Transformation

Geörg and I met at the university in Münster and right away I knew I’d marry him. It was something about his honest face, his giant ears and crooked teeth. They relaxed me. We began as lab partners, in long coats and safety goggles. The first time I looked at the plastic over his eyes, I could already see our house and the children and our jobs and the car.

Now that we’ve been married for sixty-two years, it’s difficult to make sense of things. How can I put it? Geörg and I have grown into each other. We’ve had a transformation.

I should be frank. Something happened. I don’t know why or when, exactly. Whether the change was instant or gradual. We simply evolved and the memory is foggy. It was sometime after we moved to the United States, in 1971. We lived in New York first, then Chicago, and finally San Francisco. Always pushing further west. In a few years we’ll end up even further west, in the Pacific Ocean. That’s where we’ve asked our daughter to scatter our ashes.

Sometime in between 1971 and now, my husband became a cactus. He’s a very special type of cactus, one that my botanist neighbor has told me so much about. It’s called the Cephalocereus Senilis, or more commonly referred to as the “Old Man Cactus.” And I’ve been reduced to long white strands of hair that grow from my husband’s areole and crawl along his surface. I am abundant and shaggy. More like fur, perhaps, than hair. I cover over my husband entirely, wrapping myself around his thick yellow spines, concealing his dangerous nature from the public. I keep his secrets safe.

My neighbor tells me that the Old Man Cactus was originally cultivated in eastern Mexico, in the Guanajuato and Hidalgo regions, but its seeds have traveled to other parts of the world. This makes sense, because Geörg and I have never been to Mexico. We’ve never been to a real desert.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if a stranger were to pull us apart with bloody fingers—to rip me away from my husband. Perhaps I’d look like one of those strange clouds that toss around airplanes, or a dust ball forgotten behind the bathroom door. Truthfully, I think I would no longer look like anything—just a colorless ball of dust to be disposed of. And he would be vibrantly green and yellow and exposed.

We both need each other, you know; we have come to that point. I need him in order to have an identity, and he needs me for protection. Double protection, really. I protect him from the world and the world from him. We would never survive alone.

My husband is the way most cacti are. If you touch him carefully, he’s soft. He tickles a bit. He could tell you a funny joke at a cocktail party. Or pat your back to show that he respects you. But if you try to pick him up or manipulate him, or if you handle him with too much pressure, well, then he can hurt you. He can sting. Prick until you bleed.

His yellow thorns that I try so hard to cover are each there for different reasons. They have sprouted out of his personal problems, the things in life that hurt when we try to swallow them.

For instance, he was fourteen years old when he had to put on a uniform. It was a month before the war ended, but still, he was too young to leave. That’s how he developed his first thorn. It erupted from his skin the way a pimple breaks out overnight. In the low part of his back, hidden, at first, by clothing.

His second thorn emerged when his father’s body was never found. He was lost like a paper ticket that flutters in the wind.

And then there were the tiny thorns that came in the United States. Struggling to learn a new language at forty-two years old. Pretending to laugh at joke after joke. Getting used to the smells of supermarkets, the handshakes and whispers at country clubs.

He was a wildly successful man, my husband. And then when he turned sixty-five he had to let it all go to a younger man in a nicer suit. He sat in his office one last time and looked out the window. He told me there was a playground on a rooftop across the street, one he’d never noticed until his last day.

I should mention that we had a son who one day decided to remove all of his clothing in the middle of Washington Square Park. Since then he’s heard voices that nobody else can hear. The distressing thing is that my son isn’t a liar. That’s another thorn. It’s the one that I feel the most, the one I wrap around most tightly.

~

Our granddaughter is coming to visit us this afternoon. I’ve over-prepared, I’m anxious. Things will unravel the moment she steps in the door. That’s the thing about grandchildren. They’re always too rushed, too distracted, too ungrateful. And yet I love them more than I love myself.

She is coming because she has a broken heart. She was living in Mexico, where she had a lover. I want to ask her if she saw an Old Man Cactus in its natural habitat. I want to ask her so many questions, but I know that I will forget all of them the moment she comes in with her Hollywood hair and her fashionable clothes. Sometimes I think she knows more about life than I do, which is absurd, considering she’s only twenty-three. And other times I realize that she knows absolutely nothing, that she doesn’t know a thing about perspective.

“Do you want me to tell you a story about the war?” I say when I remember that. And after she shakes her head I ask, “Do you want me to massage your feet?”

When she finally arrives the sky is pink. Her plane was delayed. She is shockingly thin and disturbingly tanned. I have the urge to rub her skin in attempt to smooth out the sun’s damage.

“You’ll wrinkle,” I almost say, but I stop myself, remembering that my granddaughter is unapologetically American and that she does not know how to appreciate a recommendation the way German children are bred to do.

She leans forward to hug us and pats our backs softly, making sure that Geörg does not hurt her. It is painful to see how the roles are reversing, how she looks at us now, like we’re the ones that need taking care of. Soon she’ll be trying to water us when we don’t need water.

She rolls her suitcase behind her and keeps her sunglasses on inside our apartment. I offer her oranges and Mint Milanos, and as she eats she tells me that while the mints are nice, the chocolate raspberry ones are her favorites. I suggest that she write this down on the notepad by the phone so I can remember for next time. She does this with a laugh: two years ago, on her last visit, she had apparently scribbled the exact same thing.

She sets us on the windowsills where we can have maximum sunlight. The Old Man Cactus needs as much light as possible. During the day we need to be moved from the east window to the west. She tells us that she is still in love with the man in Mexico. How painful, she says, to be madly in love with the incorrect person.

I want to slap her face, to tell her that I didn’t have bread or stockings as a child, that I had to take the blades off my ice skates and use those for boots, but then I stop because she is crying. To be in love with the wrong person. Such a concept would have never occurred to me.

My family didn’t want me to marry Geörg. There were other women, inappropriate incidents. My sister and I stopped speaking a long time ago because she couldn’t take it how my husband behaved at family dinners, how he never allowed me to start or finish my own sentences, how he rolled his eyes the moment I opened my mouth. My sister thinks it’s entirely Geörg’s fault that I’ve become what I am. But it’s me who chose to stay with him. It was my decision to evolve into this white tangled fur.

I won’t pretend he’s without flaws. His anger is unpredictable. The first night of our granddaughter’s visit, for example, she goes out to our backyard and sits on the woven swing that hangs on the apple tree. Nobody has touched it for years. She pushes her feet off the ground and she doesn’t notice when the small branch above her starts to bend and then crack, smiling its initial wrinkles. When she falls, hitting the ground with a broken swing and broken branch crashing onto her head, she is surprised but uninjured. As we watch her from the windowsill, the yellow tips of Geörg’s thorns start to peek out my fur. They become bigger and thicker as his rage grows violently. When she comes back inside, he is ready to hurt her.

You see, it was Geörg’s mother’s swing, I try to explain, weaving tighter around him. I swirl around and get tangled in myself. It was an antique.

But my granddaughter feels the hatred and the sting of his poison right away. She bleeds in several places. Geörg wants to hurt her deeper, but I hold on, protecting him from doing more harm than he should. Later that night my granddaughter asks me what many people have asked me before in my life: How can I stand it?

I am part of him, don’t you see? I want to say. I am what makes him beautiful, and he is what makes me exist. Once, I was in love with him. It was simple.

There are things to look forward to, you know. My clever botanist neighbor tells me that the Old Man Cactus blooms a flower at the end of his life. A beautiful, vibrant flower. It could be white or yellow, or even red. Sometimes it never blooms at all, but I have hope.