I’m not really listening to much music lately. I don’t know who to listen to, or what it would mean about me if I started liking them. I’m determined not to become someone else. So I’ve given up music altogether basically.
“Ridiculous,” Paul says. He is still gripping the top of the chair and rocking back and forth a little with the music Cate’s playing over the sound system. “And also, ballsy.” He grins. Almost everything terrible in life kind of amuses Paul. I’m hoping I’m moments away from growing into that trait, and that I will be a little more like him someday soon.
Except without the yoga mat.
“You can’t be weird about them, okay?” I say. “Like, give them cookies. It’s fine. They can eat cookies if they want.” I want to chat with Joe and watch the rest of the day float away.
Especially the part when Joe grabbed Sasha’s ass.
“I’ll find something else to be weird about, I guess,” Paul says, and he nudges his foot against the bottom of my chair so that it shakes a little.
“Can’t wait.”
“I have the perfect Forgive Your Ridiculous Father present,” he says, and reaches into his back pocket. Pulls out a beat-up copy of The Secret Garden. It’s not A Little Princess, but it’s the author’s other beautiful effing book, and I’m dead-on impressed. Not to mention, books from New York City are the best, because anyone could have written in them, and they have this infinite sense of possibility that books from the town bookstores don’t have. People in New York, or other cities, are probably like that too. Full of all kinds of hope, while I’m stuck here being small and limited.
“Seriously?” I say, and grab it from his hands, flip through the yellowed pages, and see them covered, absolutely slathered, with margin notes. Dark-red pen. Curly, swirly, beautiful handwriting.
“You haven’t had the easiest time, and I figured my favorite daughter needed something good,” Paul says. His dimples deepen, if that’s even possible, and there are one hundred things wrong with my life right now, and a few of them are in Tea Cozy with us, but man, I lucked out in the dad department. “Plus I found a marked-up copy of the terrible live-in-the-moment, self-help, we-are-all-small-specks-in-the-universe book I hate, The Power of Now.” Paul hates positive-thinking books. Hates them. They don’t jibe with his yoga and meditation. Seems like all the same thing to me, but whatever. “So it was worth walking around the East Village for an extra hour before driving back today. Hate those quick trips. Turn around the second I get there, basically.”
I’m not even really listening anymore, because this book is amazing and whoever wrote these notes is amazing, and I want to dive right in. I wave him away, and he chuckles as he walks back to the counter. I have described the plot of The Secret Garden to him many times. He knows all about sullen Mary and her trip to her uncle’s kind-of-creepy mansion and her discovery of a beautiful, secret garden that leads her to be a better person and to live a brand-new, unexpected life. Paul’s never been super interested, but he likes when I’m excited about things, even if he doesn’t share the excitement.
On the front page, the Red Script Note Taker has drawn a picture of a garden and written a haiku about rose petals and loneliness.
I’m all in.
I blast through five chapters of The Secret Garden and linger on every margin note like it’s a message from the universe directly to me. The note taker writes, Mary is real. Confused by life. Pissed at circumstance. Forgotten. Ready to explore the world, regardless. Brave. That place between my jaw and my eyes swells, and I am teary. I’m a sucker for a character who other people hate. And Mary has long been a favorite of mine. Not only after she finds her garden and makes friends and changes. I love her from page one. She may be cranky, but she’s also honest. She explores that terrifying house and its grounds with a delicious anticipation and openness, in spite of the fact that her life so far has sucked.
When I finally remember to look up, my computer’s still pinging, Joe all desperate and wanting me to be there. Tabby?? You there? Tabitha? I’m missing you!!
I kind of can’t believe I forgot about him for as long as I did. I have a distracting kind of liking for him. Sometimes I stare at my math homework for hours but can’t do a single problem, I’m so busy suffocating from feelings. But whoever wrote these margin notes in The Secret Garden captivates a different part of me.
I turn back to the computer, and Joe and I swim in our special brand of awkward ecstasy for the next hour. We recall, for maybe the twentieth time this month, how we fell for each other. It’s one of our favorite conversations to have, the way mothers tell their children the stories of their births. I recount his smile and the zap of interest on the first day of school this year, how good he looked after a summer of football drills and beach days.