Hex

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

  I moved my head so it was closer to his head, punched both my elbows down onto the bar hitting both funny bones, and with little shocked tears in my eyes asked, “Hire me?” Most of my body was over the bar now, I was lying on it, on my stomach. “I’ve just spent my last fifteen dollars on seven candles and a whiskey and I’d like to restock my stocks. I live around the corner. I can work weird hours.”

  “Ask Johansen,” he said, unblinking.

  I pictured becoming the newest anonymous employee, I would no longer need to know my own name, I would even be willing to give Mishti her drinks for free, as she’d come to expect, and to charge myself.

  George shouted, “Hey Johansen.” A blond woman stood. I peeled my torso off the bar and hurried to pick the peanut shells out of my sweater. Mishti took her second shot and slammed the glass down, taking credit.

  FEVERFEW

  I don’t know what happened after that night, there was something I’d liked the taste of, I failed three martini tests but I passed the fourth and started working, I used my tip money on seed packets. I went a little nuts. I bought enough planters to fill my empty apartment. I bought enough dirt to bury myself. I’ve been so focused on poisonous plants, it proved extremely therapeutic to plant safe, moral flowers. I planted cowslip and bupleurum and mizuna and yellow rattle. Everlasting sweet pea and Harlequin sweet pea. Stereo broad beans and sweet cicely. Mishti came over to study for your midterm while I planted garlic and set it out beside the nightshade on the fire escape. I bought single-tier LED grow lights that aren’t lab grade but make do. I know most of the flowers will fail. Some of them will love blooming. I put larkspur between the Johnny-jump-ups and the feverfew. Sometimes I’d light a votive next to only one planter to make it feel some particular encouragement and care. I had a sense that it would soon be very cold, colder than I or anything could tolerate. When I went to pee at night I kicked fourteen planters. I never turned on the lights and I eventually understood where to walk to avoid them. My toes are still busted up. My apartment looks like a corn maze for chinchillas. The first shoots are going to bloom in March in April in May. They’re going to be twenty colors. Tom and Mishti took your midterm. The sweet pea is good for strength and the dandelion is good for wish manifestation. Johansen has me working the midnight to five a.m. shift because I’m being put in my place. I feel jet-lagged from noon to midnight but I’ve been jet-lagged since I got expelled. The money is bad but absolutely adequate. Mishti doesn’t come to see me at the bar because she’s a highly competent minor scholar who needs her sleep. I would have given her the bar for free. I walk to and from work with a Bic lighter in my pocket so that if somebody starts mugging me I can at least light it up and see my mugger’s face. Muggers have cool faces. I can’t wait for the cowslip to bloom. Cowslip on your stoop will discourage visitors. Also known as password, peggle, plumrocks. Source of healing, source of appetite, source of treasure-finding.

  CHEESE

  The week before actual Thanksgiving, the Ecology Evolution & Environmental Biology Department celebrated Thanksgiving in the faculty lounge. I hadn’t yet been removed from their email list and that made me feel less excommunicated. The department wanted to make it clear that this gathering was a favor and an inconvenience, and asked us not to bring any partners. The goal of the party was that it should seem, pretty much immediately afterward, that there never had been any party.

  New York has put up with an ultra-cold November and we arrived in our winter clothes, bulk the faculty lounge wasn’t built to accommodate. There weren’t any coat hooks but we also weren’t supposed to put our coats on the chairs. They asked that we remove our shoes. We made a coat pile on the floor, to the left of the shoe pile. We’d known about no partners, but none of us had anticipated the shoe rule, a rule that left everyone shorter and stumpy-looking. Mishti wore extra-long, extra-wide woolen sailor pants that relied entirely on her platform boots. She now looked like a broom. Tom’s socks were one orange one purple. I was miserably and idiotically not wearing socks. I walked around even more hesitantly than usual, afraid that I was infecting the carpet with my toenail fungus.

  You were perfect in black tights, black tunic, gray braid. You looked at my toenails with a face that said, You’re a donkey. It seemed like a very dirty trick to return midterms the day of the Thanksgiving party, not giving anyone anywhere to hide or recover, but you hate hiding and recovery. Tom had come for the mulled wine, with the ease of a pass/fail student who’d just passed. The B- you gave Mishti has changed her life. I’ve never seen her cry in public, because she doesn’t like the chemicals that make waterproof mascara waterproof and isn’t interested in making a mess, but she was inconsolable. She’d worn her platforms as armor and even they had been taken away from her.

  I wished that she’d been able to bring Carlo, his height would have been a kind of shield and given her a wall to lean against, but no partners meant no Carlo and no Barry, and no Barry made the party worthwhile. Without Barry you are comically incapacitated at social functions. He is your mouth, your hand, your laughter. You stood by the mulled wine crockpot apparently focused on smelling it. I came over to get some.

  You didn’t greet me in any way so I poured first and then said, “Professor Kallas.”

  “Bartender,” you said.

  I was about to launch into a heavy-handed diatribe about people who need to earn a living and people who get by being wealth-adjacent, but Tom came and spared me the humiliation.

  “Professor Kallas,” he also said.

  To this you responded with great warmth. “Tell Francesca we’re stealing you,” you said. I hated Francesca and didn’t know who she was.

  Tom was so flattered he nearly fainted, and then I saw him collect and steel himself. His natural state is mid-faint, and it takes a lot of effort on his part to concentrate, but when he does, his focus is arresting. It’s the cloud eyes. He’s got such inviting, colorless cloud eyes.

  It was only when you added, “I mean it,” a flirty redundancy you never stoop to, that I realized you’d been there setting up for two hours and were deeply and seriously drunk. The little decline of your chin you’d performed to give the phrase extra verve made you lose your balance and you wobbled to straighten yourself. You weren’t looking at me, you weren’t aware of me, you weren’t even trying to insult me, you were simply attracted to Tom. All at once I was sad, as if I’d walked up to some roadkill.

  Tom strapped on his helmet and ran right onto the playing field. “I’ll tell Francesca I’m already gone,” he said. “I’m sure she knows, anyway.”

  This wasn’t zingy enough for you, it took him too long to get the words out, and by “anyway” you’d become distracted by the increasingly Pisa-like coat pile. I stepped up to take my turn.

  “Your name means a muddy place,” I said.

  “That’s the Polish spelling.”

  “If you two got married,” Tom said, looking at us, “your combined name would be Jello. That could be your wedding hashtag, #jelloshots.”

  I started to think we were all drunker than we understood.

  Tom stood there chuckling at himself, and even though you find the word hashtag unlawful, you looked entertained by his chuckling. He asked if you’d tried any of the cheeses and you said you hadn’t. Of course you hadn’t. I thought of the pepper-jack cubes stacked high at Rachel’s funeral reception. Then, wordlessly, the two of you walked to the cheese table.

  I—

  If there’s a pillar in your life, it’s worth removing it. Break down your life and see what broke. If you were to imagine the three most essential elements of your days and then imagine your days without them, what comes rushing to take their place? It’s so quiet when you bust down your acoustic paneling. Sometimes the body wants to be burned and sometimes it doesn’t; self-neglect isn’t infinite it’s cyclical, as self-care is. Every time you get to a binary choice there’s a third. Have you ever walked
out with nothing to give but your innermost energy? Have you ever been nothing other than a crayon? We don’t love most of the people we love. You’re not who you thought I was.

  What is it that I want from you? Do I want to press the corner of your mouth into your mouth? Do I want to hold the back of your neck as if you’d been injured? Do I want to steam up your eyeballs with my breath? How long until I am the recipient of my own discoveries and not their messenger? I deliver everything I am to you. I stood there by the crockpot and let a wall of air push through the room of myself. I have never exhibited sexuality only competence. I will make myself eggs for dinner. You will love my French toast. I will never invite you over for it. You will come for comfort, for company. I never need company. I have as much as I need.

  There was one final patch of late-falling red leaves on the maple across the street, the light was now too dim to see, and I could feel it pulsing there, wanting to be lit up again, like anyone. I had followed you to the cheese table during my spin-out. You were in the middle of saying to Tom, “She missed the Oxford. It was publishable.”

  I said, “The publishing thing is your tenure problem, you know, not mine.”

  “It will be yours if you’re lucky.”

  “It makes me want to scratch my skin off when you suggest something boring to me.”

  “Pass/fail students shouldn’t come to the party,” Mishti said, bringing us to a boil. I hadn’t seen her walking toward us. She looked unwell.

  You said, “Maybe admission should be an A.”

  I knew then that you were legitimately interested in Tom, that it was happening. Only real tenderness inspires your most random and needless cruelty.

  Mishti officially snapped and said, “Maybe I should accept your husband’s dinner invitation.”

  You said, “I’d like him out of the house Thursday night.”

  Tom said, “He invited you to dinner?”

  Mishti said, “Why do the jerk-offs get to join your club, it’s like you have to be lazy, or gross, or expelled. Like why does Nell still get to be your sidekick? She fucked it up.”

  “Nell’s very good,” you said, so blankly and harshly I thought I’d misheard you. “Nell completed enough work after three years to qualify for her doctorate right then, which makes the situation all the more laughable. She’s been at PhD level for years but now she’ll never be one.” You actually went so far as to point your finger at Mishti’s face. “You’re more able but she works harder.”

  I ate a cheese. I ate two more cheeses. I couldn’t speak or join you in the wild gift you were giving, because when you walked away with Tom I’d dug myself into a grave of self-reliance, and I hadn’t brought a ladder, and I stood stuck down there, confused. The truth is that I worked kind of pathologically hard when I started this program and nobody has ever known that—not my parents in the Midwest, not my very few friends—I didn’t even realize you’d known it. I didn’t need a pat on the head and didn’t get one, but the work did make me elementally tired later in a way nobody could justify and therefore came across as crabbiness. Your patience with me these past two years now felt radically informed, just, and loving.

  Mishti retreated to the mulled wine. What I found most surprising about this altogether surprising exchange was the insinuation that she didn’t work hard enough. I’d known Mishti to be a marching band, exact and coordinated and unstoppable. You were separating competence from some looser sort of vision. It was a shame that vision, when it occurred, was inevitably so loose, so often useless, so much less visible than something complete and unoriginal. I think you were wrong about both of us: Mishti can be wildly inventive even within the rigidities of her excellence and I am finger-painting. But this was a kindness you paid me, the first and I expect the last, and I’ll never give it away, or back to you.

  The night soon ended. We found our coats in the pile. Nobody could bear to be in the same room anymore. We’d eaten too much cheese and needed to use our own bathrooms. It was only seven o’clock. Beautiful heavy snow had begun to fall and we wished it hadn’t. We put on our boots, all our respective boots, and went out into it.

  DECEMBER

  “We lived long together

  a life filled,

  if you will,

  with flowers. So that

  I was cheered

  when I came first to know

  that there were flowers also

  in hell.”

  WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  SWEET POTATOES

  I first turned to botany like anybody does because I found flowers terrifyingly attractive and had been raised by reasonable people who didn’t put beauty at the center of their lives. I thought I could put it there.

  Now the study of beauty and how it grows has become my work, and I think that’s the best way of keeping it. But it also leaves the door open for something else to fill in the beauty-as-beauty center. The useless beauty. The not work. And I think what is really useless is the way I love you. I want to put that in the center.

  One example of non-uselessness is how I filled up that first notebook. I didn’t expect to get to the end of it, maybe because I believed you when you said I’d never do anything ever again. But today I had to put on public-facing butt-hushing outdoor pants and go out and buy a second book from the bodega man, you’ll see I’ve even maxed out the margins of the first one. I’ve always admired my particular bodega man for carrying black-and-white Compositions behind the register, and one box of blue ballpoint pens, as if they were treats people might like to buy on a Thursday with loose cash. I also bought a strawberry Yoo-hoo. Having drunk the sixteen fluid ounces of milk beverage in one gulp I commence now a new notebook, a night season. I’ll call this notebook December. We haven’t had a storm since Thanksgiving, but between storms the darkness lies like a little snow over the streets.

  Day and night the city’s electronic flakes never fall. These four-foot glow-in-the-dark geometries dangle overhead, threatening to impale the holiday. There are so many attractive, ambitious, well-dressed people in this city with well-shaped arms and goals and for the next four months they’ll be invisible under their parkas. We’ll all be walking eyes, impossibly equal to each other, and then my castor plant will bloom.

  I’m writing this behind the bar. I ended the last notebook with Cheese and that’s where you praised me so I’m sticking to only edible titles in this book. I don’t know what to call this one, so far we’ve only got Yoo-hoo. A woman’s sitting at the bar with good posture. She keeps looking to see if I have become the person she’s hoping will arrive. I’m still anonymous. Sometimes I make a little noise with my shaker to remind her that she nevertheless isn’t entirely alone. She ordered one chardonnay half an hour ago and hasn’t drunk any of it. I’d like to refill it for her but she’ll have to make a little progress first. Mishti isn’t here to keep the pours flowing, she’s out on a date with your husband. She looks really, really great. She’s wearing the top of a purple sari and pink jeans and some extraordinarily fancy earrings that hang down to her beefy shoulders.

  What you underestimated about Mishti is her thoroughness: when you said Thursday night she went exponential to every Thursday night. What have you been doing on your Thursday nights, Professor Kallas? I haven’t come near you since you praised me because I want to ride it a little longer. The next thing you say to me will be so rude, wisely, in the name of balance, that I won’t be able to trust or enjoy the memory of your praise anymore. Right now I can be Jasmine (talk about pants) on this soft carpet you wove me and fly above the city alone because I am also Aladdin, the thief. I get both seats on your carpet.

  Chardonnay just looked up from her totally full glass and told me I ought to be a psychologist. I asked her why. She said because I’m willing to wait. Everybody’s always rushing her, she said, I don’t make her feel rushed. She said I have a patient face.

  I told her tha
t I’ve never expected very much to happen. Easy to wait when there’s nothing to wait for. She said, Oh, you’d be shocked by the things that happen. To ordinary people. They’ll tell you stories to melt your head. I said, Melt your head? When you’re their shrink, she said.

  Chardonnay then abruptly settled her tab and left, so I’m drinking her glass, Merry Christmas. Joan the Christmas rose has another name, it’s hellebore. Nobody has ever been stupid enough to say “hella” in your presence not even in 2001 and I don’t think roses are boring so we can call it Christmas rose to be festive. It’s blooming now. I bloomed one on my kitchen windowsill. What a menace! The sap is a skin irritant and one medicinal dose of it killed Alexander the Great. The leaves, though, are deep and lustrous and the blossoms are unfathomably maroon. I’ve grown it for your office so that you have a little seasonal weapon on hand next time Barry and Carlo come to play. Barry is a balding Alexander and Carlo’s skin has never, not once, been irritated. You being you, what you’ll love most is the foliage green so dark it approaches black.

  There was a Wednesday five years ago when I’d nowhere to go for Christmas, the Wednesday was Christmas Eve. It was my first year in the graduate program. I went to the student center to collect my mail but I hadn’t gotten any mail, so I was just standing in the student center. You rushed in to leave a couple graded papers in mailboxes. You saw me standing there, Mabberley’s Plant-Book about to fall from my elbow. What I remember best—I don’t even remember what we ate for dinner that night, aside from the sweet potatoes—is how long it took you to speak, and how oddly and patiently you waited for yourself to decide what to do about me. We are neither of us inherently social. We stood parallel to each other, both facing the mailboxes, but I could feel you reading me in your periphery, and I stood very still because I wanted to be read. Then you said, “Where are you from?”