Fiction A Peach, A Bowl of Grapes Michelle Wildgen Beth opens her bedroom door and sticks her head out. She listens: the television is on downstairs, music is playing in her sister's room, next to hers.           Her mother went grocery shopping that morning, as she does every Saturday. Beth always helps unpack the groceries, but she has found that she must eat breakfast first. Otherwise everything looks irresistible: the salty potato chips, cereal sparkling with sugar frost, salami fanned inside wax paper, bulging boxes of ice cream. The ice cream has been there since this morning, but Beth has waited till now, after supper.           This week it's chocolate almond, Beth's favorite. She knows exactly what she'll do: she'll climb onto the counter to take a bowl down from the cupboard, and if no one else is around, it will be one of the big ones. And she'll fill it with ice cream and go upstairs to her parents' bedroom where the television with the remote control is, and she'll stir the ice cream around and around in its dish while she sits on their bed and watches Love Boat or Fantasy Island. After a few minutes the ice cream will be soft as soup. Then she can take a bite and let it melt, leaving shards of almond on her tongue. When she's swallowed the last liquid pool of chocolate cream, she'll chew the almonds. She can make it last a long time that way.           That is on good Saturdays, the ones when her parents go out and her older sister (who says she doesn't care what her snotty ten-year-old sister does anyway) does too. But tonight is not a good Saturday. Tonight they're all here.           Her sister's door is closed. It would be better if Anne Marie would just go to a party with one of her friends, but locked in her room is almost as good. Beth hears a shriek of laughter that doesn't belong to Anne Marie and stops. It's Missy Hassler, Anne Marie's meanest friend. Beth should have run down the stairs as soon as she realized Missy was here, but instead she goes totally still.           Her sister sticks her head out into the hallway.           "Hey. Do you have my green shoes?"           Beth shakes her head. Missy Hassler is lying on her stomach on Anne Marie's bed, her freckled shoulders bony in her halter top. Missy squints at Beth.           Missy and Anne Marie both wear their hair straight except for two long curls that hang alongside their faces, feathered back. Missy's black hair only makes her dark freckles more obvious, but Anne Marie's thick blonde hair shines in the hallway light as she stands there staring at Beth.           Sometimes, when Anne Marie seems to be feeling inexplicably nice, she tries to curl Beth's hair while Beth tries not to flinch from the hot curling iron near her cheek, the metal sizzling and crusted with browned hairspray. Beth's hair doesn't feather.           "Hey, Pudge," says Missy. Beth ignores her.            "I don't have them," she tells Anne Marie. Those shoes don't even fit Beth. She just tries them on the way she used to try on her mother's wedding dress or black patent leather sandals. Just to see. Sometimes if Beth looks at herself from the ankles down in the sandals, she can almost believe the rest of her matches her feet in those delicate shoes.           Anne Marie has shoes in every color: yellow, pink, silver, green, red. Beth's favorites are the green ones, which her sister wears with green polka dot clam diggers that sit low on her hips, showing a scoop of the tanned skin of her belly. Missy and Anne Marie have been doing aerobics after school and now Anne Marie steps out into the hallway and thrusts her belly at Beth. "Check it out," she says.           Beth makes a face. "I'm not touching your goddamn stomach," she says.           Anne Marie pokes it herself. Her fingertip, the nail painted a shimmery pink, barely dents the flesh before she flexes her belly and treats Beth to the sight of a taut sheath of muscle beneath the skin.           "Bet you don't want me to do that to you," Anne Marie says. Missy laughs, showing her crowded, pointy teeth. Missy is the ugliest thing imaginable.           "Fuck off," says Beth. Anne Marie looks taken aback, but then she curls her lip and sticks out her tongue.           It's Anne Marie's own fault if Beth swears at her. Four years before, when Beth was in the second grade, and Anne Marie in sixth grade, Anne Marie had sat Beth down and forced her to say "sexual intercourse," "giving head," and "sixty-nine." She said Beth had to get comfortable saying it or everyone would laugh at her when she got to sixth grade.           "What's 'sixty-nine'?" Beth had asked, her cheeks aflame.           "Well, 'head' is when you suck a guy's dick," Anne Marie had whispered thoughtfully. She seemed to be working it out herself. They could hear the laughtrack from downstairs where their parents were watching M*A*S*H. "And sixty-nine is anything worse than head."           Now Anne Marie turns to go back into her room. Beth peers past her.           "Quit spying in my damn room," Anne Marie says. "And look under your bed for my shoes." She shuts the door.           Beth goes downstairs, careful not to go too slowly. If she seems to be sneaking, Anne Marie might know where she's going. Then they'll come downstairs and catch her. Anne Marie is meaner when Missy is around.           The box of ice cream is wedged in the door of the freezer between a couple packages of peas. She can tell by the dent in the top of the box that already someone has had a bowl. The rest of the carton, at least, is reassuringly bulgy.           Through the kitchen window, she can see her parents on the lawn, playing a game of catch. She doesn't know anyone else whose mom plays catch.           She's taking too long. They'll be coming inside soon, or downstairs, but she can still have a little bowl of ice cream in her room, and she can rinse it out in the bathroom sink upstairs before she puts it in the dishwasher, so that no one will see the chocolate dregs and know she was eating it. If her parents will just stay outside and Anne Marie and Missy will stay in her room.           Beth pulls a chair over to the counter and climbs up on it to get to the bowls. She pauses for a moment, one hand on the edge of a white ceramic bowl and the other poised on the shelf. She's been thinking of that ice cream all day, but what if she just didn't have any? She could have diet soda, or the kind of snack she's supposed to have. She stands with one knee on the counter, one hand balanced on a shelf. Her mother's idea of a healthy snack for Beth is always something crunchy and unsatisfying: an apple, a carrot stick. Her mother never eats those things. Only Beth has to, and she would like to say she doesn't see why. But she can, in the way the same clothes never look quite as nice on her as they would on Anne Marie.           Normally she would put the chair back right away. She would set the carton on the counter close to the refrigerator, so that anyone walking in wouldn't see the frosted cardboard box from the doorway. That way they wouldn't know what it was. They'd think she was just getting some cereal and skim milk. For all they know it might just be a peach, a bowl of grapes.           Anne Marie's favorite snack is graham crackers with vanilla pudding and chocolate sauce sandwiched inside. Maybe she'll get bulgy and plump on those, her belly pouching over the waistband of the green polka dot pants. Or their mother will twist an ankle on her run and watch helplessly as she gets softer, the fibers of the ace bandage around her leg stretching and tearing. And her dad, together with Mom and Anne Marie (and Missy, who is always mooching dinner), might grow suddenly huge from eating enormous sandwiches he makes with cheese and bacon and mayonnaise.           She gets down, leaving the cupboard door ajar and the chair shoved up against the counter. She sets the spoon in the sink but doesn't rinse it. She sits at the table, the bowl and spoon before her on a bright blue place mat, and takes a napkin from the basket. As she spreads it out over her lap, her hands on the rough white paper look tan, larger than she would have guessed, her fingers longer and her nails neat where they used to be bitten and ragged, a neat crescent of white gleaming at the tip of each fingernail. Beneath her hands, the warm pink skin of her legs glows through the paper napkin. (Michelle Wildgen is in her last semester in the fiction MFA program at Sarah Lawrence, and also works as an assistant editor at Tin House literary magazine. Her fiction, essays, and food writing have appeared in Rosebud, the Madison Review, and other publications.)