CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOURThe Queens of Woodlawn Avenue were clearly not women to let any grass grow under their feet. I hadn’t been home from my shopping expedition with Linda more than thirty minutes when Jane knocked on my front door. Thankfully, she arrived without any additional pound cake. Given my weakness for it, I was glad not to be tempted. After all, I didn’t want to jeopardize the fit of my new ill-gotten designer suit any more than I already had.
“Linda’s had you out shopping?” Jane asked, but I knew by the way she breezed by me without waiting for an answer that it was a rhetorical question. Linda had no doubt already called Jane and filled her in on all of the details of our Elliott’s expedition. I wasn’t ungrateful, but I bristled at the idea of my two new friends talking about me. After months of feeling I had to fight every battle on my own, of dealing with jaded lawyers, budget movers, and fearful friends who treated me like a pariah, I suppose I should have relished the well-meant interference of my three fairy godmothers. But I wasn’t quite ready to sign away all rights to my self-determination just yet.
Jane made her way unescorted to my dining room, so once again I found myself following in her wake. She laid her red alligator briefcase on the table, snapped open the clasps, and lifted the lid. With crisp efficiency, she took out a sheaf of papers, a legal pad covered with writing, and a couple of pens. With her professionally manicured hand, she motioned me to join her at the table.
“We don’t have a lot of time to draft your business plan, so I took the liberty of making some notes.”
Jane flipped through several pages of writing, picked up a pen to make several more notations, and then set the pen down on top of the pad, all without noticing my silence in response to her comment. “So, let’s see what we can do about generating some revenue streams.”
“I can’t think of anything I’d rather generate.” I sounded more than a little annoyed, but she just laughed.
“Good. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, but I’ve found there’s nothing as satisfying as running your own business. So, let’s get started. What’s your background, workwise?”
I wonder if Cinderella had felt like she was being similarly steamrolled while her fairy godmother flew around singing“Bibbity-bobbity-boo.” As a matter of fact, now that I thought about it, I don’t think Cindy was ever consulted on the pertinent details of her transformation. I now knew how she felt.
Jane wanted to know about my qualifications. Well, I’d always thought that my efforts as Jim’s wife and my children’s mother had constituted the best work of my life. However, I doubted knowing how to simultaneously make a three-egg omelet, tutor a high school freshman in algebra, and extract a headless Barbie from the dog’s jaws would count for much in the cutthroat world of commerce.
“Well, my degree is in nursing.”
“Okay.” Linda flipped to a clean page of her legal pad and wrote Nursing at the top. “And you’d like to get back into it?”
“Actually, no. And my license lapsed a long time ago, so it would take some doing to get back up to speed.”
“Have you considered going back to school?”
I had, actually, in the long nights I’d laid awake right after Jim announced his change of heart about our marriage. But it hadn’t taken me long to realize I didn’t want to go back to school, and I definitely didn’t want to go into debt just so I could work twelve-hour shifts as a floor nurse. The thought of working in a doctor’s office, as my mom had done all those years, depressed me even more. She’d made enormous sacrifices so I wouldn’t have to follow in her literal footsteps. Despite the long hours I’d labored and the often thankless tasks I’d performed for my family over the years, I’d relished the freedom of setting my own schedule. I’d also enjoyed not having to pinch every penny. My unpaid labor had freed Jim up to bring home a whole lot of bacon.
“I don’t think more schooling is the answer,” I told Jane, and she nodded.
“What other experience do you have?”
“The only thing I’m qualified for is to be somebody’s wife or mother,” I said to Jane morosely, hating the self-pitying tone in my voice. Jane nodded, commiserating, and she looked pensive—at first. But a moment later, her eyes lit up.
“That’s it!” she cried, her smile spreading across her face. “It’s perfect.”
“What’s perfect?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of it immediately.”
Considering I had no idea what she was talking about, I wasn’t surprised about anything. “What do you mean?” Maybe all that red hat-wearing was starting to scramble her otherwise astute head for business.
“You said the only thing you’re qualified to be is someone’s wife or mother. Well, I can think of plenty of men who need the services of a wife.”
“Prostitution wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” I said, trying to laugh because I was sure that wasn’t what Jane meant. At least, I was pretty sure.
She laughed too, which was reassuring. “No, I mean that I know lots of single businessmen who need help with the tasks a wife would normally perform. Picking up dry cleaning. Playing hostess for a business dinner. All the little details someone needs to coordinate so they can concentrate on making money. You’d be perfect for that.”
“Well, I’m certainly experienced.” Jim had often said he’d never have advanced as far in his field as he had if it weren’t for me. Of course, the down side had been that he spent so much time at work, and I spent so much time making sure he could, that our marriage had been the ultimate casualty of both our efforts.
“I think you could find women clients, too,” Jane said. “Working mothers, or even some high-end, stay-at-home moms who volunteer so much they might as well be working.”
“And something like that would generate the income I’d need?” It sounded like a lot of work, which I wasn’t necessarily adverse to, but it also sounded very inconsistent. I’d been hoping for a steady paycheck if nothing else.
“Well, let’s see.” Once again, Jane started writing on her legal pad. This time, she was jotting down columns of numbers. “You wouldn’t have much overhead, which is great. And your mileage would be tax deductible. The biggest start-up cost would be advertising and the usual office stuff—business cards, stationery, that sort of thing. Oh, and you’d need a Web site. That’s mandatory.”
A Web site? I could barely figure out how to check my e-mail on a semi-regular basis on the cranky, aging computer I’d gotten in the divorce.
“I don’t know, Jane,” I said more irritably than I’d intended. I had a sudden, intense craving for more of her pound cake. Or at least that last two-pack of Twinkies I had stashed in the hard-to-reach cabinets above the ancient refrigerator.
Jane smiled, and the compassion in her expression made me want to weep. Which only made me crankier. I was tired of being the belle of the dumped housewives’ ball.
I want to be the belle of the Cannon Ball. That ridicu lous, hopeless thought came out of nowhere, but it took hold and I couldn’t push it out of my head.
“Ellie, I’m going to be honest with you.” Jane reached across the table and took my hand in hers. “I know it’s rough right now. But no white knight is going to come along and rescue you. If you want to change your life—no, if you just want to take your life back, then you’re going to have to be the one to do it. No one else is going to do it for you.”
There it was. The plain, unvarnished truth. Laid out on my dining room table without fanfare.
I looked around the room, at the cracks in the plaster and the scuffed hardwood floors badly in need of refin-ishing. My new surroundings couldn’t be more different than what I’d known for the last two decades. But Jane was right. No one—man, woman, or child—was going to come along and pluck me out of my hovel as if I were a princess in a fairy tale. If my life was going to get better, I had to make it that way.
My throat was thick with tears, but I pushed the words past them. “A Web site? How much does that cost?” My watery smile threatened to slide off my face, but I kept it pasted on by sheer dint of will.
Jane nodded approvingly. “Depends. Are any of your kids computer addicts?”
“My son, Connor. But he’s away at college.”
“That’s the beauty of the Internet,” Jane said. “Your Webmaster can be in New Guinea, for all it matters.”
“I can ask him.” I leaned over to look at the other items on her list. “And my friend, Karen, her family owns a printing business. She might be able to get me a discount.”
“Excellent.” Jane started making more notes. “As soon as you’re up and running, I’ll start spreading the word. You could have clients as soon as next week.”
“Next week?” The thought seemed overwhelming.
“Is that a problem?”
“I guess not.” Since I had no idea if Jim’s alimony check would arrive at all, I couldn’t afford to dilly-dally.
Dilly-dally. Another of my mom’s favorite words. Well, she’d managed somehow all those years. Worked hard and kept me fed and clothed. There was no reason I couldn’t do the same.
“What should I do first?” I asked Jane, and she was happy to spend the next few hours crafting a plan. We made up a price list, identified local publications where I might want to place ads, and set up an office in my second bedroom. By the time she left, I’d lost my resentment at being the latest project of the Queens of Woodlawn Avenue, and I’d gained a new appreciation for how compassionate other people could be.
Okay, I’d let Linda talk me into taking my fight for a place on the planning committee of the Cannon Ball right to my old nemesis. And I’d been a willing participant in Jane’s incipient efforts to turn me into a businesswoman. But when Grace showed up on my doorstep the next morning, a garden spade in one hand and a bag of potting soil under her liver-spotted arm, I knew I had to draw the line.
“Really, Grace, it’s not fair to inflict me on those poor plants.”
Grace pointed the trowel at me and said, “There’s no such thing as a brown thumb. Besides, every clod of dirt you turn over only raises the value of your house.”
Well, she certainly knew the one argument that might persuade me to start digging. The financial one.
“I don’t know…”
And I didn’t. I mean, how many projects could any semi-sane divorcee undertake at one time? I was going to have more than enough on my plate battling Roz Crowley and trying to launch my own business. I didn’t need to court certain disaster by trying to putter in the garden.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to hurt Grace’s feelings. She was nice enough to try and help me, and how would she feel if I let Linda and Jane work their mojo on me but ignored her offer? I had always been a sucker for making other people feel better, and so I took the spade she offered me and pasted a smile on my face. “Okay. You can try and turn me into a gardener, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Grace chuckled. “By the time I’m done with you, Ellie, Better Homes and Gardens will be calling for your advice.”
Twenty minutes later, Grace had lost some of her amusement and she’d quit predicting my launch as a horticulturalist of some renown. We were on our knees in the backyard, ready to attack the jungle that had once been beautiful landscaping. We wore matching pink paisley gardening gloves, and the sun beat down on our uncovered heads.
“No, Ellie, dear. That’s not the weed. That’s the plant.” I think she was gritting her dentures, because her jaw beneath her wrinkled skin was pretty tight.
“Are you sure? It looks pretty weedy to me.”
“You can’t always tell by how it looks,” Grace said, stooping down to pull my hands away from their intended victim.
“Then how do you know?”
“I suppose because somebody teaches you which is which. Like I’m doing for you. My mother taught me, just like she taught me to play bridge.”
I could picture Grace and her mother in old-fashioned clothes, working together in the yard or sitting across a card table from one another. Grace’s hair would have been in braids down her back, and her feet would have dangled a few inches off the floor in one of the straight-backed dining chairs. The image tugged at my heartstrings. My mother had been far too tired in the evenings to do anything but soak her aching feet while I heated more water and dispensed Epsom salts into the tub. Our weekends had been filled with shopping for groceries, trips to the Laundromat, and cleaning house. I couldn’t recall any times when we’d planted flowers or played a game together. The closest we’d come to a recreational activity had been sitting side by side in church.
Grace motioned for me to come closer, so I half-crawled, half-scooted toward her until the five feet between us was reduced to inches.
“Try it like this,” she advised me, grabbing a weed—I still wasn’t clear how to identify one—at the point where it sprang from the soil and pulling it slowly but firmly toward her. “You have to get all of the roots, or it will just grow back.”
“Okay,” I said, my eyes searching the tangle of greenery as I tried to identify a weed of my own to pull. I located what I thought was one of the offenders, reached down the stem as far as possible, and gave it my best yank. It broke off in my hand well above the roots. I looked at Grace, clutched the plant, and waited for the inevitable scold.
Instead, she laughed, her frustration withering as quickly as the poor dead plant in my hand.
“You tried to warn me, didn’t you?” She smiled.
“Let’s just say that my potential as a bridge player far exceeds my possibility as a gardener, and you know that’s not saying much.”
Grace slipped off her gardening gloves and used the back of her hand to wipe perspiration from her forehead. Her skin resembled the crepe paper I’d always used to festoon the dining room for one of my children’s birthday parties.
“Ellie, who convinced you that your only value lies in how well you do something? Don’t you get any credit just for being you?”
Perspiration slid off my forehead, too, stinging my eyes as sharply as Grace’s question stung my psyche.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Of course I knew exactly what she meant, but I wasn’t ready to go there.
“I mean who convinced you that you have no intrinsic value?” She tugged her gloves back on. “Sometimes it’s the mother.” She yanked at another weed and it came up easily, roots and all. She tossed it over her shoulder onto the crabgrass-infested lawn. “Sometimes it’s the husband. Even the children.” As she ticked off each offender, another weed flew through the air to join the pile.
“You’re way off base,” I snapped, but we both knew my flash of temper came from Grace’s words hitting too close to home.
“Am I?” She pulled two more weeds and began to hum under her breath. I couldn’t quite make out the tune.
“I’m not one of those sad women who give up their sense of self because they stay at home all day.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You implied it.” I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, and I found it even harder to believe that I was letting her get to me. She was obviously a well-meaning old busybody, but the last thing I needed was a red-hat-wearing, gray-haired Oprah trying to analyze me down the path to empowerment.
“I know my own worth.” I reached out, fingers desperate to find the right green thing to pluck out of the dirt. Frustration blurred my vision.
“Do you?”
Great. I really was being psychoanalyzed.
“Look, Grace, if you have something to say, please just say it.” I started plucking at plants indiscriminately. Since I couldn’t tell the good ones from the bad ones, why not just uproot everything and start from scratch?
“Wait, wait. Don’t pull up the daisies.”
My hand stopped in mid-pluck. “I might as well just clear the whole thing out and start over,” I said, and suddenly I knew I wasn’t just talking about my flower beds. I’d been pushing Jim’s phone call to the edges of my consciousness.
“But you don’t need to start over.” Grace looked me straight in the eye. “There’s plenty here worth saving. It just needs a bit of discernment.”
Discernment?
She nodded her head like she’d heard the question in my thoughts. “You just need some time to sort out the good from the bad.”
I sank back on my bottom, arching my back to ease the ache there. “How much time will it take for me to learn how to garden?” We both knew my question had to do with a lot more than rescuing my yard from encroaching chaos.
“That depends,” Grace said.
“On what?”
“On how patient you’re willing to be.”
“I don’t have time to be patient.” I needed a new life, and I needed it now. I had mortgage payments to make, a charity ball to commandeer, and an ex-husband who couldn’t wait to race down the aisle with a woman who made Pamela Anderson look like a Rhodes Scholar. I needed to be fabulous, and I needed it now.
“I don’t think you have any choice.”
“I don’t know why not. It would be much simpler that way.”
“I suppose. But it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying.”
At that point, though, I didn’t have much interest in feeling satisfied. I just didn’t want to feel so desperate anymore. But when I thought about it, I realized that the rest of the day stretched before me like a yawning, empty cavern. I had no plans. Nowhere to be. The only thing on my “To Do” list was to e-mail my son about setting up a Web site and to call Karen about a discount at the print shop. Together, those tasks might take fifteen minutes. I looked at the length of the flower bed as it stretched along the side of the yard, across the back fence, and back the other way toward the house. What Grace proposed was a formidable task, but, again, it was better than sitting in the living room and eating Twinkies.
“All right. I’ll try. But I may pull up more plants than weeds.”
“You might at first,” Grace said. “But I bet you’ll learn to tell the difference.”
I didn’t answer. I hoped she was right. If you looked at the last few years of my life, it was hard to make a case for the brevity of my learning curve.
“Okay, so what do I look for in a weed?”
Grace nodded her approval. “The thing to realize is that calling something a weed is an arbitrary designation. It’s only a weed because we say it is.” She looked me straight in the eye again to emphasize her point. “You know, we call something a weed because it’s hardy, tenacious, and outgrows other kinds of plants.” She paused for a moment. “Not much of a reward for thriving where others can’t, huh?”
Were my conversations with Grace always going to have this many levels? Between that and the hot sun, my head swam.
“So that’s why the only way to tell them apart is to have someone show you the difference?”
“Yes. But you also have to remember that what makes a weed is only a matter of opinion.”
“Point taken, Grace.”
Because of course that’s how I’d been feeling since the separation. Like a hothouse flower that had suddenly been declared a nuisance. I bent over next to Grace again and wrapped my gloved fingers around several long, green stalks. “Weed or plant?”
Grace looked over. “Weed. Definitely.”
“All right, then.” I yanked it up with a newfound ruth-lessness. “Just keep an eye on me so I don’t kill the real thing.”
“I plan to.” Grace smiled again, and we spent the next hour pulling up the unwanted plants in companionable silence.