Lemon
By Cheryl M.
The woman in front of me was like a wilting flower. She drooped as she stood in the train cramped with commuters heading home on a Friday night. The summer heat oozed through the gaps, smothering everyone in sticky humidity. The woman’s smart navy suit, which had held her upright throughout the day, now sagged along with her as she hung limply onto a strap above. What a picture of gloom, I thought.
Then the train rumbled out of the dark tunnel, and my reflection vanished from the window. It succumbed to the city lights that swept by too dizzyingly fast I spent the next thirty minutes looking down at the balding head of the salaryman sitting in front of me instead.
It was almost midnight when I got home. I set about making a haphazard dinner, cracking open two eggs and tossing two-week-old spinach into the frying pan. As I watched the leafy abundance shrivel up into a measly pile of greens, I thought about how hard I’d tried back when I first began living alone during college. Independence had tasted like diligently simmered pork belly and the sweet praise of my boyfriend who frequently visited with the tireless zeal of a college boy.
Now at the cusp of 30, all that remained were one-pan fixes and a student-turned-workaholic boyfriend who hardly surfaced from the office. We never went out anymore, and barely talked. But unsatisfying as it was, a breakup seemed even more tiresome and I thought it useful to keep a boyfriend that I could present to my mother whenever she felt like poking her nose into my social life. Still, a conversation once in a while sounded nice in theory. Sometimes I had to disguise texts as business emails to bait him into reading them.
Dear Mr. Kobayashi, thank you for your kind patronage…
I briefly considered sending him one now, but decided it wasn’t necessary. Tomorrow I had weekend plans for the first time in a long while. It was a job, a favour, an excuse to do something new. My younger sister had recently met an old friend from high school whom she hadn’t seen since graduation. She was a singer looking for someone to take photos of her to sell at her next live show, and my sister had passed along my information.
It mystified me because I was hardly the real deal. In high school I’d toyed with the brief aspiration of studying photography at a technical college, but my mother wasn’t having any of it and her word was the law. That’s how I eventually ended up a 29-year-old accountant content with taking pictures of random nature for leisure, instead of becoming a professional photographer and subsequently marrying a celebrity like I’d fantasized. I bought my own camera several years ago, but the extent of my portfolio only went as far as the family pictures every New Year. So I wondered why someone would hire an undecorated hobbyist like me, until my sister clarified her friend was only an indie singer who couldn’t afford a real photographer and just needed someone with a camera.
But I still agreed, for the sake of having something new to do and someone new to meet. I could feel getting myself duller by the minute.
Apparently Lemon Tachibana was quite the eccentric character.
By day she worked an assortment of part time jobs, and by night she was an underground entertainer. She jumped from live house to live house, putting on shows and selling her own self-produced merchandise. She sang her own songs with a guitar, and there was always a gimmick to go with it. Once she sat on stage with someone standing behind her, giving her a haircut right there in the middle of the performance while she sang on about heartbreak. It sounded bizarre to me but the fans seemed to lap it up.
I didn’t know a thing about her. All I had were her contact details and a citrus-filled name that left a tangy taste on my tongue.
Lemon Tachibana wasn’t like anyone I’d ever seen. She wasn’t even like the person I’d pictured in my head.
With that name and the few stories I’d heard, I had vaguely imagined a 24-year-old with a baby face and blonde hair wearing bright, gaudy clothes. The girl in front of me wore a plain white dress and had jet black hair that grazed her shoulders, contrasting alarmingly with her pale skin. She was covered in freckles, not just a dainty smattering of them across the nose, but as if someone had bottled up the sun and splashed it all over her face. The corners of her eyes drooped slightly; they had a sort of dreamy languor to them. It was like she was perpetually on the brink of drifting off to sleep, and pulling you in with her too. But her eyes were a vivid brown—contacts, perhaps—giving her this alert gaze that beamed out from underneath those sleepy-looking lids.
The strangest thing about her appearance though, was the jarring disparity between her face and her body. Her facial structure was sharp and distinct, creating an air of maturity that elevated her far beyond a girl in her early twenties. Yet this face belonged to a person who couldn’t have been much taller than 150cm. She barely came up to my chin even in a pair of heels.
All these visual juxtapositions made up the girl named Lemon, whose physical traits simply couldn’t be shelved into one category or the other. She was like a caricature, or a doll built out of randomly chosen parts. It wasn’t exactly beautiful, but the overall peculiarity made you want to study her. I couldn’t imagine this girl standing next to my sister who looked just as plain as me.
I felt self-conscious all of a sudden. I’d shed my suits for weekend mode, coming out in an old cotton top and track pants. I was one pair of sneakers away from being in pyjamas. I hadn’t even worn makeup because whenever I took pictures I tended to press the camera right up to my face and everything got smudged like half-hearted bokeh on a badly focused shot.
For all my discomfort, Lemon showed none whatsoever. At the very beginning her face showed no particular expression, but as soon as I said hello her face suddenly unfolded into a wide, toothy smile that seemed like it would stretch straight past her thin cheeks. The freckles ballooned out over her skin, before deflating again when her lips shrunk back into their gentle pucker.
We introduced ourselves. She had a voice that was mild and level in tone, almost like the only part of her that had found neutral ground.
I suggested going to the nearby riverside. I’d seen patches of purple irises growing along the bank and thought they’d make a pleasant backdrop. She agreed pleasantly, and we headed for the river. It took us a twenty-minute walk away from the main road, peppered with the delicate chatter of new acquaintances. We gradually fell into a rhythm. I had a wider capacity for talking than I’d remembered—or maybe it was just all the unused conversation that had been bottled up in the months my boyfriend and I hadn’t met. I relished that feeling of having something to talk to. Lemon wasn’t particularly talkative, but every question she asked always swelled into a larger discussion.
“What do you take photos of?”
“Mostly flowers, I suppose. Plants. Things that’re standing still in front of me.”
“What about people?”
“Not at all apart from my family when we all gather back together. Even then we have to wrestle my grandfather into it every time because he’s so shy.”
“That sounds difficult. What kind of face does he make in front of the camera then?”
“I’d set the timer, and at the very last second he’d pretend to sneeze so the picture would always have his hands covering half his face. Everyone knows this trick by now but he still does it every year.”
It wasn’t particularly funny at all, but a loud laugh bubbled out of Lemon’s mouth. She laughed at the end each time as if to punctuate the topic before changing it and asking me something completely different. I met every question with practiced courtesy out of habit, like how I did every day at work. In this way, she steered the conversation while I simply followed.
Even at the riverside, I found myself unsure of how to take the lead as the photographer. I suggested taking some shots at the iris patch, a seemingly safe choice of location. Lemon complied, standing in front of the flowers while I took a hesitant series of shots. It reminded me of every time I set up the tripod in my grandmother’s garden and had the family stand awkwardly together in front of her flower bushes.
Lemon’s small frame looked tall now standing above the irises. It felt oddly unbalanced. She must have thought so too, because she bent down so that her brown eyes were level with mine behind the lens.
“Can I move now?”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s no good just standing still!”
Lemon laughed and stepped out of her heels. She ran towards the river and, with a flying leap that seemed to last a second more than physically possible, plunged into the water. I felt a cool spray of water sprinkling on my skin, as I stared at this unexpected scene. The camera came to a pause in my hands.
“Wait—what should I do?” I called to her.
“What do you want me to do?” She answered from the water.
Rarely did I get asked what I wanted to do. Every day I got orders and instructions, not open-ended questions that entertained my own ideas. It wasn’t in my capacity to generate them myself. All I knew is that for some reason I wanted to keep looking at Lemon, who was now floating on her back with her white dress fanned out around her. She looked like a lily pad drifting idly across the water.
What a picture this must be, I thought. A girl, jumping into the water in the middle of the day to take a photo. It wasn’t the kind of sight I got to see every day. Day after day it was the same scene of stony-faced men and women in suits, the same sounds of keyboards and copy machines. I smelled the same scent of instant coffee from the dispenser. Every day concluded with the knowledge that it’d start all over again.
This display of whim in the water, on the other hand, was all too fleeting. The lily pad metamorphosed into a fish in seconds. She turned over, paddling through the water with little splashes that formed a sort of rhythm with the sound of the shutter. Splash, splash, snap, splash, splash, snap.
Abruptly, Lemon stopped splashing and turned around to face me. How’s that? Her expectant gaze seemed to say. I gave her a thumbs up, the camera still on my face. Snap.
She smiled that wolfish grin, before pulling her white dress up over her head and tossing it into the water. Snap. The dress landed a short distance from where I stood on the bank so that a light splatter hit my lens.
I blinked, taken aback by the sudden blur of beige spreading across the tiny viewfinder. I peered over it to see Lemon in the water with nothing between the water and her skin now. Drops of water clung to her hair and face and she looked utterly refreshing, like an icy cold bottle of soda pulled out from the cooler box.
“I really wanted to do that,” she said, cupping water into her hands and splashing them across her freckles. “You can’t do anything taking your own pictures! My arm’s too short, the tripod’s too small…”
“I’m not the best you can get,” I say ruefully. “If anything I’m sorry for being such an amateur.”
Lemon sank back into the river, soaking herself right up to the neck. I liked that image of her head bobbing along in the water, and took a picture.
“All I need is another person,” she said. “Someone to watch me. Otherwise it’s no fun, you know? Doing all this for the camera if no one will ever know the movements that formed this one frame. It’s just like my shows at the live house. I do everything I want to on stage because I have this whole hobby, this whole character that I made and I want people to see that. Even if it’s just 40 people in the basement.”
You got the feeling that Lemon meticulously choreographed every move she made. It wasn’t all just pure spontaneity. Some of that was deliberate and tethered down by an invisible string of narcissism. She perfectly played the role of that flimsy heroine in a coming-of-age film who drew everyone her into her caprices. I knew the tropes well. But that seemed reasonable. Everyone put on a show anyway—in the office, at interviews, in front of our parents and friends. Why not in a random river wearing nothing but underwear? If I were a 24-year-old, maybe I would.
I switched the thought around. If Lemon were 29 years old like I was right now, would she still be tumbling around like this? Would I, right now? I considered the indistinct bridge between girl and woman.
Sometime after that photo shoot I found some uncharacteristic initiative in me that made me contact Lemon again. When I called her to ask she’d be interested to meet again, I was half-expecting her to decline in favour of someone who was actually a photographer. But it seemed she’d liked the pictures from the river that day, and the ones she turned into postcards had even sold out at one of her shows (to the thirty-two people in line). So we fixed a date, and I went out to the shops to buy a tripod and a large silver reflector.
It became a new pastime. Once a month we’d go to different places and spend a couple of hours seeing what we could do with a camera. It seemed ludicrous now that I could be satisfied with photos of nature that only ever stayed stationary.
Once we tried using my flat as a location. I had a bathtub, and we filled it with dozens and dozens of lemons for her to submerge herself in.
Another time we went to a playground, and tried to see how many slides and rocking animals she could fit herself on (most of them).
And one fall weekend she brought a box filled with big, juicy blueberries and raspberries that she then smashed between her fingers and painted over her spotted face with.
These meetings were now the only thing I looked forward to in between the endless days of routine. It wasn’t even like we’d formed a deep relationship, but for some reason I liked it that way. I didn’t feel the particular need to know about her more. Secretly I simply saw Lemon as a character in a story, an actor in a short film, a paper doll waiting to play dress up.
In the winter of that year, I turned 30 without fanfare. I received a birthday wish from my sister and a basket of expensive grapes from my mother, like I did every year. This time though another fruit came in the mail—a single, bright yellow lemon. I turned it over in my hand and found a bug-eyed face drawn on it in black marker, with freckles haphazardly dotted across the rough skin. It was an endearingly tacky gesture, but I appreciated the novelty all the same. A gift was a gift, even from a person I’d only just met.
On the other hand my boyfriend, who had all but become a phantom in my memory, was predictably absent. The months were starting to stretch longer and my patience thinner, yet I’d still waited passively this whole time.
The lemon stared at me from the palm of my hand, and I met its buggy gaze. What would 24-year-old Lemon, who was so restless all the time, do in a relationship that was this stubbornly stagnant?
What would 30-year-old Lemon do?
What would I do now?
I picked up my phone and began drafting an email.
Dear Mr. Kobayashi, thank you for your kind patronage thus far…
Author’s note:
Even more so than sadness, even more so than anger, there must be nothing bleaker than the perpetual state of apathy. Being beaten down into an endless void that you just no longer have the energy to fathom. Perhaps that is why when the smallest, most trivial bit of colour appears in your life you become fixated on it until it takes over your vision. That is the effect Lemon has on our narrator, invoking an unexplainable admiration almost out of reflex. Be it object or person or intangible idea, she tastes the act of infatuation is like warm honey on a parched tongue.
I’m very much in love with that notion of infatuation and feeling for something, or someone, strongly enough they become a living poem.