The Houseplant

My boss has a lot of houseplants in her office. Filing cabinets, bookshelves, windowsills, a little wooden stool in the corner, her desktop. Every available surface has a pot, a plethora of leaves, needles, thorns, buds, and flowers, lush or wilted.

But not just her office. The whole building, really, is overgrown with them. You can find them at the end of corridors, on the landings of the staircases, atop appliances, crowding countertops, up high, down low, deep in the corners, looking out, listening in. You have your jasmines and geraniums, your birds of paradise and bougainvillea, your spider-plants and succulents, your ferns and figs, your lilies and laceleafs, a botanical bazaar, a veritable hothouse.

In meetings, my boss will occasionally stand up and walk over to a plant. She will lean in close. She will rub the dust off the surface of a leaf with the pad of her thumb. She will blow gently on the strands of a spiderweb. She will snap a yellowing leaf from the stem and crumple it in her hand. Only then, crumpled leaf stowed in her closed fist, will she turn to face you. Only then will she give you her answer.

She did it at my job interview. The questions weren’t what I expected. No, they were not the usual questions. In fact, they were only remotely related to the position that I was applying for, the night janitor position. At some point I began to doubt if I there wasn’t some misunderstanding. Were we even talking about the same job? It didn’t seem like it. I couldn’t shake the sensation that the interview wasn’t going very well. I was going off script, which is perhaps the very effect that she was trying to produce. My answer to her last question had gone on for far too long and become far too diluted, far too distant from the original theme. Somewhere along the line, I veered off path and, lost in the brambles, couldn’t find my way back.

My boss suddenly stood up. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to keep talking. I did. She walked over to the corner of the room to consult her plants. She walked so quietly that I was unable to hear her footsteps. She leaned in close, touched a leaf, closed her eyes.

Without ever having answered the question, without finding my way back, I stopped talking, spent, out of words. The room suddenly felt much bigger. With each passing second, in fact, the room grew larger and larger. The future, all of a sudden, seemed full of possibilities.

The room returned to its normal size when my boss opened her eyes. She turned around to face me. “You’re hired,” she said.

It was one of the last times she talked to me. Janitors, I would soon discover, are invisible, mostly invisible, I should say. Fixtures, they are normally overlooked, unless of course there is a mess to clean up. Then, all of a sudden, we are visible again, mop in hand, just in time to take orders.

After the interview, I couldn’t get it out of my head, the whole thing about the plants. There was something there, and I was determined to figure it out. It didn’t take me long to come up with a theory.

Naturally I began to suspect that it was indeed the plants who were running the show, albeit it in a behind-the-scenes kind of way. They were the real bosses, and my boss was only taking orders from them. Hence the need to check in with them so frequently. My first impression had been wrong. I had inverted the terms of the relationship. It wasn’t the plants who depended on my boss. My boss, rather, depended on them. An easy mistake to make.

Source: The Flower Mother (1972), written by Mary Calhoun and illustrated by Janet McCaffery

Well, they must have a method, then, to communicate, some technique for transmitting information surreptitiously. Through the soil perhaps, I conjectured. Or maybe the messages were transmitted directly through the skin of the thumb, the very pad, broader than those of the rest of the fingers, better suited for receiving information. A listening device, my boss’s thumb touched the grooves and indentations of the leaves, like a needle on a record, to decipher the messages encoded there. I didn’t rule out the possibility of a pulsation, a frequency, imperceptible to the rest of us, to the rest of our fingertips.

At some point, though, it started seemingly less probable, my first theory. Gradually, I replaced it with another one, of a slightly more paranoid character, influenced, no doubt, by the pangs of bad conscience over practicing kickflips in the back room when no one else is around.

In this new and improved version, the plants were informants, doing the dirty work, the lowly task of collecting information. Strategically placed throughout the building, they were within earshot of every conservation. Every misdeed was within their purview. In this case, they must be fitted with microscopic audio and visual recording devices. I routinely inspected the pots for cords and cables and microchips, but all I found were dried pods and wilted runners and crinkled leaves and the occasion dried wad of gum, stashed there no doubt by mischievous clients.

At last, it occurred to me. This, just recently, after much observation and even more deliberation. The elusive solution to the enigma.

It’s all a ruse.

My boss never goes with her first emotions. She never shows her cards until all the bets are placed. Before making her responses public, she subjects them to a meticulous process of refinement, not unlike alchemy, or photosynthesis. As if they were carbon dioxide molecules, she takes her first impressions over to the plants, who then run them from leaf to root and back again. In the end, they come out oxygenated, tempered, proportionate, properly shaped, tailored to the occasion.

Askance, from the point of view of a night janitor, the eyes and ears of the building, not unlike a houseplant, I have seen this process. And I have seen how well it works. I am thinking about giving it a try, next chance I get, this technique of putting a plant between your initial reaction and the subsequent course of action. My boss of course deserves the credit. There is a reason, after all, why she is the big boss and I’m just the night janitor, a fixture of the building really, a shelf on the wall, a plant in a remote corner, leafy and inconspicuous.

Source: Words, Words, Words (1966), written by Mary O’Neil and illustrated by Judy Piussi-Campbell