Adapted from the photo "WHIRLING GIRL"
by JULIA FREEMAN-WOOLPERT
Tasting the Apple
Aloft in the apple tree, we leaned back until our heads scraped bark. We need only reach our arms to pluck green apples, fruits that pre-empted lunch or supper. Our mothers frowned at our untouched dinners. They knew our bellies swelled with what we’d twisted from branches, and they warned us of stomach ache. Knowing better, we laughed.
Or, we’d climb the sweet mulberry tree and feast on berries from the outer boughs, berries blackened and sweet from soaking the most sun. Great handfuls stained our palms purple. But that was summer, a different season, when we were younger.
At twelve and thirteen, we harvested the autumn apples when we thought what we craved was a snack. We shined the fruit on our jackets, mine red corduroy with a tarnished zipper. Ducking the bees, all dizzy and drunk on October light and the mashed fruit under our feet, we swung ourselves up in the tree. We crunched through apple skin to white flesh, using our jacket sleeves to swipe at the dribbling juice.
The tree took root in our dreams, its branches umbrella-ed the giddiness we felt in boys chasing us across the kickball field, our breathlessness, our slowdown, the way we let ourselves be caught. We girls could run fast, our legs swift as deer’s, and if we slowed, it wasn’t because we had a belly full, but because the boys, like other fruits, tempted. With the taste of apples on our tongues, wood smoke and damp earth reminded us there were four other senses and we rushed to them.
It was sampling, it was trial and error, those fast and sloppy kisses we accepted from second stringers, and reciprocated, behind the pines while the main players hammered out their game plan on the field. The spectators roared and we imagined, flushed and nearly brainwashed, that they applauded us. Too warm, and drowsy as end-of-summer bees, we removed our jackets, or let the boys tug them down our shoulders and off our arms.
Recall, even now, the scrape of bark along our spines, pine needles caught in our hair, the webs we left tangled there as we walked home from the Saturday afternoon football game. We girls walked three abreast with arms hooked around each other’s waists, our lips pleasantly swollen, our bodies buzzing. The boys behind our backs might as well have been in another universe, doing whatever it was boys did when we returned from them to our girlfriends, while we exalted in the taste they left us, sweet as apples, but different, intoxicating, habit-forming. The world was shifting, though we didn’t know it then, the way boys supplant girls and men supplant boys. Stomach aches eased—and how this surprised us—made house under our hearts.
Knowledge crystallized in the time it took clouds to cross the irises of our mothers’ eyes as they pleaded with us, necks cricked from gazing up into the tree where we sat. Because we were camouflaged, we disappeared. We were branch and leaf. They saw only sky, and in mourning their daughters they mourned for the world.
They begged, because that’s what mothers do: “Don’t climb the tree. Come down. Don’t fall. Save your appetite. Don’t run.”
They would prevent this if they could, but their voices had been bled of authority. Water in a culvert below the football field drained color from ribbons the boys had torn from our hair. And we sat, wild bellies growling, pulses thrumming, still as wood in our favorite apple tree, leaning and preparing to leap.
Copyright © 2008 by Donna D. Vitucci
