When I was six years old, an old man on a Florida beach made me aware of the existence of pistachios. The old man’s daily oscillations—harmonic motion between condominium central air and the Gulf—side oven rack of his folding chair—had left his skin mottled and dry, the brittle brown layer that rests between a pistachio seed and its shell. He and his wife were two of my grandparents’ fair-weather friends—not in the sense that they were disloyal, but rather that their friendship was neatly contained within the nest of North Redington Beach, a comfortable roost woven from gray hair and Maraschino cherry stems. It was here that these migratory gulls chose to wait out winter with their paperbacks and Manhattans.
On the day I met the Pistachio Man, our family of five deployed to the beachfront with all the matériel, supply-line logistics, and hastily-barked commands of a French Foreign Legion expeditionary force. The mission was simple: rendezvous with Gran and Pop Pop’s elite advance team, establish shade, requisition joyful childhood memories. Nothing too fancy, just a walk on the beach.
No amount of briefing could have prepared us for the horrors of the frontline.
The troops were untrained, undisciplined, and—in the case of my infant sister, Kendal—developmentally incapable of walking or forming coherent sentences. Morale evaporated under an ultraviolet enfilade that strafed our S.P.F. armor, and the closest thing to shade was the looming shadow of mass mutiny. I couldn’t even hear the mortal groans of the fallen over the air raid siren that escaped Kendall’s gums. Just as all seemed lost, my father plunged our umbrella into the sand with a gravity that will only be replicated if Hollywood ever makes an Iwo Jima-Apollo 11 crossover movie.
My grandparents had already staked their claim, and were reclining in the company of two similarly-textured seniors. I honed in on the old man, a bronzed monk cupping a cosmic secret in his right hand. He was shirtless with red trunks, eating not-quite-peanuts out of a paper bowl. The sand around his canvas chair was scattered with tiny seashells, like someone had been pulling apart baby clams.
“What’re those?” I asked, eyeing the bowl suspiciously from beneath my Gilligan’s Island bucket hat. The beached sea lion, rubbery and dehydrated, leaned forward and handed me a single nut.
“Why, they’re pistachios, buddy!”
If it was a clam then it was one that grew in soil instead of seawater, a bivalve encased in a smooth khaki shell. Through its narrow half-smile I glimpsed something inside, a knotted green pearl hiding from the sun and sand.
“Go on, give it a try!” The Pistachio Man attacked his syllables with a nasally gusto, like a 1930s newsreel announcer with octogenarian sinuses. I tossed the pistachio through the gap in my front teeth and crunched down eagerly.
As I coughed and spit out salty shrapnel, it was explained to me that the inside of the pistachio was the only part you were supposed to eat. The Pistachio Man demonstrated, deftly prying open the seam then palming the seed toward his gold-capped molars as if he were taking his daily Omega-3 supplement. He added the broken shell to the graveyard at my feet. I mimicked his actions, leveraging the gap with my chewed fingernails until the nut surrendered its cargo with a dry snap. I popped it in and chewed on the hard-earned anticlimax. Basically a peanut, just more work.
Two hours later I was sitting in the exam room of the North Redington Urgent Care. My shirt was off, and every time my father’s vigilance waned I was back to scratching the blotchy spider web of red that bloomed across my chest and shoulders. The butcher paper that topped the exam table crinkled into ridges and valleys, a landscape of my itchy fidgeting. The doctor returned with a manila folder tucked under his arm and a diagnosis sitting in his smug dimples. He had curly blond hair and too many teeth, the kind of doctor who accidentally forgets he’s still wearing his lab coat when he stops in for a drink after work.
“Alrighty then…” He put on a performance of opening the folder and rifling through the pages, as if the boy with hives who just tried his first pistachio was some sort of medical mystery.
My father is not a famous man, but he is especially not famous for his patience, and I could feel the frustration radiating off his sunburnt head. This bald search tower scoured the linoleum no-man’s land, searching for an excuse to raise his voice to that elusive I’M NOT YELLING level that only dads can achieve. The doctor must have sensed the danger, because he quickly closed the folder and delivered his diagnosis.
“Your son isn’t allergic to pistachios. Or any other type of tree nut. But he does have photosensitivity.”
Photosensitivity—extreme sensitivity to direct sunlight. Medicalspeak for being pasty and lame. The kind of okay-it’s-technically-a-disease that targets the type of kid who wants to work in the zoo’s reptile house when he grows up. My skin cells had unionized and were shouting a clear message from their picket lines. What do we want? To wear shirts at the beach! When do we want it? Until middle school girls start making fun of your farmer’s tan!
Modern medicine had exonerated the Pistachio Man. It wasn’t his favorite snack, but an embarrassing level of dermal sensitivity that chased me off the beach. My parents concluded that Florida was no longer the ideal vacation spot.
That was the last time I saw the Pistachio Man. Several years later my grandparents shared the news that he’d suffered a severe stroke. My grandmother gave periodic updates:
“Mr. Crane started physical therapy last week. He might be able to walk again.”
“Oh, good,” I said with a level of sincerity typically seen in D.M.V. employees. Gran’s stern look prompted me to dig a little deeper.
“That’s really good.”
“Mr. Crane?” she repeated. “The Pistachio Man?”
“Oh! Wait, that’s great news! Why didn’t you just call him by his name in the first place?”
Over the next ten years I continued to harbor a quiet suspicion of the sun. Finally, in my junior year of high school, I convinced myself that I had outgrown photosensitivity and was gradually able to cultivate a uniform shade of pale across my upper torso. But because teenage insecurities are subject to the same conservation laws as energy and momentum, that was also the year I got glasses and braces.
The summer before I left for college, my grandmother told me in excited tones that the Pistachio Man’s granddaughter would also be attending Penn State in the fall. She left me waiting at the dining room table while she set off in search of a photograph. I amused myself with a tiny archaeological expedition, using a spoon to dig through the sugar bowl Gran used for spiking her Earl Grey. Drilling of the primary mineshaft had just commenced when I noticed a pink corner poking out from beneath the white dunes—possibly the Rosetta stone of some long-forgotten sugar-based civilization. Careful excavation revealed its true identity: a packet of Splenda. By the time Gran returned with her digital picture frame I had unearthed seven identical packets, a buried treasure trove of low-calorie sweetener. Questions abounded. Were they lost? Intentionally hidden? Was anything in the sugar bowl actually sugar? But Gran ignored me and held up the picture frame.
The screen flickered from photo to photo, pausing just long enough for the viewer to orient themselves. Pop Pop on the deck of an anniversary cruise ship. My father with a moustache like a dead squirrel. A Christmas card that Gran had painstakingly scanned in her home office.
“There she is,” she said, pointing to the Pistachio Man’s granddaughter. The girl looked to be about my age, crouched next to a chocolate lab under a banner of season’s greetings.
“Okay Gran, I’ll keep an eye out when I’m back at school.” If I had been younger, I would have crossed my fingers behind my back, but it’s not quite promise-breaking if you forget the conversation three minutes later.
I did meet her though, at a party only two months later. A moment of eye contact lasted half a second extra, and the two of us raced to figure out why we recognized the other. I went over and explained that we were supposed to know each other.
“Oh yeah, my grandma told me your name,” she said. “As if I know all forty thousand students.”
I gave twice the amount of appropriate laughter and punished myself with a sip of battery acid. I wanted to ask if her first pistachio had also been a gift from the Pistachio Man. Did it take her two tries to figure out that you’re not supposed to eat the shell, only the inside?
“Well, it’s nice to finally meet you,” I said instead.
She agreed. Yes, we have fulfilled the minimum requirements of meeting a person. I felt like I’d just checked off an item from a scavenger hunt. Meet the descendant of a man who once gave you a beach snack—check.
Spring break of my junior year found me backpacking with friends down in Georgia. The last time I’d been that far south I was six years old, a gap-toothed kid who liked dogs more than cats and snakes more than dogs. Old photographs from our only Florida vacation show a cut-and paste collage of lingering baby fat and matchstick limbs. As we drove down the I-95, our soda transforming to pop via some bizarre Dixie alchemy, a different person looked back through the rearview mirror. My missing teeth had been replaced and later straightened by the awkward miracle of modern orthodontics, and my cheeks grew fields of short stubble. My arms and legs were no longer matchsticks—now solidly in the pencil or popsicle stick category. I had also grown to like my glasses.
Our first day of hiking was spent along the Atlantic-facing shore of Cumberland Island. The sun carved a lazy arc overhead, trying first to tear off my shadow and then satisfying itself with stretching it all out of proportion. Backpack straps dug into my shoulders, and I rolled up my pants to let the breeze cool my legs. That night, as my friends pitched our tents and prepared a dinner of instant potatoes, I sat on a driftwood stump and ate from a bag of mixed nuts. My hands moved through the same motions as twelve years before, and I scratched at the blotchy web of crimson the sun had smeared across the back of my calves.
Collin Van Son is a member of the class of 2018. He is majoring in physics with minors in English and mathematics. Outside of writing, he also enjoys performing with the on-campus club No Refund Theatre. His fiction has previously appeared in the Hofstra Journal of Literature and Art.