Joe Baumann
This Has Nothing To Do With You
Your father decides to go on an all-exotic-fruit diet. He invites you to the first dinner, and the explosion of fuzzy skin and pulp covering the kitchen table looks pornographic, weird growths looking both phallic and vaginal. You pick up a strawberry and take a bite, then poke the exposed interior flesh in his direction.
What makes a fruit exotic, you ask. What’s the metric here.
My guru’s done this for decades, he says, picking up something spiky, yellow. He’s going to live forever.
Your father is a lean man with too much hair on his arms. He’s grown out his beard, flecked black and brown and gray like a calico cat. His cheeks already look sunken in.
Mom wouldn’t like you not eating burgers, you say. Are you going to compost, too.
I don’t know anything about that.Some guru, you say.
Didn’t going on this diet kill Steve Jobs, you say. Lunch, this time: a bright Saturday, black sapotes, gac fruit, lychee, buddha’s hand all spread on the patio table. Your father has power washed the concrete slab for the first time in years. It glows like a buffed tooth.
I don’t think so, your father says. But I don’t know Steve Jobs.
I’m not saying you do.
I feel like it was the guy who played him in that movie that no one saw. Your father hefts a jaboticaba in his hand, tosses it like a softball. Not that he died. He got sick.
So there, you say.
But he didn’t have nutritional advice.
I’d say Ashton Kutcher can afford nutritional advice.
Who? And afford and have are different.
He played Steve Jobs.
Why do you know that?
And you don’t have nutritional expertise, you say. You have a guru.
What’s expertise mean, anyway, your father says.
*
I’m seeing someone, he says. He bites a sapodilla. Romantically.
The guru?
Her name is Bergma.
What kind of name is that, you say. Sounds made up.
She’s a vegan.
So she’ll eat tomatoes? How does she live with herself?
She’d like to meet you.
You refuse to acknowledge that your father looks good. He’s somehow filled out a little, his arms muscled and veiny. His wrinkles appear to have retreated.
If I order a steak, will she go ballistic on me?
She does ashram yoga. She’d like us to do a session together.
One big happy family, you say.
*
Bergma is looking at family photos when you walk in.
Oh, you say.
Your mother was a lovely woman, she says. Hi.
She has gray hair, ropey and long, sprayed against her butt. She’s wearing some frocky thing, you think, that looks like it belongs on a Native American rather than a European woman who can afford to be weird.
You have her cheekbones, she says. And hairline. Both very nice.
What kind of name is Bergma?
She smiles and takes a step to the next photograph, as if she’s at an art museum. It’s German, she says. This is nice. She points to a Christmas photo from when you were twelve. Your father is a good man, wearing that ridiculous sweater. Whose idea was that?
Any Nazis in the family, you ask.
*
I visited Mom, you say. You’ve invited your father to breakfast at your favorite greasy spoon. To your surprise, he said yes. When you order the farmer’s platter, which contains several kinds of meat and three forms of carbs, he smiles at the waitress and orders the fruit cup.
I left a jackfruit on her grave, you say.
This is a nice place, your father says. The food arrives. Huge portions, he says. He eats a grape.
Are green grapes exotic, you ask.
He bites into a hunk of cantaloupe. Call it cheat day, he says.
Who are you cheating on.
Was anyone else in the cemetery?
What kind of question is that?
*
Your father reminds you that Bergma wants you to come to a session at her studio.
To do what, you say.
Yoga.
I’m limber enough. I can touch my toes.
It’s good for your mental health.
Why would I need to work on that, exactly.
She’s part of this family now, you know.
Since when? Which family?
I really like her, he says.
*
Summer has become fall, but the fruits remain, strewn, now, about the house as décor: rambutans on side tables, papayas cantilevered together on the mantel. Lychee in a basket in the bathroom. Bergma, your father tells you, likes the vibe of fruit.
They have set a date for a commitment ceremony.
You say, Is that a new term for wedding that I don’t know about.
Bergma doesn’t go in for that, your father says, slicing into a dragon fruit.
Will she dye her dreadlocks white? To be pure and all that.
Listen, son, he says. This is about moving on.
Which parts are about moving on? The fruit? Or the hippie?
Your mother wouldn’t like things this way.
You pick up a durian. You know that its terrible, deathly scent will seep into your skin, but you shove a fingertip into its spiky skin, ignoring the pain, letting the stench erupt into the kitchen. You pull it apart, peel the yellow fruit-meat out, and toss everything on the floor.
Your father looks at the mess. A waste, he says.
There is, you say, a lot of that going around.
*
You attend the ceremony. In lieu of a gift, you leave your father a basket on his dining room table, full of carrots and butter lettuce and a single shining apple, perched at the very center.
Joe Baumann
Joe Baumann is the author of four collections of short fiction, most recently Where Can I Take You When There’s Nowhere to Go, from BOA Editions, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.