I am home. My mother is trimming the holly bush, which I seek but don’t find right away. I find her only after the strange man on the ride-on lawnmower clim*xes on the side lawn. How did it happen, the four girls in my bedroom, in awe because nothing has changed since I left 26 years ago? The yellow curtains and inside shutters are closed. I open them, let in the light. There is the view of my youth, the concrete wall of the trench (say moat: it’s so much more romantic, but there is no water; there are no crocodiles), the little patch of lawn rising above it. Then sky. It is the nature of the view, looking up from the basement into the clouds: gray, green, gray.
There is a roaring from outside. “She’s mowing the lawn,” I tell my sisters, and I look for the electric Flymo, which we used on the side lawns in the latter days. It was lighter and easier to move than the old gas Flymo, and we needed something light for the side lawns, which dipped steeply from the driveway towards the trench that allowed light into the lower rooms on two sides of the house. But a man drove by on a ride-on, bent over, grunting. And then he wasn’t grunting anymore, but making strange high noises, gasping in rhythm with the pulsating motor of the machine.
“What’s he doing?” Leah asked.
“Mowing the lawn,” I said. “I’m going to tell Mum.”
Nothing has changed anywhere in this house that lives only in my dreams, replaced by high-rise condos. The burnished wood floor upstairs, with the worn persian rugs all in a row, one for each section of hallway; the heavy front door with its frosted glass and security grill; the rooms on either side, filled with antiques and with heavy velvet curtains at the windows. It is as it was. But when I open the front door, a little dark woman with graying hair stands up from where she has been polishing the front steps. “Where is Mum?” I ask, as though I know her, as though she should know me, although we never had maids when I was young. Everywhere I look there are people, trimming hedges, cutting roses, raking the gravel, polishing the window. The garden is trim and orderly, not verging on wilderness as it so often was in the past.
And then I see Mum by what should have been the holly tree, but it is not. It is some carefully shaped evergreen, curled and curlicued. I cannot hear the river. I walk over to her, but it’s not a short walk anymore. The gravel driveway scrolls beneath my feet like a treadmill. Mum gets no closer. The gardeners and maids continue their work as though I do not exist.
And then, in one of those strange, jet-dream flickers of change, I am sitting on the lawn in front of Mum, and the poodle-tree is once again the old holly bush with its dark green, thickshiny leaves and red berries clustered in a way so pretty and Christmassy — although the sun is shining and roses bloom.
I tell my mother about the man on the ride-on mower, and she says, “Oh I know how he feels, I’m all boiling and roiling with hunger.” But she doesn’t use the word hunger. No. She is young and pale and pretty against the green and red holly tree, and I float away from her, away from the 200-year-old house that is long gone now into the river, nothing to mark it but the willow tree we planted. The holly bush is gone; my mother is gone; the front door lets in no light. My room is rubble. I wake.
