JENNY SUGGESTED THAT we drive out to an apple orchard. This was a month later. She called me and asked if I wanted to get out for an afternoon. Innocent, innocent. She picked me up in front of our local McDonalds. I wanted a touch of anonymity and you cant get much more anonymous than sitting inside a McDonalds waiting for a woman to pick you up. I got in the car and said hi. I was scared but also not scared. She gave me confidence. She had girled herself up for the day. She was driving her car barefoot. A warm September, this was. Her painted toenails made a strong impression on me as they pressed on the accelerator pedal. I resisted her for a while by thinking that she was bullying me, erotically. Her clothes were carefully disordered with her blue chambray shirt slightly unbuttoned and her hair loose, and the sun drenched her side of the car.
We talked about books, how boring they were to read but how you loved them anyway.
A few miles out of town, geese patrolled the riverbank. I sat on the passenger side with my legs tucked under me. A couple in a canoe floated down the river. We passed a little Lutheran cemetery on the other side of the road where the headstones were all in German. Hier ruhet in Gott. A necklace of brilliant glass beads swung from Jennys rearview mirror: red and purple and blue. She said she used the beads for navigation. She didnt explain how. One rose lay across the dashboard facing me. Freshly cut. Its stem was wet. She said it was mine. She said it was my rose. That I could have it. This gift was ordained.
She told me that she was the youngest of three daughters. I asked her if she had ever loved a woman before. Loved? Loved? she asked. She smiled and laughed. Is that what were talking about? I thought we were talking about being a daughter.
I got scared again. Being teased that way. But then she grinned squarely at the passenger side of the car, where I was.
JUST OUT OF TOWN is an orchard and a cider press. We parked the car and made our way out to the orchard. Therere paths between the rows of trees for the people who come to pick the apples themselves and on one of these paths you can tramp up a hill where you are able briefly to see in all directions. The humble soft modest landscape of Michigan surrounded us with indistinct vegetation: the farmlands laid out in their green rectangular symmetries until they faded into haze, then the ever-distant water towers and sky-poking radio transmission antennas. Down below us in the orchard the trees were being mechanically shaken one by one by a motorized device that clamped the tree around the trunk and then vibrated so that the apples fell into a spread piece of rough brown burlap cloth. We watched the apples raining down in a circle and then being gathered and loaded.
Jenny held my hand for a moment. Then she walked backward and leaned against the trunk of the tree that happened to stand there. She reached up and picked an apple and pulled it off the branch. She bit into the apple and smiled. Then she simply handed it to me. I held the apple in my hand and gazed down at the marks her teeth had made. I raised the apple to my mouth and put first my lips and then my tongue on the spot where her teeth had been. It had a familiar taste. The apples bright sweetness worried its way into me.
I hardly knew her. We hadnt talked all that much.
Guess what, she said. I happen to know that this very tree is the very tree of life. What an amazing deal! Then she laughed and said, Come on. And then she said, You know that you and I are going to be the two best friends ever. Well share everything. The two of us?
Doing what? I asked.
Oh just being together. Having adventures, Kathryn. Kathryn and Jenny.
STILL BAREFOOT SHE WALKED into the barn where the cider press commanded the central room. They lowered the press over a layer or two of apples enclosed in burlap and held inside a wooden frame. They crushed the apples into mash and the cider flowed out through the slats into an immense wire-mesh drain beneath the press. The guy there operating it, his body looked like a sackful of gravel. The cider poured down into a containment tank. In the mass of details I lost my concentration because at that moment a dog happened into the room. A cocker spaniel. Jovial and harmless of course. Thats what they say. Just sniffing around the edges of the room for some doughnut crumbs. I turned quickly away from this dog. I cant bear to be in the same room with a dog. I was on my way out.
Until then I hadnt noticed that the room was filled with yellow jackets and bees. They flew onto the press and made their way onto the Dixie Cups on the corner card table and to the doorway where the late afternoon sun was shining in. I thought: Oh theyre just yellow jackets. But just then Jenny cried out. She bent down. She shouldnt have been in there barefoot anyway. We agreed on that later, when we were less dazed. She walked out onto the driveway and sat down. She put her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were squinting at nothing. They squinted as she wept.
Stupid stupid stupid she said. To be stung in there. I am so oblivious. Good Lord it hurts. She glanced up at me. Its just like being stabbed in the ankle with an icepick.
Then she said, I dont suppose you can do anything.
Oh yes I said. Just wait here a minute.
I ran out of the pressing room and went to the back of the barn, the shady side that faces the fields and the orchard. I checked to see if anyone was there within plain sight. Nobody was. I took the cotton bandanna out of my hair. I looked around again and lowered my jeans and my underwear and I squatted and peed a little into the cotton. Funny about what you learn in Campfire Girls. Then I hitched up and ran around again and found her and dabbed at the spot on her ankle where shed been stung. Her skin was as red as a little cloud at dawn. After about fifteen seconds she smiled and turned that hothouse smile in my direction.
Ah, she said, girl, it turns out that you are the life of me. Whats that miracle cure youve got there?
My secret.
I drove back. I drove her car. I didnt let her drive. I didnt drive to our apartment. Not to where Bradley and I lived. No. Not there. I drove to her building. Outside we sat down and talked. That was all we did. I was curious about conversation with her and the atmosphere of calm expectancy that it created. We told each other chapter-and-verse of our lives. What Im saying is that we waited.
For days after that, I sat on the front stoop, my own, ours. I watched the sun setting while my husband Bradley sat next to me and we shared the small talk of that particular day. And then sometimes he would go inside and I would stay out there looking toward the west as the breezes wafted through the tree (there was only one) in the front yard. I was thinking about her and about the feeling that she gave me.
Two weeks later, after Jenny and I had done some gardening together at one of those communal gardens where you have your own section, collecting a few late-ripening tomatoes in brown paper bags we brought along, we went calmly up to her apartment. We took the tomatoes into her kitchen. I took two of them out and found a small plate and a knife, but my hand was shaking too hard for me to slice them. I put the knife down on the table and looked straight at her.
Two weeks later, after Jenny and I had done some gardening together at one of those communal gardens where you have your own section, collecting a few late-ripening tomatoes in brown paper bags we brought along, we went calmly up to her apartment. We took the tomatoes into her kitchen. I took two of them out and found a small plate and a knife, but my hand was shaking too hard for me to slice them. I put the knife down on the table and looked straight at her.
Then she took my hand and led me to the bedroom. She told me to forget about the tomatoes for a while. In the bedroom we lay down together and we shed our calm exteriors completely and I saw her and when she asked me what I wanted, I said: I want you.
Afterward she sang to me. What she sang was Hail to the Victors. She meant it as a joke and as an anthem. I learned how to do that from her. Her cat, Ralph, watched us from the dresser. I was miserable with happiness. Our souls had merged. I lay there and stared up at the string of red pepper lights attached with tiny hooks up near the molding, the ones I had bought for her, and I exchanged jealous glances with Ralph the cat who in agitation had knocked over a hairbrush, and I felt the cool autumn breeze blowing across my body and Jennys where our two souls were lodged, and I heard the Good Humor truck go by on the street, little glockenspiel notes.
Then we both went back into the kitchen and, naked, finished slicing and eating the tomatoes. They were delicious, and she had made me ravenous.
My idea was that I could save my marriage. In some respect I suppose I loved him still. Bradley took me to the Humane Society on a Sunday and we walked among the dogs as he held me, and I guess I named them individually even though I dont remember doing so. I dont see what importance it would have if I did do that, or if I remembered it.
We made love several times that day and each time I came and I did, believe me I thought of Jenny. I thought of the flower-garden smell of her soul and how I could just reach in and find her heart any time I wanted it and of how that would be the end of my loneliness here on earth. When he was on top of me, I would hold out my hands above him in the air and imagine that I was grasping her, her invisible spirit, in the air, terrible hypocrite that I am. No, actually, that I was. I stopped being a hypocrite. It wasnt the right time to let him know that my soul had flown out of my body and taken up householding in Jennys. I sang Hail to the Victors to him because I missed her so much. I felt strong with her and weak with him. Empty and absent.
He said that he loved me but I dont actually think that he did. Or maybe his love just didnt manage to get into working order with me. By that time I had seen love in its final form. I knew what it looked like. It had freckles on its hands, the southern hemisphere on the left and the northern hemisphere on the right. And it wasnt him. Or him with me. Or any combination of the two of us. She was flying my flag by that time.