Winesap

Winesap

by Marcia Aldrich

Photo by Rose Portillo

He hadn’t yet arrived—the man who would make me want to provide for a child. Then he did. His name was Richard.
        We met in graduate school at the University of Washington, in the weeklong orientation for teaching assistants in the Department of English. The week before classes began, we gathered around a seminar table in a windowless room with a wall-size blackboard at the front. I don’t remember anyone else in our cohort, and that says something about the impression Richard made—I only remember him.
        And I remember him minutely as he was then. He wore a white button-down shirt every day, not Brooks Brothers but Sears, common and inexpensive, a work shirt in white, tucked into Levi’s and tightened with a wide brown belt that his parents, I found out, had brought back from Mexico. I remember to this day the way his waist tapered above. He was tall and lean and wore boots that made him seem taller, boots given to him by his older brother. Most of what he wore or carried had been provided by others—most especially an attaché case in goldenrod, so unlike the floppy bags and backpacks popular with students. A girlfriend, left behind in San Francisco, had made it a going-away present. It was something my father would have carried into a room—hard-shelled, indestructible, with latches that slapped open with a rattle.
        Nothing secret was housed in this case: a mechanical pencil of brown plastic that took the thinnest possible lead, with which he printed in the margins of his Coleridge in minuscule letters that only literate mice could decipher. There were yellow legal pads and whatever books he needed that day. And lunch, whole wheat bread with a thin spread of honey—a honey sandwich—and a banana or grapefruit. The grapefruit he ate like an orange, ripping the peels off in sheets with his rough fingers, prying it open into chunks, the juice running down his fingers, the sweet-acidic smell hanging in the air. Richard won me over with those segments and peels. Not just the strength in his hands, but the directness with the fruit, with no implement between.
        Of course, I couldn’t have said any of this then. Then I just watched in fascination as he ate his grapefruit.
        During orientation each of us had to bring in a sample lesson for the freshman composition class we would be teaching. Mine came from Flannery O’Connor, though about it I remember nothing. He brought handouts and walked us through a paradoxical lesson: the more specific the word, the more information it conveys. On the board he printed, in upright capital letters,
                                                FRUIT
                                                APPLE
                                                WINESAP
Did he bring an apple—excuse me, a Winesap—to demonstrate? I think he did, and how perfect, an apple and a teacher, a lesson in particularity, in philosophy. (The philosophers ask, where do you make your cut?) When I looked down at my handout, there was a lesson, the stacked words now alive, nutritious.
        As I write now, I am struck by the details of the fruit, the grapefruit and the apple in memory, my own still life that means more with each passing year. Yet they are incongruous, too. How did he fit the plump grapefruit into the attaché case? How did he close the lid? And yet he did. A prelude to what I would discover, how much could fit into what seemed an impossible space.
        Our offices were side by side. Those first months we primarily took each other’s measure by chance, passing in the hall, arriving at our office doors at the same time, riding the elevator together. We took none of the same classes and had few conversations. Yet we were keenly aware of one another. There was tension between us, troubled, troubling, and deeply pleasurable. I observed the reaction he set off among the female TAs. His office door was plastered with little taped-on slips of paper, inviting him for coffee, a movie, dinner—a full social schedule if he said yes. He’d take them down and new ones would appear.
        After Christmas break we had our first real conversation, standing outside our offices. It was his birthday, and he was of a melancholy frame of mind. The relationship with the woman in San Francisco had ended. She had driven down to San Diego with him for Christmas, met his family, and afterward given an ultimatum: either they go forward—she would come to Seattle and move in with him—or go their separate ways. This was more information than I was expecting, for he was remarkably tight-lipped. I couldn’t read his feelings exactly, and yet I saw that he was depressed by the state of his life. It was his birthday and he was spending it alone. Under the guise of cheering him up, but actually taking the temperature, I said there were many women lined up to fill the opening. I pointed to the notes on his door. He laughed a little bitterly. I felt that he was accustomed to women wanting something he was unlikely to give.
        In May the TAs in the language departments announced a walkout over our piddling stipend. Richard was one of the firebrands—the Seattle Times described him as “a leader of the English group”—and I was chosen as spokesperson by the strikers, in acknowledgment of my softer voice and reasonable mien. For dizzy days we plotted and strategized together, and then the administration relented and gave us a raise and we called off the walkout. But at the virtual barricades, Richard and I had seen something about each other we admired.
        A man had moved with me to Seattle, and we were breaking apart. I couldn’t stick anything out and hadn’t met anyone who changed my ways. And neither could Richard. As women sensed his untakenness, men sensed mine. When he wanted to find me, he later said, he looked for a group of males buzzing together in the hall. I’d be in the middle, laughing. He watched as I spent time with others, and I watched the same way, and all the while we became entangled.
        It was a rocky process, our getting together, full of doubts. Neither of us thought it a good idea. My track record is poor, he liked to say, deciding whether to stand closer to me or farther away. I saw reasons his relationships hadn’t evolved. He was a hard case, and the gift-giving girlfriend had been aware of something true about him.
        That summer we took to meeting at the Unicorn, a bar on the main avenue of the university district, where we’d sip gin and tonics and he’d tear the paper napkin from under his glass into tiny pieces and arrange them in a funeral pyre. His discomfort was that intense—it seemed painful to be in my company. It was an old habit, he told me, the napkins.
        Eventually he’d drive me home and we’d sit in silence in his little blue Honda until I couldn’t take any more and pushed open the door. For many weeks we fought being together. It might easily not have happened. We said no in many specific places. No, we can’t do this. We can’t. We can’t. In the parking lot below my apartment, under streetlights near an Indian restaurant, in the field on the other side of the Burke Gilman Trail where we used to walk. He would stand in front of me, saying no and not moving.
        The belief in me was nearly complete that I would never pair with a mate. Men would come and go; that’s how it had been and would be. But one night in late September, standing outside my apartment building under streetlights, with the yellow leaves aglow, I stepped forward toward Richard and put my hands on his chest. It wasn’t a big step, just a mincing step, but it was toward him. I could feel his chest tense and vibrate or shake or shiver—like a rattlesnake I once encountered on a trail through some dry hills in California. It was midafternoon, hot and sunny, and the snake had recently consumed a meal that bulged in its midsection. I’m not good at guessing lengths, but it was big enough to stretch across the width of the trail, and, digesting a large catch, it was not the least bit interested in moving on. I did something stupid that pains me. I picked up a small stone and threw it at the snake. The snake lifted itself and turned his head toward me and the whole length of it vibrated. I turned around and walked back down the hill.
        Richard wasn’t offended by my move, I think, but he felt something powerful and involuntary, as if he had been holding himself apart for so long that when I touched him all the tension spoke. We hadn’t touched, we hadn’t held hands, we hadn’t even brushed against each other. We had walked side by side, sat side by side, sat across from each other, but we had never touched. When I placed my hands on his chest, our stand-off was over. We moved in together, we married, had children.
        Why Richard? Some people say we can choose and love many partners. That may be true. But I have stayed with him for thirty-five years. It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve stayed. I can’t explain why Richard except to say, This is where I make my cut. It’s something about a scent, or a physical trait that matches still. I couldn’t have said at the beginning, It’s the way he smells, tart and slightly sweet. I couldn’t have said, It’s his hands. All I can really say is man, lover, husband, father. All I can really say is Winesap.