by Aimee Bender
She shrugged, agreeable. She’d heard this before.
“Where do you get them?” I asked.
She picked at the point of her eye.
“I get the fruit as a trade,” she said. “There’s a buyer who likes the salt here so he brings me fruit as payment.”
“What a deal for you,” I said, “getting all this gorgeous fruit for just a little salt.”
I brought a mango up to my nose and smelled the sweetness inside its skin.
The woman sniffed. “It’s not regular salt,” she said. She indicated behind me with her chin.
“Ah,” I said. “What’s all that?”
“Those are the words,” she said.
I kept my arms full of mangoes and took a step nearer. As far as I could tell, the entire back wall of the shop was covered, floor to ceiling, with cutout letters. They were piled high on shelves, making big words and small words, crammed close together, letters overlapping.
“Go closer,” she said. “You can’t see as well from here.” She gave me a shove on my shoulder blade.
As I approached, I could see that the words weren’t just cut from cardboard. Each word was different. I first saw the word NUT; it was a large capitalized word NUT and it was made out of something beige. I couldn’t really tell what it was but then I saw the word GRASS which was woven from tall blades, green and thready, and LEMON, cleverly twisted into cursive with peels and pulp, letting off a wonderful smell, so I went right up to NUT and discovered that it was in fact crumbled pieces of nuts all mixed together into a tan gluey paste.
“Isn’t this interesting,” I said to the woman.
I found PAPER, cut clean with an X-Acto knife, and a calligraphied ORGANDY, fluffing out so frothy I could hardly read it, and HAIR which was strawberry blond and curled up at the edge of the H and the leg of the R. The man who’d left Las Vegas had strawberry blond hair so I ignored that one and picked up PEARL instead.
“This is pricey, I bet,” I said, and she gave me an anxious look, like I was going to drop it. It was stunning, not made of tiny pearls, but somehow of one solid piece of pearl, rippling out rainbow colors across its capitals. I put it back carefully on the shelf next to BARNACLE, prickly and dry looking.
“Why do you make these?” I said. “They’re so beautiful!”
And they were. They were beautiful on their own and they were beautiful all together. I thought of her in her desert studio, hands dusty, apron splattered, sweat pouring, hammering down the final O in RADIO. She was making the world simple. She made the world steady somehow.
“People like the words,” she told me, picking up her apple to shine some more. “I made them for fun and then I got rich.”
“Well, I’d definitely like to buy these four mangoes,” I said.
She pressed the register. “Ten dollars.”
“And just curiously, how much are the words?” I kept my eyes on that wall, wanting to lean my head on PILLOW.
“Depends,” she said. “They vary. Plus, you see, those are just the solids.”
“What?” I stroked the petals that made up ROSE.
“I mean those are just the solids. I put the solids on display first because they’re easiest to understand.”
“Solid colors?” I said, staring at PLAID.
“Solid solids,” she said. “Liquids are in the back. Gases are in the back of the back. Both are very pricey,” she said, “but I’ll charge you just three dollars to look. Three dollars for the tour.”
“Liquid words?” I said, and I brought out my wallet. She rang up my mangoes and the tour. I moved closer to the register. “I think I’d like to buy a solid too,” I said.
I was feeling, suddenly, more liberated than I had in seven years. I wanted to take over the store. I wanted to bathe in plum juice, rediscover my body and adorn it in kiwi circles. I bit into a mango. The skin broke quick, and the flesh, meaty and wet, slid inside my mouth, the nearly embarrassing free-for-all lusciousness of ripe fruit.
“Oh!” I said. “Incredible!”
She gave me two dollars in change. I licked mango juice off my wrist and turned back to the words.
“Can I buy a solid?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Of course,” she said. “Which one?”
I wanted them all so I just pointed to the first I’d seen. “How much for NUT?”
“Interesting choice,” she said, walking over and pulling it off the shelf. “NUT. There are seven different kinds of nuts in here. Macademia, peanut, walnut, pecan, cashew, garbanzo, and almond.”
I raised my eyebrows, impressed.
“Wow,” I said.
She just stood there.
“Isn’t garbanzo a bean?” I asked.
She held it out to me. “I’ll give it to you for fourteen,” she said. “Two dollars a nut.”
There was a ten in my wallet between four ones and I lifted them all out. I had another drippy bite of mango.
“I won’t eat it,” I told her, indicating NUT.
She gave me a lip smile and took my money. “You can eat it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
Scooping all my purchases into a brown bag, she lifted a simple silver key off the wall behind her and beckoned for me to follow. We stopped at a gray door. Before she inserted the key, the woman put a hand on my sleeve.
“Be careful,” she said. “These are very delicate words. Don’t drip mango on anything.”
I had almost finished that first mango by now, the most incredible piece of food I had ever eaten in my life, and I held the remains of the pit away from me. My lips were sticky with juice. I felt the horror of Vegas dissipating, clarity descending like a window wrapped around my heart. She turned the knob, and I followed her in.
The back room was a square with a glass door at the far wall. This room was full of shelves too but the words were even harder to read from far away. I walked quietly up to them.
“Don’t touch,” she hissed.
The liquid words were set up in two ways. Most of them were shooting through glass pipes that shaped the letters. This looked really neat but I felt a little bit like it was cheating. Some of the others were liquids spilled onto a glass board, forming the letters. This was less cheating but looked cheaper. I walked down the row. I was not thrilled by WATER or COKE. I was drawn to RUBBING ALCOHOL, which was done with the piping and took up almost a whole shelf. It was a good one because it looked just like the water but I trusted that it wasn’t. There was one called POISON, no specification, and the liquid was dark brown. The letters were fancy on that one, like an old-fashioned theater brochure. I found BLOOD.
“Real blood?” I whispered, and brought the mango back close to me. Licked its pulpy pit.
She nodded. “Of course.”
“From what?” I asked, voice a little higher, and she didn’t answer. It shot bright through the pipe as if in a huge loose vein.
I didn’t like that blood one. I was recording all of this in a monologue in my head and I wondered then who I would tell the story to, and for the moment I couldn’t think of anyone. This made me feel bad, so I went over to LAKE and held that and it had little tiny ferns floating in it and I thought it was pretty. It was next to OCEAN which was looking more or less exactly like LAKE and that’s when I wondered if the woman was really truthful and how would anyone know? I wanted to buy OCEAN too, I wanted to have the word OCEAN with me all the time, it was way better than NUT, but I didn’t really trust it. It seemed likely that it was, deep down, TAP.
I paused by MILK. The sole white liquid. Soothing, just to look at.
“Gases?” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Sure. I’d like to see the gases, why not.”
My hands were now hardening with stickiness, each finger gluing slightly to its neighbor. I wanted to wash them, but instead I dropped the gooey pit into my purse near my wallet. The woman gave me a disapproving look and brought out another silver key, this one from her pocket. She turned and clicked and we went through the g
lass door in the back of the back room.
The gas room was empty.
“Oh,” I said, “hmm.” I worried for a second that she’d been robbed and was just now finding out.
“Be very very careful,” she whispered then. “This is expensive.” She looked tense beneath her tan, each of her features tight in its place.
“More expensive than PEARL?” I said.
“Much more,” she said. “This takes very difficult concentration. This is my most challenging work. Look here,” she said, “come here and look.”
She walked over to one of the shelves on the wall and close up I could see there was more glass tubing-not much, but one word’s worth. It spelled SMOKE. Soft granules of ash floated through the M.
“It’s a good one,” I said. “I like it.”
“Most of them,” she said, still whispering, “in this room, don’t have the tubing.”
“Oh.” I bobbed my head, not understanding.
“See,” she continued, “there are many many gas words in this room but you might not be able to read them.”
I looked to the shelves and saw nothing, saw shelves that were empty, saw how my apartment would look in a month when Steve had cleared out his books and his bookends.
“Top shelf: XENON,” the woman said. “It’s there, it’s just very hard to see. I can see it because I have very good eyes for it, because it is my medium.”
I looked to the top shelf. “There’s no XENON there,” I said. “There’s nothing.”
“Trust me,” she said. “There’s XENON.”
I shook my head. I shifted my feet a few times. There was POISON in the room before, dark and available, and a thin wire of fear started to cut and coil in my stomach.
“ARGON,” she said, “is on shelf four, below XENON.”
“Noble gas number two,” I said.
She nodded. “I prefer the noble gases.”
“I bet,” I said. “There’s no ARGON there,” I said.
“It’s there,” she said. “Be extremely careful.”
I spoke slowly, coated now in a very mild shellac of panic. “How,” I said, “how can it be there, it would dissipate. I took chemistry. It can’t just sit there. Argon,” I said, “can’t just sit there.”
“I put guidelines in the air,” she said.
“I make a formation in the air.”
I turned toward the entrance.
“I think it’s time for me to go,” I said.
“NEON,” she said, “is on shelf number three.”
But right before I walked to the door, I reached out a hand which was so hard and gluey from the mango juice, reached out just to wipe it slightly on the very tip of the shelf. The coil in my stomach took my fingers there. I barely even noticed what I was doing.
The woman drew in her breath in agony.
“Aaghh!” she choked as I got in my little wipe wipe. “You broke it!”
“I broke what?” I said. “Broke what?”
“You broke AIR,” she said. “You need to pay for it, you broke it, you broke AIR.”
Then she pointed to a sign I hadn’t seen before, tucked half behind a shelf, a half-hidden laminated sign that said: VISITORS MUST PAY FOR BROKEN MERCHANDISE.
“There’s air there still,” I said, “that’s no special air.”
“It was air in the shape of AIR,” she said. “It took me a while to train that space, it was AIR. That’s three hundred dollars.”
“What?” I said. “I won’t pay that,” I said, speaking louder. “I didn’t even break it, look, there’s tons of air around, there’s air everywhere.”
I waved my hand in the space, indicating air, and she let out another, louder, shriek.
“That was HOPE,” she said, “you just broke HOPE!”
“HOPE?” I said, and now I went straight to the glass door, “Broke hope? Hope is not a gas, you can’t form hope!”
The door, thank God, was unlocked, and I swung it open and stalked into the liquid room. The woman was right on my heels.
“I caught hope,” she said. “I made it into a gas.”
“I want to go now,” I said. “There’s no possible way to catch hope, please.”
My voice was gaining height. I didn’t believe her but still. Of all things to wreck.
“Well,” she said. “I went to wedding after wedding after wedding in Las Vegas. And I capped the bottle each time right when they said ‘I do.’”
This made me laugh for a second but then I had to stop because I thought I might choke. I could just see those couples now, perched at opposite ends of a living-room couch, book-ending the air between them, the thickest, most formed air around, that uncrossable, unbreakable, impossible air, finally signing the papers that would send them to different addresses.
I thought of the seven years I’d spent with Steve, and how at first when we’d kissed his lips had been a boat made of roses and how now they were a freight train of lead.
So that I wouldn’t cry, I put my hand near my face and made a pushing motion, moved some wind toward her. “I’m Queen of Hope,” I said. “Here. Have some of mine.”
She grabbed BLOOD from the liquid room shelves.
“Give me my money for AIR!” she said, waving the BLOOD in my face.
I opened the door to the solid room and ran through it. I kept my back arched so she wouldn’t touch me. I couldn’t pay the money and I wouldn’t pay it, it was air, for God’s sake, but I didn’t want that blood on me, didn’t want that blood anywhere close to me.
“I’m sorry,” I yelled as I edged out the front, “sorry!”
I looked past the fruit to locate my car and as I did, my eye grazed over the solid words, familiar now, but on the bottom shelf I suddenly saw CAT and DOG in big brown capitals which I hadn’t seen before and my stomach balked. The woman kept yelling “You Owe Me Money!” and I hit the dead warmth of the outside air.
Everything was still. My car sat across the street, waiting for me, placid.
The woman was right behind me, yelling, “You owe me three hundred dollars!” and I took NUT out of my bag and threw it behind me where it broke on the street into a million shavings. “Nut!” I yelled. I got into my car, key shaking.
“Vandal!” she yelled back, and she didn’t even try to cross the street but just stood at the front of the blue-awninged store with BLOOD in her arms and then she reached back and pelted my car with a tangelo and a pineapple and one huge hard cantaloupe. I locked my doors and right when I put my key into the ignition, she took BLOOD and threw that too; it hit the car square on the passenger-side window, cracking on the top and opening up like an egg, dripping red down the window until the letters ran clear. Maybe it was just juice, but that one I trusted, that one seemed real to me.
Hands trembling, I put my foot on the accelerator and the car started quickly, warmed from the sunlight, the desert spreading out hot and fruitless. The window to my right was streaking with red now. I kept a hand on the car lock, making sure it was down. Across the street, the woman pulled back her arm, which was an awfully good arm, by the way, she was some kind of baseball superstar, and she let fly a few guavas, which splatted blue against my rear window.
I drove away fast as I could. The shack and the woman, still throwing, grew small in my rearview mirror. I drove and drove for eighty miles without pausing, just getting away, just speeding away as the blood dried on the window, away from the piles of tangerines, from the star fruit clumped in stolen constellations, from the seven different mutations of apple.
In an hour I desperately needed to go to the bathroom, so I pulled into a gas station. I still had the brown bag of mangoes with me. When I opened it up, they were all black and rotten, with flies crawling over them. I dumped the whole bag. The one I’d eaten was just a pit, which I removed from my purse and kept on the passenger seat, but by the time I got home and pulled into the empty driveway, it too had rotted away into a soft, weak ball.
Two teenagers were standing on a stre
et corner.
They were both wearing the hot new pants and both had great new butts, discovered on their bodies, a gift from the god of time, boom, a butt. Shiny and nice.
They did not like their butts.
One was complaining to the other that she thought her butt was more heart than bubble and that she wanted bubble and her friend said she thought heart was the best and they stood there on the street corner pressing the little silver nub that changed the mean red hand to the friendly walking man and the light did not change.
One friend had breasts, the other was waiting.
When the light changed, they both walked to the poster store where the cute boy worked. He was growing so fast that he slept fourteen hours a day and when he came to work he had a stooped look like he’d been lifting large objects for hours and in fact there was some truth in that, he’d been unfurling his body up through his spine, up through itself. Each day people looked shorter and today these two girls-the one he liked with the ponytail bobbing, the other one that touched his elbow which he liked too-they were there again looking in the glass case at the skull rings and joking.
The boy showed them a new poster of a rock-and-roll star in a ripped shirt on a stage with a big wide open mouth that you could fall into. The girls, at the same time, said they thought it was gross. Jinx! They laughed endlessly. Too much tonsil, said one, and she grunted in such a way that made them laugh for another ten minutes. It was that fifteen-year-old laugh that is like a stream of bubbles but makes everyone else feel stupid and left out. Which is part of its point. The boy got a break halfway through the time they were there and one girl said she wanted to look at the posters one by one, flipping those big plastic-lined poster holders, because she liked to stare at her own pace, and the other girl, ponytail, went out back with the growing boy, rapidly notching out another vertebra right as they spoke, straightening higher like a snake head rising from an egg. They went out back so he could smoke a cigarette and she smoked it with him and when touchy girl finished flipping through the leather-pants women and the leather-pants men and looked for her friend, she couldn’t find her and wandered out of the store by herself.
Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.
