CONT'D: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way Here | Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

The train stopped. Never before had Petunia been so glad to see the familiar lights of her station. She got to her feet and followed three grim businesswomen to the door. "Hey!" She turned. The fat man was waving to her. "Be careful out there, lady." She smiled wanly and stepped off the train, the Bloomingdale's bag heavy over her right forearm. The doors closed behind her and the train rumbled out of the station. She looked back over her shoulder and watched the man's fat face blur and slide into the tunnel. With a small sigh, she followed the stream of people up the stairs and toward the street above.

The lights were off in her apartment, but the last of the afternoon sun was trickling in through the living room window. Petunia set the punch bowl on the kitchen table and checked her answering machine. She had three messages. The first was from Henry Carpenter, a fellow writer whom she'd met occasionally at readings, inviting her to dinner. No, she thought, remembering Henry's insipid smile and the ugly yellow tie he'd been wearing the last time she had seen him. Then again, maybe, depending on the quality of the restaurant he had in mind. She jotted down his number. The next message was a dial tone. The third was Leila, apologizing for having to cancel their semi-regular coffee date scheduled for tomorrow; she had to meet someone who was very interested in one of her works, remember, the one with the blue wire and ceramic tiles? He was flying out of New York soon, and this really could be a once in a lifetime sale. She didn't want to tell Petunia who the buyer was, not yet, not until the deal was done. He was very influential in some very major art circles, though, and as she said, he was very interested in her work. She'd call later.

Petunia erased her messages and wandered into the living room. She looked out over the street, the sidewalks bronzing in the sunset. The city struck her suddenly as being a very alien place, and she laughed at herself for being forty-two and homesick for a nondescript town in the middle of New Hampshire. "Grow up, Petunia," she said aloud. Then she laughed again at how silly her command had sounded; ordering someone with a name like Petunia to do anything inevitably sounded silly. Although there were usually some hidden smiles when she introduced herself to strangers, Petunia had never minded her name. She, Petunia, was the daughter of Rose, niece of Jasmine and Daisy, grand-daughter of Hyacinth. She was part of a long floral tradition that extended, like a vine, through generation upon generation of her mother's family. And what was the result? She, Petunia, the freshest bud of them all, was sitting pretty in her sixth-floor window box while twenty-year-old revolutionaries roamed the streets. Shouldn't she be doing something to get them off the streets? Or should she be doing something to get more people to join them? Hadn't she always told herself she would change the world someday, stand it on its head with admiration? She had, once, when she was young and foolish and lying alone in bed thinking big thoughts. There had been a day when she had idly scribbled out a speech thanking an invisible crowd for the Pulitzer Prize recently bestowed upon her - she was modest, but grateful, and devastatingly articulate despite all the flashbulbs exploding in her face. What, exactly, had happened since that day? She still had ambition. She still had desires. What was it she did not have, and was it just as well it was gone?

Questioning life and the meaning thereof always gave Petunia a headache. She closed the curtains and went back into the kitchen, where she began boiling water for tea. She padded into the oversized closet that served as her office. There had to be wrapping paper somewhere. Her desk drawers yielded none, but eventually she found a package of multicolored tissue paper tucked away in her filing cabinet. She went back to the kitchen and removed the shrieking kettle from the burner. The saleswoman had left the price tag on top of the box, so Petunia scraped at it with her fingernail until it peeled off in a sticky ball. She piled sheets of tissue on the table: pink, then yellow, then green, then pale blue. She centered the box on top of the pile and began to fold the colored sheets over and over, until the present was well-hidden under the layers.

Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

----------
Author Profile: Mary Phillips-Sandy is a PopPulse editor. She's also the Assistant Director of the Maine International Film Festival.
E-mail: mary@poppulse.com