Nonfiction by Laura Khoudari

Tomato

A number of rare or newly experienced foods have been claimed to be aphrodisiacs. At one time this quality was even ascribed to the tomato. Reflect on that when you are next preparing the family salad.

-Jane Grigson

GREENWICH VILLAGE — OCTOBER 2020

            The results of my quarantine container garden are mixed. The jalapeños stood no chance on my ninth floor terrace. Their stems snapped when they caught the whipping winds that sped down Seventh Avenue during a summer thunderstorm. My crookneck squash plants and their enormous, sticky, and spiny leaves were, like many city residents, too crowded to thrive. But my tomato plant with big tangles of rangy vines that I twist-tied to the terrace railing was mighty. I like that the tomato’s scent lingered on my hands after I handled the plant each day. The smell of heated chlorophyll, acid, and sugar remind me of Grandma Lily. 

            In the kitchen I offer my husband a sun warmed tomato. This is my favorite smell and one of my favorite foods. “No thank you,” he replies.

            My husband and daughter don’t care for tomatoes. This leaves me to eat them on my own. It’s too many. I bring some down to my mother who lives on the sixth floor of the same apartment building. She is happy to have them. She loves tomatoes. 

            I devour the small fruits each morning with breakfast. Cottage cheese, cracked pepper, and tomatoes. Avocado toast topped with tomatoes. Soft scrambled eggs and a side of tomatoes. 

            Something inside of me splits like the thin skinned fruit expanding faster than its skin can stretch.

DEAL, NEW JERSEY - AUGUST 1983

            My mother, father, and I, with our weekend bags, travel in a boxy American car like we do every few months to visit my dad’s parents who lived in a white ranch house on a suburban corner lot near the beach. I play gin rummy in the brown den with my Grandpa Mourad who smells like cigar smoke and hang around my Grandma Lily in the sunlit kitchen. I want attention. I want to help her. I want to eat.

            She is a kitchen witch. She makes kibbe which my dad calls torpedoes and lehme b’agine which I call little pizzas. They move fast from their serving plates and into our hungry mouths. My father and I jockey for “just one more.” I only get to eat Syrian food in her house. At home on Long Island, my Mormon nannies cook up crispy fried chicken with 4C Bread Crumbs and assembled Old El Paso taco nights. I made myself a lot of buttered toast, or I cut myself thick slices of Hebrew National salami and I unwrap countless Kraft American Cheese slices. I am a picky eater, even for a five year old, but at Grandma’s I eat foods I can’t pronounce the names of. 

            Grandma Lily also knows how to coax the earth to grow things.  She shows me that produce could be grown at home. As far as I knew, fruit and vegetables came from Walbaum’s. She takes me to the fruit trees in her backyard and I am mesmerized as she reaches up into one tree’s branches and presents me with a yellowish-green pear that I don’t want to eat because I don’t really like fruit. 

            Pocketing the pear in her apron, Grandma leads me to the side of the house near her kitchen door. There, along the white siding is a tangle of vines with shiny red tomatoes growing from them. I love tomatoes as much as I love her little pizzas. 

            I am looking at them and my little mouth salivates. “Go ahead, pull!’ She smiles at me from behind her big round plastic framed glasses. She wipes her hands on her apron and watches. With my fleshy and smooth-skinned hand, I grip a red orb and pull it toward me. The vine stubbornly follows as the stem bends but won’t let go. The way the plant resists, I worry that it isn’t okay to pull it. I look back up to Grandma Lily for reassurance. She nods once and then says, “twist and pull,” while her hand twists and plucks the air. I twist and pull and, like magic, I am holding a tomato freed from its stem and ready to eat.

NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS - JULY 2021

            I tend to five tomato plants along the fenced edges of my lawn where they can get the best light. My husband, daughter, and I are renting here for the summer because Covid taught me I need more nature in my life and my husband says “Okay. I wouldn’t mind more nature at all.”

            I have two Tazmanian Chocolate tomato plants whose heavy and juicy fruit is best for slicing and putting on sandwiches. I have two Green Zebra plants which quickly deliver a chartreuse fruit with yellow stripes perfect for quartering into salads because of their sharp and crisp bite. And I have one wildly growing Super Sweet 100 Tomato plant bursting with yellow blossoms and the tiny red jewels of cherry tomatoes. 

            In January I mapped out a plan, milestone-by-milestone in my planner so that at the end of the summer I would have lots of tomatoes and have written an essay about the relationship I never got to have with my Grandma Lily. I have three memories of her: her showing me her garden, her conspiratorially giving me a chocolate lollipop from her stash on top of the china hutch, and the time I walked in on her holding what I thought was her god-given hair. She smiled at me bald headed in her dressing room mirror. I ran away terrified and she felt awful for accidentally scaring me. I was six or seven years old. 

            But the Muses had no use for my color-coded timelines or beliefs about where tomatoes fit neatly into my story. Every morning I sit on my porch while the sun rises, changing from pink, to coral, and then gold, and I write poetry for the first-time ever. These poems are not about Grandma. 

            I start on a whim by writing haiku on my first morning here. Those first haiku mentioned birdsong, chirps, and warbles. But with each passing day I notice differences in the chirps, birdsong, and warbles. I use an app to identify them, and I write not about birds, but about House Sparrows, Black Capped Chickadees, Blue Jays, Golden Finches, Purple Martins, and the Worm Eating Warbler. I use another app, and poems about rabbits and orange flowers became about the Eastern Cottontail and Orange Daylilies. And I continue to write about things I didn’t need an app to identify, like my morning coffee and thunderstorms. 

            After a couple of weeks, haiku, which I initially embrace because I feel safe in its tight twelve syllables, begins to feel too binding, I give myself over to the unknown—free verse. I still write about local flora and fauna and coffee and thunderstorms, but I am really writing about lust, desire, and wanting.

            I write from dawn or just after, until the sun crests above the trees and begins to sting my eyes. Only then do I get up from my station on the porch and walk barefoot down its steps. At the bottom, I walk across the grass to tend to my tomato plants. Soft green blades and noseeums tickle my ankles. Starting with the Super Sweets I pluck suckers and I look and feel for ripe tomatoes to eat. Almost every time I pick one, I time travel; but not to New Jersey in August 1983 as intended. 

LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK - JULY 1997

            I twist and tug just as my grandma had taught me and the cherry tomatoes in Sam’s mother’s garden come off the vine easily. Ripe, they give just a little under the pressure of being pinched between my thumb and fingers while I spin the fruit off the plant. Their scent fills the air around my nose and tongue as I greedily pick one after another, collecting them in my left palm, cupped, palm skyward, pressed above my belly under my breasts, turning my body into a basket. Sam is next to me watching as I collect the ripe fruit. They are so close that I feel my arm hairs reach for their arm. My nipples harden under my wet swimsuit, which I wear under my t-shirt, and I can feel their own excitement in the sliver of space between us. I pause and bring my right fingertips to my soft upper lip, coyly hiding my smile. I inhale and smell tomato on my fingertips. 

            Sam senses all of my appetites and I suspect they enjoy my company in this erotic liminal space— a Long Island Eden. In their mother’s garden, like them, I have to hide my queerness. I have to sublimate the urge to touch them and have them touch me because their mother is standing just five feet away tending to her garden, and we are all to deny that Sam and I are a couple. We are two pressure cookers, cool on the outside as if nothing was happening inside, when in fact we were filled with tremendous heat, and turmoil from force under constraint, and we each wanted the other to release the steam. 

            “Go ahead and eat it,” Sam instructs. 

            Still tipsy on the poolside margaritas from earlier in the day, my vision blurs around the edges as blood rushes up to my cheeks and down below my waist. I am hungry for Sam but tomatoes would do and I brighten and blush at their permission wrapped up in a command. I feel them watch me as I bite down and break the tomato’s thin red skin with my front teeth. Their eyes stay on my face as I taste sugar and acid mingling on my tongue while a few seeds escape my mouth.  

            Sam’s mom continues to tend to her garden about six feet away. The late afternoon summer sun bounces off of her white clad back and stings our eyes when we check to see if she is watching. Squinting we turn back to one another. Sam raises their eyebrows and bites their lower lip. They let their hand graze my waist as they urge me, “eat another.” I was hungry, and wanted to be wanted. 

GREENWICH VILLAGE - OCTOBER 2021

            I am tired of tomatoes. More specifically, I am tired of eating them alone and I am tired of being reminded of who I am when I am living in all my fullness. I am tired of being shown my queerness and my hunger. 

            I give up on the essay about Grandma Lily’s tomatoes and at summer’s end I have a small collection of verses. I called it Summer Book. I print it out and look at it alone inside my office back in the city, windows sealed tight against city sounds. I read it and my skin pricks with heat and a pit in my stomach howls. Reading, I visit with a braver and less tamed me—summer-me. I love her and I envy her, which in turn makes me feel venomous toward her. 

            Summer-me presses against my insides and threatens to split my epidermis and let my appetites spill out. She threatens the shape of my family. She shows me with my own viscera that I feel confined by containers I helped build.

            I want all of my rangy and wild, sweet and sharp, and sometimes salty self to be firmly planted in the earth, outside, feet in the dirt, warmed by the sun, my fruit plucked when ripe and then devoured.

            I put Summer Book in the drawer. 

            I try to forget.

*Names and identifying details in the essay have been changed to protect people's privacy*

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As a teen, Laura Khoudari fantasized about being a published writer but was certain that would never happen. She was wrong. Her book, Lifting Heavy Things, has been recognized by NPR and The New York Times. Her essays have appeared in Archetype and Human Shift. Learn more at laurakhoudari.com.