As they were unloading the supplies for the cook-off from the back seat of Sarah’s Honda, she felt
the poverty of her pans. They were scruffy and bent and imperfect. Some were marred by orange-
caramelized spots They were not the perfection of silver catering trays or even the artistic aesthetic
of unmatched baskets.
Sarah’s husband Kevin was a student at the culinary academy. He agreed to collaborate with a
fellow student in the cooking competition at the annual wine festival. The winners would split a
thousand dollars and gain the positive notoriety of winning. Sarah happily agreed to go with and
make a day of it for herself while they served. She hired a babysitter for their three-year-old
daughter, and bought a new white blouse to pair with her jeans. Kevin wore his white chef’s coat
and his school’s black checkered pants.
Kevin and his friend Alex, went right to work at their assigned stand in the winery, artfully laying
out the ingredients to be mixed and displayed. They decided on a mango salsa and blue chips, a
choice Sarah thought practical and popular for a warm summer day. While the men set up, Sarah
walked around to the other budding chefs’ tables. One had swordfish and small snail-like creations
on square crackers. The chef had given his creations odd names. All of the chefs named their
foods.
Sarah knew that afterward she wouldn’t remember what the concoctions were called, their names
slipping into and out of her head like melted butter, but Kevin would recall and remind her later what
they were.. She loved this about him—his ability to remember the names of things.
After touring the winery, the huge wooden vats and listening to the guide talk about the
processes of gathering and holding, pressing, fermenting, bottling, Sarah went back to Kevin’s table.
Only an hour had passed. There were three more hours of serving before the judging. She hadn’t
thought that he’d be busy the entire day.
“Why don’t you tour the other wineries?” Kevin urged her.
The air was dry and hot, sunburn weather. As she climbed aboard the bus, someone filled her
souvenir wineglass with a cool pale yellow wine.
“Would you like your glass filled?” the woman had asked. Sarah didn’t answer, didn’t even nod
her head, but she holding the glass in such a way that the woman simply poured in the buttery
Chardonnay and said with a knowing smile, “Enjoy.”
Sarah walked to the back of the bus with her map of the wineries.
God, it felt good to hold a glass of wine after all these years. She would just hold it. Sit here on
the bus and hold the glass of Chardonnay and smell the sweet, tangy, wine odor of it. The bus
rumbled to life and soon a flat expanse of green vineyards were rolling by her window. She didn’t
know about these kinds of plants. Plants on the other side of the world from where she had grown
up—on a farm in the Midwest. She looked at her glass. She’d been sober five years, hadn’t been
thinking about drinking. Still went to meetings, occasionally. Even as she was thinking this, she saw
herself lifting the glass to her lips and taking a sip.
She immediately began to worry about Kevin finding out. He didn’t drink either. That was the
initial attraction. Neither of them drank and the sex was serious and then she’d gotten pregnant and
then there they were, two sober parents.
But the wine tasted cool and dry and bitter. It was almost like the first time —the relaxation. The
smooth lovely looseness. She was drunk on one sip. And then the glass was empty.
The bus stopped at the first winery on the tour. As she was , stepping down the last step, she
heard a band playing somewhere off in the vineyard—in what she thought was—a clearing? She
clung to the empty souvenir wineglass and walked into the main part of the winery—an open square.
The grassy square had a large crucifix-shaped path of stones extending outward and at its center,
an island display where wines were being offered. At the edges of the four paths of stones, there
were other tables set up with cheeses and wines and hors d'ouevres. And as she walked around the
circle of display tables, everyone was asking , "Would you like to try some of our wine?”
Sarah repeatedly shook her head no, smiled, told herself it wasn’t hard to do. . She’d had a glass—
that was enough. She would just feel it inside her for a while. See how that felt.
She moved toward a widely mown path, and saw a band ahead playing on a dais and people sitting
on a large square swath of grass. In front of the crowd, a woman in a long, loose skirt was dancing
with another woman in a flowery shirt. The two women, wide hips, and hair too long for the decade,
were dancing together—jiggily, with bent elbows and quick steps, to a Jimmy Buffet song. Sarah had
never liked the popularity of his music, but she liked the sound of this song now.
The gathering reminded her of all the concerts she’d gone to with her ex-husband, the Bucking
Horse sale at Miles City in Montana, and the one out in the country somewhere in South Dakota with
four-wheel drives parked everywhere, and a concert somewhere in a small town in a park one time
with different bands, all day, and they’d gone into a bar for lunch, a nice bar in the small town. She
couldn’t remember the name of that town now. But she remembered the coolness of that bar and
eating a good lunch, a club sandwich and drinking cold beer from a glass, and listening to rock bands
all day out on the grass, and there had been an old railroad station nearby, and a boxcar made into a
concession stand.
She remembered dancing like these people with her ex when they were still married. She could
have danced the whole day—but he wouldn’t. Only every once in a while could she cajole him into
getting up with her and dancing. He was a goofy dancer who liked to sing the songs while he
danced as did she. She didn’t so much miss him as she missed the music and the dancing and the
people and the rock bands. And the singing, and the inside of bars and the wine. The wine was all
part of it. And people you knew. She knew she was being sentimental. Those people hadn’t meant
much to her in the end. She couldn’t remember one conversation with any of them. It was the
people she’d met after she quit drinking who had interesting ideas.
Kevin didn’t like to dance. How did she ended up with someone like that? He could cook. Here
were all these people dancing, though. People she didn’t know. Californians. And they were all older
than she was. Graying hair. Money, she could tell. Some—early retirees. What a concept, being
able to retire early. Women who maybe didn’t have to work. For her birthday, Kevin gave her a tie
and an olive-colored shirt, a pair of blue cotton pants. Was that a sign?
She was the breadwinner now while he was in cooking school. He’d stayed home for the first year
with the baby, they’d agreed that’s what they’d do after she got pregnant. She taught theater and
high school English. He’d worked too for a while at odd jobs -- dropping oil, serving hot dogs from
a friend’s cart in a private school, but then they moved up here for him to go to the school. And
now, he was on all the time about the food and the cooking and wines.
There were trees, fruit trees around the edges of the square. Fruit trees strung with Christmas
lights sparkled in the sunlight. They must’ve left this space unplanted for just this, this kind of
venue. Maybe Kevin would work at a place like this when he finished school. He was talking about it
already -- working in a winery, or a nice restaurant, a spa. She didn’t know how she would keep
from drinking then.
The beautiful people. She believed in that once and then she didn’t. It was all a process, pick the
grapes. She could look out at the field and see the labor in it. Like farming—her father was a farmer
back in the Midwest. It wasn’t easy, keeping the weeds from choking the plants. This was different.
Making it into wine and then making it into this. This party. This celebration.
If you started at the beginning, you could talk yourself out of that second glass and see that it was
all a show, a drama production. Constructing a set, putting the scene to music, adding dances and
cues. From dirt to vine to grape to glass. That was how it was done. There was always something
behind the scenes—the real story to the drama. Dirt to vine to grape to glass.
She heard songs, the sound of a band outdoors at a winery. She wanted to dance.
Sarah looked up at the band on the dais. The bass guitarist was cute; the lead singer, a stocky,
overweight guttural alto. Trying to appear still handsome in middle age, she thought, with his musk
of a beard. She leaned back on the grass, listening, thinking of her new white shirt against her tan
shoulders, the waste of…
A man tapped her on the shoulder.
“Would you like to dance?” he said.
He was tan, lithe; had a long braided ponytail hanging down his back—like some Scandinavian
hippie. She noticed his faded coral t-shirt, brown cargo pants, leather clogs. She waited a fraction
of a second to answer him. “I…”
He waited, politely patient.
“No,” she answered, “I have to go back to the bus. The tour bus. My husband…” She was
checking her usual habit of providing too much information. “What time does the bus leave?”
He smiled at her. His teeth were small and even, the edges of them had brownish-yellow stains on
each line between the teeth. “It’s already left,” he said, and she noticed his clipped accent, something
European, Russian, maybe.
“But don’t worry,” he said. “Another one comes along every half of an hour.”
“Well then,” she said quickly, getting up and dusting grass off the back of her jeans, “I’ve got to
go.”
On the bus, she thought about not dancing with the man. He’d been very polite, she could’ve
danced with him. It would’ve been harmless. But it was like the wine. She knew it was there, inside
of her now. One harmless glass.
The bus stopped at several of the wineries along the way back to the winery where she had
boarded, where her husband’s cooking contest was probably finishing up by now. Sarah did not get
off again. She was too afraid. She wiped out the inside of her glass with the inner hem of her new
shirt. She could wash the smell out of her shirt later.
She watched the rows and rows of vines tick past. The sun was getting lower in the sky, late-
afternoon, a warm smoky dustiness to the air. She could feel the glass of wine wearing off—that
little wine headache across the top of her eyebrows and centered in the bridge of her nose.
She was terrified that Kevin would smell it on her breath. From the beginning of their relationship,
they’d had an unspoken pact that drinking would not be part of their life together. That their
daughter would be raised in a family free of… in a family that was, was the word wholesome? No,
natural, that’s what it was. She wanted her daughter to lead a natural life, didn’t want her daughter’
s life to be changed—like the grape. Something natural becoming something fermented.. It was the
drinking and drug use that invaded her first marriage and killed it. She knew that. She’d known
that. How had she forgotten it? In one second.
At the main winery she cut across the large, dusty gravel parking lot full of cars parked in long
uneven lines. At the edge of the lot, she stood still and took a second to check her breath in the cup
of her hand, wished she had a mint. She looked across the long expanse of picnic grass where Kevin
and Alex were fumbling at their food stand. They seemed to be packing their wares. Kevin was
talking to Alex, grinning; Alex pulling something up from under the stand.
Across the grass, then, she saw a green bottle suspended in Alex’s hand, a bottle with dark red
wine coming out of it, wine pouring into a glass, a glass that Kevin was holding.
She could still stop it. She could go over right now and stop it. She took a step back—behind a
latticework fence, where Kevin wouldn’t see her.
Her husband raised his glass to Alex; they clinked in camaraderie, celebration. Kevin didn’t look
around first, he didn’t look uncomfortably around, he didn’t even hesitate. He lifted the glass to his
lips and drank.
She should go over now. She could pretend not to have seen it. She could berate Kevin—pretend
she hadn’t had a glass already. Or she could walk over there, casually join in—proffer her new glass
to Alex and ask for it to be filled. She didn’t know what to do. She stood in the gravel of the
parking lot, her new etched wine glass hanging upside down in the cusp of her fingers.
the poverty of her pans. They were scruffy and bent and imperfect. Some were marred by orange-
caramelized spots They were not the perfection of silver catering trays or even the artistic aesthetic
of unmatched baskets.
Sarah’s husband Kevin was a student at the culinary academy. He agreed to collaborate with a
fellow student in the cooking competition at the annual wine festival. The winners would split a
thousand dollars and gain the positive notoriety of winning. Sarah happily agreed to go with and
make a day of it for herself while they served. She hired a babysitter for their three-year-old
daughter, and bought a new white blouse to pair with her jeans. Kevin wore his white chef’s coat
and his school’s black checkered pants.
Kevin and his friend Alex, went right to work at their assigned stand in the winery, artfully laying
out the ingredients to be mixed and displayed. They decided on a mango salsa and blue chips, a
choice Sarah thought practical and popular for a warm summer day. While the men set up, Sarah
walked around to the other budding chefs’ tables. One had swordfish and small snail-like creations
on square crackers. The chef had given his creations odd names. All of the chefs named their
foods.
Sarah knew that afterward she wouldn’t remember what the concoctions were called, their names
slipping into and out of her head like melted butter, but Kevin would recall and remind her later what
they were.. She loved this about him—his ability to remember the names of things.
After touring the winery, the huge wooden vats and listening to the guide talk about the
processes of gathering and holding, pressing, fermenting, bottling, Sarah went back to Kevin’s table.
Only an hour had passed. There were three more hours of serving before the judging. She hadn’t
thought that he’d be busy the entire day.
“Why don’t you tour the other wineries?” Kevin urged her.
The air was dry and hot, sunburn weather. As she climbed aboard the bus, someone filled her
souvenir wineglass with a cool pale yellow wine.
“Would you like your glass filled?” the woman had asked. Sarah didn’t answer, didn’t even nod
her head, but she holding the glass in such a way that the woman simply poured in the buttery
Chardonnay and said with a knowing smile, “Enjoy.”
Sarah walked to the back of the bus with her map of the wineries.
God, it felt good to hold a glass of wine after all these years. She would just hold it. Sit here on
the bus and hold the glass of Chardonnay and smell the sweet, tangy, wine odor of it. The bus
rumbled to life and soon a flat expanse of green vineyards were rolling by her window. She didn’t
know about these kinds of plants. Plants on the other side of the world from where she had grown
up—on a farm in the Midwest. She looked at her glass. She’d been sober five years, hadn’t been
thinking about drinking. Still went to meetings, occasionally. Even as she was thinking this, she saw
herself lifting the glass to her lips and taking a sip.
She immediately began to worry about Kevin finding out. He didn’t drink either. That was the
initial attraction. Neither of them drank and the sex was serious and then she’d gotten pregnant and
then there they were, two sober parents.
But the wine tasted cool and dry and bitter. It was almost like the first time —the relaxation. The
smooth lovely looseness. She was drunk on one sip. And then the glass was empty.
The bus stopped at the first winery on the tour. As she was , stepping down the last step, she
heard a band playing somewhere off in the vineyard—in what she thought was—a clearing? She
clung to the empty souvenir wineglass and walked into the main part of the winery—an open square.
The grassy square had a large crucifix-shaped path of stones extending outward and at its center,
an island display where wines were being offered. At the edges of the four paths of stones, there
were other tables set up with cheeses and wines and hors d'ouevres. And as she walked around the
circle of display tables, everyone was asking , "Would you like to try some of our wine?”
Sarah repeatedly shook her head no, smiled, told herself it wasn’t hard to do. . She’d had a glass—
that was enough. She would just feel it inside her for a while. See how that felt.
She moved toward a widely mown path, and saw a band ahead playing on a dais and people sitting
on a large square swath of grass. In front of the crowd, a woman in a long, loose skirt was dancing
with another woman in a flowery shirt. The two women, wide hips, and hair too long for the decade,
were dancing together—jiggily, with bent elbows and quick steps, to a Jimmy Buffet song. Sarah had
never liked the popularity of his music, but she liked the sound of this song now.
The gathering reminded her of all the concerts she’d gone to with her ex-husband, the Bucking
Horse sale at Miles City in Montana, and the one out in the country somewhere in South Dakota with
four-wheel drives parked everywhere, and a concert somewhere in a small town in a park one time
with different bands, all day, and they’d gone into a bar for lunch, a nice bar in the small town. She
couldn’t remember the name of that town now. But she remembered the coolness of that bar and
eating a good lunch, a club sandwich and drinking cold beer from a glass, and listening to rock bands
all day out on the grass, and there had been an old railroad station nearby, and a boxcar made into a
concession stand.
She remembered dancing like these people with her ex when they were still married. She could
have danced the whole day—but he wouldn’t. Only every once in a while could she cajole him into
getting up with her and dancing. He was a goofy dancer who liked to sing the songs while he
danced as did she. She didn’t so much miss him as she missed the music and the dancing and the
people and the rock bands. And the singing, and the inside of bars and the wine. The wine was all
part of it. And people you knew. She knew she was being sentimental. Those people hadn’t meant
much to her in the end. She couldn’t remember one conversation with any of them. It was the
people she’d met after she quit drinking who had interesting ideas.
Kevin didn’t like to dance. How did she ended up with someone like that? He could cook. Here
were all these people dancing, though. People she didn’t know. Californians. And they were all older
than she was. Graying hair. Money, she could tell. Some—early retirees. What a concept, being
able to retire early. Women who maybe didn’t have to work. For her birthday, Kevin gave her a tie
and an olive-colored shirt, a pair of blue cotton pants. Was that a sign?
She was the breadwinner now while he was in cooking school. He’d stayed home for the first year
with the baby, they’d agreed that’s what they’d do after she got pregnant. She taught theater and
high school English. He’d worked too for a while at odd jobs -- dropping oil, serving hot dogs from
a friend’s cart in a private school, but then they moved up here for him to go to the school. And
now, he was on all the time about the food and the cooking and wines.
There were trees, fruit trees around the edges of the square. Fruit trees strung with Christmas
lights sparkled in the sunlight. They must’ve left this space unplanted for just this, this kind of
venue. Maybe Kevin would work at a place like this when he finished school. He was talking about it
already -- working in a winery, or a nice restaurant, a spa. She didn’t know how she would keep
from drinking then.
The beautiful people. She believed in that once and then she didn’t. It was all a process, pick the
grapes. She could look out at the field and see the labor in it. Like farming—her father was a farmer
back in the Midwest. It wasn’t easy, keeping the weeds from choking the plants. This was different.
Making it into wine and then making it into this. This party. This celebration.
If you started at the beginning, you could talk yourself out of that second glass and see that it was
all a show, a drama production. Constructing a set, putting the scene to music, adding dances and
cues. From dirt to vine to grape to glass. That was how it was done. There was always something
behind the scenes—the real story to the drama. Dirt to vine to grape to glass.
She heard songs, the sound of a band outdoors at a winery. She wanted to dance.
Sarah looked up at the band on the dais. The bass guitarist was cute; the lead singer, a stocky,
overweight guttural alto. Trying to appear still handsome in middle age, she thought, with his musk
of a beard. She leaned back on the grass, listening, thinking of her new white shirt against her tan
shoulders, the waste of…
A man tapped her on the shoulder.
“Would you like to dance?” he said.
He was tan, lithe; had a long braided ponytail hanging down his back—like some Scandinavian
hippie. She noticed his faded coral t-shirt, brown cargo pants, leather clogs. She waited a fraction
of a second to answer him. “I…”
He waited, politely patient.
“No,” she answered, “I have to go back to the bus. The tour bus. My husband…” She was
checking her usual habit of providing too much information. “What time does the bus leave?”
He smiled at her. His teeth were small and even, the edges of them had brownish-yellow stains on
each line between the teeth. “It’s already left,” he said, and she noticed his clipped accent, something
European, Russian, maybe.
“But don’t worry,” he said. “Another one comes along every half of an hour.”
“Well then,” she said quickly, getting up and dusting grass off the back of her jeans, “I’ve got to
go.”
On the bus, she thought about not dancing with the man. He’d been very polite, she could’ve
danced with him. It would’ve been harmless. But it was like the wine. She knew it was there, inside
of her now. One harmless glass.
The bus stopped at several of the wineries along the way back to the winery where she had
boarded, where her husband’s cooking contest was probably finishing up by now. Sarah did not get
off again. She was too afraid. She wiped out the inside of her glass with the inner hem of her new
shirt. She could wash the smell out of her shirt later.
She watched the rows and rows of vines tick past. The sun was getting lower in the sky, late-
afternoon, a warm smoky dustiness to the air. She could feel the glass of wine wearing off—that
little wine headache across the top of her eyebrows and centered in the bridge of her nose.
She was terrified that Kevin would smell it on her breath. From the beginning of their relationship,
they’d had an unspoken pact that drinking would not be part of their life together. That their
daughter would be raised in a family free of… in a family that was, was the word wholesome? No,
natural, that’s what it was. She wanted her daughter to lead a natural life, didn’t want her daughter’
s life to be changed—like the grape. Something natural becoming something fermented.. It was the
drinking and drug use that invaded her first marriage and killed it. She knew that. She’d known
that. How had she forgotten it? In one second.
At the main winery she cut across the large, dusty gravel parking lot full of cars parked in long
uneven lines. At the edge of the lot, she stood still and took a second to check her breath in the cup
of her hand, wished she had a mint. She looked across the long expanse of picnic grass where Kevin
and Alex were fumbling at their food stand. They seemed to be packing their wares. Kevin was
talking to Alex, grinning; Alex pulling something up from under the stand.
Across the grass, then, she saw a green bottle suspended in Alex’s hand, a bottle with dark red
wine coming out of it, wine pouring into a glass, a glass that Kevin was holding.
She could still stop it. She could go over right now and stop it. She took a step back—behind a
latticework fence, where Kevin wouldn’t see her.
Her husband raised his glass to Alex; they clinked in camaraderie, celebration. Kevin didn’t look
around first, he didn’t look uncomfortably around, he didn’t even hesitate. He lifted the glass to his
lips and drank.
She should go over now. She could pretend not to have seen it. She could berate Kevin—pretend
she hadn’t had a glass already. Or she could walk over there, casually join in—proffer her new glass
to Alex and ask for it to be filled. She didn’t know what to do. She stood in the gravel of the
parking lot, her new etched wine glass hanging upside down in the cusp of her fingers.
r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal
summer-fall 2007 shorts on substances
from dirt to vine to grape to glass
by jamey genna
summer-fall 2007 shorts on substances
from dirt to vine to grape to glass
by jamey genna
photo 30, parrones by yeraze