“You must be proud of Mippi,” Nan said, lips tightly pursed to keep her from laughing.
“Not particularly,” Frip said, as Mitzi nodded in agreement. “A father probably shouldn’t be saying this about a daughter, but she is so willful and disobedient at times. And so contrary.”
“No!” George and Nan cried.
“She’s way too big for her britches,” Mitzi said, shaking her head in dismay. “Always knows she’s right. The rest of the world is wrong. Her parents are idiots. You know what we’re talking about, don’t you? Three teenagers . . .”
“Two teenagers,” Nan corrected. “Ellis is twenty.”
“No, he’s not!” Mitzi said. “Ellis is nineteen.” George, smiling, took a long, slow sip of gin.
“That’s right,” Frip said, lurching forward and planting his hands palms down on the glass tabletop. “Since when is Ellis twenty? He is nineteen. I know that for a fact.”
Nan took a healthy swig from her glass to fortify herself for the tangled web of conversation she knew she was about to enter.
“I think we would know, Frip, how old our son is.”
Mitzi and Frip looked at each other, confused, obviously uncertain as to how they could respond appropriately to such a bold declaration. George looked at his watch; he would time this uncharacteristic pause in the conversation. It lasted seven seconds.
“That’s not always true, Nan,” Mitzi said, flapping her hands around as if they were flippers steering her crazily through some underwater world. “Parents forget. Parents subconsciously want their children to stay at certain ages, and they’re reluctant to keep tacking on additional years. You might want to check your records, Nan.”
“You’re probably right, Mitzi,” George said. “Ellis must be nineteen. We stand corrected.”
“Let’s not get too hasty, now,” Frip said. “He could very well be twenty. In fact, now that you mention it, don’t I recall a twentieth birthday not so long ago? Wasn’t Ellis’s birthday in April?”
George shrugged.
“Hard to say,” he said. “What about this weather? Isn’t it beautiful? I actually timed a temperature drop of thirteen degrees and a dew point drop of twelve degrees in the course of one half hour. Wind direction: north-northwesterly. Wind speed: eleven, gusting to fifteen. I just took the readings fifteen minutes ago.”
Nan rolled her eyes and smiled indulgently. George looked for any opportunity to show off his weather expertise. He had a state-of-the-art Taylor weather station, armed with barometer, thermometer, hygrometer, and rain gauge sitting atop the end post of the split-rail fence, and sheltered (with the exception of the rain gauge, which had to be open to collect moisture) by a wooden frame open at both the front and back to allow the free flow of air. On the roof of the house was his anemometer and wind vane, which were connected to wind speed and direction gauges sitting on top of the desk in his office.
“I don’t think the weather’s beautiful at all,” Frip said. “It seems like we haven’t had any rain in weeks, and this is supposed to be the wettest part of the year. You should see the water bill!”
“He’s up at five thirty every morning watering,” Mitzi said. “That way, you get the most bang for your buck. No evaporation. No chance of overnight rot.”
“You’re right about that, Frip,” George said. “We do need the moisture. This is awful weather!”
“On the other hand, feel that breeze,” Mitzi said. “Who could ever possibly want it to rain now and spoil this lovely weather. My gosh, will you look at the time! We gotta go.”
“Take care,” said Frip with a violent wave as he and Mitzi bounded down the steps, passing and greeting Jim Graybill, who almost collided with them as he climbed quickly and purposefully toward the Fremonts.
“Lovely day.” Jim greeted them with a broad smile, his arms akimbo, looking around to take in the wonderful expanse of the backyard. “If you could bottle a day like this and a yard like yours you could sell it for a billion bucks. God, this backyard never ceases to amaze me. How do you do it?”
“Nothing to it,” George said. “We just let nature take its course while we sit here and drink.”
“Ha! Got another one of those, by any chance?” Jim pointed at George’s glass.
“Oh, I guess we can dig something up.” George rose from his chair with an exaggerated grunt, meant to make Jim feel guilty for putting him in motion, and made his way languidly to the door.
“No rush, of course,” Jim said. “I can stay here till the glaciers melt.”
George stooped over more and developed a limp that made his progress toward the door painstakingly slow.
“This is what you get for your sarcasm,” he said. “You say things like that and my whole body reacts by slowing down.”
“So, when do we sweep the yard?” Jim said after George returned with his drink.
“Pardon?”
“Sweep. Sweep the yard. When do we . . . uh, I . . . do it?”
“I just swept the patio yesterday,” said George, who had already downed his drink and was starting to slur his words. “No need to sweep the yard, is there?”
“Ha-ha. I mean sweep it with a metal detector.”
“A what?”
“Metal detector.”
“You have one of those?” George said. “Wow!”
“That’s about enough in the line of alcohol for you, dear,” Nan said, pointing her half-finished drink at a suddenly intense George.
“Just bought it a week ago. Top-of-the-line model. When do we sweep?”
“Sweep for what?” Nan said. “What’s there to sweep for around here?”
“Any metal in the area, such as, oh, the stray quarter or dime, or millions worth of buried treasure.”
“Why?”
“Why? Ha-ha. You’re such a card, George. Because buried under even the most unassuming suburban backyards could be enough metal to build a battleship. Old pots and pans, arrowheads, coins. Ill-gotten gains.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Meaning buried loot.”
“Be serious, Jim,” George said.
“I am serious. Down in Louisiana, a guy swept his backyard and came up with a chest of Spanish doubloons. I read it in my treasure hunter magazine. It could happen anywhere.”
“We’re a bit off those old shipping lanes, Jim,” Nan said in that supercilious way of hers that both George and Jim knew to mean this conversation should be drawing to an end.
“Anyway, it doesn’t hurt to check,” Jim said. “A complete sweep would just take, oh, forty-five minutes, maybe a little more. Whatever I find, I get, oh, twenty percent. Maybe twenty-five percent. You get the rest. And you can rely on my complete confidentiality.”
“No,” George said.
“Absolutely not,” said Nan. “Nobody’s going to go nosing around under our backyard with the thought of digging it all up.”
“We’d dig it up only if there was something worth digging up. A little hole. Hardly scratch your gardens. Then, you could spend the thousands you get from the buried whatever to turn this into the backyard of your dreams.”
“It already is the backyard of our dreams,” George said.
Jim sighed. “Oh, well, give it some thought. And, on another not altogether unrelated topic, have you two heard about the contest?”
They hadn’t. Jim explained that Burdick’s had announced, in conjunction with Livia’s weekly Lollygag, a contest to be held in July for the best yard—front or back—in Livia. First prize would be $5,000, a feature in the Lollygag, and a big PlantWorld sign in the winning yard for the rest of the summer!
“Whoa!” George said.
“You guys came immediately to mind,” Jim said, then drained the rest of his drink with a big Ahhhh! “I haven’t seen anything that approaches you guys’ backyard anywhere in Livia. Not even in the southeast quadrant.”
Nan and George doubted that. The southeast quadrant was where Livia’s storied rich lived. They could afford b
uilt-in sprinkler systems with timers, fancy rock gardens, and swarms of illegal aliens to do all the gardening work for them.
“Yours is better,” Jim said. “Honestly. It’s so . . . so . . . idiosyncratic. It bears your stamp.”
George and Nan hemmed and hawed, and promised to consider it.
“Well, that would be a pretty good time for it,” Nan said. “Let’s see, the impatiens and alyssum will be out, of course. The bee balm, purple coneflower, balloon flower, some Asiatic lilies, maybe . . . Hmmm.”
Nan quickly realized that one of the several projects she had in mind could probably be covered quite nicely by $5,000 and would be actually done by professionals, rather than that unreliable amateur, George. “We’ll look into it. But $5,000 for a gardening contest? In a rinky-dink little suburb like Livia?”
“It’s true,” Jim said. “Check out this week’s paper. They’ve got all the rules in there. Well, I’m off. Be sure and think about letting me give your yard a good, thorough sweep. I think you might be surprised by what turns up.”
“We’ll give it careful thought, Jim,” said Nan in her tone that meant she would give it no such thing. With that, Jim got up, wheeled abruptly about, and ran off, almost racing down the steps, flinging pea gravel everywhere, and accidentally kicking over the little painted-model wooden chalets Nan had placed so carefully on one of the railroad ties, but which were always getting knocked over by people who were mad, or in a hurry, or who just didn’t look where they were going.
Nan made a mental note: I have to move those bloody things before some clumsy oaf kicks them to pieces.
A souped-up orange Camaro that looked as if it had been finger painted by a kindergarten art class, and an ancient Plymouth Duster, eaten away so badly by rust and corrosion that George and Nan called it the “leper car,” squealed to a halt on the side of the road by the driveway.
It was Ellis, Cullen, and their entourages. That meant Matt and Steve, Denise, Charlie, Meg, and a beautiful girl burdened with an old-fashioned name, Bertha. Out they piled, flaunting their Metallica and Black Sabbath haute couture of T-shirts, ripped and worn-out jeans, and tank tops that showed too much cleavage, chatting and laughing, giving George and Nan little finger-roll waves before disappearing into the driveway, and entering the house via the garage door.
George and Nan had known most of them since elementary school. They knew the punch-code combination to the garage door, dipped into the fridge for snacks without having to ask, and were considerate enough to make old-person small talk when they couldn’t avoid the senior set.
Lately, though, cigarette butts had begun to appear along the roadside, and cans of super-fortified, high-octane caffeine-and-sugar drinks were getting dumped in the recycle bin. George wondered whether it was only one more small step to joints, condoms, and Magnum .357 handguns loaded with hollow-point slugs manufactured to rip apart lungs and blow away brains.
“They’re good kids,” said George. “Right?”
Nan shrugged abstractedly. “I suppose so,” she said.
George frowned, then lifted his glass in salute to Phil and Ann Boozer, who were walking down the street and waving, yelling something barely audible about “working too hard.” The Boozers were not terribly spontaneous folks. When they went for a walk, or devised a plan to do anything else, for that matter, they stuck with the blueprint. They would not be doing anything so rash as to go bounding up the steps to chat with the Fremonts unless they had made the requisite arrangements beforehand. Nan raised her own glass to the Boozers, who were just passing out of their sight lines, and who, she reflected with a smile, were the only ones of their friends who didn’t drink.
“Nan-bee, you do think they’re good kids, don’t you?” George had turned in his chair to look at her. Nan saw that his face was a sad mask of silly, niggling concerns, and that he needed her to focus him on the new challenge at hand.
“To hell with the kids,” she said. “What do we have to do to win that contest?”
12
How to Win Big at Gardening
The cool, dry spell lasted longer than anticipated. While that made things comfortable outside and kept the mosquito population at bay, resulting in what condominium and apartment dwellers and happy-faced television weatherpersons would deem a string of “perfect days,” dry was not what the Fremonts wanted it to be. They were more than willing to put up with the irritant of a few whining pests in exchange for the natural lushness adequate rainfall would bring to their backyard at this time of year.
The sprinklers were on nonstop during much of the morning. George would fit the tap with a dual spigot attachment to keep two hoses going at the same time. “Double headers,” he called them. He’d set them on full throttle just before the sun came up, then turn them off as the kids hit the showers in expectation of full blasting streams to come shooting out of the showerheads. That was for the lawn and whatever flowers could get soaked at the same time. Then, Nan would resume the watering for another three hours with the hand-held sprayers and soaker hoses for the remaining flower beds. They finally turned the water off for good at about eleven a.m. as evaporation began in earnest, negating much of the value of watering from that point on.
So, while the front yard spawned all manner of dandelions, weeds, and burrs, and gradually burned into a uniform crispy, fried-brown color, the backyard shone through as a well-watered, tranquil, and quite serenely beautiful oasis amid a desert of drought-stricken neighbors’ yards. The water bill that arrived that week detailed charges of only $100 for April and May. The next bimonthly bill, they figured, could be as much as five times that amount.
“We need to do more,” Nan announced one cloudless morning as the sprinklers whirred away. “We’re not doing enough to win this contest, and I want to win this contest. I want to win this contest so badly I can taste it.”
George frowned. On the rare occasions when Nan made such pronouncements, they generally preceded relentless bursts of energy, which invariably sucked him in to their vortex. That meant a lot more work. On cue, a pain spasm shot through his lower back to remind him that the musculature entangled around his spine, ribs, and pelvis was not keen on big backyard projects that involved a lot of lifting and bending over. He kept frowning, having thought that all the big work that had to be done to the yard could now be safely relegated to the past.
“Why?” he said. “We’re watering all the time now. You’re putting on the Miracle-Gro. The place looks great even in the middle of this drought. What else do we have to do?”
“Lots,” Nan said. George moaned.
“Besides, something’s been snipping some of the monarda, or chomping it off very cleanly.”
“I told you I heard snipping that night.”
“And I was wrong to doubt you, George. But it’s seeing that’s believing. Look at these monarda over here. Not blooming, of course, so harder to tell, but cut off very cleanly at the stem. What could do that . . . or who?”
“Who? Who’d want to cut off our monarda? What possible reason . . . ?”
“I don’t know. But we’re damn sure going to monitor the situation, and next time you hear snipping, you’re out there with your baseball bat pronto.”
The conversation moved on to what, for George, was the unsettling proposition of major improvements to the gardens. As stunning as their backyard might be, Nan was now thinking it didn’t quite measure up to her new, higher standards. It certainly would not be good enough to garner them first place in the Burdick’s Best Yard Contest. Now, she saw their backyard in its true light, as something that, while it was testimony to hard work and dedicated maintenance, was actually quite predictable and rather commonplace. With the exception of the wonderfully perilous angel’s trumpets, which were her own inspiration last month, there was nothing unusual in their gardens, which probably meant nothing that would cause the judges to stop and take notice. Basically, she reflected, everything they had planted in the backyard would scream to the judges that thi
s was the work of novices who had mastered only the basics of gardening, and had not shown the guts to take chances, to really do what it took to turn it into a masterpiece. New areas would have to be cleared. Turf would have to be dug up, and earth turned over in preparation for planting new, as yet undetermined, things. But what? It was getting well past planting season, and deep into summer.
Nan and George decided they needed to spend more time methodically scouting out the competition. It wouldn’t be hard to find the other contestants. Their names and addresses had been listed in the Lollygag, and on the website of Burdick’s, which figured it would heighten interest in the contest if residents could see what yards were being entered, and how they were being improved in preparation for the judging.
Contestants were issued big green lawn signs that read: OFFICIAL BURDICK’S BEST YARD ENTRY, then a contestant number. George and Nan yelped in amazement when they handed in their $25 entrance fee and were issued a set of official rules and a lawn sign bearing #73, having underestimated the number of competitors by about four dozen. They were appalled when they later learned that 148 signs had been handed out.
“But don’t a lot of those people just have a few flowers and shrubs?” George said. “I figured the real competition is probably limited to about a dozen or fifteen people.”
“And we won’t be one of those,” barked Nan, “unless we see what other people are doing and make some big improvements ourselves.”
George lapsed into silence. He had not seen resolve and passion like this out of Nan since they first began their backyard remake, and that meant the fires of her energy and drive were being rekindled. Even their college searches for Ellis and Cullen had never reached the fever pitch of excitement and determination that now seemed to be building alarmingly in his wife. Nan had lately seemed such a contented and unexcitable person. More wine-relaxed than coffee-driven. And now, an adrenaline-addled, workaholic, garden bitch-ass was going to be loosed on the world. Look out!
Livia is a simple suburb with unremarkable attractions among which wonderful gardens and immaculate lawns have never been counted. It can boast Mound Park, a twenty-five-acre green space featuring a dozen old Indian burial mounds. There is the Prairie Hills Mall, with its bargain-basement outlet stores. Perhaps the suburb’s crown jewel is the 200-acre Billings Lake Park, with its sandy beach and beautiful surrounding homes.
Backyard Page 9