Family Affair Page 13

  Soon Eliza seemingly forgot that she was teaching Gitana's psycho-wife about all the plants and their care. She methodically started from the beginning and went forward in a concise way. Chase liked this. It worked with her brain type.

  "Orchids are of the orchidaceae family with eight-hundred described genera and twenty-five thousand species. They are the most advanced floral evolution ever known."

  "Top of the plant chain, eh? What about the name? Is it Latin?" Word origins were always of particular interest to her. As a writer, she liked to know. Years of poring over the dictionary had only furthered this obsession.

  "Actually, it's Greek for Orchi which means..." She stopped and blushed. She stroked the white petals of an orchid and avoided Chase's gaze.

  "Yes," Chase said, now very interested.

  "It means testicle," Eliza said quickly.

  Chase laughed. "You're kidding, right?" She couldn't imagine Eliza making such a joke but maybe it was a long-standing practice of deceiving the newbies.

  "It's because of the subterranean tuberoids. Theophrastos first used the word, orchis in his book De Historia Plantarum, the Natural History of Plants."

  "He must have been a fag."

  Eliza ignored this comment and proceeded with the tour.

  Gitana came out of her office as they passed by. "How is it going?"

  "I had no idea you liked testicles." Chase smiled smugly.

  "Why did you give her the word origin?" she asked Eliza.

  "She asked."

  "All you need to know is care, feeding and type," Gitana said, pointedly looked at Eliza. She went back into her office.

  "Ball queen," Chase called after her.

  "I'm not listening," Gitana said as she sat down at her desk. "Carry on."

  Eliza led her to the first greenhouse which was the potting house. "The orchids feed according to their natural habitat on air and other plants but not as parasites." She seemed adamant about that as if preserving the innocence of the orchid by stating that it would never do anything so loathsome. "On rocks in rocky soil, rain water, humus and their own dead tissue." In the greenhouse, she stuck a scooping shovel into a bucket of what looked like bark. "Ours are mostly terrestrial plants and grow in soil."

  "I see." Chase fingered the soil. It looked like regular potting soil with big woody chunks in it. It must be magical to grow such beautiful and expensive plants. They didn't have orchids at the house. Gitana said she needed a break from them at home so she left the gardening to Chase and adored the cut flowers from the jewel garden. These plants that Eliza was gingerly examining were no tray of six from Home Depot for a dollar seventy-nine.

  "All the orchids are marked. This one is a Calopogon, a bumblebee orchid. This one is a wild orchid from the Sumatran rainforest..."

  "I like coffee from Sumatra with a lot of milk, of course."

  Eliza nodded. Boy, these people are dry, Chase thought.

  "This," Eliza said, pointing to one of the many orchids perched on the tables, "is a Dactylorhiza Fuchsii or the common spotted orchid."

  This made sense to Chase despite the overblown name as the orchid flower was indeed spotted.

  "This one is a Gymnadenia Conopsea or the fragrant orchid."

  Chase leaned in to smell it. This was the amazing scent that had filled Gitana's studio apartment the day of her seduction. She was about to relive that amorous moment when Eliza slapped a hardbound book with a dark green cover into her hands.

  "This is the manual describing every orchid we feature. It is updated every time we get in a new orchid and is absolutely crucial to this job."

  "Do I have to memorize the fancy name?" Chase felt the weight of the book and was alarmed.

  "Only if you want to appear knowledgeable and thus credible to our discerning buyers." Eliza applied more ChapStick and adjusted her spectacles.

  She suddenly reminded Chase of her Latin teacher in the ninth grade. The prim woman who'd been the physical incarnation of Miss Jean Brody but without her apparent disregard for convention. The girls had given her the moniker, "bitchi extremus."

  "Got it."

  "Good. The manual follows the nursery placement. I came up with its application so you can be assured that all is as it should be. You should begin there at the Anacamptis Pyramidalis. I will supervise and answer any questions you have. Shall we?"

  By lunchtime Chase's head was pounding and she'd taken to counting the number of times Eliza had applied ChapStick which was fifty-eight. She now sat in the break room, poring over the orchid bible as Eliza put it, The Kew World Checklist of Orchids.

  Gitana came in. "There you are. I've been looking everywhere. I thought we'd grab lunch."

  "I don't think I have time for lunch," Chase said, looking morosely at the book. "I'm still learning about leaves and shit—ovate, lanceolate or orbiculate, pseudobulbs and back bulbs and zygomorphic flowers. Damn, no wonder you studied botany. I thought you just liked flowers. The fucking customers are like walking orchid encyclopedias. Some lady asked me something about sepals, petals cattleyas and venus slippers and then something about concrescent sepals. I felt like I was on another fucking planet. Who are these people?" She slammed the book shut and rubbed her temples.

  "They're orchid lovers." Gitana patted her back.

  "No, they're evil aliens with a weird vocabulary."

  Gitana laughed. "As your boss I order you to have lunch with me. Look, you don't have to learn everything about orchids in one day. I'll get you the orchid cheat sheet."

  Chase lit up. "Like CliffNotes?"

  "Yes, and then you do what Nora does, you guide the overly inquisitive, overly educated buyer to one of the botany students who are listed on the cheat sheet along with their special expertise and let them handle it. Besides, that woman who went on about the sepals should have known the difference between a cattleya and a venus lady slipper."

  "That bitch. She saw my weakness and like a lioness went for the throat," Chase said, narrowing her eyes and suppressing the desire to water board the old hag.

  "So take it easy."

  "What's for lunch?" Chase said brightly.

  "Nora went to Subway. I got you a club sandwich and sour cream potato chips."

  "And cookies for dessert?" Food always cheered her up.

  "Of course."

  Chase fell asleep on the couch when they got home. In the background she remotely heard the phone ring. She was still comatose when Gitana brought her the phone.

  "It's Lacey."

  Chase opened her eyes. "Is it serious, otherwise I need to keep napping."

  Gitana relayed this. "She says it's extremely important."

  "It better be." Chase sat up and took the phone. Her whole body ached from standing, sorting and planting fucking orchids. She hated them already.

  "What? One day in the workplace and you're a basket case," Lacey said.

  "Oh, piss off. Now what's your emergency?"

  "Well, it's not exactly an emergency," Lacey hedged.

  "Ugh! I could still be napping."

  "You won't sleep tonight if you nap too long."

  "Somehow that doesn't console me." She nodded her thanks to Gitana who brought her a cup of red bush tea. She noticed the cup had an orchid lithograph print on both sides. They were everywhere. She'd never noticed. She was going to take a good look around the house. Gitana probably had orchid underwear that she didn't know about. "What's your gig?"

  "Gig?" Lacey asked.

  "It's text talk for what's up?" Chase was learning new words from the younger workers at the greenhouse. She took a sip of tea and studied the reproduction on the cup. It was a beautiful and quite accurate rendition of a fuschia-colored Calopogon orchid. Maybe she was getting it.

  "It's about Jasmine. She asked me out on a date."

  "Big deal. You two spend a lot of time at Pilates class or those other weird physical contortion exercise gigs." That was the conventional use of the word "gig." She wondered how it had morphed into a word a
bout what was going on. "You socialized at Bo's Fourth of July barbeque. So what's so weird about girl time?"

  "It's different."

  "You're getting your nails done or something? Is that different?" Chase was really quite perplexed.

  "It's lunch." Lacey was being incomprehensibly vague and this gave Chase trepidation as well as the desire to shake Lacey from her heels until all the facts fell out of her like change from her pockets.

  "So? As long as it's not the Sheraton Hotel bar, you're cool." Chase sipped her tea. Suddenly, images of Delia fucking Jasmine's brains out popped into her mind.

  "That's where she wants to go. How did you know that?"

  "Really? She knows you're straight, right?" Chase sat at full attention. Delia had created a Lothario.

  "Well, yeah. We used to guy watch at Starbucks together after Pilates. You know, it's just down the street from the classroom."

  "She doesn't sound horribly committed to Philip. I mean, he is her husband." She couldn't believe she was defending him. Nervously she picked up the copy of Orchid Monthly from the coffee table. She needed something to quiet her nerves. There was an article on reproduction. She was scheduled for training tomorrow in the reproductive room aka the nursery.

  "Have you ever met him?" Lacey said.

  "I can't say I have." Chase imagined him as a metro sexual go-getter with a healthy dose of egocentrism.

  "He's a dick, treats her crappy, and sucks in bed."

  "Sounds like a beautiful relationship. Maybe you're reading this wrong. She might just need a shoulder to cry on," Chase said.

  "I don't think so. She told me about her enlightening afternoon with Delia."

  Chase could tell that Lacey was miffed that this particularly juicy bit of information had not been passed her way. "I would have told you, but I didn't want to blab in case Jasmine wasn't comfortable with it. I mean, for all practical purposes Jasmine is still straight aside from that slight detour." She underlined key words like labellum, viscidium and poUinia so she could look them up later. The magazine assumed the reader already knew a lot about orchids.

  "So what should I do?"

  "Are you still straight?"

  "Of course," Lacey said petulantly. This pleased Chase.

  "Then tell her that. Make your date at Starbucks instead and behave as before."

  "Avoidance tactics?"

  "Exactly. Jasmine will get the point." Chase hoped. She would have a talk with Jasmine about choice, discretion and the dangers of bisexuality.

  Chapter Fifteen

  "I like the monkeys best," Addison said.

  "Me too. They remind me of people I've known," Chase said.

  Addison giggled.

  It was Saturday and they were at the zoo with Hilda's parenting class. Addison laughed at the monkeys' antics as they climbed along the ropes in their cage. There was something magical about a child's laugh, Chase thought. She didn't remember laughing a lot as a child. She made other people laugh with her terse wit. She was a quipster. She would do her best to make Bud laugh a lot. "See that one over there—that's Mrs. Waine, my first grade teacher." She pointed to the monkey sitting in the corner with her arms crossed on her chest.

  "She looks crabby."

  "She was. If you were bad she made you sit in the corner with your back turned so everyone could make fun of you, but you couldn't see them."

  "Like what kind of bad things?"

  "Spit balls mostly," Chase said.

  "What are those?" Addison licked her rapidly melting chocolate ice cream cone.

  Chase did the same. That was the conundrum with ice cream. It was a summer dessert, but it didn't fare well in the sun. No one ate ice cream in the winter. Chase didn't know if it was a cultural thing or that it lowered your body temperature when the world was brilliant white and freezing and was thus unhealthy.

  "Spit balls are tiny wadded up pieces of notebook paper that you spit on so they're tight and firm. Then you feed them into one of those Bic pens, the clear ones after you take out the ink cartridge. You load your arsenal and fire away."

  "Sweet," Addison said, delight registering in her eyes.

  "Yeah, we used to nail the teacher's butt."

  "I'd get expelled for school violence if I did that. Under the zero-tolerance policy spit balls would be seen as an aggressive act." She bit into the cone and sent ice cream flying. A lady with a toddler in a stroller ran it over.

  "Really?" Chase was mortified.

  "Yes. Last winter my friend got suspended for a week for throwing a snowball at recess."

  "That's a little over the top." Chase put that on her reminder list. Bud might be homeschooled after all. They'd have to hire a tutor for math.

  "It's part of the slow but steady takeover by the government in its attempt to become the paternal entity that saves us from ourselves—which of course will backfire as historically it always does."

  The man standing next to them watching the monkeys looked over at Addison. "Pretty sharp kid you got there."

  "Actually, she's a pre-adult," Chase informed him.

  "You mean like a midget or something?"

  "I'm taking human growth hormone," Addison replied.

  "You better go to college, little missy, with the smarts you got."

  "Thank you, sir."

  "Polite too." He walked off.

  Chase and Addison burst out laughing. "You are too much," Chase said, wiping her eyes.

  "No, I'm just like you."

  "I think it would be better if you weren't. I'm weird and socially maladjusted."

  "But you're improving." She dug a Wet-Wipe out of her backpack and wiped her hands. She pulled out another one for Chase and wiped Chase's sticky chin.

  "Thanks," Chase said, using the rest of it to clean her hands.

  "You want to go to the aquarium and see the jellyfish?"

  "What about Hilda and the others?" Chase asked.

  "I'll call her," Addison said, whipping out her cell phone. "And tell her you have a stomachache from eating all this processed food and we have to go home."

  Chase was about to say wouldn't it seem more feasible if you were the one with the stomachache but thought better of it. "Isn't that lying?" The morals of this act concerned her more.

  Addison sighed heavily. "Do you want me to tell her that we think the group is hideous, that we'd rather have our wisdom teeth removed than spend the rest of the day with them at the zoo?"

  "No."

  "This is politely rephrasing the truth. You could have a tummy ache. It could get better so we went to the aquarium because you didn't want to disappoint me."

  "You don't have political ambitions do you?" Chase inquired.

  "Of course not. Politicians are banal and corrupt." She pulled up Hilda on her cell phone, called, muttered platitudes and clicked off.

  "All clear?"

  "Affirmative." Addison hopped up, shouldered her backpack and looked inquisitively at Chase.

  "I'm coming."

  "Can I drive your car?"

  "No!" Chase said.

  "Just testing. I may be precocious, but you are still the official grown-up."

  "I know and that's what scares me." Chase eyed the giraffes as they passed. She'd always thought they were the most amazing creatures.

  "Don't worry, if you can handle me, Bud will be a cinch."

  "I don't think I'm a good influence," Chase said as they passed through the exit gates.

  "Why?"

  "Because I thought it was funny when you poisoned your father," Chase said.

  "Your best trait, the one that will make your child respect you the most, is honesty. That's all we want and parents hardly ever do it. My mom lies to me all the time and she has no idea that I know. That's almost worse than the lie. Lie to me and then underestimate my intelligence on top of it—now that is an insult."

  Chase, having located the car with Addison's help, clicked the alarm and helped Addison get in the Hummer. "Gawd, I can't wait to get taller. T
his short stuff is really getting old," Addison said.

  Chase got in the driver's seat and said, "SUVs are a little high even for height-challenged adults."

  Addison smiled. "Thanks, for not underestimating me."

  "Thank you for understanding me."

  When Gitana got home, Chase and Addison were eating cherry Popsicles and perusing the New York Times Book Review. Both had blazing red lips.