Grapefruit as Fatherly Love

They take work.

I’m standing behind the counter where my father peels a white grapefruit. He sections them according to their lines and continues to peel until they are no longer enveloped in the transparent casings and white ribbon. This debris he collects into a pile beside the cutting board.

“What are you doing?” I ask. I’m five.

“They taste sweeter without all this stuff on them,” he says. Fingers drip with the juice as he delicately removes another ribbon from the top of a slice. He never does this with oranges.

“Can I try?” There isn’t that much flesh where he's working, but I assume he has more, somewhere. He inhales and tilts his head like he’s about to say no.

He hands me a corner of the slice he’s working on.

When I place it on my tongue, it's dry, even though I can feel the liquid filling up my mouth. No sweetness hits my tongue, but the little pearls of flesh burst as my teeth come down, creating an oddly satisfying texture.

It tastes nothing like grapes.

My father says he doesn’t know where it got its name.

I grab a piece of the white spongy ribbons and eat it. Bitterness rolls over my taste buds as I try to break down the spongey string that keeps wrapping itself around my teeth. Bleh. I pick it out and throw it in the trash.

“What do you think?” He’s picking off the transparent skin of his last section, looking down at it as he asks me the question.

“I don’t know. It’s kind of good,” I say. “Can I have more?”

He says no. “This is all I have.” He shows me the plate. Only about five slices of grapefruit are there.

He sprinkles sugar on it and sits down at the table.

~ ~ ~

What kind of person eats a white grapefruit? It says a lot about a man. The acid, the tart juice, the bitter pith. Trying to make it as sweet as possible.

I had wanted more then. The desire went deeper than the fruit. Perhaps he offered me more from time to time, but I remember refusing; I could only tolerate so much.

I don’t think my father realized how much of a biography that was.

~ ~ ~

Grapefruit. Why “grape?” No one really knows. It might be a reference to an old book claiming a flavor similar to grapes, but this was an assumption from an uninitiated man. It could reference the clustered way the fruit grows. However, I've seen grapefruit trees, and this also seems like an assumption by an ignorant man, or perhaps a simply uncreative one.

It might be a corrupted translation of the pomelo's scientific name, citrus maxima, “great citrus," which became, "great-fruit.” This is what I find the most compelling, and I think my father would too.

~ ~ ~

I tried to peel off the same see-through material from orange slices after watching my father dismantle the grapefruit. I removed the outer peel and the strange white bits that I'd begun to suspect weren’t actually edible. But there wasn't the same stuff in an orange, and certainly not the same level of bitterness. Yet, for years, I was suspicious of eating the pith of any citrus, believing it to be somehow malevolent.

However, my mother always said that by throwing away the white bits, I was sacrificing the nutrition. But who wanted to eat it? Not me.

Not my dad.

She was right, of course. The pith is full of prebiotics, vitamins, minerals, essential oils, soluble fiber, and antioxidants. In particular, grapefruit pith promotes sleep, regulates blood sugar, reduces fatigue, and improves digestion.

I had been starving myself while believing I was filling up on something special. Or maybe I'd gorged myself to the point of malnutrition on the sweetness alone.

Or. Maybe it was fine. Maybe that's exactly how I should have been eating that kind of grapefruit.

~  ~  ~

My mother liked grapefruits. So she said. I never saw her eat them. She didn’t like the work it took to get to the sweet part. In my adult life, I've come to see this as a reflection of my parents' relationship.

Not only did she deprive herself of the bitter nutrition—the necessary evil of citrus, one might say (and I do)—she failed to enjoy the reward. No sweet juice popping on the tongue.

I was the only one he offered grapefruit to.

~  ~  ~  

There are thirteen other varieties, sweeter ones that would have swayed me sooner, ones like the Flame, Duncan, Oroblanco, Pink, and Sweeties. It was the white grapefruit, the least sweet and most bitter, that stayed in my life sporadically—the grapefruit of fatherly love.

When it went on a hiatus of about eight years, it was like the entire category of citrus fell off our radar. It became as exotic as its origins, more distanced from me than the East Indies.

~  ~  ~

I felt emptier without the ice breaker of bittersweetness. All I had was the lingering memory of pith. This small epoch in my life was critical in going from child to adult, age nine to about seventeen. I don't remember much of him then.

~ ~ ~

I didn’t have regular grapefruit until my father took over the grocery shopping. I didn’t touch them for months and months.

The ones he chose were bigger, not as easily confused with the oranges in the fruit drawer, at least, eventually. This wasn't true at first. The foreignness of their return took getting used to. Several of these mistakes resulted in simple, contemplative acceptance.

A gentler fruit, warmer in color, sweeter in taste.

More vibrantly alive.

I began eating one of the two he'd bought for the week, treats for himself. Then I started getting greedy, eating them both. This was when he silently bought more.

I don't know when I decided it was finally time to invest in grapefruit spoons. Around the twentieth I'd eaten with knife and smooth-edged spoon led me to realize that they shouldn't take that much work. And even with them, my impatience for the next bite, the impatience that had plagued me since childhood, never truly diminished.

With this fruit, I don't think I'll ever be patient enough.

I've since gotten married and moved out, but those spoons are still at the house.