Artichokes

Artichokes

The smallest ones were almost sweet with tender prickles on their purple edges that would catch in your teeth. Beata craved them each spring as soon as the snow thawed in Chicago.

This spring, it was necessary to walk. Beata left her children and did it each morning, wending her way through the campus, past the church with the little balcony that an Italian priest might perch on, past the shuttered bookstore, its windows full of presidential books that now felt quaint, relics from another life.

That life was about who won or lost the primary. In this life thousands died across the globe and her father sat smoking in a ripped easy chair in Northern Italy. In this life, too, she wanted artichokes and mint, the scrape of her teeth across the flesh. But that didn’t matter anymore. What did matter? She was healthy, her job intact. What mattered was Oscar playing with her ear that morning. He was nine and he still came into their bed in the mornings. Despite being told not to touch faces, or maybe because he was told not to, he touched hers, flicking at her earlobes, squeezing her cheeks, lifting one closed eyelid, then another with his damp pliable hands.

She loved his small fingers tapping on her skin. She had abandoned her bedtime routine, rejected her black facial soap and some blue shark-oil eye cream. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth. Her head pounded from too much red wine. Oscar tapped gently on her temples then got her the Advil.

Every night since the distancing she became quietly drunk while she watched various screens at once. She liked the blanketing of warmth behind her eyes, the bland assurances of reality TV; I have never loved anyone like this, mixed with data on the spread. Her thumbs glided over images of her friend’s children and their new hobbies, their loaves of bread and crotch-ed bikinis. She could not stop shuffling the deck of images.

“Beata, come to bed,” John had said. He tugged her hand. He even wiggled his eyebrows. Usually she found his suggestive eyebrows exciting.

“You go. I’ll come."

“It's bad,” he said when she turned back to her screen. “Did you read the briefing? We’re like three weeks behind Italy in this, if we don’t—if you look at the numbers--“

“I told you that yesterday. The article I texted you.“

“And there was another piece in--”

“Why does it take you twenty-four hours to agree with me?”

“I’m an optimist.”

“Or?”

He sighed. “Or you’re right and I’m wrong. I’m an idiot.”

“It can be a fine line,” she said. Laughing, he leaned down to kiss her and she kissed back.

“Come with me,” he said. The children were asleep. This was still real life but she could not access it. Her fingers tapped an image of someone’s window-sill basil and enlarged it until she could see the veins in a single leaf. She hadn’t read the latest briefing and still needed to do that.

“I’ll be up soon.” 

The artichoke truck was dirty in a good way, the flatbed lacquered with fragrant mud. Her father drove, her mother, at home, rolled sheets of pasta.

In the morning Beata cuddled Oscar. He was young enough to get comfort from her body. Eva was twelve and had hated her mother before shelter-in-place. Now, with none of her friends around and some extra sleep, Eva liked her again. Downstairs, Beata had coffee as strong as she could make it in the little metal cooker on the stove and worried about getting more coffee beans. Was the supply chain really solid? She read her phone, decided to let Eva sleep late and then left the children to their father. Italy was impossible. They had been planning spring break there.

She put buds into her ears like all her students, wireless white sticks. Italy was her mother, dead for a year. The way the back of her mother’s hands were soft with paraffin, covered with liver spots. She’d lived quietly among dark green hills. A red waxed table cloth. A piece bread dipped in green olive oil. A cigarette.

Meek Mill thumped in her ears, sent blood pumping through her body. She passed the building where she worked and felt a keen longing, she wouldn’t have expected after all her fervent complaining. Beata loved her students. She was not tenured and the cruelty of the system of hiring and firing had wired her body into a shrill sinew of discipline. She hated her job, the constant tension and the cruelty. But she loved it, the students, like overgrown children and so smart, the discussions of Freud and Jung that she wanted to have forever.

She sat on a bench and read her phone again. How many times a day did she do it? Her thumb’s addiction was as grave and pathetic as any other. She clicked a link and looked. Nothing. Closed it. Click the same link again. Nothing. Did that three times. Meek Mill sang about the brutality of America. The rhythm throbbed within her. The prison industrial complex. She felt different kinds of rage. Race was rage. So was gender. Bernie and Biden were rage. Her own tenure case caused spikes of rage when she’d imagined a possible rejection. Even Oscar could cause rage— his little body refusing to acquiesce at times, to take a shower when asked, or eat another spear of asparagus. The anger she felt when he asked for more screen time. Yes, when he was human it could be enraging. It made her walk. It made her run. But all of that anger now drained out of her like a fire pouring from her body. In its place was exhausted ash.

Her thumbs scrolled up and down looking for a spark. Data, numbers to spark fire. She read the recommendations from doctors and scientists. She read the inane, opposite response of the administration. The vice president sat in a prayer circle. The president refused to wear a mask. Rage came. Licks of fire surged. Nearby an ambulance screamed.

But rubber gloves lay snarled in the gutter and disgusted her. The tests were not readily available. Or they were inaccurate. Or no one could get them. Or only the rich could. Or you could get tested but results took a while. Confusion clotted puffed clouds of words. Then back to nihilism: Extreme social distancing was recommended everywhere.

Still, Beata scrolled: New York, always ahead, had been slow to comply. Commerce and company, sex and food! Thrilling transactions. The buzz that only comes from a crowd; crowds in line at test sites. Crowds at grocery stores. They could not stay cooped up. In contrast, Beata’s academic neighborhood was obedient and quiet. Rows of tulips decorated the Midway and bluebells lushed a periwinkle spread across the fields. The flat planks of sod so different from the undulating hills she’d been raised in. You could tear the very new artichokes with your fingers, and eat them in a salad with lemon and thin sheets of parmesan.

She sat on the bench alone. Without anger, she was dead. Her ass was cold. Her thumbs moved madly. There was nothing to find. There was everything to find. An infinite mess of articles unspooled one after another filled with the same nightmare. She pressed play and heard people singing across an empty street in Rome. She had grown up on earth so clean you could eat the dandelion greens from the hillside. In the harvest, the artichokes were stacked in pyramids at the market, tumbled prodigally from the bed of the truck. She remembered one that had grown enormous and rough, like a human head, the spiky prickles turning to tendrils hung around it like hair. Her mother claimed it would be tough. So her brothers had kicked it around the back of the house like a soccer ball.

She stood and walked toward the lake. Her father had married someone new she did not like. She considered calling him. There was no way he was distancing. He was standing in the little bar at the bottom of the hill, throwing the pieces of tissue that came with espresso and biscotti to the floor.

One brother was tucked in with his family in an apartment in Trastevere, the other in the country. It had been Christmas once in Rome. It had been Christmas fifty times for her in Rome. She’d had Oscar at the edge of the death her own fertility. A mighty fight. Two students walked by wearing masks. Did they wear masks because they thought they were sick, or to protect themselves from others? A coldness ran though her.

She pulled her own mask up and turned when they passed then looked at the green. People recommended gratitude. But the earth reminded her of a sorrow that had amplified; the warming temperatures, the damage that we caused, the science that we knew about how to protect ourselves yet blithely ignored.

Now she understood the word blithe: When Oscar was a baby she’d dipped his feet in Trevi Fountain during a heat wave. Ice cream ran in a hazelnut river down her wrist. She’d licked her forearm. John bit her ice cream cone. She had dried off Oscar’s foot and stuck it in her mouth. Droplets were everywhere, a fabulous contagion of pleasure and heat. The smooth bottom of his foot that had no calluses. How she’d wanted to devour him.

People were delicious. Had she always known? John had not kissed her this week. His cock was insistent but she wanted his tongue.

She had sat on her father’s lap in the bed of an artichoke truck every year, rocking over the hills, laughing as they drove home with their loot. They had once been close. Then, she’d developed breasts and he’d pushed her off his lap. There had been increments, bits of distance added each year like batting into a quilt. Jobs and moves. Then she became an intellectual, married an American. He could not reach her.

It could not be too late.

Go take your walk, John had said. It will make you feel better. She fished out her phone to scroll while walking. Stopped, Put it back in her pocket. The March sun was high and cool. Daffodils burst through the earth around a sage green house. A squirrel clung to a quivering leaf with its tiny hands. She passed the closed businesses and kept going towards the water. She passed her own house, a red brick thing, Georgian, suddenly so American she had to laugh. But Oscar’s fingers. Eva’s new affection. John’s mouth. She’d go home and make Eva a Bolognese, put on a video for the kids and kiss her husband. But she kept walking.

She checked her phone. No new messages that were personal but work emails. Notices of closures. The yoga studio. The symphony. The library. She leaned against the building where her children went to school and peered into the dark lobby. The school had hosted a benefit at a museum with a thousand guests, the asymptomatic everywhere. Deaths tripled every three days.

The light was too beautiful, defiant, and the beauty of the green confused her. She crossed the street past the spot where Joni usually stood, the school crossing guard she’d known for years.

She took the grassy parkland to the closed lakefront. The lake so vast, it looked like the ocean. Sometimes in summer she had pretended it was, and that Europe was on the other side instead of Michigan. She remembered tanning on the Fifty-sixth Street Beach, careful to push her bra straps down so she didn’t get lines. “You don’t want to smell like focaccia” John had said the first time he’d seen her applying olive oil right onto her skin.

Could soft skin matter? There was no life. There was a police line blocking the underpass to the lake. She checked to see if anyone was looking. She stepped  over the yellow ribbon, like an improbably glamorous  detective walking into a murder scene. She walked to the point and onto the rocks that banked the water from the land. The waves were dramatic when she did it.

Large crests rose in the air and splashed the edge her windbreaker. The sun broke diamonds all over the fresh water waves. A bit flicked into her mouth, the water dull as cucumber. This was not an ocean. Home was in the other direction, behind her. Home was salt. And then she took it, all the articles, the hours of time she’d devoted to it, the metal rectangle full of all her contacts, thousands of photos, and she threw the phone as far as she could into the lake.

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