The Girls Stephanie Train

THEGIRLS

STEPHANIE TRAIN

“I can’t do this.” Boyd’s mom muttered into the porcelain bowl, the bowl that Boyd cleaned at least once a day for her so she wouldn’t have to stare at vomit stains or hard water buildup.

Boyd’s mom had the acute nausea that came a few hours afer her chemo. Ten, twenty- four hours later she had the delayed vomiting. When they started her on the anti-nausea medication, she had what they called breakthrough vomiting. Boyd made sure she was stocked up on mouthwash and toothpaste so she could freshen her breath and so the enamel on her teeth wouldn’t rot away from the regurgitated acid.

One day, afer she had vacated the contents of her stomach, Boyd’s mom looked up at him. “I want to get the marijuana.”

“Come on, Ma,” Boyd said, ofering her a warm, wet washcloth.

“I mean it, Boyd, I want to try the pot. I’ve been reading about it on the internet.”

“It’s just pot mom, not the pot.”

“Do you know where to get it?”

“No, of course not,” Boyd said.

She looked at him with her red-rimmed eyes, hunched over the toilet bowl. She had wet spots on the front of her gray sweatshirt from drool or backsplash. Her hair, what was lef of it, was pulled back into a thin, wiry-looking ponytail. Boyd could see patches of scalp beginning to show, patches that grew bigger and bigger every day. She eyed him for a moment, her bottom lip protruding forward in an exaggerated pout. She inhaled and opened her mouth to speak, but another heave erupted from her insides.

Once Boyd’s mom had fnished, the quiet hung in the air between them. She stared into the toilet water. When Boyd was nine his mother had taken him to the amusement park to ride the Magic Mustang, an old-time, rickety wooden roller coaster--the fastest and wildest ride this side of the Continental Divide, the sign said. Boyd and his mom sat in the back seat as the coaster rattled up that frst incline. Once they reached the top, time had slowed for Boyd as the cars in front of him began to disappear over the gigantic hill. He’d learned about Columbus crossing the ocean in school--that people still thought the Earth was fat and if you sailed too far, you would drop of the edge of the world. Boyd clenched his mom’s hand, watching the cars in front of him continue to vanish. He began screaming, “Of the map! Of the map!” When the last car had cleared the hill, Boyd remembered a rush that swept through his mouth and nostrils, boiling deep inside his gut. He hadn’t thrown up until afer he stumbled of the ride, heaving into a nearby garbage can. His mother had rubbed frm, comforting circles on his back. “You are so brave, Boyd,” she told him that day, and when he looked up, the sun shone from behind her giving her a robust, golden aura. Now, he was the one rubbing her back, his meaty hand big and clumsy on her small, diminishing frame.

“I’m not a person anymore,” she fnally said. “I’m poison. I’m full of poison. What’s a little pot going to do to me?”

Tis was the woman who had started in with the “just say no” sermons before Boyd could talk. In his baby book she had written a note to him, on the back page in careful letters, “don’t you ever ever do drugs.” Now she was asking him about pot, or rather the pot, the gateway drug, the one thing she had begged him never to try, a big heaping slice of ruin-yourbright-future all rolled up inside a thin, white paper.

“Okay,” he fnally said, and while she was taking her afernoon rest, Boyd called to make the appointment.

Boyd was convinced that the doctor would discourage his mother, give her lectures about what marijuana could do to the brain, to the lungs. It wasn’t as though Boyd actually believed these things, but he couldn’t imagine his mom sitting in her living room toking up on an oily- looking water bong, watching poorly-drawn cartoons on some kiddie channel.

“It could help with the nausea,” the doctor told them both. Boyd’s mother, who had been slumped on the examination table, now straightened up. “Tere’s a pill,” the doctor said. “Marinol.” Tat’s all Boyd needed to hear, a pill that his mother could obtain through legitimate means—through a pharmacist—a pill that would keep her from puking, that might lend her a small bit of normalcy.

“I could go shopping for myself again,” she told Boyd in the car ride over to Drug-Rite. “I could keep on top of the housework. I could eat. We could go to Wu’s again. God, Sesame Chicken.” She clutched the written prescription in her hand. “Keep the window up,” she said, afraid that the scrap of paper might fy out of her hand.

When they got to the pharmacist, Boyd’s mother pushed the prescription across the counter, keeping her fngers on the edge of the paper until the pharmacist had it safely in hand. Boyd stood behind his mom, towering over her, using his height to protect the delicate transaction. He tossed the occasional glance over his shoulder, half expecting to see one of the neighbors or someone who sat in a cubicle next to him in the IT department of the local stock broker frm where Boyd worked.

Te pills came in glossy white and they reminded Boyd of a jellybean with the letters UM stamped on the side. Tey sat on his mother’s cofee table next to a glass half full of tap water. She looked at them, hands folded in her lap, then took a pill in between her thumb and frst fnger, licked her lips and popped it in her mouth. When she swallowed, she looked at Boyd and nodded. “Okay.”

Boyd sat with her at her behest, to make sure she was alright. Every fve minutes she turned to him and said, “I don’t know if it’s working. How will I know it’s working?” Boyd went over the prescription literature with her again, reading side efects and warnings: confusion; decreased coordination; dizziness; drowsiness; elevated or relaxed mood; headache; trouble concentrating; weakness. A half hour passed, then a full hour.

“It’s not working,” she said. Her eyes began to tear up.

“Give it some time, Ma,” he told her, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder.

“It’s not fucking working!” She broke down into sobbing spasms. Her whole body shook and she hid her face in her hands. Her frame, once robust like her hair, had thinned. She reminded him of a starved vulture, arched over, frail with hollow bird-bones, rocking back and forth on the cream-colored cushions of the sofa.

He tried to hold her but she kept pushing him away. She had always been the pillar of the family, the “bread and butter” as Boyd liked to call her. Boyd hadn’t known his father, a man who had lef well before Boyd was born. Now, Boyd watched his mom sob on the couch, the bones on her back forming humpy points under the thick fabric of her peach colored cardigan. “I’ll get some pot,” he told her so quietly that he wasn’t sure she could hear him over her own wailing. She stopped and looked at him with

her raw nose and her blue-gray eyes lambent in the redness surrounding them. “I’ll get some pot.”

“Some real pot?”

“Some real pot.”

Boyd got her a small baggie full of marijuana and a package of rolling papers, both of which he bought through a friend named Eddie at work. Te doctor wasn’t willing to write a script for the “real stuf,” said he didn’t want the legal risks. When Boyd asked for a referral, the doctor shrugged. “You probably won’t fnd one willing, not without a lot of leg work.”

When Boyd confrmed the price with Eddie, he went to his mom who, in turn, placed two brand new twenty-dollar bills on the dining room table next to a cup of cooling ginseng tea. She sat at her piano, a bright, limegreen scarf wrapped around her head. “Tat’s all it costs?” she asked as she moved her fngers over the yellowing-ivory keys.

“Tat’s all,” Boyd said. He watched her play. It was a familiar tune, a light tune, Für Elise or Chopin’s Minute Waltz.

“Is it bad? What we’re doing?” she asked, stopping her fngers mid-tune. Boyd thought for a few moments, thought about her in the bathroom, her head in the toilet, tears and snot streaming down her face.

“No, Ma,” he fnally said. “No.” Boyd’s mom smoked her frst joint in the bathroom with the door shut and the ventilation fan on high. She sat on the toilet with the lid down and Boyd leaned against the sink, arms folded. “How do I do it? Like a cigarette?” she asked, looking frst to the joint then to the lighter.

“You are supposed to hold it in,” Boyd told her.

“How do we know it’s okay?” She looked at the joint then snifed it. “Maybe it’s laced with something. What if I hallucinate?”

“It’s not laced,” Boyd told her. “Look, you wanted to do this. Put it down the toilet if you don’t.” She ficked the lighter and put the joint in her mouth, lit the end and inhaled. Smoke shot out of her nose as she folded into a coughing ft. Her body convulsed in spasms as she hacked and wheezed. Boyd flled a paper Daisy cup with water and handed it to her. Once she caught her breath she took a sip.

“You alright?” he asked. She nodded and lit the joint again, this time drawing the smoke in slowly and holding it for a few seconds before blowing it out. Her eyelids futtered shut. “Ma?” Boyd knelt down in front of her.

Her eyes, still watery from the coughing, opened and she nodded. “I get it now,” she said. “Get what? Is it working? How do you feel?”

“I get it.” Her expression relaxed into a lazy radiance. Boyd helped her

into the living room and lay her down on the couch, placing his grand mother’s old knitted afghan over her. Her face, Boyd thought, was a mask of serenity and he was suddenly on that roller coaster again, climbing the hill. Tat day, he had looked over at his mom, her hair covered with a sheer pink scarf, bobby-pinned in place. Her eyes were shut against the late morning light. She had smiled then, a smile so tranquil that Boyd had almost forgotten the edge of the world and the falling cars in front of him.

Twice a month, Boyd would buy more pot from his friend, Eddie, at work: $40 a bag. But, when Eddie lost his job for pissing a dirty urine test, Boyd started looking into alternatives. It wasn’t that he was worried about a dirty test—he had no interest in smoking himself—but losing his job was not an option, not when his mom had medical bills and food bills and drug bills that were fooding the tiny mailbox of her condominium, costs her insurance carrier didn’t cover.

Boyd made trips to the library to use the internet anonymously. He searched for information on states where medical marijuana had been legalized, even thought about packing her up, moving her away, so she could continue smoking. While he perused decriminalization blogs and skimmed through advertisements for “glass pipes,” he came across an online forum dedicated to the growing and harvesting of marijuana. Boyd began taking notes, reluctantly at frst. By the time the library closed that night, he’d written almost four pages in his legal, yellow notebook.

Te seeds arrived in the mail from Canada two weeks later. Tey came in a CD case, in a thin plastic envelope tucked underneath a blank disk. By that time, Boyd had gone to the library several more times to research the popular “grow sites” on the internet. Te initial cost of setting up would run around $500. He would have to buy the soil, the nutrients, a vial-kit that would measure PH balance, the rockwool for the seedlings, smaller cups as the seedlings grew, larger pots for the full-fedged plants, and grow lights (along with a timer to ensure the proper amount of exposure). He would have to cut a hole in the small basement window, and tape newspaper over what was lef of the glass. Ten, he would install an aluminum duct-fan so the room had proper ventilation. Tankfully, the carpet in the basement storage room wouldn’t be difcult to pull out as it was already starting to curl up at the edges and one of the local discount stores had a sales-ad for white shelving and clean plastic storage bins to keep things dry and organized.

When Boyd was, in his mind, fully prepared, when he had circled the fnal number on his notepad, he thought about his baby book: don’t you ever ever do drugs. Boyd hadn’t planned to do the drugs, to smoke the

weed. He’d smoked a few times in college. Boyd had taken a class on world mythology, had read about Indra drinking the Soma--a drink that would bestow divine qualities on its imbiber--and defeating the serpent Vrtra. He had asked his dorm mate if he could “hook him up.” Tree hours and $20 later, Boyd was sitting in his room learning how to roll a joint, how to light the end, how to suck in and hold it until his lungs were ready to burst. But Boyd hadn’t felt anything like Indra and he certainly wasn’t in any condition to slay a serpent. Instead, he’d curled up on his bed and spent the night foating in and out of hazy, unft sleep.

Boyd started with six seeds, hoping he could get one or two to take. He was elated when three of them began to sprout “tails” during germination and even more elated when they took to the spongy rockwool. Before he transferred them to soil-flled Styrofoam cups, he considered calling his mom, telling her what he had been doing, what he was willing to do for her, but telling her would make it real and then it might all disappear. So, at frst he decided to wait--to see if they took to the soil, then he decided to wait until afer he’d transplanted them into bigger pots. Before Boyd knew it, they were fourishing under their artifcial suns— dangling tubes of electric light that turned his storage room into a small but efcient nursery. Boyd felt like a god in his grow room, Apollo riding his sun chariot across the sky, bleeding life into the world below.

When the plants hit the fowering stage Boyd could hardly contain his excitement. He stood over the pots with a magnifying glass in hand, his chest swelling up with hot pride like the insides of a fre balloon. Only one of the plants had been male; the polyps on the stems had just begun to form. Boyd removed it from the house, breaking it down, stem to root. Once the sacs opened, they could fertilize the females, causing them to seed and render the entire reproduction process inert, so Boyd shoved the plant in a black plastic lawn bag and tossed it in a dumpster outside an apartment complex across town.

When the frst batch was ready, Boyd harvested. He admired a newly plucked bud, its dewy resin shining in the lamplight and for the frst time since his mom’s initial diagnosis, he did not feel like that helpless nine-year-old whelp on the roller coaster that day. As he turned the bud, the drops sparkled and winked. Perhaps, Boyd thought, it’s Soma afer all.

“Tis is good,” Boyd’s mom told him the frst time she tried his homegrown batch. Better than the last. It has a nice taste.” She took another generous hit of her pipe—a cheetah-print pipe Boyd found for her at one of the local head shops.

“Ma?”

“Hmm?”

Boyd wasn’t sure what to expect when he fnally told his mom about the grow room, about the plants—every detail from ordering supplies to visiting chat rooms on the Internet devoted to growers. He stood up and made gestures with his hands: here’s how you transfer the seedling to a cup, here’s how you check for gender, how you mix the nutrients, how you arrange the lights. Here are the diferent strains: Shiskaberry, Apollo Mist, Cannalope Haze, Swiss Cheese, Isis. By the time he was fnished, she looked up at him with glistening eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. She shook her head, wiped her wet cheeks and heaved a great sigh.

“So, they have other favors?” she inquired. Boyd slumped down into the warm cushions of her couch.

“Tey have all kinds of favors.”

“You could get a variety going,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She brought the pipe up to her nose and inhaled. “It doesn’t smell so pungent. It’s nice. You must be taking good care of your plants.”

“I water them. I give them nutrients. I have grow lamps.”

“Do you talk to them?” she asked.

Boyd thought. “I talk to myself sometimes when I’m in the grow room. I read directions out loud.”

“It’s not the same,” she said taking another draw and holding it in. When she let it out, she closed her eyes. “Talk to them, Boyd. Tey do studies about that. Plants grow bigger when you talk to them.”

Boyd might have told his mother that they were just plants, but that felt wrong somehow, as though he would be taking something away from her. Instead he said, “If it means that much to you, Ma.”

“Talking to a thing gives it a reason to live, Boyd, makes a thing feel important. And they’re all female, you say?” she asked. “You get rid of the males?”

“Te males will fertilize the females.” “You can’t have that, right?”

“No.”

“Ten they’re girls. Girls like to be talked to, Boyd. Talk to them.” Boyd’s mother smiled at him, her eyes squinting into glassy crescents. “Talk to them for me, okay? I would like that.”

“Sure,” Boyd said. “Whatever you want.”

Two weeks later when Boyd went to pick his mom up for a trip to the

doctor, he still hadn’t talked to the plants. Each morning before work, when he would enter the grow room with a fresh batch of nutrient mix, he would check the cuttings to see if they were taking to the soil. Ten, he would check the leaves for signs of diminishing (or worse, mites); check the temperature of the room and the PH Balance. But every time he would open his mouth to speak to them, nothing would come out. His mom called them “the girls” now. What could he possibly have to say that would interest the girls—or any girl for that matter?

When Boyd’s mom slipped into his car and strapped on her seatbelt, she turned to him. “Boyd,” she said. “You haven’t talked to the plants.” Her features knotted up, creating a screwed-up snarl between her eyebrows. Boyd could tell that she’d taken considerable time putting on her makeup. She had drawn darker lines around her eyes, and her shade of lipstick looked more peachy and vibrant than Boyd remembered seeing recently. She had a lavender scarf with psychedelic blobs of red and orange wrapped around her head.

“How do you know?” Boyd asked. He tried to sound outraged.

“You would have told me,” she said.

“I don’t tell you everything,” he replied.

“You would have told me that.”

When Boyd pulled out of the driveway, and onto the main street that would take them to the doctor’s ofce, his mom pulled out a joint and a lighter. Boyd slammed on the breaks, which caused the car behind him to sound the horn.

“Ma,” he said. “Good grief. Put that away. It’ll smell up my car.”

“Tis doesn’t smell as bad,” she said and rolled down her window. Te car behind him honked again, and Boyd motioned for them to go around. A tan sedan inched by, the driver pausing to look inside. Boyd’s mom had already lit up and was in the process of holding her breath, the joint poised between her frst two fngers. Boyd saw the woman driving the sedan. In retrospect, the woman’s eyes probably weren’t as wide as Boyd remembered, and her mouth might not have curled up into what Boyd considered a horrifed sneer. But in Boyd’s mind, she may well have been accusing him (and his mom) of murder.

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” his mom said when she fnished exhaling. She ripped the scarf of her head and pointed to her bald scalp, her eyes jutting out from behind the dark strokes of meticulously drawn eyeliner. Te woman’s mouth clamped shut, and she accelerated past.

“You shouldn’t be doing that in the car,” Boyd fnally said as he pulled back out into trafc.

“Let them pull me over,” she said.

“Tey would pull me over, Ma.”

“I’m sick, Boyd,” she told him. She wadded up her scarf and shoved it into the side pocket of her purse.

“It’s no excuse.”

“I’m going to go in bald today,” she said. She took another hit of the joint, held it and then blew the smoke out the window.

“Put it out,” Boyd told her.

“I’m not fnished with it,” she replied, her voice clipped and taut. Boyd pulled into the parking lot at the doctor’s ofce. He’d meant to walk around the car and open the door for his mom, to help her out. Instead, she slipped out, stood upright and started of toward the entrance without him. He called afer her.

“I don’t need your help,” she said. She reached out to open the door to the ofce complex. “I’ll get a cab home.” Before Boyd could object, she was inside the building. Boyd waited a few minutes before following her in. He wanted to give her time to catch the elevator up. He would take the next one.

A week afer the doctor’s visit, Boyd’s mom called him before work and told him she was dying. Even though he waited for her in the doctor’s ofce the day she had lit a joint in his car and later drove her to Wu’s for sesame chicken, she hadn’t uttered a word about the prognosis. When Boyd asked what the doctor said, she waved a dismissive hand in the air and muttered, “Same old crap.”

Now, she had him on the phone and was rattling of the names of local funeral homes. “McAllister’s nice but expensive,” she said. “Try Boorman’s. Tey won’t try to scam you into buying a cofn. I want cremation. No viewing, just burn me up.”

“Ma, listen—” Boyd tried to cut her of a few times. She should be crying, he told himself. Wailing or screaming at him. Instead, she went on about fowers and song choices and Boyd’s cousin Irving who made “those music video montages.”

“I have the pictures all ready to scan,” she told Boyd. “You give them to Irving, and he’ll put them on his computer. Tell him to make a good video for me. I’ve got a list of songs, too. He can pick from those. Don’t let him put any of that heavy metal junk on my video, Boyd. Are you writing this down?”

“Ma,” he said again. “Jesus. Listen to yourself.”

“What’s what supposed to mean?” She asked.

“You can get a second opinion,” he said.

“Te test results—” she started to tell him.

“Might be wrong,” he shot back.

“Boyd,” she said using the same voice she used when she frst told him she was sick with cancer, the same voice she’d used on him as a child when he’d asked her about his father. “Listen—”

“I have to go to work,” Boyd said. He hung up the phone. He made his way to the basement and unlocked the grow room. Te girls were tall now, at least four feet high, with long, elegant, fanned-out leaves.

“What do you want from me?” he asked the plants, his voice a whisper. Te ventilation fan whirred in response. It wasn’t as if Boyd was expecting the plants to answer back, but a part of him wondered if they would ofer some form of movement, something he could excuse as a sudden draf from another part of the house.

“Did you hear me?” he asked a little louder. Te girls stood rooted, unstirred. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t take care of you.”

Talk to the girls. His mother’s voice. Just go on up and talk to them.

“I’m tired,” Boyd said. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Before Boyd lef his house, he’d given the girls the last of the nutrients, mixed a batch ten times the usual strength to use up what was lef of the gallon-sized bottles. Ten, he turned on the hose and began to water them, flling up the pots to the brim and waiting for the level to sink before dousing them again. He imagined coming home to fnd the girls twice as big, flling up the entire room like an overstocked hothouse. At the thought, Boyd grabbed a bottle of bleach nearby, opened the lid and poured.

“I got some more Shishkaberry seedlings,” Boyd told his mom two months later. She had been in hospice for a few days, hooked up to a vast array of clear medical tubing. Monitors bleeped, and IV bags hung heavy from metal clips. He didn’t have the courage to tell his mom that he had killed the girls. He’d made every attempt to nurse them back to health. He’d gone to experts on the Internet, called fower shops (asking for advice on how to save his “dying tulips”). “I’ll transplant them soon,” he lied. “I have a great grow mix. I’ve been thinking of starting some herbs too, for your windowsill in the kitchen: fresh oregano, basil, maybe some cilantro.”

“And you’re talking to them?” she asked. “Talking to the girls?”

“I talk to them every day,” he said. “I tell them all the things I can’t say to anyone else.”

“Even me?”

“Even you,” Boyd said.

“Boyd, do you think we come back?” she asked him.

“Come back? Like reincarnation?”

“Yes, only instead of a person, I could come back as a plant, a

Shishkaberry plant, and you could grow me from a seedling.”

“Ten I’d have to watch you die,” he told her.

“But you could make cuttings of me, replant me, make copies and then copies of copies.”

“What then?” Boyd asked.

“Ten you’d smoke me and I’d make you happy.” Boyd burst out laughing, his torso heaving in huge, bottomless breaths. Her mouth was open wide, her eyes glistening, a gufaw stuck in her throat. Her face, pale and shiny, beamed in the dim glow of the bile-colored hospital lighting.

Boyd thought she looked radiant on her deathbed, glowing like Titania, like Aphrodite, like Gaia with her skirts of seeds and grain, fowers in her hair, the sun pouring from behind her in long strokes of gold and silver.

She died four days later, in the night, while Boyd slept in a recliner next to her bed. He stood and drank in her face, every crease, every line, and even in its dying beauty, he knew she wasn’t there anymore.

Boyd stood in the empty grow room, holding an old cardboard box that he’d flled with odds and ends—all that was lef of his growing ventures, all that was lef of the girls. He would have to come down the next day and scrub the cement foor, clean the soil and the chemical residue from fertilizers and plant food. Ten Boyd could use the room for storage, for the boxes he kept afer packing his mother’s condo.

Te new halogen light fxture cast a hard, electric blue tinge over the space, making the room appear smaller than it really was. Boyd closed his eyes and tried to remember what it looked like before, the grow lights hanging in rows, the girls in the middle, huddled together like old, stooped, green-haired women bending under the weight of their pointed leaves. He imagined what his mother might have looked like in a white burial dress, hands folded over her chest, that lavender scarf tied around her bald head.

Boyd clenched the cardboard box. He had hoped to fnd the room full again, magically, the warm light fltering through the thin green leaves, plastic buckets stacked neatly against the wall, the smell of black, rich soil wafing through the air. It was vacant, almost sterile, in the cool, crisp light. He looked and looked, searching the bareness, his eyes watering, strained.

Instead, he saw his mother’s piano sitting in the dimming light of day’s end, clouds of dust pooling in the golden beams. He saw her chipped teacup sitting on the table, spoon upright inside, the tag of the teabag hanging over the drab, porcelain edge. He saw her spice rack, labeled