It was an art, knowing the neighborhood trees where you could pick kumquat and lime, blood orange and grapefruit. Knowing who considered it theft, who considered it a favor. True, the family on the corner of Waverly and Mountain didn’t care if you harvested their grapefruit, but they were all pith anyway. And then there were the obvious choices, the orange grove on campus—everyone harvested those. What you wanted to find were the kumquats on the alley between Broadway and 10th, the lime trees at Tahoe Park, and the sweetest grapefruit, a rind that gives way in your hand, that grew in the lush neighborhood east of the university.
Mona was one of the few students in the geography grad program who had actually grown up in Arizona. That gave her a certain social edge, a grittiness the others admired. And yet. Flavia and Alex came in with their East Coast educations, expectations, savings accounts. Miles worked as a translator while Angela went to school; they could afford to work in coffee shops in the morning and bars in the afternoon. She’d seen Aaron at the food pantry once, though they hadn’t spoken. As their lives increasingly intermingled, in seminars, sitting together in stairwells waiting for exam results, drinking together on camping trips, at baby showers, at professors’ houses, she’d picked up the details she needed to blend in. Shopping at the upscale thrift stores, buying a refurbished Mac, talking about trips to her dad’s family in northern Mexico as more luxury than obligation.
Then there was the moment of terrifying clarity when she realized she’d have to revisit six of her field sites across the state. Of course her most promising results were from a question she’d added halfway through. She saw her graduation date slide forward another year and a familiar pinch—how would she pay for it?
That fall, Mona went back to the strange yard where Ronnie had once offered her a share in the citrus circus.
Ronnie’s yard had been impossible to resist in the first place. She had been going to see about a lime tree in the El Con Mall parking lot and found herself cutting over on the alley below Holmes Street. She slowed her bike at the sight of a sculpture, something like a pine tree made of blown glass and pinwheels, and pulled up alongside a low, yellow poured-cement wall. There was too much to take in all at once: a 15-foot saguaro cactus hugging itself, the two arms crisscrossed, a burned out trash pit, with shards of colored glass and whitened aluminum. Ronnie himself emerged from a three-sided outbuilding, part workshop, part trash heap, part museum. He carried an easy energy in his compact frame, his hair sandy and grey in patches. His hands, his jeans, a tarp, and some of the yard were speckled white; he seemed to be painting an old bicycle from tires to handlebars.
“It’ll go in front of La Luca Café on Grant, where Mitch was hit,” he said, as if picking up a conversation, rather than meeting someone for the first time.
“Right, okay.” Mona was still taking everything in. The rear wall of the workshop was alive with house sparrows, running short commutes to a hedge of Texas sage and back. And she saw the knife hooked on his belt, the textured green handle (antler that had been painted, she thought).
“You know people think Grant was named for the Civil War hero—but not so! There was this young man, an orphan cared for by a man named Grant, so this young man came here from Canada to start an orchard. But the orchard never took. His wife later became big in property, in real estate. When she subdivided the land, she named the road they ran through it Grant, after her husband’s adoptive father. Everything is in these street names, everything. Oh… you’ve got those tangelos in your baskets, are those from Mimi Rickler’s?”
“What? Yes. Yes.”
“Those are good ones.”
She started to push off, and it felt right to salute him, so she did.
That neighborhood east of the El Con wasn’t exactly on her loop, and the trees she did find were picked over, but all through that first year of her program, Ronnie’s yard was a respite. She helped him raise some shade cloth over a couple of benches, and he taught her how to make candy out of orange peels. She learned about the big poultry operation on Hedrick’s Acres, now a stretch of single-family homes between Glenn and Fort Lowell, about the invention of Pima cotton and the administrative history of the Pascua Yaqui.
One day, sharing a navel orange, teeth to rind, under the shade cloth, Ronnie looked up at her and said, “Listen, I’ve got this operation. I have a few people bought in, but I have a slot opening. You could get a share.”
“What are you talking about, man? An operation?”
“I’d need a thousand dollars up front, and 40 pounds of fruit—you could do that easy—it’s coming up in February, peak season. And then you’d be there, you’d love it, it’s like an underground fruit festival. And you’d get the payout, depends on the year, it could be 5K, 13K max.”
Mona pushed him for details, but as usual Ronnie had all the details you want, none of the details you need.
“Look, you are either in or out.”
She was out.
Mona had to finish her research proposal that spring, on top of a heavy course load, and Angela asked her to help organize a seminar series. Sitting cross-legged on the main green, notebooks and water bottles out, Angela, Flavia, and Mona came up with a list of names. Flavia had a connection to the professor who coined the term “megadrought.” Mona suggested someone at the Tec in Hermosillo working on heat wave impacts to day laborers. The international travel paperwork turned out to be byzantine. And though they pulled it off, Mona later wondered why the faculty wasn’t in charge of inviting speakers.
When she went to stay with her dad’s family in Hermosillo over spring break, she brought candied orange peels plus the items she’d been asked to get at Target: an electric kettle, sidewalk chalk, packs of socks, and tank tops for her younger cousins. She caught up on her classes in the mornings and went to a different aunt’s house each afternoon to feast. Asados, nopalitos, machaca, chiles, together with long and chaotic conversations. She decided to take the bus back on Sunday, even though the wait at the port of Nogales would be six hours or more.
The next time she swung by Ronnie’s she told him about the thousands of blackbirds that descend on Plaza Zaragoza at dusk. He’d love it there. She traded him a half dozen grapefruits for a bag of tangelos, and then traded the tangelos with her roommate Anna, for taking care of her goldfish and potted plants while she was away.
By the time school started again in late August, Mona was burnt out. From interviewing farmers, from wearing the same three t-shirts, from rumbling over dirt roads in the government vehicle and worrying about washouts from the summer monsoons. In late July, the teenage kids of a big family with an avocado farm and petting zoo outside of Phoenix had taken her down to the river: the relief of playing in the water that day under the swaying cottonwoods had gotten her through the last few weeks.
The orange moved through the group like a kiss, like a rumor being spread, like a snake’s sinuous digestion of a mouse.
Mona had a teaching assistantship the fall she realized she’d be another year in school. There was no guarantee she’d get a position next year, and even if she did, the money did not seem to cover rent and groceries. Though maybe it was curiosity too, that made her go back to Ronnie’s and ask about the circus.
She pulled together the thousand dollars. There had been three pay periods in October, so she took the extra check and combined it with $320 she borrowed from Angela, “for a dental emergency.” When she dropped it off, in addition to a slew of history about Spanish missions, the quince tree, and the first citrus growers in Arizona, all he told her was that it would a be a spectacle, and one-night-only. She just needed to show up at the Palo Verde Business Park on the second Tuesday in February with 40 pounds of those acid-sweet sidewalk treats.
Mona went from finals week, to a friend’s Ph.D. defense celebration, to Hermosillo for a Christmas packed with hours of assembling tamales and baking cookies, and back to Tucson to gather fruit for the circus. Her worlds felt spliced together, close to each other, but not quite touching.
There were no cars in the parking lot at the Palo Verde Business Park, no sounds coming from the corrugated aluminum warehouse. She tried two sets of doors but the handle tabs clicked meaninglessly. She heard voices from the far end of the parking lot. When she got there, she saw temporary stairs pushed up to the loading dock. She walked her bike up a wheelchair ramp, and seeing her cargo, a young man at the door, said, “Hey, you must be Ronnie’s new girl!” It wasn’t a question so she didn’t answer. He directed her inside and told her to find Ronnie.
She stepped into an echoing expo center, industrial carpets, metal struts, ducts, fluorescent lights across the ceiling. A set of doors took her to a section that had been partitioned off, and the atmosphere shifted. Translucent cloth woven through with LED lights made a more intimate ceiling, and the walls were hung with thick black and green fabric. Pyramids of pomelos dotted the floor, tables held great baskets of fruit. At a circular juice bar, workers (other shareholders, she supposed) were setting up displays with chips and salsa, bottles of tequila alongside lime and salt, fountains of prickly pear lemonade and agave lime spritzer.
She wheeled her bike carefully across the floor, which was tiled in crisp glittery pink, distributing her haul, limes to the juice bar, grapefruit to one of the grapefruit towers. She saw Ronnie across the room, unrecognizably tidy, in a tight dark suit and white mandarin collar shirt, talking on his phone.
She felt pulled to a forest of citrus trees in buckets, ringing the back half of the room. She propped her bike up, and wandered through the forest, absorbing the shiny leaves, the greenhouse smell of soil, humidity. All neatly labeled: Yuma ponderosa lemon, Hawaiian mock orange.
Ronnie found her, his cell replaced by a microphone headset, and set her up by the door, greeting guests and handing out swag bags with seed packets, hand wipes, and string bags to take home fresh fruit. Mona smiled as she offered up the bags. She tried to typecast the guests, but couldn’t—a cross section, any busload of Tucsonans. No one under 20, though.
When she left her post the evening had picked up speed, couples tasting salsa, a group of friends doing shots of tequila, a woman with her hands plunged in a bowl of kumquats. The air was sharp, the floor was sticky, and Mona felt a winding inside her, an oncoming joy. An hour or so in, the room dimmed to pinpricks of light from the second ceiling and the floor seemed to glow in response. The background music faded, and Ronnie’s voice boomed out: “Please, welcome our dancers!”
At first, the dancers moved among the guests on the floor. A tall, androgynous person in a white vest with no shirt beneath it and fringed pants sidled gracefully alongside a woman tasting tangerines and then bowed to a young man. Three people in wide peach and white skirts danced rhythmically, circling each other and curtsying, the only sound the click of their shoes. A silence and then the first plaintive accordion pulls of a norteño. In strode a dozen kick-stepping butch cowgirls, each with their left eye extravagantly lashed, browed, and painted cobalt blue.
As the song picked up and the dancers converged, Mona found her way, together with several hundred guests, onto the bleachers that ran along the west side of the hall. Workers rolled several fruit towers to the side, and spotlights lit a center arena, framed by the fruit trees, the juice bar, and the bleachers.
The cowgirls held center stage now, coming together in pairs and then crossing each other in two lines, then three lines, then pairs again, making sharp booted moves. The audience cheered and stomped throughout, and applauded as they left the stage. The peach-skirted dancers returned, washing across the stage, clearing the way for the next act.
Out poured ballerinas of every age and size, in sleeveless black jumpsuits. They surged and played in light acrobatics, cartwheels, rolling across each other’s backs, between each other’s legs. A single orange was passed among them, tucked under a chin, rolled along an arm, pressed between two backs. The orange moved through the group like a kiss, like a rumor being spread, like a snake’s sinuous digestion of a mouse.
Mona, both stagehand and spectator, felt the evening spun out, a lavish, otherworldly gift, unearned, or if earned, done so by the pleasure of knowing a place, of having a willing heart.
Ronnie stepped out, graciously, solemnly, and raised his hands to encourage applause for all the dancers, which came forth readily. The androgynous person reemerged, head bowed, off to Ronnie’s left, waiting for a signal, it seemed. Mona was close enough to see the glitter on their skin and the cut of the white vest over their bare chest. The woman seated beside Mona turned to her, eyebrows raised, offering a shared anticipation.
Ronnie folded his hands before him, and when the room was silent, he looked up at the audience, a small smile across his face. His assistant seemed to take this as the cue, and produced a lemon, tossing it into Ronnie’s waiting hands.
Ronnie took the lemon in his left hand, and pulled out his green-handled knife with the right. The first cut opened a circle around the puckered stem end, and continued down in a smooth spiral to the blossom end, cutting close to but not through the central columella. A pause, during which the only movement was Ronnie tucking his knife into his belt and turning to look back up at the crowd. He cupped his right hand a few inches from the spreading rounds of lemon and abruptly shook it towards the earth.
The first remarkable thing was that with a flick of his wrist, Ronnie had sent the spiraling lemon to the floor. It hung now, spun open and several feet long. The second remarkable thing was that the rind and the flesh folded back on themselves, widening to reveal a small child, maybe six years old, with dark hair and dark eyes, in sky blue overalls.
A bleacher may have squeaked under someone’s weight, a muffled cough. No applause. No whispers. Ronnie’s assistant bowed to the child, took his hand and led him to one of the fruit displays, offering him a choice. The boy chose a rumpled Sumo, and was led to a seat on the lowest bleacher. The assistant passed the Sumo to Ronnie and returned to his position.
Again, Ronnie pared the fruit, slung it to the floor, and revealed a child. This time, a freckled white boy in pajamas. Next a grapefruit shifted into an older girl, in a grey dress with pink plastic bracelets and then another lemon became a large-eyed child with thick black curls.
The performance ended as swiftly and wordlessly as it had started. Ronnie offered a half-bow, and receded into the shadows. The peach-skirted dancers washed back across the stage. One lagged behind, and tapped the assistant on the shoulder. The assistant turned and they danced formally to the faint notes of a piano, without losing each other’s gaze. When the pair stilled, the room went dark and the music stopped. The house lights came on, the spell was broken, the children were nowhere in sight. The audience members turned to each other, filling the hall with the rising sounds of indistinguishable conversation.
Ronnie cut her a check for almost $8,000. She paid Angela back, cleared a $2,800 credit card bill and put the rest in savings. She revisited her field sites much of that spring and early summer. She made sure to be in town for Flavia, Alex, and Aaron’s graduation, getting wickedly drunk at Plush afterwards, and telling Angela she was sooooo glad they’d still have each other next year. They ended the night eating slices of pizza at the bus stop.
Mona did see the children, now and again. She saw Blue-overalls at a birthday party in Himmel Park, and Pink-bracelets at the mall, lagging behind a mom with two younger boys. She was alarmed to see Pajamas hitchhiking on I-10, but didn’t tell Angela to pull over.
Mona spent most of the summer reorganizing and analyzing her data, with the air on and the shades closed against the heat. Aaron was still around, finishing up a grant-funded side project, and invited her to camp in the mountains in late July. They lay against each other in the tent that night in the cool dry air of the Chiricahuas, and kissed tentatively in the predawn darkness. Aaron’s summer project turned out to involve teaching coding and mapmaking at a summer program, and Mona started going with him.
At one of the schools, she saw Blue-overalls again. He was playing with older kids, writing their names in sidewalk chalk on the tarmac. She stayed through pickup, and hung back while Blue-overalls sat on the curb. An older girl and a woman came by for him, eventually, and Mona couldn’t help herself. She followed them as they walked home on the river path, to an apartment complex on East Prince.
She drifted away from Aaron, away from her data. She spent most of August haunting the school and the apartment complex. The boy was called Edgar. He went to school, he played the trumpet, he rode his bike on the river path. She thought he seemed a bit more solemn than the other first-graders, but otherwise no different. Mona contrived to tap his shoulder, to ask if this was his bouncy ball she’d found. He felt like a real boy, and took the bouncy ball, unselfconsciously.
The monsoon came late that year; it didn’t start raining regularly until almost Labor Day. Mona felt the relief of the rain together with the threat of the semester about to start and dove into delusional 15-hour sessions to finish her analysis. When she finally visited Edgar’s school and apartment complex again, she couldn’t find him.
Mona didn’t let herself take more than $300 a month out of her circus payout. She spent it on small luxuries, hothouse tomatoes and artisan bread at the grocery store, lattes with Angela, a bike tune-up, tickets to a Lila Downs concert in Phoenix for Aaron’s birthday. She touched the knowledge of her savings account like a smooth stone in her pocket, for comfort, for luck.
When Aaron left that October for a job at San Bernadino National Forest, she was happy for him. They had nudged out beyond the confines of friendship, and were both relieved when the future simplified the present. Mona’s write-up and revisions were torturous of course, and by the time her committee agreed that her master’s project was ready to defend, she found it both unrecognizable and loathsome. While she still took pleasure in the grapefruit trees east of campus that winter, she kept away from Ronnie’s yard and the Palo Verde Business Park.
Many years later, after Mona went back for her Ph.D. in citrus genetics, after Ronnie’s memorial, after she published her book Shareholding Agricultural History in the Border Region, Mona visits her cousin Eva in Hermosillo. There are old albums out on the coffee table, and the women pore over the photographs, laughing, asking “but then who is that with Tía Mela?” when Mona recognizes herself. Ten years old, in a purple jumper, blowing bubbles on the sidewalk. A memory comes flooding back. She is dizzy, sticky; she is finding her feet below her and stepping forward in the great semi-darkness before hundreds of expectant faces.
Alyssa House Rosemartin is a writer and ecologist living in coastal Massachusetts. Her collaborative scientific work has been published in Biological Conservation, Environmental Science & Policy, Ecosphere, and other journals. Her first work of short fiction was recently published in After Happy Hour. This is her second published short story.
Header photo by Andrea, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Alyssa House Rosemartin by Jessica Massanari Sapp.
