Heads of the Colored People(24)
“Thank you, Ryan.” Inedia barely smiled. She had a way of doing that, of not reacting the way he expected her to. When she was a few months old, before Lisbeth had gotten the fellowship that took them to Costa Rica, he’d pinched Inedia’s arm a little as she sat in one of those sit-up baby chairs, just to see what would happen. She didn’t cry. She looked at him, rocking herself in her footed onesie forward with her legs and back, and matched his gaze for a while, as if saying, “I understand.”
An old man stared into Ryan’s face and then Inedia’s before he shuffled away, mumbling “Cute kid.” Regardless of which parent took her out (though it was usually Ryan), people stared at Inedia, equally interested in her sharp contrast to her father’s deep brown as in her softer sable to Lisbeth’s pinkness. Ryan took Inedia’s hand. He craved pineapple, something acidic and stinging to cleanse his mouth. Lisbeth wouldn’t approve of the purchase from this store. To get to the fruit section, he cut across from the camping gear, past the fishing poles, the smell of chicken-blood bait sitting heavy in his nostrils. The fishing aisle gave way to the craft and sewing sections, which led, after the small city of baby products, to a quick detour through the beverage aisles and eventually a straight line to the produce. For all his resistance to Walmart, he didn’t want to go home.
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“As you can see, these tubs are well organized, and all the fruit is fresh,” Lisbeth said facing the camera, walking the crew to the container of mangoes. She smelled one and overemoted its visible ripeness. “That life-giving flesh; there’s strong prana in living food. You can absorb it through the third eye. Can you bring the boom in closer?” She looked above the camera to the large man, who looked at Mike. “I don’t like to raise my voice.”
“Talk a little about your process for prepping meals,” Mike said, feeling a headache building at his temples. “What do you do with all the durian?”
“So we store the fruit in these tubs, and we also use them as sorts of troughs to eat from. Ryan and Inedia make a big batch of whatever we’re eating, say, durian pudding, mango salsa, or tomato with avocado and lemon, early in the morning. And then we graze from the tubs all day. Fruitarians have to eat a lot to stay full.” Lisbeth patted her nonexistent paunch for emphasis.
Mike motioned for the cameraman, Jonathan, to come in for a medium shot that would show Lisbeth’s missing back tooth.
“It sounds like a lot of food,” she continued, “but it goes right through you. We—well, Ryan actually—does the shopping twice a week. We buy crates directly from the farmers at the farmers’ market or from organic grocers we’ve built relationships with. We harvest our own avocados and the maca out back,” she said, pointing to the screen doors. “It’s Inedia’s job to organize and wash the fruit with a white vinegar solution.”
“What do you do?” Mike said from off camera.
“I manage it all, and I run our blogs and vlogs.” With each hand, Lisbeth twirled a thick dread in contrasting directions, like some kind of double dutch tic, or as if the hair were saying “Muy loca.” “I’m more the philosophy behind the practice,” she said, letting the hair fall.
Mike wasn’t sure if he could stand a whole day of filming with her alone. “Why don’t we have you sit in one of the papasan chairs and shoot some confession-cam footage? Talk about the bed situation, in the present tense.” It was hard to set up the shots so that they both accentuated and blurred Lisbeth’s skin. You couldn’t let all the ugly cracks and spots show on camera, or no one would watch; too clean, though, and the realness of the thing would be minimized.
“Oh, sure.”
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This was Ryan’s first time at Walmart in a year or so. They’d started buying the toilet paper in bulk there after the first two months of the transition, but they didn’t need as much now. Before Inedia was born, Ryan and Lisbeth had each gone through a roll a day, dabbing at the liquid tar the online community had warned them about. There had been so many lifestyle experiments with Lisbeth: from ayurvedic eating based on their individual doshas to macrobiotic to vegan to raw. The groceries became more expensive and the lifestyle more time-consuming the closer they tried to get to earth, to original man, to whatever: ceramic knives instead of metal ones—to prevent oxidization—glassware and BPA-free everything, not that there were ever leftovers.
Looking back on his decision, Ryan must have been hungry when he agreed to quit his job to manage Lisbeth’s Web presence and “fully commit to the lifestyle.” It certainly didn’t make sense. The former financial planner in him couldn’t always look away. If the mortgage hadn’t been paid by Lisbeth’s father’s estate, they wouldn’t have been able to afford it for the food. They had blown through what was left of Ryan’s investments on the first failed durian distribution business, and the compost wasn’t making much money, but the YouTube channels were picking up subscribers and ad revenue, enough to pay for groceries each week, enough to attract Mike and the network.
After the transition to fruitarian, they continued to buy the cheap toilet paper because even Lisbeth agreed that the recycled bamboo stuff was too expensive. The toilet paper, and the diapers after Inedia was born, were the only things Lisbeth would allow Ryan to buy from a big-box store that, she said, traded in child or third-world labor and that stood for some kind of capitalistic, imperialistic, or otherwise -istic enterprises. Technically and ethically, they were supposed to use cloth diapers, but Lisbeth said, “The solvents and energy used to launder the diapers, even with a cleaning service, are way worse for the earth than tossing the diapers.” She said something about putting compost back into the earth this way.