Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart (3 page)

“Buddy-boy?” I found myself repeating with a frown. “You’re kidding—right?”

“It’s what I call my son, and he’s an honor student!” the manager proclaimed.

I looked around me, as if to say,
Can you believe this?
The others waiting in line seemed to disapprove as well, but they didn’t speak up. Our moment of togetherness and connection had evaporated. They fidgeted and frowned as if they agreed with me but didn’t want to make a scene.

If Giles Owita shared my anger, he didn’t show it. I was amazed to see the way he pulled his shoulders back to stand more proudly.

“Look, if you want to blame someone for the delay . . .” I said to the manager.

But he pointedly directed his attention toward the next customer in the line. Giles Owita stepped away from the station. He retied his Foodland apron for a neater fit. His movements were measured and unhurried. Meanwhile, I fumbled and stewed. I grasped my receipt and turned away from Marie without offering the customary pleasantries. I felt my cheeks grow red. I slapped the folded letter back into my purse, along with my receipt. Being called “buddy-boy” was probably the least of
the insults that a person of color had to endure in a place like Roanoke, and yet Giles Owita seemed at peace. His hands gripped my grocery cart. “Are you ready to go, Mrs. Wall?”

Outside, the rain had stopped. We stepped off the sidewalk.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have spoken with you at a later time.”

“It is okay. You shouldn’t worry.”

I stole a glance at him. To my ears, his pronunciation of “okay” sounded more like “okee,” which lent a hopeful, lilting tone each time he spoke the word. His steps were quick. It was a challenge for me to keep up. I hoped he didn’t notice how I struggled, taking double steps to help match his pace.

“It’s just that I wanted to schedule a time for the yard,” I said. “So I could be there to show you around.”

If I’d been truly honest, I might have added:
And so I could be there to make sure you ripped out those azaleas.

“For the record,” I continued, “what happened back there with your boss wasn’t right. We’re not all rednecks here in Roanoke. I promise. I hope you’ll give us another chance to be more welcoming.”

He nodded, unperturbed, and said nothing. I shuddered to imagine what he thought of us. “How long have you lived here?”

“In Roanoke? About two years. My wife is a nurse at Valley Hospital. We moved here for the job, which also led to a job for me, in the hospital kitchen. When I was laid off several weeks ago, imagine my good fortune in finding two excellent part-time positions. This one opened up at Foodland, and then, as
you know, I have been able to assist at the Garden Shoppe. From there, I’ve begun to pick up landscaping jobs, like yours. Many, many people have been welcoming to us, these past two years. We like it very much in Roanoke.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” I said. It seemed that Giles Owita was trying to console me, as if it were me who had been insulted, and not him.

“There are many interruptions at the checkout counter,” he continued. “This man they have put in charge of the store lacks patience. Something like this happens almost every day. Yesterday, he chased a very small boy—I believe he was Pakistani—who had opened a box of Pop-Tarts. The mother was screaming in protest. She had a cart spilling over with groceries, and had been too busy spending money in this man’s store to notice her child’s very minor misbehavior. I’m afraid that she tossed a few items at the manager. First, there was a bottle of ketchup. Next, some rolls of paper towels. Yet not one of us stepped in to help that man. Not even when the lady pushed her cart at him several times, like a bull charging. The manager was unhurt, but she succeeded in making a very big point. In the end, he retreated to his office, where he was instantly busy with some papers on his desk. We were amused to see him through the glass. He did not once look up at us. We took much joy in this, and felt it justified.”

I laughed out loud, which clearly pleased Giles Owita.

“Would next Saturday afternoon be okay?” he said.

“Next Saturday?”

“For the tour of your compound.”

“Oh. Right. Yes.” I thought out loud for a moment. “That’s the day after my parents are moving to a new assisted living facility. They have lived in the same house for more than fifty years. This is a difficult move for them, and I want to help them get adjusted. How about three o’clock?”

“Three o’clock will be fine,” he said.

So, this much was settled. We had a time, a place, and some notion of the tasks at hand. Above us, clouds shifted and mingled as they made their way toward the perimeter of a brisk Southern night. The silver moon, three-quarters full, floated above us. Lights from passing cars shone on the rain-slick surface of the parking lot. The reflections made me think of comets stretching their elongated tails.

“When you stop by,” I said, “do you think you could help me select something else to put in place of the azaleas?”

His eyes lit up.

“All right. I’ll think on this.”

I suddenly remembered something. “Oh, wait. Your fee? You didn’t say.”

“Ten dollars per hour.”

We reached my van, and I turned to him. “So little? Are you sure? It really does not seem enough.”

“It’s my standard rate.”

So many odd jobs, worked for minimum wage. It occurred to me that Giles Owita must not have any credentials beyond a green card, and I found myself wondering how he managed to
obtain one of those. Yet Sarah said he was the hardest worker they’d ever had at the Garden Shoppe. Dick would be so pleased I’d hired him, I told myself. I opened the hatch and then stood aside to watch Giles Owita tuck the bags inside, one by one.

“You say you live near the airport?” I asked, hoping to somehow find out more about him.

“Yes. My wife and I, and our two sons. We’re on Overland Street, on the north part of town.”

“Overland. Right. I know that area. It’s close to the expressway and not far from where I teach.” What neither of us said was that Overland was across town from where I lived. Roanoke is a historically segregated community, like much of the South, and had been recently listed as among the nation’s most segregated areas. Overland was somewhat of an anomaly. It was a neighborhood filled with modest homes and was an integrated community. I think the expressway and construction of another major road was responsible for this progress. I never was sure who had managed that feat of civil (and social) engineering, or if that was even one of the goals of the construction.

He nodded.

“Sarah may have told you I’m a high school English teacher,” I said, still trying to make conversation.

“No. We do not talk much at work.”

“Dick and I also have two sons. With a daughter in between. We used to call her our rose between two thorns. I know it’s silly, but . . .”

“Silly? I don’t think so.”

The end of his sentence dovetailed with the increasingly loud roar of a jet passing overhead. We paused to watch it as it crossed, left to right, through the sky above us. It seemed almost to float as it approached Wildwood Mountain. Giles Owita was especially intent in tracking its progress, craning his neck at an awkward angle. Yet there was something cautionary in the way he soberly searched the sky, and I refrained from saying anything more. The set of his jaw was firm, as if holding back deep emotion. Questions flooded my mind. How old were his sons? Had they been born in Kenya? What brought the family to the States? But most of all, I wanted to ask him why he seemed so sad right now, as he watched the jet that streaked the sky.

As if he read my thoughts, he said, “We, too, have a daughter. She is in Kenya, and waits to be brought over. There are complications with her visa. She is our firstborn child. You see, my wife and I . . .”

I waited for more detail. He hesitated. This time, I pressed ahead. “What is your daughter’s name?”

“Her name is Lok. Her favorite flower is the rose. You have given me a thought, Mrs. Wall. She, too, must be our rose among the many thorns of life. Yes. That’s it. My wife will like it.” Giles Owita looked wistful.

“I’m glad you like my metaphor,” I said. “And I just have this feeling Lok will be here soon.”

At that moment it seemed to me that he slammed the hatch a bit too hard, like a period to mark the end of our conversation. I circled the van and climbed into the driver’s seat. Behind me,
other people’s cars slashed by and Giles Owita stood ready to advise me on backing out.

I rolled down the window.

“Wabironenore,”
he said as I passed by.

“Wabir-o-ne-nore,” I carefully repeated. “It means goodbye?”

“It does,” Giles Owita said. “But also, we will see each other later.”

I
t hadn’t been easy to convince my parents to move out of our family home and into an assisted living facility nearby. Mama had finally given in, though. She was having some sort of problem that increasingly affected her gait, and she also realized that she could no longer safely handle my father’s worsening Alzheimer’s on her own.

I knew what my parents’ move would mean for me. As the daughter who was geographically the closest, I’d be the one to shoulder most of the burden of overseeing their move and settling them in. I’d be the one shopping for them and making sure they were well taken care of. In truth, though, taking care of my parents wasn’t new to me. I’d always felt my parents needed me. Even as a little girl, I’d felt responsible for their happiness.

I had a sister—an older sister—named Barbara. She was born “mongoloid,” as they called Down syndrome babies in those days, and today doctors might have been able to fix the defective valve in her heart. Back then, it wasn’t possible, and when she was just two years old she died. I was only seven months old at the time, so I had no memories of her. All I had were the pictures of her that I’d seen around the house.

The cause of Barbara’s death was always kept vague (at least to me and my younger sister, Judy). We were only told that she had a heart problem. I think most children know when something is being hidden from them—something so big—and I was perhaps even more sensitive than most. There seemed to be a shadow of mystery around my sister and her death, especially where my mother was concerned. Daddy didn’t mind talking about Barbara, and often when we were alone he’d bring her up. Daddy always called her “our little angel.” But Mama was a different story, and the unspoken rule around our house was that Barbara could never be brought up in front of Mama, nor could Mama know that Daddy talked about her to us when she wasn’t around.

Maybe that was why I was always described as such a grown-up child. I had sharply attuned antennae for sadness of any kind, especially anything that touched Mama. She was a wonderful mother in so many ways, but I learned early on that once riled, her anger could be a powerful thing. As an adult, I realized that this was a side effect of her enormous sadness and guilt over Barbara, and her disappointment at not having been
able to have a house full of children. After my younger sister was born, she was told she could have no more, and I think that loss, combined with her grief over Barbara, limited her happiness forever after. But of course I knew none of this as a child. Back then, I just knew that it was my job to help Daddy keep Mama calm and reasonably content.

My radar for anything involving Barbara, and Barbara’s effect on Mama, was bizarrely acute. I remember once when I was five or six years old, I overheard a phone conversation Mama was having with one of her distant relatives. Mama and she must not have spoken in a while because they were swapping vital statistics. I remember Mama saying, “Yes, Carol is six and Judy is four. And our Barbara died in 1952.” I knew all of this, but then came the part I did not understand at all. Mama said, “Well, you know she was a mongoloid.” I had no idea what that word meant, but something told me that it had to be something really bad. And from then on it became my project to find out more. This wasn’t just nosiness, it felt to me like a vital responsibility. Because how could I protect my mother if I didn’t know what I was protecting her from?

Not long after that, I started to put all the pieces together. I figured out that when Daddy asked me if I wanted to ride along with him while he ran an errand, this meant that he wanted to talk about Barbara. Daddy was just bursting with grief, and sometimes it overflowed. He told me how he used to take drives with Barbara, and he’d sing to her and she’d cock her head and look at him, almost as if she understood. I remember he said
once, “You know that Barbara was the kind of child who never grows up.”

Perhaps this was where I first got the idea that there were two kinds of people in this world—those who take care of others, and those who needed taking care of themselves. I always figured I was the first kind. Then, after my cancer diagnosis, I had spent too long feeling like the second kind. It was only recently that I’d learned we are all the same. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ve never been sure, but I think that after Barbara died Mama and Daddy moved me into her room. It would have made sense, since it was the nicest room and now I was the oldest. As a child, I lay in that room thinking about Barbara and wondered if she was looking for me, the same way I was looking for her. One of the photos of Barbara that I often studied also included me—I am maybe four months old, lying on my back on the sofa. In the foreground is Barbara in a little walker. She paused and is looking at me as if to say, “Well, let’s see, who is that?” Or at least that’s what I imagined she was thinking. I did a lot of filling in of the blanks as a child. I think that’s how I got to be such a storyteller. No one was telling me anything, so I had to come up with a narrative of my own.

I was a child who often grew lost and frightened by my own thoughts. When I was getting to an age when I was starting to think about boys, I became very troubled by some of the images that were coming into my mind. I was raised to be a good girl, and these thoughts and feelings I was having seemed wrong. So I
went to Mama, and I told her with great earnestness that I was having some bad thoughts about men and women. Mama looked at me and said, “You know what, Carol? What you’re thinking and feeling is normal. My minister told me that you can’t keep the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest there.” I found that advice so reassuring, and I tried to apply it so many times over the years—not always successfully. Mama wasn’t able to take her own advice either. Sometimes it seemed that all of Mama’s guilt and sadness had built a permanent structure in her head.

Mama had a strange way of coping with Barbara’s death, and it often came out in a weird sort of gallows humor. There was a story she loved to tell, as if it were the funniest thing in the world. Although she usually completely avoided the subject of Barbara and her death, this was the one weird exception. She told the story over and over, and I learned to know when it was coming. Apparently, at Barbara’s funeral, after my sister’s little white casket had been lowered into the ground, my grandfather held me in his arms nearby and he tripped, nearly sending us both tumbling into the grave. This recollection always made Mama laugh. It just tickled her to death. Of course, the effect it had on me was altogether different. I found myself obsessing over what might have happened if we had really fallen in. How would I have gotten out?

That wasn’t the only thing that troubled me about Barbara’s grave. There was a photograph that deeply affected me. I found it one day when I was digging around in a drawer, no doubt
searching for answers. It wasn’t long after that overheard phone call. In the photo, Barbara’s tiny coffin is resting just above the grave, waiting to be lowered. Around it are heaps and heaps of flowers. The image was black and white, but in my mind I imagined that the colorful petals were already wilting. At night, I tried to visualize the reds and purples, pinks and yellows pictured there, and even to count their blooms. Suddenly, I understood in a way that I never had before that they’d buried my sister, there in the ground, beneath the soil.

Daddy took Judy and me to Barbara’s grave, often in May, the month that Barbara was born. Mama never came, and it was understood that she’d be too sad to join us. Each time we visited, I placed some fresh-picked flowers on her grave. I knew even then that just like those flowers in the picture, the flowers that I left on Barbara’s grave would wilt and die. Was it any wonder that I never liked flowers? I preferred green things that grew in the ground, things that never bloomed only to fade.

We lived in a house of secret sadness. By the time I was a teenager I knew this as well as I knew my own name. But I wouldn’t find out until I was already married that there was one massive, as yet untold, secret that directly involved me in a terrifying way.

It went back to when I was just a baby, in the months before Barbara died. I was five months old, and apparently I had an awful case of colic. I screamed and cried all the time. My parents, no doubt already exhausted from coping with Barbara’s profound needs, now had two babies who cried for them all the
time. Our regular pediatrician was serving in Korea, so they sought the advice of a doctor who was known for some innovative new therapies. It was his theory that I had an enlarged thymus, and that was causing swelling, which resulted in discomfort and crying. So he recommended three full treatments of radiation to my thymus gland.

To make matters worse, the radiation treatments given at the time weren’t targeted, and the entire upper part of my body was exposed to the radiation. Mama later told me that when our regular doctor returned from Korea, he shouted, “These treatments will kill her one day!” I can only imagine how she must have wept, her universe collapsing again.

When I was eleven, I had my first non-cancerous lump removed. I had no fear, and my parents certainly didn’t tell me the cause. I was just told that I had a little something in my neck and the doctor would remove it. By the time I was seventeen, the lump had grown back and I was sent to a different surgeon. Again, I don’t recall being scared and I think that’s because I wasn’t allowed to be. There wasn’t enough room in our lives for all of Mama’s anxiety, let alone adding any of my own. I was terribly sick in the hospital, but because Mama was so upset about the situation, Daddy would leave me alone there and take Mama home.

I don’t know if Mama and Daddy would ever have told me about the radiation if it hadn’t been for an article they read about increased cancer risks in adults who’d been subjected to radiation treatments as babies. I vividly remember their call. I was
twenty-one, already married to Dick, and when the telephone rang I was ironing one of his shirts (probably the one and only time in our entire marriage that I did such a thing). Mama and Daddy were on separate extensions, and they were obviously upset. Picking up on their emotions as I always did, I became shaken myself and by the time I hung up the phone I was crying. I told Dick what they’d said—that there seemed to be an incubation period of about twenty-five years, and if you passed that without a cancer diagnosis, then it probably wasn’t going to cause any more trouble. Dick said, “So we can keep a check on that. It doesn’t sound so horrible.”

When Dick said that, I thought,
Do people actually grow up in homes where they approach life with such optimism?
I had always pretended to be optimistic for my mother’s sake, but I wasn’t actually an optimistic person. In truth, I pretty much always expected disaster. But I knew better than to show that fear to the world. I knew that when I wasn’t light and happy, bad things happened.

Not long after the first lump was removed from my neck, I started developing terrible headaches that I eventually learned were migraines. I was twelve years old, and one morning before school I was sitting at the breakfast table and Daddy said, “Carol, on the way to school we’re going to run by the emergency room.”

I had my homemade banners for the football game all around me, and I looked up at Daddy, wondering why on earth I needed to go to the hospital.

Clearly uncomfortable, his eyes darting around the room, he
said, “Your mother wants you to have a head X-ray because you’ve been having so many headaches.”

I could have put up a fight and insisted I was okay and that I wanted to go straight to school. But I went along without complaint because I knew it was easier to mollify Mama’s fears than to contradict them. And of course it turned out that nothing was wrong.

The result of all of this quiet sadness and outsized anxiety was that I was truly at a loss for how to respond appropriately to anything emotional. On the one hand, I was relieved that Dick didn’t run around in a panic after my parents’ phone call and shove me into a waiting ambulance. But on the other hand, I never felt entitled to feel scared on my own behalf.

Each time I received a new diagnosis or potentially frightening news, I wasn’t allowed to run to my mother for comfort the way other women might have. Instead, my first thought had to be how I could minimize the bad news so as to spare my parents further pain. A therapist once told me that I was like a person who got shot and tried to wipe up my own blood before the photographers arrived.

When I was little, I used to fantasize about the day I was born and how happy my parents must have been. So much of my self-worth came from my ability to mitigate their grief—and the only way I could do that was by being perfect and never causing them worry. But cancer proved once and for all that I was not the perfect baby my parents had hoped for. I was damaged goods.

•   •   •

It was Saturday, the day after my parents’ move to an assisted living home, Heathwood Hearth. I sat on my kitchen floor, surrounded by boxes of their things that wouldn’t fit in their new apartment. There was so much of it—decades’ worth of memories mixed in with stuff that either had to be thrown away or donated. As much as I wanted to help them with this truly depressing task, the whole thing made me sad and angry.

The move had gone smoothly enough. The admissions director welcomed my parents personally and gave them a tour that began in the two-story grand foyer and ended in the dining room, where lemonade and oatmeal cookies still warm from the oven were served. My mother was pleased to see the nurses’ station and the bank of elevators quite near their apartment.

Early in the day, a pleasant, gray-haired nurse presented Daddy with his special bracelet, designed to set off an alarm if Daddy tried to exit the building. The nurse cleverly explained it was “something like what you wore overseas, in service, to get in the chow line,” upon which Daddy squared his shoulders and offered his wrist without hesitation. I thought for a moment that he was going to give a soldier’s proud salute. After this he wandered up and down the corridors, as if on patrol.