The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “I was always afraid of looking too eccentric,” she said, pleased. “Too much absorbed in my own messiness. But Janice said I was the Julia Child of the garden—that should be my image, so involved in what I was doing that I didn’t notice if my hair came down or my face got smudged.”

  “The agony in the garden,” Ivan said, and laughed again. She remembered that he was a renegade priest—unfrocked? or one of those who left voluntarily? She’d never been told. Well, whatever the case, he could now make gentle little jokes against his church. “Your image, Rosie,” he went on. Yes—a dimple appeared on one side when he smiled. She longed to press her fingers against his face where the hollow was; she recalled the softness of his beard brushing her cheek when he kissed her. “What a way to look at it—as image, as if you were Nixon, when it was obvious that it was all real, that it would have been impossible for you to be any other way.”

  She didn’t tell him it was partly cultivated, that manner, that naturalness before the cameras. “You can’t garden neatly,” she said. “I mean, in order to keep the garden relatively neat you have to forget about keeping yourself that way.” What a boring conversation, she thought, he must be bored to death and wishing he hadn’t come. But in the middle of this thought, while she still smiled brightly at him, she recognized, with a jolt, just what kind of a conversation it was that they were having. She hadn’t had one in years, not since her first meeting with Barney. It was a—what could you call it?—a seduction conversation, its purpose only to fill a certain amount of time with words, to set up a decorous interlude before …

  And—she caught her breath—they were in it together. He was talking about a vegetable garden he’d had in Buffalo, in the rectory backyard, but it was a skimming kind of story, not meant to settle them down into a real talk, but something to fill the time, a warm-up exercise before the real event.

  She listened carefully, she prolonged it, just to make sure. Her head cleared; she must be very slow, very certain. The possibilities for absurdity were enormous, were staggering. But she knew the signs well, she could tell by the way he looked at her while he sipped his beer, by the amount of space between them on the bench, by the number of times he called her by name—oh, there were dozens of signals, there could be no mistake. She felt breathless, tense with hope, ready to burst into bloom like the swollen heads of the peonies over by the toolshed.

  When they stood up and began to walk slowly toward the house, close together but not quite touching, the familiarity of it all made her want to laugh, and she knew that if she did laugh it would be a harsh, abandoned sound, near to hysteria. Her heart ticked faster as they went up the path, and when they paused by the back porch, well screened by the rhododendrons and the latticework fence, and looked at each other, she understood that he depended on her to act, to break the spell or cast a new one; so she moved close to him and, with her fingertips lightly on his cheek, she turned his face so that his lips came down readily, firmly, warmly on hers.

  Chapter Four

  Rapunzel

  “I should become a vegetarian,” Susannah said. “I love animals so much. Every time I eat a hamburger I have to brace myself against the idea that it used to be a cow. Big brown eyes. Pink nose. Moos.”

  She and Duke were sitting in the empty restaurant on an April morning, drinking tea. The sun shone through the paper banner in the window:

  The tables were set up, in two rows of four each, birch tops sanded smooth by Duke and Ivan, coated with polyurethane, and set on metal bases. The sturdy old oak chairs, with their calico cushions, were pulled up neatly. The serving counter in back had been covered in white formica, and a latticework screen surrounded it, hiding the kitchen and harboring plants. The kitchen was ready to spring into action except for the gap between the wooden counter-tops where the stove was to go.

  “And I remember at one of my schools we had to learn to farm, and we had three milk cows, and we had calves.” She sighed. “Sickening sentimentality. I know, don’t tell me.”

  “It doesn’t strike me that way,” Duke said. “Margie and I didn’t eat meat for years, until I got the job at Luigi’s. The pepperoni pizzas did me in. But if we’re going to run a vegetarian restaurant we ought to go all the way. What about it? You want to?”

  Susannah sighed again and looked around the pristine room, a place that should smell of cheese and eggplant and oranges but stank instead of fresh paint. It looked like a stage set. “Ivan says I worry too much.”

  “What’s more important—what you think or what Ivan thinks of what you think?”

  She smiled wryly at him, and he got up and went to the front window to peer out. Whenever Ivan’s name came up lately, in her conversations with Duke, it seemed charged and dangerous, enclosing volumes of explosive words left unsaid. Susannah watched Duke wipe an imaginary smudge off the window with his sleeve.

  “Dammit,” he said, returning to the table. “I wish that blasted stove would get here.”

  “We couldn’t just open anyhow, and serve salads?”

  “No!” They’d had this exchange before; their conversations had begun to meander in circles. “We can’t even boil water,” Duke said. “We can’t even—” He broke off, shaking his head and smiling at her so she’d know he wasn’t really angry—just mildly frustrated, as usual. “How can I show off my cooking without a stove? I want to lure people in here with my black bean soup, my stir-fried veggies, my pizzas.”

  “Duke Foster’s Famous Goat-Cheese Pizza.” Susannah smiled back. That’s what it said on the menu, along with Lentil Salad Susannah and Mushroom Caviare Ivanovitch.

  “And we can’t serve it cold,” he said, getting up again. He paced around the room, straightening a chair, picking a sick leaf off a plant. His hair needed cutting—he was waiting until just before they opened—and it hung in wisps over his collar. “Oh, hell, let’s become vegetarians, Susannah, instead of wishy-washy almost-vegetarians who don’t approve of veal and don’t eat much meat and go around saying big old roasts of beef oozing blood make them sick and any kind of killing is unacceptable violence.”

  “I don’t say any of that,” Susannah replied. “I just say sentimental platitudes about how much I love animals.”

  “Well.” He disappeared around the partition to the kitchen where the hot plate was. “I assume you want some more tea,” he called.

  “Sure.” What else have we got to do? she refrained from adding. She didn’t really mind the inactivity. She liked sitting around drinking tea, talking, playing with the twins, reading. She was teaching herself to bake bread, from a book. She especially liked sitting in the empty restaurant. Not that she didn’t look forward to their opening; now that her story was done and sent away, she felt herself more a part of the place. It was she who had washed the inside of the front window until it sparkled, and she who had patiently given the table tops their three gleaming coats of polyurethane. But she liked the empty neatness of the place, the expectancy of it. And how could it fail if it never opened?

  But Duke and Ivan were restless. They’d begun to bicker, mostly about the recalcitrant stove, but there were spin-offs: they argued over the menu, over the sign for the front, over where and how to advertise, even over the best way to fix a wobbly chair leg. And once the chair leg was fixed, the menu at the printer’s (without the cute bunch of carrots Ivan had envisioned as part of the logo), the advertising contract signed with the newspapers, they argued over money. It tormented Ivan that they were living off savings—off, specifically, a check from Edwin and the money they’d made from Susannah’s legacy—and that the stove delay would mean doing so for that much longer.

  “Let’s not forget whose fucking money is financing this stupid delay,” he had said the last time he’d stormed out, and Duke had jumped up and gone to the door to shout, “Don’t get so goddamn self-righteous you forget it’s your wife’s money!” to which Ivan had replied, “Just leave my wife out of it, you son of a bitch,” and roared away in the van.

>   “There’s nothing like a couple of ex-priests for foul language,” Susannah had said to Duke. He had laughed and apologized, and when Ivan came home late that night, they had entangled themselves in a welter of apologies that finally reduced them all to embarrassed laughter. That had been the last; no more of this, they had sworn, and had gone to bed full of good will, except for Susannah, who had lain awake wondering where Ivan had been all those hours.

  The bitterness between the two men lingered, though. Duke was snappish and defensive, his easy good humor continually on the verge of collapse. Ivan was becoming smug, detached, mocking—it wasn’t his insistence on a Rimrock Excelsior Restaurant Model Cookstove imported from Flint, Michigan, that was the source of all their troubles. Duke knew it, but he wouldn’t give in.

  “If you’re going to do something you do it right,” he insisted, refusing to look up when Ivan said, “Well, I can’t sit around here all day feeling sorry for myself,” and left.

  Days off, he called his nameless excursions. “Where do you go, Ivan, on your days off?” Susannah asked him once, lightly.

  “I just drive around, getting the feel of the place.” Back in California, he used to say, “I’m just going out to see what’s happening,” standing at the door with his hands in his pockets, bouncing on his heels and grinning innocently at her. It all came down to the same thing—she had known what was happening there, she knew what he was getting the feel of here. She gave up on her notion that Ivan could be domesticated. Coming east—as if New England was full of starched, prim, tight-buttoned ladies like the ones Ivan used to paint. I’ve got to accept it, she said to herself, adding sometimes, when acceptance seemed not only impossible but vaguely immoral, and anger gripped her: or leave him. But they were still trying to make a baby.

  “Oh, sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing,” Susannah said when Duke came back with the tea. “I don’t see why life has to be so complex. Sometimes it’s worse than a Henry James novel, only not so interesting.”

  “Let’s go vegetarian,” Duke said. He set a white earthenware mug in front of her. Ivan had won that round; Duke claimed earthenware was false economy, it chipped too easily, but Ivan had begun to balk at expense, and refused to finance anything else. Every mug of tea Susannah drank recalled harsh words and stony silences. “Let’s,” said Duke. “That will simplify things.”

  She shook her head. “No, it won’t.” Ivan was capable of making her life miserable over such an issue: fanatic, he’d call her. There was nothing worse than a fanatic. Moderation in all things, he’d say. How could we have driven cross-country if we’d been vegetarians? In the middle of winter? And then you’re forever grubbing for protein, eating too many eggs, mixing this with that, drinking milk all the time. “We’ve talked about it, Ivan and I, plenty of times. We even tried it once or twice.”

  “And?”

  She shrugged. “You know.” She didn’t go on. She had the feeling that Duke was waiting for her to confide in him, waiting for a word that would release them into a good gossip session about Ivan’s unreasonableness, Ivan’s temper, Ivan’s irresponsibility. The thought, she had to admit, was like a cool wind—what a relief it would be, after all, to cry on someone’s shoulder.

  “You’re a big girl, Susannah,” Duke said gently after a minute. She wished he hadn’t. People were always telling her—Carla, especially, and even her father—that she was a big girl now, that she didn’t need to rely on Ivan for everything. “You don’t need to rely on him for everything,” said Duke.

  “Oh, all right,” she said suddenly, angrily. “It’s not such a big deal, for heaven’s sake. From this day forward I hereby swear never to eat another hamburger.”

  “You mean it?” Duke looked irrationally pleased, as if she’d announced delivery of the stove.

  “Sure—why not? Let’s go whole hog, ha ha.”

  An hour later, Ivan was at the door with a bag full of French fries and Big Macs, and pastry from Zakrzeski’s. “I’m starving,” he said, dumping everything on the table. “Let’s pig out.”

  Oh hell, if only she didn’t love him, didn’t have so many reasons for loving him. She lay in bed while he breathed beside her, not quite snoring but breathing loudly enough so she could count each inhalation, each exhalation, and she thought of all the things she loved him for, even little ones like his annual planting of the vegetable garden in their Dimmick Street backyard, that afforded her the sight of his bent brown back with the sun on it, and his big hands poking in the tiny seeds and covering them tenderly, paternally. She smiled in the darkness. In, out, in he breathed, curiously fast, two breaths to each of her long slow ones. It used to worry her when they were first married, that quick breathing—she used to wake him up to make sure he was all right—but she’d become used to it, it was another thing to love. And she loved his body, always, and still considered it a blessing, too good to be true, when he turned to her in bed and with his warm hand drew her toward him. And she loved him because he had chosen her, had stuck with her, took care of her, believed in her, put up with her quirks. She forgave him his affairs, his sermonizing and nagging, not only because she believed him when he said that they were part of an attempt to perfect his life (something Susannah, in her own way, strove for herself) but because she felt they were a small price to pay for the benefits of marriage to Ivan, and because she didn’t know what else to do. The alternative was unthinkable. She couldn’t think it. It was a black hole, a nightmare.

  But she wished, sometimes, in the dark as she lay beside him, with the cats tucked behind their knees and around their feet, that she had fallen in love with someone easier, someone kinder and more faithful and less picky. You should get a dog if that’s what you want, she thought just before she fell asleep. She imagined a large, beautiful dog named Ivan romping among the affronted cats, and went to sleep smiling.

  Sometimes, in the mornings after the twins left for school, Susannah walked down the road to Ginger Coleman’s house. Ginger was a middle-aged divorcée with a son in business school in Boston and a daughter in nurse’s training at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Her house was a five-year-old split level that had come to her in the divorce settlement, the details of which she told Susannah the first day she met her. The house had been built on a piece of the farmland that used to belong to the owner of Duke’s house—a cantankerous truck farmer named Roswell whose heirs had sold off his property fast and cheaply at his death, as if to rid themselves of all memory of the old man. Ginger’s house stood where the cornfield had been; unshaded by trees, it was hot from May to October, and Ginger—a large, frizzy-haired woman prone to cheerfulness—sat in her air-conditioned kitchen talking on the phone all day and entertaining visitors. She had staggering quantities of friends who called her up and dropped in on her, staying the night if they needed to, bringing her plants and homemade rolls and macramé wall hangings in exchange for her sympathy and good humor. She lived on substantial alimony checks; her husband had run off with a younger woman, and—as she admitted readily, crossing herself or knocking on wood for a continuation of her good fortune—she had profited handsomely from his guilt.

  “That poor guy,” she said to Susannah. “Saddled with a twenty-five-year-old tramp for a wife, a brother-in-law on drugs, a condominium with three bathrooms that don’t work right, and a new baby that doesn’t look anything like him. Plus a third of his salary every month for his ex-wife—not that he can’t afford it. Don’t think my heart doesn’t bleed for him. But he made his bed, and if he’s having trouble lying in it, that’s his funeral.”

  Sometimes Ginger had a job. She was an intermittent Avon lady and Tupperware demonstrator, and she had looked after not only the twins but various offspring and grandchildren of her friends. She asked Duke if she could have a waitressing job at the Silvergate Café.

  “Not that I go for that kind of food, normally,” she said. “I can’t eat salads, for one thing, because I have this hiatal hernia, and my doctor says too much roughage is a
no-no, and if you ask me all that herb tea tastes like colored water and orange peel. I’ve got to have meat—a nice hamburger, a salami sandwich, a minute steak, and a nice Diet Pepsi to go with it. But I like you kids,” she said to Susannah. “I’m real fond of Duke and those twins, and I’d like to help you all make good. And I’d be one hell of a waitress, that I’m sure of.”

  Ivan was dubious; he saw the restaurant staffed with young people—girls, Susannah knew, with healthy complexions and long legs—ads for the food. Ginger was fortyish and overweight, with unruly graying hair and thick, blue-tinted glasses.

  “She’s going to be perfect,” Duke insisted stubbornly. “Homey and motherly. Everybody loves Ginger, and she’s got more energy than all of us put together.” Ivan sulked, but Ginger was hired, and she recommended a girl named Garnet, the daughter of a friend, as their second waitress. Garnet was a junior at the University of Connecticut, where she had waitressed in the dining hall for three years. But she couldn’t start until school let out for the summer, and Susannah would fill in until then.

  “I don’t want you to be a permanent waitress, Susannah,” Duke said. “Only while we get started, or if we should need extra help. You’re a writer before anything.”

  For once, he and Ivan agreed. “You don’t have the stamina, either, Susannah,” Ivan said. “I don’t want you to wear yourself out, especially now.” He gave her the reverent look that he always did whenever he thought of her as the potential mother of his child. “And there’s your writing to consider, of course. Hell, we didn’t come east for you to give that up.”

  “Oh, I can always write,” Susannah told them, trying to sound lighthearted. “I’ve got years. And I can write at night, you know, and on holidays.” But she was beginning to feel hungry for her long, dreamy sessions with her notebook, though she didn’t have a new idea for a story. Sometimes she sat with a pencil in her hand, looking at Ivan’s painting and trying to summon back the urgency with which she had written “Cloud House,” but the images and words that came to her were vague, and failed to coalesce. The delays at the restaurant were distracting her, she knew, and so was the tension, spun out of their failure to conceive, between Ivan and herself. Even her friendship with Duke, which she had fallen into naturally and spontaneously soon after their arrival, disturbed her; it seemed disloyal to get on so well with Duke just as Ivan’s bond with him seemed to be weakening.