Feral and Brine
by Debbie Weingarten
Mandy Cano Villalobos, Cor II, cloth, metal and wood, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
FERAL AND BRINE
DEBBIE WEINGARTEN | OCT 2022 | Issue 19
The fall that my marriage was disintegrating, I craved food that tasted feral, so I made pickles with the glut of cucumbers. All summer, I had eaten too many lemon cucumbers, whole, with a pinch of salt. The Armenian cucumbers grew to be two feet long, and I sliced the ugly ones—unmarketable, beetle-scabbed, puckered at the ends—into pieces. I put them in sandwiches. I fed them to the goats. I smashed one against the ground to watch it explode.
One morning, fall was so close that I could smell it, something like cool metal and foxtails going to seed. It was riding on our shoulders. The thermometer read 65 degrees, and I sang as I put socks on the baby for the first time since spring. I ran an errand up the dirt road in the old truck—the windows forever stuck down, pliers stored in the door panel to yank the glass up in case of rain—the wind garbling lovely things in my ears. The baby cooed from his carseat.
In the corner of the kitchen near the ceiling, a spider spun an elaborate web. I watched for weeks as it got bigger, but I could not bring myself to kill it or even put it outside. As I peeled garlic and gathered dill, the baby sat at my feet, banging a spoon against my leg. Ouch, I said, which made him laugh, and he banged harder. Ouch, I said again, but louder, and he cried.
I sliced the cucumbers into spears, and then I stuffed them into mason jars so tightly that they squeaked against one another in protest. I stuffed all kinds of other things, too: the sound of my stepdaughter playing Mario Kart in the living room, the smell of goats, our dwindling bank account, nights that I slept as far away as possible from the exacting, punishing husband.
Through the window, in the glare of the mid-morning sun, the farm looked overexposed.
*
There was always one more row to weed, one more bed to harvest before the gophers and the aphids, the harvester ants. Beauty poured from every surface, but so did the next disaster—crop failure, microburst, blown tire, dead goat. How is it possible to both fear and crave the onset of frost?
When I covered the cucumbers with brine, I made something like a wish, a prayer, even though I have never believed in God. But there was something desperate about that morning, and so I said out loud—to the universe, to the spider, to the baby’s little blonde head—I promise I’ll be good. I promise I’ll stay as long as you let the farm survive.
Sometimes wishes are stored away in jars for another day.
*
The goats mawed from the yard. The baby chewed on my ankle with his tiny new teeth. I thought of the husband, how he had become perpetually cross. In the beginning, there was the carrot field and the red Subaru; my summer feet on the dash; Iris Dement on the stereo; walking out to the field at dusk to cut a cabbage for dinner. At some point, I bought a farm, racked up debt, married a man who refused to write me a single love letter. My entire body learned to freeze at the sound of his boots on the doorstep.
Maybe it is possible to trap all of the memories and tiny moments in brine, to turn them salty and soft: feeling a human being push out from between bones and cartilage and flesh while I screamed like an animal; looking into my son’s eyes for the first time and being embarrassed to feel numb and bashful while meeting such an important stranger.
*
For the first time, I imagined what it would be like to leave. The fences, the tractors, the piles of junk metal. The field where we were married. The bed of purple gomphrena. Each rooftop where I had watched the sky. I imagined slaughtering the chickens, pulling out the farm sign, loading goats into the back of strange pick-up trucks. I felt relief blooming in the center of my chest.
When the tired-eyed baby began to fuss, I abandoned the pickles on the counter. I gathered him in my arms; I smelled the top of his head. In the gray light of the bedroom, he played with my belly button while he drifted to sleep.
From the kitchen came a series of pops as one by one, the jars sealed shut.
Debbie Weingarten’s journalism and creative nonfiction writing has been featured in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Longreads, Guernica, New York Review of Books, as well as the 2016 and 2017 Best of Food Writing anthologies and the Dear America anthology, published by Trinity Press. She was a finalist for a 2019 James Beard Award for Investigative Reporting and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a writing partner with the Female Farmer Project, and writer/producer for the full-length documentary Women’s Work: The Untold Story of America’s Female Farmers. She is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays and two novels. After sixteen formative years in the southern Arizona desert, she recently moved back to Western North Carolina, where she’s trying to remember what to wear in the winter.
Mandy Cano Villalobos is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans installation, 2D, performance, and sculpture. Her projects explore ideas of home, memory and cultural identity. Cano Villalobos has exhibited in venues including Bridge Projects (Los Angeles, CA), POSITIONS Art Fair (Berlin, DE), Proyecto T (Mexico City, DF), the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum (Clinton, NY), Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, (Chicago), The Museum of New Art (Detroit, MI), Hillyer Art Space (Washington, DC), Gray Contemporary (Houston, TX) and La Casa Pauly (Puerto Montt, Chile). Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, and The Chicago Reader, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship, and has been awarded grants from multiple organizations including the Gottlieb, Puffin, Frey, and Chenven Foundations, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Cano Villalobos is represented by Mu Gallery in Chicago and drj art projects in Berlin. She works in Grand Rapids, MI and Brooklyn, NY.