The Garden of Small Beginnings, page 15
It’s these small periods of intense aggravation with my kids that make me wish I had died and not Dan. Ten minutes later, the feeling has gone away, but in the heat of an argument with my seven-year-old about which socks she will consent to put on, I am possessed by a depression so pure and all-consuming that life seems unbearable. When I hear about a woman beating her children, I often think the sentence “But those aren’t the Dora ones” must have been the last thing she heard before the red mist took away her sanity.
Eventually I dropped them off at school, and on the way to work I decided I was going to put the whole Edward kiss thing out of my mind. I was not interested in Edward, or any romance of any kind. I would work like a fiend all day, tidying up my projects, clearing out my desk, and looking for another job. I would eat a salad for lunch. I would lose ten pounds. I would use the electric toothbrush for the whole two minutes. I would immerse myself in self-care.
• • •
When I got to work, however, Edward had sent me flowers.
I actually smelled them before I saw them. I’d mentioned to Edward how sad I thought it was that roses didn’t have much scent anymore, and he had talked about heirloom roses and some other things I didn’t understand.
Normally men don’t really listen all that well. You can mention that you like apricots, or The Cure, or kittens, and it just goes out of their heads the minute it’s out of your mouth. I personally seize on these clues about people. For example, I know that Sasha loves the smell of violets, and that Rose enjoys novels of a bodice-ripping nature and walks for exercise and has a Siamese cat called Dr. Oodles, but if I’d asked Dan what his best friend had studied at college—where they were roommates—he would have had no idea.
Anyway, Edward was apparently different, because he’d sent me a gorgeous bouquet of roses that filled the room with an intense, sweetly lemony, rosy smell that was mind-blowing. The roses themselves were a rich cream and stuffed with petals that made them look like roses in paintings.
Sasha was looking at me.
“Well, you must have done something pretty amazing last night. I’ve been sketching these since I got in. They’re the most gorgeous Madame Hardys I’ve seen in a long time.” I could see she had also been getting her shit together; there were open cartons on her desk, and she’d brought her portfolio to the office.
“Aren’t they roses?” I was bending down, sniffing deeply. I looked for a card.
Sasha laughed. “The name of the rose is Madame Hardy. It’s a damask rose, and one of the most famous old roses available these days. Someone knows their flowers.”
There didn’t appear to be a card. Hmm. That was a little presumptuous.
I turned to Sasha. “Since when do you know anything about roses?”
“Since you and I did rock, paper, scissors last year for who got to do the third edition of Kittens and Puppies, and I lost. I got Roses of the World, Second Edition.”
“Oh, yeah.”
I looked at the roses. “Well, whoever sent them didn’t include a card, so who knows.”
“Right, because you’re interested in several hot horticulturalists right now, and it could be any of them.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I closed my eyes and sniffed.
“Lilian, when someone uses the word interesting about a guy more than four times in one conversation, nobody thinks she actually means interesting. You might as well wear a T-shirt saying, I’M HOT FOR TEACHER.”
I didn’t want to dignify that with a response, and, luckily, the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Did you get my flowers?” Edward’s voice was deep, and his accent seemed heavier on the phone. I flushed.
“Oh, they’re from you?”
He laughed. “Let me clarify. I sent old roses. Any other flowers you have must be from one of your other admirers.”
God, he was annoyingly together. Another man might have sputtered a bit, but Mr. Confident just rolled right over my rudeness.
He cleared his throat. “You did get them, though?” His voice wobbled a bit, and suddenly I felt OK. Romance in the abstract was not interesting, but Edward himself was.
I smiled. “Yes, they’re right in front of me, and they smell wonderful. Thank you very much.”
I could hear him smiling, too. “You’re welcome. How was the rest of your evening?” His voice dropped a little. “I had trouble getting to sleep, I will admit.”
And then, just as suddenly, I was anxious again. I was such a mess. I was giving myself emotional whiplash.
“It was fine. I talked to Rachel for a long time.”
“You made peace?”
“Yes, totally.”
“Can you have lunch today?”
Aargh. “Um . . . I don’t know. We actually all got laid off a couple of days ago, and I’m trying to . . .” I paused, and smelled the roses again. “I don’t know . . .”
His voice was calm. “How about just coffee? Not like last night . . . just coffee, OK?”
“OK.” I told him where the office was. I could always just tell him we couldn’t see each other anymore. I turned to my desk and ignored the scent of roses as I cleaned out drawer after drawer.
• • •
I was actually crouched under the desk, looking for a quarter, when Edward walked into my cubicle. What’s worse, rather than getting down on my knees and being sensible about it, I had stayed in my chair and bent down under the desk to reach the coin, which, of course, hadn’t worked, so I was actually semi-stuck and refusing to admit it. Let’s just say it wasn’t my best angle.
“Lilian?” His voice was unmistakable, so of course I backed up too fast and clonked my head.
At least he looked amused.
“I thought I recognized your . . . uh . . . shoes.” He grinned. Was there nothing that could throw this guy?
“Are you the one who sent the roses?”
Edward swung around and smiled at Sasha. “That was me,” he said, stepping forward. “I am Edward Bloem, and you are . . . ?”
“Sasha.” They shook hands, and then he turned back to me, holding out his hand. I took it.
“Shall we?” He tugged me closer and turned back to my friend. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Sasha.” She pulled a “he’s hot” face behind his back, and I pretended not to notice.
He kept holding my hand as we walked to the elevator. He held it in the elevator, he held it on the street, and he was still holding it when I stopped walking.
“I’m freaking out,” I said. It just came out. It was either stop walking and tell the truth or kick him in the backs of the knees and run for it.
He stepped closer to me and looked serious. “You are? Shall I stop holding your hand?” Because he still hadn’t let it go.
I shook my head, then nodded, then shook it again. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m freaking out. I can’t really express it any better than that. I wasn’t looking for anything. I was doing fine. And now you’re here and last night happened, and now I don’t know if I’m fine anymore.”
He didn’t say anything, but he let go of my hand and looked around. There was a diner across the street. “Let’s go in there and talk, OK? We can have milkshakes.”
I wasn’t sure how he knew about my milkshake thing, but, honestly, I could be on the verge of death and someone could suggest a milkshake and I’d rally just long enough to suck it down.
We crossed the street, and, of course, I wished I were still holding his hand.
We sat across from each other in the booth and waited silently until the milkshakes came. Then we both blew the straw wrappers at each other, which eased the tension a little.
“Can I talk first?” he asked, and then went ahead. “I was also not looking for anything. I was also fine. But from the first time I saw you, I knew I wanted to get to know you, to learn about you. You are very beautiful, which you know, but you also have a . . . something.” He blushed. “Something that is apparently making me incapable of speech.” He took a breath. “But I know your situation makes it difficult. You have children. You are a widow. Last night was . . . deeply distracting, but I’m a grown man, not a teenager. I can wait until you are ready.” He sat back and took a long sip of milkshake.
I looked at him and fought with myself.
He smiled. “Why don’t you just tell me what you’re thinking, Lilian?”
“It’s very muddled.”
He shrugged. “Tell me anyway.”
“I want to go to bed with you.”
He burst out laughing.
I continued, “But I also want to run away and never set eyes on you again. I want you so much, I really do. I’m not a teenager, either, and I know how it would be.” We were both blushing now, and he reached across the table and took my hand again, his thumb rubbing across my palm. “But just when I think it’s really as simple as that, I start to panic at the thought of what it would mean, to be with someone.” A sudden thought struck me, and my blush deepened. “Unless you’re not looking for . . . maybe you just want to . . .” Scratch that earlier comment about not being a teenager.
He grinned at me. “You are funny. No, I’m not looking to just ‘hook up’—I think is the phrase? We could, of course, if that’s what you want . . .” His eyes gleamed at me. “But I don’t think I would be satisfied with that.” He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “I want to take you to bed and drive every last bit of sadness out of you. I want to make you happy, Lilian.” He took his hand away and turned up his palms. “This is not normal for me, either. Normally, I would ask you out to dinner, politely, and maybe we would have a meal or two before I would see if you would let me kiss you, and then maybe we would be lovers, or maybe not. This isn’t like that, I’m sorry.”
I looked down at the table and tried to work out what I was feeling. Then I realized what it was.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “Can we order?”
• • •
Unsurprisingly, I felt better once I was eating. We’d both ordered burgers, and they were really hitting the spot. There had been some mutual but unspoken agreement to talk about something else, and he was telling me about his family.
“It is hard. My family all basically work in the same business, and my eldest sister runs the Bloem Company now, so one of the reasons I took this job for a year was to get some space. Amsterdam is a small city, and we saw each other a great deal. They were very critical when my marriage broke up.”
I thought about this. “Was it a messy divorce?”
He made a face. “Is there another kind? It was civilized. I feel bad for my son, of course. I’ve missed a lot of his life after his mother and I separated.”
“How old was he when you guys split up?”
“Six. But we had been living apart for a year before we actually split up, and I was working out of the country a lot before that.” He looked sad. “I doubt my divorcing his mother made much of an impact on him.” He sat back, ready to change the subject. “What will happen with your work now?” He smiled a small smile. “Who will be drawing our vegetables?”
“I’m not sure about the vegetable book, to be honest. We only found out about being laid off a couple of days ago, and nothing’s very clear yet.” I sipped my milkshake and pondered. “Maybe part of the reason I’m so stressed-out about, you know, you and me, is that everything seems to be happening all at once.”
He nodded. “I understand that. But sometimes that’s just what happens, right? Like one day it’s winter and everything is brown, and two days later it’s spring and everything is bursting into bud and flower all at once. Once nature gets an idea in her head, she tends to run with it, no?”
I smiled at him. “Are you saying we’re like spring? Just a natural phenomenon?”
He called for the check and smiled back at me. “No, just saying that maybe it’s OK to let nature call the shots once in a while.”
In honor of that thought, I let him hold my hand all the way back to the office. I still wasn’t sure what the fuck was going on, but I decided to just sit with it for a while and see what happened. Something was bound to. It always did.
Making Peace with Insects
Try to peacefully coexist with ants in the garden as (a) they are beneficial insects and (b) they outnumber you by a factor of about a billion. Use old melon rinds to attract them away from your vegetable beds.
• Aphids on your garden plants can be knocked off with frequent, strong streams of water from the garden hose. Try it, it’s fun.
• If you notice yellow-and-black striped Colorado potato beetles or the metallic blue green Japanese beetles crawling on your plants, put down a drop cloth and, in the early morning, when they’re most active, shake them off and dump them into a bucket of soapy water.
• Herbs can be used for pest control. Wormwood, yarrow, santolina, tansy, mint, and lavender are traditional moth repellents. Oil of rosemary can also be effective.
Chapter 12
That night, several hours after the kids were supposedly asleep, I heard Annabel crying and went to investigate. She was sitting up in bed, looking at something on her lap. By the night-light I could see she was really distressed, so I picked her up and carried her into my room. She brought the thing she’d been looking at, and it turned out to be a photo album I hadn’t seen before. I smoothed the tear-damp hair from her cheeks and tucked it behind her ears.
“What’s that, honey? What’s the matter?”
She didn’t say anything, just buried her head in my shoulder and handed me the album. I opened it, and frowned.
“Who helped you put this together?”
“Leah. Ages ago. We went through the baby box, and I picked out the pictures I wanted, and she helped me stick them in. Clare has one, too, but it’s all Frank.”
I looked at her. “You mean, like a wedding album?” She smiled, briefly, but her face was still drawn.
I turned the pages of her album, a little confused. Mostly it was pictures of her. As a younger kid, swinging on a swing, walking away down the street, being thrown in the air, laughing, on a pony, that kind of thing. There were one or two of Clare, very small, being cuddled, with Annabel peering at her. She was in every one, though.
I clutched at straws. “Does this make you sad because you miss being smaller?”
She looked at me, and, as usual, I got the sense she was suppressing a sigh. She shook her head, and the tears started again. “No, you’re not looking at it properly.”
I looked again, but I was missing it. I shook my head and looked at her. “Can you tell me about it? Why does it make you sad?”
“It makes me happy and sad.”
She lay back on the pillow, her soft hair curving under her cheek, so lovely and small and pulled into herself that I nearly started crying, too. She had always been so close to Dan, and it sucked that he wasn’t here to help her with this sadness, although, of course, if he were here, maybe she wouldn’t be so sad.
She sat up, suddenly, and in an angry voice pointed to the pictures.
“These are pictures of me and Daddy. Can’t you see him? They’re all pictures of me and Daddy.” Then she threw herself down again and really did start crying in earnest. I looked again.
And this time I saw him. In every picture he was holding her hand, or pushing the swing, or guiding the pony. Just his hands. Or part of his arm. His shoulder she was peering over, his neck she was snuggled into. His hands that had just released her into the sky. I had taken the pictures, of course, and had been focusing on her, not him. But he had been there, in all of them. Little pieces of Daddy.
“That’s all there is. He’s all gone.” A whisper.
I stroked her hair and let her cry.
“Why aren’t there any pictures of him around? Don’t you miss him?” She was upset with me, but it was difficult. She knew I wasn’t to blame for him being gone, but she wanted someone to be responsible, someone that wasn’t her. She turned her head to look at me. “I can’t remember his face! I was too small and my brain didn’t work so well, and I didn’t keep track of him.” She sobbed.
Oh, crap. She was right, there weren’t any pictures. Actually, there were a few family shots, but they were higher on bookcases, at my eye level. I didn’t want to turn the house into a shrine, hadn’t wanted to be reminded, at every turn, of what I’d lost, but I realized I had accidentally stolen something from Annabel, let her memories of her dad’s face fade in a way that made her feel guilty. Rachel had been completely right, after all. I was a totally selfish cow.
I looked at the clock: 11:00 P.M. And a school night, too. I got up.
“Wait there, honey.”
I fetched my computer, and some hot chocolate for her. For an hour we sat there together and went through every photo I had of Dan, and there were hundreds, thanks to digital photography. I showed her pictures of us together while I was pregnant, photos of his face pressed against my ridiculous belly, full of her, pictures of him holding her as a baby where you could see the love and amazement on his face. She picked out the ones she wanted, dozens of them, and I made them into a photo book. And we talked about Dan. About how much I’d loved him, and how much he’d loved her, and how much we both missed him.
“Clare doesn’t remember him.” She was calmer now, better.
I shrugged. “How could she? She was only really, really tiny when he died, so she never knew him. It’s not her fault.”
She smiled at me. “I know. I love Clare. I’m just sorry she didn’t know him.”
I smiled back at her. “But we did, and that’s good.”
