She senses that there is something hilarious about catcalling; she just doesn’t know what it is.
Gathering herself, she follows the dirt path to the meadow—a stretch of overgrown emerald, flanked by two hills. Near the mouth of the forest dips a large bright lawn, where people often picnic. If you go deeper, you find creeks, burrows, forgotten horse trails. As distraught as she is about the forthcoming demolition, Blandine considers it a miracle that the Valley has lasted this long, despite all the incentives to shave it into farmland, rig it into industry, compress it into landfill. For a hundred years, it has survived as itself.
Blandine takes a winding path into one of the lesser-known clearings and sits on lush grass. It’s an oval stretch of lawn, enclosed by trees, punctuated by four wooden benches on the periphery and a nonfunctional fountain in the center. Throughout her life, she has never seen water in its concrete pool. This is Blandine’s favorite place to read because it is always vacant, and the birdsong is loud, and she feels safe. The wind carries the fragrance of the adjacent lilac grove, delivering it right into her lungs. This evening, as she looks around, she is startled.
Another person sits on the bench across the grass, his head tilted back, pricey sunglasses doming his eyes. The man appears to be in his fifties, slightly overweight, with constellations of sores on his skin, almost like mosquito bites. But she can’t see much of his skin because, despite the heat, he’s wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black socks in black sandals. A tuft of dark blond hair sprouts far back on his forehead but fluffs down his skull, thick and healthy. A small mouth with thin lips curved into a frown. Something childish about the man. His sleeves are rolled up, his arms crossed over his belly, and despite the sunglasses, Blandine can see his expression. He looks like someone who has never slept through the night.
She wants to leave but forces herself to stay. Why should a sleeping man frighten her? She retrieves the book from her bag and attempts to read, but she is too aware of the man’s body, which seems to glow in her peripheral vision. Her abdominal muscles tense, and her nerves become alert, her senses prepared to receive all data and to react at once. He’s just some guy. She recalls her interaction with the driver. With Jeff and his friend on the path. She can fend for herself.
She-Mystics glares up at her like an accusation, but when she tries to read, the words meander off the page, out of her vision. She takes a break to watch bees stuff their heads into white clovers, which bloom in the grass like snow. She loves these clovers because they are plain and everywhere. The diet of cottontail rabbits. In the spring, she spent an evening studying them on a sticky computer at the Vacca Vale Public Library. What struck Blandine most as she clicked from site to site, scanning blogs and comments, was the goodwill of the online botanic community. When Mary Peterson asked, “Can velvet beans and white clovers coexist?” Ken Meltzer responded two hours later, saying, “Hi Mary—thx for your question! It is a GREAT question! The good news is white clovers & vegetable legumes like velvet beans CAN coexist, but the bad news is you have to wait ?2 yrs after planting the clovers to plant any vegetable legumes, bc the white clover = host for root rot diseases like Rhizoctonia and Pythium: (Good luck and keep up updated!!!!”
Blandine took a screenshot of the conversation and emailed it to herself.
She knows little of her own heritage but decided years ago with haphazard conviction that she is Russian. It’s the country people always guess first, so she ran with it. These clovers likely blossom in her homeland. Maybe a pair of great-great-great-great-great grandparents made love in a field of them. At the library, she imagined this until it grossed her out. She researched the clovers until a man spilled his energy drink on her lap, forcing her to pack up and return to the Rabbit Hutch.
In the woods, around Blandine, chipmunks scuffle. Small lime spiders creep up her arms and legs, through shoots of hair. Overhead, a plane drones a cello D through the clouds. Blandine wants to scoop a cupful of sky and gulp. The park is so verdant, it looks like a screensaver. She applies a cheap rose lip balm and inhales the scent of baking dirt. Lies on her belly and examines each petal as a bee drinks, its stinger drooping like a burden. The petals remind Blandine of her social worker Lori’s hair, shooting in stiff frosted jets from the head. Lori always sipped dark soda from a Chug Big cup. She wore sunglasses that evoked particularly American things, like goatees and drive-through banks and NASCAR. She was a good social worker, far better than the others, and the last one she had before she aged out of the system. Lori called Blandine Blandine, and not Tiffany, and that was nice. Now, Blandine picks a handful of white clovers—the ones the bees aren’t using—and stows them in her dress pocket.
Suddenly, the man across from Blandine snorts awake.
Annoyed by her own fear, she examines him as he gets his bearings; she loves watching people transition to consciousness. Bewildered, the man removes his sunglasses. His eyes are small, pink, and frightened. His forehead sparkles with sweat. When he looks at Blandine, he appears even more frightened. She finds his fear comforting.
“Hello,” she says.
When he speaks, his voice is gentle. “Hullo.”
A pause. Blandine points to a clover in front of her. The man cautiously watches her from the bench, as though she is a bear.
“Did you know these are officially known as Trifolium repens?” Blandine asks. Her voice is clear and confident. “But they’re also called Dutch clovers and Ladino clovers, depending on their size. Bigness is always demanding to be distinguished from smallness, you know?”
It’s like there’s a live-news lag between her words and his reception. Eventually, he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah. Some people refer to the white clover as the most adaptable urban plant in the world, actually, because it can regulate the production of this one toxin—cyanide, I think—to adapt to radically different climates. It’s native to Central Asia and Europe, but it can thrive in the heat of southern India and also in the cold of Norway.” She pauses. “In cold climates, it doesn’t produce cyanide.”
“Is that so?” asks the man. She can’t tell if he’s just being polite, but every second of the interaction is increasing her power and reducing his threat, so she continues.
“Yeah. Also—you see this stem? How it sort of creeps horizontally, then loops one stem into a new root, which sprouts a new plant with adventitious roots? These kinds of stems are called stolons. Self-sufficient but interconnected.”
“I can’t really see it,” the man replies. “But that’s neat.”
“The white clover is really nutritious for lots of different animals, too—bovine, insects, deer, rodents. When it’s not producing cyanide, that is. It’s high in protein. Humans can eat white clovers, too, when they’re boiled or smoked. I think you can dry them, make them into a tea. There’s this one insect—I can’t remember the name of it—that exclusively eats white clovers. Can you imagine? Being so essential to an ecosystem that a species would go extinct without you?”
The man’s face becomes overcast. “No,” he murmurs. “I really can’t imagine that.”
Blandine panics a little; she has run out of facts to share and can’t remember how to fuel a conversation without them. But she is spared because when she’s done speaking, the man stands laboriously, wiping his hands on his pants. He examines her for a moment, his face contorted in mysterious anguish. A path beside his bench will lead him out of this meadow, back to the central path, out of the Valley, into traffic.
“You’re beautiful,” he says sadly.
Blandine stays very still and upright, tracking the man’s figure as he vanishes from the clearing. When he’s out of sight, she offers her pinkie to a bee, goading it to sting her. It does not.
When she finally regains her focus, Blandine opens She-Mystics: An Anthology to page 247, where a browning dandelion marks her spot. She considers Hildegard her only true friend. When staging one of her musical artworks, Hildegard made her male assistant play the Devil, and her nuns play the Virtues. The Virtues got to sing; the Devil only yelled. In the play, without much provocation, the Soul cries, God created the world: I am not doing him any harm, I simply want to enjoy it! Later, the Devil says, Why, none of you even know who you are!