Michelle Fogus
Luscious Orchards
I get the phone on the fourth or fifth ring, trying to wrap a towel, turban-style, around my wet hair.
"Hi. Is this Meredith?"
"Who wants to know?" I say. Not, as you'd probably expect, from any defensive instinct. Call it a whim: the phrase presents itself, it appeals to me, I invoke it.
"This is Willard," the guy says.
"Who?"
He clears his throat. "Willard," he says, a little too insistently for my liking. "Listen, is this Meredith or not?"
"That depends on who you are." I bend over and rub my hair with the towel. But gently. My stylist says that overly ambitious toweling can give you split ends: Which you do not need more of, she assured me. She always says something like that. Something calculated to make me feel detestable. So far, in the past six months, I've been hennaed and cellophaned and touched-up and trimmed and permed; not to mention all those bottles of mega-conditioner, gel, color-sensitive mousse, and restorative shampoo.
"You know, Willard," he says, and unattractive whine creeping into his voice. "From Luscious Orchards."
When I still don't say anything, he adds tentatively, "Willard in strawberries?"
"Willard in strawberries. Sorry, but it's just not ringing a bell. Anyway, Willard, why are you calling exactly?" I have a strange desire to say his name a few more times-work it into the conversation, such as it is: Willardwillardwillard. Like that movie with the rat. Small rat-faced man creeping through strawberry vines . . .
"I was calling to see if you'd like to have dinner." His voice has turned formal, suddenly. Excruciatingly polite. That's what happens when you offend someone's dignity by not remembering them. "I mean, if you're Meredith," he amends, a slight challenge in his voice.
"Maybe I am," I say, trying to sound contemplative-as if I were seriously considering the question of whether or not I am Meredith. I scrunch the phone between my shoulder and ear and carefully massage one of the mega-conditioners through my hair, starting at the roots and working my way out, the way it says on the bottle.
Luscious Orchards I remember. A two-week job last summer, when I was getting desperate for some kind of cash flow. They hired me to work in the "store"- a roadside stand, really, nudged up close to Route 5, where they sold apple cider and flats of strawberries and maple syrup that someone's cousin bottled up in Vermont. It was a pitiful enterprise. All up and down the highway there were better places to buy fruit; places with a larger selection, everything laid out in neat, appealing rows in rustic-looking wood bins, with sweet old people sitting out front in lawn chairs waiting for customers. Luscious Orchards, in comparison, had a dingy, smarmy feel to it. Something to do with the shack where we sold the cider, and with the perpetual dust clouds, owing to the lack of grass out front. And the sign didn't help: a huge wooden thing on top of the "store" with the words "Luscious Orchards" painted in curlicue script, next to a picture of a curvaceous winking woman in a bikini.
(Gus, the owner, pointed her out to me my first day. As if I might have missed her. "That's Sadie," he said. "My wife.")
"Well, I'm a little surprised you don't remember me," Willard says, his voice smooth as butter now. Suggestive.
I bite at my thumbnail, worried I may have shared intimate moments with someone named Willard and then forgotten. But no.
"And why is that?" I ask. And tuck my thumb inside my fist to keep myself from doing any more damage to that nail. Betsy, the hairstylist, is always after me about getting a manicure. So far I've been able to fend her off; but my case will be weakened if she sees I've been biting at my nails. As it is, I have to remember to trim my cuticles just before I go in every month; because the truth is they do get ragged and I walk around like that, shameless, my unattractive hands in full view.
Old Willard clears his throat again. This isn't going well for him. I think he's beginning to lose heart.
"We once had a very, uhm, engaging conversation. About pesticides? As I remember, you argued the position that . . ."
"Oh yes. Of course. You're that Willard." It all comes back: a singularly unattractive man, son of Gus's Vermont cousin. Heir apparent to the maple syrup dynasty.
"I'd love to have dinner with you. Say, Saturday at eight? Why don't we meet at that nice little restaurant near Luscious Orchards-the Candlelight? OK. Nice talking to you, Willard."
*
By way of explanation: I am not desperate. But I have a strong streak of perversity, and I nurture it.
I mean that I'm one of those people who are drawn to small cruelties, evidence that the world's a dismal place: three-legged dogs, for instance, interest me. And televangelists wh lay hands on the cancer-stricken and command them to heal in the name of Jesus. Lepers. Patriots. Poets.
Or the idea of a retirement village at night: all those identical wood-grain nightstands, each with a water glass, in each glass a set of false teeth.
And besides-I have to admit it: I'm hoping for something from Willard. Call me an optimist, a Pollyanna, a pie-in-the-skyer, what-have-you. But you just never know where you might find love.
*
Love. There's a perversity for you: something to live for, die for, kill for. Something we do to friends and chicken tandoori and the dead, without linguistic distinction. As if a love is a love is a love.
Oh, I'm as guilty as anyone. I'd tell you how I love dead people (you, Gertrude, and Nabokov, Virginia Woolf) and a certain particular shade of sea-green and my sisters. I'd say it all in the same breath, and you'd accept it.
That's what appeals to me about it. About love. That particular perversity: that we have no definitive definition of it, we make no distinctions.
It gives you a certain latitude, is what I'm trying to say.
*
Try to understand. If his name were Will, or even Willy, I would not have made a date.
*
Gus was a liberal user of pesticides. Here in this lovely valley, nestled (and that's the word) in the many-bosomed, maternal roundnesses of the Berkshires, he would hire a man to come and spray all the trees and vines with a huge penile-shaped contraption. The chemical mist hung in the orchards for a day or two. You could see it. You could smell it. You could taste it, even: inhaled, it made its way into the delicately porous membranes of your mouth and left its deathtasting tang on those specialized tastebuds whose function it is to discern the bitter. (And such a function! Oh, I would like to be one of those tastebuds.)
The other vendors on Route 5 took to putting large signs next to their produce: ORGANICALLY GROWN. Gus liked to point out that "organically grown" equated with "worm-infested," to his mind.
We washed our fruit under the water spigot before we ate it. Willard and I and the guy in apples and Gus himself, and Sadie, the wife/model. I washed a handful of strawberries so vigorously once that they more or less disintegrated in my palm, the juice running down my wrist and staining the skin. I suppose that's when Willard and I had our pesticide conversation-the apparent basis for his remembering me after nearly a year, and thinking I'd be a fun dinner companion. Willardwillardwillard. Rat in the strawberry patch. Love.
*
You look up bitter in the dictionary (in this particular dictionary), and it says "1. having a sharp, often unpleasant taste; acrid, as quinine or peach stones 2. causing or showing sorrow, discomfort, or pain 3. characterized by strong feelings of hatred, resentment, cynicism, etc."
This, too, interests me for its peculiar linguistic perversity: the equation of flavor with emotion. (To taste sadness, too? What's the flavor of true misery, or joy?) And the conflation of cause and effect: what is bitter may cause you discomfort; or something (bitter or not) may have the effect of making you bitter.
It is the nexus of these that you may find Willard. Not Willard the abstraction, the voice-on-the-phone, the date-to-be; but Willard in his most fleshly essence. Willard of the pale pink skin and eczema, of the speckled scalp and fringe of white-blond hair. Willard of the thin forearms, potbelly, tiny feet encased in tasselled loafers. Do you think for one moment that if you-I, anyone-touched tip of tongue to his skin, it would not be bitter? That you (I, anyone), having had that experience, would not become bitter, if we weren't to begin with? Cause and effect. The flavor of emotion-how it tastes on the quadrant of your tongue where the bitterness tastebuds are.
And another thing. In that same nexus, you may also find love.
Then the question becomes one of identity: are Willard and love one and the same? It's a possibility that must be considered.
*
I've tried more common perversions. Dressing as a man, for one. And there was a brief (excuse the pun) thrilling moment when, having pulled on my first pair of jockey shorts, I contemplated that strange and tantalizing panel in the front: thought of how it admits a hand, or tongue, but requires a certain amount of-well, manipulation.
(I know. You hate puns. You consider them low humor-the burlesque players of the joke world, bumping and grinding with feather boas around their necks, their faces twisted into parodies of coquettishness. They lack the subtlety of real humor. The ability to suggest, to tease, to arouse you through oblique methods.
But I won't apologize. I love puns, and I love those aging women dancing across the stage like that. I love paunchy men in plaid slacks who do stupid card tricks, too. Anyone who lives in that domain of too-muchness. The grotesque has its place. It does! You'll have to believe that, or you'll never understand about Willard. You'll never know the end to this story.)
So: yes, transvestitism had its moment. As did the other humdrum garden-variety perversions . . . you know them, the ones I mean.
But in the end, those are nothing compared to the thrill of learning your own most intimate self. There are things there that will fascinate and disgust you no end.
*
I buff my nails-inadequately: they lack lustre-and imagine what it will be to undress Willard in my bathroom, beneath the white glare of the fluorescent tube that illuminates each outsized pore. What it will be to taste the acrid peach-pit bitterness of his perspiration, my tongue in his armpit.
Oh: soon, now. Soon.
*
Are you wondering at the genesis of this love? The love of perversion? You are. We're a nation of psychoanalysts, seekers after deep and proximate causes-explainers, to a man.
For what it's worth, I'll tell you my version. Not mother, not father, not penis envy, not any matter of being stuck in one or another phase, oral or anal. Not a landmark event in a formative year. Not a hereditary tendency, legacy of how-many generations of born perverts. Not a quirk, even, of personality.
This is my generation's mark. The mole on our collective cheek. Yes: our strawberry birthmark.
Don't believe me if you won't. It isn't my concern. But at least consider the argument: we've been raised on perversion after perversion, children of the post-baby-boom. Born while our fathers and uncles were at My Lai. Born in the blood of two Kennedys and a King. Watergated as children, cartooned beyond belief, Kenned and Barbied and GI-Joed, suburbed, TV-dinnered, smacked by two-martini fathers in the barbecue-smoked evenings, lied to in school, Reaganed, Bushed.
You aren't buying it. I can smell your resistance from here. A generation, I'm telling you, of DDT-sprayed trees. Salmon that have nowhere to spawn. Radioactive waste in our groundwater.
And don't think it stops anytime soon. This argument. Consider our inheritance of overdosed heroes: Janisjoplin Jimmorrison howmanymore. And serial killers: Tedbundy theGreenRiverkiller deadboysinAtlanta Chicagoboys JeffreyDahmer howmanymore.
Et cetera. So this is it, then: we've grown up on it, it's in our mother's milk. We require it, in small doses, to maintain our immunity.
*
My hair, in spite of all the careful attention-or because of it-is brittle. Strawfeeling, split at its ends. The roots are beginning to show. Strands of gray here and there. I forget that I'm almost thirty, that I have gray hair at all.
What did Willard see when he saw me? Rat in the strawberry patch, ratcreeping among the vines, pale nocturnal creature, scourge. Wanting what every creature wants. Love.
*
There's a certain latitude in it. Love. I've said that. And a perversity. Love has a taste. Put out your tongue and see what I mean.
*
Tasting Gus's pesticides, I was rapturous. It took me back. The way old people inhale deeply when they sniff fresh-baking bread or magnolia in blossom, and it transports them to childhoods that we (my generation, the strawberry-stained) can't imagine . . . So did I breathe in the pesticides and roll my tongue in my mouth to find their flavor, feeling it on the lush warm inner cheek flesh, porous membrane; and it took me back . . . To a childhood of riding the green banana-seat bike in the Mormon church parking lot over the speed bumps, popping wheelies, little tomboy. The apple trees small-fruited early in the season. Smell and taste of acrid chemical spray, popsicle tongue tucked in cheek. Hair soft and golden brown beneath the misting rain of DDT et cetera.
*
Ah. You have become my accomplice. You have! Having come so far, and wanting the way you do, to see me go out with Willard. You've been comforting yourself with your own disgust-with the way you detest Willardratman, and me for making a date with him. But you're the voyeur. We're in this particular pornography together: I the purveyor, you the consumer.
Even you of my generation (mes sembables! mes freres, et belles soeurs!) want to deny our common heritage. You pretend to believe in moonlit walksonthebeach while the hypodermics wash up around your ankles. But secretly-yes, like me-you thrill to those filthy needles and your adrenalin pumps at the thought of the prick that could be deadly: the dangers of love, every which way. The paradoxes and perversities.
And you do love to watch. You want to watch now: to see me undress Willard, my tongue tangled in the hair under his arm, beneath a fluorescent light. Or if not: tell me why you're still here?
*
Sadie, Sadie, lovely lady, luscious in her orchards. Winking, lascivious lady. Pornography of an earlier, more easily-impressed generation.
Penile contraption in the motherly greening hills, shooting off its chemical come. Fathering what? Father the mother-destroyer, the child-killer. Father of mutation.
I washed the strawberries until they fell apart and the juice ran down and stained my skin.
The rat runs through the strawberry patch.
Peach-pit bitter.
Somewhere in it all, a love of sorts.
*
I could have hung up, of course. At any point. Most likely, the point when I remembered Willard-who, and had a picture of him flash through my mind. That's what you would have done, isn't it?
I will never understand you. You who hang up on the Willards of your world; or worse, on those anonymous obscene callers. One heavy breath and you bang the phone into its cradle in horror, outraged.
I say: let them prove themselves. Give them a moment or two. I press the receiver against my ear, breathless (as if their panting relied on my not exhaling), never giving up hope, sure that one day one of them will know the things that are truly, and thrillingly, obscene.
And now the cranberry-scented candles flicker in their cheap glass holders. Even in this light, you can see the spots on the silverware, the trace of someone's lipstick on the rim of the wine glass.
Across the table, Willard smiles and winds his spaghetti onto his fork, covertly scratches a patch of eczema on the back of his hand. A tiny loafered foot slides over to rest against my own foot, which is naked in its three-inch heel.
I toy with my chicken parmigiana and watch him eat. He eats with his mouth open: lips parted just slightly, the food circles as he masticates.
My pulse begins to race.
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