Fruit of the Month (2 page)

Now that it's autumn and dark by five-thirty, I can stand undetected outside Charlie's office and watch him through the window. He'll be leaning far back in his swivel chair with his feet in their pointed boots propped up on the desk, reading a paper or explaining the day's lesson to a student. He moves his hands while he speaks, his wedding ring flashing. His third. The first was custom-made by a man in Peter's Hollow in New Jersey; it was pocked with craters and had a molten look. The second was wide and flat with Lorelei's name engraved on the inside. He sold them when the price of gold shot up. Ours are very narrow and as simple as possible; he wears his, he says, to keep his students from falling in love with him. It doesn't seem to work. Day after day they appear at his door, their notebooks pressed into their hearts. Who am I to blame them? He looks like the Second Coming, his curls pulled back in a rubber band, his face like the face on the Shroud of Turin, a landscape of shadows and high places. He wears blue jeans, a T-shirt, a vest from an ancient tuxedo, on its false pocket an “ERA Yes” button I pinned there months ago. The vest is threadbare. The students ask him impossible questions. “According to the Darwinian theory of evolution,” one of them said to him yesterday, “what is the origin of life?”

I was a student in the class he called Botany 500. He fell in love with my eyes, which are tragic, gray, and heavy-lidded, and with the fact that on our class walks through Chance Creek I wore a man's tweed hat with a feather. On a warm day at Chance Creek all the men took their shirts off and tied the sleeves around their waists except for Charlie, who stuck his T-shirt in the back pocket of his jeans so it flapped behind him. He has love handles, and his chest hairs curl around each nipple like small cyclones.

Standing quietly in his office doorway, I watch him fussing with the vine that trails from the top of his file cabinet down to the floor. He is dusting the leaves, lifting them one by one and blowing on them, then wiping them top and bottom with a damp paper towel. After that he mists them, and when he sees me standing there he mists me too.

“Thank god,” he says, because I've brought him a chocolate-covered doughnut from the bakery. I ate mine on the way over. That way, he thinks I made the stop just for him.

“What's for dinner?” he asks. “I'm starved.”

“Tostadas,” I tell him. “We have a coupon at home for tortillas.”

“Great,” says Charlie. “What time is it?”

I pull out my watch. “We'll need to hurry,” I tell him. “It's midnight.”

This is one of our jokes. My watch is broken. Whenever he asks me what time it is I tell him it's midnight. The watch was already broken when I bought it. I found it at a flea market in Missouri after a canoe trip. Charlie and I had not yet been together and I thought it might move things along if I failed to show up in class for a day or two. The poor man at the flea market was so eager to make a sale that he actually held up a doll for me to look at, one of those talking dolls with strings that pull out of their necks. I asked to see the watch, which was hanging from a shoe tree. The man said it was broken, stuck on midnight, and he opened it to show me. I asked him if he knew when it had stopped. He screwed up his eyebrows and told me a made-up story, how he had been stationed in Hawaii in the forties; he woke up one morning and looked at his watch, but it had stopped, and at that very moment the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. I know it was a made-up story because I heard him say the same thing about a coat with no buttons; he told a lady he jumped up so fast when the bomb exploded that the buttons popped off.

Anyway, I bought the watch, which is small and silver with a rose engraved on the cover, and when I got home that Sunday night there was a message from Charlie. “I missed you in class,” it said. I have believed ever since that the watch is special, the cause of our good fortune. Sometimes, walking home at night along the trail midway between the woods and the pond, we hear the trilled eight-note call of a great horned owl, or, from the darkened circle of the pond itself, the songs of small frogs. Early last spring Charlie dug a hole in the ground near the pond and stuck an empty coffee can inside; the next night he reached in and pulled out a spotted salamander that had been on its way to breed. It was black; with yellow moon spots along the length of its back and tail. He held it curled in his palm so I could stroke it, then put it down at the edge of the water.

Tonight, above the sloped roof of our apartment house across the fields, there appears a pin point of light, like a hole poked in the sky.

“That's Venus,” Charlie says, pointing. He explains that a planet doesn't blink like a star but pierces the black with a steady brightness. “She has no moons,” he says sadly.

“Well, you stay out here and keep her company then, and I'll go up and get the coupon,” I tell him. He's still standing there, looking up, when I come out.

At the supermarket, half a mile down Main Street, we select a package of corn tortillas, a jar of jalapeño peppers, a hunk of white cheese, a head of lettuce, a can of stewed tomatoes, and an onion. At the last minute I grab a bag of cranberries from a rack in produce. Little by little, over the weeks, I've been stocking up on the ingredients for our Thanksgiving meal. Last night I bought a bag of marshmallows for the top layer of a sweet potato casserole, the night before a tiny jar of pumpkin pie spice. My parents will be staying in the motel in town, my brother and his wife on the fold-out couch in the living room, their two retrievers on the bare striped mattress in the guest room.

Everybody seems to be shopping in our style—the express line curves past the soap display and up the frozen foods aisle. A lady behind us remarks that if only they would straighten the line out it would move much faster, and Charlie wraps his arms around my belly to keep us both from laughing. Then he puts a finger to my lips and points ahead of us. His first wife, Mary, is in line near the disposable razors. She wears glasses on a chain around her neck. Charlie theorizes that she takes them off whenever she enters the supermarket so that, if she passes him in the aisle, she won't recognize him. She has no cart, just a small tree of broccoli which she holds in both hands like a bouquet of flowers.

At home, still out of breath from walking so fast, I pour oil in a frying pan and turn on the burner while Charlie unpacks the shopping bag.

“Where are they?” he says.

“What?”

“The tortillas.”

“What do you mean, where are they?”

“I mean they're not in the bag.”

“How can they not be in the bag? We paid for them. You must have already unpacked them.”

We hunt around in the kitchen, peering into cabinets and the freezer. Charlie turns the bag upside down and shakes it. Then he pokes a hole in the bottom and looks at me.

“She forgot to pack them,” he says. “Call the supermarket.”

“They're closed,” I say. “They had to unlock the door to let us out, remember?”

“Call anyway.”

“Hello,” I say, on the telephone. “I was just down there shopping and the cashier seems to have forgotten to pack my tortillas so I was wondering if you would let me in to get them… No … No?… I'd like to speak with the manager… You are… Well, what am I supposed to do?… I don't have anything else. I just went down there to get my dinner and just because your goddamn cashier forgot my tortillas I have to… I said just because your goddamn fucking cashier forgot to pack my fucking tortillas I have to fucking starve. Your store sucks. You go home and have your shit-ass dinner while I … He hung up on me.”

Charlie is leaning forward on the couch, his elbows on his knees, twiddling his thumbs. “I'm hungry,” he says.

“I should call right back and cancel our order for the turkey.”

“I didn't even know you ordered it.”

“I didn't,” I say. “I thought you ordered it.”

“Let's not talk about it now,” says Charlie. “Let's get a pizza.”

There are three pizza parlors in town, one of which we never go to because the owner exploits his employees, and one of which never puts on enough cheese. Fred's Pizza is a block up Main from the supermarket; it has a mural of the Eiffel Tower on one wall, some photographs of tree squirrels on the other. Centered on each table is a candle in a red-tinted globe. Fred works within sight of the tables, tossing the flat rounds of dough into the air. All the way down Main Street, our stomachs rumbling, we share visions of the spinning wheel of raw dough, the platters of shredded cheese and sliced mushrooms, the flat black rings of sliced olives, ribbons of green peppers, pastrami stacked like silver dollars. We don't speak. There are rows of beveled jars of hot peppers and Parmesan and oregano, in the air the smells of sausage and meatballs and garlic. It is suddenly cold—under the street lights our breath clouds up.

A few steps away we can smell it, not the usual smell but something horrible, lime and decay, a smell dug out of the earth. There's a sign on Fred's door:
SEWER
BACKED
UP—COME
BACK
TOMORROW
.

Hunger is like mirth, the whole body pumped full of helium and let go.

“We're about to starve to death,” says Charlie, “and you're laughing.”

I follow him back up the sidewalk. For a while we trudge along with our hands in our pockets and then Charlie says we'll have to take the car to the Burger Chef, two miles north. He knows how much I hate hamburgers, and I know how much he hates to use the car, so we're even. We have to search the house for the car keys, which are nowhere. We empty drawers, turn the pockets of our blue jeans inside out, check the pegboard in the kitchen and under the mat on the fire escape. When we lift the couch cushion to look underneath, somehow we end up lying on top of one another on the box spring but it doesn't last—we're too hungry. At last I find the keys in the cookie jar.

“You put them there,” says Charlie. “You drove last.”

“I did not. I would never put the car keys in the cookie jar. You drove last. When we went to the laundromat and it was raining.”

Charlie shrugs. “There's no use arguing with you,” he says. “Because I know I'm right. And you know it too. You just won't admit it.”

“You are not right and I won't admit it,” I say. “You can just go eat your hamburgers without me.”

“Okay,” says Charlie, and he's out the door before I've even put my coat back on. I have to run downstairs and wait three minutes at the end of the driveway before he turns around and comes back for me. The radio is on. They're playing
Maxwell's Silver Hammer
, which Charlie knows is my favorite song. It seems perfectly clear that if they hadn't been playing
Maxwell's Silver Hammer
he would have kept right on driving, up to the Burger Chef by himself. I don't know whether, once there, he would have bought me a hamburger. Charlie drives with one hand on the steering wheel, the other flat on his thigh, one eye on the road, the other on the gas gauge. He is thinking how every ounce of pressure on the accelerator brings us further from the grace of a full tank. If everyone drove like he does, he is fond of saying, there would be no gasoline shortages and hence no wars.

The boy behind the counter at the Burger Chef has an erection. He's a tall skinny kid and so agitated that when Charlie says, “We'll each have two large cheeseburgers, an order of fries, and a Coke,” he brings us two burgers, one fry, and one Coke.

“No,” says Charlie gently. “That's two
each.”

The boy returns with two more burgers, two more orders of fries, and two more Cokes. He bills us for everything.

“Let it go,” I whisper to Charlie. “The poor kid's really distracted.”

“I know,” Charlie says, and we eat it all anyway.

Venus has gone down, sunk behind the middle school across the road from our building. We can see, through the sloped glass of the windshield as we park, the flat stretch of black sky over our roof, several stars, the clarity that accompanies cold weather. Upstairs I open the refrigerator and look inside. There is a list on the door, of things I need to buy for Thanksgiving, and I've forgotten to cross off the cranberries. My mother sent the list, as a guideline, she said, but I'm adhering to it absolutely. Next to the word “Turkey,” in parentheses, she wrote “Twenty Pounds.” I am worried that when I call the store in the morning they'll tell me it's too late for a twenty-pound turkey and that I'll have to make do with a ham. I would not be trusted with a holiday again. Charlie has come in and is sorting through the coupons in the coupon drawer, arranging them in piles. He does this every so often. The pile on the right is made up of coupons which have already expired. He flips through it once, to see what we've missed, and throws it away. The remaining pile he divides once again, into foods and nonfoods. On top of the food pile is a coupon advertising twenty cents off on a jar of Presto spaghetti sauce.

“We'll have that tomorrow,” I say.

“Tomorrow's Saturday,” says Charlie. “I have to go to dinner at what's her name's house.”

“Who?”

“Some student who invited me to dinner.”

I close the refrigerator softly and look at him.

“I couldn't say no,” he explains. “She's suicidal. It says so in her files. And when she invited me over she said she had this great recipe for chicken and if I didn't come she'd kill herself. She said that. What could I say?”

“You could have said, No—if I come over my wife will kill me.”

“I'll say that next time,” says Charlie.

This has happened before. Each time, I've felt a small explosion in my chest. It makes me sad. Some fragile-hearted student sets a table for two and cooks dinner for my husband. They all make chicken, because it's cheap and easy and there are so many things you can do with it. They are all slightly myopic, like Mary, or a little weird and artistic, like Lorelei, or they have fine bones and bad tempers, like me. Sometimes I wonder, is there anything left? And how do they know she's suicidal anyway? Has she scars on her wrists? Rope burns under her collars? Do they have to pump her stomach periodically? Or does she simply go around saying things like I have this great recipe and if you don't come up and try it I'll kill myself? And what does she look like?