The Cost of Green Apples
by Elle Tea

This started as a series of memories about my parent’s divorce, about my stepmother. What it is instead is an unveiling; the adults marketed to me as poisonous were actually palatable, and those that were supposed to be steadfast were cellophane.

***

This is a memory — from right after the divorce.

It was always a green apple. Cored and sliced and eagerly cupped back up into plastic wrap so when you opened it, it fell open like a lotus. The other 12-year-olds at my lunch table would gasp at the display. I would pass around the lotus, and the small jar of soft caramel: Go ahead, you can have some, I would say. See my value?

In the shape of a flower with its roots in the muck. Growing in the filth with not a pock on its perfect petals. No browning or rotting or excuses to fold.

It only cost me my family. This green lotus apple.

***

This is a memory — from the new, old house.

My mother used to buy Pert plus or Suave, whatever cost 99 cents. Now it’s my father’s new lover’s Paul Mitchell Awapuhi shampoo in a new shower. This slutty shampoo for curly hair sitting sweetly and dumbly on this wet shelf. Unaware of what it cost, to be in this shower. This one that he uses now, with her, in this house. I didn’t have curly hair but I used it anyway. I used so much of it, I let it drool down through my spread fingers, watching it chunk down the drain. The waste of it felt good. I kicked off the clumps with disgust and let them stick and dry to the side of the tub. Thinking about and trying not to think about them in this shower.

She must have known but she never said anything. About the shampoo.

I would go through her clothes when no one was in the house. Soft, thick, plaid button–down shirts, folded so the buttons were on top and the sleeves tucked underneath. Like at the Gap. Alone in their bedroom with a dark wooded four poster bed and my fingers slip into unfamiliarly folded plaid, in their house they had bought. She liked old, historical houses so that’s where I existed on Tuesday nights now. In an old historical house with old dark wood and old stairs that were scuffed. A place full of her heavy throw blankets I hated to admit I enjoyed the weight of.

***

This is a memory — from before. When they were my parents. When they were pillars and there was a steady rhythm of the roles. When we could still shelter beneath their shoulders.

Hearing him put his huge silver case in the hallway in the same spot with all of his camera equipment, I would wait in the dark. The door to my bedroom quietly opened. The slice of light, the strain of the bed, the smell of his cologne as he carefully leaned over and kissed my temple.

The next morning, a perfectly preserved piece of wedding cake wrapped in a white napkin in the refrigerator for me. Something that must have taken great tenderness. To carry a piece of cake in a napkin, back from a wedding — weekend after weekend. Did he put it in the passenger seat? Did he hold it in his lap? It was the most and only tender thing my father could offer me.

They met there. At the weddings. She wasn’t beautiful but she was the chef there and un–bitter from years of not being ignored by an emotionally absent husband and — I suppose — this is attractive to the ghost of an already–husband.

That’s the thing about ghosts; they are only see–through for some people. For others they are vivacious and fleshy and will ask you for extra pieces of cake. For his daughters, you see. How sweet. How thoughtful. How tender.

If you peer closely into a ghost — squint at it to notice its dirty pores and performative love and how its devotion only reaches as far as people compliment them for it, their head snaps back to you and the mask peels. The flesh and charisma are withdrawn — leaving a cold, spineless vapor and tea–stained teeth. The blame is yours. You shouldn’t have peered. Now it’s see through. Cellophane father. See–through husband.

A package came to our house once. It was after they had been fighting a lot. We never got packages. We all gathered around it, dumbfounded. It was full of home–made jams, relishes, and dips and other things in jars with ribbons. Who is this from? My sister and I asked. A friend, he said. My friend from work, she’s a chef.

A friend from work. She’s a chef.

My mother silently picked up a jar of peach salsa and threw it against the brick fireplace. It dried there. For weeks no one cleaned it up. The glass and perfectly diced peaches and peppers dancing and rotting in the grout.

***

Another memory — in his flimsy apartment on a busy traffic corner — after the pillars had fallen and we could see more of the pores.

A black negligee hanging on the back of the bathroom door. My older sister saw it and laughed in a way I had never heard her laugh. She threw it into the family room where he was watching TV, feeling relaxed in his cardboard castle. She threw it still on the hanger — maybe she didn’t want to touch the lying black lace. The hanger really gave it some weight — still attached to the found evidence like that. It went pretty far, for something made of lace and silk.

I remember being impressed because my sister was not athletic. She could never even throw a softball, despite his annoyed attempts to teach her. She did throw whatever was on that hanger! I’ve never seen him move so fast, snatching it up and burying it somewhere. I was confused by the quickness and the snatching. What was that? I stupidly asked her. She didn’t answer me as her newly freed out-in-the-open-anger burned into the only bedroom in the cardboard apartment and slammed the door.

He made Shake and Bake pork chops later, his only meal, and when he called her out, she laughed deliriously from the closed paper bedroom. She’s just a FRIEND, right, DAD? JUST A FRIEND. HA. HA. HA. HA. HA. We said nothing as we sat at the tiny folding table barely big enough for three. The veiny pork, dry, crowding my non–question–asking throat. His flimsy knives from his flimsy mid–life crisis block, too weak to cut it.

Tea spilled and stained the fake wood table.

***

Now there’s a charming old historic house. Filled with her LL Bean wool sweaters and plaid shirts and fancy shampoo. There’s no rotting, dried peaches on their fireplace. It’s clean, and quirky, and everything about her is new and different from my mother. She likes horses and takes me riding once. To my shame, I like it. I like horses.

I’d been to a horse camp once, while my mother was chucking a couch off a truck into the street.

She had received the black and white photographs the curly–haired chef’s boyfriend had taken of her and my father, fucking on that accomplice couch in our family room at some point in their affair. The boyfriend had followed her to our home. Our home, where my mother unloaded groceries and hung out her old panties on the drying rack and was raising two ungrateful, but trying to be good daughters. The very mad boyfriend of the curly–haired woman followed her to our house, where the fleshy–for–her, ghost–father let her in and fucked her on our rough, beige striped couch. The boyfriend took pictures of them and sent them to my mother. Then she sent us to horse camp to play leapfrog in the horse shit and threw that couch, which he was trying to take to his cardboard castle, into the street.

For now, even with all the guilt and knowing I shouldn’t — knowing it was a betrayal — I like the horseback riding, and the shampoo that smells like coconuts, and the food she makes with her chef–ness. She says things like shmutz and rad and she laughs a lot. As much as it felt like sinning, I found myself liking her. Something else to confess, later maybe. Maybe.

***

On Wednesdays, in the charming, old historic house, in the dark mornings, amongst the dark wood, she made my lunch. Turkey wraps, rolled into tin foil so it wouldn’t flatten, and brand name cookies, and Snapple iced teas that I never drank because they were peach flavored. And always the apple and caramel.

The de–cored, lotus sliced green apple, in Saran wrap origami, with a thin slice of lemon in the middle so it wouldn’t brown or rot or fold. The soft caramel.

As I numbly pass it around to girls who will never befriend me — Must be Wednesday! they say, about my Jezebel lunch.

Why green? I asked her once. She shrugged. If it were red, it would be too sweet. You need the sour to balance the sweet of the caramel.

I would give the apple away for a while. I couldn’t stand the smell of it. I was resentful of how the sour smell would turn something on in my mouth and make it water. I couldn’t control that response. To watch them thrust into the caramel. It filled me with disgust, the gluttony of it.

***

Then day I did bite into it, after her miscarriage.

The shock of the possibility of a baby that was almost immediately gone again. Its roots didn’t take in all this muck. Its heart didn’t thrive in all this fray. I once said to her, because she wasn’t eating due to the morning sickness — in this one moment of protective or outward caring — You have to eat! What if its heart doesn’t develop or something? And that is what happened.

That is what actually happened.

They never talked about it. He simply said, later — No baby, as he sat at the dining room table numbering pictures. The weight and responsibility of what I had said out loud to her fused to me and my spine, which has been choking and cracking in the mud ever since. I didn’t know curses could be cast so casually. The lotus baby that folded away so fast has been a dull haunting for me all these years.

So I started eating the apple she offered me. Maybe she had lost enough. Maybe we were even. Maybe we both lost a family. Maybe the apple was just an apple, in the end. Maybe it was no one’s fault. Maybe sometimes things just happen to women. In between all of us is a haunting, a ghost — sometimes fleshy or absent or tender or cellophane.

As her once vivacious ghost eventually turned translucent for her, too, (she must have squinted or peered at him too closely) I de-cored the apple, and served it like a lotus. The caramel stuck to the plate and was hard to wash off. A reminder of something too sweet on its own. And too sour to offer to anyone too tender.

February 2025
Massachussets, USA