Three Ways of Looking at Eggplants

by Bill Prindle

One

Lyman Whiteside, Chairman of the Harvard Anthropology Department, mixed his fourth gin and tonic, wrenching every last drop from the lime, and tossed the rind into the sink filled with unwashed dishes.

He took a sip, purred with approval, and briefly examined his reflection in the French doors leading to the backyard of his spacious Cambridge home. His bow tie, a gift from his wife, was askew. He undid it and dropped it into the trash bin.

As he wandered outside onto the flagstone patio, he surveyed his wife’s summer garden, now neglected and overgrown with snap beans, radishes, carrots, tomatoes, and the one pumpkin that had split open and vomited its seeds onto the ground.

There were the zucchinis she had insisted on growing, which he detested, and next to them her prized addition this year, the listada de gandia eggplants, solanum melongena, huddled together like little variegated turds among the weeds. A moist decomposing odor rose up from the weed-choked earth, mixing with the tang of the rotting tomatoes littering the ground.

He yanked a snap bean from its vine, bit it in half, threw the other half away, and stared down at the listada. He imagined them cowering before him like first-year graduate students.

My God, how she had fussed over them: growing them from seedlings, covering them at night to protect them from an inhospitable temperature drop, spending hours online chatting with other listada aficionados, which is how she met Martins, an assistant art history professor at B.U. — not even a full professor — for Christ’s sake.

While he glared at the vegetables, the doorbell announced the arrival of his Chinese dinner. He started for the door, turned back, and quickly stomped the listada de gandia into a pulpy mush. “Be right there,” he called out to the deliveryman.

Two

Anson Willow was well suited to her position as Assistant Circulation Manager at Harvard’s Widener Library. Quiet, efficient, reliable, polite, knowledgeable, and comely in an academic kind of way, with a touch of grey in her sensibly cut brown hair. She was also fluent in five languages and had never said, “I love you” to a lover, male or female, in any of them.

After work on a late summer Friday, she’d driven to a farm stand in Lexington and wandered through the displays of ruby tomatoes, pungent basil, glowing peaches, glistening cherries, rigid carrots, stout zucchinis, dusty potatoes, golden onions, and freshly-picked corn smelling greenly of summer and youth.

The slanting afternoon sun had warmed the produce, the aromas mingling, each basket offering the promise of something fresh and new and delicious. She paused at a bin of vegetables she’d never seen before: small green and yellow eggplants. She picked one up, and closing her eyes, inhaled.

Her thoughts drifted to the first time she’d eaten eggplant, a long ago summer holiday on Corfu. A shared dinner with an American college boy. What was his name? They’d sampled most of the menu including the sautéed eggplant, very garlicky and chewy.

Later, after too much retsina, feverish dancing at a disco, a swim in the ocean, salty kisses, and hushed laughter, they returned to his pensione and its hilariously creaky bed. Their parting, filled with promises to write and later, only unanswered letters.

She opened her eyes. “Tommy,” she thought, “his name was Tommy,” as she put the eggplant back in its basket.

Three

An electrical storm sent a power surge through the recharging cord attached to Blaster One. It had not only awakened the robot but scrambled the programming of the artificial intelligence chips the MIT graduate students had used to create him. Blaster’s software was Intended to recognize books at MIT’s Baker Engineering Library and return them to their proper places in the stacks. The students had labored to reprogram Blaster’s chips, software, and hardware, which had been donated from a local combat robot manufacturer.

But Blaster had resisted such programming. Now, under the influence of a heady 1000-volt jolt, Blaster’s combat search, evasion, resistance, and escape programming reactivated.

He scanned the room, located the door, wrenched the doorknob off, zipped down the hallway, collided against the exit’s crash bars, and rolled out into the balmy Cambridge summer night.

Keeping to the shadows, he travelled undetected down Windsor Street and turned left onto Broadway. When he beheld the thick vegetation of the Community Garden, he halted. Rolling ahead cautiously, he scanned for thermal signatures of lurking hostiles.

Finding none, he plowed through the surrounding chicken wire and searched for enemy ordnance. The kale, tomatoes, lettuce, snap peas, beans, onions, carrots, and radishes registered as harmless, but a cluster of small eggplants conformed exactly to the Russian anti-personnel mines in his database.

Blaster extended his catapult arm, and one by one, plucked them and hurled them downrange. They arced across the Charles River and splatted against the Community Boating sailboats on the Boston side. Signaling his mission accomplished with a loud “Hoo-ah!” he set off down Broadway toward Harvard Square.