They sit on the
lounge they bought together, curled up in opposite ends while the TV blares. He
sounds like the TV, droning on, talking with monotonous fervour about his job,
his friends, his bike—and she can’t make herself care. It’s like ads, like
prime time, like seeing the same reruns month after month after month, and what
was clever and funny once is now mundane. It makes her think of canned laughter
and dishes, taking out the garbage and catching buses. Forever, it’s been like
this; he talks, she listens, never interrupting, never interjecting, the
perfect girlfriend, the perfect listener, perfectly selfless, an empty vessel
just waiting to be filled—and he’s never asked about her day, not once.
He pauses for a breath and,
carefully, she lifts the jellybean jar from where it has been resting against
her tucked-up ankles, out of sight but not out of mind, cool glass pressing
against bare skin, ice in a desert storm. She unscrews it with perfect,
measured movements, not too quick, not too loud, not wanting to interrupt his
train of thought.
He glances over. “Can I have
some?”
He hadn’t wanted her to buy them,
called them a frivolous waste of money, and as soon as she got them home she
felt like he was right; jellybeans had no place in their pantry, nowhere to sit that
didn’t highlight their out-of-placeness, garish in the cool dim company of
potatoes and garlic, practical tinned tomatoes and stockpiles of penne pasta.
He hadn’t wanted her to buy them, but she’d known all along he’d finish most of
them, because that’s just how it was, and she’d never interrupted.
“Sure.” She peers down at a jar
full of sugar, bright colour and empty calories, flavour that kisses the tongue
then vanishes, leaving the mouth cloyed with generic sweetness. Bright colours,
like fruit, or hummingbirds, or hope. She chooses a dark brown one speckled
with white and twists around, arm extended so she can pop it into his mouth, a
sugar pill, a placebo. His tongue brushes her fingertips, bird-like,
here-and-then-gone, and she returns her fingers to her lap and rubs them on her
skirt.
“Yuck,” he says, screwing up his
nose, eyes never leaving the TV. “I hate the coffee ones.”
“Sorry,” she says, and fishes a
second bean from the jar, brown, with white speckles. “Another?”
He nods, and stares glazedly at
the telly; he has exhausted his supply of conversation topics, and she is
unsurprised, because every night they are the same, and they are limited, and
they are never hers, like the books kept on display to impress the neighbours
or the ornaments that line the hallway. She presses the jellybean against his
lips, a tiny act of rebellion, and he takes it without looking, and again she
scrubs her fingers on her skirt.
He makes a face and spits out
something that was perfect once, but is now half-chewed and mangled, its clear,
worthless centre exposed: a shot of glucose, an empty hope, a painted, hollow
corpse. “I just said I don’t like the coffee ones,” he snaps, shooting a
sideways glare into her temple where it pierces, lodges, and she can almost
feel the blood trickling down.
“Sorry!” she says defensively,
resisting the need to rub her temple. “I didn’t mean it.” But a thrill stirs
inside her stomach. He’ll believe her, of course he will, because she never
interrupts—but this time, she meant it, and she hears alarums sound and horses
neigh, and the clash of sword on shield.
“Hmph.” He reaches into the jar
and scoops out his own handful, multi-coloured like the eggs of a rainbow, then
scoffs them down all at once, chewing indiscriminately.
What’s the point? she wonders.
Why have different flavours in the first place, if you won’t stop to savour
them? She closes her eyes and selects one bean, just
one, its sugary surface smooth and slightly sticky. Without opening her eyes,
she places it delicately on her tongue, closes her mouth around it like a
secret, sucks it close and concentrates. Sharp, sweet but acid, tart—not lemon,
but something close. Grapefruit, she decides, and rolls it between her teeth,
trying to make the flavour last—but of course, the flavour’s gone and she’s
left with that same inevitable, generic sweetness.
She feels the same; just a
generic sort of sweet, a hollow-caloried person-shaped lump, valueless,
worthless but for fleeting gratification that weighs heavy afterwards on the
tongue. Does he feel that way about her? Although she listens, does it satisfy
him? After the first flavour of their relationship is gone, is she still
enough? She watches as he grabs another handful of jellybeans and sucks them
down, swa-llowing them like liquid, concentration on the sitcom never
faltering. Yes. He is satisfied with bright colours that smack of hope. Empty
nutrients comfort him.
She remembers the man she saw
earlier this evening, dark and tall, striding between the rows of the fruit
market with confidence like a million-dollar cruiser amidst dinghies. He’d
confronted a seller over her bruised nectarines, their blushing skins marred by
brown stains of abuse. He’d caressed ripe lady fingers, inhaled sour green
mangoes, savoured a dark burgundy grape. Not everyone is satisfied with
hollowness, she realises. She is not satisfied.
He shifts beside her, mindless,
and she knows that any moment now he will ask for his nightly cup of
coffee—supermarket coffee, over-roasted coffee, old and dull and cheap coffee.
But she is sick of crappy coffee; it reminds her of days spent under the
flickering eye of fluorescent light bulbs, walled in by partitions covered with
geometric patterns in sensible colours meant to detract from the fact that
really, they are padded. A shiver touches her spine and she stares at the
jellybeans, wondering.
And of course, “Coffee?” he says,
and she wraps her fingers around the neck of the jar and decides. Generic
sweetness is not inevitable. “No,” she says as her heart tries to break open
her rib cage, or burst her veins with blood flow. She touches her fingertips to
her temple.
He tears himself away from cued
laughter and crude humour to give her an incredulous stare. “What do you mean?”
She shakes her head, lips sealed
against the weight of what she has said. She can’t repeat it, it’s too heavy,
it will break her jaw with its passing—but she has said it once, and maybe once
will be enough.
He raises an eyebrow. “Bad day at
work?”
And there it is, the very thing
she’s been waiting for all these months, the thing she thought she needed to
hear—only now, she realises it’s not enough. It’s jellybeans, with the gloss of
hope on top hiding emptiness inside, and he, who is satisfied with handfuls of
sugar and cheap, dirty coffee, will never be enough. She thinks again of the
man in the markets, of sun-ripened strawberries made sweet with heat, of apples
crisp and fresh so the juice runs down her chin when she bites into them, and
she turns to him with eyes full of tears, with hands full of jellybeans, and a
heart full of fruit. “I’m sorry,” she says, and catches his arm before he can
turn away, before he can dismiss her
words as platitudes. “I can’t stay here,” she whispers, begging him to
understand and knowing perfectly well that candy and cost-saving never can.
“I’m leaving. I’m sorry,” and she’s not.
While he sits there in stunned
silence, she passes him the jellybean jar and stands. “You’ll be fine,” she
says, and smiles. “What we have is replaceable.” Gaping, he watches as she
walks to the bedroom, where she picks up her blackwood jewellery box that holds
the antique necklace she asked her grandma for when she was twelve, empties the
single drawer in the dresser that holds all the clothes she’s ever chosen for
herself, slips on her favourite shoes and rummages in the depths of the
wardrobe for the pale blue fake-crocodile handbag she’d fallen in love with at
the county show, the one he hated so much she’d never dared use. It smells of
feet and old carpet, pencils and overripe bananas. A smile spreads across her
face as she gathers up all the decisions she’s ever made, and carries them to
her car. “I’m sorry,” she says as he stands on the porch, still speechless.
But she’s not, and she drives away
with the satisfying sweetness of mangoes on her tongue.
