Fruit
By Catalina Bode
We arrive in Georgia by a stream of cars. We take the backroads—the highways all clusters of car crashes. Floating between vehicles, we pick cars off the road and drive them until the gas lights blink, and then we drive them a little longer. It’s a game we play. How many miles do we have after that first blinking light, how many minutes until the car heaves and the brake pedal turns to lead. This is how we travel. When the corolla dies, we roll it into the ditch and find a red truck up the road. I open the car door to find a village of sleeping mice. I request that we not disturb the sleeping townspeople, but there isn’t another car in the visible distance so Paul grabs the broom we’ve learned to travel with for this reason precisely, and shoos them out.
What I miss most are bananas and the closest thing to bananas are peaches. Not at all close, but the nearest thing to tropical. We make the trek once a year—from northern Michigan to the first healthy peach tree in Georgia. This is a new tradition of ours. We didn’t always have to drive thirteen hours for a peach, but the third year After the People Disappeared, a brutal winter killed the peach trees in southern Michigan. This would be our last peach pilgrimage. Already we passed one collapsed bridge. Surly we’ll pass more. The bridges, we know, are the first to go, everything else soon to follow.
Paul drives. Visor down. I swiped the vehicle registration and insurance card clipped to the visor before Paul could see. Thinking too much about it makes him nauseous. I sit on the traces of people. Each time I wiggle in the seat, the paper crinkles.
Can you fix that? Paul asks.
What?
Whatever is making that sound.
Paul is particular and sensitive. He can feel my leg bounce even if I am on the sofa and he is in the kitchen in our small cabin in the woods. Instead of stuffing the paper somewhere else, I tell Paul about the time I had jaw surgery. He doesn’t know about this time in my life. It delights him to realize that he does not know me, that we still need more time to reveal ourselves to each other. He does not look at me as I tell the story, but he begins looking at the road with alertness, as though he cares that we make it. So I stretch out the details. They cut bone, I tell him. They pinned me shut. For seven weeks I drank from a straw. I put bananas in everything, the potato of fruits. I could eat ten bananas blended for breakfast and do it again for lunch. My mother, amazed at my inability to tire from that sweet, starchy fruit offered to make me soup, less sugar, she told me.
We pass a car accident. Paul looks away out of habit even though we both know there are no bodies. You don’t forget to flinch. The people disappeared but for a few minutes the world kept moving. Cars rolled until they crashed into a tree, a lamp post, another car. Running faucets drowned sinks and tubs, then houses and streets. Eventually, the water towers dried out. Clocks ticked until the batteries died; forever 3:04 in the morning. These are our leftovers.
Did you see it? he asks.
Yeah.
Why didn’t you say anything? I thought you said you’d warn me?
I had said that. I had also forgotten. I apologize but he still doesn’t look at me so I stick my head out the window and watch the sky rip past.
*
It was good for him at first, this end of the world. I think it brought him out of his depression, really. Paul likes being useful. He raided the supermarkets. Took inventory. Planted solar sheets in the grass. Turned the sunniest bedroom into a nursery for potatoes, tomatoes, squash. I, on the other hand, was absolutely fucking useless. I had at one point wanted to be a nurse, but not long enough to have learned anything that would have made me remotely helpful, just long enough to go through a phase where I searched the internet for videos of surgeries and birth. I watched all kinds of birth. Human. Giraffe. Cow.
I will never give birth. I have a piece of plastic inside me that stops any chance of birth. My first IUD expired a year After the People Disappeared. I thought I’d die, but Paul told me not to be fucking stupid. He didn’t say fucking stupid. But it was implied.
Before we started the nursery, we borrowed books from the library we had no intention of ever returning. We read all morning and afternoon and at the end of the day we taught each other the things we learned. I taught him how to stitch broken skin using an old banana peel. He taught me how to shoot a gun. We didn’t know what a peopleless time would mean for the coyotes and the moose and the bears. He held the gun delicately, with two hands, like he was holding trays of the finest chocolates.
Rule number one: never point a gun at anyone unless you feel good killin ‘em.
So many people to choose from, I said and laughed.
He stared at me hard. He did not like the joke. Paul was like this. He talked like there was still a world out there. He talked like there was still a future. I wondered if he ever thought about killing me, if he thought that in a way, it was the noble thing to do. For a long time, I didn’t ask. But then something started happening where I couldn’t keep things to myself anymore. Everything I thought, I blurted out. I started telling him when his eyes turned cross-eyed, and when his chewing used too much saliva.
Do you ever think we’d be better off dead?
All the time.
I didn’t have to follow up. His answer told me everything.
Sometimes I imagined repopulating the world. But that sounded exhausting and I enjoyed occasional bouts of sloth. And so when the IUD expired, we referred to the medical books once more before Paul searched for the fishing line inside me.
I lay on a bed of paper towels that we hoarded in the basement. With purple latex gloves, Paul adjusted my knees, pushing them in, then out, then in. I told Paul that he was not as tender as my first gynecologist. But the medical text had not given any direction on tenderness so he did not care. I told him he did not butter me up and that we had failed to indulge in our personal lives.
I am your personal life, he said.
Paul has no imagination. So I told him another story about my previous life that he had never heard. He listened as he wiped my vulva with an antiseptic towelette.
My tender gynecologist once had a patient in her mid-sixties. The patient told the doctor she needed her IUD removed. The doctor didn’t understand why this woman had an IUD inside of her, long after her child bearing years. But the patient explained, no, no, this was the IUD she has had since she was thirty-three. This woman! Over thirty years she had this IUD. And so the doctor fished it out of the patient’s uterus to find a device she had never before seen. Was it not an IUD?, I had asked. It was, she explained, just one from before her time. She showed it to her colleague who would be retiring that year, and he laughed. That’s what they had used during his residency.
Paul tugged at the fishing line and out popped the IUD. He pinched it between his two fingers, lifting it so I could see. It glistened with the insides of my body. The only thing I will ever give birth to.
And you were worried you’d die if you kept your IUD in? Paul asked opening the package for the new baby blocker. He slipped off the latex gloves just like the tender gynecologist and put on a new pair. Okay, he said with one hand holding the inside of my thigh, breathe out on three. His thumb pressed softly into my leg with each count. Thumb, thumb, thumb. Another wipe and then he handed me a pair of old gauzy underwear. I slipped them on, so thread-bare they were practically lace. It was time to raid the superstore for some plastic packaged panties but Paul liked the grungy ones. I asked him if he ever caught himself wondering what people were up to.
No.
You are in fierce denial, Paul.
Sometimes I think I should call up my mom.
I said nothing. Our mothers are our sore spot. We mourn them in silence.
Why, do you wonder about your ‘tender gynecologist’?
No, Paul. I don’t.
I wondered about the old woman who kept inside her, for half her life, this tiny shield. I wondered if it filled her with joy.
*
The truck dies in front of a shiplap church. A vine crawls out a broken window. There are a few other cars in the tiny lot. Paul checks which one has the most gas as I tour the church’s perimeter. The grass is thick with prickly weeds. A stream runs behind the church. There is a tiny bridge painted white. When I go to stand on it, it heaves. I bounce hoping for a crack, but Paul calls me. I find him waiting for me by the car he has selected. It is a large SUV fit for nine. There are four booster seats in the back. Fast food wrappers litter the floor. It smells. I tell Paul this and he says we can air it out for another half hour or so, but really, we should get back on the road. Okay, I say and grab my bag from the truck bed. It is stained with scat from the village of mice we terrorized. I open the bag and slip on my black dress. It waterfalls at my feet. It is the dress I have dedicated for eulogies. I hold a funeral on the front steps of the church. I talk to the prairie that surely was once a neat lawn with a thousand crosses marking every aborted fetus. I tell the blades of grass stories of the people who once stretched their bare feet upon them. But mid mass, I realize the grass is not listening. They are so happy that no one is there to manicure them, to confine them to just one shade of green. So instead, I take my service to the creek behind the church because I know that the water missed us—we made them less lonely, for no other reason than that we were bodies together.
Paul is watching me, arms crossed, leaning against the church. I make the sign of the cross and he does the same. Palmful of creek water, I bless him. He bows his head. We head back to the car.
How strange, I say in my best southern drawl, Mrs. Croft didn’t come to mass today.
Oh god, that’s absolutely terrible.
You’re right, darling. Maybe on our way home, we can stop by and pay her a visit, see if she’s alright.
I meant the accent—I don’t even know what you’re going for.
Each door of the car hangs open—a black beetle in flight. I reach for the screwdriver in my bag and a pair of rubber gloves, ready to jam the ignition, but Paul shakes his head and pulls out a key from one of the many pockets of his cargo shorts.
Where?
A purse under the driver’s seat.
I take it from his hand and we peel out, running over the happy, happy grass. I am momentarily blinded by the sun. Everything is a sharp angle of white, and then it’s just the road again.
Was there a name?
But Paul doesn’t answer. He is already asleep.
The backstreets are mostly quiet. Large oaks canopy the road. Only one branch clogs the path. The brake pedal is shit and I have to floor it to stop in time. It is a large branch—there is no way around it. I try to lift the branch off the pavement but it is so terribly large. Maybe together we could lift it but Paul is so sweetly sleeping I wouldn’t dare. So I take the axe from his bag and break the arm of oak into manageable pieces, huffing and puffing because huffing and puffing makes everything more entertaining. It is truly quite remarkable what Paul can sleep through.
In silence I keep driving, except if my mother was here she would laugh and tell me there is no such thing as silence. But we do not think of our mothers, so instead I fumble with the radio and pretend to listen to the news. The news. I had forgotten about the news. It was something I used to do in the morning. Read the news. At the table. On the train. Sometimes at my desk if no one was looking. There was once a part of me that was curious about the world. There was a world out there that touched me. I grieve that piece of me.
I forget all the time. I forget words. I grow out of practice with language. I have already lost the vowels of my mother’s Spanish. The only sounds, this English. Sometimes I wail into the forest behind the cabin. Sometimes I wail like a whale, but I have never heard that sound in life so I pretend to have lived a life at sea and keep wailing. I want to hear things outside of myself, outside of just the two of us.
There is an accident in the left lane. To avoid it, I tumble slightly into the ditch. This wakes Paul. His eyes open in panic, bloodshot. Huh? he says twisting his head in every direction. Huh? he looks at me. Huh? he looks out the window. I soothe him, I tell him it’s okay, I’m right here, it’s just me. I brush the back of my hand against his cheek, his bristle bites back, and he’s back to sleep.
Our news now: the beans have sprouted; there is mold on the nightshades; a new coyote family in the woods. The first summer we grew our own food I learned I could not indulge in my bouts of sloth. For days I’d lay in bed and read. I read about the lifespan of latex and how to fish over a frozen lake and how to shear a sheep we did not have, but one I dreamed of having someday. I got up only for a large bowl of oatmeal. When my bout of sloth came to its natural end, I found that an animal had made its way into the garden. Our strawberry plants were destroyed. I said nothing for as long as I could, but of course he eventually noticed. I had promised strawberries and cream for his birthday—had already tested which made the best ‘cream’, aquafaba or evaporated milk. For days our dinners were grim.
This is when the bits started. I wanted to make up for our strawberry loss so when we ate our dinners of tomatoes drenched in the olive oil, which we knew would be bad this time next year, I pretended not to be tired from my body but from the latest drama at work. I made voices. I played Beatrice and Minerva and Julian. But sometimes I sounded like somebody else, sometimes I sounded like somebody he remembered, and he’d look at me as though I had robbed a grave for material. It was a split hair twitch in his face and then he laughed. He never told me who it was that I reminded him of. But maybe it wasn’t someone he could even name, maybe it was the kid at the fast-food chain who once gave him too much money back, or the woman at the hair salon who always asked whether he wanted his eyebrows threaded. I don’t know which dead inside me I woke up.
The car is at a quarter gallon when we pass a house with a car in a driveway-turned-meadow. I don’t know when we’ll come across another car so I pull over. Lichen and clover snake through the cracks of the driveway. A fallen tree has broken the roof of the house; a nest sits cradled in a limb. I cannot tell if the tree collapsed and the nest survived or if the bird made a home only after. The seatbelt buckle jams and for a minute I am filled with panic before I remember the knife in Paul’s many pockets. I cut myself free and make my way around the car to the passenger door. Paul still sleeps, sweating in the heat. I cup my hand around his hairline and sweep away the wet. His eyes open then close.
Are we here? he asks.
Yes.
Where?
Here, I say.
Huh?
His eyes flutter open, twitching back and forth until they land on me. Still.
Hey.
Hey.
He looks past me. I look at my feet. Bits of glass glitter between my shoes. I wiggle my toes loose from the sweaty leather of my sandals.
I’m surprised you even stopped to wake me. I thought you’d be out there filling your pockets, he nods his head past me.
I turn to look. To the right of the house is a plump peach tree. It presses itself against the siding. A mashed peach stains a window. Bees buzz at the fallen fruit. Paul hangs back, a sting and he’ll turn into a pufferfish. The branches open like arms, like a hug. I feel for the fruit with my thumb—soft and ripe. I pluck and toss a peach to Paul. He waits until I also have one in my hand and then closes his eyes and bites. Chin lifted to the sky, he smiles.
That’s a fucking good peach.
Our bodies are thirsty for water but we are rationing the water we brought along, and it is not yet time to open another gallon. Instead we drink peaches. Our bodies bubble orange under the shade of a nearby oak. The moths came for the clothes. The deer came through the streets. We came for the peaches. This will be the last of this fruit. Tomorrow, or the night after, depending how long we can withstand the Georgia summer, we’ll head back to the cabin in the woods, buckets of peaches in tow. For days they’ll be our breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Some we’ll surely can—bright spots in the dead of winter. And we’ll think back to this sweat soaked evening—regretting that we did not savor the fruit enough. But we did, we are. We break skin with our teeth. We moan and hum and lick the juice that runs down to our elbows. We eat peaches like kisses goodbye. It’s not the last peach, but it is the beginning of lasts. Our teeth whisper thank you, thank you.
Days after a drunken peach daze, we drive back to the cabin up, up the road. We could have lived anywhere. For a long time I dreamed of the castles on the east coast, the palaces of the west—places I had once been, but it is the photographs I remember now, not the real thing. I think of my mother’s dream, to host her whole family, all eight brothers and two sisters, in a house so big each person could have a room for each pair of shoes. But that was my mother’s dream. It feels right, our little home, our crescent patch of forest, like we made this quiet a choice.
In the car, a large bucket of peaches sits between us. I throw a worm eaten one out the window and hand Paul a good one. He takes a bite and hands it me. Sugar water stains the steering wheel, turning from wet to sticky in seconds.
Okay, I have one, I say.
I wait for him to tell me to go on. He doesn’t, until he realizes I am waiting.
And how does it go?
I am a pregnant woman. And I am having a craving. And all I want is a Georgian peach. And you, you’re my most devoted lover, but possibly not the father, but this doesn’t concern you, your only concern is how to best make a pilgrimage for a sweet, sweet peach for your sweet, sweet lady. And here you are, a bucket of peaches. Oh how I love you, my dearest darling.
He smiles at this one. The fantasies about him he indulges.
We take turns driving and the roads grow slowly familiar. Soon it is our old church. Our old cereal factory. Ourold car dealership. The sun fades behind the trees, but we don’t worry, we know these streets. The car slows for our turn. We could walk from here, except there are five buckets of peaches strapped in each car seat so we drive on the fumes. Up the road, past our turn, I see something flicker. A porch light dances in and out with light. I point, Paul brakes. The sky above dims and the light keeps blinking. This has happened before. A light left on. We never know how or why, only that sometimes we catch a flicker of the stars the people made. We make stories each time we see a light. We wondered if there was a grid still running. If maybe a whole village existed somewhere out there and the people peddled on electric bikes for some night time light. Or perhaps it was someone’s solar lamppost. Or a gathering of mutant fireflies. A fallen meteor. But Paul and I say nothing this time. We just stare at the lantern shining over someone’s door. Paul is still. So still I know he is not breathing. And then I realize I am holding my breath too. It is this that makes me sad most of all, not the car crashes on every highway interstate, but the reminder of the forgotten familiar of a light up the road.
—
About Author
Catalina Bode is a writer and educator mostly from Illinois, and now lives in Ohio.
Her work has been supported by the Hopwood Program, a Fulbright, and the Ricardo Salinas Scholarship. She is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing can be found in Alaska Quarterly Review and
Salt Hill Journal (forthcoming). You can follow her on Instagram and her website.