“You used to. I have a couple of letters you wrote to me.”
I wave her off. This time she does nothing to stop me as I push my way along a faint path away from her, but it is a long, uncomfortable time before I am safely out of her field of vision.
He’s vanished into the woods now, and I don’t give a shit if he’s lost or if he takes his own fucking life. It’s all his.
By the time I get back to the edge of Emily’s yard, I’m shaking with fury and can hardly open the gate. I hear him behind me, and then he reaches around me and opens the gate for me, ushering me in as if he owned the place.
Chapter 6
Babysitting the three younger kids while Emily and Earl are at the hospital having Eight, I enjoy just reciting the names—Eli, Erin, Evan. Imagining that their mother does, too, makes me feel connected to her, which is sort of pitiful when you think about it. The four older ones—Eddie, Elizabeth, Eva, Eileen—all had reasons they couldn’t be here. That’s fine with me. It suits me to be taking care of my niece and nephews at a time of family need. And there’s not a barbecue in sight.
Emily’s due date is a full two months away. It was Earl who called me in the middle of the night, waking me from a deep sleep and a complicated dream; not knowing my brother-in-law well, I could only assume this brusqueness to be his crisis mode. Not knowing my little sister very well, either, I asked to talk to her, but Earl said she couldn’t come to the phone, which scared me and hurt my feelings. All I wanted to say was good luck and I love you.
Apparently Daddy hadn’t been awakened by the phone, or had assumed it was for me and would add the disturbance of his sleep to the list of things he holds against me, such as the fact that I didn’t go to the Phi Beta Kappa ceremony in college and get the key he’d paid ten dollars for. I don’t know now why I didn’t go.
Even before dawn, it was warm enough to sit out here on the deck, and now it’s quite comfortable on its way to being too hot. Birds are riotous, countless different calls. If Ramon, our nature-lover, were here, he’d stand in the sunrise with eyes closed and a look of rapture on his handsome face. Homesickness slices through me, a physical pain.
“What’d you do, smother them in their beds?”
“Jesus, Will. I didn’t know you were there.”
“Sorry. Good morning, Sandi. It’s quiet, which can’t be said very often about Emily’s house.”
“Good morning, Will. Nobody’s up yet.”
“Lucky you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Thought I’d stop by on my way to work to make sure you were okay. It can get a little wild around here.”
“So far so good. They’re easy when they’re not conscious.”
“Good thing it’s summer. School days are something else. Emily and Earl have it down to a science. Everybody’s assigned fifteen minutes in the bathroom. Not sixteen.”
“You know, it never dawned on me until I was a parent myself what it must have been like for Daddy to get all five of us out the door in the morning. I don’t remember a lot of chaos or hassle, do you?”
“You girls always hogged the bathroom.”
“Until you boys started shaving.”
“You and Emily would hole up in there teasing your hair for hours. We’d pound on the door. In junior high I used to wake up every hour all night long worrying about having time to take a shower and brush my teeth.” He’s grinning, but bitterly.
“Oh, sure. It’s my fault you got such lousy grades. Sleep deprivation, right?” I’m grinning, but we’re on the brink of a fight.
“When my kids were growing up,” he declares icily, “I made sure they had equal time.”
Now I’m worrying that I’ve missed this with my own children, that our basic family routines and arrangements have felt unfair to one or the other or both of them, that they’ll carry into adulthood resentment Martin and I never knew about, as my brother obviously has. “Are you in a hurry?” I risk asking him. “Do you have time for a cup of coffee?”
“Sure,” he agrees readily, and I’m pleased. He’s inside for longer than it would take just to pour a cup of coffee in a familiar kitchen, and I imagine him listening for the kids, maybe checking on them in their various beds. Old habit would have me in a snit that he doesn’t trust me. Instead, I manage to feel like part of a team.
He emerges half-bent over, muttering around the mug held to his mouth with both hands as if one wouldn’t support it. “Wow! Strong!”
“I hate weak coffee.” I was going to say “wimpy,” but that seemed gratuitous. We have plenty of things to judge each other about; coffee doesn’t need to be one of them. My brother takes another sip, makes a face, takes another. He settles himself onto one of Emily’s plastic deck chairs, groaning on his way down. “You okay?”
“Oh, the lower back gives me trouble,” as if the lower back didn’t belong to him. “Especially early in the morning.”
“You pretty much sit in one position all day, don’t you?”
“I guess.” He feels criticized. I don’t think I was criticizing.
Emphasizing the warmth I honestly do feel, maybe overdoing it to the point of sounding fake, I say, “It must be kind of fun, talking to people from all over the country about their gardening questions.” In point of fact it sounds deadly dull to me, but I’m hoping it’s fun for him.
“It’s just a job.” Stepping over toys on the deck, he winces and presses a fist against his back.
“You’re really in pain. Have you seen a doctor?”
“It’s just middle-age aches and pains. You know.”
“Oh, yeah. My massage therapist is practically part of my extended family.”
“Well, we don’t have a lot of massage therapists out here.”
“I’m pretty good at it myself. I’ve paid attention to what she does to me.” When he doesn’t take the hint, I make the offer explicit. “Want a back rub? Martin has trouble with his shoulder and I can sometimes loosen it up for him.”
I think he looks alarmed and embarrassed. “That’s okay,” he says, obviously meaning, “Hell, no.”
“I get a massage every couple of weeks. I can always tell when it’s time.” My need to stretch is suddenly urgent, but for some reason I’m not comfortable doing that in front of him.
“We live different lives, Alexandra. Sorry. Sandi.”
Now there’s the start to any of a number of conversations. I pick one. “Are you happy with your life, Will? Have things turned out the way you hoped they would?” To my own ears I sound pleading, which makes me suspicious of my own motives: Do I want assurance that he’s satisfied with his life because he’s my brother and I love him, or because I need some sort of absolution from him for having left? Or am I hoping he’ll confess to misery that will justify the path I’ve taken?
His shrug looks as if it hurts. I realize Daddy makes the same gesture. “I don’t know. I don’t think about it much.”
“At least you have something you love. Not everybody can say that.” I’m pushing too hard, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I want to be assured that he’s all right, whether he is or not. “At least you have your gardening.”
“I hate gardening.”
I stare at him, not really as surprised as I let on. “No, you don’t.” The absurdity of that makes me laugh, but I don’t take it back. “You love gardening. You’ve always loved gardening, ever since we were kids. It’s part of who you are.”
“You’re right, it’s part of who I am. And I hate it. I hate the feel of dirt. I have to force myself to go out and pull weeds. Even moving the hoses is drudgery. Every year I pray for an early killing frost. And,” here his voice actually breaks, “I’ve come to dread spring.”
I’m not ready to concede. “But practically every time I hear from Emily she talks about your garden. She makes it sound as if that’s just about all you do.”
�
��It is just about all I do. At work I talk about gardening all day, I’m surrounded by gardening supplies and seed catalogues and greenhouses”—he shudders—“and people who consider it unnatural and immoral not to love gardening. And at home what do I do? I garden.” On a roll now, he leans forward, grimacing, and very nearly shouts. “Plant! Fertilize! Water! Trim, weed, mulch! This year I doubled the size of the strawberry patch, even though the plants I already had bore only a few berries and the birds got those. Compost, transplant, separate bulbs! I take classes to learn how to do more gardening. In the winter I read gardening books. I subscribe to half a dozen gardening magazines. Carol and the kids give me gardening-related presents for every Christmas and birthday and Father’s Day, and I don’t blame them, it’s my only interest.”
“Why—”
“And I’m no good at it.”
“Oh—”
“There is such a thing as a green thumb, and I don’t have it.”
“Oh, that can’t be true—”
He’s off on another litany now, this one of his horticultural failures and disappointments. The pervasiveness of the list (even I can grow petunias and zucchini) astonishes me, and his ferocity scares me a little, even in its comical extreme. I wait for him to finish. When he pauses, I have the impression he could go on for a lot longer, and hastily I interject. “Why do you do it then?”
He looks at me blankly. “Do what?”
The question confuses me. “Garden. Isn’t that what we’re talking about? Why do you garden if you hate it?”
“You said it yourself,” he answers bitterly. “Gardening is part of who I am. It’s how I make the world a better place.”
The two of us recite together, “The Kove family will bring good into this world.”
“Where’s my mom and dad?” It’s Erin, the gangly eleven-year-old, the worrier, wide-awake in a Pooh nightshirt. In the wash of sunlight, she looks a lot like her Uncle Will.
“They’re at the hospital having your new brother or sister.”
“It’s a girl,” she declares smugly. “Her name’s Ebony.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“Mine.”
“Ebony?”
This strikes Will and me funny at the same instant, and we howl with laughter. Erin, of course, is insulted. I gasp, “I thought for sure it would be Eight,” which causes a fresh onslaught of hilarity. Cutting her eyes at us and heaving a put-upon sigh, she retreats inside, and cartoon babble courses out through the door she didn’t exactly slam.
This is not her room. It was her room for only a minuscule fraction of its existence, and then not hers alone. The conceit that a space retains the personalities of its inhabitants is hogwash. There is no evidence, physical or otherwise, that it was once hers and Emily’s; at the time, those few years, it would have been hard to imagine as anything else. When the children were at home—all of them; some of them; one or another of them temporarily returning—I thought I would never be done with raising them. In fact, child-rearing has occupied a small percentage of my life.
My mind wanders. I feel decidedly off-kilter, as if insufficiently rested. Then I remember: Alexandra and I were both awakened by Earl’s pre-dawn phone call. I heard her answer, and later I read her note. Birth is the only good news likely to be delivered at that hour, and even then the adrenaline hurtling one out of sleep is unpleasant. Time being somewhat elastic for me these days, I had not realized the baby was to be born so soon. I do, in fact, feel a very mild interest.
Of greater interest, however, is my search of this room in which my daughter Alexandra has taken up very temporary residence. This little reconnaissance mission was unplanned, opportunistic. She is likely to be gone for some time. I will gather what information I can, and I have a perfect right to do so. She is a guest in my house.
On the dresser, angled to reflect in the mirror at the same time that it shows frontally to the room at large, is the portrait of my daughter and her family. Balancing it between my palms so as not to leave prints, I consider it in both shadow and light. I barely know these people. Her husband is black as a crow; the highlights on his cheekbones are blue. The boy must have some Indian in him, for the black hair is straight and the bridge of the nose squared. The girl is clearly a mulatto. Posed in the centre of the grouping, Alexandra is large, fair-skinned, beaming; her husband’s hands are on her shoulders and she has an arm around each of the youngsters, as if they were related to her.
For long moments I study the photo, waiting in vain for some internal response I might term familial. These people are alien. They are not my kind. They are not her kind, either, and I am furious with her for putting me in the position of reacting this way.
When I set the picture back on the dresser, the flimsy cardboard brace collapses and it tips over face-first with a tiny sharp slap. I force myself to stand it upright, but cannot quite get the proper angle. An image floods my mind, fully formed and with every sense engaged, of the instant Alexandra sees it has been moved, then the instant she realizes I must be the mover, the intruder.
The headache that has been with me off and on all my life ratchets up a notch or two, and I must sit down. Groping, I find the bed, unmade, and as my fists take some of my weight my knees buckle, so that I collapse face down among the sheets and blankets. I lie still, waiting for things to right themselves, dimly wondering, and not for the first time, whether I will have the wherewithal to end all this when the time comes, whether I will even know when the time has come.
Eli and Evan have been up less than fifteen minutes when they are embroiled in one of those utterly irresolvable squabbles, this one apparently over Cheerios, reminding me how similar fourteen- and five-year-olds can be. Erin’s haughty comments to and about them are intended both to demonstrate her moral superiority (what eleven-year-old girls self-righteously call “being mature”) and to rile them further. Helpful Will is making noises about having to get to work.
“I thought we’d hear from Earl by now,” I fret aloud to him as he drains his second cup of coffee, apparently having gotten used to the way I make it.
“It takes longer than this to have a baby. You remember—oh, no, you don’t, do you?”
On the working assumption that this is said benevolently, I grin. “See? Adoption’s easier.”
By the way he looks at me I know what he’s going to say. Serves me right for opening the subject. “So, what? You couldn’t have kids of your own?”
“Our children are our own.”
“You know what I mean. Okay, okay, you’re right. I’m sorry. I take your point.”
Somewhat mollified, I say with less vitriol than I might have otherwise, “That’s an awfully personal question, don’t you think?”
He shrugs and gets to his feet. “Hey, sis, we’re family. We’re supposed to be in each other’s business.”
There’s actually something kind of sweet and disarming about this. “We chose to adopt,” I inform him, my tone distressingly like Erin’s. “Neither of us has any reason to believe we couldn’t have birth children.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t get it.”
This “you must be crazy,” along with Emily’s “you’re heroes,” are the two most common reactions when people learn about our kids. I never know what to say. Now I hear myself asking him, “What does Daddy say about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” I sound, and feel, forlorn. Then I see that he’s lying, or withholding. “Will?”
“ ‘Alexandra always has to do everything differently.’” He spits the last word. “ ‘She does it to get back at me.’ ”
“That’s what he says?”
“That’s what he said. I think I only heard him say anything about it that one time.”
“But he’s the one who taught us to think for ourselves and do things our own way. You know, the goddamn road less travelled by.”
“Dad? You’ve got to be kidding. He controls every move we make. Always has, always will. Why do you think I’m a gardener?”
“He told you to be a gardener? Come on, Will.”
“What he’s told me over and over, from as far back as I can remember, is that flowers and home-grown vegetables are good for us and good for the world and he always wanted to grow them himself but couldn’t. So he gave it to me. I’m designated to do it for him. His surrogate gardener.”
“But you said you’re not good at it.”
“I’m not. By far more stuff dies than grows, and I have puny little harvests.”
“So why’d he choose you?”
“He made a mistake, I guess.” He laughs humourlessly. “I guess he taught me wrong.”
“How do you think he gave it to you, Will? I mean, he gave me stuff like that, too, sort of assignments, and it’s always felt like more than just teaching. Almost as if—I don’t know, as if he actually put something into me.”
Will is quiet for a long time. I don’t know what that means.
After a while I sit up. The headache has receded, a familiar lying in wait until its services are required again. As often happens in these interludes between pain and nausea, my thought processes seem clear, although the possibility always exists that this is a delusion. I stand up, brace myself against the wall until I can trust my balance, and walk across the room.
The manuscript of her novel, insolently titled Fatherland, is still in the drawer. I remove the first chapter, twenty-one pages, and sit in the desk chair to read. I cannot determine whether she has worked on it, even touched it, even thought about it since she has been in my house. I stare down at it for long moments, and then slide the box out of the drawer and sit on the bed with it heavy on my lap. Then I take off the lid.
Finally I can’t stand it anymore, and I change the direction if not the content of the conversation. “So you’ve spent your life doing something you don’t want to do so he could have fresh tomatoes?”
It’s a stupid thing to say, and he’s right to narrow his eyes at me. “Something like that,” he says to close down the conversation, which is fine with me. From inside the house Erin screams bloody murder. “I’ve got to get to work,” Will says brightly, his hand already on the gate. “It’s all yours, Aunt Sandi.”
The Yellow Wood Page 8
