The Weeds: A Novel

I.

Ranunculaceae

Clematis flammula, sweet-scented clematis

What am I looking for? Bipinnate leaves, a lacework root. The achenes almost fuzzy. Fuzzy’s not a technical term—hoary, villous, sericeous. The lingo calls to mind the serious hoary villain who stirred his coffee with a scalpel this morning and sent me out in ninety-degree heat to inch along the stones of the Colosseum and scan for green while tourists swinging anvil-sized camera bags say pardon and whoops. My ponytail has been whacked to one side of my head. Find the plant, identify the species, check it off the list. Don’t get sunburned; don’t get harassed; don’t harass anyone. Don’t leave the Colosseum. How many people have died here? It’s the tourists’ Tevas that feel like the true decline of civilization, the all-weather nylon over tuberous toes, the dominant species in this dust bowl. My fingernails are caked with the silt they shuffle up. Shit.

The flowers should smell like almonds, but all I smell is sunscreen and stench. To spot this first plant on my taxonomically ordered list, I only have to do a quick circuit of the perimeter, looking for massing vines in full sun, and then a half-dutiful scoot along the upper amphitheater, fiddling in the dirt for sprouts. (I’m not religious about this; sorry, science.) My advisor should be the one out here on his knees—oh, except he has tenure. I strike through Clematis flammula—she’s absent, a casualty of industrialization, rising temperatures, the tourism economy—and wonder if the gladiators ever felt so trapped they might explode.

Anemone hortensis, star anemone

Rome without you is muffled; a wash of absence coats the stones. You thought my grief would swallow me, but lover, I have taken an apprenticeship in color: I mark down what grows, making notes so a man in a waistcoat can make a green and ordered story. Deakin claims to hold the keys to me. Not in four decades, he says, has someone combed for every plant in this great bowl, not since Napoleon put on his hat again and fled from Elba. I’d flee from here, but every other place I’d turn—my home, your bed—is barren. The Colosseum continues its crumble; the vines continue their sprawl. (The truth: I don’t flee because you might return.)

Give me your faraway hand, let me put its soft skin here on this anemone: stamens and anthers of uncommon blue. Blue as oceans, as lapis paint, as the base of the horizon in heat. An early bloom. I inscribe a letter on the backs of sixteen petals: Love, forsake me not. There is no petal for the comma, so I leave it out.

In the ten days since you left, my breath works to fill the new hole. But I must have a man’s conviction—like Napoleon, you’ll sail back. The ancients thought anemones wouldn’t open unless the wind blew.

Ranunculus, crowfoot

R. repens, R. muricatus

The sweat on my fingers makes it impossible to swipe on my phone, so I stop to drink, to lean against the same slope where some bloodthirsty pagan matron screamed for slaughter, to fill my stomach with cold Roman water that will find its way partly into my cells, ballooning them, and partly into my bladder.

I text my brother in Mississippi: ALL IS FINE. He asks for proof of life; I send a pizza pic. I can’t tell if he thinks I’m going to kill myself or someone else. He has wife plus baby plus managerial blah-blah. I have four limbs and a mean streak. If he thinks I’m chasing glamour, last week’s pizza (€8) shows the height of what I’ve found.

Waxy yellow petals, short like schoolchildren. Muricatus has a green center, making the plant look weedy. Too much green in flowers, and people think they should get dug up. I wipe my phone on my thigh and capture this specimen for my advisor. It’ll live forever in my camera roll with several thousand other meaningless digital thumbnails: my face, sunset, plant, dinner, my face, plant, street art, plant, my face. A puny record compared to the old herbals, when leaves were stroked in ink on vellum. Deakin’s 1855 Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, which I’m tasked with replicating—or responding to—had blooming color plates. He sat with his monocle and parasol and watercolors where I’m sitting, my shorts riding up, both of us cataloging what the soil could hold. He was the Bard of botany, the Crocodile Dundee. He rubbed Ranunculus sap on his skin to see if it was poison and induced inflammation, and at length ulceration. I shouldn’t admit that I only signed up to catalog this colossus because suffering with purpose is better than just suffering. But there are many roads to Rome.

My dead mother grew buttercups. She pinched them off their stems and plated them for fairies. We didn’t know they were toxic. We murdered a generation of elves.

Delphinium peregrinum, broad-leafed larkspur

The flowers shoot out on racemes like comets, like columbines, like dolphins, delphis. Their blue is thin enough to press and save. I should press them for you. Nothing brightens a letter like a bloom. This apprenticeship is a punishment, not a bravery. I have misbehaved—you, who carry the record of my truancies, must feel no surprise. My outraged father passed me to his friend and thinks I am contained: counting species in an ancient arena, kneeling to touch a rough leaf or bend back a weeping bloom, a woman left alone in public. The safest place is where all can see.

A profession is in some ways a marriage.

When Deakin explained my tasks, I was silent; as you would say, I showed him my belly. He gave me a tour of his Colosseum, pointing out the layers, the small climates, the places where light never touches and the damp spreads. He could not sit in the sun all day, he said. His work was not in compilation, but in comprehension. A higher science. There is no room for trouble here, he said. He meant this as a protection, or a threat; a paternal tone holds both.

Before you left, I passed your new husband in the street. His eye was blackened from a fight, a smear of tomato on his shirt. I would have called it blood, but I know tomato when I see it. Imagine, choosing such messiness: a man, a marriage. But I’m here, stone-set, and you’re there, boat-bound, both of us watching for dolphins.

II.

Malvaceae

Malva, mallow

M. sylvestris, M. rotundifolia

Counting calyx, counting cleft, counting carpels. The British call it cheeses—Look, Maude, a bank of cheeses!—which makes me want to cram the purple bundles in my mouth and chew till I taste sharp salt. The petals are veiny, like old-lady legs. I have a field guide and two semesters of intro (physiology plus ecology) and a stack of articles my advisor printed out and my camera phone and a boredom that masks as persistence, so I’ll survive.

If I had to sit in a lecture hall again, I’d set fire to it. This is my approach to life—identify the irritant, incinerate it. I knew who to attach myself to (someone doing research somewhere warm), and his boss put a stamp on my application because—I guess—I’m pretty, I’m pliable. My face when I got that email! My brother saw it, rolled his eyes, took his baby back from my negligent babysitting hands. What next? he asked. Run across the Alps? You gotta settle, he was always saying, shushing me. That was his nursery rhyme: You gotta settle.

The job’s scut work: see whether this thing someone spotted here a century and a half ago is still growing (Malva? Found it!), and then my advisor will do the hard work of figuring out what these botanical shifts mean. (Is my generation the only one that can f-ing pronounce climate crisis?) He’ll let me go at Christmas, when surely nothing blooms in Rome.

Something is always blooming, he says. His mustache must tickle his lips given how much he licks it. His glowering makes me wonder if he asked his boss for a male assistant. I try to imagine being an advisor, saying dumb things, coming up with a project of my own.

If you’re wounded in battle, the word on the medieval street is to find some bread crumbs and a mallow and mush them together and mash the paste on your festering sore. How often did that work? No wonder the fields of Europe have been made fertile with bodies.

III.

Crassulaceae

Sedum, stonecrop

S. cepaea, S. gallioides, S. album, S. acre, S. reflexum, S. anopetalum

I would crawl through a desert, starving for water, so I might come upon these ripe green bulbs and squeeze them in my mouth. Would they burst like berries, soak the tongue? You would say, my love, Just eat the Sedum and find out. I wasn’t at your wedding but waited on the street outside, and when you and he came out with locked arms, your eyes were too busy to find me. He, though, met mine and winked, like a sated man wanting more.

Deakin asks what I know of plants—witches and plants are kindred, my father swore to him soberly—and I stand before his desk and say that I am attentive. His arms spill over the arms of his chair, and the papers on his desk look unbrushed. I have never met a scientist. He seems no worse than a jailer or a husband. He asks me to make sketches so he can check my work, why I am so quiet, if I have a suitor, whether I am afraid of goatherds, of skunks, of him, and in my dark gray dress I force a smile, just big enough to show him fangs. He gives me a botanical dictionary.

Get home before dark, he says. At night the Colosseum fills with thieves.

Did my father not tell him why I’m here? They must rob each other, I say.

List each plant you see, he says, rapping his thumb on his scattered desk. Don’t leave anything out. Posterity will judge.

They will only judge him whose name is attached to the work. There is a freedom to invisibility; nighttime thieves know. Though I would like to write a book, better would I like to lie in bed with you, the moths our only visitors.

My fingers find them growing sideways in the cracks. One Sedum is crammed in a niche where the lions paced; one crawls from the paving of a tiger’s pen. The stone is cold. Touching a leaf is like touching skin.

Umbilicus pendulinus, navelwort

Succulents freak me out, like they’re more animal than vegetable. I like my plants to shake in a breeze. These flowers are sweet bluebell tubes except white and pale, like naked grubs. Rub the leaf on your skin if it’s irritated—e.g., if you’re a nineteenth-century hay-for-brains and smeared yourself with Ranunculus.

This notebook says Field Journal at the top, which I interpret to mean Private! Keep Out! If my advisor ever paged through it, I’d have to find another career. I also have a field guide, a dichotomous key, and the internet, but still—half the damn plants on this checklist feel impossible. To what extent is my advisor messing with me? is a not-uncommon thought I have. Would he kill me if I went ahead and dragged a black line through all the boxes? What f-ing luck, I found them all! No climbing over this hot pile of rocks, pushing through the waddles of tour groups waving their flimsy flags, finding a crushed pile of stems and thinking, horribly, I don’t care what it is. Data collection is more grocery shopping than science. Someone has to do it/anyone can do it.

You’re here to learn, my advisor said, not to author. His basement office is like a zoo for stacks of paper. I’d just told him that we couldn’t really define it as a European flora, given the number of naturalized species from Africa and West Asia.

Is having ideas only for faculty?

He leaned back in his chair, all white and tummy-round, and told the ceiling the history of his youth, the humility of research, the sexual thrill of submission to the academy. "One even submits a paper," he chuckled. I saw a crescent moon of flesh between the last two buttons of his shirt, like a cloacal opening.

I laughed along with him. Maybe he’s right; maybe he’s a swindler. My compass broke when my mother died. I run without aim, checking in with each man to see if he knows the way.

A Baroque doctor said navelwort provokes urine, so I steer clear.

IV.

Rosaceae

Prunus avium, wild cherry

A sapling grows along the edge of the old battleground, barely tall enough to make fruit. The drupes are dark and small, following a white shower in spring. An angel tree, a tree of birds. Only its bark, striated, scarred by demon fingernails, reminds me of you, your back where the cat cut you. Cherry blood I had for dinner, until your skin was clean.

The nuns with their books look sideways at my hand on the trunk. It’s late-summer warm, and we all have covered our heads. I cannot imagine this arena clean, filled with white sand, camels parading for citizens. It has collapsed into another of Rome’s overgrown humps. We clamber over it, men and goats. There are places to hide, places to kiss. The benches burst with shrubbery. If I did not have my ordered task, I could get lost between farms and shrines. I had thought to find a way out—surely your ship has a sister—but the weeds prove better companions than the pall of my empty room. I can wait until I smell an exit.

The day you left, I was apprehended by a night watchman (vagrancy, intent to burgle) and taken to the city jail, where I was carefully felt all over—for weapons; for womanhood—and before my father could find me, the newspapers had. I was brought home in a shroud, my drawers emptied, your words found, sticky with the sap of love, redolent of theft. It was far from my first time. He paid the men so only a small notice ran: Unknown Woman Seized; No Further Plot Revealed. I can hear your silver laugh. All we did was plot. We drew futures out of nothing.

It isn’t natural, my father said, his hands pawing your letters. I said nature made us both, and him too, and stinging nettle. I had heard of Sister Benedetta, two hundred years ago, who found Christ in another nun’s body. And the teacher who taught English at the grammar school, who was whispered about, who never married. A thing being rare doesn’t make it wrong.

My mother now wipes the scrape of cherry dirt from my cheek, and my father says my atonement won’t last long; he’s finding a man for his troublesome imp, and soon my acid will be alkalized. I have a biting sense of dread.

Pyrus communis, wild pear

Deakin says there are eight hundred varieties of cultivated pear, and I call bullshit. I’ve had maybe two or three kinds in my life, one that was soft and tasted like good soil and another baked at the holidays and cinnamoned to death. The unripe ones I like best; you can taste the potential—maybe it’s like eating veal, if I were monstrous enough to eat veal. I left America because there was nothing ripening in me at