The Garden by Clare Beams

Author:Clare Beams [Beams, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

10

Pearl called and asked Joe, who said sure, he’d bring a trap, he’d tell her when. “Soon, though?” Margaret kept asking.

Irene understood—Margaret was twenty-nine weeks now but still looked only slightly bigger than when Irene had met her.

“I’ll tell you as soon as I know, as soon as he tells me.”

Back to waiting, then.

Not long after, the doctors surprised the women with an announcement. A day trip. The lakeshore—now that it was warm, almost June, almost summer. “For pleasure!” Dr. Bishop said. Really for boosting their morale, Irene and everyone else knew. But in spite of themselves they were boosted, they soared on summery swells of excitement: they would be leaving the house for a whole day.

They woke early on the morning of the trip to get ready. They put on dresses with wispier fabric than usual, in lighter colors—Irene’s was her lightest blue—and pinned back their hair, and carried layers for the lake breeze, in case it was stiff. They pretended as they went down the stairs that they would meet not the doctors and the other members of their coven but their husbands. They could be going on holiday with their husbands, whose arms they could hold to walk, with whom they could talk about next summer, and the way next summer they’d have their babies with them, by then solid and in the world enough to grab up fistfuls of lake dirt, could they imagine? They could—had—and at the same time couldn’t at all.

Out on the front steps, Irene, Pearl, and Margaret hung back from the others, not enough so any of them would notice. The sun felt hot on the top of Irene’s head already on the steps’ baking white expanse. A thick warmth crept into the rooms of the house these days, even with the curtains drawn—the breezes from the open windows behind them got caught in the fabric, setting the thick, heavy damask swaying like the skirts of waltzing women, while inside the real women, expanding, bulging, sweated in humid low light. At night Irene’s sheets went damp as soon as they touched the skin of her arms and legs. She reached up now to pat her baking hair. This summer would just keep getting hotter as she kept growing. The changing of seasons made her feel the quantity of outside-world time she was missing, sealed away in this place as if under glass.

“It’s all right for us to go and leave the garden, you think?” said Margaret.

“Oh, I’m sure,” murmured Pearl.

“I don’t know,” said Irene.

At the bottom of the front stairs a line of five cars waited like a small stationary parade. The drivers were both of the doctors, Mrs. Conrad, Phillips, and another man Irene had seen working the grounds in front.

“It’s like we’re being taken on a summer-camp outing,” Irene said.

“You went to summer camp too?” said Margaret. “Wasn’t it magical?”

Irene grimaced at her. Margaret looked awful, haunted, but her face creased with joy at the memory of summer camp, which Irene, who’d gone only once, at about twelve, had found intolerable.

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