Vibrant Blooms

The thing is, Edie’s sister is dying. Madison hears Edie explaining the situation to a few of her coworkers. A willful, overeager dog on a routine walk, a head injury, an extended stay in the hospital on Staten Island. But taking the ferry for a quick visit in the morning before work, then again in the evening—it’s not an obligation, she explains. Her sister would do the same for her if the situation were reversed.

And so it is Madison who approaches Edie. “I wanted to tell you,” she begins, trying to deliver the line as evenly as possible; she didn’t want it to be a performance. “I’m sorry about what you’re going through with your sister.”

The line is like a green light. “My sister is not well, unfortunately,” Edie nods. “I won’t forget your kindness.”

She gives Madison undue details, specifics that inspire more questions which she does not ask. How long has she been away from her desk? Edie summarizes the brain injury—it is severe—with such fluency and intricacy that Madison assumes she must be getting some clinical particulars wrong, but she hasn’t spent enough time in hospitals to know which ones.

Wanting to conclude the conversation, Madison offers Edie a hug. “I’m blessed to have met you,” Edie says into her low bun. “We all need that human touch.”

*

Madison likes Edie. In fact, she admires her. They met here, at work, a non-profit where Madison took a full-time position after college in fear that if she didn’t, she would spend the better part of the year at home, sending out a paltry resume and eating for sport. She fantasizes about working for a gluttonous corporate machine, a bevy of turnstiles, a sense of urgency that pushes her forward until she reaches a deep, deserved sleep.

Edie looks to be in her early forties, but she’s probably younger. She is tan, with full cheeks and a sharp nose. Madison notices a few wiry black hairs near her nostrils, on her chin and sideburns, though she can tell that an earnest effort has been made to remove them. Edie’s discernment relies on the cerulean glasses she wears. She dresses and primps with care, choosing clothing and makeup that matches almost aggressively and would be better suited for nighttime. If Madison’s skirts were that far above her knee, the office manager would corner her before 10 a.m.

But Edie is a “back-office” employee, since her responsibilities do not include interface with donors or trustees. She is a gift processor, and each day, she takes a stack of checks to be scanned into the system. Some days the tally is a few hundred dollars, and others, the number is seven figures. Edie’s desk is secluded, leaving her out of earshot from the pulse of the office, though with a commanding view of the Queensborough Bridge, silvery buildings, and a large billboard that throughout the year features different iterations of blithe adolescents whose smartphones make it all seem possible.

For Madison, the workday is filled with free time carbonated by gossip, her to-do list so slow that if someone doesn’t interrupt the white noise of her space heater, she fears she might vanish from her desk like a few lines on an etch-a-sketch.

At lunchtime the next day, Madison sits with a few other colleagues, their tales of weekends in the city discordant with the sand-colored cafeteria that makes her feel as if she were underwater. She sees Edie brandishing her tray, hesitates to lock eyes with her, and then, feeling guilty, overcorrects by waving her over enthusiastically. Edie settles in, listening good-naturedly, compliments the risotto.

“I think lunch hour is a good time to share something about ourselves like an embarrassing story,” Edie offers. She tells her own, a classic trope about some toilet tissue straggling on a shoe. Madison feels obligated to orchestrate, to host. She tells a fragmented story set in middle school, her brother’s friends projecting a videotape of her singing passionately, her punchline weakened by her overwrought effort to be a good sport. Her other coworkers chuckle on cue, agree with one another politely that they have blocked out their most embarrassing moments. “I’m drawing a blank,” says one, scraping her chair back as she stands.

*

The first time Edie suggested that she and Madison spend time together outside the office, they were at a happy hour where Madison assumed it was an idle invitation, fodder for their life raft of a conversation as toasts flickered and died along a rowdy, outdoor table at a bar in midtown. Edie was from Park Slope, and though it had changed dramatically in the years since she had grown up there, she could still give an insider’s tour of the surrounding area, even Dumbo. The next Monday, Madison is startled when Edie appears in her cube to follow up, repeating the hushed overture. “I wanted to confirm,” she whispers, exhaling loudly.

The proposition itself confuses Madison. The fact that Edie suggested a tour made it seem like she was offering a service, laying out the benefits of an elaborate favor. As the date approaches, Madison feels a tick in her stomach each time they discuss their plans, urging her to punctuate their conversation with thanks, a long-held visceral habit to vomit gratitude. She tries to remind herself that the outing is mutual, a confab between two grown women. The pleasure, theoretically, would be both of theirs.

But why, then, couldn’t they just meet for brunch? (This idea, too, was less than ideal to Madison, but at least it would have a conventional endpoint, whereas a tour could last any duration of time. One hour? Half a day?) And did Edie not find their age difference to be a hurdle? In a way, Madison liked the idea of two women at different stages of life finding ways to bond, that perhaps their age difference itself would be the draw. Their different perspectives would be complimentary as they reminded and reassured one another of what had been surpassed already, what was yet to come. Besides, maybe this is simply how Edie makes friends. And Madison doesn’t know Brooklyn well.

*

It was around that time that Madison had been charged with leading a meditation for her colleagues. It wasn’t that she was particularly spiritual—nothing like that. But each fiscal quarter, Demi, her boss, sent an office-wide email which delegated the planning of a different team-building activity. A brown bag lunch, or a halfhearted scavenger hunt.

“You’re leading a meditation, that’s wonderful,” Edie tells Madison. “I meditate each day.”

“You do?” Even though Madison has little to do workwise, and certainly has the bandwidth to plan the event, she has not yet started. (She was recently promoted, and with fewer menial tasks to do, she actually found herself with even less responsibility.)

As for the meditation itself—she is dreading it. Presumably, her colleagues would be closing their eyes for the half hour or so that it lasted, but it was too reminiscent of leading a meeting. Wouldn’t she have to stand in front of the boardroom all the same?

“Can you help me?”

“I would be honored,” Edie says quickly. “I’ll take care of the narration, the background music, and the water sounds.”

“What should I bring?”

“Ice cream,” Edie suggests, and even though a dairy product doesn’t seem to align with an activity as pure as mediation, Madison nods, knowing that she could swing by the grocery store down the block and then stash whatever she bought in the breakroom’s communal freezer.

The meditation happens on a Friday afternoon, and that morning, Edie arrives at work with a hefty black backpack, its structural integrity compromised because there’s hardly anything in it. Again, Madison feels the need to thank her; this time, Edie is definitionally doing her a favor. But when she does, Edie accepts her thanks graciously, as if she had been hungry and finally, the appetizers arrived. Her very reaction makes Madison feel hypocritically prickly, wondering what the big deal is, anyway.

The backpack holds a diffuser, and in the boardroom, Madison places it on the long table next to a large phone meant for conference calls, a disk with three thick legs that squat above the surface of the table. As she drops minty-smelling oil into the small apparatus—a task she approaches with undivided attention because when she is done, she will have nothing else to do—she notices water pooling at its base. She walks to the ladies’ room to get a stack of rough, greenish-gray hand towels to sop it up. When she sees Edie in the hallway, she drops the hand holding the towels to her side. Even though she knows she didn’t break Edie’s diffuser (how could she have?) the dripping still feels like a failure on her part.

“So, we’re all set in there,” Madison says, and finds herself actually offering a thumbs up. Had such gestures always been hibernating inside her?

“Marvelous. I just need to empty my bladder.”

Madison struggles to keep her face from twitching. What was the utility in calling out the bladder? Madison feels panic rising, thinking she shouldn’t have asked Edie for help in the first place, that she should have just led the meditation herself.

In the conference room, Madison lines up rectangle tubs of ice cream, Styrofoam bowls, and the fixings for sundaes, items she never would have purchased under normal circumstances, like liquified peanut butter that hardens into a cold shell. Already, the cartons are showing condensation, and Madison is angry with herself for bringing them out of the freezer too soon. But to put them back in the freezer now would make her look jittery in front of the colleagues who have already started to take their seats around the long boardroom table. There are several empty chairs left, and it takes her a moment to decide which to approach. She notices that her boss, Demi, who all but mandated this event, has not arrived, will probably not come at all.

To her relief, it’s Edie who takes control of the room. “Madison asked me to lead here today,” she says, and looks at Madison. “Thank you for throwing me under the bus!” She laughs, and Madison is slightly offended to be made the butt of a joke, though not fully—she could never experience a full, unadulterated reaction to anything while in public—and also surprised at the laughter that fills the room, rewarding Edie’s apparent social fluidity.

“Let your body relax and close your eyes. I want you to take notice of your breathing, how the air enters your nose.”

Madison does as she is told. She is acutely conscious of her breath, but not because she is feeling present, not because she is meditative. It is because she is on high alert, because she is in a darkened room with people she only knows through structured interactions, because even though she has deferred control of this event, she hasn’t, not really, because doesn’t this whole thing reflect back on her?

Finally, she opens one eye, and with her head down, scans the room—she is reminded of playing Seven Up in elementary school, how she would sit with her head resting on her forearm, but instead of closing her eyes, peek down at the shoes of the designated tapper; it was in this unfair way that she usually won the game. Even Edie’s eyes are closed. The chief of staff, Marcus, is pinching his thumb and middle finger together like the Buddha, and she wonders if he does this at home, in the morning when he wakes up, or after he puts his two little girls to bed.

Had Madison invented Edie’s awkwardness, her unlikability? She had once been proud of her own kindness, her willingness to overlook personality quirks she assumed other people would knock. But now she isn’t sure—what if she is actually more judgmental than most people, not less? Or maybe her colleagues are simply feeling generous because they, having gotten out of work early on a Friday afternoon, would rather be here closing their eyes than sitting at their desks in the punishing light of their computer screens. Madison is waiting for Edie to trip up, to say something strange, and there is a moment when Edie seems to lose focus, seems grappling for the words that come next, but then she finds them.

“We should really do this more often,” the executive assistant whispers beside her. Until now, Madison was pretty sure that this woman is, by consensus, a huge bitch. But then again, she seemed to miscalculate the consensus surrounding Edie, and it is now entirely possible that she is simply bad at reading people. Or maybe she had overestimated the consequences of eccentricity. Maybe it was possible to go through life like Edie, a bit out of step, but on the whole, doing okay.

When the meditation is finished, Madison goes to flick on the lights, and they stutter for a few seconds before filling the room with yellowish haze. She is surprised when most people keep their eyes closed, sighing contentedly, truly relaxed.

*

Arguably, Madison’s closest connection at work is Andrea, and when Madison approaches her desk, where she is talking to another colleague named Shannon, she senses a giddy air between them. “Look at this,” Andrea says, squeezing a rumpled white blouse sitting bunched on her desk. “Edie got me this shirt.” Then she lowers her voice. “I tried it on and it’s way too big for me. It literally makes me look like a pirate,” and Shannon says, “There are worse things to look like.”

Of course, the shirt didn’t fit. The shirt didn’t fit because Edie had clearly bought it for herself, discovered that it was not too large but too small for her, and then punted it to Andrea. Andrea should have been able to detect a re-gifting. But more importantly, why her? Isn’t Madison Edie’s favorite? She knows that Andrea and Edie chatted once in a while—Andrea chatted with everyone—but she doubts the conversations contained meaning, doubts Andrea can indulge Edie the way she can, the plaintive nods, the lingering hugs.

A few days later on Madison’s birthday, a text comes in from an unknown number, and she feels a satisfying prick in her chest. An old crush? She wonders, feeling the pitched but short-lived exhilaration that comes and goes in the act of unlocking a phone. But then she sees that it has been signed, God Bless You, and she knows who it is from.

*

At Brooklyn Bridge Park, Madison sees the carousel in the distance, the moored horses galloping. Walking beside Edie, she feels the odd placidity she elects when she’s bored—a defense mechanism she uses to melt the worry that she’s wasting her time. (Though what would she be doing otherwise?)

Edie doesn’t notice this as she talks, slowly, and a lot. Madison is a good listener, or at least, she’s better at listening than she is at talking. She nods as Edie waxes spiritual and tries to take in the quirkiness of the scene around her: the carousel that’s ensconced in futuristic glass, the pet beach, an outdoor bar with broad cushioned chairs where patrons tote cocktails chilled by fat ice cubes. It’s true that she never would have come down here on her own.

Edie inhales sharply. “Look at these vibrant blooms,” she says, pointing to oblong purple flowers that Madison doesn’t know the name of. “My sister is a wonderful gardener.” It’s the first time Edie has mentioned her sister all day, and Madison wonders if she is purposefully compartmentalizing. It is possible that Edie is someone who either talks about the hyper-real—a brain injury, an intensely bright flower—or else she refers to a higher power. Though maybe, to her, there is little difference between the two.

Madison is conscious of each individual step she’s taking—they are walking so slow, strolling, really, and they stop at intervals throughout the park. Edie is wearing the backpack again, but this time it looks full, and Madison realizes that she has brought a beach towel for them to sit on when they reach where the Hudson is lapping onto the city shore. Madison doesn’t like the way her thighs look as she sits cross-legged, so she kicks her legs out in front of her and leans back on her hands, her wrists starting to ache.

 “I’m surprised a gentleman hasn’t taken you here yet,” Edie says, and Madison feels herself starting to grow defensive, but Edie continues. “What I’m really looking for is a good Christian man.”

“Have you tried the apps?” Madison is a knee-jerk solution-offerer, though she knows that most people are not looking for solutions when they complain.

But Edie is receptive. “Oh, sure,” she says. “But it’s never more than a few messages. The last one sent me a picture of his genitals!” she laughs, nearly shrieks, and Madison joins her, leans into this moment that feels almost like a connection.

“I want to tell them, don’t worry about me,” she continues. “I’ve seen plenty of penises.” At this, Madison feels a passing, small delight. Edie has a way of delivering information—Madison notes that she is kind of funny—in a conspiratorial way, like they are old girlfriends getting up to no good, and sometimes this mere suggestion of fun is enough. And yet Madison is dubious. It’s not that Edie was altogether undesirable—surely everyone is desirable, in their own way—but there was something about the formal way she speaks that suggests prudishness. Ungenerously, looking out at the seafoam-colored water, Madison wonders, what type of penises? Do babies count?

“I have a platonic friend who makes a lot of money, and he and I go out several times a year. It’s better than nothing! He took me to Tavern on the Green.” Madison can’t help but wonder what, to Edie, constitutes a large salary.

Finally, finally, Edie suggests lunch, and Madison knows that she can get through this, now there is an end in sight, and she realizes how hungry she is.

“Why don’t we sit here and enjoy,” Edie unfurls the towel again, this time in the middle of a wide green, and Madison is glad she is wearing sunglasses, glad that at least part of her face can slacken. When they are divvying up a thin pizza, Madison thinks that today really isn’t so bad, that sometimes there is nothing wrong with taking a slow walk.

On the subway home, there are no seats, so she stands, holding onto the pole, noticing the dusty spots under her arms where her deodorant has been dry, then wet, then dry again. She looks at the people around her, listening to the grating of the train’s brakes. She is so close to perfect strangers, close enough to notice their patterns and mistakes: the woman who arranges the wire of her headphones in a perfect, neurotic knot; how the man beside her has a painful-looking razor burn on his neck; the residual garlic on someone’s breath, though she doesn’t turn around to confirm whose. Her feet are set hip-width apart, balancing the weight of her body as the train moves, and her whole face feels the pleasant relief of surrender.

*

On Monday, Madison hears Edie interacting with other people in the distance, but she doesn’t get up from her cube. She expects Edie to come to her, hoping that she won’t. She feels a girding in her chest for most of the day until she grows tired—disappointed, after all, that Edie never comes. In the evening, she lingers longer than usual at her desk, until practically everyone is gone.

When Madison enters the back office where Edie sits, the lights have already been turned off, and the whole room feels dusky. Edie is gathering donation checks—how funny that pieces of paper can be worth so much and still subject to the elements, how they wrinkle and rip at the corners. Edie has made three tall, neat piles out of the checks, and paper clipped them; the clips are each decorated with different cardboard citrus fruits. Then, quickly, she tucks the checks into her backpack and rips it closed with a loud, gratifying zip.

“Edie,” Madison begins, and Edie jumps, cries out. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” She shakes the backpack, rejiggering whatever is inside. Madison peers at it, and it looks, in the fading light of the room, so black that it seems saturated, almost like a cartoon. Then, seeming to decide that Madison is not a threat, Edie laughs, belly laughs. Madison feels an invisible tug from the direction of the doorway, a visceral need to escape. She knows that she has walked in on something she wasn’t meant to see. But then another feeling arises: she realizes she is not surprised at all.

But how to move this confrontation forward? There is a moment of silence, and, more uncomfortable with this than with her discovery, she falls back on politeness, the kind that’s so easy with near strangers.

“I just wanted to say that I had a great time this weekend. And—if there’s anything I can do, while you’re so busy with your sister—if you want me to run an errand or anything, I’m happy to do it.”

“I truly appreciate that,” she said. “I cherish that. But I was thinking, you should really come out to Staten Island, come to church with me and my nieces and nephews sometime soon,” she said. “I’ll confirm with you tomorrow.”

*

Madison is standing in the doorway of the corner office belonging to her boss, Demi. The feeling she gets every time she stands here is that she is completely extraneous, and that she doesn’t know what to do with her own hands. Demi has greeted her (she said, distractedly, “…hi…”) but now she has turned back to her computer, staring at the screen, where Madison believes she is composing an email. She wonders if she should simply turn around, if Demi would even notice if she began to back out of the room, that maybe this is exactly what Demi wants her to do. Or is the whole thing just a power play? At first, Madison occupies herself by examining the trinkets on Demi’s desk—a figurine of a male skier, a stack of unfinished wooden coasters—but then finally she tries to feel nothing, to simply exist.

And then, Demi looks straight at her. “I hear that you’ve been spending time with Edie outside of work.”

The question so completely knocks her off balance that she inhales. “Oh, um,” and yet this feeling of being off-balance is ultimately so familiar that she is able to gather herself. “Yeah, a little bit.”

“Whose idea was that?” So, Madison was right—other people in the office did think Edie was strange. But behind Demi’s judgment she can tell that she is truly curious, that perhaps she even sees it as part of her job to get to the bottom of this.

It seems unkind to answer truthfully; to suggest that it was Edie’s idea might betray her early reluctance. “She’s just been stressed, and I think she needs to decompress,” Madison offers. “Everything with her sister…”

“That’s a disaster waiting to happen.” Demi says, then looks hard at Madison, who knows she is waiting for confirmation, that she is possibly appalled not to have received it already.

“We’re all just waiting for her to pick up and go on disability leave. And then we won’t be able to hire anyone else.”

“Yeah…wow,” Madison says, and her face grows hot. She feels incredibly ill-equipped to have this conversation. For a moment she wonders if this matter actually has nothing to do with her, that she tripped and fell into it. But her tepidness seems only to incite Demi’s force.

“Think about it. Every single day we have a new pile of checks that need to be processed. Who’s going to pick up the slack if she leaves indefinitely?” Demi’s ire, which had been quickly filling up the room, now feels directed at Madison like a challenge.

“Well, Edie takes the checks home with her.”

Now, Demi has stopped typing, her hands hovering over her keyboard. Madison can feel she has her full attention, and the pressure is not unlike looking directly at the sun. At first, the comment seems to genuinely shock Demi, but then—Madison cannot be sure, but she thinks she sees another flicker behind her eyes: the satisfying buoyancy of drama.

“She can’t do that. First of all, this isn’t the type of job where you’re working day and night—it’s just not. She’s taking the actual checks home?”

Edie seems unreal to Madison in this moment, nothing like Demi, who at the other side of the room suddenly feels intimately close. Demi has a certain tic, like she is chewing the side of her mouth, and she has begun to do it faster. Usually, the motion makes Madison feel bad for Demi, but now it serves only to make her seem more combustible. She cannot stop offering up information that she knows is wanted of her; how can she deny this person what she wants?

“I saw her take them home and…I guess she finishes her work there,” she pauses, and then, to be thorough, she quickly adds, “Actually, I don’t know what she’s doing with the checks.”

“Knock, knock.” Marcus stands behind her, an ex-military man who is all business. Madison knows she is about to cry. The tears do not spill over her eyelids, but she knows she is so visibly upset that she might as well be crying. She weaves around Marcus (what had she come into Demi’s office for, anyway?) and makes her way to the gummy gray staircase.

Yet as she capitulates to her tears, she realizes that maybe it doesn’t matter if she cannot guess what other people are thinking or predict how they will react. Instead, her watchfulness, her urge to accommodate, the very qualities that gnawed at her, led her to something greater than intuition. They led her straight to facts that had eluded Marcus and Andrea and even Demi herself.

When her face begins to feel less inflamed, she reenters the office. “Madison,” Marcus says, good-natured. “You’re more cut-throat than you look.”

*

The executive assistant is wearing gingham pants and stomping around with purpose, her bottom-heavy legs shaking the floor, going in and out of cubicles, delivering some tasty morsel of information. People are peering over their cubes, and there is the excitement of a fire drill, an odd, playful interruption.

Marcus clears his throat in the middle of the office. “Okay everyone, I’m going to need you all to get up from your desks and spend a few minutes in the break room,” he announces, and though he seems burdened by his authority, there is an undertone of contentment, of things coming to their rightful conclusion.

In the breakroom, there are too many people milling around in the small space, and the mood is festive, like that of a party. A coffee machine is screeching behind the din of voices.

When Madison realizes Edie isn’t here, the scaffolding of her chest threatens to collapse. She moves closer to Marcus, who is holding court in the corner of the room. “It was the last straw,” he was saying. “It’s against every rule and protocol.”

Frantic, Madison opens the back door to the breakroom. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she announces to no one in particular, and as she shuts the door, she hears, “Is there anything sweet in the fridge to go with my coffee?”

She stands in the narrow hallway, peering around the corner to the front glass doors of the office. Then she sees him—the pudgy guy from HR who can’t be any older than her, holding Edie by the elbow, escorting her to the elevator bank.

Next time she won’t do this, she tells herself, go out of her way to be friendly. She had just been trying to be nice, but now it seemed like it had all been pointless. If she had just treated Edie like everyone else, this never would have happened, or at least it wouldn’t be her fault when it did. Wasn’t it only a matter of time before she was found out? Would Edie know it was her?

Madison wonders if there was anything the matter with Edie’s sister anyway, if she had a sister at all. She stands with her back against the wall like someone is measuring her height. All at once, she is tired, relieved to be outside where no one is expecting anything from her.