Dr. Sproot just sat there frozen in fury, a barely perceptible nod indicating her agreement with the new terms.
“I’ll take that as a yea. Okay, here’s what will happen now: I will study the photographs, which you will have Marta deliver to me in a plain brown manila envelope the day after tomorrow. I will then cast the spell. Precisely two hours and twenty minutes after that, I will pay a visit to your house and remove the spell on your gardens. I will not call in advance. Please leave your gate open to allow me access. The whole thing should take between one to two hours, and you are not under any circumstances to be standing around watching me, much less jabbering away while I’m trying to work. In fact, it would probably be better if you’re not around at all. And I’m warning you that this will be hard work. I cast that spell in a passion, and those are the ones that usually work the best and are the hardest to undo. With any luck, you should notice marked improvement overnight, and complete recovery in two days. There are no money-back guarantees. I’m sort of like a doctor in this regard. If the spell and the anti-spell don’t work that’s tough tamales for you. I will give you no phone number. . . .”
Dr. Sproot chuckled.
“I could just call you at the liquor store or appliance mart, Edith.”
“That’s Sarah!” said Edith, pulling the mesh veil back down over her face. “I told you to call me Sarah! And if you dare to call me at my place of work where I am Edith to talk about my Sarah business, then there won’t be any spell undoing on your gardens. If you must contact me, you may do so through Marta.
“Now, one more thing before we leave—you’re paying my bill as well as your own, of course—do you know of anyone whose dearly beloved little pet has passed away recently? I have a special on July pet séances. Offer ends at midnight July twenty-second.”
18
Out of Season
There was one big obstacle facing the Fremonts in their efforts to make prize-winning improvements to their gardens: planting season had ended a month ago.
Sure, there were a few shriveled-looking things still sitting on the picked-over nursery shelves that could be stuck in the dry ground and, if they survived the trauma and heat, coaxed into putting forth a few puny blooms. Those would stick out in their obvious and pathetic distress to any judges who knew their business.
Instead, they would have to spruce up the things that were already there, pay Jerry to build them a new trellis, then sand and paint it. They would scour the antique shops for any knickknacks that could lend little artificial accents to those parts of the yard that needed more of an exclamation point.
Another problem: they still hadn’t gotten significant rain. The mild temperatures that had made the dryness bearable through June and into early July were gone. Now they were suffering through the worst heat wave of the summer. Adding an unforgivable insult to that was the humidity level, which had soared as a heavy mass of moist air covered them like a dense, stuffy blanket.
“Dew point’s at seventy-four,” said George, panting from his exertions in the gardens, after an inspection of his weather station. “That’s tropical. That’s Amazon rain forest. Oh, and there’s the regular temperature . . . ninety-four degrees.”
Nan gasped, then glugged down a big glass of ice water. Her tank top, work shorts, and kerchief headband were soaked in oily perspiration. Exhausted, she plunked down into one of the patio chairs, her heart pounding, her body’s near-depleted cooling mechanism on the verge of breakdown and screaming for her to stop.
“George. Take five. Take fifteen, even. You’re gonna kill yourself.” Trickles of sweat streamed down her dripping forehead to sting her eyes with their salt. “As much as I hate to say so, we gotta go inside and get some AC.”
“I got a little more to do first. Fifteen bags down, ten to go.”
George migrated toward the driveway, where they had dumped the twenty-five bags of moist-smelling cypress mulch picked up at Burdick’s earlier in the morning. Eons later he was back, trudging uphill with a forty-pound bag of mulch slung over each shoulder. He stopped about midway, hunched over, and sighed.
“Sweetheart!” Nan moaned.
She watched in awe as George straightened up after a few seconds, then continued toward the fence line to dump his massive load with a deep, lingering groan. Just as Nan was all set to be lost in a dizzying cloud of admiration for this wonderful, indefatigable man, the man whom she would trade for no other, the man for whom no barrier proved too impenetrable, George slouched over to her, slumped forward, and let loose an appalling squeal of pent-up gas.
“George!”
“That’s it,” he said. “I quit. Inside for some air-conditioning, and maybe a nice cold gin and tonic for a little pick-me-up.”
Halfway down the slope, the yellow Rain Train chugged slowly upward, its grooved, plastic, white wheel fitted on its track—the garden hose—and flung curved jets of water across the swaths of bluegrass, rye, and fescue with its twirling aluminum arms. It was four p.m., the hottest part of the day, but they had the Rain Train going all day now, as well as an oscillating sprinkler in the back near the woods, alternating with two soaker hoses. They had to; two or three days without water in this kind of heat, and something, somewhere, would be drooping, the first sign of a swift descent into a dangerous plant coma from which there could be no return.
Their top competitors were doing the same thing. Some were doing it on a far grander scale. They observed yards and gardens hidden in clouds of drifting mists and spray. On closer inspection (they had grown more daring now when they sensed the homeowners were away) they saw endless coils of coarse, gray, water-beaded soaker hoses seeping their garden-boosting moisture directly into the ground. When breezes wafted those curtains of mist aside, wonderworlds of deep green grass, manicured shrubs, and bloom clouds of every conceivable hue were revealed to them.
That meant they had to redouble their efforts. Jerry had the new trellis built in three days. It was angled to hide the compost pile from virtually every point in the yard. They had it sanded, primed, and painted in a weekend, working early to avoid applying the paint to the pine in the heat of midday. Then, they screwed long hooks into the wood from which they hung a dozen birdhouses of various shapes, colors, and sizes.
“It’s ugly,” said George, inspecting their handiwork after hanging the last strategically placed, earth-tone-painted birdhouse. “Who hangs birdhouses from trellises?”
“It’s distinctive. And it hides the ugly compost pile. And it’s far enough away from the other trellises to avoid trellis clutter. I think it will make an impression.”
They had been attending to the front yard with some halfhearted maintenance that probably didn’t do much good anyway. Now, they ignored it altogether. Not that it mattered that much. The grass had gone completely to hell, cooked a medium-towell-done brown, and possibly past the point of dormancy. That didn’t matter to the Fremonts, whose only concern about their front yard centered on the ailing silver maple, the withering crown of which they could see from the backyard, towering over the roof.
“We should get rid of it,” Nan said. “It’s dying and beyond hope, and it really wrecks the view from here. Imagine a judge admiring what’s on the ground, then looking up to get an eyeful of that old thing.”
A tree service was hired to cut down the silver maple. That cost the Fremonts $1,700, which included removal and grinding up the stump. Coming on top of the $500 it cost to build the trellis, that made George nervous. He knew the money situation was deteriorating rapidly. Stoking that concern into a white-hot panic was the letter they got from the mortgage company informing them that they were in arrears and would they please make payments immediately for this month, plus the three months preceding along with a sizable penalty fee before foreclosure proceedings began.
“So, we’re going to lose our home,” Nan said.
“Not necessarily.”
“Not necessarily? What do you mean, ‘not necessarily’? You think they might be
joking or something?”
George stroked his chin and ran his hand over his bald pate, then picked at his ears, all the while avoiding direct eye contact with Nan. From long, hard experience, Nan knew these were signs that whatever he said next, which would often be with a great show of false bravado, would be absolute crap.
“It usually takes several more notices like this before they actually make a move,” he said. “They don’t want to lose us. This is just the first warning shot fired across the bow.”
Nan stared at George, amazed by what great lengths he would travel to rationalize a bad situation, despite all her years with the poor, delusional slob.
“So, the next shot from the mortgage company does what, knocks down a mast, or puts a nice big hole in the hull, allowing the ship to sink? That’s if you want to continue with your nautical analogy. And I’d have to guess, George dear, that this isn’t the first warning shot . . . three months of no payments? What am I missing here?”
“Nan-bee!”
“Don’t Nan-bee me. Tell me what the deal is.”
George shrugged in that innocent, childlike way that always melted her in lesser situations. Now, it just made her madder.
“What?”
“I don’t remember them. They must have just looked like junk mail. You know all the mail we get marked ‘urgent,’ and it just turns out to be junk mail.”
“Yes, and I also know that there is mail marked ‘urgent’ that really is urgent, and you’ve got to deal with it right away. How much do you have?”
George cleared his throat, cueing Nan that what was to come would be straight and unpleasant, no deceptions.
“We have no savings, of course. In checking, jeez, not enough to come close to paying the mortgage bill. That’s more than $4,000. I figure I’ve got about $450. That’s with utilities and phone bill yet to pay . . . and cable . . . and the newspaper . . . and there is the small matter of a tuition payment for Ellis. And room and board. That’s due next month.... Oh, and Cullen’s first Dartmouth payment. That’s a whopper!”
“Credit card balance?”
Another throat clearing.
“Pretty much maxed out thanks to the party, the trellis, and cutting down the tree. I just made a payment yesterday. Minimum.”
“Greeting card prospects?”
George’s face brightened. “Yeah, I forgot about that. I’ll be getting a check for $300 any day now. Any day now. Ha-cha. I knew there was some good news I forgot to tell you.”
Nan remained stolid, her voice cold and businesslike. “What about your inventions? Isn’t it about time you came up with another world beater of an invention? We got oodles from that last one. But it’s been, what, five years ago, or something like that. And no money left over from that? Unbelievable! You must have some other ideas cookin.’ Huh?”
“Yes, well, I have ideas.”
“Such as . . .”
“Such as the vibrating rake?”
“The vibrating rake.”
“Yeah, you plug it in and it vibrates.”
“Why would anyone want it to do that?”
“Automatic mulch. The vibrating teeth have little hammers on them that pulverize the leaves. Little wires connect each of the teeth to a main wire than runs down the handle to a fifty-foot cord that you plug in.”
“Why not just run your lawn mower over the leaves? That’s what we do.”
“This is why the idea never got past the planning stages.”
“Hmmm. Others?”
“Well, mounts that keep your snowflake collection permanently frozen.”
“That has promise. . . .”
“And chewing gum that has adhesive qualities so you can use it as a sticky putty after it loses its flavor.”
“That sounds okay. Why not try to market those ideas?”
“I haven’t figured out how to make them work.”
“Oh, well, let’s move on along to your more regular gig, that of greeting card hack writer. Got any prospects there? I haven’t seen you composing much of your schmaltz lately. Maybe you’ve been too busy looking at that lingerie stuff on the computer. Huh?”
“Nothing until the holidays,” said the suddenly grim George.
“That would be the Christmas holidays?”
“That would be the Christmas holidays. You?”
“Well, I’ve got about $400 in checking and maybe $75 in my purse. Compounding the problem is my handbags aren’t selling. I’ve got thirteen of them sitting on shelves in stores. If they magically all sell in the next two or three weeks, that’s another. . . um . . . another $400 or so. Still way short. So far short. How did we get to this? We’re going to lose the house! We’re going to lose the house, the backyard, everything, and get thrown out on the street! We’ve been spending so much time on that blasted backyard we’ve lost sight of everything else. I could rip it all up right now!”
“Not necessarily.”
“Not necessarily what?”
“We won’t necessarily lose the house.”
“Shut up with your not necessarily! We ARE going to lose the house unless we come up with a plan. What’s your plan, George?”
“Winning the contest?”
“Oh, be quiet!”
“I’m serious. Haven’t you heard? First prize just got jacked up to $75,000. Businesses all over Livia are chipping in money for it.”
“Seventy-five thousand dollars?”
George nodded eagerly.
“Nobody ever gave that much money for a gardening contest. . . at least until now. Why didn’t you tell me so?”
“I just found out at the party. Cullen and Ellis told me. I meant to tell you. It just slipped my mind.”
“How do Cullen and Ellis know?”
“They must circulate more than we do.”
That Wednesday’s Lollygag carried the official news, which was a stunning revelation because the amount being circulated unofficially was short. According to the Lollygag’s front-page banner headline story, contributions continued to come in. As things stood now, first prize topped $100,000, with Burdick’s trying to egg on more corporate sponsors to top off the contest at $150,000.
The paper quoted Mr. Burdick as saying this could be the biggest contest of its kind ever held . . . in the history of the world! He said he wanted to reward those folks who had given his store so much business over the years and that applications were cut off last week at 240 to prevent mercenaries from jumping to take advantage of the big prize money. This contest, he said, was for people who put their hearts into their gardens and would continue to do so even if no contest existed. He said he had ordered his staff to keep in touch with their landscaping sources and conduct regular patrols to make sure contest applicants weren’t relying on professionals to shape their creations.
Mr. Burdick said he was in personal negotiations right now to line up a sponsorship with the nation’s third-largest lawn care company, although numbers one and two had also expressed interest. He had also made sure his communications department had gotten the word out to not only the local but the national media as well. A major gardening magazine had already contacted him. So had a reporter at the St. Anthony Inquirer, though he had to swallow hard to mention that one, knowing full well that the stupid rag was infiltrated with semi-socialist ultraliberals who wanted to nationalize the gardening industry.
George and Nan worked like gardeners possessed. They laid down more freshening cypress mulch, and checked and rechecked every blossom and leaf daily to make sure any browned and rabbit-nibbled clunkers got snipped off. To George’s surprise, Nan gave up on the dusty miller and without so much as the faintest flicker of remorse dug out the offending plants and cast them with a cackle into the compost.
They gambled on a new plant, one that they could buy fully mature and in reasonably good condition, and scatter around the backyard, and that with proper watering and enough sunlight would guarantee them dozens if not scores of big, multicolored blooms. This was to be their
go-for-broke trump card, the flower that would take them over the top, the one that would explode in the judges’ faces like the floral version of nitroglycerin, and which nobody else that they could see was cultivating.
They gambled on the hibiscus.
19
The Wanton Flower
The tropical hibiscus is generally thought of as a denizen of the warmer, more moist Pacific climates, or of swampy areas of the United States untouched by snowflake or sleet pellet. It is most at home in places where heavy coats are stored more or less permanently in fragrant cedar closets, to be retrieved every three or four years when the mercury crashes through the freezing barrier, plunging maybe even to 29 or 28 degrees Fahrenheit, usually for about ten minutes, at about six a.m.
The plant can, however, live as a summer annual in the far northern reaches of the upper Midwest. The advantages presented by the tropical hibiscus are big blooms of garish yellow, orange, and salmon hues, often varying between the throat of the bloom and the individual petals. There is also the way it encourages otherwise semi-somnolent Midwesterners to break out the Hawaiian shirts and split open some coconuts.
For the more traditional gardeners prevalent in a suburb such as Livia, the notion of planting tropical hibiscus was something that had never even remotely occurred to them. A dignified magnificence was to be preferred. The garish opulence of the tropical hibiscus would, for them, be like putting neon signs on those quaint little bed-and-breakfasts in the picturesque towns along the Muskmelon River. You just didn’t dabble in something like that and expect to be taken seriously. A tropical hibiscus would be much more in its element wedged behind the ear of some half-naked Polynesian wanton, or as the singular floral attraction at some pagan shrine to tastelessness, such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Besides, they were transients, their blooms continually fading, to be replaced by gaudy newcomers. Such a rapid turnover would befuddle the average Livia gardener.
Backyard Page 17