The Strawberry Tease

Part One: Seedlings of the Beginning

Strawberries are the most provocative fruit. They are an elongated heart and a reddish flush of blood when the juices squirt. They are bitter and delicate like some lovers can be, but most of all they are terribly sweet to the core and must be taken care of in an old-fashioned and doting way.

It was only towards the end of May and the sun was already beating mercilessly down on Alex and the other strawberry pickers. Alex wiped his forearm across his brow. Is it really worth all this? he asked himself. The schoolyear had just ended and, at age 26, he was wondering how many of these summers he could take in the heat; and the heat wasn't the only oppressive factor in his life, there was his father to contend with as well.

Despite the trouble his father often was to him, he cherished his summers. It would not be long before he graduated from his law studies and found a place and career of his own. During the schoolyear he lived in the dorms and worked as a waiter to help support himself. In the summers, however, he lived at his father's strawberry farm, staying with him, and picking fruit, his only work-free weeks of the year being July to mid-August, and then it was back to the grind of schoolbooks, exams, and cranky professors. But the college girls – oh my – they had a way of raising his mood in the midst of the meanness. They were sweet and gentle and willing, and he usually sought out the prettiest one in the chaos of a college party and necked with her in the corner. But, for the most part, that's as far as they went with him; they were puritanical and boring, and often on those nights, in private, Alex took matters into his own hands and squirted his ivory desire down a gurgling, circling drain.

But back to the trouble of his father, Patrick. Alex knew, deep down in his heart, that his father meant no harm to him, not in any intentional way. A decade before, Alex's mother had passed and since then Patrick had become an overbearing and possessive father. Alex was all he had left, and he wanted to make sure he had an iron grip on the boy, even if it meant smothering him and leaving him nearly empty of his independence. But the young man, who was now plucking the strawberries like a quick machine, knew his phase of rebelliousness was long overdue and that something needed to be done.

Patrick was incredibly straitlaced, stern, and old-fashioned in his approach to women and sex. He had not dated anyone since his wife died and did not intend to. Alex knew his father still suffered from the loss of his mother but could not shake the feeling to get away from his dad and become free of him. It was his father's suffering that brought out Alex's empathetic side and felt he could not defy his father for fear of hurting him further or fear of perhaps Patrick thinking that his son had turned on him, just as his wife had.

In spite of himself, Alex had turned out very much like how Patrick was now. Stern. Straitlaced. When dating a girl, Alex had always chosen "the good girl," the one who behaved, the one who bowed down and was subservient to her man. But in his solitary moments, Alex knew that these things did not please him, and often longed for a different type of woman, someone who would blow him out of the water with her spunk and vivaciousness, someone who lived for the moment, and most of all, who lived for laughter and good times. There was only so much purity a man could take.

Now, bending over the rows of strawberry plants, snapping each one off above the cap and storing it away, Alex felt a kinship with his fellow man. There they were, dozens of fruit pickers, hunched over, suffering in the sun, backs aching, legs starting to buckle, drops of sweat tickling the strands of hair on their heads. Most of them were young people, but a few were long in the tooth, just as hardworking as any of them, if not more so. The sun seemed to blaze so much that it hummed a steady buzz throughout the land, taking place of the chitchat that had once been so plentiful when the day began at dawn.