Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Jeanette comes home one day to find that her mother and Mrs. White are cleaning the house and making it proper for company. She does not know why and can think of no event that would warrant such cleaning. She takes the dog for a walk and thinks of how uncertain she is over Melanie. She tries talking about it with her mother but does not believe she should share too much. She remembers the other time she felt such uncertainty: the “Awful Occasion.” The “Awful Occasion” happened when Jeanette’s birth mother comes to reclaim her daughter but is rebuffed by Jeanette’s adoptive mother. Jeanette’s mother will not let the two of them meet and sends Jeanette to her room before she can even see her birth mother at the door. Jeanette listens with a glass up against the wall and realizes that her birth mother will never come back. When Jeanette tells her mother that that woman is her real mother, Jeanette’s mother hits her and Jeanette runs out of the house and down the road, only to return later and never speak of it again.

Melanie and Jeanette spend many nights together, mostly at Melanie’s house. When they do stay at Jeanette’s house, her mother always makes up an extra bed in Jeanette’s room and checks on them randomly. When Jeanette returns from walking the dog, she finds a note from her mother saying that she is staying at her friend Irene’s home that night. Jeanette goes to Melanie’s house and she marvels at their intimacy with one another. Melanie tells Jeanette that she plans to attend university to study theology, earning disapproval from Jeanette, who thinks this course of study will bring her too close to conflicting and dangerous ideologies. She tells Melanie that she loves her almost as much as she loves God, which makes Melanie uncomfortable.

The next morning, the girls arrive at church late, and when they sit down, Ms. Jewsbury warns Jeanette to stay strong and meet her outside after the service. Jeanette is confused but then notices her mother with the pastor at the front of the church. The pastor accuses Jeanette and Melanie of having “Unnatural Passions” for each other and of being gripped by demons. They are brought to the front, where Melanie repents for her sins, but Jeanette resists, not believing that their feelings for one another are wrong. The service ends, with promises of more work to be done for Jeanette, but she sneaks out of the church and meets Ms. Jewsbury. They go to her house while a prayer group heads for Jeanette’s home with her mother.

Ms. Jewsbury scolds Jeanette for not being more careful, and when Jeanette challenges her over why she cares so much, Ms. Jewsbury tells her that this problem with the church is her problem as well. Jeanette realizes that she and Melanie are not the only women with such feelings for other women, and soon she and Ms. Jewsbury make love. Jeanette goes home the next morning and is prayed over until late that night. She still will not repent, and as a result, the pastor and her mother lock her in a room for 36 hours with no food before their next prayer meeting. In her isolation, Jeanette meets her orange demon, whose job is to keep Jeanette in one piece. The demon tells her that she must choose to keep it or to let the demon go. She decides to keep the demon and when her isolation is over, repents. She does so not because she believes she is wrong but to end the process.

Jeanette asks about Melanie and is told that she went away to stay with family for a week. Ms. Jewsbury secretly brings her to Melanie, and Jeanette, with Melanie’s help, sneaks into her room and waits for Melanie to join her that night. While Jeanette is in the room, she takes a nap and dreams of the city of Lost Chances and the Room of Final Disappointment. In the room, which is like a library, the librarian tells her that she made the Fundamental Mistake. Jeanette wakes up to find Melanie and they cry and kiss, holding each other all night. Ms. Jewsbury comes back in the early morning and Jeanette leaves.

Jeanette’s mother burns everything she believes is related to Melanie and the “Unnatural Passions” she believes her daughter has one night, and Jeanette realizes that her relationship with her mother is beginning to change. Her mother is no longer her queen. Jeanette develops a fever and sees the Forbidden City lying in ruins. Her mother believes that the fever is sin working its way out of Jeanette, but as she hallucinates, her mother gives her an orange. Inside the orange is the demon, who tells Jeanette that there is no going back now, and gifts her a brown pebble.

By the summer, life returns to normal, though Ms. Jewsbury leaves town, and Jeanette helps run a tent mission in Blackpool. On their way there, Jeanette realizes more and more that she and her mother are not as connected or as in agreement as they once were. The mission proves to be a success despite some conflict with working men on vacation over the loud music. Jeanette flirts with a new convert named Katy and spends as much of the trip as she can away from her mother. As they leave, they see that Mrs. Rothwell wandered off on the beach and is flailing and drowning in the waves. One of the men jumps off the bus and saves her, though she tells them she was merely waving goodbye, as she expected to die.

Christmas season arrives and the church begins planning carols with the Salvation Army, though a fracture soon opens when the Salvation Army leader demands the church carolers not to use their tambourines. They insist that they need them to make “joyful noise,” but when he suggests they maybe reexamine their scripture and reinterpret such “joyful noise,” the church splits completely from the project. They decide to do their own carols and ask Jeanette’s mother to write the Nativity play that year. The play goes well, though Melanie, who is home from university, comes and watches. She visits Jeanette’s house to tell her that her mother is moving and that she therefore won’t be coming back to town anymore. However, Jeanette no longer wants Melanie. Melanie kisses Jeanette and Jeanette feels the pain of goodbye.

The caroling battle with the Salvation Army arrives, and the church loses, outmatched, though they beat their tambourines so hard one splits. They go to Trinkett’s to warm up, but Jeanette won’t stay once her mother arrives. On her way home, she runs into Melanie on the bus and refuses her offer of an orange. When her stop arrives, she jumps off and runs the rest of the way home. Later on, at Bible study, Katy invites Jeanette to stay with her in her caravan.

The book then presents an interlude, telling of how on the bank of the Euphrates there is a secret, walled garden with an orange tree at its heart. It can heal wounds but to eat from it is to leave, as it instills longings for the outside world in all who taste it.

Jeanette’s stay with Katy in the caravan is the first of many, and when she looks back, Jeanette believes that Katy is her most uncomplicated love. At Easter, Melanie comes back again and announces that she is going to marry an army man. Jeanette decides to not tell Melanie, or anyone else, about her and Katy, and she does not approve of the army man, although she finds that she has no problem with Melanie marrying. When Melanie and the man leave, he says he knows about what Jeanette and Melanie did but forgives them. Jeanette spits in his face.