The market was strange: small, but with that cavernous feel of tight-margin enterprise. She picked up a basket and wandered down the first aisle, trying hard to not look as bewildered as she felt. To look vulnerable was to be vulnerable. It was all bar codes and machine voices calling out prices as her basket passed. The only people she saw were shoppers.
She picked up a head of lettuce and turned it in her hand. There was dirt on the underside. She put it back on the piles of lettuces picked up another. They were all dirty. She chose one that seemed less grubby than the others, and moved on to the carrots. It was peculiar to see them all lined up on their sides and tied together in bunches. On the rare occasions she had shopped in the past, the vegetable section in Auckland had been a series of gleaming white vats, where the lettuces and dwarf radicchio, the spinach and bok choy grew hydroponically, right there in front of you. If you wanted something, you picked it yourself. You knew it was fresh, you knew where it had been, where it had come from. These vegetables seemed… dead. Not like real vegetables at all. Where had they been grown, and how? And how did you get them clean?
She laid the carrots alongside the lettuce. The aisles did not seem very well organized. After she had walked up and down them all twice, she found the bread next to the entrance.
She joined the lines at the checkout, realized that the woman in front of her, and the man next to her in another line, both had their vegetables in plastic bags. She wondered if they brought the bags with them. The line was the worst part. People in front of her, beside her, behind her, breathing her air, all comfortable, assured, confident through having undergone this simple procedure a hundred times, a thousand times. Natives in this particular stratum of culture. In a strange country, all Lore would have to do was smile and shrug, and say loudly in English or Dutch or French that she did not understand what she should do: foreigners were allowed to make mistakes. Natives were not.
She moved one step closer to the checkout. The woman in front of her turned casually, nodded, looked at her basket, turned back to the front. Lore almost panicked and threw down her bread and vegetables. Did normal people only buy vegetables and bread? Would the woman think she was strange because her things were not in plastic bags?
In her imagination that one casual glance became a searching stare, the nod a sharp gesture of condemnation.
Was it her hair? Her clothes? But then the woman was checking her goods through the scanner, V-handing her PIDA into the metal-and-ceramic jaws of the debit counter, packing her things—canned goods mostly—into a plastic string bag and leaving. The scanner bleeped at her softly. “Next customer, please. Next customer, please.”
Lore waved her lettuce and carrots and bread through the scanner one by one, as she had seen the woman do. Then she stuck the V of her hand into the debit counter. It clicked green. The man behind her cleared his throat impatiently. She scooped her things up and walked quickly out of the door. Eyes followed her as she almost ran back down Springbank, across the safeway.
Spanner was working when she got back, frowning over a pile of slates. Lore’s hands shook as she put the lettuce in the refrigerator. It was two days before she went back out into the garden.
One day Spanner came home around noon and announced that they would go to the park. To Lore’s relief, they took back streets and cut-throughs and crossed the long-abandoned railway line to enter the park from the side.
Pearson Park was a pocket-sized patch of green in the middle of the west side of the city. Once, it had been part of the estate of some rich Victorian family. The statues they had erected at the jubilee of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India, remained untouched. Victoria herself, her white marble jowls turning slightly green with moss—like the shadow of a beard—graced a plinth in the rose garden. Albert, Prince Consort, lorded it over the pond and its score of mallards and moorhens and muddy-looking geese. Most of the birds were now asleep on the tiny island, head under wing, or begging scraps of bread or rice from the few hardy souls, well-wrapped against the cold, who were eating lunch away from the office. An oak tree, probably not much younger than the statues, Lore thought, had been half pulled up, pushed sideways, and trained to grow across the pond: a gnarled, moss-slippery bridge. Its roots were dug like long, bony fingers into the asphalt of the path.
Lore shivered.
“You’ll be warm where we’re going,” Spanner said. She led Lore around the pond toward a Victorian conservatory, all white wood and glass greenhouse, with clouds in every shade of gray scudding along its panes. Lore followed Spanner past the little window where a bored employee sold seedlings and saplings, and inside.
It was like walking into a line of hanging laundry, still hot and wet and smelling of earth and sunshine and fresh rain. She felt as though she had stepped through a mirror into another world, where the ash and charcoal, the grim mercury and zinc and lithium vanished into the living colors of the tropics. A bird shrieked. The light was bright, and reflected from the vivid orange of half fruits at the bottom of the aviary cages, on the flash of a purple-throated hummingbird, on huge, blowsy red flowers.
“Heliconia…” Lore said, in wonder, and lifted her face to smell. The ceiling was three stories high, and the whole space was lush with greenery.
“How the hell did you know that?”
“I’ve been in the jungle. Before.” Before all this.
She felt suddenly that her carapace had been ripped off, like a shiny scab, and she was open, raw and pink, to everything: the brilliant sherbet green of a parakeet’s tail; to a dozen variations on brown—leaf mold, dead moss, peat, bark, beetles; to the crunch of their feet on the gravel paths that wound between the vines and palms and trailers that spanned the fifty or sixty feet from loam to glass ceiling. It was these plants that seemed to interest Spanner.
Spanner stopped in front of an enormous green tower with trailing aerial roots and leaves that were fringed and full of natural holes. Lore tilted her head up, up, and was lost in the soaring spindle-weave of foliage, the tracery of different greens overhead, the architectural density of it all, like a great, Gothic cathedral.
She wondered why Spanner had brought her here.
“Monstera deliciosa, that’s its Latin name,” Spanner said. “The people who first brought it back from the jungle called it the fruit salad plant, because that’s what the fruit tastes like.” Her face was tilted up at forty-five degrees, and Lore could imagine her tramping through the tropics, braving unknown hazards to collect specimens, just to say she’d been there, a new place. But there were no more new places. Lore suddenly thought of Stella. Her sister and Spanner were very alike. They were the people who suffered because they were made for exploring the edges, pushing the boundaries. But the only boundaries left were inside.
She wanted to ask Spanner why she was letting down her barriers. Why now? She asked, instead: “Where does it come from?”
Spanner shrugged. “Nowhere, now, except hothouses.” She lifted up her face again. “I’ve been coming here for six years, watching for fruit. I wonder what they’d really taste like—what kind of fruit salad? Once I dreamt I found a pineapple as big as a barrel on the floor. When I ate a bit, it tasted like strawberries.” Her smile twisted at the last minute. “Imagine calling something that grows fruit salad a cheese plant.”