Grapefruit

Grapefruit. I think it tastes like soap. She thinks it tastes like candy.

The nausea, mercifully, had relented after the first trimester, giving way to a newly voracious appetite. We’re halfway through the second trimester now and she gets these very specific cravings. Last week, it was Worcestershire sauce. We made steaks, and I made virgin bloody marys heavy on the stuff. This week, grapefruit. She’s always liked grapefruit. But this week, she's obsessed. Her cravings are evidence that the pregnancy is progressing, that we’re moving forward, that things are okay. And that’s all that matters to me.

“So what I did was marinate the fish in grapefruit overnight, and then I juiced three grapefruits for a reduction, and then I sliced another grapefruit into discs to garnish the fish, but also to add some freshness,” she explains.

“So there’s gonna be grapefruit slices on the fish—the same fish that’s been marinating in grapefruit, and that’s going to be covered in a grapefruit reduction.”

“Drizzled, not covered,” she corrects me. “And you’ll barely taste the marinade, it’s so subtle. Anyway, the reduction is going to be so rich that—trust me—you’re gonna want those grapefruit discs on there to brighten things up.”

“Seems like a lot of . . .” but I trail off before I can say anything that might dampen her excitement. “Where’d you get the recipe?”

“Saw something in the Times, but then I sort of ran with it. Made it my own thing,” she says, as she gently transfers two fillets from a Tupperware full of grapefruit juice onto a Pyrex baking dish that’s been prepared with a golden layer of olive oil. The fish is bright white, and I’ve no idea if it’s a true white fish, or if the acid from the grapefruit has turned it that way.

“Ceviche,” I say.

She sprinkles coarse salt on the fillets.

“I know. Too bad I’m not supposed to eat ceviche,” she says. And then adds, as if it’s barely worth mentioning, “I heard from my mother today.”

There’s a sharp bolt of something in my chest. I’m fairly sure it’s my heart injecting adrenaline into my bloodstream, as part of its fight-or-flight response. Outwardly, I do my best to remain even. “Your mother,” I say. “You heard from your mother.”

“Yes. Her.”

“What did she . . . I mean, did you call her, or . . . Was it . . .” I hardly know which question to ask first, and so I start asking them all without finishing a single one. She gets the idea.

“She called me.” Then she adds, “Obviously.”

“And?”

“Oh, not much.” She picks up a pepper grinder. It’s a tall wooden job, stained—not painted—a rich brown, which shows off the grain of whatever wood it’s carved from. Somehow, inexplicably, right here in this moment when she’s telling me she’s spoken to her mother for the first time in over a year, for the first time since her father died, and everything boiled over and blew up at his funeral, I’m wondering what the hell kind of wood it is. Cherry? Maple? Could it be oak? Pine? The grain somehow slightly resembles tiger stripes. Is that a clue to its origin? How about mahogany? Does mahogany have grain like that? It must have said on the box when we bought the thing, but I don’t think I even bothered to notice. The truth is, I haven’t developed a sudden interest in woodworking. Rather, I’m just dreading whatever it is she’s going to tell me. Except for my wife herself, nothing good has ever come from her mother.

She turns the two halves of the pepper grinder in opposing directions, and ground pepper rains down on the fish, coating it like ash. Ash. That’s a type of wood, isn’t? Could it be ash?

“Okay,” I say, trying to stay calm. “Not much. What’s that mean?”

“She asked how I was.”

“And you said—”

“And I said I was fine,” she says, like I didn’t need to prompt her.

I find myself feeling antsy, and I walk across the small kitchen just to get myself moving. I take up a new position next to the sink, across from the oven, where my wife is still grinding pepper. I put my hand down on the counter on top of something cold and wet and squishy. It’s a bit of grapefruit. All around and also inside the sink are clumpy splatters of the crimson-pink pulp of the fruit. And from this new vantage point, I can see that our granite countertops are covered in shallow puddles of what I can only guess is grapefruit juice.

“Did you tell her . . . ?” I don’t need to even finish the question to know that she knows I’m referring to the pregnancy.

“No. Absolutely not.”

I’m relieved. “Good. She doesn’t deserve to know.”

“So I asked her how she is.”

“This should be good,” I say bitterly.

“She said she’s going into the doctor tomorrow. She’s had a bad cough for six weeks.”

“Oh god, here we go,” I say.

She gives me a courtesy laugh, though there’s no joy in it. “I know. She’s a piece of work. And you’re right. She’s probably just looking for attention.”

I hadn’t actually said that aloud, but I was definitely thinking it. But there’s something in her tone of voice that tells me she’s feeling out of sorts about the conversation. “You think it’s serious?”

“I don’t know. I mean, all I have to go off of is what she said. And what she said is that it started out like any regular cough, but then it only got worse after a couple weeks. It was one of those, you know, wet coughs? So she was coughing a lot of gunk up. But she said it wasn’t so much a tickle in her throat that was making her cough, but in her chest . . .”

I’m already tuning out. This is the thing with her mother. When she isn’t being passive-aggressively vicious, she’s being interminably boring about mundane stuff like how her sinuses would be feeling somewhat but not completely congested and how she wondered if that could be a sign of an impending infection or maybe it was just allergies because, you know, the neighbors had some new trees put in, and she’s just positive there’s an excess of pollen now, and, really, the HOA shouldn’t permit people to just go planting whatever they wanted especially when someone’s health is at stake and...

“ . . . so I guess it was the blood in the phlegm that made her see the specialist. You know her: she has no problem seeing her GP, but when it comes down to actually doing something for real…” she doesn’t need to finish the sentence. I know what she means. Her mother loves having health problems as long as they’re entirely fictional. The moment her doctor raises an eyebrow and asks her to see a specialist, she suddenly feels much better and finds a million different reasons to postpone the appointment until, finally, we all forget about it.

“So, wait. She did see the specialist?”

“Yeah. That’s what I was saying. She saw him because of the blood in the phlegm thing.”

“If she had a cough that long, she probably just scraped her throat up. That’s happened to me a million times,” I say as if I know what the hell I’m talking about.

“When? I’ve never seen you cough up blood.”

“Sure I have. If it’s bright red, then you know it’s blood from the throat. If it’s darker, like brown, then you know it’s from deeper inside.”

“I’ve never seen you cough blood.”

“I have.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. College?”

“College?”

“Yeah, college.” The pools of grapefruit juice will surely turn sticky if someone doesn’t wipe them up. “Man, there’s grapefruit juice everywhere,” I say and head for the paper towels.

“Hey,” she scolds playfully and steps between me and the roll. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Getting a paper towel to wipe off the counters,” I answer.

“Use a dishtowel. That’s what they’re there for.”

“Dishtowels are for dishes. Paper towels are for counters.”

“Dishtowel. Paper towels are for Windex.”

I roll my eyes and open the drawer beneath our drip coffee maker. I pull out a towel sporting a pattern of sun-yellow lemons surrounded by electric green lime wedges. We’ve got another towel, presumably from the same designer, where it’s the limes that are whole and the lemons that are sliced.

The woman loves citrus.

My wife heads back to the stove and sighs. “So, yeah. A cough that lasts almost two months? Blood? Her actually being scared enough to see a specialist?”

“I mean, look, who knows. It may just be a cough,” I tell her. But, it’s right then that I realize I not only think there probably is something serious going on with her mother’s health, but, also, I’m actively rooting for there to be.

“Maybe.” She thinks about it for a moment, then says, “But maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” I agree. I turn away from her for a moment so I can run the towel under some water and then I begin wiping up the puddles, but I find I’m just spreading the grapefruit juice, moving it around, distributing it across a wider area. “These things. They’re not absorbent enough,” I say.

“They’re more absorbent than paper towels,” she answers. She leans down to put the fish in the oven.

I can’t help but laugh at that one. “Sure they are.”

The oven door lets out a metallic squeal as she closes it. “They are,” she says.

“They’re not,” I reply. “I mean, think about it. What’s the one way paper towels are advertised? Absorbent.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re as absorbent as dishtowels. They don’t advertise dishtowels. If they did, they’d talk about how much more absorbent they are than paper towels. But they don’t advertise dishtowels even though they should advertise dishtowels so that people like you would stop buying paper towels, so that whoever makes paper towels can stop tearing down the rainforests.”

“Oh this is about the rainforests!” I say with mock revelation. “So now I’m responsible for the rainforests.”

“Yes. You are responsible for the rainforests. We all are.”

“Meanwhile, they’re probably razing ten acres of it a day to keep up with your grapefruit demand.”

“Well, that doesn’t even make sense. They wouldn’t tear down trees to pick grapefruits. And grapefruits don’t even come from rainforests. These probably came from Florida. Or California. Or Mexico.”

“Or the rainforests.”

“They’re not from rainforests.” She goes back to whisking the reduction.

“Fine,” I say. “You win this round.”

“Easy win.”

“Did you say I love you?” I ask.

“No.”

“Did she say I love you?” I ask.

“No.”

“Did she say she loves me?” Now I’m just trying to make her laugh.

I succeed. “Yeah, not quite,” she chuckles. Her mother has always despised me.

I get back to wiping up the grapefruit juice, still positive it’s doing nothing but spreading it around. She stirs the reduction. The fish roasts.

“Tiny sip of wine?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “But I did get some grapefruit soda. Pour me some of that?”

I leave the dishtowel in a wet heap on the counter and go to the refrigerator and grab myself a beer and her some grapefruit soda. I set her glass down next to the stove and kiss the back of her head.

“Thanks,” she says quietly.

I go back to my place near the sink, near the wadded-up dishtowel.

“You okay?”

She shrugs.

“Fish smells good,” I say, lying. It smells like she’s roasting cod in a broth of Softsoap and Mrs Meyer’s Clean Day.

“When she was telling me about her, her cough thing,” she starts saying quietly and slowly. “I started feeling sick. Like I was feeling worried, you know? Not just worried, but guilty.” She’s picking up the pace now. “I was like getting almost panicky, like, oh shit, it’s been an entire year. What if she’s going to die soon and it turns out the last year, I just didn’t talk to her? You know?”

“Sure,” I say.

“But then, I had a sudden, really vivid memory. It was right after my dad had one of his things where he, you know,” she struggles to find the right words and then softballs it, “got really mad.”

“You mean smacked you? Punched you?” I ask.

“Smack, in this case . . .” she almost whispers.

I’m clenching my fists. Time has not yet eroded my anger. It’s as real now as it’s ever been. Right here in the kitchen, I feel like I did at his wake. It was an open casket and I went up to it under the auspices of paying my respects. Really it was to look into his dead face and savor that he was finally, deservedly, a corpse. But instead of being happy, I found myself resentful that he’d gone out without ever having truly paid the price for how he’d treated her as a kid—for smacking her, punching her, twisting her arm so hard, she was sure the bones would break. My doctor says I’m high strung and have the blood pressure to match, he’d said over Thanksgiving one year. Then he’d looked straight at her and said, That should surprise you least of all people. That was the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging the reign of terror she endured by having him as a father. I’d been sitting right next to her when he said that, and I’d been within millimeters of saying something, of calling him out, but it was a holiday after all, and I could see on my wife’s face how surprised and off-balance she was from the remark, and that had me made me realize that whatever fury I’d been feeling in the moment could not have compared to the sickening and complicated combination of pain and love and hate that must have been swallowing her up. So I’d said nothing, had only squeezed her hand. And that night, she’d sobbed on my shoulder. Sobbed so hard, her entire body hitched and jerked with hiccups. Six years later, at the wake, I was looking into his dead face expecting a surge of glee. Instead, it was an urge to pound his nose in with my fist, right there in the casket, watch it bleed embalming fluid. Instead, as quietly as I was able, I’d sucked back the snot from my sinuses and into my mouth. Then I leaned close to him like I was whispering some final goodbye and I swiftly, silently spat it on his face. A brief moment of satisfaction was replaced by fear that I’d soon be caught, and we’d be forced to leave, and my wife would be angry and humiliated. But soon the wake was over, and no one had said a word. We made our way to the cemetery. As they were lowering the coffin into the perfectly carved rectangular hole that had been dug by a Volvo-built backhoe which was parked nearby, my wife suddenly yelled go to hell, you bastard and started spitting on the casket herself. Her mother and uncle tried to pull her away, but I threw my body in front of them, blocking them like an offensive lineman protecting his quarterback. Get back! I’d screamed at them. Get back! And I held the throng as my wife screamed and cursed and spat on his expensive, elegant coffin carved from what I’m sure was rare wood and stained—not painted—to show off its ornate grain to the worms and maggots that would soon devour him.

“She came into my room. I had a fat lip. But I wasn’t crying. I was just happy it was over. You know, whenever he’d hit me, he’d sort of disappear for a day or two and then after that, he’d buy me a gift. Take me out for dinner. Just the two of us. Anyway, my mother came in. I figured she was going to try to make me feel better. Instead, she grabbed me by the shirt and she goes What’d you do this time?! What’d you do this time?! You think you have it bad, I’ve got to be married to him! And she starts shaking me and telling me how the next week is going to be pure hell for her.”

“Jesus Christ,” I say in sincere disbelief. “Jesus Christ.” I hope she’s got lung cancer. Lung cancer and emphysema and pneumonia all at once, and I hope it hurts. As for him, I could grab a shovel, dig him up, grind his bones like peppercorns right now.

She turns away from the reduction, and she looks at me. She’s got this slight smile on her face. “So when she was telling me about the whole blood-cough-doctor stuff, I was remembering that. And I was thinking about how she’s going through all this alone. By herself. And it made me really,” she starts nodding her head, agreeing with herself, but also like she’s urging herself not to cry, “happy. It made me happy.”

I hug her like I did that Thanksgiving night. It’s just barely there, but I can feel the bump in her belly pressing against mine.

“I’m such a bad person for thinking that,” she says, her resigned voice muffled against my shoulder.

“No you’re not,” I tell her with more sincerity than maybe I’ve ever said anything before.

The timer goes off, and I let her go. The oven door squeals as she opens it. She pulls the Pyrex from the oven, and the fish is sizzling and smoking. She carefully, lovingly arranges grapefruit discs on top of the fillets. “Mmm,” she says, “these are gonna be good. Cut some bread?”

“Sure,” I say, and I grab a cutting board and set it down on the counter, which I can feel is already sticky. “These counters,” I say, “they’re like flypaper.”

“You need to use more water next time,” she tells me.

“You need to use less grapefruit next time,” I tell her.

“You say that now, but wait ‘til you taste this,” she says as she puts the fillets on our plates.

“That right?”

She drizzles grapefruit reduction on our fish. It’s rich and brown like aged balsamic vinegar. Like the Worcestershire sauce she’d been craving last week. Like blood, internally bled, pooling in a cancer-stricken body.

“Looks good,” I say.

“I’m telling you,” she smiles. “Grapefruit? It’s like candy.”