*
Malcolm stood at the edges of the garden, eyeing its neglect. The garden was mostly dirt. Brambles covered the back portion and, in the front, there was nothing but a row of brown flowers crushed by the rain. Sean blamed it all on his wife. “She thinks of herself as having a green thumb,” he joked, but Malcolm didn’t laugh. The garden made him think of his own marriage. Only five weeks earlier, his wife, Ursula, had left him for another man. Their marriage had been unhappy for some time; Malcolm knew that Ursula was discontented with him and their life together, but he had never imagined she could fall in love with someone else. After she was gone, he fell into despair. Unable to sleep, beset by crying jags, he began to drink to excess. On one occasion, he had driven to a scenic outlook and got out of his car to stand at the edge of a cliff. Even then, he knew he was being dramatic and that he lacked the courage to throw himself off. Nevertheless, he remained at the cliff’s edge for almost an hour.
The next day, Malcolm had taken a leave from his job and had begun to travel, hoping to find, in freedom of movement, freedom from pain. Quite by chance he had found himself in the town where he remembered his old friend Sean lived. Wandering the streets, his shirt spotted with coffee, he had made his way to Sean’s house, knocked on the door, and found no one at home.
He had been there less than fifteen minutes when he looked up to see Sean striding down the front path with a girl on either side of him. The vision filled Malcolm with envy. Here was his friend, surrounded by youth and vitality (the girls were laughing musical laughs), and here was he, sitting on the doorstep, surrounded by nothing but the specters of old age, loneliness, and despair.
The situation grew worse from there. Sean greeted him quickly, as though they had seen each other only last week, and Malcolm immediately sensed he was in the way. With a flourish Sean opened the door and led them on a tour of the house. He showed the girls where they would sleep, and indicated a bedroom in another wing that Malcolm could have. After that, Sean took them into the kitchen. He and the girls searched the cabinets to see what there was to eat. All they found was a plastic bag of black beans and, in the refrigerator, a stick of butter, a shriveled lemon, and a desiccated clove of garlic. That was when Sean suggested they go out to the garden.
Malcolm followed them outside. And now he stood apart, wishing he could take the failure of his own marriage as lightly as Sean took the failure of his. He wished he could put Ursula behind him, lock her memory in a box and bury it deep in the earth, far beneath the soil he now turned up with the toe of his left shoe.
*
Sean stepped into the garden and kicked at the brambles. He had forgotten the cupboards would be bare, he had nothing to offer his guests now, and he had two more guests than he wanted. He gave one last kick, disgusted with everything, but this time his foot caught on a network of brambles, pulling them up in the air. They lifted as a lid lifts off a box and underneath, hiding against the wall, was a clump of artichokes. “Hold on,” he said, seeing them. “Hold on one minute.” He took a few steps toward them. He bent and touched one. Then he turned, looking back at Annie. “Do you know what this is?” he asked her. “It’s Divine Providence. The good Lord made my wife plant these poor artichokes and then made her forget about them, so that we, in our need, would find them. And eat.”
*
A few of the artichokes were blooming. Annie hadn’t known that artichokes could bloom but there they were, as purple as thistles, only larger. The idea of eating them made her happy. Everything about the evening made her happy, the house, the garden, her new friend, Sean. For a month she and Maria had been traveling through Ireland, staying in youth hostels where they had to sleep on cots in rooms crowded with other girls. She was tired of the budget accommodations, of the meager meals scraped together in the hostel kitchens, and of the other girls rinsing out their socks and underwear in the bathroom sinks and hanging them on the bunk beds to dry. Now, thanks to Sean, she could sleep in a big bedroom with lots of windows and a canopy bed.
“Come look,” Sean said, beckoning her with his hand, and she stepped into the garden. They bent over together. A tiny gold cross slipped out of her T-shirt and hung, swinging. “My God, you’re Catholic,” he said. “Yes,” said Annie. “And Irish?” She nodded, smiling. He lowered his voice as he grasped one of the artichokes and presented it to her. “That makes us practically family, my dear.”
*
If Sean perceived the implications of the girls’ body language, even more so did Maria. For it wasn’t true that the two of them had put their hands on their hips simultaneously without meaning to. Annie had started the movement and Maria had mirrored her. She did this in order to proclaim the very message of inseparability that Sean had read. Maria wanted to inhabit Annie’s being as closely and as intimately as possible, and so, in this instance, she transformed Annie and herself into two identical sculptures set side by side on the grass.
Maria had never had a friend like Annie before. She had never felt that someone understood her so well. Her life thus far had been like living in a town of mutes, where no one spoke to her but only stared. It seemed to Maria that she had never heard the sound of another human voice, until that Sunday in March, at the library of the college they went to, when Annie had said for no reason at all: “You look all cozy in that chair.”
At the back of the garden the artichokes lolled on their thick stems. Maria looked at Annie standing in them, running a hand through her thick hair. Maria was just as happy as Annie. She, too, responded to the stark beauty of Sean’s stone house, and to the coolness of the evening air. But besides her delight in these surroundings there remained another bright spot that made her happy, a bright spot she returned to again and again in her thoughts. For the day before, in an empty train compartment, Annie had put her arms around Maria and had kissed her on the lips.
*