A Brief History of the Navel Orange in California

Today, Jake McCallister will die for love.

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Eighty-four years later, on the same spot of earth, though it would look different then, a woman, age forty-two, signed her divorce papers on the kitchen counter. It was a fake marble counter, but a good fake, where she and her now-ex-husband had pressed their bodies into one another with the kind of desperation that comes from two people recognizing a shared imminent loss. The woman considered redoing the entire kitchen. Backsplashes, counters, hardware. Movable things. Instead, for the time being, she took her new haircut to the animal shelter and adopted a small yellow dog.

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On the day Jake McCallister dies for love, he will be shot messily and gloriously through his midsection so that the day becomes a brilliant red all around him. Shotgun, he’ll notice, though by then it’ll be too late. But before that, in the morning, before he realizes that there’s a good chance he’ll be dead by the end of the day, he does these things:

1. Looks out the window of the boarding house, pretends that he’s back in his workman’s barn loft at the orchard. He imagines placing a green glass bottle in the window, sunlight casting through it, bending around the cracks in its body, and Catherine seeing it from her room in the farmhouse. Then he remembers the shape of her body, blurred by the dark but felt, against the warm earth beneath the branches of citrus trees. Their skin smelling of oranges and soil afterward.
2. Hops on a cart to take him to his new job at a new orange grove. He finds the pattern of leaving for familiar work comforting, but feels a tiny bolt through his chest with every inch he puts between himself and that farmhouse. He is headed in the opposite direction from it, toward the ocean. It is not until that moment that he realizes that he’s never seen the ocean before.
3. Hears the phrase, “show your face here again and I’ll kill you myself,” in his head, pinging as sharply in his memory as it did in life when it ricocheted off the iron axe Catherine’s father held beside his face.
4. Skips work. Jumps off at the new orchard, but instead of climbing a ladder into the treetops, bums a ride with a farmer headed closer to the coast. Tells the farmer what it means to be in love, that it is a kind of tethering to a big forever.
5. Pulls an orange from his lunch satchel to have something to do with his hands. Ruins it, feels the meat of the peel push beneath his fingernails in otherworldly orange curls until the juice breaks through and runs down his forearm.
6. Sweats.

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Across the county and five years earlier, the first boxes of California oranges were carted onto a train and shipped east. Once there, the direction of the trains folded in on itself and reversed, an inversion, and suddenly everyone was looking the opposite direction again. Because California, Los Angeles, was a place for health. There was no reason for anyone to get scurvy there. People could look and see for themselves how bright and colorful and alive the citrus was. The sun was so yellow, the fruit was so orange and the grass was so green that California practically sold itself. The population in Pasadena alone increased by ninety-two percent between 1880 and 1890 despite Jake McCallister’s negative contribution in the opposite direction.

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The woman with the yellow dog had a garage sale. It was dry desert hot and she could feel her skin warm as she placed items from her life alongside the road for strangers to pick through. They undervalued everything she no longer wanted to own. These strangers asked her if she was moving and how much she paid in rent and could they have her realtor’s number because it’s, like, so hard to find a place in the foothills, you know? She enjoyed telling these people that she was not the one who was moving. She wasn’t going anywhere. This was a place for roots. She could never leave a place with an avocado tree in the back yard and a lemon tree in the front. It used to be an orchard, and you could tell. She even had room for pets. You just couldn’t find places like that anymore.

Some of the items that sold:

1. Three ziplock freezer bags full of golf tees.
2. Men’s clothes. All of them. She didn’t care.
3. An X-Box 360, with games and controllers.
4. DVDs, including the Die Hard trilogy and The Best of the Three Stooges.

            Some of the items that did not:

1. A baby bib with the tags still on and emblazoned with the words “Momma’s Little Star!” written in crayon-style letters below a cartoon walk of fame star. This she would put in the trash instead of the Goodwill box.
2. A battered, mustard-colored couch that she, by herself, would drag across the street to put beside a dumpster. It would be gone by noon.

The couch was secondhand, bought years ago from a man in Silver Lake whose boyfriend had just moved out. She liked buying second hand. Something about object transference attracted her. She found the continuation comforting. When she’d told this to her husband, he had said she was just cheap, and it was a moment when she first knew that this thing between them would not last forever. The Craigslist couch seller was sweet but urgent about the whole transaction. He and his ex-partner had bought the couch together, even though the offensive color clashed with the teal curtains he’d picked out in a previous life before the boyfriend. But he was glad to be rid of all that negative energy and she could have the couch for $50—it was from Anthropologie, she’d noticed it was Anthropologie, right?—if she could haul it away that day. He had bought it new from the Santa Monica location, where it had been shipped from China where it had been assembled by people neither of them would ever meet from an adjusted original pattern requiring yards and yards of Golden State Yellow fabric from Vietnam.

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Do not judge Jake McCallister too harshly. He knows what he is doing only as much as a person in love for the first time can know what he is doing. He makes his decisions as a person who has only lived long enough to have known the front end of these feelings. He is a being who hasn’t yet experienced the breaking of a thing like this.

At his old job, when the workers sat for supper each evening, Catherine would let the curve of her hip brush against his shoulder when she set bowls of sliced cucumbers on the table beside him. When her father’s eyes were down at his plate, she’d smile across the table at Jake because they knew something that no one else at the table knew. And in the evenings, she’d put a green glass bottle in her bedroom window, placing a candle behind it to wink at Jake across the yard and say, “I love you, too.” Of course there were things he couldn’t have predicted. That Catherine’s father would have figured things out so quickly, and at suppertime, was unfortunate. Her father wouldn’t let his daughter be getting herself into a condition with some hired hand. Catherine dropped her silverware then and told her father, told the whole table, that they were going to go live by the ocean and that she was old enough to decide for herself what kind of a man she wanted and in what kind of condition she wanted to be. That was when her father called her a whore and grabbed the axe from beside the fireplace. Jake could not have predicted the pull in his gut to go back to the farm to collect Catherine and carry her away to a beach where they could smell the water and the earth and the citrus and California could be theirs forever. It seemed to him then that it must have been love.

And it seems to him now that it must be love. Jake is also young enough to have not yet developed a feel for good timing. He does not yet understand this when he decides that morning to rescue his maiden. The potential cost does not seem real. Rather, it makes the gesture feel all the more inevitable. This is what he is thinking as he lets pulped orange flesh drop into a wet mess on the wooden floor of the farmer’s cart on the day he will die for love. He also realizes that, in changing course, he has gone as far west as he has ever been in his entire life. He thinks how foolish he’s been to have come this far only to spend his days squinting against the sky into treetops. He thinks about horizons and parts of the world where the ocean meets the sky, then sees himself there on that faraway line where blue collapses into blue.

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The woman with the garage sale had been buying gifts for her sister’s baby shower when she came across the bib that ended up in the trash. This was years before the divorce, before the garage sale. She’d spent the day checking off boxes on the gift registry at one baby superstore and then another. It wasn’t until she was buying cheap wine for herself at a touristy stop-and-go on Hollywood Blvd that she saw the bib and thought to get it for her sister. The woman did not want children of her own. At least not at that moment. She liked to think that someday she might, but not because she liked babies, kids, or, as she would think later, even her husband, very much. Rather, she liked the idea that there was a future waiting there for someone besides herself. A large wild space out in front that was left blank and available to be claimed. A space from which there was no going back. Sometimes, she was spooked by the power of her body, of her biology. So instead of giving the bib to her sister, she tucked it beneath her bras and socks in the top drawer of her dresser and kept it secret from her husband. Until she wanted to change her mind, she kept it as a secret future thought just for herself. It could be for a baby, for a future person, perhaps. Or it could be just for her. The secret was hers, and that was the part she liked best.

#

During the day, in the orchards, when he thinks about someday being a man with a family and his own piece of land, Jake McCallister would run his thumb over the skin of an orange and let it rest in the dimple that made the fruit the thing everyone wanted from here to New York City. Occasionally, he’d open one and save the tiny, second orange growing just at the root of the navel. He hadn’t known that this was the aborted fruit set in motion by the growing of the first, that it is the thing that makes the Navel Orange what it is. He doesn’t know that, like him, this orange also wasn’t from California, that it was a bud plucked from Brazil and sent west, way west, to grow in a virgin, sprawling subtropical corner of the United States. Once there, the buds could become oranges, blossoming under California sunshine so that once ripe, they could be sent again to another place where mouths and appetites could consume them in a different landscape. This is what it is to love, Jake thinks, and it is a new thought to him, a secret, barely there, barely formed thought. To love is to dare and set out, plant and grow. It is to be pushed and pulled and brought back to the place where one could form oneself.

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The woman now without a Hollywood bib came home from work to find her yellow dog waiting by the door. She was happy to see her. The woman did not want to be out in the world, and she was glad for the excuse the dog provided for her to come home early. She only had two bags of groceries, as the house was half as full as it had been before. She piled them on the counter. When the bags crinkled, the sound of them hit the large tile floor, banged in her head, cracked the walls like an earthquake and eventually made its way outside onto the freeway where it belonged under the tires of the city with the rest of the noise. She let the sound wash over her, surrounded by all the heavy tile in her kitchen and she thought of making a sound to go along with it. The sound would be something primal, filling her lungs in ways that her words could not yet. She was angry. She was exhausted. She was relieved. She was alone and at the exact intersection of latitude and longitude where she knew she was supposed to be, and though she knew she was moving forward, she also couldn’t help feeling the pull of the earth dragging her in circles.

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This is Jake McCallister’s plan:

Arrive at the farmhouse after suppertime, look for the green bottle in Catherine’s window. Maybe toss pebbles, or verses, like Romeo. He will arrive wearing a shirt that he’s dipped in the ocean so she can know where they are headed. She’ll smell the salt on him and be reminded of the tides, the way they move in and wash out and began anew. She will think about how the ocean can change every day but still look the same. It will be the kind of story that audiences will love a hundred years from now, though of course Jake has no way of knowing this. Jake might be played by an actor from Kentucky, someone rugged and down-home (as the actor’s agent will market him), who hasn’t yet lost his Southern twang to too many after-parties, but still California enough to be thought attractive. Famous but accessible. Hollywood but still Kentucky. But of course Jake doesn’t think about this. He thinks about those nights with Catherine in the orchard groves often, and it is only after he is away from her that he starts thinking about what it could mean to turn away from her now. If it were there at all, a tiny secret beginning, then he was sure it would be his. This would be forever.

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The woman with the problem of the loud, empty house occasionally fell backward. When out with her friend and her sister for drinks at The Polo Lounge one evening post-breakup, post-separation, post-love, pre-divorce, Matthew McConaughey walked in, sans his wife, sans his kids. The ladies agreed that she should definitely give him her number, as she was practically single and ready to mingle. And drunk. But because the Matthew McConaughey creature was a species native to Hollywood, he was not accessible and their server seated him far away in mysterious region of the restaurant. The woman gave her number to the waiter on a napkin with instructions to deliver it to Matthew McConaughey, which of course he didn’t, though she needed to believe he did. So when her friend and her sister went to the restroom, she called her ex. She needed to let him know that she would be dating MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY now so if he could please not call her she’d appreciate it because she’s expecting to be very busy from now on. Later, she would be embarrassed for being disappointed that he never called, but would also pretend not to remember ever doing something so stupid. Her ex would be happy to jog her memory when he signed the house over to her, avocado trees and all.

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Navel oranges are seedless because they are a mutation. Every orange is a clone of the original mutation, which is why they have that second baby orange secreted away inside. Other varieties are highly susceptible to variance, even within the same tree, but not Navels. Navels remain.

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In the years between Jake McCallister’s death and the evening of Matthew McConaughey’s missed opportunity, the orange groves will dwindle and be replaced with freeways, expensive apartment complexes, movie theaters, hiking trails, neighborhoods, big parades, swimming pools, movie stars. Entire farms will become studio lots which will exist for the purpose of creating temporary worlds. These worlds will go up and these worlds will come down. In Burbank, Manhattan is right beside a Midwestern suburb, both of which are designed be stripped down and built back to be used and abandoned as needed. Nothing belongs to anything for very long. The things that remain are required to change and adapt in order to hold their position. Tourists who come to consume the 71st largest city in the world can visit a functioning film lot and see a 200 by 200 foot mini ocean. The tub is painted a cool blue and is backed by a fake robin’s egg sky where water in the tank laps against a studio-owned horizon. Visitors talk about how nice it would be to have their own orange tree right there in their backyard, despite how crowded everything is. They complain about the traffic because no one will have told them that the main streets—Cahuenga, Hollywood, Sunset, Gower—are twisted and winding to accommodate the orchards they’ve since leveled.

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The woman was fine with the nature of her city. She appreciated that she could disappear into it, tuck inside and have it wrap around and protect her while she grew into a new life. Her grocery bags surrounded her as she stood in her kitchen. She had options.

1. Move
2. Remain

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The sun is deep and yellow, gold against Jake’s skin. His fingers have chapped from so much fruit acid. He says goodbye to the farmer, walks the last few hundred feet to the coast and puts his feet in the ocean. His toes sink into the sand, deeper with each wave that washes over them, and their disappearance feels inevitable to him. This is where, he thinks, he will tell Catherine that they will build their home, in the space just above the sinking.

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The woman with the divorce and the yellow dog and the house in the foothills did not decide right away what she would do next, but she liked the feeling of the groceries beside her and liked the way the yellow dog wiggled when she came into the room. So the woman sat on the floor with her dog. She had done all the standing she could do for one day, and she knew enough to sit when she was tired.

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When the sun goes down, Jake hops an orange train going east, back in the direction of the farmhouse and of Catherine. He is in motion. He considers the train, its eastward movement, away from his piece of the ocean. He considers small secret fruits growing beneath navels. He disembarks in Riverside, leaving behind crates of oranges that will travel all the way east before the train will double back, reverse and find its way back to California again. The grand motion feels to Jake like a rocking, a lullaby. He breaks from it when he jumps from the train and begins his walk to retrieve Catherine.

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The woman sat on the floor of her house, with her divorce and her dog and her groceries and considered the gold of the sun beginning to set out her window. Her avocado tree was there too and its leaves swayed back and forth, back and forth with the breeze. She considered making guacamole and throwing a party. For the moment, though, she would sit and be still and allow the beauty of the piece of earth upon which she sat to envelop her. She felt a calmness in sitting with the quiet hum of the world, the pull of gravity drawing her closer to it and it to her.

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The sky is dark by the time Jake arrives at the farmhouse. Catherine’s window is dark, empty. Jake can see his shadow stretching long and hopeful against a stack of orange crates beside the house. The wooden boxes are piled high, with the tallest tower reaching just above his head, full with fruit and ready to ship east. He puts a foot on a low crate and says, “Catherine,”

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A flicker in Catherine’s window. The glass slides open. No Catherine, but a chalky gun barrel. Shotgun, Jake will think, but by then it will be too late. It is only in the brief moment between the flash of the blast, illuminating the outside of the house like a pulse, and the bite in the center of his gut, that Jake feels a moment that could be described as regret. In the instant that follows, there is a hard squeezing in his chest that he recognizes as sorrow, though it could have been the shards of bone entering his lungs. That feeling, too, releases as his back hits the ground. He knows then that he has made a mistake, but it hasn’t been in coming here. He has perhaps been wrong about love, about Catherine’s love, has maybe misread his own situation and it is this feeling that explodes throughout his body as the worst thing he has ever known.

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The woman with thoughts of a party considered planting another tree in her front yard. She’d heard that fruit trees often do better in pairs.

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The oranges in the crates against which Jake is shot can not be sold after the blast tears through Jake’s midsection. The fruit explodes in glorious sprays of orange and red, streaking the walls of the house and staining the dirt near the foundation. The colors remain on the surviving crates and on the house’s paneling until the juice dries, when they become dull and dark, sinking into the grain of the wood. The red of Jake’s blood takes longer fade, and eventually turns a deep, matte black that has to be painted over.

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When the woman opened up the orange from one of her two grocery bags and pressed her finger into the navel to tear away the peel, the fruit split in half. She pinched her eyes tight against the acid as liquid ran down her arms in tiny pearls, like golden specks of ocean mist. Just inside the navel was the tiny second orange, the casualty, the tiny fruit within a fruit, glowing orange and yellow and lovely. Bittersweet juice sprayed from the tear.

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In the moments just before he died for love, Jake McCallister felt the push of his body against the ground and the fibers of the wooden crates scrape across his skin. He fell and then he stopped falling. He ached and then didn’t. It had been love, it still was, but it was not what he had thought it was. Love seemed, at that moment, to be a kind of energy that moved outside of him, and it moved in waves that came and then left and though he had done his best, he had fallen into the cracks of it somehow.

Neleigh Olson holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky and is completing an MA in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society at Liverpool Hope University. Her work has appeared in The Lascaux Review and Writers Resist among others.