A Generous Crop of Tomatoes
By Katherine Gustafson
On the day Hugo learned that Kiki no longer loved him, the back garden wall collapsed in the mud. In the case of the wall: old, dry mortar, crumbling out from between the bricks. In Kiki’s case: too many times she had told him not to call her every single day. Not to speak about their potential children. Not to cling to her like a man in the sea with a life raft.
He noticed that the flowers crushed beneath the wall’s rubble had already been overpowered by grass and vines; he had not only let the wall fall down, but had also neglected to mow, water, weed. In truth: he had stopped taking care of his garden because he was so in love with Kiki, could think of nothing but her lips, her hair, her eyes.
His favorite Gerber daisies were ruined. They blinked their sorrowful eyes at him from their deathbeds, their bodies flattened under fallen bricks, their throats strangled by vicious weeds. Their gaze accused him of betrayal.
His grandfather had given him the seeds for those daisies before he died, in the dim front room of the townhouse in Boston, he and his grandfather alone, drinking cold mint tea out of slim, white glasses. The old man was tall, long-legged, his frame folding up like a piece of collapsible furniture when he sat in the too-small armchairs of the parlor. Hugo, twelve years old and always short for his age, always unable to reach things, sat in the opposite armchair with his feet dangling off the floor. For a long time, the only sounds were the low hum of Hugo’s mother’s and grandmother’s voices from the kitchen, the whispery tick of an ancient wall clock, the cat’s claws worrying the frayed scratching post. Hugo sipped his cool tea and watched his grandfather—slowly, slowly—open the drawer of the side table next to him and extract two tiny bags of colorful cloth. The warm light from the lamp on the table made the skin on his hand look like wax paper when it passed underneath, like a white fish swimming through a golden pool.
“These are for you,” his grandfather said, holding out the two little bags in the palm of his big hand. Hugo hoped the bags held candy, but could tell as soon as he picked them up that they did not. They were light, insubstantial, disappointing.
“What are they?” Hugo asked.
“Seeds, boy. For your garden.”
“But I don’t have a garden.”
“You will, of course. There is nothing more important than a garden.”
Hugo knew that his grandfather had spent hours of every evening for years in the small patch of dirt that clung to the front of the townhouse, his stooped form shielded from the city streets by box hedges that grew around the garden like walls. It was a lush tangle of colors and scents, a small island of vibrancy and calm bounded by concrete sidewalks and clanging trolley lines. Even then, with his grandfather inside ailing, unable to rise from his chair for long or stoop to do any work in his plot of land, Hugo and his mother had had to push aside sprays of blossoms on the way up the front walk.
His grandfather took a sip of tea while Hugo opened one of the bags and poured the seeds into his hand, thinking how strange it was that an overflowing patch like the one outside could arise from things that were so tiny, so weightless and unimpressive.
“Those are the daises,” his grandfather said. “Gerber daises. They are one of your essentials.”
“Why are they essential?”
“When you plant them you will know.”
“And the others?” Hugo shook the other bag, listening to the soft rasping of the seeds inside.
“Tomatoes.”
“Tomatoes?”
“Tomatoes.”
Hugo looked out the window at the mess his garden had become, at the place where the wall used to stand, and considered life without Kiki. It seemed an impossible requirement. He couldn’t bear the idea of not seeing her. In the morning, when her hair puffed like a frizz of cotton candy. At night, when she walked to the kitchen wearing slippers shaped like lions, her ankles emerging from their ferocious mouths.
She had breezed into his life on a moped. As a red light turned green and he coaxed his idling Toyota to life, she rolled up next to him and blew a kiss before speeding away. She was wearing a green top that day, he remembered, a shirt as green as grass.
He had caught sight of her again later that afternoon, a blur of green whizzing by. Nosing his car around the corners after her, he told himself he wasn’t following her, only seeking a change of scenery. But after a few blocks she looped back and pulled her bike up next to him.
“I can’t shake you, man. What’s going on?” She snapped the plexiglass visor of her motorcycle helmet upwards, pushed the blown wisps of brown hair out of her eyes.
“You blew me a kiss earlier. At the light.” It was all he could think to say, but he thought it was a good enough reason to follow someone through the streets.
“Yeah, I know. I recognize you. Sorry about that. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I didn’t.”
“You seem like the type who wouldn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Hugo was indignant, afraid of an insult.
“Well, look at you. You’ve got a car, a tie. A briefcase.” She gestured toward the passenger seat, at his design portfolio.
“So? What type does that make me?”
“The type who could use a kiss thrown at him.”
“Oh.”
“Well, see you.” And again she was off. It was the second time that day he had watched the backs of her green shoulders racing down a street ahead of him, feeling the delicious ache of longing running up and down his thighs.
There was nothing for it but to clean the garden up. Hugo eased the squeezing pain in his heart by heaving armloads of rubble, kicking at broken things with the toes of his boots. Bricks so old they crumbled at the edges. The squashed remains of flowers everywhere. He trampled on the surviving ones, angry that anything should get to avoid the pain he was feeling, the particular torture of losing his two loves in one day.
He felt a familiar comfort from a proximity to garden tools; the hard push of the wheelbarrow, the feel of canvas gloves on his hands. His throat choked with tears as he carted barrow-loads of rubble away from his ruined plot. On its own small scale, it was a disaster area, and he was the emergency response team.
His grandfather had died only days after he gave Hugo the seeds, and Hugo attended the funeral with one little bag in each pocket of his suit. He fingered them like worry beads during the service, their delicate shapes inexplicably warm through the cloth.
The man who had grown them had a long casket surrounded by a black ring of somber mourners with red faces. In the cold, dripping air of February, they threw handfuls of flowers onto him until his casket looked like his garden had been overturned on top of it. Hugo sprinkled a pinch of seeds from each little bag onto the overturned garden, picturing daisies and tomatoes springing out of the ground around the headstone.
All the grieving mourners cried, but Hugo’s tears seemed bottled up. He looked at the flat, white sky and thought about drinking mint tea in tall, white glasses. He looked down at the coarse, green grass crushed under his black shoes and thought about his grandfather kneeling in the garden in the floppy, green hat he always wore to keep the sun off his face. He looked at the gravediggers shoveling dirt onto the coffin and thought of his grandfather humming the melody of Peter from Peter and the Wolf, ladling spadefuls of soil over seeds he had just planted.
Hugo didn’t start his own garden until ten years after his grandfather had given him the seeds. He was working as a graphic designer in a small firm in Northampton after college, his evenings and weekends an endless patchwork of predictable TV shows, disappointing books, bad jokes shared with roommates over beers on the back porch. Sitting out there alone on a summer night with a Corona, he noticed that the backyard was bigger than he had thought, the distance to the brick wall in the back obscured by the high tangle of weeds. There was even an old, stone birdbath propped in the middle of this jungle, its top tilted at an angle, scabs of lichen clinging to its curving sides. Someone had once lured birds to this yard, had perhaps sat in this very spot watching them come and go. And maybe the yard had been cared for in other ways, too, by careful hands that tried to make things grow, by someone who loved a garden.
He had driven by the nursery on his way to the grocery store hundreds of times, but had never gone inside before. The crusty, old man behind the counter laughed in toothless mirth at the bumbling ignorance of Hugo’s questions about annuals versus perennials, the relative virtues of various shovels. He bought packets of seeds, bags of topsoil, gloves, spades, watering cans.
Hours every evening were devoted to the garden, Hugo on his hands and knees rummaging in dirt, poking seeds into holes, carefully following directions printed on the backs of the packets. There was a deep comfort at the sensation of cool soil coating his hands, and he watched in wonder as the blossoms he had planted emerged colorful and proud from the blank stretch of ground in the back yard. It was surprisingly exhilarating to nurture something small and lovely into existence.
In those first, inspiring weeks of gardening, he had planned the yard carefully, reserving a special place for the Gerber daisies his grandfather had given him. They would bloom in a ring around the restored birdbath, a place of honor for one of his garden’s “essentials.”
He was not sure why his grandfather loved daisies so much, but he did indeed remember that the patch of ground outside the Boston townhouse had been resplendent with them. When Hugo had visited as a young boy, his grandfather used to pretend a couple of the daisies were his eyes, hiding behind the flowers and peering at Hugo with bright petals for lashes.
In Hugo’s garden, gathered around the sturdy pedestal of the birdbath, they would keep an eye on the birds, watching them come and go.
Hugo had originally planned on adding a vegetable garden to one side of the flowers, but before he knew what had happened, the whole yard was blooming and there was nowhere left for tomatoes, corn, and cabbage. His grandfather’s tomato seeds were still in a drawer of his bureau, the little cloth bag decorated with red and orange spots a constant reminder that his garden was not yet complete. If the daisy was one essential, the tomato was the other, like two poles holding up a tent. Hugo still did not know why these were the two necessary items, but he did not question the wisdom of his grandfather, who had worked in the earth of one garden or another every day for forty years.
He had desperately wanted to plant the other essential but there was simply no more room. There was a grassy patch that held a picnic table and the household’s grill, but Hugo knew his housemates would never stand for it. They were bemused at his heroic efforts in turning their yard into a botanist’s paradise, but would not be so tolerant at having their barbeque spot commandeered.
Despite the lack of vegetables, his garden had been magnificent at the height of that first season, and the Northampton Garden Association took notice. They were amazed that he was a first-time gardener, shook their gray heads in disbelief at his handiwork. They wanted to include his backyard in the Association’s walking tour.
“Do you have a name for your garden?” asked the elderly ringleader, scribbling some notes on the clipboard she carried. “We’re going to need a name to list in the program.” She looked at him thoughtfully, her head cocked to one side, the creases on the sides of her mouth set like parentheses.
“Yes, in fact,” said Hugo. “It’s the Henry P. Stewart Memorial Garden.”
“A memorial, you say.”
“Yes, for my grandfather.”
“Very nice. Our tour-goers love that kind of thing.”
After their first meeting, Hugo saw Kiki everywhere in Northampton, zooming by with an aggravating buzz. She waved blithely as she sailed by the green awning of Thornes Market, where Hugo stood with shopping bags. Whipping past Hugo’s puttering car near the glass facade of the Northampton Hotel, she smiled a casual smile, as if it was not an amazing coincidence that she should pass him time and time again. The fifth time they met on the road, at the intersection of Trumbull Road and State Street, she pulled up next to him at a light.
“What’s your name then?” she asked, leaning her forearms on her handlebars.
“Hugo.”
Her smile was straight and white like a crescent moon. Her skin seemed to glow with a delicate brilliance. Hugo watched her in fascination, wondering where she was going, where she had come from.
“Well, since you ask, mine’s Kiki,” she said, and again was off while horns blasted behind him, the light blazing green.
Hugo longed for Kiki. He knew nothing about her except that she rode a mint-green bike and was excessively beautiful. He imagined a relationship with her. The way she would lay her head on his chest at night. The thrill of introducing her to a friend, saying off-handedly “here’s my girlfriend Kiki,” as if such amazing women were completely normal in the life of Hugo.
Cindy, his last girlfriend before he met Kiki, had been a tremulous and brittle basket of nerves, the type of woman whose skin is so pale and thin you can see the veins right through, running like a network of rivers across the face of a map. She used to say his name in a pestering drawl, the vowels stretching into a whine. He had finally told her that it wasn’t her, it was him, needing time alone and all that. But it was her. It was definitely and completely her.
Because he wanted a woman who would send currents of electricity over the surface of his skin.
And Kiki lit him up like a light bulb.
When he finally got up the courage to ask her out, he was surprised when she accepted. He dressed too nicely, was over-eager with the opening of doors, the pulling out of chairs. She was not that kind of girl, though he did not know this at first. He didn’t even know that Kiki’s type existed—hadn’t realized that this was precisely why she turned his blood hot in his veins.
After dinner he agreed to try out her mint-green moped, and she laughed as he skimmed along with his feet poised six inches from the ground, his knees drawn comically out to the sides. He had never ridden on anything like a motorcycle before; he didn’t even know how to ride a bike.
Eventually her powerful legs closed in around his hips and her arms encircled his, taking charge of the handlebars. As they moved with dizzying speed through the nighttime streets, he could feel the hot front of her pressing against his back and the sharp poke of her chin on his shoulder.
From the very beginning Hugo loved Kiki more than she could possibly love him back. He wasn’t, in fact, even sure she loved him as much as found him solid in a reassuring way. He was, perhaps, Kiki’s respite from her own life, a rest stop in which the trappings of everyday boredom would restore her will to reenter the world on her own frantic terms. Kiki’s jobs were: after school tutor; caretaker of rich old ladies with small, annoying dogs; coffee shop barista; bartender; and mountain bike repair person. Through a delicate balancing act, she maintained all at once.
Hugo’s habit of messing in his garden seemed to her like a pointless activity that bore fruits at a glacial pace. She sped through life at a hundred miles an hour while Hugo, on his hands and knees, patiently planted one small seed after another in the ground. When she came to talk to him while he was working in his garden, she didn’t pay sufficient attention to his carefully tended landscape, invariably crushing tender, hard-won treasures under her boots.
Now that she was gone, he could feel the creep of an indignant rage at the many times she had callously crushed a tulip under the heel of her shoe or rolled her eyes at the sight of him heading out the door with a spade in his hand. She had rarely commented on the fresh-cut flowers that adorned their table all summer or the bouquets he presented her, each blossom nurtured by his own hands. He was filled with a new-found, quivering outrage at the memory of her using the tip of his favorite spade, the one with the yellow handle, to repair some bungled piece of equipment on her moped, returning it to him dulled and grooved, the grip smeared with grease. Throwing him a glance that was meant, he supposed, to imply that he shouldn’t worry, her bike was okay, she had sped out of the yard in a dramatic spray of gravel, sending a particularly fast stone to strike him in the shin and bounce with a resounding clang on the favorite spade already discarded in the grass.
She had been, in reality, a garden-hater. And he was shocked now, wheeling his seventh barrow-load of bricks to the pile by the curb, that he could have dated such a person for so long. He, who had had fantasies of adorning her naked body with rose blossoms, of planting bluebells in the dip of her navel, of securing her to the bed sweetly with chains of daisies. In his wildest dreams they made love in the garden underneath a full moon, not caring, in their ecstasy, what flowers they were crushing. Afterwards he would brush the soil off her bare back with his own earthy hands.
He could see now that these had been foolish dreams, ridiculous delusions. She would probably prefer to make love on the back of a racing motorcycle than on a bed of rose petals. Falling to his hands and knees, he angrily yanked the few surviving blossoms up by their roots, smashing them to a tangled mass in his fists.
As his throat clenched and the tears left cool trails down his face, he sat back on his lonesome plot of dirt and looked at the shimmering plate of moon appearing in the late afternoon sky. The shadows grew long across his garden. He rocked back and forth and sobbed and told Kiki to go to hell as fast as her moped could take her.
His chest aching with longing, he gazed out through the hole in the wall where the bricks had collapsed, and saw that his ruined garden plot connected directly with the weed-choked back yard of the abandoned house next door. A yard the perfect size for a generous crop of tomatoes.
Katherine Gustafson, a full-time freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon, has published fiction in the Iowa Review, Passages North, Litro, Solander: The Magazine of the Historical Novel Society, The Argonaut, and Amsterdam Quarterly. Her articles and essays have appeared in Slate, Yes!, and Best Women’s Travel Writing, among others. She is the author of the nonfiction book, Change Comes to Dinner.