by Abby Frucht
June said she knew a place where we could get the strawberries free. I said, “Illegally, you mean?” and she said, “Well, yes.” If we took the freeway east a couple of miles and then turned off on a dirt road we would come to the edge of a commercial farm surrounded by barbed wire rolled up the way they do it during a war, but further on, just where the dirt road ended near a creek, there was a tree you could climb. By climbing this tree and shimmying out along one of its branches you could scale the barbed wire, dropping down just on the other side of it into the strawberry fields. June wore her hair very long at the time, blonde and fine with a touch of a ripple, like the stuff you peel off corn ears. Even now, if I am shucking corn, I think of this. How I looked up from the strawberry patch, from my knees where I had landed, and saw June scaling the barbed wire after me, her long bare legs straddling the tree branch, her hair covering her face. It was a hot afternoon, and the scent of greenery was sharp in the air, and I have never forgotten it. We squatted together between the steaming furrows of earth, pinching the berries and eating some. “If they don’t come off at once in your hand,” June said, “leave them on the stems to ripen for next time.”
We dropped the berries into a book satchel she was wearing on a strap over her shoulder, and after a while the khaki canvas, bulging with fruit, was stained pink. Our fingers were pink, and our knees, and the edges of our mouths. In the distance, across the shimmering acres of strawberry leaves, like water in the sun, we could make out the wide-brimmed hats of the legitimate berry pickers, and beyond them the low white building where the bushels were weighed and paid for, where the cars were parked. Children played and shouted along the perimeter of the farm, and people gathered on the hoods of their cars to talk and sunbathe. We stayed low and quiet, hoping we wouldn’t be seen.
I tired quickly. My legs and lower back ached, and my neck and arms stiffened. I blamed my fatigue on the heat and on my period, which had started that morning. I felt heavy and bloated and entirely out of whack. My head hurt. Finally I lay back on my elbows and told June to go right on picking without me; I was perfectly happy simply to be there. I think I fell asleep. Time passed. The sun got low. The crowd thinned out. When I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was a ladybug that had landed on my stomach. It was opening and closing its small spotted wings in a rhythmic way. One two. One two. I thought of the nursery rhyme, and then immediately of Jack, who would be waiting for me, probably standing near an open window with a tall glass of ice water, sipping and watching the road. His lips would be cool, and his eyes troubled. He keeps his anger inside, in what I’ve begun to call hot storage, and allows it to surface only in the face of a more worldly injustice. By then it has boiled and sweetened and grown thick. A few days after I went strawberry picking he threw our hairbrush at Ronald Reagan, who was president at the time. Reagan was on the news. He was saying he supported the E and the R but not the A of the Equal Rights Amendment, and Jack got mad and threw our brush at the television screen, breaking it. The brush, I mean. I reattached the handle with duct tape, and we still use it.
When the ladybug had flown off, I sat up and saw June straddling the branch again and munching on a strawberry. She grinned down at me. I was still exhausted and my only inclination was to lie back down and sleep some more, but I pulled myself up, and let June pull me up into the tree. She had scratched her leg on the barbed wire; there was a thin trickle of blood. We made our way across the tree and back down to the pickup. June turned the radio on. The song was See You in September. June leaned over and took my head in her hands and kissed me, first on the eyes, then full on the mouth. I was surprised. I responded. Then she said, “There, I’ve been wanting to do that,” and she drove me home.
I told Jack about this later, over our daiquiris. He was on his third, but I was still toying with my first, because I still felt weak and knew if I drank much more I would get sick. Also, I knew I would be driving out to Norfolk early the next morning to go sailing with June on her brother’s boat. Her brother was wealthy and out of town, I told Jack that June’s brother’s boat was small, big enough only for two. I considered this to be a white lie. I also told him about the kiss, saying how shocked I had been. Jack was entirely silent. He stirred his drink, and watched the moths that were beating against the light bulb, and lifted, by arching his foot, a tennis ball that had rolled out from under his chair. That tennis ball has always been a mystery; neither one of us plays and we’ve never figured out how it got there. He straightened his leg with the ball wedged in the arch of his foot, then spread his toes apart and let it fall—over and over until it bounced out of reach. Then he put his drink down on the cement, but gently, so there wasn’t a sound, and went inside. I followed, the screen door banging behind me. He filled a teacup with strawberries, sprinkled it with sugar, and carried it upstairs. He put the teacup on the night table. I began to undress him and we showered. Jack said, “Your fingers are pink.” That was all he said. We toweled ourselves dry and lay down in bed, our arms slung across each other’s necks. I watched him sleep, as June had watched me. Jack has remained entirely silent in fact, about all of this, for years.
The drive out to Norfolk was long and agitating, twenty-five miles on the highway stuck behind some drunken slob in a Winnebago. He had opened the back door and stood with one foot on the fender, in a stained T-shirt and shorts, guzzling beer, then tossing the empty cans out onto the highway. All this at fifty-five miles per hour. The beer cans soared crazily in the hot morning light, then veered and bounced off on the shoulder abreast of my car. I was afraid to pass him—what if he fell off?—and I never did get close enough to read the license plate. I slowed to forty, until the Winnebago was a speck in the distance, then sped up till I was close enough to have to slow down again. I hated that man. Eventually I lost him, thank god, and got on my way, but the Hampton Bridge was jammed with traffic, everybody headed for the beach. So it was nearly ten o’clock when I pulled into Norfolk, along a road that skirted the harbor, past the convention center and into the slums where June lived. I had never been there before, and I’ll tell you right now that I never went back. The narrow street was pocked with craters. June’s building was broad and tall, wood frame with row upon row of small windows, some of them broken, the ancient panes warped. I parked across the street, in a lot strewn with rubbish and whiskey bottles, behind a church that looked fire bombed. June’s truck was there. I hurried across in my clogs and running shorts. I felt like a child in a war zone. The door was locked. A second door was also locked, so I sat down on the hot, gritty stoop and waited to be let in. In the ten minutes that passed I thought about getting back into my car and driving home, but the harbor, several blocks up on the other side of the road, was just visible, dotted with sails. Besides, I was hungry. June had promised me breakfast. Strawberry pancakes and coffee, she’d said. Finally a man with a cat in his arms came shuffling up the steps and pulled out a key.
Inside was a wide hallway and three sets of steps, each more dilapidated than the last. I chose the steps with the working light bulb. June lived on the third floor, down a hall lined with green doors and covered with old gray linoleum. The linoleum had buckled, and as I walked along, it made obscene noises under my feet. I wondered how June could live in such a place. I hadn’t known her very long, having met her through a friend, and that she lived in such a seedy spot excited me. Then, when I knocked and there was no response, I thought perhaps she had mistakenly given me the wrong address, the address of a friend or relative she had been thinking of. I jiggled the door knob. It turned, and the door opened but was blocked after several inches by a chain bolt. I peered inside. The room was in disarray. Books everywhere, and clothes, and a folding table stacked with cardboard boxes, and underneath the table a heap of shoes, including what looked like a snow-shoe. There was the sickening odor of propane gas, and another of what I guessed was kitty litter that hadn’t been changed. The gas worried me. I began to knock more vigorously, and even took off my clog and started
banging on the door with the wooden sole. Someone in the apartment across the hall opened his door and looked out.
“Are you one of June’s friends?” he said. His tone was vaguely sarcastic.
“I guess so,” I said.
“She should be out in a minute,” he said. “Just keep banging.”
At last the chain was unhitched, and there was June, wrapped in a blanket, her beautiful hair fanning over her shoulders. Her face was bleary with sleep but her eyes were wide open. She seemed surprised to see me, as if she had never asked me to come—really, as if she had never seen me before in her life.
“Come in,” she said.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, realizing at once how ridiculous that was. I followed her in, and she stood in the center of the messy room and stared around at the clutter as if looking for someplace to put me. She cleared some books from a chair and sat down in it herself. A door clicked open from a room in the back. “Just a minute,” June called, and the door clicked shut. She yawned, and pulled a bare arm out from under the blanket, and found a cigarette on the table and lit it. It was the first time I had seen her with a cigarette. Her hand, I noticed, was perfectly steady. She stared at me and let out a stream of smoke.
“I think I need to get a little more sleep,” she began. “I was up all night. Don’t go. There’s food …” She gestured toward the kitchen. “I’ll be up in a while. Not long. I still want to go sailing.”
“So do I,” I lied. I didn’t know if I was angry or hurt or both. Anyway I tried not to show it. She smiled at me weakly and left. For a while I examined the room but there was too much to look at, piles of books and papers, odds and ends, and on the top shelf of the bookcase, sitting all in a row and out of my reach, a bunch of old stuffed animals. On the walls were some charcoal drawings of June, but the likenesses weren’t that good and the shading was amateurish. I had been wrong about the kitty litter. There was a dog mess, on a sheaf of newspaper spread out in one corner of the kitchen. It was a small dog. A Pekinese. I found her asleep in a bread basket on a low shelf of the open cupboard. I lifted her up and carried her over to the window and we stood there and looked out at the back of a building exactly like the one we were in. Staring across at its windows, I expected to see the two of us looking back at ourselves. I held the dog close to my breast, like an infant. She pressed her nose against the pane and left a small moist dot on the glass. The window, I saw, was covered with these spots. After a while she started squirming and I lowered her back into her basket.
I opened the refrigerator. There were two ceramic bowls piled high with strawberries, and a glass jar filled with brown water. I unscrewed the lid and sniffed, apprehensive about what I might find. Spiced tea. I poured myself a glass and sat on the floor in the main room with a bowl of strawberries cradled in my lap, pinching the tops off and popping the berries into my mouth one after another. I dropped the green leafy tops back into the bowl. I can’t tell you how lonely I felt. I was sitting in a square of sunlight, and when it shifted I inched along with it. Someone was moaning at the back of the house, and gasping. It was impossible to know whether the person who was moaning was the same one who was gasping. Then the telephone rang. It was right at my feet but I didn’t pick it up. I let it ring. It rang twelve times. The gasping and moaning continued. My mouth began to sting, from the cold tartness of the berries, but I kept on eating. I held each berry whole in my mouth, sucking the juices out, then pressing it up against the roof of my mouth and crushing it under my tongue. My stomach made wet sloshing noises like a washing machine. I picked up the phone and dialed home, wanting suddenly more than anything to talk with Jack, to tell him what a lousy time I was having and that I wished I hadn’t come and that I hoped he would forgive me.
“Forgive you for what?” Jack said.
I didn’t know how to respond to that. I sat there in silence. The moaning had ceased but the dog was whimpering. Somehow I had shut the cupboard door and locked her inside. I got up, carrying the phone, and went into the kitchen to let her out. With my free hand I stroked the dog’s head, tracing the shape of her broad bony skull with my fingers.
“What’s that?” said Jack.
“A dog,” I said.
“What do you have in your mouth?”
“A strawberry.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Tonight. It’s a long drive for nothing.”
“Mmmm,” Jack said. He would be pressing his lips together, turning them under and holding them shut with his teeth. How familiar he was. He is a gentle man; I have never known another man who does that with his teeth.
“I’ll have to be going,” I said. “This is costing June a lot of money.”
“Mmmm,” Jack said. He hung up first. He always guesses when I am waiting for him to hang up, and he never makes me wait too long.
June’s lover was tall and olive-skinned and had a mustache almost as thick as a man’s. She might have taken some pills. She walked with a swagger, in a bleached demin jacket and jeans and square-toed boots, and she had a mole on her face, in precisely the spot where Marilyn Monroe had one. The effect was freakish. Her name was Faye. I thought to myself, Swarthy Faye. Faye the Pirate. Captain Faye and the Sharks. I saw her as the lead singer in a rock band, dressed in cloak and dagger on a darkened stage in a low-ceilinged room, breathing a song. Her voice would be deep and airy like the sound a bottle makes when you blow into it. I can’t remember her actual voice. I don’t know that I heard it even once. She stayed close to June, like a body guard, and gave her looks fraught with meaning that I could not decipher.
June seemed confused. I think she had expected me to leave while they were still in bed, at the same time hoping I would stay. I was determined to go sailing. Otherwise, I told myself, why would I have come? She still looked tired, and she had wrapped her hair in a madras scarf so you couldn’t see it. She was smoking again. Faye kept the cigarettes in the breast pocket of her jacket, and every time June wanted a smoke she had to reach in and get one.
“You had a telephone call,” I said, in voice that was too cheerful. I worked as a receptionist at a hotel in town—that was my receptionist voice.
“Who was it?” asked June, startled.
“No one,” I said. “I mean I didn’t answer it.”
“Thank god,” June said. Faye smiled, barely, and at no one in particular. We drank instant coffee black, because the fake cream was stuck like a rock in the bottom of the jar. June bent a spoon, trying to get it out. We all laughed when she held up the bent spoon, then stopped abruptly when it clattered in the sink. There was no mention of a breakfast more substantial than strawberries and coffee. By then, anyway, it was lunch time, sun streaming through the windows. June’s arms were golden in the sunlight. I was wondering whether, if June and I had been alone, we would have made pancakes. All at once I remembered the time years ago when, as a teenager, I spent my first night with a boy, on a mattress in the closet of an empty house on some church grounds. In the morning we went to the house of a friend, a motherly girl in an apron, who cooked a batch of pancakes and left the kitchen while we ate them. Thinking of this, I couldn’t recall the boy’s name. The sole image I had was of his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down above my face, the forlorn, boyish shape of the bone with the skin stretched whitely over it. I remembered I told him his balls looked like plums, and how shocked he looked when I said it.
The noon hour stretched on. Then June stood up suddenly and announced it was time to go sailing. We walked the few blocks to the harbor, June chatting on and off about how rich her brother was. His boat was moored at a dock crowded with other boats. There were hordes of people, tying and untying ropes, having just come in or else preparing to go out into the bay, and some who just lounged around in bathing suits as if they had no intention of going anywhere. I have never familiarized myself with the mechanics of sailing and sat on the deck, holding my clogs in my lap while June and Faye passed rop
es back and forth and hooked and unhooked things. June disappeared below for a minute, and reappeared with three chilled beers that she passed around. Faye popped the tab off and tossed it right into the water, where it floated. I glanced at June, who shrugged sheepishly, and for a moment there was only the two of us, in the boat that was creaking and bobbing. She made a point of sitting near me while applying some tanning lotion. She had stripped down to her swimsuit. When there was too much lotion left on her hands, she rubbed it into my neck. Her hands were warm. The scent of coconuts rose around us. I didn’t know what to do. Faye stared out at the harbor past a string of boats, drinking her beer very fast. Then, when she was finished, she crushed the can with her boot and threw it with perfect aim into the mouth of a trash can on the dock, disappointing me. June clapped, and Faye came to join her, and they started the motor and we were off.
It was slow going. The harbor was jammed. I was struck by the camaraderie of boaters; there was much waving and shouting back and forth. Every few yards we had to stop and sit still while the hot smell of gasoline seared the air. I cringed each time Faye lit June’s cigarette, half expecting a blast. Faye wouldn’t look at me, but June smiled each time the sun dipped behind a cloud. Suddenly there were clouds, loose black clumps in patches on the hard blue sky, throwing intermittent shadows on the water. You could see, if you looked way into the distance into the bay itself, how the strung sails brightened and then vanished and then brightened again as they traveled through light and darkness.
“Jack would have liked this,” I said.
“You should have brought him along,” said June.
“You should have told me to,” I said. Faye took June’s hand and placed her own long-boned hand on top of it. They nuzzled and sighed.
At the lip of the bay the coast guard stopped us. There was a man with a megaphone. A storm was approaching. Overhead the clouds had clumped and there was thunder far off. The air had grown thick and electric. A few tendrils of hair had escaped from June’s scarf; they glowed like filaments. Goose bumps appeared on our arms, but there was nothing to be frightened of as long as we turned back. I was relieved. The ocean looked crazy. We hadn’t even put up our sails. The city was still in sunlight, but we knew it wouldn’t last. We shared another beer, not bothering to speak above the churn of the motors. Docked, we covered the boat with a tarpaulin and walked home as the rain started falling. I have never seen such large drops of rain, like grapes. June caught some in her mouth, and then Faye took her jacket off and lifted it over our heads. More than once I stepped out of my clog and they waited for me without turning around. We all smelled by the time we got home. Salt and sweat. The apartment was stifling and so dark we were blinded. June sniffed. “I’ve got to change that newspaper,” she said. “Poor Phyllis.” Then she turned to me and touched me very lightly on the wrist. “Faye and I are taking a shower,” she said.