page 341

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

A structure of a plant that contains its seeds

I go to the supermarket. I have to avoid aisle 4, the one with the alcohol, because the man I don’t want to see or speak to is there. And I have to avoid aisle 7, frozen foods, pet food and cleaning products, because the woman I want to see but not to speak to, and who I don’t want to see me, is there. Fortunately I don’t have any pets. Also I have to avoid aisle 3, dairy products and meat, because my neighbour is spending a long time looking at the lamb legs and I’m not in the mood to make small talk, and anyway, I haven’t had a shower today or yesterday, or brushed my teeth. I steer towards the fresh produce. When I say steer, I mean struggle, because the trolley has a bung wheel. I always get the trolleys with the bung wheels. I am going to become a fruitarian. Last week when I was in the health store, I picked up a magazine and read, ‘Fruit stays alive when picked. By eating fruit and scattering the seeds we do not destroy life—the seeds are ready for reproduction for the benefit of humankind and all other fruit eaters in Nature!’

I pick up an apple from the large pile of apples. I will only eat what falls or would naturally fall from a plant, so that the host plant itself does not die. I pick up an apple and notice there are a few bits of dust on it, and it has two bruises, one near the left of the stem and one to the left of the base. Usually I would put the apple back on the pile and look for another apple that doesn’t have bruises. But now I can’t. I have made a commitment to it, even though it has a defect. It would be unkind to reject it. In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds. The term has different meanings dependent on context. As many things have. In context A, a pair of frilled knickers kicked under the bed means adultery. In context B, somebody has failed to keep the house in order and the washing up to date. Is it possible for context A and context B to occur in close relation? I think so. Biologically speaking, a fruit is a ripened ovary. Seeds are ripened ovules.

page 342

A forty-two-year-old married woman, a friend of mine, had always found it extremely difficult to react emotionally to provocation by her husband, or by anyone else for that matter, burying her feelings in order to preserve stability in her relationships. ‘I get on well with everyone,’ she observed, when she might have said, more accurately, ‘I felt I couldn’t afford to let things get stirred up, even if the price I paid for this was my own self-respect.’ So a fruit results from the maturation of one or more flowers, and the gynoecium of the flower(s) forms all or part of the fruit. Don’t ask me exactly what the gynoecium is. Inside the ovary or ovaries are one or more ovules where the megagametophyte contains the egg cell. Someone asks you to apologise for something you don’t feel sorry about. You go ahead and ask forgiveness and allow yourself to be manipulated. Someone says to you, ‘You don’t trust me! You think I’d cheat on you!’ You deny that you don’t trust the person, and proceed to be victimised by the feigned hurt feelings. After double fertilisation, these ovules will become seeds. The ovules are fertilised in a process that starts with pollination, which involves the movement of pollen from the stamens to the stigma of flowers . . . and so on and so on . . . and as the ovules develop into seeds, the ovary begins to ripen and the ovary wall may become fleshy, as with berries or drupes.

A woman wearing a white apron and hat comes up to me. ‘Would you like to try these new crispy crackers?’ She doesn’t wait for my reply; she shoves a cracker into my hand. ‘Great with all kinds of dips and relishes! With a few extras they can make a whole meal! And today they’re only $5.99!’ I’m not eating crackers anymore of course, but somehow I walk away with a packet. I eat the tomato slice from my sample cracker and throw the rest behind a watermelon. I put ten apples in a bag and start on the oranges. Everyone has something they cannot do—my sister cannot sew, my good friend cannot swim or ride a bicycle, my mother cannot say no when people ask favours of her. I cannot have children. If a woman knew this fact at the beginning, then a woman could have mentioned this at the beginning, and then the middle wouldn’t have been so difficult and so forward-moving towards an end. ‘I only like fruits that are sweet,’ one might say, meaning, for example, apples and grapes. But then the apple turns out to be a tomato, and although it is botanically a fruit, page 343 it is not treated as a fruit in the culinary sense. I mean, would you put a tomato in fruit salad? We never had fruit salad when we were young, We had too much fruit salad, My parents were irresponsible, My parents were too inhibited, My mother was overprotective, My mother was underprotective, My father abandoned me, My father was too strict, I was an only child, I was the youngest of three, Times were really tough, Times were too easy, We were too religious, There was no religion in the house, No one would listen to me, I had no privacy.

Among the mound of oranges is a peach. It’s large, at least twice the size of an ordinary peach. I look around, wanting to return it to its family, but I can’t see any other peaches anywhere. ‘Excuse me,’ I say to a staff member (her badge says Maris) who is inspecting the cauliflowers and replacing the mouldy specimens with new ones from her cart, ‘Where are the peaches?’ ‘It’s not the season for peaches.’ ‘So there aren’t any peaches?’ ‘No, we don’t have any in store. Except for canned ones.’ ‘Okay, thanks.’

Fruits are the means by which many plants disseminate seeds. Most plants bearing edible fruits, in particular, coevolved with animals in a symbiotic relationship as a means for seed dispersal and nutrition, respectively; in fact, many animals have become dependent on fruits as a source of food. And now I am one of those animals. I take the peach, and some oranges. Then I choose some grapes, some bananas, and some pears. A hundred aunts are not the same as one mother. A hundred ants once ate the fruit in my fruit bowl. I take a mango, a pineapple, and a pomegranate. Each time I start on a new fruit, I look around to make sure no one’s watching me. To make sure the produce area is still safe. I pick up a lemon. I could do this all day. There are no clocks on the supermarket walls. Therefore time is never running out. I could spend the rest of my life choosing fruit. Already I’m picking up a talent for it. You have to let the fruit sit in the palm of your hand, and if it feels right—firm and cosy, you put it in the bag. You have to smell it, and if it smells like wax or dirt, or if it has no smell at all, you put it back. It sounds easy, but it’s not. You need patience and persistence. And to think that I used to buy fresh fruit and put it in the bowl on the bench and never eat it! The fruit would rot and I’d feel bad because I was wasting money, and also failing at something that page 344 was good for me. I pick up a melon and smell it and suddenly feel that I may not ever leave the supermarket.

Someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s a young woman with glasses. The glasses are like those of my friend who had a miscarriage last year. This woman has a trolley with chicken breasts, baby leeks, baby carrots, and a human baby. ‘Hi, sorry, I just wanted to ask you . . . could you keep an eye on this little one for a minute while I go to the bathroom?’ I say yes. She walks away. I’m alone with the baby. It’s wearing booties. I had started knitting booties. The baby has blue eyes. I think it’s a girl, but it’s hard to tell at this age. The sweet flesh of many fruits is deliberately appealing to animals, so that the seeds held within are eaten and unwittingly carried away and deposited at a distance from the parent. I imagine wheeling this trolley around the supermarket. People would think it was my baby. People walking by right now probably think it is mine. I imagine wheeling the trolley and the baby out of the store and into the carpark—Oh I just remembered, I left my lights on, I’ll be back in a sec—and then out of the carpark and up through the streets all the way to my house. I’m breathing faster now. The faster you breathe, the more air you get. It’s a way of getting one up on those around you. You’re breathing air that should rightfully be theirs. And they can’t do anything about it. And . . . here’s the mother back from the bathroom. She thanks me. I’m alone with the fruit again. If you climb up a tree, you must climb down the same tree. But what if I jump down from the tree? A broken leg, possibly.

I go to the checkout. The man in front of me has four loaves of white bread, two packets of sausages, two bottles of coke, and a packet of condoms. I put my bunch of bananas on the conveyor. Seedlessness is an important feature of some fruits of commerce. Commercial cultivars of bananas and pineapples are examples of seedless fruits. Seedless bananas and grapes are triploids, and seedlessness results from the abortion of the embryonic plant that is produced by fertilisation. I drive home slowly, worried that I’m going to run over a cat. I take the groceries inside. There’s a message on the answering phone from him. He has let himself into the house earlier this morning to pick up some more stuff. He’s taken the blender, the sieve, and the knife set, and will be around on Saturday to pick up the bed. He always manages page 345 to talk about things in the past tense, even if they are happening now or are going to happen. As though things that happen are inevitable. We have no control over anything. And yet the irony is that we could never talk about the past. I’d mention an incident that had upset me and try to discuss it but he wouldn’t talk. He’d make excuses and walk out of the room saying, But that was so long ago, Why are you always bringing up the negative? Then he’d get upset and I’d comfort him, and go into the kitchen and start making his favourite meal.

I’m sure that blender was mine. I guess I will be making a fruit salad then, not a smoothie. I take the fruit out the bags and find a large bowl. I start arranging the fruit into groups on the bench, based on type, then colour, and then size. I know everything will be mixed up soon but I can’t help it. Plant scientists have grouped fruits into three main groups: simple fruits, aggregate fruits, and composite or multiple fruits. The groupings are not evolutionarily relevant, since many diverse plant taxa may be in the same group, but reflect how the flower organs are arranged and how the fruits develop. The peach is on its own. I cut the peach open with the butter knife. There is a tiny baby boy inside. There is. A tiny baby. Boy inside. Inside the peach. I’m surprised, but only because I’m surprised that I’m not surprised about the baby. No. I’m not really surprised. I knew something like this could happen. Would happen. I think about taking him out of the peach, but he seems comfortable. I chop up some apple into tiny pieces and feed it to him. He loves it. No doubt he’ll be happy growing up in a fruitarian household. I cut up three apples for myself and eat them for dinner. I don’t have time to make the fruit salad now. I don’t have time to do the dishes, to finish doing my taxes, to return the lawyer’s phone call. I have to devote all the time I have to my baby. My little Peachling. I have so much to teach him. I go to the spare room and fetch some of the baby books from the collection I’ve been slowly building for the last two years. I sit on the borrowed sofa in the living room with the baby next to me on a cushion.

First I teach him the word ‘mother’, and then the words ‘dark’ and ‘light’. I teach him the alphabet, and I sing the song, even though I can’t sing. I teach him numbers 1–20. The evening goes on. The phone rings and I let it ring. I feed the baby more apple, and a small amount of banana. I teach him that when we grow up we have a tendency to page 346 recreate the emotional environment of our early home life. I teach him the names of domestic animals. I teach him the colours of the rainbow, using the acronym ROY. G. BIV. I teach him that the point of power is always in the present moment. I teach him the stars, the moon, the sun, the planets. I teach him that the only thing we are ever dealing with is a thought. I teach him the names of native plants. I teach him the names of fruits. I teach him that we choose our thoughts. I teach him the names of fish. I teach him addition and subtraction, and then a little bit of multiplication because I can see he’s bright. I teach him that we can change our attitude towards the past. I teach him that to release the past we must be willing to forgive. It is getting late and I am tired and he is tired. I carry him to my bedroom and place him on my bedside table next to a book of poems. I’m so tired. I lie down and pull a blanket over me. I want to spend every moment with him, I want to give him everything I have, all the love, all the knowledge. I have more to say. But my eyes keep closing. I try to resist sleep for as long as possible, because I know that when I wake up in the morning, he will be gone.