Fruit

The day after my first MRI and the day before an ophthalmologist gave me the diagnosis that I had a brain tumor, I went to the Farmer’s Market for an assortment of fruit. It was Wednesday. My friend Nancy was flying in from Hawaii that evening, and she would only be home for a few days before she left again. She loved the Farmer’s Market, but given the timing of her trip she would hardly be able to take advantage of it. I couldn’t remember what her favorites were – nectarines, plums, or peaches – so I got some of each. I went to her house to arrange them so that she would see them upon her arrival home after I picked her up at the airport. I couldn’t find a proper bowl for them on the lower shelves, so I climbed onto a counter to search the upper cupboards. On my way down I slipped; there was a cupboard below that opened at each end, so as my foot hit one side it opened, and my knee came down on the edge of the other side. It made a terrible gash: I was afraid of bleeding all over her kitchen, and I remember running to the bathroom and washing my leg in the tub. Though she would surely notice it when I picked her up at the airport, I didn’t want to tell her how it happened, as I knew she would feel guilty. She had just suffered a terrible ordeal, and I hated to worry her about something so minor.

Nancy and I planned to take a walk the next afternoon. After my diagnosis at the doctor’s, however, I didn’t feel as if I could drive myself all the way home, so I called another friend who lived nearby and went to her house first. Upon telling her the news, she simply took care of the situation – directing her husband to take their infant from her and to follow in their car while she drove me home in mine. I wanted to cancel my walk, but it was the only time I could see Nancy alone that day. Yet even though I wanted to see her, I also wondered if I might avoid telling her about the diagnosis. In fact, I wondered if there might be a way I could manage not to tell a number of people, like my mom, whose brother was about to have brain surgery for the same kind of tumor (a wild coincidence) in two weeks. And ultimately I did delay telling a number of friends – people I loved but with whom I didn’t have regular contact (this was pre-Facebook, after all!). I wanted to live in some people’s minds as I was before knowing.

I didn’t cancel the walk, and we went into the large county park – the Pogonip – that was set behind where we lived, alongside our campus. Any walk into the Pogonip from our houses meant we would trace our steps back to return. So, towards the end of our walk – I can still see generally where we stood – I gave Nancy the news, and true to form she offered to come with me the next day to my first appointment with a neurologist. At that appointment, the doctor had me go through a series of tests that quickly became familiar – ones that mainly tested my vision, balance and reflexes. He saw the gash on my leg and began asking questions, imagining it was symptomatic of the brain tumor, an assumption that, for some reason, I found funny.  Instead, it was just a stupid, but normal, miscalculation – taking what I imagined was the easy way down, I thought I could just hop off the counter and land on my feet. To this day, I remember what seems like every detail of that experience – the climb up to check the top cupboard, finding just the right bowl (purple-blue glass?), the sensation of my foot against the lower cupboard, and the surprise of the whack of my knee. I don’t know why I remember. It could have been that very particular Wednesday, lodged between the MRI and the diagnosis, or it might be because it was an accident that left a scar.

The thing is, I never really liked those fleshy fruits I picked up at the market. Nectarines and plums struck me as too messy. And don’t even get me started on peaches – the threads inside and the fuzz out. Yuck. Give me an apple, a banana, cantaloupe – simple fruits with clear boundaries. After my surgery, my mom stayed at my house for about three weeks. Every day we would have lunch, and then I would go upstairs for a nap. A couple hours later I would awake and watch Law & Order reruns (or Columbo, if I got lucky). My mom would bring me a small plate with cheddar cheese and apples. The cheese was amazingly simple; I think it might have been from a basket that a friend had delivered to me from a company like Harry & David. In the early days of the anosmia – when in fact we didn’t know whether or not it would be permanent – I gravitated towards simple tastes. The cheddar was plain and milky, and the apples were sharp and sweet. I can still remember the crunch of the fruit, as I sat up in my bed, invariably wearing one of the new bathrobes I received as a present, with a scarf tied around my head to cover my giant scar. I would try making a little sandwich of the cheese and apples, but I remember it as overwhelming and preferred instead to alternate between them, taking in one taste at a time.  

I don’t know exactly why I don’t snack on fruit. Bad habits, I guess, formed in childhood, when I would come home and eat cookies or cinnamon toast after school. So eating fruit on my own feels like a victory. Two years ago when I was staying at a friend’s house on the Lower East Side, I would walk to the new Whole Foods on Houston for my staples, and there I discovered the glory of the plum. No plum has ever quite matched the ones I tried that summer – I even had one two days ago to shake up my bad habits. It was fine, but not noticeably anything at all – neither very sweet nor sour nor even juicy. I worry it might be ages before I try another.

In writing these little pieces, I have been thinking quite carefully about these settled habits. Why the box of crackers over a nice ripe apple? It occurred to me that part of the pleasure in a cracker is the sense – however mildly delusional – that someone else has prepared it for me. Unless I eat the apple or the plum whole (as, in fact, I did on this past Wednesday), I would need to core it and slice it. I know those apples I had in the weeks after my surgery were delicious. They were sweet and crisp. But each one was handled and cut and cored for me. My mom knew I liked them. And because I liked them – because I could taste them – she kept bringing them to me in the afternoons.