Generations

by Bobbie Jean Huff

Originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of The New Quarterly

“Those lily pads,” Fee said, startling Mary as she came up behind her. “They cost about fourteen dollars apiece, give or take. Can you believe it? I could have bought fake ones—they were a bit more, but you know…” She shrugged.

Mary understood. Fee wouldn’t be caught dead with phony lily pads. Who would?

She was at Fee’s annual garden party, the fiftieth, standing beside the new ornamental pool. It was ten feet by twelve and shaped like a kidney bean. During a blizzard the previous January Fee had phoned to say that the pool was to be this spring’s project. “It’ll be so easy,” she said, as Mary watched snow blanket the top step of the side porch. “All you have to do is dig a hole and line it with a special PVC thingy. They sell them at Home Depot. Two hundred dollars. Then you fill it with water.”

The pool, with its graceful lily pads and delicate-looking water iris, reminded Mary of a Monet painting, and she stood mesmerized, as Fee explained that the goldfish Mary could see glinting beneath the surface of the water would probably overwinter. “You never know, though, with temperatures below minus forty, like we had last January.”

Behind her, two women were talking. Mary recognized both, although she hadn’t seen them in years.. The one with the short white hair had been a teaching assistant in Nolan’s grade eight class. That would have been—wow, twenty-five years ago. The other, tall and thin with turquoise rings on nearly all her fingers, was also somehow connected with Nolan, but for the moment Mary couldn’t remember how.

The women were talking about meditation. The teaching assistant said, “Did you know that Einstein meditated every day?”

The ring lady, sounding shocked, replied, “Albert Einstein?”

Mary turned to look for her husband, but she couldn’t see him. Maybe Sam had gone inside. In order to get from the pool to Fee’s house you had to walk around the perennial beds. Fee always chose this particular weekend for the party. Her spring garden was always at its peak at the end of June. In the rockery, potentilla blazed beside cool iberis and lobelia. Up the path a little way, curving beds of purple iris and tiger lilies complemented one another. No soldierly rows of plants here, Fee believed in the “Clump” theory of gardening—her British ancestry struggling through the more recent layers of down-home Canadiana.

***

Mary met Sam by the drinks table. He was talking to two men she hadn’t seen before. Both were wearing straw hats.

“Try this,” Sam said to Mary, holding out a plastic glass containing something pink and bubbly. “You look as if you need it.”

She drank it in one gulp, leaving a soggy strawberry to lurk at the bottom of the glass. She didn’t like alcohol much, but when she did drink, she preferred it straight and strong.

“Meet my wife Mary,” Sam said to the men. “She’s a lawyer, too.”

“Was a lawyer,” Mary said. “Before I retired.”

“Once a lawyer…” the taller of the two said. They talked for a few minutes about the Rosa Becker case and the Pettkus formulation—male lawyers always assumed that Mary practiced family law—but she could tell from their wandering eyes that the men weren’t really interested in what she had to say.

Oliver came over, his plate piled high with iced squares and brownies and cherry-studded cookies. “Oh, Ollie,” Mary said, attempting to hug her grandson. “I hope you left something for me.” She removed a brownie from his plate, bit into it and said, “Is your mum here?”

“Not today.”

Mary wasn’t surprised. Since Nolan’s death, his widow had made it pretty clear that she didn’t want much to do with the group Sam and Mary had been part of since before Nolan was born. It was, Mary assumed, too painful for her.

***

Neither of them had been eager to come to Fee’s party. Sam had wanted to paint his study, and after a hectic visit in Washington State with her two sisters, Mary longed for nothing more strenuous than to curl up with a book in the screened-in porch.

But to her surprise, Oliver had dropped over the day before. Mary was sitting in the dining room reading the Saturday papers when she heard him clump up the porch steps and burst through the kitchen door.

He got straight to the point. “Are you going to Fee’s tomorrow, Gran?”

She told him they weren’t sure. That they had things they wanted to do. “Why do you want to go?” she asked him, intrigued. There was a dwindling number of young people his age who continued to go, mostly as a duty to their parents or grandparents. “You could bike to the pool, it’s supposed to be nice again tomorrow.”

But when he said, “We always go,” in that new voice of his that could span an octave within a couple of syllables, Mary realized that Fee’s garden party belonged, for him, in the same category as Christmas and Thanksgiving: a milestone to be genuflected to, something not quite voluntary they did each year.

She also saw that it was one of the few remaining connections he had with Nolan, who had always loved going to Fee’s. Who was Mary to yank Oliver so abruptly from his childhood, and from his father?

Looking over at him standing in the dining room doorway, she realized how caught he was between the child and the man. His arms and legs were too long for his torso, his teeth too large for his face. Mary sensed that this would be his last garden party and she thought he could sense it, too.

“We’ll be there,” she said.

***

Fee’s parties had been going on since the late 60’s, and Mary, looking around today, can remember each one of them, even—and especially—the first.

That first party: The women were almost uniformly skinny, with hair that reached below their waists. They wore peasant blouses and long Indian skirts. The men wore jeans, the children went naked; and, as the hours went by, a few of the adults did, as well. There was lots of music, lots of dope. Fee’s stereo blasted music out of her living room window and everyone danced, some by themselves, others joining hands and circling the flower beds.

The party went on into the night. While the women cleared the tables and quieted the babies (how sexist we all were then, thought Mary), the men climbed onto the roof of Fee’s barn to smoke up and watch the sunset. When they came back down, Mary noticed one of them, in particular, who didn’t seem as stoned as the rest. He was wearing a white shirt and khaki cut-offs. His straight dark hair fell over his face. Sam.

Many of the people here today were at that first party, Mary noted, as she scanned the grounds for familiar faces. They were a lot older, of course, and they looked it. Their hair was shorter, and they seemed shorter as well. Those she spoke with today, moving from group to group, mentioned what they “did”—not meaning what career they had recently retired from, but the daily activities they performed. Some played squash. Others swam or danced. Tennis seemed to be very popular. A few people worked at a food bank, or volunteered at the local hospital.

When they asked what Mary did, they seemed nervous, as if they didn’t really want to hear her response. As if, rather than continuing the conversation, they’d prefer to go back for more drinks or take another turn around the pool. But since Nolan died, Mary had become used to that, and she decided for once not to spare them.

Every morning when she woke, she said, she pulled on her jogging pants and took off down the street. Sometimes Sam would join her, but mostly she liked going on her own. In the early morning, when the streets were still empty, the air still fresh, and she could hear the birds calling out to one another, she was able to imagine that she was just another sort of bird, loose-living and free—and untethered, by her grief, to the world.

She told them all of this, except, of course, for the grief bit, and wasn’t surprised when they smiled and nodded as if they understood—even though she knew they didn’t.

***

“What are you two talking about? Don’t you get enough of each other at home? Smile.”

It was Fee with her iPhone. She’d been making her way across the lawn, crouching here and there to take pictures. She’d never done that before, and it crossed Mary’s mind that it was, perhaps, her last party, too, and that because Fee knew it, she intended to document it. Mary took hold of Sam’s arm and faced the camera. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Ollie talking to another boy beside the barn.

“Hey, Fee,” Mary said, as Fee was turning to go. “Let me get Ollie. I’d like a family picture.”

On her way to the barn she passed the two women who had been talking about meditation. They had apparently moved on to crystals.

“Try for black tourmaline,” one was saying. “For all that negative energy in your life. You’ll need four pieces, though—one for each corner of your house.”

“I thought shungite,” the teaching assistant said. “I could have sworn someone told me shungite”

“Shungite’s for EMF’s. For someone in your situation, I’d stick with the tourmaline.”

And the earth is flat, Mary told herself, wondering exactly what a tourmaline-requiring situation might be. A few minutes later all three of them—Mary, Sam and Ollie—were standing beside the ornamental pool facing Fee and her camera, their arms wrapped around one another.

“Good party, Fee,” said Sam, after Ollie left to rejoin his friend.

“Yes,” she replied. “Good party.” But she looked preoccupied, and Mary realized that she had looked that way for some time. It hadn’t been a good year for Fee. Her daughter’s marriage had broken up and she and her two small children had moved back home with her mother.

Fee fiddled a moment with her phone, squinted at the screen, then showed Mary and Sam the photos she’d just taken. She said, “Oliver’s gotten so big. Remember when he went up that tree?

At the time, Ollie had been four. The crowd that year was particularly large, the music particularly loud. Nolan was helping an old friend build a campfire while his wife was in the kitchen organizing food to be brought out to the picnic table. Sam and Mary were sitting on the grass listening to a fiddle band when someone said, “Hey, there’s a kid up that tree.”

The music stopped. Everyone looked up and there, at the very top of the tallest pine tree in Fee’s yard, was a small figure in red overalls. He was draped across a wobbly branch and crying.

“Oliver!” Mary gasped, and she and Sam both sprang to their feet. But a second later, Nolan was there. “It’s okay,” he said. “Stay there.”

Mary and Sam clung together and watched as Nolan walked slowly—so slowly!—over to the tree. “Hey, Oliver,” he called, in a quiet, clear voice, just loud enough for Oliver to hear him. Oliver stopped crying and looked down at his father. Everyone was silent.

“Ollie. There’s a story I thought you might like to hear. Why don’t you start climbing down while I tell it to you. There’s a branch right beneath you—that’s how you got up there in the first place, remember? If you want, you can come down the same way you went up.”

Nolan started the story. “Once upon a time there was a little boy called Oliver, who liked to climb trees. At first he began with a tree that was hardly bigger than he was.”

Everyone was quiet. Oliver didn’t move.

Nolan continued. “Then, when Ollie got good at climbing little trees, he started to climb the big ones. After a while, Ollie got famous for his tree climbing. People came from miles around just to see him climb huge trees!”

Still, Oliver didn’t move.

“One day, at Fee’s party, Ollie decided to climb the tallest tree in the world. It was an old pine tree beside Fee’s house. No one thought he would really do it. No one thought he could really do it, because, after all, he was only four years old.”

And, as Nolan continued with the story, Oliver began to descend the tree. Once he got going, he did it quickly, confidently. In no time at all he had reached the lower, farthest-apart branches.

Nolan never helped his son, not even when he reached the bottom limb. When Ollie’s second foot touched the ground, Nolan said, “Hey, guy,” scooped him up in his arms and brought him over to where Mary and Sam were sitting.

Watching the whole thing from the ground, Mary recalled, was like watching a scary movie. She was terrified at first, but when Nolan started the story, she knew it would have a happy ending.

***

The heat of the day had dissipated. “Let’s go over there,” Mary said to Sam, as she pointed to the pool.

But the folding chairs beside the pool were occupied. The water was a soupy green. Mary identified some of the plants and flowers for Sam.

“It’s pretty murky,” he said.

“That’s the algae. Fee says it has something to do with maintaining the balance of nature, whatever that implies with ornamental pools that come from Home Depot.”

They moved around the other side of the pool to the sloping rock garden, where the ring lady and teaching assistant were still talking.

“You see,” the teaching assistant was saying in a didactic voice, above the din of people who had brought their plates of food down the hill to eat. “You have to move the sage bundle in a clockwise motion around every part of your body. Then you direct your thoughts towards everyone who happens to be in need.”

“Like the Haitians?” the ring lady asked. “Or the immigrants at the border?”

There were a couple of young mothers sitting by the rocks that bordered the pool. Three or four toddlers were splashing their hands in the water and squealing.

Mary counted the lily pads, then did a quick calculation in her head. Forty pads: almost six hundred dollars. Plus tax! And to think, fifty years ago Fee was making her own soy milk and tofu.

Mary turned to Sam to relate this astonishing fact, but was stopped mid-way by a motion out of the corner of her eye. One of the toddlers beside the pool had overbalanced, and was now falling slowly and quietly into the water.

***

When she and Fee had become friends after that first garden party, Mary had stayed at the farm for the summer while she and Sam and some other friends made plans to start a commune. Fee and Mary spent long days together gardening, feeding the animals, scraping wallpaper off the walls of the house.

Fee was the first to drop acid. Mary was away in Toronto for the week, and when she returned on Sunday night, Fee was just coming off it. What she said to Mary when she walked in the door was, “You gotta do this. You really gotta.”

The following weekend she and Fee drove to a nearby limestone quarry. It was a hot day. They stripped off their clothes and swallowed the small white tablets—Sunshine, Fee said they were called. Then they lay back and waited.

Mary was afraid. She had heard too many stories of hallucinations and freakouts: mountains moving, fireballs dancing across the sky, the earth heaving open. For a long while she stayed very still on her towel with her eyes closed.

After a while she opened them. Fee was giggling beside her.

“What’s so funny?” Mary asked, sitting up. But she was momentarily distracted by the air she had just displaced. Where had it gone?

“You are,” Fee said. Mary looked down at her friend. Fee was smiling. The corners of her mouth were turned up. Then they relaxed. Her nostrils flared briefly, her eyes blinked open and shut. She breathed in. And out.

Her face was a kaleidoscope of every thought and feeling she was having, and although it was a lot to take in, Mary could read them all. Why did people speak? she wondered. There was no need. If you could just relax and observe, you wouldn’t need words. Words were inferior. Faces said it all.

She and Fee stared at each other for what seemed like hours. Then, all of a sudden, they were aware of another presence. A man in a navy suit had come down to the quarry. He must have wondered what the two of them were doing there, naked and staring at one another, but he didn’t bother with them. He didn’t even say hello when Mary sat up and stared at him.

He passed not five feet from where they were sitting, and without removing his shoes or jacket he walked straight into the water. And disappeared.

A hallucination? Mary wondered, at the time. It was unlikely that the two of them would share the same one. They jumped up and called out, thinking that it must be a joke, the man was having them on and any second now he would surface. But he never did.

They didn’t report it. No one, they were certain, would believe their story, high as they were. They imagined being booked for drugs while the man in the blue suit, long beyond saving, lay beneath the surface of the water, his hair winnowing like seaweed through the water.

Every night for the next few weeks they scanned the paper for a mention of a person missing or a body found washed ashore at a local swimming hole. There was nothing.

Lots of people swam there now. There was a chain link fence around the property, you had to pay five dollars to get in. There was a parking lot, there were life guards, and a wading pool for the babies. You could buy hot dogs, ice cream, coffee.

Ollie often went, but Mary was always nervous when he did. Even though she knew it was irrational, she worried that while he was swimming with his friends he would happen upon a body, white and bloated, gnawed by water creatures. Impossible, she knew, after all those years. Perhaps she was just worried that he—who was all she had left of Nolan—would, like the man in the navy suit, walk into the water and disappear.

***

The mother of the toddler, of course, jumped in immediately and emerged with the baby, it only took a second. She held him up in front of her: a trophy. The expression on the child’s face moved quickly from shock to outrage. She took a deep breath and let out a blood-curdling scream.

Not one fourteen dollar lily pad had been disturbed.

“He could have drowned,” Mary said to Sam.

“He was only in a second.”

“Still. One lungful of water is all that’s needed.” Mary, imagining the millisecond that separates life from death, began to cry.

Fee behind them, said, “Nonsense. When people drown, it’s from suffocation. The mechanism reacts against inhaling water, and shuts itself down.”

Mechanism? Mary thought. Was Fee referring to the body, the human body that contains the soul? She wondered whether Fee remembered the man in the blue suit.

Behind Fee, the teaching assistant sliced one hand through the air and said, “No, no, it just won’t burn the same way. Ask anyone.”

Had they moved at all, these past fifty years? Mary wondered. Hadn’t they seen the child slipping into the water? Hadn’t they noticed that a tiny person had nearly lost her life while they were discussing sage bundles and crystals?

The ring lady said, in response to something Mary had missed: “Still—the dead are within us.”

Yes, they are, thought Mary. She turned away and looked at Fee. She remembered her, those years ago: a skinny girl with shaggy hair. When they met, Fee was twenty-three. She wore a single, dented gold bracelet on her wrist that her father had given her on her seventeenth birthday. She always said she would never take it off. Where was it now?

“Have a sausage roll, Mary,” Fee said. “Have two.” She held out the tray. Through the triangle of light created between her arm, the tray and her torso, Mary could see Oliver sitting on the lawn. He was deep in conversation with a slender blond girl wearing jeans and a transparent green blouse that revealed tiny, round breasts.

Oliver’s eyes were half shut, his mouth half open. He was obviously hanging onto the girl’s every word.

“Thank you,” Mary said, helping herself to two sausage rolls and thinking of Nolan, who had loved them. Oliver and the girl disappeared from the frame. When Fee moved away, they were gone.