From August, 2006
Once, when Melanie was only five, she fell off her tricycle and scraped her knee. Paul was the only one around, so he helped her up and took her into the house to have their mother look at it.
“You did the right thing,” their mother said.
“Thank you,” said Melanie.
Paul didn’t think about it too much.
Two years later, Paul and Melanie planted a peach tree in a corner of their backyard. It took a while before it looked like anything impressive, but in the meantime, it still produced nice, ripe fruit that they could be proud of eating.
Within a few weeks, they had contests as to who could finish one faster. At first, Paul usually won.
Eventually, they both recognized the sort of intimacy involved in undressing and plundering a fresh, virgin peach like that, and both secretly enjoyed it immensely, more than anything else. They never told anybody, though, especially not each other.
They entered adolescence. The peach tree still grew.
Paul never got any better. He had always thought that he would, as soon as his voice got deeper and hair started growing all over, but it didn’t. He couldn’t grow out of himself, no matter how much he tried. He wasn’t an ugly boy, though, and was spared that much.
The less Paul changed, the more Melanie loved him.
Melanie, however, blossomed in full. She became prettier when most girls weren’t, and wasn’t ever scarred by the worry or anxiety that most girls her age knew, which made her all the more attractive to surrounding boys. They both knew it wouldn’t but it didn’t take very long. It wasn’t how she would have wanted it.
The morning after her first time, she took Paul out into the yard by their tree, and sat with him, both of them on them Indian style, like they had watched tv.
“Paul,” she said, “listen to me.” Attentively, he listened.
“I did something I’m not proud of, but I was hoping that you would help me out with something.” Anything.
“I need to do what I need to do to get out of this town alive. I mean, I just need to. People want certain things of me, they expect certain things. There’s probably a way out, but I don’t know what it is. I know it’s probably going to happen again. And I don’t want you to pity me that.” I won’t. I understand.
She took a peach off the tree, and handed it to him. “No matter what we both do together, or with anybody else, that’s fine. But I want this to be our tree. This is just us. It grows from us, and it belongs to us. I want only the two of us to eat its fruit. Not just that, I want peaches to be ours. I want that to be only us. We don’t eat peaches with anybody else. Do you agree?” He agreed.
Nobody else ever touched the tree.
She was right. It did happen again. A few times, before she made it out of middle school, which she never really wanted it to. She regretted it for every other time.
It never happened for Paul. He wasn’t trying very hard, but it never came to him. It never sought him out. He could hardly even say the word.
S-E-X
Melanie would come back late several nights a week, and nothing was ever said about it. It was just kind of assumed what had happened, and none of their parents ever mentioned it. They knew. It was just sort of supposed to happen with girls who look like her. She would come home and her hair would be fussily put together, and she would look in Paul’s door to see if he was awake.
If he wasn’t, he left the peach on his night-stand.
If he was, she’d tell him about it. He always listened.
And they ate together.
In the dark, under his blanket, he thought about her. Her and the way her shoulders looked when they were naked. They didn’t just catch light, they grabbed it.
The night isn’t long, but it’s awful deep.
They didn’t know what to call it at first, so they called it ‘going upstairs.’ It was a free enough word, which didn’t lie, but didn’t catch them in the act. One of them would simply say, in the middle of dinner, or at school, can we ‘go upstairs’ later? And the answer was always yes. Neither one was ever refused.
Usually it was Paul that asked to go upstairs first.
In May of their freshman year, Melanie asked for the first time.
If they didn’t call it that, if they didn’t use the word…
I-N-C-E-S-T
…it didn’t count.
They never used the word. Besides it wasn’t the same as what she did with other people. It was different. There wasn’t the same idea to it at all. She felt better about it than anything else she did.
The same.
And, they always ate a peach afterwards. It was their peach. It was perfect.
They had been doing it about a year when the peach tree died. Nobody knew what happened to it. It was just uprooted one morning, with no dirt leading off in any direction.
Melanie started working at the grocery store, just to be on the safe side. It kept happening to her there, too, but it was easier going down.
It was something that would fall off and be blown away if she didn’t think about it.
And she got a thirty percent mark-off on all items, including produce. She always brought her work home with her
Her skin became his favorite thing in the entire world. It was soft, and when you got close to it without looking, it just stretched. He couldn’t describe it. It was like moss or something, that would just keep growing and growing. It stretched on before him. He stopped trying. He couldn’t imagine anything better.
He loved the way her skin felt like it could change shades. In the dark, it could be so many things, and it could change shades right in front of him. From white to brown to black.
He loved the way it flooded and expanded in his mouth.
Her skin. Her skin.
And they always had a peach right after. One peach, both sharing. They undressed and plundered it, their victim, their conquest.
Nobody suspected until their sophomore year. It was their father who discovered them. He saw the stains. He never told their mother.
He beat Paul within an inch of his life, until blood came out of his mouth, and he couldn’t breath out of anything but his mouth. He lost a tooth, and probably had something wrong with his kidney ever since. But he lived. He was supposed to. He came up with some horribly false story, just to keep it contained. Probably from himself.
He never touched Melanie. As far as Paul knew, she never even found out about it. She asked like everybody else did, but he told her the same thing, he told everybody else.
He was so glad, so impressed, so in love with her for believing it, being that innocent, even when he told her that they needed to be more careful about things.
Paul knew why he hadn’t touched her. He wanted one of them to be clean, to be innocent. That way they’d fall apart. One of them would get sick and tired of the other, or jealous, and they’d be driven apart.
He knew better.
Let her never ever know that.
He screamed under his voice whenever his father went at him. It was an awful sound, a whole thickness of noise, streaming out in constant. It came out in mass and in volume, and nobody ever heard it.
Hit me.
Hit me as hard as you can.
I dare you.
He screamed it, feeling the noise go loudly under his own pleas for mercy as it rattled the garage, shaking it with a biblical vengeance. He knew they couldn’t do anything to him. They didn’t have anything on him. He was safe inside himself. Nobody could touch him in there
In spite of all this, they were more careful. They only “went upstairs” late at night, or when they could, at school. There were always places. And she got fired at the grocery store.
But they could still shop there. As long as he had a job, which he could get.
This could go on for a long time. They could be these kinds of people just as long as they could afford it.
His hips still hurt some times.
Everybody should have something like this.
Everybody should only use the color green in the kitchen, and make a point of it. That will be their thing. Either that or say the word ‘bioluminescence’ on Thursdays, and only Thursdays. Everybody needs something like that, something to hang their life on. You need that kind of monogamy.
Neither one of them ever forgave the other for growing up. They couldn’t be mad at eachother, but there was someone they could never forgive for something like that. There had to be. It’d be too hard otherwise.
Their last time together, really together, was on the morning before he graduated high school. He was naked, and she was in a nice red outfit that he pictured her in from then on, and that was…
Her skin.
…right before he put on his graduation outfit. He couldn’t do that kind of thing if he was going to be grown up now.
It was always best with you, Paul. Better than with any of the other guys. It didn’t feel physical, you know? It didn’t feel like two people doing something like that. I think it’s because we’re the same. The same inside. Being related, that makes a difference. That changes everything. It’s a totally unique kind of love, something you can’t even get anymore. It’s because we’re the same inside. We’re the same.
He has a daughter now.
Paul can’t talk to Melanie the way he wants to now, not even on the phone, not even alone in the car. They could both say all they wanted about peaches, and going upstairs, and they are the same people that they were, deep inside. But it would just get lost. Down in all that empty space between them with a million echoing heartbeats. Nothing.
And they never ate peaches with anybody else. Not even their spouses.
She married someone who had been her second time. He had been as good as any of them, she supposed. She could smile about it.
But he has a daughter now. And Melanie knew there was nothing that either of them had to worry about there, but that was just strange. Now what? Now what are we supposed to do?
But she saw the way he looked at his daughter. And it wasn’t there. Nothing, peaches, nothing, was there. There was love, of course, but that’s not the same thing. He just can’t love something like that anymore. It would be wrong.
Had it been wrong before?
The same.
She wished so much for his own sake. Wished isn’t even the right word, she prayed for him. She prayed for Paul to become healed.
There are some things that, once you’ve seen them, you just can’t unknow.
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