Free Fruit of the Month by Abby Frucht Page B

dyed or natural. The lady in the shop couldn’t say and was embarrassed by the colors I chose, peach and mauve, with one bright, blood-red flower off-center among the others. I took a long time choosing these colors, adding and subtracting carnations like someone demonstrating a mathematical equation, all the while standing bare-legged in the blast of icy air from the open cooler. I thrust the bouquet through the neck of an empty Gallo burgundy jug I’d brought along in my shopping bag. At Joanie’s, I filled the jug with water from the tap. The sink was choked with dishes and pots and pans that had to be moved out of the way. When Joanie came to watch, we stood side by side till the water gushed out from the mouth of the bottle, spraying us.
    Joanie is small but graceful, with strong slender bones and a high, arched neck; her body gives one the impression of being braver than it might actually be. Circling one wrist is a heavy, crudely cut, man’s watchband. Ordinarily her features are sturdy and cool, blunt and forthcoming. But she doesn’t want to talk about herself and asks about our trip. Tim and I honeymooned on an island in the British Virgins. The place was embarrassing, a volcanic countryside lush with sugarcane, palms, poverty, and garbage. Our hotel smelled musty and sat on an isolated stretch of beach spotted with oil. Next door, on some mudflats, lived a colony of pigs among discarded kitchen appliances. A land crab inhabited our closet; we heard it scuttling all night between the straps of our sandals.
    We had a wonderful time. We swam naked, and in the evenings drove rusted go-carts around a paved track. We ate crawfish that the local boys gathered, and bought T-shirts from women in flapping skirts. I had my hair done in corn rows one day on the beach. The woman thanked me when I’d paid her, then pointed out over the sea to where some clouds had sunk. It rained every day far out on the water. Tim and I stayed close together, like mating fish. In May, when we were married, we were certain being married couldn’t make any difference. But somehow, I find myself saying to Joanie, things have changed. We grew closer on that island, isolated, as if the world didn’t matter, as if nothing mattered.
    â€œI began to worry we were living such an ordinary life, but not anymore,” I say blithely. “It doesn’t bother us, we’re so bourgeois, that’s our big joke.”
    And on and on, until finally there’s silence and Joanie finds a cigarette and says, “Tim once told me he wanted to get into politics.”
    She laughs, puts the cigarette to her lips, and strikes a match, but the match won’t flare—it’s too damp or old, it keeps snapping and fizzling. She climbs from her chair in search of another, finding one at last in a pottery bowl on the bookcase. By then she has misplaced the cigarette, and circles the room with the matches in hand, one already disengaged and waiting to be struck. There’s a half-empty pack on the table near my jug of gaudy flowers, but she won’t give up, she wants the original cigarette.
    Later we go walking in the hot midwestern air. Joanie pauses to window shop, as soon as we get past the seminary to some stores, but eventually we cut through the alley to the parking lot where our friend Mary lives, It seems inevitable that we should gravitate toward Mary’s, as if seeking shared ground. The carved front porch of Mary’s relic of a house overhangs the pavement. Her building was condemned until she bought it several years ago with government help and put the floors back in. Fake Spanish tile. She always says she prefers a wood floor over a Spanish one, but since there’s no such thing as fake wood she settled for the fake tile.
    The doorways are arched and go nicely with the tile, but the kitchen is a cubbyhole. Mary cooks only for herself, anyway. She’s our mothers’ age. When I met her and