Orange Dreams

I don’t remember how “crawling under the carrot” came to be a metaphor for death--something about the dying crickets in with Perdy’s lizard, I think--but at any rate, it did. I confuse a good lot of people with it. They say, what the hell are you talking about. All of us use it at headquarters. That is, at Caitlin’s house. A lot of us spend time there, because it has charm, and room and quiet for us to fill up. Caitlin and I make hors d’oeuvres in her kitchen and pretend the provolone is our tongues.

Caitlin is my best friend. We plan on marrying twin brothers so we can always spend the holidays together for the rest of our lives. Caitlin and Perdy both have long, blond hair and I am so jealous. Caitlin always says she’d prefer to be a brunette like me. Dark hair is so much more striking, she says. My dad says we’re chocolate and vanilla. Caitlin’s dad calls us salt and pepper. I don’t like to talk much, but I tell Caitlin most everything. We both like black licorice and tomato soup, and I don’t know many folks who like those things.

There are times when I wish I had crawled under the carrot. I used to think that was dumb, but now I know. I don’t think Perdy has ever wished death on herself, but I know Caitlin has. We have discussed it, Caitlin and I. But Caitlin wishes it mostly for purposes of revenge, while I wish it out of sheer desperation. Perhaps desperation is not the word. That makes it sound melodramatic somehow, and that has no part in my deathwish. I come home from school, maybe, and I’m eating sourpatch peaches, I’m happy, and then suddenly I start getting sadder and sadder until sleep seems like the only thing I can do, since I am too yellow to kill myself. Mostly the birds are singing outside my window when I wake up.

At my house the kitchen is small with blue cupboards. There is always fruit, and flour and vanilla and peppermint extract in the cupboards, but my mom doesn’t cook. Great Bird is always cooking, even though she complains about it. Great Bird is Caitlin’s dad’s name for Caitlin’s mom, because she’s so patriotic. She always cries during The Pledge. Caitlin says she was a hippy with long blond hair when she was young, but I don’t think Great Bird was ever that. My mom was sporty when she was young, and I can believe it because she’s sporty now. She likes to camp and fish and build fires with just flint and steel. Her dad taught her that. I won’t eat fresh fish because they taste like lake water, but I think they’re awfully pretty before their skin is off. It shimmers like nothing else.

I go down to the lake by my house a lot. Perdy says it’s not clean, but I say I don’t go there to drink it, duh. I always thought lakes should be blue, but this one is green. I take my sister sometimes--even if she is always sucking on lemon drops--but I never go there with Caitlin or Perdy. I don’t think they’d like it there. Caitlin’s afraid of the water anyway, and I like to come right up to the edge of the rock jetty and look over. My dad says, you’re a California girl, the ocean is in your blood. The ocean is blue, though, and My Lake is cool mint green in the summer and black in the winter.

I like grapefruit, and I have discovered that I am a rarety. I don’t put sugar on it, I just scoop it out of the rind--yellow or pink--and into my mouth. Perdy can’t figure out how I can do it. You’re crazy, she says. A special treat is a grapefruit spoon, which I have found out is also a rarety. Caitlin and Perdy have them at headquarters, but then Caitlin and Perdy have just about everything at headquarters. I am like one of the family there, and I eat their grapefruit more often than I eat mine. I know where they keep the different kinds of dishes and I know about the sock drawer in the upstairs hallway. Caitlin even showed me the hidden panel in the wall across from the door to the basement. I really like the den because it has low, red walls and that’s the secret to a cozy room. I am usually happy there, but once I started to cry in Caitlin’s room. She told me, buck up. Caitlin’s a good sort, but she didn’t know what to do. She’s excellent to talk to, but my back was to her, there in her room.

On Thanksgiving I left my grandma’s to go to headquarters for games. They were all eating Belgian chocolates in the den. Caitlin’s dad has been to Belgium a lot of times, and Holland too. He did Hasbro commercials. Caitlin likes the ones with orange cream inside milk chocolate, but I’ve never liked fruit with any kind of chocolate. It seems wrong to mix those things, like shaking up juice with milk. That Thanksgiving I stayed overnight at headquarters, and Caitlin slept on the carpet in her room. I slept on the bed, buried in Caitlin’s yellow bedspread with pink ribbons weaved into the cloth.

My sister says oranges have special significance in England. They are Christmas fruits. They are imported from Sunny Spain and they are so fresh and large and sweet that they eat them for dessert. Whoever heard of fruit for dessert, Perdy says, curled up in the den in her stocking feet. That’s just because Perdy eats peanut butter and chocolate like soup--straight out of the microwave in a headquarters crystal bowl. Caitlin and I wonder why Perdy is skinny when she eats like that. Nearly all of Caitlin’s clothes have some kind of sweet stain on the sleeve because Perdy borrows them and she can’t eat demurely. Caitlin hopes it will catch up with her someday, but I don’t. I figure Perdy has enough to worry about. Her face isn’t all that pretty.

Headquarters is a bully place for parties. Once we strung up all of Caitlin’s Chinese lanterns and put Christmas lights into them. That was on the back porch. It’s not the porch, it’s Paradise, Great Bird says. Caitlin’s always having to spray off the patio after her dad paints it to look like green marble. Not many people’s dads can do that. Also, Caitlin invents things like sherbet in lemon peel cups and raspberry yogurt in chocolate pie crust. I just bring salads with baby mandarins.

Last night I dreamt of oranges. Oranges floating and falling and at the end of helium balloon sticks. Oranges sliced, peeled, sectioned--oranges that turned into goldfish and swam away from me. My dad grew up in an orange grove in Tustin, California. He knows how to peel them lightning-fast. His fingernails are short, but he can do those oranges like clockwork. I dreamt that grated orange rinds were coming out of fruit cakes, that skeletons had orange slice smiles. My dad was in the dream, but all I remember about that is that he was barefoot. Orange peels turned over and over and crickets crawled under them. If I were to die, I told Caitlin, the shade of a citrus peel might look inviting.