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Norma

by Dana Hoffman

I was at Shirette’s boiling hot, crowded party on a miserably cold and icy Chicago winter evening.  Seeking refuge from the tiny, ninety plus degree dance floor pulsing with Shirette’s native Belizian music, I shoved my way out of the living room, past the postage stamp sized ‘foyer’, and into the kitchen half of which was now consumed by the living room couch.

At this point there were still some clean cups ; I filled one with homemade, nearly toxic sangria and topped it off with fermented apple chunks.  A very attractive blond guy I’d spoken to before at some previous party reached behind me for the vodka.  His name escaped me.  He reintroduced himself as ‘Rick’.  He was apparently Suzanne’s new boyfriend.  Shortly thereafter, Rick and I got on the subject of former boyfriends and girlfriends.  I said, ‘Ex’s always evoke strange memories.  Like, for example, I used to date a guy whose mother wrote his name in his underwear.’

Rick responded, ‘I have a plant named Norma.’

I laughed, ‘You...  What??’

‘I have a plant named Norma.  She’s a Begonia.’

I inquired, ‘How d’you decide to call her Norma?’

He matter-of-factly replied, ‘I name all my plants after women who won’t go out with me.’

‘Why’d Norma turn you down?’

Rick’s eyes glinted as he said, ‘Well, actually, she’s my mother’s friend.’

‘You want to date your mother’s friend?’

Rick said, ‘No.  I had to break my rule because Norma gave me that plant.  But Audrey and Cindy are different.’

‘The plants or the people?’

‘Both.  Audrey’s a philodendrum and Cindy’s a fern.  She likes to watch me take a shower.’  As Rick was uttering this last phrase, Chris, who had been trying to squeeze past us, inadvertently overheard something about women and showers.  With piqued interest, he asked, ‘Hey, what’re you guys talking about?’

I decided to let him guess and continued interrogating Rick, ‘You shower with her?’

‘She LOVES the steam,’ he replied.

‘And Audrey?’

‘Audrey...  Well, Audrey’s dead actually.  I did everything I could but...’

Chris, whose eyes had been following our conversation like a tennis spectator, interrupted, ‘Died?!’

‘Yes,’ said Rick, ‘Of dehydration.’

Chris, not about to admit he was completely lost, scooped his cup into the sangria bucket and ducked out onto the icy back porch for a blast of freezing winter air.  I turned back to Rick, ‘Does Suzanne know about them?  On second thought, is there a ficus tree or something called Suzanne?’

‘Of course not.  I never told her about Cindy.  She might get jealous.  And there’s no ‘Suzanne’ because she is going out with me.’

‘Why wouldn’t the others?’

‘I just got all tongue-tied and acted like an idiot around them.’

‘You should have discussed botany with them, you seem to be very knowledgeable.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘I think that was a compliment.’

As I smiled and sipped my drink, I regretted not having discovered Rick before Suzanne.  Bright, witty, with a perverse sense of reality.  Conversationally, he didn’t strike me as Suzanne’s type, but it was obvious from Rick’s lean, muscular body, engaging eyes, and wavy blond hair that she hadn’t recruited him for his green thumb.

Suzanne emerged from the dance floor at that point, exchanged pleasantries with me, and collected her botanist beauty.  I found Chris and made him brave the heat in the living room to dance.

When I arrived home at 3 AM, I looked at my unpronounceable flowering plant perched on the windowsill and christened it ‘Rick’.  ‘Rick’ lost all of his flowers over the following weeks.  I changed his watering regime yet he never reblossomed.

Nevertheless, ‘Rick’ the plant outlived the relationship of Rick and Suzanne.  Rick had tried on several occasions to get Suzanne not to wear her usual liberal quantities of make-up.  Like most people, Suzanne was resentful of this criticism.  She’d replaced Rick with another All-American Boy, Leland :  bright eyes, a nubile face, solid body and soft brown curls.  Leland never criticized Suzanne’s appearance, he worshipped it instead.

The next time I saw Rick was almost a year later at a huge Art Gallery party.  Two hundred of our closest, and largely shallow friends had turned up to drink, dance, and look at bad art.  Rick pulled me away from my date, Doug the actor. 

‘Hey Dana,’ he said to me, ‘Are you with that guy?’

I wasn’t sure where this was going, so I said, ‘I wouldn’t say ‘with’ exactly.  I’d say he’s here because I invited him.’

Rick then asked me, ‘Are you going to go out with him next weekend?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘Why?’

‘I’m thinking about getting another plant and naming it ‘Dana’.