Fruit of the Month

by Abby Frucht

  “I’m supposed to sit on the handlebars, right?” says Cynthia.

  The two boys nod and gawk at her as if she were naked.

  “No thanks,” says Cynthia. “I’ll pass. Where am I, anyway?”

  “Ladue,” says one of the boys. “Fortunoff’s right down the street. Over that way.” He points with his dirty hand and then nudges the other boy, who after a second climbs down from the cycle to offer her his seat. She accepts, shrugging, and wraps her arms around the driver.

  “You going to Fortunoff’s?” he asks, then guns the motor and starts off before she answers him. The sad boy stands in the center of the road, on an island of grass, and watches them go. They turn down an avenue overhung with plane trees and follow it to a parking lot. In the center of the lot is the department store lit with yellow bulbs, and only at this moment does Cynthia realize that dusk has fallen and that the air is chilly. As the boy slows the cycle for a turn, she hops from the seat and feels in her pockets for change. In Fortunoff’s she telephones Richard, who sounds far away.

  “I hitched a ride to Fortunoff’s,” she tells him. “Now I’m stuck.”

  “In Ladue!” says Richard. “What are you doing there?”

  “Just looking. Shopping around. Only I’m broke.”

  “I’ll buy you whatever you want,” Richard says when he arrives. He is wearing his white shirt and white slacks and white socks and white shoes, the same outfit he was wearing when Cynthia first met him, in the supermarket around the corner from her building. Its spotlessness astounded her then and astounds her now, so that she finds herself looking for stains, around the collar and the waistband, wherever a stain might escape notice, only there aren’t any.

  “I don’t want anything,” she says.

  Finally Richard selects a one-cup porcelain drip coffee maker and several imported dish towels, elegant but practical. He seems proud of his purchase but subdued, as if something is troubling him. In the car he says, “I didn’t know you hitched. You shouldn’t. It’s dangerous and stupid.”

  “It wasn’t dangerous,” says Cynthia. “I got a ride with a nun. I felt like driving around. Now I’m starving.”

  “Okay. Dinner. Where to?”

  They end up in a crepe place with candles on the tables. The waitresses wear blue and white checked aprons over miniskirts.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a skirt,” says Richard. “I thought girls were supposed to be wearing skirts again.”

  “I have chicken legs,” Cynthia tells him.

  “Nonsense. I bet they’re beautiful.” Richard reaches across the table and takes hold of one of Cynthia’s wrists and turns it over in his palm and strokes with his free hand the tracery of blue veins on the soft underside of her arm. Cynthia has never mentioned to him that her arms are a remarkably sensitive part of her body and that the merest touch is pleasurable. She leans back and half closes her eyes. After a minute she extends the other arm and asks Richard to please stroke that one too. His expression changes when she says this, becoming dead serious, and he fixes on her that steady, wicked manly gaze that is popular in movies. When the waitress brings the crepes, he spears a morsel with his fork and offers it wordlessly. Cynthia takes the food into her mouth. It seems that everyone in the restaurant is watching. In the heady, winy silence, Cynthia makes up a story about the nun who drove her to Fortunoff’s. The nun was driving a tiny red convertible, she explains to Richard. In the passenger seat was a sheep dog that Cynthia had to take on her lap. The nun’s headdress flew out behind them as they sped between the rows of plane trees, and droplets of the sheep dog’s spittle made a fine warm rain on Cynthia’s face.

  After dinner, in the car, Richard presses his face against her neck and chest and begins whispering things. Cynthia is chilly and her nipples are erect; Richard bites them through the grainy cloth of her T-shirt. The parking lot is dark all around but sometimes cars pull in and out.

  “Not here” Cynthia finally says, barely able to hear herself above the storm of Richard’s breathing. “This is a parking lot. I’m not… I can’t…”

  Richard pulls himself away and starts the car and drives home with frenzied impatient maneuvers that seem designed to scare the other drivers off the road. He leads her up the sidewalk to the door of his apartment, where for a minute it seems he has misplaced his key. In the living room they press against one another and sway back and forth on their feet.

  “Let me take off your shirt,” Richard says.

  He guides her ahead of him into the bedroom. In the bedroom is a door with a window in it.

  “What is this?” asks Cynthia. “Where does it go?”

  She opens the door and steps through it into the sudden cool of the night air.

  “Stop!” says Richard.

  But she ducks away and hurries home without him, through an alley and past the bakery where in the window the cakes are lit like planets.

  Several days later, crossing an intersection just north of the cleaners where she works, Cynthia’s attention is caught by the whine of tires and the appearance of a tiny red convertible that jumps a red light and continues up the hill in fitful jerks as if its clutch has disengaged. Sitting inside, close together like lovers on an outing, are a nun and a large white curly-haired dog with its tongue hanging out. Cynthia can see, in the rear-view mirror, that the nun is singing crazily along with the radio and that the sheep dog appears to be smiling.

  Cynthia is transfixed.

  At any rate she can find no other word for it, for this awful heightened sensibility into which she feels she has ascended, like a plane through clouds into thin air. She is just coming home from the cleaners, two rooms in a low-ceilinged building smelling of steam and lint and plastic wrapping; all day she ran clothes through a press and then for an hour searched the drawer of stray buttons for one missing from a lady’s coat. Then she sewed it back on, with matching thread, a yellow button with yellow thread, while the lady tapped a nickel on the Formica top of the counter. Cynthia’s feet ached and her hair grew limp; she kept thinking how it wouldn’t hold a curl. Also of Richard. She would see him tonight, of course, and the next night and the next, and each night would be different from the last although somehow similar, or similar but somehow different. Last night he had revealed to her the notion of the sort of woman with whom he might like to spend the rest of his life; the woman, he confessed, need not be of any particular intelligence or beauty or talent or accomplishment. In fact the idea of a homely woman has begun to appeal to him, someone humble and simple and full of need. He dreams of a buck-toothed girl of impoverished background, dressed in a stiff-collared blouse and a skirt whose zipper jams whenever he undresses her, whose stockings are torn, who mends them with nail polish, who under her clothing is supple and urgent and surprisingly athletic.

  Cynthia didn’t know what to say to this or if she should even think about saying anything. This was not the first time that Richard had conjured a girl for himself, an unlikely girl who was, in various ways, the precise opposite of Cynthia herself. One had a small child and lots of money, one played flute in a symphony, one was Chinese and spoke with a lilt. Each he described with what seemed like true adoration as his thin face grew paler and shadowed, taking on the look of a man stranded on an island.

  “I’ve named her,” he said. “Paulette. I need her.”

  He turned back to his ice crusher, pressing a button. There was a noise like a traffic accident and then silence. He scooped the crushed ice into goblets whose rims had been frosted with salt. Margaritas. A Mexican meal. He was wearing a sombrero. Cynthia thought to herself how naive he was, and how his naivete made him innocent, and how his innocence entertained her. She too had dressed up for the night, in velveteen trousers and a transparent blouse; underneath it her nipples made blonde shadows. Richard kept trying not to look at them. He plucked a hard red pepper from a bunch of chilis hanging from the ceiling, causing the bunch to shudder. A moth flew out from among the chilis. Then another
and another. They were graceful and discreet as they flitted to the ceiling and then floated back down, disappearing once again among the red black hollows.

  Richard didn’t notice them. He was busy with the chili, crushing it over a stew. Cynthia tapped the bunch of peppers with her fingernail. Out flew more moths. She tapped harder. They whirled about her.

  “Look at this, Richard,” she said.

  “Just a second.”

  But when he turned to look, the moths had vanished.

  “Look,” Cynthia repeated. It was warm in the kitchen; she unbuttoned the top of her blouse. Misunderstanding, Richard stumbled toward her with his arms outstretched.

  “Later,” said Cynthia. “Not when I’m hungry.” She pushed him away, into the chilis, which fell clattering to the floor. A cloud of white moths rose at once, obscuring them from one another.

  Now the nun in the sports car has vanished, leaving behind a ribbon of sunlight on a hillside empty of traffic. Cynthia still sees vividly the redness of the car and the black and whiteness of the nun and the pinkness of the dog’s tongue. She is thinking that the lies she tells Richard always come true, and that this has to do with God, or that it has to do with love.

  On a rainy day, at five o’clock, Richard surprises her by showing up at the cleaners in his rain coat, ready to accompany her home.

  “A walk in the rain…” he says, leaning with his elbow on the counter. He looks dreamy in his slick coat with the upturned collar, staring at Cynthia, spinning his umbrella while he waits. They take the road up the hill past the convent, where the rain beads up among the needles of the evergreens and cleanses the sidewalks and darkens the slatted wood benches. Beneath the benches, where the ground is drier, pigeons gather in little conversational groups.

  “Rats with wings,” says Richard.

  “I’ve heard that before,” says Cynthia, “but I’ve never agreed with it. I like pigeons.”

  “They have noble heads,” says Richard. “I know what you mean. And the sounds they make.”

  “Cooing.”

  “Yes. And the colors.”

  “Purple and blue,” says Cynthia. “Except for the black and white ones.”

  “And the reddish ones.”

  “Right,” says Cynthia. She takes hold of his sleeve and they continue silently, because the purr of the rain on his umbrella seems to command silence. Walking beneath it, Cynthia feels they have entered a circle that is their life together. Richard’s shined shoes creak as they go, and Cynthia’s pink sneakers squelch and gurgle like something drowning. At the door to her apartment, she invites him inside, where he has never been. Laundry lies scattered throughout, the dirty mixed with the clean, and she tells him how she has to pick through it every morning, walking from room to room, looking for something to wear. Along the way, she admits, she clears the dishes and cups she finds sitting on the arms of chairs, sometimes swallowing the last muddy dregs of coffee before stacking the cups in the sink.

  “I’m a mess,” she exclaims. “A pig.”

  “I know that,” says Richard. “Let’s make love.”

  They begin to undress one another, surprised to find rain drops under their collars. Cynthia traces with her tongue the path of a raindrop along the flat white plane of his sternum, between the ribs. She is moved suddenly by the very bodiness of his body, the bones palpable under the skin, the skin itself, the hairs on its surface, the pores she can see if she gets close. This is what she loves—the surfaces of things, the purity of the surface of a man’s body.

  “Wait,” she says, looking past his shoulder at the window. “There’s a nun in a treetop, waving.”

  “Of course there is,” says Richard. He lowers her onto the laundry on top of her bed, kissing her eyes shut before she has a chance to wave back.

  The Habit of Friendship

  Carla was one of those fat women whose sloppy children and houses attracted stray cats and nose colds along with other things in need of random resting places—wrong numbers, for instance, and overdue library books that no one recalled having read. She had a lot of friends, and I was one of them. My family moved around a lot in those days. My husband was in construction; he followed the jobs, and I followed him. I waitressed, or worked in shops, and had a small daughter to care for. My friendships with other women typically had about them a tentativeness common among the friendships of transients; we all took care not to like each other too much. But Carla’s big tented figure seemed to vibrate with a generous and enfolding spirit. She wore giant striped-framed eyeglasses which actually looked, in a crazy way, nice on her, and her beautiful dimpled hands were of the tapered variety common in old-fashioned portraiture. But she was not old-fashioned. She was a lot like me, in the things that mattered—atheistic, plenty of love in the family, financial problems. Before I met her, somebody described her as the girl with the striped glasses, and I knew just who they were talking about, recalling her laughter I’d heard once in a bar, mirthful and genuine, a fat woman’s laughter.

  Her house was fat too, by which I mean it seemed to belong to a fat person. All the chair cushions always half on and half off, and the shawls thrown over the chair backs not quite hiding the tatty spots, and the runners askew on the wood floors. A hairbrush sat on the arm of a couch, and a bowl on the end table, Cheerios floating in milk, the spoon on the floor in the kitchen. The dolls wore real neckties. The children themselves were grass-stained and always pestering her and losing their shoes, but Carla just went along. She steered them toward the television, on constantly. That I never understood. My own house was clean, quiet, and orderly the way I still like it, and Carla’s disorder astonished me. Once I saw her drop something and not pick it up. There was a room, an enclosed porch really, sliding off its foundation, that was filled with spider plants. She was picking the dead leaves out of the pots and weeding and then aerating the soil, loosening the roots with the tips of her fingers. A whole section of spider plant fell to the floor—soil, roots, weeds, leaves, and all. The weeds in particular fascinated me. My own potted plants sprouted delicate clovers and occasional stems of grass, while Carla’s weeds were of a monstrous variety not even to be found outdoors. Their thick milky stems sported hirsute leaves of all colors, scarred with insect galls and opaque larval sacs. Even her soil was laced with a brilliant fungus. We both stared at the clump, and Carla prodded the fungus with a bare toe, but let it lie and went on chatting. Probably we were sharing our complaints about men; there weren’t any good ones in town. Not that we minded personally, but we sympathized with anyone who did.

  “They’re all lumps,” Carla said, and we went on describing a few and their various lumpish characteristics. The lumpiest of all was named Christopher Curtis—he was the one we joked about. Christopher affected a beatnik style but was too bald and desperate to carry it off. Actually he should have given up a long time ago but he was hanging on, and everyone watched in fascination as he courted local college women and took them to bed, after which they ran away from him. I worked in a restaurant he frequented and overheard a couple of his hip protestations, It was rumored that the college planned one day to demolish his house and build a parking lot. That was what Carla and I ended up talking about, the parking lot, and how ugly it would be on a residential street. Then one of the children screamed, and Carla yelled, “What is it?” with her arms still upraised among the spider plants. Oh, she was fat. She wore a long skirt with an uneven hem, and I could see that her ankles did not look like ankles at all. I never knew, at any given time, if she was pregnant or not. When she left the room, I picked up the watering can, and watering the ceiling plants indulged in the uncomplicated flexibility of my body. Then I gathered up the clump of spider plant, but at the sound of Carla’s footsteps I put it back on the floor, because to pick up something at Carla’s was like dropping it in mine.

  Late one night Carla knocked on my window scaring the hell out of me with her thump-thumping. It was just like Carla to knock on a window instead of a door, but I d
idn’t know that and I screamed so loud David ran down from the bedroom to rescue me. Later on I said, “Why didn’t she just climb right in instead of knocking?” David said she wouldn’t make it through the window. Poor Carla. It was my music box she wanted, a Greek thing my daughter liked to listen to, called a Kouvalias, with brightly painted wood balls affixed on springs around a central globe, so when the globe spun, the balls turned and undulated. Carla’s youngest children, who loved the Kouvalias, had measles and weren’t sleeping. She hoped it might comfort them. Could she borrow it?

  I found it in its spot on the mantelpiece and handed it over. The Kouvalias played Never on Sunday, a strange song for a child’s toy, to be sure, but cheerful and mischievous. The song is sung by whores; Sunday is their day off. Carla and I used to joke about this. Sunday was her day on, she said, she and her husband always had the greatest time on Sunday mornings. She used to sing along, as the notes sounded, with a voice as fat as the rest of her, and then go on to gloat about her husband. He was a public defender most eloquent in bed. Equal Justice for All, was how Carla described it. That night she wound the box up as she left, through the door, and sang for the benefit of the neighborhood. I laughed, and switched on the porch light, but I was distressed, as she walked off, to hear the music fade. Forever, I thought, knowing Carla. David and I took exacting care of our belongings, and when I’d lifted the Kouvalias from its spot there was not a ring of dust to show where it had stood.

  Soon thereafter, my husband found work in another state and we made plans to move again. Our plans consisted of nothing more than a change-of-address at the post office, a week of meals designed to make use of all leftovers, and the assumption of a psychological limbo by which we gently disengaged ourselves from what had come to be home. Night by night, David washed and rinsed the day’s dishes, pots, and pans, while I dried them, wrapped them in newspaper, and stacked them in a carton in a corner of our kitchen. We packed our clothing that way also, washload by washload, and our albums as well, saving for last those we played most often. This way, the house emptied; it seems to me now that this gentle, determined system of sorting and packing, reenacted so many times, has formed the rhythm by which David and I have lived.