The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  It was as if Susannah was the carte de visite that had brought them together and could now be discarded. Her name didn’t come up again, and most of the things Ivan had promised to tell Rosie were never mentioned—Susannah-centered stories that both of them, in some unspoken agreement that had stretched from shower to market, had decided to omit from their evening. Ivan made leathery green pepper omelets, hush puppies that burned in the pan, and something he called “Green Bean Rondo” with onions and pimentos. They ate their dinner, and Ivan drank the Mexican beer he had brought, on the back porch. Rosie wished she had suggested the kitchen, even if it was hot and smelled of burned cornmeal. She wanted to keep Ivan to herself; she didn’t want the Sheffields to hear his hearty laughter, his loud baritone. She wished his van wasn’t so large, so visible, so blue—such a youthful vehicle to be parked out in front of her house for so long, obviously not belonging to Peter, or to Rosie’s sober, middle-aged-businessmen beaux. She wondered if the Sheffields would notice, if out in the garden next day Kiki would ask her, with a watchful smile, who was the bearded god with the fancy van.

  They talked about gardening, about California, about Rosie’s television show. She dragged out her store of funny anecdotes, and Ivan’s noisy laugh floated out over the garden. She thought to herself—but only once—that Susannah’s presence was all the more real between them for having been avoided: Ivan might have lived in California alone, and traveled east with only the cats for company; Rosie might be a childless widow, a swinging single. Would it be better, she wondered, if they talked about Susannah openly, if Ivan confided in Rosie the failure of his marriage, the daily misery of life with her daughter? But gradually she forgot Susannah—truly, totally, if temporarily, forgot that the delightful man who had cooked her such a wretched meal was her son-in-law.

  He didn’t stay late. They finished eating; she made coffee; they drank a little Kahlua. Their laughter together had moments of tentative affection, as if they had begun what would be a long process of knowing each other well. Their chairs had been pulled closer together. Their knees occasionally touched and were moved, without haste, away. They sat without a light, and the moonlit garden outside the screens was full of black and green mystery. The sky changed from light blue to dark blue, the stars appeared, the three-quarter moon brightened over the garage roof, and Ivan said he’d better get along.

  Rosie didn’t press him to stay. In amiable silence, she saw him to the door, where he kissed her gently on the cheek. My reward, she thought to herself, surprised, reminded of movies she had seen, books read, about people who tamed wild beasts or befriended shy primitive peoples: there were setbacks, slow stalking, patient waiting, and suddenly an unexpected breakthrough that drastically advanced matters. Ivan’s kiss—cool lips against hot cheek—was such an event, and after it Rosie said, “Come to dinner again, and I’ll cook for you.”

  “A week from tonight?”

  His face was still close to hers, and she felt dizzy. Events went much speedier with Ivan than with lion cubs or aborigines. “Why not?” she asked, her heart racing and the sweat coming out on her upper lip.

  “Same time, same channel,” said Ivan. Another kiss bounced off her cheek, and he was gone. The van roared away while she leaned weakly on the door.

  Next day, and the days thereafter, she took to the garden, refusing to think or expect or do what she really wanted to do, which was to pick their evening apart bit by bit as she would a tangle of dahlia tubers. She concentrated instead on the flower beds, digging out the early bloomers, separating them, hauling huge loads of compost, replanting—getting her hands filthy, her knees stiff, and her back sore. It kept her mind off what had taken place, and what might come of it. To ponder it would be to jinx it.

  When it was too wet or too dark, during that interminable waiting week, to work in the garden, or when she got so tired out she was good for nothing but a bath, a drink, and a comfortable chair, Rosie got out her father’s collection of his favorite magazine, The Countryman. She had a suitcase full of the old green volumes, faded and tattered, much thumbed. Her father, with his big black mustache, curly hair, soft brown eyes, and Anglo-Italian accent, had revered all things English, and had dragged his collection—with its articles bearing titles like “How Birds Sleep,” “Poacher Turned Gamekeeper,” “Lupins in Drought”—across the sea in the old leather suitcase with the rotted strap, where they were still stored. Toward the end of his life they were his only amusement besides the soft voice of his wife, the visits from Rosie and Peter, and old Alastair Sim movies on TV.

  Rosie had developed a fondness for the little volumes, and had even based one of her programs on them. What she liked best—besides the excellent gardening advice—were the advertisements. Adverts, both her parents used to call them. She sat back in her rose-patterned chair, with her feet up on an old velvet ottoman, and dug in, picking a volume at random. “Euthymol Tooth Paste,” she read.

  A good horse and an eager pack; a wily fox and a long chase; the blue sky above and the grass beneath; the English countryside in all its fresh beauty. Could anything be more thrilling and exhilarating? Unhappily, too few of us are able to join in the thrills of the chase. Yet every morning and evening brings a pleasurable thrill to Euthymol users. For Euthymol not only cleans the teeth but kills dental decay germs within 30 seconds …

  She loved it. It tickled her, and she sipped her Scotch and smiled, thinking of her father. She turned the pages slowly. Lost times, lost places. And the oddest products! “Energen,” she read. “Unlike other breads. Keeps indefinitely. Entirely British.” She tried to recall whether Energen had been served at the gardener’s cottage at Silvergate, but could remember only her grandmother’s hard-crusted focaccia and her mother’s wholemeal loaves. And had they used Euthymol? She recalled something called Kolynos. “Pan Yan Pickle,” the next page said. “Good AS a salad, good WITH a salad.” Rosie smiled, but her mind wandered to the garden at Silvergate where she had helped her mother stake the lilies, where she had watched her strawberries run wild over their little plot, where their cat, Mossy, had loved to roll in the dirt. I should go back to England, she thought, as she had many times. I should go now, when we’re not filming, I should go over there and write this damned book. And then the fluttery feeling came into her chest and she realized she couldn’t, couldn’t possibly go now, not this year, not at this particular time.

  What am I getting into? What do I think I’m doing? Her fiftieth birthday had sailed over her while she was out in the garden, too absorbed to mark it properly, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t come, and gone, and set her on the road to the next, and the next. You’re a pathetic old woman, she told herself, but the flutter in her chest didn’t go away, and what she felt, chiefly, was the kind of thrilled, rapturous hope that hadn’t come to her in years. She leaned back in her chair, stretched her arms over her head, and felt young, young.

  Every day, she spent hours in the garden—proud of her ability to do so. Kiki, four years older than she, used to straighten up, press her hand to her lower back, and grimace—Rosie watched her covertly from her rose bed or her pea patch—and then go inside, where, Rosie knew, she would take her nap before she showered and did her hair to be ready, when Jim arrived home from work, with a cool drink and a warm smile. Rosie kept smugly on, moving from bed to bed, from perennial border to vegetable garden, ignoring her own back, her stiff fingers, her headaches from the sun. The good weather held, the yard looked wonderful, the notebook she was keeping in preparation for her book was thick with jottings, and when she had put in a day long enough to satisfy her she curled up with The Countryman. She dreamed of going to England with the distinguished middle-aged man in the Chilprufe Underwear ad, lighting his Balkan Sobranie cigarettes for him, taking a cruise with him on the Orient Line (“Designed for Sunshine”) to Australia and back for £140, brushing her teeth each night with Euthymol Tooth Paste, and taking Eno’s Fruit Salt every morning with breakfast.

  If poisoned by
congested foodways, the human system cannot sustain healthy exercise. Make the morning draught of Eno’s Fruit Salt a golden rule. Pleasantly, safely working in Nature’s way, Eno ensures the punctual dismissal of the body’s waste …

  But she knew that what she really liked was exactly where she was, in this place and this time, with the gasping feeling of infinite possibility rising in her chest.

  But he wouldn’t come. He’d forget—wasn’t the restaurant supposed to open? What had he said? And why should he remember, anyway? She looked long and critically into the mirror, wary of its deceptions, experimenting with makeup and hairdos as she hadn’t done since the first heady weeks after Edwin left. She should get a haircut, she decided; then she rejected the idea. She went shopping and bought another dress with a low neck and a flounce, this one a soft blue with lace on the sleeves, and then she came home and hung it way in the back of her closet, embarrassed by its sexy exuberance. Her energy was inexhaustible. She couldn’t leave the garden alone, she invented unnecessary tasks, she hovered over transplanted seedlings and the tender buds on the geraniums as if by breathing on them she could hasten their growth. In fact, that had been somebody’s theory a few years back, that human presence—voice, breath, touch—encouraged plants to thrive. She had conscientiously tested it on her begonias and a flat of dianthus and had found it to be, as she reported to her viewers, claptrap. Of course, she had acknowledged, it was good for the gardener to hover, to coddle, to get close to growing things, to take comfort from them, and strength. And yet—she had never said so on her program but she thought to herself as she dug manure into the strawberry bed—gardening was in a way a gloomy activity, if you considered the wanton rankness of plants’ flourishing, with or without your help, of the way they would, if you lay down and died in their midst, creep over you and cover you and take life from your remains without a trace of gratitude. Or if you thought about the speed with which things grow, flowers blossom, time passes.…

  When she ran out of gardening chores, she got down on her knees and spent a couple of hours laboriously picking bits of roofing tile from behind the rhododendrons in front of her house, a chore she’d been postponing since the new roof was put on two years ago. She washed all the windows in the greenhouse. When Kiki hailed her over the fence and invited her for Scrabble, she declined, cheerfully pleading exhaustion; what if Ivan should call?

  Kiki had said nothing about the van or the visitor with the young, long-distance laugh, but Rosie sensed a tenseness in Kiki’s smile, disapproval in the way she admired how the Gudoshnik tulips had lasted. Or was she imagining it? She had a giddy thought that made her clutch a trowel to her chest in silent laughter: what if she’d imagined the whole thing, from Ivan’s van to Kiki’s disapproval? What if the pressures of her unwritten book and approaching senior citizenhood had unhinged her, and Ivan with his beard and his blue eyes and his strong tanned arms was a dream of her early dotage? But there was the hopelessly burned and crusted frying pan out in the trash.

  Would he come? On the sixth day she abandoned her chores and planned a menu. Nothing heavy, nothing that might not set well on her butterfly stomach, nothing gassy, nothing that looked awkward to eat (no artichokes or lobster or spaghetti) and nothing that required strenuous cutting or chewing or—she closed her eyes and thought, Yes, I’m going insane, truly, but nevertheless she came up with a menu that met her specifications. Baked chicken, rice with mushrooms, asparagus from her garden. At the little Town Market, where she tried to imagine Ivan trundling one of the tiny shopping carts up and down the congested aisles buying his pimentos and cornmeal, it came to her as she stood musing over the display of chicken parts: what if he’s a vegetarian? she remembered the tough omelets, and stood for several long moments in a sweaty panic. What to do? The image of the baked chicken on its platter sat firmly before her; she couldn’t dislodge it. Barney had loved her chicken; she remembered his greasy fingers, greasy smile. “Excuse me,” said a woman with a loaded shopping cart who wanted to push by, and Rosie moved on, calmed, toward the fish department. All vegetarians eat fish. She would substitute some nice filets. It was simple, no need to sweat, no need to clench her stomach muscles together until she felt sick.

  Standing at the fish counter, she laughed at herself, and reflected that she always seemed, lately, to be laughing at herself. Rueful laughter had become her trademark, it was the price one had to pay for, for, for … what? There was no acceptable way to think about Ivan, to think about how much she wanted him to like her and be her friend. Hers. She stared glassily at the sole filets until the fish man asked her, for the second time, if he could help her.

  Ivan showed up that evening, while Rosie was sitting in her chair chuckling over The Countryman, October 1933. “Munch,” she read. “The perfect cereal in biscuit form. It is neither indigestible nor filling. The flavour is unique and irresistible to old and young alike, while the …”

  She heard the sound of the van—could it be the van? O Lord—and dashed to the window to see him swing out of the front seat and up the path, whistling, looking for her at the door. She panicked, then calmed. She was in her bathrobe, just out of the tub, her hair in a knot on top of her head, her face not made up, her new dress still in the back of her closet—disaster! And yet he was here, and evidently meant to stay because he had a six-pack with him, and a package. She hugged herself with happiness and ran to the door to let him in.

  He whistled when he saw her, whether in amazement at her getup or as a compliment, she didn’t know. “Don’t tell me—I’m a day early. Right?” He grinned and stepped inside from sunshine to dimness, and his teeth gleamed. “Darn it, I was afraid of that. I thought it was tomorrow, and then I said to myself, you couldn’t have made it for the night of the day the restaurant opens—could you?” He ran one hand through his hair and shook his head. “But I guess I did.”

  “It’s quite all right,” Rosie said. His loud, sunny presence overwhelmed her anew. “Have a beer, make yourself at home, and I’ll go up and get dressed. I won’t be two seconds.”

  She was hardly more than that, and when she came back down with her heart beating fast, and her face made up and her new dress on, but barefoot and with her hair still in its loose knot, there he was, leafing through The Countryman and drinking Mexican beer out of the can.

  “I like your house,” he said. “You did a show by this fireplace once. Am I right? And are you going to give me a tour of the garden this time?”

  “If you like,” she said, delighted. Oh, he was perfect, perfect—handsomer than ever there in her living room, too big for the elegant chair, his hair tousled, his blue chambray shirt the color of his eyes. She’d thought she’d had him memorized, but there were new surprises, like the sprinkle of freckles across his cheekbones, and his neatly trimmed nails with their large half-moons. She wondered what excuse he’d used to get away, or if he’d told the truth, or if the relationship with Susannah was so deteriorated that he needed neither excuses nor truth. She pictured the two of them doggedly not communicating, like Edwin and herself; a fleeting sadness accompanied this thought, a thin chime of pity for Susannah and her ugly inheritance. Then Ivan stood up, with his brilliant smile, and they went through the kitchen to the backyard. He had brought her a pan to replace the one he’d burned.

  “You didn’t need to,” she said. It was a cheap pan, and smaller. She put it away hastily in a cupboard and poured herself some sherry.

  “That’s a great dress,” Ivan said, looking at it in a way that made her blush. Maybe the neck was too low, she thought, ever watchful for absurdity.

  “Just an old sundress,” she smiled. Would she ever be able to drop this spurious nonchalance, to say frankly: I bought it because of you, because I thought you’d like it, like me.…

  She did show him the garden, after they had a drink together on the porch. Drink affected her oddly when she was with Ivan; one glass of sherry made her head light, her feet slow; she moved languorously, with a dreamy smile, and
leading Ivan into the garden she had the odd sensation that she had no need to show it to him—the fading iris, the scarlet and gold Rembrandt tulips, the white azaleas and spirea against the old fence, the trillium in the grass. She felt that he was part of it, he looked as natural in the garden as a stone statue of a god. She moved with him through its green-gold light, with hints of pink sunset just beginning in the west, as if the Sheffields next door and the Andrews across the street had ceased to exist, and there was only Rosie and Ivan in the garden. She forgot, even, to laugh at herself and to stay alert for unbecoming absurdity. They sat on the bench under the flowering dogwood, by the tightly budded roses, and she drank her second sherry while he sipped beer and told her about the incredible greenness of downtown Los Angeles.

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” he said. “All anybody thinks about is smog and traffic and movie stars when it comes to L.A. There—you can tell I’m not a native and don’t even like the place, or I’d never call it L.A. But it’s beautiful, all right, some of it.” He turned and looked at her, with a bemused smile like her own. “I dream about it sometimes, or I did during the winter, on cold nights. I’d just dream I was walking down some street, some little nothing street out there, on my way to work, say, and it would be lined with flowers, and the sun would pour down.” Under the beard he seemed to have dimples, his mouth was pink and swollen-looking, his blue eyes were narrowed slightly against the low sun. “You should take a trip out there, Rosie. I mean, as a gardener. Every gardener should see California, just to see what lushness really is. Go to the Palisades, Rosie. Go to Bel Air. You could even do a couple of shows out there, just for fun. Get old Janice to set it up. take the cameras into some of those fabulous gardens, show these poor New Englanders freezing by their woodstoves what it looks like to have an orange grove in the backyard.” He grinned at her. “I’ve seen all your shows, some of them twice. I always thought you were terrific, Rosie—a nice, earthy broad.” He laughed. “Literally! You always had dirt on your hands, you were always wiping your hands off on that apron.”