Court of the Myrtles (2 page)

Glancing up, I see an older woman just a few feet away. Memory wrecker! I try to go back to my silence but I can't resist looking her way. Now I'm more interested in her. I watch her kneeling over a gravestone, carefully poking a row of seedlings into freshly dug holes. She's even whistling. Who whistles these days? And in a graveyard, too! She must have felt my gaze because she glances up and smiles. I look away, focus on my mother, her grave.

And when I look in her direction again, the woman has cast her eyes down. Out of respect, I suppose. An unspoken understanding that comes out of sharing the same sort of experience: when somebody is at the grave of a loved one we give them privacy.

But it doesn't last for long. I look again and this time our eyes meet and she's smiling at me. And, hell, why not, I guess? There is no guide to graveyard etiquette that states: “Rule 1: Never converse with another mourner.” So I smile back. Which is a mistake.

“Pansies!” she hollers out. “Only thing I can plant this early in the season that can stand the frostbite.”

“Oh!” I try not to holler back.

I go back to the business of missing my mother, leaving pansy-woman to tend to hers.

The tears were once a numbing full-force earlier today, but at least now my eyes have stopped stinging. Some days I can't think straight, Can't function. Can't do something as simple as separate the darks from the whites in front of the washing machine.

And then she's there. Pansy woman. Right at my side. Why I never… Have you heard of boundaries, lady?

“Hello again. You all right?” says the voice of pansy woman.

“I guess,” I say, falling back on my heels from where I was kneeling. It takes guts to interrupt a person crying over their mother's grave. Isn't it obvious I'm crying for a reason?

“Someone special?” she asks.

So she's a nosy pansy-planting woman. “My mom,” I say, running my hand across my permanently tear-stained cheek.

She reads the name “Rosie” and the date. “Lost her recently. I'm so sorry.” She reaches a hand out to squeeze my wrist.

I shrug. I don't need that reminder. Get me out of here.

“Got a dad?”

I shake my head.

“Siblings?”

I shake it again.

“An only child. That's a shame,” she says glancing off. “You must have good days and bad ones. Being alone doesn't help. Nobody to talk about her to, nobody to keep her memory alive the way other kids can with siblings.”

“Yes,” I say, wiping the back of my wet hand across my thigh, and deliberately looking in another direction, hoping pansy-planting chatterbox gets the hint. She doesn't.

“May I?” she asks, brushing the dirt from her jeans and plopping down next to me before I've even said it's okay. She extends her hand for a formal introduction. “Alice,” she says. I reluctantly take her hand, noticing fingernails embedded with black soil. Hasn't she ever heard of gloves? “I lost my daughter a couple years back.”

“Oh no,” I say, withdrawing my hand as though she has leprosy. “I'm so sorry.” My eyes search her face wondering if she can read my thoughts. The thoughts that say I'm feeling like a complete little selfish bitch. “Was she young?”

“Twenty-eight,” says Alice. “But always my baby.”

“I'm twenty-eight,” I say. “I can't even imagine.” Suddenly my dead mother seems insignificant. I'm not sure what to say next so I decide on my name. “Um, Marla,” I say, extending my hand again, my fingers strong, this time with sincerity. “And I'm pleased to meet you, Alice.”

“Likewise.” Her grip is strong, steadfast. “I meet lots of people here telling their stories of loved ones lost. I never knew there was so much
life
in a cemetery,” she says. “It's like a little live community of mourners.”

“Great,” I smirk. “How pathetic.”

“How'd you lose her?” asks Alice. “Rosie?” she prompts, reading my mom's stone again.

No stopping this one, I think. “Oh, it was from… an accident,” I say, reluctant to divulge more to this stranger.

“Accidents are the worst,” says Alice. “Here one moment and gone the next.”

“Never got to say goodbye. That hurts the most. Leaves me up nights tortured.”

There's a lingering silence, and then I think, why not? Give it back to the nosy old lady. “And you?” realizing the minute the words are out of my mouth that no matter what Alice's answer is—car crash, breast cancer, drowning—losing a child is the biggest tragedy on earth compared to mine.

“She died of…” and then picking her word carefully, “…an illness,” she says, surprising me with her reticence.

I suddenly feel awful. My hand goes to her wrist. “Oh, Alice, I don't know what to say…”

“Nothing to say. Different kinds of loss. Different kinds of hell. You never get over it. You just learn to live with it.” Alice stares straight ahead, as she's seeing her memories right in front of her. “Her name was Joy.”

We're silent, allowing the name Joy to float in our space. I wish Alice would continue but she doesn't. I change the subject. “I'm not worried about me. I just want to know that they got there okay, your Joy and my mom Rosie. I was just thinking of this time when I was a little girl and asked my mother the question ‘What will I do when you die?' And now that day has come and gone. Sooner than I expected, but it's here.”

“And what did your mother say?”

“Oh it's silly, really.”

“Does that mean you don't want to tell me?”

“No, I'll tell you. She told me—” I stop. This is too ridiculous. But then this woman in front of me looks as if she'd appreciate the ridiculous. “She told me she'd come back as a whale.”

A burst of laughter entirely out of keeping with graveyard etiquette. And I find myself laughing too. “You've got a problem with whales?” she asks, as though coming back to this earth as a whale is funny but makes perfect sense. For some reason, this woman has just worked some magic. I feel compelled to say more. “You know, Alice, we did everything my mom and I. Except die. She did that without me.”

“No, she didn't,” she snaps, all humor gone. “Somebody was there on the other side. She wasn't alone.”

“I hope so. That's a nice sentiment. It's exactly what she used to say.”

Alice squeezes my arm for support before rising to stand. And then I find myself steadying my hand on her, too. “In the meantime,” says Alice, “we have a life to live. Self-cultivating. Like those pansies. Always growing and learning. Like you.” She looks me straight in the eye. “Your mother lives in
here.
” Alice places her fist onto my chest and taps. The same words my mother said. The same action. Now I
am
spooked.

“Well, I'd better go,” is all I can say, suddenly feeling at a loss for words.

Alice shakes her fingers at her pant legs to even out the wrinkles.

I look around but don't see another car. And then on impulse, “May I offer you a lift home?”

“Oh no. I use this time to walk.”

Good, I think to myself. I was just being polite anyway. And I don't really want to stand here any longer figuring out what I actually feel about this odd woman.

“Walk the two miles every day. Keeps my ticker in shape,” she says self-righteously.

“Oh?” I say.

“It's my daily meditation for the thing I look forward to most. My daughter's grave.”

That's a ridiculous explanation, if I've ever heard one. “Okay, then, nice to meet you again, Alice. And I'm so sorry about Joy.” But Alice only nods. And with that, I head for my parked car just off the dirt road. I try damn hard not to glance back. But I can feel her watching me, studying my every move.

Moments later I'm safely in my seat, turn the ignition over and begin to drive away. In my rearview mirror I glance back at Alice waving goodbye a little too effusively
with her hole-digger. “Self-cultivation? Hmm….” I think to myself. Maybe she meant self-
preservation
. Oh, who knows… who cares? My mom is dead and nothing can change that. I head up the hill pressing harder on the gas pedal.

My mom, Rosie knew little of the world beyond her own mother who was a seamstress by day and a complete annoyance by night. Rosie's parents were Armenian immigrants off the boat so they had no understanding of all the modern conveniences an American girl might long for when she was cooking in the kitchen. Like an electric can opener. Her father, my grandfather, repaired clocks. All kinds of clocks, but mainly big cuckoo clocks you'd find in some grand old foyer of a Victorian home.

Rosie's best friend was a violin, though at age seventeen she was ready to move on to a friend that might actually
breathe
. She had come to despise the melodramatic squeak of the bow across the strings, longing instead for laughter and sleepovers. Though Rosie's mother vetoed that, saying to her daughter, “You can never have a sleepover because boys will sneak in.”

So one Saturday morning, Rosie slammed the violin down on the card table and just plain quit. And there was nothing anybody could say about it. So this is what it felt like to rebel: powerful.

Father Zakarian's Friday Armenian lessons went next. Then, the ill-fitting smock that covered her knees at church, until church succumbed, too. The final childhood rebellion led her across the boundary of her driveway to the promised land… the street corner two blocks away.

“Roselyn Marie!” her mother would scream over the hum of her sewing machine, “Don't you leave this house without a girdle! You hear me?”

Her mother waddled to the front door, but Rosie was already blowing through the white sheets on the neighbors' clothesline and cutting through the garden trellis to the safety of the sidewalk. Here she could stop, roll the hem of her dress up to miniskirt length, pull her shoulders back to stick out her breasts and parade past the pizza parlor on the corner where Bernie, the older man soliciting town councilman votes had installed himself. He already had Rosie's vote, and he was about to have something else, too…

Six months later, Rosie's sleek figure went from strutting her stuff to strutting her duck-waddling pregnancy. After spending the first three months with her head hung over a toilet bowl from morning sickness, Rosie gave up trying to conceal her secret. Soon everybody from the postman to the butcher knew. In fact, the only person who didn't seem to know was standing next to newly elected councilor Bernie on the town hall podium. Mrs. Bernie. His wife.

But I was not alone. I had my grandmother and a collection of babushka-wearing aunts streaming in from an Armenian mountainside, all happy to pace the hospital hallways as Uncle Zaven handed out pink-ribbon cigars.

And at precisely 8:02 p.m. weighing in at the same numbers—8 pounds 2 ounces on August 14, I, Marla, was born. The day Mom brought me home, even Grandma stopped the pedal of her sewing machine to rise up and examine me, all wrapped up in a pink bunny blanket.

My mother named me Marla because it sounded like the most luxurious item my grandmother had ever possessed: a jar of marmalade.

I may have been illegitimate, but I was wanted in every way a child could be wanted.

While in a nearby town, in another family, Alice's child Joy, was
un
wanted…

Alice, as she was to tell me, was the only redhead in a family of Black Irish, from a big brood outside of Boston. The only thing that Alice and my mom, Rosie, had in common was that they both had babies in the year 1960. Alice was the awkward middle child, number six in a line of ten kids. When she was eighteen, her parents—a schoolteacher and a butcher—were anxious to have her marry the young rookie cop from up the street. The sooner she said “I do” the sooner there would be more corned beef and cabbage for the rest of the poor family. Alice and the cop were married in a small civil wedding on the icy steps of the town hall with Alice's two siblings as witnesses. The next day, with a borrowed dump truck and a few pieces of used furniture, they rented the top floor of a duplex just one picket fence-yard away from her parents.

Alice had two dreams. One was to own a florist shop. This she imagined with one hand flicking through the pages of
House and Garden
and the other burping her baby son on her shoulder. The other dream was taking the newly hyped birth control pill that her not-so-Catholic friends were raving about. But Alice was a good Catholic girl who didn't particularly fancy burning in hell, so just like Rosie, she too, spent her mornings hanging over the toilet bowl. And in 1960, Alice was pregnant with her fifth child in little over seven years.

Alice's two-bedroom duplex was already bursting with four sons, one collie and two black cats. “But we can't afford another kid!” was all her husband could say as he
admired his reflection in the mirror, belted in his handcuffs and placed his gun in its holster.

Dodging the pull toys and missing puzzle pieces strewn on the living-room floor, Alice stormed from the hallway into her cluttered room, slammed the door and flopped on the bed in tears.

The only way to escape the chaos of kids, and that stack of unpaid bills sitting next to the wall phone, was to take a cleaning job for a wealthy woman in a Tudor mansion on Belmont Hill. There she found peace in the motion of her dust cloth swirling over a fresh mist of lemon furniture polish as it glided across the mahogany dining room table.

Alice was allowed to sip a cup of Lipton tea on the veranda during her lunch break. She would spy on the gardener working his magic around the kidney-shaped pool, watch him stand back to admire his work before planting a row of red and white impatience, preparing for a pop of summer color. This is how Alice learned.

On Tuesday and Saturday evenings, she covered after-hours duty at the Laundromat, mopping the floors, and taking great care to see that every drier's lint screen was fuzzy-free. When the clock hit midnight, she collapsed into a plastic chair bolted to the wall next to the detergent dispenser. She elevated her swollen ankles while fingering through the coffee-stained pages of a
Boston Globe
left on the folding table next to somebody's left-behind wool sock. There was comfort in propping up the news on her swollen belly, comfort in the deep rumble of the last load of clothes in the nearby dryer.