The Garden Path (26 page)

“Scared? Well, yes, I suppose you would be. She is, too.”

“I don't mean just apprehensive after all these years. I mean—oh, Peter—she's always so arrogant on that TV show of hers. Always laying down the law. Do this, do that, don't bother with petunias, don't plant blue and red together, don't try to grow tomatoes from seed. She gets so fierce about it all.”

Peter laughed. “That's her gimmick, Susannah. Everybody on television has to have a gimmick—a
handle
, it's called. To keep people alert. Ward off the old TV hypnosis. So Mom
scolds
her slavering fans.”

“Like she used to scold me.”

“She won't scold you now, Susannah. You're both grown-ups.”

“That's what I keep telling myself. Then I remember Grandma's funeral. When I saw her through the window it all came back.” Just thinking about it was like gasping for air—like being in the humid suffocation of a greenhouse. “She scares me, Peter. Really scares me. Makes me shake. Gives me the willies.”

“She was distraught that day, Susannah. Don't go by that. You know how she felt about Grandma.”

“I suppose.” She took another drink of beer; it was tasting better.

“I'll tell you something, Susannah,” Peter said. His face was very serious, and Susannah sat up straighter in her chair, alert. Now he would say something important, she would learn something. “I've lost a lot of things lately. Friends. A friend, to be exact.”

“Someone you loved?”

He nodded. “My life fell apart. And then I went to the Cape, supposedly for peace and quiet because I couldn't work, and I couldn't think. I couldn't live with myself.” He took a deep breath and paused, fiddling with the label on the bottle. “It was awful there, after a while. It was—disgusting. I drank too much, for one thing. And I couldn't make myself leave. Then one day I went out by myself for a walk on the dunes. It was raining. I was soggy, and miserable, and I was coming down with a cold, and all of a sudden I said to myself—or something said to me—Peter, you shmuck, why don't you get the hell out of here, go out to L.A. and see your father before he dies? Because I said to myself that if he died and I didn't see him first I'd never get over it properly. Do you know what I mean?”

She nodded, holding her breath, and laid her hand on his arm.

“Well, I'm not going to do it,” he said. “The hell with not getting over it. There are a lot of things I'm not going to get over.”

“Oh, Peter.” Her disappointment was intense. Any day now—maybe this very minute, while his children got drunk together a continent away—Edwin would cease to be, would become a speck on the horizon. “It would be wonderful. If you went to see him. I wish you would.”

He shook his head. “Nope. It's too late. He's
dying
, Susannah. What would be the point?”

She let go his arm, and he raised his hand and rubbed his neck again, making a face.

“Your neck hurts.”

“It's the form my cold decided to take.” He sighed, drank beer. “Don't you agree? That it would only upset him, at this point? Admit it. It's a hell of a thing to do to an old man on his deathbed.”

“He's not old.”

“But he's dying, Susannah. Peacefully, you said. The last thing the poor guy needs is me popping up at his bedside to remind him of what he's spent a lifetime trying to forget. What he's
killed
himself trying to forget.”

“Her,” Susannah said. “Rosie.”

“Their marriage,” he corrected her.

“Well. Whatever.” She took little sips from her glass, thinking of what he had said. “You're right, of course,” she said after a moment. “It would be a mistake to go and see him. And I think I'd murder you if you wrecked this for him.”

He smiled at her. “So. The old teams choose up sides again.”

“No.” She smiled back at him. “Let's go on strike, like the ball players.” Peter's smile broadened, then faded away, and she noticed again the thinness of his face, how it was shaped like Edwin's. “You know, it doesn't make sense that I always seem to be at war with someone,” she continued. “I'm really a very peaceable person.”

“I know, Susannah,” Peter said. “And that's what I really wanted to say. When I was out on the dunes getting my stiff neck and deciding not to take off for L.A. after all, what
did
become clear to me was that you've got to make it up with Mom. It's pointless for him and me—Dad. It would just be soap opera. But you two have a lot of years left to be mother and daughter. I don't know if it's Hollis walking out or what—Hollis, the guy I lived with—” He paused, drank, closing his eyes so that his eyelashes made two thick curves. She remembered how she used to envy those lashes, her own were so short and sparse. She felt them with her finger; they still were.

“Tell me about Hollis.” She wondered how many times he had walked out before he left for good, if he had roared away in a van and not returned until half the night was gone.

“You're changing the subject,” Peter said, opening his eyes. He drank again, and drained his glass. They had each finished a beer. Susannah wondered if she should get two more. It seemed a long way to the refrigerator. Byron jumped to her lap, settling the question, and when she petted him his paws opened into stars, shut, open again. “I will tell you sometime,” Peter said. “But what I wanted to say was that I think it's important not to just let things go. Not to let things get lost.”

“Sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.”

“True. But in this case there is something.” He leaned forward. “Listen. She's a very nice woman. Getting old—sure. And crochety as hell sometimes. And she can be a little hyper, too. Hopped up. She can wear you out. Lately, I've got to admit she's been a real
strega.
” Susannah grinned, recognizing the word—one of Nonna Anna's epithets. “But she's a great old girl, Susannah. Think of the fun we can have, the three of us.”

Fun. She had lived with Rosie for ten years, and she couldn't recall ever having anything approaching fun with her. But she said, “Okay, Peter. One of these days you take me over there, and we'll all kiss and make up.” She didn't want to think about it, the actual scene in which these events would take place. “But not quite yet.”

“Whatever you say, kiddo.”

She could tell he would be leaving soon, and she wished he wouldn't. She still expected him to tell her something, to give her a revelation of her own—at least to stay, tell her about Hollis, about
anything
, to be there when Ivan returned so she could look up with an abstracted air and say, “Oh—hi,” when he came in the door. But Peter stood up, stretched, rubbed his neck again, and smiled at her, yawning. “Good old Sister Sue.” It was an old nickname, taken from a book they'd had years ago.

“
Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue
,” she said. “Mom used to call us that. And she always used to say ‘She's so proud of her big brother.'”

“Well, weren't you?”

“Yes, I was. And don't grin that sly grin at me, Bunny Brown. I also hated you like poison.” She caught his yawn, and laughed at the end of it. Byron jumped down.

“Ah, Susannah.” They walked arm in arm to the door, and out. “I like this house,” Peter said, looking back into it from the porch.

“So do I. I love it here. Next time you come I'll show you the vegetable garden, and the apple trees.”

“Your mother's daughter.”

“Hardly,” she said. “It's all Duke's doing, and Ivan's. I have a purple thumb.” She held it up. “Ink.”

“Amazing,” he said, “that here you are, living in this nice old house with a vegetable garden, and running a restaurant, and writing a book.” His eyes gleamed at her in the yellow porch light. “My very own little baby sister.”

“I'm going to stay here, too, Peter. I don't ever want to leave.”

“You look so solemn. Like you're about to swear a blood oath.”

“I feel like it.” For a moment she thought how it would be to do it—to cut open her purple thumb and dip a pen into the blood. She gave a brief laugh and kicked a pebble off the porch, stumbling a little. From down on Route One, like distant applause, came the sound of traffic. The twins' plastic kite, caught high in the maple tree, fluttered against the branches with a trapped, tearing sound. There was a slip of moon, and the air was cool, smelling faintly of something sweet. All the elements of the spring night had a ticklish familiarity, reminding her of the New England springtimes of her childhood, and she felt a thrill of happiness. How odd, she thought, that any memory of that miserable time should make her happy.

They stood looking up at the moon, picking out constellations, listening as a car turned down Perkins Road, passed the house, and stopped at Ginger's. Susannah recognized it: Ginger's sister Sheila, the one with the husband who drank.

“Old Ivan is out late,” Peter said. “I thought that might be him.”

“Old Ivan leads a very complex life,” Susannah said shortly, and Peter didn't pursue it.

Her happiness didn't quite dissipate; it clung to her like the effects of the champagne. She stood by while Peter got into his Volkswagen and started the engine. Then she bent down and kissed his cheek through the open window. He reached out and tugged at one of her long braids. “It's good to have you home, honey pie.”

Garnet, the second waitress, started work that week. Susannah knew immediately, from the way Ivan pretended not to look at her, that Garnet was what he'd been scouring Connecticut for, that he'd be sleeping with her before long if Garnet was willing—and she looked willing, a jolly, busty redhead with a premature tan, a dirty mouth, and a heart of gold.

In mid-June, Susannah stopped working at the restaurant and began writing a new story—“The Cage With Glass Walls,” she called it. She worked on it with her usual slow, dreamy obsessiveness, staring out the bedroom window at the green tops of trees, the bright blue sky, the sudden black dart of a bird across the light. The story inched along, wearing her out, so that by early evening, when she had abandoned her notebook for the day, she used to walk down the road to Ginger's to be refreshed. Ginger, home from work, would be sitting in the air-conditioned kitchen with her feet up, drinking Tab. She always complained, first thing, about her feet.

“Have I got corns?” she would ask, rhetorically sticking one bare, bumpy foot into the air as evidence. “I've got corns the way your cats have fleas.”

What refreshed Susannah was Ginger's way of achieving instant intimacy with people, by the simple expedient of baring her own soul, immediately and without reserve. In turn, Susannah found herself confiding in Ginger, and the sea of the personal, the
human
that embraced her in Ginger's kitchen was as cooling to her hot soul as the air conditioning was to her sweaty arms and face. She had never told anyone—only Duke, who already knew—about Ivan's infidelities, but she told Ginger, hoping for words of wisdom. All Ginger said was what Susannah had been telling herself for years, but when Ginger said them the words took on solidity, and universality, and inevitability.

“Life is full of choices,” Ginger said. “You take the son of a bitch with his faults, or you leave him.”

“Surely there are other choices,” Susannah said timidly.

“What? Change him? Don't make me laugh. Love him or leave him,” Ginger said, and added, “If he were mine—” She shrugged and raised one eyebrow. She liked Ivan, Susannah knew. Everyone liked Ivan, especially women. She couldn't recall ever meeting one who didn't. Even Margie—a devoted wife if anyone was—had flirted outrageously with Ivan during that visit. “If he were mine,” Ginger said, “I'd take him, all right.”

Susannah nodded. “I guess that's the choice I've made.”

“Don't look so glum,” Ginger said comfortably. She seemed to find such limitation of choice appropriate—agreeable, even. Her own options had been as sparse; the one she chose had worked out just fine. Ginger cut her way neatly through a life composed of crises made the best of—like a tried and true old knife, much-sharpened. “It could be worse,” she said. “In his own way, he's devoted to you, and you know it. You lucky dog.”

In Ginger's cool kitchen, Susannah became a lucky dog, a woman to be envied because her husband, though unfaithful, was Ivan. Ginger might commiserate with her, but she respected her, too, for landing such a man. This was soothing, and so was its corollary: though she was a lucky dog, she had problems, too, and Ginger's sympathy flowed out to her, gathered her in, calmed her. “That's life,” Ginger was always saying. It was her philosophy, and Susannah adopted it eagerly: life, after all, was the whole point.

“I wouldn't be happy if I weren't so miserable,” she said to Ginger. “Didn't someone famous say that?”

She could see she was becoming one of Ginger's magpie collection of crisis-ridden heroines, and she looked forward, during the long, full, feverish hours over her notebook, to the aimless talks in Ginger's kitchen—about other people's problems, or her own, about gruesome operations and soul-wrenching divorces and troubled children, about high prices and recipes and the Silvergate Café.

“I love that place,” Ginger said. “I'd crawl on my knees waiting tables for Duke and Ivan. I consider it a privilege to be working there—really, I do, corns and all.”

They hired another kitchen helper at the Café, a young black man named Simon who hustled from refrigerator to stove to counter as if he were on skates. The restaurant continued to thrive; they extended their hours, serving afternoon tea and light dinners; they talked of hiring a cashier. They even had a “regular”—a thin man with a white beard who came in every day for a bowl of soup and said he hadn't eaten meat in forty-nine years. Kiki Sheffield ate there and told Ivan, who waited on her, that the food was fabulous, not so wholesome that you couldn't eat it. The contract came from Susannah's publisher, and then the check; she bought the twins each a bicycle, with training wheels, and put the rest into a new bank account, in her own name. The twins went to stay with their grandparents in Ashtabula for the summer; Duke drove them out there, with the two new bicycles on a rack behind the car, then turned right around and came back so he could be at the restaurant bright and early the next morning. Susannah immediately missed the little girls—the warm, fat bundle of one or the other of them on her lap while she read a story.