Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

JESSICA LEFT HER JOURNALS on subways, in taxicabs, in laneways bright yellow with the first fallen leaves, soon to be brown and rumpled and smelling of Halloween. It wasn’t just drinking with Simeon; she was a forgetful sort. Each time she bought a replacement journal she told herself she’d leave it at home, but she could never bring herself to stick to this plan. She loved writing in cafés too much to ever give it up.

She always imagined the strangers who found her notebooks. Would they take up where she left off, filling the remaining blank pages with their own to do lists, love letters, and scraps of poetry? Would they complete her failed short stories? Would they share her journals with their friends and imagine her as plump and unattractive? Jessica was plump, but her father had told her that to fetishize the very thin was actually a desexualizing of the female form, representing a male fear of womanly fecundity. He could go on. He was a cultural studies professor. Simeon told Jessica how lucky she was. Jessica’s father was never going to sigh in a disappointed manner when she showed up for Thanksgiving dinner with dishevelled hair, sans make-up and polished nails. Simeon, Jessica’s best friend, was impeccably groomed at all occasions, but this failed to impress his own father, who hadn’t yet gotten over (and might not ever get over) the fact that his son was gay.

“Some people are straight,” Jessica pointed out, “and some aren’t. People should do what they want. Guys who want to wear eyeliner should, although I do think all those chemicals have got to be bad for your skin. And do you know what they do to the bunnies?”

“What bunnies?” Simeon asked.

They were in a student café called The Mermaid, drinking coffee and eating carrot muffins. Jessica had been there since one, Simeon since three. They’d had one refill each. Jessica would’ve gotten a third, but refills weren’t free, and she was out of money. She’d have asked Simeon to pay, but she was always doing that. He got money from home to flesh out his loan. Her own professor father balked at doing this; he thought she needed to learn how to budget. Jessica couldn’t budget to save her life. Just now the manager was giving them dirty looks. The place was filling up with the after class crowd, paying customers who’d ordered soy lattés and expensive pastries and were now looking for somewhere to sit.

“The bunnies they perform the experiments on,” Jessica told Simeon as they swung out the door. It was cold. She should’ve worn a coat and not just a sweater.

“Experiments?”

“They wire their eyes open and put mascara on them to see how they react,” Jessica said.

“That doesn’t sound right,” Simeon said. They’d reached the corner where they usually parted ways.

“Oh fuck,” Jessica said, patting her alarmingly empty canvas bag.

Simeon started to laugh. He knew what was wrong. Jessica ran back to the café, hair flying. Her clogs made a nice thunking sound on the wet October sidewalks. She burst into the door. Her notebook wasn’t on their old table, nor was it underneath. The people now seated were all wearing new brand-name jackets. Didn’t they have coffee chains for people like that? She asked if they’d seen her book. What she really wanted to do was go through their bags, one by one, as if she were a store owner and they were suspected shoplifters, but they were already looking down their noses at her obvious desperation. She asked at the counter. The pierced and tattooed manager rolled his eyes; it was his rush and he was understaffed. His eyes willed Jessica to disappear.

Back on the sidewalk, she looked around for Simeon. He was gone, home, she supposed. It was raining now, and she hadn’t really expected him to wait for her since they were going in different directions.

She set off for her little bachelor around the corner. Almost at her door, her clog kicked something on the sidewalk. She looked down. At her feet there was a hard-cover journal. It was yellow. She picked it up and stashed the book in her shoulder bag. She turned the key in her lock. She walked up the three flights of stairs. Her sweater and jeans were damp and wet. She unlocked the door to her tiny apartment, went inside and sat down on the old yellow couch. She opened the book she’d found and read.

Renee and her friend Neil climbed down the iron fire-escape that led from her kitchen to the roof of the first storey, where she’d planted purple fall asters and canna lilies in halved oak wine barrels. The cannas’ foliage lent the roof a tropical feel, and much to everyone’s surprise, managed to bloom, displaying huge spikes of glowing red flowers.

It was a perfect description of the back of Jessica’s flat.

Was this one of her journals? Maybe she’d forgotten she’d ever even had it, never mind written in it. Maybe she’d been experimenting with autobiographical fiction, and her first step had been to change her own and Simeon’s names.

Except the handwriting wasn’t hers, so that couldn’t be it.

She turned the page and read on.

She and Neil climbed down the second set of iron stairs and cut through the yard of the butcher shop, even in winter stinky from heaps of discarded beef bones, through the alleyway, and back out onto the main street where they’d seen it earlier in the afternoon. It was an enormous brocade couch with a real wood frame and not a pasteboard one, and was henceforth, extremely heavy.

Now she was sitting on it. Stained yellow; round wooden feet, brocade flowers, a missing centre cushion.

Jessica went to the kitchen and put water on for tea. She changed out of her wet clothes while the tea was steeping, sat back down on the couch, and turned to the next page. It was empty. Impulsively she picked up a pen and wrote:

Renee was in shape from swimming twice a week so she and Neil were able to carry the couch down the street, around the corner into the alleyway, through the butcher’s yard that always inspired her, for fifteen minutes at a time, to become a full time vegetarian again, instead of a lapsed little-bit-of-chicken, little-bit-of-fish one. They set it down to pant heavily, exuding vast puffs of vapoury breath, dragon like, staring at their frozen whale, the return journey up the fire escape: the hard part. It didn’t help that they’d gone to the campus pub earlier and were drunk, or maybe, on the contrary, that was what made them think they could pull it off.

Jessica remembered she’d gotten the top end, being so much smaller than Simeon. She’d asked him to abandon the project because the slats of the fire escape were icy now and slick with sleet. She was afraid she’d lose her grip on the couch and kill Simeon. She told him so but he thought it made more sense to keep going than to take the couch back down. Jessica had hoped they could just leave it on the fire escape, a canted yellow whale.

She put down her pen and turned the page.

The unknown writer continued the story:

Renee learned to hate the couch—she always meant to find a replacement for the missing centre cushion that, if it wouldn’t match, would at least fit. She never did. The couch sat there for a year and eventually she called Neil and they lifted it once again and carried it back down the fire escape from whence it had come. They left it on the second storey roof; a place to sit and contemplate unlikely cannas. The young women downstairs appreciated it more than she did. They always drank cold Steam Whistles on its leaf-shadowed squishiness in the afternoon when they got home from their landscaping jobs. Leaf shadows joining with brocade fabric ones, mutating.

Years later, when Renee was happily married, she found a yellow couch at a yard sale that reminded her of the first one. It was as if the couch had followed her. Why? What did it mean? Should she buy it? She pulled out her cell to call Neil and ask him.