The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns

by Margaret Dilloway

  She sits in the hard plastic chair next to mine. “I was walking by and saw you weren’t busy.” She looks pointedly at the computer screen. “I just had a great idea while I was drawing up plans for next semester.”

  Teachers really aren’t supposed to visit with each other like this. I can see why. All the kids are interested in us, not in their projects. “We can talk at lunch, Dara. Not in front of the kids.”

  She ignores this. “What if we do a joint project? Biology and art.”

  “My students can’t draw. That’s why they’re in biology.” I wink at the watching students.

  She blinks, and I notice how much mascara she has on, and how heavy her eyeliner is. It’s run into the small creases beneath her eye. “First of all, plenty of biologists can draw. Plenty of artists can do biology. Who do you think illustrates anatomy textbooks?”

  “All right. I was just joking.”

  “It didn’t sound like a joke.” She crosses her arms. “Darn it, Gal, this is a good idea. Don’t shoot it down.”

  I realize what I said wasn’t just a joke, and if I think it was, I’m kidding myself.

  I open my mouth to apologize, to explain myself. The kidney. It’s always the kidney. I shouldn’t use my illness as an excuse for anything anymore. I should know how to control my mood swings. This lack of water might be drying out my brain. My eyes are dry and I rub them behind my glasses.

  I had snapped at Dara the weekend before last, arguing over where to sit in the movie theater for a showing of Black Swan. She said middle. I said I didn’t even want to see the movie in the first place, therefore we should sit on the aisle like I wanted. I had won. I usually did. That didn’t mean I was correct, though.

  Dara continues. “The project’s conceptual. They don’t need to know how to draw. The art students don’t need to know biology. Though they probably do.” She points to the students. “I see ten students in here who are in my art class.”

  At this my irritation returns and increases, especially because now everyone has abandoned their work, openly staring to see what will happen. Dara is a popular teacher. The cool teacher who lets them eat snacks during class and go outside to draw. I am the mean one who makes them think and doesn’t accept extra credit. “That explains a lot about their scholarship.”

  Her neck flushes red and blotchy and I know I’ve crossed the line. Cheap shot, Gal. She stands.

  I feel terrible. “Dara.”

  “Forget it.” She leaves, the lining of her wool skirt making a scratching noise.

  All the students are watching now, whispering, laughing. A few are shocked at what I said. Staring at me. These kids are wolves. Any sign of weakness and they descend.

  My nonworking fistula for dialysis, a piece of plastic tubing implanted in my inner right arm, itches painfully. I want to rip it out of my flesh. This foreign object, battering me. I try to speak, but my voice has a frog, so I take a tiny sip out of my daily water allotment. The students, these children whose greatest daily obstacle has been which type of sugary cereal to choose for breakfast, snicker. It’s an overreaction, but I feel like overturning a table suddenly. “Back to work, all of you!” The sound of my voice echoes in this room, bare of softness, and hurts my eardrums. Thankfully, they all bow their heads and leave me alone.

  • • •

  HOME. A SIMPLE DINNER of a fried-up hamburger, made myself to be low-sodium. Tonight I have dialysis. My bag is already ready with its extra toothbrush and fuzzy slippers; my teaching bag, with ungraded papers, sits on top. I always keep the hospital bag packed, like a perpetually pregnant housewife.

  I walk my outdoor rose garden, wandering in and out of the paths, pulling a red metal child’s wagon behind me to throw in the detritus. I have my rose gardening gloves on and carry my shears, snipping at random tendrils threatening my feet. Brad has taken care of most of the strays. This is one of his jobs. Easy enough. I itch to be in the greenhouse, tending to the rose for the contest, but at this point there’s nothing I can do except wait for its bud to open in bloom later this month, to see what I’ve got. It’s like waiting for a chick to hatch.

  Near an American Beauty, that pure red rose, a shoot pushes through the organic mulch. I can’t tell if it’s rose or weed at the moment. It’s just a green shoot. If it’s a rose, it’s not one I planted, but some unwanted accident that will suck up my real rose’s nutrients, choking the roots of the beauty. Which is pretty much the definition of a weed. I could pull it out and start it in its own pot, but who has the time? Heck, if I did that for every possible rose, I would have no more pots left. I yank it out and throw it into the wagon pile and continue on.

  • • •

  I BRING MY photo album of roses to dialysis and sit looking through the photos in the waiting room. Here are all the roses of the past ten years, since I got really serious about my hobbies. The Hulthemias stretch back about six years, when I first discovered them.

  One of my favorites is a pink one with a nearly maroon-colored blotch. It’s my earliest cross. I called it G21. Nothing particularly special, no fragrance. It was simply the first Hulthemia I had created.

  “Those are some roses.”

  I stiffen. Walters is peering over my shoulder, so close I feel his breath on my scalp. I shut the album abruptly.

  “I meant that in a nice way, you know.” He ambles away, giving me a wink on his way out.

  “Gal,” I hear my name called.

  On my way to my room, I pass Walters’s, that rogue who shouldn’t even be on the list. He’s chatting up Nurse Gwen, as usual. What is it about him that these women adore? I don’t see it. He gives me a dapper little wave, and I fight the urge to flip him off with two middle fingers.

  Into the bed I go. Nurse Gwen slides the needle into the plastic graft inside my leg. When my arm shunt got permanently jammed, they switched to the leg, and when that got clogged, they used my jugular for a while. One tube into the machine, one tube out of the machine with the clean blood. It sounds horrific to have a needle jammed into your neck, but after all the years of pricking it’s not so bad. The tissue inside, I’m sure, is roughened and scarred.

  “You comfortable?” she asks. She reminds me of Flo from Mel’s Diner, all brassy blond and pink-lipsticked. Her hands smell of cigarettes and baby powder.

  I give her a thumbs-up instead of speaking. She makes the room dark.

  These hospital beds are as familiar and comfortable to me as my own. The medicinal scent of the sheets, their rough texture, the plastic bars at the sides. I haven’t added it all up, but I’ve probably spent almost as much time in these beds.

  Once, when she was ten, my sister, Becky, fell out of a tree and hit her head. It knocked her out. She awoke in a hospital room. My pediatrician, seeing the name “Garner” appear in the roster, rushed over. For once, it was a different Garner. The doctor asked if she knew where she was. “I’m in Gal’s bed,” she said.

  The pediatrician was sure Becky had a brain injury, until my mother had a realization. “She thinks the hospital is Gal’s bed, because Gal’s always here.”

  When my mother tells the story, Becky ignores the point. “So the doctor was relieved it wasn’t Gal? Just me?”

  “Gal’s been through a lot more than you,” my mother replies. A well-worn explanation.

  In the dialysis room, the sound of my artificial organ lulls me to sleep. I don’t even wake up when the blood pressure cuff beeps on anymore.

  I awake feeling more or less like the old Gal, which is to say, moderately okay. A normal person like Dara would probably feel like she had the flu, but this is my new normal.

  When I get back home, fog covers the rose garden. I haven’t looked at the weather report to see if it will clear. I unlock the door. The house air is stale and unpleasant, so I open the kitchen window. The sink holds the dirty dishes fro
m my dinner last night. I should have put them into the dishwasher and wish, out of nowhere, that there was someone to do it for me. I boot up my computer and make myself a cup of tea. In the yard next door, Old Mrs. Allen is out there watering again, though clearly she watered plenty yesterday. “You’re gonna kill your precious lawn,” I say. She’s in a black lacy robe with a thick flannel nightgown peeking out from underneath. I step back before she notices me.

  I take a sip of my tea. My mother sent it, though it’s central California, not outer Siberia. Mom reads up on herbal remedies and sends me crates of vitamins and supplements that have no scientific research to back them up. I used to tell her it was a waste of money, but now I set the boxes in the teachers’ lounge and write “Free” on them. They’re always gone by noon. No one ever thanks me.

  At my desk, my MacBook, purchased at a sizable discount through the school, tells me I have a new e-mail. My heart pounds a little bit harder. It’s probably only an alert from the online rose forum I belong to, telling me I have a new message on my Hulthemia discussion thread, but I’m hoping it’s something else. I feel my face cracking into a broad smile, so big and out of the ordinary that it almost hurts. It is. It’s Byron.

  Byron Madaffer, known in the rose breeding circles as Lord Byron. He lives in Texas, on a many-acre ranch with its own airport. His people were cattle ranchers, but also real estate investors. Now Byron’s so wealthy, he doesn’t have to bother with cattle. He never has to bother with anything he doesn’t feel like bothering with. Instead, he grows roses.

  He has already won several Queens of Show, sending rose companies into frenzies to acquire his roses and test them out. The most successful is a pale pink rose with orange tips, called Byron’s Flame. It’s a delicious-smelling tea rose with long stems. If you’ve ever gotten a dozen roses for Valentine’s Day, you’ll notice that they hardly ever smell good, or like anything at all. They might as well be silk. Not Byron’s.

  It has not, of course, escaped my attention that Byron, with his assistants, has resources I do not. But he has made me believe I, too, can achieve what he has.

  I met him at my first big rose show in Texas six years ago. That year, I competed in an amateur category with what I thought would be a winner: a pink hybrid tea rose with white stripes. I called it Peppermint Candy. The previous year, this rose had won a blue ribbon (though not Queen of Show) at the local rose society show. At the time, I thought I was hot stuff, sure to win every competition I entered. I’d saved up my money to travel to this larger competition. I called a dialysis center to make sure I could attend one day during my three-day trip. Then my little rose and I went to the ballroom at a Hyatt in Dallas and waited for the competition.

  Everyone talked to each other and not to me. Nor did I try to talk. I simply sat at my designated table, the number 24 taped to my shirt, and waited for the judges to come around.

  Of course, what I didn’t know was that dozens of different takes on my rose already existed, most of them a thousand times more refined than mine.

  One of the judges took it upon himself to inform me of this fact, his casual cruelty made all the worse by his lack of eye contact and his turning away. “You know there’s already a rose with this name?” he said. “Come back when you’re ready to compete.”

  If I had belonged to a rose club, like most rose breeders, chances are I would have known. Someone would have pointed it out.

  But the truth is, I don’t belong to any rose clubs because I don’t want anyone telling me I’m not good enough. The questions I ask in the online rose forum are general; I don’t show anyone photos of my flowers. I don’t want to hear any negative comments. Besides, I’m a loner with already limited time. At that moment, however, I saw the drawbacks of this choice, and hunched down, wishing the floor would open and swallow me.

  Byron, almost hidden behind his big rose display a mere two tables down, stood and stared after the judge. I didn’t know who Byron was before that day, but everyone talked about him during the show. His cold reputation preceded him like a nor’easter.

  He strode over to me, his blue eyes bright like two flying lights coming at me. The color was all I saw. People did the Red Sea thing to let him through. He stood straighter than anyone I had ever seen. He was James Bond. Only handsomer.

  He stood in front of my table. “I heard.” He sounded more like he was from England than from Texas.

  “You want to get your licks in, too?” I did not bother to stand, playing with the yellow ribbon I’d tied around my poor plastic rose pot. It looked limp and pitiful compared to the giant bows everyone else used.

  “I’ve been looking at your rose all day.” His blond eyebrows raised into two pyramids. “The petals are ragged. Is this intentional?”

  “I wanted it to be frilly.” I glanced up at him. “I like frills.”

  He was silent, turning the rose around. He sniffed it. “Creative.”

  I heard the grudging praise in his voice. His smile, when he turned it on, was kind. “Since you appear to be finished for the day, why don’t you come to my table? We can talk shop.”

  At that, he picked up my rose and strode back to his table, me following behind in his wake, still feeling more lackey than queen.

  He pointed to a woman with tiny feet and disproportionately large hips teetering toward us. She looked as though she had been beautiful once, her blond hair artificially shiny, but her jaw was beginning to jowl. She had on a bit too much makeup, the foundation several shades lighter than her neck, which made her look like a circus clown. I wondered if Byron had the same internal judgments going on. “This judge is Ms. Lansing. Theoretically married, insists on being called Miz. Husband and wedding ring never seen. She is always nicer to the men than to women.” He inhaled. “Sorry fact of life.”

  I looked around the hall at the numerous men. More men than women take on this hobby. Lots of scientists and engineers. You have to have a certain kind of personality, and patience for the long-term results. “So she spends a lot of time being nice.” I suspected she was especially nice to Byron and his broad shoulders. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because you need to know.”

  Ms. Lansing arrived at our table with a brief disapproving smile directed at me, her face melting as she shook Byron’s hand. “My goodness, Byron, your roses are looking well. And so are you, I might add.” A creamy chuckle sounded at the back of her throat.

  “Not as well as you. A true Texas rose.” Byron’s formal inflections softened to a Southern drawl. I winced at how thick he was laying it on, but Ms. Lansing blushed. She had it bad for him. I couldn’t stifle a laugh, which made her look toward me. “This is Gal,” Byron said, with a sweep of his arm.

  “New assistant?” Her eyes were back on him. Of course. I was as much competition for a man as an armchair was.

  “New competitor. Watch out for her.” He stepped back with a little nod as she walked on, his accent changing back. “Schmoozing with judges. Most exhausting part of the day.”

  After we spent the afternoon discussing my Hulthemia lines, how I postulated I would achieve the perfect Hulthemia and which crosses would be ideal, Byron turned to me. “You’re very intuitive.”

  I blushed from my feet to my scalp. Compliments are rare.

  His assistants packed up his roses. He shook my hand and slipped his card into my palm, magicianlike. “Please keep in contact.”

  I expected he was merely being polite. But he e-mailed me first, finding my contact information on the Internet. There aren’t too many people named Galilee.

  Now we are e-mail buddies, asking questions of each other, sharing information about our roses. Byron, in another state, did not require regular meetings and socialization of me. He is the one networking contact in the world of roses I’ve met in person.

  He sends me seed specimens of interest, “to g
row my collection.” I reciprocate. Though I of course always keep my best roses secret, as I am sure he keeps his.

  His advice about the judges had paid off. At the next show I attended, I knew to compliment Ms. Lansing on her hideous teal suit. While I didn’t win that show, she invited me to listen to a special discussion panel of rose breeders for free.

  I open Byron’s e-mail. Perhaps he’s offering me a job at his ranch, finally opening the full-time official rose business he can well afford.

  Got a speckled rose. Want to keep the speckling. Any suggestions?

  He has attached a photo of a magenta Hulthemia with small white speckles all over its petals. Its center is a deeper magenta. I frown. It is obvious. Byron has an undergraduate degree in botany; he’s no dummy. He will simply have to try out another cross and see if the speckling holds; some people think that speckling is due to a virus rather than genetics. He also knows I have several speckled roses, none of which will reappear consistently for me.

  Nonetheless, I do not respond at this time. I want to double-check myself to be sure I hadn’t missed something obvious. Sometimes I get the impression that he asks me these questions as a test. With Byron, I am loath to make any mistakes. If he ever made his operation professional, maybe he’d hire me.

  It’s time to go to the greenhouse. I must prepare for today’s class, but since I’ve taught these classes for several years, I can wing it. Just give me a dry erase marker and a roomful of students and I’m good to go. I get up from the desk and immediately feel woozy. Just low blood pressure from dialysis. Nothing to worry about, unless, of course, I pass out and hit my head. In which case there’s nothing I can do. I go into the bedroom and get dressed. I won’t remember I haven’t eaten breakfast until noon.

  4

  I WRITE MY QUIZ PREP ON THE WHITEBOARD. MY STUDENTS, all fifteen sophomores in this fourth-period biology class, are being deliberately obtuse. The hormones are affecting their brains. You really might as well give up education from age twelve to twenty.