Wanting An Orange (写作课推荐读物Description）
2013-05-03 15:46阅读：
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.
