Under the Birch Tree

by Nancy Chadwick

  After class my teacher asked if I was okay as I stood with my face buried inside my locker.

  “Yes, fine,” I said. I smiled as if to will strength to my weakened self.

  “I just need to study better,” was all that came out in a trembling voice.

  I cried inside. I wanted to blast inside my locker and hide and then jump out like Superman busting out of his phone booth ready to conquer all. After class, my eyes welled as I walked on the bridge that connected the old building with the new addition. I was drawn to the floor-to-ceiling windows, meeting the light and openness as if the mirrors to the outside would release my feelings of suffocation. I stood in front of the window to succumb to the sunshine and the infinite sky that hugged me in secure delight. Wanting to get closer to connecting, I stepped next to the window, where my shoulder touched the heated glass. I tilted my head back, yearning for calm from the sun’s warmth. My tears continued as I stared at the heavens. I turned, exposing my whole self to the outside, offering my back to the inside so no one would see me. Aches started in my heart and spread to each limb as my emotions caught up with my physical pains.I wanted to escape, to will myself out of where I was, out of the time I was living in—hoping to be transported to a place where I was lighter and could be lifted above all the darkness that surrounded me, outside where a sky looked endless and warmth never ceased. I was void of a bond of being in a home, a home that had a birch buddy and a bedroom with a big closet that held a cornucopia of my interests and talents, a home where I was happy and safe. I envisioned soft cottony clouds holding me wrapped in a blanket of cheery sun.

  The bell rang.

  Once again, I evoked my faith and prayer skills I was continually taught in the Catholic tradition to be one with the Lord, asking him to help me make it through just one more day with grace and patience. It didn’t work.

  Late fall had turned to early winter. Darkness loomed when it was time to go to school and had returned when it was time to head home. It was just about 5:30 p.m. one week-night, and I was doing homework upstairs.

  “I’m home. Where are you?” Mom yelled. I met her at the bottom of the stairs.

  “It’s dark in here. Why haven’t you turned the lights on?” she said as she flew through the dark living room to find the light switches. The tone of her words pointed out my irresponsibility.

  “I was upstairs, doing my homework. I didn’t realize the time.” This wasn’t a satisfactory explanation.

  “You mean you haven’t started dinner yet? It’s late; why haven’t you gotten it ready?”

  I could only stand in the dim hallway and join the silence of the house.

  “I can’t believe you haven’t done this yet. I’ve worked a hard day, and I’m tired,” she said, pulling the drapes closed.

  Mom wasn’t interested in my day. She didn’t want to know that I had hours of homework, didn’t have a friend to call for help, and that every day at school was a struggle. She was blind to my presence on the brink of falling apart from being sucked into an adult world that was all about her. I defied the questioning and rapid-fire commentary and remained unresponsive.

  As the cold of early winter seeped into the house, chills spread through my body when I ascended the carpeted stairs to the townhouse’s second floor. I shivered there during that first winter when cold, drafty air from a wall of sliding windows met me whenever I entered my bedroom. The north-facing windows frosted over at times, and my hands would turn numb when pressed against the white walls. A grayish-white glow of ice crystals formed at the bottom of the windows, creating a crusty, tingly seal overnight to be discovered when I woke before dawn. My new room was cold and raw, like the outside, like the way I felt. My new place wasn’t like the one I’d come from. The warm and buttery yellow walls that once surrounded me had turned to dull white.

  When Mom walked into the house after work one night, she thought something wasn’t right.

  “Nancy, go check the thermostat and see what the temperature is in here. It’s cold.”

  I scurried into the living room.

  “Sixty-two degrees,” I said.

  “Well, what is it set at?”

  “Looks like seventy.”

  “But it’s not warm in here. It’s on, but it’s not heating in here. Now what do we do?” Mom screamed.

  “God, I don’t know, how about calling a repair person who fixes furnaces?” I yelled. “Who do you think fixes heaters?”

  I was battling yet another domestic issue, one I believed was not my problem to resolve. Homework, long commutes to and from school, home obligations, and Mom’s anxiety over anything new to her resulted in shared anger that put us in the boxing ring to endure verbal punches, leaving us exhausted.

  Grocery shopping together was an exercise in madness. Public arguments might have been avoided if we had arrived at the store with a better-prepared shopping list. One day, when it was time to pay at the checkout, she barked, “What did you do with the checkbook?”

  “I don’t have the checkbook. You should have it,” I said.

  Her nerves were about to explode, resulting in an unfavorable outcome for me. Perhaps my red face and silence reflected my mortification. It was my fault I hadn’t prepared a complete grocery list and didn’t remember the checkbook. I feared that I could never do enough for her, that I could never do anything right.

  Her expected life of perfection in her home—and with herself and even her children—was no longer perfect. Her dream house was gone. She was alone and in fear of the unknown, of having to learn something new, of a new house on a new street with new people, and of getting a job. Fear was the roadblock that prevented her from moving forward, gaining confidence, and living a new life of personal growth and opportunity, finding comfort and stability in perfection once again. My mother and I were both afraid, but sharing this emotion didn’t connect us; it separated us further.

  I can see now how this was her way of holding on to simplicity, the dependability of each day a copy of the previous with the familiarity of routine. I didn’t want to let go of my past connections either. I wanted to keep my links and plug them into a different place, this place, here, now. I wanted to transfer my backyard on Carlisle, with its open space of green lawn stretching like a carpet, to the parking lot I saw when I looked out my new bedroom window. The lot would be my blank canvas where I could link to my past. I was without a home because I had lost my familiar; I couldn’t find footing in this unfamiliar place. As with our days on Carlisle where lack of conversation limited our involvement in one other’s lives, mutual support was nonexistent, and we scattered in silence into the unknown. The three of us existed separately.

  My freshman year was Tim’s last year of high school. Graduation would grant him the freedom he needed from his emotions, marked by punched doors, drinking, and smoking during his high school years.

  When the time came to commemorate graduation with a family photo, Mom poked her head into the family room while Tim was seated in the recliner, sipping a beer.

  “You changed already, and we didn’t take any pictures. Can you please put your suit back on so we can take some pictures? Your father will be here shortly.”

  “What? You’re kiddin’? Not now, it’s over.” Oh, his defiance. He thought he’d earned this attitude because he was now a high school graduate.

  “No, it’s not over. Will you please get dressed again … now … so we can take some pictures,” she yelled.

  On cue, Dad stepped through the door. I noted how his entrance gave the scene a celebratory air.

  “Well, hi there, graduate,” he said.

  Tim chuckled. “Yeah, hey.”

  Mom and Dad were rarely in the same room at the same time, a carryover from their relationship on Carlisle. I don’t think either of them planned it that way; it was just an old way that never died. Dad was here, but now where was Mom?

  “C’mon, outside, everyone,” Mom directed as she stood near the sliding door to the patio.

>   And there we were, all four of us together for Tim’s high school graduation picture, steamy breezes gently blowing behind us as we stood in the backyard. Tim wasn’t smiling, his tie wasn’t tied, his jacket was crooked, and his shirt was wrinkled and askew. Dad wasn’t smiling either. Instead, he stood at attention with his arms at his sides, chin down as if posing by himself. Mom was there, smiling because she knew this recording of history must reflect happy times. I think she was frustrated, if not sad, that the scene was less than perfect. We looked so mismatched, so angry, so not together. We hung in the air with no movement like the lifeless humidity that hugged us.

  The rightness and the wrongness of this scene were evident. The rightness was in Tim’s graduation, an end to his old life and a new beginning with the freedom to be whomever and whatever he wanted to be. The wrongness was in the “should haves.” We should have been happy as a family, celebrating this milestone with more family and friends. But we weren’t, and we didn’t. All we had was a telltale photograph.

  Tim moved out of the townhouse on a summer day after graduation. Mom sat still in the dimly lit family room watching Tim carry small, encapsulated bits of his life across the room and out to his car in the garage. He took his home with him, remnants of the last eighteen years dropped into four small cardboard boxes. He plopped his clothes on the front seat and slid his possessions on the back seat, managing his keepsakes as if they were all he had, his only source of home. Tim was on a mission, and with only small talk among us and no time to waste, he breezed through the family room dressed in running shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, wearing his sense of humor with a baseball cap plunked backward on his head. With a sense of urgency in his step, he looked glad to be leaving, to load the car, to drive off, to run away. He wanted out of a place that held him hostage with bad memories. I was happy for Tim because he was moving on, not out. He was starting in a new place, maybe one he could call his own home. Mom’s response, as she surrendered to his departure, was silence. She understood that no words or expressed emotion would keep him from leaving.

  We were moving forward in our own coping ways. Tim fled to a new house with new things. Mom’s fear, anxiety, and general agitation with me and anything new became a cycle that had its phases to be worked through. And I tried to find correlations between my old and new homes, my old bedroom and backyard with my new bedroom and the confined patch of yard that was the patio. Oddly, I didn’t miss Tim not being at home. Maybe I had become so accustomed to everything that was leaving me—my birch tree, my home, my father, my familiar—that Tim’s absence did not affect me. He found a job as his own boss, working alone and managing a small distribution office. I think he liked it that way, as I, too, had once found contentment in being alone. He was establishing his comfortable familiar. He was eighteen, and I believed he would be okay.

  I would see Tim that following year when he picked me up (I didn’t have my driver’s license yet) once or twice a month to meet Dad at McDonald’s for dinner. Again, one of Dad’s timely announcements fell at dinnertime. We ate our Big Macs, declaring that school was fine for me and work was fine for Tim, and everything in between was fine. Dad then announced he was getting married to the woman he had moved in with after he’d moved out of our home. Her name was Laurie. I realized his announcement was the true purpose of him getting together with Tim and me.

  My burger and fries hit my gut with a thunk, rendering me shaky and speechless. Here was my father, who was no longer with my mother but with someone else? I posed this as a question, not a statement. I didn’t know this man who had moved on with ease, and I questioned why he’d even bothered to tell us. I guess he thought it was the right thing to do. Bothering to do the right thing now seemed ironic.

  Tim and I didn’t have to say anything as Dad commented, “But please call me any time you need to talk.” I found that to be a funny statement—calling him just to talk. Since we’d never talked when we lived under the same roof, I couldn’t imagine picking up the phone to have a conversation.

  Well, we met our obligation anyway. During the car ride back, Tim and I didn’t feel the need to talk about Dad’s announcement. We shook our heads in resignation that we had nothing to add. Our laughter was the conversation in which we found humor and camaraderie in an otherwise alienating pronouncement.

  Soon Tim and I were invited for dinner to meet Laurie before their wedding. We arrived at their condo, which sat along the eleventh hole of a private country club. We expected no less of our father and observed what a nice situation he’d happened to fall into. Before pressing the doorbell button, we paused at the door to look at each other in understanding that we would lean on each other during this uncomfortable evening.

  The bell’s ring ushered our deep breaths. The door opened.

  “Hi,” Tim and I said in unison.

  “Well, hello to the both of you, so glad you could come,” Laurie said in her English accent. We noted how it was Laurie who greeted us first, and Dad who was slow to follow. She hugged us while planting air kisses on our cheeks. Her thin, platinum blonde hair tightly pulled back in a bun showed off her high forehead. Red lipstick accentuated her full lips, making her porcelain skin glow and her blue eyes clear.

  “Hello,” Dad said. “How are you?”

  Dad invoked his clear, succinct voice as if to make an impression about living in a well-adorned condo with his lovely lady. Perhaps he thought he needed to make a pitch to us, as if we were skeptical clients.

  “Good. We’re good.”

  “And how’s school coming along?” Dad asked.

  “Let’s sit,” Laurie said.

  As Tim and I surveyed the living room, I didn’t know where I was. We spotted Laurie’s things: fancy clocks, gold and glass tables, sofa and chairs in soft blue and cream. Dad’s new place had none of the components of what I considered a home. He had none of his own things. I guess he didn’t need the old familiar of home to establish a new one. His home was with his new partner. I was resentful with envy. I wanted to be like him, to feel at home even though I had none of my familiar and the rooms that defined it.

  I don’t remember what we talked about as we gathered in strategic places—Tim and I plopped together on the couch, and Dad and Laurie sat in petite stuffed chairs on opposite sides of us. I do remember we all nodded heads while replying “really?” and “just fine.”

  Soon Laurie was puttering in the kitchen, talking loudly to overcome dinner-prep noise and keeping the conversation going. Dad didn’t say anything but felt summoned to the kitchen. I looked at Tim, and he at me. We smiled at each other and a chuckle followed Dad’s rapid exit. We were thinking the same thing: Where are we? What are we doing here?

  “Okay, I think we’re ready. Dinner, everyone,” Laurie said. Dad helped to carry the salad plates to the table.

  “Lovely. This is so splendid that the both of you could come for dinner,” she said.

  I poked my salad greens. The carrot shavings were … shavings. They were the shavings of carrot skin with dirt speckles and hair-thin roots attached, nestled on top of the curls of the dainty lettuce leaves. Maybe it was a European thing? I found the dichotomy between this rustic presentation and her polished elegance amusing.

  I could see why Dad was impressed with this woman. She had the aura of class, perhaps wealth, as measured by her surroundings, her accented conversation, and her red lipstick. Dad was showing us how happy he was in his new life with someone else. He was clearly divorced from what had been, including Tim and me.

  Tim and I attended Dad’s summer wedding. Though my brother and I had neither the interest nor the desire to attend, we assumed that we were going. I don’t even remember Dad asking us. I think Mother was insulted when she found out Laurie was going to pick out the dress I was to wear at her wedding. “You let her pick out your dress?” she demanded, as if I couldn’t pick one out myself with the help of my mother. I was stuck between justifying myself to my mother and pleasing the bride-to-be.

/>   At their wedding reception in Chicago, Tim and I did not purposely remain distant from Dad but stood across the room because we weren’t included in the social mingling. The only attention Tim and I received was from strangers at a distance. When we’d glance over at Dad, we’d see him pointing at us as if we were to be seen but not heard. He was acting out a connection with a nod of his head and a finger pointed in my direction, but really there was no connection. I was struck by the distance between us, even though he was just across the room, as Tim and I stood idle and alone. I overheard a conversation between a couple who appeared to be friends of theirs. The man remarked on how they had been together for so long. The woman completed the thought, “… and were finally able to marry.” I understood their relationship had gone on for several years, while he was still married to Mom, while he still lived with us. This explained his frequent, lengthy absences under the guise of work.

  At the time I was on autopilot, flying from one troubling scenario to another—how I didn’t want to move, how difficult it was to make friends, and how alone I felt at high school. I failed to speak up and give a voice to my feelings. I thought the idea fruitless anyway because it wasn’t about me; it was about my dad and his new wife, Mom working, and all the attention and help she needed. Tim and I attended Dad’s wedding, whether we wanted to or not. “You should go. What would people think?” Mom said. I didn’t let my voice speak through my action by not attending.

  I had started my freshman year already in a deficit, with insufficient confidence from the remnants of divorce and losing the only place I had called home. I couldn’t bond with the new house and school. They were too recent and unfamiliar. The commute to school and the loneliness of my days made it difficult to withstand even a single school day.