Wallflowers (6 page)

“I would have voted bamboo.”

The elevator opened at the main floor. I followed her through the lobby into the courtyard, an urban “green space” designed with white-slab cement, birch mulch, a stand of honey locusts, and a fountain.

I said, “They described the lemon trees as
evergreen
.”

She said, “Well, I don’t suppose they lose leaves.”

We bought coffees from an espresso bar across the street and carried them back to the fountain—a rectangular pond like a wading pool, with a hunk of granite in the centre for the spout. In fact, I’d seen the fountain used as a wading pool a few times. And as a bird bath. And as a urinal. But such is public art.

I offered her a piece of my croissant—one stuffed with chocolate, so what I said was
“Pain au chocolat?”

She said, “No, thank you.”

I sipped my coffee.

She said, “I’m not supposed to have this, but you want to hear?” She outstretched her iPhone, the white wires of earbuds looped around her thumb.

I nodded.

“One of the survivors posted it on YouTube.”

She offered me an earbud and plugged the second into her own ear. We bowed over the phone. I could feel the friction of the space between our foreheads. There’s a point where technology mimics the past. iPads like slates, like the Flintstones, like chisels. The phone felt divinatory—as though we should be bent over a bowl of water.

She tapped the screen and opened the video. She pressed Play.

Rain blew into the camera, diagonal sheets of it into the aluminum and brown water. The camera jolted up and you could see people, their orange life vests, crowded onto the wing. The rear slides had extended. They floated uselessly, like slapstick rubber chickens. What you could hear was shouting. Passengers shouting to passengers in the water—
Grab here, grab my hand
. Passengers shouting to passengers to swim away—
Dive, before it goes
. Crew shouting to passengers to stop shouting. What you could hear was rain. Drumming into metal, into hard water, pinging off the life vests. And a continuous chime from the interior of the aircraft,
ding ding ding,
like your door’s open, a friendly reminder before you leave the parking lot. And there, in the corner of the frame, you could see her treading water. She had floated the farthest from the wreck, her hair starfished out around her shoulders. She drifted farther from the plane with every paddle. Her mouth opened and closed, but not in communication, her eyes unfocused, or focused on a distance. She was singing. You could see she was singing.

=

To fold a paper swan, your paper must be square. With sixteen newspapers and scissors from Reception, you can cut a lot of squares. I began with a lifestyles story on the 2002 Miss America. I pressed her face in half. Then I folded the same line onto the reverse side, white space for an AT&T ad. I followed a dotted diagram online and ignored all the video how-to’s. I don’t like to have to pause and rewind.

April found me at eight thirty, after she cycled back to work for her phone. I had moved to the floor at this point, to the strips of paper I snipped from the squares. I stored the completed swans in an emptied recycling box—fired them from where I sat, like paper planes. Paper swans. Nose first into the box, or onto the surrounding carpet.

When she saw me, she backed up, then stepped forward, then stood very still. “We used newspaper for my guinea pig,” she said. “You look like my guinea pig.”

“You have a guinea pig?”

“I left my phone.”

“Okay.”

“When I was twelve.” She folded her arms over her ribs. “Her name was Rosa.”

She helped me fold swans. We plugged in her iPhone. We listened to “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” on repeat. By midnight, we needed to borrow another recycling box from the lab across the hall. I noticed we both folded A3 so that Joy Vernon’s face pointed outward, from the tail of the swan, or the wings.

I think I can fit the swans into three oversized boxes from UPS. I’ll mail the Polaroid of my sister with the first parcel. In the photo, she hovers a blue gingham swan above her head. She balances the wings between her fingers like she might let go. Like she knows the swan will stay suspended when she drops her hands.

Worried Woman's Guide

 

 

They removed Bea's ovaries during that week in June where you can't walk a foot without killing a caterpillar. A week after the oophorectomy and she was rolling up her driveway in a chair rented from the Princeton hospital, her ex-husband's son, Huck, at the helm. He pushed the chair over inside-out caterpillars, and when he bisected one with a wheel, it curled at both ends. She had expected it to slice right through. Sun soaked through the turmeric-dyed cotton of her caftan and made her thighs look jaundiced, until the shade of a cottonwood tree up the drive reblanched her skin and backlit the bumps that puckered from her hair follicles. She tugged the hem over her knees. When she let go, the cloth shrugged up her thighs and flashed the white of her new briefs. She adjusted her hem, crushed the cotton into her knee, and hoped to Jove that her ex-husband's son failed to catch a glimpse from his eagle-eyed view at the handlebars.

She had awakened that morning to find her morphine button missing and a bronze stilts walker of a man hovering at the door, his neck bent to fit the frame like that giraffe from the Santa Barbara Zoo with a ninety-degree spine.

“Beatrice Cooper?” he said. He wore a snap-button shirt with a rattlesnake stitched above the breast pocket, and he hugged a felt hat under his armpit, his biceps squashing the crown into his ribs, so that she thought it might pop inside out.

“Bea,” she said.

“I'm Huck.” He stepped through the frame and straightened his neck. “Parker's son.” He had a hook nose and eyes like a cat. When she stared at him, he blinked a lot.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

She had never met him as a boy, though they had sent one or two photographs on Christmas cards. The divorce had been amicable enough for that.

“The hospital still had my dad as the second contact.” He dropped his eyes to his boots. “You know he moved to the coast ten years ago.”

“I know.”

Huck didn't reply right away. Bea could hear the wheels of a stretcher squeak past her door.

“Well, I work in Kelowna now,” he said after a few moments. “So he phoned me.”

“Where's my sister? Louise should have been called first.”

Huck withdrew the hat from his armpit and ironed his palm around the puggaree to re-inflate the crown.

“Your nephew broke his arm,” he said. “Something to do with a tether ball pole.” He laid the hat on his head and hitched his thumbs under his belt. “I'm to stay with you for a few days until she comes. Dad hired me to do some work.”

“Work?”

“Some landscaping.”

“Landscaping.”

“Some landscaping work.”

 

The morphine, turns out, gets cut on day seven. But not without a consolation bag of incontinence briefs, the
Worried Woman's Guide to a Happy Hysterectomy
, and a supersized bottle of codeine-coated acetaminophen. The nurse also suggested a panty girdle for post-operation support, but that wasn't included.

Huck roved the wheelchair across the lawn to the sunroom steps. During the summer of their second year of marriage, she and Parker painted the cottage walls robin's egg blue. Two tracts of granite wall cut through the centre of the lawn on either side of a footpath—the only relic of a stone cottage planned by coastal developers before they lost funding. Parker had promised to clear the walls to build a pond, but Bea liked the haphazardry. She lined them with sea-shells from the coast and pretty, dead things like dragonflies and snakeskins, and four springs ago she planted a honeysuckle vine to climb one of the sides.

Huck strolled from behind with her knapsack over his shoulder. His eyes darted between her and the stairs until he bent his knees and heaved the chair into the air. Bea yelped and lurched forward. He lowered her back to the grass. He stood there again.

“Can you make the steps?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. She pressed the hem of her caftan over her knees again, before she leaned for the stair banister. She found the ground with her sandals and heaved herself up. Huck guided her elbow. Something spasmed in her groin and she froze with a sandal on the first stair. She snatched her arm from Huck and pressed it against her chest as she lifted the other foot. He waited beside her as she attempted the next step.

“Keys are in the zipper pocket,” she said.

He shifted the sack so it straddled his chest, grabbed the keys from the pocket, and unlocked the door. Bea reached the top step and waddled into the room, pelvis first and bowlegged.

“Can I offer you a glass of iced tea?” she asked him.

He moved forward as if to beat her to the fridge, then paused and sank onto the loveseat. “That would be fine, ma'am, thank you.”

“You'll call me ‘Bea,'” she said from the next room. “‘Ma'am' ages a gal worse than cigarettes.”

 

They sipped iced tea and commented on the artichoke. Nine feet wide and six tall—biggest he'd seen outside of Castroville, Huck said. Then he complimented the tea—did she make it from scratch? She said she had better things to do, and how was his mother? His mother was living on the coast now and very fine. Yes, a nice house; no, without a pool (who needs one a block away from the Pacific). Sandy (not Sadie) was male and almost finished high school. He planned to become a veterinarian.

“You have kids?” he asked.

“Well, I hope they'd be here instead of you if I did.”

“You want any?”

“They didn't tell you the nature of my operation, did they?”

He shifted in his chair.

“Did you ever want any?”

The rainbow plastic strips of the seat sweated under her thighs.

“At one point maybe,” she said.

Parker had volunteered in the maternity ward during his final year of med school, and Bea used to drop him off. Most mornings she had nowhere to be, so she would walk him to the delivery room doors, kiss him brassily, then meander back through the corridors. She often paused at the nursery. The pastel bundles wriggled in their beds and the nurses fed them or changed diapers, their motions always so swift with practised duty.

Bea arched her spine to stretch a crick in her neck and the flesh of her shoulders squeaked against the back of the sun chair.

“I'm going to roast Louise like a root vegetable,” she said. She inhaled the warm plastic air. “So. What is it you do when you're not landscaping?”

He clasped the brim of his hat between his finger and thumb and rotated it left across his brow. “I band hummingbirds.”

 

With her vision blurred the sunflowers on the drapes melted with those in the garden, except she didn't have sunflowers in her garden so they just melted. She uncrossed her eyes. The drapes were hideous, but they added colour to the vegetables she could see through the window. She mostly planted vegetables, because if you can't eat the produce, why get your hands dirty, except to add colour, but then, why hang drapes? She might plant sunflowers and retire the curtain, but tall crops made her feel short, and at forty-eight she was only getting shorter.

The surgeon had kick-started her menopause, the final milestone, and now all she could do was wait. Wait for her spine to sickle, her breasts to droop, until it was time to remove those too. It ran in the family. Her future would be breastless and bloodless—pre-pubescent, post-woman. That seemed to be how the chips fell.

The artichokes should have been picked days ago. Jumbo globes the colour of lizard bellies bobbed off the stalks like street lamps, the bracts open on those directly facing the sun. The flesh would be stringier than floss if she didn't pick them by tomorrow. Time passes like molasses when you're bedridden. She used to hang a flower box out her window, but after a couple weeks the daffodils succumbed to her I'll-let-it-rain philosophy. Now her sill was bare save a line of nine avocado pits. To plant an avocado tree, she always said, but really she delighted in their smoothness. A perfect sphere to cup in your palms as a child might her largest marble. In the sun they'd all shrivelled too.

She fell asleep after the iced tea and stayed asleep minus two hobbles to the bathroom. She'd been awake now for an hour and twenty-three minutes and felt okay—pain subdued thanks to the codeine-coated acetaminophen, of which she'd taken three. Maybe a little weak on her feet, head in the clouds, but from her bed the sky looked cloudless, so where did that leave her head? She wanted to get the shears. She could hear Huck in the kitchen, landscaping what smelled like buttermilk pancakes. She climbed out of bed and swallowed a fourth painkiller. Then she tiptoed or floated to the garden shed.