Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey

Author:Miranda Popkey
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

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I was still at the kitchen table when my mother came home. For the past hour I’d been trying to figure out the woman’s name. Advertising plus executive plus rape had returned some promising results, but it was hard enough to find a list of current employees, never mind headshots. Plus almost certainly she was retired. Possibly she was dead.

My mother was carrying a jade plant and three bouquets, three honest-to-goodness riots of color: orange birds-of-paradise and pink peonies and white anemones, their pistils blue-black and their petals so thin and pale as to be almost translucent. “Sweetheart,” she said, turning on a light, “it’s so dark in here.” The names of the flowers coming, by habit, unbidden, unbidden, too, the names of their parts. Though pistil seems too violent a term for eggs and an ovary and in fact I prefer to call this bit, conscious of the error and of my mother’s chagrin, the flower’s nipple. She opened a cabinet, pulled out two vases, fished scissors out of a drawer, turned on the faucet. One vase for the table in the kitchen, one vase for the table in the living room, the ratio of orange to pink to white in each would, I knew, be varied so that their symmetry would seem neither wholly accidental nor exactly planned. In front of my mother, on the kitchen counter, on the windowsill, philodendrons and spider plants, an English ivy, overgrown, a blooming bromeliad. I closed my computer. The plants I don’t mind so much. “Hi, Mom.” She trimmed the stems under the running water. “Productive day, sweetheart?” I shrugged. She takes good care of the plants, never seen one brown on her watch, never seen one die, and if they’re not dying there’s only so much space, only so many she can buy. “Leads on any jobs?” I shrugged again. It’s the flowers I hate, fresh bunches almost every day, tossed, fine, composted, before any hint of wilt, like bright blooms aren’t a luxury, like they’re some kind of need. When we argue about the flowers, the arguments I make are about waste and about money, valid arguments both. Though in fact what I hate about the flowers is that they are, for my mother, a source of pleasure, that my mother believes in allowing herself pleasure, in indulging her various material desires. What I hate about the flowers is that they are an example of the many ways in which my mother extends her kindness also to herself.

“You’ll never guess,” my mother said, “who I ran into today,” no pause, “you remember Esther? From elementary school? You sat next to her in the fourth grade, I think, or maybe it was fifth. Anyway, I ran into her mother at the farmers’ market”—she was putting the flowers into vases now, mixing the birds-of-paradise with the peonies with the anemones—“you remember her, Marcia? Well, Marcia told me that Esther’s a junior account executive at, wait”—she put a hand

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