The Shade of My Own Tree

by Sheila Williams

  Gloria sighed and pushed him toward the staircase.

  “Go upstairs now; go into the bathroom; run the water. Take off all of those clothes. Get into the tub.” She raised Troy’s face to hers. “Soap up everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Rinse off; get out of the tub. Dry off and get dressed.”

  “But, Mom, I found—”

  “Now, Troy,” Gloria’s voice was firm.

  “I found—”

  “Troy!”

  “OK.” He trudged up the stairs as if he were carrying the weight of the world on his small shoulders. Gloria watched him.

  “I wonder where he was,” she murmured.

  “In the secret tunnel,” I said, smiling.

  Gloria rolled her eyes.

  “I have got to get him some kids to play with. His imagination is just plain running away with him. He starts day camp next week, thank goodness! Oh! I almost forgot.” She thrust four pale eggnog-colored roses into my hand. “They’re called ‘Florabunda.’ I have a ton of ’em; they’re popping up everywhere. Thought they might look good in there.” She gestured toward the front parlor, which I was decorating in a traditional Victorian style.

  The roses were beautiful. And Gloria was right; they were perfect for the parlor.

  “They are lovely,” I said, turning them over in my hands.

  She nodded, trying without success to suppress her pride.

  When Gloria walks into a garden, she is transformed into a wizard, wise, subtle, and powerful. She uses the little grace notes of her art to tame the delicate blooms of the pink tea rose and sings an aria in a language only grass understands. It is the mystery of her craft and there isn’t any point in her trying to share it with me. I couldn’t understand it if I tried.

  It was magical to see the same fingers that usually held a cigarette or were wrapped around a can of light beer gently stroking the petals of a newly blossomed rose or tapping the side of a thorn until it fell off. Gloria’s hands are wide and square and her fingers are muscular. Her skin is rough and flaking because she plunges her hands into hot water without gloves and once worked on an assembly line. She doesn’t get manicures and she’s forgotten that hand lotion was invented. Her fingernails are short and often dirty with the soil and grit that she works in. And the tips of her fingers are stained yellow from the nicotine of the cigarettes that she smokes one right after the other.

  None of that matters. What matters is what she has done in the garden. It had become a place of wonder. Miss Caroline would have been proud.

  Upstairs, we heard the water running. Troy was following instructions for once. Then I remembered something.

  “Did you go to work yesterday? There was a message from the store on the answering machine.” Gloria had been working part-time at the Quik-Mart in west Prestonn.

  Gloria’s shoulders stiffened.

  “I was late. I had an interview at eight o’clock. I told the manager, but I guess she forgot.” She lowered her head as if she were trying to duck under something.

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to sound too nosy. “How’d it go?”

  “They said they’d call me.”

  Well, that usually means “no,” I thought to myself.

  “Didn’t you have one this morning, too?”

  Her shoulders practically welded themselves together. I could tell from the set of her jaw that she did not want to have this conversation.

  “Yeah. I went. But I seen when I got there that I wasn’t getting that job.”

  I sniffed one of the soft lemon–chiffon colored roses. It had a delicate fragrance. Nice.

  “What made you think that?” I headed toward the pantry to get a vase.

  Gloria followed.

  “The girl at the front desk looked down her nose at me as if she was smelling shit.”

  I tried to seem really interested in the roses. Job interviewing was another subject on which Gloria and I had declared a truce. We didn’t agree at all about how you interview for a job. Gloria believed in a bare-bones, what you see is what you get approach. She went to interviews armed with a one-paragraph résumé, dressed in slacks and a shirt and her hair pulled back. She was clean and she was neat, but she didn’t look professional. I had offered to help her with her résumé, coach her through the interview process, and give her a complete makeover.

  Gloria wasn’t having any of that. Gloria Estepp didn’t put on airs for anybody. She was what she was and that was that.

  But, so far, her approach wasn’t working. She still had the part-time job at the carryout, but no other prospects.

  “Who cares what the receptionist thinks? Who did you interview with? A manager?”

  Gloria sighed.

  “Yeah. Some guy who looked like he was Troy’s age. He was lookin’ down his nose at me, too. I don’t need that. That job wasn’t for me anyhow.”

  I bit my tongue. I had promised myself, sort of, that I wouldn’t go down this road with Gloria again unless it was her idea.

  “Have you seen anything better?”

  She pulled a piece of folded newspaper out of her pocket. It was a section of the classifieds and it had been pressed, folded, and refolded. One two-inch-square box outlined in bold black lines was highlighted in bright pink:

  Landscape Design Company needs project manager to design and implement residential and commercial landscapes. Experience required. Call Andy Lawrence at …

  The address and telephone number were also highlighted. I glanced at the top of the page.

  “This newspaper is four weeks old! They haven’t called you back yet?”

  She looked away.

  “I haven’t called ’em yet.”

  “You haven’t called them yet?” I was amazed. “Why not?”

  “I-I don’t know. I guess … I guess I was just waiting.”

  I frowned.

  “Waiting for …”

  “Just waiting. To see if they hired someone else. I guess … to see if I could get the courage to apply for it.” She took the clipping out of my fingers and refolded it. “They’d never hire me anyway.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  Gloria looked at me as if I were from Mars.

  “Why hire me?”

  “Why not hire you? If the rose garden is an example of your work, they’d be stupid not to.”

  She looked out the kitchen door at the neatly trimmed hedges, the beginnings of a topiary that she was experimenting with, and the now-flourishing roses.

  “Opal, what is a project manager, anyway?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Corporate-speak for the person whose job it is to map out the placement of the trees, bushes, shrubbery, flowers, and other green things and put them into the ground or tell other people where to put them.”

  Gloria just looked at me. She seemed to be processing what I was saying. That was a good sign.

  “Oh. I guess I could do that.”

  I shook my head in frustration. “Yes, I guess you can. You’ve single-handedly transformed this place. And it had been neglected for several years. Anyone who can do that can tell other people where to plant trees or bushes.”

  “Shrubbery.”

  “Shrubbery,” I said. Anything green is completely out of my area of knowledge. If it weren’t for Gloria, the grass on my front lawn would probably die.

  “So, are you going to call them? Maybe they haven’t filled the position yet.” I wanted to say more, but I needed to restrain myself to avoid an argument. I arranged the roses in an old crystal vase.

  “Yeah,” Gloria said with finality, nodding her head. “I’ll call ’em.”

  I took a deep breath before I asked the next question.

  “Anything I can do?”

  She saw through me immediately.

  “Yeah, write me up a four-page résumé, paint my face, and make me look like somebody I’m not?”

>   Well, yes, I said to myself. How did you know?

  To her, I said:

  “It’s all in the packaging.”

  “I’ll do it my way, thank you.”

  “Fine,” I said, turning my attention back to flower arranging.

  Upstairs, the sound of water distracted us. Gloria looked at her watch and rolled her eyes.

  “I’d better go up. That boy wasn’t in the tub long enough to get a flea’s ass clean.”

  I smiled.

  Well said.

  Chapter Eight

  Tending to the rose garden began Gloria’s transformation. Stripping off the layers of wallpaper in the house began mine.

  At the beginning of the summer when I first moved in, I had planned to have a contractor do the plasterwork in the house, but the bids that I got were ridiculous. Even Rodney’s initial “reasonable” bid grew like a dandelion. Five thousand here, two thousand there. But the rooms looked awful and I had to do something. Jack was the one who helped me get out of the corner.

  He’d come by to deliver another bid from a contractor friend of his. My dismay must have been obvious.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Does this bid seem a little high? Or is it just me?”

  “It’s just you,” he said from the opposite side of the room, where he was picking at the wallpaper that had peeled away. “A thousand more would still be within the range.”

  “Oh.” The idea of bringing the house back to its glory days was slipping further away.

  “Say, Opal,” Jack squatted down and pulled off a small piece of the burgundy brocade, “the paper comes off pretty easy. You could save a lot of money by doing it yourself. Stripping off the wallpaper, I mean. Then, when you’ve finished, Rodney can do the rest. Here, let me show you.”

  I broke fingernails and stubbed my thumb. But I did get the hang of it. And started to enjoy myself. How sick is that? Jack had created a monster.

  As I scraped, sweated, rubbed, peeled, and cursed Caroline Xavier’s insatiable decorating zeal, I thought about all of the money I was saving. But I was really saving myself.

  I was obsessed. I came home from work, checked on dinner, then headed to the dining room and forgot to eat. Another night, I stayed up until two o’clock scraping away old paper and dried-on paste. I did the west wall in a week, the east wall in three days. As I started in on the north wall, I realized that I was nearly finished. But the south wall would have to wait, because it needed plasterwork that even my fanaticism couldn’t help. And Rodney wasn’t coming until the next week.

  What would I do until then?

  A movement caught my eye outside. Gloria was getting an early start on what would be another hot, humid river valley day. I watched her for a moment. Flowers, plants, anything with chlorophyll was her passion.

  What was mine?

  I had set up a studio on the third floor just after I moved in, but I had not lifted a paintbrush. I’d put in supplies, organized brushes, alphabetized art books. I had the prettiest, most immaculate studio that you ever saw.

  And not one painting in the place.

  The easel caught my eye. I had placed a canvas on it weeks ago and it was still blank. If painting was my passion, why wasn’t I doing it?

  I painted for almost three hours that morning. I just let the colors pour out of my fingertips through the brushes and onto the canvas. I painted a bouillabaisse of twenty years of tears, bruises, car payments, school plays, torn panty hose, and headaches. I painted a stew of business meetings, accounts payable memos, and copier repairs. I remembered every art lesson that I ever had. Then I ignored them all and put what I wanted on the canvas. I fiddled around with shape and color. I put landscapes with portraits and blobs with no shape at all into still lifes. I had fun.

  The “old” Opal would have been more meticulous. Well, I’d had to be; I was painting in secret then. Not anymore. If still lifes and Impressionism didn’t go together, so what? If I made a mess on the floor or painted at four in the morning without any clothes on, who cared? No, the “old” Opal wouldn’t have done that.

  But she was gone. There was a crazy woman in her place and she was painting her soul.

  My “soul” paintings began to appear everywhere. Once I filled up my bedroom walls, I headed downstairs. No empty wall space was safe: bathrooms, the parlor, the TV room.

  The critics were not kind.

  “Looks like the dog puked,” Troy said.

  Gloria frowned and cocked her head to the side.

  “What is it?”

  It was hard to control my disappointment. The horse and rider that I saw clearly looked like chocolate oatmeal in a puddle of black ink to her.

  “Obviously, you know nothing about art,” I sniffed, teasing Gloria.

  She set her mouth into a straight line and cocked her head the other way.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she admitted. “Because I don’t care what you say; it still looks like chocolate oatmeal.”

  I only had one problem: finding just the right location for my studio. In the beginning, I thought the third floor would be perfect. It had great natural light, plenty of space for easels, works in process, and supplies. But it didn’t work out. The ceilings were too low. And I didn’t realize that the west-facing window sent the relentless afternoon sun into the room, making it stuffy and disintegrating my pastels.

  So, I took my show on the road and moved, temporarily, to the sleeping porch that would become Imani’s room when she returned from India. That didn’t work out, either. The light was fine and the ceilings were tall enough, but the room was too crowded. All of the furniture that wouldn’t fit in the stairwell to the third floor ended up in Imani’s room.

  Next, I set up quarters in the back parlor. I figured that I was moving into a landscape phase anyway and from the first floor it would be easier to take my stuff outside if I wanted.

  Dana floated through one evening after the sun went down, wearing a black cape (yes, that’s right, a black cape in July) and sunglasses. On the way out, she admired one of my paintings. From my “blue” period. How she could see the painting is still a mystery to me. She’d come to borrow duct tape. I didn’t have the nerve to ask why she needed it.

  “Maybe she’s sealing up a box or something,” commented Cynthia, a woman who was staying in the house for a couple of days. She stared with wide eyes at the vision in black.

  “I like it,” Dana purred after she had studied the painting. “It has,” she paused as if looking for the right word, “texture.”

  I have to admit here that of all the things this piece had, I didn’t think that texture was one of them. It was a screwup piece that I had accidentally dropped two blots of paint on. They had hardened into pimples—one grayish-brown, the other blue. But Dana bought it for fifty dollars. My first sale.

  “You’ve put in a lot of vork in this room,” she commented in her throaty Swedish (or was it German?) accent. She smiled and nodded appreciatively when I described my exploits with wallpaper scraping and midnight excursions to the mega–hardware store.

  “I think you should rag roll the walls,” Dana said firmly. “I could help you.”

  To my surprise, she went on to explain, in detail, the ins and outs of the rag-rolling art. She sounded like Martha Stewart. In latex. I thanked her for the suggestion.

  Jack was kind enough to echo Troy’s sentiments concerning my artistic endeavors, then tried to temper the blow with an invitation to take an evening drive and pick up some ice cream. I turned him down, too much to do right then. He pretended to be hurt and made a face that looked so pitiful that I laughed out loud. It just didn’t fit his Macho Man GI Joe demeanor.

  “Oh, it’s like that, huh?” he growled. I pushed by him with a stack of folded laundry and he followed me through the dining room to the foyer.

  “Uh-huh, it’s like that.”

  “See, th
at’s what I’m talkin’ about there. Still mad at me because of what I said about your painting. You ask a black man to be open-minded and sensitive and what does he get? Criticized! Rejected!”

  “Negro, please, you said it looked like an elephant threw up a spinach salad.”

  He tried to look serious.

  “I was trying to be creative in the manner in which I convey appreciation for your use of color.”

  The exaggerated quasi-English accent was too much. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Jack, take a laxative, will you?”

  “OK, I will after you agree to go for a ride with me; what’s up with this wall?”

  He changed the subject so quickly that I got conversational whiplash. He’d stopped at the pocket doors leading to the foyer.

  “Oh, that,” I set down the laundry basket. “I’m not sure what it is. I’ve done the best that I can with it. Rodney starts next week; I’ll let him figure it out.”

  Together we studied the wall. I had stripped and scraped down my dining room walls and I was pretty proud of myself. But the north wall presented a wrinkle that I hadn’t counted on. After I peeled away the burgundy brocade, baby-poop gold, and robin’s egg blue wallpaper, not to mention a busy rose floral number, the wall presented a brownish-greenish-gold-shaded goo that really did look like one of the dogs had puked.

  “I wondered what it was,” I said. “Mold from water damage upstairs? Another layer of wallpaper?”

  Jack ran his fingers across the wall.

  “I don’t think so,” he said slowly, fumbling in his pocket for his glasses. “It looks like paint. Not wall paint, latex. Or oil.” He looked at me and smiled mischievously. “Like the paint you use in your Dog’s Innards series.”

  I glared at him.

  “Thought I’d try that one out on you,” he said smugly. “I started to say ‘Dog Guts’ but changed my mind.”

  “Out.” I bumped him with the laundry basket. “It’s better than Dog Puke but not by much!”

  I was enjoying Jack. He brought humor and companionship, something I had not shared with Ted. Something that I needed when Beni Douglas burst into my life.