Fig Leaves
by Kylie Wagoner
Kylie Wagoner studies Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is an editorial intern for the independent literary press, Braddock Avenue Books.
Joan leaned against the warm brick of her apartment building’s entryway, squinting against a slant of spring sunlight. Her face was squeezed into a tight pout as if she were nursing a hard and bitter seed in the red pocket of her cheek. In the parking lot, her ex-roommate Robin was getting into a moving van with her new boyfriend – just a month after she and Joan had both signed a lease together – leaving her with an apartment they had promised to decorate together, and a load of the dirty laundry Robin had forgotten in the dryer. (In which Joan had not felt generous enough to remind her of. There was a shirt she liked in there, anyway.)
Joan studied Robin as her boyfriend of two months – Brandon, maybe – swung open the passenger seat for her, admitting her with a grand sweep of his hand and a jerky, ironic little half-bow. It might have been charming if the movement weren’t so self-conscious.
Joan had only met – Bruce? – twice, and neither time had he left her with any lasting impressions, other than that perhaps he was a bit of an idiot. She had not been any more inclined to amend her verdict after that morning, when – Brad? – had knocked on the apartment door and announced his intention to steal half the rent – something Robin had not informed Joan of until the moving van pulled up.
Still, Robin seemed happy enough, and she threw Joan a jaunty little wave and slammed the van door, leaving Joan to contend with the lease and 900 square feet of space.
Fuck Bryce, honestly.
Robin and Joan weren’t the closest of friends – although they were friends – and had only formed a relationship due to proximity, a natural conclusion of both being women of similar age growing up in the same small town. And, more significantly, on the basis that they had shared a strange loneliness: A contradictory desire for closeness and separation, and the recognition that, by their natures, theirs was the kind of relationship that didn’t seem to allow for intimacy – despite the other’s companionship being the only one that either of them could see themselves wanting.
Joan thought they had an understanding, once. The unspoken, mutually beneficial agreement to share their respective loneliness, so that they wouldn’t have to do so alone.
Joan spent the rest of the day sorting through Robin’s forgotten laundry, taking a couple of shirts she liked and putting what remained into Goodwill bags – if she wouldn’t pay rent, she’d at least help Joan write off some taxes – and dragging her mattress into the living room (an impulse motivated largely by the petty, fuck-you desire to proclaim the apartment as entirely hers).
By then it was 5:12 PM, and Joan was staring at a water stain on the ceiling above her floor mattress. This was about the time when Joan and Robin would begin the evening ritual of starting dinner. Dinner was a deliberately crafted image: All lights dimmed but for the ones in the kitchen, candles of clean wax lit on the wobbly little table, thick cloth spread across the various scars in the wood, and jeweled with silver cutlery. As they cooked, they’d dance around one another while Joan mixed sauces and Robin boiled noodles, or Robin peeled potatoes and Joan sautéed asparagus. The countertops were a kaleidoscope with the polychromatic assortments of meat, fruit, and vegetables, almost abstract in their varied shapes and hues – often, when they bought carrots, they’d get the rainbow pack of yellow, orange, red, and purple, just for the color – and the kitchen walls would vibrate with the sounds of clanging pans and popping meat. The little apartment would warm from the little blue spikes of the gas stovetop flame and the heat that moved between Joan and Robin as they exerted themselves over it. The windows would shine yellow out onto the soft velvet black that crept onto the windowsills, looking voyeur-like inside their shared kitchen.
Cooking and eating were sacramental – symbols for the close of a day, and the beginning of rest – and treated with the reverence and ritual deserving of each ceremony.
Ostensibly, now that she was alone, Joan should’ve started thinking about what she should do to keep herself from starving, but in the quiet absence, she couldn’t find the desire to get up. What would be the point?
Loneliness was not unfamiliar. Joan had spent most of her life bleeding it. The animal of her was more present than in most and spent much of its time, curled and shuddering, in the cave it had burrowed somewhere deep beneath her skin: Fear, of the bitter and wounded type.
A similar thing had breathed in Robin. The shared agony, Joan thought, had been a type of healing. There was a pit opening, a sense of failure and humiliation, growing on the thought that, even in the bond of a shared ugliness, Joan had not been able to keep someone. It was a sick, mortifying confirmation of her worst fear: That her wounds were not worth loving.
Joan grabbed a few takeout menus off the shadowed kitchen tabletop, shameful and surreptitious, and flipped open the nearest one. Cheung Hing. Chinese.
Cooking and eating with another person had been an experience of intimacy that Joan hadn’t known before. Communion, of the religious sort. The incredibly vulnerable and personal act of taking in food, done in front of and with another. The satisfying of one of the body’s most basic requirements elevated to pleasure, shared ritualistically.
Now shoveling pork noodles down her throat felt akin to sacrilege. And so began Joan’s hidden shame.
Over the course of the next two weeks, Joan collected empty fast-food bags, thin cardboard boxes of Chinese food remnants, and Styrofoam takeaway containers. The whole apartment smelled as if it had been drenched in salt and grease, and sometimes when Joan looked out into the fog of early mornings, she could see the wallpaper sweating with it. It was enough to make her sick.
It was on a morning that Joan was eating leftover fried rice for breakfast – hunkered over the kitchen sink with the takeout container clutched in her hands – that she happened to look out the kitchen window. It shocked her – she hadn’t been outside much, lately, and she had nearly forgotten there was a world outside. But the sky was a robin blue, and just across from the apartment’s kitchen window, Joan could see into the tiny backyard of someone’s house. And at this, she paused, rice stuck to her chin.
The backyard was packed with rows of produce: The broad leaves of cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers, and snow peas reached upwards from their trellises. A few blackberry bushes lined the rightmost edge of the shining white fence, green pockmarked by unripe bursts of sour red, and even a fig tree rose wide green palms up to the sun. Its branches were tall enough to shadow a good portion of Joan’s kitchen window. If she could open the glass, Joan could probably even feather her fingers over the leaves.
An old woman was gardening there. A large-brimmed sun hat cast her face in shadow, silver curls winding out beneath it. Her skin was dark and sun-rich, and in the corners of her large eyes were carved deep crow’s feet – Joan thought she probably squinted her eyes shut when she laughed. Her hands, nimble-fingered and strong-palmed, were tugging figs from the lower branches of the tree. With each tug, the leaves in front of Joan’s low window fluttered the glass.
The old woman held one palmful of purple fruit and brought it to her mouth. The fig – sun-soft and soaked sweet with rain – broke under slightly crooked teeth, pink water running down the woman’s thin wrist. The old woman bent her head, unselfconsciously, to flash her tongue up her forearm to catch the lines of juice, before she continued gardening in between more bites of fruit.
Joan’s tongue flickered to touch her lips, and she became bitterly aware of the grease gluing rice grains to her chin; the stale stick of her tongue, white and shriveled in her mouth; the thick swallow that seemed to be permanently latched beneath her chin. She realized that she had never eaten so much, and she had never been hungrier.
Joan, with a natural inevitability, wound up watching the woman for more than an hour. She watched her strong back as she bent over pansies – edible flowers, Joan knew, and she wondered if the woman used them as a garnish – and the flat river stones of her hands as they packed on new dirt from large, earthy smelling bags, and her face as it tilted upwards to twist a couple of tomatoes free from the stem. She watched the old woman’s easy grace and nimble strength as she pruned and plucked and pulled alone, but for the shuffling leaves and the shadows slowly easing themselves across the grass.
By the time the old woman went inside, her left hip cradling a small basket of fruits and vegetables, the sun was high, and the shadows had sunk long fingers into the grass. The old woman’s back door shut with a loud creak, and Joan was forced to find her footing on her apartment floor. She still had rice stuck to her face, and her hands ached from where they continued to clutch a near-empty takeout box.
For days afterward, Joan spent the long slide of daylight minutes staring out of the kitchen window. Joan imagined the woman lived alone. She wore no wedding ring, and behind her, the windows of the house were dark and motionless. And yet she gardened, and went out in the sun, and ate figs off the branch. She probably cooked, too, if she went to so much effort for fresh produce.
Joan imagined, staring through the leaves of the fig tree, that she was a lot like her. Alone, and – Joan thought it very likely – lonely. Despite this, and despite the lack of a person to share it with, the old woman raised Eden.
It was after a day spent in a coma in front of the kitchen window, watching the old woman clean up the stone pathway winding through the garden, that Joan examined her apartment with a new disgust. The air felt thick and tacky on her skin, and where before the countertops would be bursting with produce, they were now flooded with the raw, shameful sewage of Joan’s daily takeout.
Joan, armed with lemon disinfectant and an extra-extra-large garbage bag, frenzied about her apartment in a rush to obliterate the mess from the space. She organized, dusted, swept, mopped, and vacuumed, and by the end of it, she had a full garbage bag’s worth of old takeout containers, a grocery list, and plans to go to the nearest nursery – in the living room, a glass door opened out into a small balcony. Joan thought she could buy a few tiny planter boxes and begin a modest garden – perhaps she’d start with pansies.
Stepping out of her apartment, underneath the blue flame of the sky, felt almost painful – sharp in a bright, overwhelming way. It hurt, in the way that waking up a sleeping limb hurt – numbness pricked away by the pain of new awareness.
The trip to the plant nursery passed in snapshots. Raised wooden platforms firework-bursting in fluorescing petals, which burst spark-like from their flower centers. Shoppers, heat-drunk, shuffled by, some of their heads hidden entirely by the large plants they were toting, as if the flowers and leaves had uprooted from their spots to parade down the aisles in jeans and sandals and t-shirts. The small seed packets of the pansies were almost neon against the sun-starved pale of Joan’s skin.
Joan made the trip from the garden center to her apartment with the seed packets still pinched between her thumb and forefinger like a stack of magician’s cards – as if at any moment they’d perform some sort of fantastic trick. Maybe they had because, in the next moment, the woman from Joan’s kitchen window appeared on the sidewalk just ahead of her.
The moment seemed so miraculous that Joan simply stared.
Just – something seemed wrong. The longer Joan looked, the stranger the woman seemed to her. Joan, in her days of watching from in between the gaps in the fig tree leaves, felt she had gotten to know the old woman. But the figure before her had little of the grace Joan had once perceived. Her crow’s feet did not make her look wise, like the rings of an ancient oak; her hair was gray, and not polished silver, and it did not lend any sort of charming elegance; her back was not strong but hunched slightly, the tremors of her spine pushing up against her skin. She did not look as she had looked through the sun fog of the kitchen glass, sage and lovely. She just looked old.
Joan, motivated by an impulse to prove herself wrong, followed the woman from a few paces back. She tried to recapture the vision of what she had seen through her window, straining her eyes as if that would suddenly make everything make sense and was so intent on it that she didn’t immediately realize it when the old woman disappeared inside her house.
Seized in a world-ending sense of urgency, Joan rushed to the backyard, where she knew the woman’s garden would be.
From the sidewalk, Joan could see the garden which had grown so large and sweet through the glass. Without the window dust, Joan could see the truth of it: The old woman’s backyard was mostly the bare and flat grass typical of suburban lawns, a simple square of buzz-cut turf. There were a few plants confined to the edges of the backyard fence, the tomatoes pale in color and the cucumbers browning at the leaves. The snow peas were dry and curling at the edges, the bone-brittle of them crusting off to fall to the ground. The pansies, too, were weeping petals.
When Joan looked up for the fig tree, she could see that the fruits were indeed plump, but thick with rot instead of juice, drooping heavy on the branch. Their skins strained and writhed with the fat slide of worms, and at the trunk of the tree withered the bodies of the figs whose flesh had grown too bloated with decay to remain on the branch. In the summer heat, the stench of them sweated into the air in humid shimmers, boozy and burning, sick and fever-sweet.
Over the white picket fence, Joan jerked her eyes from the flat little box of the garden and stared into the old woman’s kitchen window. The light was on. A candle was lit on the kitchen table. Two pairs of hands, warm and wrinkled, pressed into each other as they kneaded dough.
Joan noticed, in a stab that felt like a betrayal, that the old woman’s eyes were indeed narrow when she smiled.
She wondered how she could have missed the pale line of skin around the woman’s ring finger, the pair of men’s boots outside the back door to the garden, and the step ladder braced against the fig tree’s trunk that the old woman was a bit too short to make full use of.
A hand tilted beneath the woman’s chin, two mouths pushing gently at one another over bread dough, their hands still stuck in it, intertwined.
The woman was nothing like Joan at all.
