Moonlight picks out Shasta daisies, bone-white in the darkness, some being devoured by snails stripping off foliage, leaving slimy, torn stems. The late-autumn garden wants settling into winter. I should have pruned back the perennials. I want to get the shears right now and attack the coreopsis clumps bristling with crisp dried flowers at the ends of brown stems.
More than any other place, this garden belonged to me. I created it and I maintained it, digging holes, spreading mulch, pruning trees, in privacy, enjoying my body’s strength.
In life, self-consciousness could grip me. Not in the garden. And not with you. Using my body was fun with you. Kissing you, how could I worry, how could I fret about the flesh on my thighs when we wrapped our legs together, about my breasts when you held them? Naked, with you pressed against me, what could be scary in bed with you?
Out of bed, you stepped back, remote or preoccupied. That enraged me. Because we’d been close, but now I was here, and you were there.
Early on you told me about your childhood. No, I asked you, demanding information. I thought our friendship would deepen if I knew more about you.
We discovered we both were only children.
“But I had a ton of friends,” I said. “I wasn’t lonely.”
You said you had guy friends.
“Did you like them?” I asked.
“Not particularly. We went around together. Most of the time they got on my nerves.”
They all had some disgusting personal habit or personality quirk, but you were cool. Your obnoxious friends were annoying flies, buzzing on the periphery of your consciousness. You could go around with them or go around alone. You didn’t mind either way. Fundamentally, you were always alone.
My friends and I were close. When we were together, we discussed our friendships, analyzing ourselves and each other. At school, we wrote notes and passed them from desk to desk or hid them in the restroom, excusing ourselves from class either to wedge notes inside the paper towel rack or to finger them out. After school, when we should have been doing homework, we showed each other our journals.
I never would have remained friends with a girl I did not absolutely like. My friends and I were always breaking up and forming new attachments. All this to explain why I cannot comprehend your detachment.
Winter in the vegetable patch. A gone-to-thistle artichoke plant raises fuzzy purple flowers, and on the grassy chive plants, ladybugs gorge on aphids. You never come outside. You’ll never tidy my garden. You brought me here because you know I loved it—thank you—but you left me here to witness this garden fading.
Regrets. I could be mean. I hit you. I refused to marry you, that was mean.
“An actual wedding wedding?” I shook my head, as if trying to shake the image away. “I don’t think I could be a bride, not with a straight face.”
You frowned, but cared less about my refusal than I’d expected. You liked to think of me as unconventional, said you balanced my wildness, that if not for you, I’d do crazy things, be promiscuous or unemployed. You were a steadying influence, you said, and you liked that.
Now that I can’t marry you, I wonder if, in time, I would have after all. Remember prom? I usually went along with things, in the end.
Even marriage? Yes, I can see myself. There I am, engaged, accepting the ring. Holding out my hand so my friends can admire the glittery thing on my finger, though such elegance looks odd on my knuckly gardener’s hand. Two months later, there I am on the phone, ordering a cake from one shop, flowers from another. Homegrown flowers won’t do. The dahlias and cannas in my garden are too robust and bright for a bridal bouquet.
And what of the ceremony itself? Could I put on a passive, radiant face and go through it all without laughing? Could I stand my mother’s tears?
Would I follow the customs? Toss the frothy, pale flowers to my friends? Hitch up my skirt, let you peel the garter off my thigh and throw it to your clutch of man friends standing round, soused and sniggering? Could I do all that?
Maybe I could. Though in my head I’d be hooting laughter, or waggling my tongue in my open mouth like a harpy, or just making sarcastic comments.
In life I kept up a flippant commentary, firing off glib comments inside my head, but talking to myself released pressure, ensured I never did anything worse than think mutinous thoughts. At your dad’s dinners! I mostly sat and smiled. Briefly, maybe, I drew my eyebrows together in a vexed expression. I could have been much worse.
I should have been much worse. All the time, a rebellion raged inside my head. It’s terrible to have a part of yourself (or all of yourself) trapped inside your head.
Earliest paperwhite narcissi and other late-winter flowers emerge from the soil, but crowded by dandelions and oxalis, with no compost to help them grow, are soon stunted and weak.
Part of me has always wanted to create and not destroy. I accept that both are within me. The gardener and the—pillager? Terrorist? The builder up and the tearer down, maybe. The believer and the scoffer, for sure.
When I moved in, I found your overgrown backyard disturbing. In the mornings, looking out of your bathroom window, I wanted to make sense out of the green chaos. So, I pruned the trees into logical shapes. I pulled up weeds and lay down sod. I civilized the backyard with flowers. That first summer I planted zinnias and marigolds and sunflowers.
But they died. Aphids sucked the marigolds and sunflowers. Mildew crept over the zinnias and curled their leaves. I bought The Western Garden Book, learned how to douse the flowers with various organic sprays. How to mulch them, how to deadhead and when to water. I learned how to grow Tellima grandiflora and Lunaria annua and Iris ensata (I know you know what I’m talking about) as well as zinnias and marigolds and sunflowers. I became an avid gardener. A skillful gardener. But why? What if I had fallen in love with a man who lived in an apartment?
We fought too much. My fault. I forced myself on you for your own good, refusing to let you become an emotionally detached man, like your dad. That’s what I told myself I was doing. If you left the room during an argument, I’d storm after you and clobber you on the head. You clobbered me back, but I didn’t care. I was brave because I was unafraid of being hurt. Anything to make you talk, even if you only muttered: “You tear everything down.” At least you spoke. “You destroy.” Meaning I destroyed the silence, disrupted your reserve. I believed I owed it to our relationship to sacrifice myself, bringing us closer in the long run. I wasn’t letting you sink into yourself.
How sad to think that the paperwhites were wasted this year. You haven’t come outside to kneel in the wet grass and snuff up their perfume. Too late now.
In the end, my meanness was lite. I was spirited. Boisterous. Feisty. What a word. I can think of a worse one though: spunky.
The truth is, I conformed. Pretty much. Went with the flow. Talked like a rebel, but it was just noise. I probably would’ve married you, in the end, and gone along with the wedding you wanted. If my past behavior is any indication. Giving in to the world, giving out in the knees. Giving up and putting out.
Fat, succulent hyacinths beneath the quince tree glow white among slick wet leaves.
Spring is coming. Yippee!
What is spring to me? Why did the damn bulbs come up, anyway? Why didn’t they die, like the other flowers?
Let the flowers die, I don’t give a fuck.
Or let them bloom away cheerfully, unheeded, unwanted. In a few weeks the succulent white flowers will go brown and sodden anyway.
Lately, my thoughts are brutal. This is not an apology. It is a fact. I curse all the time.
I think back and am amazed by what a nice woman I was.
I can’t believe I was a gardener. A lover of flowers.
Your fault. Your goddamn shit-fucking backyard.
I think if I were a woman now, with hands, I would use my fingers to pull triggers or build bombs. I would like to blow things up. When I was a woman, I basically was nice. I worked at an easy, silly job—in retail!—and on weekends I grew flowers in the backyard of a rented house. It wasn’t even my own house. And I did not want to blow things up. At least.
I did not blow things up.
*
He tells himself happier stories, too, while he weeds the gravel path. Toward the end she talked about the past a lot, so his stories dwell there. She would know the name of these flat green weeds and those spiky ones that smell of garlic. This is a dandelion, he knows that.
He kneels on her blue foam cushion. Why does he have her spin such negative stories? Because she didn’t want to die, wasn’t ready. They both thought the treatments, not the disease, were weakening her. She died surprised and angry.
Once, he bends over so his forehead touches the warm gravel. Not praying. Maybe trying to commune with her. She’s here in spirit, he hopes. Her DNA is here. Some of it. The rest in the urn inside. Still, he’s alone. She isn’t here to tell him how to prune the cherry tree. He does know she liked it kept small, compact. She had opinions about every tree, shrub and flower in her garden. Weeding the path is straightforward, at least.
Standing, he scans the ruined garden. A piece of pea gravel falls from his forehead. This average-sized fenced yard is too big for him to deal with. How did she do it?
At least pull the damn ivy off the side of the garage.
He obeys.
Many of his memories unfurl into fight-stories. Maybe because he knew her that well. He knew what she thought about when they fought. Because it had become stylized. Their kabuki. Her role, his role. At the same time, they were specifically themselves when they argued and shoved and wept. Instead of like any other couple at the movies or a restaurant. He flips through the other things they did together but comes back to this. If he were in a better mood he’d linger over lovemaking, hiking, cooking.
Gardening is an act of love; this restored garden will be his tribute to her. The goal is to get the place in shape for spring and invite people to see it. To the left, the drought-resistant plants in the sunny border. To the right, the shady cottage garden area.
He likes to imagine she’s here, that they’re here together. But it isn’t better in the garden, it’s worse. Because she can’t answer his questions about how to tend it for her, because he can’t keep this place she made as she made it. He’s losing that too, and he can’t stop the changes, bit by bit, slowly. Same as wanting to stop the slow changes in her. He couldn’t do that, either.
Though, really, the changes only feel slow at the time, when you think you have a chance, while you’re still assuming they’ll slow down completely, pause, and roll backward again to normal. When it’s over and you think about it the time seems to have gone fast.
He stands, looking, trowel in one hand, clippers in the other, arms dragged down by these tools, defeated.
Slowly my heart sinks lower than before. My garden was only mine as long as I worked in it. This place, so shockingly changed, is no longer the garden I made. And, so, it’s not a place I can settle into. I might as well be inside, where things are familiar. Sofas and tables don’t decompose or go to seed. Out here, the foul-smelling rot, the insects, the gusts of wind, all worry me. I feel on edge.
Happier stories will come if he tries harder. And this garden. He can manage better. She would want him to cut that morning glory vine out of that—shrub. Whatever it’s called. After that, he pulls something green out of something gray. The gray is lambs ears, maybe, probably. A snail rolls out. He stomps it into the gravel. Quickly, he trims the rosemary bush, drops the clippers, digs dandelions out of the border with the trowel. He’s scattered, can’t settle to a single task.
He’s on his knees again, making paste of slug with the side of the clippers, smearing it into the gravel. Muscle-memory of smearing garlic into salt. What the hell is he doing? Rubbing slug DNA into the earth? With hers? Together? He stands, yelling. Grips his head with both hands.
Pictures of her aren’t enough, though he’s looked at them for hours. He knows in time he’ll be looking at pictures of the garden, too, and remembering when it was beautiful like that. But he’s not willing to give up on this garden yet.
The stories keep spooling out. He can’t stop them. They’re not good stories, either. Not yet they aren’t. He’s trying.
The clippers are hiding somewhere. In some bushes where they landed when he flung them away from himself. He’s facing an overgrown pink-flowering—thing.
Tell me how to prune this, he begs her.
You could look online. Or your dad would know. Ask him. Go ahead, call. I don’t mind. You know I never hated him. Only too many people allow your dad an importance he doesn’t merit, and I tried not to be one of those people. In my weakest center, though, I wanted him to like me and I wanted him to think I was pretty. Or are those two things the same? I wanted to be admired, not ignored. Didn’t happen, though. He’d hand me a glass of wine, while talking to another guest and I’d smile into empty air. At his dinners I felt even more perfidious than usual. The skirts I wore on those occasions were like physical manifestations of my hypocrisy.
This is overdone. Manifestation? Perfidious? Don’t think so.
On the night of your birthday party, you had to listen to my complaints all the way home: “I’m so glad to be out of there. Your dad makes me feel—I don’t know.” I laughed and concluded, “He makes me feel awful!” I was loud, enjoying the noise I made.
This is better, he’s doing well now.
You and I walked quickly through the dark, and I left scraps of curses along the streets for the neighbors to hear. We flew along, faster and faster, and my words fluttered out into the night. I was breathless, but speed felt good.
Only lovers can keep pace together. Only lovers can cover ground so swiftly and effortlessly. And as we flew along together, hand in hand, I realized I was happy, after all. Your dad’s house was a dry, cracked cocoon. We’d struggled out of it and now we tumbled through the night, two beating wings on a silky, milk-white moth.
Simone Martel
Simone Martel is the author of a novel, A Cat Came Back, a memoir, The Expectant Gardener, and a story collection, Exile’s Garden. She was born in Oakland, California. After studying English at U.C. Berkeley, Simone created and operated an organic tomato farm in the Central Valley. She’s working on a new novel based on that experience.
Comments