Kudzu
by d. g. k. goldberg

I thought the show would be about Hendrix. Stupid PBS. But it was something to do with punk rock and its sole purpose seemed to be to deify Manhattan and disregard the rest of the world that did not shop at Bloomies or cross 42nd street. Bloomies--Bloomingdale's, one of the over-priced glossy catalogues that land---splat--- like a ruptured balloon (something to do with heart surgery) in my mailbox. JC Penney's sheets are good enough, and what the whatever is pima cotton anyway? Does anyone know? I hate city people. Think they are so damn superior to people like me who only want a yard.

What's anti-intellectual about having a yard?

Of course, my neighbors are every bit as bad as city people. Creepy SUV-driving, khaki shorts wearing snobs. They think they know how my yard should be. No appreciation for creativity. They just get in their growling global warmers and thunder off to the nursery and buy flats of whatever flowers everyone else plants. Fads. One year it's purple petunias, the next it is offensively neat rows of marigolds with their disgusting blonde heads rigid in a breeze. They've put no thought into their square little patches of mortgaged paradise.

I flicked the remote from the show that should have been about Hendrix and got a talk thing with Randy Weaver sounding much more rational and looking a lot sexier than the rabid FBI agent frothing on about God and Country. It was all much more than I could stand. My pansy-planting neighbors were probably having intense masturbatory fantasies about the FBI agent. Dweeb.

My husband snored softly, inoffensively, really on the pale peach (why had we bought that color, stains easily) sofa.

I spend a lot of time on the toilet. It's where I feel allowed to read and I mostly read about women in other countries, women in purdah, in harems, in Afghanistan slowly going mad behind baked walls of entombment fearing their flesh showing on a city street will impose a death sentence. I envy sexual slaves for I think they do not scrub toilets and even the most restricted, the most enslaved, the victims of vicious clitorectomy live in a haze of lust and longing that is better than a constant obsession with scrubbing appliances. When I am not worrying about vaginal odor, I am scrubbing the pipes beneath my sink---welcome to America land of Massengill and Lysol.

My husband, a perfectly good man, who didn't cause any of my angst or anxiety, is sleeping the sleep of the damned---damned because of health insurance, property tax, and car repairs to toil ceaselessly at a job he never imagined he'd like, so a woman he used to love can raise kids who he might recognize maybe someday. I am not a good feminist I can see where it might suck to be a male.

Click.

A channel where nubile Hispanic young women in thongs provoke me to become an isolationist because their asses are so smooth that I resent all immigration. If only they didn't have perky breasts. Never mind. They won't last long, one child, one decade…

Click.

An advertisement for a floor buffer, forgotten vestige of June Cleaver---immense bovine mechanized Frankenstein that skates across linoleum like a barely contained hurricane. I need it--we have hardwood floors. I write the number with fading pen, the ink dies but I press hard so that I make the imprint of the numbers on the back of the light bill. Hardwood floors mean we are better than our parents with their shag carpeting, their avocado green and harvest gold décor. Hardwood floors and listening to NPR and watching PBS make us special. We aren't really suburbanites, oh no, not really; we eat tofu and have hardwood floors. Even though Johnny is in soccer, it is so non-violent--you wouldn't want him to be a little barbarian, would you?

More snoring from my husband who thinks he's very clever because he can find a parking place close to the mall entrance. Really, he thinks it marks him as a special breed apart, a Mensa member extraordinaire, validated solely by his unique skills at getting into a place that requires three feet less of a hike to hit the climate-controlled splendor that houses Spencer's Gifts and Victoria's Secrets.

My husband being asleep means I can watch Jerry Springer; I recall the time from the TV section in the paper. I don't really watch TV except for PBS. Tonight on Springer there was supposed to be a bit about transvestite dwarves that marry obese ex-nuns who have previously been abducted by aliens. Not that I believe that crap. Or even watch it.

It's just I was bored. Kinda.

Click.

The Discovery Channel; I thought. I might have been wrong. Kudzu. Has to be some educational channel. Vegetation is superior to Springer. I scrunch into my chair and prepare to be enlightened. I love kudzu. The nursery doesn't sell it. I'd had to drive way out into the country to get it. But it only took a little. My neighbors hate me. They really do. Everyone in the subdivision hates me because instead of iris, as opposed to daylilies, rejecting roses, I planted kudzu. I do not lack imagination.

Kudzu first came into the USA in 1876, at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as part of a Japanese exhibit of ornamental plants. Two Floridians developed it for forage in the 1920's; during the Great Depression, the Soil Conservation Service promoted kudzu as a means of erosion control.

I was bored by the history of kudzu. Click. Click. The remote didn't work. I emerged from my chair and trudged to the television. I mashed on the buttons. Nothing. The television was stuck on the kudzu channel. Damn. I spotted an only-once-read romance on the coffee table. I clicked the off switch. The television remained on.

I was sucked back into the chair. I didn't understand what had propelled me into the cushions as I was flattened against the peach and beige tweed upholstery. Goes with the sofa. Peach. What was I thinking?

During the Depression, thousands of young men were given work planting kudzu through the auspices of the Civilian Conservation Corps. In the 1940s, farmers were paid as much as eight dollars an acre to plant fields full of kudzu.

I watched, mesmerized, the way I stare at the wavering light in the dentist's office as the green growth filled the television screen. I couldn't hear Roger snoring. I heard the whisper of rustling leaves, the steady creep of vagrant vines. The crinkle of leaves reminds me of the whirr of the dentist drill---why was I thinking those thoughts? I used to hate going to the dentist, but I like it these days. I like the neatly pencilled-in notations in my daytimer telling me to see Dr. Ross at 10 a.m. on the thirteenth, take Johnny to soccer, and pick up the dry cleaning. I like everything about my life from calling the newspaper to complain when they're late to buying prepared lasagna in plastic coffins at the Foodies counter in the sparkling grocery store bulging with goodies that even ten years ago only infested precious little specialty shops. I unpack designer food on my marble-topped counters; I sort out the sacks along the surface of my butcher-block table. My kitchen contains extra-virgin olive oil, pounds of basmati rice, and Hagen-Das ice cream---I am a happy woman. I am happiest crouched in my color-coordinated bathroom heavy with the scent of Lysol and potpourri while I read about women who suffer genital mutilation.

Kudzu.

I wondered if I could eat kudzu, it spread across the screen seductively, lush and vivid, somehow the color more intense, the moisture beading on broad leaves more real that most televised images. I felt a twinge of guilt about wanting to eat. What do I do all day, really? I go to appointments: dentist, hairdresser, periodonist. I take the spaniel to the vet, the child to soccer, and sneer at women who buy flats of annuals from the nursery: petunias in the spring, pansies in the fall. They die quickly. The women replace them seasonally.

I wondered, not for the first time, if Roger thinks of me as a bad investment.

Roger shuffled around on the sofa.

Kudzu doesn't die.

I was hungry. I thought about getting up and getting Cheetos, maybe making a sandwich, nuking some leftover lasagna and eating it guiltily off a TV tray. No, my thighs have spread like kudzu and I really need to schedule in aerobics.

The announcer talked about a woman who demonstrated kudzu quiche and deep fried kudzu at the Knoxville World's Fair. I don't really cook. I mostly pick things up. I seem so busy, all day every day, but what do I do?

The announcer's voice was almost drowned out by the sibilant hiss of the vine snaking out of the television. I was getting a tad carried away with my empty house and my empty life--both seem empty when everyone else is asleep. Of course, kudzu wasn't trailing out of the TV. It couldn't. Could it?

I heard that sometimes kudzu can grow as much as a foot a day, that during a good summer it could grow as much as sixty feet. That couldn't be true, could it? It had grown very quickly once I'd planted a bit in my yard.

The kudzu had crept from the screen, slipped across the floor, and twisted round the legs of the coffee table. It made a sound, a tiny "tch" of displeasure or disgust when it achieved the surface of the table. It sprawled across the table, covering it quickly in a blanket of green. Half the room seemed a surreal topiary, a television, a table, a stretch of floor sculpted in leaves.

Beneath the faint sound of spreading greenery, I heard a slight growl, a nasty, demonesque grinding, a raspy echo, a hint of hunger.

I sat shuddering into my chair. My own stomach rumbled. I thought, for the barest instant, that a long tendril of green growth turned fractionally in my direction. I held my breath. Muffled and distant I heard the sound of a car. Louder I heard the rat-like skitter of twigs scraping across the floor, over the table, toward the sofa where Roger slept oblivious.

I thought about making a sandwich, left over meatloaf smeared with dark mustard. The nervous flutter in my belly had to be hunger.

The vines swished and scuttled across the hardwood floor. Thin threadlike tentacles groped the air, swirled in the stillness, clawed the dust.

I gripped the arms of the chair.

Then I watched, mouth idiot open, white-knuckling the chair, eyes fixed, as the plant propelled itself across the space from coffee table to sofa. The green leaves danced appreciatively, wagged doggy-tail style as they wound and wrapped their way around Roger's sleeping self. Leaves shrouded him. Vines choked him. He was entombed in a pulsing mass of kudzu, a dead or dying ornamental garden conversation piece.

He hadn't made a sound.

The slight evil fairy wing-whisper of living leaves was the only noise. A faint sound, a funeral dirge from some primal forest, some darkened dale where pre-historic plants covered the ruins of forgotten civilizations.

Static on the television screen. Snow and charcoal. Screens didn't go dead like that, not in decades. Not unless there was a problem with the cable. The green monster covered the television while I impotently clicked the remote.

I stiffened. My heart began to hammer against my ribs. I felt like a potential trellis, a stick woman soon to be covered in green. Not with a bang or a whimper, not the fire next time, only the grim green of the world returning to rainforest, the air was damp, thick with the sweat stench of humid death.

I had to do something.

I jerked myself out of the chair and paced an empty bit of floor.

The kudzu inched after me. Part of the plant raised itself and shook broad leaves as if shrugging, as if to say, "No matter, we'll get you sooner or later."

In a sudden burst of fear or consciousness, I ran upstairs. I reached Johnny's bedroom door. I moved cautiously, quietly, shutting the door in increments so the cursed kudzu wouldn't sense my actions.

I slid across the polished wood to my own room. The huge bed glowered at me. The bedside lamp flickered. I dialed 911. "You've got to send someone out right now. I can't explain. No, it's in my house. Well, yes an intruder." I could tell the dispatcher thought I was a nutcase.

I thought maybe the plant was shaking, laughing at the futility of my efforts to impose civilization on the natural world. I wasn't sure. I only knew I heard something.

It was Johnny. I heard the wheeze of his mattress, the stumble of little boy into toy, the slapping of his bare feet against the hardwood floor.

I mashed the reset button on the phone. My stomach suddenly felt bloated, as if I'd eaten a dozen sandwiches, bulimically stuffed a half pizza down my raw throat, gorged to illness. I dropped the phone. Bile rose up my throat, the horrible tang of vomit etched into the membranes. I reached for the phone. Pointless. I could not speak. Green waves spewed from my mouth, half gnawed leaves assembled themselves into pristine kudzu. I retched up vines. They scratched the floor as they scurried across it.

"Lock your door, Johnny. For God sakes, lock the door." As I yelled more leaves tumbled from my mouth and vines wrapped spider-style around my legs taking me down. I grabbed the phone. I dialed. I could not hear the click of a lock. I couldn't hear an answer from Johnny. Broad green leaves filled the hallway.

I managed to dial 911. "Please, you have to send someone. Please please please." I was shrieking, hysterical. The bored voice on the other end assured me someone would be right out.

Leaves ensnared my legs. I was mummified, encapsulated, wound in kudzu. Immobilized.

Blue lights illuminated the bedroom. I heard the crunch of feet on gravel, the tinny sound of radio, the muffled sound of voices. They'd break down the door any minute. I knew it. I concentrated on my breathing. If I could just keep sucking air a few more minutes, they'd stomp through the overgrown kudzu and cut me loose. I'd be freed, unleashed, away from this unholy demon weed that had covered my house, strapped my arms to my sides, overgrown and grown across my entire life.

I heard the squish of heavy shoes on the resistant vine.

The kudzu didn't move.

It seemed to have stopped growing, stopped pulsing with life, ceased for a moment its omnivorous quest.

I sucked air.

"Well, damn." It was a male voice.

I strained against the leaves, unable to call out to my rescuers. My heart roared in my ears like the sound of the ocean, like the sound of waves of kudzu moving across sun-parched fields.

"What?" A second voice answered.

"I knew it was a crank call, we get them every so often. There's nothing out this way, just an abandoned house covered in kudzu. Been that way for years. Kids in the area sometimes wander though here and get hurt."

I heard footsteps. I couldn't tell whether they were leaving or searching the area. Lights danced in the shadows.

"Do you think someone is trapped inside? Maybe a kid on a dare or something?"

More footsteps. I tried to call out to them, leaves filled my mouth, vines squeezed my throat. I struggled for air.

"Maybe, but I can't see how anyone could have got inside."

I grabbed at the vines encircling my throat. I could not pull them off. I could not make a sound, nothing, not even a whimper. I heard car doors open and shut. Then I heard the sound of retreating cars melting into the night.

d.g.k. goldberg is the author of the recently published Skating on the Edge, a hilarious, off-beat fantasy of adventure and chain smoking. In it a disenchanted spell-caster, a feeding-disordered and phobic vampire with a penchant for television talk shows, an inept shapeshifter, a militaristic saint, and a surferesque Viking are aligned in a mission to find the answer to unanswerable questions, drink coffee, and slaughter vaguely annoying bystanders. In the course of their journey, they encounter a variety of Famous Dead Guys, Mythic Creatures, and Horrendous Jokes. Under the dominion of a patriarchal authority figure, they stumble blindly through layers of past, present, and future, only to find that No One will help them.