American Watermelon

In Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love, during the protagonist's first overseas stop in Italy, she mentions a friend, an Italian, whose American wife had apparently written on the walls of their apartment some angry profanity and accusations in Italian, once during a fight. Julio says that, had his wife truly been free and expressive, she would have written in her native language, in English, following the passion of her rage. Writing in Italian would have given her pause - time for translation. All Americans are like this, diagnoses Julio in Gilbert's words: "A savage people." Buttoned up and repressed at all times except when truly uncorked, and therefore, in the latter moments, unsafe and potentially lethal.

There is something lasting about the repressed-American story in Gilbert's memoir. While still in Italy, her narrator reports on many other Italian tendencies that clash with the ways overworked, guild-ridden Americans would respond to life.

Something of the latent feeling of these narratives pinned itself on me the afternoon I read about them, when I returned from the grocery store carrying a 20-lb watermelon.

The watermelon was mushy, and I had been so eager to bite into its crispiness that I was disappointed and, given that I am a little bit of an American, thought for a brief second that   I could return it.  Maybe should return it. I had the receipt.

Returning food to the grocery store is organically foreign to me. I think I have done it once, under pressure of people who'd urged me to exercise my American right to perfect food, but I have only done it once, and the fact that I even had the thought with this watermelon felt contrived. As if the thought had been produced in a far off place and only delivered to me superficially, landing on the top of my head, on top of my hair, like an oversized cloth stamp, and just sitting there, tottering.

As it was, I was not going to take the watermelon back. I wrapped up what I had not eaten (or spit out) and put it in the refrigerator, as if I were putting a baby in its crib, thinking about how much more energy there would be in returning a food like this than in eating and enjoying whatever parts of it were healthy. It isn't anybody's fault, after all, that the watermelon was mushy. If I had picked it out from the field in which it had grown and it was overripe, would I return it back to the soil? "I would like my money back, soil."

And yet our economy endorses this odd sense of entitlement on the part of the consumer. Of course with certain commercial items, return is reasonable and necessary: clothing that is damaged, a car that does not work. But to return a watermelon and get your five dollars back actually probably costs sixty dollars to the system that supports it. There is the time you spent buying the watermelon that you will never get back. There is the fact that you wanted a watermelon two hours ago and now have not had one yet still and have spent additional time thinking about how you are entitled to perfect watermelons and have somehow been swindled. There is the time of all the store employees and of the store itself: the cost of the watermelon, its transport, storage and display. And there is the sheer fact that you will be throwing away something on which, even as you toss it, you are expending additional needless energy.

All because, as Julio might put it, you were too overworked and emotionally undernourished to take from the earth what it happened to have given you. In our demand for perfection - in watermelon, in customer service, in ourselves - we deplete the soil of our life and culture. That patch of earth where the bad watermelon came from has now cost several patches. You have taken an overripe watermelon, which may have had half the value of a perfectly ripe one, and have expounded its liability. Your demand on its perfection, your disposal of it, return of it to the store, time spent dealing with and transporting it, has now built a small credit on the soil that it came from.

And it is because of this blindness that American life is expensive, that Americans are in debt. If every patch of soil that has a small foible on it costs ten healthy patches, this is life on credit. Life on profligacy.

I cannot say why this idea of American attitudes takes me so directly to Julio's repressed-American portrait. I only know that there is some deep connection between the tendency to repress anger and other feelings and the tendency to expound entitlement. Because I cannot tell my wife how I really feel, you, my real-estate agent, have to pamper me today. Because my child gets Cs and I can't say anything negative about it, you, my shoe salesman, will put up with every caprice about how the color black is just not the right shade on this one either. Because I am hurting, a watermelon will go back. Back and not back, for it is lost forever in the costs absorbed by my diminishing ego.