There being a distinction between an ear for something and an actual skill.
An awe for anyone who can take something apart.
And my never having heard of such a thing as music camp.
And then put it back together, of course.
You’ll love it; the cover of the brochure shows lots of trees. Quote unquote.
Sarcasm being amusing only coming from someone you don’t loathe.
Did she know I was watching?
The curtains now, perfectly still.
Did she simply not care?
Her monogrammed suitcase I could have curled up in.
Stored everything I owned in.
Along with the black T-shirt Myles wore the night we played pool, which I stole from his floor the next morning.
As if there could be degrees of stillness, different degrees of not moving.
We simply wonder what you do up there all day. Quote unquote.
And I, for my part, wonder what you do in there.
Everything in their bedroom in shades of blue, the bedspread, the area rug, the lamp, etc. etc.
The suitcase is real leather and extremely valuable, so take care of it. Quote unquote.
Wondered then, wonder still.
The feeling of independence that comes from being able to do for yourself.
An enormous leather suitcase for a single pair of denim shorts, two red T-shirts, two pairs of socks, one pair of canvas sandals.
Blue pillowcases.
Blue molding.
Sitting on one of the upper branches the day they painted the bedroom walls.
Don’t drop it, don’t scratch it, don’t let it get wet, don’t etc. etc. Quote unquote.
The paint fumes in the leaves, as high as I could climb.
And then returning from camp a week later to find a tiny house in the crotch of my tree.
Not needing to depend on someone else to do for you.
Blue picture frames and a blue dust ruffle.
How could anyone live surrounded by only one color?
We wanted to surprise you. Quote unquote.
You always have a choice in colors. You might as well make them match. Quote unquote.
Along with the books Myles lent me that I never returned.
Even after I’d told them, insisted, I didn’t want a tree house.
On the car stereo, a countdown of some sort—Top Twenty.
We thought a house would be more comfortable. Quote unquote.
Than a branch, arguably.
Along with a copy of the first flyer Myles ever made, Xeroxed until it looked like it was drawn with charcoal.
Children love tree houses, darling. Quote unquote.
The beginning pulses of a headache.
Probably the same children who play with dolls and laugh at clowns.
The dark, the strain on my eyes.
You could do whatever you wanted with it. Quote unquote.
Complete dependency.
My objections to playing piano.
Keys made of ivory?
A tree house with wood that was clean and new.
But a tree house is your own personal space. Quote unquote.
And me taking a stance against the poaching of elephants.
And yet there being no line waiting to get into the tree.
His chest rising, falling, rising.
Falling.
And in their bathroom, hand towels and washcloths, also blue.
Some of the wood weather-treated green.
And for weeks, me standing among the roots staring up at the tree.
And fourteen-year-olds with actual skill.
At the house in the tree.
Green wood!
Refusing to climb up.
And me not an exclamatory child.
I should have brought a thermos.
Coffee, black.
Blue bathmat.
The car stereo not loud, but loud enough the neighbors must have noticed.
And wondered.
You just have to give it a chance. Quote unquote.
An empty car, its hood raised, the engine running, the car stereo playing.
Along with the disk, Myles’s video.
The Big Dipper pointing north.
To think, at one time, that meant something to someone.
Sailors, and sea captains, in any case.
Safe in the duffel bag with all the rest.
Stars, whose names I’ve forgotten.
Ornamental soap dish, also blue.
A greasy rag draped over the raised hood, slipping, slipping, as the engine idled and the hood vibrated.
A chill growing, a dew forming.
The yellow nightgown she was sleeping in the night her brother’s joint set the den of her house on fire.
The pink nightgown I was supposed to have been wearing when they pulled back the sheets to put her into bed with me.
Further details of which I have forgotten.
A lake with cobwebbed canoes.
Infested with earwigs.
That video, the one thing Myles noticed missing.
And who ever heard of making a tree house from anything but scrap?
Leaves lightly brushing the outer walls in the breeze.
A man in your father’s club drew up the plans. Quote unquote.
And of course, their self-satisfied smiles.
Blue toothbrush holder.
Around the trunk, the grass yellow and matted.
A blue blanket folded up at the end of the bed.
My tree, spoiled.
Even in their sleep, slight smiles lingering.
Myles tearing apart the apartment, looking everywhere for that disk.
Even in the moonlight being able to tell she still pretends her hair’s not gray.
So stiff and uncomfortable.
Feeling myself grasping for something.
Making it all the way to the second most popular song in America.
Who ever heard of an architect planning a tree house?
Some number in the teens having been playing when Mother and the mechanic pulled up.
Myles searching and searching, and me silent, the duffel bag slumped in the corner.
A few dropped nails in the dirt, among the roots.
Nails that would grow fat with rust after months in snow.
Circling impressions of ladder legs.
The day at the camp, in the middle of the lake, I let both oars slip into the water.
Bark rubbed away below the crotch where the ladder leaned.
Long enough that the rag fell.
A few wedges cut into the arms from the stress of the frame.
The mechanic coming back out of the house looking mussed.
I can no longer remember if it was intentional.
Not mussed the way one would expect a mechanic to look.
Until finally I decided what to do.
Dad sleeps on his side, knees slightly bent, hands pressed together beneath his cheek, as if …
As if what?
Starting with the shingles on the little roof.
Then the mechanic closing the hood, getting into the passenger seat, and sitting, waiting, tapping the dashboard to the music.
Never, as far as I can remember, actually looking at the engine.
Camp must have been wonderful. Quote unquote.
Push the piano into the lake.
Which, of course, I considered.
An awe that what he might have seen in there would have made sense to him.
Why didn’t Myles just burn another copy?
The moonlight, the darkness, the sheen of her nightgown, the shine on his forehead.
Mother had changed into a pair of blue shorts.
But the piano was wider than the doorway.
Dad at work, Mother inside, me sitting on the upper branches, prying shingles off with a stick.
Mother wearing dark sunglasses much too big for her head.
My head wh
ere the window used to be.
And yet.
My feet in the doorway.
Myles could’ve made a thousand new copies, as many as he wanted.
Even especially things we’ve grown attached to.
I just don’t understand: it’s as if the tree house is shedding shingles. Quote unquote.
Leaving the front door unlocked behind her, Mother getting behind the wheel and driving off with the mechanic singing.
I should have brought an extra layer.
The yellow shorts she didn’t stop me from removing one summer afternoon when we were sixteen.
A different pair.
Maybe the mechanic was only listening?
For grinding, whining, knocking?
Recitals.
Sound, again, and its memories.
Sliding off the roof, twisting to the ground, some landing flatly, others on their corners, bending, snapping.
I nail them back in place, and then it happens all over again. Quote unquote.
And what does it all amount to?
A scorn for acquiescence.
Leaving the greasy rag on the driveway.
A test drive, merely?
Maybe it’s the tree trying to tell you something, I said.
At which they frowned.
Why didn’t Myles just burn another copy?
Strumming, drumming, cooing.
In my memory, only music and singing.
At the time all my reasons seemingly sound.
A final concert.
And every Saturday him climbing up the ladder and nailing the shingles back into place.
Up perplexedly and back down smiling, self-congratulatorily.
Leaving the greasy rag in the driveway, where Dad would find it several hours later.
A rag to wipe greasy fingerprints away.
All those years living with that bag, Myles never once asking what was inside.
While I watched from my tree.
Performing for the parents.
Even on the lake the awful noise.
Music, supposedly.
In thanks for footing the bill.
The blue sheets and blankets.
Grade-schoolers playing free jazz.
Sitting in the tree, watching Dad examine the mechanic’s rag.
This side, that side, all of it greasy.
Teenagers shrieking off-key concertos.
The pianist playing this key, that key, all of them sour.
Until finally I buried his hammer in her flower bed.
By September, this time of year, half the tiles having disappeared.
Looking and looking for the disk, until Myles finally gave up.
Keeping the little window open rain and shine.
Especially rain.
Motivations never having thought to question.
Removal of screws from the hinges of the little door.
And me never letting on I’d watched his video once, let alone a hundred times.
Only a few a day, clandestinely, so as not to arouse their suspicions.
Inside the little door, a little straw mat the color and shape of a sunflower.
The barricade, the riot cop, and the girl, her turquoise shirt with the giant daisy.
New, never having been stepped on.
A need to believe in the attainment of ideals.
The riot cop and the girl, and their embrace.
Rain.
Rotted, having been rained on.
And then the cop’s violent shove.
By the end of the month, the little shutters, loosened, blowing off.
All winter, from my bedroom, my childhood furniture, watching the little tree house fill up with snow.
The little curtains, white with daffodils, rotting.
In the spring, rain coming through the little windows.
Barefoot.
The embrace.
Dad and his ladder and an armful of shingles.
And a new hammer.
The shove.
Rotten particleboard crumbling.
Shingles sliding off by themselves.
Floorboards beginning to warp and rot.
The embrace.
Destruction being a form of dissection.
Inside, a little three-legged table with two little pale blue chairs.
The shove.
Now, all these years later, no trace the house was ever here.
Except for the nail holes, grown over, filled in.
The embrace.
A fluorescent green dog to guard my keepsakes.
And certain things I will continue to believe.
The shove.
Inside, the little walls all one color.
Blue.
Twenty-Seven
He’d always said her nose was her mother’s. Her forehead too. Her mouth, her chin, her cheekbones, all her mother’s. But Garland hadn’t seen her in so long that he was surprised, after all this time, by her unexpected resemblance to himself. He couldn’t have explained why, but it made him smile, such a superficial thing. And he couldn’t pinpoint exactly where he saw the similarity. Not in specific features. Her eyes didn’t come from him, but neither did they come from her mother, though perhaps he could see traces—the same walnut shade of brown, the same alertness. Nowhere in the family albums was there anything like them, so big, so round, like a pair of orbiting moons. Always one to take control of an uncomfortable situation, her mother had been the first to declare her a positively ugly baby, and with such insistence that she would challenge anyone—Garland included—who stubbornly insisted upon finding her cute. She had always been a bright girl, and he thought her moon eyes lent her a sort of omniscience.
Around the table they approached the meal from whatever direction best suited their disposition: Garland caught himself meeting every forkful with a contemplative tilt of his head; Muriel chewed slowly, glancing distractedly around the table, as if afraid of missing something important. She prodded skeptically at the food on her plate, although she had cooked most of it herself. As always, Garland had made the salad dressing, his own special recipe. In between bites, his daughter’s eyes were surveillance cameras, sweeping every object in the room, every move of her parents’, every stain in the carpet. Had she not been his daughter, Garland might have thought she was casing the place. He marveled that she seemed so relaxed, as if the years between them had simply been erased now that she no longer had a use for them.
His daughter wore a dress, of all things. Garland never would have guessed she owned one. Despite the season, it was a light summer dress—pretty in a way, but also disappointing. Not until she arrived had Garland realized he had been awaiting a girl in frayed jeans and sneakers with the soles worn low. An image born not of simple nostalgia, though, but from a profound sense that there was no other way for her to be.
In the days leading up to this dinner, Garland and Muriel hadn’t been able to stop speculating about what it meant, this sudden, enigmatic reunion. Their daughter had offered no real explanation. Despite his wife’s skepticism, Garland hadn’t asked for one. She had said she was calling from a hotel, of all places. Nearby, in Detroit. She’d said she wanted to come for dinner. She was bringing a friend, a girl named April. In the end, the girl hadn’t been able to make it, but their daughter had. And here she was.
Her hair didn’t have her mother’s waves or his—admittedly thinning—curls. She had dyed it. Blond. Every time he caught a glimpse of the color, he felt something seize in his heart.
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