Apple Picking
By Lex Sottile
A room in which the only piece of furniture is a two-liter bottle of Coke does not inspire confidence. In fact, I think the room would have inspired MORE confidence without even the beverage— four walls, a floor, a ceiling, the void. Because empty is a choice, or can be, but a two-liter bottle of Coke, lazily leaning against one wall, not even upright enough to seem properly placed, gives a room an atmosphere of chaos. No one chooses to only furnish a room with a two -liter bottle of Coke. That is the kind of thing that just happens. And that is not what you want in a psychic. You want a psychic to just know how to decorate a room.
I don’t necessarily believe in most psychics. My only experience with any of these (remarkably recession-proof?) ladies up to this point had been one visit, to one East Village storefront psychic, with a gaggle of high school friends sometime when I was home in New York for a holiday during freshman year of college. (The psychic said something to us about a pregnancy scare, and seeing as we were all former Catholic schoolgirls still whiteknuckling our way into technical still-virgin-ity at that time: um, no.) But anyway it was a lark, that first visit, and we weren’t serious.
Though this, the second time, I wasn’t serious either: I was desperate.
I had just broken up with, or rather, been broken up with by, my boyfriend of a year. (Let’s call him Nate, since I’ve never met a person named Nate.) It was, beyond that, the first time I had ever been broken up with by a serious boyfriend in my life. Sure, people had rejected the idea of dating me before. But, upon getting to know me, and choosing me, becoming my person, no one had ever un-chosen me before in my life. And this hurt, of course, in a new way–obviously. (I mean to be rejected before dating, that is relatively easy on the soul. You can tell yourself they must like quiet women, or tall ones, and you can have no desire to be quiet and no ability to be tall. But once you have dated? Ouch.) Even though I knew, deep in my heart, that my relationship with Nate was, well…
I’m half-Italian and Italians—I don’t like to say “believe in omens,” because that implies they aren’t real. I don’t believe in my laptop; I just see it. That is the way with Italians and omens. We see them. We are aware of them. More importantly, we don’t walk around irresponsibly like lumps, not being aware of them and ignoring the consequences of our foreknowledge.
So Nate and I both knew on some level, when he started singing Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” to me on our first date, that this, no matter what we did later or what choices we made or tried to make, was our fate. This was now both our song, and our destiny. He even said something like, “I hope this isn’t a bad omen. I hope I’m not jinxing it!” And inside I winced. Talking about the bad omen is a double bad omen! NEVER TALK ABOUT THE BAD OMEN. NEVER TALK ABOUT LUCK, GOOD OR BAD. (We both knew these fundamental laws of Italian science. Yet on we trod.)
It only got worse from there. Inexplicably, even in the throes of my first attachment, the days when I would take a call from him while I was at work and run to the copy room to giggle so loudly and much that a coworker nicknamed me “Gigglepuss” for my laughter, I developed a strange attraction to the song, “Romeo and Juliet,” by Dire Straits. Stuck at work late into the night, musing over him, I would play the video on repeat, over and over and over as I worked—a song that is fundamentally tragic: “It was just that the timing was wrong, Oh, Juliet!” sang the guy who sings for Dire Straits. I knew it was wrong to play it. I knew it was bad song fate. I was literally destroying our relationship night after night, replay after replay. And in the back of my mind, I was aware of it. But I was like a woman possessed— he and I were a couple of Love Boat Captain Ahabs, and we would follow these fated songs to our doom.
The last omen was particularly poignant. We were already starting to uncoil, but, out of nowhere, came a moment of togetherness, light from a dying star. I was doing dishes at his place; he was working in his office down a short hall. His iTunes shuffled. Band of Horses, “Is There a Ghost?” came on, with its lines, “I could sleep. I could sleeeep. When I lived alone. Is there a ghost in my house?” I started singing in one room. He started singing in the other. We sang the whole song, together but separate, united in this question. We were both alone. We were both already a ghost, in each other’s house. Still, the moment was sweet—we connected in it.
And of course there were real problems, which of course–as with any failed relationship in which there is real caring, at least on my part–I can barely remember now. (One thing I will say for natural Italian warmth is that any conflict is notoriously short-lived. Negative feeling amongst family or lovers usually vanishes completely by approximately… the next meal. And if you want something to resolve earlier, start the sauce earlier.) Still I do know that by the end, no one, aside from him, could have known this relationship, as it was, had to end more than I did.
So the absolute, abject misery that descended on me after we finally parted ways, on a street corner, one day in July, was a surprise. Unhappy as we had been together at the end, I felt even worse with him gone. I was so sad I read People magazine. That is how depressed I was. I read the novelization of Wicked, or the novel Wicked is based on. I read Wicked: The Novel. I couldn’t get dressed for work unless I watched the video for “Baby Got Back,” EVERY SINGLE MORNING and I scraped through the day by playing a YouTube playlist in which animatronic bears and wolves—a wild animal robot jug band—from 1980’s Chuck-ee Cheese spin-off Showbiz Pizza, were made to look like they were lip-synching modern songs over and over and over all day long. It. Was. Bad.
So it was that on a hot, bright, shadowless day in northern Brooklyn, I chanced upon the psychic’s storefront. It was the kind of light in which there is no place to hide, and I didn’t have the energy to hide even if I could have. I had passed her storefront, and many of those like it, a zillion times before, but those were the salad days when I wasn’t desperate enough to try just about any gender-stereotypical thing to feel better. There is something so cozy about those psychic storefronts—the simplicity. Here we are, in a window. It is just us. The little table. The tablecloth. Maybe cards. It is perhaps the only storefront remnant of a kaleidoscopic 19th Century world in which people really did and could and would believe that PT Barnum’s hairy little monkey-fish could be a shriveled-up mermaid, and all giant squid were still the Kraken. I would not want to have, for instance, come down with anything more serious than a sore throat in a time like that, but as far as street-facing windows goes, it is certainly more magical than a TD Bank.
I climbed up into the window and sat down. The psychic was a big-boned, middle-aged woman, with a non-descript middle-American accent and chin-length, straight white hair. And she looked uncannily and disturbingly like my therapist at the time. Let’s call her Audrina.
Like a nervous child, I sat in the chair, a slip-dressed doll taking my place on her dollhouse furniture, and she offered to read my palm. (She offered, as I recall, a few different options. There might have been a candle-related sell-up involved. But I chose the Basic Palm.) And I wanted, for all the world, to trust her.
But first, I stalled. I asked if I could use her bathroom.
So she led me through an interior door, further into the building, or home, or whatever it was. And on the other side of that interior door was a white-walled room, so empty as to almost be devoid of air, except for a two-liter bottle of Coke.
(I was once by myself at the big, famous planetarium in Manhattan, when I was 18 or 19, and as I was leaning back, looking up at the dome–shaped sky–engulfing darkness swirling with its speckles of incandescent constellations, overcome by the narration of its British all-knowing voice–suddenly, in an instant, the stars evaporated, revealing scaffolding. The projection clicked off and just like that I was gazing enraptured at screens and metal bars. It was disturbing and funny–the way any instantaneous visual metaphor for a Sartre-y existentialism would be. ZAP! And that was how the Coke bottle made me feel. I was sad enough to sort 19th-century lines on my palm–the carefree, small lines of skin on the inside part of my hand–to tell me something. Could that magical idea coexist with soda?)
“Do you want your boyfriend back?” Audrina said when I returned.
“Yes,” I admitted. For the first time out loud.
“Ok,” she said. “Here is what you must do. Each day, you must buy the smallest, reddest apple you can find,” she held up her hand as if holding a tiny apple, “and you must sleep with it under your bed.”
Audrina paused for emphasis, to make sure I was taking this all in. Which I was. Though in any film or television depiction of characters visiting psychics–the source of my main understanding of this interaction–no fruit of any kind had ever come into play.
“Then, in the morning,” Audrina continued, “the first thing you do, you must take one bite out of the apple, and throw the rest away.”
Another pause.
“If you do this for thirty days, your boyfriend will come back to you.”
She said it with such certainty. Like these were instructions for checking the oil on one’s car. Like a spoken out loud recipe for a nice filet of sole.
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s all I have to do?”
“Yes.” She said. “Do this, and he will come back to you.”
I paid the nice lady her five-to-ten-dollar fee, and I left the living room set and walked out into the sun. Her storefront was at the edge of my block, just a block away from home, but I decided to take a good long walk down the boulevard instead.
There was a grocer nearby to the psychic, one of those very typical New York City kinds, with the produce arrayed in bins out front so that not a particle of exhaust that escapes from the cars on the street can fail to fall on your fruit. They did, indeed, have apples, many of them small, or red, or both. In fact, the proximity started to make me wonder if perhaps the two businesses were in cahoots—the grocer was the psychic’s lover in this scenario, and she had a habit of recommending his overstock. “What you must do…is sleep with a box of jumbo Kit-Kats under your bed every night for thirty nights. But it must be a NEW jumbo box of Kit-Kats each night. Only $20.25 for a 16-pack. Did I mention it has to be a 16-pack?” That scheme made me feel even more like I was in the Old Country, maybe one of my own old countries of Italy or Ireland, any old country. I pictured the psychic and the grocer rejoicing over my coins by the fire in their hovel in the woods— and I looked at the apples.
Which was the reddest? Which was the smallest? What was MORE important? Red? Or Small? If the smallest was not also the reddest, which should I pick?
And then I immediately thought, and knew, and sank deeply into the knowledge of something I had known since she said it, had known in a way in my gut since before I had ever wandered into her space: I would not do this thing. She had asked me to do one small, benign, stupid thing, like BUY AN APPLE, and I knew I never, ever would. Because I had already known this was over, and, looking at the apples, trying to make one apple stand out like the apple-that-is-going-to-be-picked-up in a Looney Tunes cartoon, the one that is always drawn differently from all the crate apples (or tree apples, or apples rolling down a hill towards our bunny hero) in the background animation, I knew there was none, and I was going to be ok much sooner than I thought.
And that, as they say, was that. I got better. I got over it. I moved to Queens. I lived with a cheerful couple who were dancers and who taught me that thing about how you can’t put soap or water in, or ever clean, a cast iron skillet in any way that would actually clean it. (You have to put oil in it, I think, and light a candle to the gods at the Park Slope Food Co-op.) I watched the dancers stretch in the living room and also watched that Sandra Bullock movie “Premonition” with them once.
And I didn’t think about those smallest, reddest apples much ever again.
Until two years later: my next breakup.
It was summer again, August this time. And this break-up was more…abrupt. It wasn’t as clear that it needed to be over. That wasn’t clear to me, at all at that time, in fact.
I was house-sitting for a friend when it happened, and if there were books, magazines or songs involved in this one I don’t remember. All I really remember is sleeping in my friend’s great, big fluffy white bed while she was on vacation, and consuming sooooo much coconut water for the first time in my life.
Soon I was back in Queens though, in my own nice but just full-sized bed. This recent ex had, in fact, helped me transport the bed when I bought it and put it together with me, and after years of futon living, it was my first return to a box spring in a bit. So what I mean to say is: there was plenty of room, under this real, box spring-y bed, for an apple.
Or two. Or three. Consecutively.
One per night. For a few days, maybe a week?
There was this really good grocer near where I was living in Queens (it’s featured in a Spider-Man movie, actually: an Andrew Garfield Spider-Man) and so, every night, I began to stop in on my way home, and buy the smallest, reddest apple I could find. I’d bring it home to that bed, where I slept a couple of feet above it all night long. Then, in the morning, as the psychic had instructed me: I took one bite, and I threw the rest away. I told no one I was doing this. It felt too weird for even my weirdest friend. I went about the rest of my life as usual: I commuted to Manhattan to work, worked my same, extremely rational-thought-based job, and came home every night with an apple in my bag.
It was subtle and it gave me some small comfort, like fingering a worry stone in one’s pocket, or whispering a prayer for a sick loved one. It was harmless and it was my little secret, affecting only me. Until one night, I was sleeping in that bed, above apple number 5, or 6 or 7, and a text woke me very late at night.
I reached for my phone and there were those three most common words in the entire English texting language: “Are,” “You” and “Up?” It was my ex, sending a gentleman’s version of the even more boring: “You up?”
We got on the phone. I was already a little bit freaked out that the apples might be having an effect, causing him to write to me so late, but it was about to get much freakier. He was “here,” he told me, “here” being my neighborhood; he had just biked in the middle of the night to my place, from where he lived on the edge of Brooklyn. “ But why are you here?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he replied. Eeeek. It could have been, it seemed at first like, some attempt at a booty call, but he, never one to be shy, didn’t try for that at all. He seemed…confused by his own actions, more than anything.
This had all the markings of weird Psychic Apple Stuff.
I told him I’d be right down, that I’d meet him outside.
I decided to meet him on Northern Blvd and we went to the 24 hour Home Depot there and looked at wood. He is a woodworker and so when I met him I asked him to build a set for my upcoming play. And so… we looked at 2X4s and trim, under fluorescent lights, in the middle of the night. I hugged him good night. And that was that.
I threw out the apple as soon as I got upstairs to my apartment. I never did them again. Because I could not even kiss him if I had the tiniest, most irrational fear that he was somehow compelled.
And he and I weren’t meant to be, either. (This isn’t the story of how I met your Dad.) But the apples, in their wisdom, taught me two things: one by doing, and one by not.
The first is: if you are not willing to do small, dumb things for a person, or with a person, to metaphorically or actually just keep showing up and beaming or blinking yes, in all its sometimes awkwardness or mundanity, to whisper yes into the window or wall on the worst days, it is probably over or doomed.
And second: the best, most honest way to get to hold the heart you want beside your heart is still probably really the old-fashioned way: bite your lip, or theirs (or both is a great idea), but not a fruit. Especially not one that’s been sitting on the floor under a bed all night, yikes.
Lex Sottile is a writer, actress and researcher based in the Catskills. She once got to meet the band Weezer and cut Kraft Singles into the shapes of states and etc with them.
Wenjing Yang is a Chinese-born illustrator, visual researcher, and independent publisher based in New Jersey. She received her BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in Illustration Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art.