What is it about peeling fruit?
I don’t eat much fruit. I used to, but I don’t anymore, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know why, but I’d also be lying if I said I wanted to divulge. I’m going to go sideways from this point, though, to tell you that I still buy apples whenever I go to a supermarket.
Dad’s Mum, Mollie, who died when I was about eleven, had a garden with an apple tree and a plum tree. I remember where the plum tree was, but I don’t remember where the apple tree was – I just know it was there because I remember watching Grandma Mollie peel the skin away from the apples with a scratched up, wooden handled kitchen knife to bake puddings. She had this fiery hair and wore reddish pink lipstick every single day – rendering her the epitome of glamour and intimidation in equal measure. I have wanted to imitate this for my whole adulthood. Sometimes I’d sneak into her bedroom to look at her dresser where her open lipstick tubes lay, silver and ridged, and I’d marvel at the weird form of her lipsticks – arched in a severe C-shape. I’ve tried to use my own lipstick in a way that would recreate this shape, but I have never been able to. The same thing goes for peeling fruit – she did it in a way that was staccato, jagged, but so quick, and I’ve tried to peel fruit in a way that would imitate it, but I have never been able to.
I was talking to my Mum, sister and two cousins about Grandma Mollie a couple of weeks ago, on our roof in Wales in the sun – and my Mum thought it would be nice to read a bit from a piece I wrote last year about Grandma Mollie and blackberries, printed in Fortified Journal 3. She read it aloud to us in the kind of tone a person has when daydreaming about better times, and for a minute Grandma Mollie was there at the table too, with us, fruit peel gliding away from fruit flesh.
I bring this story to you, peel intact, ready to uncover with the knobbly wooden handled knife of my words, to talk about the act of peeling fruit – the slowness of it, and the images of it on screen and canvas that stick to my memory like butter on a cold plate. When I’m not writing, I’m thinking about these women, knife in hand, destruction and creation happening simultaneously by their body’s own doing. I bring this thought to you because I haven’t made an insightful comment this week, and I haven’t made a productive contribution to society at large this week, either. All I have done, is thought about my Grandma Mollie and wished that I could be a little apple in her willowy hands. Thought about being a Grandma myself one day. Arthritic and careful and strong. Skilful. Dry. Gestural. Feared the idea of growing a seed, and the destruction and creation that happens simultaneously by a body’s own doing, through the becoming of a person inside of us. Feared the ways we’re meant to feel like –because it’s happened before, for us to be here – we’re meant to feel like it’s unremarkable. As unremarkable as peeling an apple.
When I was living in a bookshop in Paris, I stole an apple from the nearest supermarket every morning. Back then, I had just started to write a book about a 25 year old woman who was pregnant– apathetically so – and I started to write this book without knowing, even slightly, what that would feel like. In this book – I called it SEED– my character spent early mornings peeling fruit in one sliver while talking to this thing inside of her. She whorled in the power she had to discard or plant this seed. To create or destruct.
In my mind during lazy weekends spent not writing, reminiscing, eating – family will be performed by actors with fruit as a prop.
When I am pregnant with an apple seed inside of me, I will peel apples and think about power. I will think about life, and my Grandma Mollie, and my Mum, and my cousins and my sister and myself. I will bake so many apple cakes, and eat so many slices, and it will be absolutely terrifying and completely beautiful.
And, when I’m not pregnant, I will continue to buy or steal apples from the supermarket. They will be a talisman of family and fear. Of potential creation or destruction, and their peels, in these amorphous threads, will tie me to all of the bodies in paintings and films, and all of my mothers and mothers before that, who peeled fruit and in doing so, pulled themselves apart. Exposed themselves. Figured out what they were capable of. Figured out their power. Tore apart the beauty in wholeness and life to expose flesh. Juicy, dripping, sour, scary, flesh.
ncG1vNJzZmimn6nEs7XToqWgZqOqr7TAwJyiZ5ufonyxe9ahmK1lmah6qsCMmpmoraRivaaxy6KloGWWp8KqwA%3D%3D