The Garden Path (7 page)

Was this, as her cousin Deborah used to say, “a shame”? Was it really “too bad” that they hadn't all parted friends as Debbie's sister-in-law and
her
ex-husband had? “A real pity” that they didn't spend at least Christmas together for the sake of the children? Rosie tried sometimes, though the attempt always either bored or infuriated her, to explain to Debbie that it wasn't any of those things, that it wasn't abnormal or sinful or even particularly sad (not to mention none of her business) for the members of a family to dislike each other and want nothing to do with each other. She and Peter, Rosie insisted, were
happy
without Edwin and Susannah. “Then you're cold fish,” said her cousin. Rosie turned away with a shrug. “Not to even want to spend Christmas together,” Debbie persisted.

Rosie could remember Christmases past, and she imagined Christmases present suffused with the malice and discontent of Susannah, with the dullness and pettiness of Edwin—and with the meanness that grew in her own heart in their company—and she said to Debbie, “No, thanks. Peter and I are going to Aruba with Larry for Christmas.”

Debbie gasped, disapproval turning her face red under heavy makeup. “To Aruba!” She always gasped; everything confounded the poor girl.

That was 1968, when Peter was sixteen. Rosie was seeing a tweedy lawyer named Larry Bruner. The Christmas trip to Aruba which so shocked her cousin was in fact Rosie and Larry's last attempt to love each other enough to marry. The venture wasn't a total washout, compared, say, to that tropical honeymoon with Edwin, a comparison Rosie inevitably made and which endeared to her Larry's garrulous good humor and constant attention. The three of them were charmed by the gentle blue-green beauties of the place, by sun and sea and tangles of bright flowers, and Christmas presents opened on a terrace under an umbrella. But Larry didn't like the bond, viewed at close range, between Peter and Rosie. That's how he put it: “I don't
like
it,” meaning he considered it in some way unhealthy but not wanting to say so, even when she pressed him. And she did press him, wanting to hear the words that would part them, knowing they were there to be spoken. But he kept hedging and hinting, telling her meaningful anecdotes from his own life. He himself at sixteen had been hard at work battling his parents at every turn. He couldn't comprehend a teenage son who was openly fond of his mother, who kissed her not only good night but good morning, and who had no interest in joining the group of noisy, flirting teenagers who gathered nightly on the hotel terrace while their parents crowded into the bar. And he resented her allowing Peter to sit up with them until all hours. She didn't tell Larry she permitted such liberties—liberties that certainly did sabotage their romance—because she had already decided she and Larry had no future. She preferred Peter's company to Larry's—though, when Peter did go to his room at night, what she and Larry did in the privacy of theirs continued to be ingenious and gratifying. Sometimes, lying in bed with Barney or digging in the garden pondering her lost youth, Rosie missed Larry Bruner. But on New Year's Day she bid him farewell forever, because—this is what it came down to—he didn't like her son.

There were other men, of course. She preferred reasonably long, temporarily permanent relationships, the kind in which they installed a toothbrush in her bathroom but still called before coming over. Peter was initially suspicious of each of her beaux. Having learned the vocabulary of the age, he was always afraid they were using her, that she was being taken advantage of simply because she slept with them, that “serial monogamy,” as he called it, was an unhealthy, dangerous lifestyle. But Rosie was lucky in love—up to a point, the point being one just short of remarriage—because she had an instinct for nice men. She had used up all her bad judgment and gullibility on Edwin. After the divorce, she was canny. She developed a nose for phonies, and for the smell of dullness. Her life, during the years of her thirties and her forties, was busy with men, full of delights for both the spirit and the flesh, with here and there a sad parting thrown in for drama.

Peter got used to his mother's liaisons and began to have some of his own, the nature of which Rosie had no inkling of at the time. Or very little inkling. He had girlfriends, too. He told her, all those years later, with tears in his eyes, how he had tried to want to do with his girlfriends what the guys at school boasted they did with theirs, and how he had failed. He had taken Nancy Kirkpatrick to the senior prom. Nancy Kirkpatrick had had an aggressive and highly visible crush on Peter all through high school. Rosie could never understand why he didn't like her—a bright, pretty girl who knew something about gardening. Ideal daughter-in-law material.

“I couldn't stand her lipstick,” Peter told Rosie during his Christmas night confession. “She laid it on with a palette knife.”

“But, Peter, a
lot
of men don't like heavy lipstick,” she said.

He gave her a reproachful look she'd never forgotten. “Ma,” he said gently, and she blushed. “I'm telling you how I am,” he went on. “You're not going to talk me out of it. It's not just a matter of lipstick.”

She apologized. She swore to herself that from that moment she would accept it. She became by an act of will the tolerant, large-minded mother Peter was so proud of and so amused by, and gradually she became that way naturally, genuinely, wishing for her son exactly what she'd told him she wished—happiness.

As Rosie lay awake that night, imagining the soft snow falling outside on her garden, she despaired of it, of happiness for Peter. She could think of him only with woe. What would become of him? She wondered whether Hollis had come to hate Peter as she had hated Edwin, had looked on his face as he slept with loathing, had cringed at picking up an article of his clothing or sitting on a chair still warm from his bottom, had come to dread the sound of his voice.… Oh, it was unimaginable. She remembered the sweetness of the two of them together. She half considered getting in touch with Hollis and begging him to go back to Peter, offering him money, weeping on her knees—finding a certain pleasurable disgust in picturing this grotesque scene. It was preferable, at least, to the scene Peter's last words had conjured up. “You're going to have to face her sooner or later,” he had said. It was, of course, true, and it edged closer and closer to her imagination until she got out of bed, put on the lights, and went downstairs to her pile of seed catalogs.
Susannah hath murdered sleep
, she said to herself, making tea and a peanut butter sandwich.

But sitting down to the catalogs was a treat she'd been saving up all month, holding off until she had them all, leafing through them as they came but waiting for the right moment to actually get down to business, make charts and lists and diagrams and decide what to order. She put on her reading glasses and let the catalogs console her, their thin pages crowded with color photos showing improbable lushness, unattainable perfection, staggering beauty. Rosie got out the paper plots she had made of her garden in spring, summer, fall, to see where the gaps were and what had died or failed or been a mistake, and how she could fill them in. They wouldn't be taping this year, so this wouldn't be a television garden, and she could afford to experiment a bit. Should she try a rock garden again? Hers had always failed—hadn't, at least, equaled the one she remembered at Silvergate that her grandfather had made, with its green and white and blue and purple clusters of tiny Alpine flowers, looking as if nature had done it all by accident. The one Rosie attempted had looked studied and rather silly, and she had eventually ripped out all the plants and let it revert to a rock pile where the Sheffields' cat sunned herself. But she was tempted by her memory. Or sweet peas: she'd never grown nice sweet peas, though she had dug them deep, mulched with peat moss, watered like mad, and provided expensive “weatherized trellis netting” for them to climb on; and yet she remembered the Painted Ladies and Queen Alexandras that had flourished so easily in the garden in England. And Japanese iris, of course, which she could never get to thrive properly in her yard.

She sat for hours with catalogs from Park's and Wayside and Harris and Johnny's and Weston's and the New England Rootstock Association and Thompson and Morgan. There was a stack of letters, too, from nurseries and seed companies and manufacturers of garden implements, asking her to endorse their products or accept free samples. She looked through these, to see what temptations she was so nobly rejecting, and then threw them in the fire. She never gave in to such blandishments; she hated being beholden. What she liked, in spite of any small fame she had acquired, was to sit down with the catalogs like a typical suburban gardener, and paw through them. She picked out a new hybrid primrose, decided to skip the rock garden, took a chance on a perennial bush strawberry and some yellow raspberries, and ordered more vegetable seeds than she could ever use.

“Rosie Mortimer's Garden,” perforce, contained plenty of veggie lore. Unlike the English, whose flowers come first, Americans tend to grow vegetables.

“If I can't eat it I don't grow it,” Kathy Andrews always said. She was Rosie's across-the-street neighbor, whose backyard plot produced a stand of corn every summer that could serve as a set for
Oklahoma!
And Jim and Kiki Sheffield, next door, grew tomatoes; their garden was a wilderness of red fruit, green foliage, and yellow beetle traps, and they put up hundreds of quarts of tomato sauce over Labor Day weekend every year. “What do you do with it all?” Rosie asked once when they brought over her annual gift of a half a dozen jars. “I put tomato sauce in
everything
,” Kiki said. And it was true that whenever Rosie ate dinner there they had something red and Italian.

So she did vegetables for her fans. If she concentrated chiefly on flowers, her great love, she'd be briskly canceled. But she had nothing against veggies, and she happily grew plenty of them herself, though she drew the line at corn. For one show, she invited the cameras across the street and introduced Kathy, her picturesque family, and her cornpatch onto WEZL–TV (and that segment was expanded by the genius of Janice into a series they called “My Neighbors' Gardens”).

Rosie was unable to decide about the iris and left that order for another sleepless night or peaceful afternoon. Wandering among flowers and shrubs and rows of vegetables—even on paper, in imagination, in memory—soothed her and made her, toward dawn, comfortably sleepy, so that she slept at last with gardens in her dreams instead of children.

It snowed all that night, and by morning there were several inches. The plows hadn't yet come when Rosie got up at ten. Schools were closed; the Andrews children, in red and blue hats, were out in their yard making a snowman. There was the hushed, clanky rasp of shoveling. A dog woofed excitedly over someone's lawn. Precarious rims of snow outlined the branches of the trees, and the sun shone on everything, laying distinct angles of black across the white.

Rosie awoke utterly refreshed. Looking out on the purity of the day, she felt as if the snow had fallen on her own hot soul, cooling and cleaning it, leaving it new. After she had her oatmeal, she put on her boots and mittens and down jacket and knitted cap and, after shoveling a path, she went for a walk. The streets were quiet; even the Post Road, where the plowed snow was gradually turning to slush and leaving bare spots, was nearly deserted, and she walked along it, liking the way the soles of her boots met the fresh snow, the merest pull as the snow grabbed on, the slight difficulty as she lifted her foot again. It was “good packing weather,” as Peter and his pals used to say, and she made a snowball now and then and threw it at the side of a building or a parked car. It was a beautiful day, so beautiful that even the tawdry stores—Big B's Discount Haven, The Liquor Supermarket, Galetti's Drug, E-Z-Do Laundromat, Alexander's Hair Works—seemed purified in the snow and the sun.

She walked west, into Chiswick. Her objective as she stated it to herself was to see if Zakrzeski's was open—the Polish bakery where she sometimes bought
poteca
—a fresh, yeasty hunk of poteca being just the thing to munch on when she returned. But as she walked she realized, with a furtive and unexpected sense of adventure, that she was heading for the vacant storefront in Chiswick that Susannah and her husband had rented. She would see if it was true; she would spy on them, anonymous in her cap and her heavy clothes. She imagined peeking in a window and seeing Susannah languid in a chair eating a candy bar while her poor husband huffed and puffed over packing cases full of ginseng and soybeans.

She passed Zakrzeski's—yes, they were open, she'd stop on the way back—and headed quite deliberately past McDonald's, Arnie's Auto Body, the Glitter City Roller Dome, Fosdick Body Works, Shoe City, Dunkin' Donuts, Chiswick Princess Beauty Supply Shop, and finally the site of the failed bookstore, in a mini-shopping center between Wendell's Tropical Fish Paradise and the Post Road Liquor Boutique.

Rosie trudged across the pristine parking lot. Only the Liquor Boutique was open. In Wendell's, there was the purple gloom of rows of dimly lit fish tanks. The plate glass window of the empty store was dusty and bare—no hand-painted sign announcing the imminent opening of
SUE
'
S NATURAL EATS
or
IVAN
'
S GOURMET HEALTH EMPORIUM
or whatever absurd and probably inaccurate label they planned to tack on their place. She peered cautiously in through the grime, ready to pull her collar up and her hat down at any threat of recognition. But there was no one inside. The store was still lined with bookshelves, one of which had fallen over. There was a counter. There was a filthy black and white tile floor. There were empty-looking cardboard cartons in a corner. That was all, just those bleak innards staring out at her indifferently. Rosie felt a vague disappointment—she had liked the idea of spying. She also felt a pang of pity for her daughter, for her ugly, taciturn husband, for the anonymous local friend who had talked the two of them into this nonsensical step or who had let them talk him into it. Doomed crazy hippies who would never grow up. Irresponsible flower babies who hoped to push tofu burgers in this wonderland of exhaust fumes and Big Macs and sweet pink wine and hair spray. It all looked, to say the least, unpromising. The view in that dusty window, Rosie decided, was one of the most depressing sights she'd ever seen.