Fruit of the Month Read online

  Fruit of the Month

  Abby Frucht

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1988 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.

  Some of these stories have previously appeared, in slightly altered form, in the Ontario Review; Agni Review, Epoch, Indiana Review; and The Ways We live Now

  Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Art Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support has been provided by generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals, and through a major grant from the Northwest Area Foundation. Graywolf Press is a member agency of United Art,, Saint Paul, and is a recipient of a McKnight Foundation award administered by the Minnesota State Art Board.

  Published 2015 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941531-08-2

  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 and, of course, for Mom and Dad

  Contents

  Midnight

  Peace and Passivity

  Fruit of the Month

  Engagements

  Paradise

  The Anniversary

  Winter

  How to Live Alone

  Trees at Night

  Fate and the Poet

  Nuns in Love

  The Habit of Friendship

  Midnight

  Not even my own mother shops regularly anymore. She confessed this to me last week on the telephone. “I just stop in on my way home from the office and pick up some lamb chops or something,” she said. “I don’t plan ahead anymore. I never know what I want until it’s right in front of me and then I don’t think twice about buying it.”

  “That’s exactly what we do,” I told her. “We just walk to the store after work and get dinner. How are you supposed to know on Monday what you’ll want on Friday?”

  “That’s right,” said my mother.

  I used to come home from grade school to find her leafing through cookbooks. She owned almost an entire set of Time-Life cookbooks, one for each region of China, France, Africa, and the United States. Once, when she had worked for a week preparing a genuine Chinese feast complete with six entrées, two soups, and various appetizers, my father surprised her with a set of dishes he’d bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop. He had skipped work and driven the fifty miles there and back to get them. The delicate soup bowls, robin’s egg blue with enameled dragons, were rimmed with gold paint and came with special matching spoons that looked like boats. We dressed for dinner that night and my mother pinned my hair up with chopsticks.

  Then one day when I was seven she picked me up at school and took me straight to the supermarket. The second grade had just experienced its first air raid drill; when the alarm rang, instead of filing out to the school yard as we did for fire drills, we were told to sit down in the hallway, our backs to the wall, our knees drawn up to our chests, our hands folded over our heads. It was wonderful. For two full minutes we sat there with our heads thrust between our knees while the teachers, in their high-heeled shoes, clicked up and down the hallway. I spent the whole time staring at my underpants. That afternoon my mother and I filled a whole cart with canned goods—soups, stews, juices, fruits. We bought five-pound bags of wheat flour, white flour, rye flour, and cornmeal and a slew of pastas, including the Popeye spinach noodles I had been pestering her about for months. These were not the types of foods we ordinarily bought and, sensing something unique in the air, like a holiday, I ran to the candy shelves and picked out a bag of Tootsie Roll pops and a carton of Cracker Jacks, which I placed in the cart right under my mother’s eyes. It was then that I noticed she didn’t share my excitement. She looked agitated. She was talking in low tones to a woman in curlers who was wheeling not one cart but two, one with each hand.

  “Peanut butter,” the woman was saying. “If you run out of meat at least you’ll have something.”

  “Dried milk,” said my mother.

  “Tuna,” said the woman.

  In all there were nine bags of groceries, which my father carried down to the basement when we got home. There was a pantry in the basement, which had a red tiled floor and a bathroom. I had been allowed to paint a mural on the wall beneath the entrance to the crawl space. I painted the flat blue surface of an ocean and, perched on top of it like a buoy, a house. My mother had promised that if I learned how to swim we would move to a house on the water, something she’d always wanted. I couldn’t wait. The idea of swimming to school instead of taking the school bus thrilled me. Right out the front door, splash, into the water!

  It took a long time to put those groceries away. When everything was in place, we stood for a while gazing at the full shelves, at the rows of bright labels and gleaming tin. We could hear the squeak of my father’s shoes as he walked across the floor above us, then the murmur of the television. It was 1962. I was well into the third grade and a Bluefish at the YMCA swim class before we started eating any of that food, and it wasn’t until my final year of college that my mother began losing the habit of shopping and the pantry began to thin out. I was home for a visit when I woke up at three in the morning craving a bowl of Campbell’s New England Style Clam Chowder. I crept downstairs in my nightgown in the dark, away from the noise of my father’s snores, to the basement. There I found one box of cornflakes, a can of water chestnuts, a packet of herb seasoning, and a three-ounce jar of pimentos. Feeling around on the third shelf, I touched something furry and soft. Still warm. My father, just that afternoon, had set some mousetraps. I screamed and ran upstairs to the kitchen, where I called Charlie on the telephone. He was eight hundred miles away in Illinois, sleeping in bed with his wife. If she had answered I would have hung up.

  “I touched a dead mouse,” I whispered into the telephone.

  “My god,” said Charlie. “It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

  “So what?” I said. “It’s three o’clock here. I miss you.”

  “No,” Charlie said. “I don’t have the exams graded yet.”

  “I want you,” I said.

  “No. I don’t think I’ll have them by tomorrow morning either. Just because I give you kids my home number doesn’t mean you can call me at two A.M. You can tell your friends that, please.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I just want to be holding you.”

  Charlie sighed. “I suggest you make an appointment with Psychological Services,” he said. “I don’t mean to offend you, but if you can’t sleep for worrying about your exam score there may be some other problem you don’t know about.”

  We just sat there for a little while without speaking, weighing the distance between us. I swear I could smell, through the telephone receiver, the strawberry-scented lotion that Charlie had told me his wife smeared on her body every night before going to bed. After a time he said, “Well,” and I said, “I don’t know if the breathing I’m listening to is mine or yours.”

  “That’s how it should be,” he said.

  Finally we hung up and I climbed the stairs to bed, my hand on the smooth woody grain of the banister. I was no longer hungry.

  When Charl
ie left his second wife she threatened to starve herself to death. Lorelei is already thin as a pole and in her hip boots and buccaneer blouses resembles an egret with its feathers ruffled up in the cold. She can’t think of herself as a woman, Charlie tells me. She once made the remark that a woman’s chest was really, when you got right down to it, no different from a man’s. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” she complained. Someone else pointed out that women have breasts while men do not, and Lorelei retorted that aside from that there was no distinction whatsoever. She still lives in the artsy house they shared on Forest Street. We stayed there once when Lorelei went off to Italy; Charlie had made a copy of their house key before he gave his set to her. We spent half the night sharing a bubble bath in the monstrous claw-footed tub, admiring our image in the mirror which covered the opposite wall. Above the tub Lorelei had painted, directly onto the tiles, a picture of a shelf with a pot of Swedish ivy sitting on it. The curled tendrils, with the light exactly right on the edges of the leaves, climbed right up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the smooth face of the mirror. When I reached for a cake of soap in a nook in the wall my hand hit plaster; it was not real soap but a painting of soap, a bar of Dial with a clock still embossed on top.

  The house is filled with minor deceptions like these. For instance downstairs, in a long narrow room resembling a Mediterranean sun porch, with tall French windows opening onto a patio, stucco walls with pale blue trim, and a parquet floor, Lorelei had painted, on either side of the fireplace, a set of bookcases complete with editions of all the books Charlie had taken with him when he moved out of the house. The Origin of Species. The Hammond World Atlas. A complete set of Peterson’s field guides. Krebs’ North American Plant Key. The Double Helix. When you step into the room to get a closer look, you notice that the shutters flanking the windows are painted as well, but that the fireplace is real and the bars of moonlight on the floor are also real.

  “Is she this crazy?” I said to Charlie as we walked from room to room with Lorelei’s plum-colored bath towels wrapped around us. “Or is she just having a good time?”

  “She’s talented,” Charlie said. “She’s a goddamn genius.”

  “Let’s have a look in the kitchen,” I said. I had a vision of a pantry stocked with rows and rows of catsup bottles painted right onto the wood. The cupboard was pine with black knotholes and cast-iron hinges. I opened it. It was bare.

  The best thing about living in such a small town is that you can walk everywhere you need to go, to the bank, movie theater, laundromat, supermarket. Charlie, who is a biology professor at the college, is terrifically proud of the fact that we’ve filled the gas tank only once since August. He means to set some kind of record. Four tanks in a year. We are having Thanksgiving this year at our house, which pleases him; everybody’s coming to us. Last year we had to drive to New York, which spoiled everything.

  Each day around five when I finish up at the library I walk across the square, along the treacherous brick walkways, to Charlie’s office. I have broken, in the past year and a half, the heels of three shoes, and I’m waiting for the day when I break an ankle and can refuse, under pressure from friends and relatives, to sue the town. We wouldn’t sue because we don’t need the money; we have everything we want. Our apartment backs up on the campus, on an acre of green with a pond you can skate on in winter. The rent is cheap, heat included. Last winter we pooled the year’s savings and rented a cabin on the island of St. John, and when we got back we bought two pairs of cross-country skis. The world’s troubles, we agree in private, seem to be passing us by. Each month we send a check to World Hunger, I have noticed that we write smaller checks if we’ve recently argued or if, for some reason, we haven’t been getting along. When this happens we spend the extra money on ourselves. Once, after a week of finding nothing to say to one another, we went downtown and found ourselves buying a couple of egg rings, those silly bracelets of aluminum which, when placed in the frying pan, assure you of a perfectly round egg—like a child’s drawing of the sun.

  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 circ
le 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.