Page 55 of Meet Me in the Garden

“I’d offer those same freedoms to you, should any man catch your eye. I still don’t quite understand why you want to do this with me.”

I ache to tell him, but I won’t. What does it matter anyway? It’s over, that part of my life. Now it’s me and my children. And Felix, if he’ll have me.

“We could combine our incomes, get a small house,” I say. “My decisions would be my own.Yourdecisions would be your own. I don’t want another husband. Not in that same way. I already did it once and I don’t want to do it again. To be a wife—inthatway—again. When I think of it, when I imagine it, I feel like I’m suffocating.”

I finish my cigarette, stub it out on the stair. The group at the far side of the yard is gone now, slipped out the gate, and we’re alone. The moon hangs in the sky, half-lit, waxing. I take a deep breath, my chest full of hope.

“Odette,” he says, eyes glistening. “I’ve been so lonely.”

PART THREE1951–1959

EIGHTEEN

AT FIRST,what Felix and I notice is the absence of a house. The other places we toured were like Claire’s and Adele’s: neat front yard, path cutting straight to the door, clearly visible from the street. But here, all we see is a tall fence and the bitter bean tree out front, an old cactus in bloom by the locked gate.

“This is Willowbrook,” our real estate agent, Jim, tells us. “There’s still a lot of farming land here, even though it’s right in the middle of the city. A lot of horses, and a whole group of colored cowboys who ride them through the streets. The houses here tend to be a little older, and unlike Compton and Watts, it isn’t all flat. Occasionally, you’ll find a sloping lot, like this one.”

He consults his notes and undoes the combination lock. He lets himself in first, as he always does, shepherding us into the unknown, pointing out tripping hazards, showing us areas of concern or possibility. Felix follows Jim, I follow Felix. For several strides, the ground is level, and then there appears a shingled roof below. We take a flight of garden stairs down to where the land evens out again and the house sits. “It’s a small place,” Jim says. “That’s why I wasn’t going to show it to you. Two bedrooms, just about eight hundred square feet. But with some work,your yard would be the envy of the neighbors. There’s room behind the house, too, in case you’d be interested in expanding.”

We step inside. Find a layer of dust on the old wood floors. Yellowed curtains. A staleness in the air. It’s very small. But the windows are large, and the ceilings are higher than those of the newer houses, almost as high as the ceilings in the blue house. There’s no formal dining room, but the bathroom has a deep, pink-tiled tub. “The children would love baths in this old thing,” I say as we test the water pressure.

In the kitchen, Felix says, “We could put a patio in right outside this door. Eat dinner there every night.”

“With weather as good as ours,” Jim says, “it’d be a crime not to.”

Neither of us mentions the privacy, as though doing so would give too much away.

Imagine, owning a house half a mile from my sisters, so close we could walk home after parties, so tucked away that we could leave the curtains open at night with the lights on, knowing not a soul would be looking through the windows. Imagine, sitting on the front porch and having a conversation without the neighbors overhearing. To cast open the front door while the children play in the yard even if it’s messy inside, even if I haven’t yet brushed my hair.

I stop in the doorway and run my hand across the flaking gray paint of the front door. Out of nowhere and with tremendous force, the pink plaster of the living room back home appears to me, and my fingers itch with wanting.

As soon as it’s ours, we take the door off its hinges, sand it. I test shade after shade of pink until it’s right. Al and Bernard and Lionel build us a patio off the kitchen as a housewarming gift. We purchase four twin beds, arrange them in the rooms—Nathalie’s and Clément’s on opposite walls, Felix’s and mine next to each other, a small gap between them.

I find pleasure in homemaking. Once every month or two, my sisters and I go shopping for fabric. Claire and Adele have a knack for knowing what patterns and styles will be in vogue in a few months’ time, move through the store with quick decisiveness. But I learned about fabric from Hattie. I take my time, ask no opinions, run my hands over thebolts, climb the ladder to see what’s kept up high. I’m after something riskier, the feeling of pushing to the edge of things. My pink door, the sofa I reupholstered in a gold brocade velvet, the indigo and silver lampshade I found at a Beverly Hills yard sale and paired with a wooden base, carved to resemble a tower of rabbits. Papa’s paintings hang on the main living room wall. The house takes time to come together, but a year and a half into living here, while Felix is away on the train, Lionel comes over to help me hang a heavy, gold-framed mirror from a rummage sale. We center it above the fireplace, and now all that’s left is an open space where a chair should be.

It’s early evening. Spring. A heat wave. Macaroni salad for dinner, chilling in the refrigerator until it’s time. I pin clothes onto the line while Nathalie and Clément play downslope, on the far side of the yard. They dart from place to place, engaged in one of their imaginary games. They’re orphans on the run from pirates or stray kittens hiding from dogs. Occasionally, they peek out from where the trees and shrubs grow wild and unruly—the “forest part,” they call it.

I clip the last shirt to the cord and take a seat on the patio with my pencil and sketchbook. Leatherbound with three hundred blank pages, a wedding gift from Felix, the most thoughtful thing he could have chosen for me. Drawing came back like an old friend. A few fumbling moments, some regret over lost time, and then familiarity, a settling back in. Soon it became instinctual, compulsory, my hand reaching for my sketchbook whenever I was idle or something caught my eye. I drew our house—the stairs set into the front slope, the kitchen windows from the outside, the forest part. I drew the bowl of fruit on the counter and the stack of dishes in the sink. The children regarded it as a magic trick at first, part awe, part mistrust. They peered over my shoulder. “How do you make itlooklike that?” Nathalie asked.

“Lots of practice.”

“But I’ve never seen you practice,” Clément said.

“I stopped for a long time.”

“If I knew how to draw like you, I would never stop,” Nathalie said.

“I believe that,” I told her. “You’re far too wise to forget the things you love.”

This evening, I draw the clothes on the line. A subject I keep coming back to. No matter the time of day or the position of the sun or the temperature, no matter if it’s Felix’s shirts or the children’s school uniforms drying, I always associate it with the night Nathalie came to us. I still have Delphine’s clothes from their final load of laundry, packed safely away. I’m shading the folds of a skirt when Felix comes home through the gate and down the steps withThe New Yorkerrolled up in his hand. “There’s a piece in here you might like,” he says. “About a painter.”

“Look,” I say, showing him my place in the sketchbook. “Only a few pages left.”

“You’ll need a new one,” he says, and together we set out the dinner.

The next week, I fill my last page with a drawing of Nathalie’s shoes. Felix is back on the train, so Adele says she’ll keep the children through dinner while I stay out and shop. I haven’t stepped foot in an art store since leaving New Orleans—drawing doesn’t require much in the way of supplies—and I’m enraptured. The sheer selection of sketchbooks alone. I choose a slimmer one this time, black leather with smooth pages, small enough to slip into my purse. I choose pencils and charcoal, pluck a gray kneaded eraser from a glass jar. And then I turn a corner and I’m in the paint aisle. So much color. Tubes of yellow ochre and cobalt green and indigo. Reds and pinks and oranges. My breath catches from wanting. But I force myself to walk away. I don’t have the time to paint, or the space in my little house.

I carry my new sketchbook and supplies to the counter and the clerk rings me up. Next to the register is a bulletin board posted with flyers advertising studio spaces for rent, artists’ groups in search of members, watercolor classes, a drop-in figure drawing class that meets on Tuesdays at seven. It’s Tuesday today. I check my watch. I could make it.