ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 56: Heather Swain’s Luscious Lemon

It’s ten a.m. on a Sunday. Sundays are family days. I feel especially lonely on Sundays. Also, the library’s closed.

I reach for the novel I fell asleep reading — Heather Swain’s Luscious Lemon. I found this novel quite by accident while looking for one by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall. But perhaps it’s no accident I found it.

Its main character is Lemon. She and her boyfriend, Eddie, love each other, and Eddie’s asked her to marry him at least three times, but she keeps turning down marriage.

She becomes pregnant. It’s unplanned. She begins to talk to her unborn baby. Eddie talks to the baby. They both want this baby, but they lose the baby.

It’s no consolation that her doctor tells Lemon up to thirty percent of first pregnancies end in miscarriage. Lemon grieves for her lost baby. This loss brings back the loss of her parents in a train accident when she was six. She goes into emotional hibernation. Or sometimes, on a rampage. She pulls away from Eddie.

Lemon visits her great-aunt who hides out in a dark basement apartment loaded with photos of dead babies. The great-aunt tells Lemon her deep secret: she miscarried five times. She’s never gotten over the losses, still living in a deep, dark place in her head and in her body.

Lemon and Eddie cry together. In all this time, Eddie hasn’t cried. He’s as sad as Lemon is but thought he needed to be strong for her.

“What I’ve needed all this time is for you to feel the same as I do,” she tells him.

This is what connects us, one to another, isn’t it? The real connection. The one that counts. Sharing our true thoughts. Revealing our true feelings. Not the same thoughts or the same feelings — how is that possible? — yet shared.