The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Duke heated more soup, sliced more red onions, chopped up more green peppers; Susannah cleared the trays Ivan and Ginger returned, and washed plates and teapots and forks. The old-fashioned cash register rang cheerily. Periodically, Susannah went out front to the blackboard menu posted over the counter and crossed something off: the quiches went first, then the mushroom caviare, the fresh strawberries and Carla’s zucchini cake. When she looked around the room at the jaunty plants and green and white checked curtains and wood-topped tables filled with people eating Duke’s food, she returned to the kitchen and said to Duke, “It looks exactly like a restaurant out there.”

  “What did you expect it to look like? A nursery school?” He was in high spirits, his face red and his fresh-cut hair sticking up, but he stayed calm, and moved without haste from stove to counter, keeping the orders miraculously straight, smiling his crooked smile. “An opera house? An animal shelter? Here,” he said, holding out a big spoon. “Did I get this soup too salty?”

  But nothing, it seemed, was too salty, or too anything. The hungry crowds left satisfied, and at 2:30 when the last customers departed and the green shade was rolled down over the front door and the CLOSED sign went up, the four of them sank into chairs, looked at each other, and burst into exuberant laughter.

  “I can’t believe it,” Ivan said. “We’re a hit. They were eating out of our hands.” He took off his apron and wiped his face with it. “They cleaned us out. Right? What’s left out there? I’m starved.”

  “Half a ricotta pie, a pile of sliced onions, and some cheese,” said Duke.

  They ate the cheese with some wheat crackers and finished the pie, and talked about what had gone wrong and how it could be put right—all except Ginger, who wouldn’t admit there had been a single flaw in the afternoon. Even the speed with which they had run out of things she interpreted as a tribute to the food rather than the amateurish bungling Duke insisted on calling it.

  “If you’re an amateur bungler, Dukey dear, then I’m Reggie Jackson,” Ginger said, taking a second hunk of pie. “You might even end up converting me to this stuff.”

  Duke smiled happily at her. “That would be the equivalent of St. Patrick converting the heathen tribes of Ireland.”

  After cleanup, and after they had helped Duke set things up for the next day—he already had a system, and already it was inflexible—Susannah and Ivan took him home and then went shopping. There were a few necessities they hadn’t foreseen: paper towels, extra spatulas, a longer-handled ladle, more sponges—things they could pick up cheaply at one of the discount stores on the Post Road.

  “Poor old Duke—he’s dead beat,” Ivan said as they were backing down the driveway. They watched Duke go slowly up the porch steps, hanging on to the railing. His T-shirt clung to his back, his hair was shiny with sweat. He stopped to pet Keats, who was sitting on the doormat, then unlocked the door and went in. “Our spent and exhausted artiste must renew himself through rest and meditation for the labors to come,” said Ivan in a voice that had become, somewhere between triumph and cleanup, hard-edged with suppressed irritation. “Wearing himself out for his devoted followers, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty. In other words, he gets a shower and a beer while we browse through the housewares department at fucking K-Mart.”

  Susannah, detecting malice behind the joking, laughed anyway, then felt she had to say something in Duke’s defense. “He does work like a madman,” she said. “As if all the customers are starving and their lives depend on Duke getting food into them fast.”

  Ivan looked over at her, then braked at the corner, looked left, shifted, turned the wheel. “I didn’t realize the restaurant biz was like the medical biz—the waitress falls for the chef the way nurses fall for the doctors.”

  “Oh, Ivan, for heaven’s sake, I only meant—”

  He put a hand on her knee, grinning. “I was kidding, honey. Joke.” Susannah experienced one of her brief flashes of hatred for him; they were rare, always a shock, always quickly over, but against her will they stayed in her memory. This moment would come back to her, his hand on her, his blue shirt, the bug-specked windshield, the mockery in his voice. “Remember jokes, Susie? Ha-ha?”

  “Jokes are supposed to be funny,” she said. Her voice was prim and tight. I’m a humorless prune, she thought. He’s made me that way. I will hate him forever. But even as she spoke and turned to glare at him, her anger was drying up, dying, he was so beautiful.

  “Aw, Suse,” he said. His fond angel-smile lit the van. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day.” He touched her knee again, ran his hand up her thigh. “But I think we’re going to make it—at the Café, I mean. If we can only keep our tempers.” He grinned at her, in complicity, marking the quarrel’s official end. “I suppose it’s too early to tell,” he said. “But it looks to me like we just might stay in business.”

  Susannah remembered Duke’s prediction—hadn’t, actually, forgotten it for long since their talk—but the tense knot of worry it had produced in her began to unwind. “I hope so,” she said cautiously. “It certainly went well today.”

  He laughed suddenly. “It’s like opening night at a play, isn’t it? We ought to be sitting in Sardi’s waiting for the reviews. ‘The real star of the piece was Susannah Mortimer Cord in the small but eloquent role of the scullery maid.…’”

  Her laughter sounded shrill and childish; she felt giddy with hope. Ivan caught the sound and reached over to tousle her hair. “You’re so cute when you’re happy,” he said.

  “I am happy, Ivan. I’m just as contented as an old sheep in a nice sunny meadow.”

  He laughed at her, without mockery. She could see in his eyes that he loved her, that all was well. They pulled into the K-Mart parking lot. When they got out of the van the heat oozed up at them from the pavement like swamp gas, and inside the store the air conditioning blasted them, but Susannah noticed none of this. The cheap chrome and plastic in the kitchenwares department looked bright with promise.

  By Sunday, when Peter came to dinner at the house on Perkins Road, they were all exhausted and had to order out for pizza.

  Peter came in lugging a shopping bag, with a huge bunch of daisies under his arm. He set everything down on the kitchen table, amused at the boxes from Pizza Heaven. “I thought I was going to get something wholesome—nutritious—home-cooked, at least!” He laughed, hugged Susannah violently, and shook hands with Ivan and Duke. Susannah was amazed at his appearance. In the three years since she’d seen him, he had lost weight, acquired wrinkles, grown a mustache. His hair was cut very short except for long bangs that made his eyes look more mournfully dark, and his face was leaner, with hollows that reminded her—strangely, for there was no other resemblance—of Edwin.

  “You look wonderful,” he said to Susannah, stepping back to study her. She shook her head, smiling; she was wearing faded jeans, a black sweater that, she realized belatedly, was thick with cat hair, and a pair of Ivan’s socks without shoes—her feet hurt. “You do,” Peter insisted. “You look terrific. Your ears still stick out. Just a little. In a very nice way. And I like the braids, not to mention the rosy cheeks. All this junk food must be agreeing with you.”

  He hugged her again. His easy demonstrativeness surprised her pleasantly. All the ancient tensions between them, any legacy of childhood partisanship and long estrangements, seemed gone. Susannah took the daisy bouquet and buried her face in the familiar weedy smell before she put the flowers in water, thinking: We could be any old brother and sister.

  Peter’s shopping bag contained four bottles of champagne. “I’m impressed with this brother of yours,” Ivan said, but he looked disappointed. He was passionately partial to beer. “Champagne’s the only thing to drink with pizza,” Peter said, winking at Susannah.

  Duke stood frowning down at the two pizza boxes—one with pepperoni, and one without—while Susannah put the flowers, in their mason jar, in the center of the table and went to get plates. “Look,” Duke said final
ly. “Maybe I could rustle up some omelets or something. We’ve got eggs, mushrooms, some onions, I think—”

  “No, no,” Peter said quickly. He looked horrified at the possibility of giving offense, or of causing anyone trouble. “I wasn’t being sarcastic, Duke. I meant it, honestly.” He opened a bottle as he spoke, and tipped the foaming champagne into a wine glass Ivan held out in the nick of time. “That’s the great thing about champagne. It really does go with everything. Hell, you two must have drunk nothing but out there in California,” he said to Ivan. “What a life—cheap champagne, fruit off the trees, and eternal sunshine.”

  “I like it here,” Susannah said.

  “I miss it sometimes,” Ivan said; she looked at him in surprise, but he kept his eyes on the brimming glass and lowered it carefully to the table.

  They sat down to eat. The pizza was cold and oily. Only Ivan and the twins ate with enthusiasm. Peter took a bite, set his piece down, and didn’t pick it up again. Susannah sat beside him, still bemused by his presence. It seemed a miracle that he was there—her long-lost brother, with his hair falling over his forehead and his thin brown hand keeping everyone’s glass filled, elegant even in khakis and a boring rugby shirt. He had Rosie’s dog-brown eyes, but hers snarled and snapped, while his were warm with gold glints, and sad as a bloodhound’s. She remembered him as a boy, dark and small, always tidily turned out and always bringing home good report cards. How I hated him, she thought with surprise, looking at him fondly. “She’s so proud of her big brother”: it was her mother’s clipped voice, out of the past.

  Peter talked about his writer’s block as if it were flu. “I was fine until a couple of months ago, and then I came down with this. I think I’ve been in graduate school too long. Or maybe I’m just not cut out for this kind of life.”

  “Want a job at a terrific little café?” Ivan asked him. “We could use another waiter.”

  “I could wear an apron that says ‘For this I spent seven years in grad school?’”

  “What do you plan to do? Teach?”

  “Teach and translate, I hope. I’ve taught my way through graduate school, and I’ve had a couple of translations published. But—” Peter fluttered his hands and shrugged in a deliberately over-elaborate Italianate gesture, and said in a thick accent, “Sometimes I justa want to fongul the whole thing and travel and be—how you say—a bum.”

  Susannah laughed. “You sound like Nonna Anna.”

  “Honey, Nonna Anna had an accent so thick you could make a sandwich out of it.”

  “Our maternal great-granny,” Susannah said to Duke. “She was the most wonderful cook that ever lived. Present company excepted,” she added, raising her glass.

  “I wish she was here now, to take a turn in the kitchen when my feet start to give out,” said Duke.

  “Why do you call her Nonna Anna?” asked Mary Grace.

  “Nonna means Grandma in Italian. She came from Italy. What do you call your Grandma?”

  “We call our Ohio grandmother Ricky, and our Florida grandmother Mimi.”

  “And we have one grandpa,” said Mary Claire. “In Ohio.”

  “What do you call him?”

  “Grandpa.”

  “If I’m ever a grandfather,” Duke said, “I want to be called Grandfather.”

  “Like in Heidi,” said Mary Claire.

  “Your grandchildren’ll probably call you Pops,” said Ivan. “Or Pappy.”

  “I just hope senior citizens are obsolete by the time I’m over the hill,” said Peter. “I don’t want to be a senior citizen. I want to be an old geezer.”

  “How about old fart?”

  “Old fart would be just fine with me. I’d accept old fart. Also old fogy. My mother says she’ll never consent to senior citizen. She says she wants to be a senior illegal alien.”

  Ivan laughed so hard he choked on his champagne, and coughed and pounded the table until he recovered.

  Peter refilled his glass. “Have a little more cough medicine, old sock.”

  “Decent of you to offer, old chap. Don’t mind if I do.”

  The four of them kept steadily at the champagne, and quickly fell into a tipsy intimacy, while the twins pounced on the corks and the gold paper and took them up to their room for one of their private games. Susannah was relieved to see Ivan and Peter getting along so well. Their only other meeting had been on that dreadful trip east for her grandmother’s funeral, when they had stood outside the lawyer’s office talking cursorily about—what? baseball?—while she had stood by in her hot nylon dress wanting to throw up, to sit down, to collapse, when millions of unsaid words had babbled at her until she thought she might go mad, when all she could think about was the little bottle of capsules she had left behind in California, wrapped up in an old pair of panty hose in her underwear drawer.

  They were talking about baseball now, complaining about the strike that seemed imminent. “Hell, it’s going to ruin baseball,” Peter said.

  Susannah broke into the conversation. “You’d probably strike, too, to keep the free-agent clause alive. I mean, who wants to be pushed around forever by creeps like Steinbrenner?” Peter and Duke looked at her in amazement.

  “When did you get interested in baseball?” Peter demanded. “When you were a kid you wouldn’t have known a baseball from a grapefruit.”

  “I keep telling you I had a very eclectic upbringing,” Susannah said, smiling.

  “And we thought you were totally committed to other-worldliness,” said Duke. “Unsullied by such harsh reality as George Steinbrenner.”

  “She is,” Ivan said. “But she has these quirks.” He finished a piece of pizza, pushed back his chair, stood up, and shoved one hand into his pocket; Susannah heard the jingle of keys. Oh no, she thought. “And now, good people,” Ivan said. “I must be off. Out on my nightly rounds. I get claustrophobic inside on a night like this. Peter—” He held out his free hand, and Peter shook it, looking puzzled. “Come and see us again soon,” Ivan said. “I’ll see the rest of you later.” He headed for the door, not looking at Susannah, and turned when he reached it. “Anyone want to come? Sure is a nice night.” He seemed to be addressing the hanging lamp over the table.

  They all said, “No, thanks,” and the words rang hollowly in the quiet room. They heard Ivan go down the porch steps, and then the van started up. Peter cleared his throat. Susannah felt depression and humiliation grip her like teeth, and she swallowed a huge gulp of champagne that made her ears buzz. Duke, at the other end of the table, looked down at her, but she avoided his eyes. The silence lingered. She couldn’t believe Ivan had done it, had actually walked out like that, with his flimsy excuse, embarrassing her in front of her brother. What if one of them had taken him up on his limp invitation—what if she had? Would he have driven her around for an hour, making insincere comments on the beauty of the evening? Would he have taken her with him while he screwed some teenybopper in the back of the van? Would he have strangled her and dumped her body in the pond? She would put nothing past him, the son of a bitch. She unclenched her teeth and drank more champagne. She realized she was getting drunk. From upstairs, she heard the twins’ record player: “Rubber Duckie,” over and over. Duke and Peter began a laboriously casual conversation about the best route to take to the Cape, but it dwindled away, and eventually Duke went to put the twins to bed. “Rubber Duckie” stopped abruptly, and Susannah heard the twins protest, Mary Claire’s whine rising to a scream and then subsiding. Peter excused himself and went to the bathroom. She could hear him urinate, flush the toilet, wash his hands; it was awful how every sound carried in this old house.

  “The Cape’s a hell of a place,” Peter said when he returned. Ah. He wasn’t going to comment on Ivan’s departure; she didn’t know whether she was glad or sorry.

  “I’ve never been,” she said.

  “I had a memorable time down there,” Peter said. His face was impassive, and she wasn’t sure how to take his statements. I don’t really know hi
m very well, she thought. “It rained a lot. I didn’t get much work done.”

  “How about your friend Terry?”

  “Oh—Terry.” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Terry’s all right.” He let his hand fall to his lap; the gesture looked desolated. “He’s a nothing. A nobody.” Another silence fell, during which there was a squeaky meow at the back door. Susannah got up, unsteadily, to open it, and all three cats entered, tails up, expecting dinner. They rubbed themselves around Susannah’s legs, getting in the way, while she shook Little Friskies from a sack into bowls. She stepped on a paw and there was a yelp, but when she stooped to pet the victim—it was Keats—he was already absorbed in the food, crouched over the bowl with his head on one side, crunching loudly.

  “Jesus,” Peter said. “Are they all yours?”

  She nodded, not without pride. “They came from California with us. Aren’t they gorgeous?”

  “That must have been a cozy trip.”

  “Oh, it was. We loved it.”

  “Ivan, too?”

  “Of course. He adores cats.” She remembered suddenly what Ivan had said, that he missed California, and she felt chilled. She shivered and sat down again, feeling the champagne. She wished she hadn’t brought up the cross-country trip, those long dull days with Ivan all to herself. “Remember how we always wanted pets?” she asked Peter. “And they wouldn’t let us have any?”