The Fig

The figs were arranged in a shallow wooden tray, four rows of six, each one resting on a square of waxed paper. The paper had darkened where the fruit had bled. My father stopped in front of the tray and did not speak for a long time. He was looking at the bottom row — the split ones, the ripest — and then at the back row, which the vendor had placed there on purpose. I knew he had noticed it was on purpose. He noticed things like that.

He picked one from the second row. He turned it over in his palm. He touched the bead of clear syrup at the stem with his finger, and the syrup pulled into a thread before it broke, and he watched the thread break.

“Are you going to eat it,” I said. Not a question.

He said he was thinking about it.

“You’ve been thinking about it for a while.”

The vendor was talking to a man in a blue apron at the next stall. They were arguing in a language I did not know, but their hands were friendly. The man in the apron laughed and the vendor did not, and then the vendor laughed a beat later, the way a person laughs when he has decided to. My father was watching them too. I know because his eyes had moved. It was not the same kind of watching.

“It’s a fig,” I said. “You eat it.”

He held it up to me. “What does it taste like.”

I looked at him for a moment. Then I took the fig out of his hand and bit into it, and I chewed without closing my eyes or making any face, because I did not want to perform the answer for him. A small piece of the skin caught at the corner of my mouth. I wiped it with my thumb.

“Sweet,” I said. “A little grassy at the end. The seeds get stuck in your teeth.”

He nodded once. He did not take another fig. He did not ask for the one I had started. He stood in front of the tray with his hands at his sides, and the vendor came back from the argument and said something to him in the language I did not know, and my father smiled politely and shook his head, and we walked on.

We walked through the rest of the market and he did not stop again. He bought nothing. I finished the fig on the way to the corner where the street widened. I do not remember what we said. I remember that he asked me once whether I was cold and I said I was not.