"Reach Your Little Plant Arms to the Sky" by Mary Duquette
Daryl was trying to determine whether or not the woman sitting on his bed was a hooker. He considered himself relatively sophisticated, but Vegas was a long way from New Hampshire – and there’d been no conversation about money changing hands, of “how much,” or “looking for some company,” or “wanting a good time.” There’d just been a sort of pleasant, vanilla-flavored exchange of what-are-you-drinking and I-love-your-shirt (on her part) and where-are-you-from and yes-my-first-trip-to-Vegas (on his part), and she’d had one too many Manhattans and somehow ended up in his hotel room with his brother Foss across the hall, probably on the phone with his wife, and Daryl sitting adjacent to the monster picture window with a view of an indistinguishable sprawl of lights, and another view of a fantastic blonde with pink highlighted tips and a sweet sort of whimsical smile that reminded him of his niece, Patrice – a vague discomfort made him want to wrap her up in a blanket and give her a cup of tea or something. They must have taken the elevator up. He didn’t remember.
He glanced at his watch. 7:45. Time was precious and burdensome. He’d taken to charting its measurements to keep it in line, safe from being carried away into meaningless shifts. The watch on his wrist, reference to his phone, kept him certain of the time. Each second mattered; whether it was 3:56 or 3:57 concerned him.
“Why are you checking your watch?” she said. “Got somewhere to go?”
“No. Just keeping track of the minutes as they pass. Time is delicate. There’s an enormous difference between one moment and the next.”
“Are you a poet or something?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. That sounded like a poem.” She rummaged through her handbag. “I love poetry. I read it all the time. It makes me feel like I’m something, you know? Not of this world. Like I’m elevated.” She took out a joint and lit it. “Want a hit?”
“No, thanks. In fact, could you put that out?”
“Okay.” She stood and stepped to the coffee table, snuffing the joint out into the bowl Daryl had been using for his morning fruit. “Sorry,” she said. “I think I might make you nervous. Am I making you nervous?”
“No,” he said. “Yes. I dreamed about a girl like you when I was a boy. I had posters of you over my bed. I looked at magazines with you folding out of them like a gift. Now you’re in front of me, real. On my bed. Like you jumped out of my boyhood dreams.”
She sat down on the bed again and cupped her hands together. “That’s probably, like, the best thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Really?”
“So, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’ll be right back.” She stood and walked to the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
He heard the sink turn on, and she ran the water for a good two minutes or more. Then silence.
Her bag was open on the bed, and he slid over and rifled through it without thinking about what he was doing. A tin of Altoids (probably pot), a wallet in the shape of a cat’s head, a few cough drops, two nondescript tubular containers that looked like lipstick, keys with a fuzzy dice keychain, three tickets to a Rockabilly concert dated last July, tortoise shell sunglasses, and a comb. He put the bag down and snapped it shut – but maybe it hadn’t been shut in the first place, so he unsnapped it. Then he changed his mind and snapped it shut again. Then cursed snaps on bags in general and cursed himself for starting the whole thing to begin with. She probably wouldn’t notice, either way. She didn’t seem the type to be overly concerned with things like snaps, or whether something had been shut or not.
His thoughts tended to be jumbled, lately. Disjointed. He couldn’t remember certain things, and the things he did remember didn’t seem to make much sense. And the pain in his back kept him from being able to concentrate for more than a few minutes on anything if it wasn’t urgent. Foss would probably be off the phone by now, but Daryl had left the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob, and Foss would assume he was tired and had gone to bed early – which wasn’t too implausible. He wondered what he would do if the woman (Angie? Annie?) wanted to spend the night with him. And he wondered what he would do if she didn’t.
If she didn’t, maybe he’d order in, a late-night snack of escargot. He’d never tried it but noticed it on the menu. It looked interesting. In garlic butter sauce. Each tiny snail had its own stainless steel compartment. The snails reposed in their partitions, nestled. Without the sauce, he doubted the snails would be as delectable. Something would be lost. Without it, they would be unexceptional.
Foss had been in his room forever, probably still on the phone, or maybe had seen the sign on the doorknob. Daryl realized he had already thought that thought, and stood, deciding to double-check the doorknob sign. Pain shot across his back, and he fell on his knees, sideways onto his left shoulder.
He tried to sit up, but the pain was intense, and he had to stop and figure out the best way of moving that caused the least amount of discomfort. He tried propelling himself up with momentum, pushing from his shoulder and putting the pressure on his knees and thighs, but as soon as he lifted two or three inches from the carpet, the pain sharpened. He rested his head on the floor and looked down at his wrist. 8:01. The time he fell in Vegas and couldn’t get up, his brother in the room across the hall, a woman in his bathroom whom he just met, and who looked like every porn starlet he’d ever lusted after but couldn’t think of anything to talk about. He wasn’t sure it mattered, at that moment. 8:05. He wanted her to come out so she could help him up. But then, he didn’t. Not at all. And he did not want Foss either.
His thoughts floated over him in a wave. All he could do was wait for her to emerge from the bathroom. He leaned his head onto the carpet pile and checked his watch (8:08) and gazed at the bathroom door.
He looked out the window, everything falling away and imagined the moon was close, although he couldn’t see it. Too many artificial lights. He wasn’t certain how something so inexhaustible like an infinite universe existed. Maybe infinity was a sphere, like earth. A finite entity but with no edge, so you’d eventually wind around again to the place you started. Or maybe the universe was countless, converging, diverging. Truly limitless, and so perfect it defied logic, the realm of possible. He raised his hand and curved his fingers around the window of artificial stars, cradling them.
She opened the door. “Oh my God. Are you okay?”
“I fell.”
“Do you want me to call a doctor?”
“No, no. Please don’t. Just help me up. I’m fine, I just need help standing up.”
“Didn’t you say your brother is here? I should get him.”
“No, don’t. Just…” He lifted his hand.
She lunged forward and grabbed it, holding his elbow as she helped him sit up. He leaned against the ottoman.
“Now can you grab me my medicine, please. It’s in the blue zippered pouch on the bathroom sink.”
She disappeared into the bathroom again and came out slowly, examining the bottle. “What’s it for?” she said.
“It’s morphine.”
She looked at him.
“I have cancer,” he said.
They sat on the bed together eating snails.
“I have an aunt in New Hampshire.”
“I can’t remember. Where did you say you’re from?”
“Steering Grace. Small town, it wouldn’t show up as a pimple on a map.” She swirled her fork around in the garlic sauce. “I was pretty famous there for my lungs.”
“Your what?”
“My lungs. I could hold my breath longer than anyone. I mean, I can hold it for a long time. I won the lung capacity championship four years in a row, before P.J. Holsteder tried it one year and passed out in his baby-back ribs, and they had to stop it altogether.”
Daryl popped a snail in his mouth. “P.J. Holsteder, huh?”
“At the time, I was proud of it. I got to six minutes and fifty-three seconds once, if you can believe it. They recruited me the year after that to be the water tank ‘fall’ girl at the Steering Grace Barley Fair. You know, the one who sits in the water tank while people throw bean bags at the button. The button releases the seat, so you fall in. I’d sit there until some guy finally hit it, and I’d sink in – but I’d stay there for a while just to make it more dramatic. In the tank, everything looked blurry, you know? And it didn’t seem very clean, although I know they scrubbed it every year. The sides were pretty cloudy and scratched up, though. Anyway, I’d stay in there and sort of float around, thinking about if I lived under water, what that would be like. No people, just me and maybe some fish and coral and seaweed, and how peaceful that would be – how easy. All you’d have to do is swim around all day and maybe sit on a rock and watch the sun set, and then dive under again. Like the Little Mermaid. I loved that movie as a kid. Sometimes I wish I was the little mermaid, but without all the mer-people. I’d want it to be just me.”
“Sure. I get that.”
“So, I’d watch them out there, outside the tank, their legs and arms all distorted, like in a funhouse mirror. You know, like they’re really short and wide. They’d walk over after a while, stand around the tank, because they were afraid I’d drown in there. I’d wait until the last possible second and I’d pop out of the water like a dolphin, and they’d say, ‘Amy, oh my God, you scared us to death!’ and I’d just laugh at them.”
“Amy.”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing.”
“All the ladies in town used to hire me to blow up balloons for their children’s birthday parties,” Amy went on. “You should have seen it. Me, surrounded by a zillion different colored balloons, and all the kids so excited. I did balloon animals. Butterflies, giraffes, dinosaurs. I even did a human face, once.” She inserted a snail into her mouth. A little of the sauce landed on her top.
“That must have been something.”
“It was.” She surveyed his face. “So, what’s the deal with your brother? He pretty much stays to himself, right?”
“Yeah, we’re not close.”
“Why not?”
“A lot of reasons. More than I can say. He’s always been a conformist. He runs with the grain. And I’m always pushing against things.”
She licked the butter sauce off her fork. “That must be tiring. So, what are you guys doing in Vegas?”
“Just visiting. Just doing the obligatory brotherly-bonding-before-you-die trip.”
“You’re not really dying.”
“I am.”
“But that’s so…” Her hand wavered in the air as if she wanted to touch him.
He set the plate on his lap. “You know what? Let’s go swimming right now.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Let’s go down to the pool and swim. It’s nice. It’s heated.”
“But, is that okay for you? I mean, can you do that?”
“Sure.” He put his fork down. “But I don’t even have to go in. I just want to watch you.”
She reached forward and brushed the hair back from his face. “Okay,” she said. “Why not.”
Daryl’s fingers went to the drawstring of his trunks, tightening the knot. He and Amy had gone to the hotel gift shop and purchased swim trunks for him, since he hadn’t packed any. They were orange and turquoise and had an art-deco-like pattern of palm trees and seagulls and ocean waves. Amy had bought lavender bikini bottoms for herself. She had borrowed one of his white t-shirts to wear with them and it hung halfway down her thighs.
She dove off the board into the deep end. He watched as she raised her arms, hands together in a prayer position, one foot in front of the other, a jump and an arch and she was in, cutting through with hardly a splash. She stayed under a long time. She had said she was a lung capacity expert, but the minutes went by and Daryl kept checking his watch.
He sat up from where he’d been laying in a white plastic-coated lounge chair by the pool to try and catch a glimpse of her. He knew he was pathetic, convalescing like some eighty-year-old, but his back still hurt, and he couldn’t quite make himself get in the water. His legs stuck out in front of him like shimmery, knobbish tentacles. In fact, he felt more octopus than human, a monster, abhorrent and wretched. His body had become a thing unfamiliar to him - it wasn’t his, anymore. It belonged to something else, taking over and deciding when he should feel pain and when he should use the bathroom and when he should throw up, without a concern about how inopportune a moment might be, and how he might miss aspects of what life he had left because he had to attend to his body’s whims. He felt it highly unfair that his body should betray him like that. That after all he’d done in his life, his failed marriage, his starting over, his picking himself back up and settling in a house and gathering his thoughts together in some sort of vaguely constructed way, that in the end he would be in a place of no return.
He stood up and slugged to the edge of the pool and sat and put his feet in the water. He could see her under there, hovering in the deep end, her limbs moving in sync with the tendrils of water around her. He wondered how he’d know if she was actually drowning. What an irony it would be if she drowned right there with him pretty much useless, dying and in pain, waiting for her to come out, thinking that she was okay because of her supposed super-human lungs, which she may or may not have had. If she was drowning he didn’t have the slightest idea how he would save her.
“Amy?” he said. “Are you okay?” It was an idiotic question. If she hadn’t drowned, she couldn’t hear him. If she was drowning, it wouldn’t do any good. There wasn’t a lifeguard this time of night, no one around except an older couple drinking pink cocktails with cherries sitting at a wrought-iron table eating from a cheese plate.
“Amy?”
She stayed under, her hair swirling around her like pink seaweed, her T-shirt billowing like a mushroom. Daryl watched her a minute longer and pulled himself up and walked to the couple at the table with the cheese and cherry cocktails. “Hello,” he said. “Here’s a dilemma. There’s a woman under the water in the deep end, and I don’t know if she’s okay.”
The couple looked at him as though they had no idea what he had said, and it occurred to him that they didn’t speak English. He thought of pulling out his high school Spanish. He tried to remember how to say, Emergency! Woman in pool might be drowning!
“Emergencia,” he started.
“What makes you think she’s not okay?” the woman asked in an accent he couldn’t quite place.
“She’s been under for a while,” he said, relieved at the English. “Although she is a lung capacity expert.”
“A what?”
Daryl wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Never mind,” he said. “Would you please come over and take a look? I just…I don’t know what to do.”
The couple stood and followed Daryl over to the deep end near the diving board. They stood by the edge and gazed in the water. Amy hadn’t moved. She floated toward the bottom of the pool, arms raised at her sides as if she were walking a tightrope.
“She’d come up if she was drowned,” the man remarked. “Dead bodies float.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Daryl said.
“Is she your wife?”
“No.” Daryl couldn’t think why that would make a difference.
“Why don’t you go in after her?” the woman said severely. “I’d go in after her.”
“I would,” he said. “But I’m not strong. I’m…sick.”
They looked him over. Daryl keenly felt his lack of weight, the pale skin on his thin legs, his slightness, his arms sallow and brittle.
“Sick, huh? What you got? That AIDS thing?” the man finally said.
“No. Please, I…I’m not sure what to do. About Amy.”
“I’d go in after her,” the woman said to the man. “Hurry up, before it’s too late.”
“The thing is,” Daryl said, “I’m not actually sure she’s in trouble. I think maybe she’s just hovering there.”
They all peered into the water again. Amy floated like a jellyfish, her arms outstretched, her fingers spread.
“Well, I suppose I should go get her, then,” the man said, and he started to take off his jacket.
“Oh, be careful, Bertie.” The woman clung onto his arm. “Remember your bad knee.”
Just then, Amy breached up, a dolphin, her hair flying back. Her nipples were exposed, plastered against the soak of the t-shirt, and she brushed her face with her fingers and stared at them with wide eyes, and Daryl thought that if nothing else existed, if the only thing that mattered was this one second, he’d be satisfied. Complete.
“She’s fine,” the woman said unnecessarily.
“Thank you so much for your help,” Daryl said. “Really.”
The man swore under his breath. He moved back to the table, and the woman took a last steady look at Amy before turning away to follow him back.
Amy watched them as they went. “Sorry,” she said. “Were you worried?”
“No.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Maybe a little.”
She reached her hand to him. “Come in with me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It still hurts. I don’t think the morphine has fully kicked in.”
“It might feel better. The water might be medicinal.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on. The shallow end.” She disappeared under the water and swam to the other end of the pool, surfacing again and standing on the stairs. She waved to him and he walked slowly toward her. He removed his sandals and his watch, placing them near the edge of the pool, and inched into the water, the first step. It wasn’t bad. He moved down to the next step, and took her outstretched hand as he went all the way in. The water fell just below his waist, at the line of his bathing suit. He shivered.
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
She pulled him closer and laughed a little, and he reached out and gripped the side to steady himself.
“Don’t worry, you won’t go under.”
“I’m not worried.”
He watched her as she swam back and forth across the pool – not lengthwise, but from one side to the other, in a zig-zag pattern. She arched up and in, cutting through the water. He held onto the metal tubular railing and sat on one of the steps, lifting his legs until they floated in front of him, closing his eyes and wondering how he got there and what would happen if he let the water engulf him.
“Hey, you know what? You haven’t checked the time in, like, an hour.”
“Yes, I did. I just checked it a couple of minutes ago.”
“Really? What time is it? Tell me without looking.”
Daryl covered his watch with a hand. “It’s...” He shrugged.
“See? You don’t know. I think that means something.”
She dried her hair with a towel from the bathroom. She still had her bikini bottoms on but had taken off the t-shirt and wrapped another towel around her. He had changed into sweatpants and sat on the bed trying not to feel the creeping ache - in his stomach, this time.
“I didn’t notice you had a plant in here.”
“Yes,” he said. “Actually, I think there are two.”
“So, I saw this show on PBS, I think. Maybe it was the TED Talks. You know them? Anyway, it was about how plants can communicate, how they respond to human’s talking to them. Like they have their own personalities. So, I tried it. I took two of the same plant, same size, same pot. I took one plant and put it on my patio. Then I took another one and put it on my deck. And one of them I talked to, and the other one I didn’t. Know what happened?”
“No.”
“The one I talked to got bigger. It flowered. It reached its little plant arms up to the sky. The other one? Stayed smallish. Interesting. Now I talk to both of them all the time. And sometimes I sing to them, too. I know that sounds wacky. You must think I’m a nut.”
“I think you’re one of the sanest people I’ve ever met.”
Amy walked to the plant. Daryl thought it might have been a Ficus but wasn’t sure. It was large enough to be a tree, but he didn’t know much about plants.
She brushed the leaves with her fingers. “Hi, plant,” she said. “Bet you’re pretty lonely up here, with no other plants around. I bet nobody talks to you, do they?”
“There’s another one,” Daryl said. “Over by the table, over there. At the other window.”
Amy went to the other plant and examined it. “It seems fine,” she said. “I think they take pretty good care of these.”
“I’m sure they do.”
Amy fingered the leaves tenderly and went to the bed and sat down next to him. “How are you feeling?” she said.
“I’m all right.”
“Tell me more about your brother.”
“Really? I can think of a million other things to talk about that would be more interesting.”
“Is he older?”
“Younger.”
“By how many years?”
“Look, I don’t want to…”
“Why not?” She took his hand and looked at him seriously. “Why don’t you?”
He stared at his hand in hers. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“I just want to know why you’re so angry at him.”
“I’m not really angry at him. We’re just different. For example, this trip. We’re on our way to see his friend in Fresno, whom I’ve never met. He thinks that somehow this would be something I’d be interested in doing. I think he’s just trying to make himself feel better. I think he’s trying to hurry up and fix things between us, before…” He looked out through the window. The sky was blue-black in the space between the glimmer of the city lights, that ancient hour marking the beginning of sleep, that time when he yearned for a thing he couldn’t name. “We fought a lot, growing up,” he said. “He was always the innocent one. I was the fuck-up. Nothing I did was any good, according to my father. So of course, I resented him. Both of them. But it wasn’t really Foss’ fault.” He looked back down at his hand and hers clasped together. “Sometimes I wish I could go back, just to try it again. To do it again, without being the way I am.”
“That’s a tough thing to keep up with,” Amy said. “Being so awful. That must be exhausting for you.”
He looked at her. “I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”
“Joking. And, not.” She pulled his hand to her cheek.
He felt a flight of warmth spread from his legs to his chest. “We used to do this thing, though, Foss and I,” he said. “We used to play badminton. Not for points, we just screwed around in the backyard, seeing how many times we could go before somebody missed. We would get into a rhythm, into a mechanized pace. Almost without thinking about it. If you focused too hard, that’s when you missed. So, we played mindlessly, and we lost count after a while. Counting didn’t even matter after a while. We didn’t talk to each other or look at each other. Just the birdie. Like a pendulum, or windshield wipers.”
She squeezed his hand. “I think that’s beautiful.”
“It’s ridiculous that it’s the only good thing I remember. I have a hard time getting close to people, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Not really. I haven’t noticed that, at all.”
He stared at his feet, two white-ish tyrants, skinny and unrecognizable, emerging from the bottom of his pants and spilling out onto the carpet.
“Do you want to lie down?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess so.”
She helped him to stand and pulled the covers back. “Get in,” she said.
He lay down, and she took off the towel and slid in next to him under the sheet. Her breasts were heavy on his arm, and he took in a swallow of air.
“It’s okay,” she said, and slipped her hand under his sweatpants. “It’s okay,” she said softly, and moved her hand over him. He felt himself harden – incredible that his body still worked, that for all his pain he could still sail there, could meet her in that place, the spring orchard where time didn’t exist, and as she climbed down his body and put her mouth on him, he watched himself fall into a familiar darkness, warm and emergent and without lucidity, sowing the hole in his chest he’d been busy emptying.
They lay next to each other on the bed. The shifting lights made angel-wing patterns on the walls and traffic growled from the street outside.
“Hold my hand,” he said.
“I am holding it.”
“Hold it tighter. I can’t feel it. Why can’t I feel it.”
“How’s that?”
Daryl closed his eyes. “Fine,” he said. “That’s good.”
They fell asleep holding hands, their heads just lightly touching.
***
After she left, he took another dose of morphine and lay on the bed. Someone knocked on the door. The knock was hollow, like it was delivered through a tube. He wasn’t even sure it had happened. He tried to say, “Come in,” but couldn’t get the words out. The morphine. Or, something else. His brain, unable to register what a word was. What it meant to bite down on a word, to open your mouth a certain way, shape it succinctly enough to utter something that somehow made sense – that would reach another person.
“Amy,” he said, and didn’t say. “Amy.”
A large picture hung on the wall, a black and white photograph, flowers in a vase. He held the flowers in his hands. Amy dove into the ocean, a translucent mermaid’s tail instead of legs wrapping around the waves as if she manipulated them into curling tiers, the moon sighing as she cast the tides across grains of sand and up onto the shaggy dunes where he sat among sea oats and wild roses. He looked into the sky and there was no end or beginning, and that was all right, too. “Daryl,” someone said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said, but it wasn’t him, it was another voice, and he couldn’t tell who it was. The flower petals surrendered to the winds. The sky was black now and the ocean was spinning and he lifted his legs in front of him as it carried him away.
