A Blossom In The Weeds - Part One
“Crocuses,” he said again, louder.
Ellie felt heat rise in her face as she forced a smile. She couldn’t ask the stranger at the door to repeat himself a third time and she had still not managed to listen to his sentence in its entirety. He’d begun speaking and her mind spun off into a hundred directions. Was this Paul the retired garbage collector or Gerald the retired policeman? Her aunt had given her exhaustive histories on all her neighbors over the years, but she hadn’t retained any helpful details. Was he here to complain about the dumpster in the driveway or that she’d parked on the wrong side of the street? This seemed like the kind of neighborhood that proactively enforced that kind of thing. If he’d asked a question, she was sunk.
He only raised an unruly gray eyebrow at her and thrust out a handful of mail.
“Mailman always leaves these in mine,” he said. “They’re addressed to Betsy.”
“Oh— oh, thanks.”
He grunted, then peered over her shoulder into the dark house.
“You must have a lot to clear out.”
An understatement. After sixty-five years of idle accumulation, the house was a rabbit warren of photo albums and cheap knick-knacks, a ranch-style monument to procrastination. Ellie had half a mind to light a match to it, but not the energy to make it look good to the insurance company.
“Will you be staying in Port Hazel?” asked Paul-or-Gerry. His face was pocked like basalt, stern, but not unkind.
“That’s what everyone asks,” Ellie said with a lightness she didn’t feel. “Nothing is decided yet. If I can get this place in shape, well. Who knows.”
He nodded with his chin, turned away as if to leave, then turned back.
“I have a trailer. If you need to haul anything to the Goodwill.”
“Thanks, I’ll let you know,” said Ellie, although she wouldn’t. She watched his bow-legged retreat down the driveway with rueful certainty of that. She had lived ten years in the city surrounded by thousands of people, but she had never felt so claustrophobically visible as she had in the last 36 hours of life on a small town street. Even now, she could see curtains moving furtively in a window across the cul-de-sac, what was probably the shadow of a pair of binoculars poking out from behind layers of yellowed lace. She’d gone out to check her own mailbox earlier that morning in broad daylight like an amateur, only to be snared into thirty minutes of baffling small talk with a potbellied old lady who wanted to know if she planned to do anything about the cherry tree that was leaning over the property line between their houses.
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” is all Ellie could say, “nothing is decided yet.”
Aunt Betsy had left the house to Ellie’s mom; Mom, in turn, offered to rent it to Ellie. Mom was currently living in a beach house in the south of Spain. She had no interest in a two-bedroom, floral-wallpapered renovation project.
“Clean it up. See how much work it needs. If you don’t want to stay, we’ll sell it.”
The offer had come at a vulnerable time for Ellie, who usually prided herself on seeing through her mother’s schemes. Gigs were petering out in the city; she was beginning to realize that the side jobs were her real job and music was just an expensive hobby. Actually, it had felt like waking from a deep sleep. She suddenly had the sense that everyone else already knew she was just a receptionist who played in piano bars now and then, that they’d known for years, that the whole world had been humoring her, waiting for her to get the memo. She started to see everything as it was, and it couldn’t be unseen: her bare-walled apartment, the hallway crowded with still-unopened boxes from her first move, the closet half filled with unflattering work uniforms, black pants and polyester button ups and an assortment of comfortable shoes wearing thin on the insoles. Takeout containers inside the fridge, photos on the outside, of friends and bandmates who had come and gone, moved on to better careers or settled into families. The keyboard, disassembled and reassembled for shows so many times in the beginning, now sitting mute under a thin sheen of dust. She felt stung and humiliated and collapsible and in the mood for a road trip.
“No pressure,” Mom had said, always a red flag. “Just let me know how you get on.”
Ellie had thought Port Hazel seemed bigger than she remembered as she drove in after dark two days ago, and not as shabby. There were two stop lights on Main Street now, along with a used bookstore and a Subway sandwich shop and a storefront optimistically offering itself as an art gallery, though she could see a Slushie machine and a few plastic tables through the glass, so the owner was obviously hedging their bets.
She’d spent a few summer vacations here between grades in elementary school. Mom had been off somewhere, Greece or Florida, chasing the sun. No time to babysit. Aunt Betsy worked during the day, but had a pantry full of food and a relaxed attitude toward house rules. Ellie remembered sunny walks on her own to the Minit Mart, sitting creekside with her feet in the water under the Main Street bridge, watching the other kids swimming while she nibbled around the letters on her Crunch bar. Then there was PBS Mystery and America’s Most Wanted in the evening, curled up on the couch under an orange-and-brown afghan, a giant bowl of popcorn on her lap, her head on Betsy’s pillowy shoulder and no bedtime or wake up time to worry about.
The house without her couldn’t be called empty, Ellie thought now, hugging herself as she came back into the living room, but it was definitely incomplete.
Mom must have known what it had turned into inside before she’d thought of Ellie for the clean-out job. She had a nerve setting the rent so high-- although maybe she’d calculated that Ellie would smell a rat if she made it too attractive.
Maybe that’s what the smell is, Ellie thought suddenly, testing the musty air with a few leery sniffs. What did actual rats smell like? Damp newspaper and ammonia? Something sweet, too. Grape jelly? It could be anything under the erratic, hip-deep stacks of magazines lined against the walls, behind the bookcases bulging with VHS tapes and DVDs of every genre from Disney princesses to the collected works of Steven Seagal and Jean Claude VanDamme, the curio where dead-eyed porcelain dolls crowded together behind the glass with Star Trek figurines and WWE action figures like strangers on a subway car. Garbage bags full of aluminum cans ballooned up through the legs of the dining room chairs, engulfed half the surface of the table; the other half was covered with unopened mail, canned food, boxes of tea.
“She’s given up.”
That had been Mom’s assessment of her twin sister even before she died.
They’d never been close, never been alike.
Mom had left Port Hazel at sixteen like a bullet from a gun, hadn’t stopped moving since. A pair of husbands had come and gone. Jobs and relationships never seemed to be in short supply, no matter how spectacularly they ended. She moved up a ladder of houses that she kept as spare and fashionable as showrooms, purging and starting over every few years, never leaving a trace.
Betsy had stayed in the house where they’d been born till the grandparents died, stayed in the job at the paper mill till it shut down, retired into the seafoam green Lazy Boy that was almost the only open space in any of the six rooms of the house.
Ellie slept there herself that first night, too dispirited to roll out a sleeping bag on the floor and too distrusting of the pilled, faintly damp-to-the-touch sheets on the guest bed to burrow under the stacks of dress shirts still in their plastic wrapping that overlay the comforter.
She woke up the next morning to the steady, alarm-clock blare of a large truck beeping as it reversed up the driveway. In a stroke of strategic brilliance several weeks before, Mom had ordered the dumpster to be delivered at 7am the day after Ellie took possession. No reason to sleep in when there was so much work to do.
Ellie had watched bleakly through the picture window as the dumpster clanged and scraped its way into position in the driveway. A bathrobed and possibly irate neighbor made an appearance in a doorway across the street; Ellie ducked behind a dusty bureau.
She googled the phrase “spring cleaning” on her phone, and spent the next four hours watching videos about methods of determining if one’s objects sparked joy.
Mom called at eleven, which Ellie let go to voicemail, then called four more times and texted twice.
“Are you there yet? How’s it going?”
“Hello? Call me!”
I’ll just take this day off, Ellie told herself. I’ll dig in tomorrow.
She googled “motivation,” but didn’t find it.
She wafted through the house, trying to get the scope of the situation.
She sat down and flipped through photo albums instead: orange-tinted scenes in grange halls and covered shelters at parks, strangers in winged collars and tight perms, smiling into the camera. Retirement parties, high school graduations, barbecues, board games. Ellie didn’t know any of these people. Neighbors, workmates? Betsy was always there, round and soft and smiling, wearing the same large tinted glasses and blonde curtain bangs she’d had at the hospital the last time Ellie had seen her.
Looking at them, Ellie felt a spark of anger. All these friends, over all these years. Did they know she was living like this? Penned in by bric-a-brac, hibernating in a green armchair while other people lived their lives?
She snapped the album shut.
It was enough to drive her to the grocery store, ostensibly to gather supplies, though it turned out to be a minefield of talkative strangers. A bearded lumberjack type offered her suggestions on which kind of garbage bags to purchase. (Not the store brand, they’ll rip before you get them to the curb.) The cashier liked her haircut-- she must not be from around here. (How an unwashed bob under a beanie revealed that was a mystery, but the lady clearly had a good eye for out-of-towners.) Was she visiting family? No? Heading up to the mountain to camp? No? What was she doing here?
Ellie didn’t quite know the answer.
It was dusky by the time she got back with arms full of cleaning supplies and a diner burger dripping grease through the styrofoam takeout container and down the side of her sleeve. The house actually looked better in the gloom. The chaos sort of melted into vague, distant shapes that could have been furniture instead of mess and there were well-trodden pathways worn through that led her right where she needed to go, even in the dark: The Lazy Boy and the TV tray already set up beside it for her meal.
What was she doing here? Good question.
If you asked Mom, she was getting the house ready to sell. That’s what it really was. The bait was a break from the city, from her sputtering career as a would-be musician, a quiet spot in the woods, a chance to reset, reevaluate.
If you don’t want to stay.
Of course Mom couldn’t imagine any circumstances in which Ellie would want to stay in Port Hazel. The plan had always been that Ellie would quickly come to hate everything about this house and this two-stoplight mountain town, that Mom would nod understandingly and say, that’s fine, you can break your lease, we’ll sell up as soon as you’ve got the house ready. Ellie had let herself be dispatched like a good soldier and everything was ticking along according to Mom’s calculations.
Well. Ellie took a look at her phone. Fourteen unread texts and five WhatsApp messages bleated for attention on her notification screen. Maybe not quite according to her calculations.
It wasn’t surprising, so why was it so aggravating? Why did her heart sink like a crippled jetliner when she opened the front door and took it all in on that first night? It wasn’t just that she’d been had; somewhere in the back of her mind, she had to have known that was part of the deal.
(The burger was helping. There was something comforting about the mediocrity of diner food, thick-cut fries and watery ketchup. She had forgotten to eat lunch and she needed the calories to weight the other side of the emotional see-saw.)
The house hadn’t looked so bad from the outside. It was dark when she arrived, of course, so maybe she had missed details, but when she first pulled up, it had really looked much as she remembered it from childhood. Maybe even a bit improved. A small, tidy lawn, a bare-limbed tree or two, blooming borders of short, purple flowers. The same pale yellow siding, the bright blue door. She had felt something stir as she looked at it over her dashboard, at her house. Had she imagined putting out patio furniture, setting up the keyboard in the window, bringing in piano students in the afternoons, warm evening walks down to the tavern to meet friends?
It all curdled so quickly, she felt embarrassed even to remember what she might have been hoping for.
Ellie sighed and put aside the take-out container.
She thought about the people in the photo albums. Maybe they’d loved Betsy as Ellie had, from the outside. From half listening to long, rambling phone calls on Sunday nights, to circuitous stories about the travails of the relatives of strangers, sometimes mixed with plotlines from whatever TV show she was watching at the time. The unavoidable affection that a kind heart engendered, even when the person to whom it belonged was impossible to really know.
Maybe she had given up. Ellie could understand the appeal. She had that same gene herself. It was exhausting trying to live up to your own expectations, it was an impossible hamster wheel of disappointment. It had chased Ellie out of the city; it had chased her mother all over the Western Hemisphere. But if she’d come here hoping to find comfort in stillness, what she’d found instead was a fly trapped in amber. There had to be another way.
One more night in the armchair, Ellie had thought, before pulling her coat up over her body like a blanket and reaching for the remote control. Tomorrow it was time to see if she could dig out.