The Wonder Garden

by Lauren Acampora

  Rosalie meets Nayana’s eyes in the rearview mirror and smiles. She is not a true “exchange” student, in that no child from Old Cranbury will be spending equal time in Bangladesh. Instead, one of Noah’s eighth-grade classmates will stay with a family in Australia for the semester. Noah had wanted to do this, but Rosalie had told him no. She can’t fathom one of her children being absent for so long, coming home taller and heavier, full of meals she hasn’t prepared.

  There is no higher directive than motherhood, she believes, no better purpose than shepherding new life through the world. She is continually transfixed by her own offspring, these five miraculous iterations of her own genes. What a pity, those women who choose not to have children, who deny the clamoring souls inside them. She disapproves, too, of those women who have children casually, who treat them as accessories, or worse, burdens—those women who continue to chase power careers, who hire live-in nannies who keep the television on all day, as she has witnessed through the window of Suzanne Crawford’s home. It’s no wonder her little boy still hasn’t spoken a word.

  The sad fact is that Rosalie is nearing fifty. She might have tried for another child, but her husband had been firmly opposed, and now the stockades of menopause are undeniable. Still, she takes comfort in the fact that there is no family in town larger than her own. Because of this, she enjoys a kind of celebrity. She is always the class parent in one grade or another at any given time. She knows every teacher and parent in the elementary, middle, and high schools. It is difficult to complete any grocery trip for all the chatting she is obliged to do. It was inevitable, of course, that she’d eventually run for school board and be elected. She understands what children need. She’d begun her first term this summer, an intrepid foot soldier in the battle of the budget. The numbers are daunting to her, the spreadsheets with rows of digits like crawling ants, but she knows better than to worry over them. What matters are the values those digits represent: each a history teacher, a soccer field, a new set of school bus tires. The decisions are, after all, basic. The board doesn’t need another mumbling accountant. It needs Rosalie Warren, clearheaded and largehearted, mother of all.

  As the late August sun dries the leaves, Rosalie feels the first stirrings of autumn. This is her favorite time of year, these last breaths of summer, the store-fresh smell of new denim. She drives the children to the mall and sets them loose in a pack, keeping Nayana to herself. The girl touches the clothing in Aéropostale as if it were powdered with gold dust. Rosalie takes the liberty of choosing things for her, hanging them in a dressing room, and shutting her inside. After several moments of silence, the door opens, and the girl stands dangle-limbed in a bumpy knit sweater dress, a crooked smile at her lips.

  “Oh, don’t you look fabulous!” Rosalie croons.

  “Everything is so short,” the girl says thinly.

  “That’s okay.” Rosalie nods. “It shows off your long legs.”

  The girl flushes and retreats into the dressing room so that only her bony ankles are visible. Rosalie buys her the dress, along with a jean skirt, colored tights, and a pair of faddish ankle boots. She barely has time to review her own children’s selections as they pile into the Grand Caravan like a winning team.

  At their annual barbecue, Rosalie directs guests to the cholar dal platter that Nayana has helped prepare. As the guests make astonished noises with their mouths full, Rosalie puts a hand on Nayana’s shoulder and tells the anecdote from the mall.

  “Everything is so short!” she repeats.

  John Duffy approaches Rosalie with a strained smile. His cheerful summer attire is like a costume on him, she thinks. The pink polo shirt and shorts are unable to disguise his cold-weather disposition, best suited to Carhartts and work boots. He is a home inspector—the most stringent in the business, he claims—and insufferable in his arrogance. The constant reminders that he is an entrepreneur, a self-made man, reek of a sense of inferiority and resentment. It is too late to get away. Rosalie gives him her best summertime smile, praying he knows better than to talk board business now. The other guests pull away, and even Nayana takes the opportunity to escape.

  John launches right into it. “The cuts aren’t even close to adequate.” He thrusts his hands into his shorts pockets. “You have to admit that the high school was a mistake.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Come on, Rosalie.” He laughs drily. “It’s bigger than some college campuses. Who are we trying to impress? With the economy the way it is? Come on. Would you have green-lighted it if you’d been on the board then?”

  A chill shoots through Rosalie’s veins, as if John has insulted one of her children. The new high school is like a Renaissance cathedral compared to the former cinder block cloister with its dank cells. The children of Old Cranbury deserve their new building. They deserve light and space and air. They deserve the new indoor stadium, the undented gym lockers, the Olympic-sized pool.

  Rosalie shows her teeth in a smile. “I think I would have, yes.”

  “Well, we’ll have to pay for it now,” he snorts. “We’ll have to cut electives, like it or not. Music, art, languages. And even, God forbid, sports.”

  “No.” Rosalie shakes her head calmly. This speech, she suspects, is one that she will have to repeat all year. “We’ll only need to cut some administrative and janitorial positions. And the busing will have to be doubled up. We’ll just have to tighten our belts a little bit, John, until we get back on our feet. Every school district is going through this right now.”

  As she is cleaning up after the party, putting potato salad into Tupperware and throwing out broken tortilla chips, Rosalie feels unaccountably drained. She is not a person who naps, but she feels that if she were to lie down now, she would stay down for hours. The way to fight this drag, she knows, is to keep moving. She moves on to the buffet table and is rewarded with the gratifying vision of the empty cholar dal platter.

  Early on the first morning of school, Rosalie prepares six lunches. She prints the name of each of her children on a brown paper bag and feels the usual sense of dislocation at seeing the names written out. The children will carry these names into the world, beyond the scope of her sight. There is a rush to the breakfast table, the plumage of self-selected fashions. Nayana sits quietly in her lilac tights and denim skirt, the battered satchel at her side full of crisp school supplies. At Rosalie’s request, she will share a homeroom with Noah, who has promised to escort her to all her classes.

  After they are gone, the house falls into bittersweet silence. Rosalie does not pause, but packs the breakfast bowls into the dishwasher and sits back down at the table with a notebook to plan the family commemoration event for September 11. Each year—each additional year of mourning for innocent lives lost, of troops crushed overseas—this project holds more meaning for her. It has never seemed adequate to observe a moment of silence at 8:46 A.M., to privately replay the barbarity of that day. This energy should be directed outward, she believes, funneled into a constructive project. This year, she decides, the focus of the event will be assembling care packages for the troops. The fighting is necessary, she believes, and ultimately for a righteous purpose, the most Christian purpose of all: peace on earth. Rosalie is embarrassed by Americans who remain willfully ignorant of the sacrifices their soldiers make every day to defend them and to bring stability to others. No one ties a yellow ribbon around a tree anymore, but Rosalie still does this every September and leaves it up until someone or something pulls it down.

  She purchases thick wool socks for the soldiers, bottles of sunscreen, Sudoku puzzles, powdered Gatorade, boxes of Nilla Wafers. Her children float in and out of the dining room, where she has set up the boxes, helping to pack them in shifts. Only Nayana stays all day, sitting beside Rosalie. As they fill the boxes with foam peanuts, Rosalie allows herself to ask cautious questions about the girl’s family.

  “What does your father d
o for a living?”

  “He was a construction worker,” the girl answers simply. “But he died in the floods.”

  Rosalie is silent, arranging pink peanuts around a stack of socks. Her face heats. It is inexcusable, she thinks, that the exchange agency failed to include this information.

  “How terrible,” she says gently. “It must be very difficult not to have your father.”

  The girl nods. There are two older sisters, she says, who help their mother and who looked after Nayana when she was younger. Her sisters and mother worked in a rice mill, but lost their jobs when the mill went automatic. Now they are in the city, where Nayana goes to a special girls’ school. Her family refuses to let her work. She is better than the boys in math and science, and they hope someday she will go to the polytechnic college and become an engineer, that she will move to America and bring them with her. This fulfillment of stereotype is exciting to Rosalie. The student will be, as she had hoped, an example of diligence and ambition to her own girls.

  “That’s exactly what America is for,” she tells Nayana firmly. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t achieve your dreams here. You should start looking at colleges. I’ll help you with your applications when the time comes, and serve as a reference or sponsor, or whatever you need.”

  Rosalie feels a swelling of thanks to God for choosing her as His servant for this task. Its significance is more than she can comfortably process, and she is humbled by it. She thinks with a knot in her throat of that mother, on the other side of the world—of the incredible flash of fortune that has sent her daughter to the United States. What a tangled gratitude that woman must feel. How awful to not be able to provide opportunities for her own children, to be forever occupied with the basics, with paying for sustenance, keeping the house from falling apart. Rosalie knows that she is among a lucky percentage of the world’s women whose husbands go to work and return.

  Of course, there are drawbacks. Michael stays late at the hospital and is rarely home for dinner. You would think he was a martyr, the way he talks about sacrificing for the family. Obviously, she’d known life with a brain surgeon would be like this. She’d managed her expectations from the start, filled her days with activity. She is not the type of woman who depends on her husband for constant companionship and emotional fulfillment. The ideal wife of a professional is able to provide much of this for herself, and does not begrudge her husband the scraps of personal space he needs, the odd hour or two he takes in his workshop: a detached tool shed outfitted with hammers and wood, out of which no construction ever emerges.

  Autumn progresses. Hannah is abandoned by her best friend; Rachel can’t shake off a clinger. Ethan falls on the field with another ACL tear, benched for the season. Rosalie scraps her varsity football column and rewrites it on sports injuries, the need to guard our children’s long-term health while promoting victory on the field. Noah and Nayana quietly ride bicycles around the neighborhood and collect bugs. It gladdens Rosalie to see that he has taken her under his wing. She is touchingly young, much less sophisticated than the girls in town. One evening, Rosalie notices that the door to the den is closed, but she cannot imagine her son being interested in a girl like this. Rosalie knocks and opens the door to find them sitting primly together, watching Nova.

  For Halloween, Rosalie solicits Nayana’s help in creating the family costume. She has thought that, this year, they might all go as Bollywood stars. Nayana seems glad to accompany her to the fabric store, where they select jewel-toned silks and gold trim. After Nayana has finished her homework and the other children are visiting friends, they sew glittering saris and head scarves for the girls, tunics and turbans for Michael and the boys.

  On Halloween, Rosalie reserves a table for eight at Gulliver’s. The other patrons look up from their meals as the Warrens enter like a dinner-theater performance troupe. Rosalie and Nayana giggle together, and Rosalie feels hot, as if in a spotlight. The boys position themselves at the table so that they face the football game on the television screens above the bar.

  “Fifteen dollars for a burger?” Michael grumbles.

  “Oh, we only go out a few times a year,” Rosalie says.

  By the time the drinks and the plate of onion blossoms come, they have forgotten their costumes. Rebecca Lamb and her family stop by the table, her boys dressed halfheartedly as astronauts.

  “You guys look amazing,” she exclaims, “even better than last year. What were you, crayons?”

  The burgers come, and Nayana’s bland-looking penne primavera. The girl is especially talkative tonight, perhaps more at ease in East Asian garb. Hannah sits transfixed as she animatedly describes an amusement park near her home.

  “It’s called Wonder Garden, and it has water rides and a very big pool, and a motorcycle show called Danger Game.” Nayana giggles. “I and my sisters want to go very much. But my mother does not like for us to talk about it. It is too much money, she says, and not necessary.”

  “We’ll pay for it!” Jonah shouts. “We can pay for your whole family to go!”

  “Oh.” Nayana’s smile fades. “No, no.”

  “Well,” Rosalie says gently, “we can talk about that later.”

  As she eats, Rosalie becomes aware of a woman with a sullen little girl at a nearby table. The woman keeps looking at them, and in particular at Michael. Rosalie wipes her chin with her napkin. Michael, she notices, is chewing with a strange twist on his lips. He laughs loudly at something Jonah has said. Rosalie glances at the woman again—an attractive blonde in a cowl-neck sweater—and catches her eye. There is something in the woman’s gaze, something flinty and unpleasant, that makes Rosalie look away.

  Out of her costume, later, she is caught for a moment by her own image in the bathroom mirror. At a glance, she sees that the black eyeliner has miraculously succeeded in conjuring its illusion. It makes Rosalie look like a different woman, younger and more dangerous. This kind of thing rarely matters to Rosalie. She is not like other women whose appearances are paramount to their sense of worth. To her, the face she has at forty-eight is not so much aged as broken in. It is stretched and wrinkled in the right places, like a pair of soft jeans, a reflection of her character. Still, she is reluctant to wash her face tonight. She gazes for a prolonged moment at this new permutation of herself, lifting her chin to different angles, until the tiny fissures in the drying makeup begin to predominate and the effect shifts from sex appeal to mild derangement.

  Michael is already in his pajamas when she comes out of the bathroom. She stands for a moment, watching him get into bed. He does not look at her in the bathroom doorway.

  “Who was that woman in the restaurant?” she asks, careful to keep her voice light, curious.

  “What woman?” Michael says, too quickly.

  “The one who was looking at you.”

  “Who’s that? I didn’t notice anyone looking at me.” He now looks toward Rosalie, in her pale blue nightgown with satin smocking. “Do you mean the waitress?”

  There is something scripted in his delivery. Rosalie has never heard him speak in quite this way.

  “There was a woman,” she says more plainly, “looking at you like she knew you. Who was that?”

  Rosalie’s heart beats quickly, uncertainly, unsure of how to pilot such an exchange, of which there is no precedent in their twenty-two years of marriage.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Michael continues in his theatric tone. “I really don’t know who you mean. Maybe she was looking at our costumes.”

  Rosalie does not speak. She stands in front of her jewelry box and, with a snag of regret, takes the gold hoops out of her earlobes. Delicately, she places them in their blue velveteen slots and, as she executes this motion, seems to tap into a deep, primal stream that delivers the truth to all women. She holds on to the edge of the dresser for a moment and closes her eyes. Then she turns around and smiles flatly at her husband. />
  “You’re probably right,” she says.

  When she wakes in the morning, Halloween has rotted away. There is a string of bright, hard days ahead of her leading up to the school board meeting. While the kids are out, she burrows into the budget numbers, taps them into her calculator. Michael returns home after dark each night and seems to avoid looking directly at her. Perhaps this is not strange, she thinks. Perhaps he never did.

  For the board meeting, Rosalie chooses a charcoal pantsuit. She puts on a string of pearls and paints her nails with opaline polish. The message, she hopes, is elegant austerity. She is the newest member and the only woman on the board. Her fellow members are businessmen, financiers, lawyers, and accountants, or think they are. They wear the set jowls of stoic beleaguerment. They are accustomed to daily, unsentimental spinning of numbers and whiteboard presentations. John Duffy is in his habitual undertaker’s suit. As the attendees convene in the high school library, Rosalie sits calmly behind her microphone, sipping at her water cup. All at once, she feels that she understands the plight of the politician, burdened with the expectations of an untutored public.

  A group of adorable first graders, up past their bedtimes, leads the group in the Pledge of Allegiance. Their parents snap pictures, then usher the children home, vacating the front rows of seats. No one moves up to fill these, so that there is a yawning gap between the board and the seated public. All at once, Rosalie feels a sharp longing for her own children.

  Gary Tighe leans toward his microphone and launches into the preliminary budget discussion. When he mentions the projected rise in expenses, there is audible rumbling. Rosalie makes eye contact with a fleshy, slit-mouthed woman she doesn’t know, most likely a woman with no children of her own in the schools. The woman’s hair is gray and frizzed, and she wears glasses that are too small for her face. This is exactly the type of person who comes religiously to board meetings. Rosalie can already predict her grievances: Property taxes are already too high—who can afford living here anymore?