Weeds
Wendy Ruth Walker
There was a time when the mother stayed at home with the kids and the dog and got wrapped up in the yard. Pruning and tending, raking and mowing. It didn’t take long before she was reckoning with weeds. Crabgrass was the worst offender. It grew in patches and wasn’t uniform. Then there was goosegrass which was almost as bad as the crabgrass and stood out in the sod, a twisted pinwheel of green tendrils. She battled hairy bittercress because it was everywhere and grew higher in the sod, waving its spindly arms. Dandelions reminded her of unwieldy lawns with chain-linked fences, but she gave up on them after her son accused her of robbing his happiness.
“I need my wishes mom. Have a heart,” he said, blowing tiny domes of seed all over. She also left the bluegrass, the nimblewill, dead nettle, oxalis, and spurge. Certain herbage mowed down nicely, or fanned out discreetly with dark, delicate arms. The clover she left for her golden retriever, since he liked the taste.
They grew wild that summer, the children, their limbs lengthening and minds expanding. They wanted her for hugs, entertainment and snacks. Her son couldn’t resist pouncing on her lap, like an oversized cat, elbows pressing into her as if her body were a springboard, and her daughter liked to roar like a dragon, turn on her belly and log-roll over her. The retriever dug into the grass, forming craters of dirt, then went to her, stretching a muddy paw on her knee, desperate for belly rubs. The kids were debasing and commanding. They said things like, “God, Mom, everybody knows badgers are nocturnal,” or “We should be composting and you knew it all along.”
The dog was a competitive barker.
In October, she set out to mow the lawn, a finale of cuttings before the grass froze. The daughter was old enough to play on her own, but wanted to be near her while she mowed, and swing on the swing that hung from a crabapple tree in the front yard. The mother used an old electric mower and between the extension cord, the mower blade, and the kid, she was nervous, but her desire to cut down the last weeks of summer usurped the rest. So she pressed on.
Their front yard was tiny, two patches of green divided by a brick walkway. She began with the side opposite the swing, where she would have the most freedom to work in peace. The ground was bone dry. It was the perfect day for mowing, and as she pushed the machine and removed the young switchgrass and liriope that had self-seeded, a sense of joy came over her. The grass cut clean, nothing impeded her path. She fell into a natural rhythm, flipping the cord from one side of the mower to the other, completing a neat line. She worked quickly, feeling the cool air against her skin.
Her daughter began singing a Halloween song she’d learned at school; the song was meant to be sung in a round. She called out to the mother to join but there was no way this was going to happen, even though the mother knew the lyrics. Instead, she thought of hiking in the Himalayas, having just read a book about a man who left his family and traveled there, searching for a white leopard. She wondered what it would cost to do that, stopped the mower, and pushed it across the brick walk to the other patch of lawn, where her daughter swayed back and forth.
“Haave you Seen the Ghoost of Joe?” sang the daughter.
The son, who had been knocking a soccer ball against the side of the house, appeared from around the bend, and joined her, in the round, with a verse about white bones. The mother worked hard to ignore this, needing to focus on the blades and the line. She plugged the mower back in and pushed, asking the daughter to move away from the swing while she hit the grass under it, but the daughter swung higher, standing now, thrilled by the closeness of the blades and the song. She sang the refrain, a series of wails that slid up and down an octave, as loud as she could as to drown out her brother and the mower. The mother stopped mowing just when her son reeled down the brick path, in dramatic stages, saying: “Wouldn’t it be better with no skin on,” and the daughter leapt from the swing, landing in front of the mower, blade whirring, causing the mother to jerk the machine back. The kids lined up then, parade-style, for a finale skeleton dance directed at the mother, who screamed at them to go away. They scattered like seeds. The mother finished her work, then admired it from the street, edging uneven border grasses with an old pair of sewing scissors, before converging on the house.
Inside, she apologized and gave them screen time. It was late in the day so headphones were mandatory. Then she stepped onto the back porch feeling guilty about yelling. A catbird sang from the top of a crepe myrtle in the backyard, then let out a grating mew before darting off, landing on a branch of the neighbor’s silver maple. The mother watched this intently, her eyes squinted. She considered sneaking inside to get her binoculars, but concluded this was too risky. The bird might fly off, the kids might want snacks, the dog might bark at the door. So instead she imagined its path, perhaps from the old magnolia two blocks away, whose thick trunk jutted up and roots spread across a field, to the pines far off on the horizon, where the sun was smeared orange.
At some point, there was the roar of a plane which left one long, white gash across the dimmed sky. The jays made their final cry; a single cricket settled into its lone, reliable whirr. The air was cool and stagnant, and she stayed with it all until the son came out and asked if they could have ice cream sandwiches.
“We haven’t had dinner yet,” the mother said.
“I’m okay with that,” he answered.
But the mother knew better and said she’d make mac and cheese.
After dinner, when she had the kids finally settled in their beds, she planned to binge watch a reality show about a veterinarian in the Yukon. She gathered up chips and chocolate and fell into the sofa, but then the daughter sleepwalked into the kitchen, and the son, who had been secretly playing video games on his tablet, came down and asked if they could go zip-lining over the weekend. The mother shepherded all of this back upstairs. She tried to remember the last time she was able to herd them easily. They were like squirrels, these two, moving faster than she could blink, pocketing relics from the outside: rocks, worms, cicada shells, pebbles, feathers. These articles fell from them everywhere they went.
The daughter, again in bed, rolled on her side, arching her body, a movement the mother recognized from infancy. The mother pressed a blanket to the daughter’s shoulder and kissed her. This was when she loved her most, when her body breathed, but was calm enough to kindle awe. As she stepped into the hall the son called out. “Hey mom,” he whispered, “I’ve got a joke. Ready?”
“It’s bedtime.”
“Where is happiness made?”
The mother was going to say something glib but the son cut her off.
“At the satisfactory.”
She jogged downstairs, feeling his smile, and let the barking retriever in. The dog brought autumn in, and she was unsure of this, this harbinger of brisk, wood-burning nights. All the raking, the sheen of frost to come, the witch hazel overgrown, the icy steps and barren trees, the mismatched gloves and outgrown boots, the dog shit buried in snow drifts. But there would be some stillness too, right? A kind of slowdown that comes from dormancy? The dog stretched a paw to her knee and she leaned down, rubbing the cold fur around his ears. Then she fell back onto the couch so she could snack without sharing, even with the beast nuzzled right there, pressing against her, begging on a loop, for love.
Wendy Ruth Walker
Wendy Ruth Walker is currently finishing up her MFA in writing at Bennington College. A previous story, “Cabinet of Animals,” received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train's fall 2017 fiction contest. She was also accepted into the 2018 Tin House Summer Workshop. For over ten years, Walker was an acquisitions editor at Simon & Schuster in New York. She has been a contributing writer to Stop Smiling Magazine, The Jewish Book Council, and is presently an editorial consultant as well as the online editor for The Little Patuxent Review. She holds a BFA in Film from Syracuse University and lives in Annapolis, MD with her husband and daughter.