The phone rings. It is one of my students. Usually, I can understand her but something is off in our communication today. I can’t understand her and she doesn’t understand me. After a few minutes I am able to determine that she wants to come over to talk to me, immediately. I tell her I have an appointment with another student in a few minutes and that I will call her when we finish and then she can come over.
“Ok, ok, just one thing please, what is your room number?” And then she hangs up. Two minutes later she is at my door, handing me a large grapefruit. She fights back near tears and desperately whispers that she has to talk to me.
We sit down and she tells me that her father died last year. So her friends introduced her to a boy who lost his mother recently. And now the boy wants her to be his girlfriend and she doesn’t want a boyfriend. To make matters worse, this afternoon he gave her a gift: a large grapefruit and she accepted it which means she is interested in him. She didn’t want to take it because she doesn’t want a boyfriend. But she didn’t want to hurt his feelings because his mother just died and she is afraid of him. He is too aggressive for her and he told her that they should date while they are in college and if things don’t work out after she graduates from college, they could break up.
Now she doesn’t know what to do and to make matters worse, she is lugging around this huge grapefruit and she just wants to get rid of it as the first step in getting rid of him.
“I cannot take it back to my dorm room”, she shamefully tells me. She doesn’t want anyone to see that she accepted a gift from a boy. So I have the grapefruit now. And I am too jaded from my long experience with high school students to comprehend the simplicity of her dilemma. She is trembling with fear and regret for taking the grapefruit. She has overstepped a cultural line that I don’t fully understand.
Memoirs of an Ordinary Woman 