Corn

Laurie
Corn
Spotty Dog, August 25, 2008

I am an admirer of Julie Hecht, and having finished her latest collection of stories, Happy Trails to You, I tried a prompt using her deadpan delivery and technique of layered associations.

Lana asks me to collect corn, tossing over canvas bags. The sign above the bin says twelve, but she says, "Take thirteen.” She picks strawberries for the farm, so the extra corn is her tip. A baker’s dozen. I like the way she bends rules.

The canvas bags have seen better days. The straps are frayed, and bits of soil cling to the insides. Lana and I have seen better days. What would be a better day for a canvas bag? A picnic on a cruise. The times I’ve sailed I’ve gotten seasick. Once I floated up the Hudson with a man I had hopes for. We argued.

I pick out the fattest ears, although they unnerve me. Lana is having people to dinner, and she will make me eat corn. You have to eat it the day it’s picked. It’s a rule. You can’t bend her rules. Another is, you can’t bring your own food into her house unless it’s organic. Lana doesn’t care that organic food is more expensive than regular food, although she economizes with her share in the organic farm. When I see corn I think about gaining weight and slipping into fat, lonely, old age.

While I am sorting corn, Lana gathers lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans. I point to a crate piled with pumpkin colored winter squash. On the rinds are warty patches that look like the shins of old men. My shins probably look like that, too, although I’m too afraid to inspect them carefully. Lana says she doesn’t eat winter squash in summer. I take one of the pumpkin colored vegetables and place it in a canvas bag, thinking I can use it to fend off the corn, even though winter squash is high in carbs, too. I just want to bend one of Lana’s rules.

The man with whom I sailed up the Hudson used to serve winter squash, baked with brown sugar and cinnamon. Now he’s old with scaly shins. Many people appreciate being fed. I feel I have to eat what’s served, even if I don’t want to, although I’m not usually that accommodating. Recently the man with the scaly shins said that at this point in life, when nothing is going to last very long, maybe we should give it another try. I pretended he was joking.

Lana cooks the corn and sets it on the table. She pours gray salt into a little bowl from a box with a picture of a moody, turbulent sea. I once sailed on water like that in Greece and became so sick I rolled around moaning on the spray-soaked deck. Eventually, I laughed. I was young. Around the table are people Lana likes to feed with the food she gets from the farm. One is a young woman with a tiny boy Lana keeps a child seat for. The boy needs to have his corn sliced off the cob, and he eats the kernels one by one. Watching him makes me hungry, and I pick out the largest ear from the platter and sink my teeth into it.

I have never tasted anything so good. The sweetness, the crunch, the perfume, the Naples yellow color. I sprinkle on gray salt. How has corn come to taste so good? Is it me or the corn? I am making Lana happy, and it is not costing me anything. The corn is like heroin. I think it actually works like heroin. I remember reading a book that said corn is a weed encouraged to colonize the planet in order to feed cattle, whose methane gas emissions comprise a large percentage of dangerous greenhouse gases. You could say the same things about human beings.

The reason I can’t consider the offer of the man I sailed with up the Hudson is that he acts like he’s Noel Coward—not the gay part, the part where the world is a party filled with carefree rich people who don’t feel implicated in the life cycle of corn. They pack caviar and toast points in canvas bags. They probably don’t even use canvas bags. Someone else carries a wicker hamper for them. If I were the sort of person who could see myself as Gerty Lawrence in a clean white sun dress, I wouldn’t be thinking about greenhouse gasses while eating heroin corn. I finish two ears and part of a third, without forgetting I am going to die of something food cannot protect me from and that the Earth is on the way to becoming a garbage dump.