Flowers with Stems but No Leaves
by Kate Krautkramer
Art by Barbara Martin
After five years dating Lucy’s sister, Martin has finally proposed, Stephy accepted, and the lilt in Martin’s step become quite articulate. They’ve been engaged a week. Tonight Stephy and Martin have walked off together to the town baseball diamond. Lucy imagines they’ll have a beer each and hold hands in the stands as though they are young. They’ll talk with friends and Stephy will clutch Martin’s arm and blush while they accept good wishes. They’d invited her along, but the evening was oppressive, and she didn’t want to be pushed in her chair or to have Martin lift her onto the bleachers. She didn’t want him to feel or smell her sweat. She didn’t want to watch the Stein’s Hardware Store team beat the Schmidt’s Tavern team. She didn’t want to go to the Dairy Bar for milkshakes when the game was over, and she didn’t want to talk to anyone.
After Martin and Stephy go, Mother heads for her DAR chapter meeting, reminding Lucy there’s potato salad and ham. At 75 Mother still walks, narrow frame erect, full of purpose, all around town for errands and church. She cooks, keeps up the house, and nurtures her flower garden, spending hours a day stooping, digging, and weeding. She’s never stiff or sore, never tired before bed time. Lucy watches until Mother turns toward the house to smile and wave good-bye before she disappears around the corner.
Lucy wheels to the kitchen and gets a plate and napkin from the cabinet where they’re stacked low for her. From the fridge, she piles ham into the napkin on her lap; one slice she folds into her mouth. She frowns at the plate, then replaces it in the cupboard.
Out the kitchen window, summer light stretches the day on. Shadows of the box elder darken the sidewalk and grass. A cardinal lands among high leaves and never flies out. Again Lucy envisions Martin and Stephy at the ball field and assuages her irritation by retrieving a Leinenkugel’s from the fridge door. She holds the bottle to her face to cool off before getting the church key from its nail. In the living room she eats from her lap and counts while the clock ticks away a minute. Three neighbor girls on the front sidewalk tip and laugh roller skating past the house and past the garden where Mother’s sweet peas and delphinium flaunt their colors like floozies.
The flowers remind Lucy that she meant to sketch when left alone with no one to hover over her shoulder and say outstanding or make the mmmm noise of appreciation. Martin, Stephy and Mother don’t mean to condescend, she’s sure. But their persistent approval rolls like a suffocating avalanche of kindness.
It was Martin who’d brought her the drawing paper and fine charcoal pencils, from New York City. He’d taken vacation time, met his army buddies in Madison, and they’d all flown there for a reunion trip40 years since they’d been soldiers. While he was there, he’d chosen a ring for Stephy and kept it secret for months before he came to getting down on a knee. But he’d not been shy giving Lucy the art things straight away when he got home.
“You’ve taught yourself everything else,” Martin said, presenting her with the pad and pencils. “Why not drawing, Luce?” He’d seemed so pleased by his idea, but Lucy had clouded. People anxious to prove their graciousness always brought her thingsreams of crosswords torn from the Courier and Leader, jigsaw puzzles in ripped boxes, stacks of dog-eared Women’s Day delivered by ladies from all four corners of town. These objects only awoke bruised suffering in her chest. Martin’s gift was a real present, not ordinary and second-hand. Still, Lucy sat in the position of acceptance and gratitude, never with the option to refuse or reciprocate, trapped by the weight of her circumstance.
“Whatever in the world would I draw?” she asked.
“Why anything you wanted! Flowers, squirrels, me!” Martin struck a profile, jutting his handsome jaw. “How about Mr. Kowalski’s Hudson there?” He pointed out the front window at the neighbor’s sedan. Lucy had let Mr. Kowalski help her inside the car when he’d brought it back from Chicago the summer before and offered “the ladies of the Becker house” a ride around the county to see how the corn was coming up. But, he hadn’t been strong enough to lift and set her all the way inside and resorted to shoving at her thighs. He’d reddened and apologized when she yelped.
Lucy’d wheeled to the window pretending she didn’t know the look of Mr. Kowalski’s car. Bitter heat swelled to a wave in her belly, but she’d rather have drunk mud than let Martin see her cry, so she concentrated on the Hudson, saw with amusement that its curves were like a fat woman’s back side, and said thank you for the paper and pencils. That was six months ago, and she had been able to learn drawing, pleasing Martin, and also herself, most recently with a portrait of a single ranunculus, its crepe petals layered in embrace.
Lucy wedges her sketchbook between her hip and her chair, but intention abandons her. She wheels to the den and turns on the television, maybe to catch I Love Lucy. Instead, Grace Kelly comes into focus, moments before she becomes a princess, seated at the front of the cathedral. It happened months before. Lucy had thumbed through the Rand McNally to locate Monaco and Monte Carlo. Everyone in the world had already seen the pictures in magazines. Some had been so keen, they’d gone to theaters to watch the movie of the marriage as soon as it arrived in the States. Now, there’s Prince Ranier walking the narrow carpet, red, she knows, although the film is black and white. When he stops to genuflect, Lucy makes the sign of the cross with him, careful to seal her beer with her thumb. She brings her face close to the screen and bites at her last chunk of ham while Ranier smiles at Grace for the shortest possible time a smile can even happen. At this, Lucy reaches out to turn the set off. She thinks of reading. Three novels from the library are stacked on the table, even an Asimov she hasn’t read. There’s also a book of poems by Auden she requested. And new issues of The Atlantic and National Geographic that have just come in the mail.
But she does nothing, for a long while. Eventually Mother comes home. Later, lying in bed, Lucy hears Martin and Stephy giggling on the porch swing in the dark.
Next day, out the window Lucy watches Martin come down the sidewalk. Everything about him is jaunty, despite being born in the previous century, a thing he often jokes about. In front of the house he stops and grins. He looks like he may start tap dancing. Martin’s visible excitement and love on display for her sweet, plain, old sister is enchanting, and at once embarrassing, the spectacle.
There won’t be children; Stephy’s blood stopped years ago. Sisters know. Lucy reproaches herself for feeling grateful. Martin is 60, Stephy 54. A life with children is one jealousy Lucy won’t need to feign she doesn’t have. She’s 42, but it’s not as if she could bear a child, either. Not that she should compare or that she doesn’t love her sister and wish her happiness. Not that Lucy ever stood a chance or held appeal for any man. Not that she can walk.
Lucy holds her hand up to see the map of veins on the back, then turns it to see the map of lines in her palm. This right hand, the whole arm, has stayed true to her. It grips and lifts and drops when told, can hold things and write and sketch very well. It doesn’t spasm. It can push and maneuver her chair. It’s not tedious and disobedient like her legs, or cargo like her heavy, puffed feet with toe nails that have turned thick and yellow.
Outside, Martin stands on the sidewalk engaged in his new lunch break activity of looking at the house and tipping his flattened hands at different angles. Martin will build an addition onto the house. Not himself, Martin’s not a carpenter. He was a machine gunner in the First World War. And for 30 years he’s been their small town postmasternever wanting to live anywhere elseweighing packages and selling stamps, taking it upon himself to make smiling part of his job; he’s told Lucy that.
So. Stephy and Martin will require their own bedroom. On this matter, the hurt in Lucy’s heart grapples with her duty to wish them contentment. She envisions herself mortified, some future morning, in the hallway in her night dress, eyes and body, spirit, everything still heavy from sleep, while she struggles to hold her bladder and meets Martin there.
Stephy and Martin had seated Mother next to Lucy in the living room to deliver the proposition that the four of them live together. Martin stood tall and beamed while Stephy wrung her hands. Her skirt swung as she looked back and forth first at Mother and Lucy then at Martin. No one said a word about the arrangement being a sad, unromantic alternative to Martin and Stephy living a private, man-and-wife life across town, or anywhere. Mother hadn’t dropped to her knees and said something like, Dear God in Heaven, thank you. Now there will be someone to take care of Lucy when I die. But it wasn’t like her to do or say any such thing, especially if she felt it deeply. And Lucy had seen weight go from her mother’s shoulders as if sunken boulders had risen from the bottom of a stream and floated away on a strong current, unbothered by eddies.
Lucy touches her blouse over her heart, thinking of it. She’d been in no position to rebuff or contradict the proposal. Martin and Stephy would live in his little apartment above the drug store until the addition could be completed. Our “honeymoon suite,” Stephy called it, blushing and making Lucy feel resentful and nauseated. Their plan to live in one house was the only way without Lucy eventually being given into the care of the State, but having not been asked, she chose to feel the events as a cut atop the sting of her powerlessness. Outside, Martin moons toward the house. He appears anything but troubled, anything but encumbered, but Lucy knows he’s not thinking about her.
Barbara Martin, Solar Tube, painting
The evening before the wedding, Stephy and Mother agonize with details of rolls and a giant roast, which Mother insists should be thin-sliced and served with the best horseradish, after which Martin is sent back to the meat market. There are also mints to mold, tablecloths to press. Neighbors and friends will gather for luncheon after the ceremony. Stephy’s made her own cake, lemon, the layers of which are separately frosted, taking up most of the refrigerator waiting to be joined.
Martin’s brother will drive down from Rhinelander to act as best man. Lucy will be the maid of honor, and Stephy’s instructed, wear whatever she wishes. Mother will give Stephy away. Father John will come to the house to perform the ceremony. Stephy’s chosen the simplest dress from the bridal shop in Eau Claire, tea length and suited to the girlish figure that has never left her. “I’m too old for a fancy dress and a train!” Stephy had declared with an uncontrolled, nervous laugh.
Just before the wedding, Mother will cut flowers from her garden and wrap the stems in a blue satin ribbon. “Won’t that do nicely? Won’t that be so pretty?” she asks.
Lucy says she hopes there won’t be daisies. “I can’t stand the smell of them even a little.” Mother presses her lips together and stares at her, even though she’s only being honest.
But any bad feeling vanishes when Martin comes through the back door with the horseradish. “Thank goodness you got there before it closed!” Mother wipes her hands on her apron, accepts the jar, and situates it on the counter as if it’s valuable and delicate as a Fabergé egg. Lucy watches from where she’s backed herself into the hall.
In the kitchen Martin pokes about, reaching for pickles on the relish tray until Stephy slaps at him. At the opportunity, Martin grabs her hand, kisses it, and gives a bow before he’s shooed from the kitchen and toward Lucy, whom it pains to smile. On his way, Martin turns her in her chair and whisks her to the den.
In the last years, often, after dinner when Stephy and Mother were finishing in the kitchen, Martin would play piano without needing music to bang out the songs from what he called his war. He’d had to teach Lucy the words and liked to chide her about being a babe in the cradle when he’d been fighting. “And we won’t come back, til it’s over, over there!” Martin’s voice filled the room while Lucy’s, high and thin, rose to the ceiling and was lost. “In the trenches,” Martin called his time, which had been with a battalion alongside other boys from central Wisconsin sent to fight the Krauts. “Even though plenty of us were Krauts ourselves,” he told Lucy. After a couple songs or after they’d played a few hands of gin, while Stephy was freshening up to go out, that’s when Martin talked the most. “Our grandparents were at home in the States still speaking German,” he told her once. “We didn’t care. We were fighting for the U.S.of A.”
Other times, while Mother and Stephy fussed with dessert or dishes, Martin sat on the sofa, let his head fall back, closed his eyes, and asked Lucy things. From his casual posture, never looking at her, it seemed to Lucy that he concentrated, picturing in his mind’s eye whatever she said to him in answer. With only the two of them there, Martin inquired, with curiosity she believed authentic, what it was like to be Lucy Becker and no one else in the world. Martin had asked her at different times, But wouldn’t you like to catch a big fish once in your life? And What do you believe is the worst sin? And Haven’t you ever wished to be someone else all together? Hating herself and blushing for thinking it, Lucy understood that Martin’s offhand queries would be the only snooping, wresting or meddling by a man of anything like her interiority. And so, however metaphorical, she cataloged these moments and held them as intimate and precious. Do you have feeling at all in your legs? He asked. Have you ever won a race? Can you even imagine swimming in a lake in summer, with water all around you on your skin?
Banished from wedding preparations, Martin lowers himself into the easy chair that’d been Father’s. He’s older now than Father when he died. Lucy’s worked the math many times, also appraising the alluring gray taking hold in Martin’s hair. She wishes he would ask her something secret or musing, but he says, “It seems I am useless,” and flaps his hands on the chair arms.
“We are a pair, then,” Lucy flaps her right hand in echo, her left tucked securely under her bottom, where it will not fly out and cause problems.
“Heavens, Lucy, I didn’t mean anything.” Martin sits up straight.
“I was not declaring my person to be of no validity,” Lucy says. “You don’t take me for as self-pitying as that.” She leaves her gaze on him, although she in fact feels more than a modicum of self-pity. Martin looks away from her to the wall.
“Martin!” Lucy allows a pinch of scold to her voice. “Take me out, will you?” she asks.
So they breeze through the kitchen and out the back. Mother and Stephy barely turn their heads from the open oven door where they coo at the beef like it’s a new baby.
Martin wheels her down the back porch ramp. On the sidewalk he pushes and whistles. In the Becker’s big front elm two squirrels chase across the limbs. One looks terrified once he’s run to the very end twigs, the smallest that will hold him. Lucy points ahead affirming she and Martin communicate without effort when he tilts her back and lowers the chair to street level to avoid curbs as he always does if they are to go any distance.
Out in the evening, cicadas ply their hollow bodies to screech and locate mates. Smells of Friday fish endure outside kitchen windows where they’ve been sent by oscillating fans. Heat enfolds Lucy and Martin as they cross the few blocks of town and friends and neighbors greet them from their porches and yards. Junior Dale leaps across his lawn to shout, “Congratulations!” He leers at Martin and calls him, “You old devil.”
Martin pushes Lucy where they’ve never been together, across the asphalt of the empty school yard, over the four-square court and past the tetherball pole where a once-yellow ball hangs, worn and gray and still. “How long did you go to school here?” By the small jolt of the chair, she knows Martin has tossed his head toward the building.
Lucy drags her hand along the bricks. “Until the fifth grade.” A mantle of humidity drapes the evening. “When I stopped walking,” she adds. They’d been having a wonderful time, and she chose to say this anyway.
At the school’s side door, Martin stops. It’s been more than 30 years, but even after several remodels, it is the same entrance through which Lucy had gone as a girl, after recess, back to class. A friend, enlisted daily by the teacher, was made to help hold her up and as a consequence come last in line, accompanying Lucy on her excruciating stumble down the corridor. Only Tom Garland didn’t mind, a strong boy tall enough to help her. But he’d held her from behind, pinching her barely budded breasts until she cried.
She’d renounced walking that year, making it her choice, before it was completely gone to her. The last doctor, a specialist in Minneapolis, told her parents that she must walk every day in order never to lose the ability. He’d been thin and tall, spouting from on high about low oxygen and birth injury and spinal degeneration. From her father’s lap, it appeared to her that the doctor was balancing his head on the skinny stick of his neck and that there was nothing to this trick for him. Such a person couldn’t understand how the bones of her feet ground against the floor or sidewalk like there were no shoes, no socks and no flesh there at all. He couldn’t know how her joints clattered, how her errant, scrawny leg muscles refused guidance. She hadn’t had words to describe her pain or body then and shouted, “I wish I’d never walked at all!” Only eleven years old, she’d clung to the broad security of her father’s back. Probably she’d hurt his ear with her yelling.
In the barren office, Father had stood and leaned toward the specialist, cradling Lucy between them. He told the doctor that he was an imbecile and ought not speak as if a perfectly intelligent child were a deaf infant. Lucy can see in memory, her father’s spittle flying and her mother, good and deferent, standing tiny and silent, the aspect of hope erased from her.
After that, Lucy stopped going to school and Father began wheeling her to the library when he could and bringing her books when they couldn’t get therescience, philosophy, history, fiction. He’d believed she should read everything. He’d also built the ramp from the back door and modified her wheelchair to be controlled with her one good arm. But, he died only a few years later. A day before her 17th birthday he’d had a heart attack, his face reportedly landing nose-first on the card table in the church basement where he’d been playing skat with some other Knights of Columbus and the priest.
Memory has long since hung its scrim over the scene in the doctor’s office. Lucy wants to believe she was brave and brazen, but lives with guilt that she’d also been insolent, sticking her tongue out at the doctor when surely he’d meant her kindness. She thought about that with her hand on the school’s back door now. But, however she’d acted, walking was one pain of which she’d managed to rid herself forever.
Martin steps around her, dangling the fob of master keys to the town’s postal boxes, and Lucy supposes to the post office itself. “How about some adventure?” He bends and inspects the lock on the school’s door and worries it a bit then winks at her. “My keys seem to work here,” he says, tone apologetic, eyes playful. “I don’t know why.”
Inside the building, the day’s last sunshine lights their way as Martin runs her down the hall and Lucy shrieks for the fun of it. Inside the last classroom he zig-zags her among small children’s desks abandoned for summer. Breathing hard, he finally parks her before a bank of classroom windows. Outside, gray silos loom where the train stops twice a day to load in August. Feed corn pokes skyward in fields beyond. At the edge of everything familiar, the water tower takes sentinel. In the background, trucks roll down Highway 29, which leads out of town, or into it, Lucy supposes. She’s never before thought of it leading anywhere.
In the middle-distance the town diamond points toward them. Martin sings Take Me Out To The Ballgame and watches some boys throw and catch. There’s no batter. Lucy squints. Impossible to tell their age from this far, through the glass, but the kids move as if they are young, not yet accorded the capabilities of their bodies. After every catch or if a catch is missed, they argue and blame, pointing their mitts, until, in unison, they abandon their positions and walk off, arms about one another’s shoulders, perhaps called home by their mothers.
Martin turns Lucy’s chair, and they parallel a long row of storage cabinets on top of which, in the very center sits a still life composed of a cylindrical container atop a child’s building block with a paintbrush by its side. The cylinder reminds Lucy of the wedding horseradish, no doubt still waiting in its place of privilege. Martin holds the can toward the last bits of light to read the label. “Paint! Here we have tempera paint. Says right here it’s blue.”
“Paint?” There hadn’t been painting when Lucy went to school. There hadn’t been kindergarten when she was small.
“Powdered tempera paint.” Martin reads again. He shakes the can next to Lucy’s ear and looks doubtfully at the lid, a tin cap forced into a tin rim. “Children bring me artwork to hang at the post office,” he says.
Lucy has seen the paintings. Circles, triangles, flowers with stems but no leaves. Smiling faces on heads with loops of hair but no bodies, only arms coming from the place for ears. Legs descending directly from where necks should be.
Martin hands her the long paintbrush, and she paints the air, rendering a shimmering pond in a corner, a tree, a curving line to be a strong limb extending from a trunk, a dot of red to be a robin resting there.
For fun she paints herself in the foreground like an ornament, a sprite atop Mr. Kowalski’s Hudson, standing in tall grass growing right from its hood. Pleased, she explains her picture to Martin who gazes into the emptiness before them, admiring every detail. His breath, still heavy from running and singing, lands like wind on her neck. Lucy buttons her memory to the moments unfolding. Her left hand pops free of her bottom, missing his face by an inch and making a shadow like a flying songbird across the back wall before she can trap it.
Martin gives effort to popping the lid from the tempera can, and powder arcs, stunning cobalt, out in a perfect rainbow to land in sprays like bachelor buttons on the tile flooring. “Don’t worry, not a spot on me!” He clutches the can and peers down into it, looking like Danny Kaye, a scamp ready to cut up and entertain. “Still a bit left, though.” He slams the lid back on the can, grabs the brush from Lucy and arranges the objects back in their tableau on the counter top. “Not to worry!”
Lucy hides her smile in her sleeve. She thinks of things sweethearts docarve initials in the bark of trees, secure padlocks to bridges. Perhaps, Lucy hopes, the paint will stain the floor.
Martin, all smiles, falls to his knees in front of her. “Well now we are in cahoots!” he says, “bound forever.” He gestures broadly toward the mess. “We must tell no one.”
The blue blooms before them. Lucy’s left hand escapes again and flaps in a bluster. She leans and toils, nearly tipping her chair trying to catch it. Eventually, Martin makes the capture and holds the clump of her fingers a moment before giving the twisted parcel of her fist back to her. He watches while she struggles to hide it under herself. “Tell me a secret, then.” Martin still play acts on his knees before her.
The paint blossom lives on its own. Lucy envisions a chart of flower parts memorized from the encyclopediapistol, stamen, anther, sepalso explicit. Stamens are the male reproductive organ of a flower, she recalls against her will. “A secret?” Lucy asks. Even through her dress and slip, the sweat of her left hand wets her thigh where it’s wedged. “A secret?”
Color has spread over the tile, bursting while Lucy wishes to be frozen in time here with Martin. He holds his pose, waiting for her answer, but in another second Lucy sees that he waivers; maybe his knees are hurting against the hard floor. Or, even with the mess in front of them, maybe he is thinking of other things just now, maybe he is impatient. Worst of all, in the passing of a heartbeat, she understands that the spill is nothing to himnot a picture, not a flower, barely even a problem. Martin will likely confess to the school custodian outright and ask him to clean it. The two men will laugh, and the custodian won’t refuse. Martin and Stephy will be married and happy starting tomorrow, if Lucy is an encumbrance to them, or if she isn’t, just the same.
“Tell me a secret because we are in cahoots.” Martin sits back on his heels, slapping his thighs. “If you tell me one, and I tell you one back, we will each have a reason to stay mum. You know, if anyone asks what happened in the kindergarten room in summer. Come on, tell me something.”
That it would be better to tell a pretty lie, to invent a whimsy, or to keep herself together with him by saying something amusing or delightful doesn’t cross her mind. Before she’s thought at all, the words are up her throat and she’s said how often, daily, she secretly hopeswouldn’t it be miraculous and merciful?to die on the same day as her mother.
Martin is on his feet and gone in less than a blink, behind her, fled to somewhere she can’t see. Instead of letting bad enough rest she ninnies on. “I won’t mind if I am too young,” she explains out into the classroom. “It will be better for everyone. Mother will not have to be sad for me, and you and Stephy can live in the house by yourselves then.” When she rotates her chair, she finds Martin standing near the windows, his face void.
It’s too late, but she stammers, “Too much. I’m so sorry, Martin. Not a good secret. Of course what I wish for won’t happen, and now I’ve burdened you.” Martin shakes his head at the suggestion. “I always wanted a boyfriend, how about that?” Lucy tries. “Also, I don’t believe God really likes me much, and I keep talking to him anyway. There’s a secret.” Sweat pours from her armpits down her sides. Outside the windows nothing moves. “Please. Martin,” she says, but she doesn’t ask him to forget.
Stiff and tight, Martin does come back for her, what else could he do? She can’t guess what he feels, but it seems he doesn’t mind letting the last slants of sun accost and blind her as he pulls her backward from the room. “Just think how it all might be for me,” Lucy says as they cross the school’s threshold. But on the other side Martin whistles again, ignoring her. “Toward home then?” he stops to ask, composing himself, straightening his shoulders, patting down his trousers.
“All right.” Lucy points with her good hand, pretending Martin might have forgotten the way. She focuses her thoughts toward Stephy and Mother, who are likely still fretting about the mints and the beef. Shadows of elms and maples have grown as long as they can before mingling completely with dusk. A block from the house, she asks Martin to stop.
“I’d like to get back now, though, Luce,” he says, stopping anyway. A few dandelions push through a cleft in the asphalt in the street.
“You owe me a secret, Martin.” Lucy’s chest tightens. She could die from the humiliation of asking anything more of him, or being left with nothing, either one.
In the distance, Stephy comes out of the house and raises her hand to her forehead even though the sun is gone. She lifts her skirt a little, although it’s not long enough to drag. She wags her fingers at them.
“I haven’t got any secrets, really.” Martin hums a few bars of nothing she recognizes. His tone, sweet as a whole orchestra, vibrates through the handles of her chair.
“Something from the war?” Lucy insists.
“We only dreamed of good food and girls. It was so long ago.”
“From the trenches, I mean.”
“I made up my mind, back there in my war, to be happy for what comes in life, Lucy.”
Martin has stepped to her side and looks down the street. He blows a kiss toward Stephy. Lucy looks to her wheels for any paint that might have clung, but none has. Ahead, Stephy walks up the sidewalk and the steps to the front door. Lucy can hear her calling out to their mother inside the house, but she can’t make out exact words. Even from this far away, Stephy looks perfect: petite, precise, and assured, with no need to think much about stairs or whether a door swings inward or out.
“I’ve got it,” Martin says when Lucy expects him not to say anything else. “I always wanted to be the catcher.” He squats beside her and hits his hand into a non-existent mitt. “I wanted to call the game, but I never played at all.” Martin shrugs. “I was afraid of the ball a long time ago.”
Anything Lucy knows about men and fear comes from novels. She imagines Martin with his machinegun in the war. Rat-a-tat-tat. “Afraid?” she asks.
But Martin stands and steps forward. His hand brushes Lucy’s head. For an unbearable second she thinks he means to rough up her hair like a little boy’s. Then they are walking toward the house. Martin is walking toward the house, pushing her in her chair. Mother’s flower garden, so near now, smells sticky, of utter sweetness, and Lucy holds back a wretch thinking of all the stamens over there. But she can’t see the flowers. It’s very close to being night.
Barbara Martin, Near the Vernal Equinox, painting
