Fiction, Madeline Holewa
“The world was so rich it was rotting”
-Clarice Lispector, “Love,” 1952
Standing in the middle of the fruit aisle, Eleanor felt her world contract a bit. As though it were a heart, straining itself to produce its next beat, never knowing when it would be relieved from the constant cycle of energy and reprieve. As far as Eleanor knew, the heart did not need to think about pumping in order to do what it needed to. Unfortunately, she could not say the same about herself. Eleanor had not originally planned to live her life in the way that she had. Though her chosen aspirations changed with age, maturity, and interest, she’d always imagined herself as being extraordinarily, notably, excellent at whatever it was she set herself out to do. Slowly, though, life turned Eleanor into a woman. And slowly, Eleanor realized that this thing which life had done to her would have implications in the way that she got to exist. This was something Eleanor hadn’t realized in her young, heady ambitions: it wasn’t all up to her.
Eleanor was not always a woman, though; she’d once been a girl. A perpetually upset, slightly disturbed, girl. What Eleanor remembered most about girlhood was the feeling of non-existence. As though the world existed as something completely detached from herself: as though it were something she could never touch, could never feel. Often, she inhabited this state of non-reality for such a long time that she became shockingly disoriented when people’s random, absent-minded comments shoved her out of her own mind. “I was thinking of you today,” someone would say, or, “this shirt reminded me of something you’d like.” And every time, Eleanor felt the forcefully volatile nausea of realizing that she also existed as a concept in the consciousness of other human beings.
She thought about her existence so much that it made her sick, like a child having eaten too many chocolates. When she was in high school, the thoughts multiplied before collapsing in on themselves, resulting in a brief hospital visit for what her mother quietly referred to as a mental breakdown. It was both an event that framed much of the rest of Eleanor’s life, and the one thing that she was able to say least about. She recovered, eventually. Maybe that’s all that needed to be said.
She recovered and then went off to college. To her surprise, Eleanor found that the existential dread she’d quietly harbored in high school actually came to her benefit, now. Those old, haughty, academics loved her constant flow of questions—her inability to feel satisfaction with the answers that she’d been provided with. Thus, academically, she excelled. She floated uneasily through college in a similar way as she’d floated through life before. Only this time, she was lauded for it. She learned quickly to capitalize on her grief—to squeeze contrived melancholia out of her soul in the same way that she made fresh orange juice for herself each morning. Squeezing, contracting, flowing.
Sex, for Eleanor, existed everywhere that sex was not. In fact, what had so enticed her about The Boy was their original lack of sex. They’d played with each other’s feelings for some time, feeding the other strings of cloaked desire before suddenly pulling back, forcing the other’s emotions into a flurry. Eleanor liked being able to play with sex in this way—to keep it as an abstract concept which she could intellectually toy with. The problem, for Eleanor, was when it became less of an abstraction. Life intervened, gripping Eleanor and The Boy with muddied hands, choking Eleanor with its long, elegant fingers and forcing her to be the very thing that she’d once been so afraid of: a mother; a wife. Eleanor wanted to be happy; she wanted to live a normal life. And so, she gave herself in. Life, Hemingway once said, breaks everyone, and those that it cannot break, it kills. So Eleanor allowed life to break her.
As she stood in the middle of the fruit aisle though, none of this particularly mattered much, anyway. She would do what she had to do, because she had to, and that was simply the way things were. She picked up a carton of strawberries, carefully inspecting to make sure she did not see any of the fuzzy white growth that indicated fruit gone bad. When she satisfied herself with her selection, she placed it into her basket and walked slowly to the check-out counter. “Would you like your receipt?” the teenage cashier asked her. She looked at him for a beat before opening her mouth to respond. “No, thank you,” she said, grabbing her bag.
Walking to the car, she imagined a life in which she got in, turned the ignition, and simply never stopped driving. Her baby would cry at home, her husband would slip tenderly into despair, and the strawberries would mold in the backseat. None of this would affect her in the least: her eyes would remain forward, on the freeway, as her existence melted away between the yellow lines on the road.
But Eleanor did not do such things. She placed the strawberries on the passenger-seat beside her, and turned the ignition. Driving home, she mentally reviewed her recipe for tonight’s dessert, making sure she hadn’t forgotten anything at the store. She hoped that her family would enjoy the strawberry shortcake—she hoped that she would make it well. This was how Eleanor lived. And that was that.
Madeline Holewa is currently a third year student at UC Berkeley, where she studies Latin and English literature. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal. Aside from school, she enjoys reading, swimming, playing cello, and getting coffee with friends. She is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After her time as an undergraduate, she hopes to pursue a graduate degree in English literature.
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