The first time I see her, she comes down the street just as the police car blocks the avenue and the fire trucks drag out hoses like great gray anacondas. I note she is frightened.
She has a lovely face, like a Madonna, with sharp black eyes, though who has dressed her in those awful clothes I cannot guess. Perhaps she is one of the locas who stroll around here mumbling and stealing my apples.
This one, though, she walks as if she remembers being young and beautiful and cannot quite understand how she has gotten to the age she is, shoulders back but with her hands tight at her sides. However, there is wisdom in her eyes and I smile at her. Wisdom is so seldom found here in Nueva York, we must prize it when we can.
“Buenos dias,” I say to her, because it truly is a good day, if one discounts the swirling light of the police car, and the shouts of the firemen as they set their ladders against the wall of the tenement across the street. With the sun out and shining down in the canyons of this great city one can believe, if only for a moment, that things are clean and bright here, which is a kind of magico.
She leans down and smells the fruta displayed on the front shelves. Not touching, not like the others, the locas, who just look around quickly to be sure no one is watching before grabbing. Or the bad boys who do it openly and lift the finger to me. But I watch her and think: maravilloso! How else to tell the age and the ripeness if one does not smell the fruta. Also I think, for a moment, that she must be from the old country, so I address her in Spanish. I say, “Claro, Dona, ustedes conocer las frutas.” The minute she looks up, those blackberry eyes not quite in focus, I see she is no Latina but someone more exotic. I do not know exactly what. But I say quickly in English, “My pardon, lady, I have mistaken you. Call me Juan Flores. It means Flowers in the English tongue.”
The smile she gives me is gracious and full. “Your fruit is fresh, sir, and I wish to have some.”
Her accent is strange, and I cannot place it. “Have or buy?” I ask. I have lived here in this country long enough to be forward.
She puts a hand into some hidden pocket of her voluminous skirt and pulls out five bills and a set of keys wrapped in toilet paper. I am careful not to laugh.
“Buy, of course,” she says. “One does not take without compensation. I would not be beholden to thee.”
Her way of speaking is, somehow, arcaico and I like that, wherever she is from. I nod.
She chooses five Galas, ripe and beautiful, plus four Bosc—though these are still hard and not ready for eating.
“For later,” she says.
“Keep them in the paper sack,” I tell her, “and they will ripen more quickly.” I wrap them for her and she smiles broadly. Her teeth are even and very white.
She takes also wheat bread—the new-baked kind I get fresh daily from the bakery, not what comes in plastic wrap—three kinds of cheese, a handful of dark green spinach, and pots of marjoram, rosemary, and thyme.
“I cannot live without these,” she says. “Can you get others?”
I nod again. “What would you have?”
She closes her eyes, thinks for a bit, then says, “Lady Bug Bean, agrimony, bitter aloes, angelica . . .” She smiles. “Especially the angelica.”
“Wait, wait,” I tell her, for none of those do I know. I take a pad of paper from my breast pocket and a nub of a pencil and have her say those things over again so I can write them down.
“And asafetida, barberry, bay leaf.”
I hold up my hand. “Dona, I have bay leaf.”
That smile again. It is so much younger than she.
“And basil.”
“That, too.” I go back inside the bodega and get both, and she hands me all her money as if she does not know its worth. The keys she replaces in her pocket. Carefully, I count out the change. When I touch her hand, it is soft as if she has never done a day’s work. “The rest I shall find for you if I can.”
She touches my hand back. “Blessings.” And smiles once more, as if consciously trying to charm me. Which she does.
I start to pack everything in a brown paper bag, but she takes the bag from me and places everything carefully in it herself, speaking to each fruit and vegetable, each herb in some language I do not think I have ever heard, but it is sweet and full of watery sounds. I am thoroughly confused by her, but it is a pleasant confusion. I take the paper bag for a moment and fiddle with the top, hoping to keep her here longer.
“I need paper and something to write with,” she says, “such as the little things in your hand. Do you have those, too? I do not see them in your . . .” She waves a hand.
“My bodega,” I say. “My shop.”
“Yes, shop, that is what Jamie Oldcourse calls it.” She runs her tongue over her top lip. “But I like your word, bodega. It has the sound of water over stone. I appreciate it and will use it, Man of Flowers.”
“Juan,” I say. And then I tell her about the stationers, which is well away from the firemen and the police car; how she is to go straight back the way she came and then to the left at the light to find it. And without a word more she walks off.
I smile at her back, having made her a present of a star fruit that she will find when she opens the bag. Not to be beholden to me—what a lovely way to say it—but to remind her that there are friends here whatever terrible passage she has recently made, for I can tell she has not been here long.
As she heads off, I realize I am moved as I have not been since my Marianna died. It is a long time since I have been with a woman. Five years, twelve days.
I wonder if this dona lives in the neighborhood. I wonder if I could ever tell her that she is dressed like a bag woman who should have been wearing the clothes of a queen. With women in this country, I am never certain how they will take such words.
Perhaps my nephew will know. He knows more about Americana women than I will ever learn, though he knows nothing about fruta and nothing at all about putting customers at ease, or selling except to take the money and give the change.