Saturday - October 3, 2020 - “Lemon” by Kate Ginna
“I’m walking to the Center for Fiction,” he texted. “I’m going to write something. Gimme a prompt.”
I was flattered he trusted me to provide the cue that would inspire his writing. It felt intimate. Then I was anxious about providing a good one. I recycled a prompt I had been given in a high school English class because it was the only salient thing to me in the moment.
“Lemon.” Then I panicked and added, “Or laundry.” “I’m gonna write about last night.”
I felt like I had told a joke in a bar too loud for anyone to hear the punchline. He didn’t mean it dismissively. In fact, I knew he meant it as a way of sharing his thoughts in real time, his excitement over the clarity of his decision, but I still blew air out of my lips slowly and let my chest deflate. Maybe, I thought, he would find a way to work me into whatever he was going to write. We had texted the night before while he hung out with a group of college friends that were tangential enough to me that I wasn’t offended not to have been invited.
He promised he would send me what he wrote and signed off. I texted back, “I’m holding you to that.” An hour and a half later, on break from rehearsal, I checked my phone to find that he had pasted the freshly minted passage into iMessage. The break wasn’t long enough for me to read and reply to it, so I spent the rest of rehearsal filled with the dread that he might think I hated it. Such is the anxiety of texting with a crush who is new enough that you worry you have dropped the baton in your flirtatious relay race if you aren’t pinging back responses within seconds. You lost your one chance, better luck next time!
Finally, after what seemed like eons but was in reality twenty-five minutes, the rehearsal ended. As I waited for the E train in Long Island City, I read what he had sent, hoping at every turn to find a mention of myself. When I got to the end, I was faced with the embarrassment of my unmet expectation. And because I had read it in search of something that wasn’t even there, I had retained none of it. So I scrolled back up to the top, tail between my legs, and prepared to read it in the way one does when you know a response is expected of you -- ready to tag certain sentences for compliment, memorize specific phrases to repeat back to the author with glee.
It was beautifully written. I wondered, at first, if he was trying too hard. Calling upon analogies that didn’t fit just right, choosing words that, though used correctly, stuck out like a child waving his hand wildly to be picked on.
After reading it a third time, I decided I was just licking my wound from earlier. He didn’t write like most of the aspiring male authors I knew – men whose writing was filled with florid language, like they had only ever read Faulkner and Fitzgerald, like every sentence – every word! – was their perfect first-born son that they had ejaculated right onto the page. He wrote with a gentle care. It was the kind of writing that made you feel like you were in on a joke, told at no one’s expense.
How silly I was to be hurt that he hadn’t used “lemon” as a prompt. And yes, perhaps my feelings for him clouded my judgment, and if he were to break my heart, I would reread the essay contained in the gray bubble of my iPhone and conclude, No, I was right before, he tried too hard. But at that moment, in the romantic buzz of being twenty-three, I just smiled to myself and typed back “thank you for this” – and I meant it.
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