Fake Fruit

Fake fruit. There’s so much of it here. Why did she have so much?

I never noticed it while she was alive. It just kinda... fit. A house full of natural light and tapestries bought from local artists and wax fruit filling decorative bowls on every available flat surface. They’re not even all in bowls. I found a pear in the drawer next to her bed, a couple loose grapes on a windowsill. There was an apple in the fridge. I wonder if she put it there on purpose, to be funny, or if it was an accident.

Was it like this when I was growing up? If it was, I don’t remember it. I don’t remember any stories about me trying to eat the decorations as a kid, or inside jokes about how many she owned. But maybe I’ve just forgotten.

That’s the thing about all of this, really. That’s what gets me. It’s not the sorting through a dead woman’s things, packing my mother’s life away into neatly labeled cardboard boxes. It’s not the feeling that I’m invading her privacy.

It’s the remembering. And the forgetting.

I grew up in this house. It was my house when I was a kid, then as I grew up it became my parents’ house. Since my dad died, it’s been my mother’s house. I don’t know whose it is now. I guess it’s my house again.

I pick up a colorful mug out of the cabinet, stuff some paper inside of it, set it in a cardboard box. Repeat the process. This one I painted for her when I was 9. It’s weird that it’s mine again.

There are so many things here with stories behind them. The ones that hurt the worst are the ones I don’t know. I take a painting down from the wall, and on the back of it is a note:

To: Annie

Thought you might like this.

-Charles

The painting is a landscape of a barn with a couple horses grazing in the foreground. I don’t know who Charles is or why he thought my mother would like this painting in particular. For a moment, I panic. There’s a whole facet of my mother’s life that I won’t be able to preserve. I consider searching the funeral registry book for a Charles, tracking him down, making him tell me the story behind this painting.

But I can’t. Because there are so many other unanswered questions here.

Letters from people whose names I don’t recognize. I don’t have the heart to read them. Tacky mugs that weren’t to her taste at all. Why did she keep them?

I focus on the stories that I do know, for a while. The pillowcase that I dyed with my grandma as a Mother’s Day present. The dark purple grape juice stain, a result of my childhood clumsiness just two days later. I was devastated, ashamed that I’d ruined the gift I worked so hard on.

She told me she loved it even more, that she loved the splash of color it added.

The centerpiece on the table is ceramic, made to look like cherry blossoms. I went to college near DC, and I sent it home as a gift my first semester. She always said she felt closer to me whenever she looked at it.

God, I miss her.

I wish I could reminisce with her one more time. I wish I could make her tell me all the stories again, even though I knew most of them by heart. I wish I could ask her about the ones I don’t know.

I wish I knew why she had so much fake fruit. It always comes back to that. Most of the other things I at least noticed while she was alive. I’d looked at that painting thousands of times, never thought to ask where she got it. But the fruit. It had to be intentional, right? There’s too much of it here to be a coincidence.

I don’t think I’ll ever know the answer.