April 30th
All day long Alice has been trying to get out to the garden to start planting. In the morning they had a dusting of snow, which melted when the temperature soared to fifty-five and the sun came out. Now it’s drizzling.
Her mother keeps piling on the chores and she’s suddenly obsessively interested in Alice’s homework and is demanding to see her planner. Only Alice’s planner is pretty blank because Alice doesn’t have many plans when it comes to schoolwork. Somehow her mother wheedled some information out of Henry’s mother. Alice can just picture poor Mrs. Grover standing there asking Henry if they do, in fact, have a research paper due tomorrow? Three pages on the Continental Congress. So then it’s off to the library. Why is the library even open on Sunday, Alice wants to know, doesn’t anybody ever get a day of rest anymore?
Now she’s got three books to skim through and three pages to write. She calls Henry.
“I need a topic sentence.”
“That’s cheating, Alice.”
“Give me one of your discarded ones. I know you have at least five topic sentences up your sleeve.”
Henry considers.
“Okay.”
She can hear him take a piece of paper out of his wastebasket and uncrumple it.
“Was Jefferson the sole author of the Declaration of Independence?”
“That’s a question.”
“It’s a teaser. Here’s the rest: While we often think of Jefferson as the sole author of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams edited it, and he defended it to the rest of the Congress and helped get it passed.”
“This is a reject for you? Geez!”
“I got interested in the role that Franklin played.”
“You should quit worrying about math, Henry. You’re a genius. Thanks a lot. ’Bye.”
“Wait, Alice—”
“Gotta go, Henry.”
“Did you—?”
“—What?”
“I heard—”
“—What?”
“John Kimball.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence.
“I need to write this paper, Henry.”
“Alice—”
“We just went to a baseball game. With Mrs. Minty. And his father. And his brother.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Do you like him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do like him.”
“I don’t even know him.”
“Did he kiss you?”
“No!”
“He did, didn’t he?”
“No!”
“He already has a girlfriend.”
“I know that!”
“Can I come over?”
“No. I have to write this paper.”
“I’m coming over.”
“Don’t. I’m having a terrible day.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I will be horrible to you if you come over here.”
“Alice—”
“Everything is going wrong today, Henry. I don’t want to have a fight with you, too.”
“Could you just tell me—”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Henry, you’re my best friend.”
“Okay.”
“See you tomorrow?”
“See you tomorrow.”
She hangs up and finds that she is actually grateful to get lost for a few hours in the prickly lifelong relationship between Jefferson and Adams, which turned into this amazing friendship in the last years of their lives with hundreds of letters written back and forth. And then they died on the same day: July 4, 1826. You can’t make stuff like that up.
She finishes her paper and looks up to see the rain still falling. Is it ever going to stop?
She heads downstairs only to get roped into helping her mother make dinner. Her mother hasn’t cooked in weeks, and today she’s making pot roast? So Alice is at the sink peeling carrots to throw in with the roast that is already bubbling away inside the stove, and potatoes for mashed potatoes. Her mom is making a pie. A pie! What is going on? Okay, so it’s the Pillsbury roll-out crust, but it’s also cherries, real cherries that they freeze every year from their own trees.
“It’s Sunday,” her mom offers, by way of explanation.
“So . . .?”
“Uncle Eddie is coming over and so is Gram.”
“I need to get out in the garden, Mom.”
“I thought it would be nice to have a family dinner. Gram is bringing her green bean casserole.”
“It’s not like it’s Thanksgiving.”
“Just some family time.”
“Dad and I always plant on this Sunday. Some people go by the equinox, we go by the Red Wings opening game. The Sunday after. It’s always the Sunday after the home opener.”
Angie carefully unrolls the crust from the package.
“Mom?”
The squeak of the rolling pin.
“Mom? Are you trying to keep me from planting the garden?”
“No.”
“Well, good. Because you can’t.”
“I just thought—”
Angie stops rolling out the crust for a minute and puts the heels of her hands over her eyes. She’s wearing Dad’s apron, Alice notices. Everybody’s wearing Dad’s apron lately.
“This is your dad’s grandmother’s pot roast recipe. And cherry pie is—”
“Daddy’s favorite.”
“Exactly.”
“So?”
“I just want my family here with me.”
Okay, Alice can understand all of this and she can even like it that her mom is cooking dinner for a change and that Uncle Eddie and Gram are coming over, but why did this have to happen today?
“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.”
“Mom!”
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?”
“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 Bliss Page 20
