Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners

by Gretchen Anthony

  And then there were the Endreses. Kyle was fine, of course, and Eldris never gave up, but what Richard was doing running around town all hours of the night at this age, she could only imagine. Her poor friend was obviously sick with worry.

  “Of course,” said Eldris, “it helps to know he’s not out womanizing or having an affair.” She moved like a water bug, skittish and determined at once. “He’s far too practical for that. He’d never spend the money!”

  She thrust her energies into cleaning a waxy buildup from one of the legs on the kitchen table. Violet heard her knees crack.

  “Eldris, there are people I can call to do that.”

  She shook her head and went on scrubbing. “But you fired them, Violet. And Ed told me every time he leaves you alone for more than five minutes he comes back to find you cleaning or fussing with something or otherwise engaged in a way specifically prohibited by your doctor.” She tossed the sponge into the bucket at her side and wiped a cocked wrist across her forehead. “You, Miss Violet, have been very naughty.”

  Honestly.

  “For goodness’ sake, Eldris. You make it sound as if I’ve been training for the Olympic figure skating team. I was just doing a few dishes.”

  Eldris disappeared under the kitchen table. “That’s not what I heard,” she called.

  It had been more than a month since the accident and still, Violet’s nasal-toned doctor had refused to clear her for normal activity. Concerns about a neuro-some-nonsense in her exams and fidgetiness in her balance. And Ed tattling on her sleepless nights. As if anyone could sleep with all that rest.

  The doctor had at least allowed her to leave the house for Christmas Eve services at church, but had forced her to spend the rest of the holiday being scolded back to the couch by her husband and daughter. She would not forgive the indignity.

  “You’re doing too much,” the doctor said, every visit sounding the same alarm. “Slow down. Don’t rush the recovery. This is not an overnight process.”

  Of all the advice she’d been given over the years, his was the most maddening. Of course recovery wasn’t going to happen overnight. She knew better than anyone the level of injury she’d sustained in her fall. After all, wasn’t she the one experiencing its painful effects?

  “Dr. Hartz,” she’d said during her last visit. She put on her let sanity reign voice, the tone she typically reserved for DMV workers, Cerise’s teachers and political boosters who made the mistake of soliciting her support during the dinner hour. “While it is true that I sustained quite the knock to my head, I am anything but feebleminded. Nor am I too shy to say that I’m simply not interested in your course of treatment. Extended immobility, as I’m sure you’ll agree, comes with its own significant consequences.”

  She’d yet to succeed in convincing him of his shortsightedness.

  Eldris emerged from under the table and went to work scrubbing Violet’s baseboards. “To tell you the truth, I’d much rather be here scrubbing these floors than nearly anywhere else. Richard’s moods and Kyle’s wedding. It’s been so stressful around our house lately I’m about to lose my mind.”

  Violet clutched at the locket at her throat and inched her way to the edge of the couch, hoping to get a better look at Eldris’s work from where she sat in the living room. From the sound of her scrubbing, she worried she might be close to stripping the paint from the wood.

  “I mean, I’m absolutely thrilled for Kyle, but you saw their ‘Save the Date’ card—according to Rhonda, those cards were worth every cent of the six thousand dollars they cost. Six thousand dollars! Can you imagine? Who spends six thousand dollars on postcards?”

  Violet had to agree, though the issue for her wasn’t so much the cost as the postcards themselves. Whose grand idea was it to put the Jolly Green Giant into the heads of their wedding guests? They’d be lucky if they didn’t end up with cupboards full of 1970’s kitsch.

  “And how are Richard and I supposed to help pay for all of these extras? Did I tell you that they’ve planned a Lake Minnetonka cruise for all of their out-of-town guests the day after the ceremony? Kyle and Rhonda won’t even be there—they’ll be off on their honeymoon.”

  Violet craned her neck farther over the couch. “Eldris, dear. Gentle with my woodwork—”

  “Rhonda calls the guest cruise a Toast to their Caribbean Adventure—did I tell you they’ve chartered a private sailboat for a ten-day honeymoon? I mean, they haven’t asked for money yet but I just know it’s coming.” She threw her sponge into the bucket and it landed with a splash, tossing a spray of dirty water into her face and hair.

  “Eldris, you’re working yourself up into a royal mess.”

  She sighed and leaned her back against the kitchen wall. “You’re probably right. It’s just that none of this is happening the way I’d imagined it would. Kyle’s hardly involved us in any of the planning. And Richard, well—I’m mad at him for so many reasons right now, I could just spit.”

  “Well,” said Violet, “don’t do it on my floor after all your hard work.”

  Eldris smiled. “You don’t know how good you have it.”

  Good Lord. She ought to have seen this coming. Eldris could go from hysterical to melancholy in no more than a heartbeat. “And what, pray tell, is it about my very unfortunate situation that I should feel so lucky about?” She made a sweeping gesture about the room, reminding her dramatic friend of just how confined her world had become of late. Not just confined, but constrained. No connection to what was really happening beyond her walls. No ears. No eyes. No insight. No influence.

  Ed was hopeless. He continued to answer the phone but refused to update his speaking points with the questions Violet really wanted answers to, like what else the Dorcas Circle had begun scheming behind her back.

  And of course she’d asked Eldris, but she’d invested all of five breaths promising nothing untoward was afoot. Eldris said people had returned to talking about themselves—their holiday visitors, their too-dry turkeys purchased from butchers they’ll never trust again, their New Year’s diets in advance of the medical procedures they’d tried but failed to apply to last year’s deductible.

  And, as was always the case with Eldris these days, their children.

  “But think of it, Violet. You don’t have to deal with any of this wedding nonsense. You’re going straight to grandparenting. You really don’t know how blessed you are.”

  Violet suddenly wished for shoes so she could throw them at Eldris. The now-familiar burn of her postinjury life needled its way up the back of her neck and her peripheral vision blurred, the curtains and walls of her living room bending like blacktop under the heat of a hundred-degree day.

  She closed her eyes. One...two...three...four...five...six...

  “I mean, you don’t have to worry about any of it—like which of your cousins you’ll invite and which you’ll be forced to snub because you’ve been reminded again and again that you are only allowed a portion of the guest list. ‘Space is limited. We can’t invite everyone we love. We’d prefer if you only included people who mean something to Kyle’s life.’”

  ...seventeen...eighteen...nineteen...twenty. She ought to sue her doctor for malpractice. How long was she going to have to live like a cave dweller to prove that nothing he prescribed was working? If she could stand up without toppling over right now she’d find her notebook and write File lawsuit in the first available slot.

  “‘Oh, and it’s soooo sweet of you to offer your mother’s china, but Kyle and I have our own pattern on the wedding registry. It’s very special to us. I’ve been looking at it in the Tiffany’s catalog since I was a child.’”

  And Ed, bound by this medical quackery to be always underfoot, always appearing with offers of tea and reminders that he is perfectly capable of doing laundry. If that were true, she’d clearly have spent the last thirty years of her life very differently. When
had everyone around her grown so confoundedly thick? She’d had a fall. Period. She wasn’t suddenly simpleminded.

  “Can you imagine my son getting excited by anything at Tiffany’s? He’s not that type. He’s a good boy. He keeps people’s eyes healthy. He loads the dishwasher without asking. He works weekends at the Community Health Corp. He cares for poor, blind children in Africa, for heaven’s sake! What could he possibly need from the Tiffany’s catalog to help him with that?”

  Meredith Turner had taken her by the elbow at church on Christmas Eve. By the elbow—a woman at least a decade older than her acting as if she wasn’t, as if she was the picture of health. Heavens, Meredith didn’t even drive herself to church. Violet knew she got a ride from Howard and Alice Tobler. And that Alice, eyeing her like a woman with a delicious, dark secret. “How is Cerise?” she’d had the nerve to ask. “How is she doing with the baby?”

  “I know I ought to be accepting. I know I ought to love anyone who loves my son. But I just can’t. I cannot understand how my son ended up with a woman who bought a bottle of fourteen-dollar ketchup as a hostess gift. Who spends fourteen dollars on ketchup?”

  Violet had told Cerise this would happen. If she’d told her once she’d told her a hundred times. People cannot be trusted to draw proper conclusions with inadequate information. And it was happening, just as she warned—Meredith Turner and Alice Tobler were but the tip of the iceberg. The knowledge that they were out there, people speculating, gossiping, tearing her poor daughter’s reputation to shreds. And all while Violet was stuck inside her redbrick fortress, unseen and voiceless. The heat surged red-hot across her skull.

  “And yet, I know I have no choice. I’d better just get over it. Be the adult. Love her for who she is.”

  Love. Where had it disappeared to in this world? When had it been swallowed up by judgment, by holier-than-thou know-it-alls who act as if they had the right—the right—to determine what ought to be? If she’d had that right, she would have ripped that atrocious plastic mistletoe broach off Alice Tobler’s sweater and thrown it directly in the trash.

  “Maybe I ought to just write her a nice note. Ask her how I can be more involved. Ask her how I can help.”

  Yes. A note could certainly help.

  Thank You

  friends and family near and far

  for joining us in celebrating Ed’s retirement.

  Despite a “smashing” finish, it was a wonderful evening.

  and...

  Thank You

  for embracing the freedom of choice for all mothers.

  Yours sincerely,

  Ed and Violet Baumgartner

  16

  Cerise

  “SOMETHING YOU’RE NOT telling me?”

  Barb flicked a piece of the mail she’d been sorting across the kitchen counter at Cerise. She knew at a glance who it was from—same card stock, same engraving as the retirement invitations. Add to that the look on Barb’s face, and her stomach went into free fall.

  “What the f—” She read the lines again, hoping they’d change before her eyes.

  “Yep. Kinda sounds like you went and got yourself an abortion.”

  Cerise reached for a chair and fell into it. “Can you make dinner tonight?” she said. “I need to concentrate on not killing my mother.”

  * * *

  A WARM BATH and a mug of hot tea later, Cerise felt ready to reenter civilization. The pause hadn’t granted her the clarity she’d sought, but it had dampened the red she’d been seeing. Now thoughts of her mother’s latest announcement only shaded the world in tones of hot pink and orange.

  The retreat had also convinced her there had to be a way to short-circuit her mother’s behavior. Almost certainly. The key was to find out why she was stuck. Eventually, Cerise would be able to flip the right switch. She’d done it before.

  Like in high school, when they had fought over Cerise wanting to go to Pink’s concert. Her mother had predictably balked at the risks—she’d ruin her hearing, she’d be fooled into taking drugs, she’d be abducted—then she got one look at the singer’s glitter-caked bras and spiked heels in the newspaper and dropped the hammer. No daughter of hers was doing that. Even more, it was as if Cerise’s mere interest in the event had sounded the gong on future misadventures, causing her mother to begin a well-coordinated antisubversion campaign.

  Cerise came home from school one day to discover that all of her jeans had been replaced by chinos, all of her above-the-knee skirts replaced by below-the-knee ones. Dinner, which had always been accompanied softly by the Minnesota Public Radio classical music station, evolved into a guided tour of the composers—a week of Stravinsky, a night of Vaughan Williams, a century of Bach. Her mother never explicitly addressed the change, but it was so obvious that Cerise began to refer openly to their mealtimes as “dining with the old, white dead guys.”

  None of which dampened her desire or determination to get to the concert. In fact, she had a ticket. She’d had her friends buy her one and had secretly paid for it with cash earned babysitting. Worst-case scenario, she figured if she couldn’t convince her mother to let her go she’d turn around and resell it; the concert had sold out in less than two hours and fans were clamoring. Regardless of the outcome, go or sell, the risk on her end was minimal but the payoff was huge.

  Then Jenny Fielding decided to cure cancer. She was only a year older than Cerise but had already lost all four of her grandparents to the disease. So when senior projects rolled around, Jenny grabbed ahold of her fund-raising crusade the way a televangelist grabs his Bible. Cerise’s mother didn’t know Jenny, but she did cluck consolingly every time the local cable commercial Jenny produced flashed pictures of her dead grandparents across their television. “That dear child,” she’d say.

  Cerise spotted opportunity.

  When Jenny distributed flyers for a “Take the Heat Out of Cancer” bake sale, Cerise made sure hers landed on the Baumgartner kitchen counter. When Jenny promoted the “Kick Cancer to the Curb” community garage sale, Cerise asked her mom if their family happened to have anything to donate. When Jenny’s “Scrub the World of Cancer” car wash needed an empty parking lot, Cerise made sure to muse aloud that the Faithful Redeemer parking lot looked practically deserted on Saturday mornings.

  Before long, Cerise’s mother was dropping less-deserving commitments from her too-crowded calendar to make room for cake baking, closet clearing and car wash supervising.

  Then came the comparisons—“Cerise, just look at how Jenny takes full advantage of everything life has to offer. She’s not too scared to dream big. Learn from her. Never back down from a challenge. Make every moment count.”

  When the lectures reached their crescendo, Cerise told her. “I have the chance to go to Pink’s concert.”

  What could her mother say?

  Cerise had flipped the right switch on her mother’s psychology back then and she could do it again. In fact, she thought, wrapping herself in her bathrobe, she might already know how.

  She padded on bare feet into the kitchen and watched as Barb stuck her head into the oven and pulled the grocery store rotisserie chicken from the rack.

  Cerise held up a hand. “Wait, why does that chicken look like it’s wearing rain boots?” Ribbons of black plastic, shiny with chicken grease, wound their way around each of the bird’s legs.

  Barb shrugged sheepishly. “I forgot to put a cookie sheet under the plastic tray when I put it in.”

  “What?” Cerise made for the oven and flipped down the door. “Don’t tell me it’s melted all over the inside, too.” She scanned the shelves and the grease pan, but didn’t see anything other than the burned remains of previous dinners.

  This was one of the few things about Barb that confounded her. How could a woman with a pristine professional reputation be so careless as to put plastic in a hot oven?

/>   “I remembered that you could reheat the chicken in its store packaging,” Barb said, reading her mind. “Only, I forgot those were microwave instructions.” She picked at the bird’s encased leg with a fork. “We can just eat the breast.”

  Cerise scowled. “Shrimpy doesn’t feel like carcinogens for dinner tonight.” She laid a hand on the underside of her belly and briefly considered their restaurant options. But she was too tired to think about putting her clothes back on, let alone everything else that came along with a dinner out. “You pull out the bread,” she said. “I’ll get the peanut butter.”

  Barb shook her head and gently ushered her over to the table to sit. “I’ll make the sandwiches.”

  Cerise watched as Barb smoothed the peanut butter to the edge of the bread with even measure, its lines parallel to the bread’s crust. She then did the same with the jelly. Such a paradox, her partner—so cavalier and yet so precise. She couldn’t make sense of it, except to be glad that in the home they’d made for themselves, life didn’t have to be perfect.

  Barb placed the sandwich and a glass of milk in front of Cerise, who said, “Speaking of my mother.”

  Barb cocked an eyebrow. “Not funny.”

  “As much as I want to strangle her, I was thinking... She’s stuck on this paternity thing because she’s bored. I mean, she’s never had to live without a project. I can’t remember a single day when she wasn’t organizing a bake sale at church and heading up the PTA and hosting a charity luncheon for missionaries in Sierra Leone.” She chewed a bite of her sandwich and washed it down with the last of her milk—she’d come to learn that baby loved all things dairy. “The key is to distract her.”