Forbidden Fruit by Annie Murphy, Peter de Rosa Page A

eyes peered over the edge.
    “What in God’s name,” he yelped, “are you up to?”
    I put my fingers to my lips and mouthed, “Mary.”
    “Why’d you think I gave her a special cocktail?”
    With that, he tried to grab the bedclothes for fig leaves but I hung on to them so that he, too, fell out of bed on top of
     me. In doing so he banged his head on the wall.
    I kissed his instantly bumpy cranium and we enfolded each other. Our whole bodies rocked with uncontrollable laughter. It
     made us more naked to one another than being without clothes. This was as one-making and sacred as sex. Twin selves were bonded
     by the greatest of all gifts: laughter.
    “Oh, God,” he gulped, his eyes disappearing in his mirth, “this is terrible. Sex is crazy.” He clutched his chest. “I think
     I’m going to die.”
    “Don’t try to kid me.”
    “Seriously, I’ve already had a slight heart attack.”
    “Sex is good for you,” I said. “Without it, you might have a
big
heart attack.”
    “No, no, no,” he said.
    “It’s not sex but the mad way you drive that’ll make you ill.”
    He put the end of a sheet in his mouth to stifle his great guffaws. “Tomorrow… I… might… drive… faster.”
    “Why?”
    “Thinking of all those fishes that just went into you.”
    “You’ve saved them up for forty-six years, can you imagine how potent they are?”
    “Don’t
say
that or I’ll —”
    “Wash my mouth out with soap and water?”
    “How,” he said, “did you know I was going to say that?”
    “These fishes are more like bullfrogs.”
    “To kill ‘em you’d need harpoons.”
    “At least.”
    “And there are millions of them,” he gurgled.
    “Maybe one of them will make a hit.”
    “Be serious, Annie,” he said, with an owl-like hoot. “I’ve studied this a great deal. Stand up quick.”
    “Why?”
    “Stand up, I say, and”—he demonstrated—“walk around.”
    “
I’m
not going to prance around naked.”
    “Sure I don’t care what you’re wearing or not wearing. I promise I won’t look, just get those bullfrogs out of you.”
    Clutching the sheet more tightly round me, I asked, “What do you want me to do, gouge myself?”
    “No, just walk around. These things swim. And they like warmth. Your egg is probably boiling after what we just did.”
    I couldn’t get up because I was laughing too much. When he tugged on my sheet, I spun on the floor like a top.
    “Please, Annie, you are in the worst possible position down there with your legs waving in the air. Keep them
still
.”
    “But you just told me to walk around.”
    “Waving your legs upside down is the worst thing. All the blood goes to your lower parts and these fishes love warm blood.
Get the blood out of there
.”
    We waited a couple of minutes for our gales of laughter to blow out before we got back into bed and pulled the covers around
     us. He felt more mine than ever.
    As we nestled up to one another, he told me that his favorite niece, Helena, was coming to stay.
    “You remember her from the old days?”
    I reminded him that I had first seen his sad eyes when he came on a week’s visit to the States in 1954 to see his sister Kitty,
     who was Helena’s mother. I had wanted then to take him by the hand and tell him it was going to be all right.
    “Remember, Eamonn?”
    He shook his head. “Anyway, Helena is bringing her four children and her sister, Maureen.”
    “Is she okay now?”
    Maureen, born premature, had weighed two and a half pounds and was given no chance to live.
    “As far as she will ever be,” Eamonn said.
    When I was a girl, my mother visited Helena’s mother. Kitty O’Hara, recently widowed, was living then in a rundown New York
     tenement. Kitty was so ill she couldn’t care for her five children. My mother had the guts and good sense to tear the newborn
     Maureen out of Kitty’s arms. The baby was starving and covered with lice. Also, mentally retarded.
    My parents took the whole family to our