Fruit of the Month (7 page)

On our lease it is stated quite clearly that we have the option to buy, that any money we've spent toward rent would go automatically toward purchase should we decide … The print is so small we have to read it with a magnifying glass from Jeffrey's
Oxford English Dictionary
. Perhaps that is what makes the possibility of buying seem so remote that we barely discuss it, the thought of ownership becoming like so many words in the dictionary. It is obsolete. It is not part of our vocabularly.

This house, we agree, is very nearly perfect. Nothing falters or slips, shatters or cracks. There are no cobwebs, no rust under the sinks, no spiders, nothing but an occasional ladybug or a moth with exquisite wings. It's the type of house you'd want to live in for the rest of your life if you wanted to live in one house for the rest of your life. Jeffrey and I have been living together for four years and we've moved three times. It's something we do well together. We wrap things in newspaper—cups, saucers, forks, spoons. We put them in boxes. We roll whole sheets of comics into balls and stuff them in the spaces. We tape the boxes shut. We write our names on them. We put them in my car and drive them across town to our new house. Our new house is always across town. South to north. North to west. West to east. I think of northwest, southeast, north-northeast. The possibilities are endless.

The other side of the house is owned by Katy and Sam. They are younger than we are and have a child, a little girl named Sharry. Sharry wears tiny red boxer shorts and a T-shirt with rabbits on it. The rabbits are copulating. She asked us several times, as we carted our furniture past her and into the house, if we had a birdbath. “It's her favorite word,” Katy explained. “She's never even seen one.” Katy is quite pregnant again and spends most of her time sitting on the front porch with her legs propped on pillows, reading or weaving on a table loom. She has a full face and thick dark hair and Jeffrey says she is the most beatific thing he's ever seen. Sam is an economics professor at a local college we had never heard of. He doesn't wear a shirt but keeps a red bandanna wrapped around his head. He is always in the back yard, “keeping it in shape.” I get tired just watching him, pruning the bushes and painting the gutters and building things. He built a playhouse for Sharry, a stone wall with a barbecue built into it, and a tiny brick patio hedged with pansies. There is a neat little fence between our yard and theirs. Sam apologized for it the very first time we met him. He said he built it just for something to do and if we wanted he would take it down.

Our street, like all others on this side of the park, is lined with magnolia and cherry trees; the grass underneath is thick with violets; the lawns are spotted with dandelions and cut haphazardly at best. It is pleasant at this time of year. Balls roll into the streets and children bounce after them. Tricycles rattle on the sidewalks at early morning and at dusk. On weekends the smell of barbecue floats into our rooms like an invitation. Today, because it is Sunday, Jeffrey dons the chef's apron I bought him as a joke and sets bottle after bottle before him on the table to concoct, his wrists precise as a magician's, the marinade I cannot duplicate. He cuts, with the cleaver he sharpens assiduously on the first Sunday of every other month, the filet into eight perfect cubes and drops them one by one into the marinade. Then he licks his fingers and starts on the vegetables—bell pepper, onion, tomato, all sliced into quarters and arranged geometrically by color on the cutting board, like a mosaic. Finally he peels four tiny new potatoes to be popped on the end of each skewer after all else has been speared, to keep everything in place.

There is a picture of a kangaroo on the apron I bought him. The kangaroo has a pocket from which poke the heads of various ladles and wooden spoons. Jeffrey looks young and foolish in the apron; I don't know if he knows I bought it as a joke. Cooking, he said to me once, is part of the routine of making life seem more important than it is; it must be perfected.

Before cooking we go for a walk on the island of green in the center of the road, under a tunnel of magnolias. The flowers came all at once five days ago; they are luminous and pink and full. “I could stand here forever,” I say, “just looking at them.” Jeffrey says no, if you stand there long enough you'll see them wither and drop. He has that half-smile on his face. “Just show me one thing,” he says, squeezing my breast, “that won't wither and drop.”

In the distance someone is bouncing a ball and singing the alphabet song. A my name is Alma and I live in Alabama and my husband's name is. “That's why people have kids,” I say suddenly. “You don't see it happen.”

We eat dinner on the back steps, fending off mosquitoes as evening settles around us and the swing set darkens. Next door on either side the children have quieted and all we can hear is the whisper of paper plates.

“All right,” says Jeffrey. “So you've convinced me. Now what?”

“Now what what?”

“What do we call it? Where will it sleep? When do we do it?”

“Do you love me?”

He taps a plastic fork against his teeth. “Explain the term,” he says. “Define it.”

Jeffrey is a better cook than I am. Every Sunday the marinade is slightly different. This is, I am certain, by design.

My parents first met him five years ago when they flew to the city for a visit. The four of us had dinner in a seafood restaurant. My mother in a beach hat, for atmosphere. Jeffrey ordered stuffed crab and asparagus spears, a civilized meal. The stuffed crab was all stuff and no crab and Jeffrey called the waiter to the table, silently, with one raised finger. “Did you forget the crab?” he asked innocently, and proceeded to pick at the food with his fork, lifting out morsels of breadcrumb and celery until nothing was left. He prodded the shell with a knife, poking it into the hollows. “It's really quite a lovely shell,” he said. “Where's the crab?”

“Would you care to see the manager?” The waiter peered at the plate, eyebrows raised. Our food was getting cold.

“No, thank you,” said Jeffrey. “I'd rather see the crab.”

The waiter left and returned with a plate of steaming crab meat. He spooned it into the shell and sprinkled it with the breadcrumbs and celery. “All yes,” Jeffrey said. My father winked at me from across the table. Later he pulled me aside. “Your Jeffrey will make a fine lawyer,” he said, slapping me hard on the back.

So Jeffrey makes it look like my idea, the baby. When he carts three boxes of books upstairs to the sunroom I say no, we'll leave the sunroom empty, furnish it for Cris, when he or she is born. He feigns a surprised acquiescence; just yesterday he said the sunroom was the ideal room for a child, all those windows laced with ivy. Of course we are careful to say “he or she.” Katy calls her unborn child John, patting her belly each time she says it. It makes me terribly uncomfortable. I show her the house when most everything is in place. She says she wants to see what it's like, a mirror image of her own house. “Like Alice in Wonderland,” she says. “Through the looking glass.” When we come to the sunroom I have to tell her we're planning to use it as our library as soon as we get the shelves built. We don't want anyone to know about Cris until they can see for themselves.

The sunroom has black and white tiles on its floor, and white walls with black trim around the windows. At midnight it glows like the inside of a shell, like a pearl, with a mute pale light. “It seems only fair that Cris should be conceived in his or her room,” says Jeffrey one night. We spread our big Mexican blanket on the floor, throw in two pillows, and take a bottle of liqueur from the nightstand in the bedroom. This goes on for four nights; on the fifth day my body is covered with small yellow bruises and I am certain my hips have been flattened like two weathered stones. My period starts early. Jeffrey is disappointed. He says, “How can that be?” and smiles his half-smile as we fold up the blanket. We like to fold it just right, taking hold of the corners and standing at blanket's length from one another, making sure the edges meet. It is something like a dance, our folding the blanket, ceremoniously, as if there were something inside.

More and more often I feel myself drawn to the porch, to Katy. She seems in perpetual repose and I wonder if this is her nature or her pregnancy. She wears those cotton maternity shifts with floral designs or stripes or polka dots. There is often a band of lace at the neck, and puffed sleeves similarly trimmed. The shifts have pockets shaped like hearts or apples; Sharry is always running up and sticking her hands in them, pulling out a bit of yarn, a cookie, a crayon. Katy fills the pockets in the morning and by evening, she tells me, they're empty. When the sun hits she holds a reflector to her collarbone, serene and motionless as a lily pad.

I try to imagine what it is like, carrying a baby. Looking at Katy doesn't help much because we're so unlike. Flesh covers her like a soft pink quilt. I am angular and hard, my hips are sharp and narrow. Jeffrey is concerned: will there be room in there? He says he can see right through to my bones, he can see exactly how I'm put together.

The baby, I hope, will change all that. People say that faces change, that they blossom into a kind of calm, like Katy's face. A woman who works the cash register at Woolworth's claims she can guess the sex of an unborn child simply by looking at the mother's face. “It's a boy,” she told Katy. “When it's a boy the face has more secrets.”

Sometimes Katy offers me a piece of fruit or cheese and today I mix two glasses of ice tea before going out to the porch. She tells me about sun tea. You put a couple of tea bags in a jar of water and then you set it in the sun. The jar gets warm, the water turns golden, in a day or two you have it.

“Tea,” she says. “A miracle.”

She scans the lawn, a hand above her eyes. Sharry has stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and places one foot on the pavement. A car speeds past; she sways like a flower, hair fanning out from her head. What is she thinking? Suddenly there is Katy, lifting her up, slapping her backside, sending her onto the porch. Sharry laughs, delighted with adventure. When Katy sits down sweat gleams on her hairline, like mercury.

Soon she is weaving, her hands calm and measured. She's making a blanket for John. Pale blue. Look closely and you can see the shapes of tiny houses woven into the wool. Rows and rows of them. “Run your hand along it,” she tells me. She pushes the weft back and forth. “You can feel them, like Braille.”

Jeffrey pokes fun of the fact that I sit here. He says imitating Katy won't make me pregnant. Katy is utterly composed; even her feet propped up on the porch railing look as if they belong there. It is disconcerting at times, watching her. I look at the covers of her books. There are always pictures of women, and the women are always running.

It is August suddenly, and Cris is as yet unconceived. Of course this is not unusual, people have waited years, but we are beginning to wonder. Perhaps it is something in ourselves, keeping it from happening? We get along reasonably, peaceably as the parts of a dining room set. We like to buy exotic liqueurs—peach, apricot, anise—and drink them from wine glasses after dark. We make love often and in various places: the bathtub, the stairwell, the back porch at midnight. Neither one of us cries out. Our love is spontaneous and refreshing as a glass of lemonade. After, we lie side by side and read. It is something we do well together, reading. Jeffrey holds the book. I turn the pages. The topics vary—primitive peoples, foreign countries, wars, paintings. Jeffrey likes to say that we're engaged in something useful, that we're learning about the world, but at parties he is known to come out with statements like “There is a man who is so in love with the whale he is studying that he named her Ella and sleeps every night in a rowboat in her tank.” This starts everyone talking. Personally I'm not concerned with the history of jazz or the private lives of politicians or the ways in which meteors fall. It has always been enough to know that such things exist, that there are histories, private lives, that things fall. If anything, it is consoling to know that Jeffrey and I will cultivate a common knowledge, consoling to read a passage he is reading, that there is this link between us.

Tonight we are reading
An Analysis of Children's Drawings
. “You can learn things,” said Jeffrey, handing me the book, “by-looking at their pictures.” We examine them closely, as if we were in a museum. The pictures seem ordinary and harmless—a house with flowers bursting from a window box, a dog, a cat, a tree with apples on it. The people have eyes set high on their foreheads, and most of them are smiling. But there are clues, the book instructs. Hands, for instance. “The child who consistently draws large hands shows a potential for violence. Small hands indicate a feeling of insecurity.” It goes on. “This drawing of a woman with small pointed breasts betrays the unloved, reproachful child. Note, also, that the woman's hands are hidden behind her back.”

“You have small pointed breasts,” says Jeffrey.

“You have large hands,” I tell him. He holds them up, flexing his fingers. We flip through the rest of the book. In most of the drawings the sky is a thin strip of blue at the top of the page and the clouds, scalloped and cheerful, have sunk below it.

For the first time in two and a half months we forego our liqueurs. We leave the wine glasses untouched, turn away from each other, and sleep. The wine glasses are the plastic kind with the removable stem. Jeffrey bought a whole bag of them once. We've used the same two over and over. It's one of our games, to see how long they'll last.

It's a flat hot Sunday, everything buzzing—hedge pruners, lawn mowers, transistor radios. Bees buzz in and out of windows and the air itself hums as if struggling to come to life. Sam is strumming a guitar, his bandanna dark with sweat. Katy fills a laundry tub with water, lifts Sharry by the armpits, and dips her into it, first one foot, then the other. Water splashes around the two of them. There's a platter of chicken in the refrigerator, and some gazpacho, featured in the recipe segment of today's paper, which Katy insisted on making, “I've got to have it,” she said, and sent Sam to the yard for tomatoes.