Some Wildflower In My Heart (35 page)

As the children discovered the worms in their applesauce, they set up a clamor in the lunchroom. One entire class of third graders, laying the treat immediately to Birdie's account, called out in unison, “Thank you for the worms, Miz Birdie!”

Jasmine Finney, the sulky child for whom Birdie had bought a pair of sneakers two months earlier, came back through the line holding her worm by the tail. “You give us these?” she asked Birdie, and Birdie opened her eyes wide in mock surprise. “Me? Now, whatever gave you such an idea, Jasmine?” Jasmine pointed her finger straight at Birdie and said, “You did it. I can
tell
.” Then she threw her head back and dropped the whole worm into her mouth. Before she left, Jasmine said something else to Birdie that I could not understand because she was chewing at the same time. Evidently her words were not lost on Birdie, however, for she leaned forward and said, “Jasmine, you're a dear to say that. Now, you go on back to your teacher and be a star pupil this afternoon, you hear?”

Birdie had brought about a marked difference in the entire lunchroom. In past years, while Vonnie Lee was full of quick, foolish talk, at which Francine endlessly giggled, and while Algeria occasionally engaged in lively conversation once the early morning was past and the day was underway, I would not have characterized our kitchen as a happy place. Each of us had her own private sorrows, which, though temporarily set aside each day, nevertheless seemed to seep into the corners of the room like a fetid vapor. Birdie's coming had cleared the air. Teachers and pupils alike were won by her smallness, her deftness, her gentleness. Even Mr. Solomon, the principal, had begun visiting the kitchen and lingering to chat. He and Birdie discovered that both of them had lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, during a three-year period in the early seventies.

On this particular day Mr. Solomon came into the kitchen as the fifth graders were filing through the line, and his laugh resonated loudly as he observed Birdie's placement of a gummy worm upon each tray before serving the applesauce. “Whose clever idea was that?” I heard him say, whereupon Algeria and Francine cast self-vindicating glances in my direction as if to say, “There now, see? Mr. Solomon thinks it's clever.”

After the last class had been served, I returned to my office to count the day's cash and prepare it for deposit. Before I could seat myself, however, Birdie appeared in the doorway.

“I know you have your schedule, Margaret,” she said, “and I don't like to be the one to interrupt it, but I just have to talk to you before another minute passes. I feel so awful about upsetting you with the gummy worms. I always seem to be stepping out of line!”

I sat down, and she advanced closer toward my desk. “I was planning to resume our conversation in greater detail after completing my paper work,” I said, not looking directly into her eyes. About her neck she wore an old-fashioned pendant of silver that I had noticed earlier that morning—an oval bearing a small pale green stone, a peridot, I believe it is called, in its center. The silver oval appeared to be a locket, and I knew that I had only to ask and she would eagerly open it to show me what was inside. I did not intend to ask, however. The pendant provided a convenient focal point as I spoke to Birdie, and staring at it, I measured my words. “I am willing to overlook your impulsive violation of policy today, but you must understand that the menus are carefully planned and regulated and are not to be changed in the slightest degree without my authorization.”

The face of the locket, I saw now, was worked about with a fancy scrolled engraving, worn practically smooth. Its surface area was approximately that of a quarter, though, as I have said, the shape of the pendant was elliptic. It was suspended from a short chain of poor quality, most of which was concealed beneath the collar of her white blouse. I suppose my scrutiny of the necklace had reminded her of it, for in the pause that followed my statement, Birdie lifted a hand and pressed lightly upon the locket with two fingers as if assuring herself that it was still in place.

“Oh, Margaret, I'm ashamed that it never dawned on me to ask you.” I still did not lift my gaze to her eyes, but I knew that her eyes were fixed upon my face. “I see now that I was wrong,” she continued gravely, “but of course now it's too late. I'm not trying to be stubborn and change the way things are done around here, I'm really not. I just wasn't thinking—or I guess I
was
thinking but not about following the right steps. I was only thinking of how exciting it would be for the boys and girls. Will you forgive me, Margaret?”

I had no heart for scolding her, I realized now. My earlier anger had been spent, and I believe it was at that moment that I understood the exact nature of my feelings for Birdie Freeman. For three months I had felt within me the warring factions of love and hatred toward her. It was not Birdie herself whom I hated, of course, but rather the softening of my heart, the stirring up of old remembrances, the gradual opening of gateways.

I did not want to love again, I told myself; indeed, I had vowed not to do so. Yet each contact with Birdie further eroded my defenses. I felt increasingly vulnerable, and this was what I hated. As I looked steadfastly upon the glint of the pale green stone in the center of her locket, I knew that I was guilty of fakery. As other women put on airs of various kinds, a behavior that I self-righteously denounced, I saw clearly my own falseness, for I had been pretending, quite convincingly, to despise someone whom I had grown to love.

Such knowledge could not be made public, however. Certain things were expected of me. I could not at the age of fifty become a different person. Or could I? Only recently had I finished a book—
Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields—in which a character named Alice made the following claim: “The self is not a thing carved on entablature.” Her point was that one can, by a force of the will, change himself in extreme, fundamental ways. For example, whereas Alice had lived for nineteen years as a contentious, domineering fault-finder, she decided after her first year of college to become a kind person and set about to do so. But I did not want to change! Or did I?

I felt that my course was set, but I saw trouble ahead. Thomas, for example, had for the fifteen years of our marriage allowed me my idiosyncrasies to an extent that others would certainly deem incredible. Ours was a symbiotic relationship, an exchange of goods and services, a business arrangement without physical union, yet I have already set down for you the slow changes at work between the two of us of late.

Though I still conducted myself in a brusque manner toward him, Thomas had begun in recent weeks, as reported in an earlier chapter, to approach me more directly and with less reserve. I know not to what cause to lay this change, although, as intimated previously, I believe that Birdie's coming into my arena, so to speak, had distracted me. Sensing a shift—though I doubt that he could have defined it in words—Thomas had begun venturing closer. As proof, that very morning he had said to me as I opened the door to leave for work, “Margaret,
I'm
gonna cook our Thanksgiving turkey tomorrow.” I had set my lips and closed the door firmly without reply, as if angry, though in truth only mystified.

To return to Birdie, however, I cannot tell how long we remained silent following her request for forgiveness. I continued to gaze at the silver pendant about her neck, as if held by a hypnotist's power, and she began to toy with it, tapping upon the peridot lightly, then running her finger around it in a tiny circle. I wanted to tell her to stop, to point out that the engraving was nearly invisible as it was and that she would erase it altogether if she did not take care, that her tampering with the stone could loosen it. But I said nothing.

A phrase from Willa Cather's
My Ántonia
kept repeating itself in my mind as I watched the tiny clockwise motion of her finger: “What a little circle man's existence is.” At length—most likely it was only seconds of time that had passed—she leaned forward, braced her hands upon my desk as she had done upon previous occasions, and repeated her question. “Will you please forgive me, Margaret? I'll be sure to ask next time.”

I lifted my eyes to hers and spoke, my voice much louder than I had intended. “As I said, I will overlook the incident today, and it would be better for all if there were no next time.”

For an instant before she smiled and replied pleasantly “Thank you, Margaret,” I tried to imagine what she would have said had I opened my heart to her at that moment, had I said something like this:
“Birdie, of course I forgive you. My anger is but an act, a poor attempt to cover my pride and fear. Please be patient with me and continue to be my friend, for I need your help.”

I permitted myself a brief interval of wishing—that my soul were as unobstructed as Birdie's, that I could reach forward and touch others unabashedly, that I could speak with her simple honesty, that I were not so trussed with doubts and seasoned rage. I had read a book some months earlier called
The Weight of Winter
by Cathy Pelletier—not a riveting book, for I felt that the author's style was still in its formative stages, yet compelling enough that I would not abandon the story midway—in which one of the characters resigns herself to remaining in the town where she grew up, reminding herself that if she were to grow restive she could always retreat to “that gauzy realm of wishing.” This seems to me, upon reflection, a most unsatisfactory way to live one's life.

I realized as Birdie turned and left my office that I would never be content merely to wish or to imagine myself more like her. What I was beginning to desire earnestly, I knew, was actually
to be
more like her. The truth could not be denied: I wanted to change. Yet I did not know how.

At the same time, however, the perfidy of my past rose up before me like a spectacular monster, and I heard its evil laugh, as if confirming an everlasting covenant with doom and damnation. I longed to call out to Birdie, to summon her back, to seek her help in exorcising the demon of my past, but I sat silently at my desk and watched her return to the kitchen. I saw Algeria and Francine move toward her as if ready to offer comfort. I saw Birdie smile and shake her head, and I remembered a curious thing I had once read in a magazine: that in certain eastern European countries when a man shook his head, he was signifying “yes,” and when he nodded, he meant “no.”

As I reported earlier, events unfolded so rapidly during the months of October and November that I began to feel quite a stranger to myself at times. On the day before Thanksgiving, the truth had stirred within my heart that I cared for Birdie Freeman to a degree surpassing the ordinary. I was not prepared, however, to act upon the realization openly, primarily, I suppose, because affectionate behavior was foreign to me.

You can imagine the emotional rearrangement necessitated by such developments, one upon the heels of the other, so to speak, for only a few weeks prior I had suddenly come to see that I cared for Thomas in a way I had thought impossible. Truly, my feelings for both Thomas and Birdie were
developments
, for they had taken root imperceptibly and had bloomed quietly.

Looking back upon those months of awakening, I feel a pang of sadness that I continued to conceal from Thomas and Birdie for weeks to come such knowledge of my fondness for them. In fact, I believe that immediately upon understanding the altered state of my emotions, I assumed an even more severe behavior toward both. I am quite certain that my hardness of manner was grounded in uncertainty, in timidity, in distrust—in short, in fear. Most likely my sternness was not altogether convincing, however, for as I have said, Thomas had begun to deal with me more confidently, yet still with gentle forbearance and an underlying respect.

Upon a number of occasions, beginning with the week of Thanksgiving, the phrase
too late
haunted my mind. I could not rid myself of the conviction that an individual's opportunity to make known his tender feelings to another could not last indefinitely, that doors forced open did not remain so permanently, that once a prime moment had passed it could seldom be retrieved. What's more, I knew that a man or woman who failed to act upon the truth of his affections was forfeiting the joy of what I had begun to think of as “living honestly.”

Pressing upon me daily was the memory of two books in particular:
Remains of the Day
and
84 Charing Cross Road
. In the first, the author, Kazuo Ishiguro, illustrates the failure to seize love, letting it wash away through one's fingers like fine sand to be carried to the ocean depths. The story of the butler and the housekeeper is one of lost opportunity, of failure to speak openly and thus penetrate the barrier between them. Likewise, Helen Hanff, in her fine epistolary work
84 Charing Cross Road
, tells of a friendship that, though charming and satisfying on one level, nevertheless falls short of complete fruition because of procrastination. I began to feel an increasing burden to ventilate my soul, to fling open windows and breathe deeply before it was too late.

It is of some interest to me that much, perhaps most, of what I have learned about human interaction has come through books. While I believe that most people turn to fiction in order to confirm what they know of life, for most of my fifty-one years I have reversed the act—judging and validating life by the books I have read. “Yes,” I may say to myself, “what I overheard between the mother and her adult daughter in the parking lot of the library is realistic because I read a conversation similar in many regards in Alice McDermott's novel
The Bigamist's Daughter
.” Of physical, romantic relationships built upon love, my only knowledge is that which I have gleaned from fiction, for as of yet I have not experienced such union firsthand. If ever I do—and I have found myself wondering of late if such could ever come to pass—will I not say to myself, “This is what I have read in books”?