Reader, I Married Him

by Tracy Chevalier

  Very well. But she was not simply rolling over. The alternative was year upon numbing year, toiling away as an ever more elderly pensioner in the gardening equivalent of the salt mines to strip away another crop of seedlings, budding with idiot hopefulness, perking and poking and flopping about with garish green naïveté. Unless she took a stand, each year her futile Sisyphean extermination would be undertaken in a spirit of submission and impotence.

  First off, she would demonstrate the extent of what Burt refused to label a problem. Thus after yet another mass murder of seedlings by the log store—an empty structure that made her feel wistful and remiss, for she hadn’t reordered fuel for the wood burner, around which she and Wyndham had lingered through many a toasty winter evening—Jeannette gathered the hairy pile of crushed blades and dangling taproots, marched to Burt’s front door, and deposited the offering on his step with a note: “Sorry, I believe these belong to you.” Within minutes—he could have heard her scuttle away, and she was braced for a blast of blue invective—a belly laugh carried to her patio, round, resonant, and loose.

  Jeannette rifled the tool shed the next morning. Even if Wyndham had kept a chainsaw, which it seems he didn’t, she’d have been too afraid of the monstrosity to use it. But she did dig out a long trusty handsaw, whose rudimentary technology she understood, and which in a moment of inattention was unlikely to amputate her arm. Besides, the identifying “rip-cut teeth cross-cut” on its cardboard sleeve sounded suitably violent.

  The sky-blue shorts with decorative pockets she wore for the project that afternoon were sensible for a warm spell in June, though they were nearly new, and showed off legs little veined and rather shapely for a woman her age. The crisp yellow crop top was also airy and cool; at Debenhams, she’d always maintained that good styling needn’t be impractical. Drawing the sword of vengeance from its scabbard, she climbed from bench to wall, then scrambled on to the roof of the log store (already shaggy with helicopter seedpods, lying in wait for next year). From here she enjoyed ready access to a fat lower branch of the sycamore, right where it thrust presumptuously across her property. Gripping the branch with her other hand for balance, she traced a cut with the tips of the teeth a few daring inches into Burt Cuss’s scruffy domain. The blade juddered.

  By the time she’d established a starter notch, she was sweating; the yellow crop top would soon be a write-off. A handsaw seemed unfitting for green wood, which continually grabbed at its teeth and brought each wobbly stroke to a standstill. After half an hour of rasping, and stopping to catch her breath, she’d got not an inch through a branch whose diameter ran to half a foot, and whose demeanour remained placid, if not contemptuous. At this rate, she’d be sawing sycamore branches in all weathers for the next year. Already, her upper arm ached, and she’d developed a blister on her right forefinger.

  What she needed was the smallest symbolic satisfaction. That meant removing one full branch to start with—much more doable if she climbed further up into the tree to attack a higher, thinner limb. Aiming for a vulnerable-looking bough ten feet overhead, Jeannette dusted off skills from a tomboy childhood, planting a pink plimsoll firmly into the Y where the branch at which she’d hacked so ineffectually met the trunk.

  Goodness, she must have been a brave little girl. When ascending many a tree to nearly its summit on family holidays in the Lake District, she didn’t remember feeling this terrified. Executing a few more shaky manoeuvres, struggling both to pull herself up and to keep hold of the saw, Jeannette remembered from painting the loo ceiling during the first footloose fortnight of retirement: fear destroys balance. Committed to this folly, she decided it was good to keep forcing yourself to do something hard, even if that was the sort of Saga-style resolution that marked you as decrepit. By the time she’d hoisted herself to within striking distance of the target branch, she was getting her confidence—or at least she’d stopped shaking.

  Braced against the trunk, she got purchase on the bough—nevertheless two inches thick. Her elbow kept running into a branch behind her, preventing a full stroke. The project grew so consumingly tedious that she lost all trace of vertigo. At last she made headway: the cut opened up from the weight of the flagging bough. With a crack, the bottom remnant splintered. What a pity that she’d been keeping steady by gripping the severed side of the branch.

  He kept the sitting room dark, with curtains drawn, though on a long summer’s day it was still bright at 9 p.m.

  “I should really go home,” she said weakly from the sofa.

  “Rubbish, you can’t walk,” Burt said, bringing whisky. “Keep that leg elevated.”

  There was the broken ankle, a cracked rib, a sprained right wrist, and naturally she was pretty scratched up. “Mortified” didn’t begin to cover it.

  He wasn’t ex-Army, but a medic for the Red Cross, who flew out at a moment’s notice to Haiti or Sierra Leone. A medic certainly made for a more providential neighbour than a retired women’s clothing buyer who was a fool. The moment she fell, he had streaked out, then crudely splinted her ankle with duct tape and sections of the Independent (not, as she’d have expected, The Sun). At a lope, he carried her several streets to their local clinic. Those expert administrations as she woozed in his overgrown grass were hazy, but she did remember the black T-shirt bunched under her head, its distinctive musk, and the bumpy journey to the clinic was vivid. Jeannette hadn’t felt the clasp of a man’s arms for nineteen months. Pain or no, the sensation was thrilling.

  Burt interrupted her reverie about the many daily activities this former “social neutrality” would now have trouble doing for herself. “You’ll need help. Got kids?”

  “No,” Jeannette said. “Wyndham and I did not self-seed.” The shorts were soiled, silly and too exposing, and she was grateful for the sheet he’d brought her, even in the heat.

  “I feel part responsible,” he said, nipping at his drink. “Should have stopped you when I first spotted you climbing that wall. With a handsaw, for fuck’s sake. Figured I’d let you learn your lesson. Thought it was funny.”

  “I suppose it was funny.”

  “So what was the plan? You’d never have lopped more than a branch or two.”

  “Over time, I was hoping to cut off enough to kill it.”

  “But what’s so bloody important about a few little plants? You’re bigger than them.”

  “Few?” She turned away, groping, unsure of the why of it herself. “I told you, I hate them. So mindlessly cheerful and impossible to discourage. Just starting out in life. Willing to give it a go, even in bark chips. Then the mess of them. They’re rioting, insane. Running roughshod over all my husband’s tending and discipline. Invading, uninvited, out of control. And I feel an obligation to honour Wyndham’s creation, in memoriam, to not let the garden go to hell in a handbasket on my watch. I only found out recently how much effort a garden is, how much work he must have done, which I was blithely unaware of, or even scoffed at. Besides. Also. There’s something horrible. The replication. The burgeoning is grotesque. I can kill them in the thousands, but I still won’t win over them as a mass. I know they’re so much smaller than I, but together, as a profusion, they’re bigger, and they make me feel helpless and defeated all over again.” It was the fatigue, and shock, and the blurring of the painkillers, but the plethora of personification must have verified the verdict: without question, a kook.

  “And you?” she added feebly. “What’s so important about that tree? I haven’t sensed any love lost.”

  “Had my fill of female wilfulness, I reckon,” he said. “Wilfulness begets wilfulness. Spirals, and never ends well.”

  “Doesn’t it?” she asked with a smile, as he freshened a drink they both knew conflicted with the advisory on her prescription.

  After sharing his takeaway, he insisted she settle for the night on his sofa. She slept hard and long, stirring only at a loud, high-pitched buzz outside. The council, ironically, must have been finally pruning the London planes along the pave
ment.

  Rising at midday with chagrin, Jeannette hobbled with her NHS crutch out of the back double doors. She knew her way around. The houses on this stretch were identical.

  Right at the back, Burt was splitting the last of the big logs, using the stump of the self-seeding sycamore as a chopping block. In wonderment, she could see through the slats: rising on her side of the party wall, the log store was nearly full, its contents neatly stacked. An offering—or was it a proposal? As she approached, he remembered to put on his chainsaw’s safety catch. Off to the right, fat fluffy twigs of felled pod clusters piled bonfire high.

  After landing a decisive blow on the wedge with his sledgehammer, Burt announced gruffly, “Sycamore seasons fast, and burns hot.”

  “If Wyndham is to be believed,” she returned, “so do I.”

  When he was not away treating cholera patients, they would recline in the glow of incinerating sycamore in her wood burner, watching the concluding Christmas special of Downton Abbey, and later the repeats—though Burt drew the line at Poldark, which he ridiculed as a sappy bodice-ripper, and she accused him of being jealous of the lead. They would stay in separate houses; the arrangement maintained a courtliness, an asking, that they came to cherish. Every spring, the seedlings returned. According to the Royal Horticultural Society website, the sycamore lays a seed bed that will recrudesce for years. But it had laid her own bed also. Nature abhors a vacuum.

  THE ORPHAN EXCHANGE

  AUDREY NIFFENEGGER

  WHEN I WAS TEN years old my mother and father died in the war and I was sent to the local Orphan Exchange. We lived in a small city in the north of the country and this Orphan Exchange was not a prosperous or well-situated institution. It stood by itself in a narrow valley that was prone to flooding, lacked protective trees and was vulnerable to passing planes and drones. Its original patrons were generous but as time went on they had been replaced by others whose charity was less open-handed and more self-satisfied. Then the war came and everything became scarce. I do not really remember the time before the war, but I dream about it occasionally. In the dreams I have something sweet to eat, perhaps a ripe peach or a little cake, and I eat and eat and no one disturbs me; I eat until I wake, still unsatisfied.

  I arrived at the Orphan Exchange on a winter night in the back of a jeep. The building was strangely beautiful in the dark; bombs had chewed its upper storeys so that it stood massive and black with lacy edges against the starry night sky. Tallow lamps lit a few windows. The girls were in bed and the NGO worker who’d brought me handed me over to the matron quietly, as though I was contraband, and left without a backward glance. The matron led me by flashlight into the gymnasium, which was full of cots; I wondered if the whole school slept here. I later discovered that there were dormitories but on the night I arrived there had been a plague of rats upstairs and the girls had all been granted the special favour of sleeping in the gym. I was given a cot and thin bedding and left alone with eighty unfamiliar girls who breathed quietly or harshly in the cold gym. I lay awake for a long time listening to them before falling into wary intermittent sleep.

  In daylight the Orphan Exchange was a bomb-crumbled mess, patched and jerry-rigged with any old thing. Some rooms had blue tarpaulin ceilings, some had plastic where windows should have been. In the classrooms during lessons the sound of water dripping could always be heard, even if it hadn’t rained, and the plaster walls and ceilings bubbled and bulged.

  Breakfast that first morning was nasty burned porridge and all the girls ate a bite or two and then put down their spoons. The girl sitting next to me whispered that the food was always horrible, “almost inedible and never enough.” I was used to hunger but this seemed to be a policy of the school, that we should not have enough of the terrible stale bread or fake orange juice to ever satisfy us. I was small for my age and the portions were too little even for me; the older girls often got desperate and stole food from us younger girls. Later that day a tall girl took my lunch, which was half an apple and a piece of hard cheese. I ran after her, grabbed her arm and twisted until she cried out and dropped my food. Then I stepped on her foot as hard as I could and went off to sit by myself. I ate quickly and glared at anyone who came near me.

  The Orphan Exchange was not impressive and I was not impressed. But it didn’t matter what I thought about it because I had nowhere else to be. I was not an endearing child. My mother’s brother’s wife was my only living relative and she didn’t want me. The other girls were in similar straits. It was better not to ask a girl why she was there. We were all curious and superstitious so it was OK if someone told you her story but not OK to ask. You might bring her bad luck on to yourself if you asked. Mr. Brocklehurst, the superintendent, might send you on a bad exchange, or you might fall ill. The girls there were constantly sick: typhus, TB and pneumonia haunted the Orphan Exchange.

  Our hair was cut short as a defence against lice and vanity. They cut my hair on the second day and I cried a little because it had been the only pretty thing about me. I was small and plain; if I wasn’t smiling people asked me What’s wrong? so that I seemed to be complaining even if I was only wondering what was for dinner. All my long black braids fell to the floor and the matron gathered them to sell to the wig makers. Nothing was ever wasted then.

  After my hair had been sacrificed and I had dried my tears I went like a little shorn dark lamb to find my classroom. I had tested far above my grade level in reading, history and writing. Both of my parents were university professors, our flat was full of books and none had been denied me. Ms. Temple, the headmistress, tested me in her small chilly office and when I put down my pencil she said, “You still have half an hour left,” and picked up my test paper. She looked at it, looked at me, and gave me a different (and somewhat more difficult) test. When I handed that one to her she raised her eyebrows and gave me a third test, which gave me a little trouble.

  Ms. Temple said, “If I place you at this level you will be with the oldest girls in the school. Would you rather be with girls your own age?”

  “I would rather not be bored,” I said.

  She smiled and wrote a note and sealed it in an envelope. She wrote a room number on the envelope and said, “You may join the first class. Give this to Ms. Scatcherd.”

  So I was searching for this room, envelope in hand. Sometimes I dream about this moment: I am standing in the long dismal hallway, all the other girls are in class, I hear the murmur of lessons. I put my hand on the doorknob and hesitate, because inside the classroom a woman suddenly shouts, “You stupid, stupid girl! Stand there, I don’t want to hear another word.”

  In the dream I always wake up before I can see her. But that day I opened the door and saw a girl standing calmly at the front of the class, gazing over the heads of the students with a slight smile on her face. It was an inward-directed smile, as though she could see something pleasant the rest of us could not. She was tall and very pale blonde and though we were all dressed the same, in grey wool and black cotton, she looked as though she had chosen these clothes, as though she was an actress playing the part of an orphan and when the scene was over she would laugh and have a coffee and a cigarette and flirt with the director of the movie, of which she was obviously the heroine.

  I walked to the front of the class and handed my envelope to the teacher, who read Ms. Temple’s note and waved me to a seat at the back. I watched the girl standing there smiling to herself until the bell rang and we all filed out of the classroom and went to our meagre lunch.

  Afterwards we were shooed outdoors into the frozen rubble-strewn yard that had once been a garden. I found the disgraced girl sitting in a niche in the garden wall, out of sight of the break monitor. She was reading a book.

  I stood near her and she ignored me. “What are you reading?” I asked.

  “A book,” she answered without looking up.

  “Which one?”

  She handed it to me. It was in Russian. I gave it back to her.

  “
Where are you from?” I asked.

  “You ask too many questions.”

  “OK.” I turned to go.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Jane.”

  “Mine is Helen. How old are you?”

  “Ten.”

  “I am fourteen. I came here six years ago.”

  “Before the war?”

  “It was a real school then.”

  “And you’ve been here all this time? You weren’t exchanged?”

  “I was exchanged, but then I was sent back here, and no one has asked for me since then.” She smiled but her expression was grim.

  I did not understand the nature of the exchanges then, so I pretended that I knew what she meant. But she saw that I didn’t know. “You’re too young,” said Helen. “They won’t send you anywhere for a while yet.”

  “Where do they send us?”

  Helen shrugged. “Different places. I was sent to a pharmaceutical company, to be a guinea pig. But my father got upset when I wasn’t here, and they had to return me.”

  “If you have a father why are you here and not at home?”

  “My mother died and my father remarried. His new wife didn’t want me there, so here I am.” The bell rang and Helen stood up. “Are you coming?”

  “Helen, wait—why do they send us? What do they get in exchange?”

  “I don’t know, Jane. Don’t ask so many questions.”

  I followed her back to class.

  In the afternoon it was as though nothing unusual had happened in the morning: Helen sat in the second row and the teacher joked with her and the other students. I discovered as the days went on that it was not out of the ordinary for this teacher to lose her temper, and the girls regarded her as mercurial but interesting; they bore her eccentricities patiently.