I had been walking past Diddlie’s place with time to spare. As so often happens in Fauxmont, she was outside and invited me over. We sip ice tea on her front porch. Diddlie makes her own blend out of homegrown spearmint, peppermint, bergamot and a Liptons teabag. The small porch, a couple of yards long, is to the left of her front door, which is open with the screen door shut. We are shaded under an extension of the roof supported by three yellow wooden posts, which rest on a knee-high brick wall. I sit next to her in one of the three green plastic chairs facing out, and watch crows chase a hawk out of the red oaks and a big maple beyond. A bare unpainted board supported on cinderblocks in front of us, serves as a table. A huge carpenter bee with sagging pointed black back flies in between the posts during a pause in our conversation. Diddlie waves it away with her trowel. Her bucket of tools and gardening gloves is next to her in the extra chair. I notice a pile of blond wood dust at the base of the yellow post in front of me. She breaks the silence between us.
“I don’t think there is much hope for that boring Fauxmont blog of yours unless you come to the point.”
The bee has drilled a perfectly round hole a few inches up the post from the brick wall, where the yellow paint is peeling off.
“The point?”
“Yes Fred, what are you looking at?”
“Was that the buzz of the bee’s wings or its drill?”
“I just asked you a question Fred. What are you talking about?”
“Your porch post is supporting a carpenter bee.”
“It is? Where?”
I point out the wood drillings and hole. She looks over.
“Oh well I’ll take care of that later … or not. What’s the harm of one bee? These things need repainting anyway.”
The bee returns and Diddlie watches as it flies around the porch and then zooms in behind my head resting against the wall.
I lean forward to let it pass.
“That’s the male.” She grabs my arm for emphasis. “They can’t sting. He’s just checking us out as we are so close to the nest.”
The bee is buzzing me for the second time, close to my ear. Diddlie’s grip on my forearm tightens and then loosens as she moves to hold my hand.
She is looking at me intently in an orange tea shirt with pocket and baggy carpenter’s jeans. Her hair is shorter than usual, and her brown eyes are steady.
“You should have reached your point about a hundred thousand words ago!” She is sympathetic like a gentle doctor telling her patient they need to change a bad habit.
“That far back?”
“That far, I mean in verbal terms it is a geological era … I mean how many people will read over a hundred thousand words before getting to it?”
“What are you talking about Diddlie?”
“Sex, Fred.” She squeezes my hand.
“Its not really about sex. Well, not explicitly at least.”
“That’s why it is so boring. Sex is the most interesting subject there is.”
“I find it more interesting to do, than talk about.”
“Fred! Talking about sex is doing it!”
“Okay, I only talk about sex with the one I am going to go on with.”
“I didn’t think you had a sex life. I mean you live in your head, I can’t believe you ever get out!”
“We don’t have that kind of friendship.”
Diddlie lets go of my hand and gets up from her plastic chair. She holds the screen door open for me. I hesitate to get up. It is cramped and difficult to get out of one’s chair and get to the door.
“Here, come with me.”
“Can’t we finish our tea first?”
The bee swoops in on Diddlie. She steps inside and closes the screen door on it and the bee bumps the screen with high volume buzzing trying to get through but zooms off.
“It’s okay honey, the bee is gone and I am not going to attack you. Just come on through here.” She reopens the screen door.
I get up slowly, slanting my knees to the right so as not to knock over our glasses or the pitcher, still half full and dripping with condensation, which stains the narrow board at my shins. We walk into the house past the living room. The Red Queen shrieks from her cage but Diddlie ignores her and continues down the hall.
I follow her past a pink bathroom to a bedroom door. She opens it and goes in. It is hotter than the rest of the house back here. Deep blue wall paper gives the room a feeling of nighttime, and the brilliantly colored paisleys drawn with tiny dots of orange, pink, yellow and pale blues resemble ancient galaxies, light years away, pictured by Hubble. She turns to look at me in the doorway from beside a mirrored closet door.
“Come on in.”
I step in and pause, looking at Mr. Liddell who has come out from under the bed.
“Is it hot in here or is it my fevered imagination?”
“Yes, I keep it nice and warm in here.”
Mr. Liddell is as still as a statue, sitting on the deep cream-colored shag carpet with his ears up and his nose twitching below his eyes like small dark buttons. It is hard to say where he is looking but seems preoccupied. Diddlie opens the mirrored door and more heat fills the room like steam. Mr. Liddell hurries under her vanity towards her and the open door. He leaves a small gold chain where he was sitting, before disappearing into the closet.
“Come on Fred.”
“Diddlie, where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
“What’s that smell Didd.?
The red queen flies in low brushing my sleeve with a wing flap. I can smell cinnamon. The bird settles on top of Diddlie’s vanity mirror and shrieks again. The vanity has a collection of green plastic lizards arranged on it, along with some small bottles. Some lizards are dark green, some have orange backs and purple eyes. One is brilliant yellow shading into green at the tail.
“Are you into lizards?”
“Yeah, painted them myself.”
“Off to bed, Off to bed, To bed to to bed to to …”
The red queen stops shrieking as suddenly as she started, and seems to be admiring herself in the mirrored closet door. She turns her head from one side to the other, and grooms her wing feathers. The parrot in the mirror door takes off flying deeper into the reflected image of the paisley wall paper until it disappears along with the red queen who isn’t any longer perched on the vanity mirror.
“Why don’t you come see honey?”
I walk over to Diddlie at the closet door and we enter a small green house.
“I have never noticed this thing from the outside.”
“No one knows it is here, and don’t tell, because it will add to my property tax, if they find out.”
“It is humid enough in here to be a sauna.”
“Strip off if you want honey.”
“You seem cool enough!”
“Yeah baby, I have always been pretty cool!”
I see orchids, and geraniums hanging in pots from the roof beams, and a dense and vigorous row of marihuana plants about five foot tall growing like a hedgerow row to the right. She stands under a hanging pink geranium with a small watercolor brush in her hand and starts pollinating a huge cluster of multicolored flowers I can’t identify. Dipping the end of the brush into one bloom after another.
“I hadn’t thought of sex in these terms.”
The greenhouse extends beyond the marihuana plants. In fact it is much bigger that I thought.
“Pollen is kind of like sperm don’t you think?”
She points out another brush sticking out of a test tube rack on her potting table.
“You want to pickup a brush?”
I pick up the brush and start pollinating a row of mauve mystery flowers with purple centers growing out of crates of moss in the shade below.
“Okay, so we are distributing flower sperm.”
“Yeah doing it together Fred!”
Diddlie sneezes. “Ooooooooo, too much pollen.”
“You need a mask.”
“I had a spasm honey.”
“You might say that.”
She sneezes again and then again… I look around for Mr. Liddel, and then …
“Diddlie! where are you?”
“Down here honey, come on around.”
Walking to the end of the row of marijuana plants I find some stone steps going down in a gradual turn through a short brick lined tunnel and see Diddlie in daylight at the bottom. A pink lizard runs down the old bricks, then a big green one darts into a crevice where the mortar has fallen off and two bricks are missing. It is cooler on the steps but still unbearably humid.
As early as it is in the year, Diddlie has golden rod in full bloom in this lower greenhouse. There are long rows stretching ahead for a hundred yards or more. She steps forward and grabs my arm, and we walk down between two rows arm in arm under the sun coming in through the glazed roof. Bird droppings and dead leaves all over the glass defuse the sunrays to some extent.
“You know my Mom always told me not ‘to do it’ until the guy had walked down the isle.”
“Oh yes I understand, no sex before marriage.”
“Yeah, that’s what transactional sex is all about.”
“Were you obedient?”
“No I am not transactional. It was the sixties Fred, remember the pill and all that? What do you think?”
“I’ll bet you were, in Jimi’s word, ‘experienced’.”
“Sure, you know, people were sort of sleeping around.”
“Some were, some weren’t.”
“I wasn’t going to marry any one before trying him out and Stuart was great.”
“Is he the one you married?”
“Oh he was the one! We broke through all kinds of barriers together and he was furry too … we spent our first three days of our first date in naked nirvana.”
“Holed up at his apartment you mean?”
“I was at Glamour College, up in Vermont with Lark. We were roommates first year and then had the apartment. That was naked nirvana. His place was polluted by his rowing buddies.”
“So he didn’t take you back to his place?”
“He did. We were fucking when the degenerates came home. So we left for my place.”
“What about Lark?”
“She is civilized, hippyized, passionate and on the highest plane. She had her own things going on.”
“So why was Stuart hanging out with degenerates?”
“Most of the young guys I met were degenerate, kind of brutish and insensitive. Stuart was different. He had the strength to be sensitive. He was a mystic as well as a math major and had graduated from U. Mass when I was in high school.”
“So how did you find him?”
“Stole him from Lark. She was his date but I left with him in his Volkswagen.”
“What about your date?”
“Oh I forget his name. He was a doper, only interested in getting high with the band.”
“Some friend you were!”
“Lark was okay with it. You know she had other interests.”
“Do you mean other men or what?”
“She had lots of men, and also politics you know, demos and concerts.”
“Well Diddlie, are you still married?
“I was Mrs. Dodgson, before he fucking died on me!”
“Sorry Didd…”
“Heart attack, at thirty six. THIRTY SIX! Can you believe it?”
“That’s a long time ago. Did you have any children?”
“No, I am so sorry now, we kept putting it off.”
“Did you ever think of remarrying?”
“Stuart was the smartest person I ever met. He was making good money too, doing secret crypto stuff for the government at Arlington Hall. There’s no one else with his magic. No! I mean our magic. Like what is growing here.”
She points to the rows of goldenrod in full bloom.
“It kind of takes me out of myself, you know, to a bigger place.”
“Is it like this all year around?”
“That’s right, all year round like vivid memories to be recalled.”
“So this is where you pick your flowers!”
“Yeah!”
“You had no need to get married again with all this.”
“No … marriage was yesterday, more than thirty years ago … no! more like forty for God’s sake! ‘I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.’
She stops and yanks on my sleeve, looking up at me.
“Oh Fred! Why did you make me so old?”
