GATHERING ROSES (published by Chipmunkapublishing, 2007)

By Ellen Weisberg

Brief Synopsis: Gathering Roses, influenced by real life events, was written a number of years ago. Yet there still is relevance to the fast-paced, Internet-driven world of today, where communication is facilitated but intimacy diminished, and where conflict is promoted without resolution.

Youtube link to audiobook of Prologue, Chapter 1 and the rest of the book!

Prologue

Lori curled her body into a fetal position on Nick’s bed and rested her head on his shoulder. Their dance was nearing its end as he lay next to her only a few months away from leaving her for good. As her fingertips moved from the coarse, dark hairs on his chest down to his stomach, she thought about the games, the teases, the chases… She lay there with his arm wrapped around her, his hand gently massaging the small of her back. She thought about all of the things that had made him seem like so little to her; the things that made her feel like nothing to him. She moved her mouth closer to his, wanting to narrow the distance that she had been sensing for so long. He pressed his lips against hers and began passionately kissing her. He lifted her hand off of his stomach and rested it back on his chest. She could feel his heart beating fast and hard.

“See?” he said. “It’s working now.” He quietly laughed.

The games, the teases, the chases. The emptiness. The distance.  She stared into Nick’s dark blue eyes and saw the reflection of someone who could finally see that there really was something. There was something to everything Lori had believed held no meaning. There was something to him. There was something to her, and there was something to what they both were to each other. There was something to life. And perhaps, at long last, it was time for Lori to start finally living it.

***

Chapter 1

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

The dawn sky was just starting to lift from solid black to a soft shade of blue when Lori pulled her car into the station’s lot. She stepped onto the pavement and peered at the disheveled, turn-of-the-century building, with its darkness and unsettling stillness. There was one window ajar on the second level, through which Lori could see a dim, red light and hear a faint rhythm.  She walked through the front entrance and dialed a three-digit code listed on the cardboard-thin wall for the radio station’s control room. A loud buzzer sounded shortly afterward and unlocked an inner glass door.

Lori knew where the control room was from the few times she had observed the station’s program director operating the mixing board. She quickly ascended a long flight of carpeted stairs leading up to the room she had seen from outside in the parking lot. She slowly opened the door.

“Hey, there,” Nick said, cheerily. He glanced up at her for only a brief second before turning his attention back to the knobs and levers of the mixing board. “Take a seat. Lori, right?”

“Yes.”

“You can watch me for a while, okay?”

“Okay.”

“This is a pretty easy one. It’s a gardening show. No special liners or sound effects. Ya just let ‘em talk.”

 Lori placed her purse next to an open carton of yogurt on a shelf, and then quietly sat down on a metal chair and positioned it to face him. She tried absorbing the pattern of his hand movements as they glided from one end of the board to the other, but he was going far too quickly for her. She reminded herself that this was just a college internship, and that she’d get credit for doing it no matter how badly she was at it. 

She blankly stared at a rose tattoo on Nick’s thin, muscular upper arm. Dressed in a concert t-shirt and baggy polyester pants, he had dark, spiky hair cut close to his head and a frizzy pony tail jutting out in back. Lori’s own hair was unwashed and lifted off her forehead with a brown, plastic headband. Because she had been running late, she was wearing the same gray sweatshirt with matching sweatpants that she had slept in the night before. Ordinarily she would have been self-conscious about her appearance, but Nick didn’t seem to be paying much attention to her. He was focused mainly on overseeing the mixing board in front of him.

“So how long have you been here for?” Lori asked.

“Oh, about seven months.” He placed one hand on his hip and kept the other pressed against the gain pot, keeping a close eye on the levels of the VU meter. Soft, muffled voices were coming through the audio board and making the meter rock steadily back and forth.

The room suddenly got very quiet. It was too early on a Sunday morning for there to be much of anything in the way of background noise, such as the bustling kind you would hear on a weekday afternoon with cars and trucks whirring past on a nearby roadway. With the eerie silence penetrating the dust-filled air of the control room like a sharpened sword, Lori struggled to keep the room filled with sound. Any kind of sound. “So what…” She moved her body closer to the edge of her chair. “What were you doing before?” 

“Before when?” he asked.

“Before you started working here.” 

 “I used to follow the Grateful Dead,” he said, stretching his arms out to both sides and opening his mouth wide in a yawn. “I uh… did a lot of traveling. Got to see all sorts of places, meet all kinds of people, experience…” He stopped.

“What?”

 “Oh, you know…” He chuckled and raised his eyebrows high into his forehead.  “Experience… all sorts of … experiences.” The chuckling turned into laughter. 

Lori sat quietly and looked at him for a moment. “What uh…” She noticed a fly had landed on her wrist. Its legs were tickling her. “What did you do for money?” She lifted her arm up and shook the fly loose.

“Oh, you know,” he said. 

Lori continued looking at him.

 “This and that.” 

The fly landed on a black gain pot at the edge of the mixing board. Nick shooed it away with his hand.  “I got by,” he said. “It was just for a few years. Decided to give it a break on my twenty-first birthday this past April.” He looked at Lori, as though waiting for a response.

She stared back at him, not knowing what he expected her to say.

 “Do you believe me? Or are you starin’ at all the little gray hairs on my head and thinkin’ to yourself, ‘there’s no way…’”

“No. I believe you. I can’t really see the gray hairs,” she said. 

“They’re from all the drugs I did.” He started to laugh. 

“Ah,” she said. She didn’t know whether to stay straight-faced or smile. Was he joking with her? Or telling the truth? She felt numbness in her cheeks. It was the same numbness that overcame her many times in the past when she’d find herself plagued with social ineptness. 

“So uh…” He brought the microphone pot down with his thumb and forefinger and raised another pot up that brought a hillbilly banjo duet to air. With his fingers on one hand lightly touching the surface of the pot, he pressed down on the keys of a nearby computer with this other hand. “What about you?” he asked. “What is this for you? An internship? You in school?”

 “I go to Springfield U,” Lori said, watching as he lowered the theme from “Deliverance” just in time for the first commercial spot to be played. She wondered how he could time everything so perfectly, and still be able to concentrate on talking to her. “One of my best friends…” she continued.  “This girl Angela… She just got her first job doing reporting on radio for a local news network… and she’s kind of an inspiration to me. I’m thinking about switching majors from science to communications.”

“Science is the reason I’m here right now,” he said, adjusting the gain pot. 

“Why?” 

“I was in the hospital for four months straight.” He looked up at her. “Had a heart transplant.” He studied her face for a response.

“Oh,” she said. She nervously glanced away from him and tried to find something to focus her gaze on that would help her to take the news in better. Her eyes fell on his fingers. His nails were curved around his fingertips, which looked abnormally enlarged.

He noticed where her eyes had fallen. “What?” he asked.

“Um. Your fingers,” she said. “They just look… Um…”

“Yeah.” He let out a strained laugh. “It’s part of my condition.”

Her eyes fell to the floor. The words faux pas flashed in neon pink in front of her. She wished she could take both her show of ignorance and display of tactlessness back, but they were splattered like projectile vomit all over him.

“Still have marks on me,” he said. He turned his body toward her, lifted his shirt to his chin, and traced his fingers along some pale tracks underneath his chest hair. He shook his head and let out a sigh. “I remember feeling so tired for so long. Used to get out of breath really easily. I’m feelin’ so much better now.”

“I’m glad.”

“All ‘cuz of science. Gave me a second chance here.”

Up until then, Lori had been following in the footsteps of her older brother, a graduate student in the biochemistry department on the central Springfield campus. She had been mesmerized by all that he had been learning over the years, and she marveled at his unyielding energy and the long hours he’d dedicate to the laboratory. She fantasized that he was spending every minute of every hour, thinking and planning and plotting strategies that could lead to cutting-edge discoveries that could redefine life as it had up to then been known. 

Seeing Nick, though, put her brother’s hard work into a different perspective. She felt suddenly ashamed, realizing that she had never looked beyond the frivolous flash and glamour and self-fulfillment to see the true impact of that kind of work on a person’s life. All of the future Bob Weir and Phil Lesh concerts Nick would still have the chance to go to, with his hair wrapped in a handkerchief and his tie dye shirt covered with beads, could be traced back to someone’s late night toiling in a laboratory.

 “You want to give it a try?” Nick asked.

“Give what a try?” 

“This,” he said, laughing. He pointed toward the mixing board. 

“Oh.” She hoisted herself onto his warmed, padded chair. With his guidance, she stiffly and awkwardly moved audio pots up and down and pushed buttons on verbal command. She could see the mechanics over time becoming rote, just as so many procedures she learned in biology lab had become with enough practice. Yet there was so much down time in between maneuvers, during which she was forced to listen to banter about Hedera Helix Selectas needing semi-shady locations and Peace Lilies requiring low lighting, that she was having trouble keeping focused on the clock.

“What happened to the break?” Nick asked. He had just returned from a vending machine on the floor below. 

Lori looked over at the clock. Her hand hovered shakily over the microphone audio pot. “What should I do?”

Nick set an opened can of juice down, quickly leaned over her, and pressed down on a button. “Late break coming guys. Get ready.” He waited a few seconds and with one hand slowly brought a bed of Ragtime music up under the hosts’ voices. With the other hand, he pushed a lever that set the nearby computer loaded with commercials in motion. 

“You’re clear,” he said to the invisible hosts before grabbing his juice can and guzzling it down.

“I’m sorry,” Lori said. “I’m not too good at this, am I?”

“You’re a little … slow.”

Lori sighed softly.

  “I’m just teasin’,” Nick said, laughing. 

Lori woke up early the following morning.  She slipped on a loose pair of pajama bottoms, sat down on her dusty hardwood floor, and began to do a series of stomach crunches. She continued until the lactic acid build-up in her upper diaphragm reached unbearably painful levels.  She swept her hand over the curvy surface of her bare stomach, hoping to detect a difference in its density, compared with how it felt ten minutes earlier.  She stood up and walked over to her mirror, dropped her pajama bottoms to the floor, and stared in awe at the slightly flatter-looking silhouette of her torso.  Could she have really lost unwanted fat in only fifteen minutes? Or was it just her posture creating an illusion?  

Staring at the wild, untamed unibrow that sat like an awning over her eyes, she wondered what she would look like if she didn’t have the means to occasionally keep all chaos in check, if she just “let herself go.”  She wondered if man had not created metal tweezers, pore-minimizing make-up, and electric shavers, would evolution naturally select only fair-skinned, lean blonds for the purpose of non-alcohol-inspired procreation?  

It was all a cruel joke, this sudden turn her body had taken just as she was finally starting to recover from the long-term repercussions of her adolescence, when her nose had shadowed her entire face and her fragile sense of self was particularly vulnerable to the verbal ice pick slayings typical of her unhinged Third Reich contemporaries.  With wire-framed glasses and metallic braces added to the mix, she might as well have been strutting around naked in a cage filled with ravenous rabies-infected rottweilers with slabs of raw meat strapped to her ankles.  She had emerged from junior high and had entered high school as traumatized and shredded as an unwanted petrified fruitcake uneaten and re-gifted for decades.  A fruitcake used occasionally as a mock football by young, restless children screwing around in basements on Hanukkah.

It was hard for Lori to envision herself as anything other than the fish-skinned, algae-infested, bog spawn creature from Hell her peers had convinced her she was and always would be. And not being able to see herself differently from how others had once seen her, she was left to wonder who in his right mind would want her? And how could she realistically be expected to want anyone in return who obviously wasn’t in his right mind? She chose to believe what they led her to believe about herself, and she allowed their unmitigated attacks on the already deformed spine of her soul to contribute to her eventual emergence as somewhat of a broken spirit. 

Rutherford was one of the few people Lori knew who could really relate to her.  So could Angela. And it was heartwarming to her to know that they were both a part of her life and could share in the recollection of the misery of their respective pasts. But she hardly ever physically saw either one of them anymore, what with Angela’s new reporting job keeping her busy at all hours of the day and night, and Rutherford’s growing obsession with his laptop computer and preference to funnel any and everything that came to his mind into type-written, electronic messages.  

From:

Subject:  he’s back in black

To:

Dearest Lori,

I don’t know if you remember or not, but when I was about 13 or 14, people would make my life miserable because I had braces and acne.  I doubt if you know the social horror and futility of weighing 320 (or was it 330?) pounds.  I had a stretch of time where six straight girls said “uhh… no thanks” when I asked them out.  SIX in a row! And these girls weren’t exactly Victoria’s Secret models, either.  Uggg! I’m getting ILL just thinking about it!

I’m a “master of disguise,” in case I never told you. The truth is I’ve never revealed my TRUE identity to anyone. Whenever you see me, I’m in my “big white dork” persona, but in actuality, I’m a shorter, skinny black guy.

Rutherford (a.k.a. The Tick)

(tune in for chapter 2…)

Here is a link to a real-life illustration of a challenging relationship dynamic, entitled “Reeling.”

And here are some other interesting and pertinent links:

DeMars Coaching – YouTube (DeMars Coaching)

Surviving Narcissism – YouTube (Dr. Les Carter)

NARCDAILY- You Are Not Alone – YouTube (NARCDAILY- You Are Not Alone)

Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach Inc – YouTube (Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach Inc)

DoctorRamani – YouTube (DoctorRamani)

Dr. Todd Grande – YouTube (Dr. Todd Grande)

Crappy Childhood Fairy – YouTube (Anna Runkle- Crappy Childhood Fairy)

Donielle Jolie Yanez – YouTube (Donielle Jolie Yanez)