2022 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing Second Runner-Up
Jack of All Trades
by Deborah Gorlin
It’s daunting, even dangerous to the fingers, to cut a pumpkin, which is why you see pre-cut pieces in supermarkets these days. One needs a chef’s knife, sharp, heavy, long. Sharp, honed to gleaming, to puncture, make the first stab at its tough imperturbable rind. Heavy, to hack through the dense orange meat. Long, at least eight inches, to traverse its girth. The position of the angle of the knife is debatable. Some recommend one insert at the tip, next to the stem, and dive down, carefully of course, in a vertical attack, applying pressure as the knife wiggles back and forth, probing, widening the crack. Others keep the knife angled horizontally, using its full amplitude, and in a rocking motion, shimmy it back and forth until it reaches the base. Either way, when the cut is complete, one can pry or pull the two halves apart fairly easily with one’s hands.
During the Pleistocene era mastodon and mammoths ate an early iteration of pumpkin, long before they were cultivars. Hard, bitter, poisonous, encased in hard rinds, the size of baseballs, they were largely inedible, except for these large mammals, whose unbothered gastric systems made them a part of their diet, and insured their continuing existence. Seeds have been found in 30,000 year old mastodon dung. With the extinction of these megafaunal mammals, how then did these wild pumpkins fare? Not too well, apparently, lacking their broadcasters. Yet, they reinvented themselves. Scientists believe that as agriculture took hold, ancient farmers made pumpkins possible: they detoxed them, softened the rind, sweetened the flesh, to evolve into a respectable food source eligible for domestication. Understand, though, the pumpkin had to cooperate
Few enjoy this step in the process, hollowing out the insides. That once cut, we must confront the guts of the fruit. So many seeds clumped and matted in the stringy, mealy threads, like slippery moth wings, gooey oval ovaries, entangled in the fibrous pulp, sticky fingers. One must separate the seed from its own offspring. One uses a big spoon to scrape out the ‘brains’ of the pumpkin, the hairy, slimy parts. Visceral, even uterine, like performing a D&C, with your bare fingers, without a vacuum. I once heard a colleague, a physical anthropologist who worked only with bones, remark, “I prefer dry tissue as opposed to wet,” to explain her discomfort watching a video of a live human birth.
On a Christian website: “outside the pumpkin looks strong and beautiful but inside we look inside and see that it is full of slimy gunk. ‘For he chose us in him to be holy and blameless in his sight.’” Ephesians 1-4.
Of all produce, pumpkins seem close to geometric perfection, a sculptural ideal. I’m sure there are mutant pumpkins, but they’re rare. They are in the same categorical class as the sphere, the globe, the ball, the orb. For all their weight, they are agile, natural rollers. Roly-poly. Some could, with engineering, spin like tops. If human they’d be described as fat dancers, light on their feet. They resemble an orange Jupiter, my ruling astrological planet.
Your job is to trial seeds for an organic seed company on its research farm to select the best possible kinds to grow according to various criteria; among the other vegetables in your cohort, cucumbers, corn, peppers, your specific task is to grow the pumpkins. You have planted 2000 this season, 200 varieties, over 2 acres of field dedicated to their cultivation.
I was six months pregnant with you, late June. Something wasn’t right. Psychologists used the term “free floating anxiety,” to describe this mental state, but the metaphor needs qualification, in my case. We all have individual styles of anxiety. If anything, it was just the opposite, the water stopped up, clogged, rising in the sink, the traffic mounting. Awareness of myself as a self was like a bone stuck in my throat, a breathing choking. Like an old-fashioned AC unit circulating the same whispery air through its coils, humming, soughing, monotonous:
In New England, the pumpkin could claim to be truly iconic; after all, we live in its Ur state, Massachusetts, where Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims and the Indians, go together like PB&J.
What would a term of venery be for pumpkins? A convention of pumpkins? A convocation? A festival? A conversation? A jubilation?
Pumpkins must have been born under the sign of Sagittarius. Triple. Just like me. Sunny disposition. Warm. Fun. A good Joe, or Jill. Who can hate a pumpkin? Your father had a memorable line in the long poem he worked on for forty years. “His grin could ripen pumpkins.” You’d have to be from outer space, a killjoy, not to like them. In one of my report cards in grammar school a teacher wrote, “Debby’s personality has an infectious sparkle that delights her classmates.” One could say I was charming, or more likely charmed, sprinkled with lots of pumpkin dust.
Our small apartment, on the second floor above our landlords, became claustral instead of cozy. Its shoddy architecture, low and canted ceilings, narrow corridors, doors not quite trued, warped floors, closed around me. It was like living in a distorted funhouse, a cardboard canyon, a child’s fort. Temperatures rose into the high 90s that stasis of a summer, and in the Northeast, the humid days stuck together like uncut pages. Time itself stalled in its forward motion, tumid hours swelled like my ankles. At the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, museumgoers can enter a huge model of the human heart, walk through the four chambers, squeeze through tunnels and passageways that represent the major arteries. I was living inside a garish orange heart of sorts, you might say a pumpkin.
Your grandparents bought us an air conditioner, which after some deliberation we decided to install in the bedroom, for the sole purpose of sleeping. Since there was no door to retain the cool air inside the room, we tacked an old brown army blanket to the entrance. It blew up and down like a tired ratty flag, or the hide of a deer. I loathed its constant hum, the sonic life of the machine, shoved into one of the two windows shut against the outdoors. Yet even on cool days with the windows opened, it made no difference: the world outside still pressed against the house like an invisible wall. Sky, like a tarp, covered me. Space, no matter how vast and open, was nonetheless bound by the horizon. Any distance stood too closely, hovered. The world was like a cell, padded, endlessly layered. My own body, the start and fault. All over me was this clinging, skin, sealing me in to its tight and seamless suit, without exit, every cell padlocked. I could not peel off embodiment. And you, my dear boy, tucked under my heart and lungs? I wanted you out of me.
One Halloween, when I was in fifth grade, my father bought me a pumpkin at Good Deal, the local supermarket, to display on our front porch, which was nothing much, a stoop glorified with decorative cast iron railings, a few brick steps, a short landing, before the front door that led directly into our living room. Many of these pumpkins for sale came conveniently pre-painted, with simulated jack-o-lantern faces, to eliminate the mess, and to simplify the potentially dangerous act of carving, for those either afraid or without the skills. With his usual panache and rage for originality, my father resolved to carve our pumpkin.
Our apartment, in a two-story house built for Polish farmers, in 1850, when many of them first emigrated to Northampton, had no bathroom sink, just a big farmer’s basin in the kitchen, now quite fashionable as a design feature in middle-class homes. Ours wasn’t. The bathroom was tiny, jammed with a yellowed, peeling clawfoot tub and a toilet and a two-ribbed radiator the size of a space heater wedged in between them. In order to wash my hair, since we rarely used the make-shift spray attachment, I’d have to lie on my back and submerge my whole head in the bath water, knees raised around my burgeoning belly, in order to fit inside the narrow tub. Its walls rose high around me like a porcelain canyon. When the water covered me, I’d start to feel panicky, as if sealed in cellophane, and hurry the process. In such a position, I myself was fetal, a version of uterine imprisonment. I wonder now why I didn’t just wash my hair in the kitchen sink; it would’ve been easier.
You tell me about Downy Mildew Resistance, DMR, a blight which sweeps through the pumpkin fields at the end of the season. No insecticide can prevent it entirely. It is inevitable. You just hope that you can harvest the crop before it comes to pass. On the topside of the leaves, yellow and white patches appear, and on the underside, white and grey and cotton-like fungal spores, hence the term, downy. Downy, the same word used to name a fabric softener. Even words have split loyalties, contradictory meanings.
All sorts of maladies can occur to vulnerable pregnant mothers. Gestational diabetes. Toxemia, or the dangerous pre-eclampsia, when blood pressure rises to stroke levels, which I experienced with your sister during a 40-hour sporadic labor. Another vulnerability is the post-partum depression or the benignly called ‘baby blues,’ as if Frank Sinatra were responsible. The causation, in scientific literature on mental illness, is attributed to the precipitous drop in hormones, the biological stress involved in bearing a child. But that explanation is simplistic. Perhaps independent of their hormones, certain populations of mothers are also susceptible that cut across class lines. Poor mothers. Single mothers without partners. Married mothers without support from their husbands. Mothers with a poor relationship to their own mothers. Mothers with a history of mental illness. You might as well say many, if not all, mothers.
I wish that I could say that a strange animal took up residence in me. Like that possum living outside our window, perched in the grape arbor, revealed when we’d pull into the driveway at night, our headlights illuminating its form, like a negative: its pointy snout, its glowing dead eyes. But no, I was possessed by nothing so glamorous. Or even that scary. The banality of mental illness. I watched myself behind my eyes, separated from my performative self, as if behind a scrim, seeing myself seeing, a visual echo. I could not shake or shut those eyes loose, cemented into my skull. I had two selves, laid upon the other, one familiar insofar as it knew word perfectly the script of my personality; the other impersonal, a stranger, an observer cut off at the head, noting in exacting detail everything I said or did. This second self, or double, was impassive as a bank clerk who sits behind the counter overseeing my behavior with others as if they were transactions, mere deposits and withdrawals.
One of the main differences between plants and animals is their cellular structure. Plants have cell walls, while animal cells have only membranes, to allow diffusion. Whereas a human embryo grows inside a mother until it is fully matured, enmeshed in her body, like a fish in a net hooked by the placenta, a plant reproduces as a discrete package, a separate entity, from its parent source. Although it manufactures seeds in its ovaries, which are really embryos, in order for them to grow on their own, they must separate from their floral origins to germinate in another medium entirely: the soil.
The illness made more of the things of the world, objects acting upon me, rather than I as a subject acting upon them. Each entity demanded my attention, detail upon detail, clamored in competition for air and space time, like those garish advertisements in Times Square. Here I am, here I am, am, am, a march and drumbeat of continuous emphasis, in a nation of demonic democracies, arbitrary equivalencies. Furniture was a natural. Blockish and stolid. But so were unlikely objects: the lettuce in a salad, the ring on a finger, the hair on a head, the paper clip, the granule of cereal, each thing as it is, a declaration, portentous, inaugural. By the same token each action insisted upon its own importance, no matter how simple or insignificant. Preparing a salad, dialing a phone, getting dressed each morning, was an ordeal. Driving a car, filing one’s nails. The sitting down, the getting up, the standing.
Reality as simulation. I was superimposed like an object, say a paperweight, placed onto a desk of space, discontinuous, separate. Self was an idea, a remembered point of reference. I moved upon the world as if it were a backdrop. Appositional to reality, rather than prepositional.
What will affect a plant so that it doesn’t grow well or thrive? Soil conditions. Fungus. Weather. Too much rain. In a healthy soil sample, for a pumpkin, fertile, well-drained soil with a pH of 5.8–6.8 is best. Plastic mulch and fabric row covers (AG-19 grade) can aid plant establishment and exclude insect pests during the seedling stage. Row covers should be removed when plants begin to flower. Poor fruit development may indicate insufficient pollination. Time plantings so that varieties will mature for the fall market. Overexposure to sun in the field after maturity and foliage dieback reduces fruit and handle color quality.
On the cover of the catalogue, pumpkins crowd the page. It is an image of abundance, a happy crowd, buoyant, sphere upon sphere, in piles, in lines, arranged in different formations, robustly vegetal. Pumpkins are cheerleaders. Ra Ra, Sis Boom Ba!, scads of them perched on red tractors, resting inside and upon a tumult of bins and crates, a teeming orange spread, an incendiary joy of color. A hand drawn sign in all upper-case in black marker reads PUMPKINS. As if we couldn’t guess.
The doctors did not know the long-term effects of anti-depressants on the developing fetus and rightly so, were hesitant to prescribe them until after you were born. For the time being, I was diagnosed with ‘an adjustment disorder,’ a term better suited to broken or maladaptive mechanisms, such as the jammed seat of a car, or a twisted rear-view mirror, than to a mental condition. I briefly visited with a counselor who assured me that my state of mind would most likely clear up once you were born. Still, I worried about its effects on your development. You were marinating in amniotic fluid that had to have been stippled with my agitation, my bolloxed chemistry. Not quite like fetal alcohol syndrome, I imagined my sustained electrical nervousness transmitted in the womb through the extension cord of the umbilicus, blinking and flashing, bathing you in a harmful bioluminescence. Or your tiny body like my own, revving and jacked up like a hi-riser car, with nowhere to go.
The word ‘pumpkin’ itself has a sonic and linguistic vigor, a boosterish quality. In general, a pump is an apparatus for forcing air or water. Pumps keep engines cool without overheating, fill up tires to mobilize cars and trucks. We use them for many of our appliances, our sanitation, our water supply. The word, with two p’s on either end, is plosive, onomatopoetic. Of course, there’s the expression “pumping iron,” when people act as human pumps, using the air, water and muscle in their bodies, to lift free weights, the term synonymous with strength and power. Kin. Pumpkin is kin.
When I would part with your five-year old sister, in the early morning that summer, she and her friend would rush to the open windows in the preschool room located in the basement of the daycare building, to catch one last glimpse of me outside before I drove off to work. To ease her separation anxiety, no doubt exacerbated by the advent of the new baby and my own inexplicable detachment, I devised a slapstick ritual, a routine that never failed to ensure their surefire laughter. I’d lift up my blouse, sometimes my entire dress, above my shoulders, to expose the comedy of my enormous belly. A typical joke about the appearance of pregnancy is to ask, “Did you swallow a basketball?” Ha, ha, ha. No big leap to substitute it with another orange entity: a pumpkin.
What would the desired traits of a mother be? Friendly fierce knowledgeable forgiving patient supportive respectful patient organized loving. Like a Girl Scout oath.
In plant breeding, agronomists can select for hardiness, disease resistance, and vigor. It is a form of eugenics. But a plant is not a person, though in certain parts of the world, such as in the Amazon, there’s a move to give them the same rights as humans. We view plants, perhaps with the exception of our houseplants, as aggregate, not as individuals. And while there are varieties of any one given plant, it’s not as if you give each corn on its tall stalk, each pumpkin in its patch, each pepper dangling from its stem, a personal name. A pumpkin named Judson. A pepper named Lisa. They are truly collective entities, bred for the many. A single plant has no ego, no agency other than its own biological imperative, no individuality. Plants, as far as we know, can’t really have mental illnesses. But they can get sick and it will affect their plant-mates.
Viewed collectively, and statistically, my illness and your birth could be seen as inevitable, predictable, something always happening that goes wrong, in a mass. It’s only when cases start to multiply that they become significant and an aggregate. Latest statistics show nearly 20% of women suffer from some kind of disorder during and after pregnancy. Each year something can ruin a crop. Weather, disease, natural disaster. Plecto-sporium blight, which leaves lesions on the leaves, is right behind DMR. With climate change, and of late, COVID, new diseases will arise, no doubt.
Your father, who was in graduate school again for his second PhD, worried about his job prospects, about supporting us, about fulfilling his potential. He was gone a lot.
The famous Mother Goose nursery rhyme, “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater had a wife/ and couldn’t keep her./He put her in a pumpkin-shell/ and there he kept her very well.” Its assumption of the husband’s prerogative to exert his ownership over his wife, presumably because of her promiscuity, galls me. But before we call it out, I think some more about the underlying surreal humor in the verse, so typical of Mother Goose. A pumpkin itself is not exactly a jail with iron bars. After all, vegetables don’t keep. Furthermore, there’s a corrective second verse, in which Peter undergoes reeducation. “Peter Peter pumpkin eater had another/ and didn’t love her./ Peter learned to read and spell/and then he loved her very well.” So after the first marriage failed, Peter apparently wised up, and realized his own responsibilities as a husband to a wife. Your father was not at fault, and not a jerk. He, too, was governed by his own demons and angels, legislated by a cultural code of norms about masculinity and paternity.
Psychologically fragile people who looked to me for sage counsel and stability inundated me. There was no social media then. I made up for it. Each dialed call on our green wall phone in the kitchen, each walk to the downtown to meet for coffee, each single-spaced typed letter stuffed into an envelope, was a notch in my belt, a conquest of compassion. A former colleague at the art museum where I had worked sculpted and gifted me a gilded model of a giant ear, dubbing me the Golden Ear. A high efficiency empath, I rushed from one psychological crisis to the next, feeding on frenzied dramas, whoring mothering. So many needy people in my life then I lose count: the chain-smoking agoraphobic who ventured out doors only for tag sales on Saturdays; the recovering anorectic for whom I grocery shopped; the gay guy who loved men he’d knew would destroy him; the newly discovered French cousin whose parents survived the Holocaust, and who ignored the time difference to tell me in detail about making a movie about our family directed by Woody Allen; my mother, in Florida, who had congestive heart failure; the architect who complained about her husband in the same program as mine, but later found my similar laments unnerving and dumped me; the husband terrified that he might be washed out of his graduate program. The most pressing was my bipolar cousin, in my temporary charge because her parents were traveling abroad, who went off her meds and had a psychotic break in our bathroom, claiming that snickering monsters were climbing out of our bathroom towels, down on her knees screaming for mercy. When she was remanded to a mental hospital for soliciting and shouting expletives in the bus station, I had to appear in court to authorize her commitment. Their travails and traumas giddied me. In my own way, I was manic, hubristically humane. I had to fall.
I send you a picture of your new grand cousin, a six-month old baby, seated in a wheelbarrow, surrounded and propped up by pumpkins. You text me back quickly. “Adorable. The pumpkin variety is called Kratos, from Harris Moran Seeds. It’s a good one.“
From Johnny’s catalogue: use convenient charts to compare days to maturity, average weights, edibility, plant spacing, vine length, disease resistance.
I come upon remarkable images of a life-size cloth womb sewn by Madame Du Coudray, an enterprising,visionary midwife to the 18th century French king, Louis the XV. She created a mannequin for teaching obstetrics, determined to train country midwives whose ignorance of reproductive anatomy endangered the lives of pregnant women and their unborn children at delivery. Travelling through France, Madame Du Coudray spent twenty-five years teaching her methods and selling her “machines,” models made from soft fabric of the lower part of a female body in various stages of pregnancy. In a photo of the only extant model, the matrix, aka the womb or uterus, is slitted in half, a hollowed sphere, the color a pinkish-orange. It could be a dead ringer for a Long Island Cheese, or a Porcelain Doll, pumpkin varieties both edible and ornamental. It’s strangely touching, this model designed to be the real thing. The fabric softens the effect, like a stuffed animal. As if mothers could snuggle with their own womb outside of their own, a transitional object taken to bed with you.
I understand the association of womb and earth, the hole in the soil like the space in the pelvis, where the seed germinates, likewise where the baby grows. But in botany, the seed serves at once as the womb and the fetus, compactly packaged, and can only grow into itself outside the flower. Plants separate as a condition of their birth and growth, and seem both more and less vulnerable in this instance. But for sure, they are never embroiled in their mother’s insides.
Plants have no inner organs and there’s no need for them to ‘digest’ their food. Plants make their own food with sunlight, water, air and chlorophyll, the pigment that is behind photosynthesis. Plants are autotrophs, meet their own carbon requirements solely from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or water. Animals are heterotrophs unable to manufacture their own organic molecules and so must take them in ready made, prèt a porter, by eating plants and animals.
After your birth, then it was a matter of feeding you. Like many of the progressive boomer mothers at the time who believed and insisted upon our bodies’ natural process of lactation, I wanted to breastfeed you like I had done so successfully with your sister. Bottle-feeding, at that time, was not only considered a 50s throwback, orchestrated by the corporate chicanery of Nestle, but more importantly, and still true, nutritionally deficient. I might as well have filled my breasts with Coca Cola. But if I needed medication, nursing you was not going to be an option since the drug’s effects on the baby were not known. I was caught in a conundrum. Taking a drug would be an admission of psychological weakness. I just needed to try harder. At the same time, I worried that a drug might make me even more desperate. I decided to tough it out for a while, hoping it would lift.
My placenta was bizarre looking, a purplish, leathery brown like a twisted, convoluted boxing mitt, or a meaty gourd. A technician carried it out, on a tray. For the longest time I thought that it was a visible harbinger of some biological wrongdoing in my pregnancy, of course my fault; I was singled out. But now I read that doctors routinely look for abnormalities in the placenta to assess the health of the infant and mother.
At home during the day, while you slept, your sister in kindergarten, and your father at school, I filled up many cheap, tiny ring pads, siphons for my ‘racing thoughts,’ described in the DMS as a symptom of agitated depression. I give you my own metaphors: thoughts caromed off the insides of my head, pinging like the silver balls in a pinball machine, like herds of pixels stampeding in a corral. Thinking replaced feeling, like a straw that sucked the juice out of emotions, atrophied the heart. I was not so far gone as to be removed from expressing appropriate feelings, even if now they seemed like rote mechanics. Keeping a running tab of their absence, though frightening, at least provided momentary release. I so desperately wanted to return to my old self. The notebooks, which I refuse to throw out, are now bundled together with an elastic band, and placed discreetly on the bookshelf in our study. I tried to read them once and can make no sense of them.
Trader Joe’s has been a genius at insinuating pumpkin into our palates. A partial list of the company’s 60 seasonal pumpkin products for 2020 are as follows: pumpkin curry simmer sauce; pumpkin empanadas; pumpkin bisque; pumpkin spice; protein smoothie; pumpkin bread and pumpkin spice batons; pumpkin brioche; pumpkin cheesecake; pumpkin ginger ice cream; pumpkin ravioli; pumpkin bagels; canned pumpkin; pumpkin waffles; pecan pumpkin instant oatmeal; pumpkin pie; pumpkin coffee; and pumpkin samosa. Cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg are the only individual ingredients in their famed pumpkin spice, whose name is evocative rather than factual.
In Cindy Ott’s book, Pumpkins: The Curious History of an American Icon, she argues that our affection for pumpkins symbolizes a nostalgic return to a rural life, one which ironically, and fortunately, may actually help small farms to survive. Droves of people, she observes, pile into their cars in the fall, and drive to the countryside to buy pumpkins to place on their front porches, to make Jack O’ Lanterns, the stock symbol of Halloween. For Thanksgiving pies, they use the canned stuff, Libby’s. Unlike Americans, people in Mexico, in Vietnam, in the Far East, in Thailand, and other parts of the world eat it year-round.
“These are my pumpkins,” you say, your long arm sweeping over a vast field.
The pejorative term, a “vegetable,” is used to describe a comatose person without consciousness or mobility. Yet, if I had to pick a vegetable with personality, at least, I could do worse than choose a pumpkin.
I leaf through seed catalogues and discover all the many new varieties of pumpkins developed and cultivated by organic farmers around the world. There are the classic oranges: Autumn Gold, Connecticut Field (touted as the original Halloween pumpkin); Jack O’Lantern, Sugar, Pie, and Winter Luxury; the heirloom pumpkins; the big guys, Dill’s Giant, Atlantic Giant, Big Max, Big Moon, weighing in at an average 500 pounds. Then the Blues, who knew? Blue Lakota, Blue Max, Jarrahndale, Kabocha, Kakai, Blue Hubbard; the red-orange: Cinderella (Rouge Vif d’Estampes), Lakota; pumpkins cultivated for breast cancer awareness: Porcelain Doll, Pink Pumpkin; Cheese Pumpkins named for their resemblance to big wheels of cheese, which include the pale yellow: Long Island Cheese, Misee de Provence; the ghostly white pumpkins: palm-sized Baby Boo, brilliant white Lumina, Casper, White Ghost (Valencia); the greens: Fairytale; Green-striped Turban, Japanese Kabocha; the Miniatures: Jack-be-Little, Munchkin, Sweetie Pie, Tiger; the warty or pimpled pumpkins cultivated for their witchy, goblin-like appearances, the Galeux d’Eysines, salmon pink with warts that look like peanut shells or the Marine D’Eysines green heirloom.
Each year, Half Moon Bay, a small town in mid-coast California, about a half hour south of San Francisco, holds a pumpkin festival that sprawls across its rolling coastal hills, the land polka dotted with orange. There are marching bands, pumpkin sculpture, carving and pie-eating contests, championship weigh offs, pumpkin infused treats–, pumpkin art, all this merriment in a place that is now seriously threatened by drought and fraught with chronic fires. Everyone is jollied by the earth’s new brand, its good will ambassador, hail fellow well met, while the ocean edges closer and the ashes still smolder in the hills.
You were 10 pounds at birth, most like the Tom Fox, ranging from 10-16 pounds, developed by its namesake, a New Hampshire farmer. I recall the birthing room. Café curtains, a yellow and brown pattern, strung around the window, a décor reminiscent of a country kitchen.
The only place in the world that can’t grow pumpkins is Antarctica. That may be changing very soon. But there are white pumpkins that look like they’ve been grown there anyway, eg. the 100 pound Polar Bear,Valenciano, Snowball, Flat Stacker, Moonshine, Casperita.
I had stopped writing completely. I was never going to be good enough. And my husband who had been my staunch champion and companion in this poet business, had sworn off poetry writing, pronouncing it no more significant or timely than making buggy whips.
The facial features conformed to the usual semiotics in question: the triangle for the nose, the circles for the eyes, the crescent for the mouth, and jagged squares, like dentals or crenellations to suggest teeth. But my father wouldn’t leave it at that. As you might fashion a snow man he inserted into the holes: a cucumber for a nose, cherry-tomatoes for eyes, a melon crescent rind for the lips, and in an homage to his own habit, a cigarette, probably a Winston, jutting from the mouth. His Jack ‘O Lantern looked a lot like one of those vegetable and fruit faces portrayed in paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. As a finishing touch, he placed one of his many jaunty racing caps on the pumpkin’s crown. After a few days, the whole project went bad. It started to smell. In the still warm late October days, bees and flies hovered over the pumpkin, clustered on its edible features, invading its insides, feasting on its flesh. A humming emanated from its core, made by the beating of tiny wings, the chewing of many mandibles. My mother, disgusted, told him to get rid of it. When my father picked it up for disposal, the sides caved in like a big orange prune, oozed with juices that squirted out and ran down his hands and pants. Holding it at a distance, he hurriedly walked across the street and flung it into the woods, a patch of land with a few trees, the only remaining section untouched by our housing development squeezed between Rt. 22 and the Garden State Parkway.
Cinderella suddenly remembers that she must leave before midnight when the spell will be broken. She’s running late, chatting intimately with the prince outside the ballroom. In the movie, she bolts abruptly in the middle of their conversation, and dashes off frantically into her awaiting coach, fleeing the prince’s men who now pursue her. But just as the clock strikes midnight, the coach begins to slow down perceptibly, like a record played on the wrong speed, jostling Cinderella against its walls and jouncing her upon the cushioned seat. Sagging, then shrinking rapidly around her, the coach collapses to the ground, as its wheels uncoil and spill into loose snaky vines. In the next few frames in quick sequence, we see a dazed Cinderella stripped of her resplendent gown in her old grey rags, sitting bereft on the ruins of the coach, a regressed pumpkin, dangerously in the middle of the lane. With seconds remaining, as the prince’s men gain on her, she scurries off the road to avoid discovery. Hidden from view, she weeps at her abject devolution. But she remains identifiably intact as a person. More than the abandoned pumpkin can say: it suffers a different fate, broken first into jagged parts, then smashed into a hot mess, trampled by the horses as they gallop past.
The Hopi believe that pumpkins possess the qualities of an aphrodisiac that ensures fertility; its vitamins and minerals are known to boost libido.
Many are the gendered associations around pumpkins. The G-rated pumpkin, invoked as a term of endearment for children, “punkin,” leads a secret life associated with alternative forms of sexuality. In Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, one of Alexander Portnoy’s goyish girlfriends is known as Pumpkin. A pumpkin eater is a pejorative term for one who performs oral anal acts. Bums look like pumpkins. But this antonomasia feels cruel especially to the pumpkin. Why not a melon scraper? Or a tomato licker? Why does it have to be a pumpkin? Because you can demean a pumpkin and it won’t complain, do anything you want?
Squash blossoms are beautiful, languid floral stars, with their five floppy points, showy and wrinkled like crepe paper skirts slit on multiple sides. When they first bud, they appear limply arrowed, tapered kewpie doll cute. While the females have a bulb at their base on the stem, the male flowers grow directly off the vine. They are located at the exterior of the plant, while the female flowers grow close to the center, “squatting low on stubby stalks that when fertilized quickly balloon into squash.” Their location protects them from predation, and from us if we mistakenly eat them. Since male blossoms far outnumber the female, they can be eaten raw, sautéed, or stuffed with cheese, without damaging the plant.
The Iroquois developed an instrumental principle to ensure agricultural diversity based on the myth of the Sky Woman, whose daughter died in childbirth. When her mother buries her in the earth formed from the bottom of the sea by enterprising turtles, three plants emerge from her grave: “From her head grew squash of all kinds, from her breast grew corn in every color, and from her arms and legs grew many different beans.” Cultivated in tandem these collaborative crops are known as The Three Sisters, which work together to ensure the best outcome and to provide a healthy diet.
The pumpkin historically has been associated with stupidity and ignorance, sonically coincident with the word, bumpkin, meaning yokel, hayseed, hillbilly, pejorative terms for those who live close to the soil. Harris Seeds features one variety called the pumpkin bumpkin, another the pumpkin munchkin. In The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving’s story, the character of Brom Bones, a rival for the love of Katrina Von Tassel, dresses up as the ghost of the Headless Horseman and scares Ichabod Crane witless by hurling his seemingly severed head at him. Crane flees the scene, never to be found again. Next morning beside Ichabod’s hat lies a shattered pumpkin.
Even after almost two months of breastfeeding, the optimal time to insure the baby receive vital antibodies in the first stages of life, I was no better. In an ironic reversal, you slept through the night while I lay awake, as if flayed by stars, my eyes sculpted open, surging with an unmodulated energy, a switch flipped on to a steady state of steroidal juice rather than bursts and flashes that in a rare moment of humor I remarked could power an electric plant. My desperation increasing, I had one last alternative to avoid taking medication, a consultation with a clinical psychologist specializing in biofeedback and hypnosis, at the university health center. I figured he’d plop me down at some incomprehensible machine, wire me up with leads and gadgetry, or train my eyes on his pendular finger. An African-American man, he presented me instead with a unique perspective on my condition. He explained that in the past, especially in closely knit Black communities in the South, a mother suffering from post-partum depression often retreated for a year because women from her loving extended family and friends would step in to care for the infant. In other more individualistic (read white) communities, similarly afflicted women were probably removed, banished to the back halls of mental institutions, and eventually forever lost to their children. That last detail horrified me. “I know where you’re coming from,” he said, referring to our mutual residence, Amherst, a university town, and its New Age baby boomer mother culture, of Lamaze and natural childbirth, its sanctification of breast feeding, its distrust of big Pharma, and its excoriation of the evil effects of formula. For the first time in our meeting, he slipped out of his professorial stance, leaned over in his chair, looked me commandingly straight in the eyes. “Sure, I could help you, but frankly it will mean years of treatment. You can’t afford that. Wean him. The bottle won’t kill him. Did it kill you? Take the drug. Now. You owe it to your family to function.”
When I ask you about your memory of pumpkins as a child you recall those we grew in our sloped garden, situated in the front of our house, on the eastern side, on the top of a shallow hill. Their long vines extended as far as the sidewalk and the neighbors would joke that the pumpkins, if cut from their tethers, threatened to roll down the street. You remember that. When you were much older, we were driving home in our pick-up truck one October, after buying a pumpkin. Our garden, by that time, was not producing well and with your sister away at college and you in high school, we let it languish. Crammed into the bench seat of the truck cab, we placed the pumpkin, loose, in the foot well on the floor. As your father was driving, the truck without warning stopped short on its own, and we were thrown towards the windshield. Flummoxed, your father wondered if the brakes had seized? The engine cut out? Then, in a joint realization, we looked down on the floor and figured out what had happened. The pumpkin had rolled over the axle hump onto the brake pedal. How could we punish this prankster?
I finally agreed to take medication for what the psychiatrist was now finally calling an agitated depression, a peripartum depression, during pregnancy and after. The drug was Pamelor, a third-generation tricyclic, which I doubt is prescribed anymore. Oddly, I liked the sound of its name, strangely comforting, similar to those of friends of mine, say, a compounded Pamela and Lori. I had expected, even hoped that I’d be prescribed the sexier, all the rage Prozac, the drug celebre in the early 90s, but the psychiatrist knew better. When I asked why, he demurred, saying that in my case it probably would make me even more agitated. After all, I had no trouble getting out of bed. My trouble was staying in. My psychiatrist was a stammering homely Jewish doctor. I could’ve gone to high school with him. But he was gentle and kind and smart. I kept pressing him about the nature and etiology of my depression, the proportion of the psychological to the biological causes. I hoped that my body would take the brunt of my blame as the true betrayer. He shrugged. Maybe 50-50? Maybe 75% biological, 25% psychological. “In any case,” he said, “I have the name and telephone number of a very good psychotherapist in town.”
I feared the drug would worsen my condition, with no way to predict how long I might need to be on it, though a year, I was told, was average. I feared that I’d be taking it forever, but I had reached the end of my own will and resolve. I had no choice but to cross that rickety rope bridge across the chasm. I took my first pill, on Halloween night, 1990, a Wednesday.
The Ur Halloween, its origins, it is theorized, derives from the pagan Celts, now the Scots, the Irish, and the British, who settled centuries later, in this part of the U.S. Though an ocean separated them then and now, and though most became Christians, remnants of paganism remain. The eve, October 31, and the next day, Nov 1, although we now call it Halloween and Saints Day, are thought to be based on the holiday of Samhain (pronounced Sow-in, as in sowing seeds), meaning summer’s end, when the harvest was over, and pagans celebrated darkness, the advent of winter, and the commemoration of the dead. It is the start of the Druidic new year. Creation, growth, fertility, begins with darkness, with seeming death.
Many traditions that braid folk tales and pagan rituals. The custom of carving the Jack ‘O Lantern, on Halloween, derives from a poorly understood natural phenomenon at the time. Scientists trace the custom to what the Latins call ignius fatuus, literally meaning, foolish fire, aka known as will o’ wisps, fools fire, or fairy lights. The bogs, swamps and marshlands, prevalent in the Irish countryside, behave mysteriously, producing flickering lights as a form of bioluminescence, when gases emitted from decomposing matter combust, described as a ‘floating flame,’ or a spherical fire. From there, the Irish imagination takes over by way of explanation. Many are the tales of these sinister lights that lead the curious to follow and to drown.
So, where does Jack come from? Start with the name itself. In 17th century Britain, the name Jack was so common it became a generic reference to Everyman. Jack and Jill. Jack be nimble. Get back, Jack. The game of Jacks. The jack of all trades. If the man worked as a night watchman, he was called Jack of the lantern. At the same time, metal lanterns were costly. As a substitute, the resourceful Irish hollowed out root vegetables, such as beets, potatoes, turnips, –there were no pumpkins–to serve as containers for light. National Geographic Magazine dubbed them a “poor person’s lantern.”
What to make of this natural phenomenon, these mysterious lights springing up in the countryside? If we don’t have much in the way of science as explanation, let’s tell a story. And while we’re at it, give it a cautionary kick, to protect people from potential harm, and more importantly, keep them in moral line. The tale follows the life of a scoundrel known as “Stingy Jack,” who repeatedly tricks the Devil for his own selfish ends, each time falsely invoking God to defend him from his own vices. Eventually, when Jack dies, neither the devil nor God wants any part of him. Instead, the Devil sends him out into the night with nothing but an ember, to light the way. Jack places it inside a turnip, doomed to wander the world for all eternity, a malevolent spirit with nowhere to rest. That light rising from the swamp, watch out, that’s Jack’s, especially when the dead return on All Soul’s Day.
In a version of immunization against inimical spirits, the Irish made their own lanterns from root crops to scare him and the other evil spirits away. It wasn’t until the Irish immigrants made their way to the States, to escape the potato famine, that the ubiquitous and easy-growing pumpkin made itself known as the perfect alternative, even better than the turnip, much easier to carve, and to illuminate.
I tricked the Devil into thinking I was unfailingly good to others, always kind and selfless, incorruptible, a bohemian Madonna with my one child, another on the way. He knew I was a fraud.
Traditionally on Mischief Night, October 30, the day before Halloween, in New Jersey where I grew up, boys (never girls) in our neighborhood pulled harmless pranks, which included toilet papering cars, soaping car windows with graffiti, hurling eggs on houses, and to the point, smashing pumpkins, stolen from the displays on porches, on sidewalks and on the streets.
For me, the real supernatural was the world itself. We were freaky, strangely costumed in our bodies. Faces. Eyes. Sounds coming out of them called words. Putting food into their mouths, chewing with white rectangles, to eat. The legs we walked upon like two by fours. The arms that branched out for things. My hands divided into ten fingers. Trees, seemingly from nowhere, coming out of the earth. All improbable.
As I swallowed my first pill, I looked out the window and saw a bonfire in a bare farm field close by the apartment, among the disarrayed furrows, where stray unpicked potatoes and onions were left to glean. This wildflower of flames, shaking its petals, pin-wheeled in the wind. I had expected that night to be no different than the others. Fall asleep quickly and then, up an hour later, awake in the desert of darkness, sitting on the side porch trying to read, pacing, or listening to the susurrus of cars, their headlights trolling the walls. I went to bed that night, around 11. At 3 a.m. on the digital clock, I woke up. Disbelieving, I counted the hours on my fingers. Four whole ones. I nudged your father awake, “I slept!“ First time in six months. Next morning, I armored the two of us. With our food stamps, I went to the supermarket to buy formula. Your transition from breast to bottle went without a hitch.
The psychiatrist authorized a one-month extension to my maternity leave, identifying the cause as postpartum depression, when in actuality, it was peripartum, starting during, rather than after, the pregnancy. I’d return to work just before Christmas. Shame that it would be on my permanent work record. His official signature and mine required. At this writing, I will say it was my John Hancock, declaring my independence. No. Make that interdependence. I needed help.
In its contemporary incarnation, according to Cynthia Ott, the Jack O’ Lantern has become a “kind-hearted natural spirit instead of the wily trickster of the early 20th century or the volatile frightening imp in Renaissance art. Amputating and disembodying this symbol of wild primitive nature nullifies its danger.”
When, after all these years, I google the image of the Pamelor capsule, since I’ve long forgotten what it looked like, I am surprised by the visual coincidence. What do you know? It is orange and white, with a black band.
Why, after all these years, do I recall our art teacher’s project one October, when I was in second grade? It would be late 1958. Our art teacher, Mrs. Bennett visited our classroom once a week. For this specific assignment, we were asked to paint only pumpkins, in watercolors, on white absorbent paper. My pumpkins amounted to big orange dots. They were to be spaced and lined up in rows as they would appear in a patch, which none of us, in urban New Jersey, had ever seen in our lives. When we finished, she had us place our pictures on the radiators to dry in the back and along the side walls of the classroom, until her visit the next week, when she would guide us through the next step.
The drug didn’t work instantly, of course, but it helped me to function and at times to forget this obsessive awareness of a divided self. It was as if I had to take repeated attendance of myself. Present. Present. Present. That self, both the watcher and the watched, the subject and the object, was like a factory worker on an endless shift, forced to pay attention, to perform the same repetitive and redundant task, that required in this case, the action of “self-ing,” like a stamp, or an auto or appliance part to be assembled on a conveyer belt. My mind rang from the industrial din of its own machinery, an alarm I couldn’t turn off.
The “Guinness Book of World Records” claims that the biggest pumpkin to date was grown by Belgium farmer, Matthias Willemijns, in 2019. It was 2624 pounds. To achieve this weights, a grower must reserve about 1200 square feet of ground, pinch off any other flowers on the vine, sacrificing them for the purpose of fattening this one prized pumpkin.
I was huge, monstrous, like one of those big guys: Dill’s Giant, Prize-runner, Atlantic Giant, Big Max, Big Moon. At the same time, I was so very small, miniature, like teacup dogs or toys: Baby Boo, Jack-be-Little, Munchkin, Sweetie Pie. I recall the therapist saying that neurotic people seesaw between thinking of themselves metaphorically as either too big or too small.
A pumpkin produces hundreds of seeds inside its flesh, which are delicious roasted. But to do so, you must pull off the stem of the pumpkin, and with a fork, spoon, ice cream scoop, or your fingers, pinch the matted seeds in fibrous strings off the sticky pulp. It is suggested that you first place them in a bowl of water to soak, and then with a slotted spoon, spread them out like cobblestones on a baking tray. Season them, salt, pepper. They come out crisp and dry. You’ve roasted the slime out. Now everyone can eat them.
The girl in the pumpkin. The ugly dumb girl in the pumpkin. The poem in the pumpkin cannot and must not be written in the pumpkin.
It only took me 29 years to make the confession when I finally told you about it. Home for Thanksgiving, you were having a rough time after the breakup of a long-term relationship. I made it quick because I was afraid to ask you if you remembered anything awry when you were a baby. My depression, that is. You probably don’t. But somewhere in you, your cells must.
Last year for Thanksgiving you instituted a blind tasting contest for pumpkin pies whose fillings made from three different varieties you grow for the company, were identified only by number. You kept the ingredients the same for all of them. There was the Howden, your father’s favorite, described as the standard large pumpkin, which ‘defined the look’ in Halloween JOL pumpkins. Because of its size, it is not really suited for cooking, but your father maintains that the meat of sugar pumpkins is too sweet for his taste. There was the new Winter Luxury, described in the catalogue as “the silky texture for a perfect pie, with its unique netted skin, a small, gorgeous ornamental but also superb for eating.” Finally, the Japanese kabocha, a variety known as Winter Sweet, delivering “a combination of sweetness, flaky texture and depth of flavor that has made it a favorite on our research farm.” It is not even orange, but a “light gray with a charcoal mottle.” It was up to all assembled at the dinner, our family and longtime friends, to decide which was the best. After each of us sampled the three different pies, we rated our choices on slips of paper. The envelope, please! The pumpkin of yore came in last. Most of us, even your father, chose the kabocha. Things change.
To complete our paintings, Mrs. Bennett asked us to cover over the pumpkins with black paint. What was she thinking? How could she possibly make us ruin them? A hesitant censor, I queasily swept my brush across the paper, blackening the surface so that no trace of the orange circles would remain. Checking on our progress, Mrs. Bennett told me I needed to apply more black paint than I had, and as an example of what not to do, held up my work, demonstrating to the other students with my painting. Once again, we laid out our papers, like crinkled batwings, on the radiators to dry.
According to gastronomic history, the Sephardim, the Spanish Jews, way ahead of the Yankees, sampled the pumpkin a century and then some, before the Puritans arrived at Plymouth Rock. Among the seeds brought back by Christopher Columbus and Spanish explorers from the New World were pumpkins. As merchants, the diasporic Jews, who fled to Italy, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Greece, during the Inquisition, maintained their connections to their former Spanish traders. Jews ate pumpkin because it was cheap, plentiful, nutritious. Early recipes exist for pumpkin ravioli, pumpkin flan and fritters. Go figure!
In everybody there is an inner bestiary, remarked Leonora Carrington. I propose as an addendum that in everybody there is an inner botanicum as well. In my deepest fantasies, I would never picture a pumpkin as my spirit vegetable. But, as Adrienne Rich said, “A poet doesn’t choose her subject. The subject chooses her.”
In rare moments, I glimpse pure pumpkin, freed from culture, history, and context, the phenomenon itself, its true nature. In Kabbalah, one aims to reach a perfected state when the small divine spark of one’s own soul becomes reintegrated into the fires of the divine in a kind of compounded flame, subsumed by the boundless light of God. You get my drift. If the Buddha were a vegetable, wouldn’t she be a pumpkin?
“I turn into a pumpkin” is an expression no doubt borrowed from Cinderella’s story. Only a woman will give that as an excuse to indicate that it is too late in an evening for her to partake in an event.
In mythology, as far as I know, no examples of a hybrid plant and human form, in my terms, can be found. Likewise, in astrology, none of the symbols associated with the zodiac are of plants, though in many myths, life is visualized as a tree.
Perhaps that’s because we consider a human vegetable hybrid inherently comic. Mr. Potato Head. The eggplant Nixon. On Russell Street, in Hadley, Massachusetts, the busy road between Northampton and Amherst, a farm stand featured an eye-catching towering sign that pictured a caricature of the farm’s owner, Stan, who dubbed himself, the Vegetable Man. His image is made up of various vegetables resembling parts of the human body. His torso, a tomato; his legs, carrots and celery stalks; his feet husks of corn, Peter Pan elvish. His arms appear to be multiple cucumbers, strung together like green hotdogs. His head is none other than a pumpkin. He carries a basket of fruits. The sign was demolished when his land was sold to two dentists who built an office. It now resides in the nearby Farmers Museum.
How does it happen that something so tiny as a seed produces something so big and orange and spherical? A wonder. Soft, warm earth is needed to plant them, about 120 growing days; leaf, root, vine, take up the first ten weeks; gophers, moles, vine borers, beetles, aphids, powdery mildew are dangers; 6 hours of direct daily sunlight needed to grow. From silky roots, sprouts pop up, perky, and two parallel leaves, surprisingly prickly, appear on either side of the stem, floppy like a puppy dog’s ears; then the stems grow longer and thicken, inch by inch, swell like a garden hose, and leaves burst from them, like limbs emerging through clothing, hands through sleeves, feet through pants. Now elephantine, lush and shady. The buds appear in thin elongated slipper-like plumes, pointy and hairy, until they blossom into big orange splashes, like floppy starfish, five pointed, crinkly, crepe papery. Tendrils in thin curlicues, an understated filigree, attached to the stem, stabilize the plant vines. It’s all seemingly lightweight until the fruit appears. The pumpkins are not like grapes, tomatoes, or beans, pendular to be picked off the vine. They are the heavy weights, orange gravities, that lower themselves upon the ground, insist upon it.
Next morning, in the classroom, I peeked at my painting. Behind, within, enmeshed in the black streaks, the pumpkins appeared, better than well. They glowed, holding their own, bright spheres floating like lily pads, in a field at night, like Chinese lanterns. Was this Mrs. Bennett’s trick, her magic? Beautiful. It was one of the few art assignments I wanted to keep. More than sixty years later, I asked an artist friend about the media used to create this effect. She explained that the teacher probably had us use either glow-in-the dark, or a wax-based, paint for the pumpkins.
We drove up one weekend in early October to visit you in Maine. You asked us if we wouldn’t mind, among the activities that you had planned, volunteering to glean a field for a few hours on Saturday morning. As well as selling seed from other vetted and trialed sources, Johnny’s has an experimental breeding program. At harvest time it donates the large surplus of this produce to its employees and to charitable organizations. Though the company could profit from retail sales, policy dictates that it would be unwise to compete with its customer base, the very farmers who buy its seeds. That morning a group of volunteers, from Johnny’s and members from a local church group, coordinated their efforts with an organization called The Gleaners, which supplies local food banks. Together we picked through the leftovers of the harvest in a field of experimental breeding squash, one dedicated for this purpose. The conventional pumpkins were in the next field over.
Limited by COVID protocols, the lack of a vaccine, still undeveloped at the time, we are masked and keep our distance, easily enough outdoors, in a big area, about 4 acres of farm. One of your co-workers instructs us to select vegetables that are as pristine as possible, meaning without too obvious visible signs of decay. There are no perfect specimens, she declares, and in our selection, we are not to discount squash that may not conform to industry standards, those lacking the uniformity of size and shape required eventually for breeding or for sale. For our purposes, eligibility is edibility rather than physical appearance. At my age, I do more talking than stooping. No one is judging. By noon, we’ve gathered 150 crates of squash, largely consisting of a charming and novel variety of kabocha, a pinkish green. I love the color combination. We load them in plastic baskets on a company flatbed truck that you drive up and down the rows, gathering the produce, which we then transport to pack into boxes and pile inside the Gleaner’s big panel truck. Everything, in the end, fits snugly. The workers applaud. You’re pleased that your math calculations were accurate to the inch, not a box wasted, every squash accounted for, none left behind. One of the two Gleaner administrators, Mary, voluptuous in her overalls, wants the volunteers to pose for a socially distanced photograph beside the company’s flatbed truck. Each of us has in hand a chosen squash, which we proudly display in front of our chests like kids in a classroom Show and Tell. You hoist yourself up the sides of the truck, seat yourself on the top edge of the bright red railings that surround the bed, dangle your long legs off the side. Your father manages to vault himself up there, too. Mary asks me to jump up on the truck bed to sit between you and Dad, to group the family visually on the same level. I try to climb up with you both but my bad hip refuses. Your dad extends his hand but I shake my head. “No problem,” Mary says, and then guides me elsewhere: “Why don’t you stand beneath him on the ground in the very center? After all, you made him; you’re his mother.”