Prologue
The fondling. The sniffing. Thumbs pressing into skins. The pursuit of the perfect heart. Of palm. Of artichoke. Hands comb the produce aisles in search of the dinner table, high-maintenance brunch with the in-laws, low-maintenance snacks for the office. The process is articulate, purposeful, even scrutinizing. Few pick their produce blindly and haphazardly, though a blind pick can be lucky (often the ruddiest-skinned oranges turn out to be the sweetest). The techniques for determining flawless specimens can range from simple visual and tactile observations to spasmodic, simian-like grappling. The nuance of selectivity is personal, embedded in tradition and heritage. The hands ruminate and choose. The hands pass over and pass down.My grandmother’s hands gave me a love for the fig and a suspicion for the fickle peach, hard one day and rotted the next, thriving when no one is looking. My mother’s hands gave me an appreciation for the brown-speckled banana, just beyond the precipice of ripe. Aunt Rose’s hands were famous for carving whales out of especially oblong watermelons, which added a carnivorous dimension to the smear of red across my chin afterwards. My father’s hands were clumsy. When he tried to grow tomatoes one year he accidentally planted the roots too shallow, exposing them to the elements of indecisive spring weather.

—

In the summer of 1986 there was a solar eclipse, and two days later I witnessed my father move out of our house. I sat on the couch and half-watched an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies on the television while he cursed out an electrical cord protruding from the lamp he carried, strangling his left ankle.

“Swimmin’ pools…movie stars.”

Moments later there was a key in the ignition, and as the groan of the garage door fell with more weight than I had ever remembered, canned laughter and banjo music filled the sparse living room. My mom sat on the Lay-Z-Boy, re-lacing her sneaker and dabbing at her eyes with her shirtsleeves.

“Maybe Mistah Drahsdale would lahke some pahssum, Granny.” “I reckon he be too civilianized for that sorta thing, Ellie Mae.”

Biting my lip, I scanned the room and made a mental list of the recently departed objects. I had a private funeral in my head for each one: Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of midsized rubber tree plant that once sat in east corner…

“EEEEWWWW DOGGIE!”

I never saw my father again, instantly becoming the only child of a single parent.

Over the next several weeks, my mother and I began the process of establishing a new routine for our everyday lives. She started working overtime, sometimes even double-time, to make ends meet. She took over my father’s domestic tasks. We coupon clipped, and I got an afternoon paper route. We were resilient, independent, a dynamic duo persevering in the face of hard times. We evolved into a new, modern familial machine, two doing the work of three, determined to get by just the same. But no matter how successful my mother and I seemed at putting the past behind us, I was still afraid to admit that I no longer had a father. Adapting to this new way of life without comprehending what had happened to my old one spread the wound thin and manifested itself in strange and unpredictable ways. Around my friends I referred to my parents as if they both still lived with me. I began to lie about inane things to make the charade even more believable: “My dad made fajitas last night.”

I went back to school that fall like nothing had happened. I thought I had given whatever was tailing me the slip until it caught up with me in my lunch bag. Since my dad left, my mom had taken to packing my lunch every day, and clearly she held a different aesthetic on what a fourth grader’s lunch should look like. There was no PBJ, no bag of Doritos, no goddamn Ziploc to ensure everything would be contained in its own proper compartment.

My lunch grew more feral every day. Each bag was reused throughout the week, and by the time Wednesday rolled around, the bag, no longer possessing the crisp sound of paper, sagged to one side like a dying sunflower; inside, meat flopped over the sides of my sandwich, and cookies crumbled into inedible dust. The era of the well-manicured lunches my father assembled was over. Now there were foreign-meat sandwiches, and on that particular day, it had a bite taken out of it! I looked up at Kristy Beckett who was seated in front of me. I glared at her Capri Sun and her Tiger Beat magazine with Jason Bateman on the cover. Her lunch glowed with familial divinity stemming from her intact family. I wanted to shove her head into the grotesque absurdity of my sandwich. I wanted her to choke on its domestic crumblings.

Excavating the sandwich as if it were a fossil, I examined the bottom-tier processed-meat product sweating onto the bread around the teeth marks. The meat itself appeared to have been taken out of the package and carelessly piled on the bread in a clump, where it sat like a wavy-haired wig of pseudo-turkey. To make matters worse, there was a giant crater in the center of the sandwich, and mustard guts had splattered out onto black, amorphous cookie ashes, forming a chunky black and yellow swamp. It looked like the inside of a stomachache.

I stared at the flattened state of my sandwich. What had caused this mass destruction? Breathing heavily, I reached into the lunch bag and wrestled out the remainder of my lunch—a gargantuan apple, the biggest I had ever seen. It was a spectacle. Had I gotten a Yeti’s lunch by mistake? How was a small girl supposed to eat an apple the size of her head? I was mortified—mortified by oversized fruit puncturing my sandwich and no doubt sequestering me to the far corner of the lunchroom where I was certain I would have to eat my carny lunch alone for the rest of the year. It was the final straw.

My mother had no idea what constituted an acceptable lunch, and now I was forced to sit among the ruins of this Oscar Meyer apocalypse, nervously peeling the suspicious burnt-sienna casing from the perimeter of each greasy, peculiarly thin slice of meat, coiling them around my index finger. My wiring was off. I felt strange. Like I had hit my funny bone really hard, but my leg was throbbing instead. I couldn’t bear the thought of having to tell my mom that I hated her lunches…but the bite! That bite was destined to ruin my reputation well into junior high. Later, my mom would insist that it was a “love bite.” Starving while packing my lunch and rushing out the door to go to work, she was unable to resist the lure of uncharted Wonder Bread.

“Maybe Miss Jessie would lahke some pahssum fah lunch, Granny.”

I felt the two-dimensional eyes of Jason Bateman looking up at me in disapproval. My mom and I had failed, and the evidence of our dysfunction was scattered all over the table. My lunch had betrayed us both; it revealed too much, and now everyone was staring at me, and they all knew somehow that my dad had left and that my mom and I weren’t cutting it by ourselves. Being part of the first predominant generation of single mothers, there was no blueprint, no sense of normalcy at how to go about the whole thing. So we faked it until we couldn’t hide anymore. We camouflaged ourselves into the herds of society, but behind closed eyes and doors, we were hard on ourselves. In the cafeteria that day, the tears came like wild, stampeding animals escaping from the confinement of a zoo. Flooded with shame, I covered Jason Bateman’s eyes with my hand.

“Are you okay?” Kristy asked between slurps of her Capri Sun. Sneering at the wreckage of my lunch, she reached into her Ziplocked sandwich bag and handed me half of her PBJ. “Here. That apple is, like, totally huge and weird.”

“I…know.”

“Can I have it?”

“What!?” I giggled through a wall of tears.

“It’s preeetty,” she said.

I placed the apple on her Tiger Beat magazine, where it sat on Jason Bateman, swollen and sympathetic. I stared into the doorway of the cafeteria. There, in the space where the walls get interrupted, my mom and I tried to hide in our strange vegetation, struggling to appear irrepressible while adapting to a harsher climate. We strove to bury our errant roots into ordinary containers, succumbing to a volatile, restless hibernation underground. We thought even the most bizarre hybrids of plants would appear halfway normal in the everyday, terra-cotta pot. Terra cotta. Terra firma. Solid. Square. Cultivated. After all, the months of deterioration in my parents’ marriage, the venomous silences, the devastating nonchalance…all happened behind a wall of terra cotta. Even in the thickest of it, my school lunches the year before were well-groomed every day, the fruit normal. Normal until now—until he had gone. Until the apple fell a little far from the family tree and planted its seeds into new soil.

Epilogue
Being part of this first generation of divorce and single parenting, we reinvented domestic normalcy. We foraged through wild patches of dense undergrowth with the savage uncertainty of explorers without maps. We lost family along the way and sometimes gained the wonderful mutations of “step” mothers and “half” brothers. We stepped out from total isolation and formed a consciousness. We gave a sense of normalcy to all of those days in the cafeteria when we struggled through winters that seemed a little colder than the years before—the times when we wrestled with figuring out how to sleep and eat again, our uncharted Wonder Bread staring up at us like freshly fallen snow, a blanket of pure white strangulation.