Carnations
Joni Renee Whitworth
In order to become closer to my older brother, who understands much of this world but not much of me, I have signed up for a ride along with him. It is the end of spring term at the University of Washington. I haven’t seen Jacob in three years, and the distance shows up as painfully long silences in forced telephone conversations. I get a B- on my Human Systems and Social Policy final, pack a duffel, kiss my girlfriend goodbye, and fly down to Orange County, a place I have never seen oranges.
He picks me up in Santa Ana at 7:00 a.m. in his beige 2001 Corolla, which is stuffed to the brim with small bouquets. Every flat surface in the car, including the drooping ledge beneath the rear windshield, has been outfitted with expandable shower curtain rods, which keep rows and rows of bouquets in place as we careen down Route 91. To make space up front, I double fist mason jars of pastel hydrangeas, daisy spray, and carnations. I stuff the rest around my feet, between my knees. I feel decorated.
“Wholesale, Madeline!” my brother gleefully informs me, “I’m killing it!”
Jacob, a theater type, has cured his post-recession blues. He’s fourteen weeks into his new job as the marketing director for a facial plastic surgeon who fixes people’s mouths after they’ve been blown to bits, crushed, mauled, or shredded.
“The worst of the worst,” Jacob informs me over crullers at Donut Story in Westminster. I learn that the plastic surgeon, Dr. Sergey Pearlman, has been in private practice since the late ‘80s, and the majority of his referrals come from dentists. In the last fourteen weeks, Jacob has become an expert in wooing dentists, or how, more specifically, to woo their front office managers, the ones who print out the list of surgical referrals and hand it to you. Jacob drives from office to office, brings flowers, and sings. The singing idea came as a great surprise to the plastic surgeon, who was nervous about such an unconventional marketing technique, but it is no surprise to me this morning, sitting with a dollar coffee, chortling into a doughnut hole.
“Oh, Jesus. I should have known,” I groan.
“They love it.”
“Let me guess, you don’t bother to call. Just walk into reception, pick a musical at random, and burst into song?”
Without the slightest trace of irony or shame, he says, “It's strategic. We serenade them.”
“You mean you accost them.”
“One could call it nonconsensual, to a degree, yes.” He finishes the last bite of cruller, wipes flaked icing from his mouth with an impossibly-thin napkin and gestures that it’s time to hit the road. In the car, my brother looks in the mirror and applies a layer of menthol chapstick.
I admit I’m intrigued. “Tell me more. What do you sing, specifically? What are the lyrics?”
“It's genius. We research the office staff online first, and I mean research. We comb the net...” his tone turning severe. This is my brother, who calls it “the net.” “...and I write dentist, well, dentistry-themed, songs, just for them. We make fake inquiries ahead of time from burner phones to get the names of the receptionists most likely to be there when we arrive.”
Jacob has been so successful at bringing in new business that he’s recently gotten approval to hire three part-time marketing interns, fresh young things from Golden West Community College. He describes his target market, the dentists’ receptionists, as wholly abandoned souls.
“You should see their faces. I mean, Maddy, Maddy, these people sit there all day, rescheduling no-shows, placating patients with steep copays for opioids, hassling people about overdue bills—”
“—dealing with solicitors,” I add from under my cherry red Angels baseball cap. He mailed it up to me a few terms ago and though it’s too small, I’m wearing it as a gesture.
“—so we tell ‘em, hey, if there’s been some kind of explosion? Some horrible car accident? Don’t waste another moment! You know who to call.” This script is enacted before my eyes in the office of Star Bright Dental.
“Shelly, Shellyyyyy,” my brother croons before the doorbell chime subsides. The room is hazy and smells of death and bleach.
A lone voice calls out, “Is that Jacob? I’ll be right up!” The whir of a copy machine flashes green light into a narrow hallway. As Shelly approaches with a fresh stack of paperwork, Jacob begins to sing and the room fills with his smooth baritone. I’m swept away in a honeyed wave of emotion. I recognize the song immediately. He’s doing a custom rendition of a reggae hymn called “Rivers of Babylon,” taught to us as children by our mother. Jacob has taken the liberty of updating the lyric “there he wept when he remembered Zion,” to “there she wept until she remembered Pearlman.”
Shelly’s face is enraptured.
Jacob sets a jar of carnations on her desk, scooting aside a patient sign-in sheet. I wait behind him. My only task is to hold our promotional materials, which describe the urgency of treating open wounds, juxtapose facial symmetry with mental health and self-worth, and offer a menu of services. The song comes to a close. Jacob hands Shelly a thick embossed business card reading “SERGEY PEARLMAN, MD,” promises to return next month, and holds the jingling door for me.
“Done, done, done,” he says in the car, scribbling notes on a clipboard, “Really, it’s quick work. Nine minutes is my average, but six is my record. Did you see how happy she was?”
“I did. That was something.”
“They teach you music up there? At college?”
“They... I’m trying to focus on classes that will get me a real job.”
“Huh.”
“It's—”
“—well, anyway. Shelly’s a sure win. Like I said, they never mind. Almost never. They get no love.”
We hit a dozen more targets in Westminster, then work our way through Midway City and Fountain Valley. Jacob has connected with each receptionist over a specific topic. With one, he’s bonded over funnel cake flavors, with another, telenovelas.
I met Pearlman once on a video call and, wouldn’t you know it, he did have beautiful teeth. He happened to walk by one day while I talked with Jacob over Facetime. Pearlman was tall, wore an elegant watch, and waved through the screen.
“So, you’re the baby sister of our new MVP,” he said, looking just above my forehead, “Jacob has shaken up the game for us! Really, we couldn’t live without him.”
I have lived so long without him. I hardly know him now, rarely see that mirrored Roman nose. I couldn’t, if pressed, name his favorite ice cream, his comrades, his crushes, his astrological sign. Something deep in my biology, some demon hot in my gut, shames me, says I should. I trace my finger on the wilted plastic of the passenger seat. A smoggy twilight sets in and the car thermometer reads 92℉. I can tell Jacob is fading.
“Well, this one is for...let me see...Camila. Then let’s be done, done, done for the night,” my brother says. My brother in a humid May. My brother, who sings for receptionists because he believes in something. In what, I’m not sure. When we arrive at a strip mall door papered with some type of mirrored foil, our sagging reflections are disturbing. Quickly, we step inside.
Jacob comes alive with the sound of music, as if he’s saved his best for the 4:00 p.m. matinée. Camila is delighted. I try to concentrate on my glossy brochures, looking down, but as Jacob approaches the chorus, he meets my eyes. It’s the first time we’ve really looked at each other in hours, maybe years. He already knows what I cannot prevent: a congenial harmony is tingling down the narrow hallways of my mind.
Above the din of a sputtering air conditioning unit, I hear something silver, or maybe gold. Half note, quarter note, breve, semiquaver. Despite myself, a raging pituitary has set sound ablaze and there can be no quenching, no antidote, but to open my mouth completely, stack of flyers in hand, flats on the cracked linoleum of Lucy Grebstein, DMD. What if this is my last chance to cascade beside him? I test the song in my alto, the voice given freely by god but trained by our mother. We spell ourselves that way. In an ode to saline mouthwashes, I swear I hear my full, real name.
In the car, we toast with our Styrofoam cups, the coffee gone stale. He takes a big, audible sip. “...I hoped you would.”
We’re grinning.
“They get no love, Madeline. I'm telling you. No love.” He pulls hard to the right as an ambulance wails past and twenty jars clink in protest from the back seat. “But we give it to them.”
Joni Renee Whitworth
Joni Renee Whitworth is a poet and curator from rural Oregon. Their writing explores themes of nature, future, family, and the neurodivergent body, and has appeared in Lambda Literary, Tin House, Oregon Humanities, Proximity Magazine, Seventeen Magazine, Eclectica, Pivot, SWWIM, Smeuse, Superstition Review, xoJane, Inverted Syntax, Unearthed Literary Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Dime Show Review, and The Write Launch.