Degeneration, denial, and plenty to cherish.
I have faced the task so often that every strategy to make shearing the ivy between my garden and Bertie’s anything but tedium is worn out. Every strategy but the most likely to succeed: Hire somebody. If I don’t do it myself, I might open a breach in the wall of denial and admit intimations of mortality. Soon I would find excuses not to pull the oxalis, prune the apricot, crawl out of bed.
One day last month my neighbor Frieda’s garden uphill had a shocking new look, as if a goat had been loose there for a week. A six-foot-high mass of rockroses had evaporated, along with mounds of santolina and lavender. The plum tree, which ought to have been removed, remained.
A young man was doing the damage. His name was Michael; he was Frieda’s nephew. I couldn’t help asking, did she want it to look that naked? Yes, that’s exactly what she wanted. His work was nearly finished; did I have anything that needed doing? I said, not at the moment.
Moments later, pricked by common sense, I went to tell him I did have a job, but he had gone. After dithering, I called Frieda. Our friendship has been in the doghouse because her dog yaps constantly when I’m in the garden. Honey pokes her anvil nose through the fence and snarls like she’d be doing the world a big favor if she sank her snout into my ankle. “What am I supposed to do about it?” is Frieda’s response.
I left a message and there was no return call; I called again, and left another. I gave up. Then, last week, Michael was back in the garden, straddling a limb of the plum tree, sawing away.
“You still looking for some work?” I yelled, and he answered, but I couldn’t hear what he said above the clamor of Honey’s dementia. She hurled herself against the fence in furious ecstasy. Michael yelled at her to settle down but that, I suspected, was whistling Dixie. Eventually he climbed down from the tree, collared her, and dragged her toward the house. She writhed like a cat, determined to keep an eye on me, knowing my wicked intent. Got that right.
“What did you do to her?” Michael asked when he got back.
We arranged for him to be at my house at 9 the next morning. In the interval, nourished by the prospect of having two strong arms at my disposal—I could see they were strong—I grew a fantasy: Instead of trimming the ivy, we’d dig out the elephantine trunk, remove it permanently. Free forever. It was doable. I had trouble sleeping, I was so psyched.
I was in pajamas when the doorbell rang at 9 a.m. Why, this time of all times, did a worker show up on time? Up close Michael wasn’t a person as much as a display of artifacts; hoops, studs, starry tattoo, chopstick stuck through a bun of black hair, and a skateboard clutched like a shield. He brought no tools, so I got mine from the shed, including my precious Japanese shears. The previous week I had misplaced my ordinary, all-purpose shears. How was that possible?
Using those shears on that crappy ivy. It broke my heart.
I hovered as he worked. Watch where you step; there are bulbs over here, and that stick is really a zauschneria that might be dead. If I was making him nervous he didn’t let on. “Wait”—I lurched forward—“use these loppers on that thick stem.”
He looked at me.
“They’re Japanese,” I said, pointing to the shears, as if that explained something.
He started to nod, then stopped, and bowed more deeply. “Ah so, samurai blade.” He slid his thumb over the edge, and watched as a line of blood beaded there, which he kissed off.
“Exactly.”
Rationality, praise Isis, was ascendant again: I abandoned the insane idea of digging out the trunk. Michael was efficiently transforming the ivy from zaftig to anorexic; he was faster than I, and would finish soon. I considered other projects. The acacia? Too dangerous. The stepping stones? Gravel needed. My compass pointed to Rita’s garden, which needed help even worse than mine. She had spent most of the last few months in Tallahassee, caring for her dying father. The passion vine, rooted somewhere in Santa Barbara County, once again overwhelmed her back hedge. Crabgrass colonized the pathways, floral equivalent of nose hairs. It was a perfect four-hour job with both of us working. An obstacle, however, was Rita. She had forbidden me to step foot in her garden with tool in hand. She couldn’t take care of it because of her knee, and she couldn’t afford a gardener. Something had to be done, and twice I put the garden back in shape, the first with her permission, the second not. She wasn’t as joyous as one might have expected. She insisted on paying me, and I refused, whereupon came the injunction.
I crossed my garden to take a look at hers. It looked worse than I’ve ever seen it. Abandoned. Rita would have cleaned up the old tomato stalks, at least. I figured her enforced absence was a dispensation. After all, I was doing it as much for myself as for her. Such degeneration in a short amount of time made me shudder. The mortality thing, again.
Michael worked like Bartleby the scrivener, intent, efficient, silent except for an occasional command—“Honey, shut up”—which she did, for about eight seconds. The only thing I learned about him—I thought he was kidding—was that his summer goal was to master a particular twist-flip on his skateboard. I doubt Bartleby would have shared that goal.
He did not say, “I would prefer not to” when I asked him to bag the debris, even though we were, at best, half-finished. Cleanup is always my least favorite part of any job. I could get used to having someone to boss around.
By late afternoon there was still a lot to do. Even with periodic time out for cleanup, mounds of withering greenery lay about. I was bushed. Michael had sliced his hand on a strand of wire and would soon be in the first stages of some fatal infection. He seconded my idea to call it a day.
He took off his sneakers before coming into my house. While he washed his hands I searched the medicine cabinet.
“It hardly hurts,” he said, as peroxide foamed in the cut.
I was hoping he would come back the next day, so we could finish before Rita got home, but he couldn’t, and we made arrangements for the following week.
Back outside, bent over to tie his sneakers, he lifted his chin and said, “Your garden is amazing. I’d like to do something like this for my mom.”
All day I had been projecting that he saw nothing of the garden’s beauties, perhaps because often I register only its deficiencies and demands, so I was surprised, and amused, thinking of the years of work it took to get it to this heightened level of imperfection.
“I’m sure your mom would like that.”
“Maybe you could help me out.”
While in the army, I worked in a morgue and noticed that most dead people smile.
—Edward Hoagland, from “A Last Look Around” (Sex and the River Styx)
“Supposedly he had less than 24 hours,” Rita tells me over coffee the morning of her return. “The hospice nurse said she never saw anything like it, coming back the way he did. When I got there, eight hours after the call, he was sitting up in bed, watching football. Everyone had a theory, he’s waiting for everyone to arrive, he’s waiting for everyone to leave, he wants to die at home, et cetera.”
“You, too?”
“More than a theory. A few nights later, I was at his bedside, about midnight, and I was half asleep when he started moaning, in agony. I grabbed the syringe to squirt some morphine under his tongue but he pushed it away, surprisingly strong for a bag of bones. ‘Get me up,’ he said, and so I sat him up, his eyes open wide. ‘It’s not right. It’s a terrible lie,’ he said. And then he kept repeating, ‘I’m going to hell and you’re all going to heaven.’ I tried to tell him the morphine was affecting his thinking, but he wouldn’t calm down. I finally asked if he wanted a priest. He did. What priest? He couldn’t tell me. I didn’t want to wake my mother; she needed the rest, but after looking through the phone book, I woke her. Time was passing. What if he died and went to hell? My mother called the rectory four times. The first three times she got a recording. Finally one of the priests answered. ‘I don’t like that man,’ she said after she hung up.
“We waited for over an hour. I kept looking in to see if Pops was still breathing. I thought the priest was blowing us off. Finally, the doorbell rang. He’d been lost, he said. His eyes were bloodshot like he might have had a sacramental nip or two. He went in the bedroom and was in there almost an hour. When he came out he made a big show of folding his stole. I was showing him the door when he asked my mother and me to sit down. Damn, I thought, a sermonette.”
Rita stands and opens the curtains behind her, and looks out at the garden.
“Good God. What happened to my garden? It looks like vandals have struck. You are responsible, I suppose.”
“Sorry. I hoped to have it done before you got back.”
“Didn’t we have an agreement?”
“No, we didn’t have an agreement. You gave a diktat. Tell me what happened. Did the priest break the seal of the confessional?”
“You’re up on canon law. What about property rights?” She turned back toward me. “Pops asked the priest to break the news. Which was, Pops had another family. A wife and two kids, back in Wisconsin. He wasn’t yet 20 when he walked away, disappeared. Never got divorced. Pops the bigamist. Dumping this in our laps right there on his deathbed. I was so pissed, especially for my mother, what she must have been feeling.”
“What was she feeling?”
“I don’t know. She was calmer than me. She was the one who asked Pops if he wanted us to contact them. ‘It’s doable,’ he said. Doable! That did it for me. My brother Jay located them; apparently it was easy. Two sons. The mother is gone. Jay left it up to them, come or not. In their shoes I would have said no way in holy Hades. Then one afternoon they walk in. Good thing I was sitting. Brian, the older, looks so much like Pops 30 years ago. It was the weirdest sensation.”
“Did they stick around?”
“Just for the day. And they came back for the funeral. They actually are decent guys, if a little Republican. It’s bizarre, having two more brothers, like extra shadows.”
“How did your dad respond to the visit?”
“He became a different person. The weeks after, he rallied and in that time I saw more affection between him and my mother than in the past 50 years. Times 10. One day I rolled his wheelchair so he could look out at the trees and he kept saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, you are so good to me.’ I wondered if he wasn’t mistaking me for someone else. Or maybe I was mistaking him for the father I used to have. He was so peaceful.”
Tears brim in her eyes. I can’t remember ever seeing her cry. She takes a paper towel and dabs them before they flow. “Thank you for taking care of my garden,” she says after a long, awkward pause, “for being good to me.”
“Yes. Well. It’s doable.”
——————————————
R.E. Faro is a poet and essayist, and a longtime contributor to The Monthly. Read his blog at berrypicking.wordpress.com.
