Free Fruit of the Month by Abby Frucht

“There is a man who is so in love with the whale he is studying that he named her Ella and sleeps every night in a rowboat in her tank.” This starts everyone talking. Personally I’m not concerned with the history of jazz or the private lives of politicians or the ways in which meteors fall. It has always been enough to know that such things exist, that there are histories, private lives, that things fall. If anything, it is consoling to know that Jeffrey and I will cultivate a common knowledge, consoling to read a passage he is reading, that there is this link between us.
    Tonight we are reading An Analysis of Children’s Drawings . “You can learn things,” said Jeffrey, handing me the book, “by-looking at their pictures.” We examine them closely, as if we were in a museum. The pictures seem ordinary and harmless—a house with flowers bursting from a window box, a dog, a cat, a tree with apples on it. The people have eyes set high on their foreheads, and most of them are smiling. But there are clues, the book instructs. Hands, for instance. “The child who consistently draws large hands shows a potential for violence. Small hands indicate a feeling of insecurity.” It goes on. “This drawing of a woman with small pointed breasts betrays the unloved, reproachful child. Note, also, that the woman’s hands are hidden behind her back.”
    â€œYou have small pointed breasts,” says Jeffrey.
    â€œYou have large hands,” I tell him. He holds them up, flexing his fingers. We flip through the rest of the book. In most of the drawings the sky is a thin strip of blue at the top of the page and the clouds, scalloped and cheerful, have sunk below it.
    For the first time in two and a half months we forego our liqueurs. We leave the wine glasses untouched, turn away from each other, and sleep. The wine glasses are the plastic kind with the removable stem. Jeffrey bought a whole bag of them once. We’ve used the same two over and over. It’s one of our games, to see how long they’ll last.
    It’s a flat hot Sunday, everything buzzing—hedge pruners, lawn mowers, transistor radios. Bees buzz in and out of windows and the air itself hums as if struggling to come to life. Sam is strumming a guitar, his bandanna dark with sweat. Katy fills a laundry tub with water, lifts Sharry by the armpits, and dips her into it, first one foot, then the other. Water splashes around the two of them. There’s a platter of chicken in the refrigerator, and some gazpacho, featured in the recipe segment of today’s paper, which Katy insisted on making, “I’ve got to have it,” she said, and sent Sam to the yard for tomatoes.
    Katy, whose belly startled me this morning when I saw her in her suit, is delighting more than ever in the final stages of her pregnancy. She makes us lay our ears against her belly to hear the baby’s heart because, she says, she can’t hear it herself. Jeffrey assures her it’s beating. “Thump-thump. Thump-thump,” he says, I don’t tell them it reminds me of the ocean in the conch shell; put your ear to a shell and hear your own blood breaking like waves.
    Later, gazpacho and chicken. Jeffrey finds the wishbone and cleans it with his teeth. He rubs it with a napkin and turns it in the light until it gleams and then he beckons Sharry to his side and grins like a father.
    â€œThis is a wishbone,” he explains. “You shut your eyes and make a wish and then you grab hold of it and pull.”
    Sharry shuts her eyes, squeezes them tight. Jeffrey cracks the bone a little in her favor and then they play. He grits his teeth. The bone snaps.
    â€œYou won, old girl,” says Jeffrey. “What was your wish?”
    Sharry blinks at him and at the splintered bone. She starts to cry. “What’s a wish?” she says.
    Later we look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary . “A wish,” I