The Care and Handling of Roses With Thorns (3 page)

“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

O
N THE
M
ONDAY 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 them 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?”

She sits in the hard plastic chair next to mine. “I was walking by and saw you weren’t busy.” She looks pointedly at the computer screen. “I just had a great idea while I was drawing up plans for next semester.”

Teachers really aren’t supposed to visit with each other like this. I can see why. All the kids are interested in us, not in their projects. “We can talk at lunch, Dara. Not in front of the kids.”

She ignores this. “What if we do a joint project? Biology and art.”

“My students can’t draw. That’s why they’re in biology.” I wink at the watching students.

She blinks, and I notice how much mascara she has on, and how heavy her eyeliner is. It’s run into the small creases beneath her eye. “First of all, plenty of biologists can draw. Plenty of artists can do biology. Who do you think illustrates anatomy textbooks?”

“All right. I was just joking.”

“It didn’t sound like a joke.” She crosses her arms. “Darn it, Gal, this is a good idea. Don’t shoot it down.”

I realize what I said wasn’t just a joke, and if I think it was, I’m kidding myself.

I open my mouth to apologize, to explain myself. The kidney. It’s always the kidney. I shouldn’t use my illness as an excuse for anything anymore. I should know how to control my mood swings. This lack of water might be drying out my brain. My eyes are dry and I rub them behind my glasses.

I had snapped at Dara the weekend before last, arguing over where to sit in the movie theater for a showing of
Black Swan
. She said middle. I said I didn’t even want to see the movie in the first place, therefore we should sit on the aisle like I wanted. I had won. I usually did. That didn’t mean I was correct, though.

Dara continues. “The project’s conceptual. They don’t need to know how to draw. The art students don’t need to know biology. Though they probably do.” She points to the students. “I see ten students in here who are in my art class.”

At this my irritation returns and increases, especially because now everyone has abandoned their work, openly staring to see what will happen. Dara is a popular teacher. The cool teacher who lets them eat snacks during class and go outside to draw. I am the mean one who makes them think and doesn’t accept extra credit. “That explains a lot about their scholarship.”

Her neck flushes red and blotchy and I know I’ve crossed the line. Cheap shot, Gal. She stands.

I feel terrible. “Dara.”

“Forget it.” She leaves, the lining of her wool skirt making a scratching noise.

All the students are watching now, whispering, laughing. A few are shocked at what I said. Staring at me. These kids are wolves. Any sign of weakness and they descend.

My nonworking fistula for dialysis, a piece of plastic tubing implanted in my inner right arm, itches painfully. I want to rip it out of my flesh. This foreign object, battering me. I try to speak, but my voice has a frog, so I take a tiny sip out of my daily water allotment. The students, these children whose greatest daily obstacle has been which type of sugary cereal to choose for breakfast, snicker. It’s an overreaction, but I feel like overturning a table suddenly. “Back to work, all of you!” The sound of my voice echoes in this room, bare of softness, and hurts my eardrums. Thankfully, they all bow their heads and leave me alone.

• • •

H
OME.
A
SIMPLE DINNER
of a fried-up hamburger, made myself to be low-sodium. Tonight I have dialysis. My bag is already ready with its extra toothbrush and fuzzy slippers; my teaching bag, with ungraded papers, sits on top. I always keep the hospital bag packed, like a perpetually pregnant housewife.

I walk my outdoor rose garden, wandering in and out of the paths, pulling a red metal child’s wagon behind me to throw in the detritus. I have my rose gardening gloves on and carry my shears, snipping at random tendrils threatening my feet. Brad has taken care of most of the strays. This is one of his jobs. Easy enough. I itch to be in the greenhouse, tending to the rose for the contest, but at this point there’s nothing I can do except wait for its bud to open in bloom later this month, to see what I’ve got. It’s like waiting for a chick to hatch.

Near an American Beauty, that pure red rose, a shoot pushes through the organic mulch. I can’t tell if it’s rose or weed at the moment. It’s just a green shoot. If it’s a rose, it’s not one I planted, but some unwanted accident that will suck up my real rose’s nutrients, choking the roots of the beauty. Which is pretty much the definition of a weed. I could pull it out and start it in its own pot, but who has the time? Heck, if I did that for every possible rose, I would have no more pots left. I yank it out and throw it into the wagon pile and continue on.

• • •

I
BRING MY
photo album of roses to dialysis and sit looking through the photos in the waiting room. Here are all the roses of the past ten years, since I got really serious about my hobbies. The Hulthemias stretch back about six years, when I first discovered them.

One of my favorites is a pink one with a nearly maroon-colored blotch. It’s my earliest cross. I called it G21. Nothing particularly special, no fragrance. It was simply the first Hulthemia I had created.

“Those are some roses.”

I stiffen. Walters is peering over my shoulder, so close I feel his breath on my scalp. I shut the album abruptly.

“I meant that in a nice way, you know.” He ambles away, giving me a wink on his way out.

“Gal,” I hear my name called.

On my way to my room, I pass Walters’s, that rogue who shouldn’t even be on the list. He’s chatting up Nurse Gwen, as usual. What is it about him that these women adore? I don’t see it. He gives me a dapper little wave, and I fight the urge to flip him off with two middle fingers.

Into the bed I go. Nurse Gwen slides the needle into the plastic graft inside my leg. When my arm shunt got permanently jammed, they switched to the leg, and when that got clogged, they used my jugular for a while. One tube into the machine, one tube out of the machine with the clean blood. It sounds horrific to have a needle jammed into your neck, but after all the years of pricking it’s not so bad. The tissue inside, I’m sure, is roughened and scarred.

“You comfortable?” she asks. She reminds me of Flo from Mel’s Diner, all brassy blond and pink-lipsticked. Her hands smell of cigarettes and baby powder.

I give her a thumbs-up instead of speaking. She makes the room dark.

These hospital beds are as familiar and comfortable to me as my own. The medicinal scent of the sheets, their rough texture, the plastic bars at the sides. I haven’t added it all up, but I’ve probably spent almost as much time in these beds.

Once, when she was ten, my sister, Becky, fell out of a tree and hit her head. It knocked her out. She awoke in a hospital room. My pediatrician, seeing the name “Garner” appear in the roster, rushed over. For once, it was a different Garner. The doctor asked if she knew where she was. “I’m in Gal’s bed,” she said.

The pediatrician was sure Becky had a brain injury, until my mother had a realization. “She thinks the hospital is Gal’s bed, because Gal’s always here.”

When my mother tells the story, Becky ignores the point. “So the doctor was relieved it wasn’t Gal? Just me?”

“Gal’s been through a lot more than you,” my mother replies. A well-worn explanation.

In the dialysis room, the sound of my artificial organ lulls me to sleep. I don’t even wake up when the blood pressure cuff beeps on anymore.

I awake feeling more or less like the old Gal, which is to say, moderately okay. A normal person like Dara would probably feel like she had the flu, but this is my new normal.

When I get back home, fog covers the rose garden. I haven’t looked at the weather report to see if it will clear. I unlock the door. The house air is stale and unpleasant, so I open the kitchen window. The sink holds the dirty dishes from my dinner last night. I should have put them into the dishwasher and wish, out of nowhere, that there was someone to do it for me. I boot up my computer and make myself a cup of tea. In the yard next door, Old Mrs. Allen is out there watering again, though clearly she watered plenty yesterday. “You’re gonna kill your precious lawn,” I say. She’s in a black lacy robe with a thick flannel nightgown peeking out from underneath. I step back before she notices me.