Fruit of the Month (8 page)

Katy, whose belly startled me this morning when I saw her in her suit, is delighting more than ever in the final stages of her pregnancy. She makes us lay our ears against her belly to hear the baby's heart because, she says, she can't hear it herself. Jeffrey assures her it's beating. “Thump-thump. Thump-thump,” he says, I don't tell them it reminds me of the ocean in the conch shell; put your ear to a shell and hear your own blood breaking like waves.

Later, gazpacho and chicken. Jeffrey finds the wishbone and cleans it with his teeth. He rubs it with a napkin and turns it in the light until it gleams and then he beckons Sharry to his side and grins like a father.

“This is a wishbone,” he explains. “You shut your eyes and make a wish and then you grab hold of it and pull.”

Sharry shuts her eyes, squeezes them tight. Jeffrey cracks the bone a little in her favor and then they play. He grits his teeth. The bone snaps.

“You won, old girl,” says Jeffrey. “What was your wish?”

Sharry blinks at him and at the splintered bone. She starts to cry. “What's a wish?” she says.

Later we look it up in the
Oxford English Dictionary
. “A wish,” I read aloud, “is the expression of an unrealized or unrealizable desire.”

“That leaves the problem of desire,” says Jeffrey. “How can you teach them anything?”

We convert the sunroom into a library of sorts, with rows of books under the windows and a reading lamp next to an armchair. We spend a pleasant morning taking the books from their boxes, dusting them off, and arranging them by subject on their shelves. “It's perfect,” says Jeffrey, surveying the room. We've always wanted a library. It's quite a relief, new that the house is complete. We bought cedar planks and cinder blocks at the lumber yard. The cedar has a sharp clean scent. It fills the air.

We still have our Sunday barbecues but it's chillier each week. The first leaves are falling. Sam and Katy's fireplace is filling up with leaves. We see them scattered on the road, one here, one there. Jeffrey comments that the street will be unbearably bleak in winter. “I don't know if I can take it,” he says from the window. “All those empty trees.” Sometimes I see him watching other women—the way they walk, the slope of their necks, the cast of their eyes. At night, even after he's read the paper, he turns on the television news to watch, I am certain, a particular anchorwoman whose hands flit about on the paper as she speaks, nervous as butterflies. She won't last long. Every so often I point this out to him. I say, “Would you like me more if I moved my hands too when I spoke, like this?” He shrugs when I say this and pats my hand. But when I go out back to look at the flowers he follows, a hand on my back. The irises never came up. There is sweet pea, and tiny sprigs of mint with purple flowers. “Mint is the only plant with a square stem,” I say to Jeffrey. It is something we read months ago. The roses bloomed late and will last into September. They have a queer waxy sheen and I touch them lightly with the very tips of my fingers, the way you touch the flowers on the tables in restaurants to see if they're real.

Katy had a boy and he cries all night so we've taken to turning on the radio before we go to sleep. This is something we've never done before. Every other night we change the station. We sleep with our ears to the speakers. We are learning about different kinds of music.

Paradise

On the bed at Joanie's is a floral quilt I'd never noticed; the antique petals of the giant roses, filmy as ghosts, have faded into their creamy background. Her wallpaper is faded as well but adorned with ferns arranged in broad, unfernlike clusters, like the fanned tops of palm trees, and on the rug that the landlord left behind is a border of plump white blossoms of indeterminate species, with dense, leafy bracts and vivid yellow cones at their centers.

The room is close and chaotic in a way that I have come to expect of Joanie herself, but today the effect is subdued; a floor fan ticks rhythmically in a corner and the air spins lazily around us. Joanie is wearing her floral skirt and an airy blouse whose short, generous sleeves undulate in the fan's current. She looks fragrant and cool, weightless as a dandelion seed. In her lap lies a white plastic comb whose tapered handle she strokes automatically. She keeps looking at the flowers I brought her, looking and then glancing away and then glancing back, as if carnations were magical and might suddenly lapse into the pattern on the quilt and become unreal.

I've known Joanie five years, but haven't seen her since May, six weeks ago when Tim and I were married. Tim was Joanie's lover first. I met him in this very room in February, and it didn't take long for any of us to figure out what was happening. But Joanie is proud, and she and I are still friends. Even so I can't imagine why I ever thought of bringing her flowers. I don't know if the colors are dyed or natural. The lady in the shop couldn't say and was embarrassed by the colors I chose, peach and mauve, with one bright, blood-red flower off-center among the others. I took a long time choosing these colors, adding and subtracting carnations like someone demonstrating a mathematical equation, all the while standing bare-legged in the blast of icy air from the open cooler. I thrust the bouquet through the neck of an empty Gallo burgundy jug I'd brought along in my shopping bag. At Joanie's, I filled the jug with water from the tap. The sink was choked with dishes and pots and pans that had to be moved out of the way. When Joanie came to watch, we stood side by side till the water gushed out from the mouth of the bottle, spraying us.

Joanie is small but graceful, with strong slender bones and a high, arched neck; her body gives one the impression of being braver than it might actually be. Circling one wrist is a heavy, crudely cut, man's watchband. Ordinarily her features are sturdy and cool, blunt and forthcoming. But she doesn't want to talk about herself and asks about our trip. Tim and I honeymooned on an island in the British Virgins. The place was embarrassing, a volcanic countryside lush with sugarcane, palms, poverty, and garbage. Our hotel smelled musty and sat on an isolated stretch of beach spotted with oil. Next door, on some mudflats, lived a colony of pigs among discarded kitchen appliances. A land crab inhabited our closet; we heard it scuttling all night between the straps of our sandals.

We had a wonderful time. We swam naked, and in the evenings drove rusted go-carts around a paved track. We ate crawfish that the local boys gathered, and bought T-shirts from women in flapping skirts. I had my hair done in corn rows one day on the beach. The woman thanked me when I'd paid her, then pointed out over the sea to where some clouds had sunk. It rained every day far out on the water. Tim and I stayed close together, like mating fish. In May, when we were married, we were certain being married couldn't make any difference. But somehow, I find myself saying to Joanie, things have changed. We grew closer on that island, isolated, as if the world didn't matter, as if nothing mattered.

“I began to worry we were living such an ordinary life, but not anymore,” I say blithely. “It doesn't bother us, we're so bourgeois, that's our big joke.”

And on and on, until finally there's silence and Joanie finds a cigarette and says, “Tim once told me he wanted to get into
politics.”

She laughs, puts the cigarette to her lips, and strikes a match, but the match won't flare—it's too damp or old, it keeps snapping and fizzling. She climbs from her chair in search of another, finding one at last in a pottery bowl on the bookcase. By then she has misplaced the cigarette, and circles the room with the matches in hand, one already disengaged and waiting to be struck. There's a half-empty pack on the table near my jug of gaudy flowers, but she won't give up, she wants the original cigarette.

Later we go walking in the hot midwestern air. Joanie pauses to window shop, as soon as we get past the seminary to some stores, but eventually we cut through the alley to the parking lot where our friend Mary lives, It seems inevitable that we should gravitate toward Mary's, as if seeking shared ground. The carved front porch of Mary's relic of a house overhangs the pavement. Her building was condemned until she bought it several years ago with government help and put the floors back in. Fake Spanish tile. She always says she prefers a wood floor over a Spanish one, but since there's no such thing as fake wood she settled for the fake tile.

The doorways are arched and go nicely with the tile, but the kitchen is a cubbyhole. Mary cooks only for herself, anyway. She's our mothers' age. When I met her and ran into people who knew her, I kept hearing what a stoic she was, such a proud woman, how brave in the face of things.

“What things?” I asked. But nobody knew. Mary's life is a secret, even from us, who sit gabbing with her till two in the morning, watching her mix drinks. She's a lady, really. I like to look at the soaps in her bathroom—carved roses, tiny lemons and plums. She comes from Maine. All night her phone rings and it's someone from Maine she's been thinking of, she's been meaning to call, she wrote a letter but never sent it. All of this is always true. On the floor in her living room is a bronze nude that has turned green. Mary's amethyst sunglasses perch on the nude's nose. I have a theory that Mary has a son in jail in Turkey, or a dead lover somewhere, or some family heirlooms buried near a gas station in Poland. Some tragedy. She hinted once that she had business abroad but could not afford to get there. On her back landing, through a door leading out from the tiny kitchen, sits a parrot in a cage. The parrot says one word. Cecil.

“Cecil is the goddamn psychiatrist that finally got the hell out of my life,” Mary said once. I retold this to the people who asked about her past, but everyone had already heard it.

Mary serves rum and Coke when we get there. She always hops up the minute you show up at the door, and before you know it there's a glass of something in your hand and a stained straw coaster on the table in front of you. Also the ashtrays get passed around, and maybe some grapes, and then the cat makes its way onto everyone's lap, purring steadily.

“Written me any poems lately?” Mary asks Joanie.

“Not really.”

“Oh sure.” Mary digs around in the chair cushions for a minute, finds her eyeglasses, and puts them on. She takes them off again, wipes the lenses on her skirt hem, and puts them back on. “I can't find a goddamn good poetry book anywhere,” she says loudly. “They're all boring trash. I can't get into anything, I want a good humid poem.”

“Try James Dickey,” I suggest.

“I've read James Dickey. I love James Dickey.”

“Try Roethke. He's got some humid ones. Lots of mud.”

“I want bodies. I can't explain what I want. I don't know what I want. Anyway this thing sure doesn't have it.”

She slaps the cover of a giant library book, and then suggests a picnic for Saturday. “Maybe a picnic will get this slug of a summer moving,” she says, and keeps slapping the book methodically. The room is piled with books and shoes—books under the furniture, shoes on top of the furniture, shoes on the porch, books in the bathroom. You could traverse the place from book to shoe, like crossing a stream on rocks. But Mary is barefoot. She was painting her toenails when we arrived. The nail polish sits on the table, and only four of her toes have been painted. She won't do it in our presence. She will wait for us to go.

“You two,” she says finally, and lets her book slide catlike from the arm of her chair. “Well, well, well.”

Saturday is warm and cloudless, alright for a picnic if you know a shady spot with a breeze. Mary says she knows one and we set off across the playing fields carrying our shopping bags and baskets. We are all wearing skirts, and Mary stuck a rose in her hair. She bought two bottles of retsina and a large jar of sour Greek olives and some tangerines. I made cookies and a bowl of Tim's favorite potato salad. Joanie fried some chicken. Her skirt smells of cooking oil, but she looks dignified as usual. At the picnic spot, where there is no shade to speak of, she comments skeptically and plops herself down. Mary insists it was shaded the last time. She remembers vividly a cool, breezy carpet of unmown grass beneath a circle of spruce trees. But the seminary has since converted the field to an athletic complex, and we sit ourselves down near a dirt running trail between some parallel bars and a balance beam. Behind us spreads the soccer field and track, and to the left the trail vanishes among tall weeds and thistles. Runners sprint past us on the brittle grass, sweat flying. They all nod at our picnic. Mary brought a checkered cloth and we sit lanquidly around it on matching napkins.

“What in god's name is that man doing?” says Mary after a while. She points with her chicken wing across the field to a man doing jumping jacks. From this distance he appears tiny and mechanical, like a windup toy.

“I wonder how much of a hunk he is,” she continues. “What do you say, Joanie?”

Joanie squints and says nothing, but I say I don't like his kelly green shorts.

“I didn't ask you,” says Mary after a while. “You're still on your honeymoon.”

I shrug and say it's true. Mary says she doesn't blame me anyway because Tim has such good taste in potato salad. Joanie snorts and says that
her
potato salad is better than mine. She eats an olive and rolls the pit around in her mouth before spitting it into her palm. Soon the man in the kelly green shorts approaches, and stops at the chin-up bar that in the harsh sun is like a beam from a raygun. Up he goes, and down, and up again, slow as can be with the sweat rolling out of his armpits and the three of us gazing, perched in our skirts on our three checkered napkins, just now feeling the heat. Around his body moves a vapor like the undulating waves above a surface of asphalt, so we watch as if waiting for him to dissolve.

“Drink up,” Mary orders, filling our cups with retsina. “This place is no Garden of Eden, I suppose.”