The Lifeguard

by Mary Morris

  There was a solution to which Mara did not want to agree, but it was viable. She could plant a special garden for the occasion. She could cut back her tulips to the ground, which she hated to do, and plant just annuals. She could move some of the perennials to another part of the garden, the whole of which was quite big now, for Mara had worked on it almost exclusively since she left her publishing job five years ago.

  She’d worked as a copy editor, correcting spelling and factual errors. But continuity was her specialty. She could read a five-hundred-page manuscript and know if a character had blue eyes on page three and green eyes on page four hundred. Or if someone drank vodka tonics, then switched for no reason to whiskey. When Mara was done with a book, one could be sure that the characters were consistent and historical events happened in sequence.

  It was continuity that made her garden special as well, for she knew how to move from season to season. Except for June, her transitions were always smooth.

  For years Mara had contemplated a theme garden. A show-place that would be dramatically different from her carefully planned one of perennial blooms. She had thought about edible flowers or Cajun blooms; an English garden or wild-flowers. She’d even considered a sinister garden once, one that would sprout only poisonous plants. Mara paused, smiling at this possibility for the wedding, then discarded it. She could plant an all-green garden. Or a moon garden. It was something she had wanted to try.

  A pure white garden of white snaps, baby’s breath, white roses, white mums, white hydrangeas. Candytuft for ground cover. And moonflower, that strange morning glory that opens only at night. A garden that shimmered in the moonlight. She could do this, but the thought of everything white frightened her.

  After Jessie and Zach showered and had a nap (Mara listened for the telltale signs of sheets rustling, but the two were discreet), they all sat down to discuss the wedding plans. The first thing Jessie announced was, instead of gifts, they’d asked their friends to bring food.

  “A potluck?” Mara mused.

  “That’s what we really want from our friends. A great meal.”

  “Please,” Mara said, “I’ll get a caterer.” Jessie and Zach demurred. Mara assumed they’d fight this battle again at a later date. Actually she didn’t much care; her thoughts were elsewhere. “Now I was thinking, if you could get married just a few weeks later …”

  “We can’t. We just can’t. Right, Zach?”

  Zach nodded dumbly. Mara glanced at him. It occurred to her that maybe this was all Jessie’s idea. Maybe Zach didn’t want to be married at all. Jessie seemed adamant, but perhaps Zach was not. Perhaps if she could get him alone, she could win him over. Talk him out of it. “A few weeks would make such a difference, for the garden.”

  Jessie rubbed her eyes in an exasperated way. Jessie thinks I’m aging, turning strange, Mara thought to herself. I’m diminished, a shadow of what I used to be. An old fuddy-duddy.

  “Mom, you spend hours, months on your garden.” Jessie turned to Zach. “She won’t even let anyone touch it. I’m sure it will be fine.”

  “It will not be fine and you are my only flesh and blood and I’m not having just any old flower patch for your wedding. Do you understand?”

  Jessie rolled her eyes. “Let’s not make this complicated.”

  “But it is complicated,” Mara said. “Growing seasons are complicated. When things bloom is complicated. I’ve spent years on this.” Silently she lamented, though she could not say this to them, that her bridal veil astilbe wouldn’t flower until late June. And, of course, that was the one she wanted most of all.

  She saw Jessie glance at Zach and he nodded back. She knew they had anticipated this. That she would behave in this way. “This matters to me,” she found herself shouting, then shaking her head. They stared at her. They knew nothing.

  It was her mother who had taught Mara about gardening. She could see her now. A trim, elegant woman with hair the same color as Jessie’s, in a dress, bent over their garden in Berlin. It had been magnificent, not like this small garden Mara grew. It was huge, or so she remembered it, with all kinds of blooming trees, trees that bore fruit that Mara could reach up and pluck in their season. Giant roses that smelled for months at a time. Mara could remember as a girl running among the falling petals of the blooming trees in the spring, laughing, while her mother paused from her digging, looking up at Mara to smile.

  Sometimes her mother would take her by the hand. Mara could still see her mother’s fingers—raw, sore, dirt under the nails. Mara had loved her mother’s rough touch, the calloused fingers that held her. At dinner her father would hold up her mother’s hands and shake his head—this elegant woman with her hands raw. Her mother always pulled them away. She would never wear gloves, she told him. She loved to feel her hands in the ground, digging. “I just can never get them clean,” she’d say, laughing.

  Then the war came and they had to leave everything behind. Mara’s mother had wept for days, for weeks. They moved into a flat in London with cousins. They were safe, but when spring came there was no garden, nowhere to plant. Mara’s mother sat staring at her hands, wondering what to do with them. Sometimes Mara saw her father hold them, but nothing seemed to matter. That spring it was cold and there was little heat. Mara wasn’t sure how long her mother lingered after she became sick, but remembered that at the time she died, her hands were very clean.

  Her father was never really the same after that. Mara was raised by her cousins, unhappy people who never smiled. She left home as soon as she was able. But sometimes at night, even now, Mara imagined her mother, sitting, holding her hand. Or at the foot of the bed, telling her a bedtime story. At times she sensed her mother’s presence in the room, but of course she could tell this to no one. Even after she’d married Burt, she felt her mother’s presence hovering over her bed. Once she’d called out in the night, calling her by name, to Burt’s dismay.

  Though Mara married him, Burt was not the man she had loved. That man was Sam, an American she had met after the war and followed to New York. He too had died, but not of a broken heart. He had been killed by a drunken driver on a Saturday night as they drove along the parkway. They were heading to a meadow to make love in the moonlight. He had died instantly and Mara had walked away without a scratch, dazed.

  She married Burt because she was getting old and because her family in England was beginning to worry about her and because her money was running out and Burt was a CPA. He was a nice man with a gentle disposition. Though he had idiosyncrasies, such as a refusal to eat Chinese food, to travel except to Florida (and the Gulf Coast at that), and to let anyone but himself fix anything in his house (hence some things never got repaired), Mara had never disliked him. But she had never loved him either.

  And then Jessie was born. Just when Mara thought that every little corner of her heart where feelings might grow was dead, Jessie came and Mara found herself consumed. Though she remained married, she discarded Burt like an empty husk, a rind. She hovered over the child, amazed at her every move, living in dread that something would happen. When Jessie first suckled at Mara’s breast, Mara thought, so this is it. This is what it is all about. To want so much you will break.

  None of this Mara had ever told Jessie. The real story she held safely within. Sometimes Mara was amazed that the world looked the same, that people went about their business, their lives, after all that had happened.

  “I think,” Mara said, “we should do wildflowers. They’re interesting. And they have a disheveled look to them, something you’d like, I think.” Jessie and Zach contemplated this. A disheveled look. They glanced at their jeans, their hands. They looked at each other.

  “Of course, they’re unpredictable,” Mara added.

  “Mom, whatever you feel like. Whatever you think works. I’m sure it will be fine.” Mara knew what Jessie wanted. She wanted her mother to stop thinking about this.

  “You don’t understand,” Mara said, looking into their doubting faces, the
ir inscrutable eyes. “I want it to be beautiful. I want you to have all the beautiful things in this world.”

  That afternoon Jessie and Mara drove into town to buy supplies for dinner. It was one of the things they did well together—cook. They liked to make roasts and big vegetable casseroles, bustling around one another in the kitchen. Though they were both thin, they loved a hearty meal and had the same taste in food. That evening it would be brisket, roasted potatoes, a bean casserole, a huge salad.

  In the car Jessie spoke first, but Mara was disappointed for it was what she broached each time she came to visit or called from the cavernous hallways of Cooper Union, always collect. “Mother,” she said, “I’m worried about you. Who do you talk to? What do you do?”

  “I talk to myself,” Mara teased.

  She and Burt had bought the house as a weekend retreat, but Burt had died suddenly on his way to work, a heart attack, at the age of fifty. He’d left everything to Mara and Jessie. With what little there was, Mara could make do. She continued to work for a few years, but finally she realized that if she gave up one place—either the apartment in the city or this house where she now lived—she could make ends meet. She gave up her job and the apartment and made the country her full-time residence without batting an eye.

  “Well, that’s what I’m afraid of,” Jessie said. “You shouldn’t be so far away. I think you should move back down to the city. You like concerts and museums, people.”

  “Right, and crime, filth, pollution …”

  “Well, then, move closer. Long Island. Nyack.”

  “Jessie, I like it here. I’m happy. I don’t need the city. I’m fifty-five and this is fine for me. There’s a bunch of old ladies and artists and we all keep to ourselves, but I’ve got people if I want them. And I can do whatever I want. I like the country, the house, the garden. I’m happy here.”

  Jessie thought about this for a moment. “And in winter. In winter you tend the garden?”

  “Winter, spring, summer, fall, I tend the garden.”

  “Mother, you’re getting weirder and weirder.”

  “You should talk, my dear,” remembering the black leather outfit Jessie had worn the last time she visited.

  “You’re my mother and I don’t know you at all.”

  Mara pondered this for a while. “You know what you need to know.”

  “You think so, but I don’t.” Mara heard the exasperation in Jessie’s voice. “Maybe I’d like to have dinner with you once in a while,” Jessie said, trying to change the tone.

  “It’s only a three-hour drive. You can come for a weekend.”

  “It’s not the same, Mother. It’s just not the same.”

  “We each have our lives. You make your choices. I’ll make mine.”

  Jessie, Mara thought, had had her own share of difficulties. She had dropped out of high school to study at an actors’ studio in the Village and had gotten pregnant. Burt had disowned her—the only stand he had ever taken was against his own daughter. And Jessie had stubbornly, perhaps only to spite him, decided to keep the child. When she miscarried on a cold winter’s night, Mara had rushed to New York Hospital and held her eighteen-year-old daughter’s hand as Jessie delivered a stillborn child. The doctor had said, “Do you want to see it?”

  “You don’t need to see it,” Mara told Jessie. “You don’t need to look.”

  Jessie had gone on from that and put her life back together. Finished high school, got into Cooper Union on the basis of her portfolio alone, only to throw it all away now. Jessie always does what she wants, Mara thought. She always has.

  “I’m sorry,” Mara said, “but I just don’t know what you see in Zach.”

  “I love him, Mother. Isn’t that enough?”

  Mara shook her head. Then she was silent for the rest of the drive home.

  Zach had the table set and was reading War and Peace when they returned.

  “War and Peace?” Mara exclaimed.

  “It relaxes me,” Zach replied. “Can I help you with dinner?”

  He is only reading this book to impress me, she thought. “No thank you, we don’t need any help.”

  “Oh, she never wants any help. Mom, why don’t you just relax.” Jessie laughed, pushing her mother gently toward the stairs. “We’ll take care of dinner.”

  Mara didn’t want to relax. What she wanted to do was cook dinner with her daughter. But mostly she wanted to do things. Keep busy. She wanted to feel the motion of her hands, chopping, scraping. Dejected, she went outside. Through the window she could see the two of them, heads bowed, as they cut and diced together, speaking in whispers. About her, she imagined. They were talking about her. How would they manage her. Perhaps even now they were making their minds up to elope.

  Mara looked at her garden. The tulips would soon be in full bloom. She loved the splashes of color, all of which she had carefully planned. If her life had taken a different turn, she would have been a painter. A female Manet or Gauguin. Traveling to exotic places or simply remaining in a garden of her own choosing, lush, exuberant, full of color. If her life had been different, her parents would have sent her to study in Paris.

  Sometimes Mara painted. She sketched the trees, the flowers, but her real gift, she knew, was with the living things themselves.

  A tap at the window aroused her. She saw Jessie, her face pressed foolishly to the glass, as she’d done as a child, her face flattened like a clown.

  They ate potatoes, brisket, beans almost in silence. Jessie made small talk about her work. This was the first meal the three of them had actually had together, and Zach appeared to have been briefed. He asked Mara innocuous questions—“Don’t you miss the city?” or “Was it difficult, raising a child and having a career?”—the kind of direct questions young people might ask of those they think are very old, as if to pamper them. At least he wasn’t rude. He didn’t pry; he asked nothing that made her cringe or forced her to lie.

  Mara didn’t want to eat, but she made herself. She didn’t want to talk either, and after a while Zach gave up. Jessie said she was tired just as they were done and excused herself.

  “Do you mind?” She touched Zach on the shoulder. “I want to take a bath.”

  “No.” He patted her hand. “I’ll clean up.”

  Mara was surprised it had come so easily—their moment alone. Now she could talk to him, speak to him sensibly about how there was no reason to rush into marriage if he wasn’t completely sure. How there would be plenty of time after graduate school. She was about to say something when she noticed his hand. It was true she had met him only a couple of times, so it was possible to miss such a flaw. But hands were something Mara usually noticed. As he was folding his fingers around her plate, she saw that the index finger of his right hand was missing.

  “Done, Mara?” he asked.

  “You’re missing your finger,” she said.

  “That’s right, I am.”

  Mara rose from the table and followed him into the kitchen.

  “What happened?”

  Zach laughed and shook his head. “Oh, it’s a crazy story. You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do.” Mara nodded.

  Zach leaned against the counter. “I was a little boy in Tampa, playing outside. You know, the kinds of things kids do. I saw something in the bushes. It was quite beautiful. I remember that. It had beautiful colors and I reached for it. A coral snake bit my finger.”

  Mara shook her head. “It bit your finger off?”

  Zach stared at her, surprised, it seemed, that he’d gotten her attention. “No, it didn’t bite it off. My neighbor chopped it off.” He put down the plates. “You see, a coral snake has a very deadly but slow poison. Once it starts to travel, there’s not much you can do. My neighbor saw me running around with this snake attached to my finger, and he knew what it was right away. He was a doctor, and he just took a butcher knife and”—Zach made a chopping motion with his hand that made Mara flinch—“that was it.”

/>   Mara went up to him, touching his hand, turning the stump this way and that. Zach did not pull away. She tried to imagine this stranger who slept with her daughter, who planned to marry her, this graduate student with sandy brown hair, in a garden with a snake clinging to his finger. “And you learned to write, to draw?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, “I learned to do everything.”

  “How strange.”

  “Not to me,” Zach said. “I’ve lived with this a long time now.”

  “No, it’s strange that I never noticed it before,” Mara muttered, wondering what other things she had never noticed. What else had she missed that was before her eyes? This thought troubled her and for a long time she held his hand.

  Jessie came into the kitchen, her hair wrapped in a towel, her face red and flushed, and saw Mara holding her fiancé’s hand.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Mara looked up, embarrassed. “Well. I just never noticed …”

  “Your mother has taken an interest in my missing finger.”

  “Oh really,” Jessie said.

  “I have all my fingers,” Mara said, holding up her hand.

  “Most people do,” Zach said.

  “Did it hurt?”

  “The snakebite?”

  “No, when your neighbor cut it off.”

  “I think it hurt my dad more.” Zach laughed. “He had to hold me down. I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it. He carried that finger around with him for days, trying to get someone to sew it back on. Then he buried it in the garden. I remember he cried. He watched over me like a maniac for years after that.”

  So other parents are like me, Mara thought. They go wild. They can’t bear their children’s pain. They hold on when they should let go.

  That night Mara slept soundly until something made her stir. A breeze, her dream, a fleeting thought. It made her get up and go to the window. What had woken her?