The two girls, even if they’d saved their pin money for months, couldn’t have afforded the box seats. Elaine—the oldest of the two, having just turned seventeen—turned to their chaperone and benefactor, her grey eyes shining. “Oh Doña Absalom, thank you again for bringing us with you. I think Gillian and I will be grateful to you absolutely until the end of time.” The older girl applied a gentle elbow to the ribs of her friend, bringing Gillian’s awestruck gaze from the opera hall to the bemused carmine smile of the Doña.
Abstractedly pushing back loose curls, Gillian licked her lips before chiming in. “I honestly think I may faint. Or be sick.”
“Jilly!” Elaine spat, embarrassed but feeling the same way herself.
“It’s true. I am so terribly a bundle of nerves that I cannot bear it.” She smiled weakly, though her eyes blazed. “I will try to choose fainting, if it comes to a choice.”
I really need to learn to stop telling people that I’m Palestinian. It invariably creates questions and conversations at times when I’d much rather just be reading while waiting for the bus or train. Do real Jewish people get asked by strangers with unsettling regularity for confirmation of their stereotypical genetic markers?
I have never had someone react quite the way a woman at my morning bus stop did last Monday, however. Here, let me set it up:
Every workday I walk from home in the old residential area of town to one our more ridiculous bus stops. Situated in front of a Plaid Pantry, the area’s answer to the 7-11, this stop sees the passage of innumerable drunks, commuting children, people getting off graveyard shifts and so on. There’s a coffee kiosk behind it, run by Wayne, one of the more endearing Canadian-Americans I know. He’ll be putting out a-board signs with the day’s specials as I walk up, or shortly after, and we always wish each other good morning. I meander a couple of yards past the bus shelter so I can finish my cigarette and start in on the day’s read while keeping a clear view of the road through the cherry trees.
It’s nice. It is routine. I won’t be home for another ten or eleven hours and I like my handful of minutes sitting there, enjoying the morning. I will give people cigarettes and lights and talk about the weather with Wayne, but I fiercely treasure those moments of quiet where it is just me and my book and a raucous group of birds across the street.
But Monday. Monday when I walk up to the stop I hear Wayne interacting with an overly cheerful lady. Being a crazy ray of sunshine himself he barely falters as she learns his northern origins and shouts “God Bless Canada!”
I start in on my book, the back of my neck tracking the cheerful woman’s movements. When you are antisocial, talkative people inspire cold-war levels of paranoia and preparation against learning far too many facts about their pets and their children and their Jesus. I believe I flinched when she called “Morning!” from the shelter of one of the town’s monstrous sequoias. Assuming that I was not her intended target, since I was clearly reading, I ignored her. Totally in vain. “Morning!” she called again.
Against every inner will, politeness took over and I turned, painfully, to regard her. I gave her a “Good morning,” and returned to my book. Taking my words as an invitation to make friends, the woman wandered over to where I sat and began talking at me. I tried my best to look very interested in my book, eyes returning to the page during every pause in her rambling speech.
I couldn’t really tell if she was intoxicated or naturally unaware of social signals. She was engulfed in a red sweatshirt, her hair looking like it had been done the morning before and not touched since, half-matted and the straw blonde of a woman in her forties still trying to overcome mousey brown at home. There was a feather stuck at a wilting angle in her hair, which clashed a little with the crushed orange plastic lei.
When she asked me about the book I was reading I told her it was science fiction. This launched a weird anecdote on her part about Scientology and some gathering in the city her nine year-old daughter had seen. “And she told me she liked what they were talking about, and here’s this little girl who doesn’t know anything and what does that show us?”
A handful of completely inappropriate answers ran through my brain, but I just shrugged. She became more animated.
“It shows that we should be able to pick whatever we want to believe in and nobody should be able to stop us.” Which, okay, I totally agree, but it didn’t really parse in context. Her small comments and conversation continued, to my dismay, hitting on several themes before she asked my name.
“Oh, that is a lovely name,” her level of sincerity was absolute and I wondered what the rest of her hair was doing, since only half of it looked to be in the braid. “It’s from?”
“It’s Irish.” I smiled with my eyes and tried to go back to my book. But she had to tell me how nice it was, the name and so on. Somewhere in there I told her I was a warehouse manager and her soliloquies became tinged with feminism, since I guess that is a job I had to wrest from the hands of some guy.
“So you’re Irish and—what else? You look Jewish.”
I sighed. “I’m Palestinian.” Which is a heavy simplification, but honestly—when you’re evenly mixed ethnically and culturally, it’s easier to just pick what people think you look like. And telling people I’m a kind of Arab tends to make them leave me alone, which was rather not so in this case.
I’d barely finished the last syllable when her eyes welled up, pooling above expertly applied black liner. Her face contorted with pain and I felt myself on the edge of utter confusion.
They’d only just ordered drinks and already Birch was swearing she’d never go on a blind date again. Dammit, she really should have known better. Aster was always trying to set her up with minor heroes so the dryad would leave her six brothers alone. Birch sighed, thinking about the youngest, the one who still had that swan’s wing. How great would that be in bed, those soft feathers trailing up—
“Tough choices, huh?” The melodic voice broke into Birch’s daydream. Right. She still had to get through this date. Tucking her short silver-green hair behind her ears she cast a glance at the menu, searching for something polite and empty to say.
“Oh, y’know, choosing something at a new restaurant is always difficult. It’s so easy to be disappointed.”
“That is so true.”
Birch looked up at the face across from her. Gods, he was so earnest. With his golden hair pulled back, the late summer sun glowed shell-pink through his pointed ears. She could imagine him at Midsummer, wreathed in flowers and winning all the archery contests. He was too pretty, she decided. That was always the problem with the Sidhe.
Johnnie stood in his garden and tried to see the hills. The fog was up, making the western boundary a towering dark smear in a light grey wall. Between him and the hills were a hell of a lot of other buildings, but his family’s place was taller than most and the hulking view from the rooftop garden was good—in better weather.
Ignoring the misting damp, Johnnie sat, straddling a bench. Though the garden was food-producing enough to justify their solar voucher, it was mostly ornamental. Greenery swarmed in arbours and grottoes, sheltering tables and benches that filled on warmer days.
With the view from the roof, the luxury of the solar inside and privacy for both, the Tip-Top Teahouse wooed customers and did brisk business. Johnnie’s grandfather had seen the need for pleasure spots even in the Five Cities’ infancy, beating most of his competitors to the punch by half a decade. When his daughter took over she refined the business, getting her fingers in the spreading trade.
Unlike most of the buildings in their nook of the Hound, Tip-Top, now technically a hostel and café, used all their floors; each themed and designed for different purposes and clientèle. Though, of course, each served tea.
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There were more than a thousand gardens, of course. The place that became the Five Cities was built on the skeleton of a forest and haunted by its fecund past. It was lush with a flamboyant excess of greenspace, laid out and continually added to in an attempt to appease the leafy fates. But such stately verdance was proved a pale shade once dame nature had room to stretch.
The Five Cities gave her that, tearing up asphalt to get to the dirt, handing out flyers about rooftop gardens, letting the ivy and the blackberries have their way with public structures. People who planned gardens were more likely to get solars, oil and meat, which was enough to encourage those who were not inclined to community work.
Taking an already existing system of shame for selfish actions, the Five Cities aimed it precisely. It wasn’t the whole earth they cared about now, just 100-odd square miles. With bribes, requests and guilt, they got their people to let nature have her head.
In hearsay, the Five Cities looked like an eden. A lower population and a retreat from industrialism, combined with enforced community effort, made it true. Where cars had parked, groves now grew. Manicured grass was consumed by clover. Decorative trees cracked sidewalks and turned streets to shady groves. It was as if the place had been waiting all this time, shoots coiled and ready to spring.
And so a place that had been where most people ended up anyway became a sought-after destination. Some used it as a jumping board to the north or to the ocean; others were captured in its green snare.