A Wild Daisy

A single drop of clear fluid slowly bulged from the tiny hole at the bottom of the bag of poison. It grew fatter and fatter, until it dropped silently into the tube that led to her arm. Another took its place. Life and death measured out in single droplets. Every time she swore she wouldn’t watch them. Every time her eyes dragged back to the clear globes of poison that were supposed to save her life. It was time in a bottle, counting backwards. 

The squeaks of soft soled sensible shoes passed by in all directions. Wheels bustled past. Voices were lowered to respectful murmurs as staff held discussions not fit for patient ears. Sometimes machines beeped. She was certain she could hear the droplet splash faintly when it fell. The almost silence was filling her head like fog until it exploded in the report of high heeled shoes clipping insistently across the industrial tiles. 

A curtain swept aside, not gently, from near the top, like the nurses did it, but abruptly and with style. She flinched slightly.

“Rebecca? I am Suava Hoffman. We have exchanged a few emails about my project interviewing chemo patients?” She said it assuming the answers, so Rebecca just nodded and gestured to the extra chair sitting in the farthest corner of the curtained cubicle. Ms. Hoffman took it, but leaned forward as if she was still in motion. Every fiber of her lean, healthy frame shouted “health” and “vitality” in this place that wasn’t. Suddenly Rebecca was exhausted, but she had agreed to this, so she would see it through. 

“Rebecca, I want to document the story you want to tell. This is about giving you a voice. You will tell me whatever you want to say, and nothing you don’t. I am working with an illustrator in this project. He can work from the manuscript I create, but if you feel comfortable, he would like to sit in on our session. How do you feel about that?”

Rebecca nodded. Her fingers picked at the yoga pants hanging loosely on her legs. 

“Sure. That’s fine.” she said, while her brain screamed that two people in this room was two more than she really wanted to see while toxic liquid seeped into her body. But it would keep her eyes away from those swelling, glistening globules. “I just don’t want him drawing the bag. He can draw anything else in the room, OK?” 

Suava nodded sympathetically, while she typed furiously at her phone. “He’s on his way, and he says whatever you feel comfortable with is fine with him.” Then she put down her phone, took out a notebook, and leaned back. 

“OK, Rebecca. What story do you want to tell? What is on your mind as you sit in this room?”

The illustrator slipped through the curtain almost without making it move, and slid into a molded plastic chair, as he opened a sketch pad. It was a single fluid motion and he never once looked up. Rebecca’s mouth opened almost on its own, and she spoke her truth. 

The summer I turned fifteen I got a summer job at a local ice cream stand. The ice cream was made locally and brought straight from the creamery to our stand fresh every morning. Ice cream from the dairy was our family’s summer tradition, and I had wanted to work there ever since I was eight. As happens so often, my childhood dreams were not realized. 

It was long hours of scooping hard ice cream, and mixing shakes, and taking crap from customers who thought it should be done faster, cheaper, and with a little more jazz. My feet ached, and my soul hurt from learning that behind the magic curtain of my dreams was just mops and bleach and puddles of souring ice cream. Still, it was a job, and there were tips. My pay check went straight into my college fund (parent’s orders) but when I had some time off, I would put the change and small bills from my tip jar into the pockets of my cutoff jeans, and ride my bike across town to my best friend’s house. 

Joey was recovering from mono that summer, so instead of our usual afternoons of smashing high scores at the arcade, or busting our knees and elbows trying out new skateboard moves, we sat around a lot. I would stop at the video rental place for a VHS and two sodas, and we would sit on his mama’s forest green couch, with our feet up on the coffee table, and watch the Dark Crystal, or Dune, or Dark Star. We watched all 5 existing Star Trek movies that summer, including the first one. He had started playing Dungeons and Dragons the year before, but my mama was convinced it was of the devil and leading to death, so it was movies for us.

My supervisor at the ice cream place was a twenty-one year old business student making minimum wage just to be able to put “manager” on a resume. Shaun was convinced he could leverage this job into something bigger. Every shift he would hold a “team meeting” and set goals for the two of us working at a time. He even had this chant we had to do before we could turn on the open sign. I remember standing beside the pull chain on the neon oval, droning out this crazy rhyme before I could pull the power and open the glass windows. We had a line up every time, and he did not care.

So one day I was doing a shift, and the goal of the shift was upselling the waffle cone. 

“Would you like that in a waffle cone?” was how Shaun wanted us to phrase it, and it was working. Shaun wanted us to ring a stupid little bell and put a star on a chart every time we sold a waffle cone. When there are seventy five people in two lines, and three people on a shift, ain’t no one got time for that, so Shaun was getting pissy.

I had just served a family of five, and was wiping the tiger ice cream off the back of my hand when I realized Joey was standing at my window. He was grinning, and before I could say anything, he said, “Dad says we’ll take two of whatever Shaun wants you to sell today.”

I took the order, rang Shaun’s bell twice, and did a little sassy dance to the cooler, emboldened by the support of my best friend in the whole world. We laughed together, and I managed to get in a “great to see you out of the house!” before Shaun was calling the next customer to my window. Still, it was the shot I needed to finish the shift strong. I sold exactly two more waffle cones than Sylvia that shift. Shaun called it a tie. He said Joey’s two didn’t count. I didn’t really care. 

The bag was half empty. The round globes were still forming, but Rebecca wasn’t watching them any more. Her eyes were focused on the curtain. Her mind was focused on the memory.

I was mopping the soured, sticky ice cream off the floor at the end of the shift. Sylvia always managed to be the first out the door, so it was just me and Shaun behind the shuttered windows. When I turned around to put the mop away, Shaun was right behind me. I jumped, and screamed slightly. He grabbed my hips, and kissed me, hard. He shoved his tongue in my mouth, and I gagged, so he backed up.

“Tell that little boy I don’t want to see him around here again distracting you.” Shaun muttered, and turned back to counting out the cash.

Two days later I was sitting in Joey’s living room watching something lame. I must have been restless or something, because he finally turned it off, and said his mama thought he needed more fresh air, now that he was getting better. 

“Let’s go for a walk, Becks,” he said. 

We wandered out the back door across the lawn toward the worn track that traversed the green belt between his neighborhood and the commercial part of town. We chatted a little about the lame movie, and when the trail ended, we turned down the industrial park, and walked along the railroad tracks. I asked something about Dungeons and Dragons, but Joey didn’t answer. 

“What is wrong with you?” he asked. “You’re acting weird. Like not the cool friend I spend all my time with. You’re acting like the drama girls at school. I don’t like it.” 

“Oh yeah?” I shouted back. “Well, maybe I don’t like you showing up at work and making my boss mad. What was that?”

Joey frowned. “He was mad? What did he say?”

I gagged out the whole story, and then sat in the middle of the railroad track, hugging my knees and crying. I didn’t even really know why I was crying. I didn’t know why I was mad. I couldn’t put words to the crushing disappointment that my first kiss had been that violent act.

Joey walked away. I knew my entire life had seismically shifted and I didn’t know how to scale the Himalayas that had been thrown in front of me. And then he was back, with a napkin, and a single daisy. He handed them both to me, and sat down next to me. 

“Well, I don’t know what that was, but it wasn’t OK. That’s for sure. You gonna tell his boss, or are you gonna quit?”

We talked it over for several hours, sitting in the middle of a railroad track, as a wild daisy slowly wilted in my hair. 

Rebecca looked up at Suava Hoffman, and smiled. 

“You know what?” She said. “I’ve spent my entire life trying to find another relationship as good as that one, but I didn’t know it until right now.”

The illustrator’s pencil was hovering over the paper, but not moving. 

“It was the summer you turned 16, not 15.” he said, without lifting his head. Rebecca grinned a little, as she wiped her palms along her ragged yoga pants.

“Oh yeah. How do you know that?” she countered.

“Because I had mono on my seventeenth birthday. And you have never in your life scraped an elbow on a skate board. You were always holding the camera while I scraped up my joints.”

At that she chuckled. “Too bad we were before You Tube.”

He just shook his head, “Oh no. I am glad that footage is lost.”

Suava Hoffman didn’t move. She was getting the story of her life, and there was no way she was going to remind them she was there.

He crossed the floor, and looked down at her. 

He tore the page off his sketch book, and handed it to her. It was a single daisy, and a railroad track. 

“I’ve been trying to get back there my whole life, too. When you’re finished here, you wanna go for a walk, Becks? We have some catching up to do.”