“Uh huh.”
“So maybe some Saturday afternoon or something.”
“Whenever.”
A moment later Denise slammed the phone down in its cradle. She was angry, among other things, at how fake she’d sounded to herself. “I could have fucked your husband!” she said. “And I chose not to! So how about a little friendliness?”
Maybe, if she’d been a better person, she would have left Robin alone. Maybe she wanted to make Robin like her simply to deny her the satisfaction of disliking her — to win that contest of esteem. Maybe she was just picking up the gauntlet. But the desire to be liked was real. She was haunted by the feeling that Robin had been in the hotel room with her and Brian; by that bursting sensation of Robin’s presence inside her body.
On the last Saturday of baseball season she cooked at home for eight hours, shrink-wrapping trout, juggling half a dozen kraut salads, and pairing the pan juices of sautéed kidneys with interesting spirits. Late in the day she went for a walk and, finding herself going west, crossed Broad Street into the ghetto of Point Breeze, where Robin had her Project.
The weather was fine. Early autumn in Philadelphia brought smells of fresh seawater and tidewater, gradual abatements in temperature, a quiet abdication of control by the humid air masses that had held the onshore breeze at bay all summer. Denise passed an old woman in a housecoat standing watch while two dusty men unloaded Acme groceries from a corroded Pinto’s hatchback. Cinderblock was the material of choice over here for blinding windows. There were fire-gutted lunc onettes and p zer as. Friable houses with bedsheet curtains. Expanses of fresh asphalt that seemed to seal the neighborhood’s fate more than promise renewal.
Denise didn’t care if she saw Robin. Almost better, in a way, to score the point subtly — to let Robin find out from Brian that she’d taken the trouble to walk by the Project.
She came to a block within whose chain-link confines were small hills of mulch and large piles of wilted vegetation. At the far corner of the block, behind the only house left standing on it, somebody was working rocky soil with a shovel.
The front door of the solitary house was open. A black girl of college age was sitting at a desk that also contained a vastly ghastly plaid sofa and a wheeled blackboard on which a column of names (Lateesha, Latoya, Tyrell) was followed by columns of HOURS TO DATE and DOLLARS TO DATE.
“Looking for Robin,” Denise said.
The girl nodded at the open rear door of the house. “She’s in back.”
The garden was raw but peaceful. Not much seemed to have been grown here besides squashes and their cousins, but the patches of vine were extensive, and the smells of mulch and dirt, and the onshore autumn breeze, were full of childhood memory.
Robin was shoveling rubble into a makeshift sieve. She had thin arms and a hummingbird metabolism and took many fast small bites of rubble instead of fewer big ones. She was wearing a black bandanna and a very dirty T-shirt with the text QUALITY DAYCARE: PAY NOW OR PAY LATER. She seemed neither surprised nor pleased to see Denise.
“This is a big project,” Denise said.
Robin shrugged, holding the shovel with both hands as if to stress that she felt interrupted.
“Do you want some help?” Denise said.
“No. The kids were supposed to do this, but there’s a game over at the river. I’m just cleaning up.”
She whacked the rubble in the sieve to urge some dirt through. Caught in the mesh were fragments of brick and mortar, gobs of roofing tar, ailanthus limbs, petrified cat shit, Baccardi and Yuengling labels with backings of broken glass.
“So what did you grow?” Denise said.
Robin shrugged again. “Nothing that would impress you.” “Well, like what?”
“Like zucchini and pumpkins.”
“I cook with both of those.”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“I have a couple of half-time assistants that I pay. Sara’s a junior at Temple.”
“And who are the kids who were supposed to be here?”
“Neighborhood kids between twelve and sixteen.” Robin took off her glasses and rubbed sweat from her face with a dirty sleeve. Denise had forgotten, or had never noticed to begin with, what a pretty mouth she had. “They get minimum wage plus vegetables, plus a share of any money we make.”
“Do you subtract expenses?”
“That would discourage them.”
“Right.”
Robin looked away, across the street, at a row of dead buildings with rusting sheet-metal cornices. “Brian says you’re very competitive.”
“Oh really?”
“He said he wouldn’t want to arm-wrestle you.”
Denise winced.
“He said he wouldn’t want to be the other chef in the kitchen with you.”
“No danger of that,” Denise said.
“He said he wouldn’t want to play Scrabble with you.”
“Uh huh.”
“He said he wouldn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit with you.”
OK, OK, Denise thought.
Robin was breathing hard. “Anyway.”
“Yeah, anyway.”
“Here’s why I didn’t go to Paris,” Robin said. “I thought Erin was too young. Sinéad was having fun at art camp, and I had tons of work here.”
“I understood that.”
“And you guys were going to be talking about food all day. And Brian said it was business. So.”
Denise raised her eyes from the dirt but couldn’t quite look Robin in the eye. “It was business.”
Robin, her lip trembling, said, “Whatever!”
Above the ghetto a fleet of copper-bottomed clouds, Revere Ware clouds, had withdrawn to the northwest. It was the moment when the blue backdrop of the sky grayed to the same value as the stratus formations in front of it, when night light and day light were in equilibrium.
“You know, I’m not really into guys,” Denise said.
“Pardon me?”
“I said I don’t sleep with men anymore. Since I got divorced.”
Robin frowned as if this made no sense to her at all. “Does Brian know that?”
“I don’t know. Not from my telling him.”
Robin thought this over for a moment and then began to laugh. She said, “Hee hee hee!” She said, “Ha ha ha!” Her laugh was full-throated and embarrassing and, at the same time, Denise thought, lovely. It echoed off the rusty-corniced houses. “Poor Brian!” she said. “Poor Brian!”
Robin immediately became more cordial. She put down her shovel and gave Denise a tour of the garden—“my little enchanted kingdom” she called it. Finding that she had Denise’s interest, she risked enthusiasm. Here was a new asparagus patch, here two rows of young pear and apple trees that she hoped to espalier, here the late crops of sunflowers, acorn squash, and kale. She’d planted only sure winners this summer, hoping to hook a core group of local teenagers and reward them for the thankless infrastructural work of preparing beds, running pipes, adjusting drainages, and connecting rain barrels to the roof of the house.
“This is basically a selfish project,” Robin said. “I always wanted a big garden, and now the whole inner city’s going back to farmland. But the kids who really need to be out working with their hands and learning what fresh food tastes like are the ones who aren’t doing it. They’re latchkey kids. They’re getting high, they’re having sex, or they’re stuck in some classroom until six with a computer. But they’re also at an age when it’s still fun to play in the dirt.”
“Though possibly not as much fun as sex or drugs.”
“Maybe not for ninety percent of kids,” Robin said. “I just want there to be something for the other ten percent. Some alternative that doesn’t involve computers. I want Sinéad and Erin to be around kids who aren’t like them. I want them to learn how to work. I want them to know that work isn’t just pointing and clicking.”