To Peel an Avocado

          Yesterday, as he prepared an avocado sandwich, Doug commented, to my great pleasure, how he always remembers my story about Nikki when he peels an avocado. So do I.

To Peel an Avocado

I lift another avocado from the basket. This one is for salad:

it must resist like a muscle the gentle pressure

of my fingers. This one will work. I remove

the remnant of its connection to its branch, then rotating it

in my palm, press the blade through the rough skin,

through the lighter green meat, and around the pit. I set down

each half and the knife. I will not peel off the skin with the knife,

leaving fruit on the skin, as I would have eight years ago.                                   

                                                                                                            The latticework

over the patio slashes the spring sun’s path into Nikki’s kitchen.  At the island

I cut an avocado in half, then begin to peel the skin from the fruit

with the knife. Nikki says something I can’t understand. I peel. My fingers

green. Nikki speaks. I peel. The knife handle becomes green

and slippery. Nikki becomes more urgent so I look up to her lips

but they give no clues because, not satisfied with having pushed Nikki

into a wheelchair and disabled her limbs and allowing her to breathe

only with a ventilator and eat only with a feeding tube, Lou Gehrig’s

has been snipping at the nerves that connect the muscles of her mouth

to her brain. Nikki is neatly groomed as usual: short blond hair washed

and styled, gold earrings, subtle make-up; slacks, sweater, socks,

and pumps that coordinate with the mint green blanket that lies

on her hands that lie limp on a heating pad and with the scarf

that drapes over her shoulders and neck and the tracheotomy tube

in her throat. Finally I make out Get a spoon. I ask what for. Get a spoon,

she insists. The knife misses the woodblock Mar, and pings on the floor.

how can you have lived I open several drawers, so long in California

leaving each ajar, and not know how locate a teaspoon, to peel

an avocado? hold it in my fist. Slide the spoon between the fruit

I prod the green on green grenade. and the skin. I glare

at the innocent fruit. Then scoop I glare at Nikki. the half out. I

search for the space to insert the spoon. I want to put down this avocado

and this spoon and get in my car and turn it on and open all the windows

and not look at the ocean and turn right at the bottom of the hill onto 5

and gun the engine out of San Diego and drive north five or seven hours

depending on the traffic and leave the car in the driveway

and go into the house and up to my bed and turn out the lights

and close my eyes under the covers. Who cares how you peel an avocado?

Instead, the spoon slips in. It slides between the skin and the fruit

like a figure skater gliding in a spread eagle along an invisible loop,

and the green meat lifts neatly out. I look at Nikki in her wheelchair

across the island. This woman I have known since before

degrees and careers and husbands and babies and my divorce

and grown children going off to college can’t speak. And she can’t

laugh. And she can’t smile. But, for now, she can tease me

mercilessly with her eyes.

                                                                        I look out my kitchen window

at the Chinese elm branches waving like a figure skater’s costume

caught in the breeze of his own velocity. Then I cradle a half of the avocado

in my hand and I slide a spoon along the curve between its meat

and its skin and when I lift out the fruit my fingers are not green.

                                                                                    —Marilyn Riddle Harper