Peaches

by Taylor Grieshober

Now that it's over, it's the little things I remember most, the compulsive gestures. The way she stuffed her hands in my coat pockets when we walked, abandoning receipts and movie tickets. Little tokens I'd find later. I found one such token on our last day together, on the way to the grocery store––a ticket for Contempt, a film we saw the month before and loved, and which was soured later by a bad fight. I don't remember what the fight was about, only that it ended with her taking a prolonged bath with the door locked. Afterwards she put Joni Mitchell's Blue on the record player at full volume and pretended like I didn't exist. She shimmied around wrapped in a threadbare towel, careless of the water pooling at her feet. 

From this description you might gather that she was a difficult person and you'd be right. Maybe you're wondering what I saw in her. I'm ashamed to admit that at best, I am an aesthete. At worst, shallow. While she was a harbinger of chaos to my life, she also possessed astounding beauty. Tall, willowy, topping out at 120 pounds, with the alien proportions of a model, her skin, freckled all over, had a granular quality, as if she slept naked on the sand. Last Halloween, she went as a desert. The costume was easy. She wore a tight, nude dress, a shade darker than her skin, and on her feet, sandals made of straw. She teased her dirty blonde hair at the roots, filled the bathroom with a cloud of hairspray and wrapped the strands around her face, until her head looked like a gnarled mess. She pulled the pieces around her eyes apart, so she could see. "Get it?" she said. "A tumbleweed." Of course, I was tasked with brushing her hair out after. 

This is not to say she wasn't graceful in other respects: she walked softly, as if levitating, and pulled on nylons with her toes pointed. She removed her bra swiftly, one handed, and drove my car with a confident command over the clutch.

Though there was that incident last winter when she slid into a ditch on the way back from the liquor store and had to walk the two miles home. I told her not to go, but she took the keys while I was in the shower. When she finally burst through the door, black ushanka hat and fur coat covered in snow, chapped hands gripping the neck of a frosted bottle, I couldn't stay mad at her. "I want to drink Dom Perignon and boil like a lobster," she announced. It, of course, was not Dom Perignon, or even champagne for that matter, but a cheap bottle of Freixenet. I ran her a bath, popped the cork, and in the morning, called for a tow truck. 

In truth, this impulsiveness was what attracted me in the first place. For my birthday she surprised me with a road trip to Cape Disappointment. The postcards showed sunny beaches, kids splashing around, birds diving into the ocean, but when we got there, it was rainy and cold, and oily gulls pecked at trash. I don't know what we were expecting. On the way home, we passed a truck full of chickens shitting on each other. She told me to pull over and when I did, she pushed my hand down her shorts. "I'm so sad," she said. 

She swore she wouldn't eat meat again, but at her insistence, we stopped at a crab shack for dinner. "Don't look at me like that," she said, "I'm done eating land animals."

I wanted to mention the rapid decline of salmon populations and sharks in Tanzania (a protein staple there), or the impending extinction of bluefin tuna, but I knew doing so would only be a waste of time. She had no use for facts, no interest in the consequences of her choices. She lived only in the here and now, purely driven by her every fleeting desire. 

So I remained quiet and watched, horrified, as she decimated a crab with a wooden mallet. Shards of shell flew into my flat Sprite. She drenched the cool slimy meat in butter and popped it into her mouth, sucking lemon juice from her fingers with great smacks. She always ate like an underfed dog: clementines in whole gulps, fistfuls of popcorn, steak bones licked clean. After ravaging the crab, she lapped up a double scoop of chocolate ice cream for she had an insatiable sweet tooth. For breakfast, she usually ate cinnamon sugar toast with a drizzle of honey and it was not uncommon for her to spoil her dinner with canned fruit. 

A good portion of my time was spent at the grocery store, restocking what she had depleted. 

In this way, our last day together was like any other. 

*

The morning after things ended, I avoided the kitchen, opting instead to fill my water glass from the bathroom faucet. But after some time, I approached the threshold cautiously and saw the scene just as I'd left it. Sunlight bounced off of the peach can's silver lid, drops of syrup glistening on the table like dew. Under different circumstances, it would have made for a beautiful still-life: the small metal fan blowing hot air around, bamboo blinds trembling, sun-spots flickering on the checkered floor tiles.

I went to the bedroom and busied myself with picking up her detritus, tossing balled up socks and free-bleed cotton underwear into a trash bag. I stripped the duvet and sheets from the bed. A waft of her tea tree oil stung my nostrils. When I freed her pillow from its sham, I felt something balled up in the corner, soft and bulky. Without having to look, I knew what it was. The t-shirt, the one my brother had lent her last fourth of July after my nephews sprayed her sundress with their Super Soakers. The shirt was large and fell just above her knees, and the faded orange color accentuated her long sun-kissed legs, making them look even better than they usually did. This was the type of beauty my girlfriend possessed: tangled hair, mascara streaked cheeks, ruddy, sharp kneecaps. Luminous in a fat man's threadbare shirt. I had spent much of that day stewing in quiet discomfort, pretending not to notice the small flirtations between my brother and girlfriend. With each giggle and playful punch on my brother's arm, I became more agitated. He and I are nothing alike—I, a college professor of  anthropology, he, an avid sportsman, a hunter, who dropped out his junior year of high school and got his GED. His hobbies are purely physical, making or deconstructing things with his hands, while I prefer cerebral pursuits. I attend museum exhibits and direct our school's visiting lecturer series. I'm studying to be a certified sommelier. He welds and does taxidermy, spends his free time at our family's cabin, up in Summer Lake, whittling wooden figures and dehydrating venison. Because of this, I had never felt particularly competitive with him. Sure, he could fix a leaky faucet, but what did he know about art and nature, physics and philosophy? But then, in the middle of a rousing volleyball game, when he picked up my girlfriend and ran with her body flung over his shoulder, I knew defeat was imminent. 

After that, she slept in the shirt every night and was often still wearing it when I came home from work. One evening I found her hunched on the couch, breathing deeply into the orange fabric. Tell me this, what man wouldn't lose his temper? Even a decent man would. And I was better than decent, I was kind. I was the man who, on our first date, after she had drunkenly danced barefoot through the street, pulled a shard of glass from her heel and kissed the open wound.  

I hoped for some sort of resolution afterward, some compromise, but the next morning she was wearing the shirt again. 

Which is why, on our last day together, when I came home from the co-op, my arms full of paper bags, and found her sitting at the kitchen table, what struck me first wasn't that she was gobbling down canned peaches like she had a tapeworm. What struck me was that she wasn't wearing the shirt, but was instead in her fuzzy bathrobe, and the tenderness that I felt toward her then radiated through me, blinding me to what was coming. 

I'd like to say it was an accident. 

I'd like to say I went to her, balled my fists under her sternum and dislodged the sticky fruit from her throat. 

But the truth is, as her hands grasped at her neck, and the chair tottered back and forth, and her freckled face turned red, then pale, then blue—a paralytic calm overtook me. I stood in awe as if in the presence of a wild animal, hoping it would pass by without detecting me. 

After a few quiet minutes, I did go to her and pull her limp body up as if I could change things. She looked so tranquil, her hands no longer restlessly seeking. I sat across from her for hours, until the kitchen grew dark and I saw only the glowing whites of her eyes. 

I spent the next day cleaning room by room, mulling over my options. My stomach grumbled from not eating. It was around supper time, when I was considering going out for Chinese, that my brother called. He was at the cabin and asked if I wanted to come out for the weekend. He'd killed a 12 point buck and felt ready to try his hand at stuffing large game. He was there alone. My sister-in-law and nephews were "visiting her parents," but I could tell by the frantic register of his voice that it was, in fact, the beginning of the end. I drove and didn't stop until I got there. He offered a Rainier from the cooler. I watched as he took measurements and removed the skin from the meat, preserving as much of the hide as he possibly could.

Taylor Grieshober earned an MFA in fiction from Oregon State University in 2018. Her short stories have appeared in Joyland, The Columbia Journal, The Masters Review, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, Off Days, was published in 2019 by Low Ghost Press. She lives in Pittsburgh where she is at work on a novel.