The Garden Path (32 page)

The next day she decided she had to see Susannah—just
see
her. She would drive to the Silvergate Café again. It was Sunday; the place was open Sundays, she knew. And closed Mondays: Ivan had come over one Monday afternoon, rashly—had found her in the garden, and she had hustled him inside. He had promised to come another Monday, and they would drive out of town for a picnic, but he never had. Well, Sunday: she would at least avoid the Liquor Boutique man with the fat hands like Ralphie's. Maybe she would even have a meal at the Café. The idea made her smile; she would do it. And Susannah wouldn't be there, anyway. But she might be. Or she might come in. She would just look at her, just see what she looked like, how she was taking it, Ivan gone.

The weather had turned cool and rainy, the sky a uniform, washed-out gray. Rosie drove slowly down Route One to the little shopping center. This time she parked on the other side of the Café, by Wendell's Tropical Fish Paradise. The store was closed, but the fish tanks glowed green in the window. It was late, the Café was emptying out. She looked inside, standing chilled in the drizzle. Only a few people remained. She wondered if she was too late for lunch, but as she stood there two young women went in, sat down, were approached by a waitress who took their order and walked back toward the kitchen with it. Rosie went in and sat by herself at a table.

It was warm inside; the warmth spilled over from the kitchen and the food, and it smelled wonderful, good brown smells that suggested soup and bread. Sick people could get well here, Rosie thought. People could come here to be healed, fed with herbs, nourished. The word stuck in her mind—
nourished
—so that when the waitress came to take her order she couldn't think what to say.

“It's late,” the waitress said with a smile. “I'd better tell you what we've run out of.” It was the older waitress, the one with frizzy hair. Ginger? She rattled off a list of things, consulting a blackboard on the wall. “I should go up there and just cross all this off,” she said. “But I haven't had a second.”

“I'll just have the soup, if you have any left. Some nice hot soup,” Rosie said. She smiled, shivering. “And bread with it, if you have any.”

“How about a nice hunk of oatmeal bread? And the mushroom soup?”

“Fine. Anything. Soup and bread.”

She looked around. It was all green and white, like a spring garden. In the kitchen, behind the serving counter, there was a red-cheeked man in an apron. She heard him laugh, and then a young black man appeared, grinning out at the waitress.

“Didn't you used to have another waitress?” she asked Ginger when she returned with her food. “A young girl?”

“Summer help,” Ginger said shortly. “She didn't work out real well.”

“No—I mean a blonde girl. A young woman.”

“Oh—when we first opened. Sure. She's one of the partners, but she doesn't work here any more, actually. In fact—” Ginger set down a bowl of soup, gently; it was filled nearly to the top. “She's actually a writer. A good one, too. She writes science fiction.” Ginger set down the bread, and a little crock of butter. Rosie couldn't speak. This was where she should ask questions, but she could only smile and pick up her spoon, nodding, ending the conversation. The reality of Susannah—
one of the partners, a writer and a good one
—silenced her; it made her throat close up again. She closed her eyes and inhaled; steam rose from the bowl: thyme, carrot, mushroom, butter, something elusive. “Careful—it's hot,” said Ginger. “Blow on it a little.” She opened her eyes—what kind of restaurant would have a waitress who told you to blow on your soup? She smiled, slid her spoon into the soup, and blew on it.

She hadn't thought she could eat, but she managed to get down half the bowl, and she ate a little bread. She heard Ginger call into the kitchen, “Duke? How's that quiche holding out?” and Duke answer, “It just gave up.” There was another waitress, a colorless little woman in a long green-checked apron too big for her—must be the replacement for the one who didn't work out.

“How's everything here?” Ginger asked her.

“Delicious,” Rosie said. “This is very good, nourishing food.”

“I'll tell the chef.”

Rosie felt the soup warm her as if it were alcohol. It loosened her throat, and calmed her. She felt that if she could just have soup like this three times a day she would feel less hopeless; she might even get out in the garden. “Sick people could come here and eat this and get well,” she said to Ginger. Ginger looked at her curiously, then laughed. “I suppose they could,” she said.

She was reluctant to leave, and she ordered a cup of mint tea. Two women at the next table were discussing gypsy moths. “Have you seen Swarthmore Street?” one of them asked. “It's just chewed to bits. Devastated.”

“They make me sick,” said the other, a tanned woman who looked like Kiki. “Literally. They make me want to vomit. I don't know which is worse, the caterpillars or the moths flying in your face or those filthy egg cases.”

Rosie would have liked to join in, but she felt shy. “I don't mind them,” she would have said. “Sure, they're disgusting, but I have faith in Mother Nature. They go in cycles. Wait—next year there won't be nearly so many. I did have my trees sprayed, but I had to. I'm a professional gardener. I can't take a chance on having my stuff destroyed. It has to look nice for the cameras.” She said this long speech over to herself, then again. The women at the next table had fallen silent, looking at her. Had she spoken aloud? Did
look nice for the cameras
echo in the air? She didn't think so, but she wasn't sure, and she smiled vaguely and stood up. Time to go, like it or not. They'd be closing. Ginger was up at the blackboard, wiping it clean with a damp sponge. The black man from the kitchen came out with a tray and began picking up dishes. Rosie didn't see a cashier. “Do I pay you?” she called to Ginger, and Ginger came over with her check.

“I'll take it,” she said. “Our cashier is off today. That's one reason things are so wild.”

“They don't seem wild,” Rosie said earnestly. “They seem quite nice.” She left a large tip—three dollar bills under the butter crock—and headed for the door. As she reached it, Susannah opened it from outside. Susannah? Yes. A tall blonde woman, hair in braids, wearing a denim skirt and a pink polo shirt. Edwin's long nose and blue eyes. Susannah? The tight feeling came into Rosie's throat and chest again. She couldn't have spoken; she could hardly breathe. Susannah didn't speak, either. She held the door, and Rosie passed through it, and as she did so it seemed to her that Susannah gave her a look of miserable, unmistakable, profound comprehension.

Chapter Six

Ashes and Sparks

By the time Susannah ran into her mother outside the Café, Ivan and Garnet had been gone more than a week. She was, Susannah told herself, getting used to it. The empty bed, the painting taken down, the space in the closet, the shocked, rootless feeling—all that was easy enough to get used to, the way an invalid comes to accept the hospital, the nurses, the injections, the pain, as natural and proper. What was difficult wasn't the actual loss, or the lies, or even the dreadful truths the lies had masked, but the knowledge of her own capacity for foolishness.
This is life
, she had said contentedly to herself:
this is what it is to be happy
—and all the while the truth had been going on, picking away at her silly happiness like termites eating the heart out of a beam until it's nothing but a husk, and can crumble.

But Susannah refused to think in such melodramatic terms; she would not consider herself a husk, and she would not crumble. She knew what she was, it was simple enough, she'd known it for years—a silly, blind woman married to a philanderer. Even Ginger couldn't turn her into a heroine—but then Ginger didn't know the whole truth. “So you threw the bastard out,” Ginger said, and sighed. “I suppose you know what you're doing.” Susannah imagined Ginger saying to people—to her beleaguered sister Sheila—“She puts up with his goings-on for years, and then all of a sudden, wham! She's fed up, and she kicks him out. Not that I blame her, looks aren't everything, God knows, but it's a shame.” And what would Ginger say if she knew all the truth? Would words fail even Ginger? Would the mechanics of coping grind to a halt? The Dear Abby wisdom run dry? The rueful laughter stick in her throat?

Garnet had come over and told Susannah. “I think you ought to know,” she said. “Ivan is having an affair with your mother. She lives over in East Chiswick? On this dead-end street? He's over there all the time. They go upstairs, and a light goes on, and then a light goes off. He stays late.”

The conversation took place one afternoon in the kitchen of Duke's house. Garnet stopped by after work. Susannah had made her a cup of tea, had commiserated with her about her sore feet, had asked about school, and then Garnet had said, “I think you ought to know.”

“How did you find all this out, Garnet?” Susannah asked her. Oh yes, it was true, she had no doubt of that. It explained any number of things; they pounded at her temples, those things, giving her a headache. She felt like throwing up. But she sipped her tea calmly, keeping Garnet in her stern gaze. Garnet was a pretty thing—young, with smooth tanned skin, braless bouncy breasts, big brown eyes, muscular brown legs and dainty ankles.
Cow
, Susannah thought.

“I followed him,” said Garnet. She didn't avoid Susannah's eyes, and her voice was defiant. “I had to know where he was. And then I asked him, and he told me.”

“You asked him, and he told you.” A light goes on, and a light goes off. “He actually told you he's sleeping with his mother-in-law.”

A smile flickered around Garnet's lips. “Yeah.”

“He's been sleeping with you, too, I suppose.”

“No!”

“Come off it, Garnet.” Susannah wondered at her own bravado. She had never actually seen one of Ivan's teenage tramps before. Garnet was precisely what she had expected—a pretty, stupid, sneaky cow.

“We've never done anything,” said Garnet.

“Then why in hell did you follow him, you little bitch?”

She spoke the words with clenched teeth, gripping the edge of the table. Garnet recoiled, and then the sly suggestion of a smile returned to her face. “I have a crush on him,” she said. “Of course. Who wouldn't?”

“Don't lie to me,” Susannah said, but she spoke more coolly. Her mind was racing ahead. He was sleeping with this waitress, sleeping with
her
—Rosie—God knew who else he was seeing, what else he was capable of. It was as if a light clicked on, illuminating her life, and she could see for the first time how impossible it was. Who could live like this?
I must be crazy
. And
her:
she remembered the dead-end street, the house, the flowers, the figure passing the window. The light clicked on, and the light clicked off.

“Only once, then,” Garnet was saying. “Once or twice, I forget.”

“Get out of here, Garnet,” Susannah said, but the girl was already on her feet, on her way to the door.

“Don't worry, he doesn't love me or anything,” she said. “I mean, it's not anything like that. He doesn't love her, either. He wants to stay with you. That's why I thought you should know. I'm trying to do you a favor.” Her voice rose at the end, approaching a wail.

“Just get out of here,” Susannah said wearily. She didn't get up; Garnet's well-meant malice took all the strength out of her. Was she, then, to be grateful for Garnet's prying? For Ivan's failure to love all his women?

“I hate you,” said Garnet, and sobbed once. “I just hate you so much. You never even go to his softball games.
I
go to his softball games. You don't even care about him.”

“Go
away.
”

She did so, crying and muttering. Susannah imagined her sobbing behind the wheel of her little Datsun all the way to—where? Ivan? Ivan would still be busy at the restaurant, and then he would—supposedly—be home, unless Garnet waylaid him.

Susannah knew as she sat there drinking her tea that
something would happen
. It would be like Edwin, finally, dying; like Margie—something final, something horrible. She wondered for a moment if she would kill him. The light in her mind hadn't gone on for nothing.
All these years
, she thought, taking the cups to the sink. Garnet hadn't touched her tea. Susannah found it difficult to think straight, though she knew she needed to. Everything whirled in her mind: Garnet's bouncy bosom, Rosie's house lit up in the dark, mother-in-law jokes, Garnet's sly smile, Ivan going off in the van, the Silvergate Café, Duke. Standing by the sink, she looked out the window at the summer afternoon and tried to see a straight path through the maze. She had a quick vision of herself sticking one of Duke's sharp kitchen knives into Ivan's beautiful stomach. The sun shone brightly, equally, on everything, and she stood there a long time without the faintest idea as to what she should do.

In the end, though, she threw him out. He came home early, with Duke, and while he was out weeding in the garden she approached him and asked him to leave, and told him why. She hadn't known, until she looked out and saw him bent over, in shorts, pulling weeds, with his whole filthy secret life curled inside him, that what she wanted was for him to go. But of course that was what must happen. It didn't move her or impress her or flatter her that he begged her to change her mind, and that he professed to love her, and that tears even came to his eyes.

“I'm so mixed up right now, Susie,” he said. “Can't you see me through this?” She said she couldn't. “I can change,” he said, and she said he could change somewhere else, she wanted him to leave. He said it hadn't meant anything, and she said it had meant everything, and she would be very grateful if he would leave. He could have money, she didn't care if he took every cent out of the savings account, so long as he left.