Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,26

it’s like you have to be lazy, or gross, or expelled. Like why does Nell still get to be your sidekick? She fucked it up.”

“Nell’s very good,” you said, so blankly and harshly I thought I’d misheard you. “Nell completed enough work after three years to qualify for her doctorate right then, which makes the situation all the more laughable. She’s been at PhD level for years but now she’ll never be one.” You actually went so far as to point your finger at Mishti’s face. “You’re more able but she works harder.”

I ate a cheese. I ate two more cheeses. I couldn’t speak or join you in the wild gift you were giving, because when you walked away with Tom I’d dug myself into a grave of self-reliance, and I hadn’t brought a ladder, and I stood stuck down there, confused. The truth is that I worked kind of pathologically hard when I started this program and nobody has ever known that—not my parents in the Midwest, not my very few friends—I didn’t even realize you’d known it. I didn’t need a pat on the head and didn’t get one, but the work did make me elementally tired later in a way nobody could justify and therefore came across as crabbiness. Your patience with me these past two years now felt radically informed, just, and loving.

Mishti retreated to the mulled wine. What I found most surprising about this altogether surprising exchange was the insinuation that she didn’t work hard enough. I’d known Mishti to be a marching band, exact and coordinated and unstoppable. You were separating competence from some looser sort of vision. It was a shame that vision, when it occurred, was inevitably so loose, so often useless, so much less visible than something complete and unoriginal. I think you were wrong about both of us: Mishti can be wildly inventive even within the rigidities of her excellence and I am finger-painting. But this was a kindness you paid me, the first and I expect the last, and I’ll never give it away, or back to you.

The night soon ended. We found our coats in the pile. Nobody could bear to be in the same room anymore. We’d eaten too much cheese and needed to use our own bathrooms. It was only seven o’clock. Beautiful heavy snow had begun to fall and we wished it hadn’t. We put on our boots, all our respective boots, and went out into it.

DECEMBER

“We lived long together

a life filled,

if you will,

with flowers. So that

I was cheered

when I came first to know

that there were flowers also

in hell.”

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

SWEET POTATOES

I first turned to botany like anybody does because I found flowers terrifyingly attractive and had been raised by reasonable people who didn’t put beauty at the center of their lives. I thought I could put it there.

Now the study of beauty and how it grows has become my work, and I think that’s the best way of keeping it. But it also leaves the door open for something else to fill in the beauty-as-beauty center. The useless beauty. The not work. And I think what is really useless is the way I love you. I want to put that in the center.

One example of non-uselessness is how I filled up that first notebook. I didn’t expect to get to the end of it, maybe because I believed you when you said I’d never do anything ever again. But today I had to put on public-facing butt-hushing outdoor pants and go out and buy a second book from the bodega man, you’ll see I’ve even maxed out the margins of the first one. I’ve always admired my particular bodega man for carrying black-and-white Compositions behind the register, and one box of blue ballpoint pens, as if they were treats people might like to buy on a Thursday with loose cash. I also bought a strawberry Yoo-hoo. Having drunk the sixteen fluid ounces of milk beverage in one gulp I commence now a new notebook, a night season. I’ll call this notebook December. We haven’t had a storm since Thanksgiving, but between storms the darkness lies like a little snow over the streets.

Day and night the city’s electronic flakes never fall. These four-foot glow-in-the-dark geometries dangle overhead, threatening to impale the holiday. There are so many attractive, ambitious, well-dressed people in this city with well-shaped arms and goals and for the next four months they’ll be invisible under their parkas. We’ll all be walking