Rosebuds and Reckoning

The year I turned forty-four I decided to be sensible, and I want to tell you how that went. It went fine! That was the problem. Nothing blew up, nothing changed, I paid my rent on the first of the month like a robot.

I'm a therapist, which means I sit in a chair all day and other people's chaos lands in my lap while I stay calm and reflect things back. "It sounds like you felt unseen," I say. Forty hours a week of that. Meanwhile my own life was so tidy you could have eaten off it.

No risks. No mistakes. I dated a dentist for four months and ended it because he was nice, which felt insane even as I was doing it. I stopped dyeing my hair. I bought a rice cooker with good reviews. Sensible, sensible, sensible, until the word started to taste like cardboard.

So when my practice closed for two weeks in November, I did the least sensible thing I could think of. I booked a flight to China. A village called Xidi, in Anhui, in the hills. I told exactly one friend, and she said, "You're going alone? To do what?" and I said, "I don't know! Walk around! Be cold!" and she made the face she makes when a client is in denial.

Xidi was beautiful and quiet and my guesthouse had terrible heating, and I loved it. Gray brick houses, white walls going soft with damp, little canals running down the lanes. Old men playing cards. I walked everywhere and my shoes got muddy and nobody knew what I did for a living, which was the real vacation.

Then on my fifth morning, the sky did something rude.

I was out past the edge of the village, near the terraced fields, when the wind came. Not wind like home. This was a microburst, though I didn't know the word yet. One second it was still and gray, and the next second the air just fell, straight down and then outward, like the sky had dropped a plate. Roars, dust, a sound of a freight train with manners.

And the chayote field? Flattened. I watched an entire crop go down. All those vines on their trellises, this whole green lattice a farmer had spent months training, and the wind pushed it over as a kid would sweep a block tower. Vines snapped, trellises folded, leaves went cartwheeling past me. I stood there with my mouth open thinking, well, that's a bad day at work.

And here's the strange part. Some broken thing in me thought: good. I know that sounds awful. But watching that field get flattened, after a year of nothing ever falling over in my life, felt like permission. Like the sky itself had said, see? Things can just come down. Nobody dies of it. The farmer will replant.

Then the rain came sideways, mixed with snow, and I stopped having philosophical feelings and started looking for shelter. There was a big juniper bush at the field's edge, one of those old sprawling ones, branches thick and heavy with wet snow, drooping down to the ground. Under the skirt of it there would be a dry hollow. People in these villages shelter under hedges all the time, I figured. I grabbed a low branch, lifted the snow-skirt like a curtain, and crawled in.

There was a man already there.

We both screamed. To be honest, we both absolutely screamed, me in his face, him backwards into the trunk, and something tin went flying and spilled dried red buds all over the pine needles.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," I said, in English, which was useless, and then he said, "No, no, sorry, sorry," in English, which was not useless, and we both started laughing because what else do you do when you've terrified a stranger in a bush.

He was maybe forty-six, forty-seven, lean, with sawdust on one sleeve and hands that looked like they'd done twenty thousand pull-ups against vines. He gathered up his spilled buds while I dripped snowmelt onto the needles.

"What is this?" I asked, pointing at the little dented tin, because apparently I lead with the important questions.

"Rosebuds," he said. "Dried. For rice."

"For rice?"

"My mother's recipe. Persian rice. You cook the rice with rosebuds and it smells like..." he waved a hand, searching. "Like a garden decided to be dinner." Then he laughed at himself. "Sorry. My English gets stupid when I'm startled. I'm Benji."

"Marin."

"Like the ocean?"

"Like the ocean, yeah. My mother was feeling poetic in a hospital in 1980."

He offered me the dry half of the hollow, the side nearer the trunk, and I scooted over and we sat shoulder to shoulder in a bush as two kids might hide from a babysitter. Except neither of us was a kid. I'm forty-four and he's forty-six, we established that fast, the way adults do, trading ages like passwords. Snow came down outside our green cave and the wind kept rattling the branches, but inside it was oddly still. It smelled like juniper and crushed pine needles.

"So you hid from the weather in a bush," I said. "You live here?"

"Grew up here. Left at twenty-one for art school in Shanghai. Came back at thirty-five to work the family terraces." He shrugged like that was a normal biography, and honestly, after forty-four years of sensible, it sounded like a great one. "The flattened field is my neighbor's. Chayote."

"That's the vegetable that looks like a wrinkled pear?"

"You know chayote," He said it like I'd passed a test. "I train the vines on the next terrace over. Chayote is a bossy plant. It wants to go everywhere. My whole job is convincing it to go where I want, gently, every day, forever."

"That sounds like my job," I said, and he looked at me sideways.

"You train vines?"

"I listen to people. Same thing, sort of. Everyone grows in a direction and my job is to notice the direction and maybe, gently, suggest a trellis."

He laughed, a real laugh, head back. "You're a therapist? You crawled into a bush?"

"I'm on vacation from being sensible."

"Ah," he said, and something in his face shifted, like that word meant something to him too. He tipped the tin toward me. Rosebuds, small and dark red and papery. "They look dead," he said. "But you put them in hot rice and they open back up. Well. Sort of. They give up everything they were keeping."

I looked at those little dried flowers and felt stupidly close to crying, which I blamed on jet lag.

"Your mother's recipe," I said. "She's Persian?"

"Was. She died two winters ago. My father is buried here, so she came here, so now I cook her rice every week in Anhui, which makes no sense, and she would have loved that it makes no sense." He sealed the tin, careful with the dented lid. "The microburst got the neighbor's field, not mine. Mine is on the lee side. So I'm hiding in a bush feeling guilty about being fine."

"That's a very therapist-shaped sentence, Benji."

"See? You can't help yourself. You already trellised me." He grinned, and I grinned, and the rain ticked on the snow above us like quiet applause.

"So," he said, after a while. "Marin from the ocean. Are you going to stay in this bush until the sky finishes its tantrum, or do you want to come see what a flattened chayote field looks like up close? I should go help him before dark."

"Both," I said. "Bush a little longer, then field."

"Good answer." He held the tin in his lap like it was warm. "It's my favorite place, this bush. I come here when the village asks me too many questions. Now it has two people in it and the village doesn't know."

"Hide and seek," I said. "I haven't played since I was..."

"Forty-four?" he offered.

"Ha. Yes. Exactly that age."

So there we were, two grown adults crammed in a juniper bush, and I want to tell you the exact moment things got weird. Good weird. Bush weird.

He put the tin of rosebuds in his coat pocket and looked at me sideways. "Can I ask you a strange question, Marin from the ocean?"

"You already asked me several strange questions. One more won't kill me."

"Would you watch? Just once. Just me, just through my pants, just my hand. Nothing else. I've been in this bush alone for eleven years and I have never once had a witness."

I should tell you I'm forty-four and I've spent about fifteen years asking other people to name what they want out loud. And when a man finally did it to me, straight out, no game, no maneuvering, my first instinct was to give him a reflective listening response. I actually felt the sentence forming. "It sounds like you're saying." Thank God I swallowed it.

"You want me to watch," I said instead. "Like an audience of one."

"Exactly. If you say no, we keep talking about rice. There's no trick in it."

I learned something about myself in that bush, which I have not told a single client: being asked plainly is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me. Not the act. The asking. My pulse was hammering in my throat like I'd run up the terraces.

"Yes," I said. "Okay. Once."

"Once," he agreed, and settled back against the trunk.

And then, I swear, nothing happened for a full minute. Snow dripped off a branch above us, one fat drop landing on the tin in his pocket. We both looked at the drip. We were the two most polite people ever to do anything like this.

"Are you nervous?" I asked.

"Terrified. You're a professional listener. What if I do it wrong?"

"There's no wrong way. There's only your way, and."

"Please don't trellis me right now," he begged, and I laughed so hard I had to put a hand over my own mouth.

Then he did start. Slowly. He just laid his palm over the front of his trousers, over the fly, and pressed, and I watched him press, and I understood immediately why he'd wanted a witness. It wasn't shy. It wasn't a performance either. It was somewhere in between, a man showing you a thing he does, the way he'd show you his terraces.

He moved his hand in long slow passes, heel of the palm first, then fingers. He wasn't grabbing. He was stroking himself through the fabric like the fabric was part of the point. I could see him filling, the front of his pants going from flat to rounded, and every slow pass of his hand made it worse, or better, and I could not look away.

"Is this all right?" he murmured. "Tell me if it's strange."

"It's strange," I whispered. "Keep going."

"You're actually watching."

"I'm actually watching. My pulse is hammering, if you want the clinical reading."

"Ha. I don't want the clinical reading. I want you to keep looking exactly like that."

Like what? I don't know what my face was doing. Something not sensible, I hope. Above us a branch shrugged and let go a little slide of snow, and it sifted down through the needles and landed on his shoulder, and he didn't even flinch, just kept that slow long rhythm going, hand flat, pressing up, sliding down.

I had a whole internal committee going. The sensible faction was filing objections. You're in a bush. You met this man an hour ago. This is not on the itinerary. The other faction, the one that booked a flight to Anhui in November because my practice closed for two weeks and I couldn't stand my own couch one more day, that faction had the votes and everyone knew it.

"Benji." My voice came out low. "You're going slowly on purpose."

"Of course. If I go fast it's just a man in a bush. If I go slow it's a thing we're both inside of." He glanced over at me, quick, then back at his own hand. "Is that too art school of an answer?"

"It's exactly art school of an answer and I liked it."