The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Chapter Five

  In the Mirror

  Never (thought Rosie) had there been such a glorious May, a June so filled with delights: the climbing roses by the porch, the foxglove and daisies and Canterbury bells in the long border, the blaze of poppies against the white fence, the early lilies and the late tulips, and Ivan in her bed.

  She had never had such a lover, never been so in love, never known anyone so miraculously beautiful. It was, she told him, as if her life had shifted from black and white into technicolor: “Like in The Wizard of Oz,” she said. “When Dorothy enters the Land of Oz.”

  He laughed, and ran his hand down her bare arm to her wrist, and circled it. They were in bed: it was only there that she told him such things, in the half-dark. “And who am I?” he asked her. “The Wizard?”

  “Oh, no—the Wizard was a sham. You’re the tornado, Ivan. You’re what makes things happen.”

  He put his lips against her neck. “Let’s make something happen.”

  “Oh Lord, Ivan, I do love you.” It was curiously thrilling to say it, to admit to him that she adored him. It had been years since she had loved anyone enough to be compelled to speak the words. The more she told him she loved him the more she loved him; the more she whispered it, when their bodies were joined, the happier the joining made her. “We’re flower and stalk,” she said, with him inside her, his chest against hers, his rough cheek on her face—feeling a bit foolish, carried away by the bliss of it, and yet believing it, feeling it true—that she couldn’t live without him; that, like a flower plucked, she would die if she were taken from him.

  “My blossom,” he called her, and he would move his lips down her belly to what he called her rosebud, and find it with his tongue, making her tremble and cry out more words of love, more, until she had said them all, and was speechless.

  He came to see her, after that first night, two or three times a week, and his presences and absences created in her a compressed cycle of preparation, bloom, decline, and renewal that was like the seasons: no wonder she was worn out and on edge; no wonder Peter called her “hyper”; and no wonder, either, that her book failed to progress.

  Her garden, though, was the best she had ever produced. She spent her daytimes—the long, empty hours of sunshine when she knew Ivan was working and there was no chance of his showing up—toiling among her flowers. She tended the vegetables, too; and the snap peas climbed their screen in abundance, the six kinds of lettuce and the parsley and cress burst from the soil in their bright green rows, the hairy tomato stalks reached out to each other over the sides of their cages. She consulted her records—the vegetables had never done better. Everything was early, everything flourished, the weather was perfect, vegetables and flowers and fruits lifted themselves rapturously into the sun. Even the elusive sweet peas grew this year as if it was an English sun shining on them.

  She rejoiced in the flowers, but the vegetables were a superfluity in her life. She was too keyed up to eat them, and her only delight in picking and washing and preparing was to offer them to Ivan. He was always hungry, and particularly after lovemaking. “You have the same effect on me marijuana used to,” he told her, with the hesitant grin he always wore when he talked about his wilder days. “I’m starving. And ex-ta-remely high,” he would say, rolling his eyes at her. Once, at two in the morning, she made him a salad, going out in the moonlight to pick fresh lettuce and peas, and thereafter she couldn’t look at the vegetable garden without thinking of Ivan, without a shudder of joy, as if the hot breeze that blew on her, and the sun on her back, were his hands on her, his body pressed close to hers.

  The flowers, though, assumed an importance that she recognized but couldn’t define. She knew she was obsessed, and that her acre of ground was becoming crazy with blossoms, simultaneously a gardener’s dream and a gardener’s nightmare. The tasks she set herself were enormous—absurd and unnecessary projects she should have hired someone to carry out. She conceived the idea of digging up a stretch of lawn along the back border of her property, a scraggly, rocky area with a rotting rail fence, where she had never grown anything. She dug out the sod with a shovel, and down on her knees extricated every last root and weed before wheelbarrowing it all, in a dozen back-breaking trips, to a heap behind the compost bin. Then she pried out the rocks, and enough small stones to fill her wheelbarrow twice. It was such hard work she sometimes wept as she did it, and wished she’d never begun, and longed to quit, but she kept at it, knowing herself to be foolish, because it made the days go by and because in some way it made her happy. In the fall she would put in daffodil bulbs, and she imagined the long, even stretch of them, yellow and cream and white, bending at a gentle angle in the breezes of next spring. For the summer, she planted a long row of marigolds and ageratum—plants bought from a nursery—an unheard-of measure, but she had nothing in her greenhouse to fill such a space. The small plants looked anticlimactic in the huge border, but by late summer they would be a brushstroke of bright color against the old rail fence, blue yellow blue.… The spiky little ageratum were the blue of Ivan’s eyes, she thought, pressing them tenderly into the earth. “There’s no fool like an old fool,” she said to herself, but with a smile—remembering how she had made that comment to Peter when she heard of Edwin’s marriage to a woman young enough to be his daughter. Well, she wasn’t, thank God, old enough to be Ivan’s mother—quite. And what heights of bliss fools could reach, she thought. A cardinal began his piercing dog-whistle, and she squinted up to see one, high in a tree like a rose. Perfect happiness, she thought, smiling into the sun.

  She supposed she should have waited and dug up her border for the cameras. Nothing like inspiring her fans to hard labor; God knows, gardening isn’t supposed to be easy. But the cameras, her television show, Janice and the rest of them were another world, mere memories of some other, saner, duller existence. She thought: I’ll always remember this, no matter what, the summer I was fifty, and foolish, and beginning to live for the first time.

  She didn’t feel fifty. She wasn’t sure what “feeling fifty” meant. Of course, her feats in the garden exhausted her, but such exertion would have worn her out at thirty—would have put him in the hospital, Ivan told her. Maybe her back bothered her a little more than it used to—had she always so relished the slow sinking into a hot bath? And she rested, perhaps, oftener—involuntary pauses in her furious activity when she sat back on her heels and bent her head over her lap, waggling her shoulders to loosen them up, thinking dreamily of how Ivan would rub her back for her later, letting the sun beat down on her neck, listening to a cardinal calling and a woodpecker knocking out a tattoo. Had her legs and feet always gone to sleep so fast? She would rise, painfully, stamp over the lawn to get the needles out, and get back to work.

  “You’re an amazing woman,” Ivan said. He repeated it often, referring to her body, her cooking, her garden. “Just amazing. I can’t get over you.” She hoped he didn’t mean: amazing for your age. She didn’t think he did. He never mentioned the fifteen years between them. He seemed not to notice wrinkles, the faint jowly droop to her chin, the dark pouches below her eyes, the stringy backs of her hands. He never told her she was beautiful, as Barney had done; but that was all right, she wasn’t beautiful, she’d hated Barney’s effusions. Amazing was all right with her. She knew it was her energy Ivan liked, her bounce, her zest for living.

  So she interpreted his remarks and attitudes as she bent over her flowers out in the sun, for what she thought of out there, during the filling of all those long hours, was Ivan. Ivan.

  What was curious was that he never spoke of Susannah. He never even acknowledged, really, that he had another life with a wife in it. Rosie began to wonder if they were separated. She knew he still lived with his friend Duke the chef. Ivan was full of stories about Duke—their seminary days, Duke’s wife’s death, the precocity of his children. She knew, even, that Duke was worried about putting on weight, and that, since he lost his wife, he showed an unhealthy
lack of interest in women that worried Ivan, and that he had bought his house and his four acres two years ago for a mere $68,000. Even when Ivan told her about the restaurant, there were Ginger and Garnet waiting on table, Duke and Simon in the kitchen, Ivan himself as waiter, cashier, busboy—the general practitioner, he called himself, doing a little of everything. But Susannah wasn’t mentioned.

  Rosie knew from Peter, who’d had dinner with them all, that Susannah had been there; surely he would know if she’d left her husband since, but if he did he said nothing. Rosie felt she couldn’t ask Peter about it; she was terrified that he would begin nagging her again about a reunion. Rosie remembered that not two months ago she had seen that as inevitable, as a sort of gift to Peter, who seemed to want it so much—even as a relief. Now the idea horrified her. She had always told herself, rightly or not, that the scales on which she and Susannah balanced their relationship—their non-relationship, she corrected herself—were tipped heavily in her own favor. Susannah, after all, had left her mother; there was no getting around that cold fact. No matter what shared misunderstandings and antagonisms had prompted her, Susannah had done the leaving. But now the scales were incalculably askew: Rosie had appropriated her daughter’s husband, her son-in-law. Something inside her sank like a stone whenever she put it to herself like that—he was her daughter’s husband, her lover was her son-in-law. She tried to keep it from her mind, along with all thought of Susannah, as Ivan did from his conversation, but it kept returning. She would be feeding the roses, or arranging the hay mulch around the sweet peas, and the fact of Susannah would edge into her mind—the grown-up Susannah, a wronged woman, a victim. She felt no joy or triumph at her theft of her daughter’s husband; her joy was all for Ivan himself, the pure and perfect Ivan who was her lover; and her triumph was over her fifty years. Toward Susannah, what she felt was a kind of pitying horror—that, and a wholly inappropriate curiosity.

  She couldn’t ask Peter for information, and she refused to ask Ivan, but one day she stripped off her gardening gloves early, took a fast shower instead of a long bath, and drove to Chiswick. She had been avoiding that stretch of Route One between Perkins Road and the Silvergate Café, doing her shopping in East Chiswick, putting off a visit to her hairdresser, even canceling a dentist appointment because her dentist was located uncomfortably close to the school where she knew Duke’s daughters were in kindergarten—Susannah’s old school, of which Rosie had a hundred humiliating memories.

  But today—it was an afternoon in late June, warm and sunny, and exactly five weeks since Ivan had first come to her bed—today she drove purposefully, consciously putting on courage, talking to herself in the no-nonsense voice she used on television: don’t be absurd, there’s nothing to be afraid of, you’re just going to the liquor store for a bottle of gin, you have as much right as anyone to shop at the Liquor Boutique.

  She was sweating as she parked the car and got out. Her heart was doing its scary thudding routine. She clutched the shoulder strap of her purse, pushed her sunglasses up on her nose, and approached the liquor store. She hadn’t yet seen the finished sign on the restaurant facade—THE SILVERGATE CAFÉ in elegant italic, white outlined in black on a grassy green background. Nice, Rosie thought, trying not to give in to the terror the sign created in her—the sign and the glimpse she had through the window of people at tables, green and white checked curtains, a waitress putting down a loaded plate; not Susannah, an older woman. Ginger? Her impression, before she ducked like a fugitive into the liquor store, was of bustling activity, of another life: Ivan’s other life, shared with strangers—Duke, the waitresses, her own enigmatic daughter. She felt faint; a pleasant smell of cooking came to her briefly, then disappeared as she opened the door.

  “What can we do for you today?” The fat man, rubbing his hands, looked at her breasts.

  “Gin. I need a bottle of—” She looked around vaguely for the shelf of gin. A pudgy penguin waddled back and forth on a block of ice in a cardboard display; behind it, gin poured from a bottle into white plastic foam that sparkled when the light hit it. “I’ll just see what’s here.”

  He was ahead of her, smiling to show eerily perfect false teeth. “Beefeater, Gilbey’s, Seagrams, we’ve got a special on our house brand here—a good buy. What do you need? A fifth? Or bigger? What’re you? Having a party?”

  “No, I guess I’ll just—” She hefted a bottle of Beefeater off the shelf and took it to the counter.

  “Got enough tonic? Bitter lemon?” he asked, rubbing his hands. There could have been a melon, or a baby, under his waistband. She imagined the flabby little breasts, the tiny penis hanging like a toy under the melon.

  “Yes, that’s all, just the gin.” Her hands were shaking as she handed him a twenty, waited for the change. He put the bottle into a narrow paper bag and handed it to her with a mock bow.

  “Come in again, mademoiselle,” he said. She realized he must be about her age. In that instant everything gathered around her: the abrupt decision to drive out there, the heat, the café sign, the liquor-store man, the lack of lunch—and breakfast, too? when had she eaten last?—and she felt faint. She reached out for the package, then dropped her hand. “Here—are you all right?” He moved out from behind the counter, took her arm, and led her to a chair beside a display of daiquiri mix. “Sit down here. Want some water? Jesus.” He laughed a little, seeing she had recovered. “Pardon my French, but I thought you were going to pass out for a minute there.”

  She managed a smile. “I’m sorry. I’m so hot. I’ve been out in the garden all day.” She raised her hand to her head, pushed back her hair.

  “I could tell,” he said, and took her hand, lightly, in his. “See that? Dirt under the nails—ground in. I knew you were a gardener. My late wife’s nails were like that all summer long.” He kept her hand. “Rest in peace,” he said.

  She smiled again—inadequately, she knew, without sympathy or interest, and using his hand as a prop, she stood up. “I’m all right now. Just a passing thing.” She walked over to the counter and picked up her package, still shaky but hiding it. She felt breathless, exhausted, and her voice came out little better than a whisper. She cleared her throat. “I’ll go home and have a cold gin and tonic.”

  “That’s the girl. Best remedy.”

  She started away from the counter. “By the way,” she said, and paused, but she had to ask, and she went on, holding to the back of the chair where she had sat. “How are they doing next door? The vegetarians?”

  He shrugged elaborately, slowly, half-closing his eyes. “What can I tell you? They’re making a go of it. I can’t explain it. I ate lunch over there one day. I ordered this pizza made out of zucchini squash.” He chuckled. “I was lucky to get it down, I’ll tell you. But the place is jammed every lunch hour. I hear they’re expanding to dinners in the fall. Plus entertainment. Probably some tone-deaf beatnik with a guitar. Listen.” He raised one hand, as if taking an oath. “There’s one born every minute. You know what I mean?”

  “They’re young people running it?”

  “Nice kids,” he said, nodding. “A girl, looks like a hippie, and two guys. Now the girl is married to one of them, so I’m told—but I don’t inquire too close.” He shrugged again, but amiably. “What can I tell you? Nowadays you never know. All I know is that they’re raking in the dough.”

  She nodded; her throat was dry. She would, actually, go home and have a drink. “The young woman,” she said with effort. “Long blonde hair? Is that the one?”

  “That’s her. Not bad-looking, but skinny. What can you expect, though, with food like that?”

  She gave a wan laugh. “Well.”

  “Here. Let me get that door for you. You sure you’re okay? Have you got far to go?” He was beside her, opening the door to a rush of warm air, the cooking smell again.

  “No—no, I’m fine,” she said, took a deep breath, and walked toward her car. “Thanks—very much,” she said, not looking back.

&nbs
p; “Hey!” she heard him call. “Next time you come in I’ll take you next door for some rabbit food.” But she didn’t answer. She got into her car and drove away without another glance at the Liquor Boutique or the Silvergate Café, going slowly, afraid to drive, afraid she would faint. Oh God Oh God, she thought. What am I doing?

  Ivan came that night. She had drunk two gin and tonics, eaten a couple of boiled hot dogs and some strawberries for dinner, and spent some time looking at herself naked in the mirror (small waist just barely gone slack, big peasant hips, hard white thighs, a freckled triangle of tan pointing between large breasts no longer firm, grimy veined hands with permanent puckers at the fingertips, fit to be held only by the obese Liquor Boutique man). Then she had two more gins. Ivan found her in tears, leafing through a Countryman from Spring, 1933: “Do you realize that millions of rabbits are caught every year in the steel-toothed trap, and often linger for many hours with shattered or lacerated limbs?”

  “What’s this? what’s this?” he asked, meaning her tears, taking the magazine from her, wiping her face with his hand. “What’s this, my little blossom? What’s wrong?” His voice was tender, but she could tell—how could she tell? something in his face? a narrowing of the eyes?—he didn’t like it, didn’t want tears from her, was even—was it something in the set of his head?—disgusted by them.