BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SPRING 2001

32 :: gentle pressure :: 3/30/01

Freya opens the refrigerator door onto the play of brands. Minute Maid Premium Original; Athenos Mediterranean Spreads Hummus; Land O Lakes Sweet Cream Salted Butter. Blue sky. Halved orange. Map of islands. Architectural structure. Indian maiden. She ignores the careful balance of these iconographies today, tunes out everything except for the familiar shape of the styrofoam egg carton. Shafer’s Pick of the Chick. She knows she could buy free range if she’d go down to the Whole Foods every once in a while. An quick image here of chickens in wire cages limed with shit. But going to the Whole Foods means a journey straight into Chicago’s yuppie north, and a special trip at that. She lifts the carton: it’s lighter than she’d expected. She pops it open: two. That’s perfect. She’s already set the pan of cold water on the stovetop: she sets the eggs into it and fires up the gas. The empty egg carton goes into the trash.

A blue glass bowl (IKEA) sits on the kitchen shelf, next to a small array of plants. Freya has chosen the things placed on that shelf deliberately so that they will catch the light that falls through the window. (The days have been hitting fifty lately; warm weather is finally returning. When the wind turns mild she will lose her heavy winter coat and her woolen hat and let that cool mild air move over her arms and through her hair. Her body and mind both ache for it.) In the glass bowl is a warm avocado that she’s been watching for the last few days. Ripe when yields to gentle pressure. California. She lifts it, squeezes to test, although she knows it’s ready.

She thinks of her old friend Melissa. Melissa had spent the first summer out of college down in South America, following some love interest on his ill-defined mission of self-discovery. By summer’s end, Melissa had returned, without him. But with a selection of colorful sweaters and a clever tin box packed with smuggled weed. It seemed like those might serve as a defense against fall. By winter the weed was gone and Melissa had returned to Prozac, which she’d made a showy point of quitting when she first got involved with the love interest. That seemed to denote her final reabsorption into the culture of the United States. Freya places the avocado’s wrinkled mass on the cutting board, tries to remember the guy’s name. Kevin something?

Not long after her return, Melissa had spent a day hanging out with Freya; they drank red wine in the afternoon and smoked some of the weed and Melissa had made sandwiches that she’d first had in South America: ham, avocado, lettuce, and hard-boiled egg. The sandwiches had been incredibly delicious, in the way that food tastes when you’re stoned, and the avocado-and-egg combination thereafter became a semi-regular element of Freya’s diet. Freya hasn’t talked to Melissa in a couple of months; she wonders how she is these days. Time advances.

A day off. Freya guides the paring knife soundlessly into the avocado and twists. A second time, and a wedge of avocado comes free. Brilliant green, solar energy translated into flesh. She checks on the pan. A day with nothing in particular planned. Warming weather. The entire world, waking up. She feels connected to its green and growing thrum at a thousand points. The water and the eggs begin to shiver.