It was ten in the evening and I was at least an hour into a rant I’d started with workplace drinking policies, 8am start times, no paid parking, which had somehow lead me to a heated one person debate in support of the 20 hour workweek, with no rebuttal I was killing it, when I noticed Krissy was sleeping, curled up on the couch in a way that suggested she’d been sleeping or considering sleeping for some time.
She’s gonna be pissed when she wakes up. Realizes I went to the movies without her. But I was too tired to leave. Too tired even to look up movies and instead read the back of the wine label. Those labels either say very astute things or nothing at all, and that’s how you know you’re dealing with a good bottle or a so-so bottle. A good bottle will tell you what to expect in a universally agreed upon vocabulary: floral, levels of oak, that sort of thing, and suggest some pairing options, lamb or pate or crème brûlée. A so-so bottle will describe the wines in terms of ‘the texture of dreams’ or some BS made up to not be read at all, and if read, to not mean anything. A so-so bottle of wine makes no commitments.
I’d drank a thousand bottles of wine, read a thousand labels and I don’t know what triggered the memory, why I thought of it right then, but I remembered my lost years, the three years between college and adult life when I moved to Spain for a sculpture internship with a very famous artist who was also very unreliable and when I’d arrived, all the way from the Midwest, it fell through. I didn’t know anyone, other than the artist and I had put off learning any Spanish, not wanting to teach myself the wrong way, I figured I’d learn from the sculptor. I used a dictionary to try and translate want ads, and I thought I was applying for a position as a nanny when I found myself employed with reliable seasonal work as an extractor. I did three seasons of the stint, so I don’t know why my last season came to mind right then, maybe just because it was the most recent.
It was early May, my first day of cork harvesting for the season and the only point in the year when I’d ever be sufficiently removed from the job to have a glimmer of excitement about the impending work. All winter I’d been practicing my Spanish, everyone told me I’d hardly need to practice, just being there I’d learn it, but I was learning nothing and people were so used to seeing me they’d just start talking as if there was no way I’d still need translation, or if I just tried hard enough I’d understand. I hadn’t gotten very far, all the words just blended together, the grammatical rules ones I never learned in English and I couldn’t see how I was suddenly supposed to understand them in Spanish. I knew terms like corcho bornizo and corcho segundero and I could get by at work mainly with hand gestures, but ordering food was impossible where I couldn’t point, making any sort of meaningful conversation was always out of the question, I didn’t even try.
At work at least I was out in nature, working with trees even if I was cutting them, I wasn’t doing any sort of long term or irreversible damage, that was part of the art. I thought of me and the trees as sort of a team, one of those natural pairings like the birds who show people where to find the hidden bees nests that are dangerous or hard to reach without tools, so the people can crack it open, taking the honey for themselves, offering the wax to the birds, which they like to eat. It was a symbiotic relationship, like the fish who eat parasites off of plants and then poop on the plant but then that poop is actually food for the plant. We were like that, only with money, and regrowth.
I had only moderate upper body strength, which was an inhibitor to the job, but a careful eye and skilled and steady hand which was an asset. I worked entirely with men, but being the only female allowed me to be quiet without it being weird, no one even noticed I wasn’t talking, they didn’t expect an opinion from me. It was insulting, but it was also to my advantage and I tried to be grateful where I could.
That first day of the season, it was a Tuesday and I remember it was warm outside, a warm that I’d been waiting for and I felt that little lift of liveliness that accompanies spring. I was swinging my ax, walking to work and singing out loud a little like I like to do when I think no one can hear me. I was swinging my ax and whistling and singing and had my jacket tied around my waist and I felt really good. I felt like it didn’t really matter where life was going, I was just out there in the woods with a job to do, a sunny happy job where no one really got hurt too bad, just the trees and just a little and even then they’d recover. Plus we only extracted bark from any given tree every nine years. It had nearly a decade to recover, and even with the extractions a lifespan of up to 200 years. I remember thinking that, they’d be hurt just a little but they’d recover when I grabbed my phone out of my pocket. I don’t know why I grabbed it, addiction I guess, just a mindless habit, I had no reason to check it, but I was checking emails and thinking how stupid it was I was checking emails when I saw an email from my sister, and in her ongoing effort to get me to quit the business was sending me more anti-cork propaganda, this time an article about wasted wine from cork that wasn’t treated right and the foul ‘wine taint’ that it resulted in. I’d had corked wine before, it’s not that terrible, though I’d never drink it. ‘Foul’ seemed disproportionately strong language, and I can’t entertain discussion with hysterical activists and so I deleted the email and didn’t bother to write her back.
But her emails always managed to plant an unwanted seed, even if I knew they were irrelevant. Cork is flexible, impermeable enough to keep wine from flowing out of the bottle, but not so much that it keeps tiny amounts of air from seeping in. Those tiny amounts of air are what allow a 30-year-old wine to age and not sour. Did she really want to live in a world where the oldest bottle of wine was two?
I was still swinging my ax now, but now with more anger than a fresh step. When I got to the site I could see men waving their hands saying ‘ho ho ho!’ and I remembered that we were never supposed to swing our axes in anger, and they were all worried about their safety and the trees’ safety and I stopped swinging the ax and put my hands up in apology, though it made me feel embarrassed, this being the first day of a brand new season, already I couldn’t be trusted with the only tool of the trade. They put me in a special section on my own, where I was to make necklace cuts which someone with more upper body strength would later follow up with a downward cut and someone else still would follow to do the actual extraction.
There aren’t any other trees whose bark can be removed and they’ll keep on living. I can see how that sounds gruesome, and how that can be sensationalized to inspire people like my sister to declare its inhumanity, but cork oaks are regenerative, we don’t have another material that can do what cork can do, and fuck her anyway, if she thinks being a divorce lawyer is the only career out there, and that being an environmentalist somehow absolves her money-grubbing lifestyle.
Krissy woke up, she was looking at me now and I realized I’d been telling the heated parts of the story under my breath to myself. Aloud in a nighttime kind of way. She wanted to know why I stopped, what happened next but I told her, nothing, I just came home, that’s all. The season ended and I was lonely.
“Oh” she said, “is that why you won’t speak Spanish but have all those CDs from Spain? All that art?”
I shrugged instead of answering her, I didn’t realize I refused to speak Spanish necessarily, or that I had so much stuff obviously from Spain.
“What other things are made of cork? If not just wine stoppers, I mean that can’t be the only use for the material if it’s so great.”
“Well corkboard,” I started and Krissy rolled her eyes and turned over on the couch. “Those ugly shoes, wine cork tray tables and art…” I was beginning to fall asleep as she woke up and half hoped she’d pick up the conversation, let me doze while she carried on for a while and I could just listen to her tell stories, but Krissy wasn’t like that, she only liked to talk when someone was listening, and usually stopped to ask lots of questions.
I liked that about her, I think it was why we became such close friends so fast, we were nothing like each other, the way we operated in the world, but we liked all the same things. We liked going to movies and talking about movies, and playing yard games on a team when we knew we’d be the losing-est team, we had fun that way, with nothing at stake. But she was thoughtful and practical and could be cold and decisive where I acted on impulse and emotion, made decisions based on hope or spite. She wanted to be like me and I wanted to be like her.
“Is the cork factory where you knew you wanted to work inside?”
“It wasn’t a factory.”
“Okay farm. Whatever. Did you ever write your sister back?”
I laughed, because it was a stupid question, this was years ago and she was asking if I’d talked to my sister since as if it had been last week. But the truth was it was one of the last times I’d heard from her. Krissy didn’t know anything about my sister. I don’t think I’d ever talked about her before and I think the question was just a way for her to ask anything, really. So I told her yes I wrote her back but not until I was back in the US and was no longer harvesting cork.
I told her about how the relationship was strained then, probably had always been strained but now we had a political ideology to put between us so we could acknowledge the fissure. I never meant to grow apart from my sister, but it seemed to me that after our mother died, she should have looked after me. That was sort of her obligation as an older sister, as I saw it. But she always acted irritated when I acted immaturely, always acted like I was in her way or not grown up enough to be treated like a person, much less helped in any way. This was when Krissy brought up my tendency to look for help from other people, like it was something I deserved, something anyone deserved, and I rejected the idea immediately, in the way people do when something very accurate has just been identified about them, so accurate and so new that they can’t see themselves that way without shattering long held fundamental beliefs about themselves and so it was years before I was ever able to see what Krissy was suggesting.
Because of the trip to Spain on my own, the many ways I’d been independent, I’d always thought of myself as independent. But she was right, acting independently and expecting that you are owed help from other people are two separate things. At the time though, I brushed it off and I continued telling her about the next time I spoke to my sister, and the final time.
When I got back home, I emailed my sister to tell her that I agreed with her, that the industry was shit and I was happy to be out of it, but in reality I felt no such thing. The truth was I needed a job and I thought she could help me find one. She sometimes had openings for overflow work, and in the past she’d offloaded certain tasks to my brother so I knew it wasn’t out of the question. But she didn’t have anything for me and only wanted to talk about the environment and so I let the conversation peter out and never replied to her final email. She’d gotten back on a self-righteous save the cork oaks thing and I was irritated and embarrassed to be her sister.
“So the last email to your sister was a lie? Or not a lie, a fake concern for an environmental issue that you didn’t believe?”
“Not really.”
Krissy looked up at me like she didn’t understand and I wondered how anyone that smart could be so stupid sometimes.
“I wrote her later, but after she’d already died. She never got the last email, but it was from the heart. I didn’t want the last thing I wrote to her to be political. I wanted it to be about us as sisters, about life or something. I don’t even remember what it said, it turns my stomach to think of it really, but I remember it was from the heart.”
Krissy took the wine bottle now, turned the cork and tilted it out in a satisfying pop. She squeezed it like she was trying to understand the material better, like testing its give would provide her with a better understanding of its properties.
“I don’t understand how two sisters can be that separate. You guys came from the same tree. You’re the bark and she’s the core that’s left to regrow. Or maybe it’s the other way around. You can regenerate without her, but she was that useful material only because of you.”
Krissy never understood sister relationships, but I nodded and let her believe she was right. It was good for a bedtime story anyway, to have everything wrap up neatly in the end. Whatever she’d written in her head, it allowed her to drift back off to sleep, and I sat and watched her for a while until I got up to recycle the empty bottle and look up movies to see the next day.
*****
Amy Janiczek is a writer living in Mesa, AZ. Her stories have been finalists for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and published in the End Times.
