In the Garden

My first home was under the apple tree. There was a bedroom, a kitchen where I made mud pies, and a bathroom, with a toilet roll hanging from a branch, just in case. I must have been two or three years old.

In the mornings I woke at dawn and walked over next door, through the garden. My grandfather would make me a coddled egg in a porcelain egg coddler with pink roses on it and a silver lid. An egg coddler is a vessel for soft boiling eggs so that they can be served without eggshells.

I played with my dolls in the nursery, or cut up earthworms in the garden to see which half would live. At first both halves squirm around a little, then finally only one crawls away. I kept earthworms in a big glass jar in the nursery.

At dusk I helped my grandmother pick flowers and dead-head the roses. We floated the rose heads in a giant glass bowl filled with water, and arranged the flowers in a vase.

The apples, I ate as soon as they grew large enough to put my teeth into. Grown ups said they were sour or unripe, and would give me a stomach ache, especially the cooking apples, which were my favorites, but I liked them that way.

I liked sour. When I was offered a sugar cube with my polio shot I said I would prefer half a lemon. They dressed me in pink taffeta and curled my hair with rollers, and took me to the marquee at Princess Helena's garden party, where I impressed strangers by eating the lemons.

Sometimes my father would take me to the greengrocer's, past the chemist with the 30 year-old cat that had been around since my mother was a child, and was fed on drugs. The greengrocers' had a mynah bird that could talk, and once when I was a baby in my mother's arms I ate the marigolds she was holding while everyone watched the mynah bird. I could remember all the women staring at me, and reassuring my mother that I would be fine. At the greengrocer's, my father bought me salt and vinegar flavor potato sticks.

My grandfather liked the cox's apples best, and shook them to hear the seeds rattle in the core if they were ripe, but I preferred the cooking apples, because they were always sour. When there were guests for dinner, we ate in the dining room, around the long, shiny mahogany table, sitting on gold velvet chairs with a big oval hole for a back. Gramps cooked lamb, usually, and sometimes baked stuffed cooking apples for the dessert, but I didn't like them as much that way. I hated meat of any kind and, for a long time, the expression 'by mistake' conjoured up for me an image of a piece of stake accidentally rolling off the table or the edge of my high chair.

With my grandmother, I walked to the other grocery store, on late summer nights, to get strawberry ice-lollies with vanilla icecream inside them. We walked home slowly, stopping to feed the ice-lolly stick to the stone lion on a gatepost along the way, a ritual sacrifice that in retrospect strikes me as selfishly anarchic.

Nearby was a college with green, grassy slopes I could roll down, and two giant stone lions to climb. My father showed me how to strike two ornamental flintstones together and make sparks in the gathering darkness. Then we went to the vending machine where I delighted in the ordinary magic of putting coins in and seeing the salt and vinegar crisps or a can of Fanta drop out.

The cafe in Golders' Hill Park served homemade lemon sorbet, but only in the summer. In long-forgotten winters we walked deliriously far, to Kenwood, for snacks whose memory is mixed with that of an ancient wooden carriage, like Cinderella's, out in the woods.

When my friend came over we dressed in fancy clothes, my grandmother's pearls, and feather boas. My great grandfather used to grow ostrich feathers in South Africa, and went broke when they went out of fashion during the Great Depression. My grandmother told stories about him.

My friend was a little older, and not enamored with my apple tree home, especially the toilet arrangements, although we did make mud pies together. She had the idea of washing the dolls and giving them haircuts.

She had numerous brothers, half-brothers, and step-brothers. They were all packed into a Volkswagen van to go out, and before bedtime we played paper and pencil games, and her mother read us a bedtime story from Beatrix Potter. I had never experienced bedtime before, and had difficulty both falling asleep and staying asleep in the morning.

The last time I saw this friend was on 9/11. We were both picking up children from a primary school in Hampstead, me my own children, and she a family she was working for as a nanny. She had a baby in a stroller. I had no idea what had happened until one of the other mothers or nannies in the playground told me. It was about 3 in the afternoon. After that, we all sat there in silence, incredulous, picked up our children and left. Later that afternoon, at the shopping center, a woman was watching the planes crash over and over on all the TV screens, watching and wailing, as I walked by with my children to play in the toys department.

Although we did not keep in touch, my friend and I, our paths intersected a number of times. She used to teach sign language at the nursery school where I sent my oldest son. I felt sorry that she had always loved children so much and worked with them since leaving school at 15, and yet I was the one who had my own. Most of the other parents were my parents' generation.

When I was three or four someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I wanted to be a hippie, and in my mind's eye I pictured myself hiking barefoot to the North Pole, which I imagined as a striped barber pole in the snow. I liked being barefoot, and looked up to the long-haired teenage cousin who had made smiley-faced iced cookies for my birthday party.

My favorite color was transparent. My friend and I played a game in which we snaked a skipping rope along the floor and hopped over it, naming a new color each time. My father tried to persuade me that transparent was not a color, explaining how clear air ended in sky blue. I already knew to paint the blue sky down to the rooftops, instead of a blue line at the top of the page. I spent long moments staring into the thick side of pieces of glass, which invariably looked greenish when turned to the light. But transparent was still my favorite color, even if it didn't really exist.

I liked dancing to music on our new record player, and staring into the red power light. It seemed there was a magical kingdom of fire fairies in there.

My brother was very sick as a baby. At night his little hands were restrained in cardboard tubes so that he couldn't scratch at the red eczema that covered his skin. He and my mother were in and out of the hospital for weeks at a time. My father brought her gemstones from the geological museum, and we hid them around the room, touching their cool, smooth surfaces. When she came back from the hospital she was pleased to find them but not as much as we had hoped. My father tried to explain to me that my brother couldn't breathe because of his asthma. He said if I breathed in and out of a paper bag I would feel the same way, but that didn't seem like a good idea. I had a repeated nightmare about pushing my brother in his pushchair accidentally into the street. He got run over by a car, and then strangers with glowing green masks instead of faces, like sculptors' maquettes, looked on at me disapprovingly. Another dream was driving by an abandoned fairground where my father had lifted me up onto the flying airplanes before the ride started to turn, much to my mother's consternation.

When I turned six we moved to Israel, in the hope that the climate there would be better suited to my brother. I traveled with a bag of beads from my dressing up days, and a pretty straw hat with flowers on it that soon got lost.

My other grandmother had no apple trees in her garden, but there were plenty of other fruit. A lush, fruitful lemon tree, a loquat tree, and a guava tree. I learned Hebrew quickly, so much so that a couple of months after we moved I was terribly offended when my cousin said that I still had an accent, although later I was given to understand she had meant this as a compliment. In the mornings I woke up alone, at dawn, and played with my fingers. Each hand was a different family. Before moving to Israel, I used to worry that my life had been a dream, and I would wake up to find out that I was still only two or three years old. Now I felt confident that it wasn't a dream, because I had learned a new language, and I could not have invented a whole new language on my own.

I played with my kitten, wearing my new straw hat in the hope that the piercing hot sun shining through the holes would give me freckles like my friends in the village. My grandmother yelled not to climb on the fruit trees, so we walked hand in hand to the playground opposite, and sat in the fiberglass structure atop the slide, under the eucalyptus trees, talking about politics and death. My cousins' father had died in a motorcycle crash before my youngest cousin was born. His picture was by my grandparents' bedside, and he looked like his brothers who still lived in the village, and let us taste milk squirted right out of the cow. I wondered what death was like for the fallen nestling we tried to autopsy with sticks, and whether the chick my baby cousin had squeezed too affectionately with her clumsy hands had survived. My grandfather asked me to help him count the chicks in the hatchery, but they were all moving about and I had little confidence in my estimate so I just stopped after I reached one hundred.

The kitten was run over before she grew into a cat, and my grandparents' little dog was poisoned. My cousins told me that the children in the village were saying my friend and I had got naked together under the loquat tree. So I played with the girls instead, teaching them chess, and coming close to winning the swimming race in the new communal pool doggy-paddle, except for not touching the wall at the other end. Or maybe it was my cousin who almost won, she was the better swimmer at that age.

Applecore #70

Remember that river near Reno? It was actually hard to get to from the freeway, so I planted this Colorado gala applecore from wholefoods in Utah in a dry riverbed nearby. The apple had survived burning man, with a thin coating of playa dust.

Applecore #69

Postultimate apple? This red delicious from Washington which was the only fresh thing at a service station in the middle of Nebraska was so delicious that, well, I just couldn't let it go. First I tried to feed it to some cattle in a truck, but they shied away and wouldn't make eye contact, perhaps traumatized by their journey or having a premonition of its destination. So I planted it in Wyoming, attracted by the espresso sign. The youngest member of the family was going
through a why phase, and I taught him the color orange.