Page 63 of Meet Me in the Garden

I have no will to finish the chair tonight, none to fix dinner either. In the pause, there’s only Ginny. Bebop pours from the Victrola, a trumpet’s notes coming quick and scattershot. I’ll join Felix in the living room, let the new record distract me.

He’s listening with his head back and his eyes closed, a cigarette between his fingers, rapturous. He tells me to be free, to do the things I want to do, but I can’t have what I really want, so what then? Impossibleto sit here. Back to the kitchen. A song fades out and a new one starts, casting frenzied notes through the house. I take out the saltine crackers and the tin of clams, check the refrigerator for butter and cream. I have everything I need, but I stand still. The music is telling me something else.Look at this right here. You’re meant to make something of it.Then I’m opening my sketchbook and pencils. Not enough. I need color. Chair to the cabinet, reaching all the way back for the cans of paint samples. I pull them out, dusty but still good. Several pinks for the door, a dark blue that I tried on the walls, two shades of white. I cover the table with a cloth, pour colors on an old plate. My sketchbook pages are too small, the paint too wet. It would ruin it. Back to the living room, flipping through the records for one I’ve taken from work and don’t care about. I cut open its jacket; inside is plain white. I begin. I have a small brush for painting along the ceiling trim—still too large for what I’m doing, but the best that I have. I use a darker pink for the sardine tin, a lighter pink for the sink. The tin turns out too big. The sink darkens as it dries, it needs to be lighter. I take the other half of the jacket and start over, looking closer, allowing myself the time it takes.

I have a rough painting by the time the children burst through the door. They look at what I’ve made, perplexed. “Why are the colors wrong?” Clément asks.

“It’s the only paint I had.”

“You’re better at drawing,” Nathalie says.

“Well, I have to start somewhere. Come help me make dinner.”

Felix comes, too. I give the children the crackers to smash into crumbs. I melt butter and instruct Felix in spreading the clams on the dish. He starts the record over as dinner bakes and the children play outside again and I rinse my brush in the sink, the water bright pink and then fainter.

He smiles at me while we eat but I can’t shake my stubbornness. I hate not knowing the right way to fix myself, hate relying on him for permission. Later, the dishes are drying on the rack and the children are sleeping and music’s playing softly from the living room. My painting is on the table, and I’m adding to it, using a toothpick for the details. I need brushes. Need better paper. The colors sink into the album jacket.And still, something’s stirring in me. Ginny pressing me against a wall. Sunlight glinting off the surfer as she notices me watching her. A garden. A bouquet of wildflowers. I sewed blue curtains for our house when I once dreamed of white ones. I married Felix in a courthouse, his friend our witness, gave him my cheek to kiss and said, “I’m lucky.” Twice, I’ve married men I don’t love in the right way.

Felix appears above me at the table. “So? It feels good, doesn’t it?” he says. “Just doing what you want?”

I stare into the blue paint. “What if what I want is dangerous?”

“How is it dangerous? What—because the children will go to sleep a little past their bedtimes?” He laughs.

Unfair of me, to resent him this much when it’s my choice not to tell him.

Ginny starts back at the plant, and I learn her schedule. I know where she likes to eat and when she breaks for a cigarette. I know she hardly smokes it, just lets it burn between her fingers. I know where she is, so I can avoid those places.

Sometimes something goes wrong, though—she shows up when I don’t expect her. I trust she’ll be at her machine but I’m by the back entrance, overlooking the shiny cars in the lot, and then she’s there, her arm is close to mine, the sleeve of her shirt rolled up to the elbow, and I haven’t had time to prepare. I’m exposed, startled, losing even the simplest of sentences, forgetting the wordhello.

And then it’s July, and Adele and I are at the train station, sending the children off on the Sunset Limited to be with their grandparents. Mama and Papa Laurent have folded Nathalie into their family without hesitation. Maman and Auntie Bertha want nothing to do with her, so Clément and Nathalie stay with the Laurents the whole time. Adele and I found a colored train car with a bunch of empty seats, and in go Nathalie and Clément and Rudy and Titter and Bobby ahead of us. The five of them will spend two days together, without us, on the train. We’ve packed meals in a basket, given them pocket money for hot dinners. They havecards and games to play, a stack of new comic books, some paper for drawing and a pack of colored pencils. Sebastian’s still too young, but once he’s three, he’ll go, too.

I go to look for a porter, find one and return with him just as Adele’s saying, “Rudy, remember: As the oldest you’re in charge of making sure all the children are safe and making good choices.”

“This is Mr. Freeman,” I say to the children.

The porter in his crisp uniform smiles down at them. “Are you boys and girls ready for the journey?” he asks.

They nod, some of them more certain than others. Clément’s holding back tears, though I know that, despite the nerves and homesickness, he’s excited for the trip. He’s been going on about beignets for the past two weeks.

“Mr. Freeman’s going to look out for you, now,” I say. “You do what he tells you to, you hear? He has his own little girl back home, he told me. And do you want to know something very exciting? Mr. Freeman knows Daddy.”

Nathalie’s amazed. “That’s right,” Mr. Freeman says. “Before I worked this line, I worked the Great Northern with your father.”

We all hug and kiss goodbye and Adele and I stand on the platform and wave as the train sounds its whistle and pulls away, and then we cry together in the car the whole drive back home.

She drops me off outside my house. “Two days, and then we’ll get the phone call that they’re safe and sound.”

“Should we chase the train and get them back?”

She laughs through her tears as she pulls away.

It’s Saturday, just before noon, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I gave in and bought a set of oil paints, have made several paintings, but no subject appeals to me now. I cook lunch but my stomach’s too nervous to eat it. I take a long nap and when I wake up, I’m a little better, or at least I tell myself that I am. I snack on some crackers and walk outside, wander through the yard. The men did a good job with the patio off the kitchen. It’s spacious, and flat, and one afternoon the children helped me hang glass lanterns from the oak tree that shades it. When companycomes for dinner, I light candles and place them inside, and they look like fireflies. But beyond the patio is more land than we know what to do with, and below it still more, all the way to the forest part where we lose control of the land entirely. I think of all I could do with it, find myself soon overwhelmed.

It’s early evening now. I takeThe Price of Saltfrom my nightstand drawer, sit in a garden chair, and enjoy the last of the light. An empty house. It’s finally time to read it. I’m back in the department store cafeteria with Therese, waiting to find out who the second woman will be, and then—there she is. Shopping for a Christmas gift for her daughter. As the cover hints at, it’s a story of attraction and longing, but I don’t know how far the author will take it. I can’t trust her to take it all the way to love, for Carol and Therese to name what they’re feeling, though I’m desperate for them to. I read until it’s dark and I have to pick myself up and take myself to my chair in the living room—finished now, as lovely as I’d hoped. I turn the pages, hungrily, and there it is: a declaration of love. There are still chapters more to go, so much that could go wrong. It’s enough for tonight, I tell myself. I mark my page with Elise’s cream calling card, rummage through the refrigerator for something to eat, step away unsatisfied.

I draw a bath, drop my clothes on the tile floor. Flash of Hattie, measuring my waist. Flash of Ginny, the moment before she kissed me. I sink under the water. Open my eyes and everything’s hazy and strange, the pink tub and one of Nathalie’s plastic horses floating above. I stay under too long, push myself up, gasping. In bed, I fight against desire. I did so well for so long. I heeded Delphine’s threat. I chose Nathalie and Clément. I chose Felix and our home and this life. And now Ginny’s back and I’m at war with myself again. The night stretches on, and I get up and pace, put the Sarah Vaughan record on the Victrola, listen to her sing “Black Coffee” over and over.

Eventually, mercifully, the sun rises and the night is over. I open the novel again. It will surely be a tragedy, which is only right. Two women don’t get to meet in a department store and fall in love and live happily ever after. The story unfolds, full of longing and recklessness andmistakes and ambiguity and heartache. By the early afternoon, I’m finished. Carol is found out and disgraced and she loses her daughter. Another warning.

I go to the kitchen for a glass of water and when I return the light from the window is cast over the rumpled bedsheets, the blanket pulled back, the red novel lying just below the pillow. I want to take the dress Hattie made for me and add it to the scene, a sweep of chartreuse against white. I want to paint it. I’ll call itMarriage Bed. It’s vivid in my mind’s eye, beautiful and revealing, enough to give me away. Then I remember Hattie in her studio, looking at the portrait I drew of her, cutting it out with a blade. I can’t paint it.