Miriam wanted a dog that would pursue rabbits. Joseph reminded her that dogs were copiously indiscriminate poopers and adored digging in beds of bulbs while pretending to bury bones, when they really dug just for the hell of it. She then proposed acquiring a cat until Joseph reminded her of their poor rapport with birds. Their moon times are meant to be filled with another kind of stalk. Had she forgotten how they yowled at night? in the afterglow of ruins? after the bombing stopped? Miriam begged him to dispatch a garter snake that wore a streak of gold like a zipper down its back, because the snake surprised her hands when they uncovered its concealing leaves; but Joseph demurred, defending the reptile’s reputation. I promise you, he said, this fellow is harmless and beneficial. Miriam responded with a dubious look. This Eden needn’t be a haven for snakes just because the first one was.
You can’t improve on God, observed the professor.
He worked before hybridization, responded the faithful.
I’m not a Saint Patrick for hire either—to scare them all away.
It’s all Scheiss about him, Ireland, and the snakes. Anyway, I wasn’t about to pay a saint wages. Saints work for nothing.
In lieu of larger help, Miriam released throngs of ladybugs from mail-order boxes. She also had to be persuaded about the virtues of spiders and praying mantises. Webs she abhorred, although she knew the results of their operations were desirable. These loud lemon-colored garden spiders think they own the plants they hang their webs from and pretend to be flowers themselves, as if suspended from sunlight and air.
In the alleged state of nature, Joseph would begin, it is said to be a war of all against all. I know you are teasing, Joey. No one can go against gardens. So let me be with my beauties, at peace with nature and all this world’s tossing and yearning. Despite a pledge to cease and desist, Joseph heard himself repeat to his mother how unnatural gardens were, how human-handed every rose was, how thoroughly the irises were trained, how the prizes plants won in their competitions were like those awarded after a proud parade of poodles, each clipped like a hedge. She should not ignore the size of the industry whose profits depended upon fashions in flowers and fads that were encouraged by the press or those ubiquitous catalogs which provoked fears of diseases, worms, and insects that could only be controlled by the poisons, hormones, and fertilizers they recommended. Nor should she make light of the myths extolling the harmless healthiness of gardening, even alleging its psychological superiority to every other avocation. She should notice how the seed companies’ bankrolls grew more rapidly than their marigolds, despite extensive artificial breeding; she should also admit the plants’ reputations were puffed and as pretentious as their adopted stage names—moonglow, for instance. The garden, he felt compelled to suggest, was like a fascist state: ruled like an orchestra, ordered as an army, eugenically ruthless and hateful to the handicapped, relentless in the pursuit of its enemies, jealous of its borders, favoring obedient masses in which every stem is inclined to appease its leader.
Once he had aroused his mother’s ire, Joey would repent his meanness and attempt to calm her by repeating what the great Voltaire had advised … Ya ya ya, she would hurry to complete the notorious sentence, I know, I know, I should fertilize … cultivate … weed my garden. So I do. But you, Professor, you do not. What do you do but stir me like a Gulasch with your smarts for a spoon. Play the day through with paste and snippers. As in the Kinder’s … ya, dass ist … the Kinder’s Garten.
Sometimes her scorn, only partly assumed, stung him a bit, but he had hidden his ego so far beneath the layers of his cultivated public selves that even the hardest blow was diverted, softly absorbed, or fended off. The truth was that he was proud of his mother’s garden now. She had achieved a renewed life through her interest in it, and her mind had prospered as much as her emotions had, something rarely true, he understood, of love affairs. She would repeatedly disappear into its shrubbery, hidden on her hands and knees, planting and weeding, folding her fingers in a more fundamental form of prayer.
The garden had but one bench, but there Joseph would sometimes sit to enjoy a brisk breeze because these discouraged the mosquitoes that flew in from every point on the globe, he felt, to intrude upon his peace and spoil its brief serenities. The swifts swirled about like bats presumably stuffing themselves with pests, but there were always bugs and always would be bugs—leaf miners, fire ants, flea beetles, earworms, borers—his mother had taught him that—aphids, whiteflies, thrips, and spider mites—the way there would always be weeds—crabgrass, foxtail, purslane, pigweed—it was a wonder, she said, that anything worthwhile remained alive—as well as murderous diseases—leaf spot and brown patch, bean blight and root rot—mein Gott!—but the Good Lord made these things, too, to bore and spoil and chew, she would say, cursing them in her childhood German—the loopers, maggots, weevils of her flower beds and borders.
So her world and his were not so dissimilar after all.
Ilex, or Winterberry, Red Sprite, seeks Jim Dandy for companionship and pollination.
From his attic window Professor Skizzen (feverish, he thought, with flu) patrolled the snowy ground. In a patch near the kitchen door, where Miriam had spread millet and sunflower seeds, numerous quarter notes swayed across a hidden score. What were the birds playing when their heads bobbed? three quick pecks, a pause, three quick pecks, a backward bound that Skizzen decided to characterize as a stiff-legged scratch (a cough), then another pause quite brief before the series was performed again. His chest felt sore, was it his ribs? It might be a dance peculiar to white-throated sparrows and their kind, if his mother’s identification was correct, because the doves rattled off eighth notes like a rifle and then rested, the cardinals cocked their heads and bounded forward like balls, while grackles clacked on nearby wires. Skizzen turned away from the window to cough again, not to be heard by the birds. Suddenly a branch would sway, out of the side of his eye a shadow slice across the crust, or a jay caw; then the flock would flee as if blown into limbs and bushes, leaving the dove, a lone hoot from a horn, placidly putting its beak to the ground—tip tip tip tip—too stupid to be frightened, yet making the most of the moment’s lack of competition by pecking solo.
Joseph’s snuffy head stared at the sheet-white yard. Its dazzle did him in. A few withered rose hips, dark marks against the snow, a few bent dry fronds with enough substance to cast an insubstantial likeness, a few thin brittle sticks: they pierced the snow’s sturdy surface to lead the eye over one stretch of death to another and encouraged the rabbits to bound across it as if it were hot, and the squirrels race to a tree, snippily flashing their tails. His own fly strips fluttered like kite tails when he coughed. Elsewhere, beneath the now-solid sod, where there remained but little warmth from a sun a month old, moles in dark runnels rarely moved, and bulbs that would later bloom so raucously kept counsel to themselves as if indifferent to entreaties from their nature. Skizzen, always perverse on Tuesdays, and made worse by phlegm and fever, let his thoughts seek those buried green blades that were so eager to push through the first wet earth offered them and flaunt their true colors. That’s where growing went to winter. That was elsewhere’s elsewhere.
Skizzen’s present season wasn’t winter. Winter in Woodbine was crisp and clear and cold and clean. The trees were dark-barked, even a sharp wind could not bend their stiffened twigs. His present climate was a stew of steaming fluids. What he saw leaked out of his swollen eyes like an overfull cup. What he smelled fell into a hideous hankie he wadded in his fist and held helplessly to his mouth. In front of him hung a column of clippings that warned against eating Chinese chickens. He stifled a sneeze and sent it to his ribs, which responsively heaved.
Spring’s final frost would bite those bulbs for their boasting and bring their beauty, so fragilely composed, to a rude and cruel close, the way wily sovereigns tempt the tongues of their subjects in order to learn who might be bold enough to wag them and thus nip oppositions, as we customarily say, in the bud. Another human
’s warmth might draw him out and leave him exposed, Skizzen concluded, especially when occupied by discomfort as he was now and dearly desiring a nurse. He considered it a thought worth noting down for use when he spoke to his class of music’s lulling little openings, childishly gleeful sometimes—“carefree” was the word … yes … sunny their disposition—strings of notes that did not pull a toy train clattering behind them as they seemed to promise but drew open suddenly the very door of war.
Once most of the birds flew away in winter, performing feats of navigation while on their many migrations that made the Magi seem novices at geography, since the three sages, at least, had a star; but now so many simply stay and tough it out, counting on the sentiments of humans who have for centuries protected those they couldn’t eat, and even kept some cozy in cages most artfully fashioned for them, or prized them for their plumage, or pitted them in fights, or said they sang at night when lovers … well … so it was rumored … did whatever they do … counting on others like his mother’s hand to feed them.
Hydrangea, or Lemon Daddy, the Fickle Bush.
Joseph tried to encourage the escape of the heat that built up in the house during the summer months by keeping the attic windows open, even if he risked, through one of his rusted screens, the entry of some unfriendly flying things, especially bats, which could hang as handily upside down as his flypapered chains of news clippings, the new group especially, strung near the opening of a dormer, that featured pederasts and their victims, a bunch he had with reluctance begun collecting because he had finally noticed the possibly suspicious absence of sex crimes and criminals—rapes, brises, and other genital deformations, gays and other aberrants, exhibitionists, porncones, sodomists, and other mysterious trans-mix-ups—an absence not to be pursued, but people and practices that nevertheless belonged in any proper inhumanity museum, the nutsy fagans and other detrolleyed toonervilles—others, aliens, weirdos, those were the words—the unlike and therefore unliked, whose unnatural acts promoted inhumane behavior in the species. It gave Joseph no pleasure at all to pursue these topics, in fact they made him queasy, but he felt it a duty to his dream.
Stir reet stir reet, he thought the wrens said, and then stir reet stir reet again. Not music, he suspected. Not conversation. Only pronouncement. Cheater, the cardinals insisted. Cheater cheater cheater.
Calamint, till frost, dainty of bloom and tart of odor.
A stinging wind brought tears to Joey’s eyes when Joseph looked down on Miriam’s garden filled with captured leaves. They flew just above the mums to be caught in hedges that had lost theirs and whose briars were now eager to seize any debris the wind blew in. I still have mine, Professor Skizzen thought, fly stuck and fluttery, though I’m not evergreen. Angered by the blurred vision in his watery eyes, Skizzen brought his fist down on his right thigh. The blow couldn’t reach through the cloth to cause a bruise.
29
We giggle together, that’s a good sign, Marjorie said.
•
She stole nickels, she stole dimes. That’s no way to run a store.
•
She was the head librarian once, now she’s just the basement dunce.
•
I don’t know what I’d do without me.
•
That Portho person took out a dirty blue bandanna to wipe the chair he’d chosen as if it were the seat of a public toilet.
•
The pencil’s point should not be too fine. Otherwise it will scratch the paper and leave a trail that no eraser can rub away.
•
I don’t like weather you can’t put a name to.
•
Nobody has worked harder to get nowhere than I have.
•
I hear that during the Depression famished poor kids used to eat library paste in their art classes. If you’re hungry enough you’ll eat earth. I wonder what sort of sounds they make, those inflated bellies? Do they growl? squeal? Can they catch cold? Can they cough? Not in the library. Of course anything you can hear in here I hear.
•
I’m told your concerts in the church basement are pretty pop, Marjorie said, with an inquiring smile. I’m told you play gospel, too, as if you were born to be black.
•
Good boy.
•
I’m not sure I like the way you listen, Joey. You let me talk about myself until I feel bad.
•
I never had it in for her, you know. My eye just caught her picking up the pennies and peering at the dates on them … or she was looking for Indian heads. So what, I thought. Until I caught her sneaking a dime from the overdue box. I bet she bought gum. We used to chew a lot of gum in here, we got so bored sitting at the front desk like an ink pad, you could have filled sacks with our yawns, but when I took charge I put a stop to it because it set a bad example for borrowers, you know, put ideas in their heads, we had enough trouble without aiding any of it, it didn’t need any aiding, so I put a stop to it. Full stop. To it.
•
I hate Kleenex. If you blow your nose you put your blow in your purse. But no. Into a library book the soiled fold goes, stuffed between pages and infecting the words. Tissue with lipstick on it wedged between pride and prejudice. Pardon me, Joey, but you know what they can wipe with it.
•
Before me, nobody thought about things. She didn’t. She sat here and smiled, stamped your book and smiled, said, Have a wordful day. Her smile was wan, though, with no conviction to it, not even a smile-filled smile, just a little twitch that widened the mouth, disturbed the lips. Wan, I would say it was. And have a wordful day was said in a whisper, as if it were between her and the book. Me—I have my great gray eyes. I look you in the face to say my say and I say sometimes, Have a nice day, okay, sometimes that’s what I say, I remind the moms, the kids, the occasionals—This book is due the twenty-first, remember—but you never know, I might say, Go away and jibber your jabber elsewhere, babble to your chums of your little life and loves, make out in the car, Carl—was that the skinny redhead’s name? who taught—would you believe it?—fencing.
•
I aspire for you, Joey. I have hopes.
•
I hate hairpins. I’ve got plenty of hair. People who come in comment on how plenty. No pins. Not anywhere. So where do these little wires end up? They end up keeping somebody’s place in somebody’s book. Put a crimp in the page. Scratch the paper. Ugly things to find in the midst of your reading like a fly in the ear. They don’t own the book. It’s not theirs. So what the hell, they think. No need to care.
• •
I took out a penny for a postcard. And that Marjorie Bruss slithers over and says, I saw you, I saw you take money from the overdues. I say, I need a penny for a postcard. Not from the overdues, you don’t, she says. Just consider it, I say. Just consider what you’ve said—how silly it is, how childish, not to say cheap, how niggling, that is the word, niggling, petty, that is the word, how petty—and aren’t you sorry now you’ve said it, because it shows off your soul, as if your soul were out walking and it were Easter.
But she says she’s going to report my actions to the library board, so I inform her that there was only one action in question, but her plural suggested others. Well, she did have others in mind, plenty of others, my improprieties, to report. That’s another reason why I call her Major. Oh, do they? don’t they? will they? won’t they? put people on report. They wear white gloves that hunt for dirt like pigeons peck crumbs. Have you a dossier, then, on me, I ask her, and she says right back and boldly in my face, Oh yes, I’m keeping accounts. That’s in the plural, too, I remind her. Neither of us has ever married. Notice that, dear, I ask of her, which sets her back, back in surprise she is rudely taken. Her face starts to redden, and I understand reddening to be a warning. Everyone knows why I’m not married, why I’m a librarian. They look at me and know, but you, Missss Brussss are well made, have hair, and speak easily to the world. What could the r
eason be? For our joint chastity? I am a witch, Missss Brussss, as anyone can see, but you are a bitch, as everyone will learn. Well, Mr. Joey, at that she screams that scream she screams, and I know I have added one more rude word to her report.
• •
You think you know what the life of an old maid is like because we are well represented in commonplace literature, in commonplace movies, in lady mags. We are leftovers from the Victorian family album, the homely sister who never hears a marriage proposal, who sits at home for dances, at parties leans against floral walls, is always a help around a complacent house, hair in a net as if each strand were a fish.
Yes, well, we aren’t alone there, most of us, at home sweet home, we are taking care of Mother, whom we have to dislike, it’s tradition. Father always dies first, like the first-picked fruit, and Mother languishes for years in an upstairs chair while her virginal daughter sits by her tatting and occasionally chatting but mostly glumly waiting out the silence through which Mother dozes between jolts of blackberry brandy.
Well, I like my little lonely world where I can keep my secrets and my skirts and my scrapbooks to myself. I liked sitting at the front desk, filing for future reference what everybody in my community was reading and noting who is a sound loan risk and who is always tardy and who tries to escape the overdues even when only a few pennies are at stake. I didn’t shush. The Major does that. I didn’t stalk the stacks like a policeman on patrol. The Major does that. I didn’t read the riot act to every moist-nosed grubby-fingered kid who comes within my hearing. The Major does that. I lacked a stamp.
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