Sand in My Eyes (13 page)

“Thirty-nine?” I gasped. “I’m only thirty-six. Come to think of it, a whopping thirty-seven the day after tomorrow, but not thirty-nine, not me, not yet! Thirty-nine is practically forty, so, no, your son is definitely older!”

I was afraid she was starting to count, notice all the times I brought up her son in conversation, and that she saw it on my face, the look a woman gives when she sees the diamond ring she really wants but cannot have. She cannot have it because there’s already a diamond ring on her hand—one she no longer likes, but it is hers nonetheless.

But then she walked over to a recliner. With her back to the chair, eyes focused out her window, she strategically positioned her feet on the floor, bending her knees, putting her arms straight ahead and dropping her buttocks down into the cushiony seat.

“Yeah, your son is older than me by two years,” I continued helplessly. “Whew—I’m not ready to leave my thirties behind just yet.”

“This will make you laugh,” Fedelina said. “He said to me the other day, ‘You know, Mom, I used to think you were so much older than me, but the older I get, I realize you’re not that much older than me.’ He’s witty like that, a deep thinker, too.” I knew then she wasn’t counting how many times I had brought up her son, and that she liked talking about him, too. But then she stopped talking and sat upright in her recliner, staring straight ahead with a focused look on her face, like an astronaut preparing a rocket for takeoff.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Oh yes, I’ve been doing this for years. I sleep in this thing.” She shifted her buttocks, reached down and tightened her fingers around the lever on one side. When she pulled the lever, off she went—feet up, upper body down. One deserves a close-up view of the moon after all of that, but there
she sat, looking out her window at my noisy house. I wanted to tell her the truth about my life and what things were like inside that house then, but I didn’t want to ruin her view of it.

“Did I mention Liam is working toward tenure?” she started back up again, gravitating toward the topic of her son as professor.

“Good for him,” I said.

“Yeah, but he was married to this—pardon my language,” she said in a whisper, “but a pampered witch. It’s sad, Anna. A guy can have the greatest mother on earth, but it’s the wife that destroys him.”

“So he’s single now?” I asked, still standing in her doorway, trying not to drool over the roses lined up in jars along her bureau, the roses that I could smell, the ones she promised to give me.

“I don’t know that my son will ever get married again. He dates.” She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Women, they fall all over that boy, but a mother knows not to ask too many questions of her grown sons. I don’t think he takes any of the girls too seriously. Teaching and traveling—I think it’s enough for him. So is your husband buying you a cake?”

“No,” I said. “He’s away on business. It’s okay. I don’t really like cake.”

“Then I should bring you a pie.”

“No, no, no,” I said with a blush, never the type to tell the world and get people revved up for my big day in advance.

“Oscar loved his cherry pies. He didn’t care much for cakes either, so I always made him a cherry pie on his birthday. This was our dream—my husband and I—it was our dream to move to Sanibel. The man worked hard his whole life—worked so much I felt at times like I was raising these kids myself. But he did provide. I will say, Oscar always provided for his family. And he never took a sick day—worked for the same company since he was twenty-two. He didn’t take vacations, but saved his money—always made sure we’d be set for retirement—then suffered a stroke and died shortly after we moved to Florida. Oh, how I miss him. I could have done more when I had the chance, could have loved Oscar more. The pain never goes away. It changes with time, but never goes away.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I think of all the annoying things he used to do, like leave the kitchen
cabinet doors open after he took his vitamins, and how he snored, and how he’d take his shoes off in the middle of the room and leave them there on the floor, you know, typical things husbands do that get under our skins. But now, Anna,” she continued, “to have him back again, I’d put up with most anything. But I should let you go now, dear,” she said. “And I should rest. I’ve been up since four-thirty.”

I looked at her like she was crazy. “Four-thirty in the morning?” I asked.

“It happens,” she said.

“What?”

“Around age sixty-two, people start waking fifteen minutes earlier for each year they live thereafter.”

“Then I should go now, let you rest,” I said, hoping she hadn’t forgotten that the reason I followed her in was to get more roses. I put my nose in the air and sniffed the room. “It smells good in here,” I said.

“Must be all the roses.”

“Anna,” she called after me.

“Yes?”

“I call out to him still. I know I sound crazy, but I do. ‘Oscar, Oscar,’ I say, and if anyone heard me, they’d think I was nuts. I swear the other day I saw him standing in the doorway, right where you are now. He had on his old flannel shirt, the one the kids bought him for Christmas years ago. He wore that thing for over fifteen years and we all begged him to get rid of it … but I’ve kept you long enough. You must have a million things to do.”

“Changing out of this nightgown is all.”

“Oh, you’re being polite. I’ve disrupted your day.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Well, you saved my life today.”

“It was nothing.”

“I don’t know what I would have done, had you not noticed me,” she said, and then matter-of-factly added, “Go to that bureau there.” She pointed. “Open the top drawer.”

I gave her a curious look but did what she told me to do, opening a
drawerful of old photos, a heart-shaped box of chocolates, and envelopes.

“There should be a little red book,” she said. “You see it?”

“Yes,” I said, picking it up. It had a faded red cover with a black title and a rose imprinted on its cover. “How to Grow Roses,” I read the title out loud.

“Inside are all the other things my mother once wrote to me.”

“Your mother wrote this book? Your mother was an author?”

“No,” she said with a laugh. “Members of the American Rose Society wrote the book. My mother wrote me letters and tucked them throughout its pages. And she jotted down notes in the margins of the book, most of it blips of inspiration she tapped into while sitting outdoors.”

“So this is where you learned about roses,” I said, sniffing the oldness of its cover.

“No, it’s where I learned about life, and my relation to nature,” she said. “My mother, she taught me a fresh way of looking at things, that’s all, a beautiful way of perceiving the world. Why don’t you take it with you, keep it for awhile.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Go ahead, I’ll lend it to you. I do owe you for your help.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Take it, read it when you find the time. See if something in it, anything my mother wrote, inspires you with your writing.”

As I fingered through its pages, I discovered it was published in the early thirties. It contained culture and care of flowers, and there were the most beautiful full-color pictures of roses, as well as black-and-white illustrations. But most astonishing were the added scribbles in ink on every page and the handwritten letter to Fedelina on the front pages, which the publisher had left blank. I also saw stationery folded and tucked throughout.

“Are you sure you want to share this with me?” I asked her.

“I wouldn’t have offered it if I didn’t. Oh, and take some of those roses, too, whichever ones you like.”

As I walked out her front door and down the steps, roses in my arms, her mother’s gardening notebook clutched in my hands, and all the things
Fedelina had said to me fluttering through my mind, I felt a tingling in my gut, the kind one gets when strongly compelled, and I could see in my mind more regarding the story I was writing—plots, themes, characters, emerging like a plane from the clouds overhead. I knew as suddenly as a hummingbird appears that it would be more than a story about flowers, but that I would have to write it down quickly, before it disappeared, and that it should be about a younger woman and an older woman, and the stages of life.

I went to my bedroom and set the roses on my desk next to the orchid, hoping they would all get along, and then I sat down with the intention to write. But instead I opened the book,
How to Grow Roses
, and pulled out worn and faded pieces of paper on which Fedelina’s mother had written her a letter.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1920

My precious thirteen-year-old
,

You’ve been sulking around with a pout on your face for a long time now. I keep telling you that if you don’t take that look off your face, it’s going to stay that way forever and no one will want to marry you. But you tell me you don’t like boys, nor do you believe a word I say. You don’t believe a lot of what I have to say anymore. And I don’t believe you, either. I also don’t blame you. It’s been a hard year
.

I know you miss your father and your friends and Portland with all its parades. The year 1918 was dreadful, the first year since you were born that Oregon cancelled its Rose Festival. You were mad at the war then, for raining on your parade, and soon after for taking your father. I’m mad, too. I miss my husband
.

As we reached the final stages of the war, I thought you might be turning back into the happy little girl I once knew, but then the influenza pandemic erupted, killing more people than the Great War and before we knew it, one-quarter of our country and one-fifth of the world was infected. I think your pout returned, but I couldn’t tell for sure since the public health departments had us all walking around with gauze masks on our faces
.

A few of my friends were playing bridge late into the night. Come morning, three of them had died, as did the lady next door. I saw her watering her flowers in the morning and she must have developed the flu thereafter, for three hours later she died
.

We left Oregon around the time her roses suffered an outbreak of black spot or mildew. I tried telling you they would bloom again, and people would find new reasons to parade, but you didn’t believe me. The war, combined with the devastating disease, stole the optimism of most, and even the birds stopped chirping in the mornings. Or we didn’t hear them anymore. I know I look too old to understand, but it feels like yesterday that I was your age. And I know how you’re feeling—like nothing is blooming. That’s where you’re at right now. All I can say is that not everything in our lives can be constantly blooming at once, and sometimes it appears as if nothing is blooming at all. You need to find some buds, Fedelina. There have got to be some buds!

But what do I know
?
I’m just your mother. And all I can do is pray that my daughter, the one who used to wrap her arms around my neck and squeeze with all her might, the happy-go-lucky girl who talked a mile a minute and asked me questions as infinite and brilliant as the stars above, might reveal herself to me again. It’s as if I left that girl behind when I moved from the place she loved to this farm in the Midwest where we live and work with the relatives who took us in. I see it in your eyes, that sometimes you despise me for moving us here, but sometimes a mother does things that don’t make sense at the time. She does them for the well-being of her children. And change—is okay. Be careful, Fedelina, of planting yourself too deeply. Remain flexible, movable. The major cause of plant death after planting, by the way, is planting too deep
.

We’re surviving. Our relocation and living on this farm are keeping us alive. But I fear I can’t be the mother I wanted to be—one who gives her daughter the lavish house, a cultural life in the city, ballet, voice and piano lessons, and, basically, the world. And as I go about without passion, toiling under the sun, I worry that you’re detecting in my eyes that your mother no longer knows who she is. When faced with survival, life is no longer about passion and frolicking in self-thought as to who we are or who we might become. It’s then that our survival mechanisms kick in, turning us into who we need to be. And the Lord has stepped in, too, reminding me through it all who I am—always with Him, and why I am here—to love the Lord, my God with all my heart, soul, and mind. People travel the world over and search their lifetimes for the meaning to it all. I don’t want to search. I’ve already found
.