Fruit of the Month Read Online Free

inside, well-lit, and carpeted, because the downstairs neighbors, whom Susan and Tom haven’t met, have not cleaned up the mess their dog made on the carpet a day ago. It smells. Susan won’t clean it up herself, on principle, and Tom certainly is not about to clean it because, well, why should he? He is watching her now, from the kitchen window. The metal stairs run flush with the house at a steep diagonal, and he can see her as she passes. She doesn’t know he is there. She thinks he is asleep. He pretended to be asleep and then, when she stepped out on the landing to lace her boots, he climbed out of bed and went to the window. He was touched by the fact that she took care not to wake him, that she dressed in the dark and shut the bathroom door before brushing her teeth. But he really wanted to see if she would kiss him goodbye, even though she thought he was asleep. To kiss a sleeping person, Tom thinks, especially if that person is your husband, is an act of faith and devotion, a form of prayer. So he lay there making grunting dream sounds and waiting. He felt like someone standing on a highway with his thumb out, waiting for a car that would not materialize.
    Now she loses her grip on the icy banister and slips. There is a moment of terrible uncertainty: will she fall, or won’t she? This is all Tom feels, the tension of the moment, but he feels it in his chest, in the region of the heart. He feels it as love. He reaches out as if to steady her, but his hand smacks the window, and by then she has regained her footing. She is a big girl, five seven, bigger than Tom. He is often reminded of a statue, a figure carved by an artist so in love with the male form that he endows even women with the attributes of men. She has broad shoulders, a wide back, a tight waist, and smooth hips. Her breasts are high and firm, like the pectorals of a body builder. Her thighs, when he lies between them, grip and rock him, and her flesh itself is of such substance that he cannot feel her ribs, or her heartbeat, through it. Lately he finds himself concentrating on her most delicate features, her lips and eyebrows, those two blonde tapered arches, with a nostalgia as acute as that felt by someone staring at a photograph of an absent lover.
    Now she is sitting in Jeremy’s car in the parking lot, drinking coffee out of a thermos. It must be coffee, because it is steaming. The car’s interior is brightly lit. Everything else is in darkness. It is five o’clock in the morning. How long has Jeremy been sitting there, in a lit car with the engine off, freezing his butt? Tom doesn’t like Jeremy. He calls him Germie. He doesn’t like a man who wears a tank top in the middle of February and rolls his rs when he says “Roberto.” Roberto is Germie’s lover, a tough cookie. It is clear that Germie is complaining about Roberto right now, because Susan is shaking her head and patting him maternally on the shoulder. If only Tom could hear her. How does she phrase her sympathy? He doesn’t know. He could be on Mars, looking down at her.
    The night before, just as the snow was beginning to fall, they had driven to the mall to get Tom some underwear. He has been putting on a little weight, and he read in Ann Landers that tight underwear can cause sterility in men. Susan made a joke, about cheap, effective birth control, that stung him. She agreed to go along on the condition that while he was in Sears shopping she would stay in the arcade and circulate her petition, against a buildup of the U.S. military presence in El Salvador. In Sears, he bought the underwear and a bag of milk chocolate stars. He ate them before going out to meet her. She was sitting on a bench, gesturing and talking to a child in a stroller. For a minute Tom thought she was trying to get the child to sign her petition, but then he saw how miserable she looked and that she had crumpled the petition into a ball. “If there’s a