Wanting An Orange

 by Larry Woiwode

    Oh, those oranges arriving in the midst of the North Dakota winters of the forties – the mere color of them, carried through the door in a net bag or a crate from out of the white, winter landscape. Their appearance was enough to set my brother and me to thinking that it might be about time to develop an illness, which was the surest way of receiving a steady supply of them.

    “Mom, we think we’re getting a cold.”

    “We? You mean, you two want an orange?”

     This was difficult for us to answer or dispute; the matter seemed moved beyond our mere wanting.

     “If you want an orange,” she would say, “why don’t you ask for one?”

     “We want an orange.”

     “ ‘We’ again. ‘We want an orange.’ ”

     “May we have an orange, please.”

     “That’s the way you know I like you to ask for one. Now, why don’t each of you ask for one in the same way, but separately?”

     “Mom…” And so on. There was no depth of degradation that we wouldn’t descend to in order to get one. If the oranges hadn’t wended their way northward by Thanksgiving, they were sure to arrive before the Christmas season, stacked first in crates at the depot, filling that musty place, where pews sat back to back, with a springtime acidity, as if the building had been rinsed with a renewing elixir which set it right for yet another year. Then the crates would appear at the local grocery store, often with the top slats pried back on a few of them, so that we were aware of a resinous smell of fresh wood, in addition to the already orangy atmosphere that foretold the season more explicitly than any calendar.

       And in the broken-open crates (as if burst by the power of the oranges themselves), one or two of the lovely spheres would lie free of the tissue they came wrapped in – always purple tissue, as if that were the only color that could contain the populations of them in their nestled positions. The crates bore paper labels at one end – of an orange against a blue background, or of a blue goose against an orange background – signifying the colorful otherworld (unlike our wintry one) that these phenomena had arisen from. Each orange, stripped of its protective wrapping, as vivid in your vision as a pebbled sun, encouraged you to picture a whole pyramid like this in a bowl on your dinning room table, glowing in the light, as if giving off the warmth that came through the windows from the real winter sun. And all of them came stamped with a blue-purple name as foreign as the otherworld that you might imagine as their place of origin, so that one Christmas day you would find yourself digging past everything else in your Christmas stocking, as if tunneling down to the country of China, in order to reach the rounded bulge at the tip of the toe which meant that you had received a personal reminder of another state of existence, wholly separate from your own.

      The packed heft and texture, finally, of an orange in your hand – this is it! – and the eruption of smell and the watery fireworks as a knife, in the hand of someone skilled, like our mother, goes slicing through the skin so perfect for slicing. This gaseous spray can form mist like smoke, which can then be lit with a match to create actual fireworks, if there is a chance to hide alone with a match ( matches being forbidden) and the peel from one. Sputtery ignitions can also be produced by Squeezing a peel near a candle (at least one candle is generally always going at Christmastime), and the leftover peels are set on stovetop to scent the house.

      And the ingenious way in which oranges come packed into their gloves! The green nib at the top, like a detonator, can be bitten off, as if disarming the orange, in order to clear a place for you to sink a tooth under the peel. This is the best way to start. If you bite at the peel too much your front teeth will feel scraped, like dry bone, and your lips begin to burn from the biter oil. Better to sink a tooth in this greenish or creamy depression, and then pick at that point with the nail of your thumb, by removing a little piece of the peel at a time. Later, you might want to practice to see how large a piece you can remove intact. The peel can also be undone in one continuous ribbon, a feat which maybe your father is able to perform, so that after the orange is freed, looking yellowish, the peel, rewound, will stand in its original shape, although empty.

     The yellowish whole of the orange can now be divided into sections, usually about a dozen, by beginning with a division down the middle; after this, each section, enclosed in its papery skin, will be able to be lifted and torn loose more easily. There is a stem up the center of the sections like a mushroom stalk, but tougher; this can be eaten. A special variety of orange, without any pits, has an extra growth or nubbin, like one half of a tiny orange, tucked into its bottom. This nubbin is nearly as bitter as the peel but it can be eaten, too; don’t worry. Some of the sections will have miniature sections imbedded in them a clinging as if for life, giving the impression that babies are being hatched, and should you happen to find some of these you’ve found the sweetest morsels of any.

      If you prefer to have your orange sliced in half, as some people do, the edges of the peel will abrade the corners of your mouth, making them feel raw, as you eat down into the whites of the rind (which is the only way to do it) until you can see daylight through the orangy bubbles composing its outside. Your eyes might burn; there is no proper way to eat an orange. If there are pits, they can get into the way, and the slower you eat an orange the more you’ll find your fingers sticking together. And no matter how carefully you eat one, or bite into a quarter, juice can always fly or slip from a corner of your mouth; this happens to everyone. Close your eyes to be on the safe side, and for the eruption in your mouth of the slivers of watery meat, which should be broken and rolled find over your tongue for the essence of orange. And if indeed you have sensed yourself coming down with a cold, there is a chance that you will feel it driven from your head – your nose and sinuses suddenly opening – in the midst of the scent of a peel and eating an orange.

     And oranges can also be eaten whole – rolled into a spongy mass and punctured with a pencil (if you don’t find this offensive) or a knife, and then sucked upon. Then, one the juice is gone, you can disembowel the orange as you wish and eat away it’s pulpy remains and eat once more into the whitish interior of the peel which scours the coating from off your teeth and makes your numbing lips and the tip of your tongue start to tingle and swell up from behind, until, in the light from the windows (shining through an empty glass bowl), you see orange again from the inside. Oh, oranges, solid os, light from afar in the midst of the freeze, and not unlike that unspherical fruit which first went from Eve to Adam and from there (to abbreviate matters) to my brother and me.

    “Mom, we think we’re getting a cold.”

    “You mean, you want an orange?”

    This is difficult to answer or dispute or even acknowledge, finally, with the fullness that the subject deserves, and that each orange bears, within its own makeup, into this hard-edged yet insubstantial, incomplete, cold wintry world.