Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [88]
I felt so lucky I wanted to scream out like Kate had done, but it was not that kind of score. For me, it was her. She was disorganized, a school report card would do just as well as anything for a recipe, she wasn’t a precious homemaker, she liked to eat in the kitchen at the big butcher-block table unless she made something complicated and wanted a dining room to honor the dish. Her handwriting looked like the handwriting of every other Catholic girl turned housewife from that period, very neat, slightly rounded cursive. Was she saving a great recipe for rum raisin ice cream or my report card from preschool? Knowing her, probably both.
I wanted things that would help me remember her ordinariness, not her debutante ball or her fancy upbringing or her physical beauty or her equestrian achievements or her sultry movie star voice. Somewhere between her swanky childhood in St. Louis and her tragic death, my mother was ordinary. Cooking, sitting around the kitchen, figuring out what to have for dinner and smoking was her favorite kind of day. It was her best time. I felt this when I read the handwritten rum raisin ice cream recipe. This was what mattered. This was what I decided to take with me. It felt like I couldn’t get any closer to her than this thing that she had written, a piece of her handwriting.
She was a mother, and in being that, she loved me, and I loved her. I stuffed it into my bag and went back to the bookshelves.
MANIFEST PREGNANCY
I LEANED OUT the third-floor window of a five-story town house on East Seventy-third Street off Madison. I had come to wrangle the hydrangeas. The week before, I had planted these hydrangeas in the window boxes, and then my boss got a call from the lady of the house saying her hydrangeas were sagging; this wasn’t metaphor but actual saggy hydrangeas, the tops leaning over onto Seventy-third Street as if they were about to take their own lives.
Dirk, the owner of City Gardens, picked up all his workers at the Bergen Street 2/3 subway station in Brooklyn around seven a.m. and gave us all rides to our various locations for the day. Most of his workers were sober and most were men, but Dirk hired me for the same reason he hired the guys who worked for him: I was clearly someone who couldn’t get or keep her shit together and no one else would hire me. I rode in the back of the van, sitting on bags of mulch with all the guys I knew from the sobriety circuit. There was always a day where someone didn’t have money for lunch, and today it was me. This guy Mike gave me five bucks. I found a banana someone had left on a flat of liriope, and it was unharmed, so I thought I’d just have that and a bag of almonds I brought from home for lunch and save the five bucks Mike gave me for an emergency.
“Okay, Jeanne, you’re working alone at the Fenners’,” Dirk said, pulling over.
I hated working alone, and I didn’t love this particular house. The house manager always yelled at me for tracking dirt on the carpets, and the young hot Polish nanny made me sad—her life looked so lonely.
I was using little sticks and string to prop up the suicidal hydrangeas. There were five floors, three windows per floor, and about four hydrangeas in each box. I had been doing this shit for hours. Marianne, the tall, fit black woman who ran the house, appeared in the doorway, startling me.
“You left your muddy boots next to the door. Carol saw them first thing when she walked in.”
“Sorry. Who’s Carol?”
“The woman who owns this place and is about to come in here and get all Medea on you,” Marianne snapped. Marianne could be made to be fun; it was just a lot of work. We often watched All My Children when no one was around.
“Well, Medea killed her own children, not the gardeners, so perhaps you should alert the kids upstairs.” I looked at my watch. “Shit. I gotta go. I gotta catch a plane.” I jumped up and collected my trowels and sticks and the clear plastic sheeting that had to be put over everything.
“You better get one of those other drug addicts to finish this window.”
“Recovering. Recovering drug addicts,