There Your Heart Lies

by Mary Gordon

  Amelia lived her college years in a happy haze, majoring in Spanish because she’d lived in Mexico, gone to a bilingual school, and was so nearly fluent that she didn’t have to work hard to do well in her classes. She made many friends and had a few lovers, not through any sense of urgency, but because sex seemed to her a kindly and pleasant thing to be doing, generous and enjoyable. When a man, a boy really, seemed to be wanting more from her—time, exclusive attention—she slipped the leash of her coupling and ran gently off, like a night creature who has found herself mistakenly spending too much time in daylight. Her friends remarked on her extraordinary ability to leave men with no residue of hard feeling. Occasionally, she would be accused of not really caring deeply for anyone; this accusation was usually leveled at her by a woman who had confided in Amelia and not been rewarded by return confidences of equal weight.

  It wasn’t that she failed to make deep connections. She loved her mother, although she occasionally found her “just too much”—too fast, too strong, too certain, too determined. She had loved her father with a clear, pure love that had run through her life like a stream; his death had neither frozen it nor clogged it. If his love was a stream, his death, when she was nineteen, had been a wound made by a cold knife that had pierced her through and through; she could feel, whenever she called up his face, the raw, tender place on her left side. Now he was gone, and there was one other person she could love with that kind of clarity. She loved her grandmother.

  Marian was co-owner of a nursery, a large greenhouse with a half-acre growing field behind it. Her partner, Helga, was the same age as Marian. They insisted on coming to work as they always had, but they needed more and more help, although they hated admitting it. Reluctantly, they hired a young man—not so young by Amelia’s standards, at thirty-five—a Nordic god who eats up all his summer wages on his long winter surfing holidays. Marian has grown very fond of him; Helga, despite her early misgivings, grudgingly admires him; both are dependent on his energy, his strength.

  Helga fled Nazi Germany with her lover, Rosa. Rosa was a ballerina; Helga worked with her father in a factory that manufactured something Helga didn’t like to talk about. She wasn’t Jewish, she didn’t have to leave, but Rosa was her love, and it was clear Rosa could not survive without support. If you wanted support, you would go to Helga; it was obvious from her posture, from the way she ate up the world with her long strides.

  For fifty years, Helga and Marian had worked together, shoulder to shoulder. Partners in business. Dearest friends.

  It is understood that Amelia will help in the nursery. But, in fact, she doesn’t like working with plants. It isn’t the hard, physical labor that she minds. She quite likes the digging; she enjoys dislodging deep stubborn rocks and roots. Nor does she mind getting her hands dirty. What she can’t bear is the uncertainty, not knowing whether what you have planted will prosper or perish. The vulnerability of what goes into the ground hurts her. Storms could destroy it, cold rather than heat, dryness rather than the required wetness. Animals: deer, squirrels, chipmunks, overly greedy birds.

  —

  She is not, in any way, a person of faith. What small gift she had for it was crushed when her father died of the pulmonary hypertension he’d suffered from for years. A new procedure was performed; they were offered the possibility of a miracle. For a while, he seemed better. But there was no miracle; he died, suddenly, when she was thinking he was better than he had been for some time.

  She can’t focus on her work in the nursery because she worries for every seed she puts into the ground. Her habitual recourse when she’s distressed is to become vague. When she helps her grandmother, she forgets where she is, loses things, can’t remember what she has just done, doesn’t hear when her grandmother says, “Bring this here,” or “Carry that there,” or “Water that gently at the roots.”

  Her grandmother sees it all. “This work doesn’t make you happy,” she says to Amelia during the first summer. And Amelia weeps hot tears of shame. She can’t bear to disappoint her grandmother, and she knows it’s a failure of her own spirit, a failure to connect, that has marked, and will go on to mark, her life.

  But her grandmother doesn’t seem upset. “You see, I understand. There are things one just doesn’t have an appetite for. My family couldn’t understand that I didn’t love horses. It made them angry. But I loved other things. I was just crazy about cars. I learned how to drive early; I learned how to fix them. And, rather late, I came to love planting things. But you must never pretend to enjoy something you don’t enjoy. And you must believe me that you’ll find what you’re meant to do. So I’ll ask for your help when I really need it. Meanwhile, look for something else.”

  She works with her grandmother and Helga until the first frost. Then she takes a job in a bakery in Westerly that’s trying to cultivate the business of the summer people and the folks who commute to Providence and the weekenders from New York. The Wildflower Bakery serves lattes and cappuccinos and espressos and each morning produces healthy muffins and unhealthy croissants and tarts and cakes and brownies and cookies: chocolate chip, oatmeal, peanut butter.

  No one remembers when Amelia started doing the cupcakes.

  She’s often bored in the slack period between nine and eleven; she thinks the idea came to her then. There is a bowl of ordinary butter cream frosting on the counter. Rachel, who graduated from Brown six years earlier and works on large metal sculptures in her studio, an abandoned warehouse overlooking the canal, had been making a birthday cake for the child of one of their most regular customers. Alongside the large bowl of white icing on the counter are smaller bowls of pink, yellow, and blue, with which Rachel had filled pastry bags and created yellow, blue, and pink rosettes, squeezing the paste from a bag that ended in a pharmaceutical-looking nozzle. On the opposite counter are the cupcakes that Amelia is meant to frost with chocolate and then top with colored sprinkles. But she decides on a whim to frost the tops of the cupcakes with white frosting and rosebuds, bluebells, and buttercups squeezed from the pastry bag.

  Rachel is amused. “Let’s put them out and see what happens.” All six of the cupcakes are bought within ten minutes of the entrance of the lunchtime crowd. Rachel encourages Amelia to branch out. On a trip to Providence, Amelia invests her own money in candied violets and silver leaf. Rachel sells the cupcakes at what they both believe is the exorbitant price of five dollars. People seem willing to pay. It becomes a fashion at gallery openings or official functions or up-market celebrations to serve cupcakes from Wildflower Bakery instead of a large cake. They’re written about in The Westerly Sun and The New London Day. A reporter from The Providence Journal makes the trip. The Wildflower Bakery becomes, in its small way, famous, and Rachel knows it’s because of Amelia. She offers to make Amelia a partner, but Amelia says no. “I feel guilty profiting from your talents,” Rachel says, and Amelia blinks and smiles because the idea of profit from cupcakes seems funny to her and as far away as Andromeda or the North Pole. “At least let me give you a good raise,” Rachel says, and Amelia blinks four times and says yes, that would be very nice.

  Amelia never wants to eat the cupcakes. It isn’t the taste of them she likes, it’s the look of them, or the way people enjoy looking at them before they eat them. People say, “Isn’t it painful to spend so much time on something and then have it disappear into someone’s mouth?” And she blinks and says, “No, you see, that’s why I like it.”

  If anyone asks Amelia—which they often do, she’s twenty-four now—what exactly she’s interested in, which means, what is she going to do with her life, when is she going to settle down to real work, preferably a real profession, she never says what she really means: “I’m interested in decoration.”

  Because she knows if she says that, she’ll be misunderstood. They’ll think she wants to fix up rooms, match drapes and slipcovers. Find the right sofa, the right lamp. But that isn’t it. What she likes is adding little decorative touches. She doesn’t want to
make things; she thinks there are already too many things in the world. What she wants is to leave a mark that’s a kind of greeting, friendly, encouraging. A mark with no future so she doesn’t have to worry about its fate. By which she means its eventual destruction. Or its placement among the unloved objects of the world: resented, hidden, out of sight.

  This was something she had learned not only from her father but from her mother. Her father was a potter. In his studio, she saw the stacked, unwanted pitchers, bowls, plates, mugs. At her mother’s word, buildings were torn down, others put up. Urban planning, it was called. Her mother was an “urban planner.” But she didn’t like telling other children what her mother did, because she would have to say “mostly she gets things torn down.” Her mother explained that some things got old, and they were not only ugly but dangerous, and they had to be torn down so that new, beautiful, safe things could be put up.

  And so, it seemed wrong to devote any hope or love to things that were meant to last. Either as with her father’s unwanted pots gathering dust in the basement, or the buildings her mother had torn down, they lasted too long. Or sometimes they were destroyed for no reason, or for reasons that were wrong, sometimes the most beautiful pots fell off the shelf and broke, or someone complained that her mother was responsible for the destruction of a treasure.

  —

  She waits till her mother comes for a visit to tell her that, in fact, she isn’t working with Marian in the nursery, but in a bakery decorating cupcakes. Her mother makes that sucking sound that she makes when she’s trying to keep back words that she knows will only make things worse.

  “Don’t take advantage of your grandmother’s hospitality,” she says.

  And Marian snaps, “Oh, for God’s sake, Naomi, it’s not the Ritz, and she’s not an indentured servant.”

  •

  Marian knows that when she was younger, Naomi’s age, fifty-seven, she might have been impatient with Amelia or someone like her. But she’s ninety-two. One thing she knows about herself: with age, she got kinder.

  It’s certainly true that Amelia can be vague. She doesn’t like saying what she thinks, or she’ll say what she thinks if it can be understood as mere description: something that has no more weight than other descriptions. But her vagueness seems to Marian a desirable lightness; her seeming to skim over the surface of the world seems beautiful, like a bird skimming over the surface of the water. Vague. Vague, the French word for a wave. That’s how Marian experiences Amelia’s vagueness, a warm wave sluicing her tired skin, a wave that passes over dry stones and shells and turns them luminous and lovely. Sometimes, you think she’s not seeing anything, and then, it’s as if you’re riding on a train at daybreak. You look out the window; at first there is only an unimposing greyness and then, gradually, a strange landscape shows itself, its lines sharper precisely on account of its recent invisibility.

  She came to a new and, she believes, valuable understanding of Amelia when she was reading one of her hundreds of gardening books. She reads gardening books as some people read romances: now they’re her most common reading; she doesn’t really want to read anything new, certainly nothing that requires a radical recalibration of her understanding of the world. Gardening books and Trollope: that’s her reading now.

  She had been reading idly, thinking of planting something whose name as well as its properties had taken her fancy. When she turned the page, she found a section describing a plant that captured her imagination. “Love in a Puff,” this one is called.

  “Love in a Puff,” she read. “Cardiospernum. Heartseed.”

  “Their color is so light,” the writer went on, “it seems almost an illumination. The papery husk opens too easily. As it matures, the seed is joined to the plant by a thick attachment that is precisely heart-shaped. And the scar left behind when the seed frees itself is a beautiful, creamy white.”

  Love in a Puff.

  Cardiospernum.

  Heartseed.

  Illuminated, fragile seeming yet containing in itself a black-and-white hardness—hardness, in this case, suggesting its most positive meaning: durability, something that can be counted on to do its work, to last. The separation that leaves behind a beautiful, heart-shaped scar.

  Birds skimming over the water. Hidden landscapes. Waves. Plants. What is it about Amelia that makes Marian believe she can only be understood indirectly, using phrases that start with “like” or “as”? Similes. Similitudes. The direct view is not the true one, only a series of connections to other things helps her to understand her granddaughter better, she likes to think, than anyone else. This understanding, she believes, must be the truest form of love.

  She tries to convey this when she says to Naomi, “Don’t worry about Amelia. She’s got something, maybe we haven’t seen it yet, that’s going to help her make her way.”

  And Naomi says, “Well, you’re right, we haven’t seen it yet. I guess we just have to believe.”

  “Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed.” Marian stifles these words, will not let them escape her lips, Jesus’s words to Doubting Thomas. So often, the echoes from a lost faith, a faith willfully and violently discarded, bob up, float up, unbidden, unwelcome, the flotsam and jetsam of a vanished way of life.

  •

  March 25th is one of the first days that can properly be called spring. It’s been a hard winter, hardest on the old women: Rosa, the youngest, is eighty-nine. Marian and Helga, who have lived much of the last fifty years outdoors, have hardly been outside. Like dogs leashed almost beyond their endurance, they demand a walk, demand that Amelia drive them to the beach.

  It is late afternoon. The sky is bluish violet; smoky clouds, thin as eyebrows, Amelia thinks, dissipate in the pastel air.

  “The air has a chill,” says Rosa, who was not entirely eager for the walk.

  “Like a glass of ice water with the ice just taken out,” Marian says. “My favorite kind of weather. Nothing has really begun, and so nothing is in the process of being over.”

  And Amelia thinks, with pride, I am descended from a woman who says things like that.

  Walking up the dune, Amelia feels that they’ve entered a new climate. The chill in the air that Rosa and her grandmother spoke of seems to have disappeared. She feels the suggestion of a fog around her eyes; she watches the sky grow smokier, turns to the west, and watches what seems like a hole in the clouds grow larger, as if the sun had burnt it through.

  Helga and her grandmother have gone ahead; Amelia allows Rosa to lean on her arm. She watches Helga’s back and her grandmother’s. They are a bit ahead, and if she didn’t know them, their identities would be unclear. They seem to her not quite real, characters in a story, illustrations from a children’s book. Nothing that she sees seems far; if there is disconnection, it can easily be bridged. There’s nothing, she thinks, that can’t be swum to.

  She looks out over the inlet; the islands make a gap through which, in high season, boats sail. But there are no boats now, only this sense of an opening to an entirely desirable invisibility. Despite the heat that travels down her spine from the climb up the dune, Amelia knows it’s winter. The beach grasses are dry, the branches of the squat rosebushes show uncomfortable-looking prickles that she knows would pierce her skin. The conifers are rusty, unbalanced by the winter winds.

  She can hear the water, but the landscape seems more desert than seacoast. Having grown up in seasonless southern California, she never quite believes in seasonality. It always surprises her. Why should she believe that, by June, the beach roses will be pink, the grasses lush and green, then a metallic silver when the sun catches the drops of spray on their new curves?

  Now everything is dormant, and she finds the dormancy restful. Nothing is being used. The only visible boat has been abandoned; it’s a hull only, on its side, tied to a rock near the shore. She can’t imagine that anyone will ever come for it, that it will ever sail again.

  The fog thickens, and Helga and Marian disapp
ear over the dune. Amelia can hear the sound of bells; she often hears them, but she can never remember their sources. She knows she’s asked her grandmother, and her grandmother has told her, but it’s the kind of thing she can’t keep in her mind, and now she’s embarrassed to ask again. She likes to believe that those bells signal the possibility of rescue.

  At the top of the dune, Rosa asks if they can take a moment’s rest. Amelia looks through the gap between the islands. She’s never known what the islands are, if anyone lives there, what they’re called. She likes it that the separation opens to an unknown destination; the unknown, rather than being frightening, seems to offer a possibility leading to something whose rightness she can sense but cannot see. Meme will go there, she thinks. Someday I’ll lose sight of her as I’ve lost sight of her on the far side of the dune. She will be off somewhere, far off, a place that I can’t follow. I must believe she will be happy. I must believe that it will be all right, as my father is happy, as for him everything is all right. Tears come to her eyes, and the islands blur, then come together, and then separate. Rosa sees her tears and leans more closely into Amelia’s body, and she, too, is weeping. The tears are pleasurable to them both, coming easily, releasing something into the heavy air.

  The wind has picked up. Amelia sees that Helga and her grandmother have crossed over the dune to the more sheltered part of the beach. The water there is nearly waveless; near the shore, there are pools of calmness and, in them, pastel reflections: blue, pink, violet—girlish colors, Amelia thinks. She looks at Rosa, her thin hair in its chignon, her rose-colored scarf, her pinkish lipstick. Her sunglasses: their rims a violet pink. She is still girlish, Amelia thinks, and I am probably, in all their minds, still a girl. Perhaps even in my own mind. She wonders when she will no longer think of the word “girl” in relation to herself.