Out of the Garden

OUT OF THE GARDEN//oce/yrc Bartkevicius ? MY GRANDMOTHER CROUCHES in the garden, dress flecked with mud and grass stains, pulling weeds and telling stories. I am seven and frightened; I can't always decipher her accent and my father has disappeared. "Tomates," she says, and she means "tomatoes ." She looks up toward the house. "Where father go?" she says, meaning "Where did your father go?" I am alone with her. "What?" I am always asking, "What?" Suddenly she is talking of soldiers, waves of armies. "Farm in Europe," she says, meaning Eastern Europe, Lithuania, her uncle's farm. "Prussians then Russians," she says, "stomp through fields, take food, take animals, take garden." I picture men in green fatigues marching over hills—scenes from the World War II movies my stepfather watches on TV. "Then must make bread," my grandmother says, "put in jar." She is on her knees now in the straw-covered row between the tomato plants, intent on her weeding. The plants rise up to my waist. I snap a small shoot, lift it to my nose, and smell. Pungent, like the tomatoes picked fresh from her garden, but with bitter undertones. I drop the shoot so she won't see that I've broken a plant, and raise my fingers to my nose to catch the lingering fragrance. "In night," my grandmother says, "run through fields to forest, bury jar in bushes." I picture the forest. It is dark, primeval, like the forests in the illustrated Grimm's Fairy Tales my mother reads to me at night. 'Then cook in dark," she says. She stands up and wipes her hands on her apron. She wears a dress, always a dress, small floral print this time, tiny pink flowers against a cream background. "Hard to cook in dark," she says, "but soldiers don't see smoke." I move closer to her, the way I edge over to my mother when she is reading, when Puss in Boots almost gets caught, when the giant spies Jack's beanstalk. My grandmother looks at me hard. She lifts her glasses, closes her eyes, pinches and rubs the bridge of her nose. We are nearly eye-to-eye, for she is stooped from years of gardening, and even at full height she is barely five feet tall. She sighs. "But you are an American," she says, "you don't understand." Her words stun me. Silently, she returns to her weeding. But I do understand, I think, following along so closely when she tells me stories, imagining myself there in the woods, hiding from The Missouri Review · 116 soldiers. And because of her stories, I frown every time we drive past the intersection where men from Eastern Europe have parked a flatbed truck full of mock gravestones, one etched with the name "Lithuania." But now I stand accused of being an outsider to all that pain. And I had thought that she was the stranger. People who know—my father, my mother, my other grandmother—call her an immigrant, alien, even peasant. Although they speak in praise of her hard work, stamina, and all that she has endured, it's clear that my grandmother is the one who doesn't belong. I'm confused. In my first grade classroom I rise each morning to say "The Pledge ofAllegiance" and sing "The Star Spangled Banner" with my classmates. Each spring, I go to the Memorial Day parade and watch marching bands, row after row of battered veterans from World War II, all the while anticipating the baton twirlers and the chance to buy a bright balloon, happy for shorts and the arrival of spring. One minute, being an American means being part of a crowd. The next, it means being a stranger, cut off from my grandmother's stories, thrown out of the garden. Dusk now, and we move inside. My father and grandfather sit at the round kitchen table. The silver rim, the gray and white Formica are scrubbed clean with homemade soap. My grandfather nods, rises silently, and leaves the room. My grandmother makes tea, pours me some milk, and then we sit in awkward silence with my father. "Tell her...