Good fences, good neighbors, and all that.
There probably is a good German word for it, the moment when a longstanding friendship busts up on the rocks. The moment has come with Vikki. Our friendship developed in the creation of her garden, so naturally the stage for the endgame has been there.
We were barely acquainted that evening decades ago when in a cloud of smoked enhancement, I suggested that she turn her blackberry-infested sand box into a garden. She carried on as though she’d won the lotto. This, plus other red flags, only added color. How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? What better way to get grounded than planting a garden? “We’ll consult the genius loci,” I said and she nodded, as though she, at least, knew what I was talking about.
After three days’ labor of shovel and snip, her garden was naked as a beach, except for a sickly pear tree and a concrete whatsit we called “Clampitt’s Tub” at first, “Clampitt’s Tomb” later. Short of dynamite, it was going nowhere. The first organizing principle was to get quick-growing plants to hide it. Over time it acquired status and even had a career as a minor deity among the 39 flavors of deities in Vikki’s household.
Despite temperamental discordances, we were a good duo; her exuberance and credit card, my pickup and good back. I noticed pretty quickly I did everything involving possible risk of a broken nail. Jethro, she called me. I was willing to be the muscle because it gave me some control. If Vikki had had her way, there would have been a perpetual queue of plants on her patio. “But it grows to 35 feet.” “How soon?” “Ten years.” “I want it.” If I said I would pick it up and bring it the next time I came over, and then happened to forget about it, chances were that she would, too.
It wasn’t all her fault that a lot of what we planted were things generations curse you for, horticultural sins that deserve infinity-minus-1 days in purgatory. Three passion vines, for example. We were in a state of plant lust, a condition that feasts on novelty and ignorance.
Still, our baby got more gorgeous by the month. Then one day there came intimations of what loomed: obnoxious adolescence. The Jolly Green Giant, it turned out, was the genius loci. Spurred by hints that she couldn’t always expect rescue from my quarters, that she should hire a gardener, Vikki made a decision: everything out, especially the boring gray plants. (“I thought you liked lavender.” “Not that kind.”) I put up almost no resistance.
By then I was at play in my own garden. As the song advises, love the one you’re with. Besides, I had a fierce hatred of the vines by then, my own hankering for apocalypse. Bye-bye buddleias (they didn’t look great anyway), adieu lavenders and artemesias. A third of the garden landed in the back of my pickup and more would have if I hadn’t driven away. The following week Vikki hired a gardener, Hector, to attack the passion vines and whatever else. The only things that survived were a screen of variegated pittosporums and the original pear tree.
One might guess I would sidestep a role in Act 2. But, having been complicit in the bad choices of Act 1, I felt a duty to contribute my more mature discrimination to plant selection. Besides, I wouldn’t be doing the planting. That would be Hector (we were both falling in love with Hector). No vines of any kind. No water hogs. No icky roses. No nightmares.
Jolly Green Giant routed, the vacancy of a genius loci was filled by the personage of Martha Stewart. Martha had a red garden. We collected red phormiums, bromeliads, cordyllines, and salvias. I tried to draw the line at red petunias. “Oh, but what about these winey red ones?” Petunias into the cart. The result was dramatic, part Burle Marx and part bordello. I suggested planting black bamboos in the back corners to bump up the theatricality even more.
Thus began Act 3, in which Hector did the unthinkable, supplanted Martha as the genius loci. The queen of domestic arts was routed by a boot camp instructor. He installed a watering system, something I’d been advising for years. The plants began shaping up, finding their inner geometry. The pittosporums turned into gumdrops. I almost never visited Vikki’s garden but when I did, I afterward looked upon the rank insubordination of my garden with a pang of regret. I needed to remind myself I wasn’t a fan of topiary or the work involved, that I liked my garden’s teetering on the abyss. It was so lifelike.
Act 4, the smartphone hummed its tune. Vikki. We hadn’t talked since spring a year ago. She was calling because her neighbor was complaining that the bamboo was coming over to his side. What should she do about it?
I drove over thinking, how bad could it be, which is what I was thinking when I planted it.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
—Wislawa Szymborska, from “Possibilities”
“Why didn’t Hector deal with it?” I asked when she met me at the door.
“Hector’s not around.”
I knew Hector had made the transition from garden to bedroom, but not that he’d been shown the door. “While you’re here,” Vikki said, “would you take a look at the watering system? It isn’t working right.”
Wasn’t working right was not quite accurate. Replenishing the underground aquifer was more like it. Had the garden not been on sand, it would have been a marsh. The bamboo, which for years had been diffident, had had a stupendous growth spurt, perhaps in grateful response to the flood. There were indeed shoots poking up on the Hendersons’ side of the fence. My tools were in the pickup. My pick was in the pickup. My brain was . . . I refrain from saying.
I broke the PVC pipe. I broke my pick handle. Every decades-old resentment bloomed like sunflowers in a Kansas ditch. Not once had she offered to pay for gas in all those years. How many times had she lost her keys and I had to drive over to let her in with my set? Did she even thank me for planting the frigging marigolds that she forgot on the patio before she left for Tahoe that time?
I didn’t see her all afternoon. Working in anger gets you so far, but anger becomes as tiresome as the task itself, no small feat, in this case. The bamboo’s root system was tough as the devil’s hide, even in the loose sand. The clumps were dense with culms, ebony to pea green, and multiple lacquered variants thereof. Touching them, caressing them, was calming, and gradually I began carefully harvesting them, cutting them into 6-foot lengths, trimming them of foliage, and segregating thick from thin.
Their beauty was the kind that inflates something near your heart, a breath of heaven, like Roget’s International Thesaurus (Fifth Edition) or Roger Federer playing tennis. When that afflatus subsided, I started having moments of pudding-like sentimentality. I would miss the garden. I might even miss Vikki.
I took a break and tested the pears on the tree that had managed to stay neutral as Switzerland. It was loaded, no pear fully ripe but one worth a try. Its cardboard unsweetness reminded me what my friendship with Vikki had become. I tossed it onto the bamboo clippings.
As is often the case in gardening, where you end up is not where you set out for. When it came time for the coup de grâce, the final routing of the mother plants, I balked. Every argument said do it, and I couldn’t. The upshot was, I would have to buy a bamboo barrier and return to dig trenches and install it. The only positive aspect to that scenario was I’d be digging in sand and not clay.
The tidy epilogue that I’d been rehearsing with its fare-thee-wells would have to wait.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
—Szymborska
“That took you long enough.” When she asked, “Did you fix the watering system?” I lost my grip on my tongue. I said, in fact, I had further broken the thing and that if she had an ounce of sense, which was doubtful, she would get a professional to fix it. “Won’t that cost money?”
I prefer zeros on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher.
—Szymborska
I unloaded the bundled bamboo from my truck, standing it along the wall of my garage. There was enough to make something. Sooner or later I’d know what.
When I left her, I had not mentioned to Vikki the need for a barrier, nor of my noble intent to install one. Yesterday I found out how much a 20-foot roll of bamboo barrier costs. It costs money. Not my money. Her money. My pussyfooting around costs in the past contributed to misunderstanding and projecting. I am also clear how important it is to leave cleanly, the barrier in place, so that I will never be pondering at 3 a.m. whether it is traveling that moment under the Hendersons’ deck; and there are no more calls for rescue.
Or, I could decide, forget it. It’s her problem.
I haven’t done anything yet. I had the thought that perhaps I want to be the rescuer, that this is the role that I relish most of all. There’s probably a good German word for that, too. Also, I entertain the possibility that I don’t want the curtain to drop once and for all. I glimpsed something the other day having to do with us aging and moving into straits whose currents are unfamiliar and treacherous, where every familiar thing is a source of safety, even the things that drive you nuts.
It’s not a compelling advertisement for friendship but it’s something.
I surely will install the barrier, but I think I’ll wait a few weeks until the pears are ripe.
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R.E. Faro is a poet and essayist, and a longtime contributor to The Monthly. Read his blog at http://berrypicking.wordpress.com.
