Fruit of the Month Read Online Free Page A

war,” she was saying to the child, “and your daddy goes away and never comes back, it won’t be my fault.” The child giggled. Susan shrugged and got up.
    â€œFirst of all,” she said in the car, “I’ll bet you nine out of ten of those idiots in there never even heard of El Salvador much less Alexander Haig, and then the manager comes up to me and says if I don’t stop soliciting he can have me arrested. Soliciting! Then I asked him if he would sign anyway, as long as I had him interested, and he crumpled it up. I could have him arrested.” She was driving a little crazily, skidding on turns and braking so suddenly he had to brace himself. “I got six pairs of Fruit of the Loom,” he said, in an effort to calm her. He unwrapped the package and held them up, but she wasn’t paying any attention. She was swearing at a driver who had passed and cut her off at an intersection. “Goddamn ignorant asshole,” she said.
    Tom stared at the labels on his underwear, at the tiny bright clusters of fruit. It hadn’t always been like this; when they were married, a year and a half ago, she was still in school, in classics. At night she read Latin aloud in her study, a corner of the living room she had roped off with a tapestry. Often he would creep up behind it and listen, barely breathing, his cheek brushing against the coarse grain of the cloth. Her voice was husky and melodious, and the strange fluid sounds of the dead language filled him with awe. He confessed to her once that he did this, that he listened, that her facility stunned and moved him. She seemed put off. She began to read in a whisper. Later, as she became more and more political, as the El Salvador thing became, as she put it, an imperative, he blamed himself.
    Home from the mall, she announced it was bedtime. She said Jeremy would pick her up at five in the morning and they would drive to Chicago for the workshop and rally. Tom hadn’t known anything about a workshop, It was one and a half days long, she explained. It was organizational. Tom said he thought she was already pretty well organized; wherever he went he saw posters with her name and number printed on the bottom. People called, and she directed them to meetings, arranged car pools, and raised money for speakers. She was hardly ever home. When she wasn’t home and the telephone rang, Tom didn’t answer it. He was tired of the words “El Salvador.” El Salvador was two thousand miles away. When Susan said this, two thousand miles , she made it sound like next door, like she could look out the window and see it. She was increasingly preoccupied. She had lost her sense of humor. He joked with her now. “Don’t do anything with Germie that I wouldn’t do myself,” he said. Susan yanked off her socks and climbed into bed and curled up facing away from him. She was flexing her feet, arching them, then pulling them taut. The pressure of her toes against his thigh aroused him, and he turned to her and began making love to her, coaxing her. He felt some resistance, but he had learned to recognize in it an aversion not to himself but to pleasure, as if her pleasure were a slap in the face of the world’s pain, so he kept on. Her face was wet. When she came finally it was with a vengeance, with a hoarse grieved sound like a battle cry. Her eyes were open, staring past him. He bent closer and whispered. “Peace,” he said.
    Now she and Jeremy have driven away. The apartment is cold; the heat was turned low for the night. Under his bare feet the linoleum is gritty. He can go back to bed and sleep until work, or he can put on a robe and slippers and drink coffee in the kitchen with the television on. What kinds of shows are on so early in the day? He switches on the set, and stands in the chilly darkness waiting for the picture. At last it appears, a gray aureole rimmed with black, a bull’s eye. He turns the