The Mother Garden (13 page)

“Isn't there another game you could play?” Gerard asks. Celia looks at him gravely and shrugs.

Why is it that no one around here can get enough of death? Even Marsha comes up to see Ellie almost every day. And though it's terribly kind, gives Ellie something to look forward to and gives Gerard a chance for carnal release—he can't help but wonder sometimes if she's a little bit attracted to the spectacle of decline. It's more excruciating and exhilarating than any carnival ride or horror film. It's happening right in front of them, what they all fear most.

Gerard stands up. “Maybe we should go put the fish in the bowl Marsha brought.”

“Can you just do it?” Celia asks, twirling her pen. “I don't want to.”

Outside her window, he can see the sun reflecting off Marsha's red car. They'd had sex in that car on Thursday. They'd driven out to look at the flower farms, to pick Ellie daisies and irises, and had parked on the side of a dirt road afterward, the flowers wrapped in paper, flung all over the backseat. Marsha leaned over the emergency brake and unbuttoned his pants. He was already hard when she ran her tongue down him, wedged her fingers below his balls. And then, as if they were still sixteen, she crawled over him, lifted her long, flowery skirt, slid her underwear off until it hung from one knee, and jerkily fit him inside of her.

She came so easily. It was nothing like Ellie. He had to work for Ellie's pleasure. He had to go down on her, play with her, watch her arch and tense and then lose her focus, bring her back to center, keep the rhythm going. That was how it used to be, anyway. He hadn't had sex with Ellie in almost a year. They'd tried a few times, but it was so depressing. She couldn't get into it, all the smells were off, and it ended in tears. Marsha did this thing with her hips and ass, pressing herself away from him a little, jerking angrily, and then she just came, loudly, unexpectedly, expelling air and noise like a sea mammal, her small eyes glittery and distant.

Gerard shoves his hands in his pockets. Celia is waiting for him to leave. He bites his bottom lip and feels a worm of longing roll inside of him.

Celia looks down at her dolls, her posture full of purpose, and punctures another one with her pen.

Gerard rinses out the squashed-looking bowl and fills it with the water from the container. He takes the bag and undoes the rubber band. The fish isn't looking at him. The fish is darting back and forth in the bag like it's looking for a corner.

One of these days, Ellie's going to slip into a coma. That's how it happens. Or for some reason that's what Gerard has decided. One day he's going to walk into the bedroom with a cup of tea and she's going to be staring glassily at the ceiling, just like that doll. He'll sit calmly on the bed with her, repeating her name. And then he'll call Marsha and the two of them will call the ambulance together—they'll watch as Ellie's loaded in, wrapped in her favorite afghan, the one her great-grandmother knit in stripes of avocado and red—and the doctors will admit her so she can have the right doses of things—or so she can have an IV bag, at least. And he and Marsha will sit vigilantly in a small, medicinal room, breathing in molecules of bodies on their way to becoming dust—and they will look at each other, he and Marsha, and sometimes they'll go back to her tiny house and eat cottage cheese with salsa and fuck in her cramped bedroom, both of them nauseated with lack of sleep, and people will probably send flowers, Ellie's obese sister Petra will probably show up, bearing some awful food for him, sausage lasagna or beef stew. And Celia will be home with a sitter. And sometimes he will bring Celia to the hospital. And that's how the end will be.

There's moisture around the top of the bag and Gerard moves his thumb and forefinger together so that the two plastic sheets slide pleasurably between them. The fish catches light from the window on its scales and shines through the murky water. Does it know that it's about to begin a lifelong incarceration? That it will swim in circles every day of its life? Or does the fish just exist for the moment—and what would that be like—to live every moment with no concept of past or future? If he could exist only in this moment, then he'd see only the fish and the water and the dirt particles and the light. He would feel that he tied his left sneaker too tight and that it's cutting off some circulation in his foot. He wouldn't think of Ellie's ravaged body—the smell of decay when you got close to her—sweet and fishy. He wouldn't remember what it was like before she got sick. How they used to collapse next to each other on the sofa after work and complain. God! What had they complained about? And he really did like the challenge of Ellie's body then—the way he had to work to bring her over the edge, to distract her from the stress of her mind, and then when he finally did, she shook and would hold on to him afterward, her long fingers kneading his while she dozed.

And then—shit! He's still holding the bag, but only one side of it, and there's water all over the floor, cascading off the counter, running down toward his feet. The fish is on the counter, flopping toward the edge in small, spastic jerks. He reaches for the tail, but it slips through his fingers. Dammit! He tries again. The fish is slick, muscular. It can't die. No! Not in this house, nothing else is going to die! It's cold and orange and has no pigment on one side, that's why Celia liked it. The fish between his fingers feels like something internal—something he has no right to be touching—and his insides get hot and his joints feel shaky but he pinches down hard and moves fast and manages to get the fish back in the stupid bowl.

“Fuck you,” Gerard says to it. And then he turns to see if anyone has seen him. But he's alone in the kitchen, the bright blue wall, the white shelves, the glass jars full of herbs turning gray in the sun.

Gerard starts to tremble a little and a pain shoots from his back to his head. His heart pounds furiously. He's dizzy. The room gets brighter, slowly brighter—but not that slowly. The edges of the counter are getting so bright they're fading out. He's not okay. He's going to collapse. He's going to die and die first! He's sweating now, and this takes all of his strength. He has to sit. His knees give gently, it's as though large hands are pushing him down, and then he's on all fours. He's spinning, an ax is banging on the bone of his forehead from the inside and something is too hot inside of him. He can't breathe and his heart is pounding and his saliva is doing something weird—he can taste his saliva. As soon as he can stand up again, as soon as he stops tasting this—so bitter, like a plant he shouldn't be chewing on—as soon as he can breathe again he'll knock that fish onto the floor and he will be able to breathe because—he thinks—something will be let go, the soul of the fish will be let go.

Gerard sweats, a bead of it falls onto the parquet floors, his hand turns white from pressing down, his body spins and spins and there is Celia. She is talking to him, she is running toward the bedroom—

And he should take the fish outside because its soul might get caught against the ceiling and hover and maybe he should make Ellie die outside too because her soul might get trapped in the house and then they would have to move, but how could they sell the house to someone knowing Ellie's soul was caught in it? He's trying to get himself outside, scooting on his arms, trying to get toward the front parlor so he can die outside—they are all going to die outside, this is the only thing that makes any sense. This makes
sense.
Ha! He's going to die
first
! And then there are hands on his back, grabbing him by the waist of his pants. What on earth, Marsha is saying, Gerard, get a hold of yourself but he can't breathe—he's laughing! And there is Ellie, teary and odd-looking, holding on to the wall. He can see right through her. Ha ha ha ha! HA! He is going to die first and that will be something! Something no one could have expected.

It's the Xanax that Marsha gets from Ellie's stash that finally calms him. Marsha sets him up in the living room and turns on cartoons—a cat racing through a well-manicured forest. He feels so light. He feels so good, actually. Like his thoughts have been bleached and fluffed.

“Come sit with me,” he says. Ellie's gone back to the bedroom. Marsha squints at him.

“I don't think that's such a good idea,” she says.

“Just come here,” he says, patting the cushion.

Marsha reluctantly sets her bag down. When she sits, she's stiff, her legs bent in ninety-degree angles, her feet parallel. Gerard wants to laugh. She looks like a diagram!

He puts his face against her chest. She stiffens even more and pushes it away.

“Not now,” she says. “Gerard, get a grip.”

He leans away from her. Her face puckers, her eyes scrunch.

“Marsha,” he says, reaching out for her shoulders.

“What the hell,” Marsha hisses, slapping his hands away. “What are you doing? What was all that?” She stands. He can hear her shoes clack as she stalks down the hall. The front door opens, slams. He would chase her, but his body doesn't feel like it could move that fast. His shirt feels fuzzy and warm.

The clatter of pans wakes him. It's dark out now. Dread hits him as soon as he's conscious, before he even remembers what happened. He stands and his knees crack. They're sore.

Ellie's in the kitchen. She's dressed in her nice clothes—her red washed-silk pants and an orange cashmere sweater; he hasn't seen these clothes in so long. They went to an opera once—Celia was smaller then, maybe six—and Ellie wore that sweater. Her hair is damp from a shower. She turns to look at him, her face pale and serious.

Gerard looks at the wall clock. It's ten-thirty. Shit, he didn't make Celia dinner and now she must be asleep.

Ellie has a large pot on the stove.

“What are you doing?” he asks. She's put on makeup and you can't tell she's dying—not really. The eye shadow glimmers up to her eyebrow.

“I'm making soup. We didn't have a lot of stuff, but there were dried lentils and that beef shank in the freezer. And Marsha brought all those carrots.”

Ellie hasn't cooked in two months, not since the pain got so bad she had to take pills on top of the pain patch. She barely has the energy to get back and forth from the bedroom to the living room to watch an hour of television. He stands next to her. She's wearing perfume, dark, leathery, and woodsy. Small circles of carrots line the cutting board; the lentils boil, filling the room with their bean smell.

He looks at the fish. It swims in circles, flipping its body around and around. He takes the yellow container of fish food Marsha brought and shakes some into the water. The fish darts up and sucks the flakes down.

Ellie sets down the knife and holds out her arms to him. Beneath the orange cashmere those arms are so thin, bruised from various injections.

“I'm so sorry, sweetheart,” she says. She's crying. Soon they'll all cry so much they'll flood the house; they'll damage the foundation. She's shaking her head. The mascara leaves speckled tracks down her cheeks.

He walks over to her, takes her body.
Ellie,
he wants to say—just her name. The lentils roll over themselves, making a soft sound. The fish hovers at the top of the bowl. Nothing else in the room moves. He's gripping her too tightly; he can feel her tensing away. But it's all he can do. He can't let go.

L
AUREL'S THE NEWEST ARRIVAL
. S
HE WON'T BEHAVE
.

“Don't put me next to Agnes,” she says. “That heifer.”

“That's mean,” I tell Laurel as I jam her feet into the tilled soil. Her kitten heels make good digging tools and I'm able to get her wedged in deep.

“I've worked hard for this figure,” Laurel says. “And I'll be damned if I get stuck beside all the fat I've left behind.” Agnes smoothes her dress over her stomach and thighs. The breeze blows a few of her brown curls loose from her barrette.

“Agnes's curves are part of her charm,” I say.

“You mean Agnes's curves belong in a barn,” Laurel says. Her eyes glint like sun on metal.

“You're being a bitch,” I say to Laurel. The other mothers pretend not to notice. “I'm sorry, Agnes.”

I can't take credit for the garden, not entirely. It was Jack's idea. We were having beers after work a few months ago and he'd just talked to his mother. His face, always prone to pinkness, was nearly violet.

“I've been calling her once a week, you know, to forge a relationship, and she has
never
asked me about my life. I'm not exaggerating. She just goes
on
and
on
.” Jack's voice went up a few octaves.
“‘Maryanne's getting remarried to that nice man at the post office, you remember, Dudley Bilson
—
you played horseshoes at his house. And Boz Parker ran off with that little blonde he just hired, Connie is just a wreck. You should see her, Jack, she looks terrible.'”
I pushed some foam around the top of my glass. As a general rule, people don't complain to me about their mothers. “She would keep going for hours if I didn't interrupt her,” he said. “You have no idea, Claire, you just don't.” Jack picked up his coaster and started tapping it on the table. “It's shitty of me to be ungrateful, I know, you're going to play the dead mom card.”

“Maybe you could loan her out,” I said. “I might borrow her.” For a moment Jack was still, his little beard a handle pulling his mouth open.

“Maybe there's something to that,” he said, and jotted an idea on a bar napkin.

Jack's a landscape designer. He did the sloping gardens at the university—dark purple foliage and bright green flowers. That garden has made its way into magazines and design shows, everything a little off-kilter. We've been best friends since our failed love affair in college. I've seen him rise through the ranks, from weekend gardener to Master of Landscape Architecture. Now I'm collaborating with him to stretch the frontier of landscaping. He expands his portfolio and I get all the moms I've missed. We're blending land and family. We're altering space and our conceptions of the garden. We're cutting edge.

It was easy to get Jack's mom, Doreena, to volunteer. She retired two years ago from her job with the postal service and shortly thereafter, her dog died of lupus. Jack is her only child. She doesn't hear a word he says, but she'd do anything for him.

We installed Doreena on a Saturday afternoon. She sat on the grass and held out her bunioned feet as if for a pedicure. Jack carefully settled them into the hole. He filled a bucket with warm water and poured it over her feet, then packed the dirt around her ankles. Doreena squared her meaty shoulders; her russet hair stood straight from her head like quills.

“She looks magical out there,” Jack remarked that evening as we watched her from the kitchen window. We'd put Doreena near the back fence and the bougainvillea rose up behind her, framing her stout figure in blobs of purple. The moonlight spilled off the leaves and gutters, tinting her skin a milky blue.

“Do you think she'll get bored?” I asked.

Jack shrugged. “She does a bang-up job talking to herself,” he said. “It seems to keep her busy.”

That night I tried to sleep, but each time I'd drift, Doreena's voice would break the silence.

“Goodness!” she said. “You are an ugly bug! You go back to your ugly bug world!”

At three in the morning, I opened my window.

“Doreena,” I called.

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you think you could keep it down?”

“Oh!” she said. “I didn't realize I was talking.”

My mother has been dead for more than a decade. My memories of her feel static. They're like film clips that I play over and over: my mother sitting at the kitchen table with her brown ceramic mug, her dark curls clasped in a leaf-shaped clip. She says, “Claire-belle, look at the magnolia tree.” Her face looks dreamy. “I was twenty-three before I saw anything that pretty.” Or: she sits by the side of my bed, her feet gauzy in nylons. A bowl of broth steams on the old wooden tray. “If you want, there're noodles in the kitchen,” she says. Her cool hand sweeps over my damp forehead. “Poor babe,” she says. “You look like a noodle.”

It's been a long time without her now—almost as long without her as with her.

“Mom,” I sometimes say to the dirt, to the tree, to the old recycle bin, “that was a dumb time to go.” The recycle bin sits blue and still. The dirt stares back at me with its dark face. The tree sways in the wind.

“I'm not sure I can deal,” I said to Jack the next morning when he stopped by on his way to work. “I slept for three hours. She talks incessantly.”

Jack looked at me in faux shock. “Not
my
mother!” he said, helping himself to some coffee and a banana. He peeled it while watching Doreena from the window. She was asking and answering questions about the weather.

“You get used to it,” he said.

That day, Jack put an ad online and an hour later, we got a reply. “Namaste,” it read. “My name is Erika and I'm looking for community, ultimate peace, and belonging. And a place to stay.”

“She sounds ideal,” Jack said when I told him.

Erika arrived the following morning, free of material possessions, her posture perfect. I showed her the garden, she admired the bougainvillea and trumpet vine, the huge St. John's wort, the window box of herbs.

“What a beautiful space,” she said slowly.

Doreena waved. “Hi there,” she trilled. “Over here the sun's just right. When I was a little girl, my brother Moe and I, bless his heart, used to sit outside to see whose hair got hotter first. He always won, of course, that Moe. He was a brunette.” She held out her hand. Instead of taking it, Erika placed her palms together in front of her heart and bowed her head.

“That's
different,
” Doreena said, smiling so wide we could see the gray sealant on one of her molars. “I like that.” She put her hands together too and showed us the top of her head, the scalp discolored from hair dye.

Jack arrived in his work clothes, looking harried and annoyed. (He'd wanted to schedule the meeting after he got off, but Erika had a ride at ten.) He gave his mom a halfhearted hug. But when he saw Erika's long neck and soft mouth, he perked up. He walked her around the garden, explaining our vision: mothers bursting out of the earth alongside other stalwart flora, lush and abundant. Erika nodded gravely after every sentence.

“So, the one criteria is that you're a mother,” Jack finished. Erika wove her fingers together and sat on the porch steps.

“I'm not focusing on that part of my life these days,” she said. “I try to orient toward joy.” Jack sat next to her and made his forehead soft. In an instant he could go from brusque to sensitive, as open as a daisy in the sunshine. Erika opened her nostrils and breathed deeply, letting the air slowly out of her mouth.

“When I was seventeen,” she said (she couldn't have been older than twenty-four), “I did a few things I'm not that proud of.” I looked over at Doreena, who, uncharacteristically quiet, pretended to study the hem of her Hilton Head sweatshirt. Erika glanced over at her. “I gave them up.” Jack tilted his head, nodded slowly.

“More than one?” he asked.

It looked as though she'd turned to glass. “Twins,” Erika said.

“Welcome,” Jack said, plucking a ranunculus from the planter box. She melted toward him, took the flower, and wove it into her waist-length hair.

We planted Erika near my bedroom window so that in the morning, when she did yoga, I could see her stretch into the sky as though plucking a cloud.

Contrary to our expectations, Erika and Doreena balanced nicely. Doreena rambled all day—people she'd known, pets she saw once, the formidable diabetes problem—and Erika meditated.

I brought them their meals each day and tried to engage them.

“How was your night?” I'd ask. Invariably, Doreena would recall a story she heard on a talk show about a woman who spent nine months in the woods with only a jackknife. “She was so
tan
!” Or she might repeat how lucky she was that, at her age, she hadn't suffered any significant bone loss according to her doctor. Erika would zone out and stare at the eaves.

Even with Erika and Doreena's yin-yang effect, there was something depressing about having only two mothers in a garden. I didn't want to burst Jack's bubble, but without a few more moms, they just looked like women in a yard, their ankles packed in dirt. I reposted Jack's ad daily on various sites. For almost a week, no one else responded.

“It's not going to work,” I told Jack. We were sitting on my sofa watching a gardening show. He ate a handful of popcorn. “There's no incentive.”

“Don't be negative,” he said. “Big ideas take a while to catch. Besides, look.” He pulled out a piece of tagboard from his bag. On it were patches of oil paint in earthy shades of brown, purple, peach, and faded indigo. “I did the color scheme,” he said. “It's great, right?” He ran his thumb over the colors. “Beauty is its own incentive, Claire.”

That week, Jack convinced Doreena to grow out her dye job, explaining that the white in her hair would more dramatically reflect light. He brought over a black cocktail dress for Erika, but when she put it on and stood ankle deep in soil, she looked out of place, like a girl stumbling from a car crash. Instead he settled on a loose silk dress in a loamy brown. Every couple of days he brought over small purple flowers for her hair. He seemed to take special care with Erika, going so far as to buy her a sparkly body spray that smelled like wood.

But still, no more mothers responded. I took out a small ad in the local paper. When that didn't work, I decided to make fliers.
Don't make art, BE art! Join The Mother Garden! All mothers encouraged to inquire!
Jack's drawing of the project sat beneath the text, all the flowers carefully sketched. The silhouettes of the mothers he left white—beautiful and strange.

All day I walked the city, hanging the flier outside day care centers and malls, clothing boutiques and grocery stores. As I was putting the stapler back in my bag at the natural grocery, a woman stopped to read it. Two young boys stood in her grocery cart alongside bags of produce and packages of dried fruit. The woman's eyebrows arched over plastic European glasses. She probably sang her sons lullabies in French and cut strawberries into their cereal in the morning. She'd correct their pronunciation and tap their shoulders when they slumped. As the boys grew older, they'd roll their eyes and snort, but secretly they'd search all their lives for women just like her.

She'd be perfect for the garden—her slim physique and interesting bone structure. We'd probably have things in common, too. I took French in college. I'd traveled a bit. I waited to see if she'd take a phone number.

The bigger boy looked me straight in the eye. Then he made his hand into a claw and slammed it into his brother's nose. The smaller boy became entirely mouth: dark, cavernous, tinseled with spit. He wailed.

“Jonah!” the mother said. “You say you're sorry
right
now!” Then she looked at me, pushing her glasses up.

“Intriguing flier,” she said. She rolled her eyes and gestured to her son. “As if any mother has time for games.” She smiled sympathetically at me, as if I couldn't help drooling on myself. Then she wheeled her cart over to a rack of organic peach nectar. Her older son turned to face me. He bugged his eyes and opened his mouth wide like a bat.

I left feeling low. It wasn't just for me, the garden. It was for the great frontier of art. I knew that my mother was dead. This wasn't simply a monument to the past. But maybe it was too bizarre; maybe I should call it off, send them home. It would piss off Jack, but it really wasn't up to him. It was my yard.

I pushed open the side gate.

“Hi there, Claire,” Doreena called. Erika stood with her eyes shut. In between them, midway across the mulch, another woman stood.

“I hope I'm in a good spot,” she said, glancing around. She'd already planted herself; you could see part of her muscular calves beneath her long orange skirt. “It seemed like the best place for me.” Her face was doll-like, a peaked nose and knobby chin. I walked over. Her spot was notably cooler than the other spots, cast in the shed's shadow.