by Ann Beattie
That first year, I uncovered a plethora of wiggly worms and numerous bottle caps, along with some not-quite-decomposed trash that had blown in and been trapped between soil and dry grass. Beaumont saw my excitement when I found the unexpected, of course. My eyes lit up when I was surprised. That must have been what gave him the idea: to deliberately scatter things in the garden at the end of the season, and to let them weather over the winter—durable things such as marbles and coins and miniature plastic animals. Eventually, larger things began to appear: an old green glass bottle, a ceramic perfume container, quite a bit of money, and even a rusted tin that contained a little silver squirrel pin. In the future, some mother-of-pearl buttons, fine when soaked clean, as well as something called a NEV-R-Rust-Cake-Serv (not rusted), and a plastic finger puppet like the Munch figure with its mouth open, a very rusty but still workable Slinky, a paperweight with a perfect autumn leaf suspended inside, a cowrie shell, a purple Frisbee uncracked by winter weather. He had to have tossed them in after I left, because the crust of dry grass weighted down here and there by bricks showed no signs of having been disturbed.
I wish I had asked him what gave him the idea: whether, the first year, the coins might simply have fallen from his pocket; whether he himself had no idea about the partially decomposed letter written by no one either of us knew that had somehow lodged, half faded, underneath the grass cuttings. The bottle caps were clearly junk. I suspect I didn’t ask because the discovery began as our secret—so mysterious and private that after the first year, we didn’t even speak of it. There must have been only my puzzled frown, my moment of suspicion during which I looked at him and asked a silent question. Or maybe I questioned him many times. Maybe he denied it. It seems he may have denied it—honestly, at first, but later disingenuously when treasure after treasure littered the garden. That might have been when it occurred to me that adults could lie and mean no harm by it; that lying was a game, and sometimes it was not wrong to be complicit. I went there at least ten times, but somehow, the last few summers, I lost interest in the garden. “Don’t make her do it if it’s a chore,” Leticia said to Beaumont.
Everything was a chore except thinking about Paul Kellogg, the cutest boy in school, and the way we’d danced together, once in the high school gym, once when nobody saw us, circling around a Dumpster at the shopping center. I spent the summer on the phone with my girlfriends. I was petulant and didn’t want to take the ride to Brown’s ice cream because the only flavor I liked was chocolate, and chocolate might give me acne. For three years I refused to go near the garden, complaining of blackflies and dirt under my fingernails.
I didn’t know Leticia’s cancer recurred, and that she beat it a second time. I didn’t know how much the photograph on the wall above the phone of B. smiling in the driver’s seat of his once-new Mustang meant to him. I heard, but somehow did not hear, that my father had numerous girlfriends (not one of whom I ever met). I did not know that my mother had been engaged before she married my father, and didn’t really want to know, I guess, which is why I disappeared from the room as Leticia went to get more Kleenex.
What is childhood, except things intruding that you aren’t prepared for: facts, like unexpected guests, suddenly standing right in front of you. I tried to ignore my parents’ past, as well as the details of Leticia and B.’s present (how worried she was when he got together with former colleagues, though he always, resolutely, only had coffee).
The year I went to college, my mother married the high school geography teacher. I liked him—everybody did—though I never knew she’d secretly dated him, then broke it off, only to resume the relationship after I graduated. My father remarried, divorced, then married his third wife, buying a van and driving her from town to town as she toured with her band.
The summer they married, they asked if I wanted to go on tour with them, and I almost said yes. Maine was no longer a possibility: the house had been sold to someone who put up a string of town houses on Leticia and Beaumont’s four acres. I like to think the garden is thriving, but I doubt it. If people were smart enough, they saved the peonies, which never mind being transplanted. Whether or not they intended to save the oregano, it’s as hearty as anthrax and probably just seeped off to grow somewhere else.
I try not to think about the garden treasures that might have been plowed under forever. It was so wrong of me, so self-centered and wrong, to simply end my secret collusion with Beaumont. I’ve come to think it was misplaced anger on my part: that I did it simply because he was a man, and for a long time I no longer wanted to trust men. I don’t mean that I came to mistrust them: I mean that in order to be myself, I arbitrarily stopped trusting men and instead put my trust in women. I decided that women were more often straight shooters: after all, my mother had filled me in on more than I wanted to know about her romance with Mr. Cattrelli; Leticia had given me her diary and asked me not to read it until she died, and I had done as she said, finding out only afterward the extent of B.’s drinking and her own premonition of dying prematurely.
If he’d upped the ante from bottle caps to mother-of-pearl buttons, what else might have frozen, unfound, in the garden I never again explored? The herbs took over, and B. stopped packing on grass to dry atop the soil. He turned his attention to pruning the lilacs for maximum flowering. There is no sign, in the diary, that Leticia knew anything about our garden game. I think the first year I told her my suspicions, but as I recall, she was as adept as any adult is when asked the Santa question.
I’m thinking of the garden because I’m in B.’s room, which is modern and characterless and has absolutely nothing in common with the garden—and little in common with the house in Maine—except that the picture of his Mustang sits on the night table, and the wall-to-wall carpeting is ironically reminiscent of the dried grass cuttings. No one wants a relative to be in such a place, but what else could happen? He needed someone to give him the fifteen medicines he takes every day; he needed to start eating meals again; he never could figure out the portable oxygen tank. It got so he couldn’t understand that he had to turn off a ringing alarm. So my mother and father—reunited again—explored the possibilities, and Beaumont became a resident of an assisted-living facility with the ludicrous name of some British manor house. You would expect mutton to be served, to be eaten with real silver. Ridiculous! But so is the name of the town houses that now stand on my aunt and uncle’s former property: Gentry Gardens.
I went back years ago when the land was being plowed and the foundation was being laid, but didn’t get out of the car. I saw it with as much tunnel vision as possible, then drove quickly away in case the neighbors recognized the out-of-state car and stoned it, having figured out who’d sold the property to the developer.
Now B. has taken a turn for the worse and has been hospitalized. He has sent me from the hospital to Highland Manor, room 301, to look for his father’s penknife, so he can open his mail. This is absurd because the only mail consists of useless advertisements (“We pave your driveway in 1 hr.!”), and what are the odds, anyway, that B. is capable of telling me where to find anything? He’s in a time warp and thinks he’s his father’s son, and that the knife is, predictably, in his top bureau drawer, and furthermore, that having the knife will empower him and, once again, make him the man he was meant to be.
I’m on the verge of tears because of the pointlessness of my search—embarrassed because I found this silly errand preferable to sitting in B.’s hospital room. I nodded and patted his hand. I let him believe there was a real chance I could find it. And if a miracle occurs, I might find it still—down on all fours, looking through the clutter dumped on the carpet: the knife a needle in a haystack magnetized to my iron hand—my hard fist hammering the floor in frustration.
The garden is surely gone, though years from now someone planting a bulb or scattering seeds might unearth a screaming figure, as corroded as a carpenter’s nail, and remember for a moment—like an aged man recalling the thrill that came from
the quick click of a knife—that there has always been so much more than the present.
The Rabbit Hole as
Likely Explanation
MY mother does not remember being invited to my first wedding. This comes up in conversation when I pick her up from the lab, where blood has been drawn to see how she’s doing on her medication. She’s sitting in an orange plastic chair, giving the man next to her advice I’m not sure he asked for about how to fill out forms on a clipboard. Apparently, before I arrived, she told him that she had not been invited to either of my weddings.
“I don’t know why you sent me to have my blood drawn,” she says.
“The doctor asked me to make an appointment. I did not send you.”
“Well, you were late. I sat there waiting and waiting.”
“You showed up an hour before your appointment, Ma. That’s why you were there so long. I arrived fifteen minutes after the nurse called me.” It’s my authoritative but cajoling voice. One tone negates the other and nothing much gets communicated.
“You sound like Perry Mason,” she says.
“Ma, there’s a person trying to get around you.”
“Well, I’m very sorry if I’m holding anyone up. They can just honk and get into the other lane.”
A woman hurries around my mother in the hospital corridor, narrowly missing an oncoming wheelchair brigade: four chairs, taking up most of the hallway.
“She drives a sports car, that one,” my mother says. “You can always tell. But look at the size of her. How does she fit in the car?”
I decide to ignore her. She has on dangling hoop earrings, and there’s a scratch on her forehead and a Band-Aid on her cheek-bone. Her face looks a little like an obstacle course. “Who is going to get our car for us?” she asks.
“Who do you think? Sit in the lobby, and I’ll turn in to the driveway.”
“A car makes you think about the future all the time, doesn’t it?” she says. “You have to do all that imagining: how you’ll get out of the garage and into your lane and how you’ll deal with all the traffic, and then one time, remember, just as you got to the driveway a man and a woman stood smack in the center, arguing, and they wouldn’t move so you could pull in.”
“My life is a delight,” I say.
“I don’t think your new job agrees with you. You’re such a beautiful seamstress—a real, old-fashioned talent—and what do you do but work on computers and leave that lovely house in the country and drive into this…this crap five days a week.”
“Thank you, Ma, for expressing even more eloquently than I—”
“Did you finish those swordfish costumes?”
“Starfish. I was tired, and I watched TV last night. Now, if you sit in that chair over there you’ll see me pull in. It’s windy. I don’t want you standing outside.”
“You always have some reason why I can’t be outside. You’re afraid of the bees, aren’t you? After that bee stung your toe when you were raking, you got desperate about yellow jackets—that’s what they’re called. You shouldn’t have had on sandals when you were raking. Wear your hiking boots when you rake leaves, if you can’t find another husband to do it for you.”
“Please stop lecturing me and—”
“Get your car! What’s the worst that can happen? I have to stand up for a few minutes? It’s not like I’m one of those guards outside Buckingham Palace who has to look straight ahead until he loses consciousness.”
“Okay. You can stand here and I’ll pull in.”
“What car do you have?”
“The same car I always have.”
“If I don’t come out, come in for me.”
“Well, of course, Ma. But why wouldn’t you come out?”
“SUVs can block your view. They drive right up, like they own the curb. They’ve got those tinted windows like Liz Taylor might be inside, or a gangster. That lovely man from Brunei—why did I say that? I must have been thinking of the Sultan of Brunei. Anyway, that man I was talking to said that in New York City he was getting out of a cab at a hotel at the same exact moment that Elizabeth Taylor got out of a limousine. He said she just kept handing little dogs out the door to everybody. The doorman. The bellhop. Her hairdresser had one under each arm. But they weren’t hers—they were his own dogs! He didn’t have a free hand to help Elizabeth Taylor. So that desperate man—”
“Ma, we’ve got to get going.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You hate elevators. The last time we tried that, you wouldn’t walk—”
“Well, the stairs didn’t kill me, did they?”
“I wasn’t parked five flights up. Look, just stand by the window and—”
“I know what’s happening. You’re telling me over and over!”
I raise my hands and drop them. “See you soon,” I say.
“Is it the green car? The black car that I always think is green?”
“Yes, Ma. My only car.”
“Well, you don’t have to say it like that. I hope you never know what it’s like to have small confusions about things. I understand that your car is black. It’s when it’s in strong sun that it looks a little green.”
“Back in five,” I say, and enter the revolving door. A man ahead of me, with both arms in casts, pushes on the glass with his forehead. We’re out in a few seconds. Then he turns and looks at me, his face crimson.
“I didn’t know if I pushed, whether it might make the door go too fast,” I say.
“I figured there was an explanation,” he says dully, and walks away.
The fat woman who passed us in the hallway is waiting on the sidewalk for the light to change, chatting on her cell phone. When the light blinks green, she moves forward with her head turned to the side, as if the phone clamped to her ear were leading her. She has on an ill-fitting blazer and one of those long skirts that everybody wears, with sensible shoes and a teeny purse dangling over her shoulder. “Right behind you,” my mother says distinctly, catching up with me halfway to the opposite curb.
“Ma, there’s an elevator.”
“You do enough things for your mother! It’s desperate of you to do this on your lunch hour. Does picking me up mean you won’t get any food? Now that you can see I’m fine, you could send me home in a cab.”
“No, no, it’s no problem. But last night you asked me to drop you at the hairdresser. Wasn’t that where you wanted to go?”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s today.”
“Yes. The appointment is in fifteen minutes. With Eloise.”
“I wouldn’t want to be named for somebody who caused a commotion at the Plaza. Would you?”
“No. Ma, why don’t you wait by the ticket booth, and when I drive—”
“You’re full of ideas! Why won’t you just let me go to the car with you?”
“In an elevator? You’re going to get in an elevator? All right. Fine with me.”
“It isn’t one of those glass ones, is it?”
“It does have one glass wall.”
“I’ll be like those other women, then. The ones who’ve hit the glass ceiling.”
“Here we are.”
“It has a funny smell. I’ll sit in a chair and wait for you.”
“Ma, that’s back across the street. You’re here now. I can introduce you to the guy over there in the booth, who collects the money. Or you can just take a deep breath and ride up with me. Okay?”
A man inside the elevator, wearing a suit, holds the door open. “Thank you,” I say. “Ma?”
“I like your suggestion about going to that chapel,” she says. “Pick me up there.”
The man continues to hold the door with his shoulder, his eyes cast down.
“Not a chapel, a booth. Right there? That’s where you’ll be?”
“Yes. Over there with that man.”
“You see the man—” I step off the elevator and the doors close behind me.
“I did see him. He said that his son was getting marr
ied in Las Vegas. And I said, ‘I never got to go to my daughter’s weddings.’ And he said, ‘How many weddings did she have?’ and of course I answered honestly. So he said, ‘How did that make you feel?’ and I said that a dog was at one of them.”
“That was the wedding you came to. My first wedding. You don’t remember putting a bow on Ebeneezer’s neck? It was your idea.” I take her arm and guide her toward the elevator.
“Yes, I took it off a beautiful floral display that was meant to be inside the church, but you and that man wouldn’t go inside. There was no flat place to stand. If you were a woman wearing heels, there was no place to stand anywhere, and it was going to rain.”
“It was a sunny day.”
“I don’t remember that. Did Grandma make your dress?”
“No. She offered, but I wore a dress we bought in London.”
“That was just desperate. It must have broken her heart.”
“Her arthritis was so bad she could hardly hold a pen, let alone a needle.”
“You must have broken her heart.”
“Well, Ma, this isn’t getting us to the car. What’s the plan?”
“The Marshall Plan.”
“What?”
“The Marshall Plan. People of my generation don’t scoff at that.”
“Ma, maybe we’d better give standing by the booth another try. You don’t even have to speak to the man. Will you do it?”
“Do you have some objection if I get on the elevator with you?”
