Broken Homes & Gardens

by Rebecca Kelley

  “We’re both drunk,” he said. “Wait here. I’ll get us something to eat.”

  “No eggs!” she yelled after him. Joanna gathered the blankets around her again. She was tired; she tried to close her eyes but felt her insides lurch. Malcolm returned in a few minutes with a plate of buttered toast and two mugs of hot tea.

  “Oh, Malcolm,” she said, taking a piece of toast from the top of the pile. “You’re such a good friend. Such a good, good friend.”

  The next morning she had to wake up early to drive back to Reno so Tess could take her to the airport. She had taken two ibuprofen to clear her head, to take away the sting from her eyes. Even that and two cups of coffee hadn’t helped though. When she hugged his parents goodbye, she had to keep herself from crying.

  Malcolm walked her out to her car and kissed her in the driveway. “It’s cold out here,” she said, but she didn’t let go of him.

  They sat in the car so they could have a few more moments together; she turned on the heat. They bent into each other, trying awkwardly to hug in the car, with their coats on. They laughed. He kissed her again, and she responded. Five minutes later, his hand up her shirt, she broke free, breathing heavily. “I should probably get going.”

  Malcolm frowned. “Too bad.”

  “You’ll be back home in a week, right?”

  “As far as I know. We’re finishing up this job for sure. They had some more work for me, a property in the Bay Area. They seemed to like my work, but I turned them down.”

  “Malcolm,” she said. She put her hand on his arm. “You can’t afford to be turning down jobs like this.”

  He turned toward her. “Oh yeah? And why is that?”

  Joanna’s head pounded. His voice sounded muffled, far away. “It’s just that—maybe it would be better for you to stay away for a little bit longer. It seems like we could use … a breather. A break.” When Malcolm didn’t respond, she kept talking. “The thing is, if you turned this job down for me—even if that was just a part of the reason—you might regret it. You’d resent me. That’s just the kind of thing we need to avoid. Maybe what we need is a fresh start for the new year, you know?”

  “A fresh start,” he repeated in a flat voice.

  “We can’t keep going on like this.” She willed herself to talk steadily, through the thick white cotton wadded up in her head. “We need—I need to get over you. This isn’t good for us.”

  Malcolm sat back in his seat. He seemed to be concentrating on the text written on the sun visor, up at the top of the windshield. He shook his head with tiny movements while Joanna talked.

  “I mean, all this time we’ve spent together—spent here—has been so, so great.” Her eyes were red and stinging but remained dry. He was staring out of the front window, his jaw clenched. “But we agreed to end it before it went too far. Right, Malcolm?” she said. “Isn’t that what we’d agreed on?”

  19

  what you do to forget

  Outside, the sky tumbled with clouds in varying shades of gray. They moved quickly with a cold breeze, sometimes revealing a patch of blue or letting a ray of sun peek through. When the wind rose up, it sent petals flying across from the plum tree in the adjacent yard. A chain-link fence separated her and her neighbor. Through the metal diamonds she could see bright yellow daffodils, the garnet branches of the flowering plum, a deep green lawn.

  All this would be very heartening if her own vegetable patch hadn’t been ravaged over the winter. She had had to bring last fall’s harvest in so early, and then she’d neglected it. Now in March the beds resembled abandoned graves—wet mounds of earth riddled with weeds and the withered remains of last year’s crops.

  She wore rubber gardening shoes that kept getting stuck in the mud. Her feet would step out of them, onto the damp ground. So now her feet were wet and cold, but she kept at it. She crouched in the soil and worked it with her hands, breaking up lumps of clay, making a pile of weeds. They had weak roots, pulled easily out of the ground. If she found a slug she’d pluck it between two fingers then hurl it into the lawn. She should kill them, but she didn’t have the energy.

  She was making little to no progress, and then the sky opened up, pelting hard, cold raindrops on her. It seemed to come at her sideways, whipping her hair across her face. “Agh!” she screamed. “Thwarted by Mother Nature again! The elements have won.” Lately she’d been doing this—narrating her thoughts as if she were on camera. She took this not as a sign of mental instability, but of job preparation. She had decided on a new career path, which started with forming her own landscaping business and eventually segued into hosting her own televised gardening show: “Mud, Slugs, and Bugs.” She’d already come up with several catchphrases, such as “It’s a dirty job, and I’m here to do it.”

  On this program, she would transform her guests’ weed-infested eyesores into veritable oases of calm and beauty. But unlike other shows, she would not shy away from the harsh realities of her craft. She was sick of the romanticizing of gardening in literature and popular culture. Tales of Victorian children—children!—smiling and pruning some forgotten garden back to its former glory enraged her. And just recently she’d read a book in which an Iowan opened her window in the dead of winter and scattered a handful of spinach seeds out onto the snow. The snow melted and tender salad greens popped out of the ground. What nonsense! Of all the suspending of disbelief she was required to do as a reader, this—this—was beyond credibility.

  Her television program would highlight the feet-sticking, the slug-tossing. Through much anguished yelling and gnashing of teeth, she would tame the unwilling landscape into something better than nature could do on its own.

  The wind and rain continued to pelt her. She could barely see. Her feet and hands couldn’t move; they were frozen to the bone. She gave up and headed inside.

  She entered the house through the back room—or what used to be Malcolm’s room. It looked the same as it had before he’d left last December. He had sent her a text message telling her he could get his furniture moved out if she wanted to bring in another roommate. No, no, she had written back. She’d keep it here for him. He’d be back eventually. Right? She hadn’t heard from him again.

  She wished she could throw herself into her work. Isn’t that what you do to forget? But her job made everything worse. What made her think she was qualified to teach writing? She’d taken on five classes this term; she was swamped with lesson planning and grading. Hours spent agonizing over those plans, those compositions, and for what? Were students rewarding her with polished apples, standing ovations, tears of gratitude? Quite the opposite. She’d just received last term’s course evaluations. “Joanna doesn’t have much talent as a teacher,” someone wrote. The office had carefully typed out the comments so she couldn’t sleuth out the author. It went on: “But that’s okay because neither do I. No one’s good at everything.” To soften the blow, a smiley-face emoticon was included at the end of the comment.

  But that wasn’t even the worst one. “The teacher doesn’t seem to know much about the subject so she can’t help us with our writing. We NEED to learn grammer! [sic] SHE DOES NOT TEACH US WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING!” And the one that made her cry, almost, it was so unfair: “She just doesn’t seem to care very much.”

  How could someone say such a thing? And what did it mean? Joanna had received the evaluations in the morning and then had to teach three classes in a row. After that, at a coffee shop next to the college, she rifled through the evaluations one by one, trying to make sense of them. Maybe they were right: she should quit teaching. If only she could hibernate through winter term, burrow into a blanket and survive on supermarket donuts. But going home didn’t appeal to her so much these days.

  Coming to no conclusion about the state of her career, she figured she should get something done. With a sigh, she heaved a folder onto her table and halfheartedly began reading student essays.

  “Joanna?”

  Three papers into g
rading and the interruption already came as a relief. “Wow, how long has it been?” Joanna asked.

  Her friend Allison was squinting her blue eyes at Joanna. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe since last fall?”

  “Here—” Joanna gathered up her papers and stuffed them back in the folder. “Sit down.”

  Allison took a seat and gave Joanna a hard look. “What’s wrong?”

  “Do I look that bad?”

  “Not bad, exactly. You look worn out.”

  “Great.”

  “Just—sad.”

  Joanna didn’t know what to say to that. Part of her wanted to break down sobbing, tell Allison everything that had happened with Malcolm. Instead she said she was feeling discouraged over the student evaluations. “What do they know?” Allison responded. She dove into a ten-minute rant about students and how they were incapable of recognizing the subtle genius of Joanna’s methods. This made Joanna feel better, even if Allison was making it all up.

  Running into her old friend got her through the last days of winter. They went out a few times. It helped to drink, to flirt with guys she’d never see again. She knew even while she was doing it how pointless it all was. But it made her feel like she was going through the motions of moving on.

  She and Allison went out one Saturday and they ended up chatting with two college students; they couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. Art school types, with unwashed hair and elaborate tattoos. And then somehow—it’s not as if she planned it—she agreed to leave the bar with one of them, this kid who paid for his beer in quarters and crumpled-up dollar bills; she went back to his apartment without even telling Allison she was leaving. Let him take all of her clothes off, then lay back on the bed and allowed him to lap at her between the legs for forty-five minutes before she pushed him off of her, gathered her clothes, and ran down the stairs and out into the street. She hadn’t even been paying attention on the ride over, had no idea where she was—she didn’t recognize the streets.

  She called Allison then. Allison was furious with her but came and picked her up once Joanna figured out where she was.

  She counted the days down until spring break, whiling away hours looking up fares to possible vacation destinations—Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Tokyo! But she ended up driving down to Nevada—again. As a part of her effort to move forward with her life, she had vowed to patch things up with her sister. As teachers, they both had a week off, while Ted had to work. Laura said since she didn’t go down for Christmas she wanted to see her parents before the baby arrived and Joanna had grudgingly agreed to accompany her. So she and Laura had been spending time together again. They’d resolved their differences not with a heartfelt talk but by simply pushing it under the rug. Not much had changed since they were kids.

  They were on a scenic portion of the drive—out of the misty blue forests and into open skies, golden windblown fields, a view of Mt. Shasta to the east for miles and miles. They had driven the last half hour or so in silence, and then suddenly Laura spoke up. “So it sounds like Malcolm’s pretty popular down in San Francisco.”

  Joanna’s heart skipped a beat. What did this mean? That he was dating someone? That he was dating hundreds of women? “Mm,” she answered.

  “I mean, it’s great that they admire his work so much. He should have no problem starting up his own business when he comes back to Portland.”

  Joanna kept her eyes on the road, trying to puzzle out Laura’s comments without stooping to ask her directly. She couldn’t figure out if Laura was speaking hypothetically or if Malcolm really did have plans to move back to Portland.

  “So what ever happened with you two, anyway?” Laura asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s obvious you haven’t been speaking to Malcolm lately. He moved out last December. It’s March now. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. He got those jobs down in California. Like you said, they love him down there. He couldn’t pass that up.”

  “Right.” Her sister rested her hand on her rounded belly, a gesture that irritated Joanna, though she knew almost all pregnant women did it. It just looked so affected. Joanna suspected they did it to draw attention to themselves, force people to jump up for them on the bus or let them cut in line at the restroom. “So you obviously had a falling-out,” Laura pressed on. “Does this mean it’s over between the two of you?”

  “What?” She couldn’t believe this. “How did you find out?”

  “Come on, Joanna. Please. Everyone knew what was going on.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was obvious to anyone who saw you together. The way you made eyes at each other, the way you disappeared off to the bathroom at the exact same time, the way you—”

  “Okay,” Joanna interrupted. “And Mom never said anything?”

  “Mom! You told Mom about this and didn’t tell me?”

  “She pried it out of me over winter break. I believe you weren’t talking to me at the time.”

  “Well, it’s all out in the open now. So let’s hear it. We have a couple hundred more miles to go.”

  Laura sat back in the passenger seat and listened as they headed back into another forest, with pines outnumbering the firs. “But I don’t get it, Joanna,” she said when Joanna had finished speaking. “Why all this game-playing? Why not just—you know—be with each other?”

  “I’m not playing games! And not everyone wants the whole marriage and kids with the white picket fence, you know!”

  “I never said you had to marry him. I’m just talking about having a basic relationship with him. And don’t tell me you’re against that on principle because you’ve done it before, with other people. Why not him?”

  “I told you. Malcolm and I are friends. That means something to me. I didn’t want to ruin it—”

  “Very ironic.”

  Joanna ignored the interruption. “Look around you. All these relationships—they end. Most people who find someone they get along with well enough to marry just wind up divorced.”

  She could sense her sister’s eyes on her. “Well—so what?” Laura said.

  Joanna was so shocked at this she didn’t respond at first—kept both hands on either side of the steering wheel, driving on. She would have thought that Laura’s current happiness with Ted would have blinded her to the possibility that it might one day fall apart. Or that even if it did fall apart, she’d rather suffer through affairs, separate bedrooms, and awkward family dinners than call it quits, satisfied that she’d toughed it out until death.

  “So you’re saying if this marriage and baby thing blows up in your face—you’d be fine with it.”

  “I’m not saying I want to get divorced, or plan to get divorced. I’m just saying it’s not the end of the world. That years of potential happiness and partnership with someone—even if it ends five, ten, sixty-five years later—is worth it. I know you think that friends are forever but obviously that didn’t work out.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You can’t be with someone forever when you go halfway like that,” Laura continued. “You sort of have to take the plunge.”

  They drove through the forest without speaking. Finally they made their descent into the valley below—brown hills, squat sagebrush, huge sky with clouds billowing up over the horizon, making shapes. They stopped for gas in Susanville and then got back in the car for the homestretch. Eighty miles to Reno.

  “You know,” her sister said out into the silence. Joanna’s mind had been wandering to her landscaping idea. The desert had made her think of it; how opposite this place was! Perhaps after some initial success in the Pacific Northwest, she could take her show on the road, gardening her way through the other hardiness zones. “This is how you tend to do things,” she heard Laura say.

  “What? What do you mean?” Joanna looked over at her sister for a moment, then focused back on the road ahead. Laura’s blonde head was swiveled toward Joanna.
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  “I mean, this thing with Malcolm. It’s part of a larger pattern.”

  “What are you talking about? I never had a friend like Malcolm before. I never slept with my friends before.”

  “I mean, you do things halfway. You always talked about going off to Vermont or someplace to college—but then you didn’t even apply.” Slowly, Joanna began to seethe. She clenched the steering wheel, staring at the yellow line in the middle of the road, breathing deliberately through her nose. “And then when you do get a chance to leave Reno, see the world, you come back early. You only had to stay in the Czech Republic a few more months—”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter that I was miserable the whole time—”

  “You were right there in the middle of Europe! You act like it was the end of the earth, a Siberian prison! A lot of people would have been thrilled—”

  “That’s enough!” Joanna yelled out. It was lucky they were the only ones on the entire highway because she felt like smashing into something.

  “All I’m saying is, it wouldn’t hurt to follow through with something for once in your life,” her sister said in a small voice.

  Joanna could barely think straight. She took a few deep breaths and checked the speedometer: eighty miles per hour. She took her foot off the accelerator, watched the orange needle drop back down to the legal speed limit before answering. The words came out clipped but reasonably calm. “It’s interesting that you don’t think I follow through with anything, Laura. It seems to me that you are the one who left your fifteen-year-old sister with our crazy mother so you could run off and enjoy the whole ‘college experience’ without a care in the world.” Laura tried to say something but Joanna kept on: “You know why I didn’t apply for any private colleges or even out-of-state schools? Because I couldn’t go out of state. Someone had to stay with Tess, and it sure wasn’t going to be you.”

  “Joanna, no one asked you—”

  “I know you didn’t ask me. You had no idea. She kept it pretty much together right after the divorce, back when you were still around. But you had no idea because you weren’t there. And you weren’t there because I was. For eight years! So don’t tell me I don’t follow through with anything!” Joanna almost choked on the last few words. She brushed tears from her cheeks. She didn’t look over at her sister, but she could hear from the sniffling sounds that Laura was crying, too.