Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  The stout man handed me a glass. I sipped gratefully. “You’re Ophelia and Rachel’s neighbor, aren’t you?” he said. “Lovely garden. You must be proud of that asparagus bed.”

  “I was, until I saw Ophelia’s.”

  “Ooh, listen to the green-eyed monster,” Silver cooed. “Don’t be jealous, honey. Ophelia’s the best. Nobody understands plants like Ophelia.”

  “I’m not jealous,” I said with dignity. “I’m wistful. There’s a difference.”

  Then, just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, Geoff appeared, looking stunningly unprofessorial, with one side of his shirt collar turned up and his dark hair flopped over his eyes.

  “Hey, Evie. Who knew a couple of dykes would know how to throw a wedding?”

  You’d think after sixteen years of living with Geoff, I’d know whether or not he was an alcoholic. But I don’t. He doesn’t go on binges, he doesn’t get drunk at every party we go to, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t drink on the sly. What I do know is that drinking doesn’t make him more fun to be around.

  I took his arm. “I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” I said brightly. “Too bad we have to leave.”

  “Leave? Who said anything about leaving? We just got here.”

  “Your papers,” I said. “Remember?”

  “Screw my papers,” said Geoff and held out his empty cup to Silver. “This punch is dy-no-mite.”

  “What about your students?”

  “I’ll tell ’em I didn’t feel like reading their stupid essays. That’ll fix their little red wagons. Boring as hell anyway. Fill ’er up, beautiful,” he told Silver.

  Silver considered him gravely. “Geoff, darling,” he said. “A little bird tells me that there’s an absolutely delicious argument going on in the smoking room. They’ll never forgive you if you don’t come play.”

  Geoff favored Silver with a leer that made me wish I were somewhere else. “Only if you play too,” he said. “What’s it about?”

  Silver waved a pink-tipped hand. “Something about theoretical versus practical anarchy. Right, Rodney?”

  “I believe so,” said the stout gentleman agreeably.

  A martial gleam rose in Geoff’s eye. “Let me at ’em.”

  Silver’s pale eyes turned to me, solemn and concerned. “You don’t mind, do you, honey?”

  I shrugged. With luck, the smoking-room crowd would be drunk too, and nobody would remember who said what. I just hoped none of the anarchists had a violent temper.

  “We’ll return him intact,” Silver said. “I promise.” And they were gone, Silver trailing fragrantly from Geoff’s arm.

  While I was wondering whether I’d said that thing about the anarchists or only thought it, I felt a tap on my shoulder—the stout gentleman, Rodney.

  “Mrs. Gordon, Rachel and Ophelia would like to see you and young Kimberly in the study. If you’ll please step this way?”

  The shift in manner from wedding guest to old-fashioned butler was oddly intimidating. Without argument, I trailed him to the front hall—empty now, except for Lucille and the young person in chartreuse lace, who were huddled together on the bench by the fireplace. The young person was talking earnestly and Lucille was listening and nodding and sipping punch. Neither of them paid any attention to us or to the music coming from goodness knew where. At the foot of the stairs Kim was examining the newel post.

  It was well worth examining: a screaming griffin with every feather and every curl beautifully articulated and its head polished smooth and black as ebony. Rodney gave it a brief, seemingly unconscious caress as he started up the steps. When Kim followed suit, I thought I saw the carved eye blink.

  I must have made a noise, because Rodney halted his slow ascent and gazed down at me, standing openmouthed below. “Lovely piece of work, isn’t it? We call it the house guardian. A joke, of course.”

  “Of course,” I echoed. “Cute.”

  It seemed to me that the house had more rooms than it ought to. Through open doors, I glimpsed libraries, salons, parlors, bedrooms. We passed through a stone cloister where discouraged-looking ficuses in tubs shed their leaves on the cracked pavement and into a green-scummed pool. I don’t know what shocked me more: the cloister or the state of the ficuses. Maybe Ophelia’s green thumb didn’t extend to houseplants.

  As far as I could tell, Kim took all this completely in stride. She bounded along like a dog in the woods, peeking in an open door here, pausing to look at a picture there, and pelting Rodney with questions I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking, like “Are there kids here?”; “What about pets?”; “How many people live here, anyway?”

  “It depends,” was Rodney’s unvarying answer. “Step this way, please.”

  Our trek ended in a wall covered by a huge South American tapestry of three women making pots. Rodney pulled the tapestry aside, revealing an iron-banded oak door that would have done a medieval castle proud. “The study,” he said, and opened the door on a flight of ladder-like steps rising steeply into the shadows.

  His voice and gesture reminded me irresistibly of one of those horror movies in which a laconic butler leads the hapless heroine to a forbidding door and invites her to step inside. I didn’t know which of three impulses was stronger: to laugh, to run, or, like the heroine, to forge on and see what happened next. It’s some indication of the state I was in that Kim got by me and through the door before I could stop her.

  I don’t like feeling helpless and I don’t like feeling pressured. I really don’t like being tricked, manipulated, and herded. Left to myself, I’d probably have turned around and taken my chances on finding my way out of the maze of corridors. But I wasn’t going to leave without my daughter, so I hitched up my wedding-appropriate long skirt and started up the steps.

  The stairs were every bit as steep as they looked. I floundered up gracelessly, emerging into a huge space sparsely furnished with a beat-up rolltop desk, a wingback chair and a swan-neck rocker at one end and some cluttered door-on-sawhorse tables on the other. Ophelia and Rachel, still dressed in their bridal finery, were sitting in the chair and the rocker respectively, holding steaming mugs and talking to Kim, who was incandescent with excitement.

  “Oh, there you are,” said Ophelia as I stumbled up the last step. “Would you like some tea?”

  “No, thank you,” I said stiffly. “Kim, I think it’s time to go home now.”

  Kim protested vigorously. Rachel cast Ophelia an unreadable look.

  “It’ll be fine, love,” Ophelia said soothingly. “Mrs. Gordon’s upset, and who could blame her? Evie, I don’t believe you’ve actually met Rachel.”

  Where I come from, social niceties trump everything. Without actually meaning to, I found I was shaking Rachel’s hand and congratulating her on her marriage. Close up, she was a handsome woman, with a decided nose, deep lines around her mouth, and the measuring gaze of a gardener examining an unfamiliar insect on her tomato leaves. I didn’t ask her to call me Evie.

  Ophelia touched my hand. “Never mind,” she said soothingly. “Have some tea. You’ll feel better.”

  Next thing I knew, I was sitting on a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before, eating a lemon cookie from a plate I didn’t see arrive, and drinking Lapsang Souchong from a cup that appeared when Ophelia reached for it. Just for the record, I didn’t feel better at all. I felt as if I’d taken a step that wasn’t there, or perhaps failed to take one that was: out of balance, out of place, out of control.

  Kim, restless as a cat, was snooping around among the long tables.

  “What’s with the flying fish?” she asked.

  “They’re for Rachel’s new experiment,” said Ophelia. “She thinks she can bring the dead to life again.”

  “You better let me tell it, Ophie,” Rachel said. “I don’t want Mrs. Gordon thinking I’m some kind of mad scientist.”

  In fact, I wasn’t thinking at all, except that I was in way over my head.

  “I’m working on an
imating extinct species,” Rachel said. “I’m particularly interested in dodos and passenger pigeons, but eventually, I’d like to work up to bison and maybe woolly mammoths.”

  “Won’t that create ecological problems?” Kim objected. “I mean, they’re way big, and we don’t know much about their habits or what they ate or anything.”

  There was a silence while Rachel and Ophelia traded family-joke smiles. “That’s why we need you,” Rachel said.

  Kim looked as though she’d been given the pony she’d been agitating for since fourth grade. Her jaw dropped. Her eyes sparkled. And I lost it.

  “Will somebody please tell me what the hell you’re talking about?” I said. “I’ve been patient. I followed your pal Rodney through more rooms than Versailles and I didn’t run screaming, and believe me when I tell you I wanted to. I’ve drunk your tea and listened to your so-called explanations, and I still don’t know what’s going on around here.”

  Kim turned to me with a look of blank astonishment. “Come on, Mom. I can’t believe you don’t know that Ophelia and Rachel are witches. It’s perfectly obvious.”

  “We prefer not to use the W word,” Rachel said. “Like most labels, it’s misleading and inaccurate. We’re just people with natural scientific ability who have been trained to ask the right questions.”

  Ophelia nodded. “We learn to ask the things themselves. They always know. Do you see?”

  “No,” I said. “All I see is a roomful of junk and a garden that doesn’t care what season it is.”

  “Very well,” said Rachel, and rose from her chair. “If you’ll just come over here, Mrs. Gordon, I’ll try to clear everything up.”

  At the table of the flying fish, Ophelia arranged Kim and me on one side while Rachel took up a teacherly position beside the exhibits. These seemed to be A) the fish; and B) one of those Japanese good-luck cats with one paw curled up by its ear and a bright enameled bib.

  “As you know,” Rachel said, “my field is artificial intelligence. What that means, in this context, is that I can animate the inanimate. Observe.” She caressed the porcelain cat between its ears. For two breaths, nothing happened. Then the cat lowered its paw and stretched itself luxuriously. The light glinted off its bulging sides; its curly red mouth and wide painted eyes were expressionless.

  “Sweet,” Kim breathed.

  “It’s not really alive,” Rachel said, stroking the cat’s shiny back. “It’s still porcelain. If it jumps off the table, it’ll break.”

  “Can I pet it?” Kim asked.

  “No!” Rachel and I said in firm and perfect unison.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’d like you to help me with an experiment.” Rachel looked me straight in the eye. “I’m not really comfortable with words,” she said. “I prefer demonstrations. What I’m going to do is hold Kim’s hand and touch the fish. That’s all.”

  “And what happens then?” Kim asked eagerly.

  Rachel smiled at her. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we? Are you okay with this, Mrs. Gordon?”

  It sounded harmless enough, and Kim was already reaching for Rachel’s hand. “Go ahead,” I said.

  Their hands met, palm to palm. Rachel closed her eyes. She frowned in concentration and the atmosphere tightened around us. I yawned to unblock my ears.

  Rachel laid her free hand on one of the fish.

  It twitched, head jerking galvanically; its wings fanned open and shut.

  Kim gave a little grunt, which snapped my attention away from the fish. She was pale and sweating a little.

  I started to go to her, but I couldn’t. Someone was holding me back.

  “It’s okay, Evie,” Ophelia said soothingly. “Kim’s fine, really. Rachel knows what she’s doing.”

  “Kim’s pale,” I said, calm as the eye of a storm. “She looks like she’s going to throw up. She’s not fine. Let me go to my daughter, Ophelia, or I swear you’ll regret it.”

  “Believe me, it’s not safe for you to touch them right now. You have to trust us.”

  My Great-Aunt Fanny I’ll trust you, I thought, and willed myself to relax in her grip. “OK,” I said shakily. “I believe you. It’s just, I wish you’d warned me.”

  “We wanted to tell you,” Ophelia said. “But we were afraid you wouldn’t believe us. We were afraid you would think we were a couple of nuts. You see, Kim has the potential to be an important zoologist—if she has the proper training. Rachel’s a wonderful teacher, and you can see for yourself how complementary their disciplines are. Working together, they. . . .”

  I don’t know what she thought Kim and Rachel could accomplish, because the second she was more interested in what she was saying than in holding onto me, I was out of her hands and pulling Kim away from the witch who, as far as I could tell, was draining her dry.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  As soon as I touched Kim, the room came alive.

  It started with the flying fish leaping off the table and buzzing past us on Saran Wrap wings. The porcelain cat thumped down from the table and, far from breaking, twined itself around Kim’s ankles, purring hollowly. An iron plied itself over a pile of papers, smoothing out the creases. The teddy bear growled at it and ran to hide behind a toaster.

  If that wasn’t enough, my jacket burst into bloom.

  It’s kind of hard to describe what it’s like to wear a tropical forest. Damp, for one thing. Bright. Loud. Uncomfortable. Very, very uncomfortable. Overstimulating. There were flowers and parrots screeching (yes, the flowers, too—or maybe that was me). It seemed to go on for a long time, kind of like giving birth. At first, I was overwhelmed by the chaos of growth and sound, unsure whether I was the forest or the forest was me. Slowly I realized that it didn’t have to be a chaos, and that if I just pulled myself together, I could make sense of it. That flower went there, for instance, and the teal one went there. That parrot belonged on that vine and everything needed to be smaller and stiller and less extravagantly colored. Like that.

  Gradually, the forest receded. I was still holding Kim, who promptly bent over and threw up on the floor.

  “There,” I said hoarsely. “I told you she was going to be sick.”

  Ophelia picked up Rachel and carried her back to her wingchair. “You be quiet, you,” she said over her shoulder. “Heaven knows what you’ve done to Rachel. I told you not to touch them.”

  Ignoring my own nausea, I supported Kim over to the rocker and deposited her in it. “You might have told me why,” I snapped. “I don’t know why people can’t just explain things instead of making me guess. It’s not like I can read minds, you know. Now, are you going to conjure us up a glass of water, or do I have to go find the kitchen?”

  Rachel had recovered herself enough to give a shaky laugh. “Hell, you could conjure it yourself, with a little practice. Ophie, darling, calm down. I’m fine.”

  Ophelia stopped fussing over her wife along enough to snatch a glass of cool mint tea from the air and hand it to me. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, and she was scowling. “I told you she was going to be difficult. Of all the damn-fool, pig-headed. . .”

  “Hush, love,” Rachel said. “There’s no harm done, and now we know just where we stand. I’d rather have a nice cup of tea than listen to you cursing out Mrs. Gordon for just trying to be a good mother.” She turned her head to look at me. “Very impressive, by the way. We knew you had to be like Ophie, because of the garden, but we didn’t know the half of it. You’ve got a kick like a mule, Mrs. Gordon. ”

  I must have been staring at her like one of the flying fish. Here I thought I’d half-killed her, and she was giving me a smile that looked perfectly genuine.

  I smiled cautiously in return. “Thank you,” I said.

  Kim pulled at the sleeve of my jacket. “Hey, Mom, that was awesome. I guess you’re a witch, huh?”

  I wanted to deny it, but I couldn’t. The fact was that the pattern of flowers on my jacket was different and the colors were muted, the flowers more E
nglish garden than tropical paradise. There were only three buttons, and they were larks, not parrots. And I felt different. Clearer? More whole? I don’t know—different. Even though I didn’t know how the magic worked or how to control it, I couldn’t ignore the fact—the palpable, provable fact—that it was there.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I am.”

  “Me, too,” my daughter said. “What’s Dad going to say?”

  I thought for a minute. “Nothing, honey. Because we’re not going to tell him.”

  We didn’t, either. And we’re not going to. There’s no useful purpose served by telling people truths they aren’t equipped to accept. Geoff’s pretty oblivious, anyway. It’s true that in the hungover aftermath of Ophelia’s blue punch, he announced that he thought the new neighbors might be a bad influence, but he couldn’t actually forbid Kim and me to hang out with them because it would look sexist, racist, and homophobic.

  Kim’s over at Number 400 most Saturday afternoons, learning how to be a zoologist. She’s making good progress. There was an episode with zombie mice I don’t like to think about, and a crisis when the porcelain cat broke falling out of a tree. But she’s learning patience, control, and discipline, which are all excellent things for a girl of fourteen to learn. She and Rachel have reanimated a pair of passenger pigeons, but they haven’t had any luck in breeding them yet.

  Lucille’s the biggest surprise. It turns out that all her nosy-parkerism was a case of ingrown witchiness. Now she’s studying with Silver, of all people, to be a psychologist. But that’s not the surprise. The surprise is that she left Burney and moved into Number 400, where she has a room draped with chintz and a grey cat named Jezebel and is as happy as a clam at high tide.

  I’m over there a lot, too, learning to be a horticulturist. Ophelia says I’m a quick study, but I have to learn to trust my instincts. Who knew I had instincts? I thought I was just good at looking things up.