Berkeley

The quince I put on Cole’s desk, was the prettier of the two. Larger, greener, no moldy spots near the bottom – unlike the other fruit I held in my hand.

A house across the street from the office kept putting the fruit out to the curb, in a little cardboard box, which is how I learned its name. And how to expect the fruit would not be sweet but, rather, bitter and “slightly tannic.”

I hadn’t known what tannic meant, until Cole told me, leaning his lanky translucent body against the office counter, biting into the pieces of fruit I had cut up.

“Like a dry wine,” he had said, knowingly, biting with his shark teeth.

He wasn’t in his chair, so I left the present on the desk.

He never did say thank you. For all I know it could be in the trash. Rotting fruit.

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The man who works in the bike shop has small dark earrings, like the kind you’d buy in a Spencer’s gift shop. I kept petting the shop dog, hoping the sniff of its long-wet snout would ease the words out of my mouth. I didn’t know what to say exactly to the mesmerizing boys club, home to gears and overalls and degenerates delightedly spitting profanities while expertly spinning machinery. Bikes. Gearheads. Bike world. Happy, dirty, oily fingers running through the shop dog’s orange coat. Black spots which you couldn’t tell were fur or grease.

Thousand-dollar brake pads, which they think ridiculous.

Struggling, using leverage until the giant wrench in my hand wrenches the pedal correctly turned. Slight release screwing screwing pedaling forward until the piece clatters to the ground.

Flashes of color tattooed on the man’s arm as he leans over and around me and over and around the bike. Screwing and unscrewing with familiar second first nature.

I feel like a cool kid, a degenerate, leaning against the wooden countertops in the back of the shop. The man getting his bike fixed thinks I work there and stares. If he paid attention, he’d soon figure I knew nothing.

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I miss my summer intern friends, Athena and Lizzy. Riding roadbikes on precarious, pot-hole-ridden streets to the gluten-free pizza parlor and talking about ridiculous things, laughing. Summer seems so far away.

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My landlady blew in from the east, a pashmina wrapped dramatically about her face, to crash in the house while she packed up for China. She had been in Greece and London and New York before here. I am starting to have a soft spot for her. She called me “honey” and said I could have some leftover salad. I think she thinks I am starving. She turned on the heat before she left.

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When I am rowing on the water, in the boat with 17 other souls, I feel proud. I try to stay in sync though sometimes I am horribly not. I clank against the person’s oar behind me. But there are night herons here with blood red eyes, and we row and row, faster, still when the ferry is pursuing us. And one day we rowed out to the break, where the marina water meets the furiously calm ocean and watched the sunset.