I’d like to say I didn’t tell on her, but it was a dark time. At that point all I knew was that the Party was in charge, and that I was meant to respect authority the way I loved my own father and mother. More than, actually, since by then my father was gone, taken away for the protection of our household values. With a young person’s paranoia, I became convinced that the NKVD would somehow know what I’d seen at Albina’s, and track me by the counter-revolutionary phrases burned into my retinas. True, I didn’t denounce her to the police—I was a child, not a monster. But I did let slip to another neighbor who shared our courtyard that Albina had something she should not. There were rewards for denunciation, and we were all so hungry. Within a week Albina was gone, and I never saw her again.
I wanted to believe I’d grown since then, but was that true? Once again I found myself choosing between happiness and good, as my father had insisted I must, and choosing wrong. Vera had always had everything—me, nothing. I knew this. But it was one thing to borrow, and another to steal. One thing to run my fingers over her throat, and another to pinch them closed and squeeze. I would have preferred to absorb her instead, drinking her essence up through a straw. But I didn’t have that option. I had Lev, and he had his opinions.
And so I became a spy. Every morning I set my alarm for a half hour earlier than I was used to, and instead of turning left at the end of my street I turned right. My new path to the Donne School campus was roundabout, but it took me past Lev and Vera’s house in a neighborhood two ticks more upscale than my own. Their street was beautifully leafy, green in the summer, then golden, then bare; now it was springtime, and the ground was pocked with the pale, bent figures of emerging crocuses. There was a particular mother who, in that period, sometimes walked the street with her infant girl at six A.M., hushing the child on her shoulder or else pointing out bluebirds in the trees; it reminded me of the walks I used to take through Maple Hill during my first winter, when everything was limned with ice. An innocence, I suppose, shared between both.
Over time, I got good at pretending to be casual, checking my lipstick in a pocket mirror or stooping down to tie my shoe. Buying myself a minute or two to dawdle without calling attention to myself. I watched Vera carry a coffee cup—or was it tea?—through a doorway (I presumed from the kitchen) and up to the bay window in the front of the house. She rarely lingered long, but I enjoyed seeing how her hair changed from day to day. Loose waves, low chignon; visible static or perfectly smooth. In the mornings she always wore a kimono-style dressing gown of purple and white, which made her look a bit like a magician.
After she disappeared from my view I’d walk on and arrive at the greenhouse by six forty-five, unlocking it with my black metal key and breathing deep the sweet wet mix of mineral and vegetable, oxygen pulsing from the space’s veins. Sometimes I’d stop and gag for a moment, trying to force out the sickness that settled, more and more often, in the pit of my stomach. Work was the only place I could feel normal.
And work I did. I checked for insect infestations with a level of attention normally reserved (or so I assume) for technicians monitoring dials at the making of a bomb. I coddled my favorites. The small saguaro cactus I’d acquired at the beginning of my tenure had gone gangrenous—it was too hard to keep it dry, especially since I’d made the mistake of potting it first with a mixture of peat soil, which “absolutely invited mites” as John so helpfully put it. The bottom shriveled up like a raisin, and the top looked pale all the time, with weak spots. But instead of giving up I checked on it every day, repotting it with a great deal of sand and moving it around the greenhouse to make sure it never got sunburned or spent too long languishing in the shade. I helped Donne girls sprout pea pods, and grew a new variety of tomato for the cafeteria on Hilda’s request: a fussy plant we started from seeds her mother sent over from their home garden in Nebraska. John and I added goldfish to the lily pond, and occasionally they splashed startlingly in the quiet.
What I wanted to know was whatever marinated in Vera’s core. The small and secret preferences. Did she like tea biscuits brought over from England? Did she sneeze when she cracked too much pepper on her food? When she saw the color yellow, did she hear bells, and when she hummed to herself were the notes blue and green and melancholic? Was there pity in her marrow? I often returned to the house at lunchtime and saw her sweeping away on foot to who knows where; Lev always took the car, although he readily admitted that she was the better driver, and wherever she went she had no interest in taxis or buses or limousines. Her purses always matched her shoes, and both were sensible but stylish: a low heel that still somehow managed to make her legs look longer, her ankles slim. She had perfected that purposeful stride which generates gyrational speed from a sexual wobble at the hips. In May she stepped on a robin’s eggshell, crushing it beneath her toe. I don’t know why I thought any of this would help me.
I tried to follow her once when she left the house, but without turning around or even—to my knowledge—realizing I was there, she took evasive maneuvers involving a flower garden and a row of parked mail trucks, each identical. She always did have a habit of disappearing at the trickier moments. Nonetheless, there is no level, I found, of cruelty or savvy in a victim that makes you feel better about contemplating her murder. Not better, no, but perhaps more accustomed. I wondered if maybe she was unhappy in her marriage, if anyone had ever felt sorry for her, in all her life. I wondered if she was doing wicked things to Lev’s manuscripts, remembering that word she’d scrawled: askew. The longer I spent around Vera and my plants, the more the tenor and tone of the projects bled into one another. If Lev was right, and she and I were like two roses from one bush, then we were just dead-heading old flowers to allow for new growth. In this case: her head, my growth. A fairly painless and ordinary process for most gardeners that grew more and more difficult for me, until I found myself sobbing down the front of my shirt, staring at the pruning shears in my hand like an absolute imbecile.
Point of interest: when you prune a plant, a certain number of them actually bleed. Take the rubber plant, or ficus, common to office desks and dusty shelves. If you cut a bit away with a knife—making sure to cut towards your thumb, to maintain control and avoid slicing open your hand; there are tendons in there that can roll back all the way to the elbow—a thick white syrup will pour out down the stem. Eventually the wound will callus and the plant will heal, not only growing in a more attractive or convenient direction but often sprouting two to four new stems, getting bushier and bushier for all you cut away. Which sounds, from a certain angle, like a threat: it hemorrhages as you plunge in the knife, but after that gets stronger and fitter, shedding limbs like so many shirts and stockings, lingerie dangled off the end of a finger before dropping, drifting to the ground.
An Oral History of Vera Orlov, née Volkov, cont’d
Recorded by the Maple Hill Police Department
“Yes, it’s absolutely uncommon for one of my authors to have a wife so involved in the process. Most of them keep their family life well out of it—distracts from the artistic method, you see. Not easy to dip into the well of inspiration when there’s a toddler running around your feet, or a woman asking for pocket money so she can pick up milk at the corner store. But Vera’s not that type of woman.