Nora and Liz (7 page)

Grinning, Liz pulled into the gravel parking lot and climbed out of the car just as Clara looked up.

“Liz Hardy, my word!” she shouted jubilantly, her wrinkled,
weatherbeaten
face one huge smile. “Look, Harry, it’s the Hardy girl,” she called to her husband, who was just coming slowly around the edge of the stand, leaning heavily, Liz was startled to see, on a cane.

“Mrs. Davis, how nice to see you again.” Liz took Clara’s outstretched hands. “You’re looking well.”

“And you, too, dearie,” Clara said as Harry reached them. His blue eyes looked a little vague, but he nodded at Liz and touched his hand to his head as if tipping a hat. “What brings you here?” Clara asked. Before Liz had a chance to answer, she went on. “I was so sorry to hear about your father, dear. What a fine man he was! We’ve missed you, all of you, these years since your sweet mother died. What has it been, five, six years? So sad, losing her. And how’s your brother? Is he here with you?”

“No, but he’s thinking of coming. He’s married now, living in California. And he has a little boy.” Liz pulled her wallet out of her back pocket and extracted a picture of Gus, a chubby, smiling, blue-eyed baby. “He’s bigger now, of course.”

“Oh, my. Looks just like Jeff, don’t you think, Harry?” she shouted.

Harry nodded; Liz remembered that he was hard of hearing and stubborn about getting a hearing aid. He didn’t seem to be wearing one now.

“Getting ready to open, are you?” Liz said.

“Yes. Though we had such a strange winter, we’re not at all sure how we’ll do. Lettuce is coming along, though; we’ll start selling it next weekend, I think. And the peas don’t look bad.”

“I’m thinking of restoring my mother’s old perennial garden, “Liz told them. “So I might be bothering you with questions.”

“Oh, no bother, dear, no bother. We’ll be glad to help. Your mother would have loved that, you restoring her garden. She loved all her gardens, she did, especially the perennial one, remember, Harry? Why, for a few years we even bought flowers from her, annuals along with the perennials, and sold them, she grew so many. The customers loved them. We could do that again, dear, if you want.”

“Why, sure,” Liz said. “If I can get it going. I didn’t remember Mom did that.”

“It was years ago, dear, when you were just a wee one.” Clara paused, looking at Liz a moment as if considering whether to say something else. Then, shyly, she said, “But I heard you were selling the cabin?”

“We were going to, Jeff and I, but we’ve decided to hold on to it at least for a while. I think I’ll be staying here this summer. I’m still a teacher, you know, so I get summers off.”

Clara seized Liz’s hands again. “Oh, my, that’d be wonderful! We’ll have to have you for dinner, then, and of course we’re just down the road so if you ever need anything, you can just shout.” She paused again, with the same expression, hesitant but curious. “But surely there’s a young man or two, a pretty girl like you?”

“No, Mrs. Davis, there isn’t.” Liz tried not to mind the assumption. “I’m fancy free.”

Clara squeezed her hands, then let them go. “We’ll just have to see what we can do about that.” She winked at Harry, who looked startled, then puzzled, but finally chuckled. “There’s one or two nice hardworking fellows around here.”

“That’s kind of you, Mrs. Davis, but I’m not in the market right now.”

“Oh-oh. I’m sorry. Broken heart?”

Well, why not, Liz thought. “You might say that,” she told her. “I’ve just split up with someone and I need to be by myself for a while.”

“I’m sure he didn’t deserve you, dear. Don’t stay alone too long, though; that’s no way to heal, I always say!”

The phone rang inside the white frame farmhouse.

“There’s your phone,” Liz said hastily, giving each Davis a hug, surprised again at Harry’s frailty. “And I should be going. I’ll see you in a few weeks, when I come back for the summer.”

By the time she’d finished driving to all her old haunts and treating herself to an ice cream cone at Harmony’s, where she and Jeff had always argued over which was better, butter pecan or peppermint
royale
, it was late afternoon and Liz had no inclination to stop at the
Tillots
’ farm. What a depressing place, she thought, turning deliberately away from the farm road; that poor woman, stuck there with two old people and no electricity! I’d have left long ago.

Maybe she enjoys it, though; maybe she’s some kind of masochist or one of those do-good types, a martyr to duty.

But Liz had to admit that Nora really didn’t look the part.

Back at the cabin, Liz baked a huge potato, cooked herself a steak, and ate them, plus a salad, at the table overlooking the lake. She sat there for a long time, sipping red wine and watching the sun set, then took her wine out to the dock and, wrapped in a thick sweater, watched the moon and the stars rise and listened to soft night sounds till she felt sleepy enough to go to bed.

This is the life, she thought as she dropped off, the life I want.

But toward morning she dreamed uneasily of Megan and woke aching and covered in sweat.

***

The cabin seemed full of ghosts again the next morning: Megan, her parents, she and Jeff as children. Liz felt too restless and too sad to go back out to the dock, so after a quick breakfast of toast, coffee, and an orange, she set about pulling things—dishes, pots, cleaning supplies, books, games, knickknacks, clothes too old to wear anyplace but at the cabin—out of cupboards and closets and off shelves, sorting, rearranging, and throwing away. By noon, there was nothing she hadn’t touched, but the ghosts were worse than before, especially when she handled the clothes and found an old green suede jacket of her father’s and a matching one of her mother’s, the latter with a broken zipper. Liz, blinking back tears, slipped her mother’s jacket on. It fit perfectly, and she returned both jackets to the closet, though she doubted that Jeff would want their father’s or that she’d ever replace the zipper or actually wear her mother’s.

Maybe I shouldn’t stay here after all, she thought later, nursing a beer at the table and looking out over the lake. Maybe I should go back to the city tonight instead of tomorrow. Think it over some more, staying here this summer.

Maybe I really can’t take the memories. Or so much solitude.

Restlessly, she got up and took her beer outside, surveying the overgrown perennial garden, where a few bright green mounds showed among the decaying fallen leaves and pine needles. Intrigued, she knelt, pulling off the mulch and studying the emerging plants. Then she went back into the cabin, found a pad and a pencil and, outside again, started sketching them.

When she finally stopped, stiff and damp from kneeling, she realized more than an hour had passed. So, she thought, going back inside, maybe I can deal with solitude after all. And the memories, if I lose myself in stuff like that. She’d felt as close to her mother, drawing her reviving plants, as she had to her father on the dock in the early morning. It was as if the ache of being reminded of them by the static cabin and its contents receded temporarily when she was outside and gave way to a nearly comfortable nostalgia.

If being here doesn’t work, she thought later, packing to return to the city, I can always leave.

And go where, you jerk? Not back to the apartment if you sublet it. And if you don’t sublet it, you won’t be able to afford to come here. So you’ll have to burn your bridges, kiddo, at least for the summer.

Feeling trapped, she opened the car’s trunk to toss in her suitcase—and groaned, seeing the borrowed jack wrapped up in its towel with the other tools.

After knocking at the
Tillots
’ door and getting no response, Liz went around back and spotted Nora kneeling in the large garden, with Thomas stretched out in the fading sun on a bare patch beside her.

“Hello,” Liz called, approaching slowly, not wanting to frighten her. “It’s Liz Hardy again. I’ve brought back your tools. Thanks so much for them.”

Nora scrambled to her feet, wiping her hands on the enormous apron that covered her faded housedress. “Thank you,” she said. “For bringing them back. I was just weeding.”

Liz nodded. A neat row of young lettuces marched along the edge of the garden where Nora had been working, and new pea vines rose against a firm, straight trellis. A row of something with large leaves and red stems grew between two lettuce rows.

“Radishes,” Nora said, nodding at them. “I don’t know why I grow them. My parents hate them, but I love them. Sometimes I even cook them in a cream sauce for a private treat. And they grow really fast.”

Nora seemed more relaxed this time, happy even, not like a masochist or a martyr at all. There was a smudge of dirt on her face that Liz found herself wanting to wipe away. “Maybe,” Liz said impulsively, “you can give me lessons this summer. I’ve decided to stay in the cabin and fix up my mother’s old garden.”

Good grief, she thought, astonished; why on earth did I say that, especially since I already more or less asked Mrs. Davis?

“I’d love to,” Nora replied. “That would be nice. But weren’t you going to sell the cabin?”

“Yes. But I decided against it, at least for now.” She paused. “Too many memories.”

Nora nodded sympathetically. “I don’t think I could ever sell this place,” she said, “although I dream about it sometimes.”

“You do?” Liz was surprised. Despite the fantasies about refrigerators and plumbing that she’d voiced earlier, Nora seemed too settled, especially now outside in her garden, to think about leaving. Liz could see her fixing the place up, perhaps, but not leaving it.

“Oh, yes. Silly dreams. But only when I’m tired.”

“That must be pretty often,” Liz said. “I mean,” she went on, flustered, afraid of being rude, “yours must be a pretty hard life.”

“As I said, it’s how people lived not so long ago. And I do like the peacefulness of it, the solitude. But then when I get the Sunday papers—a woman from church takes me to get them after the service—and I read casual references to things like computers and see ads for appliances and TVs, I realize how much free time most people must have. Oceans of time. Then I guess I do get a little envious.”

Liz grinned. “We should have oceans of time,” she said, watching Thomas, who had stood up and was intently stalking a butterfly. “But most of us don’t. I guess we don’t know how to use the leisure all that helpful stuff has given us. It seems ridiculous, but there we are.”

“I think people use the time they have,” Nora said, also watching Thomas. “People don’t like being completely idle, at least most don’t. So they find things to do in whatever time they have.”

“Lots of people waste time, though. The mothers of some of my students spend hours watching soaps, for instance.”

“Soaps?”

“Soap operas. On TV”

Nora nodded uncertainly, and Liz realized she’d probably never seen one.

“They’re like little dramas,” she explained. “Continuing stories. Each day there’s a new episode.”

“That must be nice,” Nora said. “I remember now. I’ve read about them. They must be like novels. Serial stories.”

“Well, sort of. But most of the stories are dumb. Lots of sex, lots of complicated relationships, very melodramatic. If they were books, they’d be considered trashy by anyone who’s really into literature.”

“Are you?” Nora asked. Thomas batted at the butterfly and missed.

“Am I what?”

“Into literature?”

“I suppose so. I don’t have much time for reading, though.”

“I like Jane Austen,” Nora said. “And Emily Dickinson, and Henry James. More than modern books. I sometimes get best sellers when they come in to the library, though. Mrs. Brice, that’s the church lady, gets them for me. But I don’t think most of them are very good.”

“No,” Liz replied uncomfortably, “I guess not.” She hadn’t read Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson since school, and she’d never read Henry James. You’re outclassed, kiddo, she said to herself, amused, by someone who’s never seen a computer or watched TV. How about that?

“Would you like to come in? I made some lemonade earlier, for my mother. Or we could have tea.”

Liz looked at her watch. “I’d love to, but I think I’d better get going. It’s a long drive to New York.”

“Won’t it be dark when you get there?” Nora asked, concern spreading over her features.