Seventeen Reasons Why I Hate Tomatoes

 

One

I don’t know which came first, the tomatoes or the number of centenarians in town, but somehow through word of mouth or a deliberate act on the part of the Downtown Business Association, folks started saying that the tomatoes grown in our valley and the cheese made by local dairy farmers had medicinal properties. Mom thinks one of the Italian restaurants started the rumor around thirty years ago, and everyone else repeated it. We needed a good legend.

Now it doesn’t matter whether the restaurant serves Italian or Mexican or Greek or plain old pizza, there’s cheese and tomatoes on everything from March through October. That’s all the tourists want, though most of us have eaten so many tomatoes we opt for pizza with pesto sauce and fettuccine alfredo.

This isn’t our heritage, but heritage isn’t always good for business. Most folks in town have German great-great-grandparents who immigrated 150 years ago. Our spattered recipe cards are for sauerkraut, spice cookies, and Wiener schnitzel. The tourists don’t give a shit if we have last names like Muller and Schutte as long as they can take tractor rides around the fields, tour the tomato processing factory, see cows grazing in the hills, and do cheese tastings at all three dairies. They bring credit cards, which are happily accepted by the two motels, three campgrounds, and Lord knows how many bed-and-breakfasts.

Two

Not even teenagers and already tired of the tomato torrent, half the kids in my seventh-grade algebra classes want to get the hell out of town. The other half have been promised, or maybe told, that they’re taking over the family business, and they’ve resigned themselves to that fact. For a while I thought I’d get the hell out of town, then I realized town itself wasn’t bad, I just didn’t want to be in health care like either of my parents. Teaching is fine, since I see myself and my friends at twelve years old reflected in my students. We were raised with a healthy contempt for tourists who only want to talk about soil, how the earth smells different here, and how the air seems fresher. They ask if the land is why our tomatoes and cheese are so nutritious. They say the cows must be eating remarkable grass. Kids learn to nod and smile and say, Yeah, that’s probably the case. That attitude will earn them bigger tips when they’re working at the cafes and coffee shops and taking money in parking lots, but elementary school students have competitions to see who can give the most tourists wrong directions, ones that will land them in the middle of a field with our remarkable cows. Once they’re savvy wage earners, they learn to nod and turn around before they snicker.

The high school prom is held thirty minutes away, in the next town over. By the time early May rolls around, tourists have invaded, and the nice restaurants are occupied. Folks only get married between November and March, the time banquet halls are free, and everyone can relax our faces and quit smiling all the damn time.

Three

My family has never been tied to the tomato economy, which means we’ve never had to smile for a living. Mom used to be a nurse at the hospital, but when I was seven she started working as a day caretaker at a group home for folks who heard voices that nobody else could hear.

“Sometimes the voices are mean, like bullies people can’t get out of their heads,” she told me. For weeks after that I was scared I’d sprout invisible bullies of my own, though Mom said that probably wouldn’t happen.

Even now, sometimes I’m listening.

Mom works ten-hour shifts four days a week. She’s a nurse and counselor who helps with laundry and cooking, since two people who live at the home are responsible for lunch and dinner. Mom says they eat a lot of pasta and cheese because everyone likes it, and with twelve people someone is bound to be picky.

She took me to the home a few times when I was a kid. At first I was afraid I’d see the bullies in their heads, but Mom said she was teaching everyone how to talk back to their bullies and not listen to everything they said. I don’t remember the names of the residents at the time, just that one lady braided my hair, and another lady said she liked my shirt—it had a cartoon giraffe on it—and Mom talked quietly to two people in the corner who nodded and pursed their lips. Even though I was eight, I knew she was talking to them about talking back to their bullies.

Four

The hospital is busy six months out of the year with tourists who go on hikes in the hills and sprain something when they trip on a rock while they’re looking at cows or running from a farmer who catches them trying to dig up tomato plants (which happens more often than you’d think). Other folks have heart attacks after a really big meal. Mom thinks we draw people with coronary disease looking for a panacea. You can’t clear your arteries with tomato sauce, but we never say that aloud.

Five

The older folks say it’s all a bunch of hooey—they certainly weren’t raised on tomatoes and cheese—but they remember when we didn’t have the new school and two motels, and people worried about kids moving to bigger cities and never coming back. Now we have reasons for them to stay: working in restaurants that make their own bread and pizza dough, or working at dairies that make hard cheese and fresh mozzarella, or for the grocery store that’s always selling out of Styrofoam coolers and cold packs because people want to take everything home, along with a few scoops of our dirt in a plastic jar until the town council made that illegal. It’s another way we make fun of tourists, saying they deepened the valley, a joke we toss back and forth during quiet evenings in November.

In autumn my grandma shuffles through her recipe box and finds the cards for heavy brown bread with molasses and sweet-and-sour cabbage with apples. Everyone checks on the buckets of sauerkraut made of shredded salted cabbage grown in backyard gardens. We make ham and sauerkraut sandwiches, glad to be rid of summer for a few precious months, but most tourist towns understand the flavor of seasonal contempt.

Six

The people who have bullies living in their heads taught my mother recipes like vegetable lasagna with roasted eggplant, which I love because it doesn’t have tomatoes, just squash and onions and peppers. Mom makes lasagna on the night she tells Grandma and me that she’s moving in with Dad for a while.

“Maybe I can stand him now that he’s dying,” she says, but she’s at the stove with her back to me when she says this, so I can’t read her expression.

Dad lives on the top floor of a house near the edge of town, where he moved after he and Mom divorced. Dad loves astronomy and spent his childhood searching for comets and meteors at three in the morning. But the town didn’t have a job for a guide to the stars, so he’s worked for twenty-five years in the lab at the hospital, processing blood and bone marrow samples, taking X-rays and scans, and sending doctors neat rows of numbers and pictures so they can remind tourists and locals of their mortality despite tomatoes.

Mom was working at the hospital when they met and married and had me, then divorced when I was five. I spent every other weekend with Dad in the second-floor apartment. We stayed up all night with a telescope. He’d wanted to move to the edge of town for a long time because there was less light pollution. Mom wanted to be in town, closer to the hospital and my school and Grandma. We moved in with her after the divorce, because she said she rattled around when she was alone in the house.

Dad is pale and quiet, the kind of guy with hair so light it looks like he doesn’t have eyebrows. When the scans of his liver came back with problems, dark patches, his doctor sent him for more scans out of town. That was two years ago, before operations and radiation and harsh drugs, the normal life-saving measures that go beyond tomatoes and cheese. Dad no longer has much hair, just peach fuzz. He looks rather like an alien, or like how most folks imagine aliens might look.

Dad says aliens probably exist, there are too many suns and planets for them not to be somewhere, only our idea of what aliens might look like is all wrong.

“People think of aliens as thin, green, and humanoid with four limbs and a head,” he told me once. “It’s not very creative at all. When we die, maybe we come out looking like aliens.”

I thought he was kidding about this, but with Dad, sometimes it’s hard to tell.

He also hates tomatoes. Especially raw ones.

Seven

I’ve always been rather nocturnal, in part because my family wasn’t tied to tomatoes and the grind of daylight hours. For years Grandma got up at midnight to go to the bakery and work from two until ten hefting bags of flour, shaping loaves of bread, and forming perfect circular cookies. She slept when she got home, then woke up at six in the evening to make dinner and help me with my homework. Mom could never get me to go to bed, but I didn’t have a steady sleep schedule because of the weekends I spent with Dad looking up at the stars. He made popcorn, and we sat on blankets in the back of his pickup as he pointed out constellations and planets.

Once I asked Dad why he didn’t move to a bigger city and become an astronomer and spend more time tracing the path of comets and trying to find a moon he could name after me.

“Cities stretch out too far,” he said. “It feels like you never leave. You can’t find darkness. And all the people. The noise.” He shuddered. “The two years I had in college were enough.”

My dad in the city. An alien environment.

Mom said Dad was a nice guy but not exactly a good partner. He didn’t know what to do with a kid. He changed my diapers, he fed me, and then he sat me on his lap while he looked at astronomy books I couldn’t touch.

“But you said ‘Betelgeuse’ earlier than most kids,” she says. “I give him credit for that.”

Eight

My last boyfriend is due to inherit one of the pizza places in town. We broke up when we didn’t have a pregnancy scare.

My last girlfriend hates tomatoes as much as I do. We broke up since she wanted to get out of town and found a job at a bookstore that sold more than cookbooks and gardening manuals. I didn’t blame her for leaving, but I guess I have soil and contempt in my genetic structure, along with Dad’s aversion to cities after spending four years getting my education degree and constant sinus infections. Grandma says I have a sensitive nose.

Now I’m dating Emerson, who works part-time at the greenhouse and part-time as an EMT driving an ambulance and says my parents had the least dramatic divorce they ever heard of, at least from my account of it.

“Could you tell much of a difference in their relationship after your dad left?” they asked me once.

“Not really,” I said.

Dad is a thinker, not a talker. Mom believes in spoken words and realized she needed someone who’d say things back to her. Sometimes she said she wished she was telepathic so she could read Dad’s thoughts. When I was a kid I wondered if aliens would be able to do that. Then I wondered if it would be a good idea to know what everyone was thinking about me and everyone else. Now that I teach seventh-grade algebra, I know the answer is no.

The only tomatoes they serve in the middle school cafeteria are in pizza sauce and ketchup. They tried serving salads for a while, then remembered they were feeding a bunch of adolescents.

Nine

Emerson started working at the greenhouse when we were in high school. After years of tending tiny plants, they’re an expert tomato gardener. When we were teenagers, we didn’t talk to each other. They said gardening was therapy at a time when they were confused and upset, invested in hating themselves and covering it with a veneer of cuss words.

I liked Emerson more after I came back from four years away, ready to ridicule tourists and eat sauerkraut. I was in the first month of teaching algebra when I saw Emerson in the coffee shop and barely recognized them with their hair curled and pulled back in a ponytail. They’d started wearing skirts and quietly told me that they’d always been more of a girl than a boy, but not really either, and they were scared to tell people.

“Is that why you were such an asshole in high school?” I asked.

“Could have been,” they said. Usually I’m good at not blurting out exactly what’s on my mind, but Emerson still wanted to date me after we had coffee a few more times. We have dinner together almost every evening, especially when Grandma is making pizza with tomato sauce, which she still likes for some reason.

Ten

Most of the people at the home where Mom works hate ketchup. They think it looks too much like blood. I tend to agree. Some of the folks there are convinced that aliens are talking to them and saying awful things.

“They say the alien voices sound like demons,” says Mom, “but others sound like family members and former coworkers who always said mean things to them.” Mom shakes her head. “I imagine it feels like an invasion.”

I nod my understanding. When I was a kid I got teased on the playground for having glasses and holding books too close when I read. Sometimes the words of bullies echoed through my head for days.

In the old days, doctors used drugs to drive away bad voices. Now they still prescribe some drugs, but the doses aren’t as heavy. Mom says it’s better to learn how to talk back to the voices, the bullies, the aliens, the family members. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the invasion can’t be stopped.

Mom also says I inherited all her words and then some. She claims I’m not my father’s daughter, but sometimes I disagree. I spent a lot of time with him in the back of a pickup with his arm around my shoulders and a paper sack of popcorn on my lap. When I was with him my words built up, and I let them out when I was with Mom. Knowing when to release words comes in handy at staff meetings, and when meeting with the parents of my students. Some seventh-graders require a lot of meetings.

In the evening I think of Mom and Dad living in his second-floor apartment at the edge of town. I know she’s making him drink protein shakes and filling the space between them with words.

Eleven

Mom says that sometimes Dad wants chips and salsa for dinner, which is strange since he never cared for salsa before, but she’s been getting jars of it from the grocery store. I haven’t tried to do the calculations, how my mother could tell my father good-bye twenty years ago, be content with monthly coffee chats and dropping me off to visit, then return to have dinners with him, take his temperature, help him with baths, and watch his alien bones emerge from under his skin. It’s scary when the body reveals itself like that, even though you always knew it was there.

My mother says this is the job of a nurse. Sometimes it’s helping with a bath. Sometimes it’s helping to argue with bullies in someone’s head. Sometimes it’s shutting up for a while and looking up at the stars while sitting in the back of a pickup with your ex-husband.

I’ve asked Emerson what it felt like to have this other person inside them that they didn’t want to talk about, that they kept trying to shove it back inside and deny like it was an alien impulse.

“How do you think it felt?” they asked me.

Twelve

Remember this: When you go to a tourist town, there is another town under the soil of the first one. You’re seeing the veneer, the smiling shell, the restaurants with menus that will shift come autumn to suit our tastes and not yours. Do not think this is how we live our lives. Yes, the kids in seventh-grade algebra will make fun of you later, but you won’t care, you’ll be home making tomato sauce and thinking about the pictures you took on your summer vacation.

Thirteen

Sometimes I have dinner with my parents. Mom makes nachos, and Dad dumps on salsa and hot sauce while Mom and I prefer a sprinkling of olives. Mom and I talk about her patients and my students, the battles over medications, and who was the fifteenth president of the United States. The bullies are telling Joyce she’s a bank robber, and I don’t know what was going on with Heather and Stephen in class today, but they were passing notes. After dinner I help Dad into the cab of the truck, drive a half mile out of town, help him out again, and pull him after me into the truck’s bed. We sit with blankets and look up.

My parents have the kind of love that means they couldn’t live together for most of my life, but Mom can live with Dad long enough for him to have a good death, one that is not alone. She never liked looking at the stars, but sits with him for hours. She falls asleep in the back of the truck, and when she wakes up he’s covering her with a blanket against the chill.

“People have no imagination when it comes to love,” Mom says. “They only think about romantic love, end of story. Relationships and marriages are much more than that.”

“But you’re not married to him any longer,” I say.

“I loved him enough to get married to him at one point,” she says. “I didn’t forget that. But love doesn’t stay the same.”

Fourteen

Sometimes I get nostalgic about the longevity myth and wish there was something to it, like when I see Grandma rub her arthritic knuckles, or Dad scratch the peach fuzz on his head. Town has made us brightly cynical about our fountains of youth.

“People say they wouldn’t want to live forever,” I say to Emerson while we’re eating macaroni and cheese with buttered breadcrumbs on top (their grandma’s recipe), “but it stinks when someone dies.”

“We never said we were logical,” says Emerson. “I wish I would have explained myself to everyone earlier, and I’m glad I didn’t because I wouldn’t have known what to say.”

Fifteen

Sometimes Mom teases Dad and says he has to stay around to eat the economy-sized jar of salsa in the fridge, since he’s the only one who likes it. Dad gives her a tired smile.

I don’t know what to make of the fact that my father isn’t trying any more treatments to stop the disease. I understand some of the logic: how any new attempt to cure him would mean he’d be stuck in a hospital two hours away from us and stuck with needles all day. He might not come back to this town known for its longevity.

Emerson says there’s no such thing as an easy death. It’s a surprise like a slap in the face, or a slow process we can see like headlights on a dark night. Sometimes good-bye takes too long. We want to be able to tell loved ones, Yes, it’s okay for you to go, but even when we see them in pain, part of us wants to take those words back and say, No, wait, just give me another moment.

Mom sleeps next to Dad on top of the sheets. On the occasional nights that she works, I stay with him and do the same. At night the world is different. Dad is often restless. Mom says the voices and bullies at the house are more insistent when she works the night shift. When I was a kid, sometimes I had nightmares when I was sleeping on the hide-a-bed in Dad’s living room. I dragged my blanket to Dad’s room to sleep curled beside him. He felt like a mountain range beside me. Protective. What does he feel when I’m lying beside him, his kid, just as tall as he is and slightly stockier since he’s lost weight?

Sixteen

I wake up at three in the morning and realize that in spite of tomatoes, everyone dies. This is a logical time to have this revelation, but it means I hug Emerson so tightly that they wake up.

“What?” they say.

I say, “Everyone dies.”

They pause. “Yes,” they say and hug me back. Since they drive an ambulance, I suspect they may be used to people saying things like this.

After that I start to feel more empathy for the tourists who flock to town. They have realized that everyone dies. What can we do? Let’s go buy some cheese. What are the stories hiding under their skin that make them turn to us for help? But if they didn’t come to town, they’d find a different live-forever diet plan, or book, or exercise routine.

I love Emerson even more when they come with me to stay the night at Dad’s place. I know it’s silly and human to want company in the room, someone who’s seen more life and death than me and has the grace not to tell me about it.

Dad, Emerson, and I drive the half-mile out of town to watch the stars, and listen to high school students cruising by in pickups. It’s a week until Homecoming, which is held in town because most of the tourists have left, and we can relax into being ourselves. We sit in the back of the pickup. I try not to think about the stacks of math tests at home and listen to teenagers take screeching turns. I worry they’ll end up in ditches. Some of them might have been my students a few years ago. I curl closer to Dad, sure I can feel the bones under his skin even though he has a jacket on. When you’re younger, you don’t think about bones and their fragility.

Seventeen

Some tourists come to town with oxygen tanks, a sign this is their last-ditch effort, or maybe they’re taking a vacation with family, shaping a few more memories. I cross my fingers for the latter.

What else to do when someone is dying?

“Not much,” says Dad. I don’t know if I’m mad at him for his resignation, but he’s always been like that, the stalk that bends in the wind. When I lie beside him in bed and listen to him breathing, I wish he’d have this fight in a city two hours away. Do I want him to stay with us longer? Do I not want to see his decline? Do I want to think he’s more attached to the idea of living than he might be?

Emerson says all of these things can be true.

I’ve heard some astronomers say they don’t mind the idea of becoming dust because they believe in larger things, entities, the continuity of matter. This is a fine theory, but one that’s hard to remember when I hold Dad’s thin hand on a starry night and look up and up and up, but touching him anchors me to the ground, the cows, the tomatoes, the math tests back home. My father points to the stars on Orion’s Belt as he’s always done, but for the moment all that matters is the tip of his beautiful trembling finger.

 

____

Teresa Milbrodt has published three short story collections: Instances of Head-Switching, Bearded Women: Stories, and Work Opportunities. She has also published a novel, The Patron Saint of Unattractive People, and a flash fiction collection, Larissa Takes Flight: Stories. She loves cats, independent coffee shops, and texting hearts in rainbow colors. Read more of her work at: http://teresamilbrodt.com/homepage/