"Fields" by Agata Antonow

You’re eight and at a Pick-Your-Own farm in Southern Ontario, the sun pressing down the part in your hair until it feels like one long blister. Your father is trying to explain he’s there with his whole family, you’re there to pick berries, and the college guy whose summer job this is gives him that funny look. That look you’re familiar with whenever anyone hears your parents’ thick Polish accent. Like there’s something funny, something strange going on. In a few years, you will hate this look, but for now you hear your father’s “stav-birry” and you step in, the smooth way you have been stepping in since you were six. The voice of the family. “We three would like to pick strawberries, please. How much for three pints?”

The college guy’s face turns to you, a sun moving, and the wrinkle between his brows smooths out. His swagger comes back and he snaps his gum as he tells you three bucks. 

And so you get to picking, your mother telling you to eat as much as you can in the field, because no one can see, because the prices are high, because this is part of the deal. She is wearing a kerchief around her head in a way she thinks glamorous women in Canada do, the way she wears a fur coat and heels in winter, because she has learned the rituals of this strange land through movies and has brought those images in a battered leather suitcase across twenty years and an ocean.

The fruit bursts hot in your mouth and the flies buzz dizzy around you. The smell of dirt and mud here, stains on your fingers. You can’t say if you like strawberries. You can’t say whether this is the way you want to spend an idle June afternoon. Your parents are focused on placing each berry in plastic tubs. You watch the way red flesh disappears between their lips. Next week you will go to Niagara Falls. The week after you will get a small barbecue and grill pale hot dogs in the front yard. Your parents are always learning to be Canadian but even now you see that they get the fractions wrong, like stubborn rows of numbers in class that slide and shift before your eyes. Subtracting Polish words and clothes and foods does not equal Canadian, does not equal new. There is yet another formula you don’t know.

In other rows, you see other families. The little girls aren’t wearing a straw hat (strav hat) and sundresses like you. Jeans and bucket hats. Your mother does not seem to notice this. But you notice the easy confidence of overalls and words, the way the little boy two rows over pops three berries into his mouth at the same time, picks his nose, and sticks his tongue at you. In the distance, the college guy is wiping his face with a towel and leaning down to someone with long hair and a bathing suit. 

You have a dim memory of the fields at your grandmother’s house. Fields of green cabbage, fields of tobacco plants taller than you. There, you picked because it was what the family did. What would your grandmother think of the idea of paying to pick fruit, eating it furtively? You think you wouldn’t like the answer. Is this what being Canadian means—having enough money to pay for something that families have been doing for years just to survive? Sitting outside in the hot sun?

You look down the long rows. Plant after plant in perfect lines, like rows of numbers. The salt of your sweat stings the insides of your eyes. The berries are red and sweet and you will never eat them all.  

Agata Antonow is a writer living and working in Canada. Her work has been featured in the Mile End Poets' Festival, Our Times, The Gravity of the Thing, Defenestration, Eunoia Review, and the FOLD (Festival of Literary Diversity) program, among other places.