Doughnut Garden

Cheerios. They look like tiny donuts to stupid people. (Urban Dictionary)
"What’s wrong with you?” the little girl asked when she saw what I had done. She hadn’t really meant it as a question, and because I wasn’t too sure myself, I didn’t answer. There’s nothing like looking stupid in front of a kid, so I patted her head in a vague, grownup sort of way and assured her it was for her own good. This was before the police cruiser in my driveway drove off, before she stopped wailing long enough for her parents to take her home. “What did you do to her?” the other neighbors kept asking, wondering what kind of person could make a five year old cry like that, but I told them that it had only been an accident. That I had not seen Taylor playing in the field earlier that day. That I had merely been gathering some goldenrods when I accidentally uprooted her garden. As I recited these lies, I picked at the dirt that had collected under my nails and tried to remember that I had saved her.

Perhaps one of the reasons the Bloxbys were so certain I was guilty of some unspeakable crime was that they had just moved to Marlott Drive three weeks ago. I’ve lived on this street for thirty-four years—my mother sold the old house on Blake Street after dad left—so most people here know me. But to the Bloxbys, I was a stranger with mismatched slippers and the intensity of one too accustomed to watching, who lived by herself in a four-bedroom house and, for all they knew, most likely spied on unsuspecting neighbors from behind one-way windows.

Every afternoon after school, before her father called her in for dinner, Taylor entered the goldenrod field.

The houses on Marlott Drive all face a field of goldenrods that stretches from one end of the street to the other. A goldenrod on its own is pretty unremarkable, but take a couple thousand and spread them until they are all the eye can see, and the scene is breathtaking.

The goldenrods that grow in one corner of the field are different from the others. Their stems are not thin and straight, but swollen at the nape with perfectly spherical growths, bowed as though pregnant. Once, I cut one of the swellings open on my kitchen floor. Beneath the layers of crusty, fibrous shell, I discovered a tiny maggot, a baby goldenrod gall fly, nestled within the silky white lining of the stem.

And though I know the maggot eats the plant from inside and eventually emerges with the plant's death, I sometimes like to think that the maggot is not gnawing away, but merely dreaming, safely unborn in its womb.

I’ve studied goldenrod gall flies for twenty years, so it’s stupid of me to think this way. Then again, there is always a tension between knowing and dreaming—the way things are, and the way things could be. It's like being in one of those spinning cups in Disneyland--as long as you keep spinning, all the world's a blur, and for all you know, the things you want to see really could be there. But once the cup stops spinning, everything comes into painful focus. If being stupid means twirling in the cup a little longer, if being stupid means not having to face the gap between knowing and dreaming, then I don’t mind.

Such thoughts did not immediately occur to me when I stumbled upon Taylor Bloxby that afternoon. I had been my way to take notes on the flies, which were beginning to emerge with the end of summer, when I caught sight of a small figure in one corner, the tall stems bowed over her like a green womb edged with yellow. She wore a plain blue Wendy dress already soiled at the knees, her dark hair had begun falling out of its ponytail, and she was digging with a intensity that indicated she was not there for play, but had been charged with some sort of mission that needed to be executed with the deliberation of an architect planning the hanging gardens of Babylon. Was it coincidence that she had chosen the spot where the goldenrods bowed? As she dug, she kept her other hand closed tightly over something. She abruptly stopped and looked up, my presence having disrupted her sacred work.  

“What are those?” I asked.

"Seeds," she said.

A handful of Cheerios in a Ziploc bag.

Before it occurred to me to rescue her, I envied her.

The week before dad left the house for good, a rumor began circulating among the kids in the neighborhood about Donny Hamelin, a kid who had lived in the second to last house on our street and had once grown a doughnut tree in his backyard. The tree had sprung from a couple of Honey Nut Cheerios, and bore glazed doughnuts with sprinkles until his parents cut it down. Though I had already bought some cabbage seeds for my science project, I decided that there were already enough vegetables in the world,  and so the week before dad left, I planted doughnut seeds in my mother’s vegetable garden. While there was no way of knowing whether the doughnuts that grew from plain Cheerios would have sprinkles, I hoped that at the very least, they would be glazed. I did not think to ask anyone. By that time, dad had stopped coming home every night, and my mother had stopped getting up in the mornings. As my mother slept, I dropped golden O's into the dark, crumbly earth, occasionally licking the sweetness from my fingers. The thought of a doughnut garden kept other thoughts at bay, and I told myself that if the doughnuts grew, there was still a chance.

I told myself there was still a chance when they forgot I was there and started screaming things. Close the door, my dad would say when he noticed me. Close the door.

When we got home from Grandma's that Saturday, his car was gone. The cabinet in the master bedroom no longer held his crumpled handkerchiefs and gray-white socks. The photograph of me in my sun hat at the local farmer's market had vanished from the telephone stand, and his favorite armchair no longer sagged against the living room wall. My mother had despised that chair because it clashed with everything else in the house, and he had loved it precisely for that reason. When I saw that the armchair was gone, I went out into the backyard and tore up the garden with a shovel. I moved systematically from row to row, crushing gourds and cabbages as my mother watched from the kitchen window.

But when I saw the Cheerios that lay exposed in the overturned earth, I sensed there was more at stake. I lay down the shovel and began picking my crop out of the carnage, searching from one end of the garden to the other six or seven times, crawling through vegetable innards and casting aside fistfuls of dirt until the smell of death and fertilizer clung to my fingers, until I had retrieved every single one. I cradled the still dormant doughnut seeds in my hand and breathed on them the way I breathed on dead batteries, willing them to work. 

The screen door creaked. I felt my mother kneel beside me. "These won't grow, honey," she whispered, closing her hands around mine, and I cried then, as we rocked back and forth in the cabbage leaves, for the things that could not be grown, and for the things that could not be saved. 


She would never know that her garden had been doomed from the start, because I destroyed it for her.

There was no need to continue flinging dirt after Taylor had discovered me, but it was hard to stop. There was something perversely satisfying about tearing up that garden, something empowering about saving someone, even against their own will, and I didn’t stop clawing at the earth until she began to shriek and her parents came running, yelling “We’ve called the police! We’ve called the police!” I was saving her, I wanted to tell them. It was then that I realized that the world I was trying to protect was one I was intruding on, and the thought that I no longer belonged bothered me. But there was nothing I could do. I had done for her what no one had done for me, and yet it was funny to realize that I had been as helpless as her all along.

A few days ago, on a whim, I looked up doughnut seeds online. I didn’t find much: an entry on Urban Dictionary and an ad. Some guy was trying to sell tiny packets of Cheerios, two dollars per pack. I ordered a couple of packets, but I don’t intend to start another garden. Instead, I keep the seeds on my shelf, beside two halves of a goldenrod gall. At times, I find myself wondering how his business is going, and wishing him well—hope doesn’t sell nowadays.

Long after the police cruiser in my driveway had driven off, after she had stopped wailing long enough for her parents to bundle her up and bring her home, after the pace of life had resumed and there was no time for regret, I finished collecting all the Cheerios that had been scattered throughout the field. I imagined as I knelt beneath the goldenrods, alone in a green womb, dreaming flies suspended overhead, that I had saved her. I imagined that her hands cradled the seeds, and that my hands were closed around hers, and I imagined rocking her back and forth amidst the ruins of our garden.

"What's wrong with you?"

I say the only answer I can think of. Not so much an answer, I suppose, as a prayer.

"You’ll never have to know."