The Garden Path (15 page)

Duke looked up, finally, after Ivan had set a pot of herb tea on the table with a plate of oatmeal cookies; he smiled at Susannah, stacked the pages neatly against the tabletop, and handed them back to her. “Quite a story,” he said.

“What does that mean, old buddy? Quite a story?” Ivan asked, sitting down and slapping one hand possessively on the pile of pages.

“I've never read anything like it,” Duke said, looking at Susannah with his stunned smile. He pulled the teapot toward him and poured himself a cup, doing everything slowly, speaking slowly, as if he were still thinking. “It's the most unusual piece of work—”

“But did you like it, Duke?” Susannah asked desperately. “Did you think it was
good
?”

He blinked at her. “Good? My God, of course it's
good
, whatever that means. Susannah, you must
know
it's good. But it's much more than just good.”

She sat there smiling at him, on the verge of tears. “It's so strange, you know,” she said. “To have someone read it and say something like that about it. It means a lot to me—the story does, and what you said.”

Ivan picked it up and looked at the first page. “You named it after my painting,” he said, and looked at Duke. “That sappy piece of crap Susannah always hangs in our bedroom.”

“The story came out of the painting,” Susannah said. “I can't really say how.” She bent her smile over toward Ivan.

“I'll have to go up and look at it again,” said Duke, but absently, his mind obviously still on the story. “I love the way you blend the real and the impossible, Susannah. And the way you describe things—crystal clear. And the kids, and the shock ending—no, not really a
shock
, but …” He sipped at his tea, set the mug down, and grinned widely at Susannah. “I'm going to have to look at you differently now—now that I know you're capable of something like this. I don't know what I thought you were doing up there. Ivan never prepared me for something like this. He said you
wrote
, but I thought you were some kind of dilettante, or …” He made a gesture with one hand, holding his palm out flat. The light from the hanging lamp glinted off his glasses, hiding his eyes until he ducked his head a little and chuckled. “Why didn't you
tell
me about this woman, Ivan?” Ivan didn't smile; he was looking at Susannah.

Susannah mailed her story away, as usual, to the editor who paid her the most. March went on, and warmed. Lavender crocuses appeared by the front steps. Early in April there was a freak blizzard; when it had melted away, Susannah went out into the muddy backyard with the twins, and cut forsythia to put into a jar where, two days later, it sprang into yellow bloom. Her story done, Susannah spent occasional afternoons at the restaurant, painting woodwork and washing windows and fetching pastry from Zakrzeski's Bakery. A gray-haired carpenter named John Dow built a partition between the cooking and dining areas, and two aging brothers, the Guarinis, put in a stainless steel sink and a tidy little bathroom. The stove was delayed at the factory, and then delayed again.

“You've got to have this particular stove, Duke?” Ivan asked finally. The black and white tile was down, he had even admitted it looked nice, but the stove exasperated him. “We could go down to Sears and get a goddamned stove.”

But Duke insisted on a large black restaurant stove like the one he had cooked on in his last job, and they were made only at a place in Michigan that was having labor troubles at the plant. Ivan grumbled but gave in, while Susannah silently pondered his acquiescence.

She found she liked being at the restaurant, and went there more and more frequently as spring advanced. They had made friends with Wendell, who ran the tropical fish store, and his wife Harriet—vegetarians who were thrilled at the prospect of the restaurant. And they got used to Mr. Stang's gloomy skepticism. Susannah had a letter from Carla—she missed them, her son had lost a tooth, her new boyfriend was a very caring person, she sent her recipe for zucchini cake in case they could use it. Susannah read the letter to Ivan.

“California,” she said, folding the crinkly pages when she was done. “It seems like another existence.”

“One of our many,” Ivan said. He was screwing shelf supports into the wall, and he grunted, giving the screwdriver two last turns. “I wish you'd come up with a name for this place, Susannah, before we have to call it something like The Carrot Connection.” He fished another screw from the pocket of the little tool apron he wore. “We've got to get a sign up in the window so people will know we're coming.”

“I'm working on it,” she said, and she was, but she could think of nothing that satisfied her. She wanted the name to express everything she felt about her move east—hope, fear, delight, even the flickers of nostalgia that surprised her whenever she recognized a place she used to know well. Palmer Elementary School, for example, turned out after all to be her old school with a new name, new playground equipment, new desks, new principal; she had joined the gymnastics car pool, and she had driven there twice to pick up the twins after school before she recognized the dark red brick and the sloping schoolyard.

“Work on it harder,” said Ivan.

“I will,” she promised, and it was on one of those afternoons at the restaurant, while she was drinking tea and watching the spring sun shine in through the clean window, thinking of her childhood, of this stretch of Route One as it was in those days—what was on this spot? a field? houses? she would ask Mr. Stang from the liquor store—thinking of the old playhouse and her mother's flowers, when the perfect name for the restaurant came to her. She printed it in block letters on a piece of posterboard—
THE SILVERGATE CAFÉ
—and held it up to Ivan and Duke to see.

“How about this? What do you think?”

Duke nodded immediately. “It's good, Susannah. For one thing, it gives us options—it could be anything from a coffeehouse to a nightclub.”

Susannah smiled at him—Duke, she knew, had ambitions for the place beyond vegetarian lunches—but it was Ivan's response she was waiting for. He was up on a ladder, his face pushed into the squint-eyed grimace that meant he was deliberating. When he finally said, “I like it,” a stab of grateful relief startled her so much that when Ivan laughed and said, “The old homestead, eh?” she didn't, for a moment, know what he was talking about.

Chapter Three

In the Garden

Rosie saw the first signs of spring that year in Barney. During cold weather, his lechery always died down a bit—not entirely, of course, but now and then he'd burrow against her, shivering, in bed, and say, “It's just too cold.” By the time the bed warmed up he'd be snoring. “Cold weather makes me sleepy,” he said, needlessly apologetic. “It's my Southern blood.” Barney attributed everything to his Southern blood—laziness, booziness, braininess, restlessness, as well as both desire and the lack of it.

But as February gave way to March, and the little gusts that sneaked their way through the bedroom windows became less icy, Barney expanded like a flower. He couldn't get enough. And it was more than just his usual randiness, more than the desperate lust of a midlife crisis or the deep stirrings of his Southern blood. The quality of his lovemaking, even the quality of his voice and the look on his face, had subtly changed, and one day Rosie realized, when she opened her eyes to see him propped on one elbow gazing at her with goofy tenderness, that he was in love with her.

Oh, no, she thought, and he said, “I can't get over how beautiful you are, Rosie. I could look at you forever.” He stroked her cheek with one fingertip. “Ah Rosie, Rosie,” he said, and buried his face in her shoulder, kissing her neck, and she knew they were ready for another go-round.

She didn't know what to do with this kind of romantic passion. She hoped it would remain undeclared. She loved Barney dearly, but she wasn't in love with him. She didn't wish to marry him, or even to see any more of him than Friday night and Saturday. She didn't mind at all that he left on Sunday morning for church and didn't appear again until the next weekend. This arrangement just suited her. She had no qualms about living alone; she liked it, in fact, and though her house may have been a bit large for one person, she had never wavered from the idea, since Peter left, that it would be too small for two. It gave her the same thing she got from the old gray sweatpants she sometimes gardened in (the castoff of a large, athletic, long-gone lover named Dennis)—a feeling of spaciousness, room to maneuver, freedom. A permanent Barney would make the comfortable old house a tight fit.

And yet the way he was looking at her implied marriage.
Wife
, she could see him thinking as he stroked her cheek or took her hand on impulse and kissed it. He was thinking of seven-day-a-week availability, of coming home from a long day playing Good Shepherd to his flock not to an empty bachelor pad but to a smiling wife and a good dinner. He was thinking of pooled pensions and long train trips in their old age when the Helen Palmer Elementary School said, “Good-bye, Mr. Chips,” and Rosie was too decrepit to garden. She could see it all, and in order to forestall the declaration she dreaded, she instinctively became, at times, aloof from him. She'd be busy in the kitchen instead of snuggling by the fire; occasionally she failed to laugh at his jokes, and once she even pleaded flu symptoms too severe and probably contagious for lovemaking.

Meanwhile, spring invaded her garden, withdrew, changed briefly to winter, returned in force, and settled in. The backyard went through the usual steps: snowdrops, crocuses, the first red shoots of peony and bleeding heart, the pale green spikes of daffodil and tulip leaves, the delicate blue and white of hyacinth and scilla. The silver pussy willows furred, the early purple iris blossomed, the magnolia buds swelled, everything greened. Rosie checked her previous year's garden calendar; things were earlier this spring, the Emperor tulips by two days, her beautiful Geranium narcissi by a full week. She sowed peas, lettuce and radishes, and put in onion sets and shallots. The dahlia tubers were rooting, the snapdragon seeds sown in their little pots. The tomato and pepper and eggplant and herb seeds, in flats out in the greenhouse, sent up their green beginnings. Mother Nature kept her promises, as she always did.

Rosie was busy and happy, working hard, digging in compost, pruning the exuberant red shoots the rosebushes sprouted, fertilizing them and also the hydrangeas, liming the lilacs. The smell of the earth—rich and wet, clinging in the creases of her fingers and under her nails—excited her. She didn't think to look in the mirror so much.

“It's wonderful to see you, Rosie,” Barney said to her. “You're like a spring blossom.” She smiled; she even kissed him. At her age, she was grateful for such flattery, but she was apprehensive hearing it from him, with that look on his face.

It was Barney who spotted the sign on the empty shop. He burst in one Friday with the news, and he drove Rosie out on the Post Road to Chiswick to see it. Roller Dome, Shoe City, Dunkin' Donuts, then the Liquor Boutique and Wendell's and in between them a washed window and a sign painted on a white paper banner:

COMING SOON

THE SILVERGATE CAFÉ

NATURAL FOODS

with a smiling bunch of cartoon carrots down in one corner.

“Cute,” Barney said.

“Cute,” she repeated. “Cute.”

She began to tremble with anger, a phenomenon she had read about and never believed in or experienced. But there was a fluttery buzz in her stomach and chest that made its way to her fists when she clenched them and even to her teeth, which began to chatter. “Damn the child,” she stuttered out. “Damn her. Damn, damn, damn.”

“Hey,” Barney said, taking one of her hands to uncoil the fist. “Hey. Calm down. This is your
daughter
. What's the matter, Rosie? Leave the kid alone.”

They sat there in the car, motor running, with that blasphemous sign smirking at them, while Barney tried to soothe her. He didn't succeed—she would never, never, never be soothed, she vowed—but he stopped her trembling, and she reminded him of the Silvergate she'd been born in, how Susannah had filched the name of her sleazy dump from a dear memory that she had no part in, and whose adoption by her was a deliberate provocation, a slap at the family, a call to arms.

Barney held her hands. “Rosie,” he said every time she paused. “Rosie, Rosie.” And when she stopped he began to defend Susannah. “First of all, why do you call it a sleazy dump? She may be a first-rate businesswoman and a first-rate cook—just like her mama.” He smiled at her, shook her hands up and down a little and squeezed them. Rosie glared at him. “And then the name of the place,” he went on. “Couldn't it just as well be a gesture of friendship to you? A little nostalgic feeler for you to grab on to, Rosie? Hm? Come on, honey. Give the girl a chance.”

“You don't understand, Barney,” she said, wearily, pulling her hands away.
I will never marry this man
, she said to herself. “But why should you understand, anyway? Let's go home, let's have dinner.” She took one last look at the sign, the idiotic carrots, the window. There was a light on inside. If she'd had a rock, and was within aiming distance, she would have thrown it.

“They must be in the back room,” Barney said, craning forward in the dusk to peer through the windshield. He grinned at her. “Sure you don't want to go in and say hello? Disarm the opposition? Fire the first shot?”

“I do
not
,” she said. “How you can be so insensitive as to suggest such a thing I don't know. Let's get
out
of here.”

“Aw, come on, Rosie, don't get mad at me,” said Barney, and put the car in gear, looking pleadingly, fondly, part impishly at her. But she was angry. She was livid, she was furious—at him, at the sign in the window, at life, at herself. Her heart knocked frighteningly in her chest. That girl will kill me yet, she thought. She breathed deeply all the way home to calm herself, and had an extra Scotch before dinner to cheer herself up.