Savannah fell in love on the spot. She closed the door to his pantry and kissed him until the air got thin. He tasted of exotic lime toothpaste. Three weeks later, over her mother’s objections, they were married.
“My God, he’s insane,” Maggie said. “What kind of person eats beets for dinner? I’m telling you, Savannah, this is headed for disaster.”
Her father never said a word against him, just went on tending his garden. The day of the wedding, he planted a lemon tree. When Savannah came out in her short-sleeved wedding dress, he covered the roots with his own mulch mixture, part puréed fish and sea kelp, part chipped bark. Every scent in his garden, coaxed out of the barren Phoenix soil, hit her at once—jasmine, hibiscus, the bite of lemons. For years after, the smell of citrus would make her cry.
“Daddy?” she said.
Doug Dawson stood up and shaded his eyes with his hand. Sweat dripped off the tip of his charbroiled nose. The thermometer had hit one hundred degrees on May eleventh and wouldn’t recede again until October. All the birds, except the mean crows who might have even wanted it hotter, had gone north. All anyone ever thought about was leaving.
“Now don’t you worry.” He held her loosely, so he wouldn’t sully her dress. “Love will carry you through.”
Savannah buried her head in the crook of his neck and loved her father more than anyone on earth because she knew he believed what he said. Yet it was her mother’s words that had the ring of truth.
She dropped out of college to marry Harry and move to Danville, California. It seemed romantic, giving up so much for him, but as soon as they settled into the upscale suburb of San Francisco, she was disappointed. She’d expected more from California. She’d been hoping for hippies and psychics, possibly even prostitutes-turned-actresses, but all she found were the same square lawns and careful little lives she’d left in Arizona. They moved into a beige tract house and twice Savannah got lost in the subdivision, not realizing her mistake until she tried to fit her key into someone else’s beige lock.
Harry loved Danville. He got a job as a salesman at a used-car lot and worked his way up to manager. He eventually bought out the place, and followed with eight other lots in the Bay area, and was seen on their block as a real go-getter.
Savannah, on the other hand, was more enamored with San Francisco, its wild colors and unnavigable hills and absolute optimism. Half the year, no one could see the sky, but they still built skyscrapers on fault lines and landfills; everyone just closed their eyes and hoped for the best. The heavens, on clear nights, were breathtaking, an endless expanse of pulsing, pleading red stars.
After Emma was born, Savannah enrolled at UC San Francisco and, on a whim, took a class in advertising. Right away, she was hooked. With Emma in her infant seat beside her, Savannah fell in love with make-believe. Her senior project was to devise a campaign for an unfiltered cigarette the government was trying to ban. She shot photos of hell-raisers and bruised hockey players, squinting through cigarette smoke. The caption read: Smoke Brigg’s, if you dare.
She was hired as a junior writer at Taylor Baines the next week.
At first, she worked on obscure print ads, halfpage, two-color art that would never see a national magazine, and slowly earned her stripes. Two years after she was hired, she assisted on her first television commercial for a new chocolate-coated cereal. A year after that, she was named assistant creative director.
She loved her job and worked long hours, because when she came home there was trouble. It was obvious she and Harry were toxic to each other. He was money hungry, he thought her new-age ideas garbage, he was unkind, she was not the type of woman he wanted to take out in public.
Not even a brilliant ad campaign could have convinced anyone they were going to last. Harry was embarrassed by her flashy style and shadowy premonitions. When Savannah took up the tarots again, he did not speak to her for a week. When she started practicing on a few neighbors, he put in a whole row of miniature roses, as if he was making something up to them. She ignored him and drew a card a day, leaving devils and wands on the windowsill. Harry told her she was turning into white trash, but she noticed he stuffed the sword cards down the disposal and left the optimistic Sun and Cups alone.
Emma was the reason they lasted as long as they did. They were stunned and often appalled by the things the other said, but with a silver-eyed baby lying between them at night, no one was going anywhere. Without Emma, they might have fought night and day about money and the right way to live, but instead they hushed themselves the way they hushed their daughter, with a finger over their lips, with pleas in their eyes.
Emma was colicky from the start and left little time for fighting anyway. She was a tight ball of fury, gulping formula then throwing it up, thumping her head against her crib bumper and wailing so hard she kept the mourning doves awake all night. The only peace came when Savannah took her daughter into her own bed or bundled her out into the cold. The instant wind struck Emma’s face, her little fingers uncurled in sleep, as if she expected stars to fall right into the palm of her hand.
Harry started taking Emma camping when she was two. A few years later, Harry escaped to the mountains with Emma every weekend. They never asked Savannah along, yet at night, she saw stars instead of acoustic ceiling. Instead of traffic noises, she heard the rumble of the river and Harry’s soft voice telling Emma he had never imagined he could love her so much and still be able to leave her.
On the petition for divorce, Savannah and Harry cited irreconcilable differences. On the day he left, she drew the Eight of Cups, the card of abandonment, and that night drew the Star, which meant she had never loved him right in the first place. She called up Ramona Wendall, a palm reader who had worked one of Taylor Baines’s company parties, and asked her advice on going into business on the side, telling fortunes. There was only one clear thing, and that was that each person was born for something, and sometimes she didn’t know what it was until she’d already made plans elsewhere. Sometimes, to do what was right, she just had to uproot everything.
She and Harry sold their picture-perfect house, which had a central vacuum system and his and her sinks, but never enough air. She couldn’t count the times she’d stood at her Palladian kitchen window, taking tiny little breaths while she watched her neighbor Ken Sykes take scissors to his already flawless lawn.
Harry took his half of the money and moved up higher into the exclusive, manicured hills of Danville. Savannah took hers and leased a small Victorian near the ad agency in San Francisco. She still cooked up impressive marketing campaigns but late at night and on weekends, she told fortunes of love and riches beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. She gathered a following of lovelorn teenage girls, but never the business she’d hoped for.
Then Harry found out about her sideline. He called in his lawyers and sued for custody of nine-year-old Emma before saying a single word.
Savannah didn’t waste time either. She went straight to Harry’s faux-Tudor monstrosity in Danville and plowed into his oak-paneled study, the one his new wife, curly-haired Melinda, had decorated in hunter green.
“You can’t do this,” she said.
Harry sat behind his desk, twisting his rings. He looked her up and down once, then let out his breath in a low, mean whistle. “You can’t take my daughter down with you.”
Savannah marched across the room and leaned over the desk. She had his collar between her fingers before he could even breathe.
“You’re a cold-hearted snob, Harry Shaw.”
“I can offer her a better life,” he said, unblinking. “I don’t want her in the city, hanging out with that crowd of yours. You’ve got her in that artsy school when she ought to be studying calculus. She needs to be around kids who are going to college. She needs to be around people with some class.”
Savannah let go of him and stood up straight. She had a blinding headache, and she knew exactly why. She was having trouble remembering why she had ever loved this man. She was having trouble not hating
him.
She walked over to the bookcases and took out one of his stiff, unread books. “I know you think I’m beneath you. But I don’t know, Harry. You’ve searched half your life for something meaningful, and you’ve ended up in used-car sales.”
“There’s nothing wrong with what I do!” he said, bristling.
“Of course not. You’re the only one who thinks there is.”
“You know why I married Melinda?” He stood up and yanked down his sleeves. “So I wouldn’t have to be psychoanalyzed by you.”
Savannah put the book back and turned to him. “I’m not psychoanalyzing you. I’m telling you you’re never going to be happy until you accept what you are, right at this moment. A used-car salesman making eighty thousand dollars a year. People would give their right arm for that.”
“For the thousandth time, Savannah, it is not immoral to be ambitious.”
“Absolutely not. But it’ll kill your soul if you can’t be grateful for what you’ve already got.”
“As usual, you’ve got it all figured out.”
“No.” She paused. “But I do know one thing. I love reading fortunes. I was made to do it, and if that makes me common, I don’t care. All that matters is giving Emma a full life, trying to be good to people, and sampling every food there is.”
He hung his head, and Savannah dug down and found that last speck of love. She’d just have to make do with lukewarm devotion; in truth, it was surprising even that much was left. She went to his side and put an arm around his thin shoulders. His hair was the exact same shade of sandy blond it had been when she’d first met him, but aside from that, nothing was familiar. He ate Melinda’s tuna salad every day for lunch and had given up his pantry in favor of a wet bar. He wore too many rings now and often spoke in a voice he must have stolen from some radio pitchman.
“It’s not always about money, Harry.”
He pulled away. “You know I would win if I pursued this.”
Savannah dropped her hand from his shoulders. “Your lawyers would win,” she said quietly. “You, Harry, would go straight to hell, if you’re not already there.”
Harry dropped the suit, but at the end of every summer visit, he asked Emma to stay in Danville. He asked even though she called every girl on his block a snob, and she came in at night smelling of spray paint and rotten eggs. Even a used-car salesman couldn’t finagle a girl out of knowing where she belonged. Emma couldn’t sleep in the suburbs for the awesome quiet. By age eleven, she had announced she’d stopped dreaming in sunlight. She’d fashioned her entire wardrobe in shades of gray.
All Harry could do was keep up the backpacking. He tried to instill in his daughter an appreciation for open spaces, he tried to make up for everything by taking Emma to every wilderness area in the western United States. Maybe he figured all that space would cover up the fact that he had left them. Maybe guilt dissipated a little in fresh air. Whatever the case, he was there when Emma met her first bear, and then he gave her the greatest gift a father could give: He taught her not to be afraid. To appreciate that running into a wild beast was something that didn’t happen every day.
They had both done their best with Emma, taught her what they thought was important. Until Emma was ten, Savannah had shown her only the good cards—the Cups, the suit of happiness, and the best card in the deck, the Sun, which signified joy, love, and devotion. The elements that made up a good life.
Now, that good life seemed threatened somehow, though the sky had not altered; the only difference was an impaled heart on a 3×5-inch piece of plastic.
“Honey, just don’t worry about it,” Ramona said. “It’s a fluke is all. Like that time you read me the Lovers and I started on Slim-Fast and wearing eye shadow again and then nothing.”
“Ramona, you lost seventy-five pounds and met Stan three months after that reading. You can’t expect split-second results. I’m telling you, I’m never wrong.”
“Oh, I doubt that. You just haven’t heard about it, that’s all. When you’re on, people come back and say, ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe it. I met that man just the way you said I would.’ But when you’re wrong, they just shrug it off and swear never to fork over twenty dollars again.”
“You’re never wrong,” Savannah said.
Ramona threw back her head and laughed. “Are you kidding? You think all the answers are in a few squiggles on your palm? You think life is that easy?”
“I think it should be.”
Savannah went to the kitchen and took out the army knife and sachet of mint she had stashed in a drawer. She walked to Emma’s door and shimmied the lock. Her daughter might be fifteen and starting to use Savannah’s name in curses, but Savannah was still going to make sure she was safe in bed each night. Emma might have taken up clove cigarettes and a ferocious coffee habit, but at night Savannah did what she could to counteract the damage; she sprinkled mint across her daughter’s doorstep to guard against sorrow and bad dreams.
She turned the lock, then tiptoed into Emma’s bedroom. Her daughter’s hair was strewn over the pillow, the same color as her own, like pine logs when they were split open, but cut at the shoulders, with a curl. She still had on the eye shadow she’d taken to wearing. Blue, because some boy at her school, a boy who was well on his way to flunking algebra and pumping gas at Texaco, had said it would bring out the silver in her eyes.
Savannah tucked the blankets under Emma’s chin and sprinkled the mint on the floor, but she still felt panicky. Terror zapped her all the time now, whenever she caught a glimpse of blue toenails or a tattoo sketched out in washable ink. When she saw where things were headed, with or without her consent.
She walked out and closed the door, relocking it with the knife. Ramona came up and put her arm around her. “Don’t believe it,” she said.
“How can I not believe it? You think I let people in here and then make up stories? You think I’m just scamming people?”
“I think you believe in yourself. I think people pick up on that and believe in you, too. But this … this is letting superstition rule your life instead of living it and seeing what happens. This is assuming the worst and, frankly, I’m ashamed of you.”
Savannah breathed deeply. Outside, she could hear a neighbor trying to start up his 1970 Volkswagen van and the gay lovers two doors down serenading each other with old love songs. In the morning, if it was clear, the sky over the bay would turn red as desire. There would be nowhere else on earth she’d rather be.
“Go to sleep, Savannah,” Ramona said. “In the morning, you’ll wake up laughing like always. A bad thing has never happened to you your whole life.”
Savannah did not sleep all night. She sat on the stoop of her narrow house, drinking gritty, black coffee. Just after dawn, when the sun struck the top of the pink-and-blue Victorian across the street, her own shadow walked right past her, holding a suitcase with one hand while the other stroked the fur of a wolf.
Emma slammed open the front door and trudged outside in her robe. The right side of her face bore the imprint of her pillow, the hollows beneath her eyes were caked with blue eye shadow. This was the girl who, a year ago, had gotten up every morning at dawn to practice penalty shots in the street, until her debatable best friend, Diana, told her soccer was for jocks, not for anybody’s girlfriend.
Emma sat down on the stoop and took the coffee out of Savannah’s hand. She drank the remainder in one gulp.
“Something wake you?” Savannah asked.
Emma said nothing, just squinted into the morning sun.
“They say when you’re startled awake,” Savannah went on, “it’s from the kiss of your future lover. He’s already out there looking for you.”
“That’s bullshit,” Emma said, but nevertheless she looked down the street, where a couple of handsome college students had recently moved in.
“I woke up every morning at dawn the week before I met your dad. I swear to God.”
Emma pulled back and stared at her. “I worry ab
out you, Mom.”
Savannah laughed. “Well, don’t. I’m the happiest person on the planet.”
“That’s what I mean. You ought to be laying out those cards for yourself until you come up with some dark-haired hunk who’ll buy you a place up in Pacific Heights. You ought to be trying for something more.”
Savannah shivered, because everything she wanted was right here, and if she hadn’t taught Emma that by now, it was unteachable. It was something you knew or not, it was the difference between feeling happy or lost.
“Don’t worry about me,” Savannah said. Emma snorted. She noticed their legs were touching and quickly yanked hers away. “You’re unmarried, and hanging out with crazies. You ought to be freaking out, having some kind of midlife crisis like Diana’s parents.”
“You can’t judge the world by the Truffs. Things haven’t always gone their way.”
“You know what they talk about at dinner?” Emma went on. “She tells him it’s his fault she got pregnant so young, and she never got to be an actress, then he tells her if she wasn’t so goddamn fat, she could still try, then she says he’s an asshole, then he says he never loved her, then Diana tells them both to shut the fuck up, then they yell at her for cussing, then they watch Home Improvement.”
Savannah put an arm around Emma’s tight shoulders, but Emma shrugged her off. Her daughter stood up and walked across the soggy grass, leaving imprints of tiny feet, her middle toes adorned with slim gold rings.
Savannah sighed. Emma had dieted herself down to nothing, wore hideous makeup and said ‘Fuck’ like an anthem, but anyone with eyes could see that her skin was smooth as water. Even when she cut her hair herself—which she’d done on a dare a week ago—it curled appealingly around her face. One day, Savannah prayed, Emma would just give up trying to ruin herself. One day, she’d just snap out of it.
“I’ll tell you the absolute truth,” Savannah said. “Life is glorious. Love is spectacular. If anyone tells you differently, they’re blind. Happiness is a choice you have to make every morning.”
The Wishing Garden Page 2