Luscious Lemon

by Heather Swain

  “I will.” I should say good-bye now. Our conversation is over, but I don’t want to let Makiko go. We both breathe into the phone. “How’s everything at the restaurant?” I ask. It feels good to focus on something other than me for a moment.

  “Everything is fine,” she says. “Just the same. Please don’t worry about that. Just take care of yourself.”

  When I hang up, Eddie brings me a cup of tea with lots of milk and sugar. “You doing okay?”

  “Will you check on things at Lemon for me?” I ask.

  He sits on the edge of the bed. We don’t touch. “Can’t we just focus on this for now?” he asks.

  “Last night you told me I had to get over this.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Yes, you did,” I insist without giving him a chance to explain his side of things.

  He draws a long breath in through his nose and lets it out slowly. The sound of exasperation. “I don’t think rushing right back into work is the answer.”

  “I’m not rushing back in. I asked you to check on it.”

  “Can we at least wait until you get the okay from your doctor before you start dealing with the restaurant again?”

  How artfully he avoids the issue. “She said I could do whatever I feel up to,” I tell him.

  “You have a tendency to overdo it, Lemon.” His tone is rankled, as if he’s arguing with a stubborn teenager and trying not to lose his temper.

  I know that I’m pushing him again and that if I don’t watch it, I’ll push him away like I did last night. “Fine. I won’t go in or ask you to check up,” I say. Not because I think that’s the best idea, but because I’m trying. Trying to get over what happened. Trying to show him that I can listen, compromise, and take good care of myself. I’m also trying to remember what it feels like to be happy with Eddie. Free and easy without this smog of my sadness hanging over our heads.

  He pats my leg and leaves the tea on the nightstand. “You want some breakfast?” he asks me brightly. “I could go get us bagels.”

  “Okay,” I say, indifferently.

  As soon as I hear him walk out the door, I pick up the phone and consider calling Franny. She’ll tell me if everything has gone to hell. I hold the phone in my hand, but I don’t dial. Then it occurs to me that I don’t want to talk to Franny. She’s the one who should be calling me. I set the phone down again and bury my head in the pillows. Of course, I could call somebody else. Melanie or Ernesto. But maybe Eddie’s right. Maybe I don’t really want to know how things are going at Lemon because if things aren’t going well, I’d be useless anyhow.

  Eddie tries very hard to do everything right while I’m home for the next few days. “How you doing, Lemon?” he asks every time I walk through a room. “How’re you feeling?”

  I answer each enquiry with “Fine” because I don’t think he really wants to know. I don’t tell him that I still cry every time I take a shower. Or share with him how much I bleed. It’s amazing how much blood I can lose without dying. Ropy red nodules fall from my body. What’s next? A shoe? An old tire? Jimmy Hoffa? Nothing would surprise me. I can’t imagine what it’s like not to bleed anymore. And I’m afraid of when the blood dries up, because then it will all be over, she’ll really be gone, and I’ll have to move on. So as long as I’m functioning, putting one foot in front of another, then Eddie assumes everything is okay, and that’s fine with me.

  His mother calls daily, and so far, I’ve successfully avoided talking to her. Eddie passes her messages along to me such as, “Keep your chin up” and “Look on the bright side.” Every time he blurts out another useless platitude, I want to kick him in the balls.

  His method for helping me is getting me out of the house. He takes me to do normal things like shop for groceries. This morning he suggests we eat breakfast at the diner near the park. I go along with his plan. Get up, get dressed, walk outside. Pretend that all’s well in the world, even though I’d really like to be back in bed, alone.

  As soon as we walk into the restaurant, I regret it. Twin boys, no older than three, sit at the counter, spinning on the stools. They wear striped T-shirts and matching pants and little tennis shoes with lights in the heels. They spin and squeal while their mother cajoles them to take bites of their scrambled eggs. In a booth, a mother nurses a newborn. Her face is placid, serene, as if she’s smoked a joint. An older woman sits across from her, gazing at the daughter and granddaughter with doe eyes, pure love.

  Eddie sees the distress on my face. “Let’s eat outside,” he says as if we would do it just for fun, even though he hates to eat outside. I nod and follow him out the door.

  We sip cups of strong black coffee beneath the red-striped awning as we watch people mill by on their way to and from the park. It’s a gorgeous late summer day with the sun already high and bright at ten A.M. A group of girls bounce by on their way to the subway. They’re all in tank tops and jeans and flip-flops. They laugh and wear funky sunglasses. Who are they, I wonder? They look so young. Surely they’re out of high school. Are they in college? I think of myself at that indeterminate age that I now define merely as young or at least younger than me.

  I never had that loose-limbed carefree gait. That confident walk as if nothing in the world had ever been sad. And I’ll never look like they look now. I’m already worn, battered down, and I think, this is what it means to be an adult. To carry sadness with you that will never go away. That’s what makes us slowly shrivel up and get old.

  I slump over the table and stare into my coffee. “God,” I say. “I feel like such a big fat blob.”

  “You look great to me,” Eddie says in his soothing voice that I’m quickly growing tired of. “No different than you ever have.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “I’m a flabby mess from three months of stuffing my pie hole with cheese and peanut butter and midnight glasses of milk. It was okay with me when I knew I’d get bigger, but now I hate how I look.”

  “Give yourself a break, Lem,” is his constant refrain.

  “I’m not sure that I know how to do that, Eddie.”

  “Just be nicer to yourself. Don’t expect so much. Ease back into things.”

  “Oh,” I say sarcastically. “Is that all I have to do?”

  He lets it go.

  After breakfast, I can’t stand the thought of going back to the apartment with him. With his syrupy voice, constant hugs, and endearing looks. They’ve gotten on my last nerve.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” I say.

  “Great,” he says. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No,” I tell him. “I need some time alone.”

  He looks hurt, but I don’t care.

  “I’ll be home later,” I say and head into the park, leaving him on the sidewalk.

  Surrounded by nature, I see that it’s becoming fall. September’s golden light colors the trees. The day is balmy with the first whispers of winter in the breeze. I’ve always loved autumn. The weather usually makes me want to hole up in the kitchen, slow-roasting meats, baking apple pies, simmering soups, and pickling the last fresh produce. Cooking is joyful, promising. It’s about life and living. I have the feeling that anything I’d touch right now would turn sour and bitter.

  My walk through the park is another mistake. I smell meaty, musky, and strange dogs sniff my crotch. The only other people out on a weekday afternoon are pregnant women and their babies. Fifteen-year-old Puerto Rican girls push their big bellies in front of their tiny hips. Twenty-nine-year-old Hasidic women are trailed by nine children under four years old. Forty-five-year-old yuppies in comfortable shoes carry their one precocious darling in Baby Björn packs. Hipsters sling chubby jerking infants sporting DKNY onsies across their backs. I watch them from the corners of my eyes with my lips pressed tightly together, and secretly I hate them all. How dare they parade their fertility and good fortune around as if it were nothing? How dare those groups of mommies with their milky-eyed infants sit on park benches comparin
g breast pump advice? I wish I had saved the bloody blob that I expelled so I could walk right up to these smug women and show them my baby, too.

  Of course, I can do no such thing. There is no way for me to talk about what’s happened. It’s a hushed-up affair. There are no social conventions for grieving this loss, no ceremonies, no Hallmark cards. At least when my parents died, everyone expected me to be sad. Now all I can do is wander through the park with the squirrels, trying to figure out how to get back to my life.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Two

  I don’t think I can do this,” I say to Eddie from the bed where I’m sitting, still in my underwear. My nice salmon-colored linen dress lies beside me. I hate that dress. It’s the most girlie thing I own, and I feel far from girlie at the moment.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Eddie asks as he pulls on his tennis whites. “I can cancel my game.”

  “Boys aren’t invited.”

  He tugs a T-shirt overhead. “So don’t go. They should understand. For God’s sake, it’s barely been a week.”

  I shake my head. “Believe me, my family wouldn’t understand if I missed Trina’s precious baby shower. These are people who could lose limbs, and they’d still show up for family functions.”

  Eddie leans down and hugs me. “They just want to see you.”

  “I didn’t buy her a present.” I tried. Even walked into a baby store, but I couldn’t stay. Couldn’t finger the soft fabrics of the clothes or look at the teeny-tiny socks. I turned around immediately, as if I’d walked into the wrong place. I don’t tell Eddie this because I’m embarrassed by how easily undone I still am.

  He shrugs. “So, we’ll send her something later.”

  “Maybe a supply of nicotine patches,” I mutter. I think of Trina after her welcome home party, slinging her leg over her smarmy boyfriend’s motorcycle, then lighting up a cigarette.

  “Hey, now.” Eddie gives me an extra squeeze.

  I hate it when he does that. As if I’m behaving like a child who needs correcting. Makes me want to jab him in the ribs. That would be mature. I yank my dress over my head.

  “You look nice,” Eddie says as I struggle with the zipper up the back. He reaches out and zips it for me. “Great color on you.”

  I glance at myself in the mirror. “I look like a giant hot dog.”

  “I think you look good.”

  I should say thanks, of course, but I’ve had enough of his studied kindness for one morning. I grab my shoes and leave the room.

  The steps up to my grandmother’s house are crisscrossed with pink and yellow crepe paper. The ends of the banisters are festooned with huge bouquets of helium balloons and big floppy bows. Over the green door hangs a banner proclaiming “Baby Shower Here!” complete with goofy long-legged storks in delivery-man hats, wobbly ducklings, and large-eyed kittens romping through Easter-egg-colored grass. I stand on the sidewalk, looking up at the hideous decor, and have the strong urge to rip it all apart, leaving the street strewn with pastel destruction. I take a breath and march up the steps, determined to sit through at least an hour of this affair before making my excuses to get the hell out of here.

  Inside, I smell sugar cookies and fruit punch, deviled eggs and ham. The soft comfort food of impending motherhood. Why not a spit-roasted suckling pig with baby corn? Have these people no sense of humor? From the living room, I hear the squeal of women’s voices cooing over rubber nipples and car seats. As I peek in on the scene of my slavering aunts and cousins gathered around Trina in full bloom, I wish that I had the technical knowledge to construct a bomb out of a Diaper Genie, Enfamil, and tiny plush toys. I imagine the whole place exploding into one giant poof of confectioner’s sugar and me escaping through an open window, shimmying down the drain-pipe to freedom.

  Which would be a great idea. Because watching Trina perched on the sofa lapping up the bounty of attention and loot, I want nothing more than to punch her as hard as I can in the center of her giant pregnant belly. How could she possibly deserve this more than I do? Before I can find the answer to that question, my cousin Sophie spots me lingering in the doorway.

  I know my face is twisted into some horrible grin, the look of a banshee trying to pass as a woman in the daylight hours. I’m sure I’m drained of color, and my knuckles have likely grown white from gripping a box of cookies I bought. Sophie slips away from the group and quietly comes to me while Trina rips into another pink-paper-covered box. I shove the cookies toward Sophie to avoid some cloying hug and kiss, but she pushes it out of the way and drapes her arms around my shoulders.

  I stand there like the Tin Man as she pats me and coos, “Lemon! How are you?” in a voice way too high for an adult. “We’re so glad you’re here.” And then, nightmare of all nightmares, she clutches my hand in hers, turns around, and announces, “Hey, everybody! Look who made it!”

  Christ, Lord Almighty, have mercy on my soul and kill me now, I silently beg. Strike me dead with a giant lightning bolt as punishment for all my sins. As if I’d ever be so lucky. My aunts and cousins are on their feet in a nanosecond, surrounding me. “How are you?” Pats and squeezes. “Feeling okay?” My hands are held, my arms are swung. I’m nearly spun around like a little doll. “You look great!”

  And for some reason, I answer them as if I’ve only been away on a fabulous vacation to the Bahamas. “I’m great! Just fine! Feel good! Glad to be here! Nice to see you.” Because, really, what the hell else can I say?

  “How about something to eat?” As always, my grandmother rescues me with food. She cuts through the wall of love by handing me a plate filled with thick slices of ham, a glob of potato salad, two deviled eggs, and several cookies in the shapes of rattles and bears. My aunts, always reverent at the sight of sustenance, quickly leave me and move en masse to sit at Trina’s puffy feet again.

  “Come over here by me,” Grandma says, and I obediently follow her because I’m completely shell-shocked and would walk in front of a train at the moment if she told me to.

  A cheer goes up as Trina unveils a fourteen-in-one play center for the tot, and I think of handy things nearby on which I could impale myself. The fireplace poker. Obvious choice. The plastic serrated knife on the edge of my paper plate. If I tried hard enough. Or if I get really desperate, the sparkly purple ballpoint pen my cousin Angela uses to record the gifts in a special flowered book called “Baby’s First…”

  Aunt Mary gets to me first. She wrenches herself between Grandma and me. I realize then that the overdose of baby-related paraphernalia must’ve softened my brain, because normally, I wouldn’t let any of my aunts corner me like this.

  Mary grabs me by the forearm; her talons gouge into my skin. “You know this is God’s way,” she says quietly to me while Trina holds up an itty-bitty crocheted hat in the shape of an eggplant. And I wonder, What’s God’s way? This shower? All these stupid shades of pink? Women sitting around blathering over tiny socks?

  “I highly doubt any of this is divinely inspired,” I say dryly.

  Mary looks at me straight and steady with her most Catholic stare. “Because that baby would have been deformed,” she informs me. “God was sparing you a lifetime of heartache.”

  Oh, I get it now. My baby. The one I thought I had so carelessly lost. Turns out God was being nice. Before I can respond, Aunt Gladys has positioned herself on the other side of me. “Lots of women lose them,” she tells me in a whisper. Trina has two little booties on her fingers and makes them dance the cancan. Everyone twitters with delight at her clever antics.

  “And some women can’t even get pregnant,” Mary adds.

  “That’s right,” Gladys says. “Uncle Stan works with a woman whose granddaughter had to inject horse hormones into her tushy every night for weeks, then have her husband’s you-know-what injected into her with a syringe. And it still didn’t work. Poor thing.”

  Both my aunts shake their heads.

  “They’re going to adopt,” Gladys tells me. Then she lowe
rs her voice and says in a sorrowful tone, as if she’s confiding a sad secret like cancer, “From China.”

  I glance at my grandmother, hoping she’ll rescue me again, but she’s completely engrossed in watching my cousin Angela demonstrate for Trina how to connect a breast pump to maximize milk production. “You are breast-feeding, aren’t you?” Angela asks.

  Trina shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “Chuck thinks it’s disgusting.”

  A general murmur of disapproval rattles through the crowd, but Trina seems oblivious as she rips into the next gift. I’m amazed. How can she be so calm? I would have been livid had my family so publicly objected to my plans.

  When I look back at my plate, Aunt Joy kneels at my feet, and Adele has wedged herself behind me. This is too much. All four of them at once? Haven’t I gone through enough the past few weeks? Maybe this is God’s way. Maybe it’s some horrible punishment for all my transgressions in life. Perhaps the nuns at my elementary school were right all along, and this is the day I’m paying for all those years of ditching mass and never confessing any of my immoral acts.

  “Now, Lemon,” Adele says, her cold hands resting on my shoulders. “My neighbor Loretta’s daughter lost her first one, too.”

  I’m completely appalled that she’s telling me this in the middle of a fucking baby shower. I try to show my revulsion as clearly as I can. I twist my face into a mask of horror, but she takes no notice and plows ahead, my other three aunts nodding their encouragement for her to yammer on about some other woman’s misfortune, as if somehow that will make mine less dire.

  “She walked around for eight weeks, thinking she was perfectly pregnant,” Adele says. “I’d even given her some of Beth’s old maternity clothes. But when she went to the doctor for her first sonogram”—and here she pauses for effect—“there was no heartbeat.”