Landscaping

by Hila Ratzabi

Instead of cleaning the house, Noya decided to play a game with herself. Instead of cleaning, she would just look at everything. It was her day off. A rare Friday where she didn’t have to be at work and both kids were in school. She would have meditated but instead sat on the living room sofa and read a book. She started to doze, but the story she was reading was so alive it woke her up. Nothing much had happened in the story, but the pages were bathed in light, the gardens bristling, the people strange, fleshy, their skin tingling with life. Noya blinked her eyes and looked around the living room as though she’d landed on another planet.

She looked first at the light gray side table. She willed herself to sit absolutely still, but her right hand twitched with a desire to reach out and assess each piece of mail, paper, magazine, folder. The electric bill had been sitting there probably for weeks. Had she paid it already? She probably had paid it online, but there was a chance this one was for earlier charges she’d forgotten about, she wasn’t sure. Why had she let it sit there for so long? Why hadn’t she picked it up, opened up her account online, and checked to see if the bill had been paid? Both doing this task and not doing it exerted an equal and opposing force on her. Why not just do it? Checking online would mean the distinct probability that the password had been lost and would need to be changed, and then she’d have to save that new password in an online system she had finally signed onto that saved all her passwords. She used to choose the same password for everything until both her husband and Google Chrome warned her this was not a good idea. The electric bill seemed to glow from the surface of the table, to hover and unfold itself with a plea to be seen, read, acted upon. But there were so many other things to look at and willfully ignore. 

Noya turned her face to the coffee table where no one ever drank coffee. It had the vase on it that she’d bought when they first moved into the house. It was earthy, the color of soft reddish clay, perfectly round at the bottom and open on top, where eight white irises stood straight, all but one of them browning at the tips of their petals. The flowers had been there for who knows how long, but didn’t seem dead enough to discard. 

Noya’s eyes moved slowly from the vase to space around it. Strewn on the table were new books, a paper gift bag from a concert they’d taken the kids to last weekend, spilled open with craft activities, a greeting card, two stickers, an Expo whiteboard marker, and a triangular-shaped playing card featuring a deranged-looking grinning pineapple that had been separated from the game it was part of. 

Off to one corner was a Lego airplane hovering dangerously close to the table’s edge. A character was seated at the front of the plane, wearing a gold mask with blank slits for eyes and mouth, its little gray, C-shaped hands empty. Noya never took the time to examine these characters that played such a significant role in her sons’ imaginations: heroes and villians with serious missions, who exploded with cries of delight and fury as they bounded through a universe Noya felt unable to enter. Her sons’ world was one to be managed and organized, and if there was a doorway into it that could be breached she couldn’t locate it amidst the mountains of clutter that dotted the landscape. Clutter made her twitchy, and this exercise in looking, in not touching, in not sorting and organizing and putting things in their places, made Noya feel panicky, but a little something else, too. 

What was her life when she wasn’t fixing it? With no one home today, nothing on her to-do list that felt actually doable, the pieces of their lives seemed frozen all around her, like planets paused in orbit. The art projects, the pom poms, the one Paw Patrol slipper, the bouncy balls that weren’t supposed to be in the house, the saggy beanbag chairs, the child-safe scissors, the Legos, the fucking Legos everywhere, the tiger hand puppet, the Spiderman web-shooting contraption her mom had bought Emanuel as a consolation present on Gabriel’s birthday, the Batman car that was the prized birthday present, a size 4T t-shirt from Old Navy that no longer fit Gabriel crumpled on a chair (he was going through a growth spurt and ate everything in sight) … Noya should have been getting hives by now, thirty minutes into contemplating the chaos, but her usual panic at the sight of clutter was interrupted by a question: Who was this person, this entity, sitting at the center of it all, this knowing, observing mind, who had created this world, who had put the down payment on the house from the money her grandfather had left her? Who was this awkward, grappling, restless human specimen who could not decide between doing chores or doing nothing on her day off? 

Assessing the contents of the space provided no answer. But she couldn’t move, couldn’t get up off the sofa until some clue, she hoped, would materialize. Nothing. Just stuff to be sorted, recycled, tossed, or saved. Debris of lives unfolding, disappearing. The kids were in school right this minute, drawing pictures and scribbling letters while their cells divided and multiplied, bodies getting taller by the millimeter, eyes lighting up with recognition at the shapes of snaking S’s and solid H’s, sticky fingers counting and adding, nails to be clipped and cleaned, boogers to be endlessly wiped away. 

Noya was turning forty next month. It became clear to her, suddenly, that that part of her life was over: the brain developing part, the wide-eyed reaching for, the gasps of insight, the feeling of having caught onto something, that the ground under her feet would hold her up, not sink with each next step. That racing of childhood into adolescence into stumbling adulthood. Now everything was flat, heavy. Every step an affirmation of gravity, a slow pull toward the earth. 

Noya looked out the window to the backyard. Landscapers were placing pavers down where they’d designated a diamond-shaped patio, where just yesterday they had plowed through old concrete, weeds, and grass, poured fresh dirt, measured out the space. The landscape designer had been so precise with the plan, plotting the view from every angle, and Noya had submitted to her vision because it was logical, comforting, each plant serving a visual purpose, each shape and color intentional. The wild weeds and broken concrete of the old driveway they’d removed had been an eye sore. The new sod and patio were clean, untrampled upon. The weeds would return though, that much she could count on, in the same way the whirlwind of Legos always found their way back to the floor after she’d gathered them into their plastic container. 

Noya sank into the sofa like her body was shooting down roots. She’d made some kind of a life. Though it had happened so quickly, it seemed, it felt like the first time she’d looked around and surveyed the situation. Whatever questions remained would have to be wrangled from the dirt when the weeds lifted their small green heads, gasping for air, reaching desperately for the sun.