“Happy Birthday, Dad!” Nessa had written diagonally inside the front cover in a tight scrawl. The book arrived this morning, dropped in Martin’s mailbox with a thud. Gardens of Gravel Sand. Thoughtful. Martin turns the book over in his hands. For Christmas Nessa had ordered him a folding Japanese saw and an ink painting of the garden at the Kyoto Imperial palace. He thinks it must be a relief for her to have a theme to work with, rather than casting about for gift ideas twice annually.
When he’d visited Nessa in Brooklyn the previous summer, he’d experienced two epiphanies. Or if not epiphanies, then at least brief moments of lucid thought. The first epiphany was the realization that his daughter had arbitrarily selected him as the ill-done-by party in her parents’ divorce, a choice which Martin attributed to the fact that he said less than Maureen and that Nessa still harboured resentment over her chubby elbows, which were clearly not from Martin.
The second epiphany occurred to him in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. He’d gone there to escape the heat, the humidity, the people streaming in and out of doorways in whose way he always seemed to be, the smell of garbage, the unexpected drips of air conditioners, the alarming clank resulting from stepping on the metal hatch doors that led down to the basements of every shop and restaurant, the young dads carrying babies on their fronts natural as koala bears and reminding him of what he had not been for Nessa. Not that she seemed to mind or even remember now. In the Japanese garden, Martin watched slow-moving koi from the shaded pavilion, ate sticky grapes from a plastic container, contemplated the shape of a carefully pruned tree on the far side of the pond. Martin wondered if it might just be heat stroke, but allowed the pleasant, floating feeling to buzz in his chest, buoyed by thoughts of creating something like this in his own yard. His experience had a name, as it turned out. “Aware.” An epiphany in the discovery of beauty.
What he remembers are her movements. Tucking a tissue into her sleeve. Clapping fruitflies.
Martin stands up from the dining room table with his full cup of coffee and moves to the oak cupboard kitchen. Maureen changed all of the knobs a few years ago, while the cat was in the middle of deciding whose side to take in the hardening lines between Maureen and Martin. Winding around Martin’s feet, the cat would purr and murmur, expecting treats from the bag on top of the fridge. Martin, once realizing the cat’s loyalties extended solely to the hand that fed him and not, as he once envisioned, to the hand of the truest and most honest friend, would reach up, shake the bag teasingly, dole out two or three of the fish-smelling treats. Maureen had tired of the shiny brass and lacquered oak and talked endlessly about possible kitchen renovations, the scale of which moved from complete gutting to knob changes in the face of Martin’s indifference. Or maybe she’d already realized the change would be short-lived for her, since she would be moving out to a condo close to the river valley. The cat, sensing that Maureen, while in the kitchen, was a surer bet than Martin, who sat in the living room in front of the TV, campaigned vociferously and won, from Maureen, generous handfuls of treats. Arthritic, with matted fur, the cat presented no prize anyway, Martin decided, and so he encouraged Maureen to take the cat with her, along with the rocking chair he’d always disliked, when she announced her intention to relocate to a new condo by the river which had, Martin imagined, white cabinets made of particleboard.
Martin watches his coffee slowly rotate in the microwave and wonders why regular ovens didn’t have rotating plates. Maureen, her face flushed and anxious, had forever been bending over in front of the oven, twisting pans this way and that, often burning her hands on the top element. Or dropping a tray of cookies as she moved them from one rack to the other, hot metal finding its way through her bunched-up dishcloth. Martin wonders if she still does this. Maybe she’s relaxed, the tension that defined her upper body, shoulders held high in a sustained shrug, dissipating along with their marriage. Maybe she never uses the oven anymore, her divorcée calendar of dinners out and cultural events allowing time for microwaved meals only. Martin stops the microwave at 0:01, opens it, takes out the cup of coffee and heads back to the dining room to look more carefully at the book.
A series of black and white photographs of, predictably, gravel and sand is interspersed with text. Martin flips through the book once, twice, and then a third time. His own Japanese garden, the one that exists vaguely in his head and even more vaguely in his yard, struggles into existence in brief fits of activity (such as the removal of all of the old flower beds and most of the lawn) and long stretches of contemplation and research. Martin decided on the high path to authenticity, which would, as one of his books had warned him, take longer.
“What’s the high path?” Nessa asked when Martin explained to her on the phone why he could not yet send photos of his Japanese garden.
“Well, instead of a literal interpretation of a Japanese garden, it means finding an interpretation that suits the surroundings.”
“So you’re still in the planning stages, then.”
“Oh, yes. Maybe by next summer there’ll be something to see.”
Maybe Nessa thinks he’s intimidated by plant life, and so has sent him this book as reassurance. Plants were, after all, Maureen’s domain. In the first spring after she’d moved out, Martin was pleased to see that the tulips by the front step still bloomed in a riot of colour. He entertained thoughts of Maureen driving by and, upon seeing him puttering about the yard in his rubber boots, stopping to compliment him on how well he’d kept the garden. This would lead no doubt to tender feelings which, although not the same thing as love, was all Martin thought it was reasonable to expect. As spring became summer, the tulips wilted into yellow leaves that flopped exhausted onto the cracked soil. The heat made it uncomfortable to keep walking around the yard in rubber boots. Martin gave up trying to identify what sprouted out of the ground, one plant looking very much like the last to him. By the end of July, plants staggered under the weight of their own flowers and bent double after a hard rain. The lawn started to creep into the flower beds and, because Martin was uncertain as to what were weeds and what were plants, the whole yard took on the ragged look of a rental property. Martin decided that by the time he decoded the arbitrary classification of plant versus weed, the effort of digging up the weeds would be too great. Besides, Maureen hadn’t driven by once.
The careful swirls of gravel depicted in the book remind Martin of crop circles. Out the dining room window, Martin can see his topsoil whirling in eddies. The lawn, flowers and weeds that previously anchored the soil prevented Martin from envisioning his new garden, and so he’d rented a small skid-steer with a backhoe attachment and torn the yard up in the weekend. He hadn’t known what to do with the piles of sod and dirt. He should’ve rented a dumpster or a truck to take everything away, but instead left uneven hills of decaying sod around the yard. At first, he tried to work the lumpy hills into his design, imagining them as small mountains—tsuki-yama—or foothills randomly scattered by nature. Now that he understands more about Japanese garden design, he knows that he is supposed to capture the essence of the nature that surrounds him. But the city stretches flat and two dimensional, the dive into the river valley, a brief and dangerous three-dimensional space that throws people off balance and makes them fall off bridges or throw tires and old suitcases into the river. In late spring, the river swells but still appears placid, the undertow kicking up silt and clay. The water’s turbidity brings fears of beaver fever and the taste of chlorine. In the winter, the river solidifies in pieces, islands of ice floating like mould in an abandoned teapot until they fuse together to form a solid surface that then thins imperceptibly in the spring. Martin’s not sure this is a nature worth capturing.
“So, was it like you ran out of things to say?” Nessa had asked when he’d first told her that Maureen had moved out.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever had much to say.”
In fact, Martin can’t remember a single conversation he’s ever had with Maureen. He remembers the gist of their con-versations, but not the actual sentences. He remembers, for example, that they once argued over the placement of the cellphone charger. Martin thought it should be on the table in the front hall so that, upon entering the house with a cellphone with a dead battery, he could plug it in and charge it before forgetting it in his coat pocket. The bonus of seeing it on the hall table on his way out the door, and remembering to put it back in his coat pocket made the logic so unassailable that he could not fathom how Maureen could deny it. Perhaps this is why he can’t remember their argument: it made no sense.
What Martin remembers are her movements. Tucking a tissue into her sleeve while reading a book. Extending her arm straight while changing channels with the TV remote. Clapping fruit flies with a ferocity that caused Martin to twitch if he was nearby. Pinching a wilted flower between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. Bending over, exposing the small of her back, while pulling weeds from the front flower beds. She always got a sunburn there, that space between the top of her pants and the bottom of her shirt.
Martin also remembers individual words, their surrounding mates blacked out so the word glows solitary—a pinprick punched through black paper. Like the time Maureen had told him they were going on a ‘retreat’. He’d imagined some forested cabin with a small front porch on which he could read the Saturday paper without intrusion. That it was a “couples’ retreat,” he understood only once they’d arrived and a woman wearing a straw hat and a denim dress handed them name tags to hang around their necks. One of the first “circles” they attended involved writing, on an index card with a small library pencil, a word that did not describe your spouse. Martin wrote “lazy”. Maureen could never let the dishes go undone, or leave crumbs on the counter. When they exchanged cards, Martin at first could not decipher Maureen’s handwriting, her vowels indistinguishable from one another. Maureen took the card from his hand, printed “JAUNTY” in large capital letters, and thrust it back at him. Jaunty. Martin turned the word over in his mind. It sounded like a brand name, a cleaning product maybe, or a vitamin supplement. He wanted to ask Maureen what she meant. Did she want him to be jaunty? Did this have anything to do with him napping in the afternoons? Or his lack of interest in travelling to Egypt?
But they were hustled along to the next exercise, in which they were each supposed to tell the other a story they had never shared before. Maureen went first and told him how once when Nessa, still a baby, had cried all day, inconsolable, Maureen left her in her crib, shut the door, and watched TV with the volume turned up loud for at least a third of an A&E biography on Judy Garland. When she returned to Nessa’s room, she found Nessa asleep with vomit that looked like cheese curds all over her sleeper. Maureen told the entire story while looking down at her lap, folding her index card smaller and smaller.
Martin, worried that too long a pause would seem judgmental, rubbed her shoulder and launched into a story about how he’d passed over a perfectly qualified female accountant for a promotion because he’d thought she was pregnant but it turned out she was just getting fat because she was depressed. The loss of the promotion depressed her further and accelerated her weight gain. Maureen stared at Martin, shook her head, and got up to throw her tiny, folded index card in the garbage.
Martin’s story was only partially true. The woman hadn’t been qualified at all, and the year previous, she’d gotten so drunk at a customer event she’d thrown up underneath a skirted table. Martin knew she was overweight, not pregnant, since he’d seen her eat a bag of cheezies each morning during the roundtable update meeting, her orange-stained fingers flashing as she talked.
The story he should’ve told Maureen went some-thing like this.
On the route 42 on the way home from work, Martin finished his newspaper and tucked it into his briefcase, the paper already folded in quarter-sheets for optimal bus reading. In the briefcase rolled an apple he’d carried around for a week, a couple of pencils for crosswords, and a worn copy of the route 42 schedule, the folded edges soft with age. Due to the new trend of plastering advertising over the entire outside of the bus, from inside it was possible to see where you were only approximately, by landmark, through the thousands of tiny pinholes. And so Martin could not really see out the window and rested his eyes on the seat in front of him.
“Nessa Lasdun sucks cock!!” exclaimed the seat joyfully, in thick black marker. Had it said “Nessa Lasdun is a slut”, Martin could have written it off as a jealous schoolgirl insult. But Martin felt certain it was a boy who’d written it—the sheer exuberance of the two exclamation points matched the amazing good fortune a boy of 14 would feel at having found someone willing not only to touch, but to suck his cock. Martin felt glued to the seat, weighted by anchors so heavy and deep they descended through the floor of the bus and the asphalt beneath it, through the underground conduits of fibre optics and gas to a soil packed by the pressure of the city that lay on top of it.
He missed his stop and rode the bus farther into the suburbs, where the trees were smaller and the garages bigger. Not that he could see them through the pinholes; his eyes focused on the jagged black words in front of him. As the bus emptied out, Martin searched his briefcase. Clicking the end of his mechanical pencil furiously, he bent forward and tried to scribble out the word “cock.” But the thin lead snapped, and even when he eased up, left only a shiny grey patina on the surrounding vinyl, leaving the word untouched.
The bus had turned around now to head back the way it had come. Martin looked around for an identifying number for the bus—imagined there must be some kind of graffiti hotline that he could call.
Then he remembered his keys. The previous Christmas, Nessa had given him a small army knife that doubled as a keychain. He’d always felt slightly ridiculous carrying the pocket knife as if there could possibly be some unknown danger in his office day; at the same time, he was sure that, in the face of such danger, the knife would be wholly inadequate.
He unfolded the knife and wondered what he should cut out: “Nessa Lasdun”? “Sucks cock”? The whole phrase? He settled on the shortest word and cut around it, folded the vinyl into a small square and tucked it into his briefcase.
He opened her closet door, the motion of his own arm in the mirror hung inside making him twitch.
Martin walks through the yard. If he could only come up with a plan, he would have something to show for his efforts. The hills have begun to sag, and previously level ground surprises Martin with sudden depressions that cause him to stumble. Maybe he can fill the holes with the old sod, and then put new sod over everything. A temporary measure. But then he’d have to rip it all up again and he’s already come this far.
Truthfully, “this far” isn’t anywhere. The project has somehow spiralled beyond his control, even though it hasn’t moved. He remembers when the convention centre was built, how the cost projections tripled and they’d only gotten as far as a gaping hole on the edge of the river valley. Debate raged over whether construction should halt or continue. In the end, it seemed that a large, expensive hole in the ground would leave a bitter taste in the collective mouth of the city, while tripled construction costs were deemed to be forgettable facts once the stepped glass structure clung to the hillside. Martin had seen the decision as a failure of logic at the time, but here, in his lumpy, weed-filled yard, his mouth sours.
Maybe he’s going from the wrong angle, expecting to create a master plan when he should really start with the details. A rock, perhaps. Or a pine tree.
Martin started snooping in Nessa’s room. Not often, since he had to wait until both Nessa and Maureen were out of the house. He’d walk casually down the hall, wanting to appear nonchalant for as long as possible in case Maureen returned for a forgotten grocery list or Nessa for a set of keys. Once inside her room, he was never sure what to look for, and sifted half-heartedly through books and papers. She had a password on her computer. Martin tried to crack it once, but after two failed attempts he chickened out, the speakers booming their chord of disapproval. He opened her closet door, the motion of his own arm in the mirror hung on the inside making him twitch. He groped in the dark behind stacks of sweaters and jeans.
“I know you go into my room when I’m not there,” Nessa yelled at Maureen one Friday night as Martin entered the front door after work.
“I honestly don’t. Only to leave laundry on your bed.”
“Don’t lie. Don’t lie. It makes me sick.”
“I’m not lying. We’ve always taught you to respect other people’s privacy. I would never violate that.”
Nessa pushed past Martin who stood at the entrance to the kitchen. Maureen, her lips tightened in a grim line, went out the back door to the garden. He could see her through the kitchen window, sinking a spade into the sod around the edge of a flower bed, bending over to separate clumps of dirt from the roots that held it together. If he told her, he’d have to tell her about the little square of vinyl in his briefcase.
And what could she do? Give Nessa the same talk about safe sex she’d given her two years ago, only with more urgency? Talk to her about self-respect? About how the male species was single-mindedly dirty? And maybe it wasn’t even true. And Nessa seemed to be okay. Her grades were still good. She had friends who called him Mr. Lasdun. She played badminton. Maybe they should’ve had a second child. There could’ve been more options for alliances instead of the triangle they found themselves locked in. A dilution of individual personalities until they dissolved into a cohesive whole.
In the quiet of his bathroom, Martin listens to soap bubbles in his sink drain and prays for early snow. A heavy, dense blanket to cover his yard. Normally, secrets are harder to keep in the winter—footprints blemish unshovelled sidewalks, tire tracks show who has reversed out of a garage and driven away, tracks in the yard betray the rabbit’s hiding spot under the boughs of the spruce tree.
But he doesn’t need to cover his tracks. He needs to cover everything. What if Nessa comes home for Christmas? Even if he cleans the house, shops to fill the cupboards and fridge, moves the TV off the dining room table, she’ll only have to look outside to think she knows the truth. Which wouldn’t be the truth, though protests from Martin would only strengthen her conviction. And what if she told Maureen? Christmas is months away, but there’s not enough time to create a garden. At least level the hills, he thinks. Pile the sod out behind the garage.
The day Maureen moved out, Martin stayed at work longer than usual. A trail of red tail lights snaked its way through what used to be the Rat Hole but was now a flat, broad street like any other. He’d thought maybe she’d stay until spring. But she’d changed her mind. Said it would be easier to leave in the winter while the garden was dormant. They would tell Nessa after, they decided, when each felt free to speak the truth about what had happened. Besides, Nessa had only just found an apartment in Brooklyn, and still used only her cell phone, which made Martin worry that her stability was short-lived, built on shifting sand.
Martin organized his e-mail, added items to his task list, booked a status meeting for a project that was going off the rails. And what could really be said to sum up the slow, crusty end of what had been his marriage? A solidification of what once had been fluid. When the office lights turned off automatically at seven, Martin watched the flashing, shimmying lights of the nearby casino streaking through the night.
Martin makes himself a cup of coffee, sits down at the dining room table with all of his books, graph paper, and a stencil from Lee Valley, the bushes and shrubs punched neatly out of green plastic. He wonders if Maureen misses gardening now that she only has a balcony. Wonders if she ever struggled with what plant to put where. He doesn’t remember seeing her planning on paper.
The problem, Martin decides, is that Japanese garden design requires subtlety that comes only after years of experience. The definition of aware, Martin now knows from a closer read, is an epiphany in the discovery of beauty in the pathos of life. He waits for beauty.
Kari Lund-Teigen is the winning author in Alberta Views’ 2007 short fiction competition.
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