Apples

by Mollie Hawkins

1. When he started his job at the organic grocery store, Produce Man brings me apples with names like poems: Pink Lady. Ambrosia. Gala. American Beauty. He brings me the sweet ones he knows I will like.

2. I know three kinds of apples: Red Delicious, the mouth-puckering Granny Smith, and whatever bitter kind grows on my grandmother’s trees in the Alabama woods.

3. Produce Man and I don’t feel like grownups. We slip in and out of college, like we are window shopping at a luxury department store. Work schedules and school schedules do not overlap on our Venn diagrams.4. His mother works in a warehouse, packaging first class meals for airlines. So many apple slices in little compartments next to sweaty cheese. She smokes in her car and piles the console high with cigarette ash, waiting for it to grow big enough to disappear inside, its roots firmly planted in the floorboards.

5. My father, the saxophonist with a day job, eats sour Granny Smiths by the bag, sprinkling salt between bites. We are alike in all the ways that matter, but I cannot bring myself to eat Granny.

6. Produce Man gets me a job also working at the organic grocery store. I stock gourmet potato chips and reincarnate stale bread into samples for the olive oil bar. I spend hours unclogging the honey-roasted peanut butter machine. I wear flimsy gloves and bail out nuts with a plastic cup, keeping aside handfuls. He slices up a Honeycrisp and we make ourselves sick in the back room. This is what we do now, instead of kissing.

7. In Greek mythology, apples are symbolic of love. In the Bible, they are symbolic of temptation. Desire. Evil.

8. I desire and am tempted by the way other men know nothing about me. I crave to know nothing about them—inhaling but never exhaling. I want to dig into the very cores of them and spit the seeds onto the red clay.

9. I end things with Produce Man. Eight years of growing together reduced to rotting Fujis on the counter of our apartment. I dig into the cores of other men. I find that there are no seeds, just red clay, staining my shoes.

10. I move to California, where people go apple picking in the fall, taking home pounds of blood-red apples. They beg me to take their excess. Please, they say. There’s no way we can eat all of them before they go bad.

11. Produce Man finds other women, eventually marries one. They look alike in their roundness, apple-blushed cheeks pressed together. Later, I read an interview he gives to a magazine, where he explains how he came to the South for a girl but married a better one.

12. I go to the popular apple-picking spot with a man who likes that I’m skinny and exercise too much. He buys me apple-cider donuts, which trigger my disordered body, sending me galloping to the bathroom. So many moms with sugar-high children banging the stall doors. So much humanity and love, and I’m shitting all over it.

13. Where I work now, students and staff are given Apple computers. I come home to a studio apartment in the unlit part of town, a wooden IKEA bowl full of Red Delicious on the coffee table I rescued from a dumpster. It is all sweet and sad and silent.

14. In art, apples symbolize damn near everything: the cosmos, immortality, death, seduction, destruction, rot. Newness.

15. Sometimes I fly home, to see if I can find the Produce Man at work and tell him I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. He was right all along. Pink Ladies are best.

Mollie Hawkins’ work has appeared in The Rumpus, Marie Claire, Salon, Bustle, Under the Radar Magazine, PoemMemoirStory (PMS), and elsewhere. She studied at Bread Loaf and has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she is also the social media manger. Her first book, Object Lessons: Saxophone, is now out via Bloomsbury. Originally from rural Alabama, she now lives in Los Angeles.