Harvey Jacobs writes peculiar novels and stories imbued with a wicked sense of humor: from The Juror, about an ordinary citizen who once every ten years, while on jury duty, commits mayhem, to “Stardust,” in which a woman literally eats stars. “Persimmon,” based on Hans Christian Andersen’s sweet “Thumbelina,” is no exception.
(After Thumbelina by Hans Christian Andersen)
On her fiftieth birthday, Essie Flick painted a picture of a Jack-in-the-Box. The Box was a coffin disguised as a tailfinned Cadillac. Jack’s head was poised at the end of a thick, rusty spring. Jack’s crescent moon face, contorted into an expression of utter puzzlement, loomed over an abstract sea. From a canyon mouth, Jack puked miracles: flight, the atom, the microchip, television, space travel, genetic engineering. Along with the miracles came a gush of blood in which victims of war, disease, prejudice, famine splashed like children in foamy surf. She titled her picture My Century, Sic Transit.
Contemplating the work, Essie concluded that this was an excellent century in which to be some sort of artist. Even a maker of advertisements or greeting cards. Essie herself had tried many disciplines. Alas, she had no real talent beyond a wonderful capacity for accepting rejection. So, long since, she had left a boiling New York for a simmering life in the Berkshires. There, teetering on her dotage, Essie prepared for death. She hoped she would be good at dying and prayed for a long, lingering illness that would allow her a last chance at success.
Leaving as little as possible to random chance, Essie had selected her burial plot (a vista view), composed her epitaph (MY Way), and made friends with the local undertaker. From her rickety porch, Essie watched the days dawn, wrinkle and perish. Her social contacts were mostly with strange neighbors, an inbred crowd. They lived in truncated school buses or ancient trailers circled like Conestoga wagons on shoddy lots. They spoke of winds, floods and tornadoes—things that help control the trailer population. Like them, Essie agreed that Mother Nature was a sly bitch.
Still, on certain mornings—lovely Spring mornings, crisp Winter mornings, lush Summer mornings, delicious Autumn apple mornings—the dregs of puddled hormones stirred what Essie recognized as splinters of hope. These she dealt with quickly. Essie had no tolerance for that seditious emotion, however transient. But one such morning in April, weakened by a persistent cold and made vulnerable by sneezing and antihistamines, Essie yielded briefly to a spasm of optimism.
She went walking down by the abandoned textile factory that once fueled the town’s economy. There had been a huge statue to The Spirit of Yarn hewn from granite by WPA artists during the depression of the 1930s. It stood just outside what had been the main gate, an androgynous worker holding spools and bobbins, anchored in a nest of thread. Somehow, the statue had collapsed, probably helped by cretin teenagers with mallets.
The fractured statue reminded Essie of herself, so she went closer to explore its parts. Still buoyed by the evanescent flame of good feeling, she peered deep into what must have been an armpit and there she found a seed which had been blown over the continent by a powerful wind. It was an ugly, hairy, malevolent looking seed. Essie wondered what kind of life it held inside its fibrous skin. Moved by a maternal urging, she wrapped it up in a used Kleenex and carried it home.
There she placed the seed in a bed of cracked, dry earth lumped inside a clay pot that came with the house. Instead of simply watering the miserable foundling, Essie poured sputtering bacon fat over the unlikely womb. It was all very spontaneous and peculiar and she felt sudden guilt, so she added a dollop of sour cream and a splash of warm red wine. “This is all the chance you’re going to get,” she said. “Take it or leave it.”
The next day Essie woke and weighed herself to test the strain she put on the planet. Then she tested her blood pressure to measure her own level of stress. Next she ate a meager breakfast of oats. To complete the ritual, she went out to the porch to test the weather. She had placed the clay pot out there to enjoy what there was of sun and breeze. She saw that it had been transformed. A single stalk of camouflage green protruded from the mucky mulch. At the stalk’s tip was a carbuncle bud. It challenged assault with the irresistible demand of a ripe boil. So Essie plucked a hairpin from her head and, even as a portion of her gray mane tumbled down over her neck, she stabbed into the hideous growth.
She heard a shriek. The damaged casing trickled molasses. The bud burst open. Lying inside speckled yellow petals was a tiny girl wrapped neatly in a caul. From somewhere, a stray kitten leapt onto the pot. It licked away the caul, burped, made a circle with its tail, then ran off into a clump of woods.
Essie harvested the child, placed it in her palm and saw that it was more adolescent than infant. It was delicately formed, beautifully made, entirely enchanting. It blinked up at her then, like an agile kitten, jumped from Essie’s open hand and fell facedown into a patch of grass. A dragonfly dipped from the air to help the sweet creature upright. The child darted among the blooms of Essie’s skimpy garden, kissing flowers, stroking bees, singing in a splendid contralto to a group of Japanese beetles who seemed to applaud with their legs.
This delightful creature immediately reminded Essie of two discrepant items. First, a singer/actress named Pia Zadora who was granted slim media fame largely because she was a kind of sensual thimble, a wee thing, a doll that dripped honey. Pia was a miniaturized mistress who could be carried in a pocket like a travel alarm— a perfect sex goddess for a transistorized age, a Venus designed to dangle from the sun shield of a compact car. The second thing Essie was reminded of was the penis of her first lover, who told Essie that he had been the victim of a demented Rabbi who believed in excessive circumcision and was later confined to a mental hospital in Jerusalem. Pia, penis and pious evolved in Essie’s mind into Persimmon. This was the name for her unexpected offspring.
Essie quickly confirmed that she had little interest in nurturing. But she did enjoy watching Persimmon thrive in a world Essie had learned largely to ignore. Persimmon not only was at home with things of nature, but even adored reading the daily paper. The child quietly broke the code of language by watching endless hours of Sesame Street. The day’s disasters filled her with wonder and appreciation both for the scope of the tragedy and the triumph of survival. There was nothing Persimmon did not love. She held hands with the sun and moon. Life was her sustenance and energy. The very movements of atoms were her vitamins.
As the years passed, Persimmon achieved détente with her “mother.” A natural athlete, she could easily dodge Essie’s foot when it attempted to stomp her after some disagreement. She could always tolerate Essie’s envy and resentment, through a reasoned analysis of motive. Persimmon was moist, wise and forgiving. She cleaned the house, cooked the meals, did sundry repairs, even drained the septic tank without complaint or desire for reward. If Essie did not know she was blessed with a treasure, everyone in town knew.
Persimmon’s local fame was especially interesting to the undertaker, Bertram Dritz, who knew Essie’s desire for a splendid burial. He had been prepaid for final rites and services, and spent many hours browsing casket catalogs with his eventual client. He probed for information about Persimmon and liked what he heard.
Dritz lived and worked in the mansion that had once belonged to the scion who built the doomed textile plant. He was a widower who was burdened with one son, Lance, who shared the magnificent house and assisted his father in his work. Decades before, when Lance vanished from kindergarten, a willing conspiracy of silence prevented any inquiry by authorities. He was not a well-behaved boy. Now a man, Lance never came out into daylight. He was content to remain inside the stucco shell of his dark, damp, dank home. Except for his nightmares, he hardly made trouble.
But of late, Lance had become more cantankerous and romped through the halls on all fours. Bertram Dritz understood that this behavior could be traced to a surfeit of sap flowing from gonads to brain (if brain there was). In an effort to contain Lance’s male eruptions, Bertram enticed Leticia Dor, the community slut, to spend a night with his son. That resulted in a costly settlement involving the loss of a part Leticia insisted was essential for symmetry.
Bertram realized that Lance needed a loving wife who could not testify against him. Persimmon seemed an obvious candidate. The girl had a giving manner, was certainly economical of input and generous of output. She could help the Dritz cause both domestically and professionally, being the proper size to deal with difficult orifices and indentations.
So, on a dour February evening, Bertram came to plead his case to Essie Flick. At first, Essie was reluctant to agree to the match. She did not want to lose her daughter’s company. Lance was a man of darkness and despair, not the ideal husband for an outgoing girl like Persimmon. The more Essie resisted, the more Bertram offered. When his offer expanded to include an aboveground mausoleum, a reasonable cash payment and certain fringe benefits, Essie was forced to yield. Persimmon was informed of the betrothal and immediately began to prepare her trousseau and weave the cloth from which she would fashion her wedding gown.
Outwardly cheerful, Persimmon knew sadness for the first time. The prospect of tending corpses in a large, silent house, of being wife to an unevolved churl, did not please her. Her doubts and qualms, albeit invisible, began to affect flora and fauna alike. Butterflies allowed their rainbow wings to droop, trees hung their branches, birds dived beak-first into mudflats, caterpillars lost their fuzz and curled into foetal commas. Being a dutiful child, Persimmon never openly complained, and Essie was content to ignore the crystallized fog of despair that draped over her cabin like a shroud.
The awful wedding date was set. It was decided that it would help both Lance and Persimmon if the bride-to-be could move into the Dritz mansion a few days before the nuptials. The idea was for the couple to have some courting time, if only for the sake of future memory. There was no honeymoon planned, no celebration. And, in those carefree limbo days of sweet acquaintance, Persimmon could train in the fundamentals of human taxidermy.
Thus, with one suitcase in hand, Persimmon said farewell to Essie Flick, who almost shed a tear. Essie knew her sprite was totally innocent. More than once she had attempted to introduce Persimmon to the mysteries of penetration and its consequences, but Essie’s own inhibitions prevented any clear communication. Essie assumed that Persimmon would take to conjugation the way she took to everything else. With grace, charm and diligence.
Lance, meanwhile, gorged on oysters. He worked himself into a seminal frenzy. Polaroids of Persimmon flamed his passion. She seemed small but beautifully turned, and he lusted to hang her from a picture hook and just stare for a while. Or watch her swim in his aquarium, like a mermaid among the flaking goldfish. Impatient for his wedding night, Lance’s scrotum had gone musical. Whole orchestras of sperm played symphonies.
The moment she crossed the Dritz threshold, Persimmon felt like an extinguished candle. She went pale as a mushroom. She shivered and twitched. Bertram took this for girlish glee and was pleased. It was planned that she would meet her intended over dinner.
Dinner was a fiasco. At his first sight of Persimmon, Lance heard his scrotal symphony become atonal. He ate like a jackal, told off-color jokes and made sexist remarks about the role of women in necrology. Even his father was appalled and ordered him upstairs. Bertram apologized to the microcosmic guest and offered to show her around what he called “the establishment.”
As fate would have it, a single body lay on a slab awaiting ministration. Persimmon had known only the death of animals, flowers and vegetables. She had never seen a dead person or considered that people did anything but age. The encounter with a lifeless form, a rotund, florid gentleman with a hedge of gray hair and a copious beard, naked and rigid with rigor mortis, came as something of a surprise.
Persimmon was so moved that after Bertram sedated Lance, chained him to his bed and then went to bed himself, the elfish maiden went back to the embalming chamber. Alone with the deceased, Persimmon wept hot tears that fell on the massive chest and belly. Since all the flowers were of polyethylene, Persimmon was forced to make do. She fashioned a bouquet of roses, then spread plastic petals on the dead man’s face. She knelt from his icy forehead and kissed his sleeping lips.
The sound of a thunderous kettledrum made her start. The body revived. Heat flushed through clogged veins and arteries. The result was an unexpected resurrection.
“Who is it that has returned the gift of life to me?” the man said, sitting up on his slab. “Are you some angel?”
“Just a young bride-to-be,” Persimmon said modestly.
“Then you shall be rewarded. I am very well fixed, quite comfortable as they say, and with friends in high places. Your wedding will be the best money can buy. After that, seven days and six night in some paradise of your choice. Unless there is something else your infinitesimal heart desires.”
Persimmon took time to explain that her act was gratuitous and that she expected no thanks beyond a smile. But the comfortable man insisted that she accept some more palpable token. “As you may have noticed, or shortly will, this world can be a hard place. A few dollars can make the difference between grotesque misadventure and bearable madness. There must be something I can do for you.”
“Well then, yes, there is,” said Persimmon coyly. “I don’t think I want to be married just yet. And in those soft hours when I dreamt of my future, I admit that the image of Lance Dritz did not come to mind.”
“Lance Dritz? What demented matchmaker coupled such a radiant creature with such an unromantic infection of a spouse? I refuse to hear of such nonsense. Let’s be gone quickly.”
While the newly awakened capitalist dressed in the suit he was destined to wear to heaven, Persimmon said, “Sir, can I just go? Without so much as a word?”
“Momentum is salvation. Worry later, at leisure.”
Moments later, Persimmon and her newfound friend, who was named Sebastian Plunkett, left the Dritz mansion. After a brief stop at his former residence to pick up some personals, Sebastian took her to the nearest airport. There he purchased full-fare tickets to an island he owned in the blue Carribean.
Persimmon loved flying. She even enjoyed the airplane food, which delighted Sebastian, who, like most men his age, was as jaded as his prostate. She made him feel truly renewed and reborn.
During the flight, Persimmon told him of her mysterious arrival and of the seed that bore her. Essie had kept the thing in a mustard jar for sentimental reasons. “It was not very attractive to see,” Persimmon said. “It made me question my roots. My heritage. My DNA. It left me with some kind of complex.”
“Pishtush,” Sebastian said in his vibrant voice. “Consider the origins of beauty and you soon realize that it is a triumph of accident. Be it human or art, the chances are its parents were toxic waste.”
When the plane landed smoothly on Sebastian’s island, called New Eden, the companions went immediately to the grandest home on the highest hill. It became clear that Sebastian had not exaggerated his importance. His first act was to telephone the President of the United States of America and inform him of his return to the land of the living.
On New Eden, Persimmon spent her days at pleasure, which included writing snide postcards to Essie and the Dritzes. Sebastian indulged her like a loving father. And like a loving father, he recognized the first vague symptoms of loneliness in the waif.
One day, without warning, Sebastian called Persimmon to his beefy side. He cradled her in his lap and told her to pack her things. Even as he said it, he sighed the sigh of loss. But there was bittersweet satisfaction in his tone. Persimmon was alarmed, but did as she was commanded.
When she came downstairs holding her ancient suitcase, she found Sebastian seated on a cart, holding the reins to several mules wearing pink and lavender hats. Persimmon took her place beside him, and the mules clopped off through the lavish vegetation on a path that carried them beyond even the sound of the eternal sea.
“I hate to lose you, my dear,” Sebastian said. “But it would not be fair to keep you with me. All I ask is that you kindly think of me from time to time.”
“Where am I going? To what fate?” Persimmon inquired.
The mules turned a corner and there Persimmon saw an entire battalion of uniformed soldiers guarding a metal door cut into a cliff.
“I feel agitated,” Persimmon said.
“Just act like you have maximum security clearance,” Sebastian said. “That, in a nutshell, is the secret of success and the best advice I can give you. Just let me tell you again that I love you with paternal intensity, and even past that. Who can say what might have been if you were older and more substantial. Or, for that matter, if I was younger and less significant.”
Here Sebastian snapped his stubby fingers. The door immediately sprang open. The soldiers came to attention. A single gesture told Persimmon what she must do.
She left the cart and carried her suitcase to the door. There she paused, blew a kiss to Sebastian who pretended to catch it, then crossed the unknown threshold. The door slammed shut behind her.
Inside, Persimmon saw that she had entered a wide corridor lit with sconces in Art Deco style. She walked over black marble tile to a curving staircase. Without hesitation, Persimmon descended with whatever aplomb she could muster. It was like walking into dawn. The light grew brighter and brighter.
At the base of the staircase, Persimmon saw a tremendous atrium, pulsating under waves of golden lumens. And she saw a sight that tingled her most secret memories.
She was standing in a great garden. A forest of single stalks grew from repulsive seeds and produced depressing pods. Yet Persimmon felt what she had never felt before, a sense of life’s gravity, the comforting inertia of belonging.
Some of the pods popped open. Each contained a tiny person, some more lovely and charming than others. Persimmon experienced a surge of satisfaction though she also felt competitive for she had owned a rather exclusive domain of littleness until that moment.
It was then that she noticed a very well-built, excellent-looking young man with all kinds of possibilities climbing down a stalk just beside her.
“Without knowing anything about you I see that you are a terrific person,” he said. “I feel as if we’ve known each other through gestation. Will you be my wife?”
Assessing his qualities of leadership, spirituality, sincerity and endurance, Persimmon accepted him for her groom. If he lacked Lance’s enthusiasm, something she thought of with nostalgia on balmy evenings, he did have massive credentials in his favor.
“But what is this place?”
“Ah, that. Your friend and benefactor, Sebastian Plunkett, cultivates this garden. As I understand it, the planet upstairs has become very crowded, its resources strained to the breaking. This will certainly lead to violence, destruction, extinction of the present inhabitants. We are their replacements, the new rulers of the globe. Vital, vigorous veggies who do not pollute but rather revivify. Of course, Sebastian holds patents not only on our pods but also on the products that please us. His company is called A Gift to be Simple. The man has foresight.”
“Then how am I explained?”
“Your disappearance was a major concern. Somehow your seed was separated from the cluster. It caused quite a stir. But you are back where you belong, and together we will pollinate as many tomorrows as there are stars in the sky. Have you seen a star?”
“Billions,” Persimmon said.
“Tell me about each one.”
His eloquence and boyish enthusiasm won Persimmon’s heart. She even felt tenderness toward the new pods growing from their mounds of muck. And she felt compelled to tell her fiancé that she was both a meat eater and an occasional smoker, but that could wait. Rapture is as rare as it is precious, and more fragile than any web.
The couple embraced. They kissed.
At that very moment, Essie Flick quivered and died. Her soul, smaller even than Persimmon, headed toward an unknown place, wondering if it was properly dressed for the occasion.