The Summer Garden

His eyes, once like caramel, were now hard copper, nothing liquid or flowing in them. He turned his polite face to her, and she turned her polite face back. He wanted quiet, she was quiet. He wanted funny, she tried funny. He wanted food, she gave him plenty. He wanted to go for a walk, she was ready. He wanted newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, she brought them all. He wanted to sit mutely in his chair; she sat mutely on the ground by his side. Anything he wanted, she was ready at any moment to give him.

Now, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, Tatiana stood barefoot in front of the mirror in a yellow, slightly sheer muslin dress, a peasant-girl dress, appraising, assessing, obsessing.

She stood with her hair down. Her face was scrubbed, her teeth were clean and white. The summer freckles on her nose and cheeks were the color of malt sugar, her green eyes sparkled. She rubbed cocoa butter into her hands to make them softer in case he wanted to take her hand as they walked down to Main Street after dinner. She rubbed a bit of musk oil behind her ears, in case he bent to her. She put some gloss on her sulky lips and pressed them together to make them softer, pinker. She stood, looked, thought. Smiled a nice fake smile to make the lips less sulky, and sighed. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Her hands went inside her dress and cupped her breasts. Her nipples hardened. Ever since Anthony was born, her body had changed. That, and the American food—all those nutrients. The post-nursing, American-fed breasts hadn’t lost their weightiness, their full-bodied heartiness. The few bras Tatiana owned were all too loose around and made her jiggle. Instead of a bra, Tatiana sometimes wore tight white vests, tight enough to restrain her breasts, which tended to sway when she walked, attracting the eyes of men. Not her husband, necessarily, but other men, like the milk boy.

She slowly lifted up her dress to see her slim rounded hips in the mirror, her smooth belly. She was slight, but everything on her seemed to have been curved by Anthony’s birth—as if she stopped being a girl at the point of his entry into the world.

But it was the girl-child with breasts that the soldier man with the rifle on his back had once crossed the street for.

She pulled down her sheer panties to see her patch of blonde hair. She touched herself, trying to imagine what he might have felt once when touching her. Seeing something in the mirror, she looked closer, then bent her head to look at her legs. On the insides of her thighs were small fresh bruises—thumbprints from his hands.

Seeing them gave Tatiana a liquid throb in her loins, and she straightened out, adjusted herself and, with a flushed face, started brushing out her hair, debating what to do with it. Alexander had never seen her hair this length before, down to the small of her back. She thought he would like it, but distressingly he seemed indifferent to it. She knew the color and texture of the hair weren’t quite normal. She had colored it black eight months ago, before she went to Europe, then painstakingly leached the black out of it last month in Hamburg, and now the hair was dry and limp. It wasn’t silk anymore. Is that why he wasn’t touching it? She didn’t know what to do about it.

She put it into its usual braid, leaving the fronts out and the tuft long in the back, threading the braid with a yellow satin ribbon, in case he touched the hair. Then she called for Anthony, who was outside playing with dirt, and cleaned him, making sure his shorts and shirt weren’t stained, pulling up his socks. “Why do you play with dirt, Anthony, right before we go see Daddy? You know you have to be tidy for him.” Alexander liked order in his wife and son when they came to meet him at the docks. She knew he liked how neat they looked, how put-together, how summery. The flowers in Stonington were breathtaking, the tall shimmering lupines purple and blue; she and Anthony had picked some earlier and now Tatiana put some in her hair, the purple, like lilac, to contrast with the hair, like gold, because once he had liked that, too.

She studied her fingernails to make sure there was nothing underneath them. They both hated dirty fingernails. Now that Tatiana stopped working—and Alexander was with her—she kept her nails a little longer, because, though he never said anything, he wordlessly responded to the light back and forth of her nails on him. Today she had a few minutes and painted them red.

He said nothing that day about the nails. (Or the lilac lupines, the satin in the hair, the lips, the hips, the dress, the breasts, the sheer white panties.) The next day he said, “They sell such dazzling nail polish at the Stonington store?”

“I don’t know. I brought this one with me.”

He was quiet so long, she thought he hadn’t heard her. And then: “Well, that must’ve been nice for all the invalids at NYU.”

Ah, some participation. Not great—but a start. What to say to that, though? Oh, it wasn’t for the invalids. She knew it was a trap, a code for, since nurses aren’t allowed to wear nail polish, what’d you have nail polish for, Tania?

Later that evening at the kitchen table, she took the polish off with acetone. When he saw it was gone, he said, “Hmm. So other invalids rate the red nails but not me?”

She lifted her eyes at him standing over her. “Are you joking?” she said, the tips of her fingers beginning to tremble.

“Of course,” he said, without a glimmer of a smile.

Tatiana threw away her red New York nail polish, her flirty post-war ruched and pleated New York dresses, her high-heeled New York greenbelt brilliant Ferragamo shoes. Something happened to him when he saw her in New York things. What’s the matter, she would ask, and he would reply that nothing was the matter, and that would be all he’d reply. So she threw them all out and bought herself a yellow muslin dress, a floral chintz dress, a white cotton sheath, a blue wrap dress—from Maine. Alexander still said nothing, but was less quiet. Now he talked to her of other things, like Ho Chi Minh and his band of warriors.

She tried, tried to be funny with him like before. “Hey, do you want to hear a joke?”

“Sure, tell me a joke.” They were walking up a Stonington hill behind a huffing Anthony.

“A man prayed for years to go to paradise. Once, going up a narrow path in the mountains he stumbled and fell into the precipice. By a miracle he grasped some sickly bush and started crying: ‘Anybody here? Please, help! Anybody here?’

“After some minutes of silence the voice answered: ‘I am here.’

“‘Who are you?’

“‘I am God.’

“‘If you are God, then do something!’

“‘Look, you asked me for so long to be brought to paradise. Just unclench your hands—and immediately you will find yourself in paradise.’

“After a small silence the man cried: ‘Anybody ELSE here? Please—help!’”

To say that Alexander didn’t laugh at that joke would have been to understate matters.

Tatiana’s hands trembled whenever she thought of him. She trembled all day long. She walked through Stonington as if she were sleepwalking, stiff, unnatural. She bent to her son, she straightened up, she adjusted her dress, she fixed her hair. The churning inside her stomach did not abate.

Tatiana tried to be bolder with him, less afraid of him.

He wouldn’t kiss her in front of Jimmy, or the other fishermen, or anybody. Sometimes in the evenings, as they walked down Main Street and looked inside the shops, he would buy her some chocolate, and she would turn up her face to thank him, and he would kiss her on the forehead. The forehead!

One evening Tatiana got tired of it and, jumping up on the bench, flung her arms around him. “Enough with the head,” she said, and kissed him full on his lips.

His one hand on the cigarette, the other on Anthony’s ice cream, he couldn’t do more than press against her. “Get down,” he said quietly, kissing her back without ardor. “What’s gotten into you?”

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you man o’ war!

Alone with Anthony, in their daily wanderings up and down the hills of Stonington, Tatiana made friends with the women who ran the stores and the boys who brought the milk. She befriended a farm woman in her thirties up on Eastern Road, whose husband, a naval officer, was still in Japan. Every day Nellie cleaned the house, weeded the front garden and waited for him on the bench outside, which is how Tatiana met her, just skipping by with her son. After talking to her for two minutes, Tatiana felt so sad for the woman, viscerally remembering grieving for Alexander, that she asked Nellie if she needed help with the farm. Nellie had an acre of potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers. Tatiana knew something about these things.

Nellie gladly agreed, saying she could pay Tatiana two dollars a day from her husband’s army check. “It’s all I can afford,” she said. “When my husband comes back I’ll be able to pay you more.”

But the war ended a year ago, and there was still no news of him. Tatiana said not to worry.

Over coffee, Nellie opened up a little. “What if he comes back and I won’t know how to talk to him? We were married such a short time before he went to fight. What if we find out we’re complete strangers?”

Tatiana shook her lowered head. She knew something about these things, too.

“So when did your husband come back?” Nellie asked with envy.

“A month ago.”

“So lucky.”

Anthony said, “Dad didn’t come back. Dad was never coming back. Mama left me to go find him.”

Nellie stared dully at Anthony.

“Anthony, go play outside for a minute. Let Nellie and me finish up.” Tatiana ruffled Anthony’s hair and ushered him outside. “Kids these days. You teach them to speak and look what they do. I don’t even know what he’s talking about.”

That evening Anthony told Alexander that Mama got a job. Alexander asked Anthony questions, and Anthony, happy to be asked, told his father about Nellie and her potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers, and her husband who wasn’t there, and how Nellie ought to go and find him, “just like Mama went and found you.”

Alexander stopped asking questions. All he said after dinner was, “I thought you said we were going to be all right on ten dollars a day.”

“It’s just for Anthony. For his candy, his ice cream.”

“No. I’ll work at night. If I help sell the lobsters, it’s another two dollars.”

“No!” Tatiana quickly lowered her voice. “You work plenty. You do plenty. No. Anthony and I play all day anyway.”