My father had been a gardener too, an amateur one. Your gardenvariety gardener. When I was young, he cultivated our front yard so that one half was filled with flowers, and the other with vegetables and herbs. When he was in a good mood, I was sometimes allowed to help him weed or plant; both left me filthy and tired, but I liked to lock fingers with the root systems as I pulled them out of the ground. “Imagine the garden as your mind,” he would say as we knelt in the dirt. “If you plant seeds, and tend the earth around them, they bear fruit. And just like your mind, the flowers are constantly changing. They rise, they bloom, they decay.”
“What’s the point, then?” I asked him once. “Why grow things that only die?”
He leaned on his shovel. “Everything is impermanent. Mountains. Flowers. Even us, what we think of as ourselves.”
I looked down at my stomach, my knees. I held up my bitten fingernails.
“Let me ask you this,” my father said. “Where is the self? Can you point to it? Can you tell me what color it is? No, not your sternum. Not your eye. Your Olivia.” I could point to nothing that would satisfy him. “You see,” he said, and I nodded as though I did.
It wasn’t until much later that I understood that the things he said had anything to do with Buddhism, or that others might not subscribe to his worldview. Most of the girls at my school believed that they had eternal souls, for instance. Most of the girls at my school knew that true love, when they inevitably found it, with eyes and thighs like theirs, would last forever. Most of the girls at my school, if they had ever thought about it, which they had not, would have been confident that they actually existed. From a young age, I suspected these things to be not strictly true. This may or may not have contributed to my essential loneliness.
After my father left, the garden grew wild. The two halves, edible and decorative, became indistinguishable. Some plants died, others grew tentacles, and the front yard of what was now my mother’s house became a mass of curling vine and leaf and stiff dead stalk. The neighbors scowled when they passed, but my mother said she liked it better this way. “Back to the land!” she shouted happily one morning when she found a litter of foxes fighting in the deep brush, the kits pawing at a small kill their own mother had brought them, smearing its red pulp onto the grass.
Needless to say, I never invited anyone to my house. This may or may not, etc.
To start, Luke had me weed the flowerbeds. “Gardening for beginners,” he said. “Just tug and toss.” Something else I knew how to do. Luke worked beside me for the whole two-hour period, saying little, occasionally gesturing at a gnarled section I had missed. I stole glances at him whenever it felt safe, but he concentrated on his tasks so fully I felt he wouldn’t have noticed me even if I’d taken off my clothes. (Not that I was thinking about that sort of thing, of course. No, I was not.) His cheekbones were high and sharp, which gave him the look of an ancient Greek dignitary, and his skin was brown and smooth under all that hair. I fixated on the soft baby skin in the crook of his elbow: I wanted to pinch it. He had freckles too, which was really unfair of him. He never furrowed his brow, even in the sun, and when he reached his hands into the ground, he closed his eyes completely.
He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, I realize that now—far younger than I am as I write this, an age I now find embarrassing in other people, particularly men. But back then, he seemed timeless, ageless, fixed as a character in a film. As if no matter when I had arrived, that summer or twenty years from that summer, he would have been there, waiting for me, looking just the same. Nothing like my father; exactly like him.
Just when my back was beginning to hurt, Luke stood and squinted at the sun. “Rota’s over,” he said.
I took off the gardening gloves he’d given me and set them carefully on a bench. He bent and picked a purple flower from one of the beds I had cleared. He looked at it for a moment, twirled it between his fingers, and held it out to me, and all at once I felt exposed. For the first time that day, I had the sense of myself as a girl alone with a man. I took the flower, making sure not to touch his fingers with mine.
“Ah,” he said. “Your hands are like the Buddha’s.”
“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what he meant. Later, I would blush over the compliment—my fingers are short and stubby, not at all like the Buddha’s graceful tapers. I put the flower behind my ear.
He nodded and disappeared into the garden shed. I let myself out.
On my way back to the main building, I considered throwing the flower into the grass. I was thinking of Nisha’s face when she saw my assignment, and the way Harriet had dug her nails into my arm. I was thinking of the bright red of the door of the garden shed, which had obviously been freshly painted, days or weeks ago, though the rest of the wood was weathered and gray. It was vulgar, that shining apple red. It was alluring. There was something wrong with me. But in the end, I couldn’t bear to give the flower up. As I approached the lawn, I pressed it for a moment between my palms and slid it into my pocket, so no one would see.
After rota, we had some free time before dinner, which was typically followed by another period of meditation or an evening activity, and then lights-out. When I got back to the lawn that first day, I looked for Harriet and Nisha. Surely they would want a report, I thought, considering, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. They weren’t waiting for me. I sat alone on one of the large white rocks and watched the other girls mill around and sunbathe, talking or reading magazines in the grass. One of them kept taking off her top, exposing her breasts to the sun. Each time, a staffer would hurry over and tell her to cover up, but whenever the staffer looked away, the girl would pull her shirt back over her head. Every time she was chastised, she looked surprised. Her breasts were high and round and lovely, nothing like mine. I could understand why she wanted to show them.
Toward the end of the free period, I saw Janet and Laurel emerge from the woods. Laurel wore a bright pink caftan that floated behind her like a sail as they walked toward the main building. She was tall, but she walked with a slight hunch, a kind of hollowing. Janet stomped by her side in ripped black jeans and a black t-shirt. Serena was not with them.
“They’re so weird,” said someone close by. I didn’t turn my head. “Always skulking around in the woods. Last year they disappeared for like a week. When they finally came back, they were completely covered in these small scratches, and no one said a word. I don’t understand how they get away with it.”
“Laurel’s all right,” said another.
“You’re just saying that because you want to fuck her.”
“Well,” the girl said, and then she made a humming sound, or maybe an eating sound, and the two of them laughed and wandered away, but not before Laurel turned her head and looked right at them—at us—her eyes narrowed, as if, though she was much too far away, she had heard her name, heard herself be desired.
Dinner that night was a slurry of quinoa and kale and black beans, delivered in one enormous bowl to each table in the long, loud dining room. On the way in, just past the door, there was a little station with stacks of plates. The plates were mismatched in color and size, probably donated; the one I picked up had an unbearably twee strawberry-and-picket-fence pattern. I turned it slowly in my hands and touched my fingers to the smallest, most delicate strawberry, feeling suddenly tender. Then I was promptly jabbed in the back. When I turned to look at the girl behind me, she only grinned. She might have even looked pleasant, except that her mouth seemed twice as large as it had any right to be, her teeth twice as white.