Greenhouse Management

I watched my daughter, my Amille, trundle out the front door and into the yard.  All the kids play in front yards these days.  The cozening call of radiant sun had lured her out in rumpled linen pants and button-blouse, sleeves-rolled up.  I watched as she smiled benignly at the day and loped into new snow, completely unbothered, as if it would melt at her touch and flowers would blossom beneath her magic hands.  Her mousy, fritzy brown hair faintly glowed in the sunlight.

She has her mother’s hair but her father’s grooming habits. 

The bluegrass was determinately emerald green under the insulation of the snow, which had fallen in the night, and plugs of it allowed themselves liberty to come out of hibernation.

Not hibernation.  Hiding.

            Yesterday had been different.  Yesterday, it had rained all day.  It had been humid, fiery, almost tropical, nearly insufferable.  My husband had had to lock himself in our room, blinds closed, lights off, stark naked.  Normally, I would have joined him, delightedly; but I was afraid.  I hadn’t even frisked my husband in the month since my pregnancy scare.  That joyous stupor of impending parenthood mingled with fear for the future, in this instance, had been void of any kind of bliss.  There isn’t a threat of fire in hell that could make me bring another child into the world.  And yesterday was as close to that as I had ever been in my entire life.  No, one child was good enough.  This was a different world.  And today, this world decided it wanted snow.

           

There is a reason for this freakish weather, this climate pattern to which I had acclimated, but which my humor can’t assimilate.

Three years ago, a large group of irreligious radicals, whose objective was and is probably unknown, even amongst themselves, putrefied what was left of the Earth’s remaining fresh water.  So many people died.  In order to preserve the rest of humanity, small scattered cities were erected under the refuge of glass domes, built in the coastal desert regions of Africa.  The big idea was that if seawater were to be transported into the greenhouse, the sun would evaporate it and leave behind unwanted brine.  Cold metal pipes condensed and caught the fresh water, and it was regimented and circulated.  The brine was gathered, compacted, and used to build bricks for our houses.

It was a reclamation project which was supposed to be finite, lasting no more than 20 or 30 years.  Bring the water in, filter it, subsist upon it, let parts of it out into reservoirs, and bring in more seawater.  Then go through it all again.

Today was a snow day for the sake of filling our coolers with ice, in place of refrigerators that we didn’t have the materials or electricity to produce and sustain for each individual family.  It was a useful, efficient way of life.

However, the refuges were incoherent; and in between, the heathen zealots had learned to thrive in the surrounding coastal deserts.  Rats.  They were outside, in the dry.  Outside:  the desert, the dunes, the doom.

Once, an unmarried man, depressed and trapped, tunneled under the dome and went out into the desert.  We received word that he had been slain and eaten by the enemy, his remains left to dry in the desert sun.  His bones were brought back to us, only to be returned to and buried in the dunes and no one to mourn for him except his confederate dead.

There was one thing connecting the refuges.  Some great man decided that there needed to be order and leadership, maintenance and mandates, in such a fragile system.  I don’t know him, nor have I seen pictures of him to this day.   Nevertheless, once the towns were built, efforts were made to establish a penal code modified to unite them.  And to homogenize the penal system, a highway was stretched from city to city to city.  A series of water-conservation laws were placed:

No alcohol was to be made.

No blood was to be donated.

No pets were to be brought to the refuge.

Water was to be used according to need:  no sprinklers, no pools, no squirt guns, etc.

Toilets were to be flushed once at the end of the day, for treatment and recirculation.

Teeth were to be brushed without running water.

Hoarding or saving of water on personal premises was ABSOLUTELY PROHIBITED.

            These are a sampling of the strictness with which our resources were managed.  This was justice.  If laws were gratuitously or carelessly overlooked and broken, there were imminent repercussions.  We understood, even appreciated, the gravity of these laws—more especially since the institution of Management Day.

            On this day, once a year, those who use more water than authorized were collected onto an old yellow school bus and taken to summer camp, where water was scarcer and its tenants reminded what kind of world was outside the greenhouse.  They would scour for cacti, hunt for scorpions, pee in jars and drink it—they would, some of them, not come home.  And they never took one without his family.

When I had lived in the United States, summer camp had used to mean something good.  It had been relical of a time kids got wet for fun; you drank and sweat and spat and ate watermelon with other kids and laughed snot out of your nose.  It had been a place you could cry when you scraped the back of your leg on the limb stump of a fallen log, or pee in a hole out in the woods, let your fluids run back to their mother Earth.  Today, that idea was wasteful.  Here, or rather, there, summer camp was perpetual summer, and searing.  It’s where you knew you’d go if you let the faucet drip without notifying the Conservancy Officers of a plumbing malfunction, if you went outside when the Officers turn on the rain, if you salvaged a bowl of water for your fevering daughter.  It seemed unfair, but it wasn’t really.

As we had been fortunate enough to be found and informed of shelter, before the greenhouses, we had managed to escape the merciless, man-made drought.  So others, on the outskirts of this claw machine of care, seeking the safety and shelter of our technology, perished in the endeavor.  There simply weren’t enough scouts on our side to go and get them.  So the desert took them in.  The arid granules shifted with the sea breeze, rustling and gossiping amongst themselves who had traveled the farthest in the last ten thousand years and how much they’d seen.  They obscured the defunct refugees, buried here and incapable of decaying in their sterile bed; the sand atheistically covered our dead in a gritty blanket.  I don’t like to mourn the dead—I don’t like to mourn at all.  It’s a waste of time.

Now, not only the desert, but the enemy also tromped on some of my friends or neighbors or family, ignorantly cohabiting with them in holes, coming out only for the sake of discomfiting the colony’s attempts to thrive.

But here, we would be safe.  Here, we would have enough.  The air would be clean and the domes would do luscious things for the simulated environment.  We would have no animals in our refuge; but zucchinis, squash, tomatoes, grapes, quinoa, all kinds of legumes, fruits and grains would bejewel this faux-Eden, and orchids would stand sentinel and stately in every yard.  I would remember how difficult it had been to keep them from crisping on my kitchen sill in Ohio.  Once in a while, the orchids, with their serious posture, would make me chuckle.  They would remind me of how I was when all this happened.

So it happened that I, with a 4-year-old Amille and my husband, had been relocated to live here in one of the sheltered cities, along with my neighbors, dispersed.  All of my old childhood friends and schoolyard playmates, grown and married with their own children, spirited to different coastal towns, and we went to ours.  We were strangers when we came here.

Now, we had come to find a boon in the neighbors who felt that same throb of things uprooted, things wrenched from our mouths the moment we could begin to taste them.  And because the greenhouses were only about the size of a suburb block, we had quickly become familiar with everyone there.

The Marriotts, the Seiks, the Maynards, and we lived on the short side of the block, it being ergonomically rectangular.  I began to hold book club with Emmy Maynard and the girls.  Its content consisted mainly of the Bible, since the emigration hadn’t allowed for much intentional and intelligent packing, and books were not priority then.

The Bible belonged to Nessa Marriott, the Mormon, who had snatched it from her eldest daughter the night their family arrived.  She had cried and clasped her daughter in gratitude, the Bible wedged between their hearts.

Once, during the pregnancy scare a month ago, she had asked me if I wanted her husband to put his hands on my head and pray over me.  And I had let him.

Anyhow, the book club made me feel regular, like I was in our bi-level in Kettering.  It felt right to be talking.  Like I could buy a dog any time I wanted, or an exotic aquarium with puffer fish.  Like I could make love to my husband and get pregnant whenever I pleased.  Like I could call any of my old friends over to barbeque with our family.  And, in fact, in spite of our now meatless existence, grilling was something of a pastime here now.  It wasn’t normal grilling, it was greenhouse grilling.  Vegetable kabobs were the thing.  And the grills burned no fire, but were composed of some manly technology that I wouldn’t be bothered with to find out.  My husband didn’t care for it much either.  He’s more of an intellectual.

I say intellectual, but I mean it symbiotically with idiotic.  The first time I saw him, I was 15 and he was 18.  He was loitering with a group of boyhood friends outside the United Dairy Farmers.  I was going there just to get ice cream, and enjoying a walk.  It’s something I’d do.  I walked past the boys, eyes averted, and the gang grew noticeably more boisterous.  Boys are loud, and often get louder when girls are around, so it seemed natural that I ignore them.  I plucked a Flintstone Push-Pop from the deep freezer, paid the cashier, and went on my way home up Dorothy Lane.

He pursued, but against the roar of traffic, I couldn’t hear him gaining on me, even when he was directly behind me.  I noticed him only once he was in my peripheral vision; by then, he startled me terribly, and that made me angry.  I walked tersely into a quiet neighborhood close to my house, and turned quickly as I launched my Push-Pop upward into his wide, pointed, nose.  He sputtered, and his dark, shaggy hair fell into his face as he doubled over.  I didn’t stop.  Once he stopped coughing, though, I heard him laughing, and I thought he was queer.

A week later, I saw him again.  He waited at the UDF, this time alone, sporting a surgical mask and orange jump suit.  He said, “I’m prepared to be friends.”  It was so dumb that I couldn’t not laugh.

We spent a good year or two together, me pushing him around, and him making jokes about it, which always made me feel bad.  He asked me once “Are you happy when you’re with me?”  I don’t remember what I answered.   After the summer of my seventeenth year, we lost touch.  Maybe because I was a geeky high-schooler.  Maybe because I didn’t answer the question correctly.

He came to my high-school graduation.  I was dating someone else, Gary, whose last name I don’t remember, and who was going to school to become a writer.

He came to my graduation party also.  During this time, he nattered amiably with Gary.  Or at least it seemed so from the other side of the room.  Making my rounds, thanking my friends and family for free money, chugging around the food table, I heard a sliver of what they were saying.

“No,” Gary said, “I don’t know what the infinite monkey theorem is.”

“Oh, well, it just says that if you have a never-ending supply of monkeys and time, one of them will write Hamlet by chance.”

“Oh.”

I knew my husband well enough by then to realize that he was attempting a quip-stab at Gary’s profession, and it made me feel stupid, because I was seeing Gary, after all.  I wanted this conversation over.

“James,” I said firmly, stepped between them, and gave him a reproachful glare.  He smiled good-naturedly and left.  I didn’t know it then, but James had been studying to be an English teacher.  In reality, he was inadvertently reviling himself along with poor Gary.  He never could injure a person without injuring himself.

As the party crowd thinned, James stayed.  He found my parents and prattled on with them for hours, until no one was left but him and Gary.  Neither of them seemed to want to leave me alone with the other.  But I had to clean and start my thank you cards.  So I chafed politely and entertained them as long as I could.

After they had respectfully worn their stay, I jostled them both to the door and asked them to leave.  Gary first, and James behind, they hung their heads in resignation.  Just before passing over the threshold, James looked inquisitively at Gary outside.

“What was your name again?”

“Gary,” he frowned.

“Well, Gary,” James chimed, “it was nice meeting you,” and slammed the door in his face.

We were married two months later.

Over the years we spent together, he had made me hoot over stupid things, like old jokes and toilet humor.  Even in this strange new community, he had adjusted, and re-become himself.  So, James functioned more as entertainment, rather than gourmet. 

South of our house, however, Abednego Dam grilled all day today in his front yard.  His wife cajoled him with her hip, her arm slung through his idle one, his hand pocketed in his apron.  They had looked happy.  They were only slightly younger than our little family, with a daughter only slightly younger than ours.

Their 4-year-old daughter, Amen, had been entertaining herself long before Amille skipped sloppily into the Dams’ front yard.  The girls embraced, little girl hugs, and continued with Amen’s project; she was stomping the snow into the grass, so the girls could play toss.

            We spent today slowly.  Emmy Maynard detached from her husband to run across the street and gifted the grillers a fresh batch of candied raisins made from her white grapes.  A family from the opposite end of the block, who I’m acquainted with but haven’t had the opportunity to grow close to—the Netts—brought their boys over and sat with our families.  We talked all afternoon.

           The sun, setting on today, brings all the warm colors of a bedspread and midnight snack.  One color, a yellow, rides high and ugly on the black pavement; and interrupts the dream.  As we’re calling out our good nights, the bus stops in front of the Dams’, and they are taken.

            Now, I’ll lie awake, my husband silently the same.  I’ll weep and snot into my pillow, and then I’ll bury my face in it, because today was so good.

            I’ll pray for rain.