades earlier pop out of dirty snow. A forsythia bush that looks dead puts out yellow flowers. Daffodils, the crocus, and forsythia do what they are impelled to do. You don’t have to do anything right.

Mrs. Forrest liked to lean on her canes at the garden’s edge and talk. She showed me where, along the edge of Netta’s garden plot, two rhubarb plants for 20 years had been growing up in early spring and in midsummer dying down. She laughed, said, “You can’t kill rhubarb.” Netta’s husband planted the rhubarb, Mrs. Forrest said, adding, “Lord, that man liked his mess of stewed rhubarb, and that man liked a slice of rhubarb and strawberry pie.”

Every day I went out under gray skies to Netta’s garden patch and sat on my heels and looked down at the rhubarb. “This is my life,” I thought. “I’m hunkered here in it.” I wished I could plant and grow myself into someone exotic and brave.

From the rhubarb plant’s fist-size heart, red-veined green leaves unfurled out of membranous sheaths. The sheaths that covered the leaves looked almost like skin that covered some internal human organ. I expected to see thumping, hear a slow steady heartbeat. The leaves split the membrane, and then, every day, the leaves lengthened. Red veins ran through the leaves and soon turned blood red, then burgundy. By the end of March, when my radish leaves yellowed and the radish root did not swell at all, when not one carrot seed gave out its feathery first leaf, when I had not kept to my resolutions to be more cheerful, to give Big Dog weekly flea baths, the rhubarb leaves had grown bigger than two big hands. The stalks lengthened and reddened.