Things That Grow

by Meredith Goldstein

  “So what happened?” Uncle Seth asked.

  “Well, Mrs. Holmes was apparently like, ‘Sloane, will you open your textbook and read from page 168, or whatever, and Sloane was like, sure, and then she opens the page and starts reading. She reads the entire sentence out loud and then realizes what she’s said, and she stops. Freezes. And the whole room is waiting for this romantic moment where she’s going to be like, ‘Oh Nick, yes, take me to prom!’”

  “And?”

  “And she closes the book, puts it down on her desk, and tells Mrs. Holmes that she needs to be excused.”

  “Oh my god,” Seth says. “She didn’t want to go with him.”

  “It was terrible. She basically ran out. And Nick was apparently just sitting there, stunned.”

  I explained that the whole thing led to a massive school debate. People were mad at Sloane for embarrassing Nick, but the smarter people were mad at Nick for assuming that Sloane—whom he wasn’t even dating—would say yes. He totally put her on the spot.

  “It does seem like a major risk,” Seth said. “Public proposals are always a bad idea.”

  “Yeah, but I think Nick did mean well. There are always some real dicks at any school I’ve been to, but Nick didn’t seem like one of them. When he realized what he did wrong, how much he’d put her on the spot, he felt really bad. He actually apologized.

  “But anyway, after that, Mrs. Holmes got in trouble for aiding and abetting a promposal gone wrong—like she should have thought about the public humiliation factor and how Sloane might want to say no—and now there’s this policy that you can’t do a promposal on school grounds.”

  Seth looked at me as if I’d just told a riveting story, and then he paused.

  “Have you been to prom?” he asked.

  “No, but, like, I think of it as a senior thing.”

  “So you’d go this year,” he said.

  “I would if I lived here,” I say, glancing in the rearview mirror again. “Maybe.”

  After that, Seth changed the subject, telling me how he went to senior prom with this girl named Michelle, how lovely she was, and how they’re still friends on social media and how he can’t believe her kids are already in college.

  I was quiet. I didn’t want him to stop talking. The conversation was as effortless as it was with Grandma, but with Seth, there were no boundaries.

  Almost an hour later, he’s talking to me about authors I should read, and I’m trying to memorize every name. Even though I read more than everyone at my school, I feel dreadfully unschooled in modern fantasy books when I’m sitting next to Seth. He’s not very into sci-fi, but he knows all the good writers.

  “She writes magical stories like you, but it’s all very feminist and deeply rooted in horror,” he says, after emphasizing each syllable of an author’s last name. “I’ll get you a copy of her latest.”

  An hour and a half ride to Rhode Island feels like a blip.

  We reach the address, and Seth is confused because the sign out front says GREEN ANIMALS.

  “I thought this was Brayton House or Estate, or whatever,” he says.

  Then I pull down a driveway that leads to an expansive property that was once a very rich person’s house. I’ve done a lot of googling about it this morning.

  I drive over a big rock in the parking lot, and Chris snaps awake in the back seat.

  “We’re here already?” he asks, groggy.

  “Not already. We’ve been driving for an hour and a half,” Seth says. “You had quite a nap.”

  “He can sleep anywhere,” I tell Seth. “On a bus. Sitting in a chair in school. It’s a superpower.”

  Chris wipes his eyes and blinks rapidly, waking himself up, and then he notices the Chico’s bag next to him. We’ve decided to continue to use it; Seth put the second box in it this morning. There’s a seat belt around the bag, like it’s a person, and I guess it sort of is. It’s a morbid scene.

  “She never mentioned this place?” Seth asks.

  “Not once,” I say. “The Garden Girls told me they went here once and she liked the view. But when I was texting with them this morning, they seemed a little surprised by the choice.”

  “I wonder why,” he says.

  We park at the top of the lot, and then Seth understands why even a person who loves gardens might not want their cremains scattered here for all eternity. This beautiful lush property is popular with families who have little kids. For a reason.

  Seth takes the Chico’s bag from the back seat and holds it at his side. Chris exits the other door, his backpack on, and he’s already sweating under the sweltering sun.

  I take my phone out to pull up the website and explain.

  “It’s the Brayton Estate, but only technically,” I say. “According to the site, the place was owned by a really cool writer, Alice Brayton, who never got married and basically had parties here on her own.”

  “Sounds like someone Mom would have admired,” Seth says.

  “Indeed. But the cool thing is that the estate had this gardener who watched over the property for, like, forty years, and he’s the one who made the decision to make it all topiary.”

  “Topiary,” Chris says. “Like shapes.”

  “Right. Then, after the gardener died, his daughter and her husband watched over the property, and eventually it was taken over by some historical society, but it’s technically the oldest topiary garden in the country. But now it’s called Green Animals.”

  * * *

  Seth gets us tickets, and we follow him through the gate, and the first thing I see is a giant—like maybe fourteen feet tall—teddy bear made out of shrubbery. There’s a smaller bear next to it. In the distance I can see hedges cut into the shapes of giraffes, elephants, and dogs. Children run nearby, some being forced to pose for pictures taken by parents. The animals are all oversize and creepy. There’s one kid crying in front of a topiary fox, and it looks like he just realized that the Turkish delight he took from a witch is not as good as he’d hoped.

  “I think topiary might be extremely my brand,” I say, and Chris lets out a laugh.

  “Why does that not surprise me?” he says.

  “You’ve seen Edward Scissorhands, right?” Seth asks. “This makes me remember Edward Scissorhands . . .

  “Sexually,” he adds after a beat.

  Chris and I gape at him.

  “Have you seen the movie?” Seth asks.

  “I know what it is,” I say. “I’ve seen pictures. It is not a sexy movie, from what I know. It’s about a man who has scissors for hands, right?”

  “Listen, there are two types of people in the world,” Seth says matter-of-factly. “There are the people who want to have sex with Edward Scissorhands, like, as a character, and the people who don’t. You two should watch the movie and find out what kind of people you are.”

  We hear an “excuse me” and see a woman a few feet away from us. She gives Seth an angry look, and he responds with a saccharine grin.

  “We should probably watch our language,” Chris says, nervous. “There are a lot of kids here.”

  “They deserve to know my truth,” Seth says, and I love it.

  “Which kind of person are you, Uncle Seth?” I ask. “When it comes to Edward Scissorhands?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “I guess it is,” I say.

  Chris’s shakes his head and smiles.

  “He has scissors for hands,” Chris whispers. “Why would anybody want that?”

  “Well, now we know what kind of person you are,” Seth tells Chris, and he makes it sound like an insult.

  A one-note laugh explodes from my body. “I guess I need to see it,” I say.

  “Later,” Seth says. “Come on. It’s a hundred degrees. Let’s find a resting place and make this happen.” He marches in, and Seth and I fall in line behind him.

  * * *

  The Green Animals Topiary Garden is laid out in big squares that remind me of rooms. Hedges serve as
borders. In one area, there is a standard garden—no shrubs carved into weird shapes, just plants and pretty flowers. In another section it’s all topiary shapes, and some remind me of chess pieces. A few are geometric and modern.

  Most of the topiary is animal-shaped, which I guess is why it’s called Green Animals.

  “I would think that if Grandma Sheryl went to the trouble of putting this garden on the list, she’d want to be near the actual topiary, right?” I ask. “That’s what makes the place special.”

  We walk around a large topiary giraffe that towers over the property.

  “But how can we put anything here?” Chris whispers. “I mean, look down.”

  Seth and I follow his command and see the problem. Everything beneath the topiary shrubs is dark brown mulch. One can’t just sprinkle a gray and white substance on the ground and expect it to go unnoticed.

  “Seth, what do we do?”

  “Well, we don’t put it here,” he says. “All these animals feel like a joke anyway. We will not put my mother under a giraffe. I’m going to look around the periphery of the place.”

  He starts to explore the property, and I see that Chris is making his way to a corner of the garden that has more shade.

  “I’m gonna sit for a bit, if that’s okay,” he calls back to me. “I want to draw some of this.”

  “I’ll come,” I say.

  I follow him, and we both relax under a tree.

  “We might have to wait until some of these families clear out,” Chris says as he removes colored pencils from his backpack. “It’ll probably be a little easier not to get caught then.”

  He finds the green pencil and begins sketching the giraffe.

  “If you wind up picking an animal for this, I liked the elephant,” Chris says. “You could put her in the little border around him. I think Sheryl would appreciate Mr. Elephant.”

  I go to answer him, to tell him I also like the elephant, but what comes out of my mouth is not that.

  “Why didn’t you want me to move in with your family for the year?”

  The words are out of my mouth before I’ve understood them. I guess I’ve been holding them in for twenty-four hours, but they have escaped without my permission, and I slap my hand over my lips.

  Chris’s hand freezes at the same time; the tip of his pencil is stuck on the center of the neck of the giraffe. His head doesn’t move, but he glances up at me ever so slightly. He doesn’t speak.

  “I saw you,” I say, because I have to. “I was asking your mom, and you were in the hallway. I saw your face. She turned me down, and you could not have looked more thrilled.”

  His head snaps up. “I wasn’t thrilled, Lori.”

  “Fine. Relieved, then.”

  “I was not—look. Relieved is a strong word. But it’s complicated.”

  I have to look away from him to keep from showing how hurt I am. Not far in front of us, a little kid is weeping and screaming at his mother, and he keeps yelling, “I don’t want it!” and I envy his freedom to wail without shame.

  I feel my own tears coming on. Chris catches it.

  “Lor,” he starts. “Lor, please don’t cry about this. Cry if you need to, but not about this.”

  “Forget it,” I say. “I’m not.”

  “Do you actually want to live in my house?” he asks in a more challenging voice than I’m used to. “Live with men who put up shelves and take over the television? Do you want to follow my mom’s rules about cleaning and church and community service?”

  Chris and his brother have to do five hours of giving back every month. It can be volunteering for a charity; sometimes Chris and his dad spend an afternoon organizing bags at the food bank.

  “I love doing stuff with your church! I love helping your mom! You know that.”

  “But watching what you say? Dealing with Adam twenty-four-seven? Look, I love my house, but it’s not like Sheryl’s. The two of you were like roommates, with no rules and plenty of space. And for me . . . for us . . . we’d be right down the hall from each other at night and . . . that could get awkward.”

  He scratches behind his ear. He doesn’t say more.

  “Okay,” I say, mostly to stop him.

  Sometimes I feel that my friendship with Chris would be easier if we’d met before high school. He and Jessica have thousands of stories from when they were kids—camping in a tent in the back of Chris’s yard, birthday parties with scary clowns, or, after Jason came to town in seventh grade, trips into Boston to see Red Sox games with Jason’s dad, who used to play for a minor-league team.

  I know that Jess is not in love with Chris, and I wonder if it’s because she’s known him forever.

  I wish I’d had the chance to know him forever.

  “It seemed like an impossible idea,” Chris finally says. “If I looked relieved, it’s only because my mom said it well—that it just wasn’t going to happen. But . . . are you really mad?”

  “No,” I say. “Not anymore.”

  I am relieved that he was conflicted.

  I guess I am consoled that he also thought about how it would feel for me to be down the hall at night—how that might be difficult, knowing our boundaries.

  I stand up. “I’m going to find Seth.”

  “Should I come?”

  “No. I’ll text you when we find a spot for Grandma.”

  I push the conversation with Chris from my mind when I spot Seth kneeling in front of the big topiary teddy bear, looking up at it like it’s a deity.

  “Honestly, I don’t know what Mom was thinking.”

  “Wait,” I say, and find my phone. “Let’s find out.”

  I pull up the Garden Girls text chain. There have been a few messages since the arboretum; mostly Lenny sending facts about the Explorers Garden near where we left Grandma Sheryl, and a few emojis from Rochelle (she likes the two pink hearts).

  “We’re at the topiary garden,” I message the group, and before I can write more, their responses start coming in fast.

  “How lovely,” Jill says.

  “Beautiful,” Kevin says.

  “Isn’t it cute?” Deb says.

  The pink hearts emoji from Rochelle.

  And so on.

  “The thing is,” I write back, “the ground is very dark under the topiaries here. I don’t know that I can put ashes at the bottom of any of these plants. It’d be too obvious. Also, would Sheryl really want to be buried under a bush in the shape of a giraffe?”

  Kevin responds first. “Oh, no. That’s not what she’d want.”

  “Have you walked down to the water?” Jill writes.

  “Good memory, Jill!” Kevin writes.

  “Go to the water,” says a message from Deb that comes in at the same time as Kevin’s.

  Before I can ask, Jill is calling me.

  “Sweetie,” she says when I pick up, “it’s the water. You have to take her down to the water. The beauty of the Brayton Estate is the view of Narragansett Bay. You can see all the way over to Prudence Island. The Girls, all of us, once took a bus trip down to the Newport mansions. We stopped at the Brayton Estate because of its history. We didn’t intend to stop for long—topiary isn’t necessarily our thing—but then Sheryl wandered off with her book, and after hunting for her, we found her at the edge of the property, looking out at the bay, deep in thought. I know that’s where she’d want to be, down by the water with that gorgeous view.”

  “So not under a massive topiary teddy bear,” I say.

  “I wouldn’t think so, no,” Jill says, and laughs.

  “Thank God, honestly,” I say.

  “Take some pictures of whatever spot you choose, will you?” Jill asks.

  “Of course. I’ll send them to the group.”

  I thank her and hang up.

  “Come on,” I tell Seth, and he gets up to follow me. I can see a strip of water beyond the house, so I follow it. We walk slowly down the hill until we get a better look.

  A much better look.


  “Oh wow,” Seth says.

  The bay is blue and calm and gorgeous. The border of the property is covered with grass and small plants—the perfect kind of growing things that will cover Grandma’s ashes. The spot won’t be trampled on by crying kids. It’s the place where I know Grandma probably sat, where she would have read her book and wanted to stay all day.

  “This is it, then,” Seth says, and he sits. I join him.

  He opens the Chico’s bag. At this point we’re committed to it as the official carrying case of Grandma.

  “Do you want to call for Chris?”

  I don’t have to, because I see him coming down the hill.

  “I thought you guys left me,” he says.

  “The Garden Girls told me this was Grandma Sheryl’s favorite spot,” I tell him.

  Chris has his hands on his waist, his backpack on his back, as he looks out at the bay. “She had good taste, as usual. Do you guys want to be alone? I don’t need to third wheel this every time.”

  “No,” I say. “Sit. We need the drawing of the spot.”

  He settles himself cross-legged, and the three of us make a small triangle by the water. I pull the Dorothy Parker book out of my bag.

  “Did you pick another reading?” Seth says.

  “I think this one short poem will do. Do you want to do the craisins this time?”

  Seth nods and takes the box out of the Chico’s bag. Then he removes the bag of cremains and sprinkles them carefully around the row of plants in front of us. He blends them with the dirt with his hands. It’s much simpler this time.

  Chris illustrates the landscape as fast as he can. I can’t see his notebook, but I assume he’s focusing on the water and the island we can see across it. The way the lawn just drops off and then suddenly it’s the bay, and then another shore, maybe with people looking back at us.

  The whole experience is less intense this time, probably because we’re not shocked to see what the cremains look like. Also, Seth pulls a small bottle of hand sanitizer out of his jeans pocket, which makes the act feel less sacred and more practical.

  “Read,” he says when he’s made it through the bag.