The center of Deerfield could be experienced in a radius composed of four corners: Ford Pharmacy, Deerfield State Bank, a real estate office, and the strip mall with Jewel, the grocery store, plotted to make a circle surrounding the town’s corners. After Dad attended to his head-to-toe personal polishing, we were off to the pharmacy, the dry cleaner’s, the golf pro shop to see Brian, and then to Deerfield State Bank to make a deposit. We ended our tour at the parking lot of the pharmacy where we’d started. I thought maybe sharing his to-do list with me was a deliberate action to say to me, C’mon Nancy, you’re with me. But I wasn’t really with him in the way that our shared time was more important than the errands that filled it. I think he was giving me something to do to fill my idle hours.
Dad had a lean-over walk with his head down, as if he wanted his eyes to meet his shoe tips with every step. By the time we completed the to-dos, I’d noticed sweat bleeding through his shirt from the heat and humidity already in full bloom. Back in the Cadillac de Ville, the air conditioning blasting through the vents gave us immediate relief. Dad would pause while still parked to lift his eyeglasses off his face, pull a folded handkerchief from his back pocket, and wipe his bald forehead, catching rolling sweaty drops before they hit his collar. He would then replace his eyeglasses on his nose, steadying them just right, and then start the car. I would wait for Dad to ask me something during this cooling-off pause; I didn’t care what he had to say. The conversation would be a bridge, an offering, extending a hand to connect. I grew impatient and gave up on my wishful thinking. Our relationship remained motionless in the silence between us.
On Sunday nights, the wafts of popcorn I smelled while taking a bath intermingled with Camay soap, signaling time to hurry downstairs to the kitchen. I focused on the large pot of popcorn as Dad shook it back and forth on the stove in a rhythm, stimulating more popping noises. He would fill the different-colored popcorn bowls to the rim, and then dribble butter and splash salt to crown the bumpy mound. I grabbed my designated colored bowl and headed to the den to watch ice hockey on television. But I didn’t want to watch hockey. I wanted to sit on the couch and watch My Three Sons or play cards or Monopoly—with him. I wanted him to be interested in me and what I wanted to do. We remained quiet with our attention focused in different directions.
After dinner I would hear muffled sounds of the big bands coming from the basement of the house. I descended the carpeted wooden stairs in my bare feet and stopped midway to see Dad sitting on a black stool surrounded by a drum set. I was sitting on the outside, looking in. While he fingered the vinyl stack, one of my favorites was playing, the 5th Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away,” inviting my spirit to wrap around me and, together, travel down the stairs to the basement. Allowing the music to take me as the record continued, I lifted my bare feet, glided to the next cement pole, grabbed on and twirled, dancing to the music within my world. I loved the music just as much as he did, and I could lose myself in the notes and beats where he felt secure. I wanted to have something in common with him, meeting him somewhere on his familiar ground. If he couldn’t meet me, then I would try to enter his domain. Eye contact would be an invitation to share what he had, to be a part of his life—a connection. However, Dad never looked up. I focused on him, and he focused on his music. We stared at our objects of desire. Dad kept his head bowed in concentration, becoming one with the music as his fingers wrapped loosely around the wooden sticks, allowing his wrists to snap to the rhythm. The record player needle hopped as it read the fine lines in the black vinyl until it reached the paper label in the center. The music stopped. He returned his drumsticks to their place on the record-player stand. Time for me to go upstairs. I wanted us to share the enthusiasm that music brought us, but we failed at our chance to connect.
One night after dinner, I followed the music and stood in the living room’s doorway as Dad stood over the console, reading a record jacket, tapping his foot and snapping his fingers to some jazzy sounds.
“Nancy, come here.” Dad waved over to me. I blossomed with a smile and ignited a kick in my step. “Listen to this. Do you like it?”
“I do. It’s got a rhythm.”
“Snap your fingers to the beat, like this,” he said, clapping his hands. Dad showed me the record jacket. “This is Benny Goodman. Here’s a picture of him playing his clarinet. He plays wonderful jazz.”
He smiled at me as we listened to the music together. I wasn’t tagging along or sitting on the outside looking in or diverting my attention. But the silence began as soon as the music stopped. I had hoped there would be more to our chance encounter, but Dad left the room.
I never passed up an invitation to be on the red carpet in the living room standing next to my father while jazz records spun on the console or when he read a story to me after dinner while seated together in a wingback chair next to the front window, where a world reflected to us inside. I tried to win Dad over, following him around town on errands, grabbing my popcorn bowl and sitting on his lap, and using our mutual interest in music to get his attention. I strung short scenes together: some characterized by the silence of the room, others filled with sound, and this is how I got to know my father. We couldn’t seem to connect as father and daughter the way I wanted, but if I linked all the scenes, I could begin to know him. Today, I park my car once and run my errands in a circle, all with deliberate steps in concentrated motion while leaning forward. I pop popcorn and eat it out of a colored bowl while watching football or baseball, not hockey. I listen to old jazz with bittersweet spirit while clapping my hands in rhythm and remembering where I got my musical talent. Sitting in a small, dark, jazz piano bar draws tears as I listen to the drummer’s beat. I wonder today if he ever got to know me.
disjointed
Timmy and I were required to remain seated before dinner during the week until Dad got home from work and went to the bathroom to wash up, replacing a lingering work smell with the odor of a very dry vodka martini and a lit Tareyton cigarette. Timmy and I sat on the faded purple-and-mustard-plaid couch while directing our attention to Mom and Dad, who were sitting in their respective leather chairs. Dad’s wee slurp from his martini glass and ice cubes pinging in Mom’s old-fashioned stabbed the silence. Dad would peer down his bifocals at the TV Guide, look up at the TV, and take a martini sip and then a cigarette drag, in that order. The air in the room decompressed as he worked through his ritual of relaxation. I don’t remember much conversation.
On the weekends, however, we were not required to sit in the den before dinner. With empty plates lined up in the kitchen, Mom swung around to the other side of the counter to get a better look outside, where Dad was issuing one last flip of the T-bones. A summer Saturday night meant Tim and I hovered over Mom in the kitchen watching her glide from table to counter to the front of the patio doors, where she stared at barbeque smoke plumes. She was assessing the timing, like a conductor leading his orchestra, cueing the components to create a meal, the end. The smoke engulfed the Weber, obstructing her view to determine if the steaks were done. Just as she was about to slide open the glass door to halt further damage to the beef, Dad would be piling the steaks on the platter. When the orchestrated symphony of kitchen prep subsided, stillness blanketed the dinner hour. We sat for dinner. Our heads remained bowed as clashes of forks scraping plates and piercing salad greens in bowls punctuated the silence.
And we’re off, I thought, like horses lined up in their stalls anxiously awaiting the sound of the bell and the opening of the gates. Dinner was well into play with first bites committed.
“Just leave them there,” I whispered to my brother, trying not to attract attention.
“I’m not going to do anything,” Timmy said.
“I know you’re going do something, something that’s bad.”
Timmy ignored my comments, which made me angry. His lack of response was in defiance of me and my wishes. Dad’s cough-clearing interruption, which always startled me but went unnoticed by my mother, fol
lowed a brief silence. He asked, “What on earth are you talking about? What must he leave there?”
“Nothing, it’s nothing going on,” I said. I wanted the talk to stop because everyone was learning my secret.
“She found this nest of bunnies in the front yard, and she thinks I’m gonna do something,” Tim blurted.
Now everyone knew, except Mother, who replied, “Bunnies?” Her eyes remained focused on her dinner plate as she excused the discussion as traditional kid banter that did not involve her.
To calm my upset over the bunny revelation, I considered leaving the disconnected, staccato conversation to search for a distraction, either in the backyard or cruising the neighborhood on my bike, feeling the freedom to discover every street again. The familiarity of my neighborhood gave me security when insecurity in my home was exposed.
As I surveyed the dinner remains in front of me, Dad slowly pulled a Tareyton from the open pack in his shirt pocket, examined both ends of the cigarette, and lit one of them, taking a deep draw until the tip turned red-orange. I paused and stared at the flaming end, perhaps allowing the mesmerizing fire and smoke to calm me just as it appeared to calm Dad and maybe all of us. Then Dad snuffed the spent stub. His mind returned to the dinner table after succumbing to a foggy trance, signaling the kids were dismissed. The dinner circle was broken. Dad left the table to grab a toothpick from the cupboard to pick his teeth, one by one, until the wood splintered. He’d spit and then move on to perhaps having another cigarette. Maybe Dad didn’t have much to say about anything because chewing, cigarette smoking, and oral hygiene occupied his mouth. We went our separate ways, scattering like cockroaches that rushed to dark corners when the lights went on.
As I stared down my driveway contemplating a bike ride that following Saturday afternoon, I saw Tim kneeling next to my birch tree. It looked like he was digging on all fours with his rear stuck in the air and his head plunked low to the grass. I ran to my tree and peered down at Timmy.
“What are you doing? Why do you have a box? What’s that for?” My hatred for Timmy was grounded in pleading with him.
“I’m taking the bunnies to John’s house.”
“You’re what? You can’t do that. You just can’t take them from their home like that. They will die. They’re too young. Please. Don’t do it.”
He could not be stopped. He kidnapped them one by one and placed the fuzzy gray balls gently onto a pile of shredded newspaper in the cardboard shoebox. Tears welled; my voice shook. I cried.
“You can’t do this. Stop. Put them back where they belong. They’re not yours anyway,” I said as he tucked the box under his arm and hopped on his bike. I followed him down the road with my eyes until I lost sight of him. I looked at the ground hoping to see furry movement, but instead I saw the den was empty; there was a black hole. They were so little. For sure, they would die. I had let my buddy down. I wondered if I had betrayed my tree by not protecting it from harm. I took for granted the giving nature of my tree as provider of shelter, an anchor to my growth.
My earliest memories of my house were of an idyllic place with a picturesque way about it, where I had established my connections from its very interior walls to its exterior landscape, where my tree had provided a safe, secure place for the bunnies, where they had a home and I did too. But discovering the bunnies and their subsequent eviction by my brother imparted unrest and suggested that maybe my security and safety might not always be forever as well. I had looked through a new window, and my new vision became a foreshadowing of changes to come.
silence
Tim’s and my behavior toward each other began as traditional sibling banter. With lack of supervision, Timmy would entice me to sit with him on the black Naugahyde swivel chair as if he had a secret and I needed to come close. As quickly as I hopped on the chair, he would hop off, grab the back of it, and run in circles, spinning the chair. He would then stop, pull me from the chair, and laugh at my drunken footing caused by my dizzy head. I wasn’t terribly upset; my laughter was clearly heard over my yelling and fake cries for him to stop.
But as we grew up, we grew out of our teasing ways. We no longer chased each other around the house or in a chair, but distanced ourselves to become live wires on a slippery floor, flopping and sliding in opposite directions where we found spaces within the confines of our own bedrooms.
I kept busy in my room with cleaning and rearranging my things, putting them just so on shelves. Potted plants of unequal sizes accented white tabletops. A small glass ball with a hole threaded by a thin plastic rope was hung over the lock of my double-hung window. The brazen sun enveloped the ball and took hold of the gnarly roots as they struggled to expand in their water-filled round bottom. The light filtered and refracted upon the globe into tiny rainbows. I smiled at the sight of rainbows on my window. I was in control of my small space where I wasn’t alone—I had all that was me huddled in a space surrounding me, reassuring me of who I was.
As I grew, so did my interests and creativity, and the floor became covered with what was me. I would often sit on the yellow-and-white shag carpet and engage my creative mind, filling the silence that the closet walls, looming tall and wide, enveloped while my young self sat small and narrow in the middle of the floor. I surveyed its perimeter, spying an Etch A Sketch, a Lite-Bright, and a plastic briefcase containing art supplies. A large shoebox filled with crayons was nestled near the door in the corner next to my Singer Genie sewing machine. A macramé box was slid underneath an old canvas bag with knitting and crochet needles sticking out in all directions. My creativity spoke through my busy hands. In my bedroom and my walk-in closet—whose cave-like surroundings gave me security and inner contentment—I was not confined but comforted by the connections surrounding me and the chance to be away from the silence of the entire house.
These spaces became a petri dish for my development, along with the kids’ bathroom, where I noted benchmarks of my growth. In the bathroom, a beige Formica counter ran the length of the wall with muddy blue double sinks planted in the long surface. And then there was the small window at the end of the bathroom with a plastic marble coating diffusing an outsider’s view—and an insider’s. The window remained open to varying degrees to allow a clear view of the outside to slide through. The outside, an intermingling of sounds, smells, and fragmented sights, was a connection as I experienced life’s growth in the bathroom.
When I was a preteen, Mom made a full disclosure to me.
“What is that?” I demanded, watching her grab a contraption from the upstairs closet.
“It’s a tape player. I want you to hear something,” she said.
I waited as she laced the skinny brown tape from the plastic wheel through the track and picked up the end by a slot in another plastic wheel on the opposite side. She pressed a small lever, and the wheels started to move in sync. A tiny voice sang, and then incomprehensible chatter followed while a four-year-old was bathing. I was in my world, content and safe in the confines of my tub in the kids’ bathroom. I didn’t realize then that my outlook to the world was behind the dim view of the closed window.
When I became a student of kindergarten, I could sit on the counter while Ann, my older half sister, cut the bangs of my short pixie haircut. Mom would crack the window to ease my insecurity and nervousness while I steadied myself on the slippery Formica as Ann came at me with a pair of pointed scissors. Mom reasoned that the procedure would be effortless and speedy as long as fresh air from the outside mingled with the warm air inside. I agreed. I had passed the time by recalling my carefree spirit when being outside.
As I grew, the bathroom window was raised from just a crack. I would situate my growing body in the middle of the counter and hang my head over my sink—the one closest to the window—so Mom could wash my hair with Johnson’s baby shampoo. The counter was hard and unforgiving, but not as much as the curve of the porcelain under my neck. The noise of kids’ laughter and screams outside traveled through the window and com
forted me as I looked to the openness, wanting to be out there. After I was towel-dried and combed out, I hopped on my green Schwinn and let the breeze take my honey-colored waves, turning my head from side to side, to smell the cleanliness tickle my nose, engaging in freedom with my three-speed. I had joined the outside.
Through the years, my reflection in the gold-framed mirror changed. I didn’t want the outside to know I was in the bathroom doing private things, so I lowered the window enough to allow only a draft of air. When I was in sixth grade, daily images of my wide mouth, pried open with tarnished silver braces, showed my struggle to paste tiny squares of wax on the sharp points of the tooth-straighteners. And in junior high, applications of makeup—the silent smoothing of blush on my already-warmed pink cheeks and the delicate strokes of black mascara—transformed a cute girl into a pretty lady. But then I was back to the hair drama where maybe pigtails weren’t right, so I let the bundled hair pair loose. Growing to maturity, I propped a leg on the sink curve to shave my legs for the first time, stroking the razor up my shin to create a stripe of silken flesh in the thick white foam. The newly tender skin on my legs made me stand no longer as a girl but as a young woman.
Under the Birch Tree Page 3