Cherry and Jane in the Garden of Eden
I answered an ad for a summer housesitting job and drove two hours into the hills to get there. I drove recklessly because I was the only one on the road. When the Spanish style villa columned against the sky, I imagined a summer spent drinking rosé on the porch, watching crows shuffle in the pink dusk, the crickets popcorning in the underbrush. I’d need to invent a ghost or a serial killer so I wouldn’t get lonely. I’d need to pretend I wasn’t alone to keep myself in check, sane, watched.
When I got there, the woman I’d spoken to on the phone, Simone, told me they’d decided to stay for the summer.
“I’m sorry,” she lied, “did you not get my call?” She had Renaissance hair, dark and unruly, silver dime eyes, a nose with a bump you could only see from one side.
“My phone died,” I lied, so she’d think she’d successfully played me, though it hadn’t, and she hadn’t. I’d tricked enough people to know when I was being tricked, but figured she couldn’t trick me if I knew she was trying to trick me, if I tricked her into thinking she’d tricked me successfully. A roundabout tricking. I’d lied to get the job in the first place, told her over the phone that I was an artist, that I’d use the time to work, that I’d been looking to reconnect with my practice.
“What kind of work do you do?” she’d asked.
“Oh, watercolour mostly.”
My car was almost out of gas, my bank account almost out of money—I couldn’t afford to get myself home and the purpose of this had been escape more than anything—so when she asked if I’d want to stay and watch the children, I said yes.
Driving there, I’d imagined a lush summer where I’d sleep naked in the master bedroom because I could, raid the medicine cabinet because I could, overflow the bathtub because I could, because there’d be no one to stop me. Why else take a job without a background check, an interview, a resume, if not to give a fake name, drink the ’93 Cabernet straight from the bottle, cash the cheque before they realized I’d pilfered the light bulbs from the chandelier? Instead, Simone showed me to a bedroom with a minimal double bed and an ornate vanity. North-facing and on the ground floor, the bay window never let in any light but overlooked a brick courtyard that from what I could gather had no entrance.
Their colours were so rich, like jujubes. Outside, the grounds were overwhelmingly green. A colour you could smell. A perfume of oversaturation.
I’d never been in a house like this, let alone lived in one. It was like a show home or a movie set. Smelling like particle board but shiny from all angles and with more bedrooms than the four of us could fill. Slippery hardwood floors as glossy as amber, soapstone counters, high ceilings so airy they gave me agoraphobia, but with the remnants of an old character piece: faded paisley wallpaper, an ornate banister, a brick fireplace, stained glass windows in the bathrooms and over the mantel. Their colours were so rich, like jujubes. Outside, the grounds were overwhelmingly green. A colour you could smell. A perfume of over-saturation. The house was nestled between overripe vineyards, blushing with drunkenness.
“You have any childcare experience?” she asked, while she toured me around the property.
“I have young cousins,” I lied. I’d never looked trustworthy. A face my childhood classmates had called rat-like, eyes too dark for my pallid skin, hair red as a cinnamon heart. This had made me a very good liar. I’d had to surpass the fact that naturally, no one trusted me.
“They’re well-behaved? Your cousins?” She straightened a row of vases on the windowsill.
“Not particularly. They’re kids. But what do you expect?” I challenged her back.
“The girls can be a little…rambunctious.” Simone turned to me.
“Well, they’re kids. What do you expect?” I winked a smile at her.
She shifted her weight, sized me up in a silent, carnivorous way. Like a parole officer facing a criminal claiming to be reformed. I’d dressed as proper as I could, a grey button-up from when I’d been a waitress, a long navy skirt that tied at the front, made me look unshapely, humble, ready to serve. Tennis shoes, no makeup.
She opened the door and I followed her outside before she continued, “They get bored easily.” She looked over at me as I followed her. “That can make them unpredictable. How are you with unpredictable?”
“Not intimidated.”
“The secret is to keep them busy. If they’re not busy, they get bored, they fight each other. We’ve got five acres, and all of it is theirs, so all of it is yours.” She led me past the driveway, where the sunlight broke so harshly off the car hoods that I had to shelter my eyes. “My recommendation would be to let them do whatever they want.”
“What if they want to get in trouble?”
“You know why I need you here? I’m quite busy. I’ll be in my studio during the day, working, and if I give you a list of rules for them to follow, they’re going to break them, and then you’re going to come and find me, and interrupt me, and you’ll apologize, and so it’s easier for me if there simply are no rules. They break something, then clean it up. I don’t need to know about it.” She led me along a row of hedges as tall as the house. They rose from the manicured lawn like castle turrets. The hedges stretched across the property, beyond them vineyards crested up the hillside. We stopped in front of a wooden gate. “I just have to ask that you don’t go in the garden. The girls aren’t allowed in. It’s the only rule they have to follow.”
“It must be very a important rule then.”
“That’s why I make it the only one.”
When she introduced me to the girls, they stood silent and devilish, smiling like feral little geniuses, their knees scraped up under their cotton shifts, their hair in fuzzy plaits. Their expressions—sharp-toothed, chins tucked in—disturbed me. They stared at me without blinking while Simone introduced them. Jane. Cherry. When she left me with them, they asked my name.
“Pearl,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
I couldn’t tell the girls apart, didn’t know which was older or younger or by how much. They were the same height, but not exactly twin-like. Cherry’s nose was sharper, her lips a chapped bowtie. Jane had a widow’s peak, her right eye green and her left brown in one quadrant. Both were strawberry blonde, fidgety, told the same stories at the same time, voices overlapping, both always in white dresses, clean as gauze in the morning and grass stained by the end of the day. When I asked who was older they shrugged. When I asked if they were twins they shrugged. They made sideways eye contact like they knew something dangerous that I did not.
I decided early on that I would just lie to them about everything.
I didn’t know how to cook, but told them I’d been a personal chef on a billionaire’s private yacht and served them two sunshine eggs with neatly filleted strawberries ringing the plate. “That’s right, that’s what culinary school teaches you,” I said, while I flaked on the salt.
I’d failed grade nine biology, but told them I’d gone to med school and could do neurosurgery with my eyes closed. Jane asked me what neurosurgery was while I glugged antiseptic over a scrape on her knee. “You know Frankenstein?” I said, and they both nodded. “How part of his brain is gone? Someone sliced it out. Well, that’s neurosurgery.”
I told them I was a certified pastor, had witnessed several miracles including but not limited to my aunt awakening from a 17-year coma and a swarm of monarch butterflies lifting me off the ground ...
I’d never gone to church, but Simone had left a list of 73 possible ways to entertain the girls. Number seven was to read them the Bible all the way through. I told them I was a certified pastor, had witnessed several miracles including but not limited to my aunt awakening from a 17-year coma and a swarm of monarch butterflies lifting me off the ground, and that I’d once gone all the way to Bethlehem and it was all very holy so they better be quiet and listen up. I got through three pages before they started playing a clapping game that turned into Cherry tackling Jane until she cried or maybe it was Jane tackling Cherry until she cried. I couldn’t tell, certainly not now when I try to recall.
“Here, how about we paint our faces?” I shut the book. Dust puffed into my eyes.
I brought out a gold eyeliner that I saved for special occasions—one-night stands, a childhood friend’s wedding where I wanted to show up the bride. I’d packed it thinking Simone wouldn’t be here so I might wear her clothes, wing the gold over my eyes like a pair of Grecian spears, pretend my eyes were hazel instead of brown, pretend I was a movie star, pretend I was recently divorced and escaping a scandal, get high and pretend it was my natural brain chemistry. Instead, I found myself gliding the gold onto Cherry’s cheek. “A star for Cherry,” I said, the pencil melting across her skin. “And a flower for Jane.”
I had previously considered myself an expert in pretending to work, but the girls required constant supervision. My best tactic had been to feign at counting something while holding a clipboard pressed into my side and tapping a pen in the air like I was casting a spell. If anyone walked by, I’d pretend to make a note and walk away. The secret to not doing anything was to pretend you were always on your way to doing something else. But if I looked away for one moment, Cherry would tie Jane’s hair to the radiator or Jane would drop Cherry’s flip-flops in the fountain. If I scolded them, they’d just give me an impish smile and chorus their apology. I couldn’t pretend to count anything here. I couldn’t always be on my way somewhere else here.
Although they weren’t allowed in, the girls spent hours chasing each other around the garden. I’d catch them trying to push their hands through the bushes. They’d get an arm in up to the shoulder and I’d have to drag them out. Their skin would be irritated and scratched from the branches.
“Can we go in?” One of them said. Let’s say, it was Cherry. (Could have been Jane.)
“Please please please,” the other would chant. We’ll say, Jane. (Could have been Cherry.) I drew the symbols onto their cheeks each morning, but even these have shuffled and blurred in recollection.
I couldn’t pretend to count anything here. I couldn’t always be on my way somewhere else here.
“No,” I’d say, avoiding eye contact with the wrought iron on the gate. Even in my peripheral, it shimmered like a portal. A fairy tale on the other side, a paradise or a curse. Of course, the temptation didn’t matter. The gate was always locked.
“Why not?” Cherry or Jane would say.
“Because your mother said so.”
“But why,” Cherry or Jane would say.
“I don’t know. She just said so.”
“You want to see it too,” Cherry or Jane would say.
“We know you want to see it,” the other would say.
“Everyone wants to look inside. It’s not just you. You can admit it.”
“I don’t. It’s a garden. I’ve seen gardens before. Gardens are boring. We’re not going inside. We’re going in the house. You’re getting a sunburn.”
“No I’m not,” Cherry or Jane would say, trailing behind me.
The whole summer blurred together like I lived it through a looking glass, like it was someone else’s life. Strangely vivid, but my body didn’t feel like my body. I don’t remember what happened before what. Endless green, the tiles either too cold or too hot under my feet. The air was sweaty and the sun so bright the sundial in the courtyard wasn’t accurate. Everyone thought my name was Pearl even though it wasn’t. Simone saw me sneak pills from her medicine cabinet and said nothing. I kept doing it because the wrongness itself was a high. Not long after my arrival, she found me vomiting three mornings in a row and said nothing. I’d lost track of how long I’d been there and couldn’t do the math to tell you who the father was. Conception had happened in some other life, in a city that didn’t feel real anymore, another body that wasn’t mine anymore. I told myself I was just dizzy from the heat. I stole more pills and chewed them because the twitch in my wrists made me, and I figured the two problems would eventually cancel each other out in some bloody sort of way. Simone, she’d still say nothing. We both knew so little about each other. I didn’t know what she did for work, only that she had a studio, and that could mean anything. She didn’t even know my real name.
One day the girls schemed to scale up the drain pipes so they could peek over the hedges, and I looked away because I had to throw up in the guest bathroom. When I returned, Jane had boosted Cherry up to grab a bolt in the pipe and she made a reach for the lowest tier of roofing tile. Her dress swished like a jellyfish. She caught her forearm on the gutter and was about to haul herself up when the tile she’d grabbed onto slipped free and she fell, before I had the chance to yell at her to climb down.
I bandaged her knee, torn up from landing in the gravel. “How am I supposed to explain this to your mother?”
“I’ll say Jane pushed me.”
When she said that, Jane reached over and tugged one of her pigtails and the girls started swatting at each other’s faces. I’d gotten used to this, and had to drag Jane away while they kicked at each other’s shins. It was always easier to drag Jane away. She was the gentler of the two, pretending to be violent and bratty to try and match her sister’s aggression. Once I realized this, it became easier to tell them apart. I believe that Jane had been the easier baby, that the scrappiness in her was learned, that she’d adapted so as to not let her sister see her weakness. I felt for her.
I wrangled them into the shade under a pear tree by giving them lemonade frozen into popsicles that would melt instantly in the sun. They both leaned in with their elbows on their knees, their dresses torn up, both toothy and smiling. Cherry took large bites out of the ice. Jane complained of a brain freeze and it melted down her wrist.
“Should we play a game?” I suggested. “Hide and seek. Or cat’s cradle. I’ll teach you how.”
“We have a game,” Cherry said.
“It’s our favourite game,” Jane said. “It’s called garden guess.”
“Well, that’s what we call it,” Cherry corrected. “You make up a story of what’s inside the garden.”
“And the best story wins.”
“How do you decide which story is the best?” I said.
“It’s just obvious,” Cherry said. “Because it’s the best story.”
“I don’t understand the point of this game.” I tied two blades of grass together and held them up. “We can make bracelets out of this. I’ll show you.”
“I’ll go first,” Cherry announced. “In the garden, I think there’s a—you have to start by saying that, by the way. In the garden, I think there’s a circus. With elephants that can do tricks and a lady who eats fire.”
“Then why can’t you hear it?” Jane said.
“This is part of the game,” Cherry said. “You try to make other people’s stories not make sense. You can’t hear it because the hedges are soundproof, duh. The circus only appears at night, they cast a big circus tent inside so no one sees the lights, but inside there are fireflies and acrobats and it’s lit with a disco ball. There’s a clown on a unicycle who juggles bird eggs and they hatch in the air and fly away and lots of other weird stuff like that. And there are lots of circus freaks, like a wolf girl who bites people’s fingers off and maybe a man with no face.”
“If it’s a circus, why does no one visit it?” Jane said.
“Because they treat the freaks really badly. People don’t go because it’s against their religion.”
“My turn,” Jane said. She sat up and tried to brush away the shards of glass stuck to her forearm. “In the garden, I think there’s a crypt. It’s where they bury everyone from our family and anyone who has ever lived here. It’s dusty and full of bats.”
“Why can’t we go in if it’s just a crypt?” Cherry challenged.
“Because there are ghosts, and they’ll try to possess us or haunt us because they want to live again. They’re not mean ghosts, or anything, they’re just bored from being stuck in there. Also there are gargoyles that come to life guarding every tomb.”
“Why would you need to guard tombs?”
“Grave-robbers. They want to sell your bones.”
Cherry flicked her chin from Jane to me. “Pearl? What do you think?”
I plumed through the grass, needing a moment to think. “Well, in the garden, I think there’s just a garden. With some benches under a tree, and orchids, and a little pond.”
“Why do you think that?” Cherry said.
“Because it’s a garden. What else would be there?”
They looked at each other and giggled.
“You win,” Jane said. The flower on her cheek shone and the light speared into my eyes.
“Why did I win? Mine was so boring.”
“Because, yours is most likely to be true.” They both glared at me like wolflings deciding whether or not to strike.
I always wore a gold locket with no photo inside. I’d found it gurgling in a church bathroom sink at my uncle’s funeral. Years ago, I was 18. I’d thumbed it dry and clicked it open. The photo clipping was too water-logged to decipher, so I smudged it out, left it to dissolve in the drain, and tucked the necklace into my bra. I started wearing it, cold and ornate, because people would see it and think I had someone to miss. A lover in the army. A late grandfather who’d taught me how to whittle. Sometimes, I used it to sneak an oxy into work, so my eight hours on cash at a hardware store would be twinkly and vague. Other times, I used it to sneak one out of someone’s cabinet.
When the girls asked who was inside, I debated between a dead husband and a dead mother. I went with mother because it would impact them more. They were at the age where boys had cooties, and wouldn’t feel sympathy for my fake dead husband.
“Can we see?” They reached for the locket.
I pivoted my shoulders and clutched it in my hand. “No, I said. “I can’t even look at it. I can’t even open it. It’ll make me cry too much. I’ll cry for days.”
“I’d like to see that,” Cherry said.
“Just open it to face us,” Jane suggested.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m still grieving.”
I could smell the metallic of the locket, its weight on my breastbone. I clicked it open. Its edge caught the moonlight like a silver spoon.
That night, unable to sleep because of the katydids chirring out my window and stagnant heat, I lay on top of the sheets with the locket a spot of cold on my throat. I could taste its metallic bite in the humidity. Sweat pooled at my hairline. The room too hot to wear clothes, but I felt too viscous and exhausted to touch myself even though I missed skin. Skin that wasn’t mine. Missed being held down. Missed men, to my surprise—not their talking or thinking or looking, but their touching, breathing. Once I’d learned the layout of the house, some nights I woke up before sunrise half-sleepwalked to one of the empty bedrooms, so three hours later I could have the illusion of waking up dazed in a stranger’s bed, which I suppose, was nearly true.
I could smell the metallic of the locket, its weight on my breastbone. I clicked it open. Its edge caught the moonlight like a silver spoon. There was nothing inside. My mother had been dead four years. Cancer. I hadn’t been thinking of her when I’d lied to the girls. Made up some other mother, killed her off in some other way, imagined a photo inside that had never been taken.
I copied them and started wearing summer dresses so there would be no way to know whether or not my clothes were getting too tight around the belly. They had a matching set of fake pearl necklaces and snapped them, divvied the beads into thirds, and strung them around the gold Figaro-chain choker I’d swiped when I used to work coat check at a night club so all three of us could match. It looked like a fish spine. The plastic irritated the skin of my throat, the beads so tight around my jugular it was sometimes hard to breathe. Maybe it was just because the air was so thick. I still wore it, because they wanted me to. I let them braid my hair in twin Dutch plaits the way they braided each other’s, because one would take each side and they’d be quiet for ten minutes. If my hair had been their cobweb blonde instead of its cardinal too-red, I might have become one of them. They pinned their chin-length bangs back with tortoiseshell barrettes and started snapping one onto each of my temples too. By the time July swelled through the valley, I answered to the name Pearl without needing to remind myself it was my name here.
Each morning, we walked in a line—Cherry first, then Jane, and finally me—around the perimeter of the garden in search of a peephole. Sometimes a bee hovered over the top of the hedge and drifted towards us like pollen. Sometimes, if a patch of hedge had gone thin, the girls would burrow into it and try to push a hand through, but they could never get to the other side. I’d dig in too, tearing my hands up. I had longer arms, but even I couldn’t reach. The next day, the patch would be lush as if there had never been a flaw there.
After we’d walked the garden perimeter for the day, I lay in the grass under the pear tree, the three of us with our heads in the centre of the star, our hair tangling together. A jet of light sieved through the leaves and I sheltered my eyes with my fingers.
“What does your mom do?” I asked them. I only ever saw Simone at stray, always too-intimate moments. She was always catching me red-handed. Holding something I didn’t own, at an hour too early or too late to be walking through the halls.
“She’s a sculptor,” they chimed.
I didn’t ask more, just let the sun lull me to a point of almost sleep.
I made a point of stealing something every day. The cutlery was silver, and I could decide once I got home whether I wanted to sell it or keep it so I could feel rich while I ate mac n’ cheese on the couch at ten p.m. with a reality show sputtering against my face. It wasn’t wrong. I was broke, uneducated, mother-less, and hadn’t been to a invited family dinner in six years. They were like goddesses here. The stained-glass windows dappled the hardwood floors at sunset like the dining room was a cathedral. There were so many rooms in the house that I never went in all of them. I pushed the limit of what they might notice was missing: a tarnished hand mirror, a floral plate hung on the wall and the gold talon supporting it, a soy sauce dish with a halo of koi fish each tiny as my fingernails. Maybe hand-painted, I don’t know. If I ever felt bad about it, I stood with my loot in front of the bathroom mirror, rolled my shirt up, put one hand on my belly, and said, “See that, baby. This is for you.” It was the only time I ever thought about the child. Once I left the bathroom, the stolen jewellery was for me again. I stole a light bulb from the bedside lamp in one of the bedrooms. It was like a dead firefly in my palm, still warm.
One day, in the clot of August, we found a patch in the hedge thin enough to see light on the other side that had not been there the day before, burned into the green by the sun. The branches looked whittled as bones, and the girls reached in and started snapping through them. That day, I was feeling buzzed and groggy at the same time. I’d lost the distinction between dream and awake, between sober and high, between my body and the air around it, between this summer and the rest of my life. There could be no consequence for anything I’d done before arriving and no consequence beyond the gates for anything that happened inside. Everything was always dulled and everything was always sharpened—I was no one except for who I was there.
“We’re not supposed to go in,” I said. “Your mother said that we’re not allowed in.”
“Please,” Jane said.
“Please,” Cherry said, dragging the word out longer.
“Look,” Jane said, “it’s beautiful inside.”
I looked through the porthole in the hedge. Mandevilla flowers bloomed like red trumpets. The green was so thick it dazzled; so thick I could taste it. I made eye contact with a statue: a marble woman staring at me straight on, one hand on her hip and the other raised like a teapot. Vines cinched around her elbows. I leaned away only after realizing she was never going to blink. “Ten minutes,” I said. “That’s all.”
They squeezed through the scratch of branches first, and I followed. The hedge burred at my shoulders and I hatched out the other side exhausted, reddened. I shook the leaves out of my hair.
Even though I’d walked the perimeter of the garden every day for the past two months, it seemed larger than it was. The cobbled paths twisted into an overgrowth of plants. A birdbath nearly overflowed with rainwater, the surface a precarious membrane. Skeins of morning glory entangled a wire gazebo. Moulted cherry petals drifted by in the air, and our footsteps pressed through their cotton-candy snowfall.
When I looked up, the hedges were so high that the sky looked further than it normally did. It made me dizzy. A canal wove through the green like a coiled snake—oil slick, gummed with algae, crowned with footbridges, a green so dark it looked black.
Among all the overgrowth—the moss, the trellis oozing with moults of ivy—the garden was populated by marble statues. They were life-size, life-like. Lilac veined through the stone, like blue cheese. Some stood in pairs. A couple sat hand in hand on a bench, leaning in for a kiss as if caught by some Medusa type of mistletoe. A man sat crouched on the edge of the gutter. A boy notched his fingers through the lattice of a wire gazebo; a moonflower fettered his forearms. The girls ran ahead. I crossed over the bridge and met the eyes of a woman with her arm outstretched, ivy spilling out of her palm and through her fingers like water. She stood in the centre of the path. She held her other hand behind her back, and when I stepped around to see what she might hold, her hand was closed. I traced her fingernail—the carving so fine I felt the ridge of her cuticle.
Everything suffocating everything else. Root smothered by vine smothered by bloom. So much oxygen you hallucinate, then overdose.
I swung my head around, looking for the girls. They’d disappeared among the Japanese maples and wisterias with their paper lantern flowers. All of the trees were twined with hyacinths and honeysuckles, the same ones that grew up the statues’ ankles. Everything suffocating everything else. Root smothered by vine smothered by bloom. So much oxygen you hallucinate, then overdose.
The air was so perfumed it made me feel drowsy and out of place, like I’d gotten too drunk at a banquet and had to pretend to be sober before I undressed or got up on the table or pulled one of the waitstaff into a closet or had opinions. I stopped to scratch my finger down a birdcage; lichen clogged under my nail.
“Girls,” I called. The eyes of the statues were on the nape of my neck no matter where I turned. “Where are you?”
Their giggles bubbled through the hedges, and I found them at the edge of the canal. Lilies bobbed on the surface. Pennies winked under the viscous water.
Cherry crouched, perched on her tiptoes and leaned over her knees. Jane was the one to go in. She dunked her hands in, then lay on the ground so she could submerge one arm up to the shoulder
“Girls, seriously. Get out of there.”
“It’s free money, Pearl,” Cherry said.
Jane jumped in, or Cherry pushed her. Her dress billowed like a ghost and then she was under, her blond hair floating behind her. She surfaced with a handful of pennies, shiny as fish scales. A few overflowed her palm and pin-wheeled back to the bottom.
“Get out,” I snapped.
Rolling her eyes, Jane dumped the pennies into Cherry’s outstretched hands and hopped back up. She wrung out her dress; the algae had left a green smear down the frock. A red maple leaf arabesqued from above and landed in the canal. The water was so thick it didn’t move, like it had landed on a sheet of glass.
“It’s time to go,” I said.
“But Pearl!” they both whined. “We just got here.”
“I like it here,” Jane said.
“Yeah. Our house is boring. I’m so bored of our house.”
“I said ten minutes,” I said. “We can come back tomorrow.”
They stood and started to gather the pennies in the skirts of their dresses. I again told them we had to leave, but they’d made a game of flicking the pennies into the basins of each other’s skirts. I told them we had to leave again, but they ignored me. For the first time in my life, the feeling of wrongness scuttling over my skin wasn’t alluring, wasn’t calling for me to go further.
I watched them toss pennies back and forth and eventually said, “Do you think I’d be a good mother?” I don’t know why. I’d meant to tell them we had to leave again, but said this instead. I think I imagined a minnow-like flutter in the fishbowl of my belly.
They looked at each other and chittered like a couple birds, in girlish chirps I couldn’t comprehend, then looked back at me in consensus. “Not really,” Cherry said, tilting her head to the side.
“Yeah, not really,” Jane said.
The girls went back to their game, their dresses bone-white in the shock of green. They stood with their loot of pennies, still copper and glimmering, as if waiting in offering, like figureheads guarding a fountain. The symbols I’d drawn on their cheeks were still golden—golden as filigree.
