Middle C (25 page)

He felt a little mental unpleasantness like the pang of an errant tooth. A distasteful memory had been recovered from its attic storage: of a time when “strut their stuff” was “strut her stuff” and was said of Debbie, the vain and zealous cheerleader. She should be allowed to strut her stuff if she wants, all the girls do—and she sure has the stuff to strut with, Miriam would add with a kind of pride and a show of salacious satisfaction Joey loathed. He had been so angry when Miriam had spent their precious money on that silly uniform—pleated skirt and letter sweater, one Debbie whirled and the other she joggled—that he had refused to go to the games and watch her make an exhibition of herself, although he had not offered that as a reason but had declared, rather, his indifference to football amounting to dislike. Actually, Joseph had a hatred of sports, based on his inadequacy, that he disguised as apathy.

In any case, he complained of having to witness her performance
every day when she practiced leaping and twisting in the backyard, the skirt rising around her higher thighs as if blown from below so that her hair flew up and down about her shoulders and her neck, Woodbine’s red
W
undulating as though it were sewn on rapid water. If you don’t like it, don’t look, he was told, as if that were possible.

Of course, it was their large Victorian house with its wide porches and ample back and side yards that made his mother’s new vocation possible, because she had cultivated the patch of ground their first house sat on about as far as root and branch would take her: lining the short front walk with Joey’s first gift of seeds, then placing beds in customary fashion like a moat around the building before digging up every inch of the front and back except for a few narrow paths paved by thin wobbly boards and marked at metered intervals by geraniums in sunken coffee cans. She was a drillmaster in those days, and her flowers knew they should fall into straight lines and salute as she passed.

For a time, the size of plants defeated her; they began so daintily as bulbs or rhizomes or seeds sunk out of sight in the anonymous earth that she felt they would all have the same adulthood, but they ended flopping on the ground like alyssum or raising their flags like iris and looking silly standing all alone waiting for the marigolds to arrive. Daisies shaded asters and asters denied violas their share of the light. Glads were a major defeat. She stuck them around like sentries, and those that bloomed stood at funereal attention in nearly barren patches of moss roses that hadn’t made it or in thickets of ragged robin that unfortunately had. They were also all orange. After Miriam had scraped them from her palette, Joey told her that, like Easter lilies, glads were largely florist flowers and sent by the living to the dead.

There was nothing shy or particularly nice about violets, Miriam—and Joey, through her—learned. At first admired, they invaded what little lawn was left, and every other area that offered an opening … well … like immigrants, pushing out established plants and covering the earth with an impermeable carpet of dainty-looking but devilish little flowers whose rootlets, in their eager exercise of total war, throttled worms in their runnels. These darlings, when poisons failed, she had to dig up inch by inch, ripping apart the dirt in a search for bits of root as if she were after patches of seasonal drifters. Over the years she had forgotten about her own alien history, even her present status, and had begun
to resent the Mexhex, as she called them, because they worked for potty and were taking positions at her place of work.

The vine phase lasted a long time. Miriam tacked up wire mesh to the outside of the house where clematis began to climb as soon as the opportunity offered, as well as Blaze and White Dawn among roses, each competing for space among morning glories, honeysuckle, and moon vines. About plants, she cared only that they grew; that they grew in her care was a marvel; they made her feel worthy; a dull house and idle earth were now supporting blue, purple, white, and red bursts in a show called helter-skelter. At the vine
-heit
of the season (Miriam’s accidental pun), the cottage began to be submerged, and people drove by perhaps to laugh but maybe also to admire the sheer amount of bloom Miriam’s untutored efforts had amassed, nor could you ignore the smart rows of marigolds, zinnias, petunias, and pinks now drawn over the formerly unkempt little property; they made a definite and lasting impression.

As Joey became Joseph, his approval of his mother’s “put-a-plant” procedures weakened. He remembered how he had envied, at Christmas, those houses that sported a wreath, Santa’s face, or an electric candle in every window; but now he thought that you didn’t need to use something just because you had it, nor did he believe that dormer windows would threaten to shatter without a familiar seasonal icon pressed against their panes. Add-ons were also unnecessary. Every holiday, at least one new decoration—a lamb to feed upon the snow-covered front yard—would be purchased for display or a crèche built that would be embarrassingly incomplete without three wise men and one camel, adding to the expense of the season, or perhaps a glowing guide star at the top of a pole would be deemed essential as well as straw for strewing and carols piped through a cow; and then—if not on the lawn—on the ice-slick roof, Saint Nick with a fat sack would be peering down the chimney, his precariously overfilled sleigh about to be pulled into space by all those deer; inevitably lights would be flung over nearby bushes, or they would outline doorways, loop along eaves, climb appropriate trees, till every wall and corner was agleam with holiday gimcrackery got up or laid out with considerable effort and at appreciable cost, not to demonstrate religious zeal or seasonal joy but rather to advertise the householders’ vulgar predilections for excess.

Of a silent holy night the choristers sang, shivering and cherry-cheeked, on doorstep after doorstep down the street, spreading goodwill, gay on account of the birth of Christ, and in their songs promoters of peace; yet, in spite of that, enemies were everywhere, hatching their plots, spreading their poison like a plague; consequently they had to be attacked as you might an infestation of rats and slain like African enemies as if there were a bounty on each bone.

Miriam (whose educational level was low, and who rarely read much of anything because she preferred her childhood tongue and because her adopted language was largely verbal and so heavily accented it was hard to connect what she said with a printed version) did not this time allow these impediments to deter her from feasting on seed and tree catalogs, garden magazines, and glossy foldout ads that came like bluebirds unbidden in the mail. Loose snow might be blowing down their empty cold gray street and onto bushes bundled up in their own twigs, but Miriam had no eye, no nose, for winter’s dullness, because full in her face a glorious peony would be bursting or a field of daisies blooming yellower than butter or a vase full of tulips, vase-shaped themselves, held in her hands near her nearsighted eyes to direct their gaze and thus her vision, not to the past, where her memories usually possessed her, nor to the cold gray day outside, but to the sunny future only pages away when just these daisies would cover her head with sheep-shaped cloud and vivid sky.

When young and full of fellow feeling, Professor Joseph Skizzen had been tormented by the thought that the human race (which he naïvely believed was made up of great composers, a few harmlessly lecherous painters, maybe a mathematician or a scientist, a salon of writers, all aiming at higher things however they otherwise carried on) … that such an ennobled species might not prosper, indeed, might not survive in any serious way—symphonies sinking like torpedoed ships, murals spray-canned out of sight, statues toppled, books burned, plays updated by posturing directors; but now, older, wiser—more jaundiced, it’s true—he worried that it might (now that he saw that the human world was packed with politicians who could not even spell “scruple”; now that he saw that it was crammed with commercial types who adored only American money; now that he saw how it had been overrun by religious stupefiers, mountebanks, charlatans, obfuscators, and other dedicated misleaders, as well as corrupt professionals of all kinds—ten o’clock scholars, malpracticing doctors, bribed judges, sleepy deans, callous munitions makers and their pompous generals, pedophilic priests, but probably not pet lovers, not arborists, not gardeners—but Puritans, squeezers, and other assholes, ladies bountiful, ladies easy, shoppers diligent, lobbyists greedy, Eagle Scouts, racist cops, loan sharks, backbiters, gun runners, spies, Judases, philistines, vulgarians, dumbbells, dolts, boobs, louts, jerks, jocks, creeps, yokels, cretins, simps, pipsqueaks—not a mensch among them—nebbechs, scolds, schlemiels, schnorrers, schnooks, schmucks, schlumps, dummkopfs, potato heads, klutzes, not to omit pushers, bigots, born-again Bible bangers, users, conmen, ass kissers, Casanovas, pimps, thieves and their sort, rapists and their kind, murderers and their ilk—the pugnacious, the miserly, the envious, the litigatious, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the lubricious, the jealous, the profligate, the gossipacious, the indifferent, the bored), well, now that he saw it had been so infested, he worried that the race might … might what? … the whole lot might sail on through floods of their own blood like a proud ship and parade out of the new Noah’s ark in the required pairs—for breeding, one of each sex—sportscasters, programmers, promoters, polluters, stockbrokers, bankers, body builders, busty models, show hosts, stamp and coin collectors, crooners, glamour girls, addicts, gamblers, shirkers, solicitors, opportunists, insatiable developers, arrogant agents, fudging accountants, yellow journalists, ambulance chasers and shysters of every sleazy pursuit, CEOs at the head of a whole column of white-collar crooks, psychiatrists, osteopaths, snake oilers, hucksters, fawners, fans of funerals, fortune-tellers and other prognosticators, road warriors, chieftains, Klansmen, Shriners, men and women of any cloth and any holy order—at every step moister of cunt and stiffer of cock than any cock or cunt before them, even back when the world was new, now saved and saved with spunk enough to couple and restock the pop … the pop … the goddamn population
.

Even a small order from a single catalog would bring dozens more to your door, since seed and plant companies appeared to trade mailing lists like stamps, and these glossy thick pamphlets and magazines were,
in January, the lights of Miriam’s life. Every ripe tomato drew her gaze as though she were famished, despite her decision, taken almost automatically, to stick to flowers because of the squirrels. As a result of all this reading Miriam became knowledgeable about neck rot in onions and the use of apple maggot flytraps as well as the importance for vegetables of sulfur and manganese in the soil. She did not seem deterred by the sameness natural to repeated discussions of fire blight or thrips or the super-scented language used to describe the new flowers for the year, their familiar innovations and awards, reliability of germination, rapid growth, huge blooms, resistance to pests. Last year’s moonglow marigold may have been whiter than white, but this year’s version was even more so. Soon Miriam knew there were nematodes that would defend iris rhizomes from borers, insect barriers that have had excellent results when used against the flea beetle, and she would learn of a new variety of cucumber that bites its beetles back, even the spotted ones that spread bacterial wilt.

The garden was a place of battle. It was not only where campaigns against insects, disease, drought, wilt, and scald were hourly and repeatedly carried on but also an arena where flower was pitted against flower for water, food, and sun. Peace was largely an illusion, and health, prosperity, security, were as momentary as the cover of a cloud. But Miriam warmed to it, read about it over and over, so that her English, though in an odd corner of its world, greatly improved, and her interests—for instance, in soil makeup, drainage, hybrids, chemicals, birds, bees, butterflies, moles, slugs, and worms—widened and intensified. She knew that mealybugs were covered with a white powdery wax; she learned how to control pathogens such as, for instance, gray mold, bacterial leaf blight, downy mildew, scab, and pin rot; she could diagnose like a physician, prescribe like a pharmacist, and treat like a nurse; she knew in centimeters to what depth bulbs should be planted, what loved shade and muck and what sun and loam, how to improve the stickiest clay or give sand a sense of community.

She showed him an industrious ingenuity and meticulousness he had no idea resided in her. For instance, bulbs of various sizes and species were supposed to be dug in at different, and very specific, depths—too deep and their shoots would fall short, too shallow and they wouldn’t last long in unfriendly weather—so she cut a number of dowels to the
right lengths, then lettered, along the wood that was to stand above-ground like the warning flag for a gas line, the name of the variety she was going to plant, put a red line around each to indicate how deeply the planting should be, and inserted them into the hole being dug, to the depth marked, before following that with the bulb itself, now safely lodged in the right place. Miriam then resettled the earth and, with a cry of “There!” stomped upon it with a booted foot. She labeled peat-moss pots with tongue depressors, taller plants with lathes of suitable widths on which she clearly printed the appropriate names in black ink, easier to do than the dowels—though carefully, as a bow to her background, in the antique German style.

Joseph was impressed with her devotion but even more with its effects. Miriam began to reflect confidence in all her actions, because the world had been shrunk to the size of her garden, while the principles and problems of gardening became universal: the mantis wore the colors of its immediate locale, it knew how to wait, it seized its prey with a grace of movement equal to its surety and calmly ate its mate. Did so in Illinois as well as Ohio. There were deities in her realm, and Miriam was one. There were kingdoms, and she had hers.

The canola had to be applied in thin coats, and one day Joseph stood behind his mother in amazement while her small paintbrush flicked about its bush like an anxious insect applying the oil. She stood up with the ease of someone who kneels with regularity. Her color was good; she squinched, but her gaze was confident and direct; her weight was in her knees; she munched on certain leaves because they told her much; she drove her hands into the earth as though they had grown there; and she put more things up to her nose than a pup would, laughing with delight and recognition instead of wagging a tail.