Leota's Garden

  The molten words would have come pouring out of her, burning away the landscape of her relationship with her mother, blackening everything. Some things Annie knew about her mother, things she wished she didn’t. One of them was that Nora Gaines was good at holding grudges. She kept a list of the hurts she had suffered over her lifetime. And who had caused them. She never forgot anything, never forgave. The past was like ammunition, boxed and waiting. And she was quick to load and fire. Annie knew the name of every person who had ever hurt her mother and how they had accomplished it. Nora Gaines made sure of it.

  Sometimes the blame from past transgressions spilled over onto Annie’s head, and the litanies would begin.

  “You’re just like your father. He never had sense enough to think about the future either. . . . You’re just like your father, dreaming all the time. You’re just like him. . . .”

  Or worse.

  “You’re just like your grandma Leota. Always thinking about yourself. Never caring about anyone else’s feelings. . . . My mother never had time for me. Look at all the time I’ve made for you. I was never loved the way you are. . . . My mother never gave me a thing. I had to go out on my own at eighteen and make my own way. . . . I’ve always wanted to make sure you had the best opportunities. I’ve made sure you had all the things I never had.”

  Not once could Annie remember ever hearing her mother say a nice thing about her own mother, Leota Reinhardt. And it made Annie wonder. Was Grandma Leota to blame for the way her mother was?

  There was no way to measure cause and effect because Annie only knew her mother’s side. She’d never heard Grandma Leota say much about anything. In fact, Annie had seldom seen Grandma Leota. Though her grandmother lived right over the hills in Oakland, Annie could count on two hands the times she had been taken for a visit. And as soon as the family arrived, Annie and Michael were sent out to play in the backyard so the adults could talk.

  She frowned. It had never been her grandmother who sent them out.

  Her mother always developed a headache shortly after they arrived at Grandma Leota’s, so they never stayed longer than an hour or two. On the way home, Mom would fume and catalog Grandma’s failings.

  Once, when her parents were still married, Annie had overheard her father say he liked Leota. Only once. The words had been thrown down like a gauntlet. A battle royal had ensued, long and loud, with doors slamming, glass breaking. The memory of that night was etched permanently in Annie’s brain. A memory of brutal accusations shouted back and forth. Six months later, Annie’s parents filed for divorce. By the tender age of eight, Annie had known better than to mention or ask questions about Grandma Leota.

  Lying back on her bed, Annie stared up through the crocheted canopy. It had been a present on her fourteenth birthday. Her mother had thrown a party for her, complete with friends from school, ballet, and gymnastics. The house had been full that day. Her mother had made sure her present was opened last, then proceeded to tell everyone how she’d seen the canopy covering in a home-design magazine and called the publisher, who put her in contact with the company. “It came all the way from Belgium.”

  Everyone had oohed and aahed over it. One friend had even leaned over to whisper, “I wish my mother would buy something like that for me.”

  Annie remembered wishing she could throw it back into its big professionally wrapped box with the massive silk ribbons and flowers and hand it to the girl with her best wishes. She wanted to scream, “I didn’t ask for it! She’s going to use it against me. The next time I dare disagree with her, she’s going to say, ‘How can you be so ungrateful? I bought you that beautiful canopy. I had to call long distance to that magazine and then stay on hold forever just to find out where it came from. And then I had to write to the company in Belgium. Do you have any idea how much that canopy cost? I would have died to have something so beautiful in my drab little room when I was a child. And now you won’t do the simplest thing I ask of you.’”

  Something shifted within Annie, a subtle warmth, the barest flicker of light. Just a spark, but it was like a match lit in a dark room. She could see clearly, and a chill went through her.

  Oh, God . . . oh, God. I’m lying here on my bed the same way Mom is lying on her chaise longue downstairs. I’m nursing my grievances the same way she nurses hers. I despise what she does, and I’m becoming just like her.

  Annie sat up, heart pounding. I can’t stay here. I can’t go on like this. If I do, I’m going to end up hating my mother the same way she hates hers. Lord, I can’t live like that.

  Slipping off her bed, Annie headed for her closet. Sliding the mirrored doors open, she reached to the high shelf and pulled down her suitcase. Opening her dresser drawers, she took out only what she needed, packing hastily. She had enough to get by until she was settled with Susan. She took her Bible from her nightstand and put it on top of her clothes. Closing the suitcase, she locked it.

  Should she speak with her mother? No, she didn’t dare risk it. She knew the scene that would come if she confronted her. Sitting down at her desk, she opened a side drawer and took out a box with pretty stationery inside. She sat for a long moment, thinking. No matter what she said, it wasn’t going to change her mother’s mind. Wiping her eyes and rubbing her nose, Annie pressed her lips together. Lord . . . Lord . . . She didn’t know what to pray. She didn’t know if she was doing right or wrong.

  Honor.

  What did it mean anyway?

  Mom, she wrote, I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me. She sat for a long time, trying to think what else to say to make the blow easier on her mother. Nothing came to her. Nothing would help. All she could imagine was the anger. I love you, she wrote finally and signed it simply, Annie.

  She placed the note in the middle of her bed.

  Nora heard the stairs creak once and knew Annie was coming down. That’s good. She’s had time to think things over. Nora relaxed on the chaise longue, pressed the warming compress over her eyes, and waited for her daughter to come and apologize.

  The front door opened and closed.

  Surprised and irritated, Nora sat up.

  “Annie?”

  Growing angry, she threw the compress down and rose. She went into the family room and called out to her again. Annie was probably just going out for a walk to sulk. She’d come back in a more pliable mood. She always did. But it was aggravating to be made to wait. Patience wasn’t one of Nora’s virtues. She liked to have things settled as quickly as possible—and she didn’t like to worry and wonder about what Annie was thinking and doing. She liked to know where she was and what was running through her mind.

  Why is she being so difficult? I’m only doing what’s best for her!

  As she entered the living room, she saw Annie through the satin sheers of the front plate-glass windows. Her daughter was tossing a suitcase into the trunk of the new car her father had given her as a graduation gift. Shocked, Nora stood staring as Annie slammed the trunk, walked around to the driver’s side, unlocked it, and slid in.

  Where does she think she’s going? She’s never to leave without asking permission.

  As Annie drove down the street, two emotions struck Nora at once. White-hot rage and cold panic. She ran for the door, throwing it open and hurrying outside. “Annie!”

  Nora Gaines stood on her manicured front lawn and watched the taillights of her daughter’s car flash once as she stopped briefly at the corner and then turned right and drove out of sight.

  Chapter 2

  Leota Reinhardt washed and rinsed her cheese glass, green Fiesta plate, fork and knife and set them to air-dry in the plastic stand on the sink counter. The house was silent, the windows closed. She used to leave them open all through springtime, loving the sound of the birds and the smell of clean, flower-scented air drifting in from her backyard garden. But her garden had gone to seed over the past few years, her arthritis keeping her a prisoner inside. Pulling the sink plug, she looked at her gnarled hands as the war
m, sudsy water drained away.

  Just as time is draining away. At eighty-four, she knew she didn’t have much left. Sadness filled her, a loneliness that seemed to deepen with the long days and nights of waiting.

  A door slammed, and Leota raised her head and watched as three children appeared just beyond her west-side, paint-chipped white fence. The house next door was close, so close she could talk to her neighbors if she knew them, which she didn’t anymore. All the neighbors she had known were gone. They’d moved away or died long ago. The house west of hers was now occupied by a young black woman with three children, a boy of about nine and two little girls perhaps seven and five. Leota was the last one from the original families that had purchased these houses just before World War II. Her husband’s parents had bought this house when it was new. She thought back briefly to those troubled times when Bernard had gone off to war and she had moved in with “Mama and Papa,” bringing her two babies with her. George had just turned three, and Eleanor was a toddler and into everything.

  When Bernard came back home a changed man, Mama and Papa insisted they remain with them. They saw his brokenness, and Leota faced her lack of options. For a time they all lived together civilly, if not happily, until the garage was lengthened and converted by Papa and Bernard into a one-bedroom unit with a living area and windows that looked out into the garden. Oh, the bitterness of those years.

  Things were better when Mama and Papa left the “big” house to them and lived in the smaller unit. Then Papa died a few weeks later of a heart attack, and Mama lived on thirteen more years. It wasn’t until the last few years of Mama’s life that Leota felt they had finally made peace.

  “I misjudged you.” Mama’s accent was still evident, even after so many years in America. She had tried hard to lose it, but it had returned as death approached, as though, perhaps, her mind was wandering back to her childhood in Europe. When Leota had leaned down to tuck the quilt around her, Mama had touched her cheek, her blue eyes rheumy with tears. “You’ve been good to my family, Leota.” Kind words after so many years of misunderstandings. Mama died a week later.

  Leota found it odd that she should remember those words now while watching the three neighbor children file solemnly down their back steps and across the yard. The boy carried a small shovel, the older girl a shoe box. The smaller girl was crying in abject misery. No one spoke as the boy dug a hole. He had just set his shovel aside when their mother came out the back door. She went to them and spoke to them briefly, holding out a square of pretty, flowered cotton. The older girl took it and knelt down on the ground as her sister took something limp from the box. A dead sparrow. The mother took up the empty box and walked back to the garbage can, tossing it in while the youngest girl folded the pretty cotton around the tiny bird, then placed it tenderly in its small grave. They sang a hymn, one that touched off Leota’s memories of church services long ago: “Rock of Ages” . . .

  But what were they doing to the song, adding notes and warbles? Why couldn’t they just sing it as it was written?

  As the first small scoop of dirt was carefully shaken into the hole, the little girl jumped up and fled to her mother, clinging to her long, zebra-print skirt. The woman lifted her and held her close, turning away to the house as the boy finished the burial.

  So much pomp and ceremony, so many tears for a single sparrow.

  Oh, Lord of mercy, will anyone care when I’m gone? Will anyone shed a single tear? Or will I lie dead in this house for so many days until the stench of my decaying body brings someone to check on me? She had tried so hard to keep her family together and had failed in all attempts.

  The older girl stuck a hand through Leota’s fence and broke off a few daffodils, volunteers that had naturalized from long-ago plantings. Leota wanted to slide the window up and shout at the child to keep her thieving hands off the few remaining flowers in her garden, but just as quickly as the anger came, it dissipated. What did it matter? Could the child reattach them to the broken stems? She watched the little girl place the flowers on the fresh grave, a last offering of love to the departed bird. As the child turned, she spotted Leota framed in her kitchen window. Uttering a startled cry, the child fled across the backyard, leaped up the few steps and disappeared inside, the door slamming behind her.

  Leota blinked, hurt deeply. The look on that child’s face had been like a slap on her own. It hadn’t been guilt at being caught stealing two daffodils that had made that child run so fast. It had been fear.

  Have I become the witch in a child’s fairy tale? Why else would such a look come into a child’s face unless the poor dear thought she’d seen an ugly old crone who meant to do her harm?

  Tears prickled Leota’s eyes, blurring her vision. Her heart ached.

  God, what did I do to bring things to this sad end? I always loved children. I loved my children best. I love them still.

  Yet Eleanor called infrequently and managed to visit only a couple of times a year. She never stayed longer than an hour or so and would spend most of it looking out the front window, fearing some hooligan would steal the hubcaps from her Lincoln. Or was it a Lexus? And George was just too busy to visit, too busy to call, too busy to write.

  Turning away from the kitchen sink, Leota took a few steps to the table by the back window. Bracing herself, she sat down slowly, wincing at the pain in her knees. The glass was stained from years of rain pouring down, trailing dust and grime from the clogged roof gutters. The last time she’d climbed the ladder to clean them out was ten years ago; the last time she washed her windows was last spring. It rained the day after, and she hadn’t done it again since.

  Beyond that cloudy window was her long-abandoned garden, her place of retreat and renewal. She merely glanced at it now—it hurt too much to see the scraggly roses growing in a tangle, the undisciplined bushes that had once been so carefully shaped. Weeds poked up everywhere, choking out the flowers. The lawn was dead in some places and overgrown in others. Pots still lined the brick restraining wall, but the precious plants she had purchased with hard-earned money were dead, some from thirst through the summer months and others drowned by winter rains. The cherries that had dropped last year had rotted on the small patio, leaving stains like drops of dried blood. Oh, and her lovely lavender-purple wisteria . . .

  Leota closed her eyes against the grief. Her wisteria had gone wild, shoots twisting, twining, and thickening until they broke the overburdened lattice now sagging and blocking the gate to the vegetable garden—a garden that once yielded enough to feed her family and the neighbors. Now it produced nothing but mustard flowers and milkweed—and tiny apricot trees from the fruit that had dropped and rotted into the ground.

  Flexing her fingers slowly, Leota reached for the newspaper, sliding the blue rubber band off and putting it into an empty plastic margarine container. All those silly rubber bands, one for every day of every year she’d been reading the Oakland Tribune. What was she going to do with all of them? What was she going to do with the dozens of plastic margarine containers stored in the pantry? Or the pie tins? Or the magazines? Thank the Lord the magazine subscriptions had run out and no more were coming. Now there was a bane from Satan called junk mail.

  Though inclined to read the paper, Leota decided a glance was enough. What good would it do her to read the details of how the world at large was going to hell in a handbasket? Iraq and its madman. Soviet splinter countries with their nuclear weapons and hot tempers. Japan and China with their ancient grudges. As for the local news, she already knew Oakland had more than its share of murder and mayhem and government corruption. Editorials? The same old stuff year after year. Why read about it? The last time she read the whole page, they were firing pros and cons about teaching inner-city children ebonics! What happened to learning proper English? She thought of how hard Mama Reinhardt had practiced the language, even though she never intended to work outside the home. And Papa, who did manage to learn English well, only worked until the war years; then fear and
suspicion kept him unemployed.

  No, she didn’t need to read the front page to see that the world hadn’t changed much in her lifetime. If she wanted details, she could watch them in living color on one of the news shows that ran between four in the afternoon and eleven at night. She had watched from time to time and seen the same carnage repeated hour after hour. No need for people to go out and rubberneck anymore. They could see actual footage from a police car window if they liked. As for wars, take a good long look at CNN. And nothing was too disgusting or perverse to be discussed openly on any number of talk shows.

  “Don’t even get me started on the sitcoms,” she muttered to the silence. Politically correct was just another way of saying anything goes, no matter how deviant. And all this hoop-tee-la about celebrities, most of whom she didn’t know.

  Lord, why don’t You just take me home? I’m tired. I hurt. I’m sick of seeing what’s happening in the world. It’s getting worse. I’m no good to anyone. I’ve become a cranky old hag who scares neighbor children half to death. Those I love have their own lives to live. Isn’t that the name of a soap opera?

  That was something she swore she would never do. Watch soap operas. But she was getting desperate. Sometimes she turned the television on for no other reason than to hear the sound of another human voice.

  She found the newspaper sections she wanted: the comics and Dear Abby. She had read the advice columns for so long she knew exactly what kind of advice would be dispensed. She’d read all the problems anyone could imagine and quite a few she was sure people had made up.

  There’s nothing new under the sun. Sometimes she felt like a Peeping Tom or a voyeur getting a glimpse into the private lives of other people. Well, why not? She didn’t have much of a life of her own anymore. Anyone looking through her window would be bored to death. She chuckled. She could just hear them now. “What’s that old woman doing? Sitting at her nook table, sitting in front of her television, sitting in the bathroom, lying in bed sleepless because she slept most of the day in her chair?”