“It’s March,” I said.
“My flowers will be out soon,” said my mother, who must have been holding the extra handheld in the kitchen.
The truth is I’d forgotten about my mother’s garden. One way I have never thought of her is as a gardener. I have thought of her as a geophysicist, which is what both she and my father were until their retirement. Having borne so little in-person witness to their retirement as I have, I guess I missed her point. Her point about new interests, which happened to be my interests, translated, humanely, from my sour theoretics into her totally wholesome daylight.
“What kind of flowers you got, Ma,” I said. This was already the longest conversation we’d had in I don’t know how long and it astonished me.
“Well,” I could see the little frown between her eyebrows, “daffodils, but I know that isn’t interesting.”
Heaven bless Kansas, I thought, what is interesting?
“They’re going to come up nicely,” said my father. “Nicely nicely Johnson.”
“I’m planting monkshood,” something at the depth of my knees rose up and said completely without my permission.
“You’re kidding,” my mother said, and I thought she was definitely right. “Ellen told me not yesterday that she wanted to plant a patch of monkshood for the color of them, you know, just a little blue here and there,” I looked up from the floor out the window into dilated purple Red Hook and thought Just a little blue here and there, “but she’s frightened of them, you know, because they say they’ve got such poison.”
“They do,” I said, gently, which felt to me like saying Happy Birthday Ma, You’re a Very Nice Lady. “But she can plant them for the color no problem,” I said, “no problem, tell her only not to eat any.”
“Eat any!” said my mother.
“She can call you,” my father said, “can’t she Nell? Ellen Bailey? I’ve already gone and told her you’re the expert in such things.”
I must be getting very, very old now. I took a long drink of coffee. It had come to this: my father’s recommending my services to his neighbor was without question the most gratifying thing that had ever happened to me in my life.
“You bet,” I said. I wondered if in my father’s mind’s eye I still had turquoise rubber bands on my braced buck teeth, or my signature jumbo forehead and girl-mullet and man-socks, and whether he had ever considered me beautiful. I wondered if he had ever seen me kissing a photograph of Kevin Bacon in the back of our barn, and I found myself hoping he had. I wondered if he had ever wished unattainable things for me, like prosperity and a sweetheart. All at once I couldn’t remember a single conversation we’d ever had. I could remember my mother’s red winter gloves.
“Always thought you were good at talking to folks,” said my father. “Always thought you’d grow up a talking doctor, you know, a psychiatrist? Psychologist.”
“What’s with everyone and the psychologists?” I said. I could still see Chardonnay’s mauve lipstick mouthing Melt your head.
“Well they’re reckoned to be good for your health,” said my father.
“I’ll talk to Ellen Bailey,” I said.
“That’s fine,” said my mother.
“Nicely nicely Johnson,” said my father, his expression of choice. I laughed and spilled coffee all over my arms. I could remember Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando and a woman whose name I never felt the need to know, on the cover of a VHS tape of Guys and Dolls, on top of their TV credenza.
“Oh and Nell, your cousin Richard is going in for his surgery, they can’t put it off any longer,” my mother said as I was trying to lick the coffee off my elbow. “Would you write to him? A card, a postcard,” she said. There, I thought, and despised myself, a regular elbow licker, for making Richard sick, for making him sick by assuming that somebody had to be sick. It could have just been her garden she was calling about. It couldn’t have just been her garden.
“Oh sure,” I said. “A card.”
“He’s all right,” said my father. It wasn’t true, for as much as he meant it.
“That’s fine,” my mother said.
After the call I went out and bought a rug. A small rug to put on the floor under the windows. I sat down there a long time and thought—we come from somewhere, we really do.
KALLAS
I told Joan’s father no coffee, none for me, I’d already had coffee at home thanks. He didn’t remember who I was and asked if I’d rather have tea.
“All right,” I said.
“Gray?”
“Lemon?”
“You got it.” He was an old man who put his entire enthusiasm into expressions like You got it, into events like a lemon tea. I could tell I was going to have a great time with him and that I would probably cry. When he came back with my cup I wanted to keep him at my end of the counter—five stools down an elderly woman ate scrambled eggs and didn’t require any immediate attention.
I said, “What’s the diner business like these days?” and he said, “Same as ever. Tenderness, succor, and humility.” My tea was still two hundred degrees hot and I sipped at it, razzle-dazzled. “Succor?” I couldn’t help repeating. “That’s what they call us,” he said.
“I’m a friend of your daughter’s,” I had to say then, because deception was neither tender nor humble. Succor’s definition hung about five inches outside my brain.
At that, Konstantinos Kallas opened the cheesecake vault and lifted me a slice of raspberry-topped, crumb-bottomed cheesecake so tall it could change a lightbulb.
“You weren’t so familiar for nothing.” He handed me a fork and a knife, because I’d be needing real tools.
“I have a very forgettable face.”
“Now how’s Joan.” He closed the vault and leaned on it. “She’s going through, wouldn’t you say, a hard time, a hard time,” he said.
“Hard, probably also right.”
“Well he loved her, Barry,” I couldn’t deny this, I ate my raspberry topping, “even if he was some kind of hot-air balloon.”
Joan you got your father’s bull’s-eye aim for what something is, what it’s made of, what it’s worth. But he is naturally gladder.
“It’s the school mistreated her,” he said, “they won’t say come and they won’t say go.”
“Only traffic guards say those things with any regularity.”
“I say go all the time,” said Konstantinos. Then he said it to a plate of browned home fries ready to leave the heat lamps. A waiter came and got them, took them away. “They owe her a word, one word,” he said. I said, “I agree.”
“Fact is she stopped trying when Rhea died. Her mother’s opinion mattered. Her father’s opinion is sour cream.” He shrugged his eyebrows in cozy, tired self-loathing.
“You have no idea whether she stopped trying,” I said too aggressively, his cheeks flinched into an uncomfortable half-smile, and I adjusted to, “Who could know?”
“I know, I know she cooled it down. Doing well didn’t mean so much anymore.”
I looked down at the extraordinary volume of cheesecake I’d managed to eat without even tasting it and realized I’d cooled it down. I’ve stopped trying. It’s like I’ve given up having anything other than a body. I wanted then to go out and run down the length of the stained East River, systematically fatiguing every muscle except the heart.
“What was Rhea like?”
“Smart.”
“Smart and?”
“Disappointed.”
Somewhere underground in Lawrence, Kansas, Jessica Barber’s daffodils prepared for their own birth. I had never disappointed her. I’d also never tried to do her proud. It’s because I’ve never tried that I’m bloodless. It’s because Rhea died that you’re pale.
“Rhea said academia’s for narcissists,” he wiped down the counter where a cherry had fallen, “and Barry’s
a spoiled shit. She wanted Joan to do something sincere, like cure Parkinson’s, and have a child.” I looked around the diner and its eaters—solitary, cooperative, dingy—a microcosm of a city driven less by capitalism than by our collective need for approval.
“Tell her I’m here anyway,” Konstantinos said, “she doesn’t speak to me so much anymore.”
Joan maybe we haven’t been dealing with love here maybe it’s been validation. Neither of us has ever felt approved of and so we approved of each other. That’s not whole, that’s not anything.
I handed him a twenty and he handed it back to me. More eyebrows.
“I just talked to my folks for the first time in several months,” I said, and concluded, needlessly, with, “We’re all assholes.”
He didn’t like the vulgarity so much and went to clear the lady’s half-eaten eggs. I left then because I hadn’t yet told him my name and he’d have no way to tattle on me. I wasn’t trying to get in touch with you. I was trying to touch the knob on a closed door. I’ll leave him alone now too. It wasn’t a great idea.
Joan your mother’s name means ease, or flow.
She wasn’t disappointed. Who could know?
SINGH
“She can hardly stand up,” Anjali pointed at Mishti’s stomach with a spatula, “I’ve never seen her like this.”
“Mom,” said Mishti.
“She hates sitting still, she used to bite this sofa with her baby teeth.”
“Oh?”
“Now she’s a human shih tzu,” Anjali said, and I pictured that mini-beast: Mishti’s face with dense fur between the eyes.
“Let me be,” Mishti said. “Let me be a shih tzu.”
Anjali looked at me and said, “Do something.”
In this post-Joan era nobody says that to me anymore so I found it kind of welcome. I sat in the bay Mishti’s fetal posture created, the empty spot where her middle curled away, and fed her a sprig of parsley.
I said, “Where does it hurt?”
She said, “Full-body embarrassed, exhausted, and sick of doing my best.” This burnout was overdue.
“Do your worst for a while,” I said.
She looked at me with panicked, genuine helplessness and said, “I can’t do anything,” which for Mishti was the equivalent of “I don’t exist.” She lifted her head off my leg a little and said, “I give up, I really do, Nell, I give it up, the work, the striving, the unrequited love, the gold stars, the failure, the bullshit, the hurt feelings, the only thing I feel is sick, I feel lazy in a . . . total way. Like to exert myself in any way would be to insult the very clear message I am getting from the world or whoever it is shouting: goodbye. Really, Nell, enough, it’s a great word: goodbye. Goodbye to this way of being. I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying way too hard, I’ve been fucking any guy I could get, to punish myself for wanting somebody I couldn’t have,” she said, “and now my body feels punished. Just let me disintegrate. I’ll do it quietly, you won’t even hear.”
Mishti closed her eyes. I wanted to tell her that she could have had Tom, even while he was ostensibly mine, because hearts are always up for grabs. But grabbing puts a dent in your dignity, and dignity is Mishti’s bag.
She rolled onto her side, her ear up toward my face, and I bent down to it and said, “Don’t you goodbye me.” She had sung me the overachiever’s aria and I didn’t know how to make her un-sing it. It had been histrionic but so was Mishti, and within the register of Mishti’s drama this outburst seemed to come from somewhere eerily deep in her. I felt her shoulder trembling against my thigh, as if she were crying, or freezing. If meeting requirements had always kept Mishti on course, and if she no longer felt compelled to meet them, I no longer knew what would check her energy, what would keep her, in all her cosmic flair, on our modest earthly radar. She covered her head with a pillow. Overachievers who stopped achieving were just . . . over? I looked up.
“I was hoping to ask you a chemical question,” I told Anjali but she was walking away. Mishti coiled tighter such that her knees pressed the side of my knees. She didn’t say, “Ask me,” which her non-dog-self would have said. I rested my hands on her knees and told her what I was thinking, which was, “The blessing over the haftorah is nice and melodious.”
Mishti didn’t pretend to need to respond. I looked up over the back of the sofa and through the transparent curtains which nobody had yet lifted. The G train ride from Carroll Gardens to Queens had been bumpy, as if it wanted to burp me. Under the updated LED subway lighting you can admire people in their least flattering state, which reveals where they’re incontestably mighty. I removed the pillow from over Mishti’s face and searched for her mightiness.
The stove gas hissed from the kitchen. Anjali hummed a distressed, exultant tune. Between notes she slapped the spatula against her palm. The house smelled like oil. Winter could be wintered this way, with spatulas, with knees, with smoke.
My deflated friend opened her eyes and finally wanted to talk about Tom. I hadn’t heard from him since Christmas, and could still picture the pull of his lips as he lifted his face from Joan’s and pronounced the single word “Barry.” I had nothing to tell her about where he’d gone, or where Joan had taken him. I suggested she seek him out herself. She told me that she’d never seen Tom hold anything as dear as he’d held Joan in the library that night, and she didn’t have the strength for a chase.
Without strength, Mishti’s love for Tom still carried within it a stubborn conviction that she was right, the way she might have been right about sodium’s neutron count. Right to love him, right that she loved him, right about her choice and her choice to stick to it. She loved Tom, and to love Tom was the right thing for her to do. I admired Mishti’s certainty about this love much more than I admired my own love of certainty.
To distract her from her longing I told her I’d kissed Joan. She asked when, where, I told her, she wasn’t for one second surprised and bore into me about the questions I now sat begging.
I don’t know, I’ve never done it before. It felt fine.
I want her the way I want anything I want. Wanted. She’s as gone as Tom.
Because of her grace that ignites rivers.
Because of her power that births herds of deer.
“Okay,” Mishti said. “You know that if she had left Barry and went off with you she’d be your whole life and you’d be her midlife crisis.”
This one hurt and I had nothing to say about it. Mishti looked at me without any fur between her eyes, as if she were completely complete. As if loving Tom were making her ill and entire. As if everything we want that isn’t love is a substitute for love, and once the original is there the substitutes feel hopelessly redundant. It was incredible to watch somebody who’d always craved success now suddenly and only crave romance.
“Which is fuller,” I whispered to Mishti, “the longing or the union?”
“How could I know?” she said. “I’ve never felt a union.”
“What if being with Tom was more boring than loving him?”
“What if you didn’t actually like going down on Joan?”
“What if you found kissing Tom as boring as I did?”
“What if Joan found kissing you as boring as Tom did?”
“What if you’re wrong about what you think you want?”
“What if you’re wrong about who you think you want?”
Anjali came out of the kitchen.
“How quickly can you bind a toxin to its own antidote,” I said without preface, because I didn’t want to miss my chance. “I have two giant castor beans planted in my apartment. Could I, chemically speaking, detoxify the ricin in the beans quickly enough to make the detoxification a legitimate remedy?”
“You’d need to leave time for a reaction,” Anjali said unambiguously, her daughter’s mother.
“Not just a pairing.”
“A molecule can’t attack itself, it would need to interact and then neutralize.”
“Detoxification as an action rather than a state.”
Mishti couldn’t tolerate this change in subject, she gripped my hand and said, “Would you love me if I were wrecked?” and then walked very weakly toward the bathroom.
“Do whatever you need to do in there,” Anjali told her. To me, she said, “Activated charcoal can bind the ricin once it’s been digested.”
“So you wouldn’t die?” Mishti asked, opening the bathroom door.
“No, my baby,” said Anjali.
I liked having a mother right there to know better. I liked the way Anjali stood in her own rectangle of window light absolutely unclouded and vivacious, holding an alphonso mango and answering us.
When Mishti closed the door behind her, Anjali sat on the couch as if she’d been standing for twenty-six years and said, “Love can be fought for but not insisted upon.”
Joan you bask of crocodiles you cloud of flies you skulk of foxes you smack of jellyfish you tiding of magpies you stud of mares you watch of nightingales you muster of peacocks you nye of pheasants you drift of quail you unkindness of ravens you knot of toads.
Mishti came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later, sobbing. She said you can cry over spilled milk when you are the spilled milk. I held her until she ran out of snot, tears, and breath. Anjali and I put her to bed. As I stood in the doorway, boots tied, coat zipped, Anjali rotated her two palms on either side of my ears and then brought them back to herself. It meant something benevolent in her language and I left with my temples buzzing. On the street I could no longer hear Mishti’s phlegmy coughing and the absence of it felt disastrous. A handful of rational citizens waited for the G train. Eventually it came, the doors opened, and I was not wrong to want you, Joan, my exaltation of larks.
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