The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  She sat for hours with catalogs from Park’s and Wayside and Harris and Johnny’s and Weston’s and the New England Rootstock Association and Thompson and Morgan. There was a stack of letters, too, from nurseries and seed companies and manufacturers of garden implements, asking her to endorse their products or accept free samples. She looked through these, to see what temptations she was so nobly rejecting, and then threw them in the fire. She never gave in to such blandishments; she hated being beholden. What she liked, in spite of any small fame she had acquired, was to sit down with the catalogs like a typical suburban gardener, and paw through them. She picked out a new hybrid primrose, decided to skip the rock garden, took a chance on a perennial bush strawberry and some yellow raspberries, and ordered more vegetable seeds than she could ever use.

  “Rosie Mortimer’s Garden,” perforce, contained plenty of veggie lore. Unlike the English, whose flowers come first, Americans tend to grow vegetables.

  “If I can’t eat it I don’t grow it,” Kathy Andrews always said. She was Rosie’s across-the-street neighbor, whose backyard plot produced a stand of corn every summer that could serve as a set for Oklahoma! And Jim and Kiki Sheffield, next door, grew tomatoes; their garden was a wilderness of red fruit, green foliage, and yellow beetle traps, and they put up hundreds of quarts of tomato sauce over Labor Day weekend every year. “What do you do with it all?” Rosie asked once when they brought over her annual gift of a half a dozen jars. “I put tomato sauce in everything,” Kiki said. And it was true that whenever Rosie ate dinner there they had something red and Italian.

  So she did vegetables for her fans. If she concentrated chiefly on flowers, her great love, she’d be briskly canceled. But she had nothing against veggies, and she happily grew plenty of them herself, though she drew the line at corn. For one show, she invited the cameras across the street and introduced Kathy, her picturesque family, and her cornpatch onto WEZL–TV (and that segment was expanded by the genius of Janice into a series they called “My Neighbors’ Gardens”).

  Rosie was unable to decide about the iris and left that order for another sleepless night or peaceful afternoon. Wandering among flowers and shrubs and rows of vegetables—even on paper, in imagination, in memory—soothed her and made her, toward dawn, comfortably sleepy, so that she slept at last with gardens in her dreams instead of children.

  It snowed all that night, and by morning there were several inches. The plows hadn’t yet come when Rosie got up at ten. Schools were closed; the Andrews children, in red and blue hats, were out in their yard making a snowman. There was the hushed, clanky rasp of shoveling. A dog woofed excitedly over someone’s lawn. Precarious rims of snow outlined the branches of the trees, and the sun shone on everything, laying distinct angles of black across the white.

  Rosie awoke utterly refreshed. Looking out on the purity of the day, she felt as if the snow had fallen on her own hot soul, cooling and cleaning it, leaving it new. After she had her oatmeal, she put on her boots and mittens and down jacket and knitted cap and, after shoveling a path, she went for a walk. The streets were quiet; even the Post Road, where the plowed snow was gradually turning to slush and leaving bare spots, was nearly deserted, and she walked along it, liking the way the soles of her boots met the fresh snow, the merest pull as the snow grabbed on, the slight difficulty as she lifted her foot again. It was “good packing weather,” as Peter and his pals used to say, and she made a snowball now and then and threw it at the side of a building or a parked car. It was a beautiful day, so beautiful that even the tawdry stores—Big B’s Discount Haven, The Liquor Supermarket, Galetti’s Drug, E-Z-Do Laundromat, Alexander’s Hair Works—seemed purified in the snow and the sun.

  She walked west, into Chiswick. Her objective as she stated it to herself was to see if Zakrzeski’s was open—the Polish bakery where she sometimes bought poteca—a fresh, yeasty hunk of poteca being just the thing to munch on when she returned. But as she walked she realized, with a furtive and unexpected sense of adventure, that she was heading for the vacant storefront in Chiswick that Susannah and her husband had rented. She would see if it was true; she would spy on them, anonymous in her cap and her heavy clothes. She imagined peeking in a window and seeing Susannah languid in a chair eating a candy bar while her poor husband huffed and puffed over packing cases full of ginseng and soybeans.

  She passed Zakrzeski’s—yes, they were open, she’d stop on the way back—and headed quite deliberately past McDonald’s, Arnie’s Auto Body, the Glitter City Roller Dome, Fosdick Body Works, Shoe City, Dunkin’ Donuts, Chiswick Princess Beauty Supply Shop, and finally the site of the failed bookstore, in a mini-shopping center between Wendell’s Tropical Fish Paradise and the Post Road Liquor Boutique.

  Rosie trudged across the pristine parking lot. Only the Liquor Boutique was open. In Wendell’s, there was the purple gloom of rows of dimly lit fish tanks. The plate glass window of the empty store was dusty and bare—no hand-painted sign announcing the imminent opening of SUE’S NATURAL EATS or IVAN’S GOURMET HEALTH EMPORIUM or whatever absurd and probably inaccurate label they planned to tack on their place. She peered cautiously in through the grime, ready to pull her collar up and her hat down at any threat of recognition. But there was no one inside. The store was still lined with bookshelves, one of which had fallen over. There was a counter. There was a filthy black and white tile floor. There were empty-looking cardboard cartons in a corner. That was all, just those bleak innards staring out at her indifferently. Rosie felt a vague disappointment—she had liked the idea of spying. She also felt a pang of pity for her daughter, for her ugly, taciturn husband, for the anonymous local friend who had talked the two of them into this nonsensical step or who had let them talk him into it. Doomed crazy hippies who would never grow up. Irresponsible flower babies who hoped to push tofu burgers in this wonderland of exhaust fumes and Big Macs and sweet pink wine and hair spray. It all looked, to say the least, unpromising. The view in that dusty window, Rosie decided, was one of the most depressing sights she’d ever seen.

  And, perhaps unreasonably, she took it as an emblem of her daughter, the empty store killing off her good mood just as definitively as Susannah used to. There had been that same drowsy indifference, that deadness at the center, about Susannah—about Edwin, too, as if they’d abandoned their souls and left them to moulder away. They had flat, light blue eyes that seemed good for nothing but to see with—mere sense organs, like ears, with no depth or mystery, no revelations lurking there.

  The memories of the years she spent with them returned to her painfully, like headaches, as she stood there in the snow. There, stabbing behind the left eye, was the recollection of Susannah turning away from a hug, a kind word, a smile—right up until the last time, when she was leaving. She stood in the front hall, in sunlight, her hair clean for once, a large leather purse tucked absurdly beneath her ten-year-old arm, her three suitcases stowed away in the cab and the cabdriver waiting to take her to the airport. She was meeting Edwin in New York. She and Rosie stood in the hall. Susannah looked petulant, she had set her mouth in a line and made her eyes go hard, but Rosie thought she detected beneath this a glimmer of regret, or at least of the childish sadness you’d expect from a ten-year-old kid about to leave her mother for the first time and forever.

  “You can still stay, Susannah,” she said. “You can still have a home here with Peter and me.”

  Any glimmer she saw there disappeared, or had been imaginary in the first place, the culmination of years of disappointment from her daughter. “No, thank you,” Susannah said. That was all—a simple negative, with the uncharacteristic polite tag at the end, for emphasis.

  Partly to see what she’d say, Rosie went further: “Sure you don’t want me to drive you to the airport?”

  She was only ten years old, she had never been on a plane, she was about to leave home forever, and she didn’t answer. She picked up her bag of stuffed animals and walked out the door to the taxi while Rosie stood gaping in t
he hall. By being silent, she got the last word.

  All Rosie’s little memory-headaches were variations on that scene: love offered, love rejected. Perhaps Susannah’s memories were similar. Who rejected whom first? Could such a tangle ever be sorted out? It was true that in babyhood Susannah had often cried when Rosie held her and quieted down for Edwin; was it instinctive distaste, or the apprehension of some tenseness or roughness that Rosie wasn’t aware of? It was certainly true, also, that Rosie had seen Edwin’s features in Susannah’s, and had recoiled from the resemblance. But Rosie had painful memories of a sullen, whiny, unloving daughter; Susannah’s may have been of a flinty, distant mother who playacted affection from time to time. Both of them, no doubt, remembered accurately.

  Rosie stood there looking through the dusty window until her toes began to freeze, and then she went into the Liquor Boutique for a bottle of sherry.

  “Planning to get snowed in in style?” the proprietor asked as he bagged it. He was a fat man dressed gangster-style in a dark shirt and light tie.

  She snickered dutifully.

  “Tell me the truth,” he said. “Is this stuff really worth the extra money? Is it really that much better than the stuff from California?”

  “I think it is.”

  “I really want to know,” he pursued. “I’m serious. Now I’m not a sherry drinker. Do I look like one?” He roared with laughter; whether he referred to his weight or his masculinity or some other quality Rosie didn’t know, but she snickered again. “So level with me,” he said. “Is it really better?”

  “I think it’s good,” she said obligingly. “Nice and dry.”

  “Worth the extra dough? Tell me the truth.”

  “Definitely worth it,” she said again, and held out the money. Time to ask her question and scram. It may have been laughable, at her age, to worry about men trying to pick her up, but they still did, often enough, and she could see the look in this one’s eye.

  “Seventy-eight, eighty, ninety, seven dollars, eight, nine, ten,” he said, counting the change into her hand and touching her palm with each number. His tie was ivory-yellow brocade with an unpleasant glint to it.

  She pocketed the change quickly and put her mittens on again. “Tell me,” she said, stepping away from the counter. “What’s going in there next door to you?”

  He made a face. “Health food, from what I hear.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  He made another face. “Kids. Opening in March.” He laughed and said, “Tell you what,” placing his huge palms flat on the counter and leaning toward her. “You come in when it opens and I’ll take you over and buy you a cup of dandelion tea.” He guffawed and wet his lips. “With a little snort of something in it.”

  Rosie smiled, even chuckled a bit, and left. Gad! Did she look like the kind of woman that kind of man wanted to get friendly with? She thought about that all the way to Zakrzeski’s, and it wasn’t until she was walking home with her poteca that she comprehended what the Liquor Boutique man had told her. It was true, then, all of it: the restaurant, the tofu burgers, Susannah, Ivan. And it was soon, less than two months away. They weren’t in residence yet, but they would be next time she looked.

  She squared her shoulders, with a bundle in each arm hoisted up like twin babies, and walked fast. They won’t get a thing out of me: her steps marked time to the words. It was colder on the trip back, the wind in her face instead of behind her. She was tired, she felt her age, and suddenly she wanted to be home in her warm house eating sweet bread and butter and maybe having a little sherry to thaw her out. And she would call Peter to see if he got home all right and ask him if, weather permitting, he’d like to go to the movies that night.

  He would, and they did, and then it was the weekend again, and Barney. Thus the winter went on, cold rather than snowy, as Connecticut winters had tended to be lately. Rosie watched Peter’s spirits rise, sink, rise again, and finally stabilize at a point just short of depression. He informed her in March that he’d finished his computer work on Dante—some sort of textual analysis involving word order in the Paradiso versus that in the Purgatorio—and was ready to finish up the writing of his dissertation. But he’d lost heart, and the family case of writer’s block became a full-blown disease. He and Rosie sat around comparing symptoms, the chief one being a sudden pressing need to do something else the minute one sat down to write. Peter was eternally dashing off to the library or his advisor’s office; Rosie tended to paw through the seed catalogs—ordering, after all, a few rock garden plants, deciding on another miniature rose, a tool for turning compost, a last-minute packet of yellow tomato seeds.

  At one point, she took the train down to New York, where she was put up for the night at the St. Moritz and fattened at Lutèce and at The Coach House by Janice, her producer, and Joyce, her editor. They discussed her book. When they asked, “How’s it going?” Rosie grinned and replied, “Slowly, slowly,” and they laughed maternally (both of them young enough to be her daughters) as if they knew all about it, that’s what writers always say. Rosie didn’t dare tell them the book was, so far, only a title on a legal document. She gave them, instead, gardening stories, reminiscences of Silvergate and its acres, tales of letters she received—fan and otherwise—from her public (she got regular marriage proposals, usually from elderly, widowed men who grew roses), and anecdotes about gardeners she knew. “I hope you’re going to put that in your book,” Janice and Joyce kept saying, and “It’s going to be a super book, a really fine book, Rosie,” and “Honey, if you write half as well as you talk!”

  If, indeed. Back home in Connecticut, the large notebook she had bought stayed empty except for doodles and a few notes she’d made so long ago they were now incomprehensible.

  The winter seemed long; it always did. Like the bulbs and tubers that slept underground in the cold, Rosie was in a state of anticipation. She always felt in some way pregnant as winter slogged on to its end, waiting for her own rebirth along with that of her garden. The waiting was difficult. Every morning, as always, she looked out her window at the garden, sometimes bare and brown, sometimes softened by a snowfall, sometimes promisingly wet with thaw. She felt explosive with waiting, irritable, useless. Every morning she looked at her own face in the mirror, and even there winter stared back at her, lined and gray and tired out. She would be fifty in four months, in three months, in two and a half. There were days she couldn’t bear to look at her face until she’d slapped a little makeup on it, but though it helped it didn’t, of course, change anything. Her face, unlike her garden, remained a landscape to which spring would never come again.

  Chapter Two

  Cloud House

  The last thing Susannah did before she left California was to visit her father at St. Theodore’s Hospice in Newport Beach and promise him that she and Ivan would, after all, have a child. As a consequence, the day they moved out of the Dimmick Street apartment, she tossed her diaphragm into a bag of trash, with the feeling that there should be some ritual to accompany this act beyond twisting the bag shut with a little wire gizmo and hauling it out to the curb. And then, all the way across the country, in the van with the three cats, they tried to make Susannah pregnant, making love repeatedly when they stopped for the night—making love frantically, dutifully, hoping to connect, lying there afterward (the cats hesitantly creeping back to their places on the bed) willing the sperm to hook up with the egg, willing the egg to be there waiting, willing one little hustler to penetrate it and start something—a kid with the name Louisiana or Arizona.

  She was, she supposed, ready for it. She had resisted the idea, always, but that had been an automatic response, a vow she took years and years ago: I will never never never produce a child, an article of faith that crumbled away, easy as wood ash, at her father’s request. “We will, Dad, we’ll try,” she said with a promptness—a rightness—that made it obvious she was ready, and merely waiting for the push that would knock her over. Of course—a child—why on earth not?r />
  Ivan, of course, had always been ready, had all these years been subtly pressuring her, not in ways she could reproach him for, but simply by being so blatantly the earth father, flaunting his bountiful, life-embracing vitality which was supposed, in his scheme of things, to encompass a large brood of children—mainly daughters—climbing over him, pulling at his beard and snuggling in his lap and twining their chubby arms around his neck, adoring him.

  Susannah’s father cried at her promise; at least, his eyes became wet and his mouth twisted up. It consoled him for her abandoning California, abandoning him—consolation that he needed even though it was he who insisted they leave and get on with their lives instead of waiting around for an old man to die, sentiments that sounded like the conventional, martyred, false mumblings of old age. Don’t worry about me, I’m not long for this world anyway, words that fluttered in the air at St. Theodore’s like a plague of moths, along with they don’t care, they’d just as soon I died tomorrow, and all the rest of it, those ancient resentments, perenially green and vital, that the staff at the Hospice was trained to cope with; to turn, sometimes, to good use by giving the old folks something to live for—the “I’ll show them” syndrome, one of the nurses called it.