The Mother Garden

by Robin Romm

  Jack looked at me in faux shock. “Not my mother!” he said, helping himself to some coffee and a banana. He peeled it while watching Doreena from the window. She was asking and answering questions about the weather.

  “You get used to it,” he said.

  That day, Jack put an ad online and an hour later, we got a reply. “Namaste,” it read. “My name is Erika and I’m looking for community, ultimate peace, and belonging. And a place to stay.”

  “She sounds ideal,” Jack said when I told him.

  Erika arrived the following morning, free of material possessions, her posture perfect. I showed her the garden, she admired the bougainvillea and trumpet vine, the huge St. John’s wort, the window box of herbs.

  “What a beautiful space,” she said slowly.

  Doreena waved. “Hi there,” she trilled. “Over here the sun’s just right. When I was a little girl, my brother Moe and I, bless his heart, used to sit outside to see whose hair got hotter first. He always won, of course, that Moe. He was a brunette.” She held out her hand. Instead of taking it, Erika placed her palms together in front of her heart and bowed her head.

  “That’s different,” Doreena said, smiling so wide we could see the gray sealant on one of her molars. “I like that.” She put her hands together too and showed us the top of her head, the scalp discolored from hair dye.

  Jack arrived in his work clothes, looking harried and annoyed. (He’d wanted to schedule the meeting after he got off, but Erika had a ride at ten.) He gave his mom a halfhearted hug. But when he saw Erika’s long neck and soft mouth, he perked up. He walked her around the garden, explaining our vision: mothers bursting out of the earth alongside other stalwart flora, lush and abundant. Erika nodded gravely after every sentence.

  “So, the one criteria is that you’re a mother,” Jack finished. Erika wove her fingers together and sat on the porch steps.

  “I’m not focusing on that part of my life these days,” she said. “I try to orient toward joy.” Jack sat next to her and made his forehead soft. In an instant he could go from brusque to sensitive, as open as a daisy in the sunshine. Erika opened her nostrils and breathed deeply, letting the air slowly out of her mouth.

  “When I was seventeen,” she said (she couldn’t have been older than twenty-four), “I did a few things I’m not that proud of.” I looked over at Doreena, who, uncharacteristically quiet, pretended to study the hem of her Hilton Head sweatshirt. Erika glanced over at her. “I gave them up.” Jack tilted his head, nodded slowly.

  “More than one?” he asked.

  It looked as though she’d turned to glass. “Twins,” Erika said.

  “Welcome,” Jack said, plucking a ranunculus from the planter box. She melted toward him, took the flower, and wove it into her waist-length hair.

  We planted Erika near my bedroom window so that in the morning, when she did yoga, I could see her stretch into the sky as though plucking a cloud.

  Contrary to our expectations, Erika and Doreena balanced nicely. Doreena rambled all day—people she’d known, pets she saw once, the formidable diabetes problem—and Erika meditated.

  I brought them their meals each day and tried to engage them.

  “How was your night?” I’d ask. Invariably, Doreena would recall a story she heard on a talk show about a woman who spent nine months in the woods with only a jackknife. “She was so tan!” Or she might repeat how lucky she was that, at her age, she hadn’t suffered any significant bone loss according to her doctor. Erika would zone out and stare at the eaves.

  Even with Erika and Doreena’s yin-yang effect, there was something depressing about having only two mothers in a garden. I didn’t want to burst Jack’s bubble, but without a few more moms, they just looked like women in a yard, their ankles packed in dirt. I reposted Jack’s ad daily on various sites. For almost a week, no one else responded.

  “It’s not going to work,” I told Jack. We were sitting on my sofa watching a gardening show. He ate a handful of popcorn. “There’s no incentive.”

  “Don’t be negative,” he said. “Big ideas take a while to catch. Besides, look.” He pulled out a piece of tagboard from his bag. On it were patches of oil paint in earthy shades of brown, purple, peach, and faded indigo. “I did the color scheme,” he said. “It’s great, right?” He ran his thumb over the colors. “Beauty is its own incentive, Claire.”

  That week, Jack convinced Doreena to grow out her dye job, explaining that the white in her hair would more dramatically reflect light. He brought over a black cocktail dress for Erika, but when she put it on and stood ankle deep in soil, she looked out of place, like a girl stumbling from a car crash. Instead he settled on a loose silk dress in a loamy brown. Every couple of days he brought over small purple flowers for her hair. He seemed to take special care with Erika, going so far as to buy her a sparkly body spray that smelled like wood.

  But still, no more mothers responded. I took out a small ad in the local paper. When that didn’t work, I decided to make fliers. Don’t make art, BE art! Join The Mother Garden! All mothers encouraged to inquire! Jack’s drawing of the project sat beneath the text, all the flowers carefully sketched. The silhouettes of the mothers he left white—beautiful and strange.

  All day I walked the city, hanging the flier outside day care centers and malls, clothing boutiques and grocery stores. As I was putting the stapler back in my bag at the natural grocery, a woman stopped to read it. Two young boys stood in her grocery cart alongside bags of produce and packages of dried fruit. The woman’s eyebrows arched over plastic European glasses. She probably sang her sons lullabies in French and cut strawberries into their cereal in the morning. She’d correct their pronunciation and tap their shoulders when they slumped. As the boys grew older, they’d roll their eyes and snort, but secretly they’d search all their lives for women just like her.

  She’d be perfect for the garden—her slim physique and interesting bone structure. We’d probably have things in common, too. I took French in college. I’d traveled a bit. I waited to see if she’d take a phone number.

  The bigger boy looked me straight in the eye. Then he made his hand into a claw and slammed it into his brother’s nose. The smaller boy became entirely mouth: dark, cavernous, tinseled with spit. He wailed.

  “Jonah!” the mother said. “You say you’re sorry right now!” Then she looked at me, pushing her glasses up.

  “Intriguing flier,” she said. She rolled her eyes and gestured to her son. “As if any mother has time for games.” She smiled sympathetically at me, as if I couldn’t help drooling on myself. Then she wheeled her cart over to a rack of organic peach nectar. Her older son turned to face me. He bugged his eyes and opened his mouth wide like a bat.

  I left feeling low. It wasn’t just for me, the garden. It was for the great frontier of art. I knew that my mother was dead. This wasn’t simply a monument to the past. But maybe it was too bizarre; maybe I should call it off, send them home. It would piss off Jack, but it really wasn’t up to him. It was my yard.

  I pushed open the side gate.

  “Hi there, Claire,” Doreena called. Erika stood with her eyes shut. In between them, midway across the mulch, another woman stood.

  “I hope I’m in a good spot,” she said, glancing around. She’d already planted herself; you could see part of her muscular calves beneath her long orange skirt. “It seemed like the best place for me.” Her face was doll-like, a peaked nose and knobby chin. I walked over. Her spot was notably cooler than the other spots, cast in the shed’s shadow.

  “I’m Agnes.” She offered her hand. On her right pinky sat an enormous garnet. As she extended it, all the light from the sky was swallowed by that stone.

  My mother’s mother had a garnet ring, the color of almost dry blood. When my grandmother died, my mother had it made into a pendant. I remember a particular outfit she wore: a black tunic with a full black skirt, black ballet flats, and the glossy red pendant displayed prominently against her stern
um. At night she kept the garnet in a satin-lined brass box. The day we buried her, I stood by the grave, watching people’s shoes as they shifted their weight. The dirt fell on the pine box with a hollow thump, and then, as dirt hit dirt, it made no sound at all. The adults passed the shovel as the rabbi keened. All these people would follow us back to the house, eat tuna salad and bagels and drink fruitysoda as they talked. When they left, I planned to go into her bedroom, where her garnet would be cool and smooth.

  But when I got to her room, the brass box was empty. My father and I tore the house apart looking for the pendant. In the middle of the night I came downstairs to find him on his hands and knees with a flashlight, peering around the shoes in my mother’s closet. “I can’t understand it,” he said to me, his voice shrill, his face ashen. His wrists looked very thin.

  That evening, I took them a little champagne to celebrate Agnes. Her presence out back made a significant difference.

  “So, where are your children?” I asked her. She made a fluttering motion with her hand.

  “Oh, grown and flown, dear,” she said. “My daughter’s married and living in Idaho. My son’s in graduate school in Montreal.” She handed me her empty glass. “Do you have a sweater I could use for the night?” she asked. “I know I’m not your size, exactly, but I didn’t think to bring one.”

  The small attic of my house contained nothing but boxes of my mom’s things. Dishes and figurines, her wedding dress. I dragged one down labeled clothes. When Agnes put on the crimson pullover, it fit her perfectly.

  One afternoon Agnes told Erika that she should try to write to her children, even if she couldn’t send the letters. “Start with getting your thoughts straight,” she advised. Erika ripped a buttercup to shreds as Agnes talked, but the next day she asked for some paper and a pen. Agnes had a calming effect on Doreena. She still chattered, but with Agnes around there were periods of time when she’d look at the trees or examine her lunch basket without sharing her observations.

  My enthusiasm for the project intensified. In the mornings I brought the mothers coffee (Erika drank green tea), and Agnes and I would chat. She asked me questions about where I grew up and when I told her about my mother, she pressed on her collarbone so as not to cry.

  Jack asked me to type a sample press release. We weren’t quite ready to open to the public, but he thought if we could get one or two more mothers in the next week, we could do a preliminary showing. I fussed with it after breakfast, then I made Erika’s recipe for cream cheese sandwiches with pimento-pistachio paste. I handed them to the mothers in napkins. I was headed to Jack’s, to print out what I’d written, when I heard yelling.

  Agnes must have torn herself from the dirt in a hurry. Clumps stuck to her ankles. She rummaged through the first aid box Jack fastened to the wall of the shed, and rushed to Doreena. She yanked Doreena’s slacks down and slammed her clenched fist against her dappled thigh. Doreena’s hands fell away from her throat.

  “It’s okay,” Agnes said. Erika, who’d just begun to dig herself up, stopped moving. Agnes pulled up Doreena’s pants. With maternal grace, she dusted off the mulch.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She didn’t realize there were nuts in the sandwich. She’s allergic,” Agnes said.

  “Oh, Doreena.” I walked down the wooden steps into the garden. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  That night, Jack and I installed a small clay fireplace by the back fence while the moms soaked their dirty feet in basins of sudsy water. We brought out bags of marshmallows and chocolate. Jack played simple songs on his new mandolin. Doreena sat silently and at one point in the evening, Jack put his arm around her.

  We replanted the moms in their spots around midnight, toasting their magnificence with jars of hot toddies.

  “Where would we be without you?” I said to Agnes. Her hair fell just like my mother’s, dark and incorrigible, all over her face. She reached out and touched my shoulder.

  “You can’t save everyone,” she said softly. “But you save who you can.”

  “What’s the matter with you, anyway?” Laurel hisses at Agnes. “How hard is it to diet? For Pete’s sake, couldn’t you get a little cardio every once in a while?” Laurel’s dangerously thin. You can see the strap of muscle coil around her upper arm, the tendons in her neck. When you get too close to her, she smells sulfuric.

  Agnes doesn’t respond. It’s a ridiculous attack. She’s not fat, though her body has more curves than the other mothers. Her breasts are formidable and her hips make her long skirt bell.

  “I would appreciate it if you’d keep your opinions to yourself,” Agnes says.

  “I would appreciate it if you’d move your big ass,” Laurel says.

  “Watch your language,” Doreena says.

  Erika turns to Laurel. “You’re a little out of line,” she says.

  “You’re a little out of touch,” Laurel shoots back. “That long hair thing went out with Crystal Gayle in, like, nineteen seventy-nine.” For a moment Erika looks wounded. Her long fingers rise to touch her tresses, but then she stops.

  “It must be difficult being you,” she says.

  “Not at all,” Laurel says. “It’s fantastic.” She begins a series of squats.

  A ladybug lands on Agnes’s sweater. It crawls over her breasts and into the crease of her armpit. She inserts a finger into the crease and the glossy bug crawls onto it.

  “Three spots, three wishes,” Agnes says, handing the bug to me. It sits on my finger. I’m always tempted to wish for things I cannot have—I wish there were no such thing as loss—but before I can think of a better wish, it flies off into the bougainvillea.

  Laurel is mother number four. For her I got twenty grand. Jack landscaped the yard at her husband Franz’s law firm and the two of them got to talking about the mother garden. Because Franz is a lawyer and the garden is technically mine, the offer (on creamy cotton paper) came addressed to me. Laurel needed something to do—the acting wasn’t panning out; he needed space to focus on the office remodel. Their kids were in high school, able to get themselves to basketball and sailing club. He’d pay me the money for her upkeep and in addition, he’d throw in a weekly hairstylist and a biweekly shrink.

  “What do you think?” I asked Jack.

  “I think we’re going to get a call from Montel Williams any second.”

  “Or Jerry Springer,” I said

  “Maybe Martha Stewart,” he said. I thought of all the projects we could put in Living. A mom bouquet with colorful streamers around it. Sunhats full of birdseed to attract the jays. On weekends we could invite motherless girls to make gingerbread houses with the mom of their choice.

  “Twenty grand,” Jack said. “We’d be crazy to pass that up.”

  “Do you think I should go over and meet her?”

  “Chh,” Jack said. “If you can deal with Doreena, you can deal with some retired trophy wife.”

  Laurel hasn’t stopped moving since she arrived. Her arms spiral, her fanny wags, she does a hundred squats at a time. She won’t eat anything but lettuce and celery. Her limp blond hair is ragged at the tips. She looks like a malnourished daffodil.

  “You spray me with that hose and I’ll scream,” Laurel yells. Something’s stuck a little farther up the hose than I can reach. I’ve forced a twig down to dislodge it. It seems plausible that Laurel stuck gum in there. She’s always chewing it. “You seem to be on some kind of power trip, missy, but you’re just a pipsqueak with this bizarre fetish. And when my agent gets wind of this, boy—”

  I finally get the thing out of the hose. It’s not gum, it’s a snail, and I’ve broken its dark little shell. I aim the strong spray at Laurel’s bony legs. The tension jangles Doreena, who immediately starts to recount various supersales at Marshall’s. For half an hour, from the kitchen, I can hear Laurel’s litigation threats mingling with bargain prices.

  “Don’t talk to me,” I say to Laurel when I go back outside. Agnes looks defeated.
She sits with her ankles in the dirt, knees clasped. She looks at me, waiting.

  “We’ll figure this out,” I tell her. “I’m sure she’ll calm down after a day or two.”

  “A day or two?” Agnes says, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Claire, but I’m afraid this isn’t what I came here for. I’m not up for it.”

  “Wait,” I say. I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “Claire?” she says, reaching up to touch my hand. It’s then I realize how hard I’m squeezing.

  I never thought through losing these moms. Jack and I figured we’d max out at ten, get a lot of publicity, and maybe buy a larger piece of land where we could expand. He sees us landing an NEA grant—what with the administration so fixed on family issues. “It’s the perfect project,” he said. “All happy endings and unity.” And the moms would be bountiful. Over the weeks they’ve been out back, I’ve slept better. I don’t have nightmares of being left in the desert with only a ruler, of being put on a rowboat in a storm with my fingers rotting.

  From the kitchen window, I watch them. Laurel’s absorbed in a swiveling motion, probably designed to enhance the waistline. Erika rakes her hands through her hair, vacantly studying some grass. Doreena rambles about cholesterol, her eyes wide, the white roots of her hair beginning to show.

  I could bring Agnes inside the house. But there’s no garden in there—what would I tell the other moms? I could convince her to try a new part of the yard. I could give Franz back his money, though at this point, I see I’ve been duped. He’s not taking Laurel back. Stay, I could tell Agnes. Please. Don’t go.

  “Don’t go,” I said to my mother. She was on the rented hospital bed in the study, a dead plant resting on the table near her feet. I’d killed that plant, withholding water for weeks. I crawled onto the bed when the social worker left the room and straddled her, peeled her eyelids with my thumbs. “Mom,” I said. She opened her mouth and a noise like the creak of a door came out. “Mom, you have to open your eyes.” Her tongue moved. “Open your eyes.” And then she did, she looked straight ahead, past me, past the ceiling. “Look at me,” I said. “Don’t go.” My tears hit her lips. Then she rattled, a shake went through her, and she left.