The Man with the Grasshopper Mind

By Peter Innes

The Man With the Grasshopper Mind is a satirical romp, a burlesque of gender politics in the groves of academe. Dr. Douglas Ian MacPherson (Mac) is a professor at Daventry University. In his role as a scientist, he understands rats, though not, apparently, women.
He begins by clashing with Dr. Naomi Gelsey-Ashdown of the Department of Womens and Gender Studies, goes on to offend every female on campus, and ends by alienating the affections (such as they were) of his wife.
Even Macs colleagues dont care to know him, and aside from his dog, he has only one good friend and truehis marriage counselor and drinking companion, Dr. Yeti Bahnjakris.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 22, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595623211

Peter Innes

Peter Innes grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and studied at the universities of Oregon and British Columbia. He was a university professor for several years before becoming a consultant with a sideline in livestock. He has two grown children and lives with his wife in Alberta.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

ONE

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Mac’s office phone rang.

Hello.

Dr. McPherson?

Yes.

My name is Naomi Gelsey-Ashdown. Strong voice, deep. Assured manner. I’m the new faculty representative to the Student Publications Board from the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. I have been informed that you are the representative of the School of Education, and I thought it would be appropriate for us to get together before we attend the next meeting of the Board.

Sure. Anytime.

This afternoon? We could meet at the Faculty Club.

How about three o’clock, in the lobby?

Good. How will I recognize you?

Graying hair and grizzled beard. Brown corduroy jacket and blue jeans. You?

Magenta pantsuit.

That makes it easy. See you then. Mac hung up the phone. Magenta? He thought it might be some shade of green.

Mac, as is common among males, didn’t know magenta from polka dot. He lacked the innate ability to make the fine distinctions so readily apparent to females. He could, with certainty, identify only black and white, gray and brown, together with the primary colors (those that cars come in). Magenta meant no more to him than plum or cerise, mauve or maroon, turquoise, aquamarine, or robin’s egg blue. Even such a commonplace as puce was, to Mac, indistinguishable from pomegranate.

Had his wife been handy, Mac would have consulted her. She had a truly astounding ability to perceive color differences. Without Elizabeth to guide him, he consulted his dictionary. Magenta was defined as a deep purplish red. While he was at it, he looked up some other color words he’d heard her bandy about. Very interesting. He hadn’t realized that such an extensive and discriminating vocabulary existed.

He made a list—Mac was a list maker—and considered the evolutionary significance of this difference between the sexes. He could easily see why, in primitive times, a male hunter wouldn’t much care whether the saber-toothed tiger bent on munching his tripes for tiffin was tawny or buttercup or honey-hued. But women—how did their enhanced color-consciousness benefit them? He’d have to think about that.

In the event, he had no trouble finding Naomi. Persons clad in magenta do stand out among the generally drab denizens of faculty clubs.

Naomi? he asked. She nodded. She rose and offered her hand. Mac looked her over. She was tall—even in sensible flats about as tall as he was—and big-boned, but not fat. Good-looking in a strong-jawed, large-featured way. She was all business, was Dr. Gelsey-Ashdown. Her grip was firm. She didn’t smile. She invited Mac to the coffee shop and he assented, though he would have preferred the bar. Naomi led the way, Mac followed.

Naomi chose the table, one near a window, and indicated where Mac should sit. He sought to make small talk of the sort favored in academe—he asked Naomi about her scholarly work. "I saw the title of your doctoral thesis, Shagging Shunamites: Preserving Potency Among the Patriarchy. What’s that all about?"

"It’s all about, Naomi said, how old men abuse young women to stimulate their grossest appetites. The core of the work is an analysis of the despicable behavior of the ur-patriarch, David, King of Israel and his sons, Solomon and Adonijah, toward the maiden, Abishag the Shunamite."

Abishag? They didn’t teach us about her in Sunday School.

That’s not surprising since the Patriarchy has chosen to suppress her terrible tale, an all too familiar topos.

Topos? What the hell was a topos?

Polygamous patriarchies are very, very bad for young women, Naomi said.

For young men too.

Oh? How so?

The old guys in charge pick off the prettiest and ripest for themselves and the young guys get the dregs. Or nothing at all.

I hardly think that matters, sniffed Naomi.

Mac backed off. It was safer to make small talk. David may have had ten thousand wives but his wisdom was highly regarded.

Where did you get that idea?

It’s a line from an Irish folksong.

Yes, well…my thesis has just been published and is creating quite a stir.

Really?

It’s a best seller. Seventy-four copies already sold. Quite remarkable for a scholarly work, or so I’ve been told. I have one here. Naomi pointed to her bag. Would you like to read it?

Well…yeah…sure, Mac said, not wishing to offend.

Naomi took one from her bag. That will be fifty-five dollars, plus the applicable taxes. That comes to, let’s see, sixty-two dollars and fifteen cents.

Sixty-two bucks! Mac thought of begging off, of making some excuse. He hadn’t enough money in his wallet. He’d already spent his annual allotment for scholarly tomes. His wife would kill him. But in the end, he paid.

Goddam! He’d at least have to browse the thing. Might be good for a laugh or two. And when he and Elizabeth took their annual vacation in the rented cabin by the lake, he’d consign it to the outhouse where it belonged, to be appropriately recycled.

Now that my Abishag studies are at an end, Naomi said as she folded Mac’s money and stowed it in her bag, I’m working on…something else.

Something else. Mac was afraid to ask.

And what do you do? Naomi inquired.

I study the behavioral psychology of rats from an evolutionary perspective. Or did. My rat colony was infected by Mad Rat Plague two years ago and had to be—um—put to sleep. I’m just working up old data until I can…

A few words of explanation. Mac’s research specialty was handedness in rats. Early in his career, more by accident than design, he’d discovered that if you clip the claws on only one of a rat’s front paws, it will tend to turn to that side in a Y-maze—left clip left, right clip right. The effect was small but statistically significant and consistent for every strain and species of rat he’d tested.

In recent years, he’d been attempting to breed genetically left-handed lab rats whose inherent sinistrality would override the purely mechanical effects of claw-clipping. He’d still not succeeded when his work was interrupted by the plague. Too bad—might have been a Nobel in it.

Naomi had no interest in Mac’s rat researches. But to be fair, who would?

I see, she said. Now, with regard to the student newspaper… Mac knew from her manner that he was about to hear, not an extemporaneous opinion, but a carefully considered position …I feel that I must be open with you regarding my approach to student journalism. My viewpoint is a feminist one. Naomi paused to assess Mac’s response to that. His face was carefully blank. A feminist in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies? Imagine that!

Historically, Naomi continued, "newspapers have been just another repressive, male-dominated, women-destroying institution. Coverage of women and their concerns has been confined almost entirely to the ghetto of the women’s pages except when there’s some scandal titillating to the male libido. The recent rash of what can only be termed ‘bimbo journalism’ attests to that.

Sniggering sexism, she concluded.

The needles of Mac’s internal polygraph were jittering but, uncharacteristically reticent, he made no comment.

We must change all that, Naomi went on. We must have greater female representation on the Editorial Board and on the senior staff of The Clarion, and we must devote a far larger proportion of the content of the newspaper to material of particular interest to women.

I see what you mean, Mac temporized. But you should be aware that there are already more women—he said ‘women’ advisedly, since he guessed Naomi would bridle at ‘girls’—than men working on the newspaper.

Yes, yes, Naomi said impatiently, but most of them are low-level flunkies. I’m talking about positions of authority.

But the Executive Editor, Stevie Thorsby, is a woman.

Tokenism. The Editor-in-Chief, the Managing Editor, and almost all of the Senior Editors are males. Did you know that?

As a matter of fact, Mac admitted, I didn’t.

And do you seriously think the Executive Editor has any real influence on what goes into the newspaper?

Maybe not as much as she should, was Mac’s measured response.

Right! You’re absolutely right! Just look at the bias. Take sports. Page after page devoted to ice hockey and only two column inches to synchronized swimming. That’s simply not good enough. Something must be done.

Yes, well, you may be right.

I’m pleased to hear that you agree. And I have a few ideas of my own…

Good gawd, there was no stopping her. Mac slumped in his chair, nursing his coffee, watching people come and go, wishing he were elsewhere. He only half-listened as Naomi quacked out the keywords as if she were lecturing.

"…raced and classed representatives of sexual identities…trans-disciplinary approach…historicized hierarchy of political sodalities…post-colonial weltanschauung…male-locked modalities…"

Naomi, it seemed, was fluently familiar with that dialect of English known to scholarship as Fembo-Radical Junkspeak. Mac, for his part, was a native speaker of Standard Canadian English. As such, he would never have used such a phrase as male-locked modalities whatever that meant.

…feminist theory would suggest…a persistent primacy of masculinist discourses…phallocentric genital landscape…codes of power…underpinnings of misogyny…the misleading binary of class and genderosity…

Mac wished that his cooling coffee were a pint of his regular tipple, Meldrum’s Ultra Dark, a gold-medal winner at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889—said so right on the label. A stout brew, it was—a double dose of hops and malt and alcohol, popularly known as MUD. He saw himself sitting in a corner of O’Reilly’s, his favorite pub, a rollicking Irish band banging away in the background, Naomi’s in-your-face hectoring a drunken fanfaronade at the edge of his hearing, three tables away. The notion touched the silly Celtic heart of him. He smiled. Naomi noticed.

You find my comments amusing?

Oh no. I was just remembering a tune—‘Beware of them damsels wot skips up and down.’ It’s another…

Irish folksong?

Right. Right. You know it?

Dr. MacPherson, what is the relevance of any of this? May I proceed?

Well rowdy-dow-dow, ain’t we the starchy bitch. Oh, sure. Sorry. Go ahead. His words belied his thoughts—them damsels was as relevant as anything he’d heard from Naomi.

…mechanistic, utilitarian, philistine…white male heteronormativity…profoundly limiting…the Americanocentric, capitalistic, Western paradigm…depersonalized and objectified…

Meldrum. Mac had warm feelings for the old guy. He’d been producing the same righteous brew for over a hundred years. And he wasn’t in it just for the money. Nosiree, Meldrum cared. That’s what Mac liked to think, though he knew perfectly well there was no Meldrum, just a bunch of suits sitting around in a boardroom, plotting how to cut costs without sacrificing so much quality they pissed off their customers. And isn’t that always the way? Find something you really like and they improve it. Sonsabitches, they should all be taken out and…

The quacking stopped. Mac, roused from his alehouse reverie, glanced at Naomi. She was looking intently and, Mac thought, disapprovingly back at him.

Dr. MacPherson, she said. You’re not listening.

Oh but I am, Mac lied. I am.

Surely you agree, she said, that it’s all a myth… (Naomi used the word myth in its modern sense, i.e. a false belief) …and that something must be done immediately.

What? Oh…yes…of course…indubitably. A sound idea. Very sound.

Yes, said Naomi, "but we need more than just ideas. We need a plan, a course of action to establish full-spectrum dominance over editorial functions at The Clarion. She rummaged again in her bag and drew forth a typescript. This is a three-year plan of affirmative action to reform the newspaper. It’s all here—a Central Steering Committee to develop guidelines and directives, quotas to encourage greater participation by women and visible minorities, the mandatory use of non-sexist, non-racist, inclusive language. Naomi handed the typescript to Mac. It’s only a first draft, of course, but I welcome your comments."

Now?

No, no. It’s only fifty pages, but it is quite dense and I’m sure that it will take several hours for you to fully comprehend its import. I suggest that you read it this evening and we can talk about it tomorrow. We mustn’t waste time. After all, the next meeting of the Editorial Board is only a week away.

Yeah, I guess it is, Mac said. Unfortunately, Naomi, I’m very busy right now preparing materials for one of my courses.

Too busy to give a few hours of your time to something as important as this?

Especially this, Mac thought. He tried stalling. It is important, of course, but it’s just a bad time for me—heavy instructional load this semester. A new course—new to me.

Hmmph. Obviously Naomi wasn’t buying what Mac was peddling. Very perspicacious of her. A dangerous woman. Best to placate her. Okay, he said, I’ll do my best.

Naomi smiled for the first time. Good. I’ll be in my office between seven and nine tomorrow morning. I took the liberty of checking your lecture schedule and I know you’re free till ten. Shall we say eight?

Eight? He was hardly even awake at eight. Damn the woman. She left him no wriggle room. Damn, damn, damn. Sure, eight it is.

The main business of their meeting settled, Naomi sought to be polite. I guess we’re all looking forward to the Grand Opening of the Parsnip Centre.

Yes. It should be a rare experience.

Incredible.

Yes, exactly, just the word.

I might see you there.

Indeed, you might.

Mac’s responses were, politely, a line of guff. He did not, as a matter of principle, attend Grand Openings or similar ceremonials. Besides, he hadn’t been invited. As for Naomi, if he never saw her again, it would be too soon. They were not now, nor ever would be, compatible or, as the French say more succinctly, compatible. (With regard to the occasional mot français, this story is set in Canada.)

Mac was about to say, Sorry, I gotta run, when Naomi rose abruptly. I must be going, she said. I’ll pay for coffee. Don’t forget—eight tomorrow morning.

Yeah, sure, Mac muttered as he watched her go. He rose and repaired him to the bar.

He sipped a tall cool MUD while browsing the document, which was titled The Clarion Deconstructed With Recommendations For Its Recrudescence. Hot stuff. It began with a brief, revisionist history of humankind that sought to explain the systematic suppression of women over the last ten millenia, a system that subordinated, excluded, and devalued females to the extent that their very deities had been cast down. The Divine Feminine, the Great Mother, burgeoning and bountiful, rooted firmly in the Earth, had been supplanted by a Sky God, the embodiment of the Patriarchal Mythos.

Mac found the argument unconvincing. It seemed to him, in the classical parlance of rhetoric, abunchabullshit. But then he would, wouldn’t he, being one of those unreformed males and all? He drained his glass, ordered another, and returned to Naomi’s report.

Now she was getting down to specifics. The liberation of The Clarion and the installation of a new, pro-feminist management. A firm editorial stance in favor of generally accepted feminist theory. Strict controls over graphic materials—no more Page Three pinups of half-naked cheerleaders or bosom-flaunting homecoming queens. The exclusion of any opinion that might give comfort to reactionary elements within society, including both revanchist males and quisling females.

Naomi offered her services as Faculty Co-chair of the Central Steering Committee she was proposing. As well, she was prepared to be a member of the Board of Non-Sexist Censors, since she had, as she modestly observed, experience in these matters.

Mac was appalled. Was the woman unacquainted with the concepts of free speech and freedom of the press, rights for which our forefathers—oops—foreparents fought and died? What kinda wusses did she think her male colleagues were? There was only one defense, full frontal attack. Dr. Douglas Ian MacPherson (ostensibly a mild-mannered professor of Educational Psychology, but in reality that ultramasculine superhero, Captain Hawg) would lead the offensive—balls out, tusks bared, stomping and snorting, scaring the bejeezus out of all who stood in his way. Nah, just kidding. Mac was, in reality, a mild-mannered sort.

Mac headed back to his office. One thing he’d decided, he didn’t want to meet Naomi any time soon, certainly not tomorrow, and definitely not at eight in the bloody morning. And damned if he wasn’t going to resign from the Student Publications Board—he’d had that assignment far too long. He’d talk to Fabian that very afternoon—Fabian owed him one.

Fabian Fitzdottrel had become Chairperson (Interim) of the Ed Psych Department just four months earlier, as a temporary replacement for Nodens Barley, who’d gone on to better things. Fabian was a stopgap, a compromise in one of those internecine squabbles so beloved of academics, an exercise in the chickenshit politics of marginalized minorities.

At first Mac, who didn’t care a fiddler’s fart about that kind of thing, had viewed the whole business with great good humor. He’d made little jokes, a running commentary on the proceedings that neither of the warring factions found amusing. But in time, he’d become a vociferous champion of Fabian’s appointment if only because departmental meetings (voluble, heated, and on one memorable occasion, tearful) were dragging on for hours, and he had more important things to do. Fabian had thanked him personally for his support. Anything I can do, he’d said. Just let me know.

Mac caught Fabian just as he was leaving for the day. He quickly presented his arguments—an unusually heavy course load, too long on one committee, and too many (unspecified) personal and ideological conflicts. All in all, an unbearable level of stress. He needed a new assignment to revivify his commitment to (trumpet voluntary here) The Daventry Way.

I can certainly understand the stress, Fabian said, though three months doesn’t seem all that long. They agreed on a new assignment to the Facilities Allocation Committee. That suited Mac just fine—he could keep ye eye skinned for those space-greedy bleeps who coveted his (temporarily) empty lab space.

To mark his triumph and calm his still-jangled nerves, he dropped in at O’Reilly’s on the way home to hoist a few cool ones. In the joy of celebration, he clean forgot to cancel his appointment with Naomi. MUD has that effect.

TWO

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By late afternoon, Mac was home from work but his wife wasn’t there to greet him. Elizabeth! he called. No answer. And then, more forcefully, "Eliz-a-beth! He looked into the kitchen. He shouted upstairs and down. Still no response. Goddammit woman, where are you?" And then he heard. Was it a giggle? A snuffle? A strangled cry for help? He hurried through the back door to the garden.

She was lying on her back, between the rows of vegetables, her blue cotton sundress arranged modestly about her. She was shading her eyes with a hand, talking animatedly. At first he thought she was talking to Nabs, who was lying alongside her, chin on paws, snoozing in the sun. But no, he decided, she wasn’t talking to the dog. Her dog-talk was Motherese. This was more woman-to-woman.

Elizabeth, what are you doing?

She was startled. She swept her hand away from her eyes and checked to see that her hem was appropriately placed. She looked up at Mac with a spacey eye. She didn’t seem pleased to see him. Nothing, she said. Talking to my plantsh.

Well, you look a little silly lying there in the dirt, chattering away. Here, take my hand and I’ll help you up.

Unh, unh. I like it here. And it’s not dirt, it’s errsh, Muzzer Errsh.

Elizabeth! Take…my…hand!

She did, sulkily, from habit. He pulled her to her feet. Her eyes rolled up and she staggered, nearly falling. Mac steadied her with an arm around her waist. He stooped to pick up her hat and slapped it against his leg to dislodge the dirt. It was one of those big, white, floppy, down-over-the-ears hats that made her look like a moron. Not that he’d ever say so—after twenty years of marriage, he knew better than that.

Elizabeth, what is the matter with you?

Nothing, she said, looking snootily up at him. I’m fine.

Mac caught a whiff of her breath. Aha! Elizabeth, my dearest, you are faced.

Faysht?

Yes, faced. Shit-faced. Snockered. Smashed. Hosed. Hammered. Pissed.

Meeeee?

Yes, you. Pissed.

I am not pished. I feel wonnerful. It’s my elig…hic…my eligzers. They make me feel so gooood.

Elixirs? Ah, her most recent passion, Mac remembered. Some kind of herbal remedy. He sighed. Maybe you’d better tell me about these elixirs. Where do you get them?

I make them myshelf. Jush 1i1 ole me.

Okay, so you make them yourself. But how? What’s in them?

I poshentize them.

Potiontize?

Not potiontize, silly. Then very slowly, carefully enunciating each syllable, Po-ten-tize. The herbs and flowers—in water—in the sun. Don’t you know anything?

Mac ignored the last. Got it, he said. You potentize them. Then what?

I stabilize them. I make a tincture.

A tincture? Alcohol? What kind of alcohol?

Hey. Wha’s with all the questions? You some kinda detective? Elizabeth was getting a little of her own back. It was a line Mac himself used whenever he thought she was getting a little too nosey about his comings and goings.

C’mon Elizabeth. What kind?

Nonayerbizniz.

Mac insisted, What kind?

Brandy, she mumbled, grudgingly.

How much?

Cheap stuff, she said, thinking they were in for an argument about money.

No, no, not the price, the amount.

Half and half. Half brandy and half poshen…potentized water.

Half brandy. Pretty strong stuff, Mac thought, for a woman who rarely drank. Let’s see—Mac did a rough calculation—the brandy would be about forty percent alcohol so, diluted by half, Elizabeth would be knocking back potions that were close to twenty percent. That was a least twice the concentration of his own favorite tipple.

Tell me, my sweet, what dosages of what nostrums did you have today?

Well, let me see. Elizabeth tilted her head back and looked heavenward, straining to remember. I was feeling kinda depressed so I prescribed an ounce of Gentian for Depression, then Vervain for Nervous Strain, and Agrimony for Restlessness. I started to feel a lot better but I still couldn’t decide what to do, so I had a sip of Scleranthus for Indecision. That’s when I decided to come out to the garden. But for some reason, I was feeling a little woozy, so I took Olive for Weakness and Clematis for my Dreamy State. She thought for a while. That’s it. I felt pretty good then so I thought I’d have a chat with the rutabagas.

Rutabagas, eh? I guess that’s fancy talk for what we call turnips back home. You talk to turnips?

Not to them directly. To their deva.

Their deva. Of course. And what is a deva?

Know something, Mac? For a man of your education you are sometimes sooooo stupid. The devas are—she closed her eyes and spoke as if she were reciting a carefully memorized text—the soul essences of plants which, though formless themselves, shape the energy from which the plants are formed. She smiled, pleased with herself for having remembered so well. Animals have devas too.

Are these the same devas that rejoiced at the birth of the Gotama?

How should I know? Who’s the Gotama?

Buddha.

Whyncha say so? Y’know I’m no Buddhisht.

Not today, Mac thought, maybe tomorrow. And what did she say, this rutabaga deva? She is a she, isn’t she?

I dunno. I think of her as a she but maybe they’re sexless. Anyway, she said that the rutabagas are coming along nicely but that we must all continue to work together to make sure they fully achieve their special rutabaga quality, their rutabaganess, she called it.

Makes perfect sense to me.

"She said that I must be very careful to stay attuned and beam out thoughts of love and respect. She said that whenever a person loves and tends a plant, some of that person’s being passes over, and of course, vice versa. She said that the rutabagas are partly me and some part of me is a rutabaga."

Goddam, Mac thought, no straight man ever delivered a better setup line. But, in the interest of marital harmony, he eschewed the opportunity to make a cheap joke. So if a person talks to a turnip, there are two turnips, so to speak?

Nasherly. In time, humans and rutabagas and everything will all be one.

Garden variety mysticism, Mac thought. He shook his head and wondered, not for the first time, how he, a man of some intellectual pretensions, had come to plight his troth and swear eternal fidelity to this…this turniphead. He must have suffered an acute attack of gonadal hysteria, a testosterone-induced blunting of the higher faculties. More simply, as a young man, he’d just had to have it and she’d been willing, provided of course, they were married. And so they were.

Darling Elizabeth, he asked, do you know what they call people who talk to turnips?

Don’t know. Don’t care. And besides, I sometimes hear you talking to no one at all. Who are you talking to?

To myself. That’s normal. But people who talk to turnips, they’re crazy. If you keep knocking back those tinctures, you’re going to hear the maunderings of the ethanol deva, the deva of dipsomaniacs. Tell me, where do you keep this wonderstuff?

Nunna yer beeswax.

None of my beeswax? Baby, baby, listen to daddy. I come home to find my wife flat on her ass in a turnip patch, hallucinating like some degenerate pisstank and she tells me it’s none of my business? Who do you think is going to look after poor wee Nabs when they come to take you away? Me, that’s who.

Mac’s mention of Nabs got Elizabeth’s attention—she’d always been a softy when it came to the welfare of her widdo doggy-woggy.

All right, she said. They’re in the cold room in the basement.

Mac took her by the arm and led her down the stairs. Nabs followed, tail industriously wagging. And there they were, thirty-two fake-crystal, glass-stoppered, half-liter decanters.

Elizabeth had been her usual methodical self. The decanters were lined up in alphabetical order, each labelled in a fine italic hand with the name of the active ingredient, the date of preparation, and the condition(s) for which it was efficacious. Most were nearly full, but a few were drawn down by more than half. Mac read the labels of her favorites: Gentian for Depression, Crabapple for Unhappiness, Gorse for Hopelessness, and Pine for Self Blame.

As Mac could plainly see, the language of the elixirs bespoke a less than healthy mental state. He’d have to think about that—tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m confiscating these, he said. And I forbid you to make any more.

You forbid me? Hah! You and what army?

Get a couple of boxes from the storeroom and help me pack this stuff.

Do it yourself.

Okay, I’ll get the boxes. You go to bed. But Elizabeth stayed where she was, and when Mac got back she had already polished off a nearly full bottle of Willow for Resentment and was glugging Cherry Plum for Fear of Doing Something Desperate, straight from the decanter. Mac snatched the bottle—Give me that!—from her hand. I told you, go to bed. I’ll make my own dinner.

She went. Mac heard her muttering as she staggered up the basement stairs. She slammed the door with a terrific crash. He heard her stump across the floor above him and then another crash as she slammed the door to the bedroom.

Later, he found her lying on a rug. He dragged her over and lay her on the bed—nearly broke his farking back. He covered her with a blanket. She woke briefly and opened one unfocussed eye. What kind of an animal, she wanted to know, puts his wife to bed without a nightie? And then she slept, with Nabs in full curl at Mommy’s feet.

Downstairs again, Mac conducted a series of multiple pairwise comparisons. The Mimulus was, he thought, more sprightly than the Agrimony and the Impatiens more full-bodied than the Hornbeam. Best of all was the Gorse. Must have been a good year for Gorse. Either that or Elizabeth had used a better brand of booze.

Now, some may wonder at Mac’s easy acceptance of his wife’s inanities. But that’s just the kind of guy he was, excessively uxorious, near-saintly in his tolerance of spousal excess. He knew there wasn’t much point in either argument or instruction. Tried that, didn’t work, not with Elizabeth. He’d wait until the morrow morn, when she was sober but still suffering, to suggest—gently, mind—that these medications might be a little too potent for one of her refined sensibilities. Butter her up a bit and nip a potentially serious problem in the bud—no man wants a wife given to solitary tippling.

As he continued his taster’s tour of Elizabeth’s trove—this extract of Skunk Cabbage was surprisingly