Clementine, Inside Out

My mother named me Rowan Clementine Waters because she had an epiphany while at Faulkner’s birthplace in 1991 - while walking barefoot and 9 months pregnant, she stepped on a rotting piece of orange fruit. In those days, she was studying under an eclectic artist in a cookie-cutter town known as Oxford, which just so happened to be where William Faulkner lived at a property he called “Rowan Oak.” It was this place where Faulkner was so fruitful as a writer.

When my mother stepped on the fruit, as the story goes,

“Its guts sprayed out like a story waiting to be told. A Faulkner one, with sentences that twist and turn and never quite end. That was your spirit, Clemmie, speaking to me before you took your first breath of air.”

She didn’t wash the gooey fruit insides off of her feet; instead, she stepped on them with both feet, “like grapes, Clemmie” until it turned into a messy soup that coated both soles of her feet.

“And then I tracked it like paint all throughout the town square, Clem,” she would tell me, laughing with her head thrown back. “Oh, you should have seen how those women stared with their Lilly Pulitzer dresses buttoned up to their chins.”

She always longed to live in New Orleans, where artists like her formed the rhythm and heartbeat of the city. Their open, bleeding souls were like paint that created murals on the dilapidated buildings and alarm clocks that woke old spirits who wandered through alleyways like the ending riff of a saxophone street solo. But the rent in her city of broken dreams couldn’t sustain a growing child, or a starving artist, for that matter. And so she packed up her canvases, paints, and daughter, driving away forever.

We landed 30 minutes north of the city in a small town that was like New Orleans for people who couldn’t do New Orleans. Slidell, Louisiana was like New Orlean’s ugly stepsister, and my mother took this to heart, diving into her craft and letting it consume her.

I have this image in my mind of her in her makeshift art studio splayed out on the floor, lying on her stomach with her cheeks full of juicy orange pieces. The bright liquid was sliding down her cheeks and painting the canvas like watercolor. That was Poppy. The woman who’d rather be called anything but “Mom” but would instead opt to be nicknamed after her favorite flower. “Poppy.” That wasn’t her first name, or even close.

Poppy wasn’t around much, but in the summers especially, she was frequently nowhere to be found.

“You have to move when the inspiration hits you,” she’d explained to me at one point. Sometimes inspiration would even hit in the middle of the night, and I’d hear the car turn on in the driveway. There was no telling where Poppy was going.

That meant that I was freer than any other kid my age, which somehow felt simultaneously like a superpower and a curse.

“Poppy, I’m going out to play,” I’d yell from the front door.

Sometimes I’d get an answer in simple words, show-tunes, or the trill of a songbird. Sometimes it was radio silence. It also sort of depended on the season we were in. Winters were brutal, but summers? Summers were joy. Pure joy.

My best childhood friend, Mercedes, always had her theories about Poppy that secretly made me feel defensive.

“My mom always says that people who can stay up like that are on drugs,” she informed me.

“Poppy is not on drugs,” I’d argue, feeling my face heat up.

“I’m not saying she is,” she’d say, rolling her eyes. “Just that my mother says it.”

Mercedes and I, despite her occasional judgemental comments toward Poppy, had summers that just about anyone would write home about. We built boats out of leaves and watched our Barbies sail down the brisk creek until they hit a big rock, scrambling to grab them before they met their fateful death. We petted the neighbors’ horses and fed them apples we stole from the community grocery. We took some of my mother’s art supplies and decorated trees like they were the canvases of our lives.

Poppy never cared how long I was gone for. Sometimes I wanted her to be strict, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. The neighbor kids gave me looks like I had grown a third arm when I confessed this, sharing their thoughts on my eccentric mother. But despite her commentary to me in private, Mercedes always jumped in to defend her when they started listing off her peculiarities. Mercedes and I treated the woods like our kingdom from August, 1999 until May, 2005, when Mercedes’ time in Slidell came to a gentle close. That was unfortunate because it was right around the time I started becoming a woman: hips, blood, boobs and all.

When Mercedes moved to attend a prestigious high school in New Orleans, summers got dull. I began wandering off on my own because there was nothing else to do.

This boy - or should I say man- named Wyatt lived about 1 mile away, a few twists and turns down the road from me and Poppy, near a field of wildflowers that I loved to plop down on. Their tiny petals brushed my face like kisses from ladybug wings. The path to his house was one that posed the threat of three of my biggest fears: snakes, spiders, and men in wife-beater t-shirts sitting around with nothing to do.

Wyatt’s front porch was filled to the brim with hummingbird feeders with nectar of all different colors. Our first conversation happened when he found me lying on my stomach in the grass with my head propped on my arms, watching the delicate creatures have their choice of sustenance.

The front door opened, and a tall boy-slash-man stepped out wearing a pair of overalls with nothing under it. He had thick glasses and ruffled sandy hair. He saw the way I was staring at the massive collection of hummingbird feeders with both awe and confusion.

“It’s a science experiment,” he explained to me, a serious look in his eyes. “They say the red color is the most attractive to them, but I’ve noticed that the yellow seems to pull them in.”

“I come here to watch them a lot.”

“I’ve noticed,” he said, adjusting his Coke-bottle glasses. “You’re welcome to do so.”

He was odd. He must have been about 19 based on the deepness of his voice and his facial hair. I didn’t start coming to the field to see him, but I can’t say it wasn’t part of why I kept coming. Maybe part of the appeal was that he seemed unattainable - he had something like 5 years on me. Maybe more. And he never seemed attracted to me.

Still, I confided in him on the porch, when my watching position had slowly migrated its way up there, watching the hummingbirds make their delightful selections. He knew about Poppy. He knew about her art. He knew my origin story and my wild, barefoot childhood. He listened to me like nobody else ever did, and he looked into my eyes with a softness I’d never seen before. I wanted so badly for him to love me like I knew I loved him. The porch had a swing that was big enough for two people - just barely - but he never sat with me, as much as I longed for him to.

When I got home one day in late August, Poppy wasn’t there. This was unusual because she rarely left the house on Mondays. Thursday through Saturday were her art marketplace days, and Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday were her barista days. I checked the sunroom, the closets, the reading nook in my room, and even the shed. I shrugged my shoulders and made myself some macaroni and cheese - minus the cheese - and went to sleep.

Days passed and she still wasn’t there. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. After nearly 3 days of eating raw macaroni and stale crackers, I headed over to Wyatt’s. I was ready to drink some of that hummingbird nectar at that point.

“Wyatt, Poppy’s not here.”

“Oh, Clementine,” he said, with concern in his voice. “Can you stay for a while? Stay for dinner at least. I’m not a chef, but I can make you a ham sandwich.” His glasses were fogged up with humidity, and his muscular arms were glistening with sweat.

“I’d love that.” I was trying to focus on our conversation but all I could see was his tan shoulders and sharp jawline.

The light faded out as we spoke on the porch. My tears dripped down like the nectar fell from the hummingbirds’ beaks as they flew away. Brisk. Then slow. And then brisk again. He sat next to me for the first time when he saw me crying and put his arm around me. I breathed in his scent like it would bring air into my lungs.

And before I knew what I was doing, I leaned my face toward his. At first he looked like he was leaning in too. For a brief moment, I thought he was going to kiss me.

“Clementine, no,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder gently. “I can’t. I’m 21 and you’re 14.” He wore a mixture of embarrassment and sadness on his face.

I turned bright red - orange, even. I felt so horrified that I couldn’t stand to look at him for even one more moment. I ran out of the car through the dusky woods, jumping over several half-buried barbed-wire fences and skinning my knees on sticker bushes until I reached our front door.

Mercedes left me. Wyatt rejected me. My mother doesn’t want me. Everybody leaves me. Nobody wants me.

My hot tears slid down my already-flushed cheeks. I doubled over on the steps and just cried and cried. I had no one. After a while, my head started to hurt, and the tears just stopped falling. I expected to walk into an empty, quiet house again with a fading stockpile of macaroni that I’d dip into once more.

But, to my surprise, Poppy was there, humming a showtune and wearing homemade flower anklets with a see-through floor-length dress. Her eyes were ablaze with exuberance - that’s the only way I can think to describe it. They were like the ends of lit fireworks.

She saw my puffy eyes and tear-stained face.

“Poppy?!” I exclaimed, running up to her to hug her. She allowed the hug but did not reciprocate it.

“Who hurt you?” She finally asked, tears spilling out of the fire but not even coming close to putting out the flames. The fact that she was crying on behalf of my sadness touched my heart. “A boy? A man?”

Though I didn’t respond in words, I may have responded in body language because she nodded and shook her head, in that order. Poppy vanished into the kitchen mysteriously, the train of her floral dress chasing after her like a young child. When she emerged, in her hands she held a large paper sack.

Without warning, she turned the paper sack upside down, and about 20 clementines came tumbling out. A wild grin spread across her face as she moved in slow motion until she suddenly jumped and landed right smack on the biggest clementine. A large squirt of juice hit the white wall near us, and the squelching sound echoed throughout the room.

She jumped up and down on the pile, orange liquid flying in every direction. She beckoned for me to join her with a hand motion. I looked at her wild hair, her feral wolf-eyes, and her cigarette and coffee-stained toothy smile. She let out a howl that sounded like a cross between a mountain lion and a whippoorwill. I grabbed her hand and joined her strange ritual.

But the truth is, I was angry. She thought she could disappear for a week, leave me alone with no food in the house, and then greet me with a silly, childish game instead of an apology. You left me. You left me like everyone else left me.

Suddenly, I stooped down and grabbed some of the guts and threw them at her face. There. That’s for leaving me alone in this house. There. That’s for letting me go hungry. There. That’s for never being able to love me enough.

I cried ugly, hot tears. I howled. I jumped up and down with all of my might. I grieved. I grieved what was gone and what was right in front of me. I grieved the fact that this was also the same thing.

She stood there and took it all, a large belly laugh emerging from deep within her after the third handful hit. We started jumping together and throwing clementine guts at the wall. I squeezed an intact clementine on her hair. She made a face mask out of the juice right on my face, and I felt my skin crack and squeak as a smile worked its way out of me. My tears fell down like they came from a leaking faucet, mixing with the sweet juice that stained my face. I squeezed a clementine as hard as I could until a large chunk shot out and hit a photo frame. I jumped up and down with a force I didn’t know I had in me until the fire lit underneath me turned to embers. And I sat down, right there on the sticky floor beside her.

She picked a clementine up that was still partially intact and took a big, juicy bite. She offered me the rest silently, and I obliged. For a few short minutes, we were mother and daughter, as simple as that. Each one mourning something that the other was unaware of. The air was filled with a thick but clear understanding that we were both deeply hurting.

As the sun finally set over the little house we lived in and the orange sky hugged the trees, she took a deep breath, grabbed my hand, and quoted her beloved Faulkner:

“Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.”