Stem, Stone, Brine
Fiction by Sarah Rose de Souza
In autumn we will stone the cherries – Lone calls it “splitting the atom.” They will be brined in seawater until their flesh turns firm, then bathed in sugar for a fortnight till they are sweet as pay-day. We will paste on the labels in French cursive print, the drunken swoon of the letter D tumbling towards a piquant little i. Once, parlours in New York bought shiploads of these jars, but ice cream cakes are out of style there, says Lone, and so are trifles.
I leave her in the orchard to pinch syrup from the curing room; love always makes me hungry. Then I go to Mr. Druchetti’s office next door to give him the daily report. The walls are hung with photographs of jars labelled Druchetti’s Maraschino Cherries in the ice bins of world-famous cocktail bars, framed rules for the handling and sorting of pickings, what to do if you find fruit fly eggs.
Mr. Druchetti is midway through a story about how he once defenestrated a starling in this very room – giddied it onto the lawn, left a tiny corpse – when I start choking on the fumes from the curing room. That briney sweet smell, the smell of stoned fruits washed in the Tyrhennian sea then gradually defiled, it is in my hair, it wakes me up at dawn like a cowbell. This whole town reeks of it.
I excuse myself and flee, knowing he will not notice.
“I’m losing faith,” I once said to Mr Druchetti, a year into working here.
“Your religious faith, or your faith in yourself?” he replied. He was midway through smudging a bug into the wall.
My what? I thought. I have neither of these things.
That was when I knew I needed to change my ways: how can you lose faith when you have none to begin with? A stupid way to lose.
So I worked harder. I grew to love the factory’s candied cough-drop stench, inhaled till it got me sugar high. I went to bed early, had dreams of a cabaret singer in a long ruffled gown moving towards me from the heart of a concentric ring of rooms, filled with tulips the colour of swollen lipstick. The centrepoint kept moving, so just as she got close she was far again, beckoning me from a distance. I thought of those old dances where you twirl your way from one partner’s hands into another’s, forever fleeing and slipping, like the unravelling of a skein of silk.
Yes, I thought. I have found a better way to lose.
Then Lone came to work in the orchard, with me, Paty and the other cherry pickers. And as I began to like her, I grew to hate Mr. Druchetti – who I had once admired, thought purehearted for his arrow-like focus on the harvest, his obliviousness to human nature. Warning signs of a held-in sob, unclenched fists on pay-day, it all washed over Mr. Druchetti like sugar water. He wouldn’t notice a knife in your ribs at briefing time.
Lone was not like him. When I frowned, she fretted. It made me want to throw tantrums like a cantankerous child just to catch her eye.
I push through the factory doors and hurry down the stone steps which lead back to the orchard. Lone is at the far end and has nearly finished stripping the last tree, except for a few low-hanging darlings at the bottom.
“Frances, babbino caro,” she says when she sees me. Her face beneath its safety hat is quaint and dim, like a hurricane lamp.
“I leave for five minutes and you finish the harvest without me,” I say.
“Bug spray?” says Lone, because my eyes are narrowed threateningly. The orchard air stings with the stuff. Only way to keep out pests who might gorge themselves on our harvest.
Quality fruit. Sweet red round shiny with a stone at its heart. Who can blame them, dumb desiring creatures?
Her white-gloved hand pulls at a stem on the branch and tears it free, laying it inside her basket. I put on my hat, and hear singing.
“We’ll get you back, we’ll get you!” we call to the thieving starling with the stem in its beak, flying north towards the city.
Lone and I set down our brimming baskets and squint at the trees: a consummate, bare green hush. We haven’t missed a single cherry.
It is the end of a long summer. The orchard work is done.
A silvery high chime rings out, then, coming from the factory. Our fruits shiver in the harmonics. It’s time to please bring your pickings inside to the sorting room thank you. Lone and I walk up the avenue with our baskets, walking daintily as if we are wearing something Chinese-lantern-shaped, the colour of a cold morning, maybe tufted with rosettes – rather than regulation safety wear. Oh we step so prettily but I regret to say that every other second one of us stops, looks at the ground and curses. Well, Lone curses and I spit “sorry” like the wretch I am.
Though we try to avoid it, stepping on cherries in harvest season is a sad inevitability, like never telling your co-worker that you dream of kissing their fingertips, and every time it feels like a murder – the sweet dark ooze, the skeleton stone. Only firm white-hearted cherries can stand being transported as freight without falling apart. We work with cherries of a more sensitive nature. Darker and more precious. They built the factory at the mouth of an orchard for this very reason, so that the cherries would not have to travel too far, could be carried like darling weak kittens along the avenue into the painted doors that read DRUCHETTI’S MARASCHINO CHERRIES in fat drunken cursive.
In cherry factories in America, Mr. Druchetti once told me, mouthing the word as if it were corrosive acid, they murder the cherries during production: first they are bleached, then pierced with scarlet dye. Ours come maraschino-dark on the bough. Ripening in a heat that the tourists cannot bear, they drop and drop.
Squish! Sorry, dear cherries.
We pass Paty who is raking the dropped fruit off the path, standing in her wellingtons ankle-deep in red goo.
As we leave the orchard and move into the sorting room, I think we look like monsters in our hard hats and soft white gloves. The gloves protect the skin of the cherries and the hats protect our heads. (The Venetian liqueur factory next door is under construction; clumps of stucco and terracotta have been falling from the sky for weeks.)
The first step is to check for rot. The second, to look for cracks from summer storms – cherry flesh splits easily in rain, being mostly water itself. We feed the bad cherries to the garbage chute and the good cherries to the refrigerator, ready for their tubs of syrup, and soon our baskets are empty and my hands are numb. I think about going home and lying parallel with the skirting board, but then Lone suggests we go to Floe’s. “Workers get a second scoop on Fridays.”
Our factory supplies all the ice-cream parlours in town, and Floe’s is a loyal customer. Their late closing time makes it a popular seduction spot for disk jockeys and jewel thieves, who bring their dates to sit in silk stockings on a hard chair, eating peach swirl with a long silver spoon…
The high counter seats make me too dizzy to think of love, though Lone is looking at me with sly eyes. In them I see her past, a girlhood of misconduct and elaborate pranks, of lunch-on-the-grass light, a light which has travelled years into her future to account for this sly look, this present gleam in the eye.
I think maybe, this winter, I will not haunt the out of season orchard, pressing my nose up against the netting fence. This winter, I will be the one to suggest an evening plan. On my way to meet her I might stop at Floe’s for cones: good for swapping between mittened hands, fudge-blueberry-fudge like our own private semaphore – no broken engine to report, no sea for miles.
We suck on our spoons. The sweet ice is helping my throat.
The next day, I snaffle three cherries from an open jar in the brining room, bare-fingeredly, then go to Mr. Druchetti’s office to give him the daily report. He is in a dark mood. Ants are crawling across the paperwork and there are wasps in the filing cabinet. Pests always know when the harvest has come in.
Mr. Druchetti speaks in strange compounds like ‘bough-violence’ and ‘fruit-hunger,’ ordinary words glued together to make something sensuous. He looks a little like a vampire – well-groomed and aristocratic, with a smooth polished head, high ears and molars which protrude, alarming yet wonderfully symmetrical, on either side of his mouth. “You’re so dependable, Francesca,” he tells me. Lucky my stained fingers are hidden beneath white gloves. “You pick with orchard-grace.”
I would like to say I dream of killing starlings out of loyalty to Mr. Druchetti, or even just shaking the treetops to shoo them away. But of course not. I dream of winter numbness and unfertilised soil. I wake up and pray. Please god, I can’t pluck the root of this sadness out, O help me pluck it out.
It’s true: the feeling has started to bear fruit in me, weighty and boring to look at but deadly bitter. Please god, pluck out this morbid heart and replace it with a stone. Then I can become pure and ignorant again. I will rollerskate down scentless avenues and only dream of myself at night, I will carry a stuffed starling for protection.
That autumn, all the cherries spoiled. A badness in the brine or an Etruscan curse, nobody knew. The gamblers thanking their stars for excellently-named horses and the disk jockeys in long dark skirts had nowhere to take their dates now, the cocktail bars and ice-cream parlours all having all closed their doors – for what is a daiquiri or a vanilla sundae without a maraschino cherry on top?
Mr. Druchetti calls a staff meeting in the office the morning he discovers the bad news. It was during his inspection. “Sulphur-disgrace,” he says of the smell. “Volcano-horror.” He had plunged his whole hand into the syrupy jar from pure spite. The cherries were bursting out of their skin like the opposite of something preserved. While he tells us the story, he scratches his smooth head, drawing a bright red line from dome to temple.
We are to hand in our white gloves and our hats. The factory will be out of service till next summer. He tells us to shut the door behind us. As we do, the sign on its nail swings. At peak ripeness, gentle handling is essential.
Lone and I are five streets away and can smell the factory as always, its briny cough-drop smell. The fumes from the curing room are so strong they can provoke strange visions, Lone once told me, feelings of disembodiment.
I look helpless, waiting for her to notice, but she is miles away, humming arias to herself and tapping her shoes as she walks. How will I spend the winter now?
Without my hat and gloves, I feel mysterious to myself, like I’ve abruptly become guardian to a bare, unwanted child and must learn how to dress it. Yes, to dress it. Something Chinese-lantern-shaped, I think, the colour of a cold morning, maybe tufted with rosettes...
I keep my hands in my pockets, still smelling of sugar and the vinegar they use to clean the machines.
Sarah Rose de Souza's poetry and prose has been published in Ambit, 3:am magazine, Porridge Magazine, Berfrois, Horse Egg Literary and Poor Lass Zine. She is the co-publisher of Solo Frutas, a multilingual collection of visual art and writing on the theme of fruit from an international group of artists. She works as a fiction book editor.