Cactus
by Merri-Todd Webster
September 1999


It's a lot like cactus, you see.

My mom always wanted a garden.  Someplace to plant
petunias, coleus, dusty millers, bamboo trees, a rose
bush.  She wanted rosebushes the way I wanted a horse
when I was ten, or the way I want Ben & Jerry's New
York Super Fudge Chunk at certain times of the month. 
But a Navy wife rarely stays in one place long enough
for a rosebush to flourish.  Now that my dad is dead,
and she does live in one place year round, a place of
her own choosing, she has rosebushes, and they are
exquisitely beautiful, overwhelmingly alive and vivid
and fragrant.

But when Mulder and I got married, we didn't buy a
house.  We didn't get a dog.  For different reasons,
our home life felt just as chancy, just as prone to
sudden change, as the Scully family's home life did
when I was a girl.  And that was okay, actually.  They
say you go through life trying to recreate the
circumstances of your childhood because whatever you
grew up with, no matter how painful or difficult, is,
for you, "normal".  I fell in love with a man prone to
disappear at the drop of a hat, just as my father
would be home one week, out to sea for three months
the next day, and so our home is an apartment, a place
we can easily pack up and move fast, if we have to.

At first I tried window-boxes.  I had a new place,
neither his apartment nor mine but a *new* place,
ours, and we had lots of windows looking southwest,
lots of afternoon light.  I tried petunias and
begonias in window-boxes, and they were pretty and
seemed to be hardy--until we were out of town for a
week, without having planned it, and nobody watered
them.  After I lost the second batch of plants, I took
in the boxes, bagged up the rich, moist black soil,
and stored it all away under the kitchen sink.  I
wasn't going to kill any more plants.

And I bought cactus.

It was all the fault of my hairdresser.  Anita, who
owns the shop, loves cactus, and the whole shop is
decorated in Southwest earth tones and dotted with
cactus.  All sorts of cactus:  big ones, little ones,
spiny ones, hairy ones, round ones that sit like eggs,
many-armed ones that reach out with their limbs to
grab passers-by.  So when I went to the plant nursery
after killing off the second batch of plants, I found
myself looking around in the cactus department, and I
bought cactus instead of coleus.

My mother wasn't very pleased with them when she came
over.  She wasn't very pleased when I finally told
her, not long before the wedding, that I was sterile,
that it was unlikely fertility treatments would do me
any good, and that it was unlikely we would try such
treatments or try to adopt, because there simply
wasn't *time*.  I wonder if she's figured out by now
that if I can't keep a potted plant alive, living the
way we do now, what would I do with a child?  But she
probably hasn't.  My mother's lens for looking at the
world is a pretty narrow one.  She likes flowers
better than cactus, owning a home better than renting
an apartment, having more grandchildren better than
having fewer grandchildren.  And while she understands
how important Mulder's work is to him, she doesn't
really understand that it's *our* work, and how
important it is to *me*.

"Dana, sweetheart, the window-boxes you had were so
much prettier than these prickly cactus."

"I know, mom.  But every time we get stuck on a case
somewhere in East Bellybutton, they die off.  I like
flowers too much to kill them."

Mulder, however, likes the cactus (or is it cacti?)
just fine.  He named them all with funny names and
talks to them.  Occasionally they talk back, if you
know what I mean.  I can't keep them all straight, but
there's one by the computer that he calls "Londo
Mollari"--I know he calls it that because its spines
remind him of that character's stand-up hairdo on
_Babylon 5_.  That one frequently "talks back", and I
have to admit that Mulder's Londo imitation is pretty
funny--he stands up, points out his arm straight from
the shoulder, and barks, "Vir!" in this vaguely Slavic
way, with a tense "ee" sound and a long, rolled "r".

One day it occurred to me that our marriage was not
unlike the cactus.  Not the Londo cactus particularly,
but like our having cactus instead of flowers.  It's
not what you'd expect.  It's rather unusual.  It's a
little prickly.  But it works for us.  We didn't even
get married, you see, until after the invasion had
been forestalled, the conspiracy exposed.  In fact, we
didn't even make love until after that.  We didn't
make love until our wedding night.  We figured we'd
waited that long--seven years? eight?--we might as
well wait a little longer.  Not that I was a virgin,
but it was still very special.

Getting married was special, special in a way that I
hadn't imagined as a little girl.  I used to make fun
of Missy for playing wedding, for draping an old lace
tablecloth over her head, carefully folded to hide the
coffee stains, and parading around in hesitation-step
holding a bunch of plastic flowers.  While she was
dreaming of her wedding, I was dreaming of saving the
world--riding in on a horse like Joan of Arc, rescuing
my mother and my sister and my stupid jerk brothers. 
Or getting into a sleek and shiny spaceship and flying
off to explore strange new worlds, my messy hair
hidden under a big protective helmet.  Then one day I
woke up and realized I'd done what I always dreamed
of:  Mulder and I *had* saved the world.  So when
Mulder said, one lazy afternoon in the office, "Hey,
Scully, wanna get married?" I figured I had time for
that fantasy now, the one I'd never had, about veils
and flowers and organ music.  Mulder asked the
question in the same tone of voice he always asked if
I wanted lunch, and I answered in the same way.  When
he smiled, I knew everything was going to be okay.

I guess there aren't many thirty-somethings who work
together, fall in love, don't date, agree to get
married, and then don't have sex until their wedding
night.  Then again, I'm sure there aren't many
thirty-somethings who investigate monsters, hunt for
aliens, expose world-wide shadow governments, research
cures for viruses of extraterrestrial origin, and
prevent alien invasion.  Not to mention being
kidnapped and experimented on and kidnapped again and
being rescued.  And that's during a slow week.  Our
wedding was as unusual as our courtship.  I refused a
wedding dress or a lot of attendants.  My mom stood up
with me, and Frohike, oddly enough, with Mulder. 
Frohike shaved and behaved like a perfect gentlemen. 
Mulder did, however, mumble something about the stag
party that I didn't quite catch.  It didn't matter.  I
didn't wear a wedding dress with a veil, but I did buy
a new suit, pink, with a really pretty broad-brimmed
hat that my mother talked me into.  Since then I've
been wearing hats more, though not to the office.

The end of the world as we know it has been prevented,
or at least postponed, but the work of the X-Files
division goes on.  We're still working under
Skinner--he kept his position, thanks to us, and
thanks to Alex Krycek.  Krycek sued for amnesty,
revealed how the syndicate had been blackmailing
Walter, and has since helped us enormously in
ferreting out hidden strongholds of the shadow
syndicate.  That man has the dirt on more people than
Hedda Hopper--perfectly ordinary, respectable, if wealthy
and powerful people, who were all along lending their
power and resources to the work of the consortium.  I
know he also has a dozen Swiss bank accounts he hasn't
told us about, but I'm willing to overlook that: 
Without his help, we never would have come up with a
vaccine for the alien virus.  Besides, he gave us an
exquisite silver tea service as a wedding present.  I
think it belonged to some Russian noblewoman who
married into an Italian family, or something....

So now we work on cleaning up after the bad guys,
while continuing to investigate what Mulder likes to
call "the monster of the week"--the vampire reports in
Waukesha, the possible Flukeman sighting in New York,
the hauntings and the revenants and the poltergeists. 
I still do the autopsies and check the accounting to
make sure all the figures add up.  I *think* we lose
our cellphones and trash our cars a little less than
we used to.  At least, I haven't ruined a really good
pair of pumps in a while.  And we still disagree,
often as not, on whether a given incident is really
paranormal, on whose theory fits the facts best, his
or mine.

But once the day is over, we drive separate cars home
to the same apartment, or settle into a single room at
the motel.  The day is anchored by breakfast together
in the morning and falling asleep together at night. 
Mulder sleeps somewhat better than he used to, and
he's getting better all the time.  I know there are
still quite a few nights where he wakes up after a
couple of hours and goes out to doze on the living
room couch, with the television on but the volume
turned down so it can't be heard.  Even then, he
usually rejoins me in bed before it's time to get up. 
He's become a very touchy-feely sleeper; he likes to
spoon around me from behind, or tuck me up under his
arm.  I like it, too.  The physical part of our
marriage is... entirely satisfactory.

We don't invariably sleep through the night together. 
We don't invariably sit down to a well-balanced
evening meal and talk about our day.  I'm not going to
have children, and I'm probably not going to have a
rose garden, at least for a while.  But like the
cactus that survive our unplanned absences and remain
as green and prickly as ever, our relationship has
endured this many years, through so many earthquakes. 
I think it will survive our being married.

***

end