The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  THANKSGIVING should have been a favorite holiday of Becky’s—how could you go wrong with all that food? But her parents turned the annual festival of gratitude into their own unbearably quirky ritual, as they did with most things. They invited fellow faculty members to join them, served the meal as a buffet, and filled the creaky antique house with loquacious intellectuals who drank copiously, smelled like homemade soap, gossiped about other faculty members, and eventually gathered around the piano and sang ’70s rock music very badly. And they never brought any children. All her life, Becky had been the one child present at the party, listening to inebriated academics belting out off-key renditions of “Desperado” and “Taking It to the Streets” while one of her parents’ colleagues, a feathery-haired music professor named Abigail Something-or-other, accompanied them with a florid keyboard style better suited to Bach toccatas.

  When Becky was younger, her parents’ guests would question her in stilted tones about school and soccer and her piano lessons. Once she’d gone to college, they’d switched to interrogating her about her research.

  This year, a few of them decided to ask her about her love life. How was she supposed to answer? I’m sleeping with this guy Emerson, but I don’t really love him. I try to steer clear of love. If you love someone, and then they chase a tennis ball into the road and die, it hurts too much.

  Better simply to smile and say, “Did you try that artichoke and cheddar soufflé my mother made? It’s really good.” Not that artichokes and cheddar seemed at all appropriate to the holiday. Surely the Wampanoags and the English settlers did not eat soufflés at their first Thanksgiving.

  Her parents had told her she could invite Emerson to join them at their Thanksgiving if she wanted. They’d met him on visits to Cambridge; although she’d done nothing to indicate there was anything serious between him and herself, her parents had insisted on taking him out to dinner during one visit. When she and her mother had been washing their hands side by side in the restaurant’s powder room, her mother had commented that Eurasian babies were beautiful. As if she’d thought Becky was contemplating settling down and making babies with Emerson.

  Not frickin’ likely.

  Fortunately, Emerson’s parents in California had wanted him to fly home for the holiday. Becky was spared from having to invite him to her parents’ shindig, or else lie to her parents about why she hadn’t invited him.

  So she was there alone, no longer the only child, but surely the only person under forty at the gathering. She slogged her way through the afternoon, grinning through gritted teeth as the faculty members in their baggy dresses and saggy corduroys downed spiced cider and rum and glasses of wine and burst into robust choruses of “You’re So Vain.” She discreetly cleared used dishes and carried them to the kitchen. She replaced empty platters of turkey and salmon—who ate salmon at Thanksgiving?—with replenished platters. She breathed in the waxy smoke of the candles flickering on the buffet table and thought about the glass-enclosed candle she would bring to the tree tomorrow when she met with Elyse and Florie.

  That was the plan: they would meet at the April tree tomorrow at ten a.m. and discuss what to do about Mark Gottlieb. According to Elyse, he was in Wheatley for the long holiday weekend, staying with his parents in the subdivision of McMansions where he’d grown up. Elyse had told him she wanted to see him Friday, and he’d said fine, he had no other plans. The question was whether Becky and Florie should accompany Elyse when she and Mark got together.

  They still had not had sex, some sort of record for Elyse. They’d slept together more than a few times, Elyse had told Becky, but nothing had happened. Well, some kissing, Elyse had conceded. Some cuddling. He’d gotten erections a few times, so clearly the problem wasn’t physical. But when she’d fondled him he’d steered her hand away. No explanation. No declaration that he was saving himself for marriage or planning to join a monastery, no obviously refutable claim that she didn’t turn him on. Just a gentle nudge, a shake of his head, a sigh.

  “This has never happened to me before,” Elyse had complained. “I’m not used to guys rejecting me.”

  Becky had no trouble believing that. She’d been amused by Elyse’s matter-of-fact tone. Nothing boastful in her statement, nothing self-pitying. She seemed more bewildered than insulted.

  “I’m sure Florie will offer some wise advice,” Becky had joked.

  “Yeah, right. Like she even knows what an erection is. You’re the one who says she has to be a part of this, not me.”

  “She does have to be a part of this,” Becky had insisted. “We’re all a part of this.”

  She wished she could meet with Elyse and Florie at the tree right now. Just cut out of her parents’ party, walk away from the dirty dishes heaped in the sink, away from the revelers doing unspeakable things to Fleetwood Mac, away from Hector Garson of the art history department who every year nagged Becky to eat more. “The beauties painted by Rubens had real pulchritude,” he would gush. “Looking at them, you know they relished their food.”

  Looking at him, with his paunch and his plump, stubby fingers, and the mumps-like swells of flesh padding his face—to say nothing of the mountain of food on his plate—Becky knew he relished his food, too.

  But she couldn’t meet Elyse today. Elyse was living through her own Thanksgiving nightmare. Since her father had bought the house across the street from her mother, Elyse and her sister Katie were expected to endure two Thanksgivings, one with her mother and The Toad and the other with her father, who according to Elyse would probably just serve sliced, pre-cooked deli turkey and would spend the entire meal moping about how their mother had destroyed his life.

  For Elyse’s sake, Becky hoped someone at one of the two houses was serving spiced cider and rum. Or something equally potent. Becky wasn’t much for sweet drinks, so she’d indulged in a single glass of Chablis, chilled so cold it made her forehead throb. Unlike the professors, she had little hope of getting drunk before the party broke up.

  “We should sing a hymn,” her mother’s voice rose above the others at the piano. “When I was a child, my family always sang, ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow’ at Thanksgiving.”

  “My family didn’t,” Becky’s father joked. “Oy vey.”

  Becky inched toward the dining room, not wanting to be a part of this. She didn’t know any hymns, but she had little doubt that this crowd would butcher them as thoroughly as they butchered old rock songs. She needed to put some distance between herself and that musical blasphemy.

  The dining room was quieter, the candles shedding golden light into the air around them, the table still laden with food—the turkey and salmon platters gone, and in their place large round plates of Italian cookies, a honey-pecan roll, a box of chocolate truffles that someone had brought as a hostess gift, a crystal bowl of trifle which struck Becky as far too British to be appropriate at Thanksgiving, and also a few dishes left over from the main course: a green salad, a casserole of ratatouille, and steamed baby carrots glazed with brown sugar. Who knew? Someone might want ratatouille for dessert.

  Why couldn’t her parents serve pumpkin pie like normal people?

  Professor Abigail Whatever ran a dramatic arpeggio up the keyboard, then played a resounding chord that would have sounded better on a church organ. The group began to sing “Praise God.”

  Becky spotted a decanter of sherry and poured herself a glass. It tasted bad, but not as bad as the Chablis. Not as bad as the singing sounded.

  Even if you were an atheist, you could believe that hymns ought to be pretty. They were exaltations, celebrations, expressions of appreciation for all the good things God supposedly did. Becky recognized this hymn. Sung by a choir, it would be lovely. Simple and humble, basic chords, nothing weird or atonal.

  A rowdy crowd of college professors, however, giddy with too much food
and drink and camaraderie, made even that plain little hymn sound ghastly. If God existed, Becky doubted he’d accept their serenade as praise.

  ELYSE AND FLORIE weren’t at the tree when Becky arrived the next morning. She’d planned to get there ahead of them so she could inspect the area. She hadn’t seen it since last August, when she’d made a brief trip home before the start of the fall semester. Elyse had met her at the tree then, but she wasn’t really attuned to the place, its rituals and their significance, the way Becky was. It wouldn’t occur to Elyse to inspect the ground at the base of the trunk, to see if any of the seeds Becky had planted there years ago had taken root. More grass grew beneath the tree now than on the day of the accident, but Becky wasn’t sure whether that grass had sprouted from the seeds she and Elyse and Florie had scattered around the roots.

  There were no live sprouts today. The grass had gone blond, as stiff as the bristles of a broom. The tree was a stark skeleton of limbs and branches, its foliage fallen and blown away.

  Becky could have borrowed her mother’s car and driven over, but she’d walked, hoping the raw November air would clear her thoughts. The sharper her brain got, the more she realized that she didn’t want to meet Mark. Didn’t want to see him, talk to him, come within ten miles of him. She knew April’s death wasn’t his fault—it was hers; she’d been the one to suggest that they walk home from the tennis court that day—but she still hadn’t forgiven him. Or herself, but there wasn’t much she could do about that.

  She always walked, never drove, when she visited the tree. Her penance. Her opportunity to risk her own life the way she’d risked April’s.

  Part of the ritual.

  She hugged her jacket more tightly around herself. Thanks to the jacket—an insulated parka designed for blizzard-wear—and a long pashmina scarf wrapped multiple times around her neck, she should have been warm. But the air held a hint of ice, and the nickel-gray sky chilled her by its appearance alone.

  The road was empty. A holiday weekend, and it was too cold for tennis, so no one would be driving to the court on the other side of the hill. It was also apparently too cold for any squirrels or birds to show their faces. A month ago, the last of the geese would have been bleating overhead on their flight south. Chipmunks would have been diving into burrows and crevices, gathering their winter stashes of acorns. But today, Becky had this patch of earth beneath a tree on Baker’s Hill Road to herself.

  She balanced a glass-enclosed candle against one of the tree’s bulging roots and whispered, “Apra apra dida may, extra pain this holiday.” Once Elyse and Florie arrived, she would enunciate more carefully, but this first solitary recitation was just for her. It settled her somehow, warmed her in a way her scarf and jacket couldn’t.

  Lighting the candle would warm her, too, but she would wait to do that until Elyse and Florie joined her. She gazed down at the glass she’d propped between the swells of root, and remembered the cigarette butts she’d buried under that root. What happened to cigarette butts that lay buried beneath a root for five years? Did they disintegrate? Pollute the soil forever? Transform to something other than matter, their nicotine-stained souls hovering in heaven or nirvana or a spiritual plane? Were they with April, wherever she was?

  Amazing how you could be smart and yet know so little. Amazing that you could accept that some things made no sense at all, and yet you did them anyway. Like chanting and touching the tree. It was all so stupid, so pointless, yet Becky couldn’t stop. Her rhyming incantations and candles and attempts to plant seeds where she’d once planted the stained filters of a few smoked cigarettes were probably the only pointless things she did in her life. She wasn’t about to give them up.

  Nor would she give up the totally illogical hope that someday they might start to make sense to her.

  The rumble of a car cruising up the hill drew her attention. Her breath emerged in a wisp of white as she stepped further back from the edge of the road, just in case the driver was a maniac, or someone like Elyse’s good friend Mark, whom Becky would never forgive for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But as the car loomed into view at the crest of the hill, she recognized it as Mr. Fabiano’s Toyota Camry, which Elyse often borrowed when she was in Wheatley.

  Through the windshield, Becky could make out Elyse behind the wheel. Florie occupied the front passenger seat. Neither of them was smiling.

  They cruised slowly beyond the tree and Elyse pulled onto the shoulder, the Camry’s tires crunching against loose stones and shriveled leaves. She knew to park the car on the far side of the tree where they wouldn’t see it when they gathered around the candle. April had died on the side of the tree where Becky stood, and where she died was where the ritual was performed.

  Becky listened to the squeaky hinges as the car’s doors were opened and the mechanical clicks as they were closed. She bent over and lit the candle with a butane lighter, and the flame did make her feel a little warmer. By the time she straightened up, Elyse and Florie had reached her.

  Elyse wore a thick sweater, a leather vest lined with shaggy fleece like something a Sherpa might wear, tight black pants, and suede boots. Her hair fell in lush waves that fluttered gracefully when she nodded. She didn’t appear the least bit cold.

  Florie, on the other hand, looked like a bag lady in a puffy down parka over an ankle-length skirt, and a pilly knitted cap pulled low over her forehead and ears, her hair ballooning out from beneath its ribbed edge. She also wore knitted mittens. Who above the age of six wore mittens? Florie, apparently.

  “Hey, guys,” she greeted them.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” Florie said. As if it were a birthday wish, or Christmas greetings. Nobody said “Happy Thanksgiving,” did they?

  Well, yes, Florie said it. Becky eyed Elyse, who seemed to be suppressing a laugh. Becky struggled not to laugh, as well. Florie was socially awkward. Nothing new about that.

  Becky reached behind her and pressed her palm to the trunk of the tree. So did Elyse.

  “April, April died in May,” she enunciated. “We stand beneath a sky of gray.”

  “April, for her soul I pray,” Florie murmured, clasping her mittened hands in front of her.

  “Aren’t you going to touch the tree?” Elyse asked Florie.

  “No.” Florie stared at the candle, its shivering flame sending up a sinuous thread of smoke.

  “You’re supposed to,” Elyse argued, glancing at Becky for support. “Isn’t touching the tree part of it?”

  Becky nodded, then shrugged. It wasn’t worth fighting over. “I planted grass here,” she said, toeing the semi-frozen soil around the roots. “And flowers, too. Remember the seeds?”

  “Well, there wouldn’t be any grass growing here now. It’s practically winter,” Elyse said.

  “It was mostly crabgrass this past summer,” Becky recalled. She’d tried to cultivate flowers under the tree only that first year, the summer after April had died, but she’d never seen a flower grow in this spot. Too shady? Too dry? Maybe the exhausts from passing cars had choked the buds before they could bloom. Not that so much traffic roared along the winding, hilly road. Just the occasional tennis players, or people like the Zinns who lived in this part of Wheatley, where centuries-old farmhouses sat wearily on unmanicured acreage, relics of the town before it mutated from a bucolic outpost to a Boston suburb.

  “So,” she said, sensing the static that crackled between Elyse and Florie. Nothing unusual about that. “Are we going to meet Mark Gottlieb?” Do we have to? she thought, but if she said that, Elyse would feel betrayed. Becky needed to present herself as neutral. She was the logical one, after all, the buffer, the insulation wrapped around Elyse and Florie so they would avoid touching each other and short-circuiting.

  “I’ve prayed for him,” Florie volunteered. “I didn’t even know his name until now, although I guess I should have. It was
in the local paper, wasn’t it? But I tried not to read stories about April back then. They made me too sad.”

  “Nothing personal, Florie, but your prayers haven’t done him much good,” Elyse said dryly. “He’s a train wreck. We need to save him.”

  “It’s God’s job to save him. All we can do is forgive him.”

  “For what?” Elyse retorted. “The accident wasn’t his fault.”

  “He was driving,” Florie pointed out.

  “It was an accident,” Elyse stressed. “We have to convince him of that so he can get on with his life.”

  “Fine,” Becky said, suddenly weary. “We’ll meet him and try to convince him.”

  “Where will we meet him? Here?” Florie gazed around. No other cars glided over the hill. No other people hiked along the shoulder or over the pale, dead grass.

  “Yes,” Elyse said at the same moment Becky said, “No.”

  Florie sighed, her lips blurring behind a cloud of vapor. “I just don’t get this tree business. If we want to be close to April, why do we have to do it here? Why can’t we go into a nice warm church and pray?”

  “I don’t do church,” Becky said.

  “My church sucks,” Elyse added. “It’s just a bunch of creepy old men telling people what to do.”

  “It seems to me,” Florie said, a ripple of pleading trembling through the words, “that if we’re going to meet this man, it’s something we should pray on. God will tell us what he wants us to do.”

  “God has never told me a thing,” Elyse retorted. “At least he’s never told me anything useful. He’s told me I’m supposed to obey those creepy old men—who never have sex unless it’s with altar boys.”

  Florie winced. Her hands stirred inside her mittens, as if her fingers were tiny animals trapped inside them.

  “Look. We didn’t gather here to debate theology,” Becky said, struggling to filter her impatience from her voice. “And I don’t think we should be arguing in April’s special place.”