How to Start a Garden
It isn’t difficult to start a garden.
One morning you wake up early, because while the cat was trying to catch birds through the window she pulled the curtain so far to the side that the sunrise floods in and punches you in the face.
You think about how the bars of your fire escape slice the light into sections. And then you think about oranges, and then you think about breakfast, but not until after you picture the vines of the rosebushes you are going to grow twisted around those black bars, as small and strong as a child’s fingers. You’d forgotten how the morning light falls on the opposite side of the bedspread. You try not to think about it. Instead, you decide to start a garden.
The cat cries out. She’s sweeping various pieces of dust into the corner of the kitchen with one tiny, persistent paw. You temporarily forget about the garden while you feed her.
At work, your coworker asks you if you’d like to eat lunch with her. The two of you lean over Tupperware, matching red plastic lids placed upside down on a conference room table. You tell her that you are going to start a garden.
“That’s nice,” she says. There’s a question in her eyes that she’s not asking you. You look instead at the artichoke heart speared by the plastic fork in your hand and marvel at how pale it looks against the bed of spinach. You don’t like spinach. You decide not to grow it in your garden.
Close to the end of the day, you look up gardening stores near where you live. You are surprised at how many there are. You’re not sure how you never noticed them before, and think about how many people must have gardens for so many stores to stay open. You start to wonder how many others before you have had the same idea, but it makes you feel sad and unspecial so you stop.
The garden store has potted peace lilies with flowers that reach your knees. Orchid blooms hang from stems arched like broken necks. Their faces seem to follow you around the shop as you pick up different sizes and colors of terra-cotta creations and put them back down. You are alarmed at how little you know about gardening. You’ve heard that oleanders can be poisonous. There are rosebuds like tiny fists nestled among rings of leaves. That’s what you want in your garden, but when a pretty girl with a blonde ponytail wearing a green apron asks if you need help with anything, you point to a four-inch toy cactus and ask, “How much?” You end up buying that.
In the middle of the night, the cat knocks the cactus off of your bookshelf. There’s dirt all over your floor when you wake up. You step in it first thing. You decide the cactus can’t be saved and throw it away.
Your mother has sent you a text message in the middle of the night. It’s waiting for you when you check your email. She wants to know if you’re all right, if you’re eating enough. You look at the recycling bin that, lately, has been filling with glass bottles at a more rapid rate than usual. You open the window and shove the bin onto the fire escape, and it’s as though it never existed.
At work, your boss stops by your desk and asks if you need to go home for the day. You ask her why, and she tips her chin in the direction of your wastebasket which is now brimming with tissues. You tell her that actually you are feeling sick and maybe you should leave. She nods and when you pick up your things and go, everybody keeps their heads bowed as though they are waiting for an alarm to go off.
You spend the afternoon at the garden store looking at window boxes to fill your fire escape. You choose two that seem to be about the right size, but they are the wrong color. You decide to paint them.
When you get to the paint store, you realize that you probably should have thought it through first. You see a familiar face in the aisles and he grins, then glances at the space beside you and of course you can’t read his mind, but you can kind of tell what people are thinking by now. You don’t say hello. You avoid looking him in the eye while you buy a pint of paint and leave. You think he understands, which is convenient, because you don’t have the energy or focus to offer an explanation or an apology.
You bring home the window boxes and can of sky-blue paint. You realize you have no newspapers to spread over the floor, but you cannot wait one more day to start your garden. You paint them in the bathtub, promising yourself you’ll be the carefullest you’ve ever been. You spill the paint anyway. You leave the window boxes on the fire escape to dry.
When you wake up, the air is heavy and laced with tears. Last night’s rain has blurred the paint on the window boxes into clouds and left the wood swollen and aching around the nails that hold it together. No matter. Blue cat prints zig-zagging between the bathroom and your bedroom are drying on your floor and rugs and couch and curtains. You had no idea she’d had such a busy night. You throw a toy at her and it hits her in the eyeball, and then you feel sorry and ashamed.
Your chest is tight and the world seems suddenly very big, so big that you can’t catch your breath. Pulling the covers over your head makes it feel smaller. The cat thinks you are playing a game and digs for your fingers underneath the sheet. You try to hold her to your chest but she has her claws out while she pushes you away and you’d think she stabbed you, the way you start to wail.
***
The boxes begin to pile up outside your door. When you open it, eventually, you think there’s been a mistake until you rip the tape off the cardboard and remember ordering these bags of soil, packages of seeds, tiny shovels and gloves and more plastic things. You’re over starting a garden by now, so you’re irritated as you dump the dirt into the smudged window boxes and empty the seed packets. You should look up how to do this right, but honestly, you don’t see the point anymore. Instead, you kind of stir the soil around like you’re mixing batter and hope the seeds end up in more or less the right place where they can grow.
They don’t.
Your mom comes to visit. She makes a lot of food, murmurs into your ear how she’s sorry, but this has gone on long enough. She recommends you take a shower. When you roll onto your shoulder in bed and look out the window, a single wire-thin green stem is pushing through the topsoil in one of the window boxes. It shakes in the breeze, as though the energy inside of it is too great for it to hold. You remember how you wanted roses; how close you came to having them. Your mother is still talking. You cover your head with your pillow and fall asleep.
When you wake up, you don’t know how much time later, she has gone but a pigeon is on your fire escape, glaring out one side of its head at you. A torn root hangs from one side of its beak and a string of green from the other. Your mind goes blank with rage, and when it clears you see that you’ve thrown open the window and the cat has jumped through it. Her claws are out again, and she’s burying them in the wing of the bird that is trying to fly away, and they are both tumbling off the fire escape and falling to the sidewalk below.
The cat does not survive. One of the pigeon’s wings is twisted and will not lie flat against her side. When she tries to fly, she’s frantic. Her body flutters and trembles while the broken wing scrapes against the cement as though it has been glued on. You watch her and still feel nothing but your own loss, the cavity of your body as heavy as a garbage bag filled with sand. When she gives up, you climb down the fire escape and remove the stem from her mouth.
One week later, your boss calls and asks where you’ve been. You tell her that you’re trying to start a garden, but it’s been harder than you thought it would be. The right advice is difficult to find, and anything that does start to grow seems impossible to keep alive. You tell her that one day everything seems fine, and then overnight what you worked so hard at disappears and you cannot figure out how or why it happened to you.
She says she understands, that she wants you to have all the time you need, but she’s running a business, do you understand?
You do.
You hang up the phone. Even though she was yelling at you, you miss the sound of her voice when the apartment is quiet again.
You make a cup of coffee and get dressed. You brush your hair, reminding yourself that this is what you used to do before you started a garden, although you can’t remember that now.
You keep the broken-off root of the tiny plant clutched in the crease of your folded hand as you wait in the subway for your train to arrive and take you to work. The platform gets crowded and you are pushed in one direction, and then back in the other. Strangers call you names but you can barely hear them and hardly move.
A young man sitting on a cloth on the ground beside the benches makes colored paper into roses that he sells for fifty cents a piece. Stacks of them rest at his feet: red, blue, teal, purple, yellow, green. They look so real that you can’t look away. His fingers fly over the paper, manipulating it like clay.
A stranger shoves you with a laptop bag and the root falls from your hand onto the ground, and then onto the rails as the train advances. You do not see it again.
You approach the black-haired boy with the garden growing around his ankles. You cannot stop yourself. You know before you start to pick up the roses that you have no money. You have nothing to give him. You assemble a bouquet in your arms so large that you can hardly see over the top, so you almost miss it when the boy jumps to his feet and starts to run. He holds his bag full of change in one hand as the subway cop chases him, yelling.
The cop’s belt is weighted by what he carries, cased objects that swing back and forth, knocking against his legs and hips. The flower-seller hurdles over the arm of the turnstile and is gone.
Bodies rush by and shove you, but you are rooted and they cannot move you. The crush of the crowd dissolves and the train pulls away and you are left alone on the platform holding a hundred paper flowers.
