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Authors: Nancy Thayer

Everlasting (6 page)

BOOK: Everlasting
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“Yes, fine, perfect,” the woman said, now almost friendly.

Catherine double-checked the woman’s name, phone number, and address before hanging up. She smiled at Mrs. Vanderveld, who was now looking back at her, nearly trembling.

“Oh, dear, did she cancel her order?”

“Oh, no, she agreed she needed more flowers,” Catherine said.

“Oh, my. Well, that’s good, that’s all right, then,” the little woman said.

Catherine was surprised at how worried Mrs. Vanderveld looked when the phone conversation had gone so well. There had been something quite satisfying about telling the haughty woman on the phone what to do, even if it was only with her flowers. She was beginning to think she would like working here.

“But I don’t want you to answer the phone any more, please,” Mrs. Vanderveld said firmly. Seeing Catherine’s expression, she continued hurriedly: “You did beautifully, yes, it’s obvious that you know a lot about what flowers people like for their dinner parties. But you don’t know what flowers we have available, or which flowers we will be able to get for which days—and still make a profit. So you see talking on the phone with a customer is not just a matter of helping him decide what he wants, but helping him decide that
he wants what we can give him
, what we have available or know we can get, and for a reasonable price to him and yet making some little money for us.”

“Oh,” Catherine said. “I see. There’s so much I don’t know.” She felt her good spirits evaporate.

“You will learn, my dear. You are a smart girl, I can tell you will learn very quickly. Now I am exhausted, all this talking! Why don’t you go to the back and make us a cup of coffee? It is getting close to five o’clock. Often we have a rush then, people leaving for work, on their way to dinner parties, wanting to pick up a little something. I always try to have a little sit-down and a cup of coffee around now.”

Catherine looked at her watch. It was already four o’clock. Mrs. Vanderveld climbed onto a high cushioned stool behind the counter. Catherine pushed aside the curtain and went into the now clean, garden-scented back room toward the hot plate.

The back doors flew open and a slender, dark young man entered, his arms full of bags of potting soil. Grunting, he bent to set them on the floor, then straightened and looked at Catherine.

“Hello,” he said formally. His face was terrifyingly beautiful, classic, exotic, as if carved in high relief.

“Hello,” Catherine said, equally formal. Her legs had gone weak.

“I’m Piet Vanderveld,” the man said, holding out his hand.

“Oh,” said Catherine, taking it. His hand was warm and hard and callused. “I’m Catherine Eliot. I’m … I guess I’m …” She didn’t know what she was. A salesgirl?

“The new help,” Piet said. “Good. We can use you. I’ve got another shipment to bring in. Could you hold the doors open?”

“Oh, of course,” Catherine said, moving quickly, thinking: The
help
? Her mother would
die. Good
.

She could not stop staring at Piet Vanderveld as he passed in front of her, carrying bags from a van in the alleyway. He was wearing jeans, a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a dark narrow tie. Nothing unusual there. But
he
was unusual, that was obvious. He was so … foreign. He was slender, with black tulip eyes and sleek black hair. His face was long and narrow, his eyes slanted slightly, his eyebrows arched up like a devil’s. He had a deep cleft in his chin. His looks were exotic; he would have looked perfect naked, frozen into marble, a wreath of flowers on his head, a chalice of wine in one hand, a cluster of pearly grapes in the other. His beauty was excessive, satyric. When he passed by her, she thought she smelled sweat, and immediately she sensed him on the back of a horse, or part of a horse, a centaur, slathered with sweat from the rider’s legs.…

Piet set down the last box. “I’m Dutch,” he said as if answering a question. “I’m the Vandervelds’ nephew.” He was panting slightly. “I help them, sometimes here, sometimes from Amsterdam.”

“Oh,” Catherine said, embarrassed but caught in her intoxication. She wanted only to stand staring, even sniffing, like an animal trying to place a scent. Finally her old school manners saved her. “This is all just so new,” she said as if that would explain why she was staring, dumbfounded. “This is my first day. I have a lot to learn.”

“I’m sure you’ll do well,” he said, smiling. His teeth were very white and even.

“Catherine? Dear? Have you started the coffee?” Mrs. Vanderveld called from the front.

“Oh! I’m doing it right now!” Catherine called back.

She moved quickly to the hot plate. But she was spellbound, and for a few minutes more she could only stand, watching the rings turn from dull black to glowing red as heat rushed through the coils.

* * *

T
he afternoon rushed by. Catherine brought Mrs. Vanderveld her coffee and drank a cup herself as she filled out the employment forms. She held the door for Piet as he carried arrangements to be delivered out to the van. She didn’t see Mr. Vanderveld again that day. She promised Mrs. Vanderveld she’d be at work at nine on the dot the next morning.

Stepping out onto the street that evening, she felt buoyant. It was still light, and the June sun gleamed off taxi bumpers, store windows, and doorknobs like golden blasts from heavenly trumpets. It had come to her! She had a job; she had a home; she had a future. She was starving. Stopping by a bakery, she bought a sandwich and, in her glee, an apple pie for herself and Mrs. Venito.

Back at the apartment, she ate ravenously. She wrote Leslie, words racing from her pen as fast as her hand would go. Before she went to bed, she spent an hour deciding just what to wear the next day. The linen sheath she had worn today now had to be dry-cleaned, and she knew she’d never save any of her salary if it all went to cleaners’ bills.

* * *

T
he next morning, dressed in a washable blue-and-white-checked cotton shirtwaist dress, Catherine arrived at Vanderveld Flowers exactly at nine o’clock.

Already the shop was in chaos. Catherine was shocked, almost offended. All her hard work!

Mr. Vanderveld was working with robot speed at the long work table, stabbing a mixture of flowers into small round clear glass bowls that were already filled with green pittosporum, or pit as Mr. V called it. Flash, flash! in went two white carnations, two yellow daisies, two day lilies, and in the middle, two tight-budded yellow daffodils. Flash, flash! Mr. V slid the bowl aside and did another one. Sloshed water, discarded leaves, and sliced stems flew over the table to the floor.

Without preamble, without so much as a “good morning,” Mr. Vanderveld barked at Catherine: “Take these. Five flats, twenty-four bowls on each flat, they slide into the van. You know where the Gold Room is on Fifth Avenue? Go to the service entrance in the alley. Take them in, collect the other bowls. Be sure they have all one hundred twenty. They owe me if they break a bowl. They always try to cheat me.”

Catherine did as instructed. Driver’s ed at Miss Brill’s had not prepared her for maneuvering a wide van through the city’s narrow back alleys, but after a few days she became expert and enjoyed the driving. She found it especially fun to carry in the trays of cheery bobbing spring flowers.

The return trip, however, was not fun. She was presented with five flats of twenty-four stinking, streaked, disgusting glass bowls full of dead flowers and decaying leaves. When she had parked back in the alley, Mrs. V quickly told her what to do, then hurried back to the front, leaving Catherine to work alone.

Catherine had to empty the fetid refuse into the huge green metal dumpster in the alley. People had put cigarettes out in the bowls; had stuck gum inside. Clumps of stubborn slime stuck to the bottom and sides. She had no choice but to stick her hand in—a tight squeeze—and scrape or scoop out the stuff. The smell was rank. Overwhelming odors of garbage from the restaurant two stores down floated by with its accompanying swarm of flies. She slapped the flies away from her face, getting green gunk in her hair.

Then she had to carry the flats of bowls down the creaking, sagging, wooden steps into the basement, where two huge soapstone sinks stood waiting. She hated the basement on sight. It was cement and brick and cracked stone, with bare light bulbs that hung from pull chains barely illuminating the dim, low-ceilinged room. Shelves of containers and tools lined one wall. Enormous sacks of potting soil, moss, and clay sagged against the walls like drunken men who might at any time begin to move toward her. A rusty water heater burped, a circulating fan pumped dully from the ceiling, and a dehumidifier gurgled. It was like being in the engine room of a sluggish boat on the river Styx, Catherine thought.

She had been told to scrub out the glass bowls with hot water and ammonia. It was essential, both the V’s stressed, that the bowls be perfectly clean, for any slight residue of dead flowers would hold with it bacteria that would cause the new flowers in the bowl to rot quickly. For hours Catherine scrubbed. When she emerged from the basement, hot and sweaty, her dress spotted where the putrid greens had splashed, Mr. V growled, “Why did that take you so long? You must work faster. We don’t have all day.”

For a split second Catherine thought she would quit. It would have been so easy simply to walk out the door. She had never intended to spend her life scrubbing bowls in a basement.

But Mr. V’s, “Here. Prep these. Pound the stems on the lilacs. Slice the roses diagonally,” made her think again.

Mr. Vanderveld steered her to the table where buckets of flowers fresh from the flower market stood awaiting her preparation. The sweet fragrance from the masses of lilacs and roses, so many roses, hundreds of long-stemmed roses in pink and red and buttery yellow, drifted up around her like a spell. She prepared the flowers. This she could do well and fast, for she had learned to do this for her grandmother at Everly. When she was through, Mr. V raised one eyebrow and nodded brusquely. “That’s
gut
,” he said.

She went home that second day with her hands stained and her clothing dappled green. The next day on her lunch hour she bought a long-sleeved smock and comfortable flat shoes. From that day on, only when she was sent off delivering or asked to take charge of the front for a while when Mrs. V had errands did she remove her smock and put on dress shoes or comb her hair and freshen her lipstick.

Clearly in this job her appearance was not of primary importance. Still, as the weeks went by, Catherine worried about her hands. Even though she had learned to protect her clothing, her hands still got stained. The skin under and around her nails was rimmed with green. Her hands were in water so much of the time that the natural oils were washed away, and her skin became chapped and brittle. Holly or boxwood or thorned flowers sliced at her hands, and she developed an allergy to the sappy film from the eucalyptus. At night she constantly washed her hands with Lestoil and Borax, then coated them with Vaseline.

For the first time in her life, Catherine was busy. All day long she worked hard, and by evening she was tired. Tired, and yet not settled, not finished. By late August she’d come to realize how imprecisely she understood some of the phrases Mr. Vanderveld tossed at her with urgent carelessness. What was the difference between art deco and Louis Quinze? Between teak and walnut? Between a wedding for two young people and for two widowers? She studied catalogs from the various colleges and trade schools, and that fall she began to take evening courses in interior design and art history.

She kept up with the activities of her old Miss Brill’s classmates—who were in college, going to dances, skiing, traveling to Europe, getting engaged. Catherine might deliver corsages to the homes of friends for dances or help set up floral displays for their parents’ holiday parties, but she handed the corsages to the maids who answered the door and worked with the families’ secretaries or housekeepers, and so she seldom saw her friends. That didn’t matter. None of the past seemed to matter. She was engrossed in her current life. There was so much she wanted to learn. Suddenly there were never enough hours in the day.

Perhaps, she thought, she had caught some of her passion for work from the Vandervelds. Certainly they were an energetic, even frenzied pair. Mr. V was always in a hurry, always late, always frantic, and clearly he considered his work of crucial significance in the world. With his red suspenders, red bow tie, and flushed face, his nose and cheeks bouquets of broken capillaries, he resembled a cardinal, twittering, fluttering, thrashing through his life. Mrs. V was the perfect cardinal’s wife. She hopped around the shop, bustling and chirping, pecking at her receipts and bills, rustling things into shape. When Catherine was in the shop with the Vandervelds, she felt intense, alive, and dramatic.

In contrast, Piet Vanderveld contained a quality of stillness that both attracted and frightened Catherine. The older Vandervelds hustled and flurried. Their nephew moved calmly, wasting not one movement. They babbled. He listened, nodded, acted. As the months passed, Mrs. Vanderveld told Catherine about her past, about her early life in Amsterdam, meeting Mr. V, starting the store, their desire for children, their sorrow at having none, the success of the store burgeoning beyond their early dreams. Piet told Catherine nothing about himself. Sometimes women phoned him, but he never confided his interest in them by so much as a smile. He didn’t ask Catherine about herself. He didn’t flirt with her.

But he was darkly and sensually attractive. He was like a coiled snake sunning on a rock, so still, yet so beautiful, that Catherine longed to reach out to him. Piet was magnetic. She always felt his pull. As time passed he began to fill her dreams, and in defense, during the days, she avoided him as much as possible.

She continued to live in Leslie’s apartment and in time came to think of it as
her
apartment. It was within walking distance to Vanderveld Flowers, to her parents’ apartment to visit her brother and sister, an easy subway ride to her evening courses. The shops, the parks, even some of the neighbors’ and doormen’s faces and names, became as familiar to her as the faculty and students at Miss Brill’s. She was beginning to feel at home.

BOOK: Everlasting
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ads

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