Fruit of the Month (10 page)

“I don't have my car keys,” she says. Her teeth are chattering. “I must have…they must be,” but he slashes her skirt with his knife.

“Lady,” he says. “Do what I say.”

She opens the door and for a second they stand there and look into the dimly lit interior of the car and at a pack of cough drops lying on the seat.

“Get in,” he says.

She is thinking of the knife. She can think of nothing but the knife and the extraordinary noise it made when it cut into her skirt. Surely someone must have heard it, surely the cab drivers chatting in their smoky circle near the cabs heard it.

He has struck her arm, hard, with his fist, and she finds that she is seated in the car although she can't think how she got there.

“Move over,” says the man.

He pushes her onto her back on the seat so her knee hits the steering wheel. The horn. The horn hasn't worked for ages but she pushes against it anyway with her knee, hoping to get a sound out of it.

“Don't kill me,” she says. “Don't.”

He has climbed into the car. He is leaning over her with the knife poised between their two bodies and he is grinning. She sees that he is terribly young.

“Now,” he is saying.

“What?” she pleads. “Now what?” because she doesn't know what he is talking about. He slashes at the skirt again.

“Please,” she says. “What? What do you want? Take the keys. The car. Take it.”

“You know what I want.”

“I don't. I don't know.” Because she doesn't. The cakes? The tennis racket? Why won't he take it then and get away from her?

“Take it,” she says. “Don't hurt me. Take what you want, I won't stop you.”

But then there is the high wail of a police siren and the flashing red light as it pulls into the station drive.

After what seems like a long while she pulls herself up, gripping the steering wheel and pulling herself forward until her feet touch the pavement and she is sitting on the edge of the driver's seat looking out into the parking lot. It was not a police car after all but an ambulance that is parked at the station entrance with the light still turning and the back doors open. She sits there dully and watches the commotion. Only after someone has been carried out on a stretcher and the back doors have been slammed shut and the ambulance has driven off with its siren screaming does she realize what it was he must have wanted from her.

“Oh god,” she says.

There is a bruise on her arm where he struck her and a spreading pain. Not much pain but she imagines it will get worse after a while as the shock wears off. She wonders if she is in shock. She doesn't know. She doesn't think so. She might call the police. There are phones in a row between the benches to the right of the station entrance. But she would have to walk through the parking lot to get to them. She thinks of screaming. If she screams, someone will come running and she can ask them to escort her to the telephones.

But what would she say to the police? There was this boy, and he pushed me into my car.

And she has nothing to show for it. Nothing but a slash here and there in the ridiculous pleated skirt of her tennis dress.

She pulls the Entenmann's bag and her tennis bag into the car. She puts them on the passenger seat and searches for her keys. They are dangling from the door. Then she starts for home, forgetting to turn on the lights until she is halfway across the parking lot and realizes that it's dark and she can't see anything.

Winter

One afternoon in early December, while Lydia was down in the basement printing T-shirts on a silk screen, snow fell. It was the first snow of the year and it didn't last very long; by the time she'd wiped the ink off her hands and climbed the steps to the kitchen it had stopped falling. When the wind blew over the hills, a faint white dusting of snow rippled underneath it like a bed sheet. This was in the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia, in a house that had belonged to a relative who died. It was a tall brick farmhouse with a rotting foundation; if you climbed to the second floor and looked out from the back you wouldn't see the city at all, just the layered blue hills and a thread of highway. Before this Lydia had been staying in Austin with a lover, and before that in Manhattan with a different lover, and before that in Philadelphia.

After a while a truck rolled up the drive and stopped in front of the house. A guy got out. Lydia thought at first he was looking for some wire to fix his muffler. The tail pipe was dragging. But then she recognized him as a man who played music in a couple of bars in town; he had blue eyes and a widow's peak and one night he'd come over to her table to admire her T-shirt. He wanted one for himself. He wanted a dragon, red on green, extra large. It felt good to be doing some business.

That evening it rained and the rain froze. John, who had planned to drive home to his wife, stayed with Lydia instead.

“Maybe you should call her,” Lydia said.

They were lying on the mattress in her bedroom, flipping through sketch books. Ideas for T-shirts. John said not to worry, he didn't have to call his wife because he didn't care about her anymore because she didn't care about him. Last week she'd thrown a juice bottle at his head and missed and broke a window. All this after he bought her a washing machine. The kitchen smelled like sour oranges and if you walked in certain places your feet stuck to the linoleum.

“Wait,” said Lydia. “Who stopped loving who first?”

“She never loved me in the first place,” said John. “I just caught on.”

There was a daughter, otherwise he'd move out for good. He wanted to go to New York City and get a band together and write songs and cut albums. For now he played bars and sold cocaine. He played a twelve-string with mother-of-pearl inlay, from a case lined with velvet scented like oil and wood. He was a huge man, fleshy and pale. Lydia liked the way the vial of cocaine looked, tiny in the palm of his hand.

After that it snowed five times in two and a half weeks and John was showing up every night. They'd walk out to the frozen water hole and skate around on their boot soles, or slide down the hill on a Hefty bag. Afterward they'd fill the tub with hot water and get in, one behind the other, and soap each other's backs. Asleep, John snored like a bear.

But on the morning of December 22 there was a thaw. The hills turned brown and yellow. John's tires got stuck in the mud, and finally Lydia had to take the wheel and rock the truck while he pushed from behind. Now she was standing alone in the kitchen, eating an apple for breakfast. An icicle fell past the window. “This is the first day of winter,” she said, and then the phone rang. It was a woman.

“My name's Baby,” said the woman. “In case he hasn't told you. I don't know what he's told you but it isn't true.”

“Don't tell him I called,” said Baby. “I just want you to stop loving him.”

“Say something,” said Baby. “I wanted to hear your voice.”

“Maybe we should meet,” said Lydia. She put the apple core on the windowsill and watched it. Maybe if she looked long enough it would turn brown.

“I don't know if I could stand to look at you,” said Baby.

They met in the art museum. Baby had finally said yes, they could meet somewhere, as long as she could keep her eyes off Lydia and still have something to look at. She was wearing a sweat shirt with the name of a high school printed on it. She was taller than Lydia. She had large bones, a pale angular face, wide dark lips, and heavy eyelids. She looked like she wanted to shut her eyes.

“I was doing some laundry,” Baby was saying, “with my new washer and dryer he bought me so I would be happy. He thinks when he goes to spend the night with you I can sit in the basement and watch the clothes go round and feel better. That's how I found your number, in the pocket of his jeans.”

“I'm sorry,” said Lydia.

They stopped walking, and stood before a large hanging screen titled “Mount Everest.” If you looked closely enough you could make out the shape of the mountain like something scratched onto the paper with the tip of a needle. Closer up you saw the tiny scratched shapes of spruce trees. For a while they talked about John. They talked about his music. Lydia said she admired a man with aspirations. Baby said he'd been playing the same songs for years, that he'd never get anywhere except maybe jail or dead.

“You've got bird bones,” said Baby. She had gone on to the next drawing. She still hadn't looked Lydia in the eye. “I bet he suffocates you,” she said. “A man doesn't know his strength.”

“We don't do it with him on top,” said Lydia.

It was the wrong thing to say. Baby paled. She lifted her hands to her face. She had hair the color of copper that flashed about her shoulders. Lydia thought about touching her. She could put a hand on her shoulder, maybe push the hair from her face.

“Is that your real name?” she said finally, edging closer. “Baby?”

“Why don't you fall in love with someone else?” said Lydia.

She was crouched behind him in the tub, soaping his neck with a cloth. His neck was as big around as her thigh. When he lowered himself into the tub, water splashed over the sides.

“What?” said John.

“Fall in love with someone old and rich,” said Lydia. “Then when they're dead and you're a millionaire, come back to me.”

She was thinking of Baby's ring, a heavy band of cast silver with a jagged piece of turquoise set into it. John wore the same ring. Lydia hadn't noticed it before. Probably they were wedding rings. Baby's had a wad of masking tape wrapped around it, which meant she must have gotten thinner since the wedding day.

Now the soap was lost. They started feeling around, touching one another under the clouded water. If they wanted to get really clean they'd have to empty the tub and start over again. Lydia sniffed at the back of his neck and under his arms where the hair was still thick with lather. She liked how he smelled. He smelled like a clean animal.

“I've got it,” she said.

“Okay,” said John. “Don't let go.”

Later that night he made a phone call and told Lydia he was driving up to Culpepper to visit Rick and Sue, friends of his. He said she could come if she wanted, so she made coffee and poured it into a thermos and climbed into the truck with him. The truck didn't have any heat but it was a warm night, the kind of night in which crickets would sing if it were summer.

“We're decorating,” said Sue when she met them at the door. She was holding one end of a string of Christmas bulbs. Rick, who had the other end, was trying to push his way between the couch and the wall so he could plug it in.

“Next year I said to Rick we'll have to go on a diet so we have room for a tree,” said Sue. She laughed. Both of them were fat. You couldn't guess their ages. On the mantelpiece was a photo of Sue when she wasn't fat and in the photo she looked about sixteen.

Suddenly the lights in Sue's hand blinked on, and she laughed. John played a couple of songs on his guitar, and after each one Sue laughed again, and clapped. Rick made some lines on a mirror and passed it around, and Lydia found herself telling Sue she liked her dress. It was a sleeveless dress with strawberries on it, the kind of dress you'd wear if you were fat and happy. The night went on; every so often the lights blinked. Lydia thought she could have known these people for years, she could be sitting here forever in this cozy room. To get to the bathroom you had to walk through a narrow hallway to the bedroom, where the bed was unmade. There was a dent in the middle of the mattress, which meant they rolled together as they slept, and on the sheets were roses, tiny hard clusters of them.

Back in the living room Rick handed her a chocolate cookie the size of a pancake and said, “Here, Baby.” At first Lydia thought he was being affectionate but then she realized he was calling her by Baby's name, and that he and Sue thought she was Baby. There hadn't been any introductions.

When they left it was nearly dawn. Sue filled the thermos with fresh coffee and said they should come back again, maybe eat dinner with the television on. At the doorway Rick gave John a package, and John gave Rick twelve hundred dollars.

By December 31 there had been two weeks of rain and sun and the earth was muddy. The air was fresh. Buds appeared on the trees. People said it was a freak year, winter come and gone already, spring on the way. Lydia drove into town and set her table up, on a sidewalk in front of some shops. Sunlight bounced off the shop windows, warming her back. In five hours she sold seven dragon T-shirts, four Mad Hatters, eight unicorns, and five Medusas. For summer, she was thinking, she'd do a winged horse, yellow on white. People would buy it, she was thinking, for the same reason they bought the dragons and the unicorns: they were unhappy with their lives. Someone tapped her on the arm. It was Baby, her hair flashing like a penny.

“You look good,” said Lydia. “But thin.”

Baby seemed puzzled. “I like those shirts,” she said. “I was wondering if you have one small enough for a kid five and a half years old.”

“I can give you the extra small,” said Lydia, “and you can wash it hot and stick it in the dryer.”

She felt bad, having mentioned the washer and dryer. It was like saying John's name. But Baby didn't seem to mind. She took an orange shirt with a red dragon on it.

“How much?” she said, digging around in the pockets of her jeans. You could see her hip bones pushing through the cloth.

“Take it,” said Lydia. “I wouldn't sell you a shirt.”

“Is there something wrong with it?” said Baby, pulling at the seams with her fingernails.

Then she looked at Lydia hard and refolded the shirt and put it back on the table on top of the others and walked away. A few yards off she stopped.

“I didn't know you had those crooked teeth,” she said. “I don't see how he loves you.”