The Orchard, page 4
“Oh!” cried Marie, as if she’d left milk boiling in the pan. “I’d completely forgotten! You’d come to see Rose. And here I was, hogging you both to myself.” She patted her forehead with a handkerchief that appeared from the sleeve of her cream sweater, a gesture not even in the same universe as those of Leaky Man. “She had to run to the vet. Kits, that’s her little cat, had some sort of episode. She felt awful and said she didn’t have your number, and she had no idea how long she’d be in Brattleboro, and she’s absolutely mortified.”
Did Hayley’s face fall?—just the way my heart felt? If it did, she banished the frown with a bright smile. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Hayley said, again sounding different from my mother. “We hope it’s not serious.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Marie sighed with an abstraction that seemed philosophical. “Would you all like some lunch? Rose made lamb stew.”
“Oh, thank you, no,” Hayley said. “We’ll be getting back. We have sap buckets overflowing.” And with that, and a few more minutes of banter, Hayley gently extracted us from the congenial, if papery, hospitality of Marie Bettencourt.
* * *
*
At the truck, where Bear was being a good dog for once and sitting patiently in front of the grill, I looked longingly back at the neat yellow house with the blue door, and the grand piano and wall-to-ceiling bookshelves inside that looked to hold children’s books. (They didn’t; I found out later they were art books, from Aho and Banksy and Bonnard to Caravaggio to the Zen masters of the Edo period. They would later have a profound effect on my education.)
“How come we didn’t stay for lunch?” I said.
“Cuz,” Hayley said. “Get in.”
I couldn’t move. I was rooted, staring back at the house. “Cuz why?” I said.
“Cuz never take anything that’s not offered freely.”
“She offered it.” I was zeroing in on the blue door as if it might be the gateway to some fairy kingdom. As far as I was concerned, it was. Then I surveyed the wide lawn, the terracing, the greenhouse, the view across the valley.
“Yeah but,” Hayley said.
“But what?”
“It wasn’t quite free. She kinda had to, didn’t she? Knowing we came all this way.”
“It wasn’t very far. Fifteen minutes.”
“Still. C’mon, let’s go. We’ll come back sometime, maybe.”
The “maybe” stung like a cut. I had just been totally enchanted; I had the sense that Hayley had been too. Could it be swept away that quickly? I felt like crying but girded myself. Hayley and I were a team; the way she said, “C’mon, let’s go,” reinforced it. We were in this together, we would face the disappointments of the world back to back.
I moved my lips around and kicked at the front tire. “Okay,” I said. “C’mon, Bear, let’s blow.” And we all got back in Oliver and rattled down the hill.
Three
I have found, in the wisdom of years, that the best relationships usually begin rocky. Rockily. Is that a word? It should be, given how much of life rolls that way. The man who ended up being my college boyfriend sank our canoe on our first date. He didn’t really sink it, a moose did, a gigantic monster bull in rut who swam out a quarter mile to wage the attack. It was October, the water was very cold, the bull flailed his front hooves, and frankly I’m amazed no one died.
Having Rosie not be home was nowhere near as life-threatening, but in the hierarchy of memory, it seems more tragic.
“Shit happens,” Hayley consoled as we drove past the cutoff back up Tavern Hill. “Let’s go on into town and get a milkshake.” She meant continue straight on into Putney, where our general store had a dairy counter in back. This was a treat beyond reckoning. I knew, even at seven, that we couldn’t afford it. The collateral costs of heartbreak. We sat at the long, polished wooden bar and had chocolate malts. I can still taste it. The gritty, almost salty bits of toasted barley dissolving in my mouth with the blended ice cream. Hayley’s tan and tendoned forearm touching mine. The bubbly suck of the straw as I ran it around the top edge of the shake.
“You know, Pup,” Hayley said. “The people we are most excited about often hurt us, and they don’t mean to. At all.”
“How come?” I said, and blew out through the straw to make more bubbles.
“Because we are so crazy excited. And everyone, everyone, is just kinda poking along, doing the best they can.”
“Oh,” I said.
She leaned her head against mine and blew bubbles, too, into her glass.
“Right?” she said.
“Right,” I said. Not sure exactly about what but feeling just then that it was good to have backup like Hayley.
“I translated a poem once by the very great and wonderful Chinese poet Li Po. Wanna hear it? It’s really short.”
I nodded, rubbing my head up and down against hers.
“Okay, it’s about visiting his friend the monk up at the monastery on the mountain and he’s not home. Like Rosie. It goes,
A dog’s bark and the sound of water,
peach blossoms thicken in spring rain.
Deep in the pines, the deer move like shadows,
and at the creek I hear no temple bell.
The mist moves through wild bamboo.
A flying stream plummets from the jasper mountain.
No one knows where you have gone.
Sadly, I lean against a pine and write you this note.”
“We heard a stream,” I said. “But Bear didn’t bark.”
“Nope. Let’s go home.”
“ ’K.”
“Feel better?”
I nodded.
When we climbed our rocky track to the cabin and Oliver rolled to his customary stop against the half-buried rounded boulder and Bear hopped out and I saw a thread of pale smoke coming out of our stovepipe and the way the cloud shadows swept the orchard, I felt happy again and glad to be home. Almost as if we had been on a long trip. And the bright yellow house receded into the fairy world where I guessed it was meant to be.
Four
Rosie came back that afternoon, straight from the vet. She again parked her old Subaru down below, again walked up the track through the orchard. Today she was wearing a heather blue short zip jacket that had the density of felt. It was the most beautiful piece of clothing I’d ever seen. Also, it matched her eyes. She waved and waved as she came up. I wasn’t sitting on Bear but trying to throw a horseshoe at a heavy stick we’d sharpened and hammered into the ground. It wasn’t a regulation horseshoe like the ones the Raiders played with. On the way home from our malts, Hayley had had an idea and pulled in at the Wattses’ mailbox and parked by the rail fence outside their barn, where three thoroughbreds in the paddock tugged at hay in a steel feeder. Florence Watts waved from the dark maw of the barn door. A thick gray braid hung from under a bandanna tied around her head, and she took off leather work gloves as she came toward us. I liked her. She was an old woman, not like Marie, but thin the way a knife blade is thin. Not powdery at all. She was sharp, still agile, and had a quickness about her. That was something I noticed: People who always seemed to do the right thing, by their own lights, had a certain verve. Florence was like that.
“Hey!” she said. “Did you two make some syrup? Geordie ran through the orchard the other day and said steam was coming out every opening of the cabin, just like those cartoons when someone gets really mad.”
“Yes!” I yelled. “We’re going to have pancakes for dinner!”
“How decadent.”
Hayley said, “Florence, do you have any old horseshoes?”
“Heaps and heaps. I’m positively drowning in them. Come on.”
In a corner of the tack room was a stack of what must have been sixty rusted horseshoes. Some still sported bent square-headed nails. “You can have them all. I don’t know why on earth I keep them.”
“Good luck,” I suggested. This wasn’t my first rodeo.
“Exactly, Frith! I think that must be why.”
“Pick out eight, Pup,” Hayley said. And I did. Eight of the least rusty, and the thickest—some had been worn down to nearly paper thin. We thanked Florence and continued on up West Hill.
So I was playing our own version of horseshoes when Rosie came up the track. I stood about ten feet back and threw them at the stick. Sometimes one hit and caught and circled around the stake. “Ringer!” Hayley would cry.
“Why do you say that?”
“That’s what it’s called. If you have a real metal stake it rings. It’s the sound of winning. We’ll get one, you’ll see.”
“Oh,” I said.
Bear was barking this time as Rosie approached, not in alarm but with pleasure. “Horseshoes!” Rosie said.
“Wanna play?”
“Definitely.”
“They’re noncompliant,” I said. Everything about us pretty much was.
“Great.” Rosie scooped up four of the shoes like a pro. The red ones; we’d marked four with fire-engine-red nail polish. “You throw first,” she said. “Home rules.” And it really was home rules, because I have found out since that the true game is played with just two unmarked horseshoes and players standing at opposite ends of the pit. But that isn’t nearly as congenial. And Rosie, who surely knew, never corrected me.
And that was the segue, how Rosie slipped into our lives, without having to make apologies or offer bribes. She simply picked up four noncompliant horseshoes marked with nail polish. I was relieved. I think Hayley was too. They’d finished the weekly six of beer yesterday, so Hayley brought out cold water in jelly jar glasses and we played horseshoes until the sun went over the ridge behind us and left a cold bruise over the trees.
* * *
*
So now a blizzard. I breathe myself to a certain calm at the big desk, let my hands rest on the pile of Hayley’s old poems.
Here, in Northampton, it’s very dark for two o’clock in the afternoon. The storm is not abating and seems more fierce. Can that be another inch of snow blown against the doors in however many minutes of musing? Probably.
Classes will be canceled tomorrow, I have no doubt. Amherst is conservative that way. Good. The prospect of students, of facing their bottomless need, is unappetizing to say the least. My 9:00 a.m. class is a seminar on sense of place in modern Latin American fiction. It’s wildly popular, always way oversubscribed for the twelve coveted spots, and I teach it only because I want to read Mutis, Aira, Borges. It’s usually fun—the fireworks of intellectual engagement, the crackle and pop of firing neurons, the excited hands being raised, the shy ones unable to contain themselves, the arrogant running headlong into their own limitations, my own love of sharing the work. Still, there is always beneath it this unmeetable hunger, this sense that I can never give these kids what they so badly need on some cellular, or spiritual, level. Neither I nor these magnificent authors can supply it. I wonder if pastors feel this way. I can inspire their best papers, give them A’s even, and they will walk away just a little more diminished somehow. Not diminished, maybe, but unsure what they had come for or witnessed, like the Three Magi in Eliot’s poem. They will walk into their adulthoods carrying these trophies as well as a scent of unnameable disappointment.
It was one of my heartbreaks. And I realize, pressing my eyes into the forearm of my sweater—a sweater that Rosie made for me before her death—that there is heartbreak at every turn, which is exactly what Li Xue was trying to tell us.
I lay the orchard poem upside down on a bare patch of blotter and slide the next poem toward me. I reach up and pull the chain on the standing lamp and read:
When I First Saw You
When I first saw you
there was still snow on Mount Tai.
We were so young!
The willows tossed their buds along the river.
You moved with the grace of a heron stalking the bank.
You hadn’t married. Who needs a coarse man? you said.
My husband had been sent to the western wars.
Every night I went to the gate and hid my face in my sleeves.
Around me even the young locusts were singing for a lover.
You brought wine and we sang the “Boat Sailing Home” song.
Overhead, waves of geese flew north.
Their barks fell out of the dark. Later, one came after, calling and calling.
It’s good to have a friend, you said, and poured another cup.
It’s good to have a friend. It was good. The two of us, Hayley and I, newly arrived in town—well, a year before. In Vermont, newly arrived pretty much means anything less than three generations. It was good to have a friend in this strange, hard, beautiful valley. Why had she come? The question had still not been posed. Who the fuck are you? had never been followed by Why the fuck are you here? Which seems strange now. Maybe after a few days it was too late to ask. It was simply good to have Rosie around. Why queer a good thing?
And that too: Was she gay or bi? I honestly never knew. It didn’t occur to me as a child, of course. And if I saw them sometimes holding hands side by side on the porch, well, Rosie held my hand too. Later, when I asked Rosie to reconstruct her conversation with Ivy next door, the one who had first piqued her curiosity about us, I took it at face value: There was an interesting, cultured, literate woman and her child who had just moved next door. They were eccentric in what seemed to be their chosen poverty; intriguing. In a rural village like Putney, that would be enough, wouldn’t it?
Maybe. I never pushed the question because I guess I didn’t want to know. I assume there are infinite and fluid territories along the spectrum of closeness, friendship, and love. Why try to set a hard border where there isn’t any? We loved her. I loved her. There is a place for such naming in science, but in the messy taxonomy of love, there are too many hybrids, too many wild, one-off beasts. Thank God.
Whenever she came wafting up the dirt track, I saw the swatch of color first—of whatever homespun garment she was wearing. Then the bouncing, shining curls. Then I heard the voice, whether singing or humming or calling out. She never drove the final two hundred yards up the steep track, though she could have in her Forester. And then she would see me, and I would make out the frameless glasses, the light glancing off them, the lake-water blue of her eyes.
It was late March when we were playing horseshoes, almost April, and the sun had gone down over the ridge and a tide of cold flowed down off Putney Mountain. A dog barked in the distance over toward Grafton, and a coyote answered. Two coyotes, a moil of pitched howls and yips. We’d been hearing more of them lately. Overhead, dense clouds moved in masses toward the embered smudge of sunset as if heading into battle. Rosie threw her horseshoe with intense concentration; she didn’t pull any punches playing with a seven-year-old. She made two ringers out of four. I made one. Granted, the stakes were maybe twelve feet apart, which, with her long arms, it seemed she could almost span.
“You’re good!” I said, trying to sound more cheerful than I felt. I really wanted to win. I also adored playing someone other than Hayley.
“Closet redneck,” she said. Whatever that meant.
Hayley called from the porch, “What’s the score?”
“Nine to four,” I said. “She’s kicking my ass!”
“Frith! Jesus. Where do you get this stuff? Brrr. I made chili. You guys wanna eat?”
Rosie looked at me, raised an eyebrow, held out her hands, which clutched two horseshoes apiece. “Yep, okay,” I said. “You wins.”
“Wins?”
“That’s how we say it. From when I was little and cute.”
“Got it.”
We lay the horseshoes by the near stake and walked up the short slope. Rosie put her hand on my shoulder, which I liked. She said, “A ringer isn’t really a ringer without the ring, is it?”
“Nope,” I said. Something about walking with her strong hand on me, with the air growing cold and the day going to dusk, and the distant coyotes and Hayley on the porch, and agreeing about this important thing—I felt happy. Safe. I felt I would burst.
* * *
*
The iPhone facedown at the far-right corner of my desk hums and emits a brave little hunting horn blast, called whimsically by its designer “Sherwood Forest.” Hats off to them, the designer dudes and dudettes; it’s the only thing I really like about the miraculous device.
The horn blast means I have a text. I reach for the phone, switch it to vibrate. Putting it at the far corner of the desk is a perfect geographical representation of my feelings for the thing. It’s a text from Willum in the English department saying classes tomorrow are canceled. Why they let us know department by department is beyond me. Why can’t a universal text go out to all employees, like an Amber Alert? It’s not like, say, the School of Forestry is tougher than the rest of us and will take their pickups in to campus. Willum’s text must not be to the entire department, because on mine there is an emoji. Two hearts, flying upward.
Willum.
The boy has a crush on me, he’s made no secret. Can I say that anymore? Crush? Probably not. That’s old-school. It’s too sweet, too innocent. Charming. How can charm, of all things, lose its currency? Now I probably have to say that he wants to hook up. Everything reduced to its transactional essence. Well, the progress of history seems to be the extinction of nuance. In Victorian times, the sight of a bare ankle might give a man a boner, go figure.
Willum’s a metrosexual from Illinois (his words) who has told me that he gets a complete body wax once a month. He eats his sandwiches with a knife and fork. He blushes when I enter the department office and the blotchy red goes down into his open shirt collar. He likes snap-front, yoked, plaid westerns that fit his slender body like a sheath. Also snug Hawaiians with volcanoes and hula girls. He talks with what might be called a feminine affect. Once, handing me my department mail, he tossed his soft blond bangs out of his face and blinked the long lashes of his chocolate-brown eyes and whispered, “Don’t be fooled.”
