Alice Bliss (26 page)

“Will you set the table when you’re finished there? With the good china?”

“Couldn’t Ellie do it? And I could at least stake out the first half dozen rows—”

“—Alice—”

She can’t exactly slam down the good china plates, though she would like to drop them in a big heap. Her mother pokes her head in the door.

“Not that tablecloth.”

“Why not?”

“The other white one.”

“What difference does it make? They’re both white.”

“Thanks, honey. And cloth napkins, please. Can you fold them?”

This is like torture, Alice thinks. Drip, drip, drip. All day long. And there goes the sun, a tiny sliver managing to peek out from the rain clouds, there goes the sun disappearing from the sky. Along with Alice’s plans. This is not how today was supposed to go. Dad would not have let this day get away from him, no matter what Angie had planned. He would have known how to work around her or ignore her or tease her into going along with him. Grown-ups have more options in that department, Alice thinks. She would like to just say no to her mother; in fact, she has been trying to do that all day.

“Mom!” she shouts. “I need to plant the garden!”

“That’s just going to have to wait for another day, Alice. How many times—?”

“—How many times do I have to tell you this is the day! Today, Mom! Not yesterday! Not tomorrow! Today!”

“I don’t understand what the big deal is.”

“You’re not listening to me. This is the day. Same day. Every year. Tradition. Me and Dad. Tradition.”

“I don’t see what difference one day more or less makes.”

Alice is so frustrated she is almost crying, which she has vowed never to do in front of her mother ever again.

“Alice, you’re just going to have to give in on this one. Can you finish setting the table, please?”

“Why can’t Ellie help you? Why can’t—?”

“—Alice!
”

Uncle Eddie appears, having let himself in the backdoor.

“Would you just lay off the poor kid?”

“Stay out of it, Eddie.”

“I’m just saying—”

“What do you know about raising kids?”

“I thought you were talking about the garden.”

“What sacrifices have you ever had to make?”

“Is this a contest? You win, Angie. You’ve made more sacrifices than I have. What does that have to do with anything?”

“This is none of your business, Eddie.”

“Angie, c’mon . . . She just wants to plant the garden.”

Alice considers stepping into the fray and then thinks better of it when Angie’s next tirade turns into tears, and Uncle Eddie takes her in his arms. Angie’s sobs are so loud and so ragged Alice would like to put her hands over her ears or turn on the radio to drown out the sounds and the feelings, but she can’t move. It’s kind of like watching a car wreck, only scarier.

When Angie finally pulls herself together, Alice turns away and very carefully, very quietly finishes setting the table.

And then it’s as though they all make a silent pact to pretend that everything is fine, everything is perfectly normal as they navigate the minefield that is dinner.

 

After dinner, Alice stands next to Gram at the sink drying dishes while Mom and Uncle Eddie smooth things over with a bottle of wine in the living room.

“Good pie, huh?” Gram says.

“Yeah,” Alice agrees, looking out the kitchen window through the rain, squinting to see the garden.

“Maybe a bit too much sugar.”

Alice hands the pie plate back. “You missed a spot.”

“I did not!”

“Right there.”

“You remember Grampa?” Gram asks.

“Of course!”

“From before he got sick?”

Alice thinks of the hospital and the blue-striped bathrobe he insisted on bringing from home, but then she remembers sitting on his lap on the maroon velvet couch in the big old house and Grampa reading to her,
The Girl of the Limberlost
, she thinks it was.

“He’d do all the voices when he read to me.”

“That’s right.”

“And he always smelled good.”

“Bay rum.”

Gram hands her a mixing bowl to dry.

“He was a good-looking man.”

“Gram!”

“What? He
was
.”

“Are you twinkling, Gram?”

“And lovable; he had this sweetness.”

“Sweet as pie?”

“Maybe that’s why Char always wanted more sugar. If she could’ve had Grampa, she’d have been waking up with sweetness every day of her life.”

“Wait a minute—”

“Her whole life that girl loved sugar. Spoonfuls in her coffee, on her oatmeal. It makes my teeth ache just thinking about it.”

“Maybe that’s what made her so sweet.”

“Ha! My sister was a barracuda!”

“She was not!”

“Get in between Char and what she wanted and watch out!”

“What did she want?”

“Oh, that’s ancient history.”

“C’mon, Gram.”

Gram hands Alice the roasting pan.

“Grampa. Before he was Grampa, of course.”

“What?”

“Stopped speaking to me for nearly a year when James fell in love with me.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“And then she married his brother Bobby. And never, ever stopped flirting with James.”

“But you loved her—”

“Of course I loved her. She was my little sister. Doesn’t mean we didn’t have our issues.”

Ellie walks into the kitchen and pulls her recorder out of its case.

“Check this out,” Ellie says, unfolding a list of words. ”
Cabbaged
and
fabaceae
, each eight letters long, are the longest words that can be played on a musical instrument.”

And then she plays them on her recorder.

Alice looks at Gram and bites her lip to keep from laughing.

“What does
fabaceae
mean?” Gram wants to know.

“Of, or consisting of beans,” Ellie says as she pushes her glasses up on her nose.

“Who knew?”

“Seven-letter words you can play on a musical instrument include
acceded
,
baggage
,
bedface
,
cabbage
,
defaced
, and
effaced
.”

“
Bedface
?” Alice asks.

“It’s in the dictionary,” Ellie says, as she plays the seven-letter words.

“It’s not exactly a tune.”

“No, it’s an oddity, an aberration, an anomaly . . .”

“Okay! Okay!”

“What’s your new favorite word?” Gram asks.

“I have two:
Acnestis.
Noun. On an animal, the point of the back that lies between the shoulders and the lower back, which cannot be reached to be scratched. And
pandiculation
. Noun. The stretching that accompanies yawning.”

“How about
procrastinate
?” Alice shoots back. “Or
perseverate
? Or
temporize
? Delay! Delay! Delay!”

“What are you talking about?” Gram wants to know.

“I’m supposed to be planting the garden. It should be done. Finished. Put to bed.”

“Too late now,” Ellie says.

“Thanks a lot, sport.”

“Maybe it’s just as well,” Gram offers. “We’re supposed to be getting more sleet tomorrow.”

“These are the cold weather crops. Cold weather crops
like
the cold.”

Alice finds herself close to tears, yet again. Why is it no one will listen to her today?

“Ellie! Time for bed!” Mom calls from the living room.

“That’s my cue,” says Gram. “Eddie, I need my coach and four!”

The next thing you know, Gram and Uncle Eddie are on their way home, Ellie’s in the bathtub talking a mile a minute to Mom, who is perched on the edge of the tub, and Alice is out the door. In the workshop she puts on her dad’s jacket, work gloves, and a hat. She slips into her rubber boots, then gathers what she needs: a hoe, string, stakes, seeds, the Coleman lantern. And finally, finally she is in the garden.

She goes back into the workshop to get the stool for the lantern so that, elevated, it can shed more usable light. In the cold, drizzling rain, in the dark, she stakes her rows one by one. Leaf lettuce, red and green, spinach, beets, radishes, peas, carrots. She hears her dad’s voice reminding her to alternate the red and green lettuce. They look so nice like that.
Short rows, Alice. Stagger the planting over two weeks.

She stops for a moment to listen to the wind in the branches and the steady drip of the rain, and then bends to work with the hoe, making her furrows. Not too deep. The soil is wet and heavy but she takes her time, just the way her dad does, and her rows are true.

She has to take her gloves off to handle the seed packets and the seeds. Her hands are freezing as she tears open the first seed packet.

“Alice?”

It’s her mom. In a raincoat and rain boots and holding an umbrella.

“Half an hour, I’ll be done.”

“Can I help?”

“Not with that stupid umbrella.”

Angie closes the umbrella, pulls a hat out of her pocket, and waits for Alice to tell her what to do.

“Dad and I work in from the outside. So we don’t get in each other’s way.”

“Okay.”

“Can you see the last row? Beets.”

She hands her the seed packet.

“Be patient. Don’t over seed.”

“Just one row?”

“I’ll see how you do and then decide if you get to do another one.”

They work in silence except for the slight hiss of the Coleman lantern and the steady drip of the rain.

“It’s raining down my neck!” Angie complains.

“You’ll live,” Alice says.

Alice is down on her hands and knees, carefully mounding soil over the seeds.

“Sweetie, I’m not really dressed for kneeling in the dirt.”

“I’ll do it. You just do the seeds.”

Angie straightens up from the row of beets.

“Good enough?”

Alice checks out her mother’s work, as well as she can, given the limited light.

“I guess I’m gonna have to trust you on this one.”

“What’s next?”

Alice hands her a packet of carrot seeds.

“How do you keep your hands from freezing off?”

“You don’t.”

Alice finishes the spinach and the radishes and the peas in the time it takes Angie to finish the row of carrots, and then she’s on her knees, mounding the soil over the seeds. She is rewarded with her dad’s voice again:
Tamp it down a bit. Not too tight.

The soil is cold and wet and she is thinking of the days to come, the sunny days to come when she will plant peppers and tomatoes and beans and corn and squash and the soil will be warm in her hands. She can hear her dad rattling off his favorite varieties of tomatoes:
Early Girl, Brandywine, Big Rainbow, Mr. Stripey, Nebraska Wedding.
She’ll plant them all.

“Is that it?” Angie wants to know.

“That’s it.”

“Okay. Let’s get you into the bathtub.”

“I’m gonna stay out here for a bit, Mom.”

“Alice . . .”

Alice looks at her mom; she notices that her hair is plastered to her neck. Then she looks out over the dark mass of the garden.

“Sometimes I can hear him,” she says. “Not like in a crazy way or anything. I can hear the things he’s said to me. How to do things and stuff.”

“It’s really cold, honey.”

“We’d always just sit here for a few minutes when we finished planting.”

Alice picks up the lantern and wipes the rain off the stool for her mom. Angie hesitates and then sits. Alice sets the lantern down and then kneels in the dirt. She pulls a Snickers bar out of the jacket pocket, unwraps it, and hands half to her mom.

“Snickers?”

“Dad’s favorite.”

“Really?”

“You didn’t know that?”

“Nope.”

They eat the Snickers.

“Normally, when Dad and I would do this the sun would be shining and some birds would be singing and . . .”

“I know, I know . . .”

“And you’d just sort of feel things beginning and things continuing . . . the way some things get to continue . . . because it’s the same things that are beginning every spring . . . and it’s like . . . so full of hope, you know? To put those seeds in the ground every year.”

Alice hasn’t said this many words in a row to her mother in a long time. She wonders if it’s the dark that is letting her talk like this. Or the fact that Angie has entered Alice’s world for a change.

“Can you smell that smell?”

Angie sniffs, skeptical and dubious that there could be something out here she would actually like to smell. Because while she may like big animals and barns and farmers and farmers’ wives, she does not, in any way, shape, or form, like dirt.

“Which smell?”

“All of them.”

“Honey, the garden isn’t really—”

“Ellie told me a new word today.
Petrichor.
The loamy smell that rises from the ground after rain. Isn’t it cool that there’s a word for that?”

“Ellie and her dictionary.”

“It’s there. Just like she said. It’s there.”

Water is now dripping from Angie’s neck down Angie’s back and she is wishing she could enter into the spirit of all of this with Alice a bit more fully, that she could just inhale
petrichor
like a really good sport, but just as fervently she is wishing she could get inside her nice, dry house.

“So . . . is that enough communing with nature for one night?”

Alice laughs.

“You go in. I’ll put the tools away.”

Angie picks up her umbrella and heads back to the house. She’s washing her hands at the kitchen sink and looks up to see that Alice is still in the garden, still kneeling in the dirt. The light from the lantern barely illuminates her. Angie turns out the kitchen light and returns to the window, thinking she might be able to see a little better. What is she waiting for? Her father’s voice? A miracle? Is she praying?