The windows of my apartment looked directly out onto her vegetable garden, so I couldn’t help but see her working. I watched her dig up the potatoes and clip off the stalks of the brussels sprouts and load wheelbarrows full of pumpkins and winter squash. She attacked the compost heaps, stabbing and turning the stuff in huge forkfuls, carrying buckets of the ready loam and raking it into the garden rows. She tore down bean and pea vines and hacked them to bits and mixed them into the compost along with the fallen tomatoes. Earlier, she had picked apples from the trees in the yard and blackberries from the cane at the edge of the property, and now she put up applesauce and preserves. When she was canning, the kitchen windows turned white from the steam.
She managed all this in bits of time between major farming chores.
Most of the time, her face wore a focused frown, sometimes interrupted by a wince of pain, as if some joint suddenly complained. There were moments, though, when I suspected she’d gone off into a meditative, contented state during a task, kneeling or gathering or raking, because her face smoothed and her movements lost their perpetually hurried gracelessness.
No such tranquil state was evident when we worked together. Clearly, she intended to punish me. For example, when the blackberries were ripe, I had picked a couple of big bucketfuls off my land and brought them down and left them in the kitchen for her. It was a not-so-oblique request for some token of reconciliation, but she had never thanked me or even mentioned it. I didn’t know if she’d even used them.
I got sick of being afraid of her, and given that I’d made every other mistake in life, I figured I had little to lose by making some more with Diz.
My first success occurred during a lunch break. I was munching on a sandwich and unavoidably observing as she pushed her wheelbarrow and carried other burdens back and forth through the garden gate. The gate had a flip-down peg designed to hold it open, but a stiffer-than-usual wind was blowing, today at just the right angle so that the peg dragged and the gate swung shut behind her every time she went through it. Often, the lift latch snapped shut again. This meant she had to put down her burden to open it again, then lift everything once more and push on through. Or she would back through while elbowing the latch down and banging her rump against the boards. This inefficiency surprised me—she should have given up on the peg and propped something heavy against the gate—but she was apparently so preoccupied, she didn’t notice the recurring bother.
After a while, I couldn’t bear watching. I put down my sandwich, went out, and opened the gate for her as she approached pushing a garden cart mounded with coiled watering hose.
She glared at me before coming through. “Go finish your lunch.”
She went on past, down around the house. When she came back, she was surprised to find me still there. “I don’t need your help, thank you. Find something useful to do.”
“I’m going to open the gate or help you carry stuff,” I told her.
“No, you’re not. What did I just say?”
I stayed in front of her, blocking her. “I can’t eat my lunch while watching another person work this hard. So I’m helping whether you like it or not.”
“Get out of my way.”
I crossed my arms and didn’t move. “Or what? You gonna fire me?”
Her face stuttered: started to take on an expression, failed to achieve it, tried another, lost that one, too. I knew I couldn’t be fired, because if they didn’t have a hand right now they’d never get the fall work done. And given that I had no other income to pay off my debt with, they’d never get back the money I owed. Diz was stuck with me.
I felt cranky and was determined to slug it out with her if need be. But her face stabilized into a small, unwilling smile. She nodded and said, as if in revelation, “Ah! You’re embracing your Inner Diz.”
I almost laughed. It was such a clever satire of my supposed New Age psychology, such good comedic timing. Her grin tightened. I opened the gate, and she pushed through. We did some garden chores together.
I was elated.
My Inner Diz? What had empowered me to confront her was my unwillingness to endure any more of my own fear, my determination to prove myself of value and to not take shit off anyone. If she recognized herself in that attitude, it explained the core of her, the hard way she’d had to take to live her life.
It suggested that Diz had come a long way from some difficult place, and the journey had forged her into the warrior I saw every day. What was that place? I wondered. It was six months before I learned more about her surprising, hard, broken path to becoming Diz Brassard.
I became bolder. A week later, I asked after the blackberries.
“So,” I hazarded, “I take it you got the berries? Some weeks ago?”
“Of course I got them,” she snapped. “They were sitting on my damn kitchen counter.”
Her attitude rankled and I said, “You’re welcome, Diz.”
She started to bristle but then decided to take the high, if utterly sarcastic, ground: “You’re right. I should give
