When life first gave me lemons, I was just a girl. They grew on a big tree in the neighbor’s backyard, and I liked to make them into lemonade with my maybe-friend, James.
Even though I did all the work of squeezing them into all the ragged little hangnails that decorated my fingers, James insisted he keep three-quarters of the money from our sales.
“They’re my lemons, from my tree.”
He was several years older than me and not afraid to play that card, and I was terribly lonely, so I put up with a lot.
Most days of my childhood were sick days, and could be categorized as follows:
I really am sick and a day off is sanctioned, because I threw up on something important like a desk at school or a friend’s bed at a sleepover and my suffering can no longer be denied. Or my chronic ear infections are so bad, I scream and hold the side of my head while a red-hot fever threatens to melt my brain. In this case, my ears will be irrigated again, and I’ll be left on antibiotics for scarily-long amounts of time — like, years.
I’m vaguely listless but it might just be hunger, or a perpetual anxiety that slowly eats a hole in my stomach, or the undiagnosed celiac disease I won’t discover for another forty years. My mother leaves early and comes home late, and by third grade I’ve perfected the craft of forgery, so she has no idea how often I never make it to school. I can copy her handwriting exactly to excuse myself.
This kind of malaise is more figurative. I’m just not up for dealing with the mental agony of getting teased. I’m too skinny and too poor; a punching bag for kids who are even poorer and somehow less skinny. I’m tired of cliquey rich girls who toss their perfect blonde hair and find a thousand ways to let me know I have all the wrong clothes.
My mother often left me home alone when I was ill because she couldn’t afford to miss work. She realized I could sustain this at age five, when a case of chicken pox dragged on for weeks. But if it was really bad, she parsed out my invalidity to a rotating cast of neighbors. In an effort to avoid asking a singular person with too many constant favors, she kept me moving from house to house.
Sometimes it was Lucinda, James’ mom, who would pick me up from school in her blue Volvo station wagon when I was sent home sick.
Lucinda didn’t work and, according to my mom, this was because she had issues. These came down to two things: her bad-news boyfriend, and anorexia. Some of the older girls at my ballet school had that. I didn’t understand it completely, except to know that people wanted to be skinny badly enough to avoid eating. But that was confusing to me because if only I could be fatter, and maybe have a different mother, all of my problems would be over.
Lucinda would tuck me into the guest bed upstairs next to James’ room and bring me saltines and ginger ale. I hated the way every glass in their house came out of the dishwasher scaled with a chalky white substance that felt strange against my fingers — squeaky clean without the clean. And I hated the smell that filled the air.
This was caused by Lucinda’s pet snake — a python named Monty, which she wore like a scarf. As she bent to hold the puke bowl, the snake would stare me down, flicking its tongue to taste the air while slowly writhing around her long, thin neck. I wondered how she could know its mind. I didn’t trust that any moment it wouldn’t strangle her, or strike out. Sometimes I had bad dreams about the snake.
Everything about Lucinda was thin: her bones and the skin that stretched meagerly across them. Her hair, a fine mist of staticky brown, stood somewhat on end around the long, drawn oval of her face. Even her personality seemed brittle inside the frail form of someone barely there. But she was kind.
James had the good looks of an all-American boy. He was athletic, blonde and well proportioned, and must’ve thrown to his absent father’s side in the genetic department.
He resented the fact that even though he was an athlete, and I was just a scrawny little girl — definitely not sporty — I could beat him at kickball. James could outrun me, but I was the better kicker. I put the full force of my pent-up rage behind it. He didn’t like being shown up.
And I think we both knew I was smarter.
I’d invented a whole new layer to the game of hide-and-seek, a moving version, which infuriated him and kept him confounded. When it was my turn to hide, I’d watch him looking for me and creep from place to place so that he’d never find me. Once he caught me at it and became so enraged, he held me down beneath the tree and squished rotten lemons into my face.
I was in Lucinda’s guest room on an actually-sick kind of day when James came home from school with some friends. I watched with fascination as they took turns doing pull-ups on a bar that stretched across his door.
“I bet you can’t even do one,” James said. His tone was cutthroat in front of the other boys.
“I can, too!”
It never occurred to me that I would fail. The boys made it look so effortless; their legs twisted lithely through the air as they lifted themselves up and down on sinewy arms.
“Try it,” he said. His friends snickered, which brought the blood to rise in my face as it peered up, unsure how to reach the bar.
“Stand on the chair. Just jump and grab it,” said James.
I launched into the air, arms reaching for the bar, never thinking I wouldn’t land the leap. But the wheeled chair slid backwards, and I belly-flopped. Before I knew what had happened, the hardwood floor rose up to meet me and I lay in a crumpled heap of bony parts.
The wind was so legitimately knocked from my small body that I lay twisting on the floor, gasping with a hoarse croak that did nothing to move air into my lungs. For a small eternity, I was completely unable to draw breath. The fits of laughter were more humiliating than the tears that rolled down my silent face as I squirmed towards the door.
James didn’t like to play at my house, and I didn’t blame him. There was nothing to do, and my mom’s temper was unpredictable. But she owed Lucinda for all the times she’d taken care of me, so she agreed to watch him one day.
As the hours stretched out, we played board games and wondered what to eat, and James whined about the fact we had no TV. We got into an indoor game of miniature kickball when my mom went out to the garden, and James knocked the ball right into an antique floor lamp. It teetered like a metronome before succumbing to gravity. Some of the shards fell into the old heater grate on the floor.
We tried to clean it up but my mother found the evidence. James blamed me, and my mother believed him. Even when he couldn’t beat me up himself, he found ways to do it by proxy.
Living parallel lives as the only children of single mothers, it would seem James and I should have a lot in common. But we didn’t. He wasn’t plagued with the same existential loneliness I endured.
James graduated high school and went off to college just as it was becoming clear I would not take the same kind of path.
Just before I was shipped off to live with a father I barely knew, I saw Lucinda on the street at a sidewalk cafe with her new husband. She had color in her cheeks and was nursing a baby from a big, billowy breast.
I was caught off guard by the fact there was flesh on her bones, and that she was baring so much of it for all the world to see. I found it hard to know where to direct my gaze — even more so than when that awful snake had slithered around her neck.
But Lucinda looked good; there was no sign of the wraith that had tended to me in my hours of need.
I never saw James again.
Photo property of author.
The lemon metaphor at the beginning is wonderful