The Taste of Fruit

Part 1

The Big Apple

1997 was the year Eden arrived in New York City, holding only a duffle bag of mainly A-line mini dresses and black and brown Mary Janes, a torn-up letter to Sacramento she had written on the flight over, and an idea that this was where her womanhood would begin. 1997 was also the year Princess Diana died and she watched the upheaval on the television, sitting in a bar licking the salt off her Margarita and worrying why she felt nothing as everyone else cried. She cried when her sweatshirt would get caught on the doorhandle as she was rushing out the door, cried when she saw a pigeon on the side of the road with a broken wing, or an old man sitting alone in Central Park, taking his lunchbox out of his backpack. Though she never cried at her mother’s funeral. Everyone stood around the casket in black, the dust from the tissues floating around in a ray of light and all she could think about was trying not to sneeze.

All the adults looked so funny all red eyed and rosy cheeked, wiping their noses on the back of their hand and then on the sides of their perfectly ironed suit trousers. She listened attentively to her Uncle Tim’s speech about his sisters ‘immense generosity’ and ‘selflessness even in her death’. What they didn’t see was the way her mother carried her into bed as she pretended to be asleep, the way she’d kiss the scrapes on her knees better when she’d fall off her bike - and somehow make it hurt less - or the way she’d cut her sandwiches up into quarters with the crusts cut off.

Eden lived in a 4 by 6 studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that smelled often of rice cakes or cucumber sandwiches, but always, if you breathed in deep enough, as though there was a wet towel forgotten about in some corner of the room. She had a twin sized mattress on the floor that proved difficult to get up from, so she only used it to sleep, a fridge with three shelves, a stove and three cupboards: two for her food, and one for her makeup, notebooks, pens and unopened letters. Her books were stacked in a neat, though uncomfortably high, pile beside her bed. She faced them to the wall to hide the titles from men who would assume they knew anything about her just because Lacan’s Ecrits lay crushed by Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl. Every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday evening she worked at L'Atelier as a Hostess, which allowed her to pay her way in the city, and bought her the occasional copy of Vogue, which she flicked through in coffee shops before her shifts, and they would later turn into tools for removing spiders from her apartment or covering in notes about what she had to do the next day, or who she had to see.

She attended a number of parties on the top floors of red brick buildings in Downtown Manhattan and at exclusive venues in Tribeca through friends that knew the right people. She met men who worked in finance that she would later sleep with and would leave her in bed at an ungodly hour of the morning to jog around the city, coming back to her with sweat dripping down their foreheads but somehow still smelling of bergamot and sandalwood. She was called a whore by the men she slept with once, and a prude by the men she didn’t. There was something about her full face and small breasts that attracted a particular kind of man, usually older white-collar workers, and they became infatuated with her. By the fourth month, the sex started to lose its appeal and she had reached her limit of compliments on her body, or how ‘cool’ and ‘fun’ she was. She noticed herself walking around the city, running errands, as an empty shell. She began to feel like a shadow of herself, two-dimensional and always grey in the places that were once bright.

There existed a new insecurity inside her: that she had nothing meaningful or new to say. She sat across the table from men and girlfriends at lunch, and they’d speak of ideas they had for a new column, or their thoughts on the disconnect between the political elite and the youth of the City, or their predictions for the future of technology, and she’d stare blankly back at them with a sense that she had spent too long in California thinking about her looks that she had forgotten that in the East a face was nothing without a thought behind it. That was the day she began to miss Sacramento. From that point, New York City felt too big for her.