There is one way to eat a grapefruit - cut in half, with a spoon, scooping out one segment at a time while being careful not to tear the veil between segments.
The other day, the Russian lover observed me eating a grapefruit this way and spoke up. "All you American women are so strange. You all eat grapefruit that way. Why? Why do you eat it that way?"
I was puzzled. "Becuase...that's how you eat a grapefruit." And then I was curious. "Well, how else could you eat a grapefuit?"
The Russian lover looked at me as if he was seriously beginning to doubt my intelligence. "The same way you always eat an orange. Just peel it and eat it."
It was an epiphany for me. I had never, ever thought about eating a grapefruit the way I would eat an orange (or vice versa). Never ever. My brain was as compartmentalized as the segmented citrus fruits it had never contemplated eating in any other way.
So today I packed a grapefruit for lunch, and tried to eat it like an orange. And it worked! There proved no insurmountable obstacle to eating a grapefruit without a spoon, and I was saved the trouble of finding a spoon, and a knife, and having to wipe down my computer monitor after droplets of grapfruit juice had gone splurting all over.
However, there is something to be said for a bowl, and a spoon, a grapefuit half, and being squirted in the eye. I don't think I'll ever give it up altogether.
On one of our earliest dates, the Russian lover took me to a Chineese restaraunt. At the end of the meal, they brought out fortune cookies and a small plate of orange slices. I munched on one slice slowly and, I hoped, seductively. I was preoccupied with my own mastication performance art when I looked up to realize that the rest of the orange slices were gone. All gone. And I looked up in time to see the Russian lover pop the last half of a slice into his mouth, peel and all.
"Did you just...eat the peel of that?" I asked.
"Of course," he said, confused at the question.
I started to giggle. And I couldn't stop. I just looked at him and giggled with sheer delight.
It was so unthinkable, so absurd, and yet...why not?
And now I sometimes catch myself, after peeling an orange and eating it, just nibbling a bit at the peel and finding it...not so bitter and strange as I would have thought.
But if he suggests I eat a banana peel and all...well, a girl can only be so open-minded.