“WHAT DO YOU expect?” Ashley said. “You didn’t do what I told you.”
“What?” Helen said, waving her arms. “Buy a Volvo?”
Ashley bent down and returned to her gardening. She had splotches of dirt all over her bare arms and legs and sweat marks on her tee shirt. Her hair was the exact color of the carrots she pulled from the dirt.
“I needed help,” Helen said. Her voice was coming from somewhere deep inside of her. It was rising up out of her. It was erupting. “I came to you for help.”
Ashley’s garden bursted with vegetables. Everywhere Helen looked, something was growing, sprouting, budding.
Ashley pointed her hoe at Helen. “You said you didn’t want anything drastic.”
“But I wanted something Now I have nothing. I’m worse off than before.”
It was too hot out there in Ashley’s garden, and the air was heavy with the smell of dirt, of the earth. Helen thought she might choke or faint. Without thinking about it, Helen dropped to her knees, right into the dirt, and sobbed. She thought she might die, right there.
“You are losing control,” Ashley said.
Helen clutched at the earth, began to dig. Her hands hit something hard. Radishes. Small, perfect, red ones.
“Do not ruin my garden,” Ashley said. She dropped her hoe and made her way toward the log cabin.
Helen got to her feet, shaky, uncertain. She could not stop crying. She held on to her little bunch of radishes and made her way back toward her own cabin.
Somehow—the sun?—Helen wandered the wrong way through the woods. She missed the broken fence, the pile of stones, the grazing cows, and ended up by the studios.
There was Joanne’s.
Helen went to the window. Joanne was in there, with the wire man. They were clothed, sitting across from each other. But when Joanne glanced up and saw Helen standing there, she looked away, guilty.
Disoriented, Helen made yet another wrong turn. The smell of dirt clung to her, confused her.
At the next studio, Helen hesitated. There was a strict rule about disturbing the artists during work time. She felt relieved when the door opened and one of the artists stepped out. Although he looked familiar, she could not remember who he was exactly. The potter? The abstract expressionist?
“Helen?” he said. “Is that right?”
She went to shake his hand, but it looked like she was offering him the radishes.
He laughed. “Radishes,” he said. Then he took them.
“Actually,” Helen said, “I sort of stole those.”
Carefully, he wiped each radish on his shirt. “Then we’d better eat them. Destroy the evidence.”
He held one out to her. There was color on his hands. Terra-cotta, Helen thought.
They ate the radishes in silence, except for the crunching.
Helen wanted to tell him something, but she could not form the words.
HELEN TOOK HER blank rock and the piece of pink chalk from her desk drawer. She sat cross-legged on her bed.
Joanne had told her that she and the wire man might be falling in love.
She said it like a confession.
“It’s okay,” Helen had told her.
“I like this part,” Joanne said, “when you think the very things that will later drive you crazy, maybe even drive you apart, are quirky and wonderful. When everything you do or say, they find fascinating.”
“This is the happy part,” Helen said.
“Right,” Joanne said. “Then you get used to each other, maybe even move in together, maybe even get married, and the laundry doesn’t get done and he hates your friends and you get sick of going to obscure foreign movies with him and you can’t remember the last time the two of you took a shower together.”
“The real part,” Helen said.
“Right. Then maybe you realize you’ve fallen out of love and it’s over.”
Helen felt something strange where her spleen used to be. She realized it no longer hurt very much. The itching had stopped.
“The sad part,” Helen said.
“Or,” Joanne had said, smiling, stretching in that slow, catlike way that people who are having a lot of good sex do, “love wins out.”
Helen smoothed her already smooth rock.
On one side, she wrote MERRIMENT.
On the other, she wrote melancholy.
She put the rock back in the drawer.
ON THE DAY before they went back home, Helen made her way to Ashley’s log cabin again. There were the cows, the fence. But the pile of stones was gone. Helen wondered if the woman rock artist—she and Joanne called her Wilma—had stolen them.
Ashley was in her garden again, though not gardening. She was sitting there, bent like a piece of origami.
Helen stood in front of her, waiting.
Finally Ashley opened her eyes.
“You,” she said.
“I took some radishes,” Helen told her. “That day.”
Ashley nodded and unfolded herself. “If you want, I’ll do your hair again. For half price.
But Helen didn’t want her hair colored. “I just wanted to tell you about the radishes.”
“Can I ask you something?” Ashley said.
“What?”
“Who’s Scott?”