20 of 99

by Kathleen Small

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A Memoir of Ferns and Acceptance

All my life I have coveted the kind of magic that gardeners wield. Every time I disposed of another sun-charred basil plant, another withered tomato stalk, another empty pot of dirt that never yielded a single shoot, the failure burned me, and I wished I could nurture things that couldn't be cooed to or scratched under the chin with my gangrenous thumb.

Luckily, I live with my boyfriend in a sunny corner apartment in a renovated women's shelter in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and in the year that we've lived there, Ryan and I have opened our home to two kittens dubbed Nero and Augustus, innumerable books, magazines, knick-knacks, doodads, chochkies, dust bunnies, and the occasional panic-stricken mouse, but not a single plant. In my house, plants meet the same fate as does a mouse in my kittens' claws. I once drowned a water lily.

Ryan's mother is a passionate gardener with a taste for the meticulous chaos of English gardens. She's the kind of woman who bakes things from scratch and laughs at your jokes when no one else will, and, in an effort to impress her, during my first visit to Washington I followed her into her garden to help her pot some ferns on a gray early morning. The kitchen window had been cranked open, and I could smell the fresh coffee still drizzling into the carafe. The men of the house lay sprawled and snoring; three gray-bearded cats curled comatose on the sofa. The stage was set for some profound bonding. Then it all went hideously wrong.

As I pulled on my gloves and said, "Beautiful morning, isn't it? Shall I start with this one?" Kristy whirled around and jumped.
"Oh!" she cried, "You startled me, I-" her eyes landed on the gardening gloves I'd borrowed from the garage. Her face paled. She gulped. "You wanted to help me?"

"If that's alright," I said, beginning to sense the first inkling of awkwardness. I convinced myself that it was not dread I saw widening her eyes. After all, this was a woman whose presence transformed Saddam into Oprah, tempests into warm tropical breezes. This was a woman who milled her own flour. Plus, it wasn't as though she could sense my dark history as the well-meaning Mengele of the plant world. She couldn't just say "no, it's not alright."

"Well, no. It's not alright."

"Oh... okay," I said, my body suddenly unaware of how to position itself. "I'll just walk around the place a little and, you know, see if there's any garbage to pick up. Or dead birds to bury. If you want anything-" The unfinished sentence quivered in the air between us like an unmet handshake.

Silently, she knelt in the moss and earth and began to push leaves and sticks from the base of a small fern. I backed away, pulled off the unsullied gloves, went into the house, climbed into bed with Ryan, and replayed the entire failure over and over.

Parents had always liked me. After all, I wasn't a drug addict or deadbeat. I dressed conservatively but stylishly, I told jokes bawdy enough to endear myself to Ryan's father and brother, and I was helpful enough in the kitchen to relieve Kristy of some of the tedious dicing and chopping. I liked her. I thought she felt the same.

Could it be that she heard me tell Ryan I didn't like her living room rug? It was too dark and made the room look smaller, but I'd put the same one in my living room if it hurt her feelings that much.

Deep down I knew it wasn't the rug. I believed that she sensed her shrubbery's panic using her keen perception of the moods and expressions of plants, a language to which I am even less attuned than Helen Keller would be in a live taping of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Yes, Kristy saw their quivering leaves, heard their shrill screams of panic as soon as I pulled on my gloves. I imagined her soothing the trembling young fern at her knees, murmuring, "Okay my sweet fern, it's okay, little man. I'll get rid of her. You're safe, yes you are. Shh shh."

Kristy and I avoided each other's skittish glances for the rest of the day. I wanted to go home to my happy apartment in a stony gasoline-choked plant-hating city. I smiled fondly at the thought and held on to the sweet promise of New York as I slept that night.

The next morning I walked into the kitchen and saw Kristy standing at the window, gazing out at her ferns. I started to back out of the room, but her stance shifted. Not much, just a fraction of alert that said "someone else is here now." I was trapped.

"Morning," I said.
"Good morning," she replied. "It looks like it's going to be clear today."
"Oh?"
"Yes. It'll be warm and clear."
"Nice. Maybe Ryan and I will go for a walk."
"I think I'll make a pie crust."
"Fun."

This conversation gave "shooting the breeze" a whole new meaning: I wanted to shoot myself as the ferns quivered in the breeze. Any conversation, even a confrontation, was better than this elaborate avoidance, what Ryan's dad would call putting lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig, no matter how much you tart it up.

"Kristy, I'm sorry about yesterday," I began. She turned around. "I didn't mean to startle you, and I didn't mean to intrude on your private... fern potting. I know that potting ferns is really private, and I just didn't think that me potting ferns would be so horrible." She cocked her head. "Anyway, I'm sorry."

"Why?" she asked. Great. She was going to make me wallow in it.

"Well, for invading your space, for violating your tradition, for robbing you of your meditative time, for marring your day's peace-" She cut me off with a laugh.

"Oh, Katie! I meant why would you apologize for offering to help me with my gardening?" My mouth hung open, still in the shape of the word "peace."

"It was wonderful that you asked. I think the fact that you offered, even though you don't know very much about gardening, shows a lot of generosity." She sighed.
"Katie, I have to be honest with you. Ryan's told me all about your unique gift with plants." She smiled sympathetically. I felt my face redden. It was true; she'd heard the ferns screaming.

"I think it's funny and unexpected. In a million years, I never would have guessed that you seem to kill plants. You're so warm and giving with people and animals. But Ryan's told me about the tomato plants; how you salted their soil to make the fruit taste better." She chuckled. "And the incident with the weed whacker, when you tried to prune a grapevine. And-"

"the water lily?" I asked.

Kristy sprayed coffee all over the kitchen floor. She'd heard that one, too.

"The point is I love my garden. So you probably shouldn't help me with it. It would be like me rewriting a story you spent four years creating. It's better for everyone if I just read it, admire it, and respect you for having created it. You don't have to participate in my work. Just sit and enjoy this place while you have it. Soon you won't have anything really green to look at anymore."

I accepted the hard truth: I'll never coax moist green pea shoots from a planter; I'll never invite my earthy long-haired friends over to meditate beneath my clematis-covered veranda, and I will never, ever pot my boyfriend's mother's ferns. I cannot do it. What I can do is write ten rhyming couplets on the color green while squeezed in between a stroller and a banker on the downtown 4 train at 5:30 on Friday.

Just living in this city requires full-throttle focus. Everything I see, from my apartment, from my office window, from eye-level when I'm dashing down the sidewalk trying to seal the piping hot spit from the blistering coffee I just bought for my boss who will whine and pout if the plastic white lid isn't spotless when I discreetly place the steaming cup on the marble coaster her desk, everything in this city is hard. Cement, brick, asphalt, iron, brokers, beggars, surly cab fenders. For a girl who grew up in Colorado and a guy from rural Washington, living in this place is like a constant game of hide-and-seek: we're hiding in plain sight, holding our breath; we're thrilled and we're terrified.

It helps to remember that we don't have to excel at everything, that even the barking cabbies, polished traders and schmoozing producers would be banned from Kristy's garden. After all, she wouldn't realign their tires, disassemble their portfolios, or chuck their storyboards. She gardens. I don't. The ferns have stopped screaming.

Learn more about this author, Kathleen Small.

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