The Mother Garden (9 page)

“There's a lot you don't know,” he said. “Your mother and I were our own people, not just your parents.”

“Please leave.” I stood and walked toward the door. My father, cowed, set the coffee cup down on the table, picked up his coat, and walked toward me.

“I'm only trying to be honest,” he said.

Last night, as he wailed, I'd wished for him to stop. But now I wanted to switch the flip, watch him howl and bawl every day for the rest of his life. We'd take each bead and recount a memory of my mother: the way she tapped a dish after she washed it; the way she organized and labeled our camping gear, cut dreadlocks off the dog—and as we talked, we'd drown in borderless, limitless grief. When we got to the last bead, we'd start again.

“Go be honest somewhere else,” I said.

I was supposed to meet Mateo for lunch downtown, but I had no interest in walking to the train. I didn't want to see him, his clean-shaven jaw, well-meaning eyes. I only wanted to see him if his mother was dead. I'd start a club. Maybe even a commune. I'd surround myself with people who would promise never to say the word “happy.” Who wouldn't use it or any of its synonyms. We'd be like an experimental French novel. We'd even ban the letters of happy.

The phone rang and the machine picked up. No one left a message.

“What,” I said when it started up again. My sharpness dissolved into crying.

“Yael?” Mateo sounded concerned. “I don't suppose you're coming for lunch? I was going to suggest that Japanese place, but another time. I'll just come home. Are you okay?”

Okay? Was okay like happy?

The bathroom tiles felt cool and gluey under my bare feet. All the crying had made me feel a little high. As the water crashed from the faucet of the tub, I dumped in the beads. They gathered near the drain, a colorful smattering of glass, brighter once submerged.

I took off my nightgown and sat until the water grew cold around me, gazing at the light blue ceiling, the small crack that led from the window above the tub to the corner of the room.

The front door opened and slammed.

“Yael?” Mateo called, walking toward our bedroom. I shivered, but I didn't want to move. I rolled the beads under my feet and stared at the shower curtain. A small vine of orange mold started at the bottom. Rust spotted the metal at the top of the curtain rod.

“Hey,” he said, coming into the bathroom. He sat on the toilet and peered at me. My eyes felt dry, the skin around them thin and tattered.

“How are you?”

“Never better,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. There it was again, that stupid, stupid word. He reached over and tucked a wet strand of hair behind my ear. His hand lingered there. I put my hand on his for a moment, then pushed it away.

“I brought you some food from that soul food place on the corner,” he said.

I didn't want to look at him. The rust growths looked like starfish.

He sighed. “Yael, you gotta help me out here. I'm doing the best I can.”

This was Mateo's burden? Was I supposed to comfort him?

“Screw off,” I said.

“Oh, that's really nice. I bring you lunch while you're acting like a total psychopath, rolling around in your mother's stomach remnants, and you tell
me
to screw off. You screw off.” He continued to sit on the toilet. Why didn't he just leave? My insides were made of lint and tiny red embers, a combustible combination of stillness and fury. He ought to get out now and find himself a nice girl with two functional parents and maybe a little dog to play with in the park.

“I'm not getting out,” I said.

Mateo looked down at his shoes. Brown leather loafers, appropriate for a budding journalist. News shoes. The toes were worn, the rubber soles curving a bit at the heels. He stood, took the bag of food, and walked out of the bathroom.

I thought I'd hear him leave. I waited for the door to slam, but it didn't. He went into the kitchen. I sank down into the tub and submerged myself. But as my head went under, I had to bend my knees and they stuck out of the water. I sat back up, my head soaked, my knees cold, and started to shake.

Mateo came in holding my old bathrobe and the beach towel. “Get out,” he said. His voice was gentle. I looked at him.

“I'm not ready to get out,” I said.

“Get out anyway.”

An order. How exciting. No one had told me what to do in months, since the doctor gave my mother her final prognosis. Everyone just nodded when I spoke. If they did ask things, they asked gently. I was an ominous force, a person to be pleaded with. I grasped the porcelain lip of the tub and raised myself out. My hipbones jutted like fins near my sunken stomach. I stepped onto the bath mat and Mateo wrapped the towel around me, held out the robe.

He'd set the food on a silver baking pan on the dresser. A yellow flower from the yard leaned in a large water glass. After I got in bed, he situated the tray between us as if it were a small child. He took a rib and started eating, careful not to look at me. The beads were alarmingly bright.

The phone rang.

“You get it,” I said to Mateo. He reached across me for the receiver. I could hear my father's voice booming.

“Mateo? Why are you home so early? Is everything okay?”

I tugged on the necklace and the knot gave. The string slid across my jugular, then into the robe. “Shit.”

Mateo put his hand over the receiver. “Do you want to talk to him?” I shook my head, reaching down into the robe to gather the strays. Most of them still hung on the thread. Mateo held the phone to my ear anyway.

“Yael,” my father said. I didn't say anything. “What are you doing?” I was trying to figure out if any more beads were under my thigh.

“Resting,” I said, standing up, grabbing the phone.

“You can't bring her back,” he said.

“No,
you
can't bring her back,” I said. Between my thumb and forefinger I squeezed a white bead.

“I'm not sure what you mean by that.” My father faltered. I clamped down on the bead as hard as I could, pressing my skin into the tiny eyelash etchings that graced the bead's surface. And then, as if in desperation, as if the bead had nowhere else to go, it popped from my fingers and flung itself down the heating vent. I threw the phone on the bed and pulled up the vent, but the bead was gone.

Mateo picked up the phone and politely asked my father if we could call him back. He got the vacuum out of the hall closet.

“I seriously doubt we'll be able to suction it up,” he said, plugging in the cord. The vacuum revved excitedly. Mateo lowered the hose down deep. Then we heard a pop and crunch and Mateo flipped the power switch off. I unlatched the door and took out the bag. Fishing through dust and fibers I located it, broken into small white pieces, like doll teeth.

“We can glue it,” Mateo said, taking the pieces from me. Downstairs in the laundry room we found some craft glue. He smoothed it on the ceramic surface with a small paintbrush and I used my fingers as a clamp. Mateo left me there. Gradually the milky glue began to turn clear.

When the bead seemed dry enough, I made my way back upstairs to restring the necklace. Mateo put on headphones, opting to ignore me. I set the broken bead in the center, flanked with red ones. I imagined my mother's skin, the way it was once—very pale, with blue veins in the temples and light freckles on her nose and eyelids. She sat on a lawn chair next to me. I was eleven. She held a cherry stem in her strong teeth and eyed me as I showed her how to tie one in a knot. She attempted to follow my lead, her mouth circling like she was chewing cud. Finally she stuck out her tongue to admit failure and the mangled stem fell against her clavicle.

I looked at the glue, jagged in the cracks. “Come back,” I said to it. The bead said nothing. Mateo bobbed his head to the music and paged through a magazine, and for this I was grateful. If he moved closer, put his arm around me, I would have had to admit that I understood she was dead—that no amount of piecing her together would change that. It would have been like she was there on the carpet, her arms close to her side, her mouth cracked open as if trying to let in that last breath of air.

M
rs. Capp didn't tell me we were having company this morning, but when the bell rings, she flies to the door as if she's been waiting all her life. The man's a bit of a hippie with long, wavy blond hair and an unkempt beard.

“Liza, this is Satan.” She says his name with such assurance I can't be sure I've heard her correctly. She articulated the “Sate” part far better than the “tan” part—and given his looks, he might be named “Seat-Man” or “Slaton.”

“S-A-T-A-N?” I ask. He nods. I nod back. Am I missing something? Mrs. Capp did tell me, a few days ago, that she met a man while browsing through the record store downtown. “Nice-looking,” she said. “And very knowledgeable about percussive jazz.” She mentioned she might have him over sometime. But she didn't warn me that he was coming
this
morning.

“Nice to meet you,” I say. I'm still in my pajamas, reading the newspaper. In large, gothic font across the top of the front section are the words nine dead in bus collision. Satan jams a thumb through the hammer loop of his painter's pants. He looks at the paper and I think I see his blue eyes twinkle, then he looks guiltily away.

A few months ago, Mrs. Capp placed an ad in the local paper looking for “a quiet and respectful female roommate with a low tolerance for untidiness and a high regard for manners.” We didn't hit it off so well the day I met with her about the room, but since she didn't get many responses, I ended up moving in.

In the time that I've lived here, I've gone on one date, a blind date engineered by my sister, Kate. Phil was very nice, in a helpless kind of way. Kate knew him from college. He had thin blond hair and watery eyes that sat too far apart. After speaking each sentence, he'd pause, as if his words needed time to percolate through a fine sieve. But most of the things he said to me were easy to digest, like “I was born in Seattle.” This sort of phrase wouldn't be in response to a question (such as “where were you born?”), but would serve as an awkward opener. I felt like I was supposed to do something special with Phil's silences; they seemed coded and livelier than his speech. Though I was curious about his manner, I didn't want to date him.

Mrs. Capp, however, has been out numerous times with numerous men, some of them quite young. One I recognized from my graduate program, a squinty young man, Kirk Williams. In class it seemed he was trying to see the projected lecture notes with his front teeth. I can't figure out where she meets these men because she doesn't go out much and when she does she wears unflattering pleated skirts and necklaces that hang down, accentuating a tired-looking bosom. I suspect she's one of those librarian types that men fantasize about. They seem prim, but get them in a dark room and va-voom, the buttons are flying.

Mrs. Capp was married once to a man named Sal. She's in her mid-forties now, a little overweight. Sal, I gather, was considerably older. He was a professor at the small school where she earned her master's degree. Two years ago he died of a stroke. Mrs. Capp speaks highly of him. She sighs at good meals and comments on how he would have loved the lamb, the potatoes, the flavor of the dry wine.

I get the sense, though, that she didn't really know him that well. The stories she tells don't seem specific. When I tell her about Kevin, my ex-boyfriend, I never say, “Oh, Kevin loved comedy films.” Instead, I say that when he was a baby he was born with two thumbs on each hand. The doctors immediately cut off the extras and Kevin still felt sore that no one consulted him about it.

You might think that living with Mrs. Capp has damaged my ego. After all, I am young, slim, in my prime. I should be the one waltzing off in tight pants on Friday nights. The messages on the phone pad should be for me. But in truth, I didn't move here to meet people. I came here to retreat. At some point last year, I realized that I didn't like many of my friends in California. They were just people living boring lives that seemed less boring because they were young and busy. But each of them toiled away at meaningless jobs, showered with water from the same treatment facility, had the same hurt feelings when their lovers broke their hearts.

It's not that I fancied myself different from them. It was that I began to see myself as indistinguishable. Rachel Klegman would order a turkey sandwich and I'd want the same thing. She'd buy new shoes and I'd have them already. Stacy Wong would fight with her father and come over crying and I'd realize that I'd had that fight with my own father. Instead of making me feel comforted, one of a great community of souls, I found myself trying to pump my experiences up so that they'd look unique. I'd embellish my trip to the drugstore. I told Kevin that I saw a brown ring of what looked like lipstick smudged onto the floor in the center of the feminine hygiene aisle. I said it looked like a sign, a secret message left by a fugitive. A symbol that he was whole, alive, well.

“They never clean that store,” Kevin replied.

And I understood what I was doing. This took most of the fun out of it.

The East Coast began to look like frontier, the new world beckoning to me with its welcoming, deeply lined hands. It was the only way to extricate myself from the excruciating plainness of my life: Kevin, the jars of chutney crystallizing in the fridge, the relentless Friday-night parties where self-congratulatory med students and budding PhDs got drunk on gin and pretended to forget the rules of social interaction.

Now I am three thousand miles away, eating pasta and canned tomatoes and picking my toenails while I read. And watching Mrs. Capp fuss with her hair and apply too much rouge, I'm reminded that it's hell to care about the world the way that she does.

Satan lingers in the doorway, grinning. “Well, come
innn,
” Mrs. Capp coos. For a moment he's frozen in the sunlight, and then, with a loping gait, he follows her into the kitchen.

I should have known that she was up to something this morning. She was out of her quilted housedress when I woke up at nine and sharply attired in a pair of polyester slacks with navy blue flats and dark beige hose. She's got on a pair of earrings she bought recently. Large cloisonné ducks. They swing as she moves her thin neck.

I stop reading the paper and listen. Mrs. Capp opens the freezer and it's difficult to hear what she's saying, but I can hear the cadence of her fluty voice.

“Sure,” Satan says. “Okay.” Ice clanks. Some chairs move. The back door opens. Shuts.

Satan as a Sunday-morning visitor. It seems appropriately absurd. A blatant metaphor for why I don't date. Why I pour over the
Times
(alone) on Sunday mornings, plan my weekends according to books on my shelf, homework, walks, and movies I haven't yet seen. The freedom of my newfound solitude still thrills me.

The initial phases were harder. When the graduate school acceptance letter came through my mail slot one Tuesday morning, Kevin was in my kitchen, slurping cereal. I grabbed it out of the heap of bills and advertisements, ripped it open with my thumb.

Kevin's face puckered when I showed it to him. “You're not going, are you?” I looked at his stubbly jaw, the one eyebrow that stood up like it had suffered some great shock.

“I don't know,” I said.

Weeks later, during dinner at an overpriced Vietnamese restaurant, I broke the news. Women with bright teeth and dark, glistening hair sat with men in button-down shirts, leather bags stashed neatly beside their chairs. “I've accepted the offer,” I told him.

His brown eyes, so familiar, so expressive, were utterly blank. I cringed. I knew I'd made a terrible mistake, and one for which I wouldn't be forgiven. The mistake was not in leaving California. It was telling him here, like this, the smell of steamed mussels between us like a fog.

“Everything all right?” our waitress asked.

“Oh, it's delicious,” I said. I wanted her to stay, to sit down with us and tell us funny stories about herself. “But I'd like a beer.”

“You too?” she said, turning to Kevin. He continued to stare at me for a beat. The world went still. Then his eyes teared and gaped; his hands flew to his throat.

The waitress smiled patiently.

“Kevin?” I said. He opened his mouth and his face turned a strange shade of red, then a deep shade of burgundy.

“He's choking!” I told the waitress.

The following minutes are somewhat blurry. I'd taken a CPR/General Emergency course but so long ago. When had I ever used it? And while he sat clutching his throat, I thought about how guilty I would feel if he died. The waitress pounded on Kevin's back and then one of the glossy-haired women at a nearby table ran over, wrenched the waitress's arm away, lifted Kevin to a vulnerable half-upright position, clasped her hands, and BAM, out flew the wad of noodles, onto the white tablecloth.

I dropped him off at his apartment and he got out of the car without kissing me. The relief I felt watching him go through the dirty glass doors has followed me out here. I'm still glad that Kevin is alive, those pink scars marking his thumbs, the noodles out of his airways. But I'm also glad not to be with him, walking through the glass doors, up the ammonia-scented stairway to his one-bedroom apartment.

Mrs. Capp and Satan are on the porch drinking lemonade. If I sit on my bed, in the corner of the room, I can see them through the window. And because the windows are so old, the seals broken, the glass rattling in strong wind, I can hear most of what they're saying.

“It's terrible to lose someone,” I hear Satan say.

“It is,” Mrs. Capp says sadly. “It's like the world is whisked away from you. Nothing looks the same.”

Satan grunts. Mrs. Capp must recognize the irony of explaining loss to Satan, but it doesn't show on her face.

“I brought you a present,” Satan says, gesturing to a small pink package. She gazes at it as if it were the correct ending to her sad thoughts. She's holding the package on her lap and I'm annoyed that I can't see what's inside when she carefully edges off the foil.

What gift does Satan bring on a Sunday morning? Apple chips? Tarot cards? Snakeskin barrettes?

“So sweet,” she croons. She gets up, sits in his lap, and gives him a long, passionate kiss. She pulls away and Satan looks at her in the same way he looked at the headline on the paper. She rakes her pearly nails down the edge of his jaw, stands, gathers the empty glasses. I hear the back door open.

I jump off my bed, smooth out the wrinkles in my quilt. She pokes her head in.

“He's cute, isn't he?”

“Sure.” The chirpiness of my voice is a giveaway that I've been spying, but she's too preoccupied to notice.

“Oh, gosh, Liza. Come outside and talk to him. I've got a really strong feeling about this one.” When Mrs. Capp talks about men, she sounds as if she's dangling from a fine thread. She seems frightened of falling. Maybe this is why she lines them up one after the other: the next one can catch her if the thread snaps.

She goes out into the kitchen to refill their glasses. I yank off my pajamas and slide into the jeans and sweater I left by my bed the night before. Outside, the backyard brims with life. The brown grass is turning green again. The large oak tree has its first leaves. Satan smiles at me. I pull up a chair.

“How's it going?” I ask. I can tell from the lack of sheen on his eyes that he doesn't really want me to be there.

“Good,” he says, wiping the edge of his lip. His limbs are excessively long in comparison to his compact torso. And he's not particularly good-looking. There's a lack of symmetry to his face. His eyes are crooked and small, and his mouth and nose are squishy. All of this under a giant forehead, his hairline receding.

Mrs. Capp flings herself through the door, her face a cramped expression of joy. She's brought me a lemonade as well.

“Satan's a housepainter,” Mrs. Capp says to me as she settles onto her chair. He nods.

“I was just telling him that our house could use a little painting.” This is true. The peach paint is peeling in the front and half the window frames are a glossy maroon while the other half are dirty white.

“Sure,” he says, his voice gravelly. “We could probably work out a trade.” He directs this statement to Mrs. Capp and his head lowers slightly. His lids drop over those small blue eyes. Mrs. Capp shoots him a reprimanding glance, but lightens it with a purse of her lips, which, I notice, have a fresh coat of orangey lipstick.

Satan leans back in his chair and parts his legs. His hands dangle between his thighs. I catch a whiff of his smell. It's musky, rank, and a little dizzying—the kind of body odor you can't help breathing in repeatedly, though it seems inappropriate to do so.

There's a rising tide of energy at the table and it's making me uncomfortable. It seems that at any moment, Satan might lunge over the patio table with no regard to the tall glasses of lemonade, grasp Mrs. Capp with his clearly capable hands, and mash those soft features into her powdered neckline.

“So, how'd you get your name?” I ask. A chill comes over the porch. Satan doesn't take his eyes off Mrs. Capp. He's got the fingers of both hands pressed together and he's doing little push-ups with them. No one has anything to say.