A Decent Plot of Land

Dahlia looked and acted older than 17. Serious, not easily rattled. Which is why when her father Arnold died, to the day exactly ten years after her mother Margo, no one was all that worried how she’d fend. Not that there were that many people to fit that particular bill anyhow. Aunt Monica was Arnold’s sister and she was daffy as they come, not to mention plenty old, and although she pottered her way to the funeral, she didn’t stick around long. A few neighbors paying their respects, creepy Mr. Thornton pressing at Dahlia’s palm with a hand that was somehow sodden and dry at the same time. The lady at the church who stood too close as she watched Dahlia carefully write out “three hundred dollars and no cents” on the check in the little office behind the altar.

Back home after, Dahlia held her hands under the kitchen faucet and sighed. Arnold Wethrington had been a wonderful father. She squeezed away tears and wondered what to do next. Someone along the way of this confusing week had mentioned maybe selling the house? “It’s a decent plot of land,” that person had said. “You could take the money and make a real life for yourself.”

Dahlia sat heavily in the kitchen chair. Out the window she watched as a growing wind bowed some of the skinnier trees almost to the ground, how leaves flustered across the stone patio. “These trees will outlast us all,” her father had said, cutting a spade into dirt. When the hole was dug he’d let little Dahlia pat firm the soil. Looked away when she sucked at her dirty fingernails after. Back then Dahlia didn’t like what he said. How could it be that all the trees and flowers – even then rocks, he said – would win the race?

Dahlia’s mother Margo died when she was 7, breast cancer, quick and painful. Arnold’s end, on the other hand, was decades in the making. He suffered from depression his whole life and eventually simply couldn’t hide from it any longer, not even in the comfort of Dahlia, his only and doting child. It was Dahlia who found him, hanging.

Ah, she thought, sitting up straight in the chair as she remembered. It had been Mrs. O’Hara who said that about selling the place. Mrs. O’Hara was her father’s longtime and ancient assistant. Arnold had been an estate lawyer, Mrs. O’Hara around for about as long as Dahlia could remember. Of course she’d been at the funeral, a few rows back from Dahlia and Aunt Monica, with her husband.

Sell the house. Well, that was one idea.

But she was only 17. What did she know about selling a house? What did she know about making a life for herself. What did she know about a decent plot of land?

*

Ten years on and Aunt Monica – gone from daffy to mean – was making clear that the state of the English ivy was unconscionable. Dahlia took her point. It had grown to such an extent that the path to the front door was all but covered, her still-not-dead aunt sniffed. “Not quite gone,” Dahlia protested meekly. “You just can’t see it.” Aunt Monica’s plodding explanation of how a path wasn’t actually there if one couldn’t use it, now is it dear? Dahlia thought she liked her better when she was daffy.

Finally she died. Dahlia was relieved; the ivy, even, seemed to feel a kind of cosmic relaxation, doubling down on growth – clear across the path and over the low brick wall -- as soon as Aunt Monica’s grave was dug. 

In this time of things, Dahlia enjoyed things that most young people didn’t. She liked going to bed very early and watching game shows. Her job was to talk to people on the telephone and tell them about how a certain kind of financial instrument could change their lives. “Not an instrument like a tuba,” she trotted out, especially if the person on the other side of the line seemed like they would get it. Sometimes the two would enjoy a chuckle. Less often they bought what she was selling but enough of them did so Dahlia could keep the lights on, buy food, live. I love my life, she would say if anyone asked.

*

She read that birds and insects liked leaves, so at autumn she left them right where they were and the garden out back clogged with great piles of them. Neighbors looked askew at the front. When it was windy the leaves swirled up into funnels sometimes, but that was rare. By Dahlia’s count she’d only seen it happen twice. She never went to the room where she found Arnold hanging. She wanted to be the kind of person who after a time didn’t remember that the room was even there.

On her 32^nd birthday she went with a friend to a bar. Dahlia didn’t have many friends, but this one was called Carol, and they got along pretty well. They shared a warm brownie with ice cream on top with their drinks. Carol drank martinis, one after the next, and had to be taken home and helped into her bed. When Dahlia left Carol’s place and was waiting for a taxi out front, a tall, thin man asked her for a light for his cigarette. Because it was her birthday she, suddenly brash, told him she wished she did. That it would be fun, she found herself saying to him, to be lighting up “with tall handsome stranger on my birthday of all days.” He was charmed.

Dahlia and the man who was no longer a stranger enjoyed what she could muster. He was called Jerry. At the end of their dates, she would return to Arnold and Margo’s and think of how her mother would often be awake long into the night, the end of her cigarette winking in the darkness as she curled on the sofa, legs pulled up under her, especially on the days when Arnold was in a particularly bad state. “Your father’s resting, that’s all,” Margo would tell her.

That same sofa was where Dahlia sat during her own late nights; she didn’t smoke but instead watched as the garden – not at all a garden anymore, more like a forest – watched back. Dahlia liked the feeling.

*

“Not an instrument like a tuba,” she said. Mr. Miller Ames of Lubbock, Texas, his voice throaty and faraway, chuckled. Dahlia sat in her favorite work chair, a worn blue wingback, by the side window. She observed that honeysuckle was obliterating the fence between Arnold and Margo’s house and the neighbors’. “How much will all this cost me?” Miller Ames asked.

*

Meantime, five-leaf akebia had spread across the patio, was creeping down to the cellar. Japanese wisteria, though beautiful, had a chokehold. If Dahlia had wanted to she couldn’t open the back door; something with light green leaves and almost animal-like in its primitive need had sealed the door.

Jerry didn’t last long. And after, there were a few but none who lasted. Dahlia found one morning, heaving over the toilet, that she was pregnant. Beneath the bathroom sink was some blusher of her mother’s and she dusted on a bit of it the morning she went to the gynecologist. She tapped at her stomach and thought that Lenora might be a pretty name. It was on the bus home that she started bleeding.

That afternoon she drew the curtains tights and took to her bed. After three nights of this before she was able to seek comfort, this time in her nightgown outside in the mystery that her garden had become. She found grace, even, stepping between the vines, pushing bushes aside, feeling the soft brush of leaves on her bare arms, the dirt cool between her toes, many branches scraping at her but not from malice.

She made her phone calls selling financial instruments and carefully wrote checks to pay for what she had to and didn’t eat much so there became in time not much need to leave. Eventually there were no more friends.

And Dahlia became, before her time, the lady on the street about whom everyone whispered. The wisteria, my god, does she even know how difficult it will be to tackle that to the ground? and Lord knows what kind of animals live in that mess. It’s a fire hazard. On and on.

Daytime, especially, Dahlia felt their judgement and heard the murmurs carried on breezes through the windows she’d slid open with desire.

And soon enough, she was very, very old. She was not afraid to die. But when that moment came, an enormous fright seized Dahlia. If you’d been watching, you would have gone cold with terror, watching that weird old lady with the mess of a house, a disgrace to the neighborhood, watching as she writhed and called out at the end for relief.

But no one was watching. No one heard, even, as that decent plot of land -- vines bushes flowers grasses -- pulled in tightly around the house, the roots of every last growing thing now hardening, thickening, deep deep into the soil then earth then core below.