Rules for Visiting Read online

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Jessica Francis Kane

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Illustrations by Edward Carey

  Excerpt from The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Copyright 1931 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1959 by Leonard Woolf. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from “The Sycamore” by Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998 by Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Kane, Jessica Francis, 1971–author.

  Title: Rules for visiting : a novel / Jessica Francis Kane.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018039054 (print) | LCCN 2018040313 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525559238 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525559221 (hardcover)

  Classification: LCC PS3611.A543 (ebook) | LCC PS3611.A543 R85 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039054

  ISBN 9781984878779 (international edition)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Departure

  Part I.A Crossroads

  Duck Woods

  El Puerto

  The Taurus

  Ash (Fraxinus excelsior)

  The Yew

  Road Trip

  Driving Lessons

  Silver Linden (Tilia tomentosa)

  The Last Whiskey Sour Party

  Accidents

  Rewards

  Day Trip

  Peeps

  Crack Willow (Salix fragilis)

  Part II.Baggage

  Invitations

  Packing

  Departure

  Arrival

  House Proud

  Catching Up

  Walking Distance

  Local Attractions

  Souvenir

  Part III.Weeping Birch (Betula pendula)

  Posts and Tweets

  Nesting

  Postcards

  House Bound

  Fortnight Friends

  Banyan Tree (Ficus benghalensis)

  The Airport Road

  Mock Orange

  Arbotchery

  Postcards

  The Right Evergreen

  Travel Supplies

  American Elm (Ulmus americana)

  Part IV.Hostess Gifts

  Staging

  Bowls

  Clapham Common

  London Plane (Platanus acerifolia)

  Pilgrimage

  Part V.Settling

  Transformation

  Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba)

  Hester

  Night Gardening

  Meadowbrook

  The First Night-Blooming Cereus Party

  The Tree That Owns Itself

  Rules for Visiting

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Rachel, Rebecca, Laurie, Heidi, and Sharon

  My original fortnight friends

  Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow—no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life—for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends . . .

  —VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE WAVES

  Departure

  A problem: If you’re in an airport on a moving walkway, and a stranger glides by on the opposite walkway holding a book bag printed with a phrase you’ve been thinking about for months, how long will it take you to finish the sentence? You have no frequent flier miles, an unprecedented amount of paid time off work, and a new rolling suitcase named Grendel.

  A best friend is someone who . . .

  The book bag in question was blue canvas and the words were printed in white. I thought the sentence might finish on the other side, the side pressed against the woman’s ample hip, and that it might be important for me to figure out what it said. My eyes widened at the thought because at that precise moment I was on my way to visit a friend, Lindy, whom I hadn’t seen in several years. If I had a best friend, and I wasn’t sure that I did, I was on my way to see her.

  I wish I could say I turned and ran in the wrong direction on the track in order to confront the woman and read the rest of her bag, but that would be cinematic. And by that I mean movies make the most of situations like this but life rarely does.

  I looked over my shoulder just as my moving walkway came to an end, nearly tripping myself and the young mother behind me. I apologized, she swore at me from behind her stroller (the child was young, and, I hoped, deaf), and I rolled my suitcase off to the side, out of pedestrian traffic.

  The air smelled of coffee, perfume, a little chlorine. There was something summery about it, which was at odds with the gray December sky visible through the airport skylights. The owner of the book bag was a heavyset woman in leggings and a Christmas sweater, and she wasn’t moving very fast. She had a cell phone in one hand, a coffee in the other, and was tipped slightly to the side in an effort to talk on the phone and keep the bag from sliding off her shoulder. I’m almost forty and fit, mostly from gardening, and would not have had trouble catching her.

  I would have had trouble explaining I needed to read the other side of her bag. What if it turned out to be nothing but corporate swag? “A best friend is someone who . . . buys you Gardenite shears.”

  Or a health advisory? “A best friend is someone who . . . gets a flu shot.”

  While I was considering other, worse possibilities, a child stopped in front of me. “Excuse me,” she said solemnly, though large red bows held her hair up in very high pigtails. Most people smile at small children, but you really don’t have to. They appreciate seriousness.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Excuse me,” she said again.

  “I’m listening,” I reassured her.

  But she turned to look behind her, toward a woman across the concourse in line for the family restroom, who was wrestling with an infant in a pouch across her chest. She frowned in our direction and waved in a way that sugges
ted perseverance.

  The child turned back to me. “Please?” she tried. “I’m thirsty.”

  I looked over my shoulder, then slid sideways so she could drink from the fountain I’d been blocking. When I looked up, the woman with the book bag was gone.

  It is not like me to search for truth on the bags of strangers, but I was having an unusual year.

  A few variables. Consider the word visit. It’s from the Old French visiter, which meant “to inspect, examine, or afflict.” You can visit a neighbor or a friend, but so can plagues and pestilence.

  And travel. It’s from the Middle English travailen, which meant originally “to toil or labor; torture.”

  So clearly traveling to visit friends should not be done lightly. There is a reason I named my suitcase after the first monster in English literature. Beowulf’s Grendel traveled off the moors to visit Heorot because he wanted to stand listening outside the great hall of friendship. Shall I tell you that I know something of how he felt? I may not eat anyone, but transformations are not always violent or even physical.

  O Muse. I sing of visits and the woman.

  Yew (Taxus baccata)

  I.

  A Crossroads

  Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward. I was tipped backward and wobbly, my balance was off, and this made sense to me. A life seemed so long, I couldn’t see how anyone proceeded under the accumulated weight of it.

  Medication helped, for a while. Mainly I recall it giving me for a few months a pleasant sense of the present. I went to Washington, D.C., for a landscaping conference around that time and I remember with fondness the new and sudden ease of my morning routine. The edges of everything seemed clearer. And I don’t mean just the lovely things like trees and the sunrise and the flowering kale (genus Brassica) planted everywhere in that city, but tubes of toothpaste and pots of face cream. It was easier to wash my face in the morning. In fact, it was a pleasure. I believed again in the possibility of a new day, the present one and the next one after that.

  The facts of my life seemed clearer to me and I was able to think about them with a new kind of resolve. Not a resolve to do better; just a steady sense that this was the way things stood and it wasn’t necessarily a catastrophe:

  I have no hobbies and no desire to develop one.

  I read books, but not always the best ones. I often say I like biographies, but in truth I rarely finish them, the last part of the life, the descent toward death, too depressing.

  I am not a good cook.

  I cannot sing and no longer play an instrument.

  I am neither an early riser nor a night owl, so can claim no virtue in those realms.

  Animals tolerate me but are not drawn to me.

  The same is true of children.

  I worry about the world but have never given much time to charitable work.

  I cannot paint or speak a foreign language.

  I own one cat, Hester, who is undeniably lonely.

  I have not traveled much, a particular disappointment given my surname, Attaway, an Old English name that derives from the words for “at the way” and referred to someone who lived close to the road. Somewhere on the misty moors of England when naming began, a few people looked around and saw trees (Ash) or a whole stand of them (Ashworth) and named themselves accordingly. Others considered the work they did (Smith, Potter, Mason), or the town they were near (Walls). But my ancestor looked around and was inspired by the road, a means of travel and change. She must have stood “at the way” just as I stand on the bridge over the train tracks near my house in Anneville, turning north, then south, wondering about the possibilities in each direction.

  * * *

  —

  I WORK AS A GARDENER for the university, which was certainly not what I’d planned. The first plants I remember tending were a series of African violets that suffered and died on my childhood windowsill. Their velvety leaves hate water, but I poured indiscriminately. Next there was a red geranium that lasted as long as it could (about two weeks) in the shade of my bookshelf. I don’t know who gave me these plants or why I so glaringly neglected them; I was otherwise very careful about looking after my room. When the plants died, I remember carrying them out to the compost pile by the garage, each gloomy procession giving me the distinct impression I did not have a green thumb.

  In college I kept a few dusty dorm plants; then, briefly in New York City, my studio apartment didn’t get enough light to grow anything green even if I’d tried. But when I moved back to Anneville, something changed. Suddenly I wanted a whole garden. Years later it was pointed out to me that guardian and garden share a root meaning “safety, enclosure.” I had come home, in part, to help care for my mother. I started reading gardening books and drawing plans. I was enthusiastic and optimistic, and if I was neglecting other aspects of my life (such as finding a job or my own apartment), I thought the payoff would be armfuls of flowers that would make us all feel better.

  It didn’t work out that way, but my interest survived and I eventually applied to the Landscape Architecture program at the university. Landscape architects are responsible for creating pleasing natural environments for people to enjoy. It could be a backyard or a park, a campus or a playground, a public road, highway, or parking lot. We’re taught to carefully analyze the terrain to be planted, then create a design that works in harmony with everything around it. I completed two years, then took a job with the grounds crew at the university. It turned out I was less interested in designing spaces for other people than in working with the plants myself.

  The job suits me, and I like working with Susan Mint, with whom I am often paired by our boss, Blake O’Dell, for bed maintenance around the university grounds. Sue is about a decade older than I am and prides herself on never having had an indoor job. “I started raking leaves as a kid to supplement my allowance,” she told me. “Never looked back.”

  Sue and I go days talking about only the work at hand, but occasionally she has more to say, and by that I mean I don’t know if we’re friends, but she’s a good coworker. She has a sense of humor I enjoy. Once, describing a garden designer we both know, she said, “She has a tendency to overdesign. I mean, she draws in her eyebrows, for god’s sake.”

  Now Sue said, “I had a weird dream last night.” We were raking the beds around the English Department, disturbing the little spring weeds. “I had my own landscaping company and a friend wanted me to landscape her yard.” Sue stretched her back. “But she wanted a local stream redirected across her property and through her living room.”

  I stopped raking. “What?”

  “Yeah, I know. At first I worried about damage to the watershed, too. Of course. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.”

  I waited.

  “Watersheds are threatened everywhere, right? So bring them into your home to protect them. That was the idea, anyway, and somehow it made sense in the dream. I cut the path in a curve and used bluestone to build the banks. I even put in a small cascade. It was beautiful, but news of the project spread and then everyone wanted the same thing.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  Sue nodded. She has strong forearms from years of gardening. A dusting of soil coated the skin visible between the top of her floral work gloves and the pushed-up sleeves of her black T-shirt.

  “What was the name of your company?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It didn’t have one.”

  I didn’t know what else to say, and Sue looked as if she regretted sharing the dream. We both went back to raking.

  * * *

  —

  THE IDEA TO VISIT MY FRIENDS began with an article I read that spring in the book section of
the newspaper commemorating the anniversary of the death of the writer Amber Dwight. On a March afternoon fifteen years earlier, a plane carrying Amber and her parents had crashed into a mountain in North Carolina. She was on a tour promoting her first novel and her father, who had a small plane pilot’s license, had been flying her around the country to her events. There were no survivors.

  Immediately after her death the outpouring of grief from her friends around the country was enormous. A popular web magazine had created a site where people who knew Amber could share memories. And—this is important—it was before the advent of Facebook and Twitter and the page had been set up for posts only. For months people shared beautiful stories, and no one could like or judge or comment. The site was still up and you could read through the posts and come to your own conclusions, without cacophony. There was a quiet elegance to it, a hushed quality, missing from today’s internet.

  Most of her friends were writers of one kind or another, so their various remembrances and elegies were bound to be well written. Still, it was obvious reading through the site that there had been something extraordinary about Amber. There were stories about her generosity, her loyalty, her sense of fun and adventure, her expertise on everything from used-car parts to brownie recipes. She was very opinionated, but everyone seemed to agree that the opinions were well informed, insightful, and usually for the benefit of someone else’s problem. People wrote that to meet her was a historical event, one you would remember for the rest of your life.

  The article was accompanied by a black-and-white photo of Amber, and I wondered if it had been her author photo. She was looking straight at the viewer, her head tilted, not smiling but not unsmiling either. She looked like she’d been a good listener.

  Amber was the campfire around which a lot of people gathered. And the amazing thing was that the people on either side of you, also huddling close to Amber? They might change your life, too. She created possibility of all sorts. —Helen