The Memory Garden (6 page)

They are all looking at her, apparently expecting some kind of response.

“Bay, Howard is going to take you and me to do our shopping. You don’t mind, do you?”

Mind? Of course not. It would all be so perfect had not Mavis announced that there were a few things she needed as well, which reminded Ruthie of her toiletries confiscated by “those horrible security people.” Howard says they don’t have to make up stuff for him to do just because the people he was supposed to transport have already arrived, at which Mavis and Nan offer their wineglasses as proof of the need for a designated driver, while Ruthie says she simply cannot get behind the wheel of a car so soon after her harrowing trip from the airport, if ever again.

Bay reconsiders going along but can’t deny herself his company. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t seem the least bit curious about her. It doesn’t even matter that she is squished between the lemon-scented Ruthie and Mavis, with her horrible death perfume, in the backseat of Howard’s small car. It doesn’t even matter when the three women start singing some song from an old TV show which, surprisingly and much to their delight, Howard sings along with. What matters is him.

So carried away is Bay by the sweetness in her heart that she finds herself nodding vigorously when Ruthie invites Howard to join them for dinner.

“Don’t embarrass the boy,” Mavis scolds. “I’m sure he has more interesting things to do than spend the evening with a bunch of old ladies.”

And
me
, Bay thinks.

“Of course he does,” Nan says. “He’s already going out of his way as it is. He only stopped by to confirm the schedule for tomorrow, now we’ve got him taking us to the grocery store. I’m sure he has plans for the evening.”

“Well, I just asked. He’s a big boy. He can say no.”

“You’re putting him in an awkward position.”

“Goodness, how awkward can it be? I mean, really, Mavis—”

“Actually, I think it would be nice,” Howard says.

“What?”

“I think it would be nice.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you sound just like Marlon Brando?”

“Yeah, I get that sometimes.”

“You must have other plans.”

“I don’t. My parents moved here after I started college. I don’t know anyone local. I think dinner would be nice. If you don’t mind.”

“Oh, not at all!” Ruthie says in her sing-song voice, while Nan says something about how his presence will make it even more of a party.

“We’d love to have you,” Bay says too loudly and out of sync with the rest.

“Yes,” Mavis drawls. “We couldn’t be happier.”

Bay casts a sideways glance at Mavis, who sits staring straight ahead, a slight smile playing at the corner of her red lips. Bay suspects she is being mocked. She folds her arms across her chest and leans, ever so slightly, closer to Ruthie. Bay has discovered that Ruthie smells like lemons, Mavis smells like death, and Nan smells the way she always does, like lavender, but Howard smells like melted brown sugar and butter, which Bay thinks just might be the best scent ever.

Everything is going rather well,
Nan thinks. There was a point there, in the car, when Bay seemed annoyed at Mavis, but Mavis at her best is annoying. Nan can’t really worry about that now. Everyone has to learn how to cope with Mavis until they fall in love with her.

“Tell us what you are studying in school, Harvey,” Mavis says, serving herself another piece of lasagna.

Earlier, after he moved Ruthie’s and Mavis’s rental cars from the street to the driveway behind the house, Howard helped Bay bring another card table up from the basement; the tables, pressed together and covered in white linen topped with the silver candelabra, make a pleasant setting on the front porch where the moonflower blossoms trail up the railings, luminescent in the candlelight. Nan is pleased that their sweet scent obliterates the stench she’s noticed this summer arising from the backyard.

Howard wipes his mouth with the cloth napkin, smiling behind the flickering flames. “I’m majoring in biology.”

“Oh, are you going to be a doctor?” Ruthie asks.

“Might be.”

“These things don’t happen by accident,” Mavis says. “What is your intention?”

Howard looks taken aback. Nan worries the pleasant mood is ruined. Mavis has always been good at ruining things.

“This isn’t a complicated question, Harold. Do you intend to be a doctor or not?”

“His name is Howard. Howard. Not Harold or Harvey. How hard is that to remember?” Bay asks.

Nan feels an odd combination of panic and pride at Bay’s rude behavior. Luckily, Mavis appears completely unperturbed as she slowly draws the spoon between her lips. “This sauce is delicious,” she says, dipping her spoon into the casserole dish again, scraping it against the sides for more. “I do need to work on remembering names better, Sage.”

They are all laughing, even Mavis, though she looks slightly confused, when the car comes down the road, slowing in front of the house.

Nan is proud of her shoe garden, pleased to have it admired in front of her friends, but when the driver sticks his head out the window, she immediately suspects he has not come with compliments.

“Hey look, it’s a witches’ party,” he shouts, making an unidentified, but almost certainly obscene, gesture, before speeding away with his hooting passengers.

“What did he say?” Ruthie asks.

“Just kids being silly,” Nan says. “You know how they are.”

Mavis stops spooning sauce to study Nan, who pretends not to notice.

“I also write poetry,” Howard says, refilling his wineglass. “But that won’t pay the bills.”

Mavis turns away from scrutinizing Nan to address Howard. “Life,” she says, “is not a bank account.”

Bay, who looks oddly like she’s just swallowed a bug, stares at Mavis, the disturbed expression replaced by something like wonder.

So
it
begins
, Nan thinks with a thorn in her heart. After all these years, Mavis still has the power to charm, which is what Nan hoped for, isn’t it? Even Howard looks as though he is reassessing. Nan isn’t so foolish as to imagine there is any sexual element to Howard’s new interest in Mavis, but how shocking is it to discover it doesn’t matter? Once, Nan believed that when Mavis lost her sexual power she would be left completely depleted, but this is not the case.

After dinner, Mavis, Howard, and Bay sit on the front steps, chatting. Nan’s bones are too stiff for such a posture, especially with all the cleaning she did to prepare for her guests; she remains at the table with Ruthie.

“When I go to Africa,” Mavis is saying to her young audience.

“Oh heavens,” Ruthie whispers, “she’s not still talking about Africa!”

Nan and Ruthie muffle giggles behind their hands. Howard and Bay sit at Mavis’s feet, their backs toward Nan; she imagines adoring expressions.

“I plan to live in Africa.” Mavis’s raspy voice rises out of the dark.

Ruthie turns to Nan, eyebrows raised. “Doesn’t she realize she’s old?”

Nan shrugs. Mavis can’t be serious. Had she really wanted to go to Africa, she would have done so, instead of talking about it for sixty-some years! The realization makes Nan sad. If there was anyone who seemed destined to follow her dreams, it was Mavis. How does it happen? Nan wonders. How do the girls with dreams as big as the world end up old women with regrets?

Bay appears to be focusing most of her attention on Howard. It is difficult to hear what he is saying, his voice is gently modulated, but it sounds as though he might be reciting a poem. Nan wishes she could hear better, but Howard has one of those voices that always makes the listener lean close. It would be annoying, if he didn’t have such a pleasant face for leaning closer to, in spite of the troublesome bruise.

When he finishes, there is a long silence until Bay and Mavis speak at once. Bay stops short, of course. Mavis has a powerful voice.

“That needs work, darling.”

Howard lowers his head. Bay’s sweet voice gushes, “It’s a really nice poem.”

“It’s not good enough, not nearly good enough, but who knows how good you could be if you dedicate your life to it?”

Howard speaks, again too low to hear.

Ruthie sighs. “Here she goes again. How does she make people listen to her?”

Well, there it is, the unbearable truth. When it mattered most, when Nan knew better, she buckled under the great weight of Mavis’s certainty. It’s a wonder thoughts of Eve stayed at a distance this long. She should be at this reunion, sitting at the table with them, talking about her family, her own children and grandchildren. After all, Eve was the one out of the four of them who the children really loved.

Mavis was so bossy, the kids at camp were afraid of her. Ruthie liked the children, and they seemed to like her, but she was forgetful, tended to be late to activities, and had trouble with the physical exertion. Nan tried to be interested in the young campers, but the truth is she’d taken the job to be with her friends and get away from her mother. Also, Nan can admit this now: she much preferred reading books in the shade of her porch, a big glass of lemonade nearby, to the buggy forest, or the stinky glue of pinecone crafts, which gave her a headache. Eve taught the girls how to weave dandelion chains and do water ballet, cheering the little ones whose toes barely cleared the surface. It was Eve who organized the campfires and told the best stories. “They have to be just a little scary,” she scolded Mavis one night after she’d offered up a terrible tale about a murderer in the woods. Later, when the girls had nightmares, it was Eve’s name they called.

Of course, Eve was made immediately older by her mother’s death. She had to learn at a very young age how to take care of her little brothers and run a household. Now Nan wonders if Eve’s wild side was part of her character or a rebellion of sorts. She was the one, after all, who stole the bottles of wine from the camp kitchen after the end of summer dance, saying she didn’t care that James never arrived, getting quite drunk until the rain that held off for hours exploded onto their cabin, and Ruthie said it was a shame, because whatever had kept James away, he wouldn’t be able to come now. That’s when Eve, lying on her bunk with that orange dress fanned around her pale face, surprised them by saying he never existed. “I made him up,” she said, smiling through her tears. “I guess I fooled you all pretty good.”

Nan shakes her head, glancing at Ruthie, who sits with her hands folded neatly in her lap, staring off into space, while Bay and Howard sit at Mavis’s feet, looking up at her admiringly. “In Africa,” Mavis starts, and Nan sighs, remembering Eve as a girl in ankle socks, her dark braid coming undone in loose curls around her face, showing Nan how to eat the honeysuckle growing up the side of the house. When Nan asked how she’d learned to do it, Eve said her mother taught her, which Nan found remarkable. She couldn’t imagine having a mother who would encourage such a thing. It was Eve who showed them the back way to school, past the neighborhood gardens, picking beans and pulling carrots, brushing them with her fingers and eating through the dirt.

She was the smallest, but that didn’t stop her from scrambling up and down the Haverstone’s apple tree, her legs red as though the tree had clawed her, showing the bottom of her white underpants as she ran toward them, half her skirt tucked under her elbow, making a bowl for the stolen apples.

“I’m not sure you should be playing with Eve so much,” Nan’s mother said. “I’m afraid that girl’s going wild. Why don’t you play with that nice Mavis more?”

Nan’s mother thought Mavis was a perfect little girl. Once, when Nan was caught in some transgression, she can’t remember what it was, her mother embarrassed her by saying, in front of the others, “Why can’t you be more like your friend Mavis here?” which might have ended the friendship right there, had Mavis not been standing behind Mrs. Singer, mimicking her sharp gestures and pursed lips.

They grew up together, but they also grew up apart.
Isn’t it true
, Nan thinks,
that
all
intimacy
is
defined
by
the
space
between
distant
points?
Wasn’t that the terrible lesson of her life? Who can ever really know anyone?

Nan can’t bear it. She rises quickly and bumps the table, causing a clatter of plates and silverware; the candles waver, but she ignores them, stacking the dishes, not caring about making a ruckus.

“The lasagna was divine,” Ruthie says.

Nan nods, perhaps too enthusiastically, trying to shake the past from her mind.

Ruthie collects the silverware tenderly, as though the forks, knives, and spoons are made of glass, as though any rough movement will cause a disaster.

“Ruthie,” Nan says, “you have to tell me what happened to you.”

Ruthie stops in midreach, her thin hand hovering over the table. “I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“Not notice?” Nan looks up, startled by Ruthie’s eyes. Were they always so blue? “How could I not notice? You must have lost fifty pounds at least.”

“Oh, you mean—” Ruthie spreads her arms out wide beside her hips.

“You were never that big.”

“I got to be. I was huge. One of those women people fear, a monster.”

“Oh, Ruthie, no.”

Ruthie shakes her head. “You don’t know what it’s like. I can say this now because I’m…I’m—”

“Thin,” Nan says. “You’re quite thin.”

“Well, normal size at least. I’m a bit of an expert on the way fat affects how people are treated, and I guarantee you, it wasn’t pleasant.”

“I wish I’d known.”

“What was I supposed to do, call and say, ‘I’ve gotten horribly fat, would you like to visit?’ I wish I’d known about Bay. It can’t have been easy to raise her alone, Nan. My son was enough to keep both my husband and me pulling each other’s hair out. I always wanted a daughter, but it was not to be.” She leans close and lowers her voice. “I lost all my girl babies before they were born. I always felt like it was, you know, some kind of curse.”

Nan feels the pain in her chest like the crushing of a flower. Sometimes she thinks her whole life is best described as a ruined garden. Well, not everything. Not Bay, of course.

“I can’t tell you that I didn’t think of you and her”—Ruthie juts her chin toward Mavis, still sitting on the steps, enchanting Bay and Howard—“and wished we’d stayed in touch. I never had any other friends like you girls. If we’d stayed in touch—”

“If we’d stayed in touch, everything would be different.”

It is true that they are old and given to sentiment, but Nan and Ruthie look at each other across the table. The candlelight softens the wrinkled dimensions of their faces, and for just a moment, Nan actually sees Ruthie the way she was as a young woman: earnest, trusting, innocent. Nan never took Ruthie seriously. Mavis didn’t either. They thought she was silly.

Nan pretends absorption in the stacking of plates. Had she really been the sort of person who let such cruel judgment cloud her affection? How could she not have remembered this about herself? How could she have let so much time pass? How different her life would be if they had remained friends! How tragic, really, to be lonely all these years.

Snap out of it, Nan tells herself. There’s business to be taken care of. They are here now, and everything is going rather well. The recipe Bay found for the lasagna turned out to be quite good; what a wonderful invention no-boil noodles are! There’s only one sad-looking, sauce-depleted piece left. There was that business with the boy yelling out the car window of course, but things went no further. It was unfortunate, but it certainly didn’t prevent them from sharing a lovely evening. The phone hasn’t rung for days, ever since Nan had the number changed. She isn’t so foolish as to think Sheriff Henry won’t appear eventually. In fact, he almost certainly will. By then, Nan hopes, she’ll have made arrangements. Obviously, it isn’t a perfect solution, but she is far too old for perfection.

“Why settle when you’re young?” Mavis’s voice coils out of the dark. “You can do anything, be anything, live any way at all. Why choose to be ordinary? Why choose to be boring? Of course you can choose that sort of life, almost everyone does, but why?”

With a grunt, Nan picks up the stack of dishes. Ruthie follows, carrying the nearly empty lasagna pan and silverware through the foyer, past the dining room, pushing the swinging door open into the kitchen, which is its own little climate zone, overly warm and humid, with the mingled scents of chocolate tomato sauce and the persistent moonflowers whispering through the screen door and open window.

“I forgot how bossy Mavis can be,” Ruthie says. “Where’s the dishwasher?”

Nan points at herself.

Ruthie runs hot water and squeezes out a generous portion of dish soap. “Nan, I have to say, listening to Bay scold Mavis for getting that boy’s name wrong was the high beam of my day, after seeing you again, of course.”