“I love you,” she would say, even before she was sick.
“I love you, too.”
“Do you?” She needed the repetition like a drug.
“Yes! I love you very much.”
Even when the exchange went as she hoped, she looked sad.
Where was Eleos, goddess of pity and compassion? Or Artemis, reliever of disease in women? Or even winged Hermes, god of thresholds and boundaries, who might have softened her fall?
* * *
—
WHAT HAPPENED ISN’T COMPLICATED. It doesn’t take a long time to tell. When I came home after college, I moved back into my old room, which was the largest. The house didn’t have a master bedroom with a bath, just the three bedrooms and one full bath on the second floor. My large room was originally the room my brother and I shared when we were young, my parents had always had the midsize room, and the smallest bedroom was my brother’s. With my mother’s health in decline, my father was more often than not sleeping on the sofa downstairs. We thought they’d both be more comfortable if we moved her to my room, and I would take the downstairs guest room until I found my own apartment.
I emptied my closet and drawers. I boxed up my books and Steiff and glass animals. I went to a department store and bought my mother a new bedspread, picking one with lavender hues I thought she’d like. My father and I changed the bed’s orientation so that it would be easier for her to get in and out from either side. He built a little wooden step for her, hoping that would also help. My brother bought a beautiful old mirror for over the dresser, which reflected the opposite window and added to the airiness of the room.
When everything was ready, we filled the bedroom with flowers. It was August. My mother liked it well enough, as much as she liked anything then. Misery loves company, they say. My mother kept her shades drawn against the sunlight most days. She reveled in the TV news, all of it evidence that the world was rotten and she wasn’t missing much. With pain and depression her personality was changing.
It’s not a complicated story. One warm September evening we had dinner, I can’t remember what we ate, and my mother went back up to her room right afterward, as usual. I cleaned the kitchen while my brother went up to do his homework. My father played Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, loudly, so my mother would hear it upstairs. It was their favorite. I had another glass of wine. My mother had been in her new room less than a week.
It doesn’t take a long time to tell. In her old room, the place where she’d slept with my father for twenty years, her path in the night to the bathroom was out the bedroom door, turn left, three steps, turn right into the bathroom. That night, after we’d all gone to bed, she came out her new bedroom door, took three steps, and turned right off the top of the stairs. The night was moonless and dark. Because of the hernia she was misshapen, off balance, and wobbly on her feet. She must have been on her way to the bathroom. I’ve paced it out a thousand times.
Everybody trips on stairs at one time or another. It’s actually been calculated that you’re likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use a staircase. The two times to take particular care are at the beginning and at the end because most stair accidents occur on the first or last step. Not surprisingly, going downstairs is more dangerous than going up. More than 90 percent of injuries occur during the descent. When did humans decide we needed staircases in our homes? When and where did one floor become insufficient?
My mother fell nine steps to the landing and her head went through the balustrade overlooking the front hall. Her nose was broken, several teeth were knocked out, and there was a lot of blood. Her neck broke on impact, they said, but I know I heard her. It didn’t sound like her, but there was a sound.
The ambulance was not quiet when it came.
I have wondered: Did the Pastoral Symphony that night make her sad? Did it remind her she might never walk again across such landscapes? Which of us decided we should move her to my bedroom? We can’t remember. We won’t remember.
There was no funeral or memorial service and each of us healed around the tragedy the way a tree grows around a rock. My brother finished his senior year, got into a California college, and flung himself across the country. I didn’t blame him. He’d done his job. The parent he’d had his eyes on in the car was still alive.
My father moved to his basement apartment and I moved into my brother’s room and cleaned and covered the blood stains in the hall. No one came to visit or help. But I didn’t ask them to. I started gardening. That first spring I found a surprising number of shiny pennies on the ground, which signifies only that I was looking down all the time. Sue has a penchant for finding four-leaf clovers, but no one in my family has ever been that lucky.
Are we a family damaged beyond repair? I don’t know. I do believe in the power of words and stories to make sense of things.
I can still hear my mother’s voice: “You’ll be fine without me.”
Well, we are and we aren’t.
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba)
Ginkgo biloba is sometimes described as a living fossil because it is the sole survivor of an ancient group of trees older than the dinosaurs. It is the only member of its genus, which is the only genus in its family, which is the only family in its order, which is the only order in its subclass. That’s pretty lonely, which is why I think it should be forgiven the fact that its seeds when fallen smell like vomit.
This seemed like a brave choice on my father’s part.
Recently Chinese scientists published a draft genome of Ginkgo biloba showing the tree has an exceptionally large genome of 10.6 billion DNA letters (the human genome has 3 billion), enabling a huge number of antibacterial and chemical defense mechanisms.
The greatest examples of the ginkgo’s tenacity are in Hiroshima, Japan, where six trees growing between one and two kilometers from the 1945 atom bomb explosion were among the few living things to survive. The Japanese have a word for them, hibakujumoku, trees that survived the blast. The six trees, though charred, were soon healthy again and are still alive today.
Hester
One night last week I was late getting home from work because I stopped to do some errands in Barracks Mall. Afterward, in a rare lapse, I couldn’t find my car. Bonnie was in Leo’s shop, so I was driving my father’s Taurus and he hates the fobs that make the car honk and flash for you. I like to think of the mechanism as similar to a horse snorting and stamping for its rider, but he doesn’t agree.
“How many times in one life can you remember where you parked your car?” I’ve asked him.
“I intend to find out,” he says.
I usually park in the same spot if I can, near the landscaped island closest to the Barnes & Noble, but if it’s not available, I have a few rules. I tend to the right, I tend toward shade, and I will not park next to anything larger than a Jeep. I don’t mind walking so I never worry about proximity to the shops and feel sorry for the circling people who do.
When I finally found my father’s car, it was sandwiched between two giants: the one and only Hummer in town and a Chevrolet Suburban. I was tempted to key them both, but I didn’t. I have never vandalized anything and I didn’t want to start.
When I got home, I put on Chopin’s nocturnes to calm my nerves and started dinner. After a while, I realized I hadn’t seen Hester. She usually wanders into the kitchen to wait for her dinner. I put out her food and called, but she didn’t come. I checked her usual places, but she wasn’t in any of them. The only windows open were the ones with screens. Still, a worry started to grow.
The house on Todd Lane has old-fashioned windows with sashes and separate heavy storm windows that are supposed to come off in the summer for the screens. Then, ideally, the screens come off in the fall and the storm windows go back up. It’s a lot of work and I haven’t done it in years. The screens are stacked in the garage, most of them rusted. I just keep the screen
s on one window in the kitchen and one in my bedroom for fresh air when I need it.
I started moving through the house fast, oddly aware of the disconnect between the beautiful nocturnes and my search. I looked everywhere, in the closets, beneath the beds, on top of the towels, behind the sofa, every single one of the secret places I knew Hester liked. I opened kitchen cabinets, wondering if she’d gotten stuck inside somehow. I even opened the refrigerator. I called her name over and over. I thought she knew the word “treat”—I kept a pouch of them around for her—so I grabbed the bag and ran through the house shaking it, repeating “Hester, Hestia, treat, treat” until I started to cry. I called Sue, who had been taking care of Hester when I was away. I thought she might know if Hester had a new secret place, but she said when she checked on Hester she was usually asleep on the couch.
“I can’t find her,” I cried.
“I’ll be right there,” Sue said, and hung up.
When the doorbell rang, I was amazed that Sue had made it over so fast, but I opened the door to find Janine holding Hester, who looked only mildly agitated.
“I found her in the backyard when I went around to drop something off for your dad. I didn’t think you let her out, so I scooped her up and took her home with me. She’s a sweetie.”
I reached for Hester, who was, gratifyingly, squirming a little bit to get out of Janine’s arms.
“Are you okay?” Janine asked.
I couldn’t speak.
Sue pulled into the driveway. When she saw me holding Hester, she rested her forehead on the steering wheel for a moment before opening the car door. “Thank god,” she said, coming over. She scratched Hester’s cheek, then pet my shoulder.
Janine and Sue introduced themselves, and while we stood there on the front step, they managed to discover they had a mutual friend. Someone named Ned who did odd jobs.
“How did she get out?” I said.
Janine said she thought the kitchen window screen might be loose. We walked around the house to see and she was right. The screen had come out of the frame.
“I think she must have been sleeping on the sill and just rolled out,” Janine said, petting Hester, who was still in my arms. Hester must have been a little rattled because she didn’t usually allow herself to be held for so long.
“Good thing it was on the ground floor,” Janine said.
“May doesn’t take her storms down,” Sue said, and Janine and Sue looked at each other as if they had a mutual understanding about me.
“Okay, Hester,” Sue said. “Tell your mama you deserve extra treats tonight. Are you okay?” she asked.
I nodded. “Thanks for coming,” I said.
“Of course. Anytime,” she said, and squeezed my arm.
Sue left and Janine offered to help me get my storm windows down in the spring, if I wanted. I said that would be nice. Then she offered to help me wash them, too.
“We could even get the outsides done now, if you wanted,” she said.
I told her I would think about it.
Night Gardening
Recently it has been popular to say that Emily Dickinson gardened at night because for a few years in middle age the sun stung her eyes. I feel certain it was more complicated than that. The woman was a recluse. Her garden was important to her thinking and being out there at night would have given her a chance to think while invisible, not just to the world but also to her family. She stayed away from people so she could be herself and when she was in the garden at night she could be another self, which is, interestingly, Aristotle’s definition of a friend. Something about the night work appealed to her.
The ice mound in front of the El Puerto promenade was long gone, but it was July now and Leo still hadn’t put anything in his planters. I didn’t know if he was discouraged or disinterested, but I did know I hadn’t encouraged him and I wanted to fix that.
I went to my favorite nursery, the Garden Keeper, which is down a hill from a new development of enormous houses. Sometimes I drive around up there and check on some of my favorites, like the house that looks like a stone castle with a veranda. It’s the first house on Ski Club Drive, though there isn’t a ski club in Anneville.
Today, though, I pulled straight into the Garden Keeper’s lot. I knew from my father that the rehabilitation center across the street was where Beth Gould was recovering from her stroke. I left Bonnie running while I considered driving over to visit her. I wouldn’t be able to do it after I bought the plants because they’d wilt in the trunk. I sat for several minutes, ultimately deciding I wasn’t a close enough friend. I pictured Beth surrounded by all of her real friends, the ones who gave her the silver plate, and turned off the car. I decided I would send flowers when she was home.
The university receives most of its plants from several large commercial nurseries, so there was no need to frequent the local places and I hadn’t been to the Garden Keeper in some time. The day was hot and the cicadas, the sound of surf for the landlocked, were thrumming. In addition to disliking petunias, they are a flower I have never been able to grow well. They get long and spindly on me. Nevertheless, I was determined. I greeted the flats of them respectfully and asked that we give each other another chance. A light breeze ruffled their thin petals.
Edith Wharton’s philosophy of room decoration matches mine on container gardening: “Concerning the difficult question of color, it is safe to say that the fewer the colors used, the more pleasing and restful the result will be. A multiplicity of colors produces the same effect as a number of voices talking at the same time.” I bought three flats of Easy Wave shell pink petunias plus a small English boxwood (Buxus sempervirens “Suffruticosa”) for the center of each pot to provide vertical and year-round interest. For texture I bought some creeping Jenny (Lysimachia nummularia), which cascades beautifully and its golden, coin-shaped leaves would pick up the yellow centers of the petunias. It was a simple but elegant design, I thought, just like Leo’s promenade.
* * *
—
ALL THE WAYSIDE SHOPS were closed when I drove into the parking lot that night. It was midnight and traffic was sparse; the summer students weren’t yet partying. Streetlamps cast cones of light through the humid air and I could hear crickets and peep frogs in the dell. Leo had added a couple of strings of fairy lights over the promenade early in the summer, but they were off now.
Everything I needed was in my trunk, so I backed up to the planters and got to work. A few cars drove into the lot, probably hoping someone at El Puerto would still make them a burrito, but they left quickly when they saw it was closed. One car stayed awhile, and I thought maybe someone was watching me garden. When the engine switched off, I looked up and saw a couple of students making out in the front seat.
I was placing the last pale pink petunia in the second planter, my back to the parking lot, when Leo said hello. I jumped straight into the air.
“I’m sorry!” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What are you doing here?” I must have sounded angry.
“I was working late in the garage,” he said defensively.
I scrutinized the darkness in that direction.
“In the office. Paperwork.”
I nodded.
“When I saw someone over here, I grabbed a flashlight.” He shined the light on the pots.
“You said your grandmother had petunias.”
“She did. They were pink.”
“I guessed.”
“Good guess,” he said.
“I like pink. I don’t like red, but I like pink.” I looked around. “Well, I’m all finished. I was just about to clean up. The plants are small now, but if they’re happy here, they’ll trail over the sides by the end of the summer. It should look nice.”
“They’re perfect. Thank you.” He shined his flashlight on the promenade’s red table umbrellas. �
��You don’t like red?” he asked.
“Red flowers. I don’t mind red on other things.”
“Oh, good.”
Leo aimed the flashlight back at the petunias and we stood there looking down at them.
“I did like one red flower,” I started. “One year my father brought back a cardinal flower—Lobelia cardinalis—from my grandmother’s and planted it behind our house. He tried to approximate the streambed or lowland environment the plant needs with a milk carton full of water and a tiny pinhole in the bottom. It seemed to work for a time.” I paused, a little breathless from all the words.
“What happened?” Leo switched the flashlight off and we stood there in the dark.
“He painted the carton green so it wouldn’t distract from the garden. It was quite a feat to keep that plant alive in our backyard and he did it for a few years. But eventually he lost heart, or interest, I don’t know. My mom started needing more care, I was getting ready to leave for college. It was hard to watch him give up something he’d enjoyed. For a while, I kept the milk jug full myself, but when I came home from school my first summer, the plant was dead.”
Rules for Visiting Page 18