I should be lying down; a sedative still runs through my veins. But right now, I feel more relaxed than doped, and I want to do just a quick check on the roses.
The greenhouse is divided into different sections. At the short wall opposite the entrance, I have a desk, with shelves of my notebooks detailing my parent plants and how they were bred over the past decade.
In the middle of the greenhouse, I have three shallow boxes, four feet wide by six feet long, containing potting soil and topped with peat, which looks like white pearls sitting on top. These are my seedling boxes, where I sprout my new roses.
Farther down along the walls, I have tables of my older potted roses, the parent plants, spaced carefully apart from each other to prevent accidental pollination, two and half feet apart to ensure proper air flow. Each one is carefully tagged on the pot and cataloged in a notebook as well as in my computer.
And then I have my top-secret rose, the repeat bloomer, G42, in its special spot on my worktable. Though I’m hoping for fragrance this year, as a repeat bloomer it will be enough to get me into the market.
Outside, on my property, are rows and rows of my flowers. These are also categorized. Nearest the greenhouse, separate from the others, I have pots of my rootstock. After you get a good seedling, you take it and graft it onto rootstock to generate more of the exact same kind of seedling. Then you try growing these outside to see how they do. Not all will do well outdoors; a good many will die off. Some will return and surprise you in unexpected ways.
Then I have other roses grouped by type, mounded together with dirt paths in between. Though Hulthemias are my favorites, I have all manner of roses out here: hybrids, teas, climbers. Some of these are my second favorites: English roses, David Austin roses, big-headed and fragrant, almost like delicate cabbages.
My landscaping is functional and farmlike, not an aesthetically pleasing garden. Many casual rose growers plant other flowers that will bloom when the roses finish. Freesias with heady fragrance or ranunculus bobbing on their stick stems are popular. I don’t bother.
Out here is where the bees roam free, where I let nature take its course, more or less. In November, birds eat the rose hips and crap out the seeds during their migratory flights. I’ve thought of placing a tracking device in the rose hips to see where they end up.
There, I unlock the door and survey the scene. The hoses are put away, the water is off, the pruning shears are placed back on the pegboard hanger. I turn off the lights and lock the door, making sure the key is not under the mat.
Now my sleepiness hits me. I go back indoors.
It’s dark inside. The only sounds are the refrigerator humming and my own breathing. I make my way through the unlit house into the bedroom, taking a carefully worn path so I don’t run into any furniture. I switch on the dim bedside lamp and regard the blinking light of the answering machine again. I take a breath, dialing my mother back on speaker as I take off my shoes and socks and change into my nightshirt, a long football jersey handed down from my father.
“Hello, how are you?” I ask when she picks up. My voice sounds unnaturally loud in this house, and I fight the urge to whisper.
“Fine, thanks, and you?” This we must go through, no matter how many times per day I speak with her. “Let me call you back.” She hangs up and so do I. Mom does not want me to incur long-distance charges.
The phone rings. “How did it go?” Mom tries to sound cool, but underneath, worry vibrates as plainly as tight violin strings wail.
“Dara took me. I’m fine.” These are two things Mom wants to hear: that I’m not alone, and that I am all right.
“Will they make you do the IVP test?”
“I don’t have any results from this test, Mom.”
The MRA test was a last-ditch effort to measure my blood flow. The best way to get the results is through an intravenous pyelogram, or an IVP test, and I’m allergic to the dye. I’ve gotten a CO2 test, where they pump carbon dioxide through you: results inconclusive. And now this MRA. If the MRA doesn’t work, the doctor will insist on the IVP test, allergic or not.
I change the subject. “How was the library art show?”
“Great. I sold a watercolor. Gal, I can be out there tomorrow morning.”
“You sold a watercolor?” I don’t want her to visit. “Congratulations! That’s major, Mother. How much?”
“It doesn’t matter. Do you want me to come?”
This is one reason I left my birth city. If my mother is here, she will be all over me, too guilty and busy to go outside and make her plein-air landscapes.
“It was noninvasive, Mother.” I muffle my sigh in my pillow. My parents are going to France soon, to sit in the French countryside, visit Champagne wineries, and eat moldy cheese that would be outlawed here. I am not going to have my mother miss her trip for me, though she always buys travel insurance “in case Gal has something come up.”
“Are you sure you’re all right? You sound off.” If she were here, she’d be making me tea and stroking my hair. For a moment I want her here.
“I’m on a sedative. I’ll be more coherent tomorrow.” I put my glasses on the nightstand and rub the bridge of my nose. I want to change the subject. “Heard from Becky lately?”
She hesitates, oddly. “I have.”
My eyes close. I am so close to sleep that I regret asking, yet I can still detect there’s more to come. “What’s up? She lose her job again?” Becky is a pharmaceutical sales rep, traveling her region and selling pills to doctors. Like me, she has a degree in biology, and on the surface, she looks like a well-respected suit-wearing white-collar worker, with flat-ironed shiny hair and carefully applied makeup.
“Not lost it. She got a new one. More travel.” Now Mom’s voice sounds funny. “Riley’s coming here to stay with us. After we get back from France.”
“Really?” I yawn. Riley is Becky’s daughter. Father in and out of the picture, out for good now.
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea.” Pot lids clang on Mom’s end, meaning she is more nervous than usual, even after one of my operations. “We’re to visit Aunt Betty this summer after her knee surgery . . .” She trails off. “Teenagers are a lot to handle.”
“Did you tell her that?” Mom lets Becky walk all over her, sending her money whenever Becky goes over budget, which I’m sure is more often than even I know. “Did you say she didn’t need to create another new problem?”
Mom ignores this, so I know she didn’t say a thing. “I’m sure it will work out.”
“Always does, one way or the other. Even if it’s badly.” I smile at my little joke.
“Ha ha.”
My mind drifts. Poor little Riley. The last time I saw her, I was still living at my folks’ house. I haven’t seen her in, what, seven years? She’s fifteen now.
When Riley was a toddler, perhaps two years old, I’d stopped by Becky’s townhouse in San Diego. Becky had been laid off from her first pharmaceutical sales job. At the time, Becky had been a party girl, a pot smoker and drinker, perhaps more. We suspected “laid off” was a nicer term for “let go because you showed up hungover.”
I was dropping something off. I don’t remember what. The door was unlocked. Her cat meowed at me.
“Riley? Becky?” I moved into the house.
Becky was stone-cold passed out on the couch.
I shoved my sister. She didn’t respond. I slapped her face. “Becky? Where’s Riley?”
“Uhh?” Becky managed to open her eyes, but could not focus.
Then I heard crying from the backyard. Riley was on the patio, dressed only in a sagging diaper, clutching the nape of the old yellow golden retriever Becky had inherited from her ex. Her eyes were reddened and stood out Christmas tree green, her face was filthy, her arms covered in mud, but she was all right. She held her arms
out to me.
I scooped her up and took her over to my parents’ house. It was hours before Becky woke and realized her daughter was gone.
Riley went to live with her father after that, and we thought everything was all right. His mother watched Riley while he worked. Becky cleaned up, stopped partying, and saw her daughter regularly. We chalked the incident up to immaturity.
A few years later, Riley’s grandmother passed away, and Riley’s father got another woman pregnant. A woman who didn’t like the fact that Riley’s father had had another family before hers. He married her and moved to Boston, and Riley went back to Becky. I understand that Riley’s father hadn’t offered more contact than his monthly signature on the support checks.
Becky had moved to San Francisco for her new job, at a different drug company. Now, if Becky partied, she made sure to show up to work sober, or at least functional, because she’d held on to this job for years. I’d suspected that though she’d slowed with the alcohol, she wasn’t averse to the occasional super-strength pain reliever, palmed out of her samples. I could hear the fog in her voice on the rare occasions when we talked on the phone. Though she pulled in a good salary, she was always, somehow, in financial straits. Her boyfriends had been numerous, and always had questionable job titles like “nightclub promoter.”
My mother refused to believe anything was wrong. “Riley would tell me,” she would always say. Mom would fly up to get Riley, fly back down with her, keep her for weeks at a time during the summer. I had to think my parents had a stabilizing influence, as had her paternal grandmother, during her very young years. I had to believe Riley couldn’t remember her earlier neglect.
“Riley doesn’t want to be taken away from her mother,” I said. At eight, Riley showed a fierce and undeserved loyalty to my sister.
“Everything is fine, Aunt Gal,” she told me on the afternoon of her eighth birthday, when I phoned.
“Look in your cupboards and tell me what’s there,” I challenged her.
She had responded immediately. “SpaghettiOs, pizza, and a lot of vegetables. A lot of vegetables. My mother makes me eat them.”
I caught her out. “You keep pizza in your cupboard?”
“I thought you meant freezer.”
And it was always like this, Riley protecting and covering up for her mother, Becky wheedling whatever help she could get out of my mother, without admitting she should have given up her daughter long ago.
I remember this as I stare at the ceiling, listening to my mother make excuses for my sister. At last I say, “What Riley needs is a good education in a stable home. Her mother’s ruined her.” I think of my colleagues with children. The first child gets free tuition. It had always pained my frugal little heart that I could not take advantage of the program. “She oughta come here. Get a free private school diploma.”
“You couldn’t handle her.”
“You haven’t seen me in action with my students.” I chuckle. Oh, I’m close to sleep. I think I’m on the beach in San Diego, dipping one toe into the frigid Pacific. “Pollution levels are high,” I mumble and slur. I’m dreaming of another high school science project, testing the ocean water.
Her tone softens. “I better let you get to resting.”
It’s all I can do to hit the End button on my phone receiver. The pain medicine is better than a sleeping pill. The moonlight comes in, dappled through the chiffon curtains, making abstracted rose patterns on the ceiling. I close my eyes and picture my rose family pedigrees. Hulthemia. They rise three dimensionally around me, dancing like I’m Alice in Wonderland visiting those snotty flowers. I smile in my delusion. Maybe I can breed the pink to the yellow. I cross Hulthemias in my head, their offspring reborn as quick as film passing by. Until I fall asleep.
3
ON THE MONDAY AFTER MY PROCEDURE, I WALK UP AND down the front of my classroom, my sensible athletic shoes squeaking on the black linoleum. All the science rooms have black linoleum floors and black counters. At Halloween, I decorate it to look like a dungeon. I don’t have Bunsen burner gas lines like the chemistry room, but I do have an array of microscopes along the counters under the mottled-glass ancient windows. It’s a room students tend to daydream in, on the second floor of the building, overlooking an array of still-bare treetops and the athletic field, where a P.E. class is engaged in a flag football game.
There are no pictures of saints on the walls, like there are in the religious studies’ room; most Catholic schools these days are not really very Catholic. There aren’t even any nuns here; not enough to go around. Our priest comes in only once a month or so, to lead Mass. Otherwise, it’s essentially like any other private high school.
I’ve worked here for eight years, starting right before my kidney failed again. I came from a public high school, with indifferent faculty and even more indifferent students. A smaller private school was a welcome change.
The headmaster, Dr. O’Malley, looked worried when he first met me at my teaching interview, glancing from the top of my head down to my feet. “How will you keep the kids in line?” he had asked.
I straightened to my full height. “First of all, I come from a public school and never had any problems. I thought this school was intolerant of bad behavior. Second, the tongue is mightier than the sword.”
Dr. O’Malley had smiled. “I think that’s the pen. And you’re right. We do have good kids here.”
“I know what you’re thinking.” I leaned across his desk. “I’m going to get sick, cost you lots of money.”
He started to demur, but I held up my hand.
“Let me say this. No one knows what will happen. A perfectly healthy person could get hit by a semi tomorrow. But I guarantee you, no matter how much time I have left, I will leave the school a better place than when I found it.” I sat back in my chair, my case presented.
In the end, of course, the board had not found a reason they couldn’t hire me. They certainly couldn’t say I was short, or unqualified. I have been here ever since.
Today, the class will learn about osmosis. Osmosis has to be one of the simpler concepts to understand, and a fun lab to boot. I’ve brought in potatoes. We’ve sliced them up and put them in beakers of water: one plain, one salted, and one sugared. They’re supposed to explain why the salted potato got so soft, why the sugared one didn’t get as soft, and why the plain one got harder. Osmosis causes water to move toward the salt.
A girl with a red ponytail in a cheerleader uniform raises her hand. The cheerleader uniforms are not too unlike the regular uniforms: a plaid skort and a sweater emblazoned with St. Mark’s instead of a white blouse and skirt. “Can we use the same glass for all three?”
I have already gone over the directions, but she had been staring off outside. I turn to the rest of the class. “Anyone know?”
John, a boy wearing a school sweatshirt, clinks his beakers together. “Um, Sarah, how many beakers do you have in front of you?”
The rest of the class titters. If she were a cartoon character, she’d have a giant light bulb go off above her head. “Oh! Got it.”
“I thought cheerleaders were supposed to be kind of smart at this school,” the boy mutters, shaking his mop of black curls.
“Hey. There’s only room for one smart aleck in here.” I tap my fingers on the table in front of John.
He grins sheepishly. “You?”
I nod and smile. “Everyone, if you have any further questions, John will be more than happy to assist. Without commentary.”
He blows air through his lips and crunches his shoulders together, but does not say anything else.
They at last all settle down and begin working in earnest on the lab. The class lasts about fifty minutes, and they have almost forty left.
I sit at my workdesk in the back of the class, where I have a good clear view of th
em all and they can’t see me. Despite spending the weekend resting, I feel run-down and hope I’m not coming down with something. A kid near the front coughs and I listen carefully. Sounds like a dry allergy cough to me. After nearly twelve years of teaching, I can tell the difference now. Aware that I was holding my breath against the germs, I allow myself a big yawn.
On the desk is my water bottle, filled with half a liter, half my daily allotment. If you’re a patient that still makes urine, you’re allowed more than this. It’s not much, but it’s better than the first time I was on dialysis, when I was allowed the equivalent of only one can of soda per day.
This lack of liquid gives my skin the lizard look of lotion commercials. A bottle of plain white hand cream sits on my desk. In a locked drawer are the pills I’m supposed to take regularly, and my nondelicious, low-phosphorus, low-potassium, dialysis-friendly snacks. Eat too much of these and you could trigger a heart attack. I should market my own diet. The slogan will be, “It’s so unappetizing, you’ll lose weight.” I grin.
I open my rose file on the computer. The family tree of my roses spreads out before me. G42 should bloom any time now; I hope it’s sweet-smelling. Its parents were the multiblooming rose from last year and another multiblooming rose. The grandparents of these roses have fragrance. In my strains, the fragrance seems to appear about once every other generation, like blue eyes do in some brown-eyed families. This is what I’ve intuited, though I’m not always correct. It’s always a surprise in the end.
Dara appears beside me, quiet in her black ballet flats. She has no students right now; it’s her prep period. A twinge of irritation wells. She shouldn’t be interrupting my class because she’s bored. Also, I admit, I was doing something I’m not supposed to, thinking about my roses during class time. I click off the screen so she can’t see what I’m doing. Dara has been known to lecture about such things before.
“Finally come to learn about osmosis?” I swivel around in my seat. “Or is there a matter of importance I should attend?”
The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns Page 3
