{"id":212,"date":"2021-04-02T15:21:24","date_gmt":"2021-04-02T20:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magicmasterminds.com\/DonnaDVitucci\/?p=212"},"modified":"2021-04-18T19:39:28","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T00:39:28","slug":"oranges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magicmasterminds.com\/DonnaDVitucci\/stories\/oranges\/","title":{"rendered":"Oranges"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Oranges<\/h2>\n

If the way I remember differs from how others recall that time at United Methodist, well, memory trains itself\u2014the dumbest, most diligent animal treading a familiar dirt circle, the pony performing its same one trick. Speaking now, who can it harm, with so many vanished, and the rest of them dead?<\/p>\n

Our Pastor James appeared one formidable man, a hill to be conquered, an odd duck, a deviant. You wouldn\u2019t think his high forehead could inspire, or dash, a girl\u2019s hopes that way, but it did mine. In a particular light his black hair whispered blue, rendered him comic-book-handsome, lethal and planted quite suddenly in my path. His beauty snapped open my eyes.<\/p>\n

This was before I dared call him James. I needed a job; I wanted his housekeeper position to shelter me from the elements, and it didn\u2019t involve cows or horse hide. I\u2019d seen how sun and the seasons drubbed my brother, Den, on his farm, to where I\u2019d been shuttled, only sister of five brothers, me barely school-age after our parents\u2019 deaths. Den and his wife Mary Lee took me in, a sort of indentured servitude for twenty years that felt twice as long.<\/p>\n

I glossed over my pathetic history for the pastor, while in my head clanged what was foremost about me\u2014sheltered, voice withered on account of false gratitude, and clawed at by those who could take advantage.<\/p>\n

Skin creamy as buttermilk.<\/em> Den\u2019s foreman nursed a fixation for me, along with his drink. It made me desperate to escape his blunt-tipped fingers. When I told Den he said, \u201cGo, if you got somewhere else to go,\u201d mouthpiece for Mary Lee and her perverse glee at my lack of options. Nowadays women have shelters and advocates and hot line numbers, but in my time we levied food and shelter against black uncertainty, and the wiser girls, we shouldered men\u2019s rude wanderings.<\/p>\n

I peeked under the rectory table where the pastor and I sat, saw my feet in their sensible saddle oxfords, swore to myself that I was done walking across Den\u2019s shadowy porch.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour experience?\u201d the pastor said.<\/p>\n

\u201cKitchen work, mostly. Feeding crews that come through and scour the orchards.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUntouched has suited you to now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

See how he granted me unspoiled status? Baptism from the man\u2019s lips, a vow. He promised me, and I promised him. I\u2019d bring the scrub bucket; he\u2019d intone the benediction. We\u2019d both sacrifice. A clean path, a fresh start, a man who didn\u2019t treat me like he owned me or like I owed him.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d chopped my hair, in my nervousness, immediately prior to the interview, and there in his church kitchen he lifted my chin to the window light and said, \u201cA succinct haircut points up intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not afraid to say I know how to lead a man by the noose of his desires, even warmth he\u2019s not yet and maybe never will admit. The pastor touched my jaw a second longer than proper, and I allowed it. In the beginning I thought, I\u2019ll handle this man, the way the last man handled me.<\/em><\/p>\n

To me the pastor would award the honor of stripping his bed and completing other banalities a single man with spirituality occupying his mind lets slide. Before this I\u2019d only worked Den\u2019s farm, and I\u2019d never met a man of the cloth on his own turf, nor heard a man talk with unerring certitude about any aspect of me. Next to him was the only place to sit, I was convinced, where I had already been so very willing to go, anyplace free of the graspy, raspy liquored tongues.<\/p>\n

\u201cOr perhaps,\u201d my employer said, \u201csmartness resides in the cheek bones. The world will tell you. Joy, the world loves your bone structure.\u201d<\/p>\n

I let him rattle on with his inane talk; I could not, would not for the world, stop him from lifting any detail of me aloft. He made me matter. Like the Samaritan woman drawing water, he selected me, like Moses hid among the river reeds he lifted me up.<\/p>\n

He palmed an orange from the bowl on his table and said, \u201cShall I peel it for you?\u201d By the end of the interview I was calling him James; he was peeling me fruit. The new stove showed off like a freshly minted automobile. An aroma of scalded milk marred his otherwise sparkling kitchen, and I vowed to myself then and there if he took me on I would watch so nothing ever again boiled into the drip pans of his stove. I planned curtains to brighten his bachelorhood and cut flowers to relieve that burned-milk stench his dreaminess had created.<\/p>\n

In our many privacies he extolled my intelligence, he said my refreshing perspective bored into confusion like a star pierces night. He was full of words, he talked too much. Men do, especially men of God.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not afraid to say he bought me things\u2014a piece of beach glass, for one, drilled through so it could be assembled as a pendant around my neck. Forty-five years, and I\u2019ve not removed it. I watched him thread the stems of four gigantic zinnias into a carafe so their color exploded on our table. When he caught me observing, he blushed over me discovering this kindness. Within his heat my world grew rounded and brilliant. He softened the sharp edges I\u2019d cultivated to battle with every bunkhouse jerk who passed through Den\u2019s place when the fruit ripened. The pastor and I endured equal embarrassment over our untapped fires, a friction that turned his kitchen, that innocuous kitchen, all electric. We resisted for weeks, and then there was no more resisting.<\/p>\n

He declared us a match made in heaven, chuckling, chucking my chin, grabbing me. Grabby, in those days when he could be grabby, before the accident. He laid claim, and I saw it as my own victory.<\/p>\n

I felt bad continuing to his bed, though I don\u2019t mean to say I was sorry, Lord no. I exclaimed over him and his body and what he made mine do. We were noisy lovers, one big storm.<\/p>\n

James kept saying we had to quit, and then he\u2019d reach for me, negating what he\u2019d just vowed. I had to believe a man of God knew right and wrong better than I.<\/p>\n

When he yelled, and he sometimes did yell, the next thing to trip from his mouth was, \u201cWhy are you crying?\u201d He couldn\u2019t bear ill will, especially in his direction.<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cOver onions is all.\u201d My eyes smarted the live-long day.<\/p>\n

James said, \u201cYellow has always been your color,\u201d as he removed my slip, this following his removal of every stitch preceding the slip.<\/p>\n

He prayed over me in such a way that I felt exalted.<\/p>\n

A neighbor shanghaied me at the church mailbox. I reminded myself retrieving his letters was nothing about which I should feel shame. I\u2019d been hired; I had a right to his envelopes. The neighbor and I talked of the rain, in<\/em> the rain. We had all kinds of nosy in that congregation. The reverend\u2019s letters were melting in my clutches.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe stove\u2019s on,\u201d I said. I lifted my one empty hand back at the house, his<\/em> house, where I lived in the housekeeper\u2019s quarters.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, don\u2019t apologize,\u201d the neighbor said.<\/p>\n

Kitchens and gardens offered me excuse to be rid of these inquisitions. Also laundry. Pot roast in the oven, simmering with roughly chopped onion. Something was cooking and needed watching.<\/p>\n

James said, \u201cSit still,\u201d and \u201cYou have such strong shoulders.\u201d He kneaded my tense muscles as if he were care taking instead of me, he priming the dough, and me the bread.<\/p>\n

For years my brother had drilled into me that nothing lasts. But humans without hope are nothing but shells. We must hope, all the while knowing nothing adjusts on this hope. For five months James managed the congregation, the synod rules handed down, and petty discrepancies among the nervy and rankled elders, while I managed his rectory. That was daytime. Nights brought celebration that turned me foolish with hope. No one insists Methodists live celibate, but their leaders are asked to abide by God\u2019s law. Only after he began shepherding the little girls in his office following the Sunday lessons did I intuit he had no intent toward the altar.<\/p>\n

The first time he led them back I sank into a kitchen chair as I heard the lock twist in his study door. The fruit bowl, as ever, anchored the table\u2019s center. It absorbed my focus.<\/p>\n

Oranges are not from clay. The still life on the table exerts its demands while oranges remain orange and bananas yellow and the avocado pebbly black. Divided from the vine or the root or the branch, the fruit still maintains pulse. The brown-fuzzed kiwi thumbs its nose at beauty the way an ogre stomps his favorite farm. Within the range of that ogre\u2019s fury, fruit will splatter the place, so coming on the mess you\u2019ll wonder what crime erupted here, what passion fired, what madness held the mad inside until it was no longer able. A still life can fool you with its beating heart.<\/p>\n

When he ushered them free an hour later, when they ran outside to the arms of their mothers and dads, he encountered me palming an orange like a baseball.<\/p>\n

I tamped my anger into a most measured tone: \u201cWeren\u2019t we to go on?\u201d Squeezing the orange pained my knuckles, but I did that over pitching it at him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you implying?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho\u2019s closest to you now, James?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose girls are innocents,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I said, \u201cAnd I am not.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou and I, Joy, we\u2019ve got to stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

As if our physical love had been my<\/em> perfect idea and he the so very unwilling, he the one cajoled into believing unbelievable things.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I\u2019m no longer young? Not young enough? Not as young as they? Stop what?\u201d I fumed. \u201cStop arguing, stop accusing, stop carrying on?\u201d<\/p>\n

He said, \u201cI\u2019m a minister. I minister.\u201d<\/p>\n

As if that was his excuse, his refuge.<\/p>\n

I poked at us with a stick to see if we had a pulse. My mind raced to who or where or how I\u2019d locate different employment because rectory housekeeper was a line you mostly get born into and latch onto and die within. It is your shroud for life. I had been lucky; and then misfortune adhered to Luck\u2019s heels like horse shit.<\/p>\n

\u201cTears betray weakness,\u201d he said, exiting the room.<\/p>\n

I wanted to scrape my shoes clean of him. We were still one, no matter what he said, no matter how he tried to turn his righteous, rigid back. He never asked me to leave, but our intimacy vanished. He pointed his most direct loveliness to the little girls he corralled in his office on Sundays.<\/p>\n

I made the flavored ice pops he asked me to mix up for their treats, but while the ices hardened I put my head with the treats in the freezer and dreamed of Alaska. The piping young voices two rooms off threaded through his baritone. Suddenly I was no longer hope-filled. My belly pressed against the sink when I washed his dishes.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeasure the need and the results will be few,\u201d the pastor taught. \u201cGive without thought to the cost of giving. Be brave,\u201d he told them.<\/p>\n

Back in the kitchen I mother-henned them, and said, while I dispensed water and fruit: \u201cCrush the rough world to your breast, shed tears over losing it...which you will.\u201d<\/p>\n

The girls looked at me like I had three heads, or like I might any minute cluck. They lifted their unspoiled faces to me and I wanted to break them like plates.<\/p>\n

My words faded next to his chiseled jaw, his sing-songy play, and his taste for sweets that drew them and focused their little nerve bundles into one conduit. Plain and simple: he adored being adored, and the little ones, they adored best. James\u2019s love revolved among the shades of a bruise; his ache toward those innocents was so palpable I felt beat up in my own gut.<\/p>\n

Down the rectory steps, one of the girls ran into the arms of her daddy, who lifted her to his shoulders and walked away. You could watch James and see his heart strangling. He wanted to be who they ran to and leaned beside, which mostly they did because they didn\u2019t know better. All they wanted was love, as children do. Practically babies, they were, when all this started. From his insides crawled fire ants and mealy things, centipedes and larvae, and the white things termites secrete to destroy, which until then I had been unable to see. Now the girls were the blind ones.<\/p>\n

From where I stood at the kitchen sink with a bottle brush in my hand, I heard him down in the cellar below me, but I mistook his mutterings for prayer. He did that sometimes\u2014courting attention, I used to think\u2014coughed split verses and language you\u2019d not recognize so you\u2019d imagine the Pentecostal tongues were erupting out of him. I heard him gasp and howl and I rushed the steps to discover him against the tool table, blood letting all over that surface, coloring down his front and his pants legs, across his sharp hips where I\u2019d lain my body, which he told me we\u2019d never do again. But I took him in my arms and he let me. He did not hold back, yet his convulsions wiped away what lingering I wanted to pursue. I couldn\u2019t locate the wound.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat? What?\u201d I remember saying. What happened, what reason, what were you thinking?<\/em> But I couldn\u2019t speak more and he only bleated like a small boy among his goats.<\/p>\n

\u201cCon,\u201d his dusky lips whispered.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCon. Con...trite.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDamn you,\u201d I said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t penance, it\u2019s just stupid. We\u2019re flesh and blood. We bleed.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was then I knew those girls were inside<\/em> him, a sickness beyond him, throughout him, and I forgave his jilting me and his trailing after them like a pet.<\/p>\n

His higher orders weren\u2019t saving him that day,I<\/em> was. From over his shoulder, as I held him to me like the lover I\u2019d known, the two of us shaking like we housed old desire, I saw the imperfections along the cellar\u2019s length. He\u2019d returned to me, the evidence all over the both of us would not wash off. We held while I watched damp marks on the wall appear like cave glyphs, resisting whatever whitewash had been painted to hide them, news ghosting the idea of the impossible baby I\u2019d squelched before it managed to root in.<\/p>\n

In his basement, amidst his emergency, with nothing but our fears to guide us, I perhaps paused. A caesura the grammarians call it, in which his sacrifice finally equaled mine.<\/p>\n

All this occurred in a blink. I do not mean that I withheld care, but a swift of ideas and emotions flooded me while I staunched his blood with the dishtowel I was forever sporting like a stole over my shoulder. The rescue men came as quickly as they could.<\/p>\n

One of them said to me, \u201cYou probably saved his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even so, James lost the hand.<\/p>\n

I am ashamed to say his misfortune fueled my jubilance.<\/p>\n

During the weeks he recovered in the hospital, I buried the ax head in the backyard, at the foot of the lilacs, where no one would ever think to look or dig. I made believe it was a tiny headstone, which until then had been lacking.<\/p>\n

He used to preach: \u201cGod will not let us grow complacent, and for this He gives us trials.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes I think I wanted those girls more fiercely than he did, and that trumps any guilt over the extra seconds I stood in the basement, shook to my marrow, and enjoying him in my arms.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>

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