by Debi Goodwin
“No one is giving me away,” I answered. Why would any sixty-five-year-old woman want to be given away?
“What prayers would you like me to read?”
I looked at Peter, who was sitting back, letting me answer the questions. “We don’t want any prayers.”
“Will there be music?”
“No,” we both said. We didn’t want to bring speakers out into the quiet of our backyard.
“Will the dress be formal or informal?”
“Informal,” I said.
He must have sensed I was growing frustrated with his questions. “I just need to know whether I should wear a jacket and tie or can come in a summer shirt,” he said.
I nodded, hoping the questions were over.
He looked at the page before him with so many sections scratched out. “And Peter,” he said, perhaps hoping for more conciliation from the man at my side. “You’ll say your vows first.”
We both must have looked at him quizzically. “It’s the bride’s day,” J said. I cringed at the old thinking, but also wondered why, if it was the bride’s day, she didn’t get to go first. But I didn’t say anything; Peter and I could make that decision later. I wanted this process over. As a girl, I’d always despised the roles assigned to women in bible stories and the expectations of them in my family, especially of brides at weddings.
Even when I’d first married at twenty-three, I hadn’t wanted a big wedding. But after I’d suggested a very small ceremony to my mother, she’d burst into the bathroom where I lay naked in the bath and accused me of being either pregnant or ashamed of my fiancé. To her, those were the only reasons a young woman in the 1970s might not want all the hoopla, the only reasons I would deny her the opportunity to invite all her friends and relatives to a good show. I was her last child but her first chance to put on a big wedding. Faced with her hysteria, I’d told her coldly to do what she wanted and I’d be there. And my wedding day had ended up being more about her wishes than mine. I wasn’t about to let anything like that happen again.
Finally, J seemed to get it. The simplest of ceremonies. I thought we were all set, but then he began to ask questions. “To get to know you better,” he said.
“Why?” I asked with suspicion.
“So I can introduce you.”
I have never been very good at confrontation. Over the years I’ve learned to speak up when I must, but I’ve never learned the right tone to use. I tried this time. “This isn’t personal,” I said. “But I don’t see someone who doesn’t know us introducing us to people who have known us, I’d say, on average for about twenty-five years.”
It was Peter who saved the moment. He sat quietly listening to my objections, watching J’s discomfort. “I might have a solution,” he said. He turned to J. “How about I write something that you could say to start the ceremony and send it to you?”
J welcomed that solution, appeared relieved the matter was settled. And we all left the meeting intact. As Peter and I drove to pick up Jane, I felt lighter. And I was reminded how much I loved Peter, not just for his wisdom and compassion, but for the way he let me be who I was. The only times Peter pushed me was when he thought I was being too self-effacing.
After returning from my travels straight to dealing with drought and concerns about keeping the wedding and Peter’s eating on track, I felt out of rhythm with the garden. Weather reports teased us with promises of rain, but there’d been none in the past week and little all month. The promised thunderstorms all seemed to roll over us and drop their rain on nearby locations. It seemed to me I spent most of my time keeping the garden from drying out. I left the hose dribbling on the new trees, watered the vegetables, and moved the sprinkler from yellow spot to yellow spot on the lawn. A drought is not the best time to feed plants, since they are doing all they can just to survive, but I still tried to give them some nutritional support. My zucchini plants were having the hardest time. Baby-finger-sized fruit would appear, stay that size for a week or so, and then finally shrivel up. My crop was reduced to a few fruits that somehow survived hidden under leaves. I would certainly not be able to feed any nation, no matter how small.
I deadheaded any wilted roses, partly to thwart the Japanese beetles and partly to give the plants a rest so they would bloom again once the weather grew cooler. When I’d been walking with A around her flower garden in New York, she’d praised the benefits of Epsom salts turned into the soil around the roots of her roses. But in searching the internet, I found mixed reviews, even one from a reputable horticultural site that said the salt could harm the plants. Most sites said Epsom salts help grow bigger tomatoes, peppers, and roses if the soil lacks magnesium; others said magnesium deficiencies are not that common and not to add it without testing the soil. As an experiment, I added some Epsom salts to a couple of roses and realized again that keeping plants healthy was a bit like trying to solve Peter’s eating problems. Despite all the medical science that exists, everything still felt like trial and error. Probiotics: yes, no, maybe. And food that appeared as good choices on one list appeared on others as bad. I wanted clear answers, obvious solutions, but once again had to accept the middle ground of confused attempts to get things right.
Three weeks before the wedding, Peter weighed 161 pounds. Our family doctor sent him to a dietitian, who came up with a long list of digestible, high-calorie, nutritious foods for him to stick to and a strict schedule of eating small meals every two hours during the day. When he had been trying to keep his weight up in the fall during his cancer treatments, he had drunk cans of chocolate Ensure or Boost for the calories but he’d hated the chemical aftertaste. The dietitian told us of a juice form of the drink that was more palatable but hard to find. On the way home, we ordered a case of it from our local drugstore. The visits to the doctor and the dietitian accomplished two things: they reassured us that both the digestive problems were understandable after the drastic rearrangement of his system that Peter had gone through and that there were things we could do to keep him from losing more weight. And later, on our second visit to the dietitian, she seemed pleased that Peter’s weight loss was levelling off and came up with more strategies to get his digestive system working more consistently.
Food once again became a battleground instead of a pleasure. The folding chairs we’d used most weeks the previous summer for Wednesday suppers remained hanging on the garage wall, and once again we avoided eating out or dining with others. At home, Peter would start to eat a favourite food and not be able to finish it, or he’d suggest something he wanted to eat for supper and then not want to bother with it because he felt too bloated. More and more he relied on the supplemental juice drink.
The midsummer bountifulness of the garden seemed pointless. In fact, it felt like an affront because Peter showed no interest in any of it. I harvested peas, chard, lettuce, beans, and beets and wondered why I’d grown all these vegetables. The difference in our dinner plates that summer was stark. Peter’s plate, with its small slice of baked chicken pot pie, looked spartan, while my plate, supplemented with yellow beets, red-stemmed Swiss chard, and zucchini stir-fried with tomatoes and onions, was a riot of colours and nutrients.
In gardens, as in life, you just keep doing what you think you need to do. I didn’t want the garden to grow rampant. It felt especially important that July to get at least one thing under control, to not let the garden slide into a midsummer funk along with my spirits. Near the end of the month, I had T over for the afternoon for jobs that required more strength than I had. While we worked, I told T that Peter and I were getting married in the garden and I needed everything to look its best. He seemed surprised we weren’t already married, so I gave him the one-minute summary: I hadn’t got a divorce until a few years back. But it was enough of a statement to open the door to a long story of his relationship with his new girlfriend. B was Catholic, a married Catholic wanting a divorce from an ex who resisted giving her one even though he didn’t want to be with her.
Whe
n five rolled around, I wanted to stop, but T said he’d like to get some dinner and then work into the evening. In the past, I might have offered him something to eat, but I didn’t feel like doing that when meals were so troublesome in our house. Instead, I asked if he’d go to a local pub he favoured. That question opened the door to another story about how the pub’s recent renovations had ruined the place. In the past he’d been able to get a large plate of fries there for five dollars; now the fries had sea salt and came as a small side. On top of that, the owners had taken out the pool table to add more seating. He had met B at that pool table. But he knew where to get the best bargains in town; he’d go to the local grocery store where they sold hot potato wedges. I didn’t have the energy to question him about his devotion to healthy food.
He’d had plans, T told me, perhaps a bit defensively, to go climbing with some buddies but they were all off playing Pokémon. He seemed annoyed and bewildered by their decision to suddenly choose that old game over an evening with him. It became apparent to me he hadn’t heard of the Pokémon Go app, which had become an international craze that summer. I tried to explain it to him as best I could.
“That sounds kind of fun,” he said, unembarrassed that an older woman was telling him about a young man’s game.
The waning days of July were stinking hot, with no rain. In between garden tasks and medical appointments, I helped pack up an apartment without air conditioning that had sat empty for six months, waiting for the Syrian family our local committee had attempted to sponsor. We had rented the apartment in February when we’d received word that our family would arrive shortly; members of our committee had lovingly furnished and stocked it while I’d been by Peter’s side after his surgery. But by midsummer our family was still stuck in Turkey and the Canadian government’s effort to clear refugees like ours had lost momentum. It was another disappointment in a disappointing summer. I had taken on the task of being one of the people who communicated with the family’s father through Google translation, but I was running out of ways to reassure him, especially since I was so focused on figuring out ways to keep myself calm.
Then, on the last night of July, it rained. It poured. I woke to the sound of thunder and the electric thrill of negative ions in the air. In the early morning, I remembered the orange cushions were still on the chairs on the deck; it had been so long since I’d had to worry about them getting wet. I ran downstairs and out into the warm rain. It was six-thirty and the solar lamps in the garden were shutting off one by one. But as rain clouds passed overhead, they darkened the skies and confused the lights’ sensors. Was it day? Was it night? The lamps began blinking off and on.
I stood for a while watching the lights as their sensors tried to read the skies. I didn’t mind standing in the rain; it washed away the knots of depression that had been gathering in my stomach, muscles, and mind. I felt excited by the rain, excited by the possibility that not everything always went downhill, that good news — like a good rain — could surprise you. The garden would green up on its own. And no one had given us any suggestion that Peter couldn’t get better. The solar lamps continued to twinkle, caught between light and darkness, a place I understood all too well.
Chapter Twelve
IT WAS THE BEST OF MONTHS; it was the worst of months. A riff on Dickens that ran through my head like a bad radio song as summer days grew cooler. It’s a poor writer who relies on the words of others. But if I’m being kind to myself — and I feel I must be — it could simply be that a patterned phrase rescued me from a gut-wrenching search for my own words. Like the gardener who buys hanging baskets of petunias and pots of patio tomatoes, I just didn’t have the energy or the desire to get down on my knees in the dirt. To dig past the pain and shock. The extreme between the high and the low of the month was just too cruel to absorb.
August began with a push in the garden. Even though rain had finally arrived, I still had to water the beds and the grass in the days that followed to keep everything at its best. I wanted the garden perfect for August sixth, the day Peter and I would get married. I was obsessive about it, worked for hours each day to pull weeds, deadhead perennials, and keep the Japanese beetle at bay. As if by making the garden perfect, the day perfect, I could make everything all right.
Peter’s pain and eating problems persisted. When he wasn’t having stomach cramps, he was groaning from back pain. I’d suggested in late July that we postpone the wedding until we sorted out his postsurgery issues.
“I’ll be fine when the day comes,” he said. “That day will be the highlight of my life.”
I was touched by his choice of words but also a little frightened by them. But since he was not in a mood to postpone anything, I continued taking care of the details for our wedding.
Only there was nothing fine about his state of health as the day approached. At night, he’d lie on his side in his white undershirt and ask, “Would you rub my back?” I would stretch out a hand from my side of the bed and gently stroke his back through the shirt. There was none of the playfulness we used to have at bedtime: Me making up silly songs and him singing the love song he’d created. “I’m in love with a beautiful woman,” he’d intone. “She’s from Grimsby, Ontario. She grows green beans, dill, and tomatoes. And rides her scooter on the escarpment solo.” For years, he’d been playing with a second verse but he’d given up on that. I hadn’t heard the first one in months. Still, we had to believe that despite the back pain and the eating problems, everyone — the doctors, the dietitian, the physiotherapist — was right when they told us Peter’s symptoms all fit with a rocky recovery. I had to believe we’d already had our victory on the cancer front and Peter would beat these postsurgical difficulties, too.
Outside, my Victory Garden had suffered as I turned my attention to the other gardens before the wedding. In the early days of August, I went back to it. I tried to get the tomatoes under control with more stakes and ties. Ironically, I had no problem with my indeterminate tomatoes, the Big Beef, which grew tall and straight. While I had pulled suckers from them to keep them from getting rangy, I hadn’t needed to do it often, even if they now leaned a bit under the weight of fat tomatoes. It was the Romas, the variety described as determinate tomatoes, which were supposed to stay bushy and controlled, that sprawled everywhere, with some weak stems falling to the ground. In July, I’d pushed more stakes into the soil around their perimeter and wrapped twine around the stakes to hold the drooping plants. And, while I’d picked some tomatoes to eat from the various plants around the yard and on the deck, the bulk of my tomatoes were smaller than they should have been by early August and they were still very green. The platters of sliced homegrown tomatoes with basil I’d pictured on the wedding buffet table were not to be.
There were bare patches in the Victory Garden, too, where I’d pulled out lettuce that had bolted. I’d tried to fill the gaps with other crops, but in the heat wave the seeds had refused to sprout. So I left one row of bitter lettuce for its colour — like the inside of a lime — simply because it was unlike any other green in the patch. A few straggling Armenian cucumber vines clung to the net at the back of the garden. I didn’t pull them out either, hoping cooler weather would increase the measly production I’d had.
On my last day of intensive gardening before the wedding, I had T come to help me one last time. He’d finally got his passport and was leaving for Australia.
That day, I had a short list for T, but one that would round up my basic garden chores for the season. Earlier in the summer, I’d bought fertilizer spikes for all the trees but had never got around to getting them out of the shed. It was a job Peter had always taken on at our last house, but one I couldn’t expect him to do that summer. So I had T go around the yard and knock the spikes in with a hammer at the drip lines of all our evergreens and our wonderful canopy of deciduous trees: the oaks, the ash, the plane, along with the tamarack.
As he pounded away, T told me he planned to come back to Canada in March to work i
n Niagara the next spring. He already had a job lined up painting houses. And B said she’d wait for him. He wanted her to come to visit him in Australia, but her difficult ex was unlikely to sign papers that would allow her to travel with their toddler. It all sounded tawdry until I stopped to consider what my life must have looked like from the outside after my marriage had ended and Peter came into our lives when Jane was just three years old.
T worked quickly, but not quickly enough to get everything on my list done. He was more distracted than usual, a man eager to get on with his errands and travels. As we walked to the car, I asked if he was keeping his phone number until the spring. He still hadn’t figured that out. What phone he’d keep, what number he’d use; it was all too confusing. His mother had given him an older iPhone to take with him so he could rely on FaceTime to communicate at no cost. His voice rose as he talked about how it would work. “I just have to have Wi-Fi, click, and I can talk to my mom or B.”
I may have looked a little bemused, because he added quickly, “I’d heard about it. I just didn’t know it was so simple. You just have to click.”
He approached me for a hug and I hugged back. I didn’t have much in common with this wandering youth except those hours in the garden. But he was the only other person I knew who didn’t mind getting covered in mud. I hoped he’d be back in the spring to lessen my workload and entertain me with stories about B and terraforming on another continent.
When I wasn’t outside gardening those first days in August, I was in the kitchen. I baked tarts with blueberries from a local Mennonite farm. And I assisted Peter as he made batches of ice cream with local peaches and blueberries. I also baked six savoury tortes for the freezer with Swiss chard from the garden. Even after cutting all the chard leaves I needed, the plants looked untouched. The chard would be on the success side of the garden ledger. So would my Kentucky Wonder beans, which had come through for me once again despite the drought. In the days leading up to our wedding, I found enough beans on the vines to make a salad with mustard dressing that would feed all the guests who wanted it.