The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey

Author:Kitty Burns Florey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497693470
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Chapter Five

In the Mirror

Never (thought Rosie) had there been such a glorious May, a June so filled with delights: the climbing roses by the porch, the foxglove and daisies and Canterbury bells in the long border, the blaze of poppies against the white fence, the early lilies and the late tulips, and Ivan in her bed.

She had never had such a lover, never been so in love, never known anyone so miraculously beautiful. It was, she told him, as if her life had shifted from black and white into technicolor: “Like in The Wizard of Oz,” she said. “When Dorothy enters the Land of Oz.”

He laughed, and ran his hand down her bare arm to her wrist, and circled it. They were in bed: it was only there that she told him such things, in the half-dark. “And who am I?” he asked her. “The Wizard?”

“Oh, no—the Wizard was a sham. You’re the tornado, Ivan. You’re what makes things happen.”

He put his lips against her neck. “Let’s make something happen.”

“Oh Lord, Ivan, I do love you.” It was curiously thrilling to say it, to admit to him that she adored him. It had been years since she had loved anyone enough to be compelled to speak the words. The more she told him she loved him the more she loved him; the more she whispered it, when their bodies were joined, the happier the joining made her. “We’re flower and stalk,” she said, with him inside her, his chest against hers, his rough cheek on her face—feeling a bit foolish, carried away by the bliss of it, and yet believing it, feeling it true—that she couldn’t live without him; that, like a flower plucked, she would die if she were taken from him.

“My blossom,” he called her, and he would move his lips down her belly to what he called her rosebud, and find it with his tongue, making her tremble and cry out more words of love, more, until she had said them all, and was speechless.

He came to see her, after that first night, two or three times a week, and his presences and absences created in her a compressed cycle of preparation, bloom, decline, and renewal that was like the seasons: no wonder she was worn out and on edge; no wonder Peter called her “hyper”; and no wonder, either, that her book failed to progress.

Her garden, though, was the best she had ever produced. She spent her daytimes—the long, empty hours of sunshine when she knew Ivan was working and there was no chance of his showing up—toiling among her flowers. She tended the vegetables, too; and the snap peas climbed their screen in abundance, the six kinds of lettuce and the parsley and cress burst from the soil in their bright green rows, the hairy tomato stalks reached out to each other over the sides of their cages. She consulted her records—the vegetables had never done better. Everything was early, everything flourished, the weather was perfect, vegetables and flowers and fruits lifted themselves rapturously into the sun.

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