CLOSED FOR RIPENING
by Dawn Bedore Proctor
What happens to your life when your very first feeling is fear? When your infantile awareness of the life you have begun living outside the womb surveys the world and senses you are not safe? Inside your helpless body and tangle of instinct what force, what energy pushes you forward up and out into the air? As if there will surely be light and food? As if life was worth living? How, why, do you keep growing up?
After high school, she had left her parent’s house and would never return. The night they delivered her to college would be their last together. Years spent in the shade of their mutual bitterness were not revealed in any visible defects. Hibernating in the back seat, she appeared prepared. As they rounded the narrow causeway leading into town, she woke to her first view of the city, its sparkling skyline hovering over the black water of the bay. The University. Alive with light. Teeming with life. It offered, no, it promised. Deliverance. Sweet release. Another chance to grow, coddled this time, in the warmth of infinite possibility and self-reliance. Her brain chanted and her blood rose. It was over. She was getting out. The parting was not painful.
Entering the walls of her new, aged, dank, fertile room she inhaled the pungent smell of accumulated lives, the only record of countless previous passages. She set a solitary bed on the wounded wooden floor. She did not complain. Not even to herself. She was free. Free to unfold.
The syllabus for school was a thick, glorious bouquet of intellectual offerings. She wanted to pick every class. Political science, philosophy, literature, history, botany. They each beckoned her. The company of other students generated a feeling that she was part of something good and pure.
Historically the University had made the map as the site of an infamous student revolt two years earlier. Now, she arrived to see the remains of the revolution. The marches, heroes and songs were now only fuel for fireside tales. She wandered the mythic neighborhoods to find the buildings boarded and blind, the streets harvested of resistance. Only the least successful hippies remained, trafficking in stories of unity and ecstasy, to get laid or high one more time.
Embarrassed by her tight budget and small-town ignorance, she struggled. Then scattered. Into obscure classes and odd jobs. Waited for the sun to penetrate her potential, and that part of herself, left longing for the formula to safety and security, remained inaccessible.
She recognized the movements, the mechanisms of friendship, and of love, but was unable to taste their essence. A suspicion of her shortcomings began to thrive. In isolation and on inspection, she was able to identify her earliest memory.
The early sun pale and enormous. The fields crowded with bent backs. Long, low rows stretch on and over a gentle hill. She feels the prickly drifts on her knees. Between the rows, the narrow paths are covered with straw, their hollow, stiff stems poking, hurting, her newly bare feet. Slowly, she senses a warm softness, under her arches, seeping up between her toes. She turns and she sees the uneven trail of crushed berries, bloodstains on the pale-yellow path. Suddenly, she is lifted. Up and over, round and down. But there is no joy in this spinning, no safety in these arms. They are pulsing with frustration, ripe with anger and, soon, will prove capable of great harm. And while no words are spoken, she does not have to be told to be equally silent. She escapes and searches for a sparkle of sunlight, a bit of morning dew to live inside of for as long as she could.
A decade descends and she is unable to uproot herself. She finds work on the fringes of the college, friends among others who barely belong. She learns to do with less. Outside on rickety porches, alongside beer and the occasional brilliant remark, sensitivity sustained her. But it was back-breaking work, to live, to survive. Some days, so much of the world must be taken in to glean a single grain of sustenance, of happiness. She tires. She fades too early. Closes too soon. Each morning she struggles to open again.
Maybe humans couldn’t afford to comprehend their own mortality. Was it a successful ecological adaptation to be so smart you could comprehend the futility of your own existence? In this new century, over-thinking, not a raging virus, was probably our greatest threat to survival. Maybe suicide was a uniquely self-directed form of extinction, selecting those too intelligent, too sensitive for this world. An extinction they had to carry out for themselves.
At night, under nimble, shifting stars, she dreams. The sky is white and blinding. The air still. The ground bare. A line of railroad cars stretches on and over a gentle hill. Car after car. Drawing near, she sees inside an open cargo door. The car is filled with cakes. Birthday cakes. Graduation cakes. Wedding cakes. Down the line, the doors are all open, each car overflows with cakes. Delicious cakes. She will eat all she wants. She reaches out. Then stops. She sees. The icing is dusty, crystallized. Edges of the pink and yellow frosting flowers are splitting. She kneels down beside one of the endless cars, laden with stale cakes shimmering under the sun and understands. These cakes were never cut. These celebrations were never held.
Each summer, she ventures into the now familiar countryside and finds lush berries. Faithfully, she kneels between the rows. Humbly, she takes only what she needs. She washes away the earth, and removes the stems to extend their life. But cannot bring herself to eat them. As she watches, the fruit sits on her counter, turning a deeper red, then purple, finally brown. Then she throws them away, knowing she had failed to enjoy them and unable to understand why.
Tomorrow she will try again. In misty morning, heading out of town, she rounds the causeway once more and in the smooth speed of its curve, she tastes her best memory. She is out. She is safe. She has survived. And it is enough to satisfy. Worth the wait. So perfect, it never seemed right to ask for anything more.
Suddenly, she is overcome by an unfamiliar feeling, a realization of what she has learned over the symphony of seasons. That children are more resilient than we hope. That instinct favors survival. At any cost. In any form. These thoughts burst open her heart and now she knows. There is still time. To push stronger and higher out of the bare ground. To find enough sun and rain to blossom. To gather up the goodness in the world and the kindness in people. And to believe in the appetite and beauty of herself.
She follows the aging hand-lettered signs, first right, then left onto a slim dirt road. Having found her way to the fields once more, she nearly drives into the twisted gray cable blocking the road and holding a small wooden sign reading simply, “Closed for Ripening.” These berries need more light. They are not ready for her.
The dust cloud blows forward and envelops the car. The cable swings slightly and the sign rocks. Embarrassed and self-conscious, she shifts quickly into reverse, before anyone can see her, and heads back the way she came.