The person who taught me to eat a pomegranate was fairy-like, looking like she had stepped from the canvas of a romantic painting. Slight, sandy hair, large eyes, with a sad and sometimes dreamy expression that narrowed into intent focus on the day she introduced me to the fruit of the Punica granatum shrub, because this is a fruit which requires undivided attention.
It was late fall, it must have been, for pomegranates to be in season, and we went to the store and she selected one with the same care and precision which I imagine surgeons dedicate to finding bleeders before they close an incision. Her long, delicate fingers danced over fruits which seemed identical to me, as she tested them and occasionally lifted one only to set it down again, or to raise it to her ear and listen intently for a moment. She finally settled upon one, weighing it back and forth for a moment before handing it to me and repeating the process, and we went to the 12 items or less lane with our pomegranates, these slightly mottled, dull red fruits which felt surprisingly heavy and solid for their size.
She drove us to the headlands and we sat there while she carefully explained to me that the pomegranate is a fruit which demands patience. It is a fruit, in fact, which will reward you for being painstaking and delicate, and will punish you for hurrying. It was sunny, that day, but the surf was heavy because a storm was rolling in and the wind was just starting to pick up, whipping her fine hair around her face.
Using her long, sharp nails, she started the pith of my pomegranate before opening her own, and her fingers seemed to brush the fruit without touching it to slowly peel back the pith and reveal the tiny rubies inside. A transformation; from dead shell to living, resplendent arils inside. I sat there helplessly watching her, until she told me to just peel a bit of the pith back to expose the interior.
She somehow managed to deftly pick out the arils without crushing a single one, her mouth and lips reddening with dark juices and a neat pile of pith stacking up next to her. I, meanwhile, labored over my pith, inadvertently crushing and dropping the innards of the fruit all over the rocks and sand and occasionally managing to extricate one which I could eat. My tongue stuck out of the corner of my mouth as I concentrated intently on trying to replicate her motions with my large hands, one of which could engulf both of hers. My short fingers with nails clipped short scrabbled where hers darted, fumbled where hers were steady and sure.
A burst of juice, sourness, a hit of complexity. A purplish red kind of flavor which exploded in my mouth when I cracked through the outer membrane. Occasionally a single especially tart individual which would cause me to pucker in surprise and astonishment. That slow strange feeling which overcomes your teeth when you eat a pomegranate.
The pomegranate is a highly sexualized fruit, and I could see why, that day, seeing those fingers lifting and separating and plunging a little bit deeper into the mysterious depths of the fruit. Seeing that refined elegance with which she teased out each tiny jewel and popped it into her mouth, juices dripping and fingers reddening. That intent focus, eyes widening with delight when another delicate layer was peeled back.
We never touched each other, not once, but it still felt like a private and secretive moment. Perhaps even a transgressive one. Our companionable silence as we worked, because eating a pomegranate is work indeed, became loaded with a strange sort of tension which would have been impossible to acknowledge or pin down. After all, we were just eating fruit.
Lips swelled with sourness and stained with juices, fingers slowing as the edible parts of the fruit gradually diminished, slowly, carefully, opening curtains and layers and pockets and channels. The “pop” and spurt of juices. I wondered what those fingers would feel like on my hair, my skin, smoothing down the seam of a shirt or pulling a stray leaf out of my scarf. I watched the delicate tracery of her hands across the shrinking globe of the fruit and imagined her hands fluttering over the small knobs on my wrists, I saw a drop of juice caught in the downy hair on her arm and saw a world ripe with possibility.
When we were finished we dipped into the water, briefly, shocking cold and swirling sand, and she emerged from the water like Aphrodite, water and salt running over her skin and her lips still stained and full, and I looked away to watch the pith we tossed swirl away as it was sucked out with the tide.
I cannot help but think of her every time I eat a pomegranate, my own private alchemy, the transmutation of fruit into…something else, something which cannot be articulated, because, after all, I’m just eating fruit. Years later, I heard that she became a piercer, and I imagined those sure, confident, long, cool fingers finding the perfect place and the right moment for the plunge, the transformation.