Fruit of the Month (6 page)

June seemed confused. I think she had expected me to leave while they were still in bed, at the same time hoping I would stay. I was determined to go sailing. Otherwise, I told myself, why would I have come? She still looked tired, and she had wrapped her hair in a madras scarf so you couldn't see it. She was smoking again. Faye kept the cigarettes in the breast pocket of her jacket, and every time June wanted a smoke she had to reach in and get one.

“You had a telephone call,” I said, in voice that was too cheerful. I worked as a receptionist at a hotel in town—that was my receptionist voice.

“Who was it?” asked June, startled.

“No one,” I said. “I mean I didn't answer it.”

“Thank god,” June said. Faye smiled, barely, and at no one in particular. We drank instant coffee black, because the fake cream was stuck like a rock in the bottom of the jar. June bent a spoon, trying to get it out. We all laughed when she held up the bent spoon, then stopped abruptly when it clattered in the sink. There was no mention of a breakfast more substantial than strawberries and coffee. By then, anyway, it was lunch time, sun streaming through the windows. June's arms were golden in the sunlight. I was wondering whether, if June and I had been alone, we would have made pancakes. All at once I remembered the time years ago when, as a teenager, I spent my first night with a boy, on a mattress in the closet of an empty house on some church grounds. In the morning we went to the house of a friend, a motherly girl in an apron, who cooked a batch of pancakes and left the kitchen while we ate them. Thinking of this, I couldn't recall the boy's name. The sole image I had was of his Adam's apple bobbing up and down above my face, the forlorn, boyish shape of the bone with the skin stretched whitely over it. I remembered I told him his balls looked like plums, and how shocked he looked when I said it.

The noon hour stretched on. Then June stood up suddenly and announced it was time to go sailing. We walked the few blocks to the harbor, June chatting on and off about how rich her brother was. His boat was moored at a dock crowded with other boats. There were hordes of people, tying and untying ropes, having just come in or else preparing to go out into the bay, and some who just lounged around in bathing suits as if they had no intention of going anywhere. I have never familiarized myself with the mechanics of sailing and sat on the deck, holding my clogs in my lap while June and Faye passed ropes back and forth and hooked and unhooked things. June disappeared below for a minute, and reappeared with three chilled beers that she passed around. Faye popped the tab off and tossed it right into the water, where it floated. I glanced at June, who shrugged sheepishly, and for a moment there was only the two of us, in the boat that was creaking and bobbing. She made a point of sitting near me while applying some tanning lotion. She had stripped down to her swimsuit. When there was too much lotion left on her hands, she rubbed it into my neck. Her hands were warm. The scent of coconuts rose around us. I didn't know what to do. Faye stared out at the harbor past a string of boats, drinking her beer very fast. Then, when she was finished, she crushed the can with her boot and threw it with perfect aim into the mouth of a trash can on the dock, disappointing me. June clapped, and Faye came to join her, and they started the motor and we were off.

It was slow going. The harbor was jammed. I was struck by the camaraderie of boaters; there was much waving and shouting back and forth. Every few yards we had to stop and sit still while the hot smell of gasoline seared the air. I cringed each time Faye lit June's cigarette, half expecting a blast. Faye wouldn't look at me, but June smiled each time the sun dipped behind a cloud. Suddenly there were clouds, loose black clumps in patches on the hard blue sky, throwing intermittent shadows on the water. You could see, if you looked way into the distance into the bay itself, how the strung sails brightened and then vanished and then brightened again as they traveled through light and darkness.

“Jack would have liked this,” I said.

“You should have brought him along,” said June.

“You should have told me to,” I said. Faye took June's hand and placed her own long-boned hand on top of it. They nuzzled and sighed.

At the lip of the bay the coast guard stopped us. There was a man with a megaphone. A storm was approaching. Overhead the clouds had clumped and there was thunder far off. The air had grown thick and electric. A few tendrils of hair had escaped from June's scarf; they glowed like filaments. Goose bumps appeared on our arms, but there was nothing to be frightened of as long as we turned back. I was relieved. The ocean looked crazy. We hadn't even put up our sails. The city was still in sunlight, but we knew it wouldn't last. We shared another beer, not bothering to speak above the churn of the motors. Docked, we covered the boat with a tarpaulin and walked home as the rain started falling. I have never seen such large drops of rain, like grapes. June caught some in her mouth, and then Faye took her jacket off and lifted it over our heads. More than once I stepped out of my clog and they waited for me without turning around. We all smelled by the time we got home. Salt and sweat. The apartment was stifling and so dark we were blinded. June sniffed. “I've got to change that newspaper,” she said. “Poor Phyllis.” Then she turned to me and touched me very lightly on the wrist. “Faye and I are taking a shower,” she said.

I kissed Phyllis good-bye and grabbed a handful of strawberries and left. For a while I sat in the car and waited for the rain to let up, chewing slowly to ward off my hunger. For days, I felt, I had been eating nothing else, like someone lost in a forest. I just wanted to get home. On the highway I took a wrong turn. They had to turn me around at a toll booth, stopping traffic so I could cut across the lanes.

Jack wasn't home when I got there. He had been busy; the bed was stacked with laundry. The windows were open, and the floor was streaked with rain. It was the season of mildew, and I could smell it on the towel as I wiped the perspiration from my face. I was tired, too tired to undress. I fell among the fresh-washed clothes and slept.

Later that night, Jack came home. He smelled like soap. I have never asked him where he was and he has never told me. At the time I was too sick to care. My throat and tongue were parched, and my limbs ached dully. He helped me out of my clothes and fed me water and aspirin. He dampened a washcloth and held it briefly to my face, which he told me was swollen. My lips felt swollen and tasted of brine. I refused to eat. Jack brought me hot cups of broth, which cooled before I touched them.

“What could it be?” he said, on the second day, when I was feeling a little better. I was sitting up in bed, just sitting, still dazed, doing nothing.

“Strawberries,” I said. “Look at this rash. What else could it be?”

“Mmmm,” Jack said. He was brushing my hair, a lock at a time. His strokes were even and gentle. That was when we turned the television on, and Ronald Reagan said what he said, and Jack threw the brush and hit him in the face and broke it. It fell to the floor in two pieces. I don't remember the rest of the news, if there was any. We just sat very close. I think I told him about the man in the Winnebago, just then remembering him. Then we both went to sleep. Ten years have gone by, and it is suddenly the season, and believe me when I say I haven't touched another strawberry since.

Engagements

Jeffrey and I agreed four years ago that if we ever have a baby we'll get married without a word, with no second thoughts and little ceremony, just a case of San Miguel Dark and a few hastily scribbled invitations. If we don't make a big deal of it, we said, nobody else will. There will be no T-shirts printed with our names, no weeping, and not too many flowers. Of course I ponder, in private, as I am certain he must also, the question: why marry for the baby if not for ourselves? What difference could it make to a child? It is a troublesome question, fragile as crystal and as cold to the touch.

I've learned to be careful with questions. Joanne, for instance, who lived across the street from us before we moved and wears her white uniform even on off hours, thinks I am pushy or rude. Tactless. I know this because her husband, who used to smile whenever he saw me, no longer did. He no longer waved when I passed. He looked the other way or past me at the tops of trees or at my feet. I spoke to Joanne only twice. The first time, she was kneeling in her yard, prying weeds from between the bricks in their front walk. I thought she might like to know that her skirt was up around her hips but when she saw me coming she stood up and straightened it out and smiled, so instead I asked her what it was like to be a nurse. She said she wasn't a nurse but a nurse's aide, that the patients were senile and usually got her down, that she was tired of lugging bedpans and changing bibs, that the TVs blast incessantly but there are flowers everywhere. She seemed startled that I had asked and went on to explain, in detail, the callousness of the doctors. She said more often than not they don't know what they're doing, that they are heartless bastards, that people are always dying.

The next time I saw her I invited her over for a cup of tea. She is plump and cheerful and efficient; when I spilled the whole bowlful of sugar she whisked it away with a paper towel while I stood cursing. As soon as we were seated on the front porch, drinking our tea, I asked her why she got married. She shivered a bit and pulled an old pink sweater tighter around her, but this could have been the chill in the air. It was autumn. She said quite abruptly that she was in love with Richard. Richard is her husband.

“But why bother to get married?” I pressed. “What's the point?”

“It's not a bother. I'm proud to be his wife.”

We didn't say much after that. I counted the leaves that fell as we sat there. Five leaves. She was staring across the street at her house, which was a large house for a childless couple.

“Are you going to have a family?” I asked.

“Of course. Of course we're going to.”

She left when her glass was still half full.

Whenever I ask Jeffrey whether or not I am beautiful he compares my cheekbones to those of an Indian woman whose picture he has pasted to the refrigerator. She is a Sioux, standing in a wheat field, cradling a bundle of it in her arms. Her eyes are wide and wet-looking. Her face is pained. Her hair, which falls across her chest, is coiled like rope. My cheekbones, Jeffrey tells me, could very well be hers.

“But she looks like her IBM is plummeting,” I say unfairly. “What on earth do you see in her?”

“She's suffering,” he says. “She's lost her mate.” From this I understand that he thinks he knows everything about her, that he has imagined making love to her. When he talks this way he stares at the ceiling while one corner of his mouth twitches and turns up as if he is trying not to laugh. I don't know if he takes himself seriously.

“But is
she
beautiful?”

“Come to think of it,” he says, “the shape of her face”—tracing the line from eye to chin with the eraser of his pencil—“the general effect. It could very well be yours.”

It's like ordering tea in a restaurant and getting a little ceramic pot filled with steamy water and a teacup with a Lipton tea bag inside. You never get quite what you're after.

Jeffrey is thirty-three. I am twenty-seven. He is a lawyer with a downtown firm, I am part-owner of the bookstore, and we have just moved into this house, this tall brick house which is a step up from anything else we've lived in because it has a fenced back yard and several small leaded windows, It was amazing luck, really, this house. We had gone for a drive in Jeffrey's MG. It was the first real spring day: the forsythia suddenly blooming, the buds on the magnolias beginning to swell, the streets lined with joggers. Jeffrey had put on his driving cap, a jaunty tweed he inherited from his father and wears only on rare occasions, then he'd picked a sprig of forsythia and stuck it in my hair.

“There,” he said, stepping back to look at me. “We're both suitably out of character.”

We drove around for an hour and then we saw the house. One of the two front doors was open and a man wearing white overalls was painting it scarlet to match the other. The windows, three on each side, are arranged symmetrically and have scarlet shutters. There is a chimney on either side and a neat row of ivy grows straight up the middle, dividing the whole house into two perfect halves.

“How tacky,” we both said.

On the front lawn was a sign which read
FOR
SALE
and beneath that in smaller letters,
OR
RENT
. We stopped. When the man saw us he put down the brush and wiped his face, leaving a smudge of paint the size of a strawberry. He said, “Pets and children welcome,” and showed us the house. It had arched doorways leading from one room to another, a set of steps which made a right-angle turn, a bathroom papered with the kind of print you usually see on flannel nightgowns, a sunroom whose sills were spotted with leaves, and a fireplace with a hearth. There was an old air hockey table with two broken legs and a chipped enamel stepping stool in the kitchen. The kitchen had blue tiles on the walls and was clean and provincial-looking. I signed the lease and Jeffrey made out a check for the security deposit and the first month's rent.

Before we left, the man took us out back and showed us the yard, proudly, as if it were something he had invented. The previous tenants had left a sandbox and one lawn chair and a swing set. He let me give the swing a trial push and took a whole fistful of sand from the sandbox to let it sift through his fingers while we watched. He showed us the vine which had spread in all directions on the back fence. It's rose, he said. Yellow rose. There is azalea too, and a clump of long tapered leaves he told us was iris. In August there are lots of bees, he said, but they stick to the flowers and don't bother a soul.