Sand in My Eyes (12 page)

“Yeah, with the long pointed rose-buds in clear pink—the Prairie Princess. I don’t know if you know anything about roses.”

“I don’t,” I told her.

“It’s excellent as a cut flower.” Her voice was turning calm and conversational, as if nothing had happened.

“Aren’t all flowers good cut?” I asked, feeling ignorant. But I didn’t care. I was still trying to breathe normally after what we had gone through together.

“That one blooms in great mass, and then rests awhile to put on growth before blooming profusely again.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It does this over and over.”

“Does what?”

“Blooms and rests, blooms and rests, speaking of which, it’s my turn now.”

I looked at her like I didn’t understand. “Your turn for what?”

“To rest,” she said. “It’s a good thing.”

“Rest?” I asked, catching on.

“Women,” she said, nodding, “like those Prairie Princesses, need restful periods, too—non-productive times in their lives in order to prepare for their next bloom.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I enjoyed that letter, the one your mother wrote.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “My mother had a certain wisdom to her. She was always teaching us things.”

“How nice,” I said. “I hardly have time to teach my children anything other than, ‘Don’t jump on the sofa with grapes in your mouth—you can jump on the furniture, just not with grapes!’”

“You’re in that ‘get them through alive’ stage,” she said with a grin, “but the time will come when you want them knowing more about life, things you’ve learned yourself.”

“I don’t know,” I said, and let out a laugh. “I don’t think I’ll have anything good to teach my kids. I hardly know who I am anymore.”

“I had a friend,” Fedelina said. “She spent decades of her life searching for, of all things, herself. And one day she woke up and knew exactly who she was.”

“Who?” I asked.

“An old lady on her deathbed,” said Fedelina, and we both laughed. “I never had time to go searching for myself. But my children, I taught them the basics. They could all cook at least one meal and press slacks by the time they left the house. I threw my son Liam out when he turned eighteen, but told him first, ‘I’m going to teach you how to make beef stew, and then you’re out.’ He’s a vegetarian now, so it never helped him any.”

I shifted on my knees, relaxing in the grass, crawling a bit to gather the
items I had dumped out of her bag. She stretched far enough to reach the syringe. “In case you were wondering, I have diabetes,” she said, tossing it into the bag.

“Type one?”

“No, the other,” she said. “Had it for years and didn’t know. But now it’s obvious. My body produces insulin but no longer responds to it, or there’s not enough insulin. My doctor tells me to stay active, keep moving. I try not to sit around all day. I work in the yard every morning.”

“You think you overdid it today?”

“Hypoglycemic attack,” she said. “I usually eat breakfast and lunch at the same time, but this morning the roses were calling. I couldn’t resist. It happens to me in the garden. I lose track of time. My blood sugar dropped.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah, but I could use a little rest.”

I got up from the grass and offered her my hand but she got onto all fours, like a cat, and from there stood on her own.

“I hope I haven’t kept you,” she said.

“Not at all,” I told her. “I wasn’t doing anything. That’s bad, I know. I’m unproductive lately. I don’t know why, but I dislike it. I feel ashamed when I’m unproductive.”

“Then I should give you some roses to remind you that they aren’t always in bloom, nor can you be.”

“Nothing in my life is blooming at the moment,” I said.

“Such is life,” she said. “Not everything can be blooming at once and sometimes it feels as if nothing is blooming at all. Why don’t you gather up those Prairie Princesses that I dropped in the grass over there? Take them home with you, will you? See this one here?” she said, tilting her head toward an open flesh pink flower growing on another shrub alongside her house. “The definition of a rose, always my favorite.” She held its branch until I hurried over and touched my nose to it. “We’d see it near the beach when I was young. It’s why I like to grow it now.” She reached into her pocket, pulled shears out, and snipped it off. “Take this one home, too,” she said, handing it to me. “It’s a Susan Louise rose, 1929, and it’s truly recurrent, giving happily and constantly,” she stated, and then paused
and added, “like mothers.”

As we meandered further alongside a fence in her yard, I didn’t want to tell her that I disagreed, that as a mother I was constantly giving, yes, but happily? No. It’s hard to give happily when tired, or when there’s never a break from giving, when no one is there to give to you for a change.

“See this one?” she asked. “Iceberg, Climbing, 1968, it blooms so prolifically you can cut large bouquets for the house, yet seldom see where you have cut. I cut tons of them yesterday. If you have time to come in a minute, I’ll give you a few of them to take home, too.”

I followed her around the house and up the steep wooden steps. “If a mother takes care of herself,” she said as she held the screen door open for me to go in, “she can give much of herself and no one will see what has been taken from her.” She put her finger to her lips. “We have to be quiet. I don’t want to wake my son,” she whispered.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

YOUR SON?” I ASKED
, confused and upset that she hadn’t sent me running straight into that house to get her son when she was down in the grass.

“He’s visiting for the week.”

“But why didn’t you …”

“I don’t want him to worry,” she whispered. “Now wait here. I’ll be right back. I need to get something in the kitchen.” When she returned she was eating a protein bar. “Now come with me,” she said, “so I can get you those Iceberg, Climbing.” I followed her down a long hallway, my arms already full of the roses she had me gather from her grass. “Remember,” she said more loudly as we went. “The roses should remind you to rest. One needs rest in order to bloom again. I know it sounds hard, but mothers must take care of themselves. They more than anyone need sufficient rest.”

“You’re not writing a book, are you?” I asked. “A book on gardening?”

“No, why? Are you?”

“Oh, everyone, I think, has a novel in their drawer, don’t they?” I said, hesitating, “But yes, I am. I guess I am writing one myself.” I stopped talking when a door in the hallway opened and a man stepped out. He wore boxer shorts, a gray T-shirt, and black-rimmed glasses and all I could think was that somewhere in my life, a dream, maybe, I had seen him before. His hair was the color of northern sand and looked windblown and
wild, as if he had been pounding a few waves on the beach the night before, but standing nose-to-nose in the uncomfortably narrow hallway, there was a look on his face—that of a raccoon caught in a headlight—and I felt embarrassed by it, and the silk nightgown I was wearing, and the way I felt my face flushing. Like a self-conscious schoolgirl, I held the roses up to my chest—trying to cover up the laciest part of my gown—then looked at his mother and gave her a raise of my eyebrows, the kind that says, “Okay, escort my nearly naked body away from your strikingly handsome son now.”

“Anna, meet my son, Liam, art history professor. After visiting me, he’s off to England—a sabbatical—so he can get to know better, experience on a deeper level, the places he talks about.”

“Wow,” was all I said, glancing at him and quickly back to his mother. I could only assume he wanted us out of his way and was hoping for a strong cup of coffee, not a conversation with his mother and her neighbor.

“He’s an artist, too,” she went on, squeezing my arm. “Give him a pencil and a piece of paper and my son will draw you a masterpiece. But Oscar and I, we always told our kids artistic endeavors don’t put food on the table. And he listened. It’s why he got into teaching. You can never go wrong with teaching. And Liam, he’s always been a good boy, nothing but a joy.”

“You pretty much summed up my life story in record time, Mom,” he said, clearing his throat and looking at me. “Well, there goes any mystery surrounding me, Anna. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

I wanted to tell him, “No, there is still mystery around you,” but I was finding it hard to touch my teeth to my tongue and talk. I don’t know why he had this effect on me. We had never met before, I don’t think, yet I felt a familiarity toward him, as if he were the blue sky, white clouds, and fresh air I had known and loved all my life.

“England,” I managed to say.

“Stonehenge,” he told me. “I’m starting at Stonehenge, and from there taking a year, visiting the world’s most famous sacred places—ending, hopefully, at Delphi in Greece. As an assistant professor, I need to write a book so I can work toward tenure.”

I could think of nothing more fascinating, and for the first time in my life I felt aware of space, as if all the particles in the space separating us were dancing, making me want to dance, too, and I wondered in that moment whether Fedelina’s hallway where we were standing was sacred in and of itself.

“Anna’s a writer, too,” Fedelina said.

“What do you write?”

“Chaos,” I said, and then wondered why I had said that.

“Is your chaos published?”

“No,” I laughed. “Not yet.”

“Anna’s also the mother of three kids,” my neighbor chimed in.

“Where did you learn to write?” her son asked me.

“I’m an English literature major,” I told him, noticing he was studying my eyes as if he was interested in what I had to say. Timothy never looked at me this way, never heard anything I had to say. “Where did you learn to draw?” I asked, feeling safer with the attention off me and my writing.

“I don’t know,” he said, gazing at me through his dark-rimmed glasses. “Just drawing, I guess.”

“Liam’s hardly taken any art classes,” his mother said.

I looked back at her son, my eyes asking how that could be true, how a person can create a so-called masterpiece having taken few or no relevant classes.

“I don’t know whether I could sit through a class that tells me how to draw, or how not to draw,” he said. “A class like that would put the fear of artistic gods in me and make drawing a form of homework, a task I have to do and dread.”

“I hear you,” I said, not wanting to tell him I was one of those writers who work in fear of breaking rules, who feels the grammar patrols at her heels, waiting to pull her over every time she writes a word. “But drawing, how interesting,” I said. “What do you draw?”

“Anything related to the outdoors. Trees, mostly.”

“As far back as I remember,” his mother said, “ever since he was a small boy, Liam has always loved the outdoors. He’d pace back and forth in front of the window until I’d open the door and, whoosh, out he ran. It
was like I had a puppy that I was always chasing.”

“Okay, Mom,” he said with a grin. “I do need coffee. If I don’t make it to the kitchen by noon, I might get a withdrawal headache.”

“You might have to reheat it,” she said. “I made it at five.”

I didn’t expect him to hold his hand out to me, but he did, and I shook it, feeling once more embarrassed by the way I was dressed. Then again, he wasn’t wearing much more than me. In fact, with him in his boxers and me in my gown, the two of us matched. We were both underdressed for the occasion of first meeting. But when he smiled at me with big brown eyes and then kissed his mother good morning on the top of her head, I made a mental note to ask her later how she had done that, how she raised a boy into a man so kind to his mother.

Fedelina motioned me to follow her. “I want to give you more roses,” she said.

“It looks like she’s got enough roses, Ma,” he said, turning back to look at us.

“No such thing,” Fedelina told him. “No such thing as a woman with too many roses.”

When we reached her bedroom, I noticed a long, dark, wooden bureau full of roses, some in jars, others lying in piles. But then I saw several framed photographs sitting on the bureau and, because it might take hours to look at all the pictures belonging to a woman with seven children, I honed in on only one, picking up a decorative gold-framed snapshot of her son, the one I had just met.

“What’s he doing in a cave?” I asked, holding his picture close to my face for a better look.

“That’s Lourdes.”

“Lourdes?” I asked.

“With the healing spring—Bernadette—the Virgin Mary.”

“That
Lourdes,” I said. “Of course.”

“Liam has summers off. He’s always traveled, loves to see all these famous places. But I think he’s trying to find himself, trying to find meaning after his divorce.”

“Divorce?” I asked.

“It breaks my heart,” she said, “People always told me when my children were small—little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.’ It’s true, Anna. Keep the temper tantrums in perspective, because they grow up and you’ll wish you were dealing with a temper tantrum you could walk over. But I try not to worry about Liam. He’s too much of a free spirit for me to worry about anymore. He’s around your age, thirty-nine.”