As the year takes us into a time of long shadows and short days, we’re contemplating “Keeping Things Fresh,” a new fiction piece by Room 47.4 Full Circle‘s commissioned writer, Shashi Bhat.
“Keeping Things Fresh”
by Shashi Bhat
Your life, little girl, is an empty page that men will want to write on.
—“Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” The Sound of Music
She has begun reading the American newspapers, and she has already learned about so many new things. It isn’t easy to get through a dense article on an unfamiliar subject, but she takes it slowly, consulting the occasional flow chart or Wikipedia article. It is a good time for learning about this country: there’s an election coming. Today alone she has read about mortgage-backed securities, U.S.-Cuba relations, and the resurgence of cube steak. Having grown up in a vegetarian household, she had never even heard of cube steak, and would not have been able to identify it at a meat counter. But The New York Times had helpful pictures, and after reading of “greasy, grim casseroles studded with string beans,” and that “cube steak represented all that was unstylish and lacking,” she understood its history, and how far it had come, and why it had regained popularity—because of the economy, of course, and now she knows all about that, too.
She cooks up some cube steak, taking cues from the article to sauté it in butter and season with just a little salt and pepper. Her boyfriend seems surprised when she serves it for dinner, since she usually makes smoky, earthy legumes and rustic, grainy breads, but he also seems awed at how much and how quickly she is learning.
“Look at my little vegetarian,” he says, and admires the dish rack, where she has nimbly balanced more dishes than would have seemed possible given the rack’s size. “This bodes well for your future wifely abilities,” he says.
“Let’s eat in front of the TV,” she suggests, knowing he expects her to switch on a sitcom rerun, but instead she chooses the nightly news. They watch it together, and she nods in all the right places.
When the election rolls around, she keeps notes of the various candidates’ platforms and streams the debates live on CNN.com. Because she shares Wi- Fi with the neighbours, the connection is spotty and once in a while the screen freezes, capturing John McCain with his hands and mouth spread wide, and she panics and disconnects and reconnects until the feed jerks back into pixilated life.
That week she leaves open the map that shows Electoral College votes in each state, refreshing and refreshing, a knot in her throat. This is what it is like to participate in democracy.
A couple of months later, she catches a bus to D.C. with her boyfriend at 3:00 a.m. to attend Obama’s inauguration, and while watching on a big screen, crammed in with thousands of others on the National Mall, American flags painted on their cheeks, she is moved to tears, even though she is only in the U.S. on a student visa and thus doesn’t have a vote.
In the spring, out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant with her boyfriend and meeting his parents for the first time, she manages to mention the recent suffering of domestic catfish farming due to the rising prices of corn and soybean. “It’s really a symbol of a complex economy,” she says, and continues to discuss the politics of high-fructose corn syrup with the boyfriend’s father, who nods vigorously as he loads a chip with pico de gallo.
Afterwards, she is alone with the boyfriend, sitting on his lap in his apartment’s single damaged armchair, and he tells her that his father was impressed.
“You’re really doing well with all of this,” her boyfriend says.
“I feel like Eliza Doolittle,” she replies in a very accurate Cockney accent. “Wait, who’s that again?” he asks.
“Eliza Doolittle? From My Fair Lady?” She should have said Pygmalion. It would’ve been a good chance for her to prove again that she isn’t some dummy. And besides that, she favours Shaw’s original ending for Pygmalion. She doesn’t like the ending of My Fair Lady at all. “Maybe you should read Pygmalion,” she could’ve said.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t known anything before she moved to this country and started this whole newspaper endeavor. Was it five months ago? Yes, five months ago her boyfriend had sent her that text message—can we talk 5min yr apt— and he’d shown up to her cramped studio sobbing. He pushed past her into her apartment, and she followed him, bewildered, and sat down on the bed as he paced across the tiny room, then tried to pull out of him what was wrong. The way he was behaving she thought his whole family had died, or he had irrevocably bashed somebody in the head and the authorities were coming for him and now he would never be able to finish his master’s thesis. He kneeled as though in supplication, grasping her legs, while burying his face in her blankets. She finally got it out of him that he was crying because he intended to break up with her, and she prodded: “Why?”
And then he listed the reasons—“You talk too much about flowers . . . You have a hair growing on your areola and it makes me uncomfortable to see that on a woman . . . You watch too many sitcom reruns and it’s like you aren’t aware of serious artists. For example, I don’t think you’ve ever seen a Woody Allen movie. . . You sometimes talk about your problems like they are more important than mine . . . You don’t know anything about American politics . . . If my friends heard you talking, I just don’t think they’d see you as an intellectual . . . ” This went on for approximately twenty minutes.
She’d replied, slowly, thoughtfully: “You think I’m stupid.”
“I don’t,” he said. “Just, you know.”
This was the first person she had ever slept with. Dumb, dumb, dumb, he must have been thinking, as he fucked her. She loved him severely, for no good reason. Her father would not have liked him. But she thought of the empty summer ahead, in this bleak, scorching city. Of all the activities they had planned that would be cancelled. She didn’t really have any friends on this side of the ocean. It was just her and nobody else. Years later, she will think of this as the moment that split her life in two.
Her eyes wandered to the single purple hyacinth she had stolen from a public garden six weeks ago and placed in a clean jam jar on her bedside table. The flower’s tight blooms resembled the curls of Marge Simpson’s hair. She had plucked it, not for its looks, but for the intensity of its fragrance: an invitation to breathe deeply. A reminder to get enough air.
“I know there are things I need to work on . . . I’ll try,” she vowed. “Really. I’ll start reading The New York Times. I can trim that hair. Woody Allen, got it.” She didn’t say anything about the flowers.
“I could give you a list,” he said helpfully.
And so, he’d wiped his tears on her comforter, which he then threw off the bed so they could make love passionately and tenderly and also intelligently.
After her boyfriend went home that night, she couldn’t sleep. It was as though he had bought a house and wanted it renovated, and she was both the contractor and the house itself, which was red when he chose it, but now he’d prefer it painted blue, and maybe a new electrical system, and she was the painter and the electrician and the yard maintenance worker, as well.
So she typed up an email in defence—I am not some blank robot who needs to be programmed, but I, like everyone else, am a work-in-progress, and I need you to understand that—and she provided a run-down of her accomplishments, such as speaking seven languages fluently, founding a million-dollar flower delivery business while still a teenager, winning a national medal for entrepreneurship, and receiving a scholarship to attend a top school in America after her only living parent was killed in a train derailment. Before she sent the message, she attached her resumé as a biting punchline.
She checked her email every three minutes. Standing up and going to the fridge and opening the door to stare inside and coming back and checking her email. Going to the bathroom and sniffing a bar of soap and coming back and checking her email. Folding one shirt and coming back and checking her email.
Then, the subject line in bold, unread. She opened the message. His response said, You’re hired! And several lines down: God, that email really made me love you.
She decided she would take some of his suggestions anyway. It would be like getting Botox or learning new positions from Cosmo—it would keep things fresh, give her something new to talk about, and probably wouldn’t hurt that much. And now she knows the latest U.S. unemployment statistics, where to find the best deals on auto insurance, which brand of bottled water conserves the most packaging, and that Watchmen had divided critical opinion. But Watchmen has left the theatres, so she consults the reviews for another movie he had seen and recommended, but in a few weeks that is gone too— everything is out of date and everybody has moved on, because now there is an earthquake, an ash cloud, a health care plan, a climate bill, an oil spill, a documentary about babies.
Six years ago: she was standing inside a television studio, about to pitch her company on her country’s reality investment show. The show was not unlike Shark Tank, she would tell her boyfriend-turned-fiancé later, in a second life. Quieter, though. Less bombastic. Less colour and less sound. The set was a simple grey room. The investors sat in four brown leather armchairs in a spaced- out row at the other end, facing her. Beside each chair was a small table with a glass of water, a notepad, and a pen. To the right: bright lights; a camera crew. Later they would add a narrative voice-over and broadcast it on her country’s one publicly funded channel.
As she began to speak, her voice did not quaver. “I’m asking for $200,000 for a twenty percent stake in my company.” The two friends she had recruited to help her walked out in pressed white blouses and black skirts, each carrying a vase of flowers, which they placed on the investors’ tables. There were four mixed bouquets of cream-coloured peonies, yellow roses, green button pompon chrysanthemums, Italian ruscus, and seeded eucalyptus.
She told the investors about her business: a flower delivery service. Working with local growers, she prepared arrangements and sold them to businesses and individuals using a subscription model. To deliver the product, she had hired other girls from her school, who rode around town on their bicycles with flowers spilling out of the front baskets. It was like Uber, but with bicycles and flowers instead of cars and passengers, except that Uber didn’t yet exist.
Before coming here, she had researched the investors to find out if any of them suffered from seasonal allergies. This information was not publicly available, but thankfully, they all seemed to possess underactive immune systems. The investor in the chair furthest to the left was a man who one might argue was both too thin and too rich. He was like a willow tree that grew money. Next to him was the investor who had been on the show the longest—her father’s favourite, because of the book he’d written about becoming a millionaire incrementally by investing the loose change left over at the end of each day. The book made a million dollars sound possible, her father had said. The third man had made his fortune with a Brazilian fast-food chain and could really pull off a pocket square. In the fourth chair was the lone woman—the newest investor on the show, who had built a tech empire and often spoke in terms the others couldn’t follow, though they nodded along. She wore the same gold suit the whole season, for visual consistency, because the filming schedule was such that they spliced pitches from different days into each episode. The men wore identical black or grey suits every day, but that was less remarkable.
“Now, tell us your sales figures,” commanded the money-willow man.
“And are you taking a salary for yourself?” inquired the loose-change man. “How much have you spent on marketing?” queried the pocket-square man. “Who handles the backend on the e-commerce site?” asked the woman in gold. “What are your net profits?”
“How much of your own money have you put into this?” “What are you paying those delivery girls?”
“What is your average customer acquisition cost?”
They pinged and she ponged. She knew her numbers. Over many nights, she had stayed up late with one friend or another quizzing her, while she pinched the neck of a rose and scraped the thorns off its stem with a knife. Know your numbers, her father had always told her, when she was six years old and they watched this show on the black-and-white television in their kitchen, so small the investors’ faces were like coins. At the time, she could recite multiplication tables from one to ten, which she practiced while her father chopped potatoes and put them on the stove to boil. “Don’t waste anyone’s time,” was another one of her father’s adages, so though before the show she had prepared a flowery introduction full of all her best puns, she ruthlessly pruned it; distilled it like rosewater.
Early that morning, she had arranged the bouquets and set them in buckets lined with Styrofoam inside the rear of the van. While she drove, a friend sat in back, embracing the flowers so they wouldn’t tip over as the van bumped over potholed streets on the way to the studio. Before carrying them inside, the girls used small loops of Scotch tape to stick on each vase a business card in matte tangerine. Kew Gardens, it said, in a white serif font. She had ordered the cards from a fledgling family-owned print shop in her town, and after that they became permanent customers. The name referred to a Virginia Woolf story she had read, where a variety of flawed people stroll through an omniscient London garden.
Next, the investors asked about margins. About the price point and how it compared to her competitors.
“That seems a bit high,” said the woman in gold. “How are you able to charge this much?”
“Who knew there was so much money in flowers?” mused pocket-square. “Who are your customers?” questioned loose-change.
Her customers were serene restaurants and bustling cafés, sleek law and counselling offices, modest households, and dedicated lovers.
“Even if people will pay that much, there’s still an issue here,” remarked money- willow. “None of this is proprietary. What’s to keep someone else from starting an identical business and stealing all your customers?”
There was a twist. Something she hadn’t yet told them.
“Those flowers next to you,” she said. Her friends, who were standing to one side, hands clasped tightly in front of them, snuck glances at each other, trying to hide their excitement. “Those flowers were cut six weeks ago.”
“Six weeks?” The woman in gold raised a single eyebrow.
“What do you mean?” wondered loose-change. “Do flowers usually last that long?” He turned to the woman for confirmation.
“They look as though they were picked this morning.” Pocket-square rubbed the petal of the peony closest to him between his thumb and forefinger, as though testing to see if it were real.
She raised her hand up to eye level, holding a tablet the size of a dime. It was round, pastel pink, and chalky. The investors craned their necks and squinted to see. “We add this to the water.” She dropped it in a glass of water she had on the display table in front of her, and it hissed as it dissolved. “It’s non-toxic,” she told them. “You could drink the water in those vases if you wanted to, and it would soothe acid reflux and taste like strawberry soda. The flowers last for a minimum of six weeks.” It was a formula she had discovered by serendipity and then perfected. The ingredients were the price of wheat. And she owned the patent.
“If you’re doing so well, why do you need our help?”
“To expand,” she told them. At present she produced the tablets at home in her kitchen, but with the investment, she could outsource manufacturing. And bicycle delivery could only go so far.
“I don’t know anything about flowers. But my money is on you,” said loose-change, pointing at her without smiling. “You, I can tell, will get things done.”
All four of them invested. It was a first in the show’s history. The episode would play forever in syndication.
She is sitting with her fiancé-turned-new-husband, here in their usual café with the big ceramic cups and Dave Brubeck playing from staticky speakers and the dim, flattering lighting that had allowed them to fall in love (their first date had been here). They are arguing over a quote, what that politician’s wording had been when he stated his belief about pregnancies resulting from rape—she knows he said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down . . . ” but her husband disagrees. What is odd is that they are on the same side—they both know what the man said was absurd; it is only the exact words they can’t agree on, but the words as he remembers them don’t sound as awful somehow. Her husband had laughed about the statement, because to him what stands out is the man’s stupidity and the nebulous way he spoke with no evidence, as though science were just a cloud of guesses. And this bothers her, too—imagine thinking a body had insight, could make the right decisions, that a body knew what love is and isn’t. She wishes it did. But what is worse is the man’s staggering callousness, his dismissal of the whole fate of a woman. To her husband the issue is theoretical and distant, but to her those words are like being gutted with a wrench.
And anyway, he is wrong, he is definitely wrong. “No, you’re wrong,” she insists, and needs so badly to prove it that she is near tears with frustration, and she can prove it, too, because though neither of them has a smartphone (he believes smartphones are a distraction from the present moment), she has that section of the newspaper right here in her handbag (they had switched to a paper subscription because he prefers the old-fashioned dignity of newsprint). So she reaches into the handbag, rattling the Chapstick and pens to pull out the folded, rolled paper, but her water bottle has leaked, wetting the page she wanted; she holds the page in her hand and estimates its new worth.
That night they eat the meal of fattoush and chickpea salad she prepared— they are both vegetarians now (he had watched a documentary about factory farming). “Should we have sex?” he asks, as he tends to after he has eaten a light dinner and gone on a half-mile digestive stroll.
“I guess so,” she says.
“Have you . . . ?” he nods in the general direction of her lower half. He has a strong dislike for body hair, perhaps because he is naturally as hairless as a ball of mozzarella. Her own dark hair coats her whole body—she is constantly tweezing, and who knows how much of her money has gone to wax? He also prefers when she sprinkles a scented powder in her undergarments, so everything smells vaguely of roses, the most overrated of flowers.
She shakes her head.
“It’s okay this one time,” he says, with an air of generosity.
The mattress needs replacing. He raises her hips for better leverage. It is always when they’re in bed, when she’s pressed like a petal under his hairless body that she feels it most acutely: the weight of her choices and his preferences. She has lived two lives: one active and one passive. One where she has ideas and crafts them into living things. One where she is erased by someone else’s shallow desires. One magic and one ordinary. One full and fruitful, where time is elastic, and one where she is wilting by the day, by the second. He lifts her leg mechanically, like a chiropractor. Adjusts and arranges her.
She remembers walking home after the TV show appearance, after returning the van, holding a large leftover bouquet wrapped in a newspaper she hadn’t read. On the street headed toward her was a homeless man she recognized from town. He opened his arms wide and grinned: “For me?”
On impulse, she had thrust the whole bunch at him. “For you!” she said, because she had so much to give. There are no flowers in her house. Her husband is allergic. But there are flowers on the wallpaper of the café where they met, flowers that hold her attention like hindsight, like a premonition of the past. She examines them every time she’s there, silently chanting: Hydrangea. Gladiola. Chrysanthemum. She can name every single one.
Before she left for America, she transferred part ownership of the flower business to the friends who had helped her. Now, a decade and a half has passed, and their success has been extraordinary. Business is blooming! it says on the news section of their website, which she checks late at night after drinking a glass of wine and while pumping her breast milk, as her husband sleeps nearby. She still owns the patent and a percentage of the company’s shares and collects dividends that pay their mortgage and her husband’s student loans. He isn’t so bad, she thinks. He isn’t so bad. Her husband is just a choice she made, one branch of a river with infinite tributaries that all empty into the same sea.
After the loans are paid off and her sons have moved out, she will leave her husband and, with the money she has left after the divorce, she will rent an apartment on her own, where she will grow flowers and body hair and rediscover the gentle sitcoms she watched in her youth. She will adopt a Persian cat and speak to it only in French and Italian. And because no news will appear on her screen or arrive at her door, she will forget what day it is, what month, what year. One evening she will crouch in front of an ancient VCR, put in a recording, and press play. Four investors looming in front of her young self. Narrow shoulders in a white blouse. The sweat between her shoulder blades, and the radiant tenor of her own proud voice. Numbers playing in her head like a song.
“I don’t know anything about flowers. But my money is on you,” says her father’s favourite investor, who built a fortune from a single coin. He is pointing at her, voice urgent as a train.
“I agree,” says the woman in gold, who is dead now, and who always got the last word. “You could do anything you wanted.”
Find more dream-like pieces that ask what non-linear stories do we have to tell? in Room 47.4 Full Circle.
Header image: photo of Shashi Bhat by Olivia Li.
