The Mother Garden (10 page)

I have never had any illusions about knowing the workings of Mrs. Capp's soul, but right now I feel particularly alienated. I knew she was a bit desperate, but there's an edginess to her need I didn't see before. Her neck looks more than thin, it seems breakable.

“We were thinking of going to a matinee,” Mrs. Capp says. She wrinkles her eyes and nose.

I take the last cookie from the fancy platter on the table. Beside the platter is the CD Satan brought for Mrs. Capp in that pink foil. It's called
Music for the Living: Experiments in Joyful Sound.
That's just too much. Who is he trying to fool?

There's a shifting under the table. Satan's foot, clad in a dirty Converse high-top, creeps up Mrs. Capp's leg and his knee, in the process, bumps against my thigh. I set the CD down with a thwack. Mrs. Capp raises her eyebrows.

“Well,” she says, “if we're going to go, I should put on a warmer sweater. I always get cold in theaters.” She takes the CD and places it on the empty platter. Satan gathers the glasses and follows her into the house. I stay outside, looking at the oak tree trembling in the imperceptible wind.

After a few minutes, I get up and walk around the house. A large Dodge van is parked out front. Satan's van. The windows are tinted and a large, expandable ladder is secured to the top. There's a big dent in the rear bumper. I circle the van and I'm surprised to find a mural painted on the door of the driver's side. It's a crudely painted picture of the planet Earth. The continents make a green-brown yin-yang with the bright blue ocean. Underneath it is a red heart with the words one love printed inside. The rest of the van is a sinister gray with a black stripe running along the base. I stand on my tiptoes and peer into the back. As I suspected, among some paint cans and roller brushes, a flannel sleeping bag covers a foam mattress. A tapestry is fastened to the ceiling.

Who is this man? Where did he come from? How long is he going to stay? Should I be concerned about my stuff?

For the first time since I moved here, I feel distinctly alone. Not solitary, but unseen. I don't miss anyone, exactly. Who would I miss? If Kevin were here he would claim to know things he didn't know. He would say that none of this was our business. He would shrug and suggest that we play ultimate Frisbee in the dog park.

The street is quiet. I can hear the movement of blood through my body. I look at the peeling peach house in front of me and kick the tire of the van. Nothing happens.

I go back inside. The door to Mrs. Capp's room is shut. I stand in front of it, staring at the white paint. I wonder if they've managed to leave without letting me know. This seems unlikely. Mrs. Capp doesn't have a car and the bus stop is right across the street. Then I hear a giggle. Several giggles, a moan.

I know I should leave. I'm crossing a line by standing here in front of her door. I should go back into my bedroom, read a magazine. Then there is a creaking sound. Some talking. I get even closer.

“Oh, that's so strange,” she says. Her voice sounds husky, playful. “Stop it!” There's a cracking sound, like a horsewhip. A squeal.

“Like this,” he says. And then the words are muffled.

“Oh God!” she cries. The sound of rustling. Soon a rhythmic thudding begins. I back away and walk aimlessly into the kitchen.

Eavesdropping has only intensified the bad feeling. I can't think of a single thing to do. Satan's denim jacket is draped on a chair. A pack of cigarettes pokes from the top pocket. I take one with the matchbook and go out onto the porch. Mrs. Capp would throw a fit if she saw me smoking, but it seems safe to assume she's preoccupied. I inspect the matchbook, hoping it's from an incriminating place—a strip joint or casino. But the matchbook just advertises a brand of cigarettes. The foxglove that Mrs. Capp planted shoots up from the raised beds and a few purple buds have opened to the sun. I will a silence to take over my thoughts, but before I'm even finished with the cigarette, a voice comes from behind me.

“She's a fine woman, that Sondra.” My heart skips, then a hot surge of blood races to my ears. He's standing in the doorway. I turn to see him adjust his privates through the canvas of his pants. He's so efficient. A real time manager. If he worked a service job, his face would be lacquered to a celebratory plaque.

It takes me a moment to register what he's just said. Fine woman. Who says “fine woman”? What could that possibly mean? Is it a euphemism for a good, easy lay? And he called her Sondra. I don't think I've ever heard anyone call her Sondra. Not even her mail comes addressed like that.

“Really a first-class broad,” he says. He must be trying to get my goat. He lights a cigarette and leans lazily against the door frame, crossing his gangly legs. Mrs. Capp comes out in a coral wrap that matches her lipstick.

“Liza dear, do you think you can help me find my keys?” This must be a cue: she wants to conspire with me to get rid of Satan. She realizes she's slipped and now she wants a trusty female hand out of the mess. I stamp out the cigarette and breathe deeply. Mrs. Capp turns and I see Satan run a hand up the back of her leg and goose her. She giggles and swats his hand. He grins.

Inside the living room, Mrs. Capp begins to root around between the sofa cushions.

“Could you check around, dear?” she says. “Maybe they're underneath a magazine or something.” I halfheartedly pick up the paper. Nothing. Carefully, I fold it along its creases and set it on top of the unread sections on the coffee table. Mrs. Capp scurries about, lifting picture frames off the mantel, patting pillows, straightening up as she looks.

“Maybe you left them in a pocket,” I suggest.

“Well, it seems unlikely,” she says. “But let's check.” I follow her into her bedroom and almost keel over, the smell of sex is so strong. Her powder blue curtains are drawn and the bedsheets are tangled. Her fluffy comforter is pushed to one side and a condom wrapper lies torn and empty by the foot of the bed. With a swift movement she scoops up the comforter and settles it back on the mattress. I walk stiffly to her dresser and peer at the contents. There are the cloisonné ducks. This comforts me. She does seem the sort to take her jewelry off before a roll in the hay. I touch the earrings. They're cold and hard. I press the little hooks into my thumb. Her etched night sky box sits next to a glass paperweight with a miniature seal caught inside. On a slightly brown crocheted doily stands a framed photograph of Mrs. Capp's deceased parents. They look normal enough—her father dressed in military uniform, a mustache curling over his lip, her mother erect by his side, unsmiling.

“Where on earth could they be?” she says. Then she sees the condom wrapper and picks it off the ground, sticks it in her pocket. She meets my eyes and blushes slightly. I feel emboldened.

“Satan said you were a first-class broad,” I tell her.

“Well isn't that sweet,” she says. I study her face. Surely it's going to fall into something other than that dreamy smile.

“I told you, Liza, he's special. I can sense it.”

I jam the hook into my thumb a little harder.

While Mrs. Capp goes through her jacket pockets, I try to imagine what my life would have been like had I followed Kevin up those stairs, into that dim apartment. He would have sulked for a while about his potential death while the sky outside darkened to black. I would have sat on the scratchy wool sofa, paging through a copy of some weathered novel Kevin kept on his bookshelf for show. He would have taken a shower, emerged wet and sullen, his brown hair sticking up in shiny cowlicks all over his scalp. Soon he would have nestled next to me, buried his face in my neck, forgiven me my lack of heroism, thanked God for sparing his life. We could have gone on like that, the scratchy sofa bothering our legs, into the great infinity. Would that really have been so bad?

“Here they are!” Mrs. Capp says. If the keys had hair, she'd give it a good-natured tousle. “They must have fallen off the night table.” She clanks them in her palm. Little castanets.

I sit down on the bed and smile. “Don't do anything I wouldn't do,” I tell her.

She winks at me. “Oh, Liza,” she says. “You wouldn't do anything.”

I
F
I
WRITE THAT MY MOTHER DIED OF CANCER, NO ONE
will publish this story—cancer being too ubiquitous. So, for this story, let's call it consumption. It's a romantic idea, anyway—the air hunger, the weakness.

My boyfriend Kierny is a writer, too. He claims to be a novelist, though apparently he also wrote a few stories while I was back in Idaho, adjusting my mom's meds, switching her oxygen tubes around. I found out about Kierny's story writing by accident. It was Saturday and I was in a bad patch, working and reworking the same fragments. A goose flying out of a woman's mouth. A child hit by a bus. Nothing was going anywhere.

“Why didn't you
tell
me?” Olivia demanded. I'd picked up the phone on the first ring, assuming it would be Kierny.

“What? What didn't I tell you?” Liv was a friend from graduate school. Everything excited her. Her own ears seemed to make her shrill with joy, but in spite of myself I felt a surge of hope.

“God, it's like the best one in the anthology, Sarah. You must be so proud.”

I had four stories published the year before my mom died—a few in really good places. I'd been on a roll. The magazines came to me in shrink-wrap, my name shining out in glossy black or blue or pink. Did an editor somewhere forget to tell me she'd submitted one for a prize?

“It's an incredible rendering of your mother. Just amazing. There's even the way she did that thing when she ate—that thing with her teeth. Just a sec, you must know the scene. Here it is, page 239—”

“Liv, what are you talking about?” I asked.

“What do you
mean
?” she said. “Kierny's story in
Best American
…‘Consumed.'” I looked at the apple slices turning brown on my plate. “Sarah?”

“I didn't know about it,” I said.

“Oh,” Liv said. “Oops.”

Kierny didn't pick up his phone, which was just as well; I couldn't formulate a thought. I drove to the bookstore.

It was probably a mix-up. Another Kierny. Another mother. Kierny had a competitive streak. Every time I had a story accepted he locked himself away for weeks, working to catch up. But we were honest. We'd been through hell together. The midnight phone calls after I wrestled my mother into bed—my anger the only thing available to me. He sat on the sofa those awful winter evenings, listening to me berate everyone—from the doctors to my closest friends—and he didn't try to reason with me. When she finally died, he drove all night from California to make the funeral, showed up in a wrinkled gray shirt and borrowed slacks. He greeted extended family. He cried when I cried. He shoveled dirt into her grave.

I could see the dust floating in the air of the bookstore. Huge skylights cut through the roof and the glossy paperbacks shone. There it was—on the wooden display table with the latest by Eggers, Chabon.
Best American
—its bright orange cover beckoning. I opened it. A few big names and then: Kierny McAllister…“Consumed.”

Why hadn't he told me about this? I flipped to his bio. Kierny McAllister is a North Carolina native living in Berkeley, California. “Consumed” is his first published story.

The fucker, I said aloud. A woman with a toddler in tow shot me a look. I shot one back.

The fucker.

I brought the book to the cashier and slapped it on the counter. I couldn't even read the first line. With the book in the trunk, I went to find Kierny. He was probably at his studio writing more stories about my life, more stories about my dead mother. For God's sake, Kierny, I thought, get your own death. Get your own pain.

Kierny's studio belonged to the McDonald's of art studios. A company bought up vacant lots around California and erected these cheaply constructed corrugated-metal buildings. Kierny had a spot on the ground floor next to a woman who made custom tarot cards and animal-shaped soap. Outside his open door sat a bench and a bunch of happy-looking poppies.

He'd left his door ajar.

“So were you ever going to tell me?” I said.

Some kind of grease had worked its way across his glasses. Papers were scattered around him on the floor. He looked annoyed.

“Hi, Sarah,” he said.

I went to hold up the book, but I didn't have it, so I ran back to the car, unlocked the trunk, and ran back. I held it like a little orange picket sign.

“Look what I found! Someone named Kierny McAllister is writing stories about my mom!”

“Sarah, Jesus.” Kierny turned back to his lit-up screen and saved his document. Then he calmly closed his laptop. It made a soft click.

“So you read it?” he asked.

My arm skin prickled. “No, not exactly, not yet.”

“You haven't read it and you're this mad?” He raised his thick eyebrows.

“I can't believe you'd write a story about my mom dying, send it out, get it published—and never run it by me.”

He pushed his hair off his forehead. “I was afraid you'd have a bad reaction,” he said. “And you are.” Kierny took a breath and held it, gazed down at the poppies. I moved my foot back to squish one.

“It's about death, Sarah, and I didn't want to bring up more death stuff for you.”

“You didn't want to bring up more death stuff for me? Are you kidding? This is
my mom
you wrote about. For you this was a story, but for me it was
real.
”

“Shhh. Sarah, there are people working here.”

I'd always thought Kierny was adorable—his blackish hair and crooked nose. His way of leaning when he walked, as if it would make him less tall.

Now Kierny looked a little anemic. I could see his wormy temple veins. And he had a cold. He looked plugged up.

I turned around, went back to my car, drove home.

With a tall glass of whiskey, I tried to settle myself long enough to read the story.

I couldn't do it. It was the middle of the day, too hard to read. I shut the blinds to approximate night. I turned on all the lights. I fed my cat. I washed the dishes. I felt dirty. I felt like crying. I turned on the shower and stood under it.

All the stories I had written about my mom's death had come back with little slips of paper.
We just get so many stories about cancer
(oops, I mean consumption),
it's impossible to publish another! We do admire your writing, though, so keep sending us work!
Or
The grief is palpable
—
you've allowed us to see it in a whole new way. No small feat! But we're afraid grief isn't enough for us. We need a larger worldview. Maybe submit to our next theme issue: CLASH: Ugandan Politics and the New Urban Male….
One editor suggested I wait until I was in the next phase of my life before sending another story. It got so obnoxious that I stopped sending the stories out. No one wants to hear about mortality, I figured. Dead moms, dead dads—they're a dime a dozen.

I took a Xanax.

I opened the book.

I kept imagining what it would feel like to get closer to her
—
to hold her, undress her, run my hands over the strange rubber of her skin. Even if she was my girlfriend's mother
—
my girlfriend's dying mother, in that state
—
so near to death
—
she was magnetic.

Okay, fine. She didn't die of consumption, she died of cancer. And like most cancer deaths, it wasn't pretty. Her breast turned purple, then black, then it ate itself. Her skin grew tough and red. Sores opened on her lips and forehead. The tumor grew so big it was like a globe pressing out of her chest. She smelled like fish and sweat and unflushed pee. She was delirious for weeks, coming in and out of this world.

My mother was trained in classical ballet. She stood erect and held her head high. Before she got sick, she used to coil her thick hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. Men smiled at her in grocery stores. Students filled every dance class she offered.

She was sick for eleven years. The treatments and steroids made her hair change texture. It fell out and came back wiry, streaked with a dark, flat gray. Then it fell out again and came back in patches. Her skin took on a chemical glow. She gained weight. She wasn't magnetic in her death state. Kierny could barely stand to be in the same room with her. When she was in the final stages, moaning, balling her fists, rolling back her eyes—he wouldn't even visit. He stayed in California, apparently imagining all this, working extra hours at his magazine job.

I was alone when she died. As her body morphed, swelled, and rotted, I held her hands. I wiped the oozing. I don't have any siblings. And my father, he's not around.

I'm straying. I'm writing about death again. Damn it. It's become a habit. Is the key to insert sex?

Gratuitous Sex Scene #1

The night after my mom died, Kierny arrived in Boise. I don't remember very much about that evening. There was whiskey and beer and lots of casserole. Some of my mom's friends had arrived and were answering the phone. Dinnertime passed, then it was night. We went upstairs to my childhood bedroom.

He held me and I tried to relax. My body wouldn't settle. I felt violent. I wanted to throw the little porcelain box off my bureau and watch it shatter, hurl books through the window, leave bloody scratches up my own arms. And so I pulled away from him, pushed him down on the bed, undid the button of his jeans.

It wasn't sex I wanted, not really. I wanted to watch him under a spell. I wanted to control him.

“Are you sure?” he asked. I untied his shoes, pulled off his boxers, looked at his pink penis, lying a little lopsided across his stomach. I took it in my hands, then in my mouth. It pulsed and quivered. Finally he started panting. I went faster, pulled at the base—and then he came all over my quilt.

“Oh wow,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

But I still felt violent.

Kierny, you might be interested to know, has both of his parents. He's from Chapel Hill. His dad is a physicist. His mom is a pediatrician. He has a sister named Wendy who is happily married to a veterinarian. His younger brother Anton is at Yale.

Kierny is a well-adjusted person. In fact, Grover Edgar, a student in our graduate workshop, once said you could tell from Kierny's prose that he hadn't felt a whole lot of pain in his life. “It's like what an alien might imagine human pain would feel like,” he said. At the time I'd thought Grover was kind of an asshole. His dad killed himself when Grover was young and it was all he could write about.

“Red Rover, Red Rover, help Grover get over it,” Kierny joked.

…in that state
—
so near to death
—
she was magnetic.

You want more of Kierny's story? Well, go buy it. It's under copyright. I'm only providing a synopsis.

The story takes some funny turns, Kierny being a funny guy. He's with Terri (the fictional me) and Lucinda (my fictional mom) while Lucinda is dying. Terri is having a lot of trouble managing the daily tasks—administering meds and doing laundry—because Terri is obsessed with yoga and detox diets. (I am most certainly
not
obsessed with yoga or detox diets.) Terri watches yoga videos on the television in the basement, leaving the male character, Theo, with plenty of time for monkey business.

Of course, Lucinda and Theo never actually have an affair. But they do have numerous meaningful conversations on the nature of life and death. Pithy ones, even. But a particularly stunning scene involves Lucinda fantasizing about having a one-night stand.

“I was too well behaved in my life,” she says to him. “I wish I'd broken a few more rules.” In this scene, she's just been bathed by a nurse. She reclines in the bed, her hair wrapped in a turban. (Hair? A turban?) She won't tell him the details of her wishes, but in her eyes he sees a film strip: a dark house, white linens, soft light, and the deep line down a woman's spine.

He feels a powerful pull and says, “I think I need to get a beer.” Lucinda rubs her dry feet together suggestively.

At the bar, which he goes to alone in Terri's truck, he meets a young undergrad, Fiora. Fiora's a biology major. She's got dark skin, long dark hair, and a small diamond in her nostril. She's nothing like poor Terri (who's milk and honey pretty, but who's turned a little stringy and dour during these hard months). Fiora's eyes are coy, her lashes shine. She laughs at Theo's jokes and her fingers travel up the inseam of his pants.

Outside, on the gravel of the parking lot, he bites at her jaw.
She smelled like oatmeal and coal,
Kierny wrote.

(Kierny once told me about a girlfriend he'd had at summer camp when he was fifteen. She smelled like oatmeal, he'd said. And when I said that was kind of a dumpy thing to smell like, he disagreed vehemently, saying oatmeal was about as earthy as you could get.)