Emma had been moving in since we started dating six months ago, one little object at a time—a chartreuse toothbrush sprouting out of the holder in my bathroom, a pair of olive tights draped over my headboard, a candy-lime phone charger coiled up behind the couch—so that by the time we agreed to officially cohabitate, there was not much more to be done, as she had been living a peripatetic life, couch surfing with various friends she kept at a distance from me. No furniture, a couple of suitcases, some potted plants. Actually, she had a surprising number of these for someone who had never rented or owned a place of her own.
All of them succulents.
And all of them super adorable.
“I’m a succulent person,” she said, shrugging.
I had never owned a pet before, nor cared for a plant, but I welcomed the change.
“They don’t really need any water or anything,” she told me. “Just sunlight. They pull all their moisture out of the air.”
Which explains why they were spread out across the windowsill and my multipurpose table and crowding the side tables by the couch—the sunniest spots in our cramped four rooms near campus. But a few days later, when I was loofahing my naked body in the shower a shiver of revulsion ran through me upon noticing the Minion-like green domes ogling me from the shower caddy with the goggle-eyed nodules that beaded their bodies.
“I thought your plants didn’t need a lot of moisture,” I said, dripping wet in the doorway.
“Hmm? Oh, you mean the guys in the shower? Not them, they’re super thirsty,” she said, glancing up from her laptop screen.
The next day I dug a prickly globe topped with a scarlet floral bow out from beneath the dust bunny wasteland beneath our bed. “I thought these things need sunlight.”
“Well, that one lives off dust,” the succulent person said through a mouthful of wintergreen toothpaste.
I returned it to its sunless dust bowl.
Another one, my favorite of hers—sorry; ours—a bouquet of fanciful fluted tubes, was placed in the closet beside a pile of Emma’s colorful t-shirts, which I noticed after a time had started to fade from bright neon to pastel.
“Oh, don’t move those, babe,” she said when she came upon me shifting the t-shirts away from the coral-like plant. I noted that all the unexposed areas of the shirt were still just as bright as before. “That little fella lives off color.”
“Say what?”
Her glasses flashed. “Did I stutter?” Then she laughed.
I was living in a desert landscape of waxy leaves and luscious blooms and dusty tendrils, but it was by no means unpleasant—anyway, being surrounded by flora is supposed to be therapeutic. However, in this arid environment, my skin began to itch and flake.
“Hmm, I wonder if I’m allergic to our plants,” I said, noting the squamous, angry appearance of my wrist.
“Lemme see,” she said, setting her chopsticks down into a takeout Thai container from which every sliver of bamboo had been culled. “Ahh, yes. This happened to me at the beginning.”
I coughed, from spice. “The beginning?”
“The little guys are so thirsty, they just suck every drop out of the air. Strip,” she instructed, “and lie down.”
As I obeyed she strode into the bathroom and returned with a large bottle of viscous liquid.
“What are you doing?”
“Aloe vera,” she said, straddling me, and with an obscene noise squirted a blast of cold gel onto my bare chest. “Extract from another succulent, natch. Fire with fire. Now be a good boy and lie still.” Then she leaned in and whispered into my ear, the back of my neck erupting in gooseflesh, “and after, I’ll let you rub it on me.”
That night, my throat parched,I stumbled out of the bedroom and into the darkened kitchen for a glass of water, when I stepped in something mealy and cold. I leapt back and fumbled for the light switch.
The ground was littered with coils and coils of orange tubes of Play-Doh, reminiscent of either fiddleheads or ammonites, I couldn’t decide which. I wet a paper towel and wiped the substance free of the arch of my foot and between my toes, then got down on my hands and knees, approaching the tight coils, sniffing. They had a fresh, sweet, medicinal smell, much like the aloe Emma and I had rubbed all over each other hours earlier. Now that I was studying them, I saw that the orange coils protruded from the nodules of the thick-leaved succulents Emma had spaced around the kitchen floor and counter. One of these tubes formed a line of communication between a nodule on one plant and the powdery lilac blossom of another. I can’t say why, but I found the substance revolting, so much so that I retreated back into the hallway, vigilant not to squash any more coils, and returned to bed without retrieving a drink. There, I lay awake for hours listening to the silent apartment, convinced I could actually hear the orifices of these plants evacuating the long tubes of this … stuff.
“Take it from an ethnobotanist: It’s super normal,” Emma informed me in the morning when we ate our avocado toast in a transformed apartment. It looked as if someone had thrown a party in here last night, going hog wild with weird intestinal-like streamers, the coils and tubes festooning every surface. Prolific. Or, as it turned out, promiscuous. “They’re known as antherpods, just a means for the little ones to communicate and navigate their environment, and also an alternative method of reproduction.”
“Woah, woah, woah. Two things. First, did you say navigation?”
She nodded, smirking, and took a big bite of chewy toast, a dab of bright-green paste smeared along the side of her mouth. She hid her chewing with a hand. “Haven’t you noticed they move?”
“Well, it’s hard to keep track of them all.” It had only been three weeks or so, but there must have been a hundred of these potted plants by now; when had she brought them all in? “But I figured you just hadn’t settled on their arrangement.”
“No, no. The succulents decide.” She nodded sagely.
“Okay. And two: these anther-things are—
“Antherpods.”
“Okay, right—antherpods; they’re part of the reproductive process?”
“Don’t make that face!” she said, punching me jocularly on the shoulder. “Pollen is part of the reproductive process; so are gorgeous blossoms; so is yummy fruit”—another bite of toast here—“and yet those don’t gross you out.”
“I never imagined quite how much I’d learn about plants when we started dating.”
“Just wait, babe. Ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“In the meantime should we clean up all these coils?”
“Wait till this evening. They’re still in the active cycle. After a few more hours, the eversible proboscises will have become detached and turn powdery, then we can just sweep them up. Ooh, gotta hop to it: teaching an 8 am class today—mwah.” She gave me a gooey kiss. “Be back for lunch.”
Though I wasn’t teaching that day, I went into the lab to do some edits on a paper, work I easily could have accomplished at home. For some reason, however, despite my healthy attitude towards pollen and fruit, I felt uncomfortable in our cramped apartment surrounded by the succulents’ antherpods; the things struck me as creepily lecherous.
Emma and I arrived home only a few minutes apart, and we found that the vibrant color of the coiling tendrils had faded, all of them now completely dried out, leaving behind brittle veils of whitish-gray that turned to dust at the faintest breath.
I swept up and dusted while Emma made us egg and pepper tacos, a meal that later struck me as a celebration of fertility. After lunch we had another hour before Emma had to return to campus for a seminar, time we spent in bed doing the human version of antherpod exploration. I noticed for the first time a couple of quarter-sized scars right near the base of her scalp, one on each side. They looked surgical, and I thought it best not to pry. She would mention them in time when she felt comfortable. Still, I had kissed her neck so many times during foreplay over the past months, it was strange I hadn’t noticed them till now.
I worked more on my paper when Emma went out. This time I stayed at home. Now that the antherpods had been cleaned up, I felt a bit silly about how weirded out I had been over them earlier. A few hours writing and reading articles, another hour jogging, the day was well spent. Emma texted around five that she was grabbing drinks with some colleagues. I didn’t want to come hang, did I?
Thanks, I get my fill of ethnobotany at home, I texted back.
Made a pot of puttanesca for us and when she came home humming and smelling of gin an hour later we fattened ourselves up and Netflixed till bedtime in the growing sageland that was our home. Throughout the evening Emma was constantly on her phone, texting with “no one important.”
Before we had sex that night, she put on a pair of green stockings I’d never seen her wear before. And even with the lights out, I noticed those scars on her neck. Also on the sides of her breasts, and secreted away on her inner thighs. I can’t explain how, but the small circular scars drove me crazy. I couldn’t stop ... attending to them, and Emma, her body slick with sweat, had never been more vocal, never seemed so feral.
After she had fallen asleep, and I was lying there, my inner eye replaying exquisite scenes from the evening, my phone lit up in the darkness. I reached for it, focused on the screen, then furrowed my brow at the unusual background.
Duh, it was Emma’s phone. The text from someone named Steve, telling her that he would leave his spare key in the mailbox.
And also that he was super-excited.
That was all, and despite all the missing pieces in the conversation (no, I did not open her phone and read the entire text thread) I knew that Emma was moving on, moving in with another guy.
I collapsed back on the bed, my mind reeling, my eyes pulsing in time with my crushed heart. Steve? Who? It was too sudden. How could she? What had I done? I thought we were so good together, laughing, loving. We had a life together, a horde of hundreds of little green children. I had to wake her up, hear it from her own mouth, convince her she was making a mistake.
But I didn’t get the chance.
I felt a sharp pinch at the base of my neck, then my chest and groin. I couldn’t see anything in the dark, but I reached towards my nipples and felt the tubes, the antherpods burrowing into my flesh, exuding a cooling aloe-like substance at the puncture marks. To numb the pain, apparently.
Whatever it was doing, these proboscises numbed more than the pain, for suddenly I felt no sense of regret about Emma and I, nor did I panic at the sight of all these tubes coiled over my body. If anything, I felt I wanted to reach out and squeeze Emma’s hand, to enjoy this euphoric experience with her.
***
In the morning, Emma was gone.
So were her toothbrush and tights and phone charger. So were the lion’s share of the succulents.
She did leave me a couple, and it’s a good thing too, because one thing I’ve definitely taken away from our time together is that, like Emma, I’m also a succulent person.
Such a great little story.