The Evolution of Tulips  by  Lauren Yaffe

   I start walking and my mind is blank, calm.  Suddenly I'm furious.  I remember an incident:  a woman holding the door as I entered a museum.  As I passed through and thanked her, she hissed, "I wasn't holding the door for you!"  I saw, then, another woman behind me, the person for whom the door was being held.  I continued in to the exhibit--oversized canvasses of complex flowers--but for me they were all a blur.  Minutes later, the woman who had hissed tapped me.  "Your rudeness is beyond belief," she said, and walked off.  This all happened a while ago, several years. 

Now I am walking to meet my friend Lucy.  The coolness of autumn strikes my face with the sadness and exhilaration this season brings. We always meet at Lucy’s place because, she insists, my apartment is too far.  It is farther for her to come to me than for me to go to her.   From my work, it’s a forty minute walk, the same amount of time it would take Lucy to get to my place by subway.  But no matter.  I am happy walking, feeling my thighs harden, my soles knead the pavement.  I pause at a greengrocer's to admire the buckets of tulips.  Now you can get tulips year‑round.  Two weeks ago I bought some for Lucy for her birthday.  Flowers soothe me.  Especially tulips, which have evolved dramatically since the tulips of my childhood.  Tulips used to be orderly cups of primary colors, red and yellow.  Now their leaves flop like multi‑colored rattan hats.  Such haphazard perfection.  At once, I feel happy.  I don't scorn the woman with the Bendel’s shopping bag, hailing a cab with a brusque flip of her wrist. 

Then I pass the museum.  The museum where the woman held, or didn't hold, the door for me, as it happened.  Suddenly I am furious.  I should have said to her, "I'm sorry you're in a bad mood, but you needn't infect others with it."  Clever, I think.  I have been struggling for such a phrase for years.  I wanted to say something to open her up, to change her. 

I quicken my pace.  Couldn’t Lucy come to me this once?  True, she lives near more restaurants.  Also, she doesn’t take the subway.  She could take a bus, but then it is really out of the way.  I’ve walked myself into a state.  When I step off the elevator on Lucy's floor, she is at her door waiting for me. "Birthdays are terrible, aren't they?" she says.

“Yes,” I say.  This is the right thing to say to Lucy.  My friend is wonderful when I'm unhappy, but if I'm happy, she's murderous.  “I'm depressed,” I say.  Lucy hugs me, and I breathe in her perfume.

We go to dinner, a Lebanese place Lucy suggests.  It is too expensive for me, which is the case with all the restaurants Lucy suggests, but tonight she is treating.  "You get the Saba Glaba," she says.  "I'll get the Tajine Chicken."  She does not look at the menu.  "I always get the same thing," she says.  "It's always good."  Perhaps there is a delicacy she has overlooked?  Artichoke Cous‑Cous sounds good.  "Who cares?" Lucy says.  "Why order an unknown when the Saba Glaba and Tajine Chicken are excellent."  It is hard to disagree.  I order the Saba Glaba and she the Tagine Chicken.  They are both excellent.  Lucy orders wine--also excellent. 

I tell her about the museum lady.  "I know it’s petty of me, thinking so much about an incident that occurred years ago.  I don't remember the exhibit I saw but that woman haunts me."

"I would have socked her," Lucy says.  She does not find my memory petty.  She approves of anger.  The longer ago the incident, the better, as far as she's concerned.  Anger is a century plant that after years of quiet growth sends out its bloom.

"Maybe she had a reason,”  I say, picturing the museum lady's slight arms struggling against the door's weight, her paisley scarf wisping about her face.  "Maybe she was dying." 

"Not everyone is dying!"  Lucy says. "You are such a Libra.  You keep trying to balance and see both sides.  You’re torn by the weight of things."  

"But you're a Libra too," I protest. 

"I'm the other kind," she explains.  "I throw all my weights on one side and hope I don't run aground."  We laugh.  We are both as she describes. 

Then she tells a story.  This is the reason I am friends with Lucy.  If not for her stories, she'd be impossible.  I eat my half of the food, which is delicious, and listen. 

"When Richard and I were married," Lucy says, "I'd get furious over the stupidest things.  If he wanted Chinese and I wanted Greek, I'd scream, 'We are eating Greek and that's that!'  You know how I get."  She laughs.  "After Richard left, I decided I'd better learn to be more reasonable or I'll be alone the rest of my life."

"But I'm reasonable," I say.  Lucy does not hear. 

"I convinced Richard to go out with me one night.  As friends, I assured him, but of course, I was hoping to seduce him.  During dinner, he mentioned he was playing golf the next day.  Golf!  The stupidest game in the world!  But I didn't say so.  How nice, I said.  And do you know, he wanted to come home with me!  He knew I hated golf and was touched that I had approved of it in his case.  

"But do you think I wanted him then, knowing he was going to play golf the next day?"  Lucy gulps down wine, wipes her hand across her mouth.  "So what's the point of being reasonable?  None!" 

I finish my wine, cheered, at least, that I'm not Lucy. 

Outside the restaurant, I kiss the cheek she tilts to me, breathe in her perfume.  On the walk to the subway, I pull my jacket close around me, stirred by the haunted excitement of autumn.  Then they start to work on me, the walking and the wine.  Maybe the museum lady is like Lucy:  unreasonable.  I could have said anything, and no difference.  She infected me with her bad mood because that’s the way she is.  I said nothing then fumed because that's the way I am.  I go to Lucy’s apartment, I go to restaurants I can't afford, she tells stories, I listen. 

On the train, I try to shake my thoughts off.  That thought again?  Out!  Shoo!  I tell myself.  We rush through the tunnel.  Lights flicker.  A couple talks in the seat behind me, but their words are a blur.  Maybe I was rude, I think.  Was the museum door heavy, the woman too slight to hold it?  People never say what they mean.  Maybe, instead of discussing my rudeness, the museum lady meant to say, "I'm dying!" 

At home my cat Minna rubs against my legs and circles around me till I feed her.  I stroke her coat as she eats.  The sadness of autumn flows through me.  It is also the sadness of my birthday, but since my birthday is always in autumn, it’s hard to separate.  I decide to make brownies.  I follow the directions on the box.  Pre‑heat oven.  Beat for fifty strokes.  DO NOT OVERBAKE.  The recipe is emphatic on this point:  DO NOT OVERBAKE.  This dwelling on the museum lady is ridiculous.  Maybe it's the walking.  I was walking that day too, I recall, visiting the museum.  Maybe I was looking for something soothing, filling.  I remove the brownies at the allotted time--I do not overbake—but when I try one, my teeth sinking into gooiness, I think, Why did I listen?  I prefer overbaking, prefer a sharp crust.  I finish the brownie anyway, to fill myself before sleep.   

I lie in bed with Minna curled at my feet and think of how things should have gone.  The woman is ahead of me, brushing her paisley scarf away from her face as she struggles to open the door with its heavy metal and glass.  She is holding it open for me.  Waiting for someone to whom she can say,  "Your rudeness is beyond belief." 

No.  It should have gone like this:  She holds the door.  I walk through it.  She says the part about my rudeness.  "Did you have a bad day?" I reply.  She takes my arm, smoothes down my wind-blown hair.  "I'm dying," she says, her voice shaking. 

I have been joking but what if it were actually true, that the museum lady was dying?  Here she was, holding a door for a friend, only to have a stranger cut in and pay her no mind.  All along, I have been imagining her like Lucy, unreasonable.  But her voice, I recall, shook as she spoke to me, as if she were unaccustomed to such outbursts.  Usually she listened, never telling her own stories.  But she was dying.  She needed to tell someone, a friend, about the evolution of tulips. 

When she was a child, tulips were easy to draw.  She would start with a clipped fringe of grass across the bottom of the page, then a neat row of upright stems, in unabashedly kelly green, then the flowers themselves, orderly cups of red and yellow, flower after flower smartly satisfying, as long as no green stem bled into yellow petal.  But what could she say of tulips now, their petals muddied and frayed, at once raucous and demure?  Listing to one side, they brazenly flounced open their skirts, exposing a dark ripeness within. Though she could not have said why, she would walk far, out of her way even, for such beauty.