Life, Cultivated - Natalie Blake
Six years ago, I divorced my then-wife, frumpy thing that she was, and moved back onto campus. Tenure had come with a two-up two-down townhouse she never appreciated due to its postage-stamp of a back yard. But I can buy a bunch of flowers just fine — and have them arranged in a vase by a pretty little thing who is herself as easy to please as those flowers.
I drape my arm over the back of her chair, the pretty thing, who goes by the name of Lucy. She plays with the potted stems adorning the center of the restaurant table, then dares a glance at her parents.
“And how did you two meet?” The mother, Susan, nurses a diminutive glass of white wine and casts her cautious gaze between us.
“I needed a research assistant. Lucy applied,” I reply, and the girl nods in tandem. I haven’t revealed, of course, that I’ve weathered this storm once before and that it didn’t go well; or that I fear she’ll outgrow me and graduate, our affair destined to become nothing more than a well- pressed bloom between the pages of her college textbook.
“That’s right, I beat out fifteen other applicants.” Lucy strokes the inside seam of my trouser leg, barely containing her wry little smile when I’m forced to clear my throat.
“Fulfilled the criteria, did she?” Susan purses her lips.
Halfway through his second beer, the father raises his bottle with pride. “Lucy’s always been a smart girl. Top of her class and on the honor roll.” He sucks foam from his upper lip and gives Lucy an encouraging nod.
Perhaps his approval can be cultivated.
“Daddy, don’t be embarrassing,” she scolds. The poor thing flushes when she looks at me, but there’s nothing to be insecure about. We all went to high school, one decade or another. “Anyway, school was years ago,” Lucy adds.
“Not that many years ago—“ the mother mutters into her wine glass, and promptly shakes the bottle from its cooler for a refill.
“Sue,” David sighs, and shoots me an apologetic look.
Despite her age, I top up Lucy’s wine to the brim and bask in the sunbeams of her approval. “Are you a hunting man, David?” I make it sound casual, off-the-cuff. Lucy nuzzles my shoulder in thanks because she’d insisted that I ask. Said it would win her Daddy round ‘big-time’.
“Oh I’ve tried my hand at it,” he chuckles, ears pinking. “Nothing big. Got a deer once though,”
David fumbles his key chain to the table. A flaccid lump of antler hangs from the ring. “Biiiig buck it was.”
Susan’s lips curl. “I detest the killing of innocent creatures in the name of sport.”
“I think it’s very masculine,” Lucy argues, determined to propagate her opinions away from her mothers. “Joseph has a black bear head above the mantel.” She pecks my stubbled cheek with pride, then waits and watches for her parents’ reaction when she adds, “the pelt is in our back bedroom.”
David sputters. “….our?”
“Yes,” I interject. “Lucy moved in after Spring break.” Sometimes, I think if you were to cut my chest open, you’d find the roots of her wrapped around my ribs.
Susan presses her napkin over her mouth, paling. “This is your fault David; you know that don’t you?” She sounds like my ex-wife. “Always away! If it isn’t a business trip it’s a hunting trip,”
Susan continues, David deciding to skulk off to the bar for another beer instead of listening.
“Mom. Why are you being like this?” Lucy hisses once her father is out of earshot. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”
Playing my finger under Lucy’s bra strap, I lean close to whisper, “Don’t start, princess.” She flushes and sits back. “We’re all adults here, Mrs Birch,” I re-assert, so her parents are clear on this fact. “I understand meeting your daughter’s first boyfriend can have a somewhat…aging effect, but I hope I can rely on you not to judge our relationship at first glance.”
“You must admit it’s awfully hard not to—“
“Lucy knows what she wants. I think it’s time you respected that.” My words may be cutting, but Susan’s the rotten vine that needs plucking and pulling up before it sucks the life from its surroundings. “In truth, it was not me who did the pursuing.”
“That’s right,” Lucy spouts at her mother, “and it’s not like it’s against the rules.” She restlessly tears faux petals from one of the flowers that had, moments ago, decorated the restaurant table. “He’s not my lecturer, we’re not even based in the same building.”
“Indeed. I teach classics. Latin mostly,” I offer, before the conversation derails. “And we’re really very happy together. So happy, in fact, that —“
“Oh Lucy,” he mother starts, “I want to be happy for you, I do, but when you said you were bringing someone to dinner, I just got so excited. I didn’t expect that someone to be…” Susan’s eyes dart to me, then she twists her napkin into ever-tightening tubes before abandoning it with a troubled sniff. “Well, someone who calls you princess,” Susan finishes, lowering her voice, as though in the midst of a scandal. “You’re a smart and capable young woman who doesn’t need taking care of. Life is not some fairytale.”
“Maybe I like being taken care of,” Lucy bickers back, and the two women immediately have at one another like clucking chickens, caught in fraught debate. Her petite fingers, like tendrils, burrow into my skin and cling ever tighter to me the harsher her mother’s words become.
I start to wonder if love is not unlike like a slow growing creeper, flourishing only when it can feed on the detritus of its predecessors. But like all wild things, love has a habit of running away with you.
“— we’re actually getting married in the Fall.”
Originally published by Pure Slush Press 2022
Natalie Blake is a British-born writer, now living abroad. Her short fiction has most recently appeared in Unleash Lit, Full House Literary, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety, among other notable publications, and will soon feature in the 2024 Spring issue of The Stray Branch. Through her work, Natalie often explores contemporary issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and the intersectionality of women’s lives with wider society. She is currently writing her second novel.
