Raising Hope (5 page)

I didn’t use to notice anything about colors or textures or the way the rain was needed to make the flowers grow. I was going to be a lawyer like my father, and lawyers don’t care about anything except twisting words to win their cases. I was the talk of the town when I went to Wellesley College, and then again when I went to Harvard Law School. “Everyone’s talking about you,” Mama used to say proudly. “They’re so excited to see what you’ll do next.”

What I was supposed to do next was practice law for a few years, marry a nice young man from a good family, have a couple of children—a boy and a girl, naturally—and then gracefully retire from my brilliant career to raise them. It was all headed that way until I tripped off the fast track and never managed to get back on.

I received nine job offers during my last year of law school. That was two more than Frank Doblinski, the smartest person in our class. I was raised to play the game, you see, intuiting exactly what I needed to say and who I needed to be to make those lawyers leaning back in their leather chairs feel smart and powerful. They fired their interview questions at me, ostensibly to gauge whether or not I’d be an asset to their law firm, but what they really wanted to talk about was themselves. They were just dying for someone to bring the conversation around to them, and I—wearing my blue interview suit from Saks and the strand of pearls my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday—was happy to oblige.

I took my time in deciding which law firm would get me. I let Harrison, Miller, and Hogan take me to dinner at a little restaurant overlooking the Boston Public Garden. I went to tea at the Ritz with Townshend and Black. Coleman and Dempsey gave me symphony tickets, and I heard a lovely program of Brahms and Beethoven.

I called my mother after each of these occasions and told her everything. “Mama,” I said, “you would not believe how fancy this tea was! Someone was playing a harp in the corner, and we weren’t even allowed to pour our own tea. A waiter came over to do it for us. And we each had a little silver teapot and all of these gorgeous little pastries on a silver tray.”

“What did you wear, Sara Lynn?” asked Mama, holding her breath.

“My red silk dress. With my pearls.”

My mother sighed as though she’d reached the promised land. Then my father got on the line and asked if I needed any money.

My parents had me late in their lives. My father was a highly regarded lawyer in Ridley Falls and, indeed, all of New Hampshire. My mother taught school as a way of making herself useful until she found someone to marry. She met my father when he came to speak to her sixth-graders on careers in the law, and she became his wife six months later. She didn’t teach school after that, as she was determined to settle right down to the business of having children of her own.

But there was a slight problem, a small glitch in the master plan. No children came. Indeed, it was seventeen years before I arrived on the scene. For seventeen years, my mother must have made my father his dry toast and black coffee for breakfast, tidied up our big house in the old, nice section of Ridley Falls, had a little lunch with some of her lady friends, cooked dinner for my father, asked him politely how he’d spent his day, and waited to see whether or not menstrual blood would stain her white cotton underpants.

She must have cried bitterly each month when she ran cold water in the sink to soak her panties and popped an aspirin to help the cramps. She must have lain beside my father each night they tried to have me and prayed. Please let it happen this time, she must have pleaded, picturing a tiny tadpole sperm penetrating the egg she had put out specially for the occasion.

She must have gardened as though her life depended upon it, because surely it did. She must have wanted so badly to create something beautiful, and if she couldn’t make a child in her womb, at least she could make flowers bloom in the dirt.

Of course, I really don’t know any of this because I’ve never dared to ask. Oh, I’ve tap-danced around the issue, saying things like “I must have been quite a surprise to you when I showed up so many years after you were married.” But I’ve always been too frightened to look my mother in the eye and ask, “How did you feel when you kept trying and trying? Were you sad? Did you despair?” I’ve simply never had it in me to force her to relive her pain in the name of finding my own truth.

“You were a wonderful surprise,” she used to say, and she’d beam so brightly that it was hard to imagine she’d ever once given up hope of having me during those years she couldn’t conceive.

Ow! I bring the cut on my thumb up to my mouth and suck it, hard. I wasn’t paying close attention and I got pricked. I back away from the roses, my thumb still smarting, and begin to deadhead the scabiosa flowers growing beneath them. My mother loved me until I failed her. I think about this as I clip off the scabiosa seed heads, making room for new flowers. Was it really love, then? Did she really love me at all, or was she loving only the reflection of herself I worked so hard to shine back at her?

I’m cutting dead flower after dead flower, but still the plants don’t seem at all bare. The harder you cut back scabiosa, the more vigorously it blooms. Cruel to be kind, you know. I’m fond of these blue flowers—pincushion flowers, Mama calls them, for they look like the tiny cushions a seamstress might use to store her pins. The pincushion flower’s not a showy perennial, but neither does it ask for much. I like that in a plant.

Now, the delphinium—that’s a different story altogether. As I glance over at the tall, proud, luminously blue flowers sitting in their own patch down a bit from the roses, I put my hands on my hips for a moment and say, “Hmmph!” Delphinium. Too much sun, too much shade, too wet, too dry—they’re never happy. Some gardeners say they grow better in the cooler, wetter climates of the Pacific Northwest, but I don’t believe it for a second. They’re likely fussy things everywhere. Even if they’re blooming tall, straight, and the blue of the bluest sky, and you think that finally you’ve got it right—you know how to cultivate delphinium—well, they’ll wither up and die on you one day just because they feel like it. I still grow them every summer, just because we always have, but I don’t trust them one little bit.

Not like my scabiosa, and I run my finger over one of the blossoms the bees aren’t climbing all over. Ruth is like a scabiosa. I picture her at the stove, waving her spoon in the air and joking with Hope about her frosting. Ruth doesn’t need much of anything to keep smiling and laughing her way through life. A little sun, a little rain—it’s all the same to her. Mama, on the other hand, is definitely a delphinium. A real pain in the ass, to use a choice term of Ruth’s. I draw my back up straight, surprised at my own vehemence. She’s just getting old, I tell myself. She wasn’t always that way.

Oh, yes, she was. I pull up some weeds in the beds and tell myself the truth. She’s always been fussy about things, demanding and demanding from me ever since I was a little girl. Sara Lynn, wear your hair this way. Sara Lynn, I hope you’re staying at the top of your class. Sara Lynn, I don’t want you wearing the tacky clothes other girls wear. Sara Lynn, you don’t really feel sad; you’re a happy, happy, happy girl. Yes, Mama is a delphinium, for sure.

If Ruth is a scabiosa and my mother a delphinium, then what am I? Nothing living in the garden, I think. Maybe part of the hardscape. Maybe a rock.

Chapter 4

K
eep your hands out of the cake!” Ruth slaps at my hand as she spreads the frosting in a thick layer.

“She’s got eyes in the back of her head,” Mamie calls from the porch rocking chair. “Best to be careful around that one, Hope.”

“Tell it, Mamie!” says Ruth. “I’m bad!”

Mamie chuckles. “Stay out of trouble, Hope. Come sit by me and tell me about your day.”

I walk out to the porch and sit at the foot of her rocker. “I played tennis,” I tell her, picking at a callus on my heel that’s been there forever and doesn’t show any sign of going away.

“Stop that picking, now,” Mamie says as she pats the top of my head with her old hand.

“Tennis?” Ruth calls from the kitchen. “I thought you hated tennis. Isn’t Sara Lynn always trying to get you to take it up? Sport for life, and all that?”

I swear, you express an opinion one time, and people hold you to it forever. “Actually, I love tennis,” I call back.

“Hmmph.” Ruth sounds skeptical. “Who’d you play with?”

“The new club pro. His name is Sam. Sam Johnson.”

“Did you beat him?” asks Ruth.

“Duh!” I laugh, picking at my heel again. “He’s the pro.”

“Will you stop it? You’ll make it bleed,” Mamie says, clucking.

I roll my eyes and call in to Ruth, “Can I lick the frosting bowl?”

“Sure,” Ruth says at the same time Mamie corrects, “
May
I lick the frosting bowl?”

“May or can, it’s all going down her gullet,” jokes Ruth, and Mamie laughs at that one. I scramble up from the porch floor and go into the kitchen to grab the frosting bowl.

“Take two spoons,” Ruth says as she opens the silverware drawer and hands them to me. “Share with Mamie.”

Mamie doesn’t object to that. I give her a spoon, and she winks at me like we’re partners in crime. “Mmm-mmm-mmm!” she says, dipping her spoon in and putting it to her mouth. She looks like a kid sucking on a lollypop, and I laugh at her as I run my spoon around the inside of the bowl.

“Go on upstairs and shower, Hope,” calls Ruth. “Dinner’s in half an hour.”

“Sara Lynn hasn’t showered yet,” I argue, licking my spoon. “She’s still fussing with her flowers.”

“Oh, don’t worry about Miss Clean.” Ruth laughs. “She wouldn’t think of eating dinner after an afternoon at the club without showering first.” Ruth says “the club” in a fake snooty voice. It’s not really her kind of place.

I sigh. “Okay.” Mamie and I have licked the frosting bowl clean anyway.

“And don’t forget to comb out that mop of hair!” Mamie says as I get up and head inside.

It doesn’t take me any time at all to shower. It’s combing out my beastly hair that’s the problem. I frown into the bathroom mirror, throw my comb on the sink, and walk into my bedroom. I flop on the bed and lie flat on my back, looking up at the ceiling and jiggling my feet. Then this lonesome feeling starts gnawing at me, and I turn onto my stomach and reach under the bed to get my
Diary of Anne Frank
book. I look at Anne’s face on the cover, and for like the thousandth time, I feel a pain inside that always comes from looking at her. I love Anne so much. It’s my special secret, something I can’t tell a single soul because they’d think I was stupid. Heck, even
I
think I’m stupid. She’s dead, for crying out loud. That’s what I yell at myself in my head whenever I start thinking about Anne like she’s a living person. But then I just quiet that mean voice inside and imagine she’s right here with me, my best friend.

The thing is, we would be best friends if she were here right now. We wouldn’t care about being popular because we’d have each other. I’d tell her everything, and she’d understand. I touch her face on the book cover and wish hard for what can never be.

Even though I’ve read the book about fifty times, I still can’t believe she dies. I mean, of course she dies! God! I knew that even before I first read it. That was, like, the whole point of having to read the book for school. “Class,” said Mrs. Wilson, “this is a very sad book about a young girl who died in the Holocaust.” But here’s the funny thing: Every time I read the book, every single time, I get to the end and I cry and cry because there’s no more Anne and my mind just can’t take it in.

When I first read the book, I tried to wear my hair like Anne’s. Since my hair’s a lot curlier than hers, it was a big, ugly failure. I tried keeping a diary, too, but that lasted only about a week. I even asked Sara Lynn and Ruth if I could become Jewish, but Sara Lynn said we were Episcopalians, and that was that. Ruth told me later that maybe when I was older and knew my own mind more, I could look into it. Then she asked me if maybe I was getting a little too attached to Anne Frank.

“What do you mean?” I asked her, practically shaking from embarrassment.

“Well,” she said, and it was killing me because she was trying so hard to be nice, like she was talking to a baby or a crazy person, for crying out loud, “you read that book an awful lot. You carry it with you wherever you go. Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. But maybe it’s time to read something else.”

I tried to act like I had no idea what she was talking about, like it didn’t want to make me sink into the ground that she suspected how much I loved Anne Frank. “It’s no big deal,” I snapped, deciding right then that I’d hide the book under my bed so nobody would ever see me with it again. “I’d think you’d be glad I’m at least a little bit interested in history.”

History. They taught us in school that if you don’t learn from the past, you’re doomed to repeat it. Sometimes that scares me so much, it makes my heart stop for a second. I mean, the Holocaust was so horrible that it just can’t happen again. But, of course, I know it could. See, people don’t like people who are different. Look at me. No mother, no father. That’s why the KKs were so mean to me today. Because I’m different.

I put my head on the pillow and close my eyes for a minute, wondering what it would be like—what I’d be like—if I had my mother and father. It’s not that I don’t love Ruth and Sara Lynn, because I do. But what would it be like to have my mother tell me what it was like to have me growing inside her? What would it be like to have my father take me to the seventh-grade father/daughter dance, shaking his head as he looks at me all dressed up, saying, “Hope, you’re getting so pretty. You’re the spitting image of your mom.”

“Hope! Dinner!”

They’re calling me. I shove my Anne Frank book back under my bed and leap up, shouting, “Coming! Coming already!”

“Happy birthday, dear Hope, happy birthday to you!”

The dining room table is set with Mamie’s best china—the white plates with blue and pink flowers all over them. We’re using the good silver, too, with the curly “H” etched in each of the pieces. Sara Lynn dimmed the chandelier lights as Ruth brought out my cake, so the room is dusky as I take a deep breath and blow out all twelve of the little pink-and-white twisted birthday candles on top of my cake. I think of a bunch of wishes, but at the last minute I can’t decide which one I want most, so my wish is a jumble of “Anne Frank, parents, popular, period.” All spelled out, what I wish is: “I wish Anne Frank were here; I wish I had my parents; I hope I get to be popular; I hope I get my period.”