Wallflowers (7 page)

Now the artichokes loomed above Bea on the ends of their sceptres, two flies humming and bumming around the highest globe. She stood half-hunched beside the plant, its jagged silver-green leaves clawing at her sleeve, at the aquamarine garden loppers in her hand. She angled the loppers at a low-flying artichoke, about level with her nose, and squeezed the handles, but when the blades nipped together, they only pushed the stem away. She grasped the stalk with a fist and pressed the handles together with her hip and other hand. The globe plunked to the grass between her pigeon-toed feet and she nudged it with her heel. It rolled into the dirt bed and stopped short of a mound. Ants streamed back and forth between the mound's peak and the edge of the grass, and when they reached the choke, they forked into two threads. Anthill removal was another project she and Parker never got around to.

On the taller stalks the artichokes were just beyond arm's reach. These were the globes nearest the sun, their scales glutted with yellow light and beginning to yawn. She stabbed the loppers into the lawn, leaned on the handles, and stared at the house. Huck stared back from her bedroom window. She drew her shoulder blades together and raised her chin—embarrassed that she felt embarrassed for getting caught outside. The sky was overcast now. Clouds trapped the heat and the warmth hung boggy and thick around her limbs. She needed a footstool. She leaned more weight into the handles and the point sank deeper in the grass. Huck continued to watch her like he didn't realize she was staring right back. The shadow from the eaves darkened half his face as his hat might have done, but she fancied she could still make out the green of his eyes. She stepped onto the path, leaving the loppers vertical in the lawn, and padded her feet along the gravel.

 

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In an ant colony, sterile wingless females form the proletariat—hired as soldiers or workers depending on the size of their heads. You know you've found an anthill if the ground is alive, the dirt sifting beneath your feet. You lie beside them. The ants with oversized heads explore your hips. More follow. They swarm your legs, your feet black with their exoskeletons. You wear ants for pants, thousands of hooks stamping your skin.

Expect to itch, the nurse said. Before this, you had not shaved since your first year of marriage. Must pick up moisturizer. Must reread chapter three of the
Worried Woman's Guide to a Happy Hysterectomy
, “On Shaving.”

 

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She couldn't scratch her crotch because now Huck was below her, spotting. One of his palms shined out, fingers stretched and ready should she tumble from her two-foot footstool. His other hand held his hat, flipped upside down to collect the artichokes. Bea clutched a lopper handle in each of her hands. She arched back and looked sideways at the remaining fruits, sun piercing through the clouds now and blotting out the stems so the globes looked suspended from fishing line like a mobile of the solar system. Around the stool the grass was studded by the chokes decapitated before Huck volunteered his hat. She pressed the fulcrum of the blades against the stalk and clipped. The artichoke plopped to the grass. Bea stepped down and Huck, who thought she was falling, palmed her butt. Her feet stayed pegged to the stool—she wondered if he could feel the extra padding.

He whipped his hand into his jeans pocket. With eyes pinned to the grass he bobbed his chin to the empty nectar feeder that hung from the eaves.

“That won't attract hummers without red,” he said.

The feeder was a wedding gift, another unused relic. She looked away from it and told him she'd like to go to town.

 

Her cottage dwelt in a pocket of wood between Keremeos and Cathedral Park—a fire access route away from the turquoise bridge, which led to the Ashnola Forest Service Road, which led to the Similkameen River and Highway 3. Keremeos was home to fifty fruit stands and Hedgehog Central. So local vendors sold hedgehogs and peaches, but no panty girdles. The next nearest Canadian town was Osoyoos, and it was almost faster to shop at the General Store in Nighthawk, Washington, but Nighthawk was also unlikely to sell panty girdles. Bea shifted in the passenger's seat to transfer weight off her groin. She spread her thighs and cracked the joints in her hip sockets. Her knee grazed Huck's hand, which rested on the clutch and did not flinch at her contact. She drew her knees back together and grazed his hand a second time, then threw her stare at the windshield, which was slicked with the butterscotch entrails of flying highway insects.

“So you band hummingbirds,” said Bea.

He raised his chin in a way that indicated he heard.

“Why?” she asked.

“Identification.”

“Why?”

“To learn.”

She pressed her lips together and glanced at the rear-view mirror before she could again ask why. Her eyelids were thicker than average and made her look like an insomniac or a poet or French, but with her lips sucked in she looked like the speak-no-evil monkey, so she puckered them out. To plump her lower lip she rolled it toward her chin until the luminous inner lining glimmered in the mirror—then she drew it back. She rotated her head to aim the perfected pout at Huck and realized he was already looking at her, so she darted her eyes forward and opened the glove compartment. Inside there were road maps, balled-up receipts, and a sleek aluminum case. She drew the case onto her lap and unclasped the buckles. The interior was lined with velvet, and a hole in the centre cradled a digital scale. Shape-appropriate slots carried a magnifying glass and surgical tweezers. She pinched the glass from its slot and examined her fingernails, then the stick shift and the hairs on Huck's knuckle, then his eye, which bulged in the lens and startled her. She tucked the magnifying glass back in its slot, buckled the case, and slid it into the glove compartment. “You ever call yourselves bandits?” she said.

“What?”

“Hummingbird bandits.”

He didn't reply. Out the window the topography softened more and more into grasslands, badlands. Hills of canvas rolled on either side of the highway and clumps of thistle prickled from the hills. When she drove Parker to the interior thirty years ago, he could not take his eyes off the tumbleweeds. He said he felt like Clint Eastwood and didn't seem to notice that after five minutes the desert dwindled back into orchard. Sure as rain, grapes replaced the next kilometre of sand—rows of vines sea-nymph green and plump with irrigated water.

“Do you date?” said Huck.

“What?”

She pressed the fabric of her dress into the nooks of her armpits as the truck passed the sign for Osoyoos.

“My boss in Kelowna is around your age. Needs a lady to spend money on.”

Around her age.

“I can give you his number.”

She searched her mind for a sly response, but could not form the words in her mouth before the moment stretched too long.

 

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Find your belly button. Now slide two fingers down—one left, the other right, until each rests halfway to your hip bones. These are your ovaries. Your estrogen epicentres. The estrogen softens you, shapes sex traits like wide hips and breasts. Between your wide hips you can draw a constellation. Start from the ovaries. Trace your fingers in toward your pubic bone. These are your fallopian tubes and the horns of Aries, first sign of the zodiac, the ram. The face of Aries is your uterus. The surgeon left the uterus, but your horns are removed. They've uncuckolded your ram.

 

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She chose the scarlet panty girdle with Bettie Page on the package because the other ones were labelled like tofu—firm, extra firm. It cinched belly button to thighs and she almost bought the matching garter. When they returned to the cottage, Bea lit the stove and put on a pot of water the size of a small bathtub. She added rock salt and lemon juice and, when she couldn't see through the steam, six artichokes. More than she and Huck could eat if the artichokes weren't the main course. Boiling artichokes was like boiling crabs, except she didn't imagine their screams until she made the comparison, at which point she did. Then she imagined the human heart as a thistle that had to be boiled and peeled and dipped into butter, and felt silly so she left Huck to mind the stove. After a few minutes he set the pot on the table over two oven mitts, and brought the saucepan of butter and an enamel bowl for their scraps. The panty girdle made Bea sit up straighter, which made her cross her legs at her ankles, which tightened her hips and piqued the pressure on her groin. She peeled the first artichoke bract gingerly, but there isn't a polite way to suck off the flesh. The scales piled in the scrap bowl and she and Huck watched each other from behind their green goblets, gums grinning like thirsty kings.

“How do you catch a hummingbird?” asked Bea. She had been planning this question since the drive, letting herself imagine a dream catcher, webbed with twine and turquoise beads and down feathers.

“A mesh net.”

“And then what?”

“We measure them. We weigh them.”

“Isn't that like weighing a helium balloon?”

“We wrap the bird in a nylon sock.”

“A sock?”

“A nylon knee sock.”

Bea scraped her bottom teeth against the meat of an artichoke petal. The butter was forming crystals in the pan.

“Tomorrow I'll clear those rocks,” Huck said, and wiped his thumbs on the tablecloth.

“It might rain,” she said. Her palms hung off her wrists, fingers glossy with butter. “I won't have you work in the rain.”

 

After dinner Bea's skin boiled, so she stood in her panty girdle and sports bra, the lights out except the bulbs around her vanity. She traced a red splotch that bloomed across her chest in the shape of Australia, then slid out the door to the full-length mirror in the hall. She could hear boot steps. On the bottom stair, up one, two, and pause. A dull pain swelled between her thighs, and when she clenched them, it didn't help. The boot steps resumed and Bea kneaded her toes into the rug. She leaned her shoulder against the wall and waited for a shadow to spill onto the top stair. A shadow did spill onto the top stair, then up the wall, followed by Huck in his cowboy hat.

He turned away immediately. “I'm sorry, ma'am,” he said, and removed his hat.

She wiped her collarbone with the back of her hand, then wiped her hand on the wallpaper as he beetled back down the stairs. “You'll call me ‘Bea,'” she said.

 

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To suck honey from honeysuckle, find a vine and pluck a flower. Tug out one of the stigmas. Insert the bell of it between your teeth and the tip of your tongue. You and your husband used to take turns. He would pluck a stigma and slide it between your teeth, your chin tilted up like a baby bird's. You would scrape out the honey, then slide a stigma between his teeth, and he would re-open his jaw and trap your fingers.

 

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Bea stood before the vine that climbed the granite wall. She cupped a flower between her palms and gazed at the chalice of strands.

“Did you know every day a hummingbird must consume half its weight in sugar?” said a voice.

Huck's silhouette hovered under the eve of the porch. His face was blotted out by dark, but indoor lamplight pooled on the brim of his hat and made it look disembodied. “They need it—some migrate three thousand miles. Honeysuckle's their favourite.”

Bea spread her fingers and the flower slipped to the grass.

“I don't mind the rocks,” he said, and walked to the other wall.

“Me neither.”

“If I take 'em out, that'll be the end of the honeysuckle. Was it you or my father who wanted the pond?”

“Your father.”

“Then how about we leave the rocks be.”

She smiled and watched him fiddle with the brim of his hat.

“I'm going banding tomorrow,” he said. “You can come if you like. I take the pickup, so if it's too much strain, you can rest in the truck.”

“Why, Huckleberry, I'd love to,” she said.

 

The trap is made from two rubber rings—the bottom ring a foot below the top and joined by fishing line. A nectar feeder hangs from the mesh roof, and more mesh shrouds the outer circumference, bunched at the top but ready to be dropped on entry of a hummingbird. Huck hung the trap, which he called a “mist net,” from a crabapple tree forty-five minutes west of her cottage. They had left the pickup on the highway and followed a brook through the woods until they reached something of a grove. Six crabapple trees clumped in a horseshoe on either side of the stream, their branches deluged with blossoms like over-feathered flamingos, and between the trunks the brook blushed with their reflection. Bea and Huck shared a stump a few feet away.

“And now we wait?” she asked.

“And now we wait.”

Bea shifted weight onto her tailbone. The damp air erected the hairs on her forearms, so she unrolled her flannel cuffs and tucked her jeans into her wool socks. “Hot chocolate?” she asked. She had awoken before Huck and had time to get a pot of oats on the stove, as well as some cocoa for the road.