“Hey, Lili, sorry about your penis.”

  I shifted in my chair. “Jesus, what is it with everyone this morning? You’re all beside yourselves about the penis.”

  “As it were.”

  “So here’s my question, Al. Are you sure there’s a mistake? My input from the editor agrees with what I have, so what do you have there, an encyclopedia of penises? PenisCheck 2000?”

  I could hear him grinning. “I cannot divulge the sources of the fact-checking department, you know that. I’d have to kill you, and then we’d lose our best illustrator.”

  I turned to Sasha. “Your boyfriend just said I’m the best illustrator.”

  We could both hear Al yelping. Sasha shrugged without turning around.

  “Tell him now I’ve seen Moby’s gear, I’ve lost all interest in him anyway.”

  “Al, she’s leaving you for a cetacean.”

  “Again? That whore. No, but seriously, our guy at the aquarium caught the typo, and we checked with the editor, and his original content was wrong. No big deal, just checking the facts. We see a fact, we check it. It’s our job.”

  “Oh, well, OK, then. I didn’t know you had a tame whale guy on call.”

  “Again, I cannot reveal my sources, but how else do you think two scruffy guys with liberal-arts degrees proof all this stuff, if not for a fat, fat Rolodex of smart people with very narrow fields of focus?”

  “You make a good point, Al.” I hung up, fixed the word, and re-sent the document to Rose. In the cover note, I wrote she could stick the penis in fact-checking’s in-box, which I knew she would appreciate.

  My phone rang. Rose. “Upstairs wants to see you.”

  I frowned. “Am I getting fired?”

  She clicked her tongue. “No clue. Why don’t you gather your balls in your right hand and go upstairs and find out for yourself?” Rumor has it Rose was the mistress of the first Mr. Poplar, and was installed in the art department, as it was originally called, to hide her from his wife. Seeing as that would make her around eighty, and she is not that, I doubt it, but clearly she has embarrassing info on somebody. Otherwise, they would have fired her long ago. She has people skills like lions have gazelle skills. I sighed and headed upstairs to face Roberta King, my general manager.

  • • •

  Roberta King was probably around my age, but we had as much in common as a roller skate and a race car. (This isn’t the best analogy for either of us but was something my dad always said and it springs to mind. He died last year, but I am keeping him alive by stealing his best material.) Roberta and I had met maybe half a dozen times, at work activities that sought to build community through trust falls and other excruciating experiences, and all I could remember about her was that she had looked as uncomfortable as I had felt.

  I was wearing my working-mother-at-work ensemble, consisting of a long skirt over boots (with two different socks underneath, but the skirt covered them), a long-sleeve T-shirt that I had slept in, and a V-necked and somewhat stretched sweater from Target. Roberta was wearing a suit. She smelled of flowers. I smelled of waffles.

  However, she was smiling at me as if we were old friends, which of course meant I was about to get fired.

  “Hi, Roberta. Rose said you wanted to see me?”

  “Yeah, hi, Lili, come on in. Take a seat.” She pushed her chair back from her desk and crossed her legs, indicating that this was a casual, girl-to-girl type of thing. I sat at an angle, like you do, and crossed my legs, too.

  “How are the kids?” Ooh, a personal question.

  “They’re good, thanks. You know . . .” Shit, I had trailed off. Why was this difficult? I was a woman, she was a woman, we both worked in publishing, ovulated, perspired, ate ice cream and felt guilty about it, read People at the checkout, wondered what people thought of us. We should be able to be relaxed.

  “Two little girls, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And one dead husband?” OK, she didn’t say that. I just added it in my head. People often ask, when they don’t know you, “Oh, and where’s your husband?” Or, “And what does your husband do?” And it’s very hard not to reply, “In heaven, hopefully.” Or, “Oh, he mostly just rots.” But anyway, she didn’t mention him, which meant she remembered he was dead and was being polite and thoughtful. Bitch.

  “So, Lili. As you know, things are a little tight in publishing right now. Education budgets are getting cut all over the country, and that’s having a direct impact on our business, of course. Poplar’s trying to stay ahead by branching out a bit.”

  I laughed. She paused, frowning a little. I blushed. “Sorry . . . I thought you were making a pun . . . Poplar . . . branch . . .” I swear a tumbleweed blew through the office and bounced over a ridge in the carpet.

  Roberta cleared her throat. “Fortunately, an opportunity has presented itself. The Bloem Company is one of the largest seed and flower corporations in the world.” I nodded. Even I had heard of them, and I don’t know a daisy from a doorknob. “They produced a series of flower guides, and they’re going to add a series on vegetables. They’ve asked us to publish them, because the small press who released the flower guides has gone out of business.”

  I nodded and put on my intelligent listening face, adding a little between-the-eyebrows frown for extra focus. I was actually just waiting to hear my name, like a dog.

  “We’d like you to illustrate them.”

  I nodded again, but she had stopped talking.

  “Well, that will be . . . fun.” I was puzzled. What was the fuss about? Why was she pulling me into her office to tell me about a job? Normally we get briefed on new projects downstairs, in a short meeting, and then they arrive via e-mail.

  Roberta started up again. “It’s a very big job.”

  “Well, there are lots of vegetables in the world.”

  “Yes. And the Bloem people want to cover all of them. There will be several volumes, plus an addendum.”

  “I love an addendum.”

  “And we want you to do it by hand, not computer. Watercolors, pen-and-ink, charcoal, whatever you like. Bloem wants to create something artistic and lasting. While at the same time capitalizing on the rebirth of interest in slow food, organic gardening, and the back-to-the-land movement.” She was nervous about something, I could hear it in her voice. She suddenly looked at me and blurted out, “I’m afraid I did something terrible. Truly, truly terrible.”

  I was surprised, because I hadn’t thought she was that kind of girl, but I got ready to be shocked.

  “I said you’d take a gardening class.” She cleared her throat. “A vegetable gardening class.”

  “I’m sorry?” I frowned. “Did you say a gardening class?”

  Roberta blushed. “I was on the phone with the woman from Bloem, and she mentioned that one of the Bloem family sons was teaching a class on vegetable gardening, here in Los Angeles, and I said you’d take it.”

  “The class?”

  “Yes.”

  “On vegetable gardening?”

  “Yes.” She spoke more slowly, as apparently I wasn’t getting it. “I said you’d take a class on vegetable gardening.” She said it the way someone else might have said, “And you’ll be slowly dipped in battery acid, toes first.”

  “I don’t mind taking a gardening class. It sounds like fun.” I paused. “Unless it’s a three-year commitment and requires a lot of heavy lifting?”

  She shook her head quickly. “It’s Saturday mornings, for six weeks. We would of course be compensating you for your time.” I half shrugged, and she leapt on it. “And giving you extra vacation days.”

  I would have done it for nothing, but there was no need to tell her that. “Sounds fair.”

  She shuddered. “I would have taken the course myself, but I simply couldn’t.”

  I altered my opinion of her, subtly. “Why?”

  “I hate worms.” She visibly shivered, and may even have gone pale. It was hard to tell under her perfect makeup. “I had a bad experience as a child. I can’t even stand too close to soil, you know, just in case.”

  I had to bite my lip not to ask for details. What qualifies as a bad worm experience? I imagined her running along, tiny and cute in coordinated Baby Gap, tripping, falling, her little braids twisting in slow motion as she hit the ground, skidding, coming face-to-face with a worm . . . that pulled out a gun and shot her? That bit her on the nose? I mean, honestly, they don’t even have mouths. But you can’t say that kind of thing to people. You can’t mock their fears openly. But I made a note to do it later, in private.

  She still looked worried. “So will you do it?”

  I shrugged. “Of course, happy to. I’m sure it will inspire my illustrations.” I didn’t add that I could always get up close and personal with a carrot in the produce department, but she seemed to think this class would help the project, and who was I to argue?

  She relaxed, visibly, and stood up. Her clothes fell perfectly, not a wrinkle. Maybe she had some little guy under the desk, steaming her as she sat. Mine kind of stuck where they were, as if someone had wadded them into a ball and thrown them at me.

  “Excellent. The class starts this Saturday. You can bring your kids.”

  I said thanks, and she said thanks, and we both shook hands and said thanks again, and then she added something.

  “We’re very worried about the future of Poplar. But I know you’ll make a good impression, do wonderful work, and save the company.”

  “No pressure, then.” I tried to soften my sarcasm with a small smile.

  Her first genuine smile since I’d entered her office appeared. “I know you’re up to the task.”

  I tottered out and headed back downstairs.

  • • •

  I went to the tiny kitchen and poured an enormous coffee. My mug said, WORLD’S GREATEST DAD, which I supposed was applicable, although I picked it because it was the size of a bucket. Rose had put a sign above the coffeemaker: IF YOU TAKE THE LAST OF THE COFFEE, PUT ON A NEW POT, OR I WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE . . . CHALLENGING. She meant it, too. Sasha forgot once, and Rose connected all her outward-bound calls to the CEO’s office, which meant five times in a row the guy picked up the phone and there was Sasha. Eventually the CEO suggested she not forget to put on more coffee next time.

  Back at my desk, I called my sister.

  “Can you babysit the kids every Saturday morning for the next six weeks?”

  There was a pause. Then she said, “Yes, if you don’t mind dropping them at my house and running the risk that naked people might be there. Or trained animals.”

  I laughed. “Come on, your private life isn’t that exciting.”

  “That’s what you think. Note the use of the word private.”

  “So that’s a no, then?”

  “Do I have to commit to the full series? Can’t I do it as needed?”

  “This is as needed. Work has asked me to do a gardening class, and it’s every Saturday for the next month and a half. I’m illustrating a book on vegetables, and they think it will help if I learn how to grow them.”

  “They might be right.”

  “I doubt it. I did a great job on Monasteries of 14th Century Europe, and I’m not a monk, nor French, nor dead for five hundred years.”

  “Good point. Can’t you take them with you?”

  “I could, but I thought they’d rather hang with you.”

  “How about I come to the class, too, and help you with the kids there?”

  I actually took the phone away from my ear and looked at it.

  “Are you OK? Gardening? Really?”

  She sighed. “I’m feeling oppressed by my job today. I have spent the last two hours on the phone, yelling at people I will never meet, but who hold the fate of my company in their slippery hands. A very important item has been lost in transit, which I am having a hard time with.”

  “Wow, you really are pissed. You just ended a sentence with a preposition.”

  “Eat me.”

  “What was it?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual. A priceless, thousand-year-old statue of a horse.”

  “Well, maybe it’s just in the wrong box or something.”

  “It’s life-size. And on its back is a naked woman holding aloft the headless body of an eagle. But apart from those minor distinguishing features, it’s easily missed.”

  “OK.” I paused. “I have no response to that at all. Good luck with your missing horse.” We hung up. Honestly, our conversations were getting more and more like an old married couple’s every day. Apart from the headless-eagle part, although I always say you never really know what goes on in someone else’s marriage.

  • • •

  “We’re what?” Annabel looked skeptical in the rearview mirror.

  Yet again, back in the car. I should buy myself one of those beaded seat covers that are supposed to be good for your back, but I’d end up with the pattern permanently embedded in my ass, and the last thing I need back there is more texture.

  We were heading home after school. Or at least we would be, once the carpool line inched its way out of the school parking lot. The thing about carpool lines is that teachers use them to indicate how much they like your kids, and, by extension, you. I might be reading too much into it, but how else can I explain the fact that I might be at the front of the line and able to see my kid sitting there, picking her nose with all the subtlety of Howard Carter in a pyramid, and have teachers hunt high and low for children to take to cars way behind me? Cars containing parents who send in cookies more frequently, or even at all. Parents who remember to send thank you cards after birthday parties, or put clean clothes on their kids more than once a week. They’re always nice to my face, these teachers, but they say things like, “Oh, Annabel is so unique.” Or, “Clare said the funniest thing again in class today.” Or, “She has an amazing vocabulary, Mrs. Girvan. Honestly, I’m not even certain a tiger has a clitoris.”

  I answered the question calmly. “We’re going to learn how to grow a garden.”

  “I already know how to grow things.” Clare was excited. “We do it at school.”

  I looked at her, quickly, over my shoulder. “You do?”

  She nodded. Annabel confirmed. “The little kids have a garden in the playground. We see them out there digging in the dirt.”

  “I kissed a worm.” That’s the thing about Clare, she’s shy.

  “Did he kiss you back?”

  She laughed. “Mom! Worms aren’t he’s. They’re both girls and boys!”

  Huh. Score one for the Los Angeles public school system.

  “Yes, they’re hermaphrodites,” Annabel clarified.

  “No, they’re boys and girls.” Clare wasn’t going to let her sister one-up her.

  We were nearly at the street. “Well, anyway, we’re starting this weekend, and it’s going to be fun. Aunty Rachel is going to take the class with us.”

  “Can I get back to you?” Annabel apparently needed to consult with her people.

  “Well, I’m doing it.” Clare didn’t need permission from anyone.

  We parked in front of the house, and I let the kids out, stepping back to avoid the small cascade of car crap that fell out when the door slid back. You could always tell where I’d parked: granola-bar wrappers, a small, bent straw from a juice box, a grubby wipe. Mommy droppings. I imagined a Native American tracker crouching low on the sidewalk: “Middle-aged, plump woman, heading south, surrounded by young.” He would straighten and shake his majestic head pityingly. “Moving slowly.”

  As I shut the car door, I noticed broken car-window glass in the gutter and instantly wondered if it had been there since my husband’s accident. It hadn’t, of course, but images of that day often flickered into my mind without being invited. Broken glass. A car door slamming suddenly. Coffee spilled on the street, still steaming. The sound of emergency voices distorted by static.

  They had come very quickly when Dan had been killed, although I hadn’t heard the sirens. I was standing in the kitchen, replaying the argument we had been in the middle of, as it happened, saying all the things I had meant to say. It had been a hissing morning argument, where we’d gone to bed angry, woken up still angry, and then had to put it on infuriating hold while he took the kids to school.

  “I’ll be back,” were his last words, but not in a pleasant, don’tworry way, but more in a Terminator, this-argument-isn’t-done way. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t true anyway, and never would be.

  I cut back to today and watched the kids get out of the car in that jumping-falling way little kids do, then I reached into the backseat to get backpacks, art projects, and stray shoes. I could hear our Labrador, Frank, barking as I walked to the door, and he greeted us enthusiastically, checking the kids for food, then scooting his fat butt across the rug.

  “Frank has worms again, Mom,” announced Annabel, Child Veterinarian, turning on the TV.

  “Maybe he just has an itchy bottom,” suggested Clare. “It happens.”

  I sighed and started emptying the dishwasher. The dog has worms. Clare needs a filling in a baby tooth because I’m a bad mother and give her sugar. My sister wants dinner. Meanwhile, I haven’t had a haircut in five months and have started to resemble Cousin Itt. Cousin Itt was a blonde, of course, whereas I am more of an indeterminate brown, but still. I caught sight of my reflection in the kitchen window and for a minute thought I was my mother. Fantastic.

  An hour or so later, my sister walked in. “You’re starting to look a little like Cousin Itt, did you know that?” She put the grocery bags on the counter and picked up Clare, who was squealing about the dog and his worms. “Wait, who has worms? You have worms?” She looked at Annabel. “Do you have worms, too?”

  “Yes.” Annabel was expressionless, engrossed in the TV. “Hundreds of worms.”

  I put water on for the pasta and started making dinner. I thought about the times I’d watched my mother chopping onions, the radio playing, an empty tomato can holding her wooden spoon on the counter, the smell of melting butter permeating the air. I wondered if she’d been as underwhelmed as I was. Every day around four o’clock I would start making dinner for the kids, which meant for me, too, because otherwise I would eat alone, or not at all, and then they would eat (if I was lucky), take a bath, get into their jammies, have stories, and go to bed. When Dan had been alive, he would arrive in the middle of it, full of adult thoughts and complaints about his work, which at least provided some visual interest and the possibility of polysyllabic words. Now Rachel was often here, which worked, too, but sometimes I found myself singing the Curious George theme song under my breath in a way that probably indicated brain-cell death.

 

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