Under the Birch Tree

by Nancy Chadwick

  I had had no reason to believe Dad wanted to leave Mom, to leave his home, too. Also, I was young and didn’t know differently about how parents behaved with one another. But now I know that something must have been missing for Dad—this is the only explanation I can give for why he wanted to divorce my mother. He wasn’t getting what he needed from his wife and his home, so he turned to someone else to fill his needs. I wondered if he was ever happy with us. Mom remained connected to us through her actions by continuing her role as a stay-at-home mom who maintained the household while taking care of two kids and providing a hot meal every night.

  Years later, maybe when I was in college or in my early twenties, any mention of the divorce was usually in one-sentence statements that popped up when Mom and I talked about how life used to be on Carlisle. When I joined her one evening to watch The Sound of Music on television, she blurted, “The divorce took me completely by surprise. And I’ll never forget … while I was watching this movie in the spare bedroom. He just stood there and announced it.”

  “You had no idea?” I asked. I thought this was a polite way of finding out more details, when what I really wanted to ask was, “How could you not know things were that bad?”

  “Not at all,” she whispered.

  “But the long absences, and those ‘business’ trips for weeks?”

  “I never questioned your father about anything. We never talked. We never even argued. And that was a mistake.”

  I understand now how Dad’s request for a divorce had been a shock to her. She had trusted him and trusted that his absences for weeks at a time were for work. Now that her ex-husband the decision-maker was gone, her urgent need for attention was the beginning of everything being about my mother.

  I viewed my parents’ divorce not as dividing time into “before the divorce” and “after the divorce” but as the line between childhood (before) and adulthood (after). Life before the divorce was lived each day like its predecessor. As a child, I didn’t know anything different. I thought we would continue our lives as we knew them. But after the divorce, I didn’t know what the next day would present as my innocence slipped away.

  When Dad said, “Well, we’ll have to sell the house, you know,” I found this matter-of-fact, declarative statement mirrored his proclamation of the divorce decree when we were in the car. I didn’t understand why the house would have to be sold. After all, Dad was the one who asked for the divorce, essentially a declaration that he would be leaving—not Mom, Tim, and I.

  I became caught in the fray of splitting a physical whole—the house and all the things in it—and leaving what identified me and what I identified with. It didn’t matter whether it was within the confines of my bedroom, what I held in my hands, or outside. It became my home, by definition as all-encompassing parts—my backyard, bedroom, parents’ bedroom, basement, walk-in closet—and I needed to keep it whole. After all, these were my connections I had discovered.

  I thought of my birch tree and the bunnies housed within its roots. The bunnies had been displaced from their foundation just as I was being uprooted from my home. I was losing my birch buddy, too. I would remember it as an anchor to all things under it, a foundation cradling innocence and nurturing growth, a protector, a guide and support with its bumpy roots peeking through the surface of the grass bed and its arm-like branches providing shade and enough sun to warm me. My buddy’s glossy leaves danced in soft breezes with rustling notes playing to my ear. My home was my foundation; it was where I was from. I learned to understand that my birch tree and my home were synonymous.

  I prepared to leave, to separate from the physical, my home. It was time to relinquish my backyard, tetherball pole, flower beds, patio under the maple tree with room for running through the sprinklers on steamy summer days. I had to vacate my room, bounded by cheery yellow walls that encapsulated my haven, my walk-in closet, a gateway to myself, the person I was learning to become. I concluded that I couldn’t do much about growing up, but what I could do was pack all my memories and colored snapshots of what I had grown to know as my home.

  My bedroom had evolved over the years commensurate with my growing years, where my young child self called tea for two to be set on a white table and chairs positioned under a window, and my preteen girlhood was more entertained by playing through stacked LPs leaning against one another on the floor with Bobby Sherman and Donny Osmond smiling at me from their record jackets. Dolls that Dad had collected from his travels around the world adorned one corner of a bookshelf. When I tired of seeing them and lost interest in conversing with my friends, I would wrap them in newspaper and pack them in cardboard tombs. Nancy Drew books, once standing at attention, would retire from investigating new scenes. Memories of lying sick in bed with the measles and a Timmy the Turtle vaporizer gushing wafts of Vicks VapoRub–scented steam comforted me. The welcoming buttercup yellow walls provided safety I was drawn to and contentment I could count on. These were all my things, and my touching each piece had anointed it a part of my home. My ability to look at them in excitement and joy and feel their power as stimulating my growth was now in jeopardy. I feared losing the very connections that defined my home and, in turn, losing it.

  Not only did I have to let go of the room I’d escaped to, created memories in, and found silence in as my friend and a source of comfort, but also I had to release the extension of it—my backyard, a bright world that filled my senses. I remembered a patch of dirt that was in bad shape with rocky lumps and hard clay. I’d tried to pound the dirt to soft soil, but the earth stood her ground and remained hard. I planted a seed mixture of wildflowers anyway, reveling in the ease of sprinkling the salt-and-pepper-colored magic dust from the white envelope onto the lumps and discovering green tips sprouting quickly. The dust turned to green dots, which soon formed leaves bursting through the earth. All grew to be different colors with a variety of blooms, including one tall sunflower that stood strong. It was the last flower to tower in the bed when the others had reached their end, shriveled and flopped on their sides. A pair of willow trees stood soft in the opposite corner with flowing limp branches. An all-encompassing oak tree in the middle of the yard spread in many directions and never bent in the wind. I sunbathed on the patio during the sunny, hot days of summer basking in the sun, skin slicked with baby oil, listening to the portable radio playing “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Croft with no desire to be in any other place. Gentle breezes roused the leaves’ stillness; robins and sparrows chirped in conversation while I witnessed the unfolding of delicate rose petals in Mom’s rose garden on rich summer days.

  My physical, material world defined my foundation. Scenes were staged in each room, represented by four walls and props. These components were physical pieces that had been constructed and added to over the years to declare the entire story a home. Would I soon be homeless, losing my components, my possessions? If my material possessions were to leave me, my definition of domestic security and safety would surely falter.

  A few weeks after the divorce announcement, it was as if there never had been an announcement, and our familiar routines resumed as if nothing had happened. My question to Tim—It can’t be any different than it is now, right?— was more of a confirmation. We were on our own, but hadn’t we been on our own for a while? We’d learned how life was during Dad’s lengthy absences, evolving from a party of four to three people, so when Dad was gone, there wasn’t a notable transition.

  The once-new house would never be as it was in 1964 when the foundation’s thin lines drafted on blueprint were virginal. The floors would be released of their coverings, and footprints would disintegrate into the now-thin air. The furniture would be relocated to new rooms, and the inhabitants would sit elsewhere.

  “4 Bdrm, 2½ bath, hardwood floor in den and dining rooms, large eat-in kitchen and living room,” our “For Sale” ad read in the Deerfield Review weekly paper. I had mixed feelings—sadness, confusion—as I watched our things being taken away. These were my thing
s, my furniture, my connections that defined home. I was embarrassed and angry that I was a part of something that was not my doing. When I arrived at the neighbors’ that afternoon to babysit, Mrs. Schafer asked, “Oh, are you moving? I saw the moving truck parked in the drive and thought you were leaving.”

  “Oh, no, my father is just moving out. My parents are getting a divorce,” I said, in the similarly clear and concise voice of my father when he announced his divorce to me. I had to explain what was going on. I didn’t like the position I was put in and hadn’t asked for, something that he had caused.

  Dad already had a place to live and someone else to live with.

  As I helped Mom find new homes for the barely worn furniture, she reminisced about when she had worked with the decorator to transform the house into a showplace of personal taste and elegance with each chosen piece. She had everything she dreamed of—her perfection. She added, “Your dad was a good provider. We always had everything we ever needed.”

  I recognized her reflective moments in her words, of the home she had built over the years, and her attempt at disconnecting from that which was a part of her. I also recognized how she could have spoken disparagingly about Dad. But she didn’t.

  I sat on my bed the night before we moved. My eyes followed the yellow walls that still hugged me, halting at the window, and then fixed to memorize the view. I replayed the familiar, and then I had to look ahead. I was starting high school and would be branching out with growing limbs, exploring unfamiliar destinations, and taking root in new places.

  Like the bunnies I’d discovered years ago that had been plucked from the only secure ground they knew, I was being uprooted and needed to find a new place to be. I took comfort in the knowledge that my birch tree would always be my buddy, and I would also maintain my connection to it. Because of that, I believed I would always find home, no matter where I went.

  part 2

  yellow walls … white walls

  disconnections

  The house sold quickly, and Dad helped Mom to find a new place with her half of the money from the sale. She found a new townhouse on Pheasant Lane on the westernmost unincorporated area of town. One Saturday morning, Mom dragged me to our new place to decide on interior details. As she spread sample boards on the kitchen counter, I knew I was going to be pulled into something I had no interest in.

  “Help me pick out paint color and carpet, and then there are the appliances,” Mom said, pulling me closer to the counter and sample boards.

  “I have no idea. Just pick something.” I waved my hand in a futile attempt to quickly dismiss her request.

  “How about this carpet? It’s got flecks of black, tan, and brown within the beige. This would bring everything together, don’t you think?”

  “Fine.”

  “And what about the kitchen?”

  “What about it?”

  “What color for the walls? We could really do a nice color, something different in here. With the new stove and fridge, it’ll …” Mom was letting her decorator instincts and her quest for color-coordinated perfection in all the rooms get the better of her.

  “Mom, I don’t know. Just pick out what you like.”

  “But I don’t know, help me, what should we get?”

  I didn’t want to pick out paint color and carpet. I wanted my mom to make the decisions as I expected parents to do. I had bigger worries about starting high school, afraid of not receiving parental support when I felt out of place at a new school. I wanted a parent—my mother—to make it all better. I wanted her to tell me to not worry about a thing, but my concerns were not hers as she tried to make her concerns mine.

  Still, I never gave up on being Mom’s personal cheerleader, confidante, and supporter when it came to the biggest challenge she faced: getting a job. Though finding a job in the late seventies was as easy as flipping to the “Help Wanted” section of the Deerfield Review, Mom was her own worst enemy. “I haven’t worked in over twenty years,” she’d tell me. “I don’t even know what they’re doing in offices these days. Who’s going to hire me at forty-seven?”

  “But you’ve got all that secretarial experience from before you got married. I’m sure you could use those skills in any office around here,” I’d encourage her.

  “I’m just not qualified,” she’d say. This was her mantra, an excuse to not even try.

  “You’ll have to do a résumé. Look in the paper. You don’t know until you get out and talk to someone. You’ve got to start somewhere,” I said, hoping to end it.

  A few months later in the fall, she found a job at Brenners Stationary and Supply.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” she reported.

  “But you got a job!” I said. I hoped my definitive statement in raised voice would snap her out of her attitude. I certainly thought this would be the start of good things, and I wished Mom thought so too. Back then, I thought parents could do anything with no problem at all. I didn’t understand her self-doubt and defeatist attitude. But now I understand. There was an underlying emotion: fear. She was afraid of the unknown and of facing it alone, a working world of which she had not been a part for almost two decades. Mom hadn’t been bothered with securing an income, paying bills, deciding if a plumber needed to be called—because she’d had someone else take care of her for twenty-two years, providing her with anything she needed or wanted. But now the provider was gone, and she would be responsible for these requirements as a single parent without her provider. She couldn’t do it alone. The void had to be filled, and that void-filler was me.

  Mom needed daily reassurance that she could do it. But what about me? I had the same need. I channeled my focus and energy into just getting up in the morning and getting to school; I didn’t have stamina for the both of us. And Tim wasn’t much reassurance, as he was off on his own and disengaged from his mother and sister. Some of those summer nights, Mom and I really didn’t know where he went, but I figured it out when he came home one night, and I heard him throwing up in the bathroom. Surely he had been at a buddy’s house back in the old neighborhood, partying away.

  The next morning, Tim was standing in the driveway next to his car with the driver’s side door open.

  “Don’t tell Ma about this,” Tim said quietly. He was washing out his jacket with the garden hose.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, watching him clean the inside of his car of what looked like vomit. I knew the answer to this question.

  Tim chuckled and thought the whole incident was funny. “Just a little accident.”

  “I heard you throwing up last night. Are you insane to drink so much that it made you throw up? And god, you were driving, driving a car while drunk? What are you thinking?”

  Tim continued to wring out his jacket while neither looking at me nor answering my questions. If Mom was never going to know about this, I figured someone had to yell at him for his bad behavior. When I assumed this role, I realized Mom and I had something in common: we had a knack for asking questions where we already knew the answer, setting up an assumed offender for verbal berating, a common action by a parent. This was just the start of the shifting dynamic among Mom, Tim, and me, where our day-to-day relationship became a role reversal.

  I had hoped I would have my own space at the new townhouse, an immediate connection to a long-lost familiarity. But the contentment I’d needed from my new environment was not to be. Our backyard consisted of a concrete slab about six feet square, surrounded by grass and sectioned off by tall wooden fences on either side. Goosebumps scurried up my arms as I stood on the cement, feeling naked without the familiar wrapped around me. The winds snuck through and wiggled the fence slats. New saplings hung in uncertainty of how to grow or in what direction. There was no shade to provide an umbrella of stately, leaf-filled limbs seeking new destinations. No birch trees welcomed me to let me know a piece of home was with me. Where was I? This wasn’t my home.

  When I walked out the front door, the familiar sight
I had come to know and rely on was absent. When I hopped on my bike, my tree no longer stood next to me like a friend bidding me safe travels. I wasn’t feeling adaptable, as if I could start growing again and branching out in a new clearing just like the nature of birch trees. The earth beneath me was heavy and impenetrable as the concrete block under my feet.

  I thought of the abandoned bunnies forced out of their home. I wondered if they were cold and afraid because their new place wasn’t like their old one, the place where they were born, where they were from. I didn’t know where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. My lack of connection to anything underfoot or to my surroundings made me numb and disoriented. I’m sure the bunnies didn’t even know where they were. The newness of it all—my backyard, the house, even my bedroom—wasn’t enough of a distraction for me to be excited. My contentment with being alone at home turned to loneliness and confusion in a new place.

  The time had arrived to start high school. I attended an all-girls school, about a forty-five-minute drive from the townhouse. Tim delivered me to school in his lemon yellow 1977 Challenger my freshman year, arriving at the school parking lot with spoiler engines roaring. The noise level, increasing upon the car’s acceleration, competed with the blaring of Kiss on the radio, which could be heard even with the car windows rolled up. Heads would turn to the source of the disruption and eyes would stare in amazement and disgust. “Careful getting out, don’t burn your ankles,” he’d say, chuckling. My ankles, close to brushing the shiny side pipe because of a difficult stretch for my short legs, cleared with nothing but a breeze to spare between the pipe and my calf. Tim loved his car because of what it did and said about him, and he considered his sister’s discomforted experience a compliment on his prized possession.

  Hopelessness won over one fall day at school as the divorce, the move to a townhouse, high school, and a changing season with less daylight and more darkness overwhelmed me. I failed a first-period Spanish quiz because I couldn’t keep up during the oral test. I was lost, and I panicked.