The Summer Garden

by Paullina Simons

  Picking up his dark hand off her white breast and kissing it, she pressed it to her face. “Yes, I’ve learned that lesson well. For better or worse, Alexander,” she said, “you’re the ship I sail on— and go down with.”

  “Did you say go down with or on?”

  She pulled his forearm hair. “You I take with me—to our ninety-seven acres of America. We have nothing else to do but live there and die there. And when we die, we can be buried on the land by our mountain.” She almost smiled. “Not in the ice, not in the frozen earth, but near a sunset. We can call it our Riddarholm Mountain, like that place in Stockholm, and we can be buried there like kings and heroes in our own Temple of Fame.”

  “You’re daydreaming of dying then?” asked Alexander. “Is this how you always get what you want?”

  “I don’t always get what I want. If I got what I wanted,” said Tatiana, staring up into the moss oaks, “we wouldn’t be orphans, you and I.”

  They went to Phoenix.

  Double Wide or Triple Wide?

  “Let’s buy a mobile home and put it on our property.” That was him.

  “You mean a trailer?” That was her.

  “Not a trailer,” Alexander said patiently. “A mobile home. Have you noticed your Temple of Fame-y ninety-seven acres have no house? Where would you like to live while we save up for one? In the tent?”

  They were sitting cross-legged opposite each other in the clay sand on their land on top of Jomax. Anthony was chasing Gila monsters or collecting cholla blooms. The electricity had finally been run on their unpaved upwardly sloping road. A mile down near Pima someone had built two small homes. The desert was singed; it was scorching July. Alexander sat palms out with Tatiana’s little palms flat on top of his.

  “Shura,” she said, “we just lived in a trailer. For three years. I don’t want to live in a trailer anymore. I want a real house.”

  “A mobile home is a real home. And it won’t cost as much as a regular house. We won’t need a mortgage—ah, you like that.” He smiled. “I thought so. We have enough money, we can buy it outright. We’ll get a couple of cars, I’ll build a deck for the back, so we can sit and watch the sun over your little valley, and I’ll find work. We’ll save money and then build exactly what we want.”

  Tatiana frowned. “What cars?”

  He smiled. “I want to get a truck. And you need your own car.”

  She shook her head. “No, no, your truck will do. You can drive me.”

  “I’ll drive you anywhere you want to go, babe,” he said, squeezing her hand, “but unless you plan to grow your cucumbers like your grandfather in Luga, you’re going to have to go food-shopping once in a while. Besides, I’m a carnivore.” He grinned. “I need meat. I can’t live your Luga life of potatoes and onions.”

  She was unconvinced. “Two vehicles is too extravagant for us.”

  “Tania, this isn’t Coconut Grove. No Laundromat a mile away. You’re going to want to go to a department store. Maybe buy yourself some high heels?” He poked her. “An electric can opener?”

  “So we have to spend even more money?” she asked. “This—um, trailer, will it be bigger than our Nomad? Will it be on wheels? Will it have even one bedroom? And what about a bathroom? You can’t live five minutes without water on your body.”

  Alexander stared at her incredulously and then laughed. Jumping up, he gave her his hand, pulling her up. “Come, my communal-apartment-living Russian princess. I’ll show you what I mean. Anthony, let’s go!”

  He drove them to Pacifico Mobile Home dealer on Thomas. After two hours of wandering around the lot full of mobile homes and comparing sizes and prices, Tatiana said, “All right. It’s not bad. But we don’t need a large one. A small one will do.”

  “A minute ago you wouldn’t live in one at all because you were afraid it would be too small, now you want one the size of a closet,” said Alexander. “Where are you going to put your books and can openers, Tatia?”

  The mobile homes came in three widths: the single wide, the double wide, and the triple wide. Tatiana was opting for the single wide—the least expensive. It was 14 feet wide, 30 feet long. It had two bedrooms, one bathroom and a tiny kitchen. “The price is right. And it’s plenty for us,” she said. “We need so little.”

  Alexander sighed in mock exasperation. “Here, let me show you something.” Stepping inside the home, he bent his head to get in and then, once inside, stood nearly touching the ceiling. “You don’t see a problem here?” The model was six and a half feet tall.

  She stepped in the little house without bending or touching anything and stood comfortably, saying, “No.”

  “I know you barely clear five feet, but I’m six three,” Alexander said. “Am I going to have to live with my head permanently bent to the side like this?”

  Tatiana said first of all, she cleared five feet by nearly a full two inches, and second she didn’t know what the big deal was. “It’s just for a little while. You said so yourself. We’ll save more money this way.”

  “It’s not about the price,” said Alexander, stepping back outside into the heat and crossing his arms. “It’s about the life. What if we have to live in it for a couple of years? Don’t you want to be comfortable?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” she said, coming close to him. “As you know—a shack with no roof, as long as it’s with you.”

  Alexander covered her face with his open hand and then kissed her nose through his spread apart fingers. “Well, at least with no roof,” he said, “I won’t get a crick in my neck.” He pulled her to the triple-wide home, where Tatiana said timidly, “You know we can just sell ten of our acres and build ourselves a proper house.”

  Alexander shook his head. “Wife, for someone who’s supposed to have second sight, you sure are completely unprescient. You want to sell our land? If we sell ten acres, then right next to us someone will build twenty homes. Maybe thirty. You want to live that close to other people?”

  “No,” she admitted, sheepishly.

  “Exactly. And second, you bought the land six years ago for fifty dollars an acre. It’s now worth $500 an acre. I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing a trend.”

  “The realtor said—”

  Alexander lowered his voice. “Fuck the realtor.”

  He tried not to smile. He crossed his arms and waited while she wrestled with herself.

  “Fine fine,” she said. “But a triple wide is a colossal waste of money. We don’t need a trailer that big.”

  “What about our squad of offspring? Where are we going to put them?”

  “When we have a squad then we’ll upgrade to a triple wide.”

  “Now that’s a colossal waste of money.”

  It was Tatiana’s turn to cross her arms. Alexander gave in and in the spirit of matrimonial harmony, they compromised—which is, neither got what they wanted.

  The double wide home, 24 feet wide, 60 feet long and 8 feet tall, had a front door, a back door, and a large open area in the center with a kitchen, a dining area and a living room. To the right of the living room was a master bedroom with its own attached bathroom! And a shower! “What a country,” said Tatiana. On the opposite side of the mobile home were two more bedrooms, the bigger one for Anthony and a smaller one for “a nursery,” said Alexander. “A guest room for Vikki and Tom,” said Tatiana. There was another bathroom in the hall and a laundry room.

  “Shura, no more washing clothes in rivers!” she said happily.

  “That’s good,” he said, “considering there’s no water for three states.”

  The home had black and white linoleum in the kitchen and dining area, and wall-to-wall carpeting throughout the rest of the house. “Wall-to-wall carpeting, Tatia,” Alexander said, suggestively reminding her of Lazarevo wood floors gone by, but Anthony was near and Tatiana wasn’t playing, though she was blushing.

  They paid for the home in cash and in two days the workmen delivered it and set it up on cement blocks on
the edge of their property, up on the hill, with the front of the trailer facing the road. They couldn’t look in any direction without seeing the desert or the mountains or the valley.

  “We finally have a home!” Anthony kept yelling, running through the empty house. “We’re not nomads, we’re not gypsies! We have a home!”

  All three of them painted the trailer—the bedroom cream-yellow, Anthony’s room cream-blue. The living room and kitchen walls were the color of crème brûlée, though when Alexander called it that, Tatiana cried. “Why, why do you say such awful things, Dad?” asked Anthony, patting his mother.

  Tatiana hung sheer white curtains, she bought stainless-steel pots and pans. “No more eating out of the same bowl, Shura?”

  “Forever out of the same bowl, Tania.”

  Alexander bought himself a truck. He spent a week picking out just the right one. Finally he decided on a 1947 electric blue Chevy light truck, ¾-ton with a roomy cab, chrome grille and sideboards. He bought Tatiana a brand new 1949 sage green Ford sedan.

  He bought lumber and started building a shed where he could work and keep his tools. “If you’re very good,” Alexander said to Tatiana in a low voice, “I’m going to build a work table in the shed that will be just the right height for you—to peel potatoes on, that is.” Anthony was near so Tatiana wasn’t playing, though she was profoundly blushing.

  They bought a round dining table with extra leaves for when guests came (“Like King Arthur’s,” he said, “so we can discuss the business of our life here”), a comfy couch and three radios. Alexander, with Anthony’s help, built Tatiana two bookshelves, a knick-knack shelf, though she had no knick-knacks, and himself a utility table.

  They bought a Napa-sized, brothel-worthy brass bed. It didn’t have a canopy but it had a box spring and a thick cushy mattress, and was nicely high off the floor. Tatiana spent more woman-hours picking out sheets for the bed than she spent painting and furnishing the rest of the house—though slightly less time than Alexander spent picking out his truck.

  “What color sheets would you like?” she asked him. They were out back in the heat.

  “I don’t care, anything you want.” He had a saw in his hands. He and Anthony were laying out two-by-fours on the ground for their rear deck. Alexander was making it king-size, despite her protestations.

  “Alexander.”

  “What? I don’t care. Anything you want.” His back was to her.

  She pulled him away from Anthony. “It’s our marriage bed. It’s the first real bed you and I have ever had. This is very, very important. We need sheets that reflect this paramount gravity.”

  “That’s a lot to ask of poor sheets.” He went back to sawing the two-by-fours, telling Anthony to keep his little hands away.

  “What color?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Fine. Pink then?”

  “No, not pink.”

  “Polka dotted? Striped? Black?”

  “Anything’s fine.”

  “Pink then?”

  “Not pink I said.”

  “Mommy, how about something with dinosaurs?”

  “What about roosters, Mommy?” Alexander grinned. “Maybe rutting ruminants?”

  Tatiana took the saw out of Alexander’s hands, pulled him up again, and made him write down his three top choices on a piece of paper. He put down white, white, and white. She tore up his piece of paper and made him do it again. He wrote down cream, cream, and cream. She held his hand to the paper and made him write down other words. He was laughing until he couldn’t breathe. “I. Don’t. Care,” he kept saying. “Which part of I don’t care don’t you understand? Please yourself. Make yourself happy.”

  “You are going to have to make love to your wife every night looking at these damn sheets,” she whispered into his ear, “so you better start to care, because you’re going to care in a week.”

  All grimy and sweaty, Alexander drew her to him, his palms on her back, and bending to her and tilting his head, whispered into her mouth, “Tatiasha, I know you won’t believe this, but if I’m looking at the sheets when I’m making love to you, we’ve got bigger problems than what damn color they are.” He kissed her like it wasn’t daylight.

  She pulled away from him, gave the pencil back to Anthony, and huffed away. “That’s it, I’m not playing with you anymore.”

  Finally Tatiana came back with quilts, pillows and blankets, and spent another day washing and ironing them. After she made the bed, she made Alexander close his eyes before she led him inside. “Okay, now open.”

  Alexander opened his eyes. The mass of pillows, the down quilt, the sheets were white. The patchwork quilted bedspread was light cream, almost like white, with satin stitching and velvet crimson buds all over. She’d bought new curtains, too—gauzy with velvet blue and yellow pansies. He stood silently, looking at the bed.

  “Well,” she said eagerly, squeezing his hand. “What do you think?”

  “Eh,” he said with a shrug.

  She burst into tears.

  Laughing, he lifted her into his arms. “Oh, no! The wife has lost her bawdy sense of humor.” He kicked the door shut behind them.

  Their six-year-old Anthony was down the road playing at Francesca’s house with six-year-old Sergio Garcia. There weren’t many children born in 1943; Sergio’s father and mother recently came from Mazatlán, Mexico. Sergio spoke Spanish. Anthony spoke Russian. They were instant best friends. While they played, Alexander made love to Tatiana on their new sheets, and afterward said, “Honestly, I barely noticed them.”

  But she had just been loved and was in no laughing mood.

  “I’d like an armchair for the bedroom,” he murmured.

  “What do we need an armchair in the bedroom for?” she said. “We have a couch outside.”

  “Buy the chair and I’ll show you.”

  After the chair was delivered, he undressed her and kneeled between her legs upraised on the chair arms. Afterward she agreed it was money well spent.

  When Anthony started school they suddenly had their new house all to themselves. They had tomblike daylight privacy. They had DAYLIGHT! They walked Ant downhill to the school bus stop on the corner of Jomax and Pima, in front of Sergio’s house, saw him off, said hello to an always smiling non-English-speaking Francesca, who was pregnant with her second, and then spent the mornings in their plush, downy, soft white bed with crimson buds. Day, daylight, empty house. They christened every room (except Ant’s). The kitchen counters, the kitchen table, the kitchen chairs, the comfy couch, the carpets, the linoleum floors, the baths (with water and without), Alexander’s truck (bench and back of pick-up), Tatiana’s sedan—front and back (and hood). In between, they drove down south once to the Fort Huachuca base, he finished the rear deck and she planted lilac sand verbena and baked bread. The deck was fabulous. They christened that too. They had a wonderful August.

  And then they ran out of money.

  Every penny they had made and earned and saved had gone—into their home and their cars.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “I think I might need to get a job,” he replied.

  She sent him off with a packed lunch. He got work on a painting crew on a large commercial account. But when the gig was over, the work was gone. He got another gig; that was soon gone. It took a while to get paid. Tatiana stopped buying meat. “Buy the meat,” Alexander said. “We’re fine.”

  “Next week there’ll be no work again,” she said.

  The problem wasn’t just the unsteady work, it was the enormity of the labor force and the paucity of the wages. Alexander may as well have been picking grapes in Napa. “Tania, quit worrying. I’ll get new work,” he assured her. “And my reserve check will be coming in any day.” But the small check wasn’t enough to live on, to pay their overwhelming electric bills with the air conditioners being on day and night. Tatiana started anxiously turning off the AC, conserving water, foregoing lunch, making him two sandwiches instead of
three. She told him he could smoke only two packs a day. “Two packs? That’s how you know everything is going to hell in a handbasket,” said Alexander, lighting up.

  Dreaming Oxen

  One night in September Alexander came home from painting, and the house was cool! Tatiana had made Beef Stroganoff. A bottle of wine was open on the table, on the stove a cherry pie was cooling. She came out from the bedroom to greet him wearing a soft dress, her hair down.

  “Oh, no,” he said, in his overalls, covered with barely dried paint. “Is it our anniversary?” He had taken off his boots and left them outside. They were too filthy to bring into his clean house.

  “Mommy got a job,” said Anthony, running up to Alexander.

  “Anthony!” Tatiana exclaimed. “Go to your room right now.”

  Turning around, Anthony stared at her blankly.

  “In the hospital, Dad.”

  “Anthony!”

  Alexander stood bleakly by the door. “Ant,” he said, “you heard your mother. Go to your room.”

  “And do what?”

  Throwing his keys on the side table, Alexander ushered Anthony to his room and shut the door to his plaintive, “What did I do?”

  He walked back to the kitchen.

  “Sit, darling, are you tired?” Tatiana said, pulling out a chair for him. “Or do you want to wash first? Are you thirsty?” She got him a drink, a beer, opened it for him, poured it for him.

  “Are you going to drink it for me, too?” Alexander said, downing it. “What’s going on?”

  “Why don’t you go change, wash? Dinner will be ready in a few minutes.”

  “I’m suddenly not hungry. You got a job?”

  “It’s just to help us a little, like in Napa, remember? Until we get back on our feet.” She was fidgeting.

  Alexander took her by the hands and sat her down in the chair next to him. “You got a job at a hospital?”

  “The hospital. There’s only one. Phoenix Memorial. It’s downtown on Buckeye, just a few miles from here.”

  “Buckeye? It’s forty miles from here!”

  “Thirty-seven. You can come and meet me for lunch.”