Wide Eyed
Page 11
“What’s new, dear?” she asked.
“I found this new variety of artemisia,” I said.
“Very nice,” she said. “Does it smell good?”
“No, it’s more for color. It’s in the silver section.” I pointed out how all the plants surrounding it have silvery leaves.
“Do you want to go shopping?” she asked.
“Is that a hint?” I asked.
“You need some new clothes, you don’t have to wear pajamas all the time,” she said. “Are you depressed, sweetie?”
“No,” I said. “I just like gardening. Does it mean I’m depressed just because I have a beautiful garden?”
“You should date boys,” she said. “Instead of working out in the yard all night in an old nightshirt.”
She’ll never understand. The whole reason I’m designing this yard is to attract the right man.
Lou Reed’s Transformer plays in the background. Oh it’s such a perfect day / I’m glad I spent it with you. Cheerfully sad, the way only Lou can do. I lie in my glass coffin waiting for the scents of roses, jasmine, and honeysuckle to permeate that crack where the glass top meets the tomb’s marble bottom. My name, Snow White, inscribed in cursive upon the marble, is obscured by moss. I’ve been lying sedately in this greenhouse for a long time. Since I’ve been unconscious for seasons, I temporarily forget what my name is, then remember it again as I clean the letters. Venus flytraps and other swamp plants grow in here with me, and I’d be eaten alive if it weren’t for the most generous sweet peas creeping in. Their curly stems protect me, blooming around my hands folded over my torso. Only once have I felt the flytrap’s dewy tendrils snapping closed on a finger. I involuntarily flicked it away.
Besides the plants, there are several flies buzzing around me. They’ve been trapped in here for ages. They started families in the creases of my dress. Blue velvet serves the maggots well. They build little cocoons; their sticky silk adheres to the dusty fabric. A fairy gave me this dress and I have no intention of letting a few flies ruin it. I’ve spit bits of that poisonous apple down there to distract them for months at a time. It’s funny, I only took one bite but I’ve spit up perhaps seventy apples worth of fruit. I can’t wait until springtime so the glass won’t fog up where I breathe.
Even the Prince in Snow White doesn’t interest me as much as the sparkling gemstones that the dwarves mine. When I do sleep, I dream of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds lining my bedroom walls. That’s more comforting to me than having a man in bed beside me. I’m happy to know I can equally love a glamorous cave and a human. Only once did I put the moves on a man in my garden. It was during an intimate dinner party.
I cooked pasta for four friends. Three girlfriends came, and one had a male friend with her who was a motorcycle racer. His name was Pat. He had on a leather jacket. He asked me for a tour of my garden, but I suspected he’d never had respect for plants. He was the kind of guy who would ride his bike through the forest, brutally crushing and killing all the greenery. I found this disturbing but exciting.
The moon was full. We’d just finished another bottle of merlot. Pat didn’t seem affected by this but I felt drunk since I hadn’t slept well the previous night. I was yawning a lot, and stumbled a couple times.
“This is Angel’s Trumpet,” I said. “And those are moonflowers.”
“Why are you so woozy?” Pat asked.
“I’m just tired,” I said. “Let’s sit on the bench.”
I leaned toward him to see if he smelled good. He smelled delicious in combination with the nightscented flowers that grew on the trellis above us. I invited him to sleep over since he’d been staying at my friend’s house for so long. She was getting sick of having a houseguest. They were old friends from back in the day when she used to own a motorcycle herself. One time she’d won him in a race. So it wasn’t fishy when he announced as everyone was about to leave that he’d be crashing on the couch at my house. The girls were like, “Good night, Snow White.”
The air was crisp and I felt like a moth fluttering around a flower. It was early summer, but I heard the opening sentence of Snow White in my head: “It was the middle of winter, and the snowflakes were falling like feathers from the sky.” To make myself come, I thought about my bejeweled room. I envisioned lying in a glass coffin. “Satellite of Love’s” piano parts played in my head, and Bowie’s background vocals transported me to deep space. I looked at my white fingertips coldly burning from gripping my stone bench so hard. I thought of Snow White, icily dormant, cursed with the Sleeping Death. I pretended I had chipmunk friends to sing to. I saw white stripes lining their backs, fuzzy little landing strips. I saw baby chipmunks running in and out of their hole, each one pausing to rub noses with the next one as in some cozy mountain love film. Bluebirds whistled to me and I whistled back. When I opened my eyes all the flowers seemed pointed right at us; there were bright blooms everywhere. The garden looked incandescent glowing with moonlight. Everything went white as I came, as if the moon suddenly got brighter.
Pat slept on the couch. I woke him up and gave him coffee. I thought a lot about hearts. I wondered why they’re associated with love, and wondered why mine didn’t seem either elated or broken. I cooked bacon for breakfast, started thinking about eating pigs, and realized the link between pigs and hearts: the evil queen. “It was salted and cooked,” Snow White goes, “and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking that there was an end of Snow White.” What would possess somebody to eat a heart? If I hated someone I still wouldn’t eat their heart. It’s bad enough to eat a pig’s hind legs. My mom used to feed chicken hearts to our dogs. The heart symbolizes the place love comes from, but biologically it functions as a pump for blood. When I consider blood and love commingling, I think of an aroused man. The plants’ stems get hard as I water them. Watering plants is a feminine thing to do. Consuming another person’s organ is a female idea. I got horny as I ate the bacon.
My mother works full-time as an accountant, and sometimes I wonder if she’s jealous of the satisfaction I get from gardening in my PJs. Everything she says to me sounds like criticism. You’re too old to be lounging around all day, she tells me. Dress up, she says. Get out there and earn some money. Stop looking like a peasant so you can meet a man. It’s unhealthy to socialize with plants, she says. She’s required to wear suits and nylons to work, and she never leaves the house without first applying lipstick. Since she’s single, pretty, and in her fifties, lots of older men ask her out. She goes to see movies with them but rarely finds them interesting enough to continue dating. That’s where we see eye to eye.
“How was your evening with Lee?” I ask her on the phone.
“He took me out for Italian,” she says. “He ordered one big plate of spaghetti and wanted us to share it. So corny. Did you do anything fun this week?”
“I mulched,” I tell her. “That guy Pat called, but I didn’t call him back.”
“I don’t want you going out with men who ride motorcycles,” she says. “They’re too dangerous.”
“I don’t want you dating men who make you share spaghetti,” I say.
It’s unclear to me what benefits come from working all the time in a lousy office and dating nerdy bachelors. I’d rather be broke and stay home with the plants. During the daytime, I occasionally write articles for gardening magazines; I slide by on that meager income. One time I was hired as a hostess at a restaurant, but when the manager asked me to put on makeup and a shorter skirt for my next shift, I quit. Plants don’t care what I wear. I aim to sleep all day and wake up around sunset.
My dog and I will wait for Lou. I’ll invite him over on a full-moon night. Lou will pet the dog when he walks out to my backyard. As I hand him a glass of wine, he’ll notice my gown, feeling the soft yellow ribbon tied around my waist. All the white flowers will open up and face us. A bunny will jump into Lou’s lap as he sits down on the bench with me. A doe will trot up and lick my hair smooth again after Lou puts his hands all through it.
We’ll tie the knot, then Lou will take me to the castle he bought thirty years ago after he had a drug-induced vision of Snow White loving him.
Other selections in Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series
GODLIKE a novel by Richard Hell
141 pages, a trade paperback original, $13.95
Godlike, Hell’s second novel, is a stunning achievement, and quite likely, his most important work in any medium to date. Combining the grit, wit, and invention of Go Now with the charged lyricism and emotional implosiveness of his groundbreaking music, Godlike is brilliant in form as well as dazzling in its heartwrenching tale of one whose values in life are the values of poetry. Set largely in the early ’70s, but structured as a middle-aged poet’s 1997 notebooks and drafts for a memoir-novel, the book recounts the story of a young man’s affair with a remarkable teenage poet. Godlike is a novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty.
THE FALL OF HEARTLESS HORSE by Martha Kinney
97 pages, a trade paperback original, $11.95
Selections nominated for a Pushcart Prize
“Tumultuous and beautiful, an emotional inquiry into writing and the nature of illusion, so highly pleasureable, a surprise and triumph for the American novel.”
—Claude Simon, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
“As a grateful and admiring reader I can only thank her for this work and eagerly await more.”
—Amy Gerstler, author of Ghost Girl
GRAG BAG by Derek McCormack
203 pages, a trade paperback original, $14.95
“Grab Bag culls the best of the perverse and innocent world culls the best of the perverse and innocent of Derek McCormack. The mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past—these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe.”
—Edmund White
HEADLESS stories by Benjamin Weissman
157 pages, a trade paperback original, $12.95
“Headless is at play in the world. It is fearless, fun, and sometimes filthy. Weissman invites you into an alphabet soup of delight in language. Eat up.”
—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
VICTIMS by Travis Jeppesen
189 pages, a trade paperback original, $13.95
“This book marks the debut of an author who will surely become a major voice in alternative literary fiction … rich, lyrical language reminiscent of a modern-day Faulkner informed by the postmodern narrative strategies of Dennis Cooper.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
These books are available at local bookstores.
They can also be purchased with a credit card online through www.akashicbooks.com.
To order by mail send a check or money order to:
AKASHIC BOOKS PO Box 1456, New York, NY 10009 www.akashicbooks.com, Akashic7@aol.com
(Prices include shipping. Outside the U.S., add $8 to each book ordered.)
Trinie Dalton lives in Los Angeles and has an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. As a journalist, she writes about music, books, and art. She’s also a visual artist. Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is, an art book she co-edited, is available from McSweeney’s.
1 “Leeuwenhoek’s Perception of Spermatozoa,” http://zygote.swarthmore.edu/fert1a.html
1 The Cat in Magic, M. Oldfield Howey.
1 Natural History, Pliny, Book X and LXXXVI.
2 Magic Zoo, Peter Costello, p.130.
3 Magic Zoo, p.131.
4 The Bestiary of Christ, Louis Charbonneau-Lassay.