The Garden Path (19 page)

And ran downstairs, hearing a car door slam. But it was the Sheffields, unloading bags of peat moss and a new garden hose. Rosie looked at the clock; she had been upstairs exactly fifteen minutes.

Well. She pressed both hands to her chest, breathing deeply:
calm down, old girl
. Her heart still pounded, and the question pounded in her head:
will he come back
? She poured herself a little sherry—not beer, or she'd be running to the bathroom every half-hour—and stood by the window, in the sun, watching Jim and Kiki. She considered going out to talk to them, so he'd find her, if he did come back, chatting casually with the neighbors, absorbed, indifferent—“Oh,
there
you are! Back already? Jim, Kiki, meet my son-in-law, Ivan Cord.” But no—she could imagine friendly Ivan inviting the Sheffields over to dinner, and the evening turning into a Scrabble tournament, with the Sheffields telling him how Rosie really should get down to Florida in the winter, and Jim talking about his arthritis and how Frank Sinatra might look like an overweight businessman but he still had his voice, God bless him.

The Sheffields went inside. She continued to stand by the window—barefoot, she realized, and went to find sandals, and returned to her post. She was watching, she thought to herself with disgust, with delight, like a teenager waiting for her date—watching for a car she wouldn't recognize, one with California plates, most likely, to pull up in front, and Ivan to jump out, whistling. She looked at the clock. He'd been gone twenty minutes. Five minutes into town, ten in the store, five back, he could be here by now if Clyde's wasn't crowded. Ten minutes more at the most. If he wasn't back in ten minutes he wasn't coming, and she'd go next door and invite Jim and Kiki for drinks.

She poured herself another sherry—
will he come back? and what am I getting myself into
?—and, to demonstrate to herself how truly nonchalant she could be, she began to straighten up the living room, brushing crumbs off a table, stacking up books, fluffing pillows, and she began to hum the song Ivan had been whistling. What was it? Surely an old Beatles tune. Dee dee dee
da
da, dee dee dee
da
—it came to her, with a jolt. “When I'm Sixty-Four.” That's what it was.
And he won't come back, he won't. You're ridiculous, ridiculous, in your little dress, your earrings
—

And a door slammed. She ran to the window. A large blue van had pulled up, and there was Ivan hopping out of it, with a bag of groceries, whistling “Tea for Two.”

It was as if Susannah was the
carte de visite
that had brought them together and could now be discarded. Her name didn't come up again, and most of the things Ivan had promised to tell Rosie were never mentioned—Susannah-centered stories that both of them, in some unspoken agreement that had stretched from shower to market, had decided to omit from their evening. Ivan made leathery green pepper omelets, hush puppies that burned in the pan, and something he called “Green Bean Rondo” with onions and pimentos. They ate their dinner, and Ivan drank the Mexican beer he had brought, on the back porch. Rosie wished she had suggested the kitchen, even if it was hot and smelled of burned cornmeal. She wanted to keep Ivan to herself; she didn't want the Sheffields to hear his hearty laughter, his loud baritone. She wished his van wasn't so large, so visible, so blue—such a
youthful
vehicle to be parked out in front of her house for so long, obviously not belonging to Peter, or to Rosie's sober, middle-aged-businessmen beaux. She wondered if the Sheffields would notice, if out in the garden next day Kiki would ask her, with a watchful smile, who was the bearded god with the fancy van.

They talked about gardening, about California, about Rosie's television show. She dragged out her store of funny anecdotes, and Ivan's noisy laugh floated out over the garden. She thought to herself—but only once—that Susannah's presence was all the more real between them for having been avoided: Ivan might have lived in California alone, and traveled east with only the cats for company; Rosie might be a childless widow, a swinging single. Would it be better, she wondered, if they talked about Susannah openly, if Ivan confided in Rosie the failure of his marriage, the daily misery of life with her daughter? But gradually she forgot Susannah—truly, totally, if temporarily, forgot that the delightful man who had cooked her such a wretched meal was her son-in-law.

He didn't stay late. They finished eating; she made coffee; they drank a little Kahlua. Their laughter together had moments of tentative affection, as if they had begun what would be a long process of knowing each other well. Their chairs had been pulled closer together. Their knees occasionally touched and were moved, without haste, away. They sat without a light, and the moonlit garden outside the screens was full of black and green mystery. The sky changed from light blue to dark blue, the stars appeared, the three-quarter moon brightened over the garage roof, and Ivan said he'd better get along.

Rosie didn't press him to stay. In amiable silence, she saw him to the door, where he kissed her gently on the cheek.
My reward
, she thought to herself, surprised, reminded of movies she had seen, books read, about people who tamed wild beasts or befriended shy primitive peoples: there were setbacks, slow stalking, patient waiting, and suddenly an unexpected breakthrough that drastically advanced matters. Ivan's kiss—cool lips against hot cheek—was such an event, and after it Rosie said, “Come to dinner again, and I'll cook for you.”

“A week from tonight?”

His face was still close to hers, and she felt dizzy. Events went much speedier with Ivan than with lion cubs or aborigines. “Why not?” she asked, her heart racing and the sweat coming out on her upper lip.

“Same time, same channel,” said Ivan. Another kiss bounced off her cheek, and he was gone. The van roared away while she leaned weakly on the door.

Next day, and the days thereafter, she took to the garden, refusing to think or expect or do what she really wanted to do, which was to pick their evening apart bit by bit as she would a tangle of dahlia tubers. She concentrated instead on the flower beds, digging out the early bloomers, separating them, hauling huge loads of compost, replanting—getting her hands filthy, her knees stiff, and her back sore. It kept her mind off what had taken place, and what might come of it. To ponder it would be to jinx it.

When it was too wet or too dark, during that interminable waiting week, to work in the garden, or when she got so tired out she was good for nothing but a bath, a drink, and a comfortable chair, Rosie got out her father's collection of his favorite magazine,
The Countryman
. She had a suitcase full of the old green volumes, faded and tattered, much thumbed. Her father, with his big black mustache, curly hair, soft brown eyes, and Anglo-Italian accent, had revered all things English, and had dragged his collection—with its articles bearing titles like “How Birds Sleep,” “Poacher Turned Gamekeeper,” “Lupins in Drought”—across the sea in the old leather suitcase with the rotted strap, where they were still stored. Toward the end of his life they were his only amusement besides the soft voice of his wife, the visits from Rosie and Peter, and old Alastair Sim movies on TV.

Rosie had developed a fondness for the little volumes, and had even based one of her programs on them. What she liked best—besides the excellent gardening advice—were the advertisements.
Adverts
, both her parents used to call them. She sat back in her rose-patterned chair, with her feet up on an old velvet ottoman, and dug in, picking a volume at random. “Euthymol Tooth Paste,” she read.

A good horse and an eager pack; a wily fox and a long chase; the blue sky above and the grass beneath; the English countryside in all its fresh beauty. Could anything be more thrilling and exhilarating? Unhappily, too few of us are able to join in the thrills of the chase. Yet every morning and evening brings a pleasurable thrill to Euthymol users. For Euthymol not only cleans the teeth but kills dental decay germs within 30 seconds …

She loved it. It tickled her, and she sipped her Scotch and smiled, thinking of her father. She turned the pages slowly. Lost times, lost places. And the oddest products! “Energen,” she read. “Unlike other breads. Keeps indefinitely. Entirely British.” She tried to recall whether Energen had been served at the gardener's cottage at Silvergate, but could remember only her grandmother's hard-crusted
focaccia
and her mother's wholemeal loaves. And had they used Euthymol? She recalled something called Kolynos. “Pan Yan Pickle,” the next page said. “Good AS a salad, good WITH a salad.” Rosie smiled, but her mind wandered to the garden at Silvergate where she had helped her mother stake the lilies, where she had watched her strawberries run wild over their little plot, where their cat, Mossy, had loved to roll in the dirt.
I should go back to England
, she thought, as she had many times.
I should go now, when we're not filming, I should go over there and write this damned book
. And then the fluttery feeling came into her chest and she realized she couldn't, couldn't possibly go now, not this year, not at this particular time.

What am I getting into? What do I think I'm doing
? Her fiftieth birthday had sailed over her while she was out in the garden, too absorbed to mark it properly, but that didn't mean it hadn't come, and gone, and set her on the road to the next, and the next.
You're a pathetic old woman
, she told herself, but the flutter in her chest didn't go away, and what she felt, chiefly, was the kind of thrilled, rapturous hope that hadn't come to her in years. She leaned back in her chair, stretched her arms over her head, and felt young, young.

Every day, she spent hours in the garden—proud of her ability to do so. Kiki, four years older than she, used to straighten up, press her hand to her lower back, and grimace—Rosie watched her covertly from her rose bed or her pea patch—and then go inside, where, Rosie knew, she would take her nap before she showered and did her hair to be ready, when Jim arrived home from work, with a cool drink and a warm smile. Rosie kept smugly on, moving from bed to bed, from perennial border to vegetable garden, ignoring her own back, her stiff fingers, her headaches from the sun. The good weather held, the yard looked wonderful, the notebook she was keeping in preparation for her book was thick with jottings, and when she had put in a day long enough to satisfy her she curled up with
The Countryman
. She dreamed of going to England with the distinguished middle-aged man in the Chilprufe Underwear ad, lighting his Balkan Sobranie cigarettes for him, taking a cruise with him on the Orient Line (“Designed for Sunshine”) to Australia and back for £140, brushing her teeth each night with Euthymol Tooth Paste, and taking Eno's Fruit Salt every morning with breakfast.

If poisoned by congested foodways, the human system cannot sustain healthy exercise. Make the morning draught of Eno's Fruit Salt a golden rule. Pleasantly, safely working in Nature's way, Eno ensures the punctual dismissal of the body's waste …

But she knew that what she really liked was exactly where she was, in this place and this time, with the gasping feeling of infinite possibility rising in her chest.

But he wouldn't come. He'd forget—wasn't the restaurant supposed to open? What had he said? And why
should
he remember, anyway? She looked long and critically into the mirror, wary of its deceptions, experimenting with makeup and hairdos as she hadn't done since the first heady weeks after Edwin left. She should get a haircut, she decided; then she rejected the idea. She went shopping and bought another dress with a low neck and a flounce, this one a soft blue with lace on the sleeves, and then she came home and hung it way in the back of her closet, embarrassed by its sexy exuberance. Her energy was inexhaustible. She couldn't leave the garden alone, she invented unnecessary tasks, she hovered over transplanted seedlings and the tender buds on the geraniums as if by breathing on them she could hasten their growth. In fact, that had been somebody's theory a few years back, that human presence—voice, breath, touch—encouraged plants to thrive. She had conscientiously tested it on her begonias and a flat of dianthus and had found it to be, as she reported to her viewers, claptrap. Of course, she had acknowledged, it was good for the
gardener
to hover, to coddle, to get close to growing things, to take comfort from them, and strength. And yet—she had never said so on her program but she thought to herself as she dug manure into the strawberry bed—gardening was in a way a gloomy activity, if you considered the wanton rankness of plants' flourishing, with or without your help, of the way they would, if you lay down and died in their midst, creep over you and cover you and take life from your remains without a trace of gratitude. Or if you thought about the speed with which things grow, flowers blossom, time passes.…

When she ran out of gardening chores, she got down on her knees and spent a couple of hours laboriously picking bits of roofing tile from behind the rhododendrons in front of her house, a chore she'd been postponing since the new roof was put on two years ago. She washed all the windows in the greenhouse. When Kiki hailed her over the fence and invited her for Scrabble, she declined, cheerfully pleading exhaustion; what if Ivan should call?

Kiki had said nothing about the van or the visitor with the young, long-distance laugh, but Rosie sensed a tenseness in Kiki's smile, disapproval in the way she admired how the Gudoshnik tulips had lasted. Or was she imagining it? She had a giddy thought that made her clutch a trowel to her chest in silent laughter: what if she'd imagined the whole thing, from Ivan's van to Kiki's disapproval? What if the pressures of her unwritten book and approaching senior citizenhood had unhinged her, and Ivan with his beard and his blue eyes and his strong tanned arms was a dream of her early dotage? But there was the hopelessly burned and crusted frying pan out in the trash.