The Mother Garden

by Robin Romm

  You take out the agate and look at it and you think it’s like the eye of your dog, Moose, before Moose died. Then your mother turns to you over the front seat with her long thick braid and those pretty strands that fell over her forehead, sometimes getting caught in the hinge in her big glasses, and she says, “Hi, baby, what are you doing.” She never asks you questions, she simply says the question like she’s announcing something. She holds out her palm and so you reach into the pocket of the car and grab the giraffe and set it there.

  She studies this little plastic animal and then she turns back to look out the windshield of the car, to see the day flashing in, this one day, driving to a softball game or a picnic or something that no longer matters but mattered right then. There is a huge weeping willow tree and a sloping lawn and some dogs running on a hill. All of this falls through the windshield and lands for a moment on the dash and she holds the giraffe and then she starts to sing.

  Can you even imagine how young she was then? Listen to her voice, reedy but sweet. It’s a song you haven’t heard since—some strange song about the foam of the ocean—she probably made it up. And your father pulls over and says, “I don’t know where the fuck this is, Nan. Where the fuck is this?” And you wish you could say, for the purposes of the story, that she rolled down the window and sang her song to the passersby, unbraided her hair and shook it around. You want to say that she got out of that car and flung her arms, wildly singing about foam, but actually she just said, “Why don’t you look at the map?” Then she threw the giraffe back at you and it landed in your lap and she went searching for a map in the glove box.

  My father hasn’t mentioned my mother in the three years since she died. If I mention her, his face grows still, his nostrils tighten, but he says very little. Maybe: “It’s very sad.” Maybe: “Life’s not fair and no one said it was,” but her name, Nancy, doesn’t come up. He doesn’t hold her sweaters to his face and cry.

  Ariella. What can I tell you about this newest choice? In junior high she was sporty. She had thick brown hair and equally thick legs. She smiled with her whole body, like a well-treated dog. With me, he’s distant and disinterested. But I’m sure she brings out his charming side.

  I start to straighten the house. In my bedroom, I check to see if I’ve left any dishes and find my grandfather sitting up in bed, mashing Saltines around in his mouth—and since he is dead and can’t swallow, spitting the mush into a water glass.

  “HELLO HELLO!” he shrieks. Death has not improved his hearing and so he delivers his words at the highest decibel and pitch. “HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR FATHER?” My father still lives about an hour from here, in my childhood home, the home he shared with my mother for nineteen years. I, on the other hand, have moved from place to place. And yet they have no trouble finding their way in here, and none of them seem able to figure out where he is.

  “He’s home, I think,” I say. “But he’s visiting later.” My grandfather takes out his teeth and wipes them off on the edge of my sheet. He reinserts them and raises his top lip. “These damn things don’t fit right anymore,” he mutters.

  “What do you need?” I ask.

  “WHAT?” he screams.

  “WHAT DO YOU NEED?” I scream back.

  “I DON’T NEED ANYTHING. WHAT DO YOU NEED?”

  “I’M TRYING TO CLEAN THE HOUSE,” I scream.

  “GOOD IDEA,” he screams. I stand there looking at him and a gooey hunk of gray cracker slides from his lip into the glass. His eyes are so tiny, like the buttons of a lady’s blouse. The skin on his face looks oniony, translucent, and large splotches of gray mottle the greenish hue. He scrunches his face like someone is grabbing his ear and it hurts.

  “HE’S COMING FOR A VISIT?” my grandfather says. I nod, then take the crackers off the nightstand and grab the glass. My grandfather doesn’t seem to notice. I walk the stuff back into the kitchen, dump the cracker goo down the drain, flick on the disposal, and listen to the grind. With great care, I load the dishwasher. Then I go back into my bedroom.

  “HE HAS A NEW GIRLFRIEND,” I say. My grandfather turns and looks out the window. The yard is dead. I’m terrible with plants. Even the weeds have turned brown. But there, in the center of a patch of dry, cracked earth, where a better person would have a lawn, my grandmother stands, fooling with the belt of her raincoat.

  “THAT’S WHAT I HEAR,” my grandfather says. “A SHIKSA. I’D LIKE TO KNOW HOW HE MANAGES.”

  “HOW HE MANAGES WHAT?”

  “HOW HE GETS ALONG!” my grandfather wails. “HOW HE HANDLES HIS MASCULINE NEEDS!” He’s furious now, quivering in the bed, his gray spots turning lavender.

  My grandmother appears by the dresser.

  “Masculine needs?” she says. Her face is old again, wrinkled, and her hair is red.

  My grandfather tries to respond, but there’s too much saliva in his mouth. He gasps and says through the wet, “Why do you hate me, Eve?”

  “Look at you,” my grandmother says, and though she isn’t screaming, my grandfather seems to hear her. “When I was alive,” she says to me, “the best meals I ever ate, I had to eat with the ladies from the secretary pool because he wouldn’t spend the money.”

  “WE HAD NO CHOICE!” he wails. “WE HAD TO THINK OF THE FUTURE!”

  “This is the future,” my grandmother says. “This is it.”

  “You should have asked,” my grandfather says.

  “Ha,” says my grandmother. Her mouth is tight. “Get out of bed.” He obeys. Then they are gone.

  Though I wasn’t there to see it, the legend goes that while my grandmother was bleeding on the floor of their apartment, my grandfather kneeled in the blood and cried. He told her how much he loved her and she looked at him and she looked at him. My grandfather thought she was incapable of speaking, he thought she was being carried off by God, but she was just listening to him blubber. Finally, she raised a hand to her forehead, leaving a smear of red, and said, “Louis, you wouldn’t know love if it hit you in the head.” Then she died.

  Back in the living room, there’s a disturbing situation. Someone has cut cardboard boxes into little headstones. In black marker, one says Eve, the other, Louis.

  “In here, sweetheart!” my mother calls. She’s in the bathtub, her head resting against the blow-up pillow. There’s no water in the tub and she’s still in her skirt, though now she’s wearing thick stockings underneath it. “I hope that stuff’s not bothering you. I’m trying something to see if I can keep her away.”

  “The headstones?” I ask her.

  “Has Eve ever told you that she hates her monument?” my mother says. “She thinks we were cheap. She thinks she should have had the higher-grade marble, not granite. I told her the marble isn’t strong—it wears away so that in fifty years your name is just a smear of lichen, but she doesn’t believe me. She says that I convinced your father to buy her a headstone from China.”

  “We did buy her a headstone from China,” I say.

  “Well, it wasn’t cheap,” my mother says.

  “So what’s with the cut-outs?” I ask her. She sits up in the tub and smooths the skirt down.

  “She won’t want to be reminded,” my mother says. “So maybe she’ll stay away.”

  “Why are you here?” I ask her. Her face gets concerned, the way it did when I was little and told her that I skinned my knee on the driveway.

  “You wanted me here.”

  “I know,” I say. “I did.”

  My mother glances toward her hips. “You need to clean this tub,” she says.

  Musical Interlude #3

  This time, the song is a sad one. You’re twenty-four years old and you and your mother sit on a grassy overlook, the Pacific Ocean thrashing beneath you. You’re both pretending that it’s a much nicer day than it is—pretending that wide, blue skies stretch above. You don’t yet know what all of this will mean, this view of sky and water. You think only that oceans seem calming, attached to a force that can soothe you.

>   She says, “Hold my hand,” and you take it and notice it doesn’t feel right; it’s too cold and rubbery. You fight the feeling of rage that keeps slipping in from the side with its fishtails and its scampering. The black wheelchair sits crookedly in the grass, and for a moment you worry that you will not be able to get it back to the road. Slowly, as you strategize how you will press the wheelchair hard on one side to turn it, the scampering quiets and in its place you feel a desire to ask something. The question is hard to put into words. It feels like you have to ask it in a foreign tongue, and it sits for a long time inside you.

  “Do you believe you’ll go anywhere after?” you finally ask. It comes out fast. She sits perfectly still, letting the question absorb, and then she starts to cry. She pulls the oxygen tube out so she doesn’t clog it and she looks like a fish without air.

  She raises her eyes and her shoulders in a gesture of unknowing. For a long time you sit like that, staring out, not noticing anything different about the jutting rocks covered in barnacles and bird shit or the pattern of dull light on a winter sea. Later you’ll wonder if that day was marked by God, tagged somehow, but you don’t yet know enough to wonder this.

  You feel weary, but you aren’t through. “If when you die, you can still visit, will you?” you ask her. Your voice breaks here, and you feel ashamed—because your wish right now is so selfish: you don’t want to be left in this world alone.

  Her dark eyes are filled with the jaded, exhausted seriousness that will become the only seriousness you will ever really trust. “Of course, sweetheart,” she says. “You’d be number one.”

  Now you both listen to the earth’s song, the crush of sand beneath water, the cry of gulls—and that is when you notice that there is something creaky about the bench you’re on, that the cry of gulls has reached a strange fervor, that the water doesn’t sing, it growls.

  My mother disappears—as they all do—and for the rest of the afternoon, nothing happens. I toss the headstones. I finish the laundry. My father said he would arrive at around seven and by five, I am exhausted.

  I lie down on clean sheets, but my mind races. When my mother was dying, my father left town every weekend. He claimed he had meetings he couldn’t miss, conferences it would be professionally irresponsible not to attend. My mother lay on the sofa, a blanket over her swollen feet, and watched animal shows on the television. She nodded when he gave his reasons. I don’t know what she knew at the time. I don’t know what kind of arrangement they had. But she seemed to understand that her absence would simply be that, an absence, a hole, and that he wouldn’t know what to do with it other than plug it.

  If I say to him, on my birthday, that I miss her, that every happy occasion just brings with it a blur of pain, he shakes his head.

  “You can’t live in the past,” he says. “You have to move on with your life.”

  But that’s not it. It’s not that I’m stuck. They’re just not as gone to me as they are to him.

  At seven, promptly, the doorbell rings. Ariella looks exactly as I remember her. In fact, she even dresses much as she would have in junior high. She wears a plain white T-shirt that’s too big for her and tight faded jeans. Her beige moccasins are not stylish and her bangs hang over her eyes.

  “Hi,” she says to me and I see trepidation in her face, which I appreciate.

  I lean in to hug my father. He smells like leather.

  They come into the house and I get out some wine. We talk about their drive. We talk about restaurants. We’ll go out to eat, sure. How about Thai food? Or do you prefer something else, Ariella? Italian? My father takes his heavy hand and puts it on Ariella’s neck the way he used to put his hand on my neck when I was little and he was playing ventriloquist.

  When they finish their wine, I gather the glasses and take them to the kitchen. Eve, Louis, and Nancy are all there, hovering together in the doorway.

  “Only a goy would wear those shoes,” my grandmother says. “What are they made of, elk?” My mother stands soberly beside her.

  “She’s so young,” my mother says, and bites the inside of her cheek. My grandmother gets her rain cap out of her coat pocket and shakes it vigorously.

  “Elk,” my grandmother says again. “Hmph.” My grandfather hovers by her side looking gleeful, his wet mouth twitching.

  Musical Interlude #4

  My father didn’t sing to me. He has no sense of tone, no patience for lyrics. The night she died, he came up to my childhood room, where I’d been staying. I was still awake, my fear gnawing at me, a caffeine of nerves, but I knew he was coming to deliver bad news and so I feigned sleep.

  “Hey,” he said, knocking quietly on the door frame. I didn’t respond. In that silence, a hundred songs, a thousand songs, so many songs that the noise became silence.

  “She’s gone.”

  From the sofa, Ariella lets out a high-pitched giggle.

  I walk back into the living room and ask them if they’re ready to go. Ariella is flushed. My dad grins.

  “We’re ready,” Ariella says, pushing my father’s hand off her neck.

  I pull my coat from the closet and follow my father and Ariella outside. He opens the car door for her and I breathe in the late-fall air. There will be rain. The air smells like rocks.

  “How about Italian, actually,” Ariella says, and I canhear my grandmother saying, “The last thing that girl needs is pasta.”

  “Italian’s fine,” I say, climbing into the backseat. “There’s a new restaurant just out of town.” I glance back at the house. Through the big window, my mother watches us. She makes a shooing motion with her hand. My grandmother snaps her rain cap beneath her chin and adjusts the belt on her coat. My grandfather looks like he’s shrinking, but his fists are balled in an approximation of victory.

  This time, the pocket behind the driver’s seat contains an atlas. I slide it out, flip to this city—its streets colored red and blue—and show them how to go.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to the readers, teachers, and magazine editors who gave their time, support, and advice along the way, especially Michelle Carter, Peter Orner, Bob Glück, Nona Caspers, Kira Poskanzer, Camas Davis, Laura Davis, Amy Payne, Shayna Cohen, Rob Spillman, and Hannah Tinti. For their attempts at cheerleading and assuaging the crazies, thanks to Richard Romm, Martha Walters, and Suzanne Chanti. The MacDowell Colony provided the community and support that allowed me to write “Family Epic.” I’m grateful to Maria Massie for her unwavering faith in this book and to Alexis Gargagliano for being such a kind, thoughtful, and thorough editor. And of course, a special thank-you to Don Waters, who has known these stories from their first halting words, and who has seen me grow up along with them.

  About the Author

  Robin Romm was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon. Her short stories have appeared in a number of publications, including Tin House, One Story, and The Threepenny Review. She was a 2006 MacDowell Fellow and lives in Berkeley, California.