“That’s probably a good idea,” Garrison said. He finished his portion of casserole and put a few of the frozen potatoes on his plate. He cut into one and steam rose from its white, overprocessed interior. He put his fork down. “How can you eat these things?” he asked his son, and the boy, that incurious consumer of so many suspect commodities, shrugged and said that french fries were french fries.
The next day after work, Garrison slid open the patio doors and stood at the edge of the paved border. New grass was only beginning to come up and the bare spots in the yard were still muddy from the drenching rain. Garrison walked carefully out into the yard. The trees at the back were a mix of things he’d planted years ago when they were new to the house and had been ambitious about landscaping, along with some older, preexisting hardwoods. There were flowering crab, redbuds, an apricot that had never fruited, as well as a hackberry, a couple of silver maples, and one big oak that made the other trees grow in lopsided ways around its borders.
Garrison walked up to the oak, tripped over one of its above-ground roots spread out in knotty ridges. You could never mow around the things. He tilted his head back and looked along the trunk to the central canopy where the main branches began to spread, about fifteen feet up, he calculated. The tree had not yet leafed and some of last year’s leather-brown leaves still hung on in patches. He wondered how old the tree was, how old oak trees lived to be. He felt stupid not knowing.
When he came back inside his wife asked him what he’d been doing out there and Garrison said he was checking for wind damage.
That weekend he went to the big home improvement store near his house. In the lumberyard section he picked out the oldest employee, a gray-haired man with heavy shoulders, and waited until he turned his way. “Help you?”
“I hope so. I want to build a treehouse.”
“Ah. For the kids?”
“Grandkids.” Garrison paused. “Not that I have any yet.”
He waited to see if the man would turn stony or uncomprehending, but he laughed. “An investment for the future.”
“You might say that.”
“Ever build a treehouse before?” Garrison shook his head. “Why don’t you start with telling me about your tree.”
Garrison spent forty minutes talking to Dave, that was his name, about the different strategies of treehouse structures. Supports could be built from the ground up, or the foundation could be anchored to the tree itself. There were such things as fixed and flexible joints, and you needed flexible, since trees moved and treehouses moved along with them. Was he going to put in windows? Garrison thought so. Sure. He could get them prehung, all you had to do was install the frames.
When he left, Garrison had a sheaf of sketches, a list of supplies, and some helpful booklets. He stopped in the hardware department and bought a twenty-foot extension ladder, and, at Dave’s suggestion, a ladder leveler so he could set it up on uneven ground. He arranged for it to be delivered and spent another few minutes browsing the saws, planes, nail guns, and drills, calculating what he already had at home, what he’d need to add or replace.
The ladder arrived two days later. Garrison had them bring it inside the back gate, then he loaded it on a yard cart to get it to the far end of the lot. He bought a lawn chair from the patio so he could sit and read all the safety instructions. It pleased him that even a ladder had so much in the way of information attached to it, things he would have to learn.
His wife and son weren’t home, so he managed the ladder by himself. That was just as well. He wasn’t yet ready to answer a lot of pestering questions. Once he had the ladder up and resting against the tree, he worked the rope and pulley until the extension locked into place, pulled the base away from the tree at a thirty-degree angle, and began to climb.
He was cautious at first, testing the footing, but then he allowed himself to trust it. When he was a good twelve feet up, his head reached the level of the first branch. He looked around, trying to imagine it. The day was chilly and a sharp spring wind rattled the old leaves. In every direction a tracery of bare, overlapping branches enclosed the space. It was fine. It was more than fine.
He made several more trips to see Dave and together they came up with a set of working plans. The foundation would be bolted to the tree, but would extend out past the trunk and there it would be supported by a couple of cement-anchored ground posts and struts. They would edge the platform with sections of rubber tire to protect the bark from rubbing. “Where would you be without the tree,” Dave said.
Garrison said he had that right and apologized for taking up so much of his time. Dave said that somebody was sure as hell going to take it up, and it might as well be him. Dave said that if Garrison wanted, he and his boy could by some Sunday and give him a hand with setting up scaffolding and getting the biggest pieces in place.
Garrison, a little surprised, said he’d appreciate it, thanks. He could manage the basic carpentry himself, if only barely; he didn’t mind if the finished product turned out more shack than house. He already had a house, a place to keep all the equipment of his life, and the lives of his family. This would be something else.
The day he and Dave agreed on was the last Sunday in April, warm enough to work up a sweat, but still cool enough that sweating felt good. “Real nice place you got,” said Dave politely. “Thanks,” Garrison said. He knew the house didn’t really interest either of them. Garrison allowed himself to envy Dave’s panel van, which was all business: the loops of power cord fastened to hooks in the side, the heavy-duty toolboxes with their array of saw blades, drill bits, wrenches, fittings, bolts, and fasteners, the row of ten-gallon buckets, splashed and stained with paint and primer, holding work gloves, shop rags, files, switches, coiled wire. They unloaded what they needed and got to work. Right away Garrison saw how out of his depth he was, how impossible it would have been to proceed on his own. He sucked it up and made himself useful.
Dave’s grown son turned out to be an ace at tree climbing, balancing in unlikely perches. (Garrison’s own son sulked in the house, refusing to come outside.) Bracing the ground posts was what gave them the most trouble. Garrison had set the cement for the bases a few days ago, and in spite of his cautions the forms had shifted one side off plumb. He felt like an idiot. “Ah, we’ll git her done,” said Dave, and so they did.
By noon the first long boards of the platform were in place, making it possible to stand upright in the tree’s leafy center. Garrison climbed up and took his first cautious step. It was the damnedest feeling, this untethering from the ground, even if it was only by a dozen feet or so. Dave stood on the scaffold below him and levered a board over the platform’s edge. Garrison bent to receive it. It would be easy to lose your balance. Or give in to the perverse impulse, take a step off the leading board. He understood why someone might do that, just for the sensation, that instant of green flight.
Dave and his son worked stolidly away, and Garrison put his head down and tried to match their pace. He found the rhythm of swinging a hammer, and little by little it steadied him. These days he felt strange to himself, as he knew he must seem strange to others. It quieted him to guide his muscles, hit his mark, move on to the next one. Mindless work, people called it, and that was exactly right. Mindlessness was what he wanted. But you couldn’t go after it straight on. You couldn’t even really want it. You had to sneak up on it, forget all about it, and if you were lucky it showed itself, like a rare bird. He drove another nail home and then another and another.
At the end of the day they sat in the lawn chairs, drinking beer and contemplating the neat, 8’-by-12’ platform, braced and level, ready to receive walls, windows, door, and roof. Dave said, “Another thing about a treehouse, you can keep adding on. Go into the next tree if you wanted, say, a rope bridge leading up to a whattyacallit. Crow’s nest.” Garrison agreed that this was something to think about. He knew he’d have to do the rest of the work himself, just to keep it his.
Garrison’s wife tr
ied to make sense of the treehouse in different ways, once she was convinced he was “serious” about it, meaning, she was unable to talk him out of it. “But why?” she kept asking, reasonably enough, and when he couldn’t provide much of an answer beyond he felt like doing it, she grew silent, injured, as if he were withholding some part of himself from her. Which he guessed he was, although not in any way he could have helped. He knew she had discussions with her women friends, as she did about all other aspects of their life together, a committee of females evaluating him at every step. She turned ironic and tolerant toward him. He was, after all, a man of a certain age, and all sorts of blundering misbehaviors might be expected of him. No doubt the friends had told her that a treehouse was harmless, such a transparently juvenile thing. Much better than an affair, or even a sports car. After all, he was right there in the backyard where she could keep an eye on him.
For a time she brought lemonade and sandwiches out to him as he worked, and asked questions to show she was interested. “Why did you leave all those cracks between the boards? I can see right through them.”
“So that rainwater can drain.” He was using a power sander to shave the top edge of a wall panel, and he had to turn it off in order to talk to her. When she looked like she was done, he started it up again.
His wife covered her ears and once he paused to take another measurement, she said, “I’m surprised the zoning laws let you do this. I mean, what if everybody on the block went around putting little houses in their backyards?”
“As long as it’s not rental property, they’re fine with it.” He gripped the panel and laid it flat on the hoist he’d rigged to get the heavier lumber up to the platform. He was pleased with the hoist. A sling of canvas with grommets was threaded through with nylon rope and attached to a donkey, a Y-shaped branch he’d pruned out and carefully cut to size. The donkey was fastened to a higher branch and when he’d winched the donkey, turn by turn, to take up the slack rope, he tied the sling off to the platform.
“What color are you going to paint it when it’s done?” his wife asked.
“I haven’t decided.” He hadn’t thought about painting it. It hadn’t occurred to him.
“You could do it white and green trim to match the house. So there’d be the real house and the miniature version.”
“Yeah, that would be nice.” He finished securing the panel in the canvas and was ready to climb.
“I wish you’d wear a safety harness when you’re working up there. What if you slipped? Or had a dizzy spell or, God forbid, a heart attack?”
“I’ll get one if it would make you feel better.”
“You mean, you’ll promise anything if it will make me go away.”
“I didn’t say that, Janine.”
“You don’t even see me anymore. I’m just this object you have to avoid running into.”
“I’m sorry you’re unhappy.” And he was. He was sorry for all the unhappy people in the world. “Maybe you could start playing tennis again, you used to play a lot of tennis when the kids were growing up. You were really good at it.”
“Do you know how long it’s been since we made love? Huh? Do you even remember the last time?”
“We can do that too, if you want.”
“If I want? If I want?” His wife’s shoulders shook, although the shaking had begun somewhere else, in her clenching hands, perhaps. She turned and ran across the yard to the house. Garrison waited until she’d gone inside, then he climbed the scaffold and maneuvered the wall panel upward, taking care not to let it swing wide and hit the trunk.
By now he had four walls and the trusses for the roof in place. He lay on his back on the floorboards and looked through the open spaces to the interlacing leaves, still new and unfurling, red-veined on their undersides. The sky between them was the blue of a watercolor. The trick was to forget what you were looking at, forget that those things had names, leaf or sky, green or blue. Forget that there was such a thing as a name. You had to try not to try. His breathing slowed. He was not asleep; his eyes were open. A space of time passed, or rather it did not pass, since he was not aware of it. Something roused him, a noise in the street, and brought him back to himself. “Wow,” he said out loud, what a silly word, and so he laughed and said it again, “Wow.”
He wondered if he could figure out how to put a skylight in the roof, decided regretfully against it.
At work he managed well enough, turning on his business self as if with a switch. It was like driving, a set of reflexes he could rely on. Once in a while, in conversation, he was aware of leaving a gap where words should have gone, or of people giving him measuring sorts of looks. But on the whole, it was remarkable how little of his attention and energy it took to keep his work life in motion. The smallest push from him sent it wobbling about the track.
Loretta was out sick for two weeks, then the word came that she had lung cancer and wouldn’t be coming back. A card made the rounds for everyone to sign. Even for people no one much liked, there was always a card. Garrison lingered over it for a long time, looking at the messages his coworkers had already inscribed, their expressions of sympathy and encouragement—Hang in there!—the festoons of exclamation points and hearts. Finally he wrote, “I hope you have peaceful days.” He drew in a breath and let it slip out again, all sweet air.
One evening his wife said to him, “Your car is dirty.”
“Yeah?” He looked out to the driveway. The Lexus’s windshield showed a clear half-moon where the wipers had cut through the dirt. “I better take care of that.” He felt bad about the car. It deserved better from him.
“What are you going to build next?” his wife asked. Her newest approach to him was to remain very calm, as if she were dealing, professionally, with someone of diminished capacity.
“Next?”
“When you finish your treehouse. I thought you’d probably start a new project.”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“I thought you liked building things. The hands-on part of it.”
“Sure.” She’d followed him into the kitchen, where he’d gone to make a sandwich. She was always doing that now, tracking him through the house. “But that doesn’t mean I have to keep on doing it.”
“I am trying very hard to understand this, Brian.”
“I know.” She was waiting for him to say something else. He put the top on his sandwich and cut it in half. He said, “I saw one of those announcement boards in front of a church. You know the kind I mean? It said, ‘Life Handed Us Our Paycheck and We Said, We Worked Harder Than This.’”
His wife nodded. “You’ve always been a hard worker. I can see why it spoke to you.”
“I thought it was more about, just, life. What life’s supposed to be.”
“Would you be happier in a different job? We could manage. Get by on less. There are these people, career coaches. They’re supposed to help you figure out what you really want to do.”
Garrison knew he was explaining things badly. “I don’t mind my job. It just doesn’t seem as important as it used to be.”
His wife looked past him, as if some aspect of the cabinet behind him arrested her attention, the way she might if its surface had arranged itself to resemble the face of Christ. “Am I still important?”
“Of course you are,” Garrison said, but he didn’t say it fast enough, and she turned and walked from the room.
The roof was a struggle. Even though his carpentry skills had improved over the course of the project—they almost couldn’t help but improve—he gave himself about a C+ for the roof. He tar papered and shingled over the center seam and hoped for the best. Then he thought, so what if the roof leaked? He could lay himself down where the rain came through, let his skin fill up with it.
He made one more trip to see Dave and get the lumber for the permanent, anchored ladder. It would consist of half-round pine logs, sanded down to show the grain of the wood, like an extension of the trunk. He and Dave shook hands. “
How’s life in the trees?” Dave asked, and Garrison said it was coming along pretty good. “You should stop by and see the finished production sometime,” he said, meaning it, but knowing Dave wouldn’t do so without a fixed and specific invitation.
“Sometime,” Dave agreed, and they talked awhile longer about the best way to fit the ladder treads, and what kind of stain or varnish he could use to protect any wood that wasn’t pressure-treated. They shook hands again when Garrison left, and he thanked Dave once more for his time and help. “Happy to oblige,” Dave said, then turned to assist the next waiting customer. Garrison, walking away, thought that he could do worse than to be like Dave, mild, knowledgeable, patient. But it would be too easy to let himself be lured in by that universe of equipment, all the sharp and shining busy-making things.
His daughter came home for a few weeks between her summer adventures. Her little red car pulled into the driveway one Sunday afternoon. She opened the car door and stretched out her thin, tan legs. Then her mother appeared on the front walk and the girl waved and squealed and ran to embrace her. Garrison, watching from an upstairs window, felt his heart tear like paper.
Dinner that night was made into an occasion, with a cloth laid on the table and drinks served in stemware. His daughter was a vegetarian now, like many other daughters, and so there was a mushroom sauce for the pasta, and a more elaborate salad than was usual, and an attempt at an eggplant dish. His son fixed himself a hamburger, ostentatiously rare, which he ate with considerable smacking and chomping. “That is so not cool,” his daughter said. “Why don’t you just feed him from a dish on the floor?”
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