Leota's Garden (5 page)

So much pomp and ceremony, so many tears for a single sparrow.

Oh, Lord of mercy, will anyone care when I’m gone? Will anyone shed a single tear? Or will I lie dead in this house for so many days until the stench of my decaying body brings someone to check on me?
She had tried so hard to keep her family together and had failed in all attempts.

The older girl stuck a hand through Leota’s fence and broke off a few daffodils, volunteers that had naturalized from long-ago plantings. Leota wanted to slide the window up and shout at the child to keep her thieving hands off the few remaining flowers in her garden, but just as quickly as the anger came, it dissipated. What did it matter? Could the child reattach them to the broken stems? She watched the little girl place the flowers on the fresh grave, a last offering of love to the departed bird. As the child turned, she spotted Leota framed in her kitchen window. Uttering a startled cry, the child fled across the backyard, leaped up the few steps and disappeared inside, the door slamming behind her.

Leota blinked, hurt deeply. The look on that child’s face had been like a slap on her own. It hadn’t been guilt at being caught stealing two daffodils that had made that child run so fast. It had been fear.

Have I become the witch in a child’s fairy tale? Why else would such a look come into a child’s face unless the poor dear thought she’d seen an ugly old crone who meant to do her harm?

Tears prickled Leota’s eyes, blurring her vision. Her heart ached.

God, what did I do to bring things to this sad end? I always loved children. I loved my children best. I love them still.

Yet Eleanor called infrequently and managed to visit only a couple of times a year. She never stayed longer than an hour or so and would spend most of it looking out the front window, fearing some hooligan would steal the hubcaps from her Lincoln. Or was it a Lexus? And George was just too busy to visit, too busy to call, too busy to write.

Turning away from the kitchen sink, Leota took a few steps to the table by the back window. Bracing herself, she sat down slowly, wincing at the pain in her knees. The glass was stained from years of rain pouring down, trailing dust and grime from the clogged roof gutters. The last
time she’d climbed the ladder to clean them out was ten years ago; the last time she washed her windows was last spring. It rained the day after, and she hadn’t done it again since.

Beyond that cloudy window was her long-abandoned garden, her place of retreat and renewal. She merely glanced at it now—it hurt too much to see the scraggly roses growing in a tangle, the undisciplined bushes that had once been so carefully shaped. Weeds poked up everywhere, choking out the flowers. The lawn was dead in some places and overgrown in others. Pots still lined the brick restraining wall, but the precious plants she had purchased with hard-earned money were dead, some from thirst through the summer months and others drowned by winter rains. The cherries that had dropped last year had rotted on the small patio, leaving stains like drops of dried blood. Oh, and her lovely lavender-purple wisteria . . .

Leota closed her eyes against the grief. Her wisteria had gone wild, shoots twisting, twining, and thickening until they broke the overburdened lattice now sagging and blocking the gate to the vegetable garden—a garden that once yielded enough to feed her family and the neighbors. Now it produced nothing but mustard flowers and milkweed—and tiny apricot trees from the fruit that had dropped and rotted into the ground.

Flexing her fingers slowly, Leota reached for the newspaper, sliding the blue rubber band off and putting it into an empty plastic margarine container. All those silly rubber bands, one for every day of every year she’d been reading the
Oakland Tribune
. What was she going to do with all of them? What was she going to do with the dozens of plastic margarine containers stored in the pantry? Or the pie tins? Or the magazines? Thank the Lord the magazine subscriptions had run out and no more were coming. Now there was a bane from Satan called junk mail.

Though inclined to read the paper, Leota decided a glance was enough. What good would it do her to read the details of how the world at large was going to hell in a handbasket? Iraq and its madman. Soviet splinter countries with their nuclear weapons and hot tempers. Japan and China with their ancient grudges. As for the local news, she already knew Oakland had more than its share of murder and mayhem and government corruption. Editorials? The same old stuff year after year. Why read about it? The last time she read the whole page, they were
firing pros and cons about teaching inner-city children ebonics! What happened to learning proper English? She thought of how hard Mama Reinhardt had practiced the language, even though she never intended to work outside the home. And Papa, who did manage to learn English well, only worked until the war years; then fear and suspicion kept him unemployed.

No, she didn’t need to read the front page to see that the world hadn’t changed much in her lifetime. If she wanted details, she could watch them in living color on one of the news shows that ran between four in the afternoon and eleven at night. She had watched from time to time and seen the same carnage repeated hour after hour. No need for people to go out and rubberneck anymore. They could see actual footage from a police car window if they liked. As for wars, take a good long look at CNN. And nothing was too disgusting or perverse to be discussed openly on any number of talk shows.

“Don’t even get me started on the sitcoms,” she muttered to the silence.
Politically correct
was just another way of saying
anything goes, no matter how deviant.
And all this hoop-tee-la about celebrities, most of whom she didn’t know.

Lord, why don’t You just take me home? I’m tired. I hurt. I’m sick of seeing what’s happening in the world. It’s getting worse. I’m no good to anyone. I’ve become a cranky old hag who scares neighbor children half to death. Those I love have their own lives to live. Isn’t that the name of a soap opera?

That was something she swore she would never do. Watch soap operas. But she was getting desperate. Sometimes she turned the television on for no other reason than to hear the sound of another human voice.

She found the newspaper sections she wanted: the comics and Dear Abby. She had read the advice columns for so long she knew exactly what kind of advice would be dispensed. She’d read all the problems anyone could imagine and quite a few she was sure people had made up.

There’s nothing new under the sun.
Sometimes she felt like a Peeping Tom or a voyeur getting a glimpse into the private lives of other people. Well, why not? She didn’t have much of a life of her own anymore. Anyone looking through
her
window would be bored to death. She chuckled. She could just hear them now. “What’s that old woman doing? Sitting at her nook table, sitting in front of her television, sitting in the
bathroom, lying in bed sleepless because she slept most of the day in her chair?”

She’d heard on some talk show that people should exercise their minds. Since she couldn’t exercise her body anymore, she figured she might as well try rolling the marbles around in her head. So she’d taken to working crossword puzzles and studying German from a book Bernard had bought for her shortly after they married. A pity she hadn’t started earlier. It might have helped build a bridge between her and Mama Reinhardt. Anyway, she was still keeping her mind busy. The last thing she wanted was to develop senile dementia or Alzheimer’s. Heaven help her if she wandered out her door one day and took off in Oakland, looking for who knew what. She’d get lost on the streets. End up sleeping in a doorway. Poor Eleanor and George would get a call that their crazy old mother had been found sleeping on a park bench.

Maybe that’d get their attention.

A friend of hers from working days had been moved by her children to Chicago. Cosma Lundstrom had written that she had gone out for a nice walk one bright, sunny day and had almost frozen to death in a doorway before her frantic children found her. She’d written Leota all about it.

The sun was out, but then the wind came up. They’d told me about the wind, of course—this being the “Windy City”—but I never expected it to get that cold. I sat down and couldn’t get up. That stoop was so chilly it might as well have been a brass bench on the South Pole. I think my backside froze to the blasted thing. And then my false teeth stuck together so I couldn’t even ask for help. I suppose everyone who passed thought I was having a gay old time, sitting there and smiling when all the while the fact was my lips were frozen to my gums!

How she’d laughed over that letter. Cosma always wrote funny things. She’d taken a trip once to Arizona with some senior citizens and written back that it was 117 degrees with a windchill factor of 10.

They said it was cheaper going in the summertime. Now I know why! I was so hot I bought a bathing suit and didn’t care who saw my ancient wrinkly legs. A lot of good it did me. Why in the blazes would anyone heat a pool in Arizona?

One year, the Christmas card Leota sent Cosma had come back with a line drawn through the address. Someone had written
Deceased
in bold letters and ink-stamped a hand pointing back to the return address.

Deceased.

A fifty-year friendship was over. Just like that.

Deceased.

What a cold, unfeeling word. It just didn’t fit the woman who had been so full of life and laughter and keen observations. Cosma had been a God-sent gift all those years ago when Leota was working and Mama and Papa were still alive. She and Cosma had the same boss, a kindly man who had two sons serving in the Pacific. He made a point of hiring the wives of servicemen. Both young, both with husbands off to war, Leota and her new friend had had much in common. Cosma had always been the one to listen to her woes and offer sound, often-followed advice concerning Mama Reinhardt.

Leota’s eyes teared up.
Oh, Lord, how I miss Cosma. I’ve no one anymore. Emphysema must have gotten her. I always told her smoking wasn’t good for anyone. But she had to start, thought it made her look so elegant.
She shook her head. Cosma hadn’t been in Chicago more than a year when her children had to move her into a rest home. “Me and my oxygen bottle have new digs,” she’d joked in a letter. “Remember how we used to walk around Lake Merritt after work and we’d be as fresh as daisies when we finished? Now, it’s all I can do to walk from my chair to the bathroom. The most exercise I can manage is writing letters. As long as my fingers do the walking and talking, I can manage.”

Oh, the fun they had had when they were young, going to movies together. Several times they’d gone to the downtown USO and swung to Glenn Miller and Harry James with soldiers on liberty, crying on the way home because it seemed as though the war would never end and their own husbands would never come home.

And yet, while Leota had worried about what might happen if Bernard were killed in battle, Cosma took on life like a bullfighter. And life had gored her badly when soldiers came to her door with the news that her first husband, Jeremy, had been killed in action on Guadalcanal.

Cosma met her second husband, Alfred Lundstrom, a handsome, blue-eyed Marine from Minnesota, when he was back in the States recuperating from a wound he’d gotten in the South Pacific. He and Cosma married within a month of their first date, shortly before he rejoined his unit. Al returned in one piece. He packed up Cosma and moved her northeast to Minnesota. “This city girl is milking cows!” she had written. They had remained long enough to have their first child, a boy, and then moved back to California.

When Leota had heard their plans, she’d been filled with hope that they would end up living in the Bay Area. She’d longed to have her friend back. She’d been desperately unhappy then, working long hours, at odds with her mother-in-law, with whom her children were bonding in her place. Anytime she told them to do something, Mama stepped in and said they didn’t have to do it. And then there was Bernard, still at war within himself.

But her hopes didn’t materialize. Al saw a lucrative future in the Southland, and, as it turned out, he was right. He arrived in time for the boom years of building and did so well in construction that he eventually opened his own business.

“This man lives to work,” Cosma had grumbled once on the phone. Al died of a heart attack when he was sixty-five.

“I’m ashamed to say I’m mad at him,” Cosma had written. “He just retired. We had all these plans of how we were going to enjoy our golden years together, and off he goes without me. Just like a man. Can’t take time to meander. Just a straight shot to where he’s going.”

Thankfully, Al had been well insured and the sons had been trained in the family business. Cosma had gotten over being mad within a few months, but she mourned for several years. It was her daughter who blasted her out of the house with a cruise to Mexico. After that, Cosma started traveling on her own.

Leota had loved Cosma’s letters and lived vicariously through her adventures, for no two lives could have been more different.

Bernard had never been ambitious or particularly industrious. He’d come home whole in body but wounded in heart and mind. He wasn’t the beau she’d fallen in love with and married at twenty. He was like a tired old man, sitting in his easy chair and closing his eyes, not to sleep, but to shut the world out. She had tried all kinds of ways to bring him
out of his depression, but he was mired in it. Then he started to drink to deaden the ache in his heart and drown the consuming guilt. He never allowed himself to get too drunk. He would drink just enough to make himself drowsy. Only once did he overdo it to the point of losing control. She managed then, briefly, to get past his barriers and close enough to his tormented thoughts to glimpse the pit he was in. He told her everything, and she had felt the darkness surround her, too. For a time afterward, he tried to keep her down there with him, but she fought free, finding the ways and means to climb out.
Oh, God, oh, God!
she’d cried out, and the Lord had put His hand down to her and drawn her up.