ANSWERED QUESTIONS by Man Martin
What messages did Mother leave?
On her answering machine she left this message in a loud, cheerful, bluff voice, “I broke my damn foot, so it takes a while to get to the phone. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. Just leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.” The tape was lost, but as my siblings and I cleaned out her apartment, we played it over and over until we had it by heart. We found the note she left for the cleaning lady: “I’m taking a nap just now. Please come back later.” That note has now been lost also, but I have a photocopy of the other one, which I believe she wrote immediately after the wine and pills. The Xerox is fairly faint, but the handwriting is firm and even–she would have been very pleased with the fact her hand did not shake:
Dear Children,
I am sorry to leave you with this mess, but it looks like from here on out it’s all downhill, and there doesn’t seem much sense enduring for the sake of enduring. Know that you all have been the joy and light of my life. I’ve had a good life filled with lots of laughs and love. Love, love, love!
Mur
The sheriff found this note on her dresser beside The Oxford Book of Verse.
What events led up to Mother moving to SunRise?
A year and a half previously, her various prescriptions started working in combination against her, resulting in sodium depletion and severe depression. The symptoms stole upon her so gradually that she didn’t notice the onset or suspect that she had fallen prey to something as simple as over-medication. Mother told herself it would pass, that she’d sleep when she got tired enough, but she only grew more exhausted. I later read William Styron’s first-hand account of depression; the outward symptoms, the tiny, gasping voice, the terrible insomnia, all tally perfectly with Mur’s experience. But what the book maintains again and again is that the experience of depression is impossible to describe to someone who’s never felt it. Metaphors of swirling blackness and chaos of self-loathing are inadequate to portray depression’s terrible and inexplicable pain. At first Mur denied being depressed, maintaining she had just “gotten sick.” Later, after recovering, she admitted that during her ordeal, all she could think of were ways to die without too much pain. Evidently she privately made up her mind never to let herself visit that particular slice of hell again.
An alarmed friend contacted us, and we checked her into Macon Memorial Hospital. Mur’s transformation shocked us. The feeble voice was the worst, that terrible tremulous squeak; was this really Mur, that powerful woman we had known, that presence? If you could hear a tape of my mother’s voice in those heart-rending days, you would understand why we took the action we ultimately did: moving her from her friends and familiar surroundings to a retirement high-rise in Atlanta. My siblings and I have replayed those events over and over until the thought of them has stopped bringing tears; certainly, had we known the outcome, we would have acted otherwise, but that sad, weak voice! Coming like rusty water dripping from a long-disused pipe. And Mur’s eyes–wide, startled, pale and frightened. Even her body seemed shrunken. It was as if she were standing at the other end of a long tube.
The doctor prescribed antidepressants, restored her chemical levels, and sent her to occupational therapy. She painted a ceramic peach with a base that read “GEORGIA!” I don’t know what became of it; she probably left it in Macon. It made her smile, when she was capable of smiling, to think of all the ceramics my father, her second husband, painted while drying out in psych wards around Florida. He brought some home: an alligator and a football. But Mother, lying in her hospital bed, said for every ceramic alligator he kept, he must have left five behind. She imagined them dust-furred on a closet shelf at the Chattahoochee Medical Center: the purple and magenta striped alligator at one end he painted when he was first admitted in the throes of DTs, and the apple-green alligator with blue dots when he was almost ready to go home. In between a parade of the others lined up to mark his progress.
Although mending, Mur still tired easily, so the hospital allowed only one visitor at a time. My siblings delegated me to broach the topic of what to do when the hospital paroled her. She and I sat in the hospital dayroom. As I remember, the TV weatherman was explaining the looping chains on the map behind him, but neither of us watched. The other person in the dayroom, a jowly man with six skinny wires of hair combed over his head like a cage door, stared at the TV with a locked expression suggesting a man on his way to or just back from shock therapy on another floor. Mur and I were as good as alone. The sun-warmed window behind us smelled faintly of dusty houseflies, an earthy whiff for such a clean place.
I brought up the matter of surrendering her independence like a gentle child approaching a shy kitten. A step forward, gauging the reaction, another small step. I began with how good she was looking. The sodium depletion must have been pure hell–sneaking up on her that way! We can’t ever let anything like that happen again. (I imagine that she breathed a silent amen at this.) The terrible thing was–I turned my palms up and looked down, shaking my head in helpless consternation at the dilemma–the terrible thing was that all of us lived so far apart. My wife and I in Atlanta, Chris in Mississippi, Helen in Tampa, Homer in San Diego. If only there were some way to be closer to at least one of us, so we’d know if anything were amiss.
I wanted the suggestion that she move to Atlanta to come up naturally so she’d feel we’d hatched the plan together, and not that her children had already decided behind her back. It was ironic to practice my powers of blarney on the very person who’d helped me develop them. Mur and I used to read palms at parties and school fundraisers. She taught me to gratify people with the backhanded compliment: say just what they wanted to hear, but almost apologetically, as if only complying with the Sacred Rules of Palmistry. You make a wonderful friend but a terrible enemy was our most popular diagnosis, and our subjects grinned and blushed; who wouldn’t be flattered? The man dragged forward by the eager girlfriend clearly believed this was all the worst kind of damn foolishness. The mother-and-son palm-reading duo seemed not to notice as they judiciously inspected his hands. “Look,” one of us would say. “Yes, I see,” said the other, as if he weren’t present. “Remarkably intelligent hands.” Inevitably he would draw in his breath and lean forward. The former skeptic walked off, surreptitiously studying his own upturned palms. Amazing what some people can see in these.
Sitting in the hospital under the warm bars of light falling through the blinds, Mur knew what I was working up to. She interrupted, “You want me to sell my house and move closer to you and Nancy. Atlanta. I think that’s a great idea. I think it’s time to sell my car, too. As soon as I’m out of here, we’ll start looking for a place.” I laughed to find myself outflanked; I had no tricks of persuasion she hadn’t taught me. She smiled too, and I had a lot of hope. My old palmistry partner still had a few surprises left in her.
What was her apartment at SunRise like?
She had five rooms: a little kitchen, a living room/dining area, an office, a bedroom, and bath. The furnishings were simple but of good quality. A balcony opened off the back where two people could sit comfortably–high up enough not to be bothered by gnats or traffic noises, but still low enough to see the courtyard dogwoods when they bloomed. She had few artworks: in the living room a framed poster of colorful interlocking poison-dart frogs. That one went to my niece, but downstairs I have the pastel my sister Helen did that used to hang in Mother’s kitchen: a frog and a mushroom in a shaft of yellow light. Mother had murder mysteries and books of poetry in every room, and of course, on that day there were also multiple copies of her living will placed strategically with the words “do not resuscitate” highlighted in yellow, impossible for a paramedic to overlook.
SunRise’s brochure gives some idea of the luxury of the accommodations. We rejected many locations before picking it. It’s not at all what comes to mind when you think “nursing home,” and in fact, a nursing home is what it specifically is not. SunRise apartments are for vigorous seniors. Anyone unable to care for himself or get around moves to the Extended Care facility next door, and is given the very best of care; then the newly vacated apartment is made ready for the next vigorous senior.
Was there something she regretted?
While waiting on the shuttle bus to go on one of the Wednesday junkets sponsored by SunRise, Mur saw Sylvia Bell approach on her slow walker. This was before Mur broke her own foot. The lobby door opened as Sylvia reached it, and stayed open as she worked her way through with glacial slowness. A groan went up among the ladies– they were almost all ladies on the bus that day–dressed and made up to look their best for their outing: bright cotton blouses, waxy red lipstick. And just as they were going, here comes tottering Sylvia! It would take forever to get on the bus with that walker!
Mur didn’t like Sylvia. She was a crabby old Yankee who denigrated Georgia and bitched about everything generally. No one ever saw Sylvia in the Waldorf Room but you couldn’t miss her in the dining hall–raising her voice against the ambient clatter of cutlery, making thinly veiled racist comments about the staff, trying to enlist everyone in a conspiracy of discontent. Yesterday, Sylvia had been riding the poor hairdresser in the SunRise salon. The beleaguered hairdresser caught Mur’s eyes with amused exasperation, what can I do with this? What could anyone do with those brittle strands of hair that Sylvia insisted on dying carrot-red?
But now it was Wednesday, and whatever scissors and hairspray could do had been done. Mur could see Sylvia had painted her nails to match her hair. She had on a bright blue and white blouse with a matching scarf that Mur guessed she’d been saving especially for this outing.
The driver pressed the pneumatic switch to lower the bus, and got out to help Sylvia board with the same indifferent patience as the automatic door. Mutterings began to be heard.
Mur wanted to speak but didn’t. She could have stood up and told her fellow passengers before Sylvia came within earshot, “Goddamn it. What’s so important that we can’t wait a few minutes for an old lady to get on the bus? She’s got little enough in her life to look forward to as it is. There but for the grace of God go you or I.” That’s how Mur said it to us, the speech she should’ve given on the SunRise shuttle, and it’s just the way she would have said it too; she was good at on-the-spot oratory, and that grace of God line was one she used verbatim in other situations. She had a chance to stick up for someone who had no one else to stick up for her, but she didn’t.
What did she buy on her shopping trip, and why did she want you along?
First I took her to a package store where she bought two splits of white wine which were to act in combination with the pills. She made a great show of wanting a particular wine she’d had with my brother Homer. She had me and the owner search the bottles shaded in their wooden trellis as she followed on her aluminum walker. The owner denied in his polite Indian way that the wine she wanted came in splits. Mother insisted in her polite Southern way she’d had a split of that very wine in San Diego. It was less like a quarrel than a dance. Eventually she settled on something “just as good.”
It was all play-acting, like reading hands. She wanted me in the dark even if it meant overplaying a little. She only drank one split, and on the anniversary of her death, my sister Helen and I drank the other. We quaffed it off in one gulp as we presumed she had done. We did this outside in late spring; the dogwoods and azaleas in my backyard were still in bloom. After that we said nothing but just savored the cool sweet spice and fruit stinging our throats. We hurled our glasses against a tree trunk to break them. Histrionic? Maybe. But who could put them in the dishwasher and return them to the shelf?
After Mother selected the wine, we went to Kroger. I asked if she needed a prescription, and she said that she had plenty of medication. She bought unsweetened yogurt to settle her stomach, which by that time had been empty for twenty-four hours. In her day-timer, she meticulously recorded the date and time she stopped eating. Alcohol and narcotics have a stronger effect after fasting, but pouring them into an empty stomach might cause regurgitation which would make her efforts nasty and ineffective at best, and, at worst, result in a long-term vegetative state.
She said the yogurt was for breakfast on those mornings she didn’t feel like going to the dining room, and the wine was for a bridge party she was hosting. She needn’t have justified either purchase to me, but SunRise frowned on residents keeping alcohol in their rooms. She must have been concerned lest I inform the staff or tried to dissuade her from making the purchase.
I can think of several reasons why she wanted me along, not least of which was practical. She couldn’t go shopping alone, and the staff was sure to learn if she took the shuttle to buy wine. She also wanted me to tell my siblings that before her death, she was in full possession of her faculties and in good spirits. I offered to carry her purchases to her room, but she refused, saying gaily she wanted to manage them herself with her walker. I told her it wouldn’t be any trouble, but she said, “Look, I’ve already got it. I’ll put the yogurt in the bag with the wine, donk, donk.” She made the sound effect as she did this. I don’t know why she’d be reluctant to let me see her apartment, unless she already had on display five copies of her living will.
Did she love you?
Yes.
What is the policy of the SunRise Retirement Apartments regarding alcohol?
The management discretely but firmly discouraged alcohol in the rooms, overdrinking being a perennial risk among the elderly, especially if they were allowed to drink alone. Residents could keep their liquor in the Waldorf Room, the dark oak-paneled “club” on the third floor next to the dining hall. In the evening, a bartender served them from bottles which bore their names. In theory residents could drink as much as they wished, but few mustered up nerve to ask for more than two cocktails an evening. If the housekeeper found a bottle of wine or six-pack in someone’s room, the resident received a carefully-worded reminder about the Waldorf Room. Wouldn’t it be nicer and more convenient to keep your adult beverages where you can enjoy them with your friends?
What activities did she engage in at SunRise?
Never one to be a wallflower, Mother pledged herself to take SunRise up on whatever was on offer. She found a circle of fellow bridge players and soon established herself as a formidable presence at the table. Before her death, her winnings, all in quarters, filled her top dresser drawer a quarter of an inch deep. When she opened it, they grated over each other with a pleasingly opulent friction and slid back again when she closed it, unbalancing the drawer each time, as if it were filled with so much liquid. The quarters have since been divided among four glass jars and given to the grandchildren.
But bridge at SunRise held little interest for her. “You haven’t played bridge until you sit at a table where everyone has macular degeneration,” she joked. “It adds a surreal element to the bidding when your partner can’t tell the King of Hearts from the Jack of Diamonds.”
Mur took a part in a skit one of the residents wrote about SunRise: a crabby woman in the dining hall constantly–and loudly–complaining about the food. Someone drew a poster announcing the performance, which was held in the Waldorf Room one evening after dinner. Mother said everyone laughed at the in-jokes, and several of her friends told me how funny she was. But no one seemed interested in putting on another skit right away; the first one had used up all the good material.
Another resident put a notice on the bulletin board looking for people interested in playing chess, and Mother played a game with him one afternoon. Herbert George, that was his name, told her he’d been a college professor and chess master. He wore old-fashioned bifocals with a visible line through the middle, and he stank sweetly of cologne and mild incontinence. His hearing aids–he wore one in each ear–were flesh colored, but his flesh itself wasn’t–his skin was the color of a dingy white sheet.
Herbert’s hearing aids didn’t seem to do much good. He never asked Mur to repeat herself, but she could tell by his vague nod that her voice wasn’t much more than blatts and blahhs, like grownup voices in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Since he was confined to a wheelchair, he didn’t leave his room often except for meals. He was not long for SunRise, Mother told me; no doubt they were even then making ready a place for him in Extended Care.
For Herbert, chess was a silent language. Mother’s pawn-to-K4 was a greeting, and he responded in kind, watching with bifocaled eyes to learn where this conversation went. Mother played middling-good chess; she and my father used to play and even went to tournaments–so her opening moves were sound, if unconventional. But Herbert’s vastly superior skill pressed her back like an advancing glacier. His position presented no flaw to clutch and wedge pieces into. She began thinking less about her moves than the chessboard, lovingly polished, if slightly greasy, with lemon oil, and oversized for old eyes and unsteady hands.
Herbert lifted his bishop by the nose of its mitered hat; his starched cuff brushed his queen’s crown. Between moves, two fingers touched his lips, holding a nonexistent cigarette. She decided he must’ve smoked a long time before his doctor or someone made him give it up or he moved into SunRise where smoking was forbidden. His hand and arm could not forget, though, and kept the ghostly pretense of smoking whenever he was thinking of other things.
Before she could castle, Herbert pinned Mur’s king in the crossfire of two bishops, and then dropped his knight into place for an elegant checkmate. If the game’s brevity disappointed him, he didn’t show it. He was eager for another, like a man who has endured a long solitude hungers for a human word. Mur demurred, and instead made Earl Grey, and they talked. Herbert said Mur was only the third person who’d answered his notice looking for chess players. The other two, also women, barely knew how to play. Herbert offered to give lessons, but they weren’t interested. No one takes up chess at seventy. At seventy, you only try new things if you’re proficient right away; you can’t waste years discovering the flaws of the Sicilian Defense. Mur suspected that the other women hadn’t been interested in chess, but in Herbert. You wouldn’t think a wheelchair-bound codger with a weak sphincter and two hearing aids would be much of a catch, but Mur said that depends on who’s doing the catching. These white-haired ladies were as man-hungry as any woman on earth, and dropping a widower in their midst is like throwing a steak in a kennel–albeit a kennel of dogs who have to replace their dentures before chewing.
Mur couldn’t understand why of everything age takes away, women tried so hard to recapture that. Did they think if they shook their biological clocks vigorously enough, they might get them ticking again? Was life really so hollow without a man to fix sandwiches for, clean up after, and generally tend to?
She had more than one picture of a frog in her apartment; why did she seem so fond of frogs?
Maybe it had to do with the time my brother Homer, then a little boy, went collecting snails one humid north Florida spring. He brought home an amazing number in an empty Maxwell House can, tiny delicate animals, each no bigger than the toenail of your littlest toe. He left them on the kitchen counter without a lid.
Mur went in the kitchen and found the window, cabinets, and counters dotted with the reconnoitering snails. One was making a slow circuit of the cinnamon jar in the spice rack, as if seeking an opening to the fragrant rough brown tubes inside. The bright trails pointing to the empty can told the story. Mur plucked the little snails from the windowpanes–dropping them–plink, plink–in the can. She couldn’t decide if she actually smelled them or not; she’d always had a remarkably acute sense of smell, and knew the odors of palmetto bugs and picnic ants, but the snails were so small; surely their aroma–not unpleasant but earthy, scented of ferns and the gritty crevices between loose red bricks–was her imagination only.
She hadn’t had time to grow angry, but she’d started to feel entitled to do so and something like annoyance prickled the spot between her brows, when her husband came in. This wasn’t my father, but her first husband, Jack, before those terrible ulcers that finally killed him. He surmised the situation, put his arm around her waist, and rested his head in the crook between her neck and shoulder.
“You’re such a good mother,” he said. “Most women would have a screaming fit to see all this. But you just take it in stride.”
After that there was no way to be angry, so she and Jack retrieved the snails and returned them outside. From then on she reserved a special affection for snails, which has nothing to do with frogs except they are the sort of animal Jack loved her for not loathing.
How did she break her foot?
One morning after her shower, she brought her right foot down on the bathmat with just the wrong amount of firmness and just the wrong angle to break one of the delicate bones leading to her toes. She knew instantly what had happened. I just broke my foot, like that. She pulled the white emergency cord in the shower to let the staff know something was wrong and limped into the bedroom, drawing her bathrobe over her dripping shoulders. The voice came over the speaker a moment later, “Mrs. Martin, is something wrong?”
“I broke my foot.”
“We’re sending someone right now.”
“Thank you.” She called my wife Nancy and dressed. Soon there was a knock, and a staff member came in with a wheelchair to take her down to the lobby. Nancy took her to the doctor. The front desk showed Mother a card with a row of faces in graduated degrees of pain: a happy face at one end, and an open-mouthed sobbing face at the other. Which are you? Mother indicated the one next to the sobbing face: not the worst pain ever, but pretty damn painful. In between the x-ray and the official diagnosis, I arrived. In retrospect–it pains me to say this–my attempts at cheery bonhomie overshot the mark. Mother would have known my breeziness was meant to comfort, but I wish now I hadn’t tried so hard.
The doctor said, “Yes, Mrs. Martin, you have broken your foot.” He and the cheerful Jamaican nurse fit her with a walking cast and lent her a walker until she could get one. Nancy and I took her the very next day to buy her own walker.
Like many of the bathtubs in SunRise, Mother’s had a cut-away side, so she didn’t have to step over a high wall getting in or out; in theory this would prevent just such a mishap; however, she must’ve known the real culprit was not the distance she’d had to step, but the bones that did the stepping.
She shared her awareness of mortality with us a few times. At fifty, she showed me her high blood pressure medication and said, “This is the first illness I’ve ever had that won’t get better. I can’t take a shot, or lay in bed a few days and recover. All I can do is treat it.” Another moment came in Crete; she stood at the foot of Psiloritis where, the guide informed her group, Zeus was raised in secrecy from his father Kronos. For those willing to make the climb, the path and the site itself were clearly marked. Some made the foray, but Mur stood under the blue sign with its red arrow pointing up the rocky path. There is some snow, the guide added, unnecessarily. At one time she’d have gone, to breathe the bracing air of myth, but that was for younger legs than hers. She would never stand in the cave where the she-goat suckled Zeus.
How had her own mother faced death?
When my grandmother Little One fell and broke her hip, Mur told me it’d been the other way around. Young people fall and break things. Little One’s hip had broken, and then she’d fallen. Mur and her brothers had a consultation about what to do for Little One, not unlike the one my brother, sisters, and I had during her sodium depletion. The three of them sat at Uncle Flash’s table under the Tiffany lamp as they discussed options and looked through slick tri-fold brochures. They found a good place, one that didn’t smell like urine. There was a TV room, and the meals were probably more nutritious and certainly more varied than Little One’s previous diet, which had been Stouffer’s chicken pot pie for lunch and dinner and Special K cereal for breakfast.
Little One signed over her power of attorney and made no fuss about her new living quarters. They sold the little white frame house she’d lived in for thirty years with the dusty backyard and the live oak. Moving into the nursing home had no connection with Little One’s having her first stroke a few months later.
Mur visited and brought a treat: chocolate covered cherries. Little One took one and bit it, clear syrup spilled over her chin, and she set it on a bedside tray. She seemed to forget it. Mur wiped juice from Little One’s chin with a Kleenex, and discretely palmed the remainder to drop in the trash. She found the notepad where Little One had written a list of words she wished to remind herself of. Refrigerator, thumbtack, jelly glass. Mur recognized the onset of aphasia, Little One’s heroic effort to scrabble up the high smooth wall slowly pushing backward. The second stroke, a month later, carried Little One away. Mur believed she had made up her mind not to fight the second stroke when it came, to let it overwhelm her. These days it isn’t so simple. Even after a very serious stroke, it’s amazing what the doctors can do to keep you going.
What was your mother’s procedure?
She ate her yogurt to settle her stomach. Her last meal. She was too preoccupied to rinse the bowl. She drank the wine from a plastic wineglass–the kind with a separate snap-on base. We found the yogurt-smeared bowl and the used glass, without its base, lying on the counter. This last was Mother’s symbolism; she would not set the glass down until she emptied it. We imagine she drank in a single long steady draught, not taking the glass from her lips except to refill it. Then she went to the bedroom where she wrote her final note. This is conjecture only, of course. She could have written it at any time; perhaps she didn’t let me carry her purchases to the room because I might have seen it. Although the handwriting is very firm, the words themselves have a spontaneous quality, and it’s more in keeping with Mur’s character to save writing the note until the last.
The only moment we can tell she betrayed any fear was with the pills. Evidently she struggled with the childproof cap. When it came off, pills scattered on the carpet. Cleaning up, we found a tell-tale archipelago of pain pills under the bed and surmised what had happened. We could almost hear her irritated, “damn it,” as she bent to retrieve them from the floor and eat them. There were still plenty of pills in the bottle–evidently she’d hoarded them for months–but Mur was nothing if not frugal. She then lay on the bed and pulled a plastic bag over her head. It isn’t necessary to try the same yourself to know the unlovely and unpleasant smell of warm breath and plastic. Pills and wine are risky, but suffocation is sure-fire. The ceiling fan overhead would have been a dark smear to her, a moving shadow, as she composed herself to sleep. On her dresser lay the note, the pills, and The Oxford Book of Verse.
Why these questions?
Unanswered questions before death become unanswerable after it, so I’ve coaxed what I can from the answers I have. A man who loses his key on a dark street searches under the street lamps. Not that it’s any more likely he dropped it there than elsewhere, but searching is only possible where there’s light. Like the man who lost his key, I hope to find meaning in the places I’m capable of searching. I know Mother did what she could to comfort us, but so much still depends on the questions I choose to ask myself and the order in which I ask them.
My wife and daughter claim that the night we got the news, the phone rang more urgently than it had before. You don’t believe it, and I don’t either. Phones don’t ring any differently for calamities than they do for telemarketers. That is not what happened. I must be precise, know I haven’t wished a comforting construction on Mur’s death.
What did happen was that I answered the phone, and a woman who said she was from SunRise asked to speak to Mr. Martin. I said it was I, and she turned to speak to someone behind her, neglecting to cover the mouthpiece. I could hear quite clearly, “I don’t want to be the one to tell him.” That clumsy burlesque was how I learned. I share this to show I haven’t painted facts to make them gaudier nor to obscure moments of black comedy, however unlikely. I am precise. My answers are faithful, so my love is faithful. I am true, so the hope I feel must also be true: my dear mother chose to die because she loved life too much to live.
When did she learn to love poetry?
As a teenager in Kentucky, when school let out, she went to an apple tree in the field behind her parents’ house carrying a fat volume of poems, its pages fragrant with the mustiness of the dimly-lit country library, and climbed into a shady niche under the green leaves and white apple blossoms between bough and trunk where she sat cradled as if in the hand of a giant, her lap full of poetry, turning pages and letting words flow through her like music. She returned each day as petals fell like tiny linen napkins.
By July when she closed her eyes, whole pages floated into her head. One green apple had grown enough to tempt her to sample it– so hard and sour it took her a full two minutes to work up spit again. August came and summer dipped its head toward autumn, and she began eating an apple or two each visit–they were not Red Delicious, you know, but wild apples of a variety unique to that tree–even at their ripest, tarter than the tartest Granny Smiths–and these were far from ripe, so it could only have been such long proximity to them that made her try again, and decide they weren’t half so bad.
School let back in, and she could only go to the tree in the afternoons. Autumn followed and the apples continued ripening, and she ate the ones closest to her perch and had to leave the book face down on the bough to climb to higher branches to find more, reciting poems aloud. As the days shortened, the apples mellowed and ripened, and then over-ripened, becoming mealy and finally downright mushy. But she loved all the flavors of the wild apples, even that first bitter one she’d had in July, and she always associated poetry with the taste of apples, the soft rustle of leaves, and the rough but welcoming boughs of the tree.
Man Martin’s debut novel is Days of the Endless Corvette (Carroll and Graf, 2007).