That fifty-year-old woman she otherwise would never be—Holly would pass that woman on the road. That woman would be driving a ghastly little car, and Holly would drive past her until she could no longer even see in her rearview mirror.
She’d even quit reading poetry, except for happy nursery rhymes to Tatty.
THEN, HOLLY REMEMBERED the inspiration she’d woken up with:
Something had followed them home from Russia.
As she’d known it would, that sentence had grown to mean nothing to her now. Now she needed to get on with things. Now she needed to put the roast in the refrigerator, so it wouldn’t rot, so that it could be eaten tomorrow, when the storm had passed. Now she should again call Eric. And she also wanted to talk to Thuy—although she imagined her friend curled up on the couch, Patty between herself and Pearl, watching something on TV. It’s a Wonderful Life? Or Miracle on 34th Street?
Pearl and Thuy were the kinds of mothers who seemed determined that every hour of their child’s life be filled with memorable and seasonal pleasures and events. They took Patty to orchards and to cider mills and on hayrides in the fall. In the spring they walked with her through the woods to sketch the wildflowers they found (and did not pick!). There was the beach in the summer, of course, and Christmas began in late November with the Nutcracker (in Chicago) and the Ice Capades (in Detroit) and the stringing of cranberries and popcorn. Holly thought of them on the couch together now, snowed in and glorious, and she thought how much she wished she’d had their model for motherhood when Tatiana was still a child.
Because Tatiana was no longer a child, was she?
It was a terrible thought. Tatty’s childhood was over! Holly walked over to the kitchen island and rested her hands on the cool and tomblike granite. It was a deep-sea blue, nearly black, but inside the smoothed stone there were tiny silver flecks. She wished she had more energy. She wished she felt strong enough to call out to Tatty again, to tell Tatty to come out of her room, to take off her terrible black shoes and that dress, to put on her white tank top and yoga pants, to wear her fuzzy slippers, and to bring a blanket. Holly would make hot chocolate, popcorn. If there weren’t any good old movies on TV the two of them could sit and watch the blizzard outside the picture window. Holly would keep her arm around the thin blue shoulders of her daughter.
But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear it. The thought of going to that door and knocking on it again, of stepping into Tatty’s room—she couldn’t even do that, could she? She couldn’t even knock on the door. If the door were locked, if Tatiana had hooked closed that door on Holly with the lock that she herself had provided, what would Holly have to face then? And if it wasn’t? That would be even worse. Holly could not bear that, either, to step into that room and find her daughter’s cold back turned to her again.
Maybe later, but not now.
Instead, she went back to the picture window and looked out.
One must have a mind of winter.
Wallace Stevens.
Wallace Stevens was the insurance executive poet whose name Eric was trying to remember when he blamed Holly for her own writer’s block, insisting to Holly that it wasn’t motherhood and her job in corporate America that was giving her writer’s block. (“Look at that poet, you know, that guy, the insurance guy…”). That her problem was, instead—
Well, Eric had a billion accusatory explanations for Holly’s writer’s block over the years, hadn’t he?
Beyond the window, there was now a high wall made of snow. The flakes that composed it no longer had the individuality that snowflakes were always being ballyhooed as having. They’d come together in solidarity, instead. They were shrugging off any claim to personal distinction. They might, each one of them, be different from the others, but they were far too alike to be differentiated. They could never have been sorted, or given names. Together they formed a door, and closed themselves. Wait—
No.
That wasn’t quite true.
There was no door, just the illusion of one.
What those flakes formed together was a window—a window behind this window, which Holly stepped closer to. She put her face to the glass, and cupped her hands around her face, and realized that if she narrowed her eyes against the light she could make out the fence between their yard and Randa’s. She could even see the snowchild of the birdbath, and the cloth bags she’d tied around the roses in the fall against that fence.
Those cloth bags were gray-white, like the falling snow, and were now covered with snow, so that Holly could only really see their outlines against the cedar boards of the fence back there. From here, obscured by blizzard, those sacks protecting her roses looked like heads, lined up, seven of them, against Randa’s fence. Skulls full of roses, minds made of roses, hidden in there so that they could stay warm and dormant, so that her rosebushes had some chance of living through the Michigan winter:
One must have a mind of roses.
Now, it was hard to believe that, out there, covered in those bags and dormant (whatever dormant meant: somewhere between sleeping and dead?) were her Teasing Georgia, her Mardi Gras, her Cherry Parfait, her Falstaff, her Purple Passion, and her Black Magic—the one she called her Tatiana. Holly had placed the sacks over those herself, back in October.
Several years before, when she and her neighbor were still on speaking terms, Randa had asked Holly (politely, Holly had to give her that) what it was that Holly was spraying on the roses. Randa told Holly that she loved the roses, loved to see them blooming along the fence line that they shared, and loved being able to look over her fence and see them in all their glory and perfection. Still, she wondered, could whatever it was Holly sprayed them with poison her poodle? Or, say, Holly’s chickens? Or the birds that came to their backyard feeders? Or anything else? Her little boy, or Tatiana? Randa’s questions became more hysterical the longer she was allowed to ask them. Was it a pesticide? Was it a carcinogen? Were there any organic alternatives?
Holly had simply lied. In truth, she sprayed the roses with diazinon, malathion, and something else, something called Knock-Out. And, no, you couldn’t grow roses like this without poison. There were no organic poisons—or, you might say, all poisons were organic (of, related to, or deriving from living matter; of, relating to, or affecting a bodily organ). The earth itself was the ultimate poison, and the sun—they were all being slowly killed by radioactive fallout from the sun. She didn’t bother to argue with Randa. Instead, she said, “Yes. It’s all organic.”
“Phew,” Randa said. “Thanks for not being offended that I asked!”
But Holly had been offended:
She’d been offended by Randa’s ignorance, and then been offended by her gullibility. She’d been offended that anyone could be so naïve as to think that roses like these might be able to fend off their own aphids and fungi and black spot without help from humans and the toxins they concocted in their factories. She was offended by Randa’s innocent idea that Holly had any options (other than not grow the roses at all) but to spray them with something potentially deadly. Roses like this were worth some risks, weren’t they? She felt a little guilty, yes, especially about Rufus the poodle, who spent most of his time sniffing around the fence between their yard and Randa’s, where the roses happened to be growing. But, after all these years, Rufus was still alive, and Holly had felt much less guilty since Randa had confronted her (attacked her) about the cat.