Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  The Dark Lake

  I’M SITTING AT MY DESK, writing in a ledger. Aromatic geranium, anise hyssop, flowering amaranth. The moon is blue. I keep writing poetry in the margins of the ledger. Of course, the order sounds like poetry, too. Perennial geranium, hyssop, love-lies-bleeding; the moon is blue, its soft blue night time shadows; night sounds, cat prints, whispering into this office like stringed instruments, cellos, moon shadows. Everyone is sleeping and sometimes I can almost hear the sounds of their breathing through the walls. Katya will have her arm flung over her head, her head turned sideways, facing the damp curling tendrils of her armpit hair. At night her skin releases its scent, like a flower. Katya’s flowery vapour fills the room. She likes her smell, too. Her white sleeveless nightgown is covered with small flowers.

  I want tea. Katya is not awake to make it for me. I long for her nurturing but I’ll have to make it myself. My name is Jim. I am in love. But not with Katya. I have been in love with Katya before and will be again, but just at this moment, it’s the dark swamp song of sex I want from her. I don’t wake her; I know she went to bed tired.

  Plums and tea. I go down the stairs into the dark ticking kitchen, plug in the kettle. I bring my ledgers down with me, to write while I wait for it to boil. It’s hot, even at night, in July. In the daytime the bay glisters turquoise. Snake Station. Places here there’s still nothing but rattlesnakes and poison ivy.

  I write. The ledger is full of blue lines, blue lines that become soft and blurred when wet. I know this because if I leaf back several years, there are places where my tears have fallen and stained the page. Those are the places where I have written letters to Katya in the margins. “Plump beloved, when will you come?” When I’d finished my weeping I blew smoke rings to amuse her. They were only tears, after all. In the morning there was still an order to fill out, to get ready for shipping, although it’s been years that I like to work at night. Other places the blue lines are blurred from the sweat splashing down off my forehead, because it was so hot, like today. I think of Katya, upstairs asleep, curtained in flesh and flowery fabric, her long hair tumbled across the pillow. She fascinates me because she is so fat. All that flowered flesh contains secrets, coded in another language. Sometimes, when we are making love, or even when she is just sleeping beside me, her body imparts one of its secrets, almost in spite of itself. Sometimes the flood of orgasm or the pull of a dream softens the edges of her skin so that the secrets slide out like puddles. Out of an arm, a thigh or a knee. And a secret slips into me, my contours softened also from love or dreaming. Because it is only through the skin that these secrets can come. It is nothing you can read in a book, or, say, a seed catalogue. Even if they’d print it, which they probably wouldn’t, it couldn’t be written. It is an alphabet that only lodges in the flesh.

  sss

  The dark lake. It is summer and everything smells. It smells of strawberries and flowers and hay and pollen and sand and rocks and rattlesnakes. I want to be happy. I want a bath. I want the house to be clean, which it never is, unless I do it myself, at two in the morning, before I settle down with my plums and tea, my ledgers and packing slips. After filling my orders I go down to the dark lake and walk around it. Spring fed, it’s not much more than a pond really, cut off from the bay proper by a densely wooded hollow. It takes maybe ten minutes to go all the way around. A rocky basin, cut out by a glacier a million years ago. I sit on my rock, looking into the lake. A dragonfly comes and settles on the rim of my coffee mug. I look in and see my face, framed by the mug’s rim, decorated by spun gold insect wings. Another face greets me from the lake. The face of a benevolent water monster; I always see her in my mind’s eye when I’m here, looking quite inappropriately cartoony and Disneyesque. I feel her presence, always sense she wants to speak to me, but I’m still afraid. I lie on the rock and feel it heat up, feel how the sun warms my back even when I’m face to the heavens on stone. Today I will not swim either, although she calls, and I am almost in love.

  sss

  “Plump beloved, when will you come?” Katya reads aloud from my ledger, smiling. Both Katya and my accountant are always entertained by my daydreams, my inability to leave a ledger crisp with numbers, to always muddle it with poetry in the margins, love letters to my wife. He’s my therapist, too; he better be, the amount he gets paid. Katya is forty now, tells me she has already been healed of everything that made her small and pithy and outspoken. She reads my notebook, smoking. Now she wears huge flowered tent dresses, reads, tends our children, plays baseball, grows her hair long and extremely curly, and makes weather. She makes the weather for my business, although she doesn’t have to do it too often, just once or twice a year. She makes a cloudburst in the summer, when it hasn’t rained for three weeks. I could just run the hoses, but I’m a miser for my electricity bill, and besides, I think it’s so cool to have a weather-making wife. More importantly than rain in July, she can put off the first killing frost by a day or two so I have time to mulch the delicate perennials or bring them in. She has her store, which I rarely go to; she too: it’s only open Thursday and Saturday afternoons, and can only be approached by boat. It’s on a river, the same river, Katya says, where she used to eat blue crab with her mother and uncle, childhood birthdays. The river moves through her life, a page at a time. It is always there. To Katya it is not the bay that is important, or the lake, but the river. At the store she plays with the children, and arranges her merchandise. She sells vortices, through which one may enter other worlds at will. No one knows this except Katya and the children and me. I used to think it was a crafts store, full of hand-painted cushion covers, grapevine wreaths, dried flowers, potpourri. Katya’s body whispered the truth in a dream: each wreath is a threshold; each person who buys one opens a door to their own possibilities. My wife drives to IGA for steaks and to Stedman’s and Bi-Way for an endless stream of things the children need: sunscreen, new sand shovels, ointment for cuts and bruises, hats, sneakers, sandals, UFO shorts, swimming pools, Band-Aids. I stay home and nap on the shield rocks by the lake.

  sss

  I sit at the handmade table, writing in the half-light, cherishing the quiet before my family gets up. “Putting food by,” I write, quoting the title of a book, thinking of the pears in the orchard behind the house, of how, this year, I really do want to make chutney out of them.

  “Space shorts from Bi-Way,” I write for my son Sam. They had space shorts in the Bi-Way flyer yesterday, covered with fluorescent planets and space ships and things, three bucks, size two to six-X. My son should have those; size six-X for him. Because I work in these very early morning hours it sometimes seems my whole family is something I dreamed. I’m always sleeping when they are awake. It’s as though they are a glossy magazine someone has left on the kitchen table, through which I look longingly at photographs of a plump beautiful wife in flowered dresses, and chubby gleaming children, stubbornly radiant with happiness and health. Yet, by the time they are up I am fast asleep again, exhausted by my nocturnal prognostications, my order filling, my lists, my walks, sometimes accompanied by the cat, to the dark lake. When I get up again, having catnapped, at noon or at one, there is a cheerful note and an absent pickup truck. “Good Idea! Gone to town to get shorts. See you soon. Love, Katya, Sam, Sela.” Sam has written his name himself, a child’s scrawl.

  I’d like to spend more time with them, but it doesn’t work. I wake like clockwork at two each morning, like a pregnant woman with insomnia, regardless of sleeping pills, alcohol, valerian. I’ve tried them all. I’ve given up, now use the time to work, to walk to the lake at dawn or before. In the afternoon, after I’ve slept and they are gone, I take the shipments to the post office. I make more lists. I wonder. We meet for dinner.

  Creeping thyme, I write. Phlox subulata, michaelmas daisies. I pack the plants carefully. Afterwards I throw the I-Ching. It is an old habit, from when I was young. Chen Tui, the marrying maiden.

  Thunder over t
he lake, indeed.

  lavender

  echinacea (purple coneflower)

  comfrey

  creeping thyme

  bergamot

  bee balm

  The last two of which are almost the same thing, the first having a greater medicinal value, the second a floral one. My business is in perennial flowers and herbs, plants and seeds. I experiment with the placing of plants, which goes beside which, according to the homeopathic formulas of Rudolph Steiner. Plants and humus, desire and energy. I mutter through the rose beds at four in the morning, pushing aside straw mulch with my feet to see where the new asparagus is coming up. Mutter mutter mutter: the flower and herb beds, all shimmering pale blue and silver in the ghost light. Sometimes they all seem to rise up and speak to me at once. But what do they say? Simple things, most of the time. “Move me,” the veronica says. “Where would you like to go?” “Beside the foxglove.” And so I do. “Swim with your monster,” the dark opal basil says, but I am afraid. I don’t think I’m crazy to talk to my plants and hear them talk back, but I am afraid to swim with my monster, afraid the change she might demand would be too real.

  sss

  Shambling through the shrubbery, poking our noses into our charges: a little tear here, a sniff, a chew, a pulled weed. Although many of the weeds are left. Being herbs, or flowers. Motherwort, feverfew, cinquefoil, catnip, some of the wild asters and daisies. Compositae. We take out some of the clover and alfalfa, because there is so much of it, and leave some in, because it is a nitrogen binder, and because we like the flowers. The red clover flowers, especially, are said to be a cancer preventative when taken in tea. I pull the ragweed. The pigweed and purslane I weed selectively. The rest I take home to make a salad for dinner.

  sss

  Sometimes it seems as though I am always dreaming. And yet, everything seems to get done around me, miraculously. Perhaps I do it myself, sleepwalking. As though that night waking time for me takes place in an alternate temporal stream, one that doesn’t belong to my other life, the life I share. My cheerful domesticity, my dinners with neighbours and the friends they bring, hoping to share in our always pleasantly surprising overflow of joy. Time keeps doing funny things around me, as though I have two selves, and they slip in and out of each other, leaving imprints. I sit on the one sandy bank of the lake for hours; I look at fossilized shells; I can’t seem to remember ever doing anything else, staring at the fossils of snails, fossiled spirals. Everything in my life is like double exposure photographs.

  The pickup truck starts up, and leaves down the driveway.

  sss

  Someday I will go with them, to where they go every day. To Stedman’s, to IGA, to Katya’s store. But today I take off my socks and shoes—red $12.99 high-tops Katya bought me at Stedman’s—my shorts and T-shirt. Today I dive into the cold spring water, come face to face with that other being who lives there, the horned one whose face I’ve only seen reflected in my coffee mug. She knows I am not in love with my young wife, but with her. Holds that secret for me, tames it. “Rest your heart,” she says, speaking soft and clear in my mind, “it will be again.”

  sss

  Pictures, words. When I wake at two that morning, I don’t go downstairs to endlessly peer into the mirror of my journals, with the excuse of working, but open my cells to my sleeping wife, listen to her with my body’s tiny receivers, the ears of the skin, the way Monsty taught me.

  Then, from Katya’s flesh into mine comes the feeling of eating green ice cream, on a hot dusty day, a million years ago, her feet in plastic thongs and her thighs damp inside her shorts. She sits on a fence, watching men, kicking her legs. Already she feels superior to them. Already she knows she can do what she wants. She chews gum. She kicks her legs. She walks along the railroad tracks, putting down pennies to be flattened by the train as it roars past, so close her hair feels like it is being blown off, so loud her ears hear it for a long time afterwards. Afterwards the pennies are too hot to touch. She goes down the street, to where her uncle has his metal shop in the back of a garage facing an alleyway, and watches in mute fascination as he makes little holes in her collection of flattened coins. She makes earrings and a necklace, and wears them until they get too heavy. She isn’t afraid of the drill press. She knows that very soon, maybe next year, maybe even this year, if she is very serious and very good, he will let her use it. She is eleven; in two days she will be twelve.

  It is always hot summer when her year turns. It makes her feel special. It is always hot afternoon when everything is still and she walks down the street, her flip-flops going slimy from the sweat, even the wildest dogs lounging in doorways or under cars, their tongues hanging out. She walks to the corner store for more gum, the change jangling in her pocket. Later this afternoon they will go out for dinner, Katya and her mum, who is called Estelle, and her uncle, who is called Randolph, to the place on the river, and Katya will eat crab. There will be a big tank in the window, with crabs swimming around in it. There will be sea vegetables growing from the mire on the bottom; the owner’s one concession aside from the tank’s relative roominess to the comfort of the crabs.

  Randolph gets the creeps from the crabs, but he doesn’t say anything. He loves Katya too much, and, as always, admires her feistiness, her bravery. Estelle is wearing a white suit; she looks slim and pure, her brown hair has waves in it. Katya is wearing a clean T-shirt over her shorts and not the green velvet dress which was offered to her by her mother. Her hair is cut in bangs and quite short but not too short, so that it curls under just above her shoulders. Her brown legs under the table are wearing not flip-flops but new white sandals. Randolph: I am not sure whether he, too, is wearing a white linen dinner jacket (where would he get such a thing?) or his overalls over a purple T-shirt, his safety goggles up on his head, where he has forgotten to take them off. He watches Katya with an intense interest. I inject myself into his interest: it is awed, admiring, completely absorbed. Estelle watches, too. She is cool, a little distant; she sips her drink, which tastes faintly of lime Kool-Aid. She is in love with Randolph.

  Their window overlooks the river. The window is huge, made of plate glass. You can look straight down and see the river moving; it gives you a funny sensation, as though you are floating, or on a ship, for the restaurant is built on a bridge, exactly on the river. They say it is bad geomancy to live right on the river, and this accounts for the owner’s edginess; it is his electromagnetic currents being perpetually out of balance from the amount of time he spends at his business. When you look at him his image slips out of itself, but just as you go to rub your eyes to make sure you aren’t seeing things it slips back in.

  “Thank God he doesn’t sleep here,” Estelle says, smoothing her skirt, even though she is sitting down and it’s hidden under the tablecloth. I cannot get a clear picture of Estelle; I cannot tell whether or not I like her. I know that Randolph (Katya’s father is dead) is essential to Katya’s survival, with his pockets full of change, his dogs, and his extremely loud, dirty machines. Estelle plays the other side: her house is cool and clean and crisp; she likes things nice, she plays music in the afternoons. There are always flowers in the window; the sun shines through the vase, and the water, filled with yellow pollen, looks like liquid gold. Katya loves her mother fiercely, but she stays a little bit distant, or, perhaps, merely respects the distance her mother has created with her white curtains, white couch and white rug, and opera music. Because of her mother’s sadness. Katya is afraid she knows what her mother is sad about, beyond simple loneliness. Randolph is safer. Randolph is necessary. Randolph offers freedom, dirt, noise, a clear cheerful gruff surface. The uncomplicated superficiality of men: all the messier emotions that turn into complicated neuroses in all the women she knows, absorbed, subsumed, transformed by the noisy, friendly machines the men work with. Men are better. Men are safer. Usually, Katya sides with the men. And yet, if she was to choose one of them, if she
had to choose one, Randolph or Estelle, to raise her for the rest of her childhood, she would choose Estelle. With Estelle she sits at the kitchen table at the back of the house, looking out at the garden. Estelle makes her peanut butter and cucumber sandwiches, and lime Kool-Aid. “What did you do today?” asks Estelle. “Was it fun? How is your uncle? He cut me some roses? How nice.” Estelle puts the roses in a vase. They are climbers, cut from the bush. Randolph lives in the old house, the Summers’ family house, surrounded by old climbing roses. He is Estelle’s brother. Katya and Estelle live in a smaller, newer house on the outskirts of town; there is light yellow wallpaper with tiny butterfly prints all over it. Estelle teaches piano. Katya always tries to be out of the house for the piano lessons, in the afternoons.

  They are raising her together, by unspoken agreement. In winter she goes to school but work doesn’t stop in the summertime and so, all summer long, during her mother’s lessons, Katya goes to Randolph’s.

  sss

  The air in the bedroom glows faintly with illuminated dust; cigarette smoke, pollen, the disintegrated wings of moths, particles of skin. Onto this screen Katya’s body projects its secrets, a hologram of emotion. Because of Monsty I am able to insert myself into the feelings of any of the people in the story: into Katya’s child-self, into Randolph, even into the happy river that meanders below their feet, day in and day out, page after page.

  Estelle is more opaque; the distance she places between herself and the world since her husband died has made her more difficult to read. Or else it’s my own temerity. I know beneath her cream linen jacket she harbours pain; the pain of her loss, the pain of being in love with her brother. Katya knew this, even as a child; I can suddenly feel it. Yet she never told me, never shared this, and what other painful secrets? Withholding her trust, feeling she always had to show me only her flowers. She knew I withheld part of my love. I want to give her that part now, the part always held in reserve. It is Monsty who showed me the way. The invisible one, always felt with the wisdom of the body.