Wallflowers by Eliza Robertson Read Free Book Online Page A

‘Bea,’” she said from the next room. “‘Ma’am’ ages a gal worse than cigarettes.”
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    They sipped iced tea and commented on the artichoke. Nine feet wide and six tall—biggest he’d seen outside of Castroville, Huck said. Then he complimented the tea—did she make it from scratch? She said she had better things to do, and how was his mother? His mother was living on the coast now and very fine. Yes, a nice house; no, without a pool (who needs one a block away from the Pacific). Sandy (not Sadie) was male and almost finished high school. He planned to become a veterinarian.
    â€œYou have kids?” he asked.
    â€œWell, I hope they’d be here instead of you if I did.”
    â€œYou want any?”
    â€œThey didn’t tell you the nature of my operation, did they?”
    He shifted in his chair.
    â€œDid you ever want any?”
    The rainbow plastic strips of the seat sweated under her thighs.
    â€œAt one point maybe,” she said.
    Parker had volunteered in the maternity ward during his final year of med school, and Bea used to drop him off. Most mornings she had nowhere to be, so she would walk him to the delivery room doors, kiss him brassily, then meander back through the corridors. She often paused at the nursery. The pastel bundles wriggled in their beds and the nurses fed them or changed diapers, their motions always so swift with practised duty.
    Bea arched her spine to stretch a crick in her neck and the flesh of her shoulders squeaked against the back of the sun chair.
    â€œI’m going to roast Louise like a root vegetable,” she said. She inhaled the warm plastic air. “So. What is it you do when you’re not landscaping?”
    He clasped the brim of his hat between his finger and thumb and rotated it left across his brow. “I band hummingbirds.”
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    With her vision blurred the sunflowers on the drapes melted with those in the garden, except she didn’t have sunflowers in her garden so they just melted. She uncrossed her eyes. The drapes were hideous, but they added colour to the vegetables she could see through the window. She mostly planted vegetables, because if you can’t eat the produce, why get your hands dirty, except to add colour, but then, why hang drapes? She might plant sunflowers and retire the curtain, but tall crops made her feel short, and at forty-eight she was only getting shorter.
    The surgeon had kick-started her menopause, the final milestone, and now all she could do was wait. Wait for her spine to sickle, her breasts to droop, until it was time to remove those too. It ran in the family. Her future would be breastless and bloodless—pre-pubescent, post-woman. That seemed to be how the chips fell.
    The artichokes should have been picked days ago. Jumbo globes the colour of lizard bellies bobbed off the stalks like street lamps, the bracts open on those directly facing the sun. The flesh would be stringier than floss if she didn’t pick them by tomorrow. Time passes like molasses when you’re bedridden. She used to hang a flower box out her window, but after a couple weeks the daffodils succumbed to her I’ll-let-it-rain philosophy. Now her sill was bare save a line of nine avocado pits. To plant an avocado tree, she always said, but really she delighted in their smoothness. A perfect sphere to cup in your palms as a child might her largest marble. In the sun they’d all shrivelled too.
    She fell asleep after the iced tea and stayed asleep minus two hobbles to the bathroom. She’d been awake now for an hour and twenty-three minutes and felt okay—pain subdued thanks to the codeine-coated acetaminophen, of which she’d taken three. Maybe a little weak on her feet, head in the clouds, but from her bed the sky looked cloudless, so where did that leave her head? She wanted to get the shears. She could hear Huck in the kitchen, landscaping what smelled like