Laura Rider's Masterpiece (2 page)

Laura first met her the night she took eighteen potted plants, old and new favorites, to the Hartley Garden Club. The rumor
had started a week before: Jenna Faroli was going to join. Laura was going to stand before the twenty-five members, the Hartley
High Society, women to whom she would forever be in service. They had asked that she explain the virtues and care of each
perennial, and she also planned to show them a crafty way of cheering up a room with container gardens in galvanized-steel
buckets wrapped in sticky floral shelf paper and ribbon. As Charlie had said, “They love that shit.”

The Hartley ladies, with their garden club and book club, Friends of the Library, and their college-bound children, had no
idea how pretty Laura Rider, through the years, had improved herself, how a decade before, for instance, she had started listening
to public radio because an older woman employee, a crank, had insisted upon it in the greenhouse. When Laura listened to authors
talking about their books she could actually feel her mind, the ant colony of it, the bustle and movement up there, the building
of tunnels, the carrying of food. Her brain, she knew, was improving itself of its own accord.

She had never said a word to anyone about how she considered Jenna Faroli to be her teacher. Charlie, maybe, sensed her infatuation,
but not, surely, the extent of it. Here was another essential part of Laura Rider that she could not speak about. No one would
understand the solace and the thrill of that phantom place, 90.4 FM, made possible by a bandwidth, made possible by waves
as long as a football field. From ten every morning until noon she imagined that she and Jenna were alone in a sunlit room—yes,
just the two of them. Laura was at a child’s desk, with the top that lifts, and the deep well inside for crayons and neatly
stacked workbooks. Laura, obedient and shining. How she loved slipping into the dream, master and pupil bathed in the warmth
of their mutual regard. The idea, though, that in real life she might be in the same small room with Jenna at the garden club
filled her with such excitement and such dread she had to pull over twice on the way in order to steady her breathing, and
once for fear she might throw up.

Under any circumstances it is surprising and sometimes disappointing, and even unnerving, to see a radio personality, particularly
after feeling intimate with the voice, that voice which seems the whole of the person. Laura, unfortunately, had identified
Jenna at the grocery store a month earlier and so already had had the shock. She was prepared for the disjunction, for the
fact that Jenna was not, as she had imagined, a woman with an ample bosom in a cream-colored suit, a knot of blond hair at
her nape, milky skin down her throat, and medium-sized pearls glowing in her ears. Jenna in the flesh was awkwardly tall,
flat-chested, dark-haired, and her large wide feet, in her sensible shoes, were duckishly turned out. She was nothing like
the beauty her rich, warm voice suggested. Laura had thought how unfair it was that in the twenty-first century, when so much
help is available, smart women were still often not attractive, and yet, on the other hand, Jenna didn’t seem to make much
effort. She had looked as if she’d taken no care at all, a smudge of lipstick on her shapeless mouth, and two black lines,
also smeared, under her small gray eyes. The makeup did nothing to highlight what may have been her best features. She wore
silky sack clothing, the sort made for women who have given up. Laura had wondered if it was possible—could it be?—that Jenna
had even the smallest inferiority complex when it came to her appearance. How strange that would be, and yet Laura’s love
for her would be redoubled if it were true. The more she thought about it, the more she realized how awful it would have been
if Jenna were beautiful, how much more terrifying it would have been if Laura had to stand before the Jenna Faroli of her
imagination, a woman who was mythically glamorous as well as knowledgeable, wise, articulate, kind, and deep.

Jenna would have occasion to remember that first meeting with Mrs. Rider. She remembered Laura’s apparent sweetness, the moussey
drenched look of the blond curls that framed her face, the rosy blush, and the way she’d demurely lowered her eyes and then,
as if in that shy moment she’d given herself a pep talk, she’d lifted her graceful head and gazed directly at Jenna. There
was the charm, too, of the library’s basement, the glossy salmon-colored paint on the cement floor, the faux-wood paneling,
the case of trophies suspended from the ceiling, relics from a long-ago Hartley triumph. Jenna had come to the garden club
because she did not want to seem standoffish in her new community, and because she did mean to plant a bed of flowers. She
had come even though she despised clubs, especially those that were sure to attract no one but women.

She sized up the group in her first glance. The members were the upper crust, the wives of doctors and lawyers from the surrounding
area, or perhaps, she thought, the Hartley women were themselves professional. It was hard to tell. They had good dye jobs,
the silver and golden blond streaked through the gray, and many of them wore pleated slacks and matching jackets, and flats
on their feet, their arms jangling with bracelets, all of it meant to seem casual. They were standing in tight clusters, as
they may well have done on the school yard in seventh grade. Jenna had learned to be careful of her own sex, and although
she appreciated a woman’s easy intimacy in the studio, off the air she admired restraint. Off the air she longed for reticence.
In the library basement she went straight to Laura’s display, to the table of virgin’s bower, crested iris, lenten rose, and
lungwort.

“How lovely,” she murmured, bending over the blooms. She wanted a sweep of beauty in her yard, however that could be had.
Often her listeners were eager to meet her, but when they did they stared, trying to put voice and face together, which, Jenna
knew, was a struggle.

Laura had squatted down to get her box of brochures from under the table, and when she stood up, there, right in front of
her, was her idol. In spite of her rich fantasy life, she had never imagined the first seconds, the introductory moment. “Ha!”
was what came out of her mouth on a sharp inhale.

Jenna remembered first thinking that Laura Rider was trying to make the mental leap, trying to square the fact of Jenna’s
unruly hair, the ungainly figure, with the disembodied silky voice. Or did the woman have a fever? Her color was high, her
wide blue eyes were glassy, her puffy lips parted in a small
o
. “Are you all right?” Jenna said, reaching across, touching Laura’s forearm.

“Me?” Laura breathed. What she’d give for a second chance, and yet she idiotically said again, “Me?”

Jenna couldn’t help admiring the style of the plant woman, a contrast to the constrained beige uniforms of the garden club
members. Laura Rider was wearing a straight denim dress with a toothy shiny zipper down the front as if in mockery— or was
it in homage to a farmer’s coveralls? She had boldly cinched it at the waist with a wide leather belt in the muted soft purple
of liver. On her the effect was somehow both elegant and humorous.

“It seems warm in here,” Jenna said, “and I was only yesterday with someone who fainted. So now I suppose I’m afraid everyone
I see is going to keel over, one by one, all these ladies collapsing. Imagine the sound of those bracelets at the same time
hitting the floor, the point of impact.”

Laura burst out laughing, her hands clapped to her mouth. She had grown up in Casey, the next town to the west, and she, the
upstart from the rival high school, had dated the brothers of some of these women.

“Is that shock or glee?” Jenna asked, leaning into the table as if the better to see for herself.

Laura wasn’t going to look, but she sincerely hoped that the women of Hartley were observing that, of all the people in the
room, Jenna Faroli had chosen to talk to Laura Rider. “I, I played basketball at Casey High.” She was speaking through her
smile, through her laughter, the words bubbling from her mouth. “I was on the team, the shooting guard, my fifteen minutes
of fame, and one time the sister of Cassie Johnson, she’s over by the flag, tried to beat me up after a game.” Shock or glee?
Laura was being interviewed by Jenna Faroli! “I almost married Patty Heiderman’s—she’s the one in red—her brother.” Mark Heiderman
was the reason Laura had dropped out of community college, escaped to her sister’s, hadn’t shown her face in Hartley for a
year. Mark Heiderman had socked her in the stomach when she’d gotten pregnant, and Patty had slain her verbally in public,
at the car wash, when she’d found out Laura had had an abortion.

“I’m sure there is so much in the understory of a small town,” Jenna said, “so much a stranger, no matter how long she lives
here, can never know. From the outside, though, I tell you, it all looks wonderfully serene. It seems to us like heaven.”
She picked up one of Laura’s brochures. “So—you’re not going to faint even if you secretly wish everyone here would, and you
sell perennials, and you do landscaping. Prairie Wind Farm.”

“Yes, yes, we do. My husband, my husband, Charlie, Charlie Rider, and I have had the business for—oh my gosh—over ten years.”

Jenna would remember that, too, the first time she heard his name. “Charlie Rider,” she mused. She knew that she shouldn’t
bring up the title of a book to this woman, and yet, even as she meant to stop herself, the sentence was floating between
them: “Have you ever read
Brideshead Revisited
?” Why was she asking? Why did she persist in referring to books when it was obvious the listener would not have read them.
“Or seen the miniseries?” Jenna added with little optimism.

Although Laura nodded with great enthusiasm, although she grinned hard, she was sure Jenna would be able to tell that she
had never heard of it.

“I say so,” Jenna forged on, “because Charles Ryder is the name of the narrator, a blank slate of a young man, very impressionable,
who goes up to Oxford. To study there, that is. He becomes captivated—obsessed, really—by nearly everyone in a wealthy Catholic
family. He falls in love with the idea of them. He loves them and observes them and chronicles their downfall.”

“My Charlie,” Laura exclaimed, “would do something like that!”

Jenna thrust her nose into the blooms again and said, “How lucky you are to raise such exquisite things.” She had recently
decided that, in the balance and in general, she hated people, but in spite of this new self-knowledge, she couldn’t help
finding the individual person interesting and often heartbreaking.

“This is our love, Charlie’s and mine. Our real love is the nursery.”

“How lucky,” Jenna repeated. Why had she mentioned
Brideshead
? She sometimes disliked herself more than she disliked the population at large. Why lecture this stranger about one of her
favorite novels, a wonderfully sentimental book about decline, the sorrow of aging, the loss of love, the end of a glorious
era for the landed gentry? It was funny, of course it was, the way Laura had so happily said, “My Charlie would do something
like that,” without having any idea that the fictional Charles Ryder was actually a colorless, depressed character. Still,
how could the name Charlie Rider come up without Jenna’s mentioning
Brideshead
?

In an effort to redeem herself, she began to talk. “I’m a beginner,” she said, “and so I feel as if I’m here under false pretenses.
I don’t have time right now to be a regular member of the club, or go through the Master Gardener course, but I’m dying to
make a garden, to do the actual work, to plant—to get back, somehow, to …” She hardly knew what she was trying to explain,
an unusual predicament for her. “I want to be outside and have my hands in the dirt, a primal sort of desire, I guess. The
idea that a person can make something as fantastic as the pictures in the books I’ve looked at seems preposterous, all that
beauty of your own making. With this garden business I feel naïve and ignorant and arrogant, too. As if I think I could become
a brain surgeon by reading a manual, or a best-selling novelist because I like books.”

“Not at all!” Laura cried. From the corner of her eye she could see that Patty Heiderman had rotated 180 degrees to stare
in her direction. “We can work out a color palette in relation to the shade and the sun in your yard.” Imagine Jenna Faroli
at the farm, sitting in the wicker chair in the shed with Laura, the books spread out on the table, the color wheel before
them. It was a reversal of the fantasy: Laura, the teacher; Jenna, the student. She was not as ugly as Laura remembered, or
maybe she seemed somewhat attractive—
handsome
was perhaps the word—because she was speaking. Laura could now fully understand why the radio guests revealed themselves
to Jenna in the interviews. In person and in a large room, it was just as if Laura were alone in her car with Jenna on the
radio, with that voice, the color of it a warm buttery yellow. “There are many hardy varieties,” Laura went on, reaching over
to touch Jenna’s arm, the same gesture Jenna had made a few minutes earlier. If it was Patty Heiderman’s gaze that spurred
her to this intimacy, so what? “I could guide you, if you came to the farm, if that seemed like a good idea to you. You can
learn as you go and at the same time have fun. You can have real pleasure with the basics.”