I quickly locked it. “Am I ever pleased to see you! That woman is a nutcase.”
“Yes, I heard her.”
“I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t shut the door and if I left for the phone I think she would have followed me.” I peered through the stained glass pane in the front door. “She’s still there.”
“She’ll go soon. I’m early, I know, but I have to leave early. I’ve brought the scales. It won’t take long.” Maggie took off her jacket and hung it over the banister rail.
“They’re upstairs because I fumigated the basement,” I said. “And the long storage bin is too difficult to shift.”
In the spare bedroom, I pulled out the bin and took a deep breath to inhale the aroma of dried buds, a quite different smell than growing plants, and very pleasant. Maggie unboxed a flat scale on top of the dresser and weighed an empty Ziploc bag while I poured the coffee I had ready.
“Have you seen Swan lately?” I asked as casually as I could.
“Not since we trimmed here.” Maggie began to stuff handfuls of buds into the Ziploc. “Some people are super careful packing but I just stuff them in.”
“She left her bag here and I can’t get hold of her. I’ve looked in the deli, but she’s not been there.”
“You want 227 grams, which is half a pound, plus two-and-a-bit grams for the bag.” Maggie looked up at me. “I expect she’ll show. She may have gone to trim for the outdoor guys.”
“Oh. She didn’t say.” I tried to take an interest in the packing and weighing. “So you fill a bag and then remove or add buds to get 230 grams?”
“Yes. Did you want help with something?”
“No. Not really.”
Maggie must have guessed from my tone or lack of enthusiasm for the proceedings that something was wrong, but she went on weighing until six half-pound bags plus a handful of extra buds lay in the bin.
“Three pounds. Not bad for a first effort.” She sat on the bed with her coffee.
“What do I do with the extra?”
“You could smoke it. Or make brownies. Or keep it and add it next time.”
“I’ve never smoked pot. Or cigs for that matter. Not since I was a teenager. I’ve tried, but I can’t inhale. Makes me cough.” I patted the six plastic bags filled with dried bud. “I still would like to try, but I don’t even know how to roll a joint.”
“You don’t need to. You can get yourself a vaporizer so you inhale steam, not smoke. Much healthier that way.” Maggie stretched her legs. “What’s up with Swan?”
“I did something really silly and she went off in a huff and I haven’t seen her since.” I sat on the only chair. “I feel terrible.”
“What happened?”
“We drove to the dump with the dead plants and leaves and when the woman asked what we had, I went and said pot. The attendant thought it was funny, but Swan was furious.”
“I expect you frightened her.”
“Yes, she said she’d be deported if she was caught. I didn’t know she’s an American.”
“She’s from California. Berkeley. Her parents are professors at the university there.”
I was amazed. “Lordy. They must be shocked by their offspring.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Swan is unusual. And very bright. I think they’re wise enough to let her find herself.”
I was taken aback by Maggie’s opinion of Swan. I had only seen her as flighty, a bit daft, and unable to think of anything but boyfriends. I remembered that Amy had thought her intelligent.
Maggie continued, “Pot growing is a risky business, Jess. Kids like Swan can’t afford to get a criminal record.”
“I guess not.”
Where did politicians get off? Deciding that marijuana was harmful but liquor was not and proclaiming to ordinary people what they could and could not grow?
“I’ll be seeing Marcus later. I’ll tell him you’re ready.” Maggie stood up and put her mug on the tray. “Got to go.”
“How long does he take to sell it?”
“Depends on who’s in town. Sometimes he’s back in an hour or two and sometimes it’s a few days.”
“Thank you so much, Maggie. I owe you, and Swan, for trimming. As soon as I get the dollars I’ll be in touch. Oh, and will you tell Marcus I need soil?”
Maggie opened the front door and a voice said, “Repent, so that you may enter the Garden of Paradise.” Maggie quickly closed the door. “Phone the police. I’ll go out the back.”
“Do you really think I should ask the police to come here?”
“They won’t come in. They’ll just deal with the woman.”
“But if they do come in, what do I do? I expect the place stinks. I better burn incense.”
“Candles are better. It didn’t stink when I came in.” Maggie headed for the basement.
I lit candles in the living room, then phoned the local police and told them I had a religious nutcase on my porch who wouldn’t go away.
“That’ll be Eliza. She’s harmless. But we’ll send someone over to take her home.”
One of the things I liked about Nelson was its tolerance for eccentrics: strangely dressed people on Baker Street, a man who kept bicycles on his roof, a man who wore a blanket and carried a wooden staff, and all the incredible hair dos, tattoos, and piercings. This sort of tolerance seemed to provide a rich soil for artists to grow in—as well as other things.
I moved the seedlings and the packaged buds downstairs to keep the smell in one place, a place with an air vent. Three pounds; at two thousand dollars a pound that would be six thousand, and half of that would be mine. Three thousand dollars. Now that has to last three months, I told myself, so that’s one thousand a month, so be careful. The following month, I would start getting Old Age Security and that would be about a thousand a month. Two thousand a month; two thousand. I could manage very nicely on that.
To get going on the next crop meant some hard work for a while. I needed soil to fill the pots and start again and I kicked myself for not telling Marcus that while he was here. I carried everything back downstairs, put the packaged buds on the shelf next to the seedlings and switched on the air vent. As I left the cupboard I noticed two bales of soil near the back door. Marcus must have brought them the day before. He had his uses after all.
19
I was beginning to feel I had a split personality, like Jekyll and Hyde. Half of me was an upright citizen doing the things I’d always done, like meeting with the Crones and my family, and the other half was growing pot in my basement. Each activity meant moving in quite different circles and having to adjust to each. In what I thought of as my ordinary life, I talked about the weather, local politics, and my grandchildren. As a gardener, topics of conversation were soil, pruning, and plant food. Neither circle overlapped. Maggie was the only common denominator.
Everyone knows what it’s like when your thoughts are elsewhere, yet you have to act as usual. I was like that in both roles. As a pot grower it was, what the hell am I doing? What would happen if I were caught? Was I was doing it right? In my ordinary life I was a fugitive who had something to hide and was always on my guard.
The people in each circle were so different too. My gardening friends were young, laid back and spoke a language I barely understood. To them I was older, yes, but they didn’t hold it against me. In fact they listened to me, and Marcus thought I was funny. My ordinary friends were, well, just the same: same attitudes, same values, same daily routine and comfortable with it all. That’s what got on my nerves—the complacency.
The Company of Crones decided to meet in Lakeside Park because we were enjoying an Indian summer and we wanted to take advantage of it before we had to hunker down for the long winter ahead. We met at the picnic tables under a shelter and, instead of bringing a bag lunch, most of us partook of the excellent food provided
by the concession.
There was no plan for our meeting other than to walk the labyrinth that had been built near the shelter. The labyrinth was a metaphor for a journey to your inner self and then back to the outer world with a broader understanding of who you were. At least that’s how it was explained to me. I can’t say I had ever finished walking it with a revelation of my inner self, but maybe that was because I usually entered it when I was consumed with some problem. Quite often I had solved the problem after walking slowly in diminishing circles, but I was still the same old Jess at the end, no nearer Enlightenment than before.
Four women were there when I arrived. Shortly after, Thelma showed up, all in white: white flimsy shirt, white slacks, white sandals, and enormous white sunglasses. Her floppy straw hat set on her white hair and her bright red lipstick were the only contrast.
“How’s tricks?” I asked her after greeting the others.
“George wants to come back.” Everyone leaned forward. Six people, most of them hard-of-hearing, at a picnic table made conversation difficult.
“Chloe gave him the big brush off. So now he sits on his own at dinner.” Thelma looked around at everyone with a satisfied smirk. “Serves him right.” She stood up, took off her sunglasses, and with a lot of hip swaying and toe pointing sang,
“Let him go, let him tarry, let him sink or let him swim
He doesn’t care for me nor I don’t care for him
He can go and get another that I hope he will enjoy
For I’m going to marry a far nicer boy.”
We all applauded. “Are you?” Jane asked. “Going to marry again, I mean.”
Thelma managed to appear coy by looking down at the table and pursing her lips. “Maybe. Maybe not,” she said.
Just then, a woman arrived, flamboyant in a flowered purple dress. I didn’t recognise her until someone said, “You look well, Laura. Are you better?”
Good heavens, it was Laura! The last time I’d seen her was in the hospital looking like death warmed over. That was about three months earlier. She hadn’t been at the last meeting when Thelma had told us about George, but someone had said she wasn’t any better. So what had produced this remarkable transformation?
“Whatever did you do?” I asked.
Laura sat down. “Yes, I’m much better. It was my nephew who found the cure. He’s a pharmacy student and did a work term here. He makes special little brownies for me. I’m only to eat one a day, at dinner time, and you wouldn’t believe how much better I feel.”
“What’s in the brownies?” Maggie asked. She looked at me with eyes wide open and a slight nod, but I didn’t pick up the message.
“I’m not sure. Some sort of medicinal plant. But he makes them just for me. They don’t work with all the other pills I was taking, he said, so I’ve stopped those. And I feel great.” Laura looked around smiling.
She did look great; she had put on weight, her eyes shone, and her skin bloomed. But the biggest change was in her outlook: she was positive, no longer a Moaning Minnie, less anxious and even serene.
“What are you going to do now he’s gone back to school?”
“He’s got a friend here who will make them and deliver them to me when I run out.” She produced a container. “They help with conditions affecting the elderly, he says, so I’ve brought you all a brownie to try.”
The container circulated and we each took a small cake that tasted of chocolate.
“I wonder if they’d make me feel better,” Joan said. “My arthritis is getting worse. I can hardly move this shoulder, look.” She lifted her left arm out straight and then tried her right arm, which couldn’t rise.
“I’ll see if Craig will make any more,” Laura said. “Or find out where you can get them.”
“We could go into business,” Maggie whispered to me. So that was what was in the brownies? Geez, I was slow on the uptake.
“See if you can get us the recipe,” I said to Laura. “We might be able to make them for ourselves.”
“You didn’t finish your story, Thelma,” Jane said. “Are you going to marry again?” She turned to Laura. “You weren’t here last time. George wants a divorce because he found out Thelma had an affair more than fifty years ago. So he went after Chloe, but now she’s dumped him and wants to come back to Thelma.”
We all smiled and looked at Thelma.
“I am dating, yes, but no thoughts of marriage. I’m having too much fun.” Thelma nonchalantly waved a hand with bright red long nails.
“Who’s the lucky chap?” I asked.
“He’s younger than George and can still…you know…” Thelma said. “His name is Percy and he lives on the floor above me. Used to be an electrician.”
My imagination took off. I pictured an elderly man in a dressing gown, with a walker, sneaking out of Thelma’s apartment back to his own in the middle of the night and being caught by one of the staff.
“Just like your former lover,” Joan said.
“Oh yes, but not as agile.” Thelma smiled. “Good with his hands though,” she said with a wink.
It was my turn to walk the labyrinth. Thelma’s electrician wore a thick tartan dressing gown and even with a walker, he was sprightly. No, get rid of the walker. Have him bound up the stairs. I walked a few steps. Marcus had been to collect the buds and returned the same day with twenty-seven hundred in cash, not the three thousand I expected. My product had not reached the desired standard and only fetched eighteen hundred a pound. Why? The buds were too small and the quality wasn’t good. What do dealers look for? Maggie might know. Swan. My little Swan. Marcus hadn’t seen her and didn’t know where she was. How could I have been so horrible? I wouldn’t blame her if she decided to tell me to bugger off.
My eyes were teary when I reached the center of the labyrinth and began the return journey. If only I could tell her how sorry I was. I had to see her—I owed her a hundred and twenty dollars for trimming. I owed Maggie too, and I had the money with me. When I reached the end of the walk I wasn’t a better person: I was still a stupid old fool.
Back at the picnic table I told everyone I was going to the concession and asked if I could bring anything back for anyone. Maggie jumped up and said she’d come with me. As we walked across the grass I managed to slip the money into her hand. “What I owe you for trimming. And Swan…you haven’t heard from her, have you?”
“No. Don’t worry, Jess. She’ll show up.”
“If she trimmed for the outdoor guys, she’d be back by now, wouldn’t she?”
“The weather’s been so good, they may have delayed the harvest for the buds to get bigger. Then she could have gone off for a few days camping or something.”
We ordered and as we waited for our burgers and salads I admired the flowerbeds near the concession, still very colorful despite the fading of their summer glory, and still with enough fragrance to fill the air. A Japanese maple showed off its red-bronze leaves against the blue lake, and other deciduous trees tried to compete by turning their own leaves red. It’s funny how the world appeared in glorious technicolor.
“So what do you think of Laura’s recovery?” Maggie asked.
“Is it really pot that’s made her better?”
“No. Her nephew was smart to get her off her meds by saying they wouldn’t work with his brownies, so it’s stopping those that’s improved her. The pot would make her more cheerful for sure.”
I took the opportunity of being alone with Maggie to ask about quality of buds and why my return was less than expected.
“The buyers examine the buds closely and also smoke some. They seem to know what they want. I once got two hundred a pound more than the going rate based on the smoke.”
“What did you do to make it so good?”
“That’s what’s so annoying—I don’t know. I’d done what I’d always done. Didn’t change th
e food, same sort of soil, same routine. Never did figure it out.”
The server called our numbers and we picked up our orders. “It only happened once.” Maggie said.
We moved to join the others. Thelma was telling a story about George and everyone seemed to find it hysterical, as they were giggling more than usual. I listened and found myself dissolving with mirth too, though I couldn’t have told you why.
“And then he went down on bended knee to present Chloe with flowers, and guess what?” Thelma cracked up and couldn’t speak. Finally she spluttered, “Silly old fool couldn’t get up again.”
We all shrieked with laugher. A couple walking past us stopped to stare.
“What happened?” someone asked.
“They had to send for the staff to help him, but they couldn’t find anyone for at least fifteen minutes, so he was stuck there. Chloe got up and left him on his knees. When the staff came to get him on his feet, he’d seized up so much he couldn’t walk and they had to get a wheelchair to take him to his room.”
My stomach ached from laughing. I looked at my friends. What wonderful women. I wanted to go around and kiss each of them, but climbing over the bench of the picnic table was too much effort.
“Yeah, growing old is not for the faint of heart, my grandmother used to tell me,” Claire said.
“There are some advantages,” Maggie said. “A reporter asked a 104-year old what was the best thing about getting old and she said, ‘No peer pressure.’”
Someone was sure to have a heart attack from laughing so hard, but everyone seemed inspired.
Joan said, “It’s scary when you’re old and you start making the same noises as your coffee maker.”
Even old Nina joined in. “Someone wrote to the paper complaining about dogs on Baker Street and said, ‘It’s the dog’s mess that I find hard to swallow.’” She was about to choke on her carrot stick but Maggie got up and patted her back.
“Back in olden days when Great Grandpa put horseradish on his head, what was he trying to do?” Maggie asked. We stared at her. With a straight face she said, “Get it in his mouth!”
Gone to Pot Page 14
