The Garden of Small Beginnings, page 12
“OK, that’s weird. I’ll be right out.”
As I rounded the corner, I realized that thinking about my mother-in-law must have been a premonition.
“Maggie!” I literally squeaked with excitement, and more or less ran across reception.
My sister-in-law, Maggie, was not only Dan’s sister but also one of my oldest friends. I had known her first, in fact, because she and I had been in homeroom together during our freshman year of high school. From the first minute we saw each other, we knew we were going to be friends, and it wasn’t just because we both had Flock of Seagulls haircuts. We were kindred spirits, and even though the teachers quickly realized their lives would be easier if we were kept apart, we were mostly inseparable. And, of course, then she introduced me to Dan. I had only seen her twice since he’d died, because she lived in Italy with her husband.
“I cannot believe you’re here! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” I kept hugging her and laughing. “Rose, this is Maggie, my sister-in-law.”
Maggie smiled. “Hi, Rose. Sorry to be weird about giving you my name, but I wanted to surprise her.”
“You succeeded.”
“Why are you here? Where’s Berto?”
Maggie paused and looked at her watch. “Can you come out for lunch?”
“Of course, wait here.” I went to grab my bag and tell Sasha to cover for me in case it turned into one of those three-hour lunches. We headed out of the office, and once we reached the street, I hugged her again.
“My God, the kids are going to freak!”
“If they remember me.”
“They probably will. Or at least they’ll say they do. They were pretty small last time you met. Rachel will be stoked, too. Shall I call her?” Obviously Rachel and Maggie were friends, too, although Rachel had been two years behind us at school. “What kind of food do you fancy? Not Italian, I guess.”
She smiled faintly. “Anything but. How about sushi?”
“Great.” I directed us down the street, and once we were seated, I just sat and looked at her. She was a female version of Dan, tall and thin like him, but with dark red hair instead of brown. Something was obviously bothering her, because she seemed tired, an adjective that had never applied to her before. Like her brother, she had always been full of life and good humor.
“So, what’s up?” I waited, but she said nothing. “Where’s Berto? Did he come with you?”
She straightened her chopsticks and fiddled with the soy sauce. “Berto is currently having sex with one of his students, I expect, who he left me for a month ago. For whom he left me, I should say.” Maggie was a professor of English Literature. I think it physically hurt her to split an infinitive.
“Get out.”
She shook her hand. “Can’t.”
“You’re joking.”
“Is it funny?”
“But Berto loves you.”
“And says he still does. But strangely that love allows him to stick his penis in someone else. He says he cannot help himself, it is passion, it is amore, it is total and complete bullshit.” She looked at me with eyes that had clearly run out of tears. “I have no idea what to do with myself, and the semester ended, so I just flew home. My parents don’t even know I’m here yet.”
The waiter came over, and we did that thing where you pretend everything is fine for the two minutes it takes to have a social exchange of information, and then dove back into the conversation.
Maggie looked a little green. Maybe sushi wasn’t such a good idea.
“Are you OK? You look like you’re going to throw up.”
“I think I’m OK. It’s like a dream or something, and not the one where Johnny Depp gets a flat tire in front of my house. I thought I knew Berto, inside and out.”
I nodded. “So did I. I’m totally thrown for a loop here. It’s not like him at all.”
She made a face. “And yet that’s how it was between us when we first met.”
I remembered. Maggie had gone to Italy for her second year of college, to learn Italian and study Dante, like you do, and came back a different woman. Not only was she speaking Italian, she was passionately in love with Berto, who’d also been on the Dante trail, and the two of them spent every possible vacation with each other until they graduated. I remembered, too, when Berto had first come to America to visit, how wonderful he was, how funny. We all fell in love with him a bit, even the guys, because he was just charming and unusual and gorgeous and completely Italian. They got married right after graduation, and Dan and I had gone to stay with them at least once a year from then on. They worked as teachers, living in tiny, ancient apartments, then gradually worked their way up until they were professors and lived in slightly larger ancient apartments in Florence. Idyllic. And now, apparently over.
Maggie was getting more pissed off. “Why is it that men get a second chance at being dickheads, and we’re supposed to keep aging gracefully?”
I shrugged. “There’s nothing stopping you from chasing younger men if you want to.”
She sighed. “And we were trying so hard for kids for so long. I guess it’s just as well we don’t have any.” Her eyes got shiny. “But maybe if we did, he wouldn’t have fallen in love with someone else.”
The sushi came. We paused to eat. She was obviously hungry, because her color got better with every eel roll.
“You know what sucks the most?” She pointed at me with her chopsticks.
I shook my head. It all seemed pretty bad.
“I can’t really blame him. I mean, I can blame him, and I do blame him, for being such a selfish bastard, but when he came to tell me about it, I could see that he was having the most wonderful time. This lovely young woman is interested in him, and they’re going to museums together and spending all day in bed having sex, and staying up late talking, and it’s all like being twenty again. I mean, I get it, I get why that’s appealing. I’m just furious that it’s more appealing than protecting the feelings of the woman you’ve been married to for so long.”
I tried to think of something to say. “Hey, maybe it will blow over, and he’ll come crawling back.”
She shook her head, mixing more wasabi into her little soy-sauce dish. “I don’t care if he does. I’m done.”
“You’re just mad.”
“You’re right. But I plan to stay mad for a bit and then move elegantly into disinterest. When she throws him over for someone whose stomach doesn’t hang in front of his dick, he’ll probably come back, but I’ve lost respect for him.” She leaned in closer. “He dyed his hair.”
“No.”
“Yes. And bought a yellow Vespa.”
I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “No way.”
“Way. He’s knotting his sweater around his neck and leaping on and off the blasted thing like he’s in a Fellini movie.”
“Maybe he’ll have a stroke and die.”
“There is hope. Although, of course, then I would be heartbroken, which is the real kicker. I still love him right now, as well as hating him, and being embarrassed by him, and ashamed of him, and happy for him, and jealous of him.”
I finished the last roll and signaled for another Coke. “I find it hard to believe you’re happy for him at all. He’s an asshole.”
Her mouth twisted. “For sure. But I’ve loved him and been his best friend for so long, you know? If I put my own rage and disappointment aside for a minute, which is pretty hard, then I can see that he’s happy, and I want him to be happy. While at the same time wanting him to lose control of his bowels in public.” She fell silent. “It’s all very hard.”
And then, finally, she started to cry.
• • •
After lunch, Maggie went to her parents’ house to break the news, and I headed back to the office. I was pretty upset. I’ve reached the age where couples whose weddings I went to are starting to get divorced. It seems to happen when the kids are in third and fourth grade, for some reason.
Here’s the pattern I see, with the caveat that I won’t experience it myself, seeing as my husband croaked: You get married, you love each other, you have a lot of sex, you argue occasionally, but all is well. You have babies, which we’ve already agreed is hard work. You pull together or apart, under the stress, and if you’re lucky, it’s the former. Years go by, and at first you argue about the sex you no longer have and the time you don’t spend together, but then you stop missing both and start feeling relieved you don’t even want it anymore. You stop telling each other what you did all day, because who gives a shit? If you hear a good joke, you don’t bother retelling it. If you read a good book, you loan it to a girlfriend, because he doesn’t like the same books you do anyway. And then bing, bang, bong, it’s all over. Thirty-one . . . thirty-two . . . forty, fifty, sixty, dead.
When I got off the elevator, Rose was standing on her desk. Literally standing on it. I realized that in more than a decade of working at Poplar Press, I had never seen her ankles. This whole day was starting to get a little tiring.
“Rose? Is there a mouse or something?”
She shook her head. “No, Lilian. I am protesting.”
“OK. Do you need support?”
“No, although you are welcome to join me.”
I put down my bag. “What are we protesting?”
“They’re closing the department.”
I looked at her and frowned. “Which department?”
“Our department. The creative department.”
“I’m sorry?”
A trace of the old Rose flashed across her face. “Lilian, please try and keep up. Miss Roberta King came down during lunch.”
I felt sorry for Miss King, suddenly.
“She asked me to sit down, and then she thanked me for my decades of service and fired me. Or rather, she attempted to fire me.”
“She didn’t fire you?” Jesus, I’d only been gone two hours.
“Well, she did, but I didn’t accept it, and still don’t. I’ve been here longer than anyone. They can’t fire me.” She raised her voice at the end, and stamped her foot in its sensible shoe.
“And then what happened?”
“Then she went to the main conference room, where everyone was invited to join her.” She frowned at me. “You’re welcome to climb up here on the desk, but I think she’ll want you with the others.”
Crap. I picked up my bag. “How long ago did this all happen?”
She shrugged. “A matter of moments.”
I turned and headed toward the main conference room. I half expected to see a melting giraffe or giant baby head on the way, seeing as all rules of reality appeared to be broken.
The conference room was pretty full. There aren’t that many of us, but it isn’t a very big conference room. Roberta had been talking when I opened the door, but she stopped and gave me a reflexive smile. I smiled back, similarly bound by centuries of social conditioning. Inwardly, I was freaking out.
I sat down next to Sasha, who was crying. I squeezed her hand.
Roberta cleared her throat. “Glad you’re here, Lilian, although it’s really a very sad day. As I was just explaining to the rest of the group, management has decided to outsource all new jobs overseas. We already make extensive use of freelance writers, as you know.”
Everyone turned to look at Elliot, the only person in the room with the title of writer. He blushed. “I’m more of an editor, really.”
Roberta continued, “And while the fact-checking department will stay in-house, for quality-control reasons, the illustration, layout, and design departments will finish up the projects they already have and then be free to leave.”
There was a long silence, then a woman who worked in layout raised her hand. “Are we free to leave before then?”
Roberta looked surprised. “Well, of course. But if you leave before you’re officially laid off, you won’t qualify for COBRA or unemployment benefits or . . .”
She stopped, because the woman had risen to her feet. “I don’t care about that. I’m out of here,” she said. “I’ve been saving for years, squirreling away every meager bonus, every extra hour, and now I have enough to live my dream.” She gathered her stuff, her face glowing. “I am moving to Canada to raise miniature ponies. Losing my job is just the push I was waiting for.”
Elliot the editor had a question. “Can you just move to Canada? Don’t you need to get a visa or something?”
The layout lady looked surprised. “No. I’m Canadian.” She looked at Elliot and frowned. “We slept together for six months in 2009, you didn’t know that?”
He shook his head. “I knew about the ponies . . .”
The layout lady shrugged and left, and we heard her whooping as she skipped down the hall.
• • •
The children received my news with their usual brand of aplomb. Clare said yay, because she thinks work is something boring one has to do, and Annabel asked how long it would be until we ran out of money.
“A long time. I’m not going to be out of work forever, and we have some money in the bank. We’re fine, don’t worry.” I was leaning against the kitchen counter, watching them eat PB&J as their post-school snack. Leah was picking up in their room, but I could feel her listening.
Annabel frowned. “Well, are we going to have to sell the house?”
Since when did seven-year-olds worry about this shit? When I saw little girls playing with dolls, their braided heads close together, were they actually debating the decline of the real estate market? Was Barbie about to lose the Malibu Beach House? Were bailiffs repossessing the Jeep? I felt momentarily grateful that the house was paid for, thanks to Dan’s life insurance. The one good thing that came out of his death was that we weren’t going to be homeless. However, heating and lighting the place was a totally different matter.
“No, we’re not going to have to sell the house. Nothing is really going to change that much, to be honest, except I’m going to be around more. And I’m going to be at work for another month anyway, finishing up stuff.” I hadn’t had a chance to ask Roberta King about the vegetable encyclopedia, and wasn’t sure if it was officially in-house or not yet. I made a note to ask her the next day.
Leah came into the kitchen but didn’t meet my eye. Annabel observed this, being the tiny anthropologist she is, but for once she kept silent. She turned her attention back to me.
“Well, you can always get a job at McDonald’s.”
Clare perked up. “Yes! Get a job at McDonald’s! Then we can have free fries!”
Clare loves a McDonald’s fry. It’s the crack they sprinkle all over them.
“I’m not going to get a job at McDonald’s. I might not even look for a job. I might just do freelance illustration.”
“What’s freelance? Do you work for free?” Annabel looked skeptical.
“Have you finished your snack?” She nodded. “Do you want something else?” She shook her head. “Freelance doesn’t mean you work for free. It means you work for yourself.”
“Where?”
I shrugged. “From here.”
There was a pause. Then Clare pushed her chair back and carried her plate to the sink. “I think that sounds like a good idea. Then you will be here all the time. We can clear out the garage to make an office for you.” And with this piece of inspiration, she wandered off, calling Frank to come and play. Frank often lay next to her while she played her complicated imaginary games with tiny plastic animals, and she would ask his opinion and advice now and then. I had never heard him respond, obviously, but apparently he added a lot.
Leah looked at Annabel. “Do you have homework?”
“Just reading.”
“Do you want to go and do it?”
“Sure.” She got up and wandered off to her room, then came back. “Clare and Frank are being noisy. Can I read in your room?” I nodded.
Leah looked at me.
“So . . . am I out of a job?” She comes to the point, that girl.
I shook my head. “No, not now at least, and hopefully not at all. If a month or two goes by and I can’t find any work, then we might need to rethink the situation, but we should be OK. I’ve no idea how much freelance work there is out there, and I kind of want to do a book . . .”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “What kind of book?”
“A kids’ book, I guess. I don’t really know.” Which was true. At that moment, I really didn’t know what the hell was going to happen. So I did the obvious thing: made myself a huge ice-cream sundae and called my sister.
How to Grow Garlic
Garlic is easy to grow and produces numerous bulbs after a long growing season. Not only does it taste great in butter, it’s a natural insect repellent.
• Do not plant cloves from the grocery store. Firstly, they might not be the right variety for your area, and secondly they’ve been treated with something that makes them last longer on the shelf. This makes them surly and resistant to growing. And, frankly, who can blame them?
• Place cloves 4 inches apart and 2 inches deep, in their upright position (wide side down).
• In spring, as the weather warms up, shoots will appear and neighborhood vampires will retreat.
• To harvest, lift them carefully with a garden fork, dust them off, and let them cure in an airy, shady spot for two weeks. You can tie them on a string and hang them upside down to be sure all sides get plenty of air.
• Some people eat garlic raw, claiming it gives them eternal life or something. I think it’s more likely that no one will come near them afterward, making life just extremely peaceful rather than eternal. Totally your call.
Chapter 10
Rachel showed up in time for dinner, and brought Maggie. Her parents had been happy to see her, she said, sad to hear about her marriage, and ready to take out a contract on Berto.
