The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Rosie had never told Kiki much about Susannah and Edwin, beyond the bare facts. When Kiki mentioned, one day when the two women were outside sighing over a late dusting of snow covering their gardens, that there was a health food restaurant opening up in Chiswick, Rosie said, “My daughter and her husband are running it. Don’t eat there.”

  “What?”

  “My estranged daughter, from California. And her husband—an ex-priest.” Rosie piled it on, keeping her voice even and her face straight.

  “Your daughter?”

  “My estranged daughter. We don’t get along.”

  “But, Rosie.”

  She was so flabbergasted and, when she realized Rosie wasn’t kidding or exaggerating, so horrified on her behalf—Kiki had two daughters and two sons, all of whom she was selflessly devoted to—that Rosie invited her in for tea and told her the rest of it.

  “You must go see her,” she said when the story was done. Rosie could detect in her face something of what she’d seen in Barney’s—the desire to be the instrument of reconciliation.

  “Nope,” she said. “Not a chance.”

  “Well …” Kiki hesitated over her words, treading carefully. She was dressed in a navy blue wrap skirt printed with green whales, a matching green jersey with her monogram on it, and blue knee socks. Her knees were as brown and bony as a monkey’s, and Rosie stared at them while she waited for Kiki to go on. “I’m sure she’ll come to you, Rosie, but perhaps she’s afraid to … you know … she may be a little … but if you approached her, Rosie, it … she would …”

  Rosie said, as gently as she could, “This is hard for you to believe, I know, Kiki, but I don’t want to make it up with her.”

  “Oh, Rosie.”

  “I mean it. I don’t know what your method of dealing with unpleasantness is, but mine is to face up to it and then eject it from my life.” She was no longer speaking gently, but it wasn’t Kiki she was scolding.

  “You’re her mother,” Kiki said, bringing one brown hand to her cheek as if a tooth ached, mother being one of her sacred words, like marriage.

  “That girl hurt me to the depths of my soul, Kiki,” Rosie said, not wanting to. “Over and over. I don’t feel like her mother any more.”

  They dropped it. Kiki, it was clear, could say no more. Rosie was her friend, she liked her, they’d known each other for years; and yet her friend had spit on the floor of Kiki’s favorite temple. She was shocked. Her eyes damp with puzzled sympathy, she went home to fix Jim’s dinner.

  Rosie avoided the Post Road into Chiswick. She didn’t want to see the progress of the Silvergate Café. She imagined it plenty, picturing not so much the roomful of tables, the water-spotted silverware, the inevitable scrawled blackboard menu, as her daughter: tall, pale, sharp-nosed, sloppy, lank-haired Susannah, in an apron, yawning without covering her mouth while she took orders for tofu burgers. Now that she was actually in town, Rosie couldn’t help fancying that Susannah was inching closer to her, like plague germs or a cold front, and that it was, as Peter said, only a matter of time until they met. She tried to contemplate this prospect calmly, tried for resignation, for indifference, for maternal tenderness, for detached amusement, but all she felt was an irritable dread.

  “It’s just that you don’t know her, Ma,” was Peter’s opinion. He gave it one lovely April night when he came over to have dinner with Rosie. He was leaving the next morning for a friend’s cottage on the Cape. He hoped to surmount his writer’s block there. Who the friend was, he didn’t say, so Rosie didn’t ask. She wondered, though. She also wondered if he had gone to see Susannah. She couldn’t believe he would keep it from her if he had, but he kept saying Rosie should give her a chance, get to know her, then decide whether to go on with what he had begun to call “this absurd family feud.”

  “It’s the strangeness and the awkwardness you’re afraid of,” he lectured her. “Right now you see her as an ogre. Once you actually meet her and talk to her, she’ll be just like anyone else. I’m not saying you two will become soul mates, Ma, but you might not find it that hard to be civil to each other.”

  She looked at him. He sat across from her at the table in the kitchen-nook, calmly spooning up his soup, slurping a bit, half-smiling at her while he ate. No doubt about it, he had lost his dapper joie de vivre. He was dressed in a blue work shirt and khakis—a bad sign. She didn’t even know he possessed such clothes, and she wondered whether he had bought a whole new wardrobe to go with his new mood.

  “Have you seen her, Peter?”

  He flushed a little, and stopped his spoon halfway to his mouth. “No, but she calls me.”

  “Still?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For what, may I ask? Still trying to get my support? Or have you two become soul mates?”

  “She’s all right, Ma. Really.” He spooned in more soup. “She’s not so bad.”

  “Peter?”

  He looked from his soup to Rosie, smiling. “She’s family, Ma. For years that didn’t mean anything to me, but now it does. Maybe I’m getting old, I don’t know.”

  His smile was pleading, a sad smile. She sighed. How could she deny him a sister when he had just lost a lover? “Tell me about her,” she said cooperatively, keeping her mind in a narrow groove that didn’t admit that impudent sign in the window, or even any sour memories. She would think of Susannah as a stranger, someone she didn’t know very well. “What do you mean, she’s all right?”

  He considered, glad to be asked. “Well, she’s twenty-seven years old. She’s an adult, after all.”

  “That makes her all right? Adults are somehow more all right than children?”

  He reached over and smoothed her hair. “Don’t be cantankerous, Ma,” he said. “I just mean she seems to have grown up.”

  Rosie didn’t answer. She merely looked. Of course, she felt betrayed, but her feelings as she gazed over at Peter in his work shirt were more complex than mere pique at his going over to the enemy. She was invaded by the sure knowledge, filling her all of a sudden, that not only would she indeed be seeing Susannah, but that some sort of reconciliation would no doubt take place, that the long years of resentment and anger and dislike were coming to an end. She could see that all this was inevitable, that only an unnatural, unreasonable bitch would oppose it, and—clearest of all—that Peter wished it.

  “I haven’t seen her or Ivan,” he said, speaking the name of Susannah’s husband with awkward casualness, as if his familiarity with it was thorough but recent. “But when I get back from the Cape I’m going there for dinner. Two weeks from Sunday. At their house, I mean, not at the restaurant. It’s opening Tuesday, by the way, this coming week, but only for lunches at first. If it does well they’ll start serving dinners, too.”

  “You know all about it.”

  “Well, she calls me.”

  Rosie tapped her fingers on the table. She would have liked to take her knife and dig it into the tabletop, hard, putting gouges into the pine. But she sipped soup from her spoon for a while in silence—oxtail soup, her mother’s recipe, a nuisance to make but one of Peter’s favorites. Peter sipped, too, and buttered bread and dunked it in and ate it dripping. The absurd thought passed through Rosie’s mind: I’ll lose him to Susannah. She realized as she thought it that it had no basis in reality, that it was a pathetic grasping after a new grudge to take the place of the old imminently crumbling ones, that it said more about her state of mind than about reality, and that she was perhaps becoming a bit nutty on the subject of her children. So she said, conversationally, to Peter, “Did you say they have a house?” Just your average Mom and Sonny discussing good old Sis.

  “In Chiswick, up on Perkins Road,” he replied. She could tell it made him happy, this attempt at normal chattiness. “They share a house with this guy Duke, the chef—the one they’re running the restaurant with.”

  “The chef.” What did chef mean to people like Susannah and Ivan? What did sharing a house imply?

  “H
e’s had a lot of restaurant experience, Susannah says.”

  But she didn’t want to hear about Duke the chef. “Peter, tell me truthfully. Has Susannah said anything about money from me?”

  “Not a word.” He said it eagerly, his eyes bright; he sensed capitulation.

  “Implied it, then. What about all this support stuff?”

  “I think she means moral support, Ma. Emotional support. She tends to use the word supportive. You know, she thanks me for being so supportive, she wishes you’d be more supportive—”

  “She does.”

  “Well, yes. She does.” Was there defiance in his face? Was it really absurd to think she’d lose him to Susannah if she didn’t knuckle under to family feeling? Was this blackmail?

  “What about her father?” Rosie asked, still reasonable. “Is he being supportive?”

  “I think he gave her some money,” he said, and there was something evasive in the way he looked into his soup.

  She sniffed it, as surely as Ann Landers would—emotional blackmail. “Dear Ann Landers: My daughter has managed to extort cash for a business venture out of my ex-husband. Through my son, she’s trying to get money out of me by holding her father up as a sterling example of parenthood. Should I give in? Signed, Bewildered.” “Dear Bewildered: Wake up and smell the coffee, honey. This is a classic case of emotional blackmail.”

  “Good,” she said. “So she’s all set in the money department.”

  Peter shrugged. “We haven’t really discussed her finances, Ma.”

  Rosie had another question, but she saved it until they had finished dinner and were having coffee, and she asked it with reluctance. She was sick of the whole matter. She felt weary and bruised by all that Peter had told her and all she had deduced, and by the vista she saw stretching ahead, of awkward family gatherings with the old grudges lurking behind everyone like shadows, like lashing tails. But she had to ask it. “Why did she choose to call it that, Peter? The Silvergate Café?”

  Peter grimaced. “I knew you wouldn’t like it. She thought you would, but I couldn’t convince her. You know how she is.”

  “I thought she wasn’t any more.”

  “She can still be pretty stubborn,” he said, smiling apologetically. “Maybe it’s inherited,” he added in a stage whisper.

  She ignored that. “So she thought I’d like it. It’s supposed to touch my heart.”

  “I told her it would have just the opposite effect.”

  “Did you,” she said, and finished her coffee. “Well, you’re right. It does indeed.”

  “And then she says it’s an allusion to San Francisco—Golden Gate, Silvergate. She likes San Francisco. She used to live there.” He stood up and took her cup. “Let’s not talk about it any more. I’ll get you some more coffee. Tell me what happened to Mr. Chips.” Diplomatic change of subject, transfer of emotional emphasis. Rosie seized it gladly, but she got depressed telling him about Barney. She missed him, she realized—good old Barney, dear Barney. She looked into the fire and could remember only their lovemaking on the hearth rug.

  She and Peter had more coffee and cake, and they talked a little about Hollis, whom Peter still mourned. Before he left, he asked, “When are you going to settle down, Ma? With some nice man?”

  “When are you?” she could have countered, but she said, “I am settled down, Peter. Without some nice man.”

  But it wasn’t the truth. She didn’t feel settled down; she felt shaken up, and in the weeks that followed she found herself searching for a sign, an indication of what she should do. She had reached the point where she was willing, though not happy, to bow to the inevitable, but she didn’t know how to do it, how far to go, what to give in to and what to preserve. And try as she might—and she did try, for Peter’s sake if nothing else—to get out from under her ancient burden of anger, she felt sometimes that the reason she was giving in to the necessity of seeing Susannah face to face was to pick a fight with her that would lead to a new, more profound and permanent rupture. She had never been so bedeviled by her own motives, so confused—not, at least, since the months before she actually split with Edwin.

  She’d been hemming and hawing that summer, afraid to be on her own with (as she thought then) two young children. At that time, she had a thrice-weekly fifteen-minute gardening program on a local radio show produced by Jim Sheffield in Hartford, and it brought her perhaps enough income to support a small dog on—not a family of three. As it turned out, when Edwin did leave, she boldly asked Jim if she could expand to half an hour. What eventually happened, after days of talk and weeks of negotiation and months of ironing out the wrinkles and getting out the bugs (and here Janice, her producer, appeared in Rosie’s life with her steam iron and spray gun) and a couple of pilot films, was that she got a show on the station’s television affiliate that was, before too long, picked up by public television, and “Rosie Mortimer’s Garden” was born. Rosie came along, it seemed, at precisely the right time. “Americans are turning back to the soil in droves,” as Janice put it back in those early days. Rosie pictured long grim lines of citizens armed with trowels and seed packets, marching over vast tracts of Roto-tilled earth. But Janice was right, of course, and the show took hold like ivy on a brick wall, and became an institution, and made Rosie rich.

  But that hot, miserable summer when she made the decision to break up her marriage, all this was in the future, and she was scared and uncertain. So she performed a test. She stood on the back step, took off her wedding ring, and threw it as hard as she could out into the tangle of the back garden. She closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t see it flash through the air and land, and she said to herself, If Fate wills that I find it, I’ll stick with Edwin. Then she went inside to get dinner. And found the ring the next morning, in the strawberry bed, when she went out early to pick off Japanese beetles. And cried and cried, slipping the slightly gritty ring back on her finger.

  But she wasn’t a very good fatalist; she was a manipulator. She had her astrological chart done once, and spent a great deal of time grouchily and defiantly circumventing the pattern it laid down for her (she would have another child, she would lose a large sum of money, she would change her residence), much as the hero of a detective novel ducks into alleys and takes false turns to shake off the sinister characters who tail him. So she tried the ring trick again not long after—shut her eyes, drew back her strong right arm, and threw the ring out, out into the garden, knowing she would do so again and again until Nature swallowed it. But she never found the ring—Fate, she decided, must have been on her side, to be manipulated so easily—and as the days and then weeks went by she slept more peacefully than she had in years, and went through the days smiling. She hummed as she worked, and fixed Edwin’s dinner with extra care, knowing her ring was buried in the dirt by a squirrel, or woven into some trinket-loving bird’s nest, leaving her free.

  She remembered the ring that lovely April when Susannah was about to invade her life, and she looked for a sign—afraid, almost, to encounter one because she didn’t trust her deepest wishes. She might manipulate Fate again, with who knew what results? Not she. Personally, she was stumped by Rosie Mortimer. And then she alternately inspected her feelings and shrank from inspecting them and sickened of it all; she tried again and again to get to work on her book, while she sought solace in the garden and at the Sheffields’ Scrabble parties (where she and Ralphie won so consistently as partners that they were separated and Rosie was matched with a man named Gene Swan, whose wife viewed her with transparent suspicion); and while spring was thrusting its way toward summer, and the lilacs blossomed and the wisteria hung its purple clusters on the stone wall, and the roses set their tight green buds—she had a visit, one day, from her son-in-law, Ivan Cord.

  Rosie was out in the back garden. It was mid-May, and warm, and she was staking the peonies—restaking them, actually. She had tried out some new metal stakes she’d seen advertised, and they hadn’t worked. The heavy, swollen blossoms
were the size of peaches, and the stakes wouldn’t support them. They were all bent over. Damned flimsy things, she thought, pulling them out and putting in the old, ugly, reliable wooden stakes. She’d send the new ones back, and, furthermore, on some future show she’d warn her audience against them.

  She became aware of a noise behind her, and when she turned there was a young man coming toward her down the path. She stood up quickly, with one of the wooden stakes in her hand, and faced him. She wasn’t suspicious or unfriendly by nature, but she was aware that you don’t welcome strange, strapping, bearded young men into your yard with open arms—you gird yourself with the nearest weapon, you try to look fearless, and you imply, somehow, by your stance or the look on your face, that your wrestler-husband is weeding the rose bed just over there behind those trees.

  “Yes? What is it?” she said as he advanced. He didn’t look at all familiar; if asked, she would have sworn without hesitation that she’d never seen him before in her life.

  “Rosie Mortimer?” he asked, extending a large hand.

  She relaxed a little, dropped her weapon but didn’t hold out a hand. “Yes,” she said warily.

  He put on a grin she could only describe as joyful—a kid’s grin. “I’m Ivan Cord,” he said. “I’m Susannah’s husband. I’m your son-in-law.” The grin intensified until, with his last words, it became a laugh, and he picked up her limp hand in its dirty gardening glove and shook it, chuckling happily. “I’m glad to meet you,” he said, and squeezed her glove once and let it go, wiping the dirt on his pant leg.

  “Well,” she said. “I guess I’m glad to meet you, too.” She looked behind him for the sight of Susannah following languidly around the side of the house—with dread, and yet with a lick of excitement, too: all right, this is it, let’s get it over. But he seemed to be alone. “What brings you here?” she asked inhospitably. She didn’t really mean to be rude; she was taken by surprise. She had imagined, from time to time, her meeting with Susannah and what she would say, but she hadn’t ever predicted that her son-in-law would come creeping up on her in her garden. Nor was she prepared for his disconcerting appearance. She remembered him as a sullen, hulking, silent hippie brute, and here was Kris Kristofferson, grinning at her like a puppy. Could she, actually, have impaled him on a peony stake? And would that poor piece of wood have had any effect on this giant?