Page 11 of Grape Juice
“Don’t worry, I’ll get the dessert, then,” Henri says to the ground and trails after his uncle. For a moment, I stand alone in the limp light, listening to the low rumble of activity in the kitchen on one side of me and the buzz of conversation at the table on the other, belonging to neither one.
I walk back wondering what, exactly, has just happened—why I can taste guilt when I haven’t done anything wrong.
“She returns! There she is,” Pietro shouts in my direction, standing up to pull out my chair with a feverish bow. “They always come back!”
VI
The following morning, Henri hardly speaks while we work opposite each other in the vines. We fill bucket after bucket with Sylvaner, emptying them one by one into the baquet, listening to the relentless thrum of French conversation around us while we harvest in silence. This hush, almost deafening, reinforces my gnawing sense that whatever transpired yesterday was, somehow, a transgression—even if a devastatingly innocent one.
At 10:00a.m., Julian climbs into the back of the truck and calls out an announcement through cupped hands: “Antoine says he’d like a team of us to start out on a new plot. We have a lot to get through today!” Oh, how he delights in the vague power that comes with his unpaid intern stature.
He jumps down and walks along the outer perimeter of the vines. “OK, you three—come with me.” He gestures toward myself, Henri, and Ruby, and we traipse to the vehicle and maneuver ourselves inside.
“The chosen ones. Aren’t we lucky?” Ruby sings, sittingbetween Henri and me and placing an arm around each of us. “You think we’re being promoted?”
“From free laborer to senior free laborer?” I joke.
“Maybe demoted,” she amends.
“Feels more likely,” Henri adds.
“With that attitude.” Ruby musses his hair, a brusque, fraternal gesture.
We’ve been picking low to the ground since I arrived, but now we drive past miles of midrange vines within reach at a proper standing height. Then we arrive at a portion of the domaine where the grapes stretch so high, I wonder how we’ll pick them at all.
The answer: We’ll do so perched on stacks of overturned buckets. And within minutes, my calves ache from standing on my tiptoes. Our arms are angled upward as if we’re performing a ritual to will rain from the sky. My triceps throb from holding the prolonged position, a pain that recalls the discomfort of blow-drying my hair (somethingelsethat takes too long).
It is hot—scorching enough that the work grows more tedious as the sun beats down on our shoulders. Our pace is glacial. Our buckets fill at a devastatingly slow rate. The size of the fruit, the difficulty of the task, makes it impossible to move quickly. These shriveled, tiny grapes, Julian takes great pains to explain, will be used for sweet or fortified wines, since they’re so overripe, so loaded with late-season sugar.
“God, I’m sweating heaps,” Ruby announces. “You’ll all need to entertain me if we’re going to make it throughtoday. Who has gossip?” With excessive drama, she lugs her bucket several feet to the left to begin hacking away at a new section. “Julian, you’re up. Tell us a secret.”
Julian, who has just removed his T-shirt to tie it haphazardly around his head, looks over in mock anger. “I have no secrets. I’m German.”
“What does that even mean?” Ruby cries and tosses up her hands.
“Not true. Impossible,” I say. “Good characters all have secrets.”
“Just because you and Henri spend all day sharing your oral autobiographies doesn’t mean I have to.” Julian looks between the two of us tauntingly.
“Sure does!” Henri pipes up.
“I’ll tell mine if you tell yours,” Ruby proposes.
It isn’t difficult to siphon information out of Ruby, but in this particular context, there’s something to offering collateral. And Julian seems like the sort of man who requires negotiation to close any deal.
“Fine,” he starts. “I’ll answer any question you want if I can ask any ofyoua question in return—and you have to answer honestly.”
“Deal,” Henri agrees, and Ruby and I nod.
“OK, then, what exactly do you want to know?”
“Obviously we want to know if you have alover,” Ruby responds without hesitation, lingering on the syrupy syllables of that last word.
I grin and swell with buoyant affection for her. Ruby, with her hands on her hips, socks pulled nearly up to hercalves in her Blundstone boots. Julian is now shirtless, but Ruby’s taken a different sartorial approach: She’s wearing enough fabric to cover the both of them. In a long-sleeved button-down with a handkerchief tied around her neck, she’s committed in full to protecting her alabaster, redhead skin. The overall effect implies camp counselor or zookeeper.
“Oh, well, I’m actually engaged.”
“Like... to be married?” Ruby guffaws.
