Licorice Read online

  Licorice

  Abby Frucht

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1990 Abby Frucht

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Michael Zimmerman’s company, humor, and understanding were wonderful as always. For their insightful readings of the manuscript-in-progress, the author thanks Michael Zimmerman, Tom

  Hart, Carolyn Frucht, Yopie Prins, Katrina Kenison, Gary Engle, and especially Scott Walker. And many special thanks to Howard Frucht for his inspirational remarks about the medicinal properties of licorice.

  A portion of this novel first appeared in the Kenyon Review (New Series, Summer 1990, Vol. XII, No. 3·Copyright © by Kenyon College) under the title “Steps Out.”

  Published 2016 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941531-09-9

  eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  FOR MICHAEL

  who has good taste

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  The Day the Supermarket Closed

  INTERVAL ONE

  PART TWO

  Danka’s Soup

  INTERVAL TWO

  PART THREE

  Stewing

  INTERVAL THREE

  PART FOUR

  The Top Hat in the Kitchen

  INTERVAL FOUR

  PART FIVE

  Hungry Love

  LICORICE

  PART ONE

  The Day the Supermarket Closed

  NO NOISE. Just a shadow. In a fraction of a second, I’m scared. But it is only a flock of geese. White-bellied with black-bordered wings, they fly close to the tops of the quiet trees like a single, giant kite. Ordinarily, snow geese don’t come here–they fly north to the marshes surrounding the power plant, now defunct, or east to the flats where they vanish among tall reeds. Here, the bodies of water are simply too small, the fish miniscule. The geese swoop low above the reservoir, then soar over the woods out of sight. Gone, they might have been a gust of wind, leaving ripples on the water. There are the same people fishing; some boys and their father who fish every day. Squinteyed as men, the brothers sight the lengths of their homemade poles as if aiming into the murk to shoot. They’re not fishing for sport, but hunger. The skinny father watches from a distance, perched on concrete blocks, not scowling, not impatient, not anything, really, but fatherly, like someone overseeing homework from the other side of a tv set. He watches turtles basking on a log and slipping off. Every so often he rises, throws a cigarette butt to the gravel, walks around the water’s edge and stares down into the bucket near the boys’ tackle box. It’s a toy bucket just deep enough to hold these tiny fish they’re catching. Blue-gills, no bigger than cocktail crackers. No one would eat these fish unless they had to, every night, dipped in flour and fried. You hold a fish by its tail, slide it into your mouth, pull it out between clenched teeth to skim off the flesh, like eating artichoke leaves. I wonder if they dip them in butter and lemon. Our town is so small that the geese are now several towns over, but this family lives on the other side of it, in another world, where the houses are built from my neighbors’ cast-offs; extra doors, discarded windows, some shingles, cinder blocks and the boards from some old bookcases. Sometimes a sink, a carpet remnant, a length of fencing of a set of porch steps. Because the doors do not properly close, the front yards of these improvised houses are as cozy as parlors, like the tv rooms under the awnings in trailer parks.

  “Hi,” the older of the two boys says as I pass, and I watch him throw a fish back into the water, too small to nibble, the size of a quarter. In the bucket are crowded fifteen or so of the bigger ones, tails barely undulating.

  “Catching anything?” I ask stupidly, and the boy points into the bucket with his elbow while hooking a fresh worm. Nearby, a submerged bullfrog grunts in its city of algae until a second frog replies. Why don’t these boys eat frog legs, too, I wonder, but can’t bring myself to ask. We’re eating dinner tonight at our friends’, Ben and Leah’s. Leah’s a potter, and each meal is a feast of platters and bowls. Last time, around a tray of steaming corn tortillas sat platters of beef, chicken, and beans, bowls of peppers, hot sauces, sour cream, chopped olives, tomatoes, onions, and a dish of guacamole. Also, some margaritas in Leah’s squat mugs salted and chilled.

  I say goodbye to the back of the younger boy’s head just as his line starts to wobble, then follow the trail to the fork. There, it slopes down into woods near the creek, the fallen logs cushioned with fungi and moss. But somebody is already sitting on my log–it’s Joe with the piercing eyes. This evening, Joe keeps his painter’s cap in his lap while talking softly to Eva, his dog. His white T-shirt strains at the armpits while, even sitting like that, his biceps flex like they can’t help themselves. Soon he sticks his nose in his armpit, sniffs, and gets a look of wierd pride and elation. He doesn’t see me. His bald head looks tender as a mushroom; I think of stripping naked, straddling his shoulders and licking his head, ear to ear in slow, continuing spirals.

  FROM THE ROAD I can see my husband in communion with our pear tree; he circles it slowly, his fingers alighting on the tips of its branches now and then, his head cocked, his legs bent – mysteriously absorbed, he is like a tailor circling a dummy. The pear tree is slender and young, with trembling, budding extremities, just sparsely flowered. Petals drift from my husband’s touch and come to light on the toes of his sneakers. Daniel is duck-footed; his splayed feet straddle the base of the trunk as he frowns and tends, tends and frowns. He might be toying with the secret, dewy recesses of his own soul, examining its negative spaces, its shapely apexes on which fruit is soon to grow. How tender he looks, from the sidewalk in front of our house, how grave and enraptured.

  “This poor tree is so fragile,” I say, coming up from behind.

  “Bullshit,” says Daniel, then kicks at the trunk with the rubbery toe of his sneaker; petals fly, I gasp, Daniel hops on one foot in a gesture of pain, yet the tree stands serene, its faint response over and done like the sigh of a house when its door has been slammed.

  I step closer while Daniel resumes. Of course-how could I not have known?-he is hand-pollinating the flowers, choosing the healthiest, unblemished specimens to be plucked from the tree so the dust of their anthers may be applied to the receptive female counterparts, the blossoms of which he has not even paused to smell. That’s the thing about Daniel: he’s a scientist. For a living he follows bumblebees through glades and montane meadows, recording, with a clicking, hand held counter, the precise number of open flowers on which each bee feeds, and then, with a stopwatch, the number of seconds she spends probing each one. Often I’ve wondered, What kind of occupation is this? And what kind of man? Soulful? Eccentric? Adventurous? Or merely clinical, playing matchmaker on our fruit trees simply for the sake of a juicier F-2 generation?

  The tree is shorter than Daniel, taller than I.

  “When will it fruit?” I ask. “In August?”

  “I think. I was just back from the field when it did last year. Remember? Or maybe early September.”

  I shake my head, no, although I do remember. Still I want him to tell me about it, because the things he recalls, however coolly, always make me nostalgic. These days, I crave nostalgia, because the present, somehow, seems vaguer than the past–less definite, less c
ircumscribed.

  “That was so crazy,” he says at last, flicking away a fingerful of anthers, “to pick a fresh pear and wait a whole week to eat it.”

  “Go on,” I say. So he tells me the rest.

  How we had one pear, the sole product of our lawnful of fruit trees. The apple trees were sick, and the cherries half-eaten by blackbirds and sparrows before I noticed they’d ripened. The pear tree was smaller then, but the pear itself, mellow and golden brown, was of the usual size and so out of proportion to the thin droopy sapling that I thought Daniel had tied it to the branch for a joke. We watched it for days, waiting for it to ripen, wary it might drop, dreading all the while it would be stolen by students. It wasn’t. We picked it ceremoniously, and deciding we wanted it cold, stuck it in a basket in the refrigerator and forgot about it. A week later when we found it, how sad it looked, no longer fresh, just an ordinary, brown-speckled fruit with no dewdrop remaining on its toughened skin. Guiltily we shared it. It tasted okay, a little mealy, just a pear. But, we sucked the juice from each other’s fingers when we were done.

  “WHAT I MEAN IS,” I expound tonight at dinnertime, “that there may be other living, thinking beings existing simultaneously with us, sharing our space, but in another dimension, and in ways we can’t sense. Think of your senses. Sight. Hearing. Smell. Touch. Who says there aren’t other senses that we don’t possess? And that therefore there are things, corresponding entities, that we can’t sense. That we can’t be made aware of. Whole lives, I’m talking about. All these daily lives going on around us that are inaccessible.”

  “So what?” says Ben, always glad to be the gloomy one.

  “You left out taste,” says Daniel.

  “I did?” asks Leah, offended, chagrined. She ladles peanut sauce onto his shish kebab, sprinkles bananas, coconut, diced cucumber relish in a ring around his dollops of yogurt and chutney, then beckons, from the far end of the table, a teacupful of freshly ground garam masala. Ben was shelling the cardamom pods when we arrived, dropping them in with the other spices. Then, two cinnamon sticks and the whir of the blender.

  “He didn’t mean that,” I say. “It’s delicious. Everything. Absolutely.” I finger a bowl. These are new, so thin-walled as to be nearly translucent, with cloudy tints of silver, turquoise, and aquamarine.

  They look like mother-of-pearl.

  “Are these raku?” I ask.

  Stevie, our son, age one and a half, screeches from the other room. Something rips. I cringe, knowing it’s the fish kite they’ve hung from the ceiling, its tail a cascade of red and yellow streamers.

  “Simon!” yells Ben.

  Ben and Leah’s son, Simon, runs from the playroom, xylophone hammer in hand. Stevie follows, crawling, still screeching, pulling the xylophone upside down by its cord of yellow plastic.

  “Did you take that hammer from Stevie?”

  “Shish kebab,” says Simon delightedly.

  “Sooleybop. Jesus,” says Ben, who refuses to acknowledge that Simon, precocious, is learning to talk.

  “He said shish kebab,” I tell him, as Stevie, forgetting the xylophone, climbs onto my lap. I pull a cube of beef from the end of my skewer, blow on it, touch my tongue to its surface to see that it’s cool, pop it into his waiting mouth.

  “How’s work?” I say to Ben. He’s a biologist, too. He studies a community of woodchucks who feed on the tract house compost heaps and make their summer burrows at the edge of the creek where it cuts past a meadow of fruit trees.

  “I got the new zoom, at last,” he tells me.

  It’s a hand-held zoom he must have ordered months ago.

  “He got it on Thursday, he’s out there till two in the morning, even though they keep bedtime hours,” says Leah. “Those animals go to bed around nine, he sits there and zooms around hoping they’ll sleepwalk. Three were pregnant this year. Just wait till the little ones come out of the dens. He’s like a kid with a new toy.”

  “New toy, my ass,” Ben says proudly. “That thing cost four hundred bucks.”

  “Banana,” says Simon.

  “Jesus. Anyana?” says Ben.

  “I mean, there could be a whole other family like us, right in this room, eating their dinner,” I say.

  “God forbid,” says Daniel, and strokes my arm.

  “She’s right” says Ben. “But it doesn’t affect us. I mean, some invisible kid could be throwing up in my plate this very minute and I’d never know, I’d just eat my food, I’d say ‘Hey, this stuff is really good.’ That’s what you’re talking about, right?”

  “Ben,” says Leah.

  “Simon said banana,” I say, hurt, and remember my new friend, Emily. Emily would understand. Emily, whom I met at a party a week ago and haven’t had the nerve to call up. It was the first time we met, but we understood each other completely.

  “Careful!” yells Daniel a while later, because Stevie is kicking the table. Improperly braced, the whole thing sways. This happens every time we come here for dinner. Now Simon pushes hard against it, and Leah’s beautiful bowls come sliding toward me. I catch hold of them frantically, two by two.

  Stevie sighs, leans back into me, rubs a spoonful of yogurt onto my face.

  WE TAKE the long way home because the night is so lovely, and let Stevie sleep in the stroller. His chin has fallen to his chest, his toes bob and sway an inch above the ground. From behind, my hands loose on the grips of the stroller, I watch the naked back of his neck, tendons taut beneath the skin. Darkened with sweat, a multitude of curls lie close to his skull.

  Beside me, Daniel puts his hand on my back, hooks his fingers on the neck of my T-shirt and lets them hang.

  “There’s something I keep forgetting to tell you,” he says, and sidesteps a hole in the sidewalk. Just ahead, exposed tree roots snake through a crack in the buckling sandstone and send up green shoots. Sidewalks are rarely repaired in our town, but when they are, the fresh, bland concrete clashes with the older slabs of sandstone whose porous surfaces echo the long-ago quarries. Here and there, the slabs buckle, split, and ooze. Pockmarks, filled with water and sprigs of moss, resemble small sinkholes.

  “Yes?” I say, because he seems to have forgotten again. In a sense, I already know what he means to say. That is, I know it will make me unhappy, because those are the things he forgets to talk about.

  “Who died?” I ask.

  We go on in silence.

  “Who’s moving away?” I continue, and this time he tightens his grip on my shirt.

  “Who already took off?” I ask, suddenly frantic, already feeling the loss. The front wheels of the stroller smash into a faultline. Pitched forward, Stevie topples face-first from the seat toward the ground, but Daniel catches him, rearranges him, sets him back in the seat. We’re accustomed to this. Stevie opens his eyes, looks out at the night, closes them again, sleeps.

  “It’s a secret,” says Daniel. “Nobody’s figured it out, yet. Harley’s gone.”

  “Harley. Oh, no.”

  “I went to his house when he didn’t show up for a week.”

  “Oh, no,” I repeat. Harley’s the lab technician. He’s awkward, shy, and the butt of Daniel’s practical jokes. Daniel hid Harley’s new bike in the cold room. He marked Harley’s sneakers radioactive, emptied his bag lunch and filled it with chilled lampreys. Harley must know that it’s Daniel who does these things; in return he visits Daniel in his office and they talk about Harley’s rock climbing trips. Why Harley? I wonder, although the answer is clear. His wife left some time ago, as suddenly as this, taking only a backpack with rope and pitons. He thought she’d ridden to the quarry the way she sometimes did, to climb and relax at the end of the day. But her bike was still chained to the tree in their yard, and she never came back, and now, when we think of her, it’s as a bright speck scaling a distant peak. Where can she have gone? And now, where’s Harley? What’s become of them, I want to ask, as if they have died. And maybe they have. No one knows, is the problem, about the people who’ve lef
t. Hundreds. Sometimes they clear out their houses, sometimes they don’t. They only rarely say goodbye and almost never come back. They don’t seem to have planned it, actually, but one day they’re here and the next day, where? It’s the women, I’ve noticed, who vanish first. Or the women who pack, who arrange for the U-Haul, who surprise the rest, at dinner, with a bus ticket wedged underneath each plate. I haven’t said this out loud, about the women being first, but increasingly I know that it’s true. It happens mostly in summer; more this summer than last, and more last summer than the summer before. It’s this excess of peace that scares them away: the fruit trees with their bruised blossoms hanging, hanging, the air barely stirring the tops of the grasses, those geese overhead with their silent shadow. Every woman wants peace, but not peace and quiet. Up one street, down another, U-Haul here, U-Haul there, amid cars with their tops buckling under the luggage. Some do it more secretively, like Harley’s wife and then Harley – no preparations, no goodbyes – but the secrecy, we think, is only accidental. They can’t help themselves, they can’t take it any more, they have an urge-whatever-they pick up and go. Or just go. One neighbor left her television playing on the porch. She was sitting snapping green beans while her boyfriend trimmed the hedges at the side of the house. She owned the travel agency, was plump, blonde, and played the tv so loud we could hear people kissing on the shows she liked. Between one kiss and the next, she must have walked off somewhere. Several days later, on one of my routes, I stepped on a green bean lying on the sidewalk. It was the other side of town but it gave me the chills. I stood still a minute, listened and watched, then kept on going. It was no use getting excited. Everybody knows that. There’s no logic in this, nothing you can explain. Before the travel agency closed, the boyfriend sat at her desk and wrote out the tickets for people who’d made reservations. He’s left the television on, turned low, and spends most of his time outside in the yard, still trimming, pruning, mowing, and hedging. I’ve never told him I stepped on a green bean, of course. Maybe it was hers, but it could have been Harley’s, for all I know.