“California,” she said, folding the crinkly pages when she was done. “It seems like another existence.”
“One of our many,” Ivan said. He was screwing shelf supports into the wall, and he grunted, giving the screwdriver two last turns. “I wish you’d come up with a name for this place, Susannah, before we have to call it something like The Carrot Connection.” He fished another screw from the pocket of the little tool apron he wore. “We’ve got to get a sign up in the window so people will know we’re coming.”
“I’m working on it,” she said, and she was, but she could think of nothing that satisfied her. She wanted the name to express everything she felt about her move east—hope, fear, delight, even the flickers of nostalgia that surprised her whenever she recognized a place she used to know well. Palmer Elementary School, for example, turned out after all to be her old school with a new name, new playground equipment, new desks, new principal; she had joined the gymnastics car pool, and she had driven there twice to pick up the twins after school before she recognized the dark red brick and the sloping schoolyard.
“Work on it harder,” said Ivan.
“I will,” she promised, and it was on one of those afternoons at the restaurant, while she was drinking tea and watching the spring sun shine in through the clean window, thinking of her childhood, of this stretch of Route One as it was in those days—what was on this spot? a field? houses? she would ask Mr. Stang from the liquor store—thinking of the old playhouse and her mother’s flowers, when the perfect name for the restaurant came to her. She printed it in block letters on a piece of posterboard—THE SILVERGATE CAFÉ—and held it up to Ivan and Duke to see.
“How about this? What do you think?”
Duke nodded immediately. “It’s good, Susannah. For one thing, it gives us options—it could be anything from a coffeehouse to a nightclub.”
Susannah smiled at him—Duke, she knew, had ambitions for the place beyond vegetarian lunches—but it was Ivan’s response she was waiting for. He was up on a ladder, his face pushed into the squint-eyed grimace that meant he was deliberating. When he finally said, “I like it,” a stab of grateful relief startled her so much that when Ivan laughed and said, “The old homestead, eh?” she didn’t, for a moment, know what he was talking about.
Chapter Three
In the Garden
Rosie saw the first signs of spring that year in Barney. During cold weather, his lechery always died down a bit—not entirely, of course, but now and then he’d burrow against her, shivering, in bed, and say, “It’s just too cold.” By the time the bed warmed up he’d be snoring. “Cold weather makes me sleepy,” he said, needlessly apologetic. “It’s my Southern blood.” Barney attributed everything to his Southern blood—laziness, booziness, braininess, restlessness, as well as both desire and the lack of it.
But as February gave way to March, and the little gusts that sneaked their way through the bedroom windows became less icy, Barney expanded like a flower. He couldn’t get enough. And it was more than just his usual randiness, more than the desperate lust of a midlife crisis or the deep stirrings of his Southern blood. The quality of his lovemaking, even the quality of his voice and the look on his face, had subtly changed, and one day Rosie realized, when she opened her eyes to see him propped on one elbow gazing at her with goofy tenderness, that he was in love with her.
Oh, no, she thought, and he said, “I can’t get over how beautiful you are, Rosie. I could look at you forever.” He stroked her cheek with one fingertip. “Ah Rosie, Rosie,” he said, and buried his face in her shoulder, kissing her neck, and she knew they were ready for another go-round.
She didn’t know what to do with this kind of romantic passion. She hoped it would remain undeclared. She loved Barney dearly, but she wasn’t in love with him. She didn’t wish to marry him, or even to see any more of him than Friday night and Saturday. She didn’t mind at all that he left on Sunday morning for church and didn’t appear again until the next weekend. This arrangement just suited her. She had no qualms about living alone; she liked it, in fact, and though her house may have been a bit large for one person, she had never wavered from the idea, since Peter left, that it would be too small for two. It gave her the same thing she got from the old gray sweatpants she sometimes gardened in (the castoff of a large, athletic, long-gone lover named Dennis)—a feeling of spaciousness, room to maneuver, freedom. A permanent Barney would make the comfortable old house a tight fit.
And yet the way he was looking at her implied marriage. Wife, she could see him thinking as he stroked her cheek or took her hand on impulse and kissed it. He was thinking of seven-day-a-week availability, of coming home from a long day playing Good Shepherd to his flock not to an empty bachelor pad but to a smiling wife and a good dinner. He was thinking of pooled pensions and long train trips in their old age when the Helen Palmer Elementary School said, “Good-bye, Mr. Chips,” and Rosie was too decrepit to garden. She could see it all, and in order to forestall the declaration she dreaded, she instinctively became, at times, aloof from him. She’d be busy in the kitchen instead of snuggling by the fire; occasionally she failed to laugh at his jokes, and once she even pleaded flu symptoms too severe and probably contagious for lovemaking.
Meanwhile, spring invaded her garden, withdrew, changed briefly to winter, returned in force, and settled in. The backyard went through the usual steps: snowdrops, crocuses, the first red shoots of peony and bleeding heart, the pale green spikes of daffodil and tulip leaves, the delicate blue and white of hyacinth and scilla. The silver pussy willows furred, the early purple iris blossomed, the magnolia buds swelled, everything greened. Rosie checked her previous year’s garden calendar; things were earlier this spring, the Emperor tulips by two days, her beautiful Geranium narcissi by a full week. She sowed peas, lettuce and radishes, and put in onion sets and shallots. The dahlia tubers were rooting, the snapdragon seeds sown in their little pots. The tomato and pepper and eggplant and herb seeds, in flats out in the greenhouse, sent up their green beginnings. Mother Nature kept her promises, as she always did.
Rosie was busy and happy, working hard, digging in compost, pruning the exuberant red shoots the rosebushes sprouted, fertilizing them and also the hydrangeas, liming the lilacs. The smell of the earth—rich and wet, clinging in the creases of her fingers and under her nails—excited her. She didn’t think to look in the mirror so much.
“It’s wonderful to see you, Rosie,” Barney said to her. “You’re like a spring blossom.” She smiled; she even kissed him. At her age, she was grateful for such flattery, but she was apprehensive hearing it from him, with that look on his face.
It was Barney who spotted the sign on the empty shop. He burst in one Friday with the news, and he drove Rosie out on the Post Road to Chiswick to see it. Roller Dome, Shoe City, Dunkin’ Donuts, then the Liquor Boutique and Wendell’s and in between them a washed window and a sign painted on a white paper banner:
COMING SOON
THE SILVERGATE CAFÉ
NATURAL FOODS
with a smiling bunch of cartoon carrots down in one corner.
“Cute,” Barney said.
“Cute,” she repeated. “Cute.”
She began to tremble with anger, a phenomenon she had read about and never believed in or experienced. But there was a fluttery buzz in her stomach and chest that made its way to her fists when she clenched them and even to her teeth, which began to chatter. “Damn the child,” she stuttered out. “Damn her. Damn, damn, damn.”
“Hey,” Barney said, taking one of her hands to uncoil the fist. “Hey. Calm down. This is your daughter. What’s the matter, Rosie? Leave the kid alone.”
They sat there in the car, motor running, with that blasphemous sign smirking at them, while Barney tried to soothe her. He didn’t succeed—she would never, never, never be soothed, she vowed—but he stopped her trembling, and she reminded him of the Silvergate she’d been born in, how Susannah had filched the name of her sleazy dum
p from a dear memory that she had no part in, and whose adoption by her was a deliberate provocation, a slap at the family, a call to arms.
Barney held her hands. “Rosie,” he said every time she paused. “Rosie, Rosie.” And when she stopped he began to defend Susannah. “First of all, why do you call it a sleazy dump? She may be a first-rate businesswoman and a first-rate cook—just like her mama.” He smiled at her, shook her hands up and down a little and squeezed them. Rosie glared at him. “And then the name of the place,” he went on. “Couldn’t it just as well be a gesture of friendship to you? A little nostalgic feeler for you to grab on to, Rosie? Hm? Come on, honey. Give the girl a chance.”
“You don’t understand, Barney,” she said, wearily, pulling her hands away. I will never marry this man, she said to herself. “But why should you understand, anyway? Let’s go home, let’s have dinner.” She took one last look at the sign, the idiotic carrots, the window. There was a light on inside. If she’d had a rock, and was within aiming distance, she would have thrown it.
“They must be in the back room,” Barney said, craning forward in the dusk to peer through the windshield. He grinned at her. “Sure you don’t want to go in and say hello? Disarm the opposition? Fire the first shot?”
“I do not,” she said. “How you can be so insensitive as to suggest such a thing I don’t know. Let’s get out of here.”
“Aw, come on, Rosie, don’t get mad at me,” said Barney, and put the car in gear, looking pleadingly, fondly, part impishly at her. But she was angry. She was livid, she was furious—at him, at the sign in the window, at life, at herself. Her heart knocked frighteningly in her chest. That girl will kill me yet, she thought. She breathed deeply all the way home to calm herself, and had an extra Scotch before dinner to cheer herself up.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Barney. “If I’ve been bad company lately. Tonight. I hate having what’s past and done with pop up again, things I’ve worked out for myself and put in their place and gotten to terms with coming back to haunt me.”
It was a cold early April night. Dinner was overcooking in the oven. They were sitting on the floor by the fireplace, drinking, and Barney had his hand companionably under her skirt, on her stockinged thigh. “I like my life to be settled,” she said.
She felt Barney’s hand tense, then relax. His thumb went back and forth, back and forth. “So do I,” he said, in a voice full of meaning. He took her drink from her with his free hand and set it at a distance, and then he applied both hands to various parts of her body, pinning her down on the hearth rug. “Rosie, Rosie,” he said with his lips against her ear. “Marry me, Rosie. I love you, honey,” he said, and the hand on her thigh moved up, wiggled under her pantyhose and down again, and he sighed happily as he got to work. “Marry me, Rosie,” he said. “I love you so much, baby.”
She didn’t need to answer just then. In a second they were both busy with buttons and zippers. Rosie didn’t know what it was, but she hadn’t felt such need in years. Maybe it was simply knowing that sooner or later—and sex on the floor in the firelight would make it later—she’d have to say no to his proposal. Whatever the reason, she wanted him frantically, and she tore at his belt, his pants, his shirt, she whipped out of her clothes and sat astride him, lowering her breasts to his mouth while she rode him slowly up and down—a fairly awkward procedure but one that made him grip her bottom hard with his two hands and moan with pleasure. “Ah, Rosie, Rosie,” he mumbled and sighed, but it wasn’t marriage he was thinking of by then. She prolonged everything, keeping it all slow and dreamlike, while the coq au vin dried out in the oven and the fire burned down to coals. She waited for the old detachment to take her over, as if it were some powerful force watching and waiting to turn her to stone in the midst of her pleasure, to say: you shall not enjoy yourself with this dear man. But it kept back, it let her be, and she fell on Barney and rocked him against her with a cry and nearly wept into his shoulder with happiness when they were done.
But the reckoning came. You can’t make love on the hearth rug forever. They dozed a bit, woke, felt chilled, kissed and hugged, poked the fire, threw on a log, dressed, and sat down to their ruined dinner. Barney looked at her across the table, his electric hair rumpled and his eyes still bemused from the hearth rug.
“What about it, Rosie? You going to marry me?” His Georgia voice was slow and calm. She could hear him cracking his knuckles under the table.
The words you’d be crazy to say no crossed her mind, and in the same instant she said no. “I can’t, Barney,” was what she actually said. “I don’t want to be married.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve tried it. I don’t like it.”
“Honey, I’m not Edwin. We’re happy together, Rosie.”
“We wouldn’t be if we were married.”
“We would.”
She put down her fork and leaned across the table. “I wouldn’t be, then,” she said with great distinctness. They stared at each other a while before she sat back and resumed eating. The chicken was practically melted, falling off its bones at the touch of a fork, bits of bones wandering around in the sauce. “Don’t ruin things, Barney,” she said. “It’s so nice the way it is.”
“I want a wife, Rosie,” Barney said, looking forlorn. She didn’t pity him, though. He had a good life. You can’t have everything.
“Then you don’t want me,” she said.
“I do.”
“But I’m not a wife, and I don’t intend to be.”
“I’m getting old, Rosie, dammit. I want to settle down, preferably with you.”
She still refused to pity him, though she could see that he was pitiable, also lovable, also—probably—right. She should have said yes. Who was she, at her age, to take offense at “preferably with you”? But she did. She said, “Ah, I see. Preferably with me. In other words, it’s some abstract notion of a wife you’re looking for. It’s not me you love, it’s wifiness. And if I don’t choose to settle down with you, you’ll find someone who will. Some wife. Right?”
“Aw, come off it, Rosie,” he said, pushing bones around on his plate.
“Am I right?”
He stood up and whacked his fork on the table. “You’re a hell of a woman, Rosie, but you’re no spring chicken, either, and one of these days you’re going to find yourself all alone and you’re not going to like it.”
“Yes, I am,” she said perversely, though of course that wasn’t true. It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought of solitary old age and a life narrowed to the TV, a doggie, her own cold flesh, and too much drink. “Why don’t you sit down and eat, Barney? We can still be friends. You can still come over and pull my knickers down while you look for a wife.”
It took him a few seconds, but he laughed and sat back down, and they finished dinner. He even stayed the night, and the next, as always. They played Scrabble, drank, watched Vincent Price in The Fly on the late movie, took a long walk—not toward Chiswick—on which Rosie told him more about Silvergate, the real Silvergate, the sacred one. When they got back she showed him, again, the National Trust booklet, with its color photographs of the box hedge, the lily pond, and the pinkish brick manor house topped with the octagonal cupola. They no longer plotted to sail to England some day, but he let her talk, and he had the tact not to try any more to persuade her of Susannah’s admirable motives.
It was a normal weekend in every way, except that they were unusually considerate of each other. They were retreating, warily, from each other’s province; even their friendly, intimate talks were no more than a smoke screen thrown up to disguise and soften the split. And there was no more lovemaking, except for a Sunday morning before-church quickie, and that was Rosie’s idea. She felt bad, because she knew she had hurt him, and because their time together was up, and so she seduced him—a laughably easy task, as ever—and sent him off to mass. They smiled ruefully at each other at the door, and kissed lightly, formally, with a certain reluctance, and then she let him go. She
was sorry—even, once he was safely out of sight, weepy—and though she knew she’d feel, before too long, a kind of ultimate gladness, like a long sigh of relief, she knew she’d miss him too, probably forever, as she continued to miss Larry Bruner, and Dennis of the sweatpants, and a man named Dan Powers whom she almost married when she was on the verge of forty, and vulnerable.
Jim and Kiki Sheffield, tanned and wrinkled, returned from Florida, and filled some of Rosie’s Friday nights with Scrabble tournaments. Besides her, they invited two other couples and Jim’s older brother, Ralph, a hard-smoking bachelor of sixty or so who wore suspenders and did magic tricks. He used to reach across the Scrabble board and pull little plastic bunnies out of Rosie’s ears—a nice man, good at Scrabble and crossword puzzles and checkers and bridge, with a store of funny anecdotes from his days as a television newscaster in Boston, but so patently designed for her by the Sheffields that Rosie obstinately considered him a buffoon and nothing more.
“What do you think of Ralphie?” Kiki asked her one day, girl to girl, over tea.
“He’s a real card, Kiki,” she said. “Har de har har.”
“Really, Rose,” said Kiki, disappointed, looking down into her cup: a matchmaker thwarted, but a smile twitching at her lips because she knew what Rosie meant.
They were pals, Rosie and Kiki—or as palsy as it was possible for a divorcée and a devoted wife to be. In Rosie’s opinion, there were always limits in those friendships—territories in each other’s lives they hesitated to enter because they were alien or threatening or downright impenetrable. Kiki didn’t like to hear, for example, about Rosie’s beaux. She had married Jim at twenty-one, after a two-year engagement, and had never known another man; not that Jim wasn’t a perfectly nice chap—a more dignified Ralphie—but Rosie had a feeling Kiki didn’t want to think about what she had missed. Nor did Kiki dwell on her own domestic felicity, for the same reason, but reversed. And they carefully disguised their mild disapproval of each other’s way of life—Kiki having to dash home to get Jim’s dinner, Rosie having to dash home to primp for a date—disapproval in which there was always a smattering of envy.
The Garden Path Page 12
