The Art of Apple Peeling

Abstract

The Art of Apple Peeling Janice N. Harrington (bio) 1 A child stands in the kitchen of a one bedroom flat watching as her mother flays apples with a blade no longer than an index finger, paring apples while the pressure cooker’s valve turns this way round and that way back again to spit its hiss of steam. On the counter, beside the stove, in a metal wash pan, apples lie banked and glowing like embers, like lanterns lifted by a mother’s steady hands. Unfazed by brilliance or heat, she trims their skins into scrolls, into scrim, thin, thin, till the peels slip and spiral into her child’s cupped hands. Curled from her knife’s lathe, there turns a red road, a red flag, the apple’s red tongue singing of sweetness, of shape and boundary. 2 An apple turned and turning, centered in a woman’s palm, the cut and the wound, the knife pushed between pulp and peel, the skin slowly shaved and slipped away—this is the art of apple peeling. This is seduction and revelation that begins with wounding. The peel winds round, spiraling, a moment into other moments, sliding as a silk robe slides from a woman’s shoulder. The light that shines upon her bare skin is not the sun, but the beloved who watches. The light that shines is her nakedness. She is a colored woman. She shines. She shines apple bright. 3 In a kitchen in Wichita Falls, in a one bedroom flat, in ‘58 or ‘59, there is a child. She watches her mother. The child is colored. The mother is yellow. They have not yet removed their skins, nor will they. [End Page 1076] But the child draws between her lips her mother’s gift, a ribbon, a well rope, a red string for a kite, an umbilical cord, a helix coiling the way one thought coils around another, a screwing spill like molasses from a biscuit sop or spittle from slack lips. In the palm of a yellow woman an apple lies plump as the Grande Odalisque. An apple sits plump and smooth-skinned and shining upon a couch of flesh. An apple’s peeling is a curtain, a caul, a bounding wall. What lies hidden beneath an apple’s skin? Is desire the gnawing worm or the worm bitten? Is it the worm-heart curled in a womb of flesh or is it the apple heart that teaches dimension: the death-worm that feeds unseen in what is, at first, sweet, at first, for us alone, at first, safe? But it doesn’t matter. The mother will stab out the worm and worm-corrupted parts and pitch the leavings into the pressure cooker, lesson learned. 4 Api Toile, Carpentin; Foxwhelp, Sturmer; Tremlett’s Bitter, Gilpin; Hauxapfel, Dulcet; Early Joe, Anna; Lady in the Snow, Toko; Leather Coat, Mutsu; Walter Please, Billie Bound; Alexander, and Seek-To-Further. 5 Will you ever taste a Shiawassee? 6 If I say the sun hangs like a Tallow Pippin, if I say its light is autumn cider or white vinegar, if I say a heartbeat is the low note of windfall apples, if I say there are more varieties of apples than of love, or if I say love resembles the slow art of apple peeling—requiring attention, a sharp edge, a wound, revelation, and a falling away, if I say the word of God is written not on a brittle scroll but on an apple peeling, if the sum of all darkness is no bigger than an apple seed, and an apple’s white meat is the sum of all light, [End Page 1077] if I say the moon is only a peeled apple, the stars a glittery peel reeled into nebulae and constellation, if I say I know this because I am Eve’s daughter and have pressed an unpeeled apple against my thigh, if I say I am the slayer of apples, have sucked apple peelings like the entrails of the sacrifice, have seen the death-worm and bitten it and swallowed but remember only the apple’s sweetness, if I say these words and hold...