The Garden

“The Blue New York Botanical Garden” art by Yuko Kyutoku

by Jessica Payne

	Nothing tastes sweeter than that of the earth, you convinced me, as we stood bent at the hips in the garden that summer. We opened our mouths wide and waited for the stalks to thrust from the soil. We lusted for the taste of tomatoes, eaten raw and ruthless like apples, their red juice running down our arms to show insides reversed. We spent hours there, balanced in different positions, our eyes straining for evidence that the ground had broken and a seed was indeed sprouting from within. 
	You believed that all things were meant to be. We were born without a choice, but destined for a life just the same. “Just look at that,” you said, your feet bare and buried in the soil. You knelt and shifted a mound of dirt with your finger, a green sprout crowned between your toes. The willingness of the earth excited you--its ability to open and spit things out. I was leery of such a trick. I kept shoes on my feet. 
	I watched you from a lawn chair at the garden’s edge. My legs climbed down from my hips and drew a shadow across the grass. I wore your favorite shorts of mine, the only pair I owned. I had no desire for another pair, a pair more fashionable or a pair less worn. “Maybe when the sales start up again,” I said, knowing such thoughts were worthless.
	It was late in the day; the sun fell into your eyes. “That looks to be the start and the end of it for now,” you said pointing to the center of the garden. That single-headed sprout, like a voice in the dark. “How long do you think it will take for the others?” I wondered to you aloud. “There’s really no telling,” you said and then trailed on about the predicted weather. I listened, catching every fourth word. 
	We lay in bed that night and listened to the sound of rain as it played our metal roof. Our little music chamber. I looked to you and waited for my eyes to focus; it was impossible to tell if you’d already been sleeping or were waiting for me to speak. I tried to find it in your face, that rapid involuntary twitch to the rhythm by which you dreamt. I rode your strong inhalation across the pillows and into your scent and listened. I waded through your jumbled rants, which are completely useless until someone else’s name is uttered. I fell asleep with an empty breast.
	At the breakfast table, you asked me what I had dreamt, and for the first time I told you that I could not remember. “It’s as if a weight’s been dropped inside me, and no matter what strength I muster, there’s just no telling what lies beneath it,” I said. You’d spent the morning cooking breakfast, and I felt that you deserved a better answer. I remembered a passage from a book I’d once read and made you believe I’d thought of it, as you slept beside me. 
	The smell of the eggs seemed worse beneath a thick spread of butter. I took a deep breath through my mouth to experience their taste, but my body did not want it. I reached for a slice of toast instead. You had never pulled more than the door from the pantry; I realized your motive, as you watched me chew. I decided to reward you with another bite, and perhaps tomorrow, I would give you one more. 
	We bought this house for the sounds it made. “It has a story to tell,” you said, and I agreed. As a child, I slept with a flashlight and a shaker of salt, afraid of what loomed at the foot of the bed. I walked my weight across the floorboards, and the voices grew fainter. An ambiguous whisper echoes in the corners of every room. You convinced me that I heard only what I wanted. Or perhaps, you said, what I desired. I learned to double-step with you in the parlor, and the house grew ears, while I no longer listened. 
	That was the summer when my mother became wrapped within the hands of the clock. She wound around and around herself and behind her words there was a horrible gurgling, her tongue sliding across the pool beneath. I wanted to tilt her forward, empty her onto the floor and soak the mess through a paper towel. My mother, the watering can. Oh, what pleasant things she had once grown from beneath the arches of her feet. She was tickled, even by the weeds. We kept her bed on the far side of our home. “Buttercup,” her voice rippled from behind the door, her hairbrush tarnished upon the vanity. Her hair fractured and turned against the back of my hand; the sound of the bristles chomping grew louder with each encounter. I reminded myself: This is your mother, this woman of pale and forgotten envy. I searched her face and her flesh, but still, I could not find the memory of a child’s love. With each close of the door, I felt a funeral. 
	The weather was harsh--no rain for weeks. The wooden stakes were ridiculous, as they stood from the ground with nothing to show. I wanted to pull them, with every sense of violence, from where they had refused to root and hurl them into the woods. I wanted to show the trees what became of failure. I was embarrassed inside. You said all would be fine, as you dug your toes into the soil and wiped your fingers across your shirt. I could not pull my sights from the stains that no vigorous movements of my own fingers or the toxins of soap would be able to remove.
	We changed the ritual of our days. You spent more time attempting to stimulate the yard. You rigged the hoses to emulate the rain and hummed along the garden’s edge. I locked myself inside; I watched you from afar. I studied the length of each day by the shadows on the wall. I was spoiled, perhaps. I could not understand the reason for such effort. Breathing never seemed so unattainable as grass and trees and flowers bloomed all around us. I opened my hand and remembered it was full of seeds. I remembered how you tucked the soil over each seed with your bare hands “for blessing”, and afterward sat for dinner without washing. The stench was a constant reminder, like the growing crack in the hallway that allowed the innards of the house to be known.
	There was one evening when I watched you from within. You seemed much smaller from where I stood, a simple thing, and so I flattened the palm of my hand and held you through the window. Your body moved mechanically, with no complaint for what was expected of it. You balanced upon the windowsill, when the moment came, and adjusted the wire for the tomatoes. You sifted the soil and found no more and no less than what you had expected. Your shoulders were pulled tightly in the back, a man on a leash, and I climbed onto the other side of the glass to release you.
	I left the door ajar. 
	You grew larger with each step, as I drew closer. I rested my face upon your bare back and did not mind the salty taste. You said that I needed to warm up to the idea of you, and I assumed you were right. I parted my lips and let each bead collect in the pocket beneath my tongue. I leaned forward atop the uneven earth and spilt. The grass bubbled and split like a burn. The warmth rolled across me, a punishment well deserved, within the cold closeness of our embrace. It was only bone that kept us together at the center. The unflinching truths within the harshness and shock of life. Our flesh, pink and soft laid arrogantly atop the soil beneath us.
	The dogs invited themselves. We stood in ignorance and started our way up the hill and back to the house. The breeze decided itself too proper to carry the odor from the furniture, the walls, the floorboards. “What difference does it make?” I shouted, and you laughed. It was your laughter that made the dogs run faster, from one room to the other. I was convinced of it. I could only imagine what beastly things had taken place there, as the weather began to spoil. Heavy jaws brushed against the dining table. Inappropriate pieces spread across appropriate places. I chased after them in circles; their tongues hung from their faces with delight. My mother appeared in the entryway, feet dirtied and hair askew, she choked out a giggle from her dimpled center. I tripped over the puckered rug and began to cry. 
	It was funny, the way the dogs became children who covered their bottoms once the laughter stopped. You pulled them one at a time by the collar and through the backdoor. I was sure the bedroom was a fright. You told me to make myself comfortable on the sofa, as you pulled the fourth rotten son from the kitchen, his feet out before him, pushing up linoleum. You, the other portion of the angle, connected toe-to-toe with him in the center, as you strained in the opposing direction. “You’ve got to discipline the damn things,” I heard you say, without even a whisper. I could read your eyes well enough to tell the story, even if there were pieces chewed and replaced. 
	An heirloom quilt was strewn savagely across the floor. There was no place to turn where the pieces did not follow, like the sharp note of a violin echoing against the walls. I tried to stitch it back into one piece, but it was too complicated to mend. With each thrust and pull of the needle, a bit more of the quilt unraveled. Three frayed pieces became six, became twelve, became twenty-four. Within the hour, I held nothing more than a lapful of thread. A genetic code unraveled and complex. I wanted to bury the remains in the garden, inside a brass box I had received as a girl from my grandmother. You could not understand; you continued, as men do during such a time. You drew the bath and boiled the kettle. “How can I be expected to throw such a thing away,” I said, “alongside eggshells and nail clippings?” I laid in the bath and allowed the warm water to sink into my pores, to drown me from the inside. 
	It took time for the smell to escape, the scratches on the floor remained. My mother was in bed by that time, in her slumbers, as we called them. I sat on the edge of the mattress and fed her broth. There were days when she smiled, and I felt nurtured within her light. On others, she clenched her lips and refused each bite. “Edelweiss,” I pleaded. Her legs, thin and clean, snuck out from the blankets, as she struggled to recover. 
	The air was only stirred by your passing. 
	We spent our afternoons in separate places, so we would have topics to discuss over supper, I suspect. My mother’s flesh threatened to tear at the points of her angles. She refused to eat what was natural; I had little talent for cooking or for convincing. She was dreaming, merely walking in her sleep. You gave her a doll, “a child,” you said. She carried it against the length of her thigh; I could not tell who was holding on to whom. My mother’s face grew still. As the days moved on, you said the garden was dry and excused yourself from the table each morning. I wiped my mother’s lips and lost track of time beside her. 
	There were flies in the kitchen; there was hair on the floor. Visitors would not notice the state of the house, for we shooed them away some time ago. The linoleum was cracking, and the oven was rusting. It was difficult to remember when it all began, if it were a time before my mother, before the garden, before the aches and the cramps of love lost. We retreated into the pinks of our skins and closed the door behind us upon each exit. We never turned to look behind us, one always leaving the other. Our words were at odds. You only spoke of the garden--the prospect and the growth. Our walls were dingy. How could I be expected to think of anything but death? You checked the harvest each morning; I was left to spoil in such close quarters. I said, “I am rotten to the core--don’t you see?” You said I was bruised and sour. You said to give it some time; I would recover. “Pieces that are bruised are cut out. They never heal,” I said. 
	My pores filled with water, although they never leaked. My mother cried from her room on the far corner of the house, her sounds unfamiliar and strange. You spoke of only rain and your need for more. The hoses would only reach so far; the water from the well was soft and the soil was harsh. The knowledge you had was natural. It was your words that were forced on the topic of other matters. I heard very little. My ears were swimming, and my vision was a blur. My appetite for juices, red and thick, grew bitter. You moved the lawn chair into the shed. 
	You were angry at the onset of summer. “It can all become fertilizer,” you said. You were delighted by the feast of life upon death. I saw no strength in it. I laid the doll upon my mother’s chest in her final moments. She was gone long before then; she was merely walking deeper into her slumbers. Her fingers wrapped around the back of the doll’s head, as if to pull it nearer her breast. “Death throes,” the doctor later said to me. I was convinced. I said to you, “The end is not subtle. It is never peaceful”. 
	It was unseasonably warm on the afternoon my mother was buried, just a few days into the autumn. We returned home to an empty house. I felt you, that afternoon, in the unnatural tilt of the mattress. It pulled me closer to you, as you reclined on the opposite side. I had the look of sleep; I took breaths from my mouth with struggles. You wore your shoes on the comforter. I did not hear you walk into dreams of your own, though you muttered my name from a place that seemed distant. Only when you reached for the ceiling fan did I stir. The base swayed from the ceiling, like a threat. My lips ailed blue. I grabbed you by the wrist and pulled you down to lie next to me. “Let what falls bury us both,” I cried. You lay atop me. You kicked your shoes over the bottom of the bed. You took my face in your hands and, as I looked back at you, the blades began to press down. I closed my eyes and thought of nothing more.

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