Wetlands

If you leave it on the radiator it only takes a few days. Once the moisture has dried, I run the soft, dark-brown pit across my lips. When they’re dry they feel so soft. I like to do it for minutes on end, with my eyes closed. It’s like when I would run my dry lips across the greasy leather cover of the pommel horse in the school gym—until someone would interrupt me. “Helen, what are you doing? Stop that.”

Or until the other kids would laugh at me. Then you spare yourself the embarrassment by doing it only during the few moments you can sneak into the gym alone. It’s about as soft as my ladyfingers when they’re freshly shaved.

You’ve got to peel the brown shell off the pit. To do that I stick my thumbnail into the shell and keep cracking it. Just be careful not to let any pieces of the shell jab under your nail.

That hurts and it’s hard to get the pieces out even with a needle and tweezers. And trying to finish ripping open the shell with splinters under your nail hurts worse than the initial pain of them getting jammed in there in the first place. It’ll leave ugly bloody marks under your nail, too. The blood doesn’t stay red, either. It turns brown. It takes a long time for it to grow out. In the meantime your nail looks like a sheet of floating ice with a piece of driftwood frozen into it. Once the shell’s completely removed you can see the pleasant color of the pit—either light yellow or sometimes pale pink.

Then I hit it with a hammer. But not so hard that it crushes. After that I put it in the freezer for a few hours to simulate winter. Once you’ve had enough of winter, you pull it out and insert three toothpicks into the pit. Then you suspend it in water in a glass, using the toothpicks to hold it at the right height.

An avocado pit looks like an egg. It’s got a thick, round end and a more pointed end. The narrower end has to stay above the water. About a third in the air and two-thirds submerged. It’ll stay this way for a couple of months.

A slimy film grows on the part of the pit in the water. I find it very inviting. Sometimes I take the pit out of the water and put it inside me. I call it my organic dildo. Obviously I only use organic avocados for my starter pits. Otherwise I’d end up with toxic trees.

You definitely want to take the toothpicks out before you put it inside you. Thanks to my well-trained pelvic muscles I can shoot it back out afterward. Then it’s back into the water with the toothpicks stuck back in. And then you wait.

After a couple of months you’ll see a crack in the round end. It’ll get wider, a deep crevice in the pit. It looks as if it’s about to split in half; then a thick, white, taproot will start to grow out of the bottom. It curls into the bottom of the glass—there’s no other direction for it to grow. Once that gets pretty long, if you look closely at the crack on the top side of the pit, you’ll see a tiny green sprout starting to grow. Now’s the time to transfer it to a pot full of potting soil. Soon a stem grows with big, green leaves.

I’ll never get closer to giving birth than this. I looked after that first pit for months. Had it inside me, pushed it out. And I take perfect care of all the avocado trees I’ve started that way.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to have a child. There’s a recurring pattern in my family. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and me. All first-born. All girls. All neurotic, deranged, and depressed. But I broke the cycle. This year I turned eighteen and I’ve been waiting for that moment. One day after my birthday—as soon as I didn’t need parental approval—I had myself sterilized. Since then the thing my mother says to me so often doesn’t sound so threatening: “How much do you want to bet that when you have your first child it’s a girl?” Because I’ll only be having avocado trees. Apparently you have to wait twenty-five years for a tree to bear fruit. Which is also about how long you have to wait to become a grandmother. These days.

While I’ve been lying here thinking happily about my avocado family, the pain has subsided. You always notice when it begins; but you don’t notice when it stops. That moment doesn’t grab your attention. But I realize the pain is completely gone now. I love painkillers and try to imagine what it would have been like to have been born in another era when there were no good painkillers. My head is free of pain and now there’s room for everything else. I take a few deep breaths and, exhausted, fall asleep. When I open my eyes I see mom leaning over me.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m covering you up. You’re lying here totally exposed.”

“Leave it the way it is. The sheet’s too heavy on my wounded ass, mom. It hurts. It doesn’t matter how it looks. Do you think they haven’t seen it here a thousand times before?”

“Then stay that way. Good God.”

That reminds me.

“Can you please take down the crucifix over the door? It bugs me.”

“No, Helen, I won’t do that. Stop being so ridiculous.”

“Fine. If you won’t help me, I guess I’ll have to get up and do it myself.”

I start to move one leg off the bed, bluffing that I’m going to stand up, groaning with pain.

“Okay, Okay, I’ll do it. Please stay in bed.”

No problem.

She uses the lone chair in the room to reach the cross. As she’s climbing onto it, she speaks to me in an artificially friendly, sympathetic tone. I feel sorry for her. But it’s too late.

“How long have you had this condition?”

What is she talking about? Oh, right. The hemorrhoids.

“Always.”

“Not back when I used to bathe you.”

“So I got them sometime after I was too old for you to be bathing me.”

She climbs back down off the chair, holding the cross in her hand. She looks questioningly at me.

“Put it here in the drawer.” I point to the metal nightstand.

“You know, mom, hemorrhoids are hereditary. It’s just a question of who I got them from.”

She closes the drawer firmly.

“From your father. How was the operation?”

We learned in health class that divorced parents often try to manipulate their kids into taking their respective sides. One parent will bad-mouth the other in front of their kids.

What those bad-mouthing parents fail to realize, though, is that they are always insulting one half of the child. If you consider a child half the mother and half the father.

Children whose mothers constantly insult their fathers will eventually take revenge against their mothers. It all comes back like a boomerang.

So for years the mother has tried to get the child on her side only to have the opposite happen. She’s just pushed the child closer to the father.

Our teacher was right.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there—they used general anesthesia. They say it all went well. It hurts. Did you bring my avocado pits?”

“Yes, they’re over there.”

She points to the windowsill. Right next to the diaper container is a box with my beloved pits. Perfect. I can even reach them myself.

“Did you bring the camera?”

She pulls it out of her handbag and puts it on the nightstand.

“What do you need it for here in the hospital?”

“I don’t think you should record only the happy moments in life—like birthdays—but also the sad ones, like operations, illness, and death.”

“I’m sure it will be a joy for your children and grandchildren to look at an album of those pictures.”

I grin. If you only knew, mom.

I hope she’ll leave soon. So I can take care of my ass. The only situation in which I would want to spend more time with her would be if there was a legitimate hope of getting her together with dad. He’s not coming today. But tomorrow for sure. A hospital with your daughter in it is the perfect place for a family reconciliation. Tomorrow. Today: ass photos.

She says her good-bye and tells me she’s left pajamas in the wardrobe. Thanks. How am I supposed to get at them? It doesn’t matter—I’d rather lie here bare-bottomed anyway, with all those bandages. Air is good for the wound.