by Jana Casale
Leda followed behind the woman, who gave all sorts of gardening tips on pansies as they walked over to the register.
“And if you have any trouble, just stop on by. I’m always happy to help.”
“Thanks, that’s very nice of you.”
They continued to chat about the weather and then about all the many local stores that had gone out of business over the last few years. They both agreed it was a shame.
“Well, I’m glad I can at least count on you guys always being here.”
“It’ll be seventy-two years come the end of March.”
“That’s incredible. Are you related to Betty, by any chance?”
“Me? No, there is no Betty, actually.”
“There isn’t?”
“No, the man who founded it named it after his dog.”
“Oh, how funny. I always thought there was a Betty.”
“Well”—the lady stacked the pansies back into the wagon—“there was, but she didn’t have a garden.”
They talked for a little while longer before Leda turned to leave. She looked back at Betty’s Garden, and the place looked smaller and sadder than it ever had before. She hoped the next time she came in the lady wouldn’t be around, although she wasn’t sure why she felt this way.
When she got home, she put her pansies out on the back stoop with the intention of planting them the next day. But the next day it rained hard, and so the garden had to wait. The day after, she was getting lunch with Annabelle and didn’t have time, and the day after that was John’s birthday. By the time she got around to her pansies they’d already died.
“You can’t just leave them in those containers,” John said.
“Well, why didn’t you tell me that when I first bought them, John?”
She didn’t have tolerance for the things men thought they knew about everything anymore. She certainly had very little tolerance for John.
Spring meandered on, and she didn’t get around to gardening like she hoped. She kept planning on weekend after weekend, but something always came up. Her energy was limited and fall was fast approaching. On occasion she’d go out into the yard and start clearing areas of brush, but she’d tire quickly or her knee would hurt. With little else to go off of, she’d always promise herself tomorrow.
There was a moment so delicately placed at this time in her life. It was so fateful and so still: She was sitting at her kitchen table. To her left was a pile of unopened mail and to her right was the mug of coffee she’d made for herself. The mug had penguins on it that had faded due to many trips through the dishwasher. She thought about her garden and the summer coming to a close. It already wasn’t reasonable to plant anything. There already wasn’t hope. She thought of Elle, who she’d found out only recently had divorced her husband. She wasn’t sure of any other details, whether it was related to the affair or whatnot. All she knew was that Elle was living in an apartment now rather than the giant house she’d shared with him. She still had a nice car, and based on some of the pictures she posted, it seemed as if the apartment wasn’t too bad either. But there was a quiet desperation in Elle now that her marriage was over. She’d constantly post pictures of cocktails and memes with snappy sayings like, “Today is yesterday’s tomorrow!” At one point she asked friends if anyone knew a good lawyer. Despite it all Leda was sure that, even now, even at their age, Elle was a woman who would bounce back. She would find her footing and she would be okay and probably meet another millionaire. There was hope for her, and Leda was happy that her old friend had found the strength to move on. Leda heard a rasping against her kitchen window. It was the birch tree that had overgrown and was invading their home. A tree expert had come out and told them they needed to trim back the branches, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it yet. The tree had grown up beside their home, and it seemed wrong to cut it back, as if it didn’t have the right to thrive. She thought again of her garden and its endless possibility that had seemed so within reach when she’d first come to the decision to plant it. I didn’t even dig one hole, she thought. And then in this moment with Elle and her divorce, the fading penguins, and the rasping birch, she considered something so bold it was almost sublime. In this moment of her life she was in complete control of her most conscious and immediate destiny. She got up and made a phone call to Betty’s Garden.
“Hello, Betty’s Garden.” It sounded like the same lady as before, but she didn’t care.
“Hi, I’m just wondering if you know of a landscaping service in the area that you’d recommend?”
Three days later Leda and John had the most spectacular garden that either of them had ever seen. It had been very expensive, and it wasn’t the same as planting it themselves, but it was beautiful beyond belief. There were rows and rows of roses, beds of every varying pansy, and tulips as far as their yard stretched. They set two lawn chairs in the middle of it all and sat outside soaking in the sun for hours. They breathed in the rich smell of reincarnated springtime and the inescapable feeling of accomplishment. By the next year it would be mostly gone. Few of the flowers grew back, and they didn’t bother calling anyone out to maintain it. When she and John became too old they’d sell the house and move to a condo, and at the condo there wouldn’t be a yard at all. Leda would remember it as such: turned soil, and opened blossoms, a birch tree that would never be trimmed.
CHAPTER 56
Never Reading Noam Chomsky
On the last day of her life Leda felt a surge of energy that was greater than any she’d ever felt before. She’d been too ill for days to get out of bed, and even though she still couldn’t get out of bed, she felt that she might be able to soon, and that was enough to make her happy. On the last day of her life she was happy.
John had died a few years before. He’d had some health issues that left him bedridden for quite some time. In the end he died peacefully in his sleep, something she would forever be grateful for. She’d moved in with Annabelle and her husband, Philip, and their two children, a daughter, Nina, and a son, Michael. It was a quiet and pleasant life. She spent most of her time in her room watching TV or playing with the grandchildren, but she missed John terribly. She’d often dream of him, and when she woke she expected him to be beside her. She expected to smell his skin and hear the sound of him breathing.
“Are you going to work?” she remembered sleepily asking him so many times as he woke early in the morning. She fixated on this memory of him in the darkness, kissing her goodbye. Sometimes she felt as though maybe this wasn’t a real memory at all, but simply something she wanted so strongly to have happened that she’d envisioned it to be real. She celebrated his birthday each year, and on their anniversary she’d sing “Dónde Está la Playa” to herself, although she couldn’t easily remember many of the words.
Quite suddenly she started having some heart trouble, and the last two weeks had been spent in the hospital. She knew she was dying and she thought Annabelle did too, but between the two of them nothing was said.
Annabelle and the children came and visited her that morning, and Philip was planning on stopping by with Annabelle later that night. She liked Philip and thought he was the right kind of man to be with her daughter. He was easygoing and kind. He let Annabelle lead, and work, and when she cried that she didn’t see the children enough, he told her the kind of lies any good man does when a working mother is sad over everything she’s missing.
“Mom, tell them to leave the window open,” Annabelle said as she cranked the hospital window a few inches ajar. “It’s good for you to get fresh air.”
“I’m fine, honey. You worry too much.”
“Grandma, this is an Asian elephant. They can live sometimes almost as long as people,” Nina said, pointing to a picture in a book she was holding. Each visit she brought a new book to show and explain in detail. Michael mostly just jumped around the room and made the kind of loud noises that cou
ld be expected of a six-year-old. On occasion he’d climb up on the bed and say: “Hi, Grandma.” It was so lovely.
Sometimes she looked at Annabelle and thought she looked too skinny, and sometimes she looked at Annabelle and saw her looking older and older. She was no longer a young woman in the way she had been for so long. Sometimes she saw herself in her daughter and sometimes she saw the fierce elegance of her mother. She thought that Annabelle was something greater than both of them, and this made her proud.
The last six months of her life Leda was unable to read. Her eyesight was failing her, and she tired quickly. Annabelle would read to her on occasion, but between the children and work she didn’t have all that much time. That morning she read her an old New York Times article about being able to fall in love with anybody. The article proposed that so long as you read each other a long list of questions and stared into each other’s eyes, you would be able to fall in love.
“This is something women want to believe,” Leda said as Annabelle finished reading.
The children and Annabelle stayed for lunch and they all shared a pizza. After that Annabelle told her mom she’d stop back again tonight with Phillip.
“Bye, Mom. Please make sure they leave the window open for you. I want you to have fresh air.” And she looked back at her mother and waved.
The nurse came in soon after that, and Leda told her that she was feeling much better and thought she’d be going home soon. As she said it she thought, Maybe I’m not dying at all yet. The nurse was positive and cheerful in her response. She was the kind of exuberant woman Leda had tried to avoid most of her life, and here she was, the last woman she would ever see.
A few hours after the nurse left, Leda felt suddenly very tired. She thought that maybe she should lie still, and then she thought of herself and the way it felt to sing in a shower and how good and free she was then, like there was lightning all over her body and the whole world was taking notice of the electricity. Then she thought of herself as little fragments drifting into the universe in tiny little pieces, and then she thought of each little fragment as separate and singular to herself, and she could not tell if she were only the fragments or if she were ever anything bigger than that. She closed her eyes and the hospital ceiling was the last thing she saw. The last thing she heard was the sound of her own heartbeat, improbably consistent, uniquely her own. She counted the beats, one two three four five six seven eight nine ten…But then there were no more numbers or words. There was just her heart. The sound of her heart to herself, a sound she’d heard so many times, a sound she barely ever listened to. And then there was nothing at all.
When she died, she died alone.
Epilogue
It took Annabelle quite a while to go through her mother’s things. She hadn’t expected to feel so completely devastated by her mother’s passing. Certainly she knew she would be in deep grief, but she had not anticipated the utter and absolute devastation it caused her, like everything in her life was no longer real, like she was no longer who she thought she should be. For a brief time she considered quitting her job and staying home with the children, although she knew that wouldn’t solve anything. Nina was also having a tough time. She’d ask her mom when she would be happy again, and she wasn’t eating very well. Michael was too young to know what was happening, really, and for that she felt both grateful and sad. On the one hand, he was being spared the pain; on the other, she knew he wouldn’t remember his grandmother much, and that really bothered her. He was the youngest person to know and love her and, as such, was the one with the greatest potential for her memory to be carried on with the longest. Perhaps Nina would pass the memories to her children, and so maybe that counted. All of this mattered to her a great deal. She was fixated on the idea of her mother somehow becoming immortal. She told Nina stories about her every single day, but then she feared that what she was telling her daughter might distort her natural memories and so she stopped.
Philip told Annabelle to take her time with going through her mother’s things, so each day she did a little bit until it became too painful. Once her father had passed away, they sold the condo, and so most of her mom’s things had already been donated or thrown away. What remained was whatever she’d brought along with her, and so Annabelle took great consideration of the fact that what was left were all things that her mother had already deemed important enough to hang on to. Clothing was easy enough to give away, and there were knickknacks that could easily be stored. But her mother had been a great lover of books, and so most of the room was bookshelves upon bookshelves filled to the brim. Annabelle didn’t want to give away too many of them, and so she took care in deciding which should stay and which could go. All the classics would be given to Nina and Michael. There were all her Toni Morrisons and Margaret Atwoods, and so of course those would stay. By her bedside was a pile of books that as far as she could tell her mother had wanted to get to reading. One was dog-eared on page 67, a sure marker that her mom had started it but was unable to finish it as her eyesight worsened. On the bottom of the pile was the Noam Chomsky. Annabelle held it in her hand and flipped through it. She brought it up to her face and took a deep breath of the old paper. She didn’t know of her mother’s intentions to read Noam Chomsky. She did not know that she never had. She tossed the aged book in the donate pile and continued going through the room. Just like that.
Two days later, as she was nearing the end of her cleanup, she came across a notebook with a short story her mom had written. She’d read quite a bit of her mom’s work before, but this was a story she’d never seen. It was titled “The End of an Era.” It was funny and smart, beautiful and sad. Annabelle thought it was very much the best thing she’d ever read of her mother’s. She wished so badly she could tell her that she loved it, and that she thought it said so very much. She’d keep the story, and when Nina and Michael were old enough she’d read it to them and Nina would remember her grandmother, and she’d wonder what the line she was so alive she almost wasn’t at all meant. She’d wonder about it, and she’d go over it and over it again and again in her mind as she saw and did so many things, and little by little time would pass and she would live her life like every woman, beautiful, irreverent, oppressively real.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank the following people: my family—my mom for making me love books, and my dad for giving me his sense of humor. My husband, Jake, who listened to me read every single one of these chapters at their earliest stages. Without his encouragement and support and love this book could not have happened. Amelia Atlas for her passion and hard work to find this book the most perfect home. Her vision has been spot-on from the get-go. I’d also like to thank everyone at Knopf for their phenomenal work and support, especially Jennifer Kurdyla for her keen eye and for helping make my book as beautiful as possible, and Margaux Weisman for her contagious enthusiasm and dedication. Thank you to Steve Yarbrough, who worked with me many years ago when this book was just a vision. Marti Leimbach for her encouragement and consistent wisdom. Gail Mooney and Dona Cady for being fantastic mentors and friends. Every dear woman in my life whose love and heartbreak was the inspiration for this book. And finally, I’d like to give a special thanks to Mr. David Lambert, my fourth-grade teacher. He told me I was a good writer and it changed my life.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jana Casale has a BFA in fiction from Emerson College and an MSt in creative writing from Oxford. Originally from Lexington, Massachusetts, she currently resides in San Francisco with her husband. The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky is her first novel.
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Chomsky