Mulch Read online

  A climbing hydrangea went alongside a tall pine at the edge of the patio; someday it would flower in a column of glorious, puffy white blossoms. She moved a stand of bamboo to a small hillock in the side yard; she also had a local quarry deliver enough rocks for Bill to construct a partial wall to buttress the little incline.

  It wasn’t the first time that patient Bill had been called upon to build a wall for her: He teased her about trying to replicate Roman ruins wherever they lived. On top of the wall she planted a couple of jasmine plants, their arching branches cascading gracefully down over the rocks, looking as if they had been there for years. In spring, it would be a shower of tiny yellow blossoms.

  Bill hadn’t minded building the wall, but he had disapproved of moving the bamboo nearer to the house. In fact, she had tussled with the big, awkward, soggy clumps all by herself, for fear he would talk her out of the project. This left her muddy, and with a sore back from digging, but with an unbounded sense of accomplishment. She had lassoed the bamboo like dogies with a hunk of sturdy rope, and dragged them from the back corner swamp, one by one. Bill warned her she was creating a future southeast Asian jungle, skeptical that the twelve-inch black plastic edging she imbedded around them would keep them in check. He had looked at her darkly: “Do you realize bamboo has been known to uproot whole houses?” She promised him to keep a constant eye out to be sure it didn’t grow beyond her plastic boundaries.

  The Leyland cypresses were the last straw. When she brought the three of them home a few days ago—and, granted, they were big, so they were pricey—Bill had asked her to sit down to talk. It didn’t matter to him that the cypresses were needed in the near distance to give real depth to the yard.

  With extra politeness, he brought out the family accounts and went over them with her. He didn’t even have to say it: It was obvious that she had become a horticultural spendthrift again. And right when they had taken on the biggest debt load of their lives. When he had gone on to suggest that she was overdoing the gardening because there was something missing in her life, Louise could hardly keep back her tears. She listened in this taut state, as he talked about the gardening “situation”—she would have laughed merrily at this euphemism had she had any sense of humor left—and, chastened, told him she would do the bills with him in the future, to get a better handle on their finances.

  Louise knew she had a problem. She was a binge gardener, not much better than the binge drinker, Mr. Woodruff, now busy fighting with his nervous wife by phone in the kitchen.

  She slumped against the handsome new bathroom sink and tried to dredge up one happy feeling about life.

  Woodruff slammed down the receiver and rejoined her in the bathroom, his head down, muttering under his breath. But his spirits seemed to lift as soon as he looked at his completed work—new skylight overhead, Mexican tile on the walls, touches of wallpaper, and custom cabinets.

  “It is lovely, Mr. Woodruff,” said Louise, meaning it. Fortunately, his skills had been ingrained so deeply that they over-rode the effects of alcohol. All those had days when he had stumbled in half drunk would soon be forgotten. She would pay him and he would be gone, and she could get on with her life.

  But no. No, he said, she needn’t pay him today; he would send her a bill.

  “And can I ask you one more little favor?” he asked. In his red and scarred face with its fattened jowls and knobbed nose she could see dimly the handsomeness that must have been in the young, strong, talented Carpenter Woodruff.

  “What’s that?” she asked, raising her chin to take any last blow.

  She realized he was cajoling her the way he must have cajoled his wife in better days. “I sure would love one last cup of your nice, strong coffee.” He smiled. With the exception of a couple of gleaming gold fillings in back, his teeth had grown old gracefully.

  She smiled back. “Come on, let’s sit in the kitchen. I have a couple of sweet rolls, too. I’ll pop them in the microwave.” She led the way down the hallway. She could see light at the end of this tunnel. But right now she had to make one more conversation with the man. Her mind sought vainly for a topic, and then one came. “By the way, Mr. Woodruff, do you know there is a valuable ground cover with your name?”

  “Is that so?” he asked, his voice rising with desperate interest. “Tell me about it.”

  After she closed the door on Woodruff, she felt strange. On a sugar high from the sweet bun, but no place to go. She wandered slowly through her house, trying to look at it objectively. Time to take stock of things.

  She had done well up to now, hadn’t she? After all, weren’t the pictures all hung now, and with only a few polite arguments with Bill? She wondered why he liked them hung higher than she did; it was one of their small incompatibilities. She straightened a small print that had moved from its assigned place.

  And Janie was doing well. Apparently she liked tenth grade at her new school. She was filling out, not quite as thin as she used to be. She had a few friends, the best one the boy across the street. True, when she got in a glum mood she disappeared for long, solitary walks. But since Louise used to do that herself, she was sure it was normal.

  Their highly social Martha, who didn’t know how to be glum, liked Northwestern University and loved being away from home. She and Bill were comforted by the fact that Louise’s parents lived three miles away in Wilmette, so that their daughter had a place to go if she needed family. When Louise went to Northwestern, she found, as she joked to friends, that her folks were about 497 miles too close. Now, it was perfect for Martha to have a grandmother and grandfather near at hand.

  Except Martha was spending little time with her grandparents. And her phone calls home were becoming less frequent. Louise felt she had lost a daughter and Chicago had gained a social butterfly. (“The quarter system is hell, Ma. It gives us no time to have fun.” “My, my, Martha,” Louise had said, “your profanity sounds so natural.” A snapshot of one-year-old curly-headed Martha flicked through her mind. “I’m not that profane, Ma. Just when I think of everything I’m supposed to jam in my mind in ten weeks! It sucks!” Louise would try to talk about language when she came home for Thanksgiving. “The hardest class is the English seminar on feminism and Marxism. Now, don’t worry about my becoming too rad—I’m more of a middle-of-the-roader.” Louise had smiled at this moderate position from her opinionated offspring. “But it’s this phallocentric stuff. It pervades our culture, Ma. I’m really going to have to bring you up to speed when I come home at Thanksgiving … if I come home.”)

  Phallocentric? Maybe she had better check some feminist writings out of the library before Martha arrived.

  As for making friends near home, she and Bill liked the neighbors, but nobody was a real friend yet. They preferred to travel back to Bethesda to see their old-time friends. Because Louise had been persuaded to take the job of grounds chairman of the swim club by Sarah, the potter, she had felt obliged to study up on landscape effects at the library. Another woman in the neighborhood, Sandy Stern, played tennis with her every week, enabling Louise to keep up with her game. But now it was too cold. She, Sandy, and the elusive Nora from across the street seemed to be the only women at home during the day, although there probably were young mothers ensconced in other houses. The interesting Mary Mougey came over one afternoon, and they had tea. Mary’s life seemed full of travel, to all parts of the United States and many countries of the world. As she told of the cruel plight of the millions of refugees in the world, Janie joined the two women, and sat on the floor at Mary’s feet near the white couch. Her stories of distressed children brought tears to the girl’s eyes, and Mary stretched out a hand to show she understood. As Louise saw the instant bond between the woman and the girl, she recognized Mary’s enormous talent at reaching out to people. The only trouble with Mary was that she was seldom home.

  Bill’s experience was different. As soon as they moved in, he had started playing poker with the neighborhood men; he was developing bosom buddies
faster than she was. As usual, her husband was right at home in a new place. Maybe that was because his family had moved many times when he was a child, while she spent her entire early life in the same house, with the same friends and neighbors.

  As for the job search, she’d made some progress, hadn’t she? She had borrowed an updated version of What Color Is My Parachute? from the library and answered a half dozen or more leads from friends and from the paper for writers and editors. So far she had had two interviews. Each time the job sounded so dull that she could hardly wait to get away. In both cases the offices had been modern, gray, electronically overburdened, and just not her kind of office at all. She would have to work on that.

  Summing it up, Louise could say everything had been going along fairly smoothly. There were little things not quite set to rights: the smell and the swamp in the yard. The smell was in a closet within a closet. Mr. Woodruff, on seeing it, dismissed it. “Y’c’n fix it yourself,” he assured her. “All these slab houses, from California on out cast, have no basements so they have dead air beneath them. Usually smells like a rat died.”

  It was a small linen closet with a long, thin door in its side wall. This allowed access to some pipes for the adjacent bathroom that ran from underneath the concrete slab the twelve feet up to the flat roof. When she had first opened this access door she recoiled backward, holding her nose against the strong, moldy odor, and noted fleetingly before she closed the door that it would have made a good hiding place for her precious jewels, had she owned any.

  Bill thought the odor inconsequential and had it low on his list of household tasks. She, on the other hand, put it first.

  This smell was her enemy. It was the distillation of all the strangeness and the adjusting she had had to do in the past two months.

  “It sucks!” she muttered. “It’s got to go.” Noting only fleetingly that she had absorbed daughter Martha’s raw language, she went to the kitchen cabinet where Bill kept assorted tools and found a big roll of silver duct tape. According to him it was capable of holding the whole world together. Now she’d find out if he was right or not.

  She ripped off stubborn hunks of the stuff and sealed the little door on all sides. Then she crouched down and sniffed from bottom to top. She smiled: only a trace of odor left.

  One more small battle won. She got into her Wellingtons and rain jacket and went to the kitchen and fetched the colander filled with daily food scraps—vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, and eggshells—and went to the living room and slid the tall glass doors open. As she stood on the semicircular patio, raindrops pelted her face. She took deep breaths of cold air that hinted at the coming of winter.

  She took a spade from the toolshed and dug a careful, deep hole in the garden alongside the patio, avoiding the little patch of pale lavender autumn crocus, Colchicum speciosum, which she had tucked amidst the Geranium sanguineum “Album.” She found a spot and dug energetically, dumped in the contents of the colander, then carefully replaced the earth. It made her feel good that every useful scrap and ort of food was going back to recirculate in the earth. Each time she buried garbage, she thought of her grandmother, who had buried her scraps in her sunny, old-fashioned garden, winter and summer. She mused sadly on the fate of that old lady, who after having lived, loved, and gardened for eighty-two years, was now confined to a wheelchair in a retirement home. Only her bones, and not her mind, had deteriorated.

  Thoughtfully, Louise returned her spade to its place in the toolshed, trying not to dwell on the realization that her grandmother was nearing her last days. Then she came back into the yard and turned her eyes toward the final garden problem: the swampy corner.

  The trees were so numerous on the property there was no way a truck of fill dirt could be driven into the area. Even if it could, she reflected guiltily that she had spent her last dollar on garden materials—at least for this season.

  She frowned and stared at the spot, then went down the steps and across the forested yard to look at it more closely. This tiny corner was a bog in dry weather and a pond in wet. On this dank, rainy day, the water poured evilly into it, imparting an ominous feeling that reminded her of a dark poem by Robert Frost about a forest pool.

  Yet she had to admit that there was an awkward charm to the corner. It was due to the flagrant, big-leafed plants sprouting from the edge of the wetness. Skunk cabbage, with their mysterious, mottled purple and green spathes emerging in early spring, and turning showy yellow as spring grew older. In England, she had seen magnificent varieties growing near pools. The British used them in abundance, not being as skittish as Americans about the bad odor that was emitted when the leaves were crushed.

  She was beginning to see possibilities out in this dank corner, and for a moment considered giving the swamp a reprieve. Her mind conjured up a picture of a lush bog garden, with plants that liked their feet wet. Japanese iris, Cyperus, Lysimachia, Japanese sweet flag, and horsetail would be perfect here.

  Then, like a sign, a new burst of rain came splattering down on her face. Her heart hardened: She wasn’t going to maintain a swamp in her new backyard. But how to get rid of it?

  In an instant, a solution came to her that would spare her the expense and labor of buying and hauling bags of fill. She would just gather the fall leaves that her neighbors were putting out for the trash men, dump them out here, and bring up the level of the land. She heaved a sigh of satisfaction and headed for the house for a hot cup of coffee.

  Scuffing leaves as she went, she walked quickly with head down around the corner of the house, nearly running into the figure wearing a hooded loden cape.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, recognizing the calm face beneath the hood. It was Nora, mysterious Nora, with whom she had not spoken since the cocktail party at Eric and Jan’s when they first moved in. Louise felt unaccountably nervous. The smoky woman. The woman that men liked so well.

  “Louise.” Voice warm and lilting. Gray eyes irritatingly beautiful and unlined, although she appeared to be in her early forties like Louise. “I’m so glad I found you. When I rang your bell no one answered.” She tilted her head back and looked at the sky. Her hood fell off her dark, straight hair. Then she moved close to Louise. “Rain’s stopped. D’you want to try sitting on a log out in your backyard?” She pointed to Louise’s supersaturated woods.

  “Wouldn’t you rather go inside?” asked Louise. “It’s so … chilly out here.”

  The big eyes studied Louise seriously. “Not really. I would always rather be outside, with the squirrels and birds.”

  “I’m dressed for it, I guess,” conceded Louise, leading the way, clumping down the slight decline to a large log. The termites that had once feasted on it had contributed to making it a good seat. Nora would have a good view of squirrels here: They were working furiously, cleaning and burying oak nuts for winter.

  “How about this?” asked Louise, and plopped down.

  “Perfect,” said Nora, smiling. “We’re right in the spirit of Robert Frost.” She settled her body down gracefully, then drew cigarettes and matches from a pocket and languidly lit up. Louise noticed she didn’t inhale much; could she be smoking just for the effect? And how could she smoke if she were such a nature lover?

  For a moment Nora said nothing. Then she turned her gray eyes on Louise and said, “I see you’ve had a contractor doing things to the house.”

  “Yes, a very slow contractor. He finally finished renovating the guest bathroom before Bill and I died of old age.”

  Nora chuckled. “We could tell from the things you put out to the curb.”

  “I’ll show it to you if you like.” Her voice was not enthusiastic. At the moment, nothing interested Louise less than her hard-won remodeling job.

  “And you’ve populated your woods with the most wonder-fill-looking plants.”

  Louise took a side wise glance at Nora’s serene countenance. How unruffled the woman appeared, in contrast to Louise’s churning inner discontent. “I didn’t know if
you’d noticed all the activity. I’ve just been trying to achieve—oh, that Japanese thing with near distance.” She opened her hands on her lap. “I think, however, I’ve done enough this fall.” That was surely an understatement.

  Nora’s cigarette was now at rest in her graceful hand, like a small, magic wand. Her bearing, as she sat on the termite-ravaged log, was as royal as a queen’s. She turned her serene gaze again toward Louise. “I know you’ve been terribly busy, Louise, and done wonderful things. But are you happy here?”

  Louise, who thought she had composed herself against domestic disorder, erratic contractors, closet putrefaction, the onset of empty-nest syndrome, and the psychic anguish of moving, looked for a moment at the poet sitting beside her on the log.

  Then she burst into tears.

  7

  Invisible Janie

  JANIE SNEAKED QUIETLY OUT THE REC ROOM door, closing it soundlessly behind her. Leaning against the house near the door was her bamboo walking stick, one her father had found for her and neatened up by cutting off its small branches with pruning scissors. She grasped it firmly and took off, loping through the woods that were her yard and down the street toward the nearest park. She left behind parents talking money. Specifically, Martha’s college costs. By the time Janie went to school, think how much time they’d have to spend “talking finances,” as they called it. By then, Martha would be a senior and the family probably would be penniless. They wouldn’t sit there and tell comfortable little jokes to each other while they did their figuring. They would probably look grim and resentful, the way poor people always looked when they discussed their problems on TV shows. Janie was afraid of being poor. Maybe she had better get an after-school job; her mom didn’t seem in a hurry to go to work. Having peeked at Martha’s quarterly tuition bill, Janie didn’t want to be the one to bring the family down.