Discoveries

Ghosts in the Garden

Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self

Beth Kephart, photographs by William Sulit

New World Library: 144 pp., $17

On her 41st birthday, Beth Kephart wandered into the Chanticleer pleasure garden in southeastern Pennsylvania, just a few miles from her home. She returned every week for two years. “Ghosts in the Garden” is a record of the time she spent there, but there are very few details about the author’s life or why she finds herself at a crossroads. And that is fine. It is enough to know that her son is 12, her marriage is 20 and her writing life has ceased to inspire her or to reflect her authentic self. “You try to put too fine a point on things,” she cautions, and “you lose your talent for idle thought or lazy daydreaming.... I had become a writer because I’d loved the sound, the kiss of words. But now language seemed vacuous and puny.”

In the garden, about 30 acres once inhabited by the Lenni-Lenape Indians and given to the public by Adolph Rosengarten Jr. in the 1970s, Kephart is able to walk, think and let things happen. She is finally able to let go. One day, in the garden, a little old lady confides in passing that she is afraid to stay on the path because she might miss something. If she leaves the path, however, she is afraid that she might not be able to find it again. “Leave the path,” Kephart tells her. “Leave it. Absolutely.”

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What Does Mrs. Freeman Want?

A Novel

Petros Abatzoglou, translated from the Greek by Kay Cicellis

Dalkey Archive Press: 112 pp., $12.50 paper

THIS careful little novel is absolutely the most chilling, concise description of a life wasted in the ups and downs of marriage that you have ever read. The narrator, who shares the author’s name, tells the story of an old friend, Mrs. Freeman; of her courtship and marriage -- as she related it to him over several years -- to a rather famous linguistics professor, Mr. Freeman.

The narrator, Petros, is lying on a bed of seaweed in a patch of shade on a beach in Greece as he tells the story, a mere outline, really, of a life, to his companion, who remains nameless and faceless. Periodically, Petros or his companion rises to swim in the ocean; Petros is also easily diverted by the subject of food; lusty meditations on chops with oregano, fish soup or feta cheese and bread are frequent interruptions to his story.

Why so chilling? The lack of details, the wide gaps in years from big event to big event (an affair is had, a son is killed in the war) give Mrs. Freeman’s story an everywoman feel. What does Mrs. Freeman want? “Everything” she tells the narrator when she is 90. “Everything.”

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The Garden of Reading

An Anthology of Twentieth Century Short Fiction About Gardens and Gardening

Edited by Michele Slung

Overlook Duckworth: 336 pp., $25.95

The great appeal of this anthology on gardening lies in its delightfully strange mix of authors: David Guterson and James Thurber; Rosamunde Pilcher and Eudora Welty; Garrison Keillor and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Many of the essays portray the garden as place of solace in a bewildering world.

But the winner, worth the price of admission, is Lisa St. Aubin de Teran’s “The Lady Gardener,” an unsentimental, non-earnest, irreverent look at a gardener run amok. Gladys is a middle-aged woman who left her terrorist past in the jungles of Latin America to marry into the British middle class. When her 7-year-old daughter is hit by a drunk driver and paralyzed for life, Gladys (formerly La Loba) goes after the woman who hit her (the judge let her off, saying the remorse was bad enough) and kills her.

“She returned to her garden with her appetite for killing whetted as never before.” Gladys answers an ad for “lady gardeners for unusual work. Applicants must not be squeamish about killing slugs.” Gladys takes the job as hit woman for wealthy women who want revenge and can’t get it legally. Back at home, the slugs destroy her flowerbeds.