Watermelon

When my daughter was four, she had a tiny high-pitched voice. Her preschool teacher, a woman who wore haram pants and gave all of her parents long, careful looks when they came to pick up their children, called it her “little voice,” and constantly encouraged her to use her “big voice.” I was surprised to hear that she had a big voice. She's nearly 22 years old now and I haven't heard it yet.

The kids and I were shopping at the co-op grocery store that was at the bottom of the hill we lived on in Santa Cruz. Our apartment was actually on the side of the hill that the university sprawls over the top of. I used to run on the university track, and on foggy mornings, I felt that if I stepped off the side of the track, I would land gently in the ocean. It was a beautiful place to live. We had decided to splurge and buy a watermelon that day—a rare treat when our income consisted of student loans and the money my husband made cooking in a restaurant in town. Sierra, her six-year-old brother and I inspected the watermelons in the bin, the kids searching for the biggest one. I thumped a couple, wondering what I was supposed to be listening for, and finally we chose one—a really big one—and moved on to the tofu case. Tofu, if you haven't noticed, is cheap.

Family Student Housing on the UC Santa Cruz campus is a wonderful place to raise children. There is free childcare of the best quality I've ever seen just a four-minute walk from our apartment. There is an extensive playground with two sets of swings and three slides of increasing size and woods that drop down the hill from the playground where the older kids play hide n' seek. The path to Porter College goes through a field where deer routinely graze and huge garter snakes come out of their holes on warm days and lie all over the field like the lazy lengths of muscle they are. Of course, children can only be raised here during the years that at least one parent is attending classes at UC Santa Cruz, and, unfortunately, one cannot afford to do that indefinitely.

The family student housing complex consists of eight or nine parking lots scattered over the the side of the hill with apartments arranged in circles around each parking lot. Our apartment was at the top of one loop. To drive out of our parking lot, you would drive downhill and turn left onto the street that would take you into town. If you were to drive straight downhill instead of turning left, you would enter another parking lot and another loop of apartments.

There was only one negative about living in the UCSC apartments, apart from the deer that wandered the apartment complex after dark. When deer are surprised, say when a person suddenly appears while the deer are winding their way back through the apartments after a visit to the community garden in the center of the complex, they don't run. They stand perfectly, silently still and watch you as you approach. This was how I nearly ran into a buck with huge antlers one evening while carrying an armful of books and thinking about the paper I had to write on Latin American literature. The only negative (and really, how can you call deer wandering silently through your apartment complex in the middle of the night a negative?) was the fact that everything that you or your child accidentally lost hold of while walking from your apartment to the playground or to the laundry room that was even vaguely spherical in shape, or that had wheels attached, would end up outside of the door of the Icelandic couple who lived in the apartment at the end of the loop that was below our loop. One day, I went to pick up my children who were, conveniently, the same age as the Icelandic couple's rosy-cheeked children, and found Ingrid on her doorstep looking at a tricycle that had arrived that afternoon. “I wonder whose this is?” she said cheerfully.

Home from the grocery store, I parked our hatch-back in our spot just outside our apartment and helped my tow-headed children out of their car seats and we all headed for the trunk where the groceries and the watermelon were. “I want to carry the watermelon,” my daughter said in her tiny voice. “Can I carry the watermelon? I want to carry the watermelon.” My daughter was even smaller at four years of age than I was at her age. Her father's people are small and though she and my son were both very healthy and well-fed, they always stood a good head shorter than all of the other children of their age. But I was a parent who believed in allowing children to learn from their own bodies what they could and could not do. When we went to a playground, I was never the mother following her child as he climbed the stairs to the slide, warning him not to jump, not to go down the slide head-first or stop and play half-way down. And so, after opening the trunk and standing and looking back and forth between the watermelon that lay there so large and green and my daughter's small arms, I decided to let her try its weight. Once she discovered how heavy it was, she'd happily release it to me and we'd get on with our day.

I lifted the watermelon and placed it gently into her outstretched arms. The watermelon, of course, slipped through her arms and fell to the ground. And then it rolled. It rolled and it rolled down through our parking lot, over and over, my son and daughter, mouths hanging open, watching it go. It rolled and rolled, endlessly it seemed, until, after bouncing over a small bump in the asphalt, it split open and broke into two pieces that both continued to roll across the street and into the parking lot below ours. The two pieces broke into smaller pieces that rolled off in wide arcs towards one neighbor's apartment or another's until it all finally came to a stop. The three of us stood there, looking. Amazed. We never would have guessed just how far a watermelon could roll.