Mother’s Garden / The Historian
by Andrew Bertaina
Mother’s Garden
After the call, I packed and took the first cheap flight home. When I arrived, mother was sitting in the kitchen, facing the garden — a modest rectangle of yard, at least for California, a yard where my siblings and I had taken turns toiling during our adolescence. In the heat of the northern valley summer, we’d sweated while converting a boring stretch of grass and a single tree into a proper English garden. First, we’d pulled every blade of grass out by the roots, ripped knotty ropes of ivy from the ground, tendrils, like a line of vertebrate. We’d formed mounds by slogging piles of earth around the side yard, then dug paths that snaked through them. We’d hefted brutishly heavy flagstones to line the footpaths, hauled gravel to fill the paths, dug a hole and lined it to make a pond, filled it with koi. We planted the mounds with primrose, azalea, blackberry, lilac, star lilies, rose bushes and daisies. Welcome home, Andrew, mother said, reaching over her shoulder for my hand, then holding it there, as she always had.
I unpacked in my childhood room, bare white walls. As a teenager, I’d covered every square inch with sports memorabilia, box scores, Michael Jordan posters. A large shade now covered the window, where once the sun had blazed through on summer afternoons, turning the room into a sauna. The room was darker now. The changes discomfited me. It was as though I expected things here, mother, my room, to remain the same, while my own life hurtled onwards — marriages, children, divorce, career changes.
I lay on my childhood bed and looked at the ceiling, thinking of my own children, nine and eleven, back home, wondering if they’d fly across the country to see me too someday, even if their mother now hated me. I fell into sleep and dreamed I was a child with a fear of Dracula and the dark as I’d once been.
When I awoke, I was hot and confused. The world returned to me in bits, the bare white walls were the same walls I’d seen shadows on as a child. The bed was the same one I’d once lay naked on with my college girlfriend, our lithe bodies covered in a layer of sweat. I lay there for a moment and let the memories of the last few years wash over me — the leukemia, the things my father had said about me the year before he died. I thought about the slow accumulation of meaningless hours by a child’s crib, my former wife’s red-gold hair, which I had once adored. Thoughts passed through my head, one after another, as rain through sky.
Mother was still sitting in the kitchen, eating an early dinner. Your sister is arriving tomorrow, she said, a small bit of pasta attached to the balloon of her cheek. Good mother, I said.
Mother, I said, sitting at the circular wooden table that I had sat at as a child, what was the best moment of your life? An absurd question to ask an aging woman, but I had become absurd in middle-age, sentimental and confused about what my life was supposed to mean.
I waited, while dust motes streamed in buttery light, while a starling bent to clean its feathers in the boughs of the apricot, while a house fly battered the windowpane, while the television droned on with an ad about industrial glue, for my question had troubled mother. Her downturned mouth pursed at the effort of producing the right answer. Mother, who had always given up self to her children. My phone rang, interrupting the moment. One of the children was calling, my son, to tell me about his soccer game.
In the next two days, my siblings arrived, efficient adults, who had not been waylaid by middle-age, but who had redoubled their efforts to structure the world around them, to bend it to their wills. If they could work out enough, set enough meetings and family vacations, perhaps they could control it, harness time. We talked about mother as though she wasn’t there, as though she were a piece of property, something to be managed. They were not cold exactly, never that, but they didn’t seem to see what I saw, flashes of soul, of something that made her a person beyond us even if she never claimed it, her right to not be mother.
Andrew, she said, from her seat by the kitchen window. I have an answer for you. This is the best moment, being with all of you here, she said, seeing the people you’ve grown into. She smiled and took my hand. Outside, the rose bushes trembled in the wind. We’d buried our cat underneath them, years ago, a massive animal that had come when you called his name as if he were a dog. He’d dropped dead one summer morning with all of us home, as though he’d wanted to say goodbye to everyone first.
My brother was in the next room, grey-haired now and balding, tending to mother’s papers, and my sister was preparing dinner. In the yard — everything had gone to hell, piss colored plants, nearly waist high, grew on the garden paths; weeds threaded many of the mounds, beginning to choke off the flowers we’d planted over the years. The small patches of grass were returning, spreading seed and sending out tufts of roots, reclaiming lost territory.
That’s lovely, mother, I say. And it is. I’m reminded, as I stand at the table, of the Easter baskets she’d given us as children. She hadn’t been well off after they split, but mother would always get us extravagant baskets — chocolate bunnies, candies, yellow peeps, jelly beans, round milk chocolates. In the morning, we’d rush to the table, to see what surprise was in store for us, to see what other wonders mother would give to her children, no matter how much she too must have needed.
The Historian
The past cannot be rewritten, his wife said ominously as she stirred the dry oats into a morning bake. He was a historian though and knew this to be untrue. As such, after breakfast, he retired to his room and looked out into the garden, admiring the peonies and the overgrown bay bush, and then began writing his autobiography. In this version of his life, he got married to a woman vastly different than his longtime wife — this time he was married to a lovely French-speaking woman who supported his idleness, his predilection for explaining movie plots, his inability to put together IKEA furniture, and his fascination with silent cinema of the early twentieth century. And yet, as a house wren swooped across the yard, he suddenly found himself arguing with his seemingly pliant French wife about the name of one of his children. The two of them quarreled in his autobiography, and she sulked in her room. She was given to sulks, which vexed him greatly. And eventually they didn’t have any children at all and separated. He couldn’t remember why he’d married his French wife to begin with. She was very different than he’d expected. Sometimes he’d stay awake at night and dream of the coast of Maine, his old wife, who he’d written out of this version of history. He wondered if Herodotus had similar problems while composing The Histories. He suspected not. He just lacked a certain zest for life or so his French wife had always reminded him.
Andrew Bertaina's short story collection One Person Away From You (2021) won the Moon City Press Fiction Award (2020). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, Redivider, Orion, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC, and currently serves as an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel.
