Backyard (10 page)

Nan quickly realized that one of the several projects she had in mind could probably be covered quite nicely by $5,000 and would be actually done by professionals, rather than that unreliable amateur, George. “We'll look into it. But $5,000 for a gardening contest? In a rinky-dink little suburb like Livia?”

“It's true,” Jim said. “Check out this week's paper. They've got all the rules in there. Well, I'm off. Be sure and think about letting me give your yard a good, thorough sweep. I think you might be surprised by what turns up.”

“We'll give it careful thought, Jim,” said Nan in her tone that meant she would give it no such thing. With that, Jim got up, wheeled abruptly about, and ran off, almost racing down the steps, flinging pea gravel everywhere, and accidentally kicking over the little painted-model wooden chalets Nan had placed so carefully on one of the railroad ties, but which were always getting knocked over by people who were mad, or in a hurry, or who just didn't look where they were going.

Nan made a mental note: I have to move those bloody things before some clumsy oaf kicks them to pieces.

A souped-up orange Camaro that looked as if it had been finger painted by a kindergarten art class, and an ancient Plymouth Duster, eaten away so badly by rust and corrosion that George and Nan called it the “leper car,” squealed to a halt on the side of the road by the driveway.

It was Ellis, Cullen, and their entourages. That meant Matt and Steve, Denise, Charlie, Meg, and a beautiful girl burdened with an old-fashioned name, Bertha. Out they piled, flaunting their Metallica and Black Sabbath haute couture of T-shirts, ripped and worn-out jeans, and tank tops that showed too much cleavage, chatting and laughing, giving George and Nan little finger-roll waves before disappearing into the driveway, and entering the house via the garage door.

George and Nan had known most of them since elementary school. They knew the punch-code combination to the garage door, dipped into the fridge for snacks without having to ask, and were considerate enough to make old-person small talk when they couldn't avoid the senior set.

Lately, though, cigarette butts had begun to appear along the roadside, and cans of super-fortified, high-octane caffeine-and-sugar drinks were getting dumped in the recycle bin. George wondered whether it was only one more small step to joints, condoms, and Magnum .357 handguns loaded with hollow-point slugs manufactured to rip apart lungs and blow away brains.

“They're good kids,” said George. “Right?”

Nan shrugged abstractedly. “I suppose so,” she said.

George frowned, then lifted his glass in salute to Phil and Ann Boozer, who were walking down the street and waving, yelling something barely audible about “working too hard.” The Boozers were not terribly spontaneous folks. When they went for a walk, or devised a plan to do anything else, for that matter, they stuck with the blueprint. They would not be doing anything so rash as to go bounding up the steps to chat with the Fremonts unless they had made the requisite arrangements beforehand. Nan raised her own glass to the Boozers, who were just passing out of their sight lines, and who, she reflected with a smile, were the only ones of their friends who didn't drink.

“Nan-bee, you
do
think they're good kids, don't you?” George had turned in his chair to look at her. Nan saw that his face was a sad mask of silly, niggling concerns, and that he needed her to focus him on the new challenge at hand.

“To hell with the kids,” she said. “What do we have to do to win that contest?”

12

How to Win Big at Gardening

T
he cool, dry spell lasted longer than anticipated. While that made things comfortable outside and kept the mosquito population at bay, resulting in what condominium and apartment dwellers and happy-faced television weatherpersons would deem a string of “perfect days,” dry was not what the Fremonts wanted it to be. They were more than willing to put up with the irritant of a few whining pests in exchange for the natural lushness adequate rainfall would bring to their backyard at this time of year.

The sprinklers were on nonstop during much of the morning. George would fit the tap with a dual spigot attachment to keep two hoses going at the same time. “Double headers,” he called them. He'd set them on full throttle just before the sun came up, then turn them off as the kids hit the showers in expectation of full blasting streams to come shooting out of the showerheads. That was for the lawn and whatever flowers could get soaked at the same time. Then, Nan would resume the watering for another three hours with the hand-held sprayers and soaker hoses for the remaining flower beds. They finally turned the water off for good at about eleven a.m. as evaporation began in earnest, negating much of the value of watering from that point on.

So, while the front yard spawned all manner of dandelions, weeds, and burrs, and gradually burned into a uniform crispy, fried-brown color, the backyard shone through as a well-watered, tranquil, and quite serenely beautiful oasis amid a desert of drought-stricken neighbors' yards. The water bill that arrived that week detailed charges of only $100 for April and May. The next bimonthly bill, they figured, could be as much as five times that amount.

“We need to do more,” Nan announced one cloudless morning as the sprinklers whirred away. “We're not doing enough to win this contest, and I want to win this contest. I want to win this contest so badly I can taste it.”

George frowned. On the rare occasions when Nan made such pronouncements, they generally preceded relentless bursts of energy, which invariably sucked him in to their vortex. That meant a lot more work. On cue, a pain spasm shot through his lower back to remind him that the musculature entangled around his spine, ribs, and pelvis was not keen on big backyard projects that involved a lot of lifting and bending over. He kept frowning, having thought that all the big work that had to be done to the yard could now be safely relegated to the past.

“Why?” he said. “We're watering all the time now. You're putting on the Miracle-Gro. The place looks great even in the middle of this drought. What else do we have to do?”

“Lots,” Nan said. George moaned.

“Besides, something's been snipping some of the monarda, or chomping it off very cleanly.”

“I
told
you I heard snipping that night.”

“And I was wrong to doubt you, George. But it's seeing that's believing. Look at these monarda over here. Not blooming, of course, so harder to tell, but cut off very cleanly at the stem. What could do that . . . or who?”

“
Who?
Who'd want to cut off our monarda? What possible reason . . . ?”

“I don't know. But we're damn sure going to monitor the situation, and next time you hear snipping, you're out there with your baseball bat pronto.”

The conversation moved on to what, for George, was the unsettling proposition of major improvements to the gardens. As stunning as their backyard might be, Nan was now thinking it didn't quite measure up to her new, higher standards. It certainly would not be good enough to garner them first place in the Burdick's Best Yard Contest. Now, she saw their backyard in its true light, as something that, while it was testimony to hard work and dedicated maintenance, was actually quite predictable and rather commonplace. With the exception of the wonderfully perilous angel's trumpets, which were her own inspiration last month, there was nothing unusual in their gardens, which probably meant nothing that would cause the judges to stop and take notice. Basically, she reflected, everything they had planted in the backyard would scream to the judges that this was the work of novices who had mastered only the basics of gardening, and had not shown the guts to take chances, to really do what it took to turn it into a masterpiece. New areas would have to be cleared. Turf would have to be dug up, and earth turned over in preparation for planting new, as yet undetermined, things. But what? It was getting well past planting season, and deep into summer.

Nan and George decided they needed to spend more time methodically scouting out the competition. It wouldn't be hard to find the other contestants. Their names and addresses had been listed in the
Lollygag,
and on the website of Burdick's, which figured it would heighten interest in the contest if residents could see what yards were being entered, and how they were being improved in preparation for the judging.

Contestants were issued big green lawn signs that read: O
FFICIAL
B
URDICK'S
B
EST
Y
ARD
E
NTRY
, then a contestant number. George and Nan yelped in amazement when they handed in their $25 entrance fee and were issued a set of official rules and a lawn sign bearing #73, having underestimated the number of competitors by about four dozen. They were appalled when they later learned that 148 signs had been handed out.

“But don't a lot of those people just have a few flowers and shrubs?” George said. “I figured the real competition is probably limited to about a dozen or fifteen people.”

“And we won't be one of those,” barked Nan, “unless we see what other people are doing and make some big improvements ourselves.”

George lapsed into silence. He had not seen resolve and passion like this out of Nan since they first began their backyard remake, and that meant the fires of her energy and drive were being rekindled. Even their college searches for Ellis and Cullen had never reached the fever pitch of excitement and determination that now seemed to be building alarmingly in his wife. Nan had lately seemed such a contented and unexcitable person. More wine-relaxed than coffee-driven. And now, an adrenaline-addled, workaholic, garden bitch-ass was going to be loosed on the world. Look out!

 

Livia is a simple suburb with unremarkable attractions among which wonderful gardens and immaculate lawns have never been counted. It can boast Mound Park, a twenty-five-acre green space featuring a dozen old Indian burial mounds. There is the Prairie Hills Mall, with its bargain-basement outlet stores. Perhaps the suburb's crown jewel is the 200-acre Billings Lake Park, with its sandy beach and beautiful surrounding homes.

For those seeking the cosmopolitan touch, there is a Tunisian restaurant started up by a guy from Paramus, New Jersey, that used to be rated nationally as a four-star undiscovered gem. It had suffered from its brief fling with fame, and expanded too quickly, allowing quantity to trump quality. Now, it catered primarily to a lunch crowd of businesspeople for whom pretty decent North African fare was plenty good enough.

Because they had some pride in their community, Nan and George had been pleasantly surprised to find, as they followed the contestants map supplied by Burdick's, so many lawn signs sprouting from properties they ordinarily would not have suspected to be in the running for any kind of landscaping recognition at all. They also felt somewhat threatened and deflated to discover that many of these gardens, often fronting the streets, were pretty darned good. Many were on streets seldom traveled by the Fremonts.

Then there was the Billings Lake area. What they found there was a revelation that gave them new hope. Many of the yards were too gaudy and pretentious. Others had not been properly cared for, and were showing signs of drought damage. Some were quite lovely and tasteful, but others were so often garish quilts of mismatched plants and flowers. Repeated visitation revealed that many used hired labor, which disqualified them right away, and would probably double disqualify them if the hired labor was of the illegal sort.

As they branched out into virgin territory, a new world of Livia yard horticulture opened up to them. In fact, they found threats galore to what they had always assumed was their uncontested place among Livia's landscaping elite.

The curving cul-de-sacs of south-central Livia, known only to them because Ellis's best kindergarten friend lived on one of them, were a special discovery. Here were at least eight lush gardens swimming in moisture. Black soaker hoses snaked everywhere, their mist turning the landscapes into mysterious, wet-climed fog gardens. All manner of exotic annuals and perennials sprouted from these gardens. Even Nan was at a loss to identify many of them. After two such scouting missions, they decided to bring along a digital camera, so they could surreptitiously take their pictures, return home, plug the camera into their computer, and search their gardening books for the appropriate IDs.

It was easy enough to spot the roses. In one garden, four different varieties swallowed up six giant trellises at the front and side of the house. God knows what was in the back, because, at this point, their scouting expedition scruples did not allow Nan and George to trespass on private property. That left them cursing the absence of alleys, which would have allowed them access to what was
really
going on, and frustrated them with the knowledge that what they were seeing was probably only the tip of the blossom. The rose house they were able to dismiss as “too one-dimensional,” though it certainly made a vivid impression. With any luck, the Fremonts figured, those roses would have shot their wad by the time of the contest.

It was harder to ignore the house on Waveland Circle, a long, hidden-away cul-de-sac perched on the bluffs overlooking the Big Turkey River Valley. Due to the way the houses on the cul-de-sac were constructed on their plats, Nan and George were able to get a good look at the backyards as they followed the circumference of the cul-de-sac circle. What they saw stunned them. Here was the sort of garden that made theirs look like an HO scale model by comparison. There were at least four varieties of phlox, which would likely burst out just in time for the judges' visit. Lots of peonies, but those would probably be past their prime by then. There were lilies and amaryllis everywhere throwing out beautiful blooms. Would they still be blooming at contest time? Nan wasn't sure. Her own lilies, she knew, would not be, darn them!

Spreading clematis splotched an aging, weathered-gray section of fence with scores of violet-and-white blooms and, right next to it, a huge hydrangea with green flowers would go white in about two weeks. Perfect timing, drat it all! Someone had shown the presence of mind to plant lots of big annuals, which would bloom all summer: sunflowers, which hadn't come out yet, and might not by the time of the contest; lovelies-bleeding, larkspur, and mallow. The ornamental grasses, though, were really what hit Nan because they were so well placed, breaking up the annuals and perennials: Scottish tufted hair grass, huge pampas grass, switchgrass, and purple fountain grass.

Most of those names George and Nan wouldn't even know until they were able to blow their pictures up on their computer and match them with photographs in their four illustrated gardening books.

“Oh, and of course, they have their token roses,” harrumphed Nan as she aimed her camera at an eight-foot-tall curved trellis smothered in the ruby red and pink of scores of Don Juan and Jasmina roses in full bloom. “Wow!”

“I don't know; that yard looks awfully busy to me. There's too much going on there. There's no theme.”

“Are you kidding! It's spectacular! But, yes, George, if simplicity is considered the top virtue of a yard by our judges, then we can rest easy; these guys will not win. Somehow, though, I think spectacular might win some points. And we're only seeing about half to two-thirds of the backyard. Let's move around the curve here.”

They followed the curve around to the other side of the driveway, but the house blocked the view of the backyard from that angle. It was at this point they noticed that a man and woman were watching them through the house's front picture window. They waved and the Fremonts waved back. Then, they moved away from the window.

“Better scoot before we have to answer some pointed questions,” Nan said.

They got in the car just as the man came out the front door. He watched them impassively as they drove off.

“I hope he didn't get our license plate number,” said George, who had burned some rubber as he shot out of the cul-de-sac.

“Now, why would he want to do that?” said Nan, who was busily scrolling through the photos she had taken on the viewfinder screen. “He was probably going to ask us what we were doing, then invite us into the backyard when we told him. No big deal.”

“Can't take too many chances,” George said.

As they pulled into their driveway, they were surprised to see a woman dressed in a burnoosey-looking thing and carrying a camera scurry across their yard, then run down the street, get into a white sedan, and peel out with a squeal of tires and engine.

“Loony!” George said. “People just go goddamn loco about some things. What do we have to do, fence in the yard? Keep that car in mind in case you see it prowling around again.”

“No problem. I bet only fifty cars matching that description come by here every day.”