The Garden Path (22 page)

She still spent hours and hours reading, oblivious to everything but the page before her. She took out a card at the Chiswick Public Library and brought home
Daniel Deronda, The Princess Casamassima
, and two Trollope novels she'd never read; they lasted her nine days, and she went back for more. At this rate she'd exhaust the tiny library in six months. She wished Peter would come back from the Cape so he could lend her books. He'd extended his stay to a month; she inferred a romantic entanglement. He called her from Truro one evening early in May, and though he admitted his writing wasn't going much better he sounded exuberant. She heard a male voice singing in the background above the clatter of dishes.

“Who's that?” she asked.

“That's Terry. Friend of mine.” She could tell he had turned to Terry and smiled. “He's washing the dishes. We had mussels for dinner.”

“Ah,” she said. She knew Peter was gay, of course. How did she know? Had he told her that time he came to California, when they were all high? Or had she sensed it? She couldn't remember; the knowledge came out of that blurry period in her life.

“How's Dad doing?” Peter asked her. He pronounced
Dad
as self-consciously as she imagined she would say
Mom
, if she ever said it.

“He's exactly the same. Not very good but no worse. Dr. Strauss says it's miraculous, the way he hangs on. I talk to him every couple of days. I wish I could go out there and see him, but Ivan says it would be pointless.”

“I thought he preferred it this way—Dad, I mean.”

“Oh, he does, or so he says. No—he means it. And I suppose it's better.” She sighed. “Peter?”

“What?” He chuckled as he spoke. The clatter of dishes had stopped, and his attention was half on Terry, who was singing in falsetto:

I'm called Little Buttercup, dear Little Buttercup,

Though I could never tell why.

She had been going to say that she was longing to see him, she wished he would come home, but she couldn't. She heard a crash, then muffled laughter.

“What, Suse?”

“I just wanted to remind you to come for dinner as soon as you get back.”

“I will. I'll call you the instant I get in. Oh God,
Terry
!” There was another crash, and Peter said something to Terry that Susannah couldn't make out, then said into the phone, “Why don't you go over and see Mom before I get back? Just drop in. She'll probably be out in the yard. Just go around back and surprise her.”

“But you said she didn't even want to see me!”

“I never said that. I just said she's still nursing a couple of old grudges. Hell, so are you. But five minutes would put everything right.”

“It
would
? What makes you think—”

There was another crash, then the sound of a piano, and Terry's voice:

Then buy of your Buttercup, dear Little Buttercup,

Sailors should never be shy …

“Look, Susannah, I've got to get off the phone. Things are getting pretty wild here. I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Okay, sweetie pie?”

“Okay. Good-bye, Peter,” she said quickly before he hung up, cutting off the laughter and the music. She stood on the landing, feeling irritable and left out, still holding the phone. She was home by herself, waiting for a loaf of cheese bread to rise; the others had gone out for Chinese food. What if she dialed Rosie's number? She had looked it up in the directory weeks ago, had memorized it without even meaning to. What if she called and asked if she could come over? Or what if she just hopped into the van and drove over there?

If she had paused to think she wouldn't have done it; recognizing that, she didn't stop, didn't let herself analyze. The call from Peter had made her lonely; the house seemed huge and empty. Without pondering further, she grabbed her keys and ran outside, leaving the door open behind her.

It wasn't quite dark. There were tatters of sunset over the trees down the road: rose madder, scarlet, ocher, carnelian. The night was cool. One of the cats, crouched on the porch railing, looked at her and meowed, and its eyes gleamed yellow and opaque. Susannah shivered in her denim skirt and cotton blouse, but she got into the van, reversed it down the driveway, and drove up Perkins Road to the highway. A wild exhilaration filled her. What nonsense it had been, these years of silent feuding. They were both grown women, she and Rosie. There might soon be a grandchild, for heaven's sake. And think how proud Ivan would be of her, if she came home and when he asked her where she'd been she could say, “I was over at my mother's.”

She drove east out of Chiswick, past the restaurant, past Zakrzeski's, past the Chinese place—there was Duke's Volkswagen in the lot—past the turnoff for the school where she picked up the twins on gymnastics days, past the library, to East Chiswick with its grassy center and its quaint Main Street: the chic little seafood restaurant, the butcher shop with its gold-lettered window, the Town Market unchanged since her childhood. She turned left on Mott and right on Worth, her mother's dead-end street, and drove down to the house at the end. In the dusk, she could just make out that it was still painted a yellowish white, the front door was still flanked with rhododendrons, the walk still brick and winding. Little tan car in the driveway. Bright tulips along the fence. Lush grass, bordered with flower beds. She could glimpse the old playhouse out back; she knew from the TV shows that it was now a tool shed. Two windows in the house were lit, one downstairs where she remembered the living room was, and one upstairs. She sat in the van and peered out at the silent house—the same, precisely the same, as she'd imagined it hundreds of times in the sixteen years since she'd carried her bags down the brick walk and gotten into a taxicab. How strange it was, the house the same and herself so different.

A figure passed across the light upstairs, and passed back again—Rosie, of course. Susannah recognized the abundant hair and the thickening figure she'd seen on television. The light went out, and Susannah, panic rising in her throat, as if she'd seen a ghost, put the van in gear and turned into the driveway behind the little tan Audi, backed up and headed down Worth Street to Mott again. She didn't look back, afraid of what she'd see, and the van roared up Mott Street to Main and then Route One. Over its noise Susannah heard herself say
Nonononono
as she drove. She could never, never, never—how could she think it would be easy? And what was the point? Why stir things up? Rosie's silhouette in the window was enough to remind her—what a troublemaker her mother could be, what a vindictive, sharp-tongued woman. Nothing was ever pleasant with her, she was a villain. For no reason, Susannah recalled the time she flung her squash at the drapes in the dining room, and her mother's response. With Rosie, it was always slaps, insults, unchecked fury culminating in cold silence.
No
, Susannah said, speeding down Route One. The way to perfect your life was not to yank into it, against her will, a woman who never smiled, a woman with grudges, even if she was your mother.

Passing the darkened restaurant, she was reminded that she had left bread rising, the door unlocked, the house lit up like a jack-o'-lantern. Ivan would kill her if he got home first. But when she sped by Sun Luck she saw that Duke's car was still there. She pulled into her own driveway at last and ran into the lit-up house, the cats following her. The house was unburgled, intact, the bread still a heavy lump under its dishtowel. “Safe,” she said to herself, aloud, and collapsed into a chair with Shelley in her arms. Her heart beat fast.
No
, its rhythm repeated.
Nonono
. But by then she felt slightly absurd, even ashamed of her flight.
Susannah, you jerk
, she said to herself. She wished Duke had a television. What she needed was a mindless comedy or an old movie to calm her down and cheer her up and keep her from wanting to cry into Shelley's striped fur. But Duke thought television was bad for the twins. Even “Sesame Street,” he said, was passive entertainment; he'd rather see the kids out flying kites or playing with their magnetic ABCs. Susannah guessed she agreed, but she missed, some nights, the friendly presence of the old black and white set that used to keep her company when Ivan was out.

She looked through an old
Prevention
, and was absorbed in an article called “Overcome Fear Through Vitamin A” when Ivan and Duke and the twins returned. They brought her egg rolls and a paper container of vegetables, and she ate quickly while the twins watched her with attention. They thought she didn't eat enough. It concerned them that she didn't like ice cream, or carrot cake. “You live on tea,” they accused her. To please them, she ate everything they'd brought her, and then she punched down her bread and put it in a pan to rise again.

“Promise you'll eat a piece when it's done.”

“If it turns out okay,” she said. Her bread had a tendency to bake into hard, impenetrable slabs.

“This looks good,” said Mary Claire, poking the dough with one finger. “I think it'll work, Susannah.”

For some reason, at those words, the desire came over Susannah to be pregnant, to have a child, so powerful and sudden it made her knees weak. She smiled blankly at the twins, who went off to give the cats their evening feed. Susannah steadied herself against the kitchen table. She wondered if she was already pregnant, if the quick bright flash of need she had felt was in fact a confirmation that the need would be filled.

She had a long-distance phone call a few days later, from a woman named Leslie Merwin, an editor at a publishing company in New York. Susannah had been so sure, when the operator asked for her, that the call was from St. Theodore's announcing her father's death, that it took her a few seconds to recover from her desolation, and to understand. Leslie Merwin had been shown Susannah's story, ‘Cloud House,' by Otto Schenk at
SciFi Review
, and had wondered if Susannah was interested in doing a book of short stories.

“I want to use this one—‘Cloud House'—and three or four of the others Otto has published, plus a couple of new ones. We're offering you a $5000 advance, half now and half on delivery of two new stories. And a December first deadline? Would that give you enough time? Want to think it over and call me back? I love your stuff, and our list is a little weak in the sci-fi category. I'll tell you what—think it over and call me back Monday.”

“No—no!” Susannah gripped the phone with both hands. Duke was sitting on the kitchen floor repairing a toy truck; Ivan was at the sink washing dishes. The room was filled with sunlight. “No—I can tell you now. Yes. Yes, of course, it sounds wonderful. I'd love to. I mean, sure.”

“That's just great,” said Leslie Merwin. “That's fabulous, in fact. I like ‘Cloud House' very much; it's so unusual, you have a real gift for the realistically eerie—do you know what I mean? At this point, I see it as the title story, unless one of the new ones turns out to be even better, or has a catchier title. I'll tell you what. Do you have a new story in the works?”

“Oh, sure,” Susannah lied. “I always have a new story in the works.” Ivan looked over his shoulder at her, and Duke put down his screwdriver. Susannah raised her eyebrows, nodded furiously, beamed extravagant smiles at them to indicate jubilation.

“Then why don't you send me an outline of it? Anything. Any ideas for the new stuff. In fact—” Leslie Merwin paused, and Susannah heard her take a drag on a cigarette. “I'd love to meet you, Susannah. Plan to come into the city and have lunch with me one of these days. But meanwhile I'll get your contract and your check in process, and you send me whatever you've got, and then I'll get back to you. Okay?”

They all had a beer to celebrate. Susannah felt stunned, and was almost inclined to think it was a hoax, a joke played on her by—whom? Otto Schenk? Peter and the wild Terry? Her mother? She suggested this, timidly, to Ivan and Duke, and when they laughed at her she expanded it into farce: “Suppose some sociologist or psychologist or someone is writing a book about, oh, I don't know—
gullibility
, people's reactions to improbable pieces of good news—and Otto Schenk gave them my name, and right now they're chortling over my reaction, saying they've never
seen
such pathetic gullibility.”

She laughed along with Duke and Ivan, but even after Otto called to congratulate her she remained, deep down in her soul, skeptical—though she began, immediately, to turn over in her mind ideas for stories, trying to recall every illumination, no matter how vague, just in case.

She got her period the next morning, before she and Duke and the twins set off for a trip to the Aquarium at Mystic, and she tucked aspirin and tampons in her purse, feeling—as she did each month when her infertility was confirmed again—a mixture of disappointment and hope. Well,
next time
, she said to herself, and decided that June was a much better month to begin a pregnancy; the baby wouldn't be born in the dead of winter, it would be a spring baby. She pictured it surrounded by flowers. And it had been too much to expect, a pregnancy and a publisher (if it wasn't a hoax) in the same week.

They were going to drive along the coast, out to the eastern part of the state, for a holiday, a last fling. Delivery of the stove had been promised, at last, for the following Monday, and the restaurant would open on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Duke had heard of a man in Stonington who had an old-fashioned cash register for sale, just the kind of thing he'd been wanting for the restaurant. “They make that nice ringing sound when you pull the lever and the drawer opens,” he said. “Reminds me of the store where I used to buy penny candy when I was a kid.”

“And where was that?” Susannah asked him. They were driving up Route 95 in the Volkswagen, with the twins—playing hooky from school for educational purposes, Duke said—securely belted into the back seat. Susannah had braided their hair for them, and she looked back every once in a while to see the way the fat pigtails stuck out on either side of their identical faces. Their round greenish eyes were fixed on the back of their father's head while he talked, turning to Susannah when she swiveled around to smile at them, then back to Duke. They loved his stories of his childhood.