I enjoy how she starts so many conversations, "There was an incident, a few years back." I have my camera with me today. I am guessing that there are maybe 400 individual items on my desk, but none deserving immemorialization. None would qualify as incidents. Or maybe I am unaccustomed to embellishing the story behind the object. She would focus on the dried fig, and I would tell her, "It was the first fruit that tree produced. It was still green, but I was sure it would die, or get taken by a jay, so I picked it." I split it open with my pocket knife, brought it to work, laid it out on top of a book, next to the phone. It has been there for over two years now. I sometimes wondered why it didn't grow mold, or why the hundreds of seeds remained rooted to the walls. Its skin has become as solid as a piece of rawhide. That's it. That's the whole story.
You have had a fig rotting on your desk for two years, and you can't come up with an incident for yourself? she might say. Didn't your mother used to tell you stories about throwing figs at the neighbor girls growing up? Throwing figs that had wasps in them, for spite?
Yes, I think to myself, but this was a story she embellished. Fig wasps aren't really like mud daubers or yellowjackets, you can barely see them. Most people don't even know they're eating them.
But that's what I mean. In the way she told it, the fig she threw had a great big queen hornet inside, and when it struck the rich child thumbing her nose and sticking out her tongue, the fruit blew up all over her chest, staining that pretty white chiffon and the stinger put a welt on that girl's eye that forced her into reading glasses, the only person in that whole generation with worse than 20/15 vision.
That would have been quite an incident.
It was.
I didn't happen that way.
It did.
In fact, I think there might have been two wasps inside that fig. The other'n got into her underpants, and that's why she's gone through three husbands in 8 years.
Mm-hmm.
Don't deny yourself a bit of vengeance with some misguided sense of historical integrity, she might say.
You said that, not me.
I did.
There was an incident, a few days back. A co-worker walked in, picked up the dried fig on my desk, asked me about it.
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6 comments:
throwing figs seems really decadent to me, like throwing chocolate dipped strawberries. you should just throw apples, like a normal person.
That's absurd. I don't believe you.
I have more tomatoes to use right now than any one family could possibly be expected to eat, so I will supply any of you with as many as you'd like to throw. Provided you don't throw them at me.
Screw all this fruit, just throw rocks.
jenny, there are some kids around the neighborhood who throw apples. under the right lighting conditions and from a considerable distance, they do indeed appear to be like normal people.
peefer, what you call absurd, i call a FIGure of speech. Go figure.
eclectic, seriously, didn't you read my post? take all those tomatoes and just set them on your desk for two years. they will make great conversation starters.
jennie! i will totally start throwing rocks when i am ready to supplement my 'incidents' with some good old fashioned misdemeanors.
Let he or she who is without mummified figs cast the first rock, apple or tomato.
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