Every week I give my seejanerunners a reading assignment. Sometimes its simply a quote to capture the mood of a work-out (like last week, after a monster week on Duke Forest’s hill’s, I sent them this nugget from Ernest Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer : “Everyone was dead tired and we all went to bed early like worn-out healthy savages.”
This week I am sending out my favorite short story … partly because I believe everyone should read it! … but mostly because I feel I have been distant from the group as of late (due to my heavy Pumpkin Run co-race director’s work-load). I do believe teammates must remain vulnerable to one another if they have any chance of hitting the high note on goal-race day. So, this story is for my on-line and off-line community.
Enjoy!
GASTON
By, William Saroyan
They were to eat peaches, as planned, after her nap, and now she sat across from the man who would have been a total stranger except that he was in fact her father. They had been together again (although she couldn’t quite remember when they had been together before) for almost a hundred years now, or was it only since day before yesterday? Anyhow, they were together again, and he was kind of funny. First, he had the biggest mustache she had ever seen on anybody, although to her it was not a mustache at all; it was a lot of red and brown hair under his nose and around the ends of his mouth. Second, he wore a blue-and-white striped jersey instead of a shirt and tie, and no coat. His arms were covered with the same hair, only it was a little lighter and thinner. He wore blue slacks, but no shoes and socks, He was barefoot, and so was she, of course.
He was at home. She was with him in his home in Paris, if you could call it a home. He was very old, especially for a young man¡Xthirty-six, he had told her; and she was six, just up from sleep on a very hot afternoon in August.
That morning, on a little walk in the neighbor-hood, she had seen peaches in a box outside a small store and she had stopped to look at them, so he had bought a kilo.
Now, the peaches were on a large plate on the card table at which they sat.
There were seven of them, but one of them was flawed. It looked as good as others, almost the size of a tennis ball, nice red fading to light green, but where the stem had been there was now a break that went straight down into the heart of the seed.
He placed the biggest and best-looking peach on the small plate in front of the girl, and then took the flawed peach and began to remove the skin. When he had half the skin off the peach he ate that side, neither of them talking, both of them just being there, and not being excited or anything¡Xno plans, that is.
The man held the half-eaten peach in his fingers and looked down into the cavity, into the open seed. The girl looked too.
While they were looking, two feelers poked out from the cavity. They were attached to a kind of brown knob-head, which followed the feelers, and then two large legs took a strong grip on the edge of the cavity and hoisted some of the rest of whatever it was out of the seed, and stopped there a moment, as if to look around.
The man studied the seed dweller, and so, of course, did the girl.
The creature paused only a fraction of a second, and then continued to come out of the seed, to walk down the eaten side of the peach to wherever it was going.
The girl had never seen anything like it¡Xa whole big thing made out of brown color, a knob-head, feelers, and a great many legs. It was very active too. Almost businesslike, you might say. The man placed the peach back on the plate. The creature moved off the peach onto the surface of the white plate. There it came to a thoughtful stop.
“Who is it?” the girl said.
“Gaston.”
“Where does he live?”
“Well, he used to live in this peach seed, but now that the peach has been harvested and sold, and I have eaten half of it, it looks as if he’s out of house and home.”
“Aren’t you going to squash him?”
“No, of course not, why should I?”
“He is a bug. He is ugh.”
“Not at all. He is Gaston the grand boulevardier.”
“Everybody hollers when a bug comes out of an apple, but you don’t holler or anything.”
“Of course not. How should we like it if somebody hollered every time we came out of our house?”
“Why would they?”
“Precisely. So why should we holler at Gaston?”
“He is not the same as us.”
“Well, not exactly, but he’s the same as a lot of other occupants of peach seeds. Now, the poor fellow hasn’t got a home, and there he is with all that pure design and handsome form, and no-where to go.”
“Handsome?”
“Gaston is just about the handsomest of his kind I’ve ever seen.”
“What’s he saying?”
“Well, he’s a little confused. Now, inside that house of his he had everything in order. Bed here, porch there, and so forth.”
“Show me.”
The man picked up the peach, leaving Gaston entirely alone on the white plate. He removed the peeling and ate the rest of the peach.
“Nobody else I know would do that,” the girl said. “They’d throw it away.”
“I can’t imagine why. It’s a perfect good peach.”
He opened the seed and placed the two sides not far from Gaston. The girl studied the open halves.
“Is that where he lives?”
“It’s where he used to live. Gaston is out in the world and on his own now. You can see for yourself how comfortable he was in there. He had everything.”
“Now what has he got?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid.”
“What’s he going to do?”
“What are we going to do?”
“Well, we’re not going to squash him, that’s one thing we’re not going to do,” the girl said.
“What are we going to do, then?”
“Put him back?”
“Oh, that house is finished.”
“Well, he can’t live in our house, can he?”
“Not happily.”
“Can he live in our house at all?”
“Well, he could try, I suppose. Don’t you want to eat a peach?”
“Only if it’s a peach with somebody in the seed.”
“Well, see if you can find a peach that has an opening at the top, because if you can, that’ll be a peach in which you’re likeliest to find somebody.”
The girl examined each of the peaches on the big plate.
“They’re all shut,” she said.
“Well, eat one, then.”
“No. I want the same kind that you ate, with somebody in the seed.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, the peach I ate would be considered a bad peach, so of course stores don’t like to sell them. I was sold that one by mistake, most likely. And so now Gaston is without a home, and we’ve got six perfect peaches to eat.”
“I don’t want a perfect peach. I want a peach with people.”
“Well, I’ll go out and see if I can find one.”
“Where will I go?”
“You’ll go with me, unless you’d rather stay. I’ll only be five minutes.”
“If the phone rings, what shall I say?”
“I don’t think it’ll ring, but if it does, say hello and see who it is.”
“If it is my mother, what shall I say?”
“Tell her I’ve gone to get you a bad peach, and anything else you want to tell her.”
“If she wants me to go back, what shall I say?”
“Say yes if you want to go back.”
“Do you want me to?”
“Of course not, but the important thing is what you want, not what I want.”
“Why is that the important thing?”
“Because I want you to be where you want to be.”
“I want to be here.”
“I’ll be right back.”
He put on socks and shoes, and a jacket, and went out. She watched Gaston trying to find out what to do next. Gaston wandered around the plate, but everything seemed wrong and he didn’t know what to do or where to go.
The telephone rang and her mother said she was sending the chauffeur to pick her up because there was a little party for somebody’s daughter who was also six, and then tomorrow they would fly back to New York.
“Let me speak to your father,” she said.
“He’s gone to get a peach.”
“One peach?”
“One with people.”
“You haven’t been with your father two days and already you sound like him.”
“There are peaches with people in them. I know. I saw one of them come out.”
“A bug?”
“Not a bug. Gaston.”
“Who?”
“Gaston the grand something.”
“Somebody get a peach with a bug in it, and throws it away, but not him. He makes up a lot of foolishness about it.”
“It’s not foolishness.”
“All right, all right, don’t get angry at me about a horrible peach bug of some kind.”
“Gaston is right here, just outside his broken house, and I’m not angry at you.”
“You’ll have a lot of fun at the party.”
“OK.”
“We’ll have fun flying back to New York, too.”
“OK.”
“Are you glad you saw your father?”
“Of course I am.”
“Is he funny?”
“Yes.”
“Is he crazy?”
“Yes. I mean, no. He just doesn’t holler when he sees a bug crawling out of a peach seed or anything. He just looks at it carefully. But it is just a bug, isn’t it, really?”
“That’s all it is.”
“And we have to squash it?”
“That’s right. I can’t wait to see you, darling. These two days have been like two years to me. Good-bye.”
The girl watched Gaston on the plate, and she actually didn’t like him. He was all ugh, as he had been in the first place. He didn’t have a home anymore and he was wandering around on the white plate and he was silly and wrong and ridiculous and useless and all sorts of other things. She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn’t like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn’t stop, and she didn’t like that at all. The open halves of the peach seed were wrong, too. They were ugly or something. They weren’t clean.
The man bought a kilo of peaches but found no flawed peaches among them, so he bought another kilo at another store, and this time his luck was better, and there were two that were flawed. He hurried back to his flat and let himself in.
His daughter was in her room, in her best dress.
“My mother phoned,” she said, “and she’s sending the chauffeur for me because there’s another birthday party.”
“Another?”
“I mean, there’s always a lot of them in New York.”
“Will the chauffeur bring you back?”
“No. We’re flying back to New York tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
“I liked being in your house.”
“I liked having you here.”
“Why do you live here?”
“This is my home.”
“It’s nice, but it’s a lot different from our home.”
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
“It’s kind of like Gaston’s house.”
“Where is Gaston?”
“I squashed him.”
“Really? Why?”
“Everybody squashes bugs and worms.”
“Oh. Well. I found you a peach.”
“I don’t want a peach anymore.”
“OK.”
He got her dressed, and he was packing her stuff when the chauffeur arrived. He went down the three flights of stairs with his daughter and the chauffeur, and in the street he was about to hug the girl when he decided he had better not. They shook hands instead, as if they were strangers.
He watched the huge car drive off, and then he went around the corner where he took his coffee every morning, feeling a little, he thought, like Gaston on the white plate.
The Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1962
William Saroyan has been writing since he was thirteen years old and has published almost forty books and plays. He refused the Pulitzer Prize for The Time Of Your Life but accepted the Drama Critics Circle Award for the same play “because there was no money involved.”
goodness. that cut deep.
I am extremely glad I stumbled over this blog and this story.
Why does this only work because it’s the guy who has the quirky view of life and the mother who is more rational? Would it have worked as well if the roles had been reversed?
Thanks, Joan. Keep trawling and bringing gems up to the surface for the rest of us to read and reflect on.
[...] Years ago I was really into the Jungian idea of synchronicity. I was hyper-aware of “charged coincidences,” and believed I was existng in a world of unseen connections … like the time I made a copy of Gaston (short story) for my freshman runner b/c I knew she wanted to be a writer someday and because I felt her spirit would respond to Saroyan. “Oh,” she said, in her typical blase fashion, “That’s my favorite short story.” How did my unconscious mind already know this? We had never discussed Saroyan, or any other writer for that matter. I was just getting to know her. Was it a coincidence that her name was the same as my first-born daughter? Was it a coincidence that her running resume from her senior year found its way to the top of a pile of recruiting letters that was a mile high? I don’t think so. I think we were destined to know each other. I was reading an article in the New Yorker (on John Ashbery, the poet) that has me thinking about synchornicity all over again. I’ve been too busy (and distracted) with three kids at home for the last 10 years to pay close attention … but the signs are coming back. Quietly this time. “What he is trying to do (and here the metaphors get a little screwy, but these are the pictures that come to him) is jump-start a poem by lowering a bucket down into what feels like a kind of underground stream flowing through his mind – a stream of continuously flowing poetry, or perhaps poetic stuff would be a better way to put it. Whatever the bucket brings up will be his poem. Since he is always dipping the bucket into the same stream his poems will resemble one another but because the stream varies according to climatic conditions – what’s on his mind, the weather, interruptions – they will also be different. [...]
… Not unlike the Heraclitean credo that one “cannot step into the same stream twice”.
Man this story is deep. That little girl has been brainwashed by the mom. It’s no wonder why the parents split apart.
I used Saroyan’s story for my teaching demo. Gaston, if you think about it, is really the Dad. The story is about a father-daughter possibility of a relationship squashed in the end. And guess what? I passed with flying colors!
its bittersweet
i was upset that the mom was ruining her daughters relationship with her father. it almost sounded as though she was trying to sabatage that bond. i felt bad that the little girl didnt realize how much it might have hurt her dad.
It’s hard to come up with a moral to this story. I find that the little girl is so young to understand anything much about her parents. The mother has no sight for the simple things in life and has killed all thought of Gaston and the father being human in her daughters eyes.
This story really digs way down deep. It makes you think about several things in life; happy I found it on Google!
this was a good story, but i failed a reading comperension test about it, some how i didn’t get the questions about it
While watching “Before Sunrise,” I suddenly remembered reading this short story in junior high. Thanks for posting it!
hey, i love this short story. my junior high comm. arts class did a reading comprehension on it. it really goes into deep and complex thinking. thanks for posting it online!
i had to read this short story for the english class that i am taking, it helped me so much because his style of writing is different that i have ever read. thanks for posting it.
when i read gaston i found that the storys symbolism is that gaston represents the divorced dad and he is all allone and uncomturble. the girl wants the squash him, in other words people dont really assoseate with divorced dads that much and when the man finished eating the peach and the girl says no one else would ddo that is like saying they would through him away or (divorce) gason is alone and doesnt know what to do and when she asks if gaston can stay in her house he says not happily just like him staying in her house and at the end the man feels like gaston on the white plate, theres sooooooooooooo much more exzmples of meaning to this story but those are a few.
I’m amazingly happy that I found this. Now I might be able to get an A on our test were we analyze a story we’ve never read before
You didn’t hear that :0
This is funny, i’m in Mr. Riecherts class too!! I’m going to ace that final.
haha wow what a coincidence…I’M in mr. reichert’s class too!!
I love this story
i hate the ending its too sad
I first read this story in my seventh grade English class years ago. It always stuck with me. I feel that it strikes a very realistic, disturbing, and telling chord about divorce and the nature of child raising, and living in general. A+ story.
I first read this in seventh grade English class years ago as well. I was looking through old classwork, and found a English Comp book with this story inside..I love it.
the book makes u think better views about relationship and it very heart taking at the end it was a very diffrent kind of story the mom has diffrent views of life if u read this book a second time youll see very many views of life.and the ways
THIS IS A GOOD AND SAD STORY TO READ AND DEEP IN SIDE I WANTED TO CRY BECAUSE IT WAS A TOUCHING STORY AND THE MOM SHOULD TREAT THE DAD BETTER AND LET HIM SEE HIS DAUGHTER ANY TIME HE WANT TO OR WHEN EVER SHE WANT TO SEE HER DAD
I as well found this story very complex, there’s soo many different relationships that you can apply to the divorce situation from gastons homeless cicumstance. I’m in 9th grade and im doing a paper on my biased opinion on whether or not the girl should grow to live in the mothers care or the fathers, i found that living in the fathers care would create an insightful lifestyle, while living with the mother would mature her to be ignorant and maybe unappreciative.
Lauren Driscoll
4/15/09
English 9/ Farmer
Gaston
In “Gaston” by William Saroyan, a daughter is staying with her father in effort to spend some bonding time with each other in his flat. It’s a hot summer day in Paris, and the father has bought a kilo of peaches for them to share. The girl notices a flawed peach among the others and the father chooses that one to slice open. When he does an insect is found at the core. The father, in attempt to start a conversation with his daughter names the bug Gaston. And their simple act of eating peaches turns into a thoughtful insight.
The daughter is used to the pampered lifestyle of her mother and has never really spent quality time with her father since the divorce. The mothers lifestyle is luxurious, and lavish. It’s my biased opinion that the girl should not live with her mother. Because although her mother can provide more advantages, and opportunities, I believe that if the girl grew up more often than not in the mothers care she would grow to be slightly pompous, and ignorant.
I think that even though the father is quirky, he also insightful and open-minded. I believe that if she lived frequently with her father she would learn the value of money, and mature to appreciate the things that, in her mothers care would be naught of importance and significance.
I feel that I can relate the situation of the insect to the circumstances of the father and daughter. For the reason that Gaston a simple bug without a home ends up being much more. I also deem that the insect is a visual of the daughter and father and that like Gaston, the possibility of a father daughter relationship is squashed.
I think that the daughter has been somewhat brainwashed by the mother and that maybe the mother is a little bit controlling and that might of have been the reason for the parents divorce. I was upset that the mother was ruining her daughters relationship with her father. It almost sounded as though she was trying to deliberately sabotage that bond. I felt bad that the girl wasn’t old enough to realize the pain that she was causing her father. I was thinking about this story, and found a lot of examples or possible examples to relate the peach and Gaston tothe divorce situation. This story is very complex.
i never understood why the father didnt hug his daughter.
yahh i dont get this story. whats the moral> orwhat isthe purpose of thistory. i dont understand it at all!
Great, this story makes me want to cry. Poor guy…
I remember reading this story in eighth grade. It really affected me at the time. I haven’t thought about it in ages. I should read more of Saroyan’s work.
Thanks for posting it.
great story…..great website
They don’t hug in the end because their possibility of a good relationship is squashed by the mother’s influence on the daughter. They are now like strangers again because Gaston had been squashed. Gaston was the only way the daughter and father could bond and now that Gaston is gone, their chance of a relationship is gone. Therefore, they are back were they started. The daughter doesn’t remember much about the father and doesn’t visit him often because of the mother’s luxorious lifestyle. Gaston is like her father. She is like her mother. She squashed Gaston and her mother squashed her father.
It’s all about metaphors and you really have to think it through. I don’t think it’s that hard, but it’s just something you really have to understand. The story isn’t about a bug that gets squashed. It really isn’t. I’m reading it right now in sixth grade.