Epiphanette
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| Cauliflower and Pomegranates by Pierre-Auguste Renoir |
In the late morning I am driving home from the retirement community where my father now lives—it was the second time in a week that I had to go over there to meet with the hospice staff who have started to look after him—they say he is “dying” even though he doesn’t have a terminal illness per se, just “failure to thrive” because he’s not eating much or talking in full sentences anymore, and is getting very weak—which is not only painful and depressing to watch but also confusing. And I am driving on MLK instead of Sacramento because I need to buy an orchid plant for a friend’s anniversary—when at the corner of MLK and Center Street I spot A, my brother’s partner—I never quite know what to call her because she is like my sister-in-law except she is not married to my brother but I feel like she is part of my family so I wish I had some way of identifying her besides “brother’s partner”—stopped at the light in her tiny electric car, the new white one shaped like a bubble, and there’s my niece B in her car seat in the back, but when I wave at A, she doesn’t respond—her car doesn’t have doors or windows so she’s easy for me to recognize, but apparently I’m not easy for her to recognize, either because my car does have doors and windows or because I hardly ever drive so she doesn’t expect to see me in a car. So I honk my horn once and wave again, and this time she waves back but her expression is indifferent and perfunctory so I think she still probably doesn’t realize it’s me—sometimes I do that, too, just wave back at someone in car who seems to know me even if I can’t tell who they are through the glass. I think how strange it is running into my own family members by accident—so much weirder that running into mere acquaintances—and I remember that time years ago when I was walking on San Pablo Avenue and noticed my own mother driving by in her little red car, and how when she saw me there on the sidewalk, she waved ever so gaily but then drove on past me without even slowing down.
When I get home I walk quickly to the health food store around the corner to pick up some bread for my lunch, and as soon as I enter the shop, I spot C, a woman close to my age who became friendly with my parents because she was—let me think—a good friend of a good friend of good friend of theirs. And after I call out C’s name, we stand together by the door and she immediately asks how my dad is doing, and I tell her he seemed a bit more lively that morning and had actually gone down to the dining room to breakfast, and she says oh, good. But I’m thinking how the days when he eats something just mean he will take longer to die, and honestly, should that be considered good or not, but I only say there are good days and bad days and you never know, and she says she’ll visit him after the holidays, and “Happy Thanksgiving!”
In the late afternoon, I walk up to the cluster of small shops in my neighborhood to buy some fresh fish, and just as I start to cross Hopkins Street, I have the eerie sensation someone is looking at me, and sure enough, there is my friend D standing on the corner, with her signature spiky blond hair and French striped sailor shirt and she is smiling affectionately, with her head tipped to the side, as if she has been watching me for some time. So I dash over to embrace her—she’s so slender I can feel her bones through her clothes. I ask her, are things still going well a couple of hours later, because we’d spoken on the phone earlier that afternoon, and for once all the drama with her soon to be ex-wife and the rebellious teenaged son she was trying to keep from dropping out of high school was all under control, and she laughs happily and says, yes, things are still going well.
D tells me she’s already finished her shopping but she’ll tag along with me to the fish market, and as the two of us stand in front of the cool, gleaming display and I’m thinking swordfish or black cod, black cod or swordfish, I hear a familiar voice and, oh, there is E, with her beautiful long gray hair and one of her Chinese jackets, standing in front of the cash register (I haven’t seen her in quite a while, and she’d recently asked me to go for a walk with her one afternoon but because of all the turmoil—not to mention extra demands on my time—over my dad, I’d had to turn her down). So I pat E gently on the arm and say her name, and she lights up at the sight of me, saying that she’s been worried, and after I assure her that I’m fine and that we’ll get together soon, I introduce her to D, thinking that even though I tend to run into a lot of people I know, this is probably the first time I’d had to juggle two of them at the same time. And after E pays for her fish and takes off, D and I walk together to the Monterey Market parking lot, and I remind D that I had told her about E in the past, that E was a poet, very intelligent, quirky, and fun to be with, but I don’t mention the last time I saw E, how she told me, sobbing as she drove, all about stillbirth of her first child.
After D gets into her car to go buy dog food, I enter the Monterey Market alone and wander through the aisles assessing the offerings of the season—orange, heart-shaped persimmons, ruby-red pomegranates ripe to bursting, luscious, late-harvest grapes, extravagant heaps of leafy green chard with white, red, and golden stems—when I suddenly I notice an orange cauliflower—it’s called a cheddar cauliflower probably because it is the color of cheddar cheese, not because it tastes like cheddar cheese—that is so beautiful it reminds me of a story Paramahansa Yogananda told in The Autobiography of a Yogi about how when he was a boy studying at his guru’s ashram, he’d grown an exceptionally beautiful cauliflower, of which he’d been so proud that he’d hidden it away in his room, and how to teach him a lesson his guru had—while the entire group was away on a trip—used his magical yogic flying powers to return quickly to the ashram, remove the cauliflower from his student’s room, and fly back to rejoin his group—or something like that. And at that moment the veil falls from my eyes and I see at long last what a truly magnificent vegetable the cauliflower is, yes, a great, golden sunburst of a perfectly formed flower, and F would have called that moment an “epiphanette,” a word he coined, but he is long gone from my life and when I recently ran into him accidentally I felt a surge of emotion so strong that I pretended not to see him and quickly walked off in the opposite direction.
by Nina Zolotow
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