The Garden of Small Beginnings, page 6
Rachel couldn’t help herself. “I know that when I get down on my knees every day, I always kick off my gratitude list with worm piss. Those miniscule bladders just give and give.”
Edward looked up at her and frowned in an “English isn’t my first language and I’m not sure if you’re joking or not” way, but then turned back to his plans. Not everyone gets Rachel, or understands that she simply can’t stop herself from making jokes. With a mother like ours, we both developed a strong line in sarcasm as self-defense.
Edward leaned back on his haunches. “We also need to consider the position of the sun in relation to our plants.”
“Isn’t it, generally speaking, right above us?” Mike laughed.
“In the middle of the day, yes, but of course it rises in the east and sets in the west, and as it travels overhead it creates shadows which must be considered. There is almost no natural shade here for our plants, which is both good and bad. Anyway, we will talk about this more once we start actually putting seeds and plants in the ground. For now, we need to get to the earth.” He pulled a walkie-talkie thingy from his pocket, and pressed a button.
“Bob, we are ready for you over here.” Edward got to his feet, stretching. He was very tall and well built, and why I was noticing this I have no idea.
“Normally you would dig your own beds and paths, but then again normally you wouldn’t be starting with a space of this size. These days we can cheat a little.”
Right on cue we heard an engine noise, and turned to see a man driving a small tractor toward us. The children squealed, and we all grinned.
“It is much easier,” continued Edward, raising his voice, “to use a large machine to dig up the ground, though a rototiller is not a precision instrument, clearly. We will have plenty of work to do ourselves.”
The tractor came pretty close and stopped, and Bob, with the face of a Greek god and the bashed-up hands of a plumber, wandered over. This was the problem, or joy, of living in Los Angeles: The best-looking people from all over the world came to Hollywood, seeking their fortune and some measure of fame. Back in Buttfluff, Maryland, they were constantly being told they should be a movie star. They were the prom king or queen, or 4-H glamour girl, and they got off the plane expecting to be mown down by paparazzi. Instead they discovered that the guy who rented them a car, the girl who pulled them a latte, and the dude at the dry cleaner’s were all better-looking than them. And could probably sing and dance in two languages. You were constantly walking down the street and spotting the most beautiful creature you’d ever seen in your life, then turning a corner and seeing three more. It was insane. Anyway, here was another perfect example, driving a very small tractor and working at the botanical garden while he waited to be discovered behind a marigold. I personally would have thought there were more populated places to go wait in, but hey, maybe he liked the tractor.
I glanced at Rachel. The drunken celebrity had lowered her sunglasses and was regarding Bob thoughtfully. I knew that look. I saw it on the dog’s face whenever there was beef cooking. I looked at Bob, feeling sorry for the little cutlet, but he was looking back at her, with the nonchalance that only serious good looks can carry off. I sighed inwardly. I had thought a gardening class might be drama-free, but apparently not.
Edward was talking. “And now, who wants to drive the tractor?”
• • •
However long I live, I will never forget the sight of Clare driving the tractor. Yes, she was sitting on Bob’s lap and he was working the pedals, but she had her hands on the steering wheel and was doing all of the important squealing.
She had been the first to stick up her hand when Edward had asked for volunteers, and to my surprise he had called her up.
“You are the perfect person to start, as there is nothing at all you can do wrong at this point.”
Bob grinned and took her from Edward as he handed her up.
“I’m going to put this seat belt over you, all right, but the most important thing to remember is that you must stay sitting down, OK?”
Clare nodded, obviously somewhat scared of being so high up.
Angie looked at me. “Aren’t you worried she might get hurt?”
I nodded. “Yes, but I’m sure Edward and Bob know what they’re doing.” I looked at Edward. “You know what you’re doing, right? She’s not going to fall off and get crushed?”
He looked at Bob who, somewhat unreassuringly, shrugged.
“Do you want me to take her off?” Edward asked. “If Bob loses his mind and flings her in front of the tractor, it will definitely not be good.” It was a funny image, and I started to laugh, then realized I was the only one.
“Let her do it.” I turned. Gene, of all people, had spoken up. “She’s just experiencing what generations of children did on farms throughout American history, and besides, what is life without a little excitement and risk?” He still wasn’t smiling, mind you, which further underscored his Sam the American Eagle appearance. But he made a good point.
“I won’t get down, anyway.” Clare sounded unwavering on this. I looked at Rachel. She turned up her palms. Annabel spoke up.
“If she’s doing it, I’m doing it, too.”
“Oh, go ahead. But if you drop her, I will turn you into humus on the spot.”
Bob laughed. “Fair enough.”
And lo and behold he set off, Clare squeaking with excitement. So what if I was derelict, as she lay in the emergency room getting her leg set, or her kidney removed, she’d probably forgive me.
Once Clare had driven two loops, the tiller tearing up the grass behind them, Bob stopped in front of us.
“Who’s next?”
“Can I sit on your lap, too?” Rachel was shameless.
Bob smiled and nodded.
And as they set off, with much the same amount of squealing and laughing, it was clear he had no idea his goose was totally cooked.
• • •
Gardening turned out to be fun, but harder work than I had thought. Once the ground was mostly cleared, apart from broad strips of grass as pathways, we paced off the four main plots and placed flags and string along the plotlines. Our time was soon up, and Edward assured us that things would be further along when we returned the following week.
“It’s a little naughty, but there isn’t really time in three hours to do what we need to, and if we leave the ground like this for a week, we’ll spend the next session weeding. So over the week, Bob and I will build raised beds in the plots and get things ready. Your homework is to do research and decide what vegetables you’d like to include. I’m going to send you a list to look over, too, so make sure your e-mail is on the sign-in sheet. While you’re at it, look up the term potager, which is the type of garden we are creating. Basically, it means a garden in which vegetables, flowers, and herbs are grown together, making it efficient.” He frowned at himself. “I’m sorry, I have a tendency to lecture. I find the whole subject of gardening fascinating.” He coughed, politely. “You know, it has been suggested that gardens like these, attached to cottages or smaller houses, started after the Black Death of the fourteenth century killed so many people there was suddenly enough land for everyone to have their own garden. I like to think that it was also in response to that stress, that in times of great difficulty, growing food is comforting, as well as practical.”
He paused. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”
It struck me that “Mommy, what’s the Black Death?” was in my future.
He carried on, ignoring my inner monologue. “Anyway, Bob will be making it very easy for you, but you’ll still have plenty to do. The few purchases you might want to make are a good pair of gardening gloves, a wide-brimmed hat, and plenty of sunscreen.” He waved his hand. “We have no shade here, which means you run a high risk of getting gardeners sunburn, which is painful.”
He turned away from us and pointed at the back of his neck, which was, indeed, very brown. “Back of the neck, top of the shoulders, forearms, and hands. And, one unforgettable summer when I was young and silly, the soles of my feet. I was too cool for shoes, but not smart enough to sunscreen my feet.”
We laughed. Mike chimed in. “When I first started surfing, I was pretty dumb, too, and I burned the backs of my knees. Man, all I could do for, like, four days was lie in a hammock and cry, while all my friends caught some righteous curls.”
“Lying in a hammock doesn’t sound so bad,” Frances said, smiling.
“It isn’t if you’re supposed to be at, like, school or something, but when the alternative is surfing . . . it’s torture.” He was very earnest, our little Mike, but it was possible that he lived entirely in a dream world. Certainly Angie was looking at him in a very confused way, even though they were the same age, more or less. I wondered again about what Rachel had said, about the kind of people who would be drawn to this class. I didn’t sense any actual insanity, not yet anyway. Maybe it was like that saying in poker: If you don’t know who the sucker is at the table, it’s probably you. As we walked back toward the gate of the botanical garden, I fell in alongside Angie.
“Your son is five?”
She nodded. “I only have him every other weekend, because I share custody with his father, but maybe he will cut me some slack and let me bring Bash to class every week.”
I looked at her. “It probably wouldn’t matter if he only came every other week. It’s not like they’re grading us.”
She smiled. “True, but I’ll tell you something. I grew up in your classic projects, east L.A. I never saw so much green, like we see here, until I was in my teens. Literally. The only trees I’d ever seen were those crappy ones on the street, surrounded by dog shit. Just running around on an enormous piece of grass, like your kids were doing today, is something Bash doesn’t get to do very often. So I’m going to bring him every week.” She smiled at me sweetly. “Even if I have to shoot his shithead father in the nuts.”
• • •
Sunday has always been my favorite day. I let the kids gorge themselves on TV, lolling around in the living room in their jammies, calling Frank to deal with spills, while I pretend I’m living in turn-of-the-century Paris, shockingly slender, young and unencumbered. When Dan was alive, he would walk to the corner with Frank for the New York Times, and we would scatter it around, competing over which of us got “The Week in Review” and the magazine. Now I read the news on my computer, then spend an hour looking at before and after pictures of celebrity plastic surgery. I don’t even know why. I start out reading something worthy and intellectually interesting, like the fate of the world’s water, or transgender politics in Hungary, and always end up back at Meg Ryan’s face. She’s like a black hole.
Eventually I got up to see if I could bug the children into giving me something to do. They waved me away, and after standing in the living-room doorway for a while, secretly watching Phineas and Ferb, I decided to go and evaluate the backyard. Maybe I could create a vegetable garden that would feed us all. Or keep chickens, or something. I sat on the kitchen steps and drank coffee, listening to the sound of the Los Angeles morning (helicopters, rap songs through car windows, hipsters riding bicycles to farmers markets, ringing their stupid little vintage bells). Frank pushed past me and stumbled down the three or four cement steps. Finally, he thought, finally she’s discovered the hidden cache of organic sausages I’ve dreamt so much about. After sniffing about for a minute, which is all it takes back there for a thorough inspection, he threw himself down glumly and sighed a sigh that literally blew a leaf around. I knew how he felt, because I wasn’t sure it would ever be possible to grow anything out back. It was sunny right then, in the morning, but there was a sea of weeds that looked ready to take up arms if we tried to unseat them, and a squirrel regarded me balefully from the one small tree we had. The squirrel was an urban creature, impossibly fat and round (there was a McDonald’s around the corner, and he probably had a collection of Happy Meal toys to rival Clare’s), and he was thwacking a metal pipe into his palm, warningly. OK, that isn’t true, but he was definitely a menacing squirrel, and not the shy and darting woodland creature one hears about in the kids’ books. I have a friend who used to feed the squirrels that came to his deck, in a Snow White kind of way, and one day, daring to reach out to pet one of his tiny dependents, he got bitten to the bone and had to have rabies shots. I repeat, to the bone. When Tennyson said, “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” I kind of assumed that nature was going to keep the redness to herself, so to speak, but it seems as if we’ve been implicated in some way and any minute now the animals are coming for us. It would serve us right, I expect (see earlier reference to McDonald’s).
I leaned my head against the door frame, closing my eyes and trying to imagine a tiny oasis of greenery in the garden. Did I want flowers? Vegetables? Long, tangled vines of jungle fruit with chimpanzees hooting and throwing bananas? I started to drift off, which is something I have noticed about my life—I used to have energy, but then I had kids. Now I run at a constant sleep deficit of about two hours a night for the past seven years, and if I close my eyes, I fall asleep. I found myself dreaming of vegetables so shiny and beautiful they could only be Hollywood vegetables, professional vegetables with agents. I stood in my picture-perfect garden with a reed basket over my arm, my hair in long braids with red ribbons on the ends, picking runner beans. One of the kids (like mine, but clean) was standing by, gazing up at me with admiration, marveling at my mastery of Mother Nature. Propagation porn. I opened my eyes. The reality was a mostly concrete backyard, a tiny lawn huddled at one end, with several muddy Polly Pockets half buried in the flower beds, looking like the victims of a war crime. I could see enough candy wrappers to suggest my kids were importing treats from the outside, and very little that looked like it had actually grown there. I sighed. As with all other porn, reality and fantasy weren’t even distantly related.
How to Grow a Tomato
Stick your tomato plant in the ground and admire it: Tomatoes are susceptible to compliments. Water generously.
• Watch for predatory bugs: They’re sneaky.
• If the weather is particularly dry, find some flat rocks and place one next to each plant. The rocks pull up water from under the ground and keep it from evaporating into the atmosphere.
• If using stakes, prune plants by pinching off suckers so that only a couple stems are growing per stake.
• Try not to eat all the tomatoes off the vine, and be cautious: A sun-heated tomato can be explosively juicy.
Chapter 5
I had barely sat down at my desk the next morning when the phone rang. It was Roberta, from upstairs.
“How did the class go?”
“It was fun, thanks.” I unpacked my breakfast of champions: a cinnamon cruller the size of a baby’s head and a triple latte. Better living through chemistry.
“No worm incidents?”
“None worth mentioning. Only sighted in the distance.” I was a little impatient to bite the cruller, I have to admit.
I heard her shiver. “And the Bloem son? Did you speak to him?”
I frowned a little. “Yes, of course. He was the teacher. I could hardly avoid it.”
“Do you think you made a connection?”
I thought about it. “Uh . . . sure?”
She sounded pleased. “Excellent. Did he mention Poplar?”
I tried to be good, but she was cock-blocking me and my cruller. “Well, yes. He asked if I wanted to go to work for Littleman’s Press, as they were offering to do the encyclopedia for less than us, and plant fourteen thousand trees to replenish the earth.” Littleman is our biggest competitor, and the friendly rivalry between us was occasionally less than friendly.
She sucked in her breath. “Absolutely not! We will totally outplant them! Tell him we’ll plant twenty thousand!”
I went ahead and took a bite of cruller, just to make her suffer a little more. “I’m joking. He didn’t talk about it at all. I mentioned that I was illustrating a book about vegetables, but I didn’t mention who was publishing it. Do you want me to?”
There was a silence as she pondered the political implications. “Perhaps. If it comes up organically.”
I chuckled, appreciatively.
“Why are you laughing?” She sounded worried.
“I thought you were making a joke . . . you know, organic, gardening . . .” I trailed off.
“Poplar is counting on you, Lili,” Roberta said. “Please take this seriously.”
“OK, Roberta.” I licked my fingers after I hung up the phone, and wondered if it was me who was unfunny, or her. I decided it was her and continued with my day.
• • •
After work, I went to the grocery store. Leah, our babysitter, was with the kids at home, so I dawdled around the aisles, picking up inappropriate food and random crap. When I got out of the hospital Leah was there, hired by Rachel, using Dan’s life insurance money. She makes my life possible, and I’m not even slightly joking. When I’m standing at the pearly gates, assuming I don’t go the other way, Leah is the person I’m going to give a special shout-out to. Yo, Petey, I shall say, that girl Leah, she’s fab. Make sure she gets a good cloud. She picks up the kids from school on those days I can’t, brings them home, gives them a snack, starts dinner, helps with homework, and basically eases the whole transition. That way, when I walk in the door, the house is an oasis of calm. A sanctuary of sanity in an insane world. A welcoming harbor of peace.
Tonight, after the grocery store, for example.
“Mother, Annabel said that boy cats have boobies, so I went to find Oscar and found him, but he doesn’t have boobies, and then he scratched me and Annabel laughed.” There were heated tears accompanying this speech, and it was delivered in a tone of voice that made the dog scratch at the back door and whine.
