Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Argument Garden
In a shared house, the plants grow strongest the morning after an argument, tallest of all after the one that mentioned moving out.
- dated: "July, August"
- narrator: "Delia Ross, lodger"
Tuesday 14th. A row tonight, the kitchen kind, low and long, about milk and about whose week it is to clean the drain. Not even a real row. When it was over I washed my cup in the scullery and Cora went up first and the house ticked like a house going to sleep, and I thought, as I always think after one of those, what a small thing a household is, that it can spend so much and carry so little.
Wednesday. I noticed the basil first, on the sill over the sink. It stands higher than the blue cup that leans on it for a mark, and it has leaned on that cup since March, and in my whole time here it has never once stood above it. Something at the top has come on overnight. I did not touch it. I have not touched anything in the garden since June.
Thursday 16th. I asked Cora whether she had fed anything, wanting it not to be what I already thought, and she said my garden, my debt, which rowed us again, low and long, about whose debt, and it was a colder row than the first because it had money in it. This morning the beans along the back fence stand a hand's width over the fence wire. On the fourth or fifth of the month they were quitting the season early. I said nothing. Cora saw them at the back door and said nothing either, and not-saying has a sound of its own, and I heard it.
Saturday. Out in the yard with the watering can at last, because it seemed cowardly not to, and counting. The row with the new leaf at the tip of every stalk — that is the drain row, the milk row, Tuesday's. The row gone over the wire — that is Thursday's, the money row. And in the bed under the kitchen window, where I put out decades-old seed because the packet said it would keep, the tallest plant in the yard is standing where nothing was planted. Pulling it up goes against it, whatever it is, so I have staked it, quietly, before Cora is up.
Tuesday 21st. She mentioned moving out. Not an argument. Worse than an argument — she mentioned it in her bright voice over the dishes, the way people drop a stone into a well they will not be leaning over again.
This morning I could not see the back fence. I could see a place where the light does not come into the yard, and the leaves have a shine, and the drain pipe has gone under along the kitchen wall. The sweet peas came in over the door and I do not remember sowing them at that height. The tomatoes, the only sane crop we have, are the only thing unchanged. It is not a garden any more. It is the house being said again, out there, in whatever speech it has, and I notice everything it says gets said by morning, and never, all the years I have gardened, by night.
I gardened at old Quarter Street for eleven years and nothing I ever planted came up like this. What it would mean, that our worst nights are the only things that grow here, I leave to whoever reads this. I do not water now. What would be the sense. Thursday she is seeing about a room on her sister's side of town, and I am not rowing her out of it, because I have seen what she would be rowed into.