“Was she being naughty with Dale? Were they caught by her husband?”
“Lilia! Dale is a good man,” Nancy said.
“We can’t really be sure about that,” Lilia said. “Why did she visit Dale then?”
“He didn’t know! She insisted on visiting him.”
“Maybe she was doing that to annoy her husband in his grave,” Lilia said.
“You always make people sound weird,” Nancy said.
“Why isn’t she coming anymore?”
“She died in April.”
“Is that why Dale wants you to be a special friend, now that Peggy Horn is gone?”
Nancy closed her eyes. Lilia had noticed that when Nancy didn’t want to answer a question she would blink in a slow-motion manner. “If I don’t say yes he may ask another person,” Nancy said when she opened her eyes. “It’s not that I’m particularly fond of Dale, but I don’t want to see him sit with someone else after he already asked me.”
“By all means say yes!”
“You make it sound like an engagement.”
“Trust me, I’ve married three times and it’s always fun to say yes,” Lilia said. Even Hetty, that woman made of marble, must have felt a moment of thrill when Roland proposed.
BETWEEN FURNITURE AND GARDENS, LILIA had always preferred gardens. This was not a confession. Nevertheless it was a fact worth sharing aloud with her room, for which she had no fondness. The dresser and the armchair, from her marriage with Gilbert, had moved in with her. Some other furniture had been shed like skin when she married Norman and again when she married Milt. The move to Bayside Garden, however, was not about shedding skin, but cutting loose a few fingers. No, a limb or two. Lilia had not let herself feel sentimental. Having outlived her three husbands, the table and the chairs and the buffet and that old armoire Gilbert’s parents had given them as a wedding present had taken on a kind of coldness. Like friends and family all of a sudden looking distracted after throwing the flowers onto the casket. They were thinking about their suppers, or their toes pinched by new shoes in need of breaking in, or the dry cleaning fee for their black suits.
What Lilia did miss, when she moved around her room or watched the world from her seventh-floor window, were her gardens. They were what she had to surrender with each move. Gardens never uprooted themselves for anyone. A garden stays put, nonchalantly and disloyally blossoming for the newcomers.
“If I want to write about my life I would write about the gardens,” Lilia said. No one was listening, and that was what she wanted. Lilia had two voices, one for other ears, one for her own. She was not alone in this, but people often made the mistake of letting the latter voice bleed into the former. A sign of weakness, or a sign of aging—Lilia allowed neither. The voice she used with her fellow residents was the one she had long settled on between the world and herself—one size fits all! When her children called, she sounded friendly, accommodating, cheerful, busy—whatever would put them at ease. The tricky case was Katherine. Lilia couldn’t be merely fuzzy and warm and absentminded, like a grandmother; and she couldn’t be demanding or polite or passive-aggressive, like a mother. Katherine was Lucy’s daughter before she was Lilia’s granddaughter, and it was on Lucy’s behalf that Lilia brought up the girl. But how do you speak to a granddaughter in her dead mother’s stead? Can the responsibility to the dead ever be replaced by the responsibility to the living?
A mother is always a cautionary tale for a daughter. Lilia did not mind if Carol and Molly treated her as one. Lucy? But it was too long ago, and Lilia did not want to think of herself in Lucy’s eyes. Lilia’s own mother, greedy for happiness that would never be reached, had settled for the rapture of misery. Even when she should have felt contented, she had wasted no time in feeling the injustices done to her. For instance: Kenny as a baby, rosy-cheeked, sleeping in a white wicker bassinet under the weeping cherry in their garden. Lilia calculated—she was eight then, so her mother was thirty.
Let’s hope he doesn’t break too many girls’ hearts when he grows up, her mother had said.
Even at eight, Lilia could see through her mother. She was hoping for the opposite. The many hearts Kenny would destroy would make his mother proud.
But by then there won’t be a place in his heart for his old mother, Lilia’s mother added, kissing each of the baby fingers. Lilia looked on with abhorrence. Her mother was only waiting for Kenny to get older, as the witch waited for Hansel to fatten up. Lilia and her other siblings did not give their mother the same appetite.
They all had mothers to judge or to love, but not Katherine. She did not know where her life came from.
I’m the oldest of six children. My father’s side came to California from Lithuania. My mother’s side came from Missouri. We are: Lilia, Hayes, Lucille and Margot (twins), Jack, and Kenny. Our father liked a big family so our mother gave him that. She tried her best to love all her children. She only achieved that with one of us, and I believe she chose the wrong one.
Erase? Erase, yes. Lilia did not like that her mind was making up its own mind to talk about these things as if for an audience. Lilia never cared for the stage, not out of shyness or timidity but because the stage was a set thing, and anything set bored her.
Most people live on a stage, though. Some feel they are pushed onto it. Others constantly seek it. Life would have been bleak for Roland if not for all those people he imagined were observing him with admiration or envy. Did he count Lilia among them? As much as he counted other women who had once been known to him and then forgotten?
On the way back from the pub David said, I didn’t realise you knew so many people in this town. Have you visited before? No, I said, and I don’t know any of them. The point is, I explained to David, they see me greet people and think to themselves, look at that lucky bastard with so many friends. Then when I greet them they will think themselves lucky because they now appear to be connected to me.
That entry from July 1929—Lilia did not have to open the book to remember it, though she liked to reread these words. Roland had written it when he and his friends traveled to Prince Edward Island. Those people whose eyes he had so cherished had long been dead. It was his fortune that someone was still here, watching him, seeing him, seeing through him, but with fondness, so he wouldn’t feel that he was strutting around naked. (Oh but, hohoho, he would’ve loved that.)
Longevity is required for loyalty, and true vindictiveness is like true loyalty, neither of which you can boast of unless you have outlived the shelf life of those perishable feelings called love and hatred. To live a long life is to weed out the people who do not deserve either loyalty or vindictiveness. Lilia always preferred those flowers that blossomed all season long.