In the afternoon or early evening, when the light turns from milky and gold to milky and blue, I eat an orange in the bath. An idea from the veins of the internet (Reddit circa 2016, then everywhere else)—the instinct is not my own and so it feels languid and full of plenty. The arm’s-length impulse: not something I need, just something pleasing for its own sake.
An orange fits in your palms like the golden ball in the fairy tale. Dig your thumbs in at the crown. Feel your nails slice into the hard peel and the bright, tender sting hit your nostrils. Pull away the dimpled skin and thick, clean pith. Dig in your thumbs again and listen for the small padding noise as the fruit separates into velvety, plump, ordered segments (almost too big for your mouth, not quite). There’s a lot of water in a bath: a bit of juice running down your fingers, your wrists, your chin, won’t make you sticky—just leave that clean, sweet smell.
I lived with a friend in my early twenties who spent parts of her childhood in Morocco. She didn’t wear perfume, just orange blossom oil. It’s possible this is misremembered, but I do also remember her eating whole oranges, and wearing a cotton robe around the house, printed with oranges. In Morocco with a man I loved, later, there were utes filled with oranges. Orange slices in the water (another unreliable memory). At the night stalls were towering piles of delicate desserts, drizzled with orange blossom water. Citrus of all kinds, stacked in shining pyramids.
‘I’m of the belief that human beings need, to live their lives, more or less the same climatic conditions as lemons,’ a professor tells his students, somewhere off the coast of Greece, in Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights. When she was six, my little sister ate lemons whole. She married an Italian and made her home in the land of citrus. At Christmas after dinner we eat mandarins every night, playing cards around growing mounds of peel while cold, grey winter slinks by the apartment windows.
‘A good orange tastes of sun and sky,’ someone wrote on a recipe blog comparing 45 kinds. In the south-east of France, oranges amères—bitter oranges, the ones given as a gift of love, and used in marmalade—ripen over winter. People in villages hoard them paranoically to make homemade wine in the spring. The lip of it, of the wine, smells like your bath orange. It makes you think of gardens in Seville—of fragrant air; stiff, dark, glossy leaves; waxy flowers gleaming in the dusk. A soft, sharp, lucky scent.
Leave the peel on the edge of the bath. You feel like a human cocktail, in your enamel glass. When your bath is finished and you carry the peel to the bin, it forms the ghost of an orb in your hands. Afterwards, your fingers smell clean and bright.