The State We're In

ADIRONDACK CHAIRS

After Artigan’s death, Bea was afraid to weed the garden. Artigan had not died from the yellow jacket bites — though he was horribly allergic — but because as his shovel split their in-ground nest and they swarmed up as the first and last golden tornado he’d ever see, he fell backward over the stone wall and hit his head on a tree stump. Artigan had been doing some gardening for summer people who were not yet occupying their house. The blood was congealing when Bea arrived in the Heppendales’ truck to pick him up. She worked at the greenhouse, where there’d been a big run on lemon verbena. She and Tracy (who’d once worked at a vineyard in Sonoma) had come up with the idea that the greenhouse could offer a free wine tasting with music and gardening information. There was a tip jar, and they were a little embarrassed that people left so much.

I worked at the greenhouse, too, but I never had any bright ideas. The Heppendales raised my friends’ hourly wage and agreed that, yes, they should offer the back building for weddings. Alex Heppendale ordered Bea and Tracy new gardening boots from Zappos, along with a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate each for another pair of shoes. By July, when word had spread about the cocktails and gardening advice, business had almost doubled. Chilean chardonnay, supercold, in real glasses, with hors d’oeuvres and Mr. Heppendale and his daughter Alex (a Princeton graduate) circulating and offering tips about gardening… people in town went mad for it, as well as people from away. Mrs. Heppendale bought flouncy dresses and meant to attend, but found that, Friday after Friday, she had a headache.

On Saturdays, Artigan also worked at the greenhouse, tending the suddenly popular, slightly strange herbs and repotting orchids. Had he not died, he and Bea were going to test out the back building for their own wedding at the end of August. They’d already been a couple long enough for him to teach her to drive, for her to break his texting addiction, for them to consider sponsoring a child from the Fresh Air Fund the following summer, by which time they’d be legit. As a little girl Bea had believed in angels, but that was more or less because she loved girlie tchotchkes. My Little Pony was over the top, but even as she got older, she kept her fondness for barrettes decorated with sunflowers and bunches of cherries. Her hair was seventeen inches long, measured from the crown to its longest point. (Tracy had the idea, and I measured. I admit, we thought a lot about ourselves and very little about plants on our half-hour lunch breaks.)

At the ER, there was much commotion, little talk. People either pulled Bea forward by her hand like a child or repeatedly dropped her hand, she couldn’t remember. She knew when she saw him on the grass near the garden that he was dead. She’d seen enough corpses on TV. She had no religious beliefs, so she didn’t think Artigan was anywhere but there, and as she dialed 911, she knew he’d only be on the ground a few minutes longer. So much for their wedding.

I quit my other job waiting tables at the York Harbor Inn and stepped in full-time to join Tracy at the greenhouse at the end of July, when it became clear Bea wasn’t going to be able to work anymore. It wasn’t just grief, it was morning sickness. She wouldn’t have to borrow a child from Fresh Air to play with on the beach the following summer. Of course she wasn’t going to be able to afford to live in town anymore. She’d only been able to do it because a former college roommate had offered Artigan his cousin’s house for the summer while the estate was being settled. In exchange for gardening and lawn mowing, Artigan and Bea had briefly seemed like everybody else, sitting on the front lawn in the Adirondack chairs, admiring the bobbly headed peonies that dowsed the ground, drinking a G and T in the evening (which, for them, meant eight o’clock). When Bea’s mother and father came to take her home, they stripped the beds and wrote thank-you notes to the family (strangely, using no salutation). They also turned the Adirondack chairs upside down on the front lawn as if they were boats that needed to drain. My aunt and uncle, who had a lot more money than my parents, once had a maid who was intent on showing you that she’d cleaned the rugs, so she put them back upside down. Sometimes the colors were surprisingly bright. Once or twice they were left wrong side up.

At the Heppendales’ greenhouse, Tracy and I were really the also-rans. I was always tripping over the hose or putting a plant down too hard and cracking the clay pot. She fainted, on a hot August day, loading a ten-pound bag of soil into some old guy’s trunk. After that she made sure to hydrate and wore the big canvas sun hat with the annoying chin strap. She told me later it was weird to have felt the way Artigan might have just before he died. We’d both gone to the funeral, though Bea wasn’t there. It was my second and Tracy’s first. It was a hot day and Mrs. Heppendale hadn’t been there because she’d had an allergic reaction to something she ate the night before. For one reason or another, Mrs. Heppendale was hardly ever anywhere.

It was the turned-over chairs at Artigan and Bea’s that really stopped Tracy and me when we went over to the house to see if Bea and her parents needed any help. When we got there, though, they’d already left. We pulled up the steep driveway and went in through the back, so we didn’t see the chairs at first, though we did see and read the notes from Bea’s mother and father, with a box of Kleenex weighing down the corner of one and a conch shell as a paperweight over the other, both smack in the middle of the dining room table, bracketed by silver candlesticks. What was going to happen to Bea? She was almost certainly going to be okay, we figured, but that was before we knew about the pregnancy and before scuzzy Winston Bales blabbed that she’d been known to do a little coke. The Zappos boots, in a striped pattern with the stripes filled in with paisley, sat by the back door. Another empty box had been discarded in the trash: stilettos, said the print on the box, black patent, size 7¹/₂. She must have taken them. To do what? Stumble around in her pregnancy? Bea’s family lived in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her mother worked for a dry cleaner. Her father was an accountant. One of his clients had been Big Pussy, from The Sopranos.

Shortly after Bea’s departure, Mrs. Heppendale also left. She told people she was going to visit her sister in London, but both Alex and Mr. Heppendale said that it was a made-up story, that she was simply walking out on them. Part of her reason was that they were obsessed with Bea, and inconsolably distraught about Artigan, while they’d paid no attention to her when she had the flu, or when her migraines began (she’d had to get a cab to the ER). Also, her husband and daughter danced outside on the terrace under the stars to big-band music piped out through those excellent Bose speakers they had everywhere, and she was worried that anyone seeing such a thing would think something incestuous was going on.

I was the last one to see Mrs. Heppendale. I was at the transportation center in Portsmouth, waiting for my best friend since first grade to arrive by bus from Logan airport. She’d just been given a Tiffany engagement ring. She was coming for a visit to show it off and to take me to dinner with her fiancé’s American Express card, to which she’d been added. Things were going to work out for Stella. Hers wasn’t going to be any tragic situation. I’d gotten my hair highlighted and was wearing new ballet flats. Stella had the same shoes — everybody that summer had those shoes — but hers were bright yellow.

Suddenly out of nowhere came Mrs. Heppendale, as the bus was visible in the distance. Well, she came from inside, but she just appeared, big zippered bag slung over one shoulder (she traveled light), purse in hand. “How interesting that, as I exit, I encounter the budding writer,” she said to me. “I’m going to England and not coming back. I’ve got a sister there who loves me, and I love the theater. It hasn’t been easy, seeing summer productions in barns full of mosquitoes and minor TV actresses at the Ogunquit Playhouse in revivals of The Sound of Music. There’s not much of a story in my running away, because once you say I drink, no one’s going to be interested or sympathetic. I thought you were a nice girl, though seriously lacking in self-confidence. I never understood why you hung on Bea’s every word. You and everybody else thought she was so great. I thought she was scared of her own shadow and that she tried to cover that by being outgoing. Did she and Arty ever really seem to be in love? I never thought so. But I’m quite a bit older than you girls, so I’m not preoccupied with love. All I care about anymore is mysteries and crossword puzzles. And by the way, I know more about orchids than any of them. I kept telling them to stop repotting. Orchids are best grown in the smallest possible pot, you know. All they care is that they’re fashionable and that they’ll sell well. That’s why we stocked those ceramic kissing frog couples and hoses made to look like cobra skin.” She gave a little snort.

How had she gotten to the transportation center? Had she driven and left her car in the parking lot, or had someone dropped her off? She said, “There’s a species of orchid in Australia — only in Australia — a subterranean species that blooms underground. It has no chlorophyll, but it flowers beneath the soil. It’s a perfect metaphor for something, isn’t it? Use it sometime, and think of me.”

“Mrs. Heppendale. You’re really leaving? Right now?”

“If the bus ever arrives,” she said.

The bus was swinging around the curve to pull into its bay. An announcement of its arrival came over the PA system.

“I’m sorry we never really got to know each other,” I said. “You know, Bea and I liked working at the greenhouse. I think you would have liked Bea if, you know, you’d known her. Better, I mean.”

“I don’t like people who flirt. I know people enjoy flirting and being flirted with. It’s just not my thing.”

“Bea flirted?” I said.

“With Alex! She was quite intent on getting something going with Alex. I was the one who had to point it out to my own daughter. What do you girls notice? Pain concentrates the mind, I suppose. When I have migraines I have to remember to breathe and to focus through them. You squint whether you want to or not. Nobody could be more surprised than me that sometimes I can see right to the heart of things. That’s no doubt what made me think to tell you about that orchid.”

“Did Alex, I mean, she agreed with you?”

Mrs. Heppendale raised an eyebrow. “She’s not a total fool when something is made clear,” she said.

“What do you see when you look at me?” I said.

What I saw, with my inner eye, was a young woman too often stunned, even by the most usual things: two chairs left behind at a borrowed house, in an odd position. A note in backward-sloping handwriting, another note more or less block-printed, all in capital letters, lying on a table where a fruit bowl might be.

Mrs. Heppendale said nothing, though she must have said good-bye, because our eyes locked for a few seconds before she stepped onto the bus. Then suddenly Stella, the Luckiest Girl in the World (self-appointed), exited through the rear door and flew into my arms. What if Mrs. Heppendale saw that? Stella’s hair smelled of peaches. The diamond ring sparkled as if the day weren’t cloudy. I looked over Stella’s shoulder. I couldn’t see through the bus windows, though I’d ridden that bus and knew Mrs. Heppendale could see out. Was she wondering what my next expression would be, how soon I’d drop my polite but nervous smile?

Bea had had a flirtation with Alex? It had gone right by me. What would something like that mean, anyway? Nothing. It’s not like they ended up together. (By September, even Stella’s engagement was broken; instead of returning the ring, she’d sold it to an estate jeweler in Boston and sent the money to him — which, of course, was nowhere near as much as he’d paid for the ring.)

In a supermarket recently, I stopped to look at the orchids and thought about telling the guy who worked in the floral section about the underground orchid, though I realized he’d probably think I was either crazy or flirting. I wasn’t the sort of person who struck up conversations with strangers. Bea had been the one who was outgoing, always curious, asking whether I believed in God; what I expected out of life; how high I thought a heel could be before it just looked silly. “You take it on faith that there’s a God?” she’d echoed one time, wide-eyed. Well, sure. The same way we take it on faith that people in the Adirondacks must sit in those uncomfortable wooden chairs with the seats tilted so deeply backward that your knees sprang up like a ventriloquist’s dummy as the wood pressed into the back of your thighs. Otherwise, why would they be so named?

I thought about Bea a lot, but she never answered my e-mails, and her cell phone had been disconnected. One time when my thoughts were wandering, it suddenly came to me what Bea’s parents had done. When they left the house, they’d turned the Adirondack chairs over (shocking pink was that summer’s color) to show that they disliked them. They’d given the finger to the very symbol of summer, and they’d been right to do it. Those things ruined women’s stockings and made you spill your drink; you had to sit in them awkwardly, pretending that your casual moment was also comfortable. That you’d adapted easily to their too-deep seats and were having fun.

I certainly wouldn’t know how to write the story of that summer. Tracy and Bea and Alex and I were at those points in our lives when everything made sense in not making sense, you know? You do know. Who hasn’t been twenty-one? Who hasn’t sat outdoors on a summer night and known — known without questioning it — that through the impenetrable black sky, someone or something is looking down at you? The stars just glitter to draw your attention.