Andrea Chesman fiction short story Her First Choice

Her First Choice

by Andrea Chesman

Harvest, wash, bundle, repeat. The good thing about Stan dying in the middle of the summer was that all the farm chores continued, and Dorie soldiered on alone, with a grim fortitude that required little thinking. Broccoli, carrots, onions, potatoes. All organic, all by hand. 

Neighbors were respectful. They kept their distance as they helped with the harvest and Dorie didn’t have to talk much, beyond barking out orders and muttering thanks. She bagged up vegetables to give to her volunteers, not wanting to be beholden, and returned to the house to sit in the gathering dusk, alone.

Her refrigerator filled with her neighbors’ offerings. She’d drag her aching bones back to the house, shower, then rifle through the refrigerator, sighing at the sight of another sesame noodle salad, another brown rice and black bean casserole. She’d eat a few bites, then dump the food into a bucket to feed to the chickens the next day. Did no one make macaroni salad anymore? She wanted fried chicken, BLTs, chicken and dumplings like her mother used to make. 

This was Dorie’s fortieth year on the farm. Stan inherited a third-generation Vermont dairy farm, but when prices for milk tanked in the eighties, they replaced the cows with pick-your-own blueberries and organic vegetables. Stan made it through most of the blueberry season; what was left required mostly dragging irrigation hoses around and harvesting the late-season blueberries for jam. And there were always the vegetables, which she sold at the farmers’ market. 

Hot summer blurred into cool fall. Selling at the farmers’ market was Dorie’s least favorite chore, something she avoided when Stan was around. Fending off well-wishers who sympathized about Stan’s death took it all out of her. Stan had been revered by the organic veggie crowd, an old-timer who turned organic early, a fount of practical knowledge of soil amendments and nontoxic bug control. And Stan loved people, he loved getting out to greet his customers, to remember who had a baby, who lost a mother, who was new in town. So she couldn’t say out loud what she was thinking, that while she missed Stan’s help, she loved the silence that followed her around the farm more. She used to tell Stan he was filling up her airwaves; now her airwaves were filled only with birdsong and her own thoughts.

Apart from the torturous farmers’ market days, Dorie worked in silence, and while she labored she thought about rage, what rage really looked like, whether it could be cold as ice. Stan called her cold. Maybe rage melts into ice.

When she was young, she dreamed of becoming an ice skater with the Ice Capades, which toured Maine every year. In high school, she put aside childish dreams and dreamed of moving to New York City. She wanted to be a writer but wasn’t sure she had enough stories to tell. So she thought she would be happy to settle for being a fact checker at a magazine in the Time-Life building. She liked to know things, she liked to be right. But when she thinks about those dreams now, she sees how quick she had been to settle for less. 

She never got away. She got pregnant. 

Stan easily slipped into the role he prepared for his whole life, taking over the farm from his father, who died young from a massive heart attack. He had little choice though it meant abandoning his plans for college; there was his mother to support, the farm to hold on to. Dorie loved Stan as much as any high school girl loves her first boyfriend, but she would leave him someday. They would be sad for a little while, maybe write or call for a few months, until she met someone else. That was the plan she constructed in her head. 

Dorie didn’t have many friends. She wasn’t a talker who could chat for hours on the phone. As Stan’s girlfriend, she was included in the tailgate picnics and parties she wouldn’t have otherwise been invited to, but she held herself apart. She was too serious and bookish to be part of the farm crowd, never joining 4H or Future Farmers of America. But she wasn’t part of the popular crowd either, having no use for cheerleading and pep rallies. She was just herself, a girl who read a lot and dreamed of a future in a big city. 

When she told Stan she was pregnant, he was a little scared but mostly very happy. Dorie supposed she wanted the baby; she wasn’t sure she wanted Stan, not enough to be a farm wife, living just down the road from where she grew up. A nascent women’s movement was telling Dorie she should free herself from the tyranny of men, but no one said anything about how to raise a child as a single parent. As for the tyranny, well, Stan was a good guy, a great guy even. 

Yet, in the shade of the apple orchard where Stan and Dorie often met, she railed against the trap she thought fate had set for her, against Stan, against her small-minded parents. 

Stan, holding her close, said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This isn’t what we planned, but what can we do? There’s a baby to consider.”  

In 1974, abortion was legal, but unthinkable. Stan wanted the baby, he wanted marriage, he wanted to slip into the life his parents had laid out for him. 

***

They were married at City Hall with his mother and her parents in attendance. After a quick weekend trip to the coast, Dorie and Stan returned to the farm. They had just begun to settle in, when Stan’s mother announced her intention to move back to Maine and live with her widowed sister.

“You don’t want me to be a burden to you, do you? Looking over your shoulder all the time, like my mother-in-law did?  Good gravy, sometimes I thought I was going to kill her, she made me so angry!”

“But, Mom, this is your home. Don’t you want to stick around and meet your new grandchild?” 

His mother stood at the sink, washing out her cereal bowl. “You two kids will do just fine without me—and my sister needs me now. Anyhow, I expect Dorie’s mom will be over all the time. It’s her mother a woman wants when she has a baby, not her mother-in-law.” 

Stan and Dorie exchanged glances. Soon after the wedding, Dorie’s mother had left her father and joined a women-only commune somewhere down South, but Dorie hadn’t told her mother-in-law. It was private family business, shameful even. 

Dorie miscarried in her fifth month, just before Stan’s mother left. She felt both hollowed out and suffocated. Generations of stuff in the house dogged her steps. There were mismatched farm boots, dog-eared books, and unlabeled bottles of fruit wines and elixirs of dubious origins. In the cellar was a freezer half-full of cryptically labeled meats wrapped in butcher paper and shelves of mason jars filled with wan vegetables and pickles. The house itself had a smell that nothing Dorie cooked or sprayed or scrubbed affected. What gave her comfort was throwing things out, taking truckload after truckload to the dump.  

Stan spent much of his time examining, refurbishing, or hauling away rusty tools, tractors, tractor parts. He had miles of fencing to repair, plus wood to cut for winter and for next spring’s sugaring, on top of the twice-daily milking.

All around them, hippies were moving to Vermont looking for the good life. Dorie was mystified when she met them at the grocery store or post office. She found farm labor oppressive; she was beginning to think she wasn’t Stan’s partner, she was his domestic servant. For every hour he spent repairing testy machinery, wrestling recalcitrant animals, riding uncomfortable, noisy tractors, she spent sweltering hours preserving fruits and vegetables, sanitizing the milking machines, and shoveling manure. 

Did she think about leaving again?  Of course, she did. Still, she wasn’t a monster; she knew the work was more than one person could manage. So when Stan and Dorie made love, she kept her eyes closed and imagined she was with a different man, one she saw on television or in the movies: someone handsome, urbane, different. Someone with soft, uncalloused hands. She got pregnant again.

Oh, that summer was hot!  By the end of the workday, she couldn’t wait for a long soak in a cool bath. Stan would finish his chores and run over for a dip in the old quarry. One day she decided to join him for a swim. She was still concealed by overgrown brush on the north end of the quarry when she saw that the water was a gathering spot for the newly arrived hippies—all of them skinny dipping, even her husband. She watched him emerge from the water, sit down on a large flat rock on the far shore, shoulder to shoulder with a naked woman with long dark hair. Dorie didn’t reveal her overblown, matronly presence. Instead she slipped away as quietly as she could. 

She often thought back to that moment and wondered why she didn’t just keep walking—away from the farm, away from Stan—but she just couldn’t see beyond her pregnant belly. Again, she made the choice to stay and stay quiet. To nurse her wounds in the privacy of her own thoughts.

To be pregnant is to be conquered by a foreign entity. If she didn’t know she was pregnant, she’d think she was dying. Pain, nausea, muscle cramps dogged her as she dragged through each day. Stanley was kind, he was so kind, but she wondered if it was love or just the same tenderness he felt toward all the dumb animals in his care. 

Alaina was born on a rainy August day and cried for three months straight—or that’s what Dorie remembered. Surely there were moments—smiles, times when she relaxed in her mother’s arms as she nursed, as she fell asleep in Dorie’s arms. Surely love flowed when they shared a warm bath, a soft bed, a peaceful swing in a hammock. But what Dorie remembered were sore nipples, sleepless nights, miles of pacing the floors trying to calm the baby, trying to ignore the grit underfoot and cobwebbed corners. Did Alaina feel Dorie’s anger through her rigid spine?  Was that what made her little belly ache? 

Stan wanted another baby, but Dorie almost always said no, until she didn’t, and Dylan was born. All the love she withheld from Stan—and Alaina, too, if she was honest with herself—she lavished on baby Dylan. Dylan was a sunny, placid baby. Easy to love.

Stan worked hard to woo her back into his arms. He knew she was unhappy—he couldn’t miss how miserable she seemed—and encouraged her to take time off from the farm, though what she would do was beyond his imagination—or hers. The hippies—they had names, but that’s what Dorie called them—frequently invited them over for potlucks, but she never warmed to them or their carob brownies and brown rice casseroles, though the kids loved to run wild with the hippie offspring. She watched Stan smoke weed with the men and talk about tractors and trucks; maybe he found the talk of crystals and biodynamic gardening interesting. She spent her time with the women trying to figure out if one of those women had an affair with Stan. In truth, it didn’t matter; she was an outsider, in that community, in her own marriage. 

One night after the kids were in bed and she and Stan were washing the dishes, she confronted Stan. “What is it with those hippies next door?”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard they all practice free love.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they’re a promiscuous bunch. They all sleep around. Are you in on that?”

“Jesus, Dorie, I’m married to you.”

She sniffed. “That doesn’t mean a damn thing these days.” She turned and started wiping down an already clean counter.

“Dorie,” he grabbed her by the shoulders with wet hands and turned her to face him. “You, Dorie. You are my love, my wife, the mother of my children. I love you.”  Her kissed her tenderly. Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away. 

Maybe he slept with one of the hippies, maybe he didn’t; maybe he slept with all of the hippies. She knew she could have Stan if and when she wanted him, with love or not, it was her choice. All in all, he was the faithful sort. She knew she should have admired him for his loyalty to the farm and his heritage, for trying to make the best of the cards he was dealt, but she suspected she was part of the compromise.

Still, the new baby changed her. Once she opened her heart to Dylan, her heart cracked open more, embracing Alaina, softening toward Stan. They had some good years, when the kids were little. So much to do, but it seemed to all have a purpose. She supposed that is what she wanted all along: a purpose.

***

After the funeral, Alaina, who had fled the farm for college, then law school, counseled her on her weekly phone calls to think about her future, to think about selling the farm. She offered to hire a private detective to find Dylan, who missed his father’s funeral because no one knew how to reach him. Dorie always responded by saying she didn’t need Alaina’s “high-heeled help.” She needed to figure out for herself what she wanted to do. 

With the winter came a luxurious quiet. For the first time in her life, Dorie had no one to care for but herself. She could live on coffee and popcorn. She could make a chocolate cake and eat it for days as breakfast, lunch, and supper. She could sit and read library books, getting up only to feed the woodstove. She knew she was worrying Alaina, but didn’t really care. No, she was thinking that widowhood suited her just fine. There were no invitations to the social gatherings she would prefer to avoid, no excuses to make.

She made a stab at cleaning out all of Stan’s clothes. Folding, handling Stan’s things made her stop and think: it wasn’t such a bad life. Yes, there had been compromises, maybe infidelity, but she had been loved, well loved. And that counted for something. She hoped Stan knew that she loved him as well as she could.

It was March when Dylan finally came home; Alaina had hired a detective to track him down. He came driving an ancient Honda CRV with all his belongings packed in a few contractor bags. Dorie was happy to see him, but it wasn’t in her nature to show it directly. She made his favorite dish, pork chops with applesauce, and he entertained her with tales of life on the road—the fine points of dumpster diving, couch surfing, and seasonal farm labor. 

After a while, Dorie asked, “What are you really doing here?”

“Doing here or doing with my life?”

“Both. Either.”

“What do you mean? I always come home for blueberry season. This year I thought I’d get a head start on the blueberries since Dad isn’t around to do the pruning and fertilizing. And don’t tell me you don’t need help, because I know you do. I can’t believe you didn’t expect me to come. I came now so we can get the greenhouses started for the market garden.”

“Your father died last summer. You didn’t help me at all then. What makes you think I need you now?”

“Ah, Ma. I’m sorry I was so out of touch. I just, well, there was a girl…Anyhow,” he brightened, “this’ll be fun. You and me, Ma. You and me. Do you think we’ll fight the same way you and Dad did, or are we gonna get along?”

“Fight?  Your dad and I didn’t fight.”

“No, you vibed. You’d go silent for days. Dad always said, ‘Don’t worry about your mother. She’s gone to Dorieland. But she’ll come back. She always does.’ That’s why I haven’t been around. It wasn’t any fun to be around when you guys were fighting.”

“It won’t be fun now. It’s hard work and no time off.” 

“I know that, Mom. But it’s home. This farm is our home.”

Dorie was quiet for a few minutes, focused on her plate. Then she looked at Dylan directly, “Look, I’ve had an offer on the land. I want to sell. People are moving to Vermont. Climate change, crowded cities. You can get any price you want. There’s never been a better time to sell.”

“Sell?  You can’t sell. Didn’t you hear me?  I want to take over, lighten your load, get this farm back to the glory days.”

“There were no glory days. And, there’s no money to start up this year. The greenhouse needs new plastic, and I haven’t even bought seed. There’s nothing to plant.” Dorie stood and started clearing away the dishes, not meeting his eyes. Dylan rose to help her. 

“So, we’ll get a loan. Here, you wash and I’ll dry.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to help.”

“What if I want to? You’re going to have to get used to my help, you know.” He flapped a dish towel at her, trying to coax a laugh out of her.

Dorie turned off the hot water and turned to him. “Dylan, you’re welcome to stay, but I’ve decided I’m leaving. I never wanted this.” She gestured vaguely to the farm beyond the kitchen walls. “I’ve sold some of the land—the hayfield down the road Mike has been renting. The rest is yours, and Alaina’s. I’m going to meet with a lawyer to draw up the paperwork. I’ll turn the farm over to you and Alaina. Do with it what you want.” 

“You’re going to leave me?” His voice pitched higher. “I just got here. You knew I was coming back. I always come back.”

“For what? A life of endless labor? You couldn’t wait to leave. Why come back now? I release you.” 

“But I’m ready now. I want to take on the farm. All I’ve ever wanted to do was come back. Dad knew that. Dad knew I planned to come back. How could you not know? Wait, we talked about it. I know we talked about it when you were around.”

“I…I…I didn’t think you meant it. I thought you were just humoring your dad.” 

“Why? Why would you think that?”

“Why? Why not? I’m giving you the choice I never had.”

“But this is my home! And I need you to stay. I need to learn from you—what to plant, when to plant. Dealing with the taxes, keeping the books, everything.”

Dorie shrugged. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever made a choice in my whole life and I choose to leave.”

“But where will you go? And what will I do?”

Again, Dorie shrugged. She didn’t answer the first question because she didn’t know the answer. “Sell or stay. It’s up to you. Alaina can help you figure things out. I should have left a long time ago.”

Dylan stared at his mother, open-mouthed. The words, finally spoken out loud, lifted a huge weight from Dorie. A smile cracked her face; she used muscles she’d forgotten she had. She would leave, she was finally making the choice to leave.