Strawberries

Oates, Joyce Carol

It's a neutral day.

No sky and no atmosphere.

No emotions and no oxygen.

And no memory. And no future

beyond the plane's broad wing.

Yet: a scissor-flash of sun

and I'm seeing again.sun

beating on the strawberry patch

of my grandfather's lost farm

as a warning pulse beats

on the underside of an eye.

Here I am kneeling in sunshine. Sunshine beating

`on my bare head. None of us wore hats. On my grand

father's farm picking strawberries. Filling quart

baskets. Up and down the rows filling quart baskets.

Ten cents a quart. Thirteen years old. Quick, deft

motions of my stained fingers. Hypnotic. Dreamy.

In stained work-clothes kneeling. In sunshine kneeling.

You pick, you reach, you reach farther, an ache.between

the shoulder blades like a nail entering flesh so you

know it's time to shift your knees, to inch forward

smelling your heated body. Pulsebeat, pain. Pulse

beat, pain. In the next row, Linda Birkenhead and

Ginny Dunston, two older girls, are picking. Jesus,

I hate strawberries! Could puke, strawberries! Linda's

loud hoarse voice. We're laughing, calling to one

another, you'd think our throats would be scratched

by now, shrieking with laughter, and it's only 10 A.M.

and we started at 7 A.M. and we're exhausted, we're dead,

except noisy and giggling in the shimmering heat

of June in my grandfather's strawberry patch where rows

go on forever no beginning no end. Pulsebeat,

pain. Yet I believe I will live forever.

True pain, like grief, is for solitude only.

Not picking strawberries, ten cents a quart,

with Linda and-Ginny. Not picking strawberries,

row after row, no stems, no leaves, cobwebs sticky

on my fingers in shimmering heat in June these

endless rows on my grandfather's farm.

Only last year, these girls tormented me.

At school, they teased and chased me.

Older boys twined their fingers in my hair, why?

Dirty fingers in my hair and when I cried,

they laughed, why? First the pulsebeat, then the pain.

Heat-haze of summer, the world's smiling.

Unless it's weak eyes needing glasses.

That year I'd begun to wonder how do we come

to an accurate knowledge of ourselves

my question to bear through life, unanswered.

Picking strawberries, I'm the fastest, frantic

to finish a row first as in a race, always

to be the first, and careless, bruising fruit,

picking stems, leaves, coming to abhor the touch

of strawberries, how seeds are stippled

in the flesh, rough as a cat's tongue and some

of the strawberries are weirdly shaped, greeny

white and never to ripen, other strawberries

are soft-rotted from the inside, female fruit

leaking watery runny red juice. Within hours,

a box can go bad: My grandfather hated straw

berries, so perishable, not like apples, pears,

quince, cherries, a strawberry ripening

is a strawberry close to rot.

Kneeling in sunshine. Sunshine beating

on my bare head. And my friends Linda and Ginny

Who'd been so cruel. They'd hated me at school,

maybe I was too fast with my answers, maybe

too smart, and too young,mow I'm like the others

dumb and suntanned and my small breasts hard

as green pears and my fingers groping quick

in the strawberry plants blinking away pain,

swallowing down nausea, no Iwasn't going to think

of how they'd tormented me, chased me, jeering

pelted me with horse chestnuts, clumps of mud,

chased me through cornfields on the Tonawanda Creek

but I'd outrun them so it was a game,

yes probably it was a game, laughing, shouting,

maybe a sign of crude liking so reasonably I might

tell myself They don't mean harm. Not like, poking

me with an elbow in the eye, they'd mean to gouge

out the eye. For there'd come, unexpected, that day

last September, returning to school and the oldest

Birkenhead girl Linda stared at me, and smiled, and

later there was Ginny Dunston and her brother, and

others, so suddenly it was O.K. Why, don't ask,

if the world's suddenly O.K. don't ask, don't inquire

into motives for there are no motives for maybe

it was something simple: I'd grown over the summer,

I was lanky funny, tall and suntanned and tough

and fast as ever except now it was O.K. which is why

kneeling in sunshine picking strawberries for ten cents

a quart I'm happy. I love my. friends, that's all

you want at thirteen but it's a gift you don't

always get. The sky is a great mirror

mirroring all-time-to-come.

Always I'll remember how suddenly meanness

turned sweet. What ripened, and wasn't rot.

How grateful, and how quick to smile, laugh

ing like the others in the shimmering heat

of June, happy. Those summers of no beginnings

and no ends and one day a biographer will note

below a photograph Oates lived on her grandfather's

farm until the age of i8. She believed she was happy

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author, most recently, of The Collector of Hearts (stories), Blonde (novel), and Where I've Been and Where I'm Going (essays). Her poetry has appeared in Paris Review, Boulevard, and The New Yorker. She teaches at Princeton University.

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