Isle of Palms (16 page)

From the time Emily was six weeks old, I would roll her up and down South Battery in her enormous English pram, another gift from Trixie. There I was, dressed in old Gap jeans and a faded T-shirt, pushing a thousand-dollar carriage. It was absurd.

Money was tight even though Jim had an allowance from his parents. Jim gave me what he could but I didn’t have much gumption when it came to asking for anything for myself. I started to cut his hair to save money and did a pretty good job at it too. This grew to a part-time thing of me cutting the hair of other students for five or ten dollars. Word spread that I was pretty good with scissors.

Daddy would sometimes slip me twenty or fifty dollars when I saw him, but he had taken the position that if I was married, I should pay my own bills. I hardly ever disagreed with Daddy, though it seemed the circumstances I was in should have made a difference. It didn’t. As much as I loved my father, I knew it was futile to ask him for help. Violet’s legacy was a strange one. Daddy had become cheaper than ever and as petulant as a child. Or so it seemed to me. Besides, he was occupied with all the spaghetti dinners and pound cakes being delivered by various widows since the news of my departure had traveled the circles of Mount Pleasant society. That, I thought, was probably a good thing. Nonetheless, there was a growing uncomfortable distance between us.

I racked my brains trying to figure out how he could justify his stingy behavior with me. Maybe he just wanted me to grow up. Maybe he was jealous of Trixie’s support because he had suffered so much deprivation when he was a kid.

I was living dangerously in a depressed lull. Instead of enjoying my motherhood, I worried and sulked. I hated that I wasn’t qualified to do anything. I didn’t have money for school. Daddy wasn’t willing to lend it to me. I was afraid to take a loan. How would I pay it back? Ask Trixie? No way! I ticked days from the calendar with growing impatience. Was this my life? Changing diapers and waiting for Jim to graduate and leave me with a child? I needed to figure my way out of my dark hole, dug by everyone around me and by my own complacency.

Walking Emily up and down the streets of Charleston fast became a screaming bore. I decided I needed a hobby and turned to my first attempt at gardening. I remembered watching my mother work in the yard when I was little. I had always enjoyed helping her dig little holes with my own spade and refilling the watering can, especially on hot days. Maybe I would enjoy it now too.

Our little carriage house had a garden plot on either side of the front door and a long narrow plot that ran down the side of the house facing east. The other side faced a brick wall and had no sunlight. I decided to start with the front door area.

With Emily napping in her carriage, I began to weed and then to dig the tiny courtyard, sifting out old roots, bulbs, and stones. On my meager budget I was only able to afford to plant a few flats of flowers and herbs. Once they were in the ground, I thought it cheered the front of our cottage up tremendously. And me too.

Not long after my petunias began spreading and blooming, I was outside deadheading the flowers to encourage new blooms and Miss August surprised me by appearing right behind me it seemed from nowhere.

“Your flowers look very nice, Anna,” she said.

I jumped at the sound of her voice. “Thanks. I thought they would add something, you know, and give me something to do.”

“Yes, well, when I was your age, this entire garden was filled with blooms of one sort or another all year long. But now I can’t worry about all of that. Arthritis, you know. Kills the knees and you have to have obliging knees to garden.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, unsure of what to say.

“I used to be an officer of the Charleston Garden Club,” she said. “I knew Mrs. Whaley.”

“Wow. Well, that must have been fun,” I said, deciding she was probably just a little lonely and anyway, old people loved to reminisce.

“Your garden is only as good as your dirt, you know,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, I’ve heard that said.”

“Every three feet is a new garden, you know,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said and giggled. She was absolutely working herself into a lecturing lather saying
you know
with every statement, as though I knew anything, which I didn’t.

“I assume you like to garden?” she said.

“Well, I guess it’s something about me that I never knew,” I said. “Turns out that I like it a lot.”

“Hands in the dirt and a new baby in a carriage. What could make you closer to God than that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

Long after she was gone I was still thinking about what she had said. I had neglected my religious duties since marrying Jim. Emily had yet to be baptized. Maybe it was because Catholicism had belonged to my grandmother and had been shoved down my throat. I had not taken the time to think about it. Everything had been too confusing and I was still angry that I was in this situation anyway—married and a mother instead of being in college like Frannie. Frannie had gone off to Georgetown University and was studying political science. She would probably become a professional rabble-rouser. There was no question that I felt cheated, but I decided that I needed to stop complaining for a while. I was even getting sick of my own thoughts.

But, my life wasn’t a complete bummer. Every time I looked at Emily—her perfect fingernails, her innocent expressions—I felt blessed and grateful. Yes, grateful to God to have a healthy child and ashamed of my dissatisfaction over not getting exactly what I wanted. I told myself what the nuns had drilled into my hard head—that God had a plan for me. I wondered when the last time was He had reviewed it and, thinking He might have taken His eye off the ball, I began again to worry about a plan for myself. I began reading the want ads in the paper, hoping I would find something where I could work from home. Even something part-time.

The following week, Miss August knocked on my door.

“You busy?” she said. There was bounce in her question.

“No, not at all,” I said, wondering what in the world she wanted with me.

I stepped out to the curb to see a truck with twenty yards of topsoil and huge bags of manure and vermiculite. They dumped the soil on a tarp in the driveway and two huge men stood by waiting for instructions.

“It’s a little gift from me to you to me,” Miss August announced, pleased with her cleverness.

“Well, then, let’s have us a garden!” I said.

She produced a pitcher of iced tea from her kitchen and then supervised the men while they removed her shrubs and mixed the dirt into her beds and the ones in front and on the side of my cottage. I had carefully removed my plants from the ground to the side and would replant them later.

We were just sitting on her porch like two old friends, sipping sweet tea and watching the men dig and mix the ground.

“I’ve instructed the manager of Abide-A-While Nursery over in Mount Pleasant that you are coming to choose planting materials for us. Get anything you want. Does that suit you?”

“Oh! Yes, ma’am!”

Well, I was as happy as a wannabe gardener could be. Besides, it was the first time in my whole life that anyone had said,
Get anything you want!
I was so excited at the possibilities of it all. I was still nursing Miss Emily With the Voracious Appetite and this would be the perfect pastime to occupy me. Then Miss August surprised me by adding, “I thought I might be able to offer you a little stipend if you’d weed my part of the yard too. You know, just keep it tidy? How is seventy-five dollars a week? I mean, I think every girl should have her own pin money, don’t you?”

I didn’t know what to say so I just sat there in her wicker rocker trying to think of some way to say thank you. Jim didn’t have that many friends with hair for me to cut!

“All right, we’ll make it one hundred fifty dollars a week, but if you tell your husband, the deal’s off! And your mother-in-law! Busybodies! This is between us; is that clear?”

“Miss August! This is wonderful! Thanks, and believe me, I’m not telling a soul!”

“Fine! You can’t do any worse than that last fool I had working this yard. Irish drunkard he was! Had a black thumb and a hollow leg, I tell you!”

“Well, Miss August, I’ll do my best.”

And I did. The new gardens took root and grew into a kaleidoscope of color and fragrance. Trixie thought it was astounding, that Miss August had found a magician. She had no idea her magician was me until she caught me working in the yard.

“Ah didn’t know you liked to garden, Anna!”

She made the statement the same way you’d say,
I didn’t know you could read, dear!

“Yeah,” I said, “I love it.”

“Well, if you can do this for Augustine, maybe you would do it for me?”

“Sure, well, we’ll see.”

I thought that was noncommittal enough, but the message was clear that since she paid all our bills, I owed her something. But that wasn’t how I felt. Maybe Jim owed his mother something, but I didn’t think that her paying our rent entitled her to my manual labor. Motherhood and marriage without the conjugal fulfillment had made me slightly bitter.

I told Jim that Trixie wanted me to take care of her yard and he said to ignore her and she would forget she had ever said it. I should have known better.

The gardens continued to grow—great mounds of Blue Danube asters, hollyhocks and picta ribbon grass sprang up against the spillage of blue, white and pink flowers of Lamium and the gray-blue velvet texture of lamb’s ears. I had adopted the determination of my advisor from Abide-A-While to plant the entire yard without impatiens or begonias. Her name was Libby Hawkins. Libby had this hard-core philosophy that impatiens and begonias made your yard look the same as a gas station. I didn’t quite agree with that, but I decided to give her advice a shot and see how it looked. She was right about one thing. The absence of impatiens certainly gave the garden distinction.

It seemed that all I had to do was put something in the ground and it took off heading for the sun. I found a stack of old trellises in Miss August’s shed and cleaned and set them up, then planted small mandevillas, with Confederate jasmine sprigs at their bases. In no time at all, they crawled all over the trees and everywhere they could travel. I bought a book on pruning and went to work on her ancient boxwoods. In four weeks they were filled with fresh sprigs and looked as vital as new shrubs.

By the summer’s end, I had money in the bank and Miss August was thrilled. I cleaned up the old wrought-iron table and chairs in the garden and on occasion I’d spot her there from my window just looking around, smiling and enjoying a cool drink.

As Emily became more blond and her eyes more green and passed from infant to baby, Trixie was butting into our lives full force, undaunted by the clear evidence of questionable paternal identity.

My father-in-law, Jimbo, who just shrugged his shoulders the first time he saw my tiny infant daughter, knew better. After being driven to the outer edges of sanity by Trixie’s bossy personality for nearly three decades, he took up tournament bridge with a vengeance and traveled the world competing. He was in London when he died of an aneurysm at the Connaught Hotel. He was only fifty-seven years old and holding enough spades to trump the planet. Trixie made a swift recovery and Jim took a turn.

Jim’s father’s death was the beginning of the end for my marriage. He began staying out late and coming in sweaty reeking of cigarettes and beer from dancing all night in Charleston’s private gay bars. I would find him in the morning, sleeping in his clothes on the couch. When I woke him he would say, “Oh, my God, Anna! I can’t believe you let me sleep like this! I’m late for class!” He’d hardly finish brushing his teeth before he was out the door, returning home to sleep until ten or eleven and go out again until all hours. I mean, he didn’t do this every single night and when he was around he still gave generous time and attention to Emily. He loved her to pieces. But by her third birthday, his behavior had become a resolute pattern. And it was obvious from the phone calls and the way he responded to them that he was seeing someone.

With his father dead and his inheritance secured, his end of the bargain was technically fulfilled. He wasn’t asking me to leave or anything like that. No, there was a tremendous bond of affection between us but I was really uneasy. I knew he wanted to get on with his life and I couldn’t blame him.

I mean, I had always known in my heart that our marriage would eventually come to some kind of watershed, but I wasn’t prepared for it. And, I didn’t want Trixie to know the truth. It’s true what the old people said, that when families started keeping secrets, trouble came in the door.

Trixie pretended to be oblivious. She was as attentive to Emily as a grandmother should be, which is to say she never missed a birthday party or a Christmas morning. When Emily had the chicken pox, it was Grandmomma Trixie who put the calamine lotion on her blisters with a Q-Tip, while singing her Broadway show tunes. Under her tutelage, Emily learned all the words to the theme songs of
Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King
and
Les Miserables
. Emily also sang the title song to
Cabaret
like a miniature Ethel Merman, which was not necessarily the best thing in the world, but never mind.

Trixie’s attention to Emily was not the problem. The trouble started when Trixie began to recognize Jim’s general discomfort. Jim was her son and, as they say, blood has always been thicker than water. No mother wanted to see her son unhappy. She also suspected that I was sitting on a pot of money from Miss August, which she intimated all the time and I ignored all the time.

Trixie began to give me the chill while she investigated our lives. At first, it was subtle. She would call late in the evening and ask for Jim. He wasn’t home, of course, and I would tell her some fib, like he was at the library. These excuses were met with prolonged silences and deep sighs.