Bad Seeds
Pomegranates promise so much but deliver so little. Pop a seed into your mouth and you enjoy an elfin sip of its juice, tart and sweet at the same time. In an instant, the pleasure is gone and you’re left with only the white core, bitter and unpleasant to chew. You eat another aril, hoping this time the drop of nectar can replace the taste that the pip has left in your mouth. And again, your hope is disappointed.
“Open them in a bowl of water,” the man at the farmers market says. “The seeds will sink to the bottom and the white will float to the top.” His instructions sound simple but there is so much I forgot to ask. Cut the pomegranate in half first? Peel it? What about the small bits of white that cling to the ruby seeds and sink down with them? I end up spattering the counter and my clothes. Even my face is speckled red. I scoop a handful of seeds from the bowl and swallow them whole like medicine.
When I look in the mirror, it is my freckled eight-year-old self who stares back, reminding me of the days when Mom lay on the couch, reading mysteries and eating special treats until she had to get up and cook dinner before Dad came home. It frightened me to watch her pry apart the pistachio shells with her red-stained fingers and long, sharp nails. Sometimes she would share three or four pistachios, and we sucked on the salty shells until all the flavor and red dye #2 was gone. We bit them open to reveal the soggy green nut inside and stuck out our tongues, turned into bright, feverish flames.
Once in a while, our parents went out for the evening together. Mom squeezed into a girdle and snapped on her stockings; she put on her elaborate face: foundation and powder, eyeliner, dark mascara. Then, her dress. We elbowed each other aside to be the one to zip her up. But she wasn’t ready to go until the final slash of red across her lips. Even in the black-and-white photos that Dad took on their honeymoon, you knew that her mouth was painted crimson.
But that was long ago, when she was still beautiful. Before we ruined her figure, before she took to the couch with her tales of blood, clutching books whose titles contained ominous words like Death and Kill and Murder. She disappeared into those pages where we could not follow.
Other mothers offered up Bugles and Fiddle-Faddle, crunchy snacks served in brightly colored boxes. But Mom loved all foods that were scarlet and crimson: ripe tomatoes, fresh cherries, dark wine.
And most of all, pomegranates. She had us remove the seeds for her. “Do I have to?” we whined, and she would answer, “That’s why I keep you around.” She allowed us a few but when we spat them out, she said no more for us. Why waste expensive fruit — available only in winter — on people who didn’t appreciate them? She relished the experience of finding the bitter waiting so reliably within the sweet.
When I tell people that she made us prepare the fruit for her enjoyment, I take pains to sound aggrieved, as if our child labor was arduous and uncompensated. The fragile bits broke beneath our clumsy fingers as we peeled the white membrane away. It took forever to free them from their gleaming hexagonal rows, and each one of the precious seeds had to be saved. I was the princess in a Russian fairytale, sorting peas from pebbles, without even an enchanted mouse to help me.
But the truth is, I wanted to do it; we all did. We longed to please her, to perform the task well. In the kitchen, we fought among ourselves: who got to carry the fragile bowl of ruby jewels in to the living room? She would look up from her book and for a few minutes give us her attention while we waited to hear whether we had passed the test.
In fourth grade, I read about Persephone, captured by Hades and brought to his underworld. While Demeter searched for her lost daughter, the mourning earth was cast into winter and Persephone yielded to hunger. She ate a few — only four or five—tiny pomegranate pips and, thus, we have the seasons: warm, bright months and those cold dark times when Persephone must return to her gloomy husband. I watched my mother eat seed after delicate seed and knew she was sentencing herself to exile from Grandma who lived in Florida and never came to visit.
One morning, our mother rose from the couch and packed a bag. She took her make-up and hairbrush, a nightgown, the checkbook. Her mysteries and gothic novels were abandoned in stacks upon the coffee table. I riffled uselessly through their pages in search of a farewell note, finding smudges of pink thumbprints from her pomegranate days. She left behind a shadowy shape in the sofa cushions, the memory of when we stood before her, holding our bowls of mangled fruit and our hope that if she kept eating those magical seeds, she would stay with us.