THE THING ABOUT PEACHES
Word Count: 486
He struggled up the three stairs and into the kitchen, the screen door banging shut behind him.
She was standing at the stove, stirring a huge steaming pot that came almost up to her chin. She turned around at the noise, stared as he shuffled past her and put the heavy load down on her clean kitchen table. “What you got there, old man?” she asked, hurrying over to clean the dirt that knocked off the old bushel basket as he plunked it down.
“Peaches. Art’s got a shitload of peaches this year,” the man said proudly. He moved out of her way as she cleaned around him. She rinsed out the rag and knelt down to wipe up the clods of soil he’d tracked in across the linoleum squares.
“I wasn’t planning on doing no canning this year,” she grumbled. She was scowling to show him she was angry at him, at his fifty years of presumption.
“Look at them,” he said. “They’re perfect this year. You don’t get them like that every year.”
“Thank God for small mercies,” she said. She wouldn’t look at the peaches.
“Eh, what’re you bitchin’ for? You like eating them in the middle of winter.”
“You sure do.” She was pulling out plates and forks and knives from cabinets and drawers. “Get them off the table, will you–if you want supper.”
He lifted the weight with a loud grunt, set the basket down on the floor in a corner. “They ain’t that much trouble to do up.”
“You ain’t never done them!” she said. Her grunt was softer, more a hmmph! of annoyance. He washed his hands at the sink. She set the table after wiping it clean again.
They ate in silence with a focus on the task, each moving in their own steady routine. He ate all his meat and then the potatoes before he started in on the carrots and cabbage. She moved like a carousel horse around the plate, dipping a fork in each in turn.
“Coffee?” she asked, though he always had it after a meal.
“You got pie or somethin’?” he asked.
“Blueberry,” she said, already pulling it off the counter. She counted the coffee scoops into the old aluminum percolator and filled it with water. He pushed back his chair and leaned back with the day’s newspaper in hand.
She finished washing and stacking the dishes, turned down the coffeepot on the stove, and stood waiting for it to turn the right color brown in the little glass bubble on top. She folded and hung the dishtowel. She looked down at the basket, bent over and picked out a peach, straightened up and held it up to her nose and sniffed. It was gold blushing crimsony-orange and felt fuzzy and firm in her hand. She glanced over to the old man quickly, to make sure he hadn’t seen her smile.
susan – i love this writing today.
Thank you, Billie.
Hi Susan – I absolutely am caught up in your writing, and this one just tugs at my heart. What love is poured out as she picks up the peach after dinner…nothing more needs to be said. Thank you. S.
Thank you, Shirley. I love writing about the unspoken intricacies in a relationship, particularly a long married one.
Excellent piece! Although, your suggestion that the women of the household do most of the work…oh, umm, well never mind then.
But Steve, the old man honestly thought he was helping her by picking the peaches. That’s how guys think.
i think you caught this dynamic almost perfectly which seems to me a delicate one because so much has to remain unspoken but still flow beneath the surface of the explicit interactions. the writing is very skillful, saying just the right amount to get that dynamic moving without smothering it by saying too much itself.
the characters reminded me a lot of one set of grandparents, the ones who lived in northern new hampshire, who are still the only people i’ve ever been around who’ve been (well, who were) married fifty years. i like thinking of them, when i do.
Stephen, thank you so much for your kind comments! I just love watching older couples interact, it’s so nuanced and specific to the couple themselves. There’s so much that they know about each other that they don’t need to talk so much anymore yet they communicate constantly.