Fruit

“I asked Heath the Fruit Question,” says Kate, around a mouthful of hot dog.

We are strewn around the patio table in Longstreet and the Empress’ back yard, at the tail-end of both a barbecue dinner and the searing heat of a merciless summer day. I have dispatched a hot dog and a crab cake and a cheeseburger of my own, all of which were quite tasty, but I am far more grateful that the sun has dipped low enough to place the patio table in the shadow of the house than I am for any of these. I can still feel the fire burning along my arms and shoulders, in defiance of all my ludicrous slathering with sunblock.

“Which one?” asks the Empress, stabbing a forkful of salad. “The ‘Which fruit are you most like, and why’ question?”

“Yup,” says Kate. The rest of the hot dog disappears down her throat.

Kate is the Empress’ oldest daughter. She is in her mid-twenties (I confess I don’t remember exactly where), with everything that implies. Her passion, like her father’s before her, is Theatre, and she’s been making a very credible stab at turning that passion into a career- but like everyone else who’s ever tried to do that with the Arts, she can’t yet do it and pay her bills at the same time, so she’s been living in her mother’s house and working as a teacher while she gains experience and successes. She is a couple of months off a very serious long-standing relationship with a guy slightly her senior. She left him in the end because she didn’t feel like he was treating her well enough, nor that they had much in common anymore, and because she wanted the freedom to be able to Be Herself and to Find Her Own Way. As I am only a couple of months off being dealt a near-mortal wound by a girl of a similar age, who left our very serious long-standing relationship for essentially those same reasons, I am faced with an extremely hard-to-reconcile conflict. On the one hand, Kate is my niece; she has never been anything except happy to see me, never shown me anything except compassion and kindness, and I have tried to show her the same. On the other hand, she is the enemy. If the considerations that I am her uncle and that she has known me all of her life were removed from the picture, I have no illusion that she would be anything less than sympathetic to the choice my ex made, nor have counseled her to do anything differently- and I suspect that to be true even with the considerations still in the picture. It makes me want to clout her upside the head as a retributive strike against the idiocy of everyone under 30, seize her by the ankle and hurl her hammer-like over the horizon, where the only mental effort I will have to afford her will be reflecting on the faint plume of smoke rising from the distant crater where she landed. Not rational. But true.

“Heath” is the latest in the string of attractions she’s gone on to sample. (When you are in your mid-twenties and in Theatre and not utterly repulsive you have considerable options in that regard, a perk I vaguely remember and admit myself jealous of.) The Fruit Question, though- that’s a whole different piece of idiocy.

The Empress catches me slumping in my seat and sneering. (The sneer is rapidly on its way to achieving capitalization status these days: the Sneer.) “What?” she asks.

I glance at her, frowning. My son is around here somewhere, too, but he’s had the good sense to take his cheeseburger and go sit somewhere else, where he doesn’t have to be subject to any inquiries. “That’s one of those… She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named questions,” I spit, looking away.

“No, it isn’t,” says the Empress. “That came from us.”

“Yeah,” says Kate, chiming in, the two of them looking at each other briefly for confirmation. “We were the ones who told it to She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

I sift my memories and discover that all the circumstances surrounding the key image are fuzzy; I have the lurking impression that she and the Empress are probably right. “Are you sure?” I ask, looking sideways at them. “I thought I recalled her being familiar with it from some other source.”

“Oh, yes,” says the Empress, nodding. “Absolutely.”

“That’s the question I was asked when I first started dating your sister,” adds Longstreet, from out by the pool. “Twice.” He wanders over to the table, glass of Jack Daniels in hand. “First by her,” he says, indicating the Empress, “and then by your other sister, Iris.”

“Nnnh,” I mumble, still searching inward. We were here, at this house, sitting around this same table. They were all in a group, facing each other, and I was outside it; Faye was sitting with her back to me, and I came over to stand by her, but it didn’t really matter, because she was focused on the conversation, enjoying herself, no more than vaguely aware I was there anyway. Somebody- Iris?- explained the question to her, how it could be used to get a first impression about someone, and she lit up, clapping her hands. “That’s awesome!” she cried. “I love it! I’m gonna use that.” And she answered it right away for herself: kiwi, or starfruit, or some other stupid thing I can’t remember now, something tropical and exotic.

And then, of course, having asked her, they had to ask me. And all I could do was stand there spinning my wheels, thinking, “How the hell should I know? What kind of moron compares himself to a fruit?” But I couldn’t SAY that without unleashing their derision, without driving all of them away from me again- driving HER away from me, AGAIN. They didn’t want to know what I was really thinking; they just wanted some pop-culture insight into my psychology that wouldn’t be too serious, something that they could use to compare my cleverness to their own. And in the moment I realized that, it was already too late, because I had paused for so long that I had broken the flow, so long that there was no way for anything I said to be funny or elegant or just blend in. I hated them all so much for that, for all the countless times and gatherings at which they’d ever done that to me, time after time after time…

I strangle on my own rage. “It’s a stupid question,” I growl.

“Why?” says the Empress, scooping up her salad bowl and the meat tray. She rises from the table, balancing them in her arms, and heads for the back landing of the house. “What kind of fruit are you like?”

“It’s a STUPID. QUESTION,” I bark, raising my voice noticeably.

She pauses at the top of the landing, the dishes well in hand, turns halfway back with a tiny smirk and an even look that hits me dead in the eye. And just as she does, in that moment when my anger flares hottest, there are suddenly images inside me, bright flashes among the flames- Faye standing in front of the bookcase, telling me after five years how much she hates the Greek myths, creating one more thing we’ll never share; the howling shades and twisted spirits in D’Aulaire’s; the breakfast plate in front of me at Leisyll Vineyards, so long ago, pink seeds in white flesh. And for once, I finally have the answer.

“POMEGRANATE!” I roar at her, all my teeth exposed. “BECAUSE IT’S THE FRUIT OF THE FUCKING DEAD!!“

I clamp them closed, still grimacing widely. The Empress cocks her head to one side, lets the silence swell.

“A globe of bitter, twisted flesh, wormed through with seeds?” she says, raising one eyebrow at me. “Tough, ugly and unpalatable-seeming on the outside? Mushy on the inside?”

“Yeah,” I say, settling back into my chair, with a small smile. “Something like that.”

“Mmmmm,” she says breezily, nodding. She bumps open the doorway of the house with her hip, glances over her shoulder at me grinning, and disappears.

Kate says nothing as I pick my can of Sprite Zero up from off the table and sip at it. It’s nice to be understood, I think, relaxing.

***

Watermelon, I think, closing the document. Because no one wants to deal with me in my entirety. They have to cut small pieces and spit away the parts they aren’t interested in before they can find me palatable.

I re-open the document.