The $64 Tomato Read online

  Bridget blinked. “Cartesian?”

  I looked to Anne for help. She pretended not to know me.

  “You know,” I said. “Rectangular. Planar. I guess we had something more rambling in mind.”

  Bridget looked at the plan and thought for a minute, and this is what she must have said to herself: “My husband is going to use Big Machinery to shape and terrace the land; therefore the terraces have to be perpendicular. Irregularly shaped terraces would require him to build them by hand, which he is not about to do at any price.”

  Obviously, she couldn’t say that to a client. Here instead is the translation she supplied to the naive and gullible homeowner.

  “The problem is, Bill”—it was strange, tingly, and totally convincing to hear her say my name—“you have to terrace it to deal with the slope, and terraces have to be rectangular.”

  Oh. Well, that shows how much I know. Of course, terraces have to be rectangular. (It would be some years before I realized the blatant untruth of that statement.) Okay, so much for winding, rambling paths. Rectangular is fine. I moved my attention to the broad, grassy paths. “I don’t know that I like the idea of having to mow my garden. Can we put something else in here?”

  Bridget crinkled her green eyes at me. “But, Bill, the grass paths will look so grand,” she insisted. “So stately. And the mowing is nothing. Two swipes with the mower. You think about it; I know you’ll want the grass.” I looked to Anne for guidance, but she was gazing at Bridget.

  The garden architect flashed her pearlies in Anne’s direction. Anne, I think involuntarily, smiled back. What kind of spell had this Valkyrie cast over us?

  Okay, rectangular and grassy. Sounds good to me. And she does have all those beautiful architectural symbols and Latin names, and the great teeth. We wrote out a check and agreed we would see her husband around Labor Day.

  AS LABOR DAY APPROACHED, Anne and I were flush with excitement. We had signed a contract, made a down payment for the construction phase, and spent our idle minutes running our fingers over the smooth blueprints and poring over seed catalogs. One moonless night in August, we grabbed some blankets and lay on our backs in the tall grass in the garden-to-be, touching hands, looking at the constellations, discussing what to plant. We were going to have a two-thousand-square-foot garden next year! To a couple of former city dwellers, this seemed like a small farm. No more agonizing decisions over whether to plant squash or lettuce. We could plant everything. I fancied myself a small farmer, self-sufficient in vegetables for at least several months of the year, and longer for storage crops like potatoes and winter squash. With the occasional shooting star shamelessly egging us on, Anne topped my ambitions with her romantic dreams of canning, making the garden’s bounty last twelve months of the year. I responded with homemade sun-dried tomatoes, tasting of sunshine and acidic sweetness.

  “Fresh blueberries,” Anne moaned, “that turn your lips blue.”

  “Cherry tomatoes,” I countered. “Popped whole into your mouth.”

  Before long we were rolling in the summer grass, our way of saying farewell to the baseball field with its little vegetable patch and welcoming the kitchen garden.

  With these tantalizing visions dangling before us, we didn’t mind sacrificing the last few late tomatoes of the year, ripping out the plants and disassembling the beds in anticipation of Big Machinery that would be arriving any day.

  Labor Day arrived. No Big Machinery. I called Bridget to try to get a start date.

  “George is held up on a job on Long Island,” she explained. “He spends every summer working on an estate, and the job’s running long this year. But we’ll definitely be starting by Columbus Day.”

  Long Island? That’s a hundred miles away. This guy gets around.

  “You don’t say, Bridget. I’m from Long Island. What town is he in?” As if I didn’t know.

  “East Hampton.”

  Great. I’ve just ripped out my tomatoes, rainy season is approaching, and my landscaper is summering in the Hamptons. Just great.

  “I just wouldn’t let it slip past Columbus Day,” I warned her once I caught my breath. “After the first hard frost hits, our soil gets very slick, and your machinery is going to get stuck on the hill.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Bridget breezed. “George is pretty good with the equipment.”

  Sure, I wanted to tell her. So was Napoleon until he encountered Russian mud.

  POOR THING (BRIDGET OR NAPOLEON) didn’t have a clue. But I had witnessed my own Waterloo after our septic system failed almost as soon as we’d moved into the house (naturally). Actually, it’s not quite accurate to say our “septic system” failed. Unknown to (1) our crack home inspector, (2) the bank holding the mortgage, and (3) the novice buyers, our ninety-year-old house did not have anything resembling a septic system. In fact, I didn’t even know what a septic system was. The only accommodation for waste was some ancient, brittle clay pipe that ran underground for about a hundred feet down the hill, under an old stone wall (which had partially collapsed the pipe), and into a stone well, whose exact location was a closely held secret. The liquids apparently escaped between the well stones into the surrounding soil, while the solid wastes … well, I don’t know what became of them except that after a few months of our family’s flushing the toilets, nothing was going anywhere.

  We brought in Lou, a local excavator who was recommended to us by our plumber. He checked my credit, flushed some expensive transmitting device down the toilet, and listened through headphones for the plaintive beep that would reveal the location of the secret well.

  It was never heard from again.

  We did eventually locate and open the ancient stone tank with the help of a former owner and, after seeing it, immediately came to the conclusion that we needed a new, modern system. Within a few days, Lou had dropped in a twelve-hundred-gallon concrete holding tank and said he’d be back to complete the more time-consuming part of the system—the drainage, or leach, field—in a few weeks, after he’d completed another job. Lou explained helpfully that the way a septic system works is that all effluence goes into a concrete tank planted in your lawn. Near the very top of the tank is a pipe that leads out to a leach field, which consists of a set of underground perforated pipes. As waste enters the tank, solids drop to the bottom, where they are broken down by naturally occurring bacteria. The clean liquids on the surface flow out the pipe to the leach field, where they seep into the earth to be filtered and broken down before reentering the water table.

  Grateful for the ability to flush our toilets again, we didn’t fuss over the delay or even over the fact that in lieu of a drainage field for the liquid wastes, Lou had run a long hose down to the woods that constitute the lower half of our property. A little pee in the woods for a couple of weeks couldn’t hurt anything. And it flowed away from the house.

  A couple of weeks stretched into a couple of months. I started calling Lou regularly as the leaves began falling from the trees. I thought I was always polite, but Lou didn’t appreciate what he felt was harassment. What had started as a cordial partnership between homeowner and contractor soon turned tense, then rancorous.

  “What are you complaining about? At least you can flush your toilet,” he snapped once. “Do you think I’m loafing around? I’m taking care of people who can’t flush their toilets! I was there for you when you needed me, wasn’t I?” He followed with a vague threat about walking off the job if I wasn’t happy with him, and hung up. Uhoh. That was the last thing I needed—to start over with a new contractor. I stopped calling.

  Either in spite of, because of, or irrespective of my discontinued phone calls, one day in early November, Lou and his backhoe did materialize in the backyard and immediately started making huge gashes in the steeply sloped lawn behind the kitchen. Another day or two and the leach field would be completed.

  The next morning we woke to the season’s first hard frost, a sparkling carpet of silver across the grass and expose
d soil. Lou arrived at 7:30 a.m. and fired up the back-hoe. As I made coffee, I heard unfamiliar whining sounds coming from the machinery, not unlike the sound of a car spinning its wheels on ice. I looked out the window. The backhoe was stuck in the melting frost, the treads whirring helplessly in place. Lou came around to the house.

  “I can’t do anything here. I’m going to come back around noon, after the sun has dried out the ground.” But the low November sun never did dry out the ground, not that day nor the next. There was once a thriving brick industry in town, and apparently a vein of brick-quality clay ran right through our property. Each morning’s frost or dew brought more moisture to the clay that lay only inches below the surface of the lawn. Lou gave it a noble effort. I watched, unbelieving, as he “walked” the backhoe up the hill by pushing the blade into the earth and lifting the treads off the ground. But clearly one could not put in a leach field by walking a backhoe around the property. Nevertheless, Lou wasn’t ready to give up.

  “It’s supposed to get warmer next week,” he explained. “Let’s just leave it untouched, and I’ll be back in a week to finish up.”

  I must have looked doubtful.

  “Don’t worry, we’re going to get this done.”

  And indeed, as Lou predicted, a warm front did come in. Preceded by a thunderstorm. Torrents of water rushed through the little canyons left from the digging, leaving mud and wet, sticky clay everywhere.

  Game, set, and match. Lou announced he would be back next spring to put in the leach field. We were disappointed and upset, but at least we were sure that he would keep his word, that he wouldn’t walk off a job that had become a nightmare for him and for us, as some contractors might have done. In fact, we were absolutely, positively sure he’d be back.

  We had his backhoe.

  Right outside our kitchen window. First stuck on slick clay, then stuck in frozen clay, then covered with a blanket of snow. All fall, winter, and spring, the accusatory backhoe sat there, huge and school-bus yellow, its open jaws mocking, laughing at us, every minute we spent in the kitchen. Our Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter guests were incredulous as they stared out our kitchen window, mouths agape.

  “You mean he just left it here?” was the typical response. “Is he paying you for storage?” He wasn’t, of course. The hose carrying our liquid wastes down the hill also attracted some interest. I looked at our water bill and did a little math. Our typical water consumption was about six thousand gallons a month. Sounds incredible, and I can’t figure out how we use all that water, but apparently that figure is typical for a family of four. Since virtually all of the water that comes into the house leaves the house via the sewage system, over the nine months between septic tank installation and leach field installation, fifty-four thousand gallons of urine, dishwater, bathwater, and anything else that went down the drain ran down our hill into the woods. Just how far down the hill that liquid got before disappearing into the ground, we never knew. We did wonder if the neighbors far on the other side of the woods ever noticed anything peculiar, but we were too chicken to ask.

  As the high sun of late spring slowly dried out the clay, our uninvited guest sat motionless like a loyal pet awaiting an owner who would never return, the knuckles of its fingered scoop resting on the ground. It turned out that over the winter, Lou, who had spent his navy years in ships’ boiler rooms, had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a particularly vicious cancer of the lining of the lung. I saw him only once again. I was shocked; at first I didn’t recognize him. Lou had literally become the clichéd “shell of his former self,” his skin hanging too large for his emaciated body. He managed a weak, but definitely not warm, smile for me. I wished him well and shook his hand. A month later he was dead. Someone else showed up to fire up the backhoe and finish the job. But I felt, and still feel to this day, ashamed at myself for my impatience, the angry phone calls, and the ensuing bitterness. I promised myself I would never again allow a relationship with a contractor to become bitter (a promise I would break the very next year).

  ALL OF WHICH IS to explain why, when Halloween approached and Bridget’s husband and his Big Machinery still had not arrived, Anne, sweet Anne who absolutely hates to get involved with contractors, Anne who would rather suffer months in silence than verbalize a complaint, Anne who is totally nonconfrontational in nature, woke up and saw the frost on the pumpkin and called Bridget.

  “You may know landscaping,” she told a shocked Bridget, “but Bill knows his soil. You need to start this job. Now.”

  And a couple of weeks later, in early November, they did. I took the day off from work and anxiously awaited George and his Big Machinery. Three hours late, still breathless and blond, Bridget pulled into the driveway in her battered Toyota, followed by a flatbed truck carrying Big Machinery. A young man in his twenties, with a long, flowing blond mane and familiar crinkly green eyes got out of the truck. Bridget introduced me to Lars and explained that George was finishing up a job and would be available in a couple of days to do the “skilled” work. Meanwhile, little brother Lars’s job was to pull out the brush and tear up the soil, loosening things up for the terracing operation. Bridget gave Lars a few instructions—one of which, oddly, was, “Don’t drive too fast”—and was off. Lars unloaded the tractor and a disc. The disc, which I remembered seeing as a child on the TV show Modern Farmer very early on Saturday mornings, is a frightening device, resembling something used in the Spanish Inquisition: a two-foot-diameter metal disc that sits off kilter on a large tricycle. Hitched to the tractor, it slices deep into the soil at about a forty-five-degree angle, breaking up and loosening the earth so that it can be pushed around by other Big Machinery.

  I watched from a discreet distance as Lars tried unsuccessfully to hook up the disc to the tractor, struggling with a pin-and-socket fitting. More than once, he thought he had it figured out, only to drive off and leave the disc comically behind, like a motorcycle speeding off without its sidecar. The few times it stayed attached, it bounced ineffectively over the turf. I couldn’t bear to watch, so I considered offering my assistance, although I doubted I could be of much help. Even though I am the director of technology at a research institute, where I manage the computer systems, technology for me begins where machinery leaves off. Or even later. Originally an engineering major in college, I wisely switched to English literature after a frustrating freshman year spent in the basement of the engineering building, unsuccessfully struggling to get a picture on the oscilloscope. Things haven’t improved much in the decades since. I’m the guy who brings his car to the dealer because I can’t unfold the backseat. The most significant automotive advance of the last fifty years? My vote goes to the symmetrical car key, because until its arrival I inserted my key upside down at least half the time.

  Thus I had no business helping Lars, but the poor soul looked so pathetically perplexed that I wandered over toward the tractor to offer, if nothing else, moral support. Besides, I had a question.

  “Ever use one of these things, Lars?” I inquired as politely as possible.

  Lars grinned somewhat guiltily and shook his blond locks from side to side.

  After a few minutes of fiddling with the connection, I had it hooked up to the tractor. Lars, relieved and smiling, hopped aboard.

  “Remember, Bridget said don’t drive too—” He raced off, tearing around the field like a kid in a go-cart, ripping up the earth, sending clods of grass and earthworms flying. It was a horrific sight. I couldn’t bear to watch. Fortunately it was growing dark by this time, so a few minutes later he climbed into his truck and drove off without doing too much damage. Oddly he never showed up again, and his name was never mentioned. Instead, a couple of days later, I arrived home from work to the sounds and smells of Big Machinery. Anne met me in the driveway.

  “George is here,” she said, her voice a mixture of excitement and relief.

  “What’s he like?”

  “Handsome.”

  Interesting response.
r />   Despite that flaw, and his perfect Hamptons tan underneath a trimmed beard, George was, I had to admit, instantly likable, assertive, knowledgeable, and skilled. But it was now winter on the Russian steppe, and he, like Napoleon the Emperor and Lou the Excavator before him, was no match for the brick-quality clay, his tractor slipping and sliding helplessly. If it were a horse, they would have shot it.

  “I never saw anything like this,” he exclaimed as he loaded his machinery onto the flatbed for the winter. At least he didn’t leave it behind.

  I couldn’t resist getting in a parting shot. “We tried to warn you,” I said. “You may know your business, but I know my land.”

  We Know Where You Live

  Don’t live in a town where there are no doctors.

  —Jewish proverb

  We were immigrants to this land, having fled the city of Yonkers a few years earlier in search of more breathing room. Our neighborhood in that working-class city bordering the Bronx was populated by old-school Italian and Polish families who weren’t quite sure what to make of the “strangers,” as we heard ourselves called. I guess we were strange. Anne, rather than staying home to raise kids, was putting in hundred-hour weeks as a medical resident, while I often filled both the traditional mother and father roles.

  Yonkers was for us a city of contrasts. We loved our home but felt out of place in the neighborhood; we loved being able to walk to the corner market but sometimes came home numbed from the unsolicited advice of neighbors (“What is that child doing out of the house before she’s been baptized!”).