by Sarah Reith
I understood at once that he was the kind of domineering rich guy my mother might refer to as creative and powerful. I thought I saw a hint of tightly controlled mania—or at least of calculating possessiveness, in how the dead man squinted at his bride in photos on the wall.
Reina was still telling me about Zack, still showing me her home. She was making friends with me. I tried to reciprocate by being a really good listener. She said her late husband wore pressed slacks and a starched button-up shirt to mow the lawn.
“And loafers,” she added, gazing out over the grass like she could see him still, doing things his own particular way.
I could see him, too, his big face florid with too many martinis, his neck bulging masterfully above the collar of his shirt. His body was just swollen enough to inspire the kind of respect people have for a powerful, expensive machine. He was corpulent, it’s true. But his bones were wrapped in succulent meats and delicate wines, the finest pairings of each. He was a libertine, not a Cheetos-chomping beer-swiller.
Zack Hill—if you slurred the name after a few drinks, it rhymed with jackal—had named his estate. And the name he gave the grounds, where oaks and manzanita spread their rich dark mulch in the shadow of the rolling hills, was Foxglove.
“Because of digitalis,” Reina explained. The name had an air of secrets, and beauty, and crime.
The derivation of the name “foxglove” is shrouded, as death-obsessed people say, in mystery. The authors of the nineteenth-century classic, English Botany, Or, Coloured Figures of British Plants, quote the eminent Dr. Prior, an authority on the origins of popular names. The doctor claims that the original name was foxes’ glew (which, as everyone knows, means foxes’ music), because the flower looks like a tintinnabulum, or a ring of bells over an arch. Who but a fox, the reasoning goes, would be cunning enough to make a set of bells out of a poisonous plant?
Here the authors of English Botany exercise their right to disagree with the expert. They draw the reader’s attention to the fact that “the name ‘foxglove’ is a very ancient one and exists in a list of plants as old as the time of Edward III (who reigned from 1312-1377).” It is touching to think of these well-mannered botanists handling such an ancient list, with the reverence due a long-dead specimen. They point out, with a briskness that belies a shy demeanor, that the name is “folksglove,” not “foxglove”; and that the “folks” of Wales were fairies. With a certainty that is almost poignant, they go on to say that “nothing is more likely than that the pretty coloured bells of the plant would be designated ‘folksgloves,’ afterwards, ‘foxglove.’” The fairies they mention, who sound like they would have devoured Miss Tinkerbell after roasting her on a spit, were said to lurk in the digitalis bell and use it to produce fairy thunder as an indication of wrath.
All these characters: the musical foxes, the wrathful fairies, even the ancient list, sound like fragments of some half-remembered folk tale, where everyone is panting for Freudian analysis, disregarding solemn injunctions, and falling prey to powerful potions. The foreshadowing of this malicious little tale grows darker with the mention of further names for the flower, which, like any charming psychopath, has more names than a nineteenth-century coquette had ribbons for her hair. They include: Bloody Fingers, Deadman’s Bells, Fairy-folks-fingers, and Lambs’-tongue-leaves. They make Emily Dickinson’s beloved perennial sound like an ingredient in a witches’ brew that might also call for slivers of bone from a hanged man’s skull.
The symptoms of digitalis are almost religious, in the way we’ve come to expect from medieval visionary saints. They include blurred vision, changes in color perception, and halos. There is no mention of the increased visibility of fairies; but mortality as always remains a primary concern. The literature notes that women and dogs are particularly susceptible to its harmful effects.
What was I doing in a place that was named after a poisonous plant, known for harboring fairies of uncertain disposition? If our origins have anything to do with who we are, didn’t it matter that I was born into an anarchist collective in an old canning factory? My favorite thing to do as a child was roller-skate madly up and down the hallways, which were badly lit and wide enough for a team of Clydesdales and a couple of bulldozers to proceed abreast.
Now I lived in a doctor’s mansion, where the floors were tiled in great marble slabs. They were a mottled meaty pink in the living room, and the bright glaring red of shallow wounds in the kitchen. What happened to that filthy child, that anarchist spawn with the tangle of unwashed hair in her eyes? I was such a genteel guest these days.
The fireplace was so enormous, it had a little porch that three people could sit on. Reina and I used to curl up in front of it, making beaded jewelry, sipping fizzy drinks, and dishing the dirt about men. The little porch and the mantle were made of thick black rock, dotted with trilobites and fossilized snail-shells.
What the hell was I doing in a place like this? In the years I lived on my grandmother’s farm, I went to a one-room schoolhouse in a tiny town called Parkfield, where the only thing that ever happened was earthquakes. Because of the regularity of its temblors, Parkfield was the epicenter of earthquake prediction efforts for years. We took endless field trips to the laser station, where our teacher monitored the motionless hills with devices that made him swoon with envy for himself. I became a voracious reader, and lay in the shade of a tree that smelled like Band-Aids, gorging my young brain on books about horses and dystopian futures.
Now I lolled on deck chairs carved from wine barrels on someone else’s lawn. A calico cat snoozed watchfully on a couch upholstered in soft burgundy leather. The anarchists and the earthquakes and the men were all gone, and we were still waiting, Reina and I, waiting for something to change. In the meantime, our life together was a string of sleepovers, one long girlish Friday night indoors. We spent hours at her hand-carved walnut bar, going over tales of Zack the philanderer, Zack the shrewd businessman, until the night yawned into morning and I missed the man as ambiguously as she did.
Zack had gotten brain cancer in the middle of a years’-long battle with his wife. It was unforgivable that he should end the argument that way, absolved of any obligation to apologize, explain, or divide his assets. I have promised, with every appearance of sincerity, that I would not tell a living soul what I heard in the course of a protracted slumber party at Foxglove.
“Zack was a pillar of this community,” Reina explained. “You can’t tell anyone!”
“I think I know when people would like to keep things private,” I told her. I didn’t add that I wouldn’t know a pillar of the community if I were shackled to one in the marketplace.
Several beats of silence ensued. It was like one of those moments when everyone is making silly puns and someone suddenly drops a remark about how language makes us human. She assessed me. That’s what she did. In the marble fossil fireplace, a handful of ashes held its breath.
“I’m sure you do,” she responded evenly.
I tried to maintain an air of sympathetic understanding. That is what people do when they are so insignificant their only hope lies in being helpful or unseen. You are a cream-fed cat, I recognized. And I am a likeable stray. I knew that somewhere in those stares, I had finally been seen. Reina, I realized, probably knew that wasn’t alfalfa in my hair.
I may have mentioned that Reina had a very fine eye. The pictures she showed me were composed with great dramatic flair around the large, lumpy, self-assured figure of Zack. He always sat, like an informal potentate or a charismatic leader, in a loose semicircle of people much younger than he was. If he was holding a glass, it sparkled and snapped with a double shot of something aged and burning. If he drank champagne, it was out of a flute; and if he held a wineglass big as a chalice, it was so the aroma of the deep red liquid could be properly released. And if he looked at a woman—
“Look!” Reina cried, tapping the screen with a manicured nail. She was a nurse, so really, her nails were maintained, not manicured. B
ut they were very well-maintained, without a hint of cuticle or dirt. They glowed with perfect health and transparent nail polish, like they’d all been gently licked.
“Look at that!” she hissed. “Look at that bitch!” She tapped a few keys, and the image of a dark-haired woman with a cunning leer filled the screen. “She’s standing—here,” she told me, angling her quick lean body into a doorway.
She crouched there, furiously exaggerating the other woman’s posture. Then she leaped up and dashed back to the computer, as if the leering woman might have been up to something while she was gone. It occurred to me that it would be a very bad idea to pick a fight with Reina.
“Zack and our friends are sitting—there,” she continued. She snapped the focus of the picture back onto Zack, and pointed at the patio. “And he was looking back at her—like this.” She sketched a quick, invisible diagram on the bar and turned a triumphant, wronged glare in my direction.
“So you think—?” I ventured, not entirely sure if I was expected to be morbidly fascinated or politely interested. Here I was, in lavish surroundings with a sophisticated, savvy woman who was not my mother. She trusted me with her heartbreak. I was the recipient of so much generosity, and all I had to do was show up at the bar and be attentive, like a diligent scholarship student.
“Oh. I know.” She sounded smoky and experienced, like a Washington insider encountering a young intern’s horror at a senator’s corruption. “Zack sent out mass emails sometimes.” She paused. “He was too stupid to hide the recipients. Too stupid, or too arrogant.” She paused again. Then, with the air of a forensics expert revealing the culprit, she declared, “This bitch was always on that list. And here she is—” She spun back to the computer, where she enlarged the woman’s leer until it became a blur, a nonsense piece of information, like a memory that doesn’t hurt anymore.
“She’s at my house!” A howl crept into her voice. “She’s at my house, looking at my husband, on my patio!” She was in a wide-legged scrapper’s stance, strong bony hands balled into fists. The woman in the photograph leered on and on. “And he’s looking back at her!” She zoomed in on Zack, who appeared to be smiling at a young woman lounging on the grass at his feet, like the youth of Athens being corrupted by a fat old man. “He could do that. He could point his eyes at you, and the whole time, he’d be scanning. Just scanning the room for some young cutie.” She crept back to the leering woman, who was neither young nor lovely, though she did seem agile and willful enough to captivate a man.
“She thought she was getting away with it,” Reina gloated grimly. “But I was up here, like this.”
Abruptly, she ran halfway up the stairs. She peered slyly through the hand-carved manzanita banister. She hunkered and aimed an imaginary camera at the doorway where another woman had crouched in three-quarters profile, leering at a man who smiled at a girl stretched out on the grass.
“I ruined my eyesight,” she told me soberly, descending the stairs like she was moving into the final act of a morality play. “Watching him around the corners of dumpsters, squinting at security cameras in the hospital . . .” She touched her glasses, which were checkered black and white and covered in tiny rhinestones. You will remember that blurred vision is a sign of digitalis poisoning.
The question remains: what the hell was I doing at a named estate, listening to a stranger finally tell the truth about a man I’d never met?
And now that the question has been posed three times, like a riddle in a fairytale, I have no choice but to answer it.
I was a scholar. I was a reader. I had retraced the journey my ancestors made—not to find out about my own past, but to abandon all traces of a pointless marriage to a man who should have been someone I knew briefly, a long time ago. I already knew about lusty passionate women like Reina and Caitlin, and how they fall in love. Their drama was a movie I’d seen so many times, I could sit in the dark alone and murmur along with the lines.
But I was going somewhere on my own. That’s how it started. I was on my way, and I got sidetracked and confused and caught in simple snares. I spent a long time sitting stupefied. I made escapes that compromised my honor. I took shapes that weren’t my own, and finally—well, you remember the lotus-eaters, don’t you?
Cannabis
ALL I WANTED to do was lounge around reading novels and recover from not being in Germany anymore. But I was not a well-born lady of the nineteenth century, with the option of soothing my nerves on a fainting couch indefinitely. I had to get a job, as horrid as that sounds. And there is really only one industry in Mendocino County.
Sure, there are ranchers and loggers and fishermen, too. But mention Mendocino anywhere in the world—which I have—and even the straightest stockbroker will raise his eyebrows and get a little grin on his face. When I came back to Northern California, my speech still furred with traces of German, I took a job in the industry. Specifically, I went to work in Alizarin Goldfarb’s pot garden. I had a little bit of a fraught history with gardening, and a long history with Alizarin.
I met her when I was three years old and she and her daughter Jezebel moved into the canning factory. Jezzie and I were both in kindergarten when her mother and my father locked eyes across a Scrabble board and fell briefly and flagrantly, madly in love.
The thing I remember most about that time is killing snails in Caitlin’s garden. The yard at the canning factory was a gaping wound in the middle of the parking lot. It had been ripped out of the concrete with a rented jackhammer and amended with compost from the sewage treatment plant. I don’t know if you can still buy cubic yards of treated human shit in San Francisco, but in the early 80s, they were practically giving it away. The people in our building kept the chunks of concrete they tore out of the parking lot and used them to build rough benches and a wall around the wound, which they christened Jackhammer Park. They adorned it with giant aloe plants and red geraniums and two small plum trees with fruits as dark as scabs. A few of the women grew food. Someone rolled out a carpet of lawn, as severely groomed as a military haircut. The grass and I both flourished under daily ministrations from a sprinkler that had to be moved every five minutes.
But gardening is brutal business, and Caitlin wasn’t one to spare a child. My task was removing snails from the glossy green leaves and stomping on them. I think I was supposed to find this gratifying, the finality of those hard brown shells as they broke into the soft flesh of my mother’s enemies. “Even the babies!” she instructed gaily, like she was giving me permission to transgress some rule we’d all agreed on.
My mother’s beans climbed up a network of salvaged poles and reached for the plum trees. Her melons twined around the headboard of a bed she had driven into the ground. An assortment of companion plants was supposed to protect them all from insects and disease. She had begun to draw a diagram of a medieval knot garden, where all the herbs were planted according to mnemonic devices invented by monks who knew the Bible by heart.
The trouble was this: my mother, a fighter to the core, was raising a wimp. As I re-create that era in my mind, it becomes almost clear to me that by the time we had our showdown in the garden, she must have known about my father and Alizarin. It cannot possibly have had anything to do with me or the snails. But there I was, refusing to accept her enemies as my own. She wanted us to stand together in Jackhammer Park, stomping on snails and lining the pathway with little dead smears.
Instead, I plucked them off the plants and held them in my hand. I understood how terrified they were when my enormous fingers wrapped around their fragile bodies. I knew why they vanished into their plain brown spiral shells. It made sense to me that they clung as hard as they could where they fed in the sunshine, oozing harmlessly along. So I put them in the pockets of my pink and white dress, dawdling as my mother moved ahead of me impatiently.
When I thought the snails were getting overcrowded, I wandered over to the other side of the giant aloe plant. The leaves were prickly, but not enough to hurt, if you were
careful. I took a handful of snails out of their hiding place and began to arrange them on the muscular curves of the aloe leaves. Some I put in the sun, because I thought they looked pale and might like to get warm. Others, I concluded, preferred the shade, so I tucked them in close to the heart of the plant.
I was almost done when I became aware of my mother, standing above me with a trowel in one hand and an empty plastic planter in the other. She was wearing a large straw hat, but her bare shoulders were lightly sunburned. She watched me in silence for a long time. I began to feel a slight chill, crouching there in her shadow on what had been the sunny side of her favorite healing plant. I had set a clump of snails beside me on the grass, and they separated and began to stream away before she spoke.
“You really don’t care at all about this garden, do you?” she said at last. “You could give a shit less if everything I’ve worked for”—she waved her arm, and bits of wet dirt flew off the trowel and onto my hair—“all this.” She turned to look at the melons, the beans, the tender lettuce in the shade. Then she looked back at me. Her eyes were wet and fierce. “What the fuck, exactly, are you doing?” Her diction was precise.
She was much bigger than I was. It occurred to me that this no longer meant she was someone who would pick me up when I was tired; who would reach into the cupboards and give me things to eat. It meant she was stronger and faster than I was, and we were alone in her garden, and I had never seen her this angry.
“I’m putting the snails,” I whispered, watching as my slimy little friends crept onto the aloe, inches from her foot.
“You are putting the snails,” she repeated slowly. She crouched down beside me and brought her face close to mine. “Are you aware, you little asshole,” she enunciated clearly. “You are actively destroying something that is very important to me.” She took a deep breath. Then she stood up. “Fine. You stay here. Save the snails. By all means.” She smiled brightly. “Have a great time,” she added, and spun away. I saw her take off her hat and drop it in the parking lot.
