The Hosta
Carolyn Wilson-Scott
Dawn’s father is coming to visit. Not that he told her; Dawn heard from her brother. Men in their family didn’t make phone calls, but there are always exceptions, and since Dawn’s mother died, Dawn hasn’t done much calling of her own.
He’s coming to visit, and she has thirty-five hosta shriveling in their plastic nursery pots on the front walk. When the landscaper suggested them for the stretch of shade between their house and the neighbor’s, she’d asked him to bring something else. But here they are, which probably means he’d already had them, maybe rejected from another job, at the time she’d told him no. She could start email negotiations, calling to bug his secretary when he failed to answer; but he hadn’t relented on the overcharge for the maple tree until Seth had gotten involved, so Dawn starts moving the plants out of the sun. They’ll die if she doesn’t. Twenty minutes for that and a quick rinse-off and the drive to her first-ever psychologist appointment. She got the name from a friend who’s been with one professional or another from the age of nine and talks about her feelings like passing weather, things capable of consequence but fit for everyday conversation.
The office is in one of the converted Victorians across town that now house restaurants and boutiques selling upscale outdoor wear. Dawn copies down insurance numbers for the intake form, though the therapist’s website said she doesn’t take insurance. She signs to acknowledge that there’s a legal requirement to report instances of suspected child abuse.
What did she think therapy would be? She knows Freud: childhood trauma, repression, reenacting, patterns. So she shouldn’t have been surprised when the therapist asks if she’s close to her family. Close. Seth speaks to his mother every few days, but she does most of the talking, except during the calls when he’s roused enough to tell her she’s wrong about something or other. Dawn doesn’t fight with her parents — or didn’t, in the case of her mom. She calls to make Thanksgiving plans or to let Alessi talk. The therapist wants to pick up there to begin their next session; Dawn says great and pulls out her phone. What she doesn’t calendar is her cancellation call, though she notes that she’ll need to make it before the 48-hour, no-refund window, at a time after five when the sound-machined room will be deserted.
Alessi is astride a push car on the playground when Dawn arrives at the preschool. She calls for help when she sees Dawn, the plastic tires binding with pea gravel trekked over from under the swings. Sweeping the path would be a good job for the college helper, but he’s looking at his phone. Dawn should say hello — an involved parent is a protected one — but he’s asked her to call him Druid, and she just can’t.
The other children leave, responding readily after their five-minute warnings, skipping off to their cars where they won’t arch their backs and scream when it’s time to be strapped into their car seats. Dawn watches the time. If Alessi goes too long without lunch, she’ll melt down; on the other hand, there are seven more hours until bedtime and Alessi is content.
Alessi stops in the middle of the path, looking guilty.
“Do you have to go potty?”
It’s a godsend, the classroom halfway to the car. In the miniaturized bathroom, Alessi bends over to tug down her shorts and lets them fall onto the concrete floor.
“Don’t you want to shut the door?”
Alessi shakes her head. “Miss Sharon says we can’t.”
“Miss Sharon says, or John?” John is Druid.
Alessi concentrates. The rims of her eyes pink.
“Does John ever help in the bathroom?”
“All done,” Alessi announces. She has to stand to reach the toilet paper, and she takes her time removing a single square from the roll. “Not too much,” she chants.
Dawn grabs a more sufficient wad, but Alessi has already hitched up her bottoms and is clambering onto the stool in front of the sink, working the soap dispenser, which lights up when pressed correctly, red and then green flashing against Alessi’s face in the mirror. Dawn lays the extra paper back over the roll.
After macaroni and cheese, Dawn lays down with Alessi to try for a nap. Alessi sleeps in a toddler bed, and Dawn has measured its dimensions: twenty inches across and sixty long. She guards the outside edge, her feet dangling off the end. “How many minutes?” Alessi asks.
Dawn tells her five, the same as every other day. She begins to count aloud; if she reaches three hundred before Alessi has fallen asleep, then Alessi is allowed to stay up. Dawn’s more patient friends have instituted “quiet time” with their three-year-olds, but Dawn would rather grit her teeth through the extra rounds of dress-up than to walk Alessi back to her room time after time until the designated twenty minutes are up.
Dawn immobilizes herself, channeling her inner hypnotist. Today it works: Alessi is breathing deeper at 270. Dawn gives it another fifty for safety’s sake, then eases up, holding her breath as she gathers laundry, freezing when she hits the creaky step on the way to the basement. But Alessi’s bedroom stays silent. A nap means Alessi won’t be asleep for the night until ten, so Dawn needs to put this time to good use. She starts the washer and sits down to her computer. Her edits on the college clips are due in two days, and so far she only has seven seconds, the camera panning from sunlit stone and green lawns to a set of multiethnic students over open books, looking studious but also fun-loving. She scrolls to the classroom shots. She’s envisioning spicing these up by cutting between subjects — human biology for the doctors-to-be, welding in the engineering shop for the hands-on kids, Psych 101 for the undecideds.
Alessi wakes up crying. It’s been fifteen minutes. She won’t go back to sleep, and she doesn’t stop crying through the snack she pushes off the table or the Play-Dough time Dawn suggests. “Look,” Dawn says, sawing yellow-and-blue snakes into discs, “cookies!” Three has been a hard year. Around other moms, she jokes that the hormones start early, but when she’s alone with Alessi, another thousand rounds of three-hundred to go, she smiles at her child through tears. After an hour of the crying, Dawn turns on the TV.
Alessi quiets at the sight of dancing puppets, and Dawn sinks into the couch. But not for too long — there’s her deadline. She says she’ll be right back, hiding the laptop behind her back when she reenters, waiting until Alessi is reabsorbed into a segment on the letter R. But Alessi hears the click of the keyboard; she pushes the laptop shut.
“No, Alessi,” Dawn says. “Momma needs to work.”
Alessi won’t move her hands. What’s Dawn supposed to do, wrest the computer away from her daughter, the two of them fighting like sisters? At least Dawn’s dad isn’t there yet. He doesn’t like kids getting their way.
The show’s over, timed to the AAP’s recommended half-hour. Dawn punches the remote. She wishes the people who made the rules would also publish their personal schedules for entertaining three-year-olds wholesomely for fourteen hours a day — minute-by-minute, not just platitudes about reading aloud and snuggling. Because right now Alessi wants the TV back on. She kicks her legs until one of them bangs against the coffee table, then she howls in pain. It’s real, a thud of impact, but there’s satisfaction in Alessi’s cry, too, along with the accusation.
Dawn is supposed to identify the emotion, validate the anger. She manages not to say Alessi should have been more careful. She tries a hug. Alessi pushes her away.
“Okay, Ally-O,” she says, voice bright, “come on and help me with the dryer. You can do the lint.”
Alessi still needs her hand held when she goes down the stairs. She doesn’t want her hand held. She twists it in Dawn’s grip, pulling away, and when Dawn squeezes tighter, it’s maybe a little tighter than necessary.
In the basement, Alessi lets the lint trap fall to the floor.
“You like this.” Dawn swirls up a corner of the fuzz, white from the load of towels she’d started the day before. Alessi shakes her head. Dawn does it herself. The nap was short, so early bedtime. Six o’clock dinner, six-thirty bath, lights out by half-past seven. Three years down, fifteen to go. Dawn will still be in her forties. She thinks of her contact at the agency, a PR manager who made a documentary before settling for a steadier paycheck. He’d been rather buttoned-up when she’d started freelancing, Oxford shirts and combed hair, but he’d changed his look around the time she had Alessi, for a style Dawn thinks of as Californian, shirt open at the neck, jeans neither too loose or too tight. They would video-conference again after she submitted her current project; if she did well enough, maybe the company would fly her in for some work. Filming wouldn’t wrap up until late, but he’d want to review the footage, and they’d both need to eat.
“Alessi!” Dawn yelps.
She’s kneeling at their front-loader, and Alessi has a handful of her hair. Alessi isn’t crying anymore, she’s watching Dawn. Dawn tries prying her fingers loose. “Stop, Alessi. Let go.” Now Dawn is crying. It hurts, and she’s mad. “Let go,” she says, but Alessi doesn’t listen. She pulls harder.
There’s no chance Seth won’t notice the $120 Dawn withdrew to pay the therapist. She tries building up credit against such expenditures, keeping quiet when the new TV with its sixty-five-inch monitor showed up, despite the fact that there was nothing wrong with their old one. She and Seth had banked separately before they’d gotten married, paying rent out of a joint-checking account, but with Dawn earning so little these days, it didn’t make sense — what could she buy at $300 a job?
She’s still not sure what she’ll say, and then Seth is home.
She goes to greet him. “Hi, hon.”
“It’s the numbers that are all wrong,” he says, kicking off his shoes. The wireless earphones are new.
Dinner occurs without a mention of the money. Alessi is already asleep, which means Dawn had time to make an adult meal, risotto and a salad. Accompanied by the wine left over from flavoring the rice; Dawn often chooses what to cook based on whether it requires wine or not.
When she turns out the bedside light, Seth puts a hand on her hip. They started having sex again six weeks after Alessi’s birth. One woman she knows made her husband wait an entire year; Dawn would never do that. She’s talked to her gynecologist about alternate birth control methods because she read the Pill could affect a woman’s libido, but her gynecologist said that was the new baby talking. Give it time, she said.
When it’s her turn to come, she sets her mind to it. She needs some kind of scenario, a little movie in her brain to get her going. Nothing too creative — a man walking in on a woman pleasuring herself. A friend of a friend, naked and facing Dawn, the man at her back incidental. An older man at her mercy; you want me, she says, so pull it out.
When Seth comes, he puts a hand on her cheek and says he loves her.
Her dad lands at eleven the next morning. His timing means Dawn has to keep Alessi home from half-day preschool, but she doesn’t ask if he wouldn’t mind taking a taxi. The hosta have wilted a little despite the shade, and since Dawn can’t stand the waste, she goes out to water them.
It takes forty-five minutes to coax Alessi outside, Dawn’s father-welcoming shirt sweated through. But Alessi perks up once she’s out, darting through the hose’s spray and pushing her fingers into the resulting mud, and she doesn’t balk when it’s time to go. Dawn backs out of the driveway feeling victorious. Yes, Alessi’s T-shirt is plastered to her, and yes, she’s eating a rather squashed banana Dawn found in the glove box, but they’ve avoided the fight that would have ensued had Dawn insisted on going inside to change. Isn’t this how people tell you to survive the first years? Sleep when the baby sleeps, let them be your guide — they’ll teach you what you need, if only you’ll listen.
At the airport, Dawn opens her arms for the requisite hug. Her dad keeps as much distance as possible between them, so that only the area around their collarbones touches. All Dawn can think about are her boobs. There are two ways men conduct the greeting hug, and this one, meant to be chivalrous, creeps Dawn out just as much as a man looming behind her, the arms of her coat splayed out.
For something to say in the car, Dawn asks if he’s hungry. They pull off at the first exit, where she locates the classiest façade available. Inside, though, the menus are plastic, Alessi’s crusted with old ketchup. She wasn’t going to find a place that played Verdi, but she hasn’t listened to the top 40 since Alessi, her car stereo now permanently tuned to NPR or the collected CDs of Francis the badger. She isn’t prepared for I’ll be your sucrose-crusted daddy / you little tender paddy.
She waves a quarter for the table-side jukebox. “You want to do it?” she asks Alessi, gesturing to the slot while flipping through the selections with her other hand, looking for something instrumental or at least PG. “The music’s a little much in here.”
Her dad shrugs behind his menu.
Alessi’s unable to align the quarter, but she lets Dawn guide her hand into position. “Now you push the buttons,” Dawn tells her. Alessi mashes them joyously.
The falsetto doesn’t stop. Melt in my mouth / run down my chin / make me, make me, make me grin. Alessi tips her head back. “Is it my song?” Faint creases mark her neck, waning vestiges of babyhood. Back then, they’d collected dirt and sweat and dripped milk, emulsifying it into a dark paste. Both Dawn and Alessi had hated prising the skin apart to wash.
“Is that my song?”
To distract her, Dawn squints at the selector. “Let’s see what you picked. Hmm. Do you think it was ‘Achy Breaky Heart’? ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’?”
Above them, the speakers pop.
“Here it comes,” Dawn says, making wide eyes.
Her dad closes his at the opening notes, but it’s nothing Dawn recognizes. Until the chorus, which, amazingly, is a direct translation of her dad’s favorite lieder. “You picked a good one, Alessi.” He opens his eyes and starts to sing, in the German, not loud enough for the neighboring booth to hear, but Dawn has no greater wish right then than for him to stop. “Come on,” he says, “you remember it.”
She tilts her head. “Mmm.”
When they get back to the house, her dad sucks his teeth at the sight of the hosta.
“You’ve got to get these into the ground,” he says, but he’s not happy with the state of the soil, too clay-packed. “Hosta need drainage. Think of ours, under the big oak.” He knew she didn’t have much time, looking after Alessi, but the garden should have been amended before she put any of the landscaping in. Dawn goes to get him a shovel, hoping Seth won’t mention they paid someone to do the work.
She takes Alessi in for a nap and they both fall asleep. When Dawn wakes, Alessi is stripped down to her underwear. Dawn’s heart pounds, but she keeps her voice neutral. “How long have you been up, honey?”
Then she sees the marker, streaked up and down Alessi’s legs. The door to the bedroom is still closed. It’s loud, too, a pocket-type on metal rollers, which is why Dawn leaves it open when they’re alone.
She takes the marker away from Alessi, who begins to cry. “You said I could.”
It’s true that there are late napless afternoons when “painting fingernails” turns into more of a whole-arm job. Alessi’s arms or Dawn’s — it’s torpor-inducing, a little like a massage, with Alessi chatting and the marker prodding. Today she scrubs Alessi the best she can, reaching for one of the dresses her mother saved from Dawn’s own childhood, wrangling Alessi into tights though the day is too hot.
She’s making dinner when her dad comes in. He pretends to steal Alessi’s nose and goes to shower, the pipes singing his song, which Alessi is also humming — what three-year-old picks up a lieder the first time through? Dawn switches on kids’ radio.
“You know,” her dad says, smelling of her shampoo, “I’m happy to watch Alessi tonight. You and Seth could go out.”
Dawn bends over the cutting board. “That’s okay. Seth works pretty late.”
When Seth gets home, he shakes her dad’s hand and pecks Dawn on the cheek. “Is that actual chicken?” he says, leaning over the stove. Dawn gave up meat a year earlier, the rest of the family following along, at least at home, where she did the cooking. But vegetarianism is still new-fangled where she comes from, suspect, with its subversion of the animal kingdom’s natural order, so she’d picked up a week’s worth of plastic-wrapped meat trays at the grocery store.
“We can put it in the fridge right now and have it tomorrow,” her dad says. “I offered to babysit,” he tells Seth.
“And then what would you eat?” Dawn gets out the plates, ignoring Seth’s look.
“I’m fine with peanut butter and jelly.” Her dad nudges Alessi, who is filling a loaf pan with spices, half the bottle of cinnamon, a vigorous dash of ground sage. “How about you?”
“I don’t like peanut butter.”
“What kid doesn’t like peanut butter?”
“It’s true. She’ll only eat it on celery.”
“Then she can have celery and peanut butter.”
Dawn has to turn her back to them all. “It’s nice of you, Dad. Another time.”
Behind her, Seth opens the refrigerator for a beer. He thinks Dawn will feel more sexual if the two of them had more dates. Dawn braces herself, knowing he’s forgotten her scouring the house of anything her dad wouldn’t like: the beer is currently at the back of their closet, safer there than in the garage or the furnace room, and providing the possibility of cracking open a warm one after they close their door for the night.
She brushes her teeth instead. Seth’s not in a comradely mood. “We could still go,” he says. “Just for a quick drink. Alessi won’t even know.”
Dawn’s mouth is thick with foam. She spits. “Don’t you remember the last time we tried that?”
“Your dad could call us. If we went to Alonso’s, we’d be home in two minutes.”
“I don’t want to, Seth.”
He turns his phone back on. He thinks she doesn’t care about what he wants, that she’s too caught up in being a mother, that he’s not enough to pull her from the sickening weight of sustaining Alessi’s little life. But that’s not it. She wants to explain. She’s going to try, even though she already feels his skepticism. She knows she’s bad at talking to him like this. They’re good at joking — he’s the quick wit, but sometimes she gets to the pun ahead of him, and that’s a little bit of magic. But she’s never convinced they understand each other when it’s something hard. Which isn’t to say they don’t fight. They do, and it’s so awful she wants to die, but there’s a breakthrough eventually. No, it’s these conversations — when she wants to show him something about her, something private — that humiliate her.
“This song my dad used to play came on at lunch today — well, a version of it. It’s Schubert, so I don’t know what it was doing on a jukebox, and Alessi picked it completely at random, which made it so. . . .” Uncanny, but she doesn’t want to sound dramatic. “Crazy. I used to have to sing it when he had friends over. It’d be me on his lap, harmonizing about caresses.”
“Maybe he was trying to be nice. You know, involve you in his interests.”
She tries again. “It’s like those daddy-daughter dances. Don’t you think that’s weird, the dad pretending to be the little girl’s date?”
“Jesus, Dawn, at least they’re trying.”
Dawn and her dad plant the hosta the next morning while Alessi is at school. He was right: the ground gives easily with its new mixture of potting soil and peat moss, and yet she still finds glass. The existing soil is littered with shards. Dawn can’t sow a seed without turning up a broken bit of bottle, and she’s put out vegetables enough times to develop theories. A giant party where every Bud got pitched into the yard; the biggest greenhouse for miles, taken down in the sort demolition no current building code would permit; the pet project of an eccentric archeologist. She finds green glass and brown, pieces too thin to have come from bottles, glass that strikes her as too fragile even for windows.
It’s here even in this layer, so much of it fresh from the bag, sterilized against microorganisms, standardized for proper absorption, whole mines set up for the manufacture of those tiny white pellets, precision-blasted out of the ground and shipped cross-country for processing. So much time and money. So much effort, and yet here’s another piece, this one the size of her palm. Even if you covered the whole yard, trucked in enough virgin soil to bring up the level two feet, there’d still be erosion, there’d still be upheave.
They finish with an hour before pick-up. Dawn goes in for iced tea; her dad carries chairs around from the outdoor table. The garden is on the side of the house, separated from the backyard by a six-foot gate and from the street by its elevation, high enough above the sidewalk so that all that’s visible beyond the neighbor’s overhanging catalpa are the tops of passing heads.
Her dad stretches out his legs. “They might stay green through the winter here.”
“Maybe. It’s amazing how many nice days we get.”
“Uh-huh.”
She’s not doing so badly.
He shakes his ice. “You didn’t need to buy them, though. I’d have divided ours if I’d known you wanted some.”
She thinks he’s looking at her. “More tea?” she says, reaching for his glass.
Inside, she takes as much time as she dares, keeping an eye on him through the sheer kitchen curtains. They’re new, purchased with Dawn’s first paycheck. Her mom had called their house a fishbowl when they’d bought it; anyone could see anything, walking by at night. And people did walk by, bars on the neighboring blocks, their voices leaking in on the air. I’ll make the drapes, her mom had promised.
Hosta outside the windows, then, year-round, with a panel of gauze in between. Objectively speaking, there’s nothing wrong with them. They’re deep green and proportional, the darlings of garden magazines, with the formal, regular-edged leaves that Dawn actually prefers.
Against them, enjoying the sun, her dad could pass for a much younger man. His hair is still dark, his shoulders wide.
Another minute. So far Alessi takes after Seth’s side of the family, a near replica of the pictures they have of his mom as a girl. But sometimes she sees her own brother in Alessi, how he looked as a baby, though how Dawn remembers this is hard to say — she was Alessi’s age when he was born. It’s hard to parse, coming as it does by happenstance, only at the edges of her vision. Genetics, she thinks, though what does she remember of high school biology? That twisted, zippered model, A-C-T-G, a mystery, to Dawn at least, as her report cards from the time attest. And then, all at once, it isn’t. It’s like waking up and getting it, a visitation. Thanks to Alessi; if not for her, it would have stayed buried inside, unguessed at.
