Ella in Bloom Read online

  However, Daddy’s invitation raised a problem more serious than either my strapped finances or my frazzled appearance: the matter of my sister Terrell’s purported visit to see me last summer in Old Metairie. She had called me, at first I thought just to say hello, about a year ago, shortly after the Fourth, to say she was telling them all—Mom and Dad and Rufus, her husband—that she was coming to see me, that she meant to get back in touch with her baby sister Ella. But that she wasn’t really making a trip to see me. That she had a man. “You musn’t think bad things about me. We’re head over heels in love and I never ever had that before, the way you did with Buddy. He makes me feel so young; I’m out of my mind.” They had been trying to get together for just about absolutely forever, she said, and now at last they’d arranged this weekend to New Orleans. Did I think she was just awful?

  “Who is he?” I’d asked, not wanting a name, just wanting some clue, I guess, of how come she’d picked him. It made me nervous, and more than a little bit sad, to hear about her doing this. I still thought of her husband, back when he was just a law student called Red, as the one friend I’d had before I left home. He used to confide to me how crazy about Terrell he was and I used to confess to him how bad I wanted to get out of there, that house and family that he was wanting so much to marry into.

  “I won’t tell you his name, Ella. Then you can’t let anything slip. But I can tell you this much, he comes from the very same county Daddy does, Ector County, from a little town called Notrees. I’m not kidding. I guess that’s what got me first, that West Texas twang. He says where he grew up is a sort of desert with old meteor craters and no oil. Though everybody out there has to tell you they haven’t got producing wells on their place. He and his daddy grow beef and now they’re farming emus, which are just like overgrown chickens, he says. He says they raise them for leather, but then they have to use the leather for gloves and chaps to keep the birds from ripping an arm or leg off with those toenails.

  “We met on a sailing weekend, and right away as soon as I saw him, I just about went out of my mind over him. I wasn’t looking or anything, but, between us, privately, things haven’t been all that great at home. Now that Rufus has quit the law firm, he’s sort of gone crazy on me. You don’t know how that is, because, well, Buddy wasn’t, you know, in the mainstream to begin with. But when middle-aged men change their spots, if you get what I mean, it’s like they just turn into somebody else overnight. We hardly have one word to say anymore, and the boys don’t know what’s going on. So, anyway, it’s taken me and Mr. Emu, I’ll call him, nearly forever to get together, but we’ve finally got it all planned. You have to promise me you’ll never ever tell, no matter what—”

  I’d done my best to stay in touch with Terrell over the years. After all, your sisters or brothers, whoever you had, were the people who went down the same road with you all the way. You came into your parents’ lives after things had already happened; the people they’d once been were gone and the people they were you couldn’t really know. And it must be the same with your children. You were already set when they showed up, you were opaque to them, they were in another time zone from you. But siblings, they were on the same boat, in the same car, skating down the same sidewalk from the start.

  “Cross my heart,” I said. Not really warm about my role in this—I wasn’t into lying about someone else’s life on top of my own. But I asked, “What do you want me to do?” Trying to figure out if I was going to get to see her at all. It had been four years then since I’d last been home.

  “You’ll have to send me a picture of your place, you know, and tell me something about the house I can pass on to Mom, who’ll want to hear everything. And make up some stuff we went to see, so I can tell her and Dad, and Rufus and the boys. And maybe something about Robin?”

  “She’s calling herself Birdie now,” I mentioned. “She’s learning to play the cello.” That being the one true thing I always told. “Look,” I said, “why don’t I meet you at the airport? I could bring photos of my place and Birdie, and we could get someone to take a shot of us together?” I hesitated, then said it straight out, “Hey, I’d like to see you.”

  Terrell said she just couldn’t. “We’ve only got two nights. We’re flying in together and we’ll be lucky if we can wait till we get to the hotel.”

  “Sure, okay.” I understood. Still, I was disappointed. “It’s just—been a long time, Ter.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. Honestly. I get so busy and it seems like we have people from West Texas and the Hill Country coming to the lake every weekend to sail. Just to see water. You have no idea what this drought has been like.”

  At first I thought maybe she didn’t want me to see this guy from Notrees. That she might be keeping him from me, since I was more available, being single. You get this between sisters, sometimes, worry about the competition. Buddy had actually first started hanging around the house trying to get a date with her, before he and I got a lot of chemistry going, a lot of heat. Luckily, she didn’t go for the futureless type. And Red and I, her present husband Rufus and I, used to go out for hamburgers when she wasn’t home and talk about was she ever going to marry him or not, and talk about how could I leave home without finishing school or knowing how to do anything.

  But after I got off the phone, I’d realized that the fact was she didn’t want him, this Mr. Emu, to see me. Didn’t want to be embarrassed by her tatty younger sister. If she’d gone up a notch in her marriage from where we came from (the history professor daddy and the gardening mother), then I’d gone down a notch or two in my scrambling solo life. I could see that one of the advantages of a secret lover was that he didn’t have to meet your kin.

  So I did exactly what she asked for. In the same manner that I now wrote letters to my mother, practically coming to believe them myself, so I carefully built up all the details of a wonderful weekend reunion with my sister Terrell. I sent her photos to show around of “my” pink-painted cottage on one of Old Metairie’s nicest magnolia-shaded streets, the sort of house—with white picket fence, white shutters on the floor-to-ceiling windows, pots of waxy white Cape jasmine by the door—to which my mother could point with pride. The sort of home, classy but not large, dear but not overpriced, in which a sociable young widow might live a pleasant life in the Deep South. I wrote describing a late supper in a French restaurant called the Pink Cafe, where I had never eaten; early communion at the old Episcopal church, because Mother loved old churches, modeled stone by stone after St. Bartolph’s in Cambridge, England, that I often drove by; and a benefit high tea in the rose gardens at historic Belle Vue, whose grounds I did know well.

  I constructed that weekend never dreaming that I would be called upon to repeat the story again and again at my sister’s funeral. That I would have to recount to everyone where we went, what we saw, our breakfasts of fresh strawberries and cream on my pink patio, looking out at my walled summer garden.

  Telling all this to her husband had been the very worst. My parents were too stunned, too staggered by their grief, to be able to listen for long. My mother had to hold herself together, straight and composed, for her daughter’s friends; my daddy had to make coffee and apple kuchen for the remnants of family. But my old friend Red was someone I had never lied to, was the one person in my past I could always come to with the whole (unsavory, shocking, or ordinary) truth. And he was the one who seemed to hang on my words. No longer the law student I remembered, with horn-rim glasses, shaggy dark hair, white shirts with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows, corduroy pants, usually with a casebook under his arm, as if to prove he was what he claimed to be. He still sat, intent, the way he used to, leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, but now in a well-tailored black suit, good shoes, an expensive haircut, discreet contact lenses. His once-tanned face had been blanched with shock and his once-voluble conversation muted, but, still, after his subdued greeting, “Hello, Ella,” he’d stayed close, listening while I retold the tale of the weeken
d reunion in Old Metairie. Hearing my daddy lean down and say, “I’m glad you daughters had a get-together.” His eyes wet. Hearing my mother, wearing winter white, the mourning of another era, say to a friend, her voice shaking slightly, “The girls had such a nice visit, only last summer.”

  And all the time wondering what my sister had told them. And wondering, too, if anyone else knew who she’d been going to see that bitter January when her little chartered Piper Cherokee went down in the sleet.

  3

  Birdie had let herself in with the key she wore around her neck on a ribbon, and was in the kitchen by the time I had emerged from the shower and changed into my watering shorts and a clean T-shirt.

  “Do you want a peanut butter sandwich, Mom?” My daughter did our lunches at home on the weekend; I did our suppers.

  “Thank you,” I said. “With banana.”

  She added bean sprouts to her sandwich, making them today on seven-grain bread, which tasted to me like brown paper sack.

  “We’re going to Austin for your grandmother’s birthday,” I told her, knowing that if we missed a Saturday, she missed a Junior String Project class.

  “Why are we going to do that? Last time we went to see Grandmom, you cried all the way home.”

  “It was my sister’s funeral.”

  “I think,” she suggested, “you cried because you don’t get on with your mom.”

  “That, too.”

  “So how come we’re going to go?”

  “My daddy called.” Guten Tag. “He’s sending us tickets.”

  “Is that nice, to let Granddaddy do that?”

  What was nice? The major existential question. And something I’d been reprimanded for not being by both my mother and my daughter, birds of such different feathers.

  “He wants us to be there,” I said.

  “Okay,” she decided, eating the seven-grain crusts I’d left on my plate.

  “I need a dress.” I stared down at my watering shorts.

  Birdie cleared our plates and helped herself to orange juice. “Felice’s mom, who sews? She says people take their old clothes to that resale shop in the Pink Mall. She sometimes makes things over, for Felice—?” She made a furrow between her eyes in her earnest desire to help.

  It was a myth that people created their own children, the ball-of-clay business. The truth was, children made themselves in reaction to you. They detected the moth hole in your personality, the weak seam in your resolve, and they moved right in to make out of the whole cloth of their observation a better self than the one you had ready for them. I often found myself thinking, Can this be my child? This short, plump, bossy person with crinkled masses of light hair down to her waist, in an Amish-style dress dangling the length of her unshaved legs. A serious musician at fourteen.

  A full-time problem solver.

  “I could look into that,” I agreed, thinking that a thrift shop made a lot of sense. Kissing her cheek, grabbing my car keys, I headed out the back door of the duplex into the sticky midday heat.

  With some effort, I tried to loosen my shoulders and check my watering notes. If I lately had increased anxiety about going into other people’s homes and being, for the short period of time that I tended their houseplants, solely responsible for anything that happened (any damage to property, any breach in security), I had only myself to blame. But at least I no longer, as I once had, grew faint with fear that I’d never understand the plants placed in my care. Did they droop from thirst or soggy roots? Did they grow sideways searching for more light or seeking shade? What of a yellow leaf? Now I read them as easily as I did birds picking at fallen figs or cats sunning themselves on a stoop. Now with confidence I checked the leaves and blooms, loosened and tested the soil, gauged the light, let the tap water sit the fifteen minutes it took the chlorine to settle out.

  My first home today was a stark modern (strange to see on Old Metairie’s tree-lined streets) whose owners, from sun-dried California, were summering in the Alps. There I struggled to tend great specimen palms in heavy stone pots—Kentias, Chestnut Dioöns, King Segos, Ming Aralias. Difficult to heft around or shift to catch the natural daylight without throwing out my back. The second home, four blocks away, near the Old Metairie Country Club, was, in contrast, a pleasure. The interior courtyard fragrant with dwarf orange and lemon trees, Asian Japonica camellias, Persian white jasmine. The decorative fountain splashing the night-blooming moonflowers with their great dozing luminous blooms and the pale funnels of the Mandevilla.

  At the third house, the scene of my crime, I punched in the code (the last four digits of my phone number) that had been programmed for me and carefully set inside six large cobalt-blue water jugs. As with any below-sea-level area (we were the lowlands of America), everyone had filtration and purification systems, reverse osmosis units, and, those who could afford it, purified drinking water delivered to the back door, much as milk had once been.

  This house, which belonged to Mrs. Thibaud, my very first customer, was the place I had learned to love roses. She didn’t have the old antique roses that Henry, the head gardener at Belle Vue, had, heirlooms with breeding lines going back through the centuries to a French empress, a Chinese emperor. But almost painfully lovely English hybrids nonetheless, as delicately colored as home-dyed Easter eggs.

  I had been working here, at this imposing Georgian colonial, while the owners skied Vail, the day I’d heard about my sister’s crash. And I just lost it. There I was, standing surrounded, suffocating from the incense of those papery pastel blooms, tears running down my face. Nothing was mine. Not the grand house, not the husband shepherding his grain facilities in St. Charles, St. James, and St. John the Baptist Parishes, not the matched pair of rare Chartreux cats who slept upstairs in a cool room far away from strangers, not even one single scented, cupped, and cabbagey rose. I didn’t have any of this and a sudden feeling of overwhelming deprivation washed over me. A stand-in for the irreversible loss: I had no sister.

  I felt I had to take something. Had to walk out that door with something that wasn’t mine. Perhaps waifs who stole lipsticks in the mall had that same feeling: I deserve something. Setting down my watering can, my moisture gauge, I climbed the wide, curved stairway to the off-limits second floor. And in her closet (nice Mrs. Thibaud’s walk-in closet), from a cluster of half a dozen black linen dresses, I took one. Folding it with care over my arm, I left the house. The roses would survive; they were more hardy than we.

  I became obsessed with making sure my mother could not find fault with anything. With Birdie’s help, I subdued my unruly nut-brown hair into a pinned-up French braid. I scraped together the money for a real manicure to undo the dirt damage to my knuckles and nails (remembering that Scarlett O’Hara got into trouble, despite making her green velvet drapes into a fancy dress, because her turnip-rooting hands were a giveaway).

  After the service, back at my parents’ house, I’d heard my mother say, a drenched lace-edged handkerchief dabbing her eyes, “Oh, and this is our other daughter, Ella,” and she was not ashamed. To each of my mother’s sympathetic friends, I held out a smooth hand. To each of my daddy’s distressed colleagues, I offered my blushed and powdered cheek. The only time I broke down was when my mother peered at Birdie, a plump fourteen-year-old she’d last seen at age nine, and murmured, “My, hasn’t she grown—”

  When I returned the dress, unspotted, four days later, tucking it back between the sleeveless black shift and the black shawl-collared shirtwaist where I had left the empty padded hanger, I thought I must have been mad. My heart could not have beat faster if I’d opened the closet door and found half a dozen security guards waiting with drawn guns.

  Even now, as I gave myself over to the pleasure of the rose-filled atrium, I took care to remember that nothing I handled was mine.

  4

  My friend the realtor, Karl Krauss, showed up at the back door in his shirtsleeves, saying he had a house he wanted me to see. He wasn’t exactly a boyfriend, although h
e’d been a friend since he’d found the current tenant for my duplex, and although we provided occasional warmth of an intimate nature for one another. Trying to raise a daddy-less girl, I’d have welcomed almost any grown man of decent intent and sound mind, and for his part, heading for fifty with no dependents, the idea of being a surrogate uncle to Birdie had a big appeal.

  Besides, I liked going around to houses with him; he enjoyed ferreting out the history of a place, seeing if it had been down-at-the-heels once and was now on its way back, or the other way around. He liked looking up the deed records; he liked hazarding a guess as to why neighborhoods changed. This information came in handy in selling—he could point out the home’s fine past or its pricey future—but mostly he just got a kick out of digging around. It made his life, he said, something more than the detritus of a salesman.

  “You want to come along with us, Bird?” he asked her.

  “No thank you. Felice and I are going to the Pink Mall.”

  I couldn’t object to my daughter and her friend hanging out at the small nearby square of specialty shops—stationery, gifts, candles, linens, socks—and eating places. They had older friends who worked as clerks or waiters, and they counted the days till they could do the same. Child labor laws did not take into account grown-up fourteen-year-olds who wanted to buy a cello or (Felice) flute of their own, good instruments, not String Project rebuilt loaners. My daughter made a little money baby-sitting, and, in the summer months, got paid to feed the cats of people escaping the steam-bath heat. Baby-sitting, cat-sitting, plant-sitting: we were a cottage industry.

  “We don’t have to hurry,” Karl said, noticing that we were suddenly alone. “Nice and cool in here.” He edged over and slipped an arm around my waist.