Fruit of the Month
Fruit of the Month
Abby Frucht
Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 1988 Abby Frucht
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
Some of these stories have previously appeared, in slightly altered form, in the
Ontario Review; Agni Review, Epoch, Indiana Review;
and
The Ways We live Now
Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Art Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support has been provided by generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals, and through a major grant from the Northwest Area Foundation. Graywolf Press is a member agency of United Art,, Saint Paul, and is a recipient of a McKnight Foundation award administered by the Minnesota State Art Board.
Published 2015 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print Series Selection
eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941531-08-2
eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers
Published in the United States of America
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
.
For Michael and, of course, for Mom and Dad
Contents
Midnight
Not even my own mother shops regularly anymore. She confessed this to me last week on the telephone. “I just stop in on my way home from the office and pick up some lamb chops or something,” she said. “I don't plan ahead anymore. I never know what I want until it's right in front of me and then I don't think twice about buying it.”
“That's exactly what we do,” I told her. “We just walk to the store after work and get dinner. How are you supposed to know on Monday what you'll want on Friday?”
“That's right,” said my mother.
I used to come home from grade school to find her leafing through cookbooks. She owned almost an entire set of Time-Life cookbooks, one for each region of China, France, Africa, and the United States. Once, when she had worked for a week preparing a genuine Chinese feast complete with six entrées, two soups, and various appetizers, my father surprised her with a set of dishes he'd bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop. He had skipped work and driven the fifty miles there and back to get them. The delicate soup bowls, robin's egg blue with enameled dragons, were rimmed with gold paint and came with special matching spoons that looked like boats. We dressed for dinner that night and my mother pinned my hair up with chopsticks.
Then one day when I was seven she picked me up at school and took me straight to the supermarket. The second grade had just experienced its first air raid drill; when the alarm rang, instead of filing out to the school yard as we did for fire drills, we were told to sit down in the hallway, our backs to the wall, our knees drawn up to our chests, our hands folded over our heads. It was wonderful. For two full minutes we sat there with our heads thrust between our knees while the teachers, in their high-heeled shoes, clicked up and down the hallway. I spent the whole time staring at my underpants. That afternoon my mother and I filled a whole cart with canned goodsâsoups, stews, juices, fruits. We bought five-pound bags of wheat flour, white flour, rye flour, and cornmeal and a slew of pastas, including the Popeye spinach noodles I had been pestering her about for months. These were not the types of foods we ordinarily bought and, sensing something unique in the air, like a holiday, I ran to the candy shelves and picked out a bag of Tootsie Roll pops and a carton of Cracker Jacks, which I placed in the cart right under my mother's eyes. It was then that I noticed she didn't share my excitement. She looked agitated. She was talking in low tones to a woman in curlers who was wheeling not one cart but two, one with each hand.
“Peanut butter,” the woman was saying. “If you run out of meat at least you'll have something.”
“Dried milk,” said my mother.
“Tuna,” said the woman.
In all there were nine bags of groceries, which my father carried down to the basement when we got home. There was a pantry in the basement, which had a red tiled floor and a bathroom. I had been allowed to paint a mural on the wall beneath the entrance to the crawl space. I painted the flat blue surface of an ocean and, perched on top of it like a buoy, a house. My mother had promised that if I learned how to swim we would move to a house on the water, something she'd always wanted. I couldn't wait. The idea of swimming to school instead of taking the school bus thrilled me. Right out the front door, splash, into the water!
It took a long time to put those groceries away. When everything was in place, we stood for a while gazing at the full shelves, at the rows of bright labels and gleaming tin. We could hear the squeak of my father's shoes as he walked across the floor above us, then the murmur of the television. It was 1962. I was well into the third grade and a Bluefish at the YMCA swim class before we started eating any of that food, and it wasn't until my final year of college that my mother began losing the habit of shopping and the pantry began to thin out. I was home for a visit when I woke up at three in the morning craving a bowl of Campbell's New England Style Clam Chowder. I crept downstairs in my nightgown in the dark, away from the noise of my father's snores, to the basement. There I found one box of cornflakes, a can of water chestnuts, a packet of herb seasoning, and a three-ounce jar of pimentos. Feeling around on the third shelf, I touched something furry and soft. Still warm. My father, just that afternoon, had set some mousetraps. I screamed and ran upstairs to the kitchen, where I called Charlie on the telephone. He was eight hundred miles away in Illinois, sleeping in bed with his wife. If she had answered I would have hung up.
“I touched a dead mouse,” I whispered into the telephone.
“My god,” said Charlie. “It's two o'clock in the morning.”
“So what?” I said. “It's three o'clock here. I miss you.”
“No,” Charlie said. “I don't have the exams graded yet.”
“I want you,” I said.
“No. I don't think I'll have them by tomorrow morning either. Just because I give you kids my home number doesn't mean you can call me at two
A
.
M
. You can tell your friends that, please.”
“I couldn't sleep,” I said. “I just want to be holding you.”
Charlie sighed. “I suggest you make an appointment with Psychological Services,” he said. “I don't mean to offend you, but if you can't sleep for worrying about your exam score there may be some other problem you don't know about.”
We just sat there for a little while without speaking, weighing the distance between us. I swear I could smell, through the telephone receiver, the strawberry-scented lotion that Charlie had told me his wife smeared on her body every night before going to bed. After a time he said, “Well,” and I said, “I don't know if the breathing I'm listening to is mine or yours.”
“That's how it should be,” he said.
Finally we hung up and I climbed the stairs to bed, my hand on the smooth woody grain of the banister. I was no longer hungry.
When Charlie left his second wife she threatened to starve herself to death. Lorelei is already thin as a pole and in her hip boots and buccaneer blouses resembles an egret with its feathers ruffled up in the cold. She can't think of herself as a woman, Charlie tells me. She once made the remark that a woman's chest was really, when you got right down to it, no different from a man's. “I don't see what all the fuss is about,” she complained. Someone else pointed out that women have breasts while men do not, and Lorelei retorted that aside from that there was no distinction whatsoever. She still lives in the artsy house they shared on Forest Street. We stayed there once when Lorelei went off to Italy; Charlie had made a copy of their house key before he gave his set to her. We spent half the night sharing a bubble bath in the monstrous claw-footed tub, admiring our image in the mirror which covered the opposite wall. Above the tub Lorelei had painted, directly onto the tiles, a picture of a shelf with a pot of Swedish ivy sitting on it. The curled tendrils, with the light exactly right on the edges of the leaves, climbed right up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the smooth face of the mirror. When I reached for a cake of soap in a nook in the wall my hand hit plaster; it was not real soap but a painting of soap, a bar of Dial with a clock still embossed on top.
The house is filled with minor deceptions like these. For instance downstairs, in a long narrow room resembling a Mediterranean sun porch, with tall French windows opening onto a patio, stucco walls with pale blue trim, and a parquet floor, Lorelei had painted, on either side of the fireplace, a set of bookcases complete with editions of all the books Charlie had taken with him when he moved out of the house.
The Origin of Species. The Hammond World Atlas
. A complete set of Peterson's field guides. Krebs'
North American Plant Key. The Double Helix
. When you step into the room to get a closer look, you notice that the shutters flanking the windows are painted as well, but that the fireplace is real and the bars of moonlight on the floor are also real.
“Is she this crazy?” I said to Charlie as we walked from room to room with Lorelei's plum-colored bath towels wrapped around us. “Or is she just having a good time?”
“She's talented,” Charlie said. “She's a goddamn genius.”
“Let's have a look in the kitchen,” I said. I had a vision of a pantry stocked with rows and rows of catsup bottles painted right onto the wood. The cupboard was pine with black knotholes and cast-iron hinges. I opened it. It was bare.
The best thing about living in such a small town is that you can walk everywhere you need to go, to the bank, movie theater, laundromat, supermarket. Charlie, who is a biology professor at the college, is terrifically proud of the fact that we've filled the gas tank only once since August. He means to set some kind of record. Four tanks in a year. We are having Thanksgiving this year at our house, which pleases him; everybody's coming to us. Last year we had to drive to New York, which spoiled everything.
Each day around five when I finish up at the library I walk across the square, along the treacherous brick walkways, to Charlie's office. I have broken, in the past year and a half, the heels of three shoes, and I'm waiting for the day when I break an ankle and can refuse, under pressure from friends and relatives, to sue the town. We wouldn't sue because we don't need the money; we have everything we want. Our apartment backs up on the campus, on an acre of green with a pond you can skate on in winter. The rent is cheap, heat included. Last winter we pooled the year's savings and rented a cabin on the island of St. John, and when we got back we bought two pairs of cross-country skis. The world's troubles, we agree in private, seem to be passing us by. Each month we send a check to World Hunger, I have noticed that we write smaller checks if we've recently argued or if, for some reason, we haven't been getting along. When this happens we spend the extra money on ourselves. Once, after a week of finding nothing to say to one another, we went downtown and found ourselves buying a couple of egg rings, those silly bracelets of aluminum which, when placed in the frying pan, assure you of a perfectly round eggâlike a child's drawing of the sun.