BLANCA and the Red Pear
By: Domenic Maltempi
1-12-09
Blanca is a woman in my office who is always printing up envelopes….she uses the same printer as I do… On most days I hear Blanca not quite shouting: ‘Please don’t print.’ Today she said something she has never said before to me, and possibly to anyone else. Blanca, you must understand, is a taciturn Cuban woman from Sunnyside…Queens. She is a pleasant woman, even sweet. I didn’t expect this to happen, our falling out, our embroiling slip from quiescent affability to screwy loggerheadish pugnacity. Our company provides us various lunch and breakfast goods, all conveniently placed in our kitchen. Such items include deli meats such as ‘Cracked Pepper Turkey,’ or a snack called ‘pretzels.’ There is even a seltzer product I’ve never seen before called Zaz, a name that struck me as unassailable in it’s perfection. Blanca wears orthopedic shoes. I drink a lot of water. We both enjoy fruit. We especially enjoy red pears. We have over the last few years developed a tacit compact, an unmentioned or unmentionable (because of the heightened sensitivities?) to not eat more than one red pear a week. In general, most of the fruit, even of the lowest tier, and long to get ripe variety, is quickly snatched from the fruit bowl with a depression era temerity that oozes malignly in the quick grab and go—fiercely lukewarm war for goods that goes on in the kitchen and the office in general.
It was a little after 3pm on a Tuesday. It was winter time, and less people were going out to eat, more employees ( and the plant/fish subcontracting weasel woman) were stocking up in a most avaricious manner on all kinds of kitchen goods. The richer the employee, the more he or she seemed to or was secretly accused of hording foods or goods (tissue boxes were a big hording item…..see my When the nose was never stuffed up report in my last newsletter Vol. 4 2008) Blanca and I noticed that somehow there was among one stepchildish looking mutt of a pink lady apple, a Red Pear. We both suspected it was unripe, squeezed into an advanced age, fondled into a sclerotic state of desiccated oldfruitdom. I needed to make sure. I unloosened my emerald green tie, saying something in a phony Spanish to both amuse and distract Blanca. Then I heard it. I heard what I could not believe I heard. Before being able to fully grasp the fruit, with a few fingers caressing it’s more than tempting surface, Blanca let out a roaring: “Don’t PRINT Please.’ I dropped the pear as the soft hand of a virgin princess before the menacing visage of an irascible king bent on my annihilation. Blanca, (without washing) bit into the red pears skin with a feral animated chomp. Her skin glowed with an angelic, scintillating, detoxified might, that made me reflexively sheath my stunned eyes. Things have not been the same. Things never are.
(too sweet, red?)