“Wow, sophisticated college humor.”
“It’s his way of saying he’s missed you,” said Garrison’s wife.
“Oh yeah, like a dog misses fleas.”
“How’s his housebreaking going?” asked his daughter, with such a serious, concerned expression that they all started laughing. The boy made a comic face, like a dog begging at the table.
When they’d settled down and were once more working on their food, his daughter said, “So Dad, tell me about your treehouse.”
Garrison took the time to chew his bite of salad and swallow it. He saw that their earlier light and silly talk had been a kind of script, performed in the shadow of the central problem of himself. He took a sip of water. “What do you want to know?”
“Why didn’t you build us a treehouse when we were little, huh? That would have been awesome.”
“We would have had to worry about you falling.”
“That’s just a big fat excuse. You didn’t want us to have any fun.”
“That’s right,” said Garrison, with a heavy attempt at playfulness. “Fun, bad.”
“So why are you doing it? I mean, why now?”
His wife refilled her iced tea glass. “Anyone else?” she asked, holding the pitcher aloft. Garrison imagined the kind of information and complaints that she’d passed on to their daughter. He didn’t like to think of it. He said, blandly, “I guess I wanted a hobby. I thought it would be a challenge.”
His daughter pouted. “That’s not a very good answer.”
“You want a different answer, ask a different guy.”
“Will you give me a tour?”
Garrison was mildly surprised to realize that neither his son nor his wife had ever asked to see the treehouse. He wondered if they went up there while he was at work, if they stood in his spot on the bare boards, looking for clues to himself he might have left behind. “Sure. How about tomorrow, after I get home?”
The next day Garrison changed out of his office clothes and told his daughter to put on some shoes she could climb in. The extension ladder and scaffolding was still the only way up. “Careful,” he told her, standing on the ground, bracing the ladder. She worked her way up faster than he could have. “Hey,” he heard her say from up above him. He followed her to find her standing at the window of the small room, her face lit with the green, reflected sunshine of the canopy of leaves. The air was summer-warm. Cicadas buzzed around them. “This is great, Dad.”
“Glad you like it.” He unfolded the camp stool and deck chair he’d brought up. “Have a seat.”
She chose the stool, hugging her knees up to her chest. She’d been growing her hair out. The ends of her ponytail were sun bleached gold. “So what’s the deal here, is this your secret clubhouse, no girls allowed?”
“Except for you.”
“You’ll teach me the password and the secret handshake, huh?”
“Sure.” In spite of his best intentions, he felt fatigue creeping over him. He rallied against it. “You look like a surfer girl. Like a Beach Boys song.” She made a face; geezer music. “It was a compliment, honey.”
“Mom thinks you don’t love her anymore.”
Garrison considered this. “I don’t not love her.”
“That’s not so good, Dad.”
“No, I guess it’s not.”
“What’s wrong? Don’t say ‘nothing.’”
Garrison shook his head. There were words inside him somewhere, too heavy to dredge up.
“Dad.”
“I’m all right. I guess this is”—he made a sweeping hand
gesture, meant to indicate the treehouse, and everything that had led up to it—“I just wanted a place where I could be . . . quiet.”
His daughter looked around the small space again. “You did a good job. It smells nice. All woodsy.”
“Thanks.” He thought, yes, he had done a good job. The corners were square, the door frame tight, the wall boards straight. Now he could rest.
“This would be a great place to read. That’s what I’d do. Bring a book and an apple and hang out.”
Garrison considered. “Maybe the apple.”
“Or music. You could bring your music up here.”
“Ah.” He shrugged. “I haven’t spent much time on music lately.”
She pursed her lips softly, as if to whistle. She had always been the talker in the family, the one who needed the sound of answers. “Are you doing meditation?”
“Meditation always makes me think of incense and naked guys sitting around cross-legged, chanting.”
“Then could you just tell me what’s going on with you, instead of making me ask all these stupid questions? Are you sick? Are you mad about something? Jeez.”
“I’m not mad. Not sick either. Maybe just tired.” She wanted the secret password, the explanation that would unlock him. “You wake up one day and you realize, you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, like you’re going someplace. But you’re not.”
She was visibly trying to understand, wrinkling her forehead. She said, “Where is it you want to go?”
“Nowhere. I want to stop right where I am. Right here and now.”
“Stop?” she said, doubtfully.
“Stop pushing so hard. Get rid of all my tired, worried, mean, sad parts.”
“You’re not mean, Dad.”
“I can be. I have been.”
“Then don’t be. Cut it out.”
“I want to be . . . more like a tree. I don’t want so much baggage. Opinions. Judgments. Moods, good or bad.”
“But you’re not a tree! That’s all human being stuff! Dad! You’re freaking me out!”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.”
“If you’re depressed,” she began, determined to argue him out of what he was saying.
“I think maybe I was depressed. Before. Now I’m better.”
“Because you don’t care about anything anymore? Because you totally shut yourself down?”
“I like to think of it as opening myself up.”
“This isn’t normal. It’s not healthy. It’s stupid and horrible, it’s like you’re telling me I don’t even have a father anymore!”
If he was honest about it, he had always loved her more, and more purely. More than his difficult son, more than the wife who had worn him down over time. She would be the hardest to let go. She was waiting for him to deny it, reassure her, enclose her in the circle of himself, that empty circle. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
Then she was gone, a brief, blurred moment in his sight, the sound of her feet receding on the ladder, rung by rung.
The first night he spent in the tree was by accident. He had taken an old quilt and a cushion up there, a resting place for his head. He closed his eyes in the long summer twilight and opened them to darkness. The air was alive with all manner of night-speech: leaf and branch, breath of wind, and whatever small creatures hummed or whirred or called out to one another. There was no moon, but gradually the blackness resolved itself into the finest gradations of pale and dark. He wrapped himself in the quilt and slept again until the first birds woke him.
He thought he could get a small foam mattress up there, and, when necessary, some kind of heater, kerosene, maybe, as long as you were careful to vent it. There was always the bathroom in the house, and the occasional discreet pee off the edge of the platform.
The permanent ladder was finished, anchored and bolted into place, its beautiful grains and whorls standing out like sculpture. He disassembled the scaffolding and cleaned up his work space, stored the tools away in an orderly fashion. He liked the look of them now that they were at rest. The Bible verse came to him: Well done, good and faithful servant.
Well done, eyes and ears, mouth that tasted, pliant skin and steadfast, beating heart. How remarkable that his body had gone about its business all along, in spite of his inattention. He’d walked around inside it as if it was only another car that needed driving. Brake, ste
er, accelerate.
The world had grown too large, he could have told them, too cluttered with bewilderment and pain. Now he had made it small enough to fit inside himself. Through the open window of the treehouse he saw leaves showing their gray undersides, flattening out in an uneasy warm wind. The birds had gone still. A storm was setting up to the west. The sky was as green as a glass bottle. In the distance a siren started up. Somewhere in its warning hoon he thought he heard voices, his name turned into a shriek, a lament. He closed his eyes and waited.
How We Brought the Good News
Sophie said it would be possible to be an eco-terrorist right there in New York City and that holding out for Idaho or Oregon was just an indication he wasn’t serious. It was all very well to talk about blowing up dams and freeing the salmon to migrate. It was easy to get excited about salmon. They were one of the glamour stocks, the headliners. But there were so many practical and logistical barriers, so much preparation involved, and in the meantime they could do something about taxis. All the fuel-chomping, space-clogging taxis. Or watersheds! There were watersheds in trouble right under their noses.
Jer was doing his martial arts exercises. It annoyed her when he did that, went into his mind-body trance thing for the purpose of not listening to her. She said, “Anyway, they probably have all the eco-terrorists they need out west. New York is underserved.”
Jer balanced on one foot and raised his opposite leg into attack position. His arms swam in slow motion, making elegant, killing shapes.
“Furthermore,” Sophie went on, although furthermore was one of those top-heavy words that meant you’d already lost an argument and were just trying to prop things up. “You suck at anything that requires precision. Like dynamite. Duh. You majorly suck.”
Jer pivoted, did a flick kick with his outstretched leg, let the momentum carry him around. He ended up in a half-crouch, arms overhead, fingers spread like daggers. “Oh, I am so scared,” Sophie said. “I feel menaced.”
She went into the bedroom and closed the door. The bedroom was built up as a loft so that you had to climb a ladder to get to the bed. When one of them was angry with the other, they pulled the ladder up after them, and that’s what Sophie did now. She had the dismal thought that she should start looking for a new place, or call a few of her friends, sound them out about couch crashing. She was tired of Jer’s big talk that went nowhere, his posing that was presumably for her benefit but from which she was so pointedly excluded. And here the eco-terrorist thing had been his idea in the first place. He’d gotten her all excited about it, but when she’d taken it up, started reading the books he read, firing up with the same righteous enthusiasm, it was clear she’d ruined it for him. She had only been meant to listen and admire as all those brave and scornful things came out of his mouth like a cartoon balloon.
Sophie fell asleep, and when she woke it was late afternoon and the apartment was quiet. Jer had gone out somewhere, perfecting the process of ignoring her. Sophie packed a few shirts, her other jeans, underwear, shampoo and stuff, some CDs he’d notice were gone even if he didn’t notice anything else. It all fit into her ordinary canvas bag. Nothing full scale or spiteful, no broken dishes or nasty note. After all, she wanted to preserve her options. She wished she was braver, more determined, better at feeling indignant, fatally insulted, no turning back. Those were always the ones the boys came running after. Well, that wasn’t her. She guessed she was still hoping they’d make up, be the people they used to be, all goofy with sex and fondness. She was so totally mushy. She’d make a terrible eco-terrorist.
She dawdled on the stairs but Jer didn’t appear, nor was he on the street outside. No big gorgeous scene of the kind she’d been rehearsing. It was hot, she’d forgotten how it was outside, airless and malevolent. It was as if the concrete itself, and every other bit of man-made dreck—wires cross-hatching the sky, delivery trucks fatly blocking traffic, pissed-off honking, mechanical sweat of rubber and exhaust—had amalgamated into some sci-fi monster, bawling and staggering around, out to get you.
Sophie decided she’d go hang out at the coffee shop/art gallery/video game emporium where she sometimes worked. It was at least air-conditioned, and also Jer would think of looking for her there, or would be careful to avoid looking for her there, depending on how things stood. More stupid wishy-washy on her part. What did she think, Jer was going to show up with flowers? Ha! Did guys do that anymore? Had they ever?
She trudged the six overheated blocks. She wondered how many toxins she was breathing in per square inch. It had only been a few hundred years ago, the blink of an eye in geological time, when all of Manhattan had been wild and free. Forest? Swampland? She should look it up. Say somebody bombed the whole place, not that she had any active wish for that to happen. She wouldn’t go that far, except maybe on a really bad day. How long would it take for the ruins to grind down into dust and sift away? For brambles and tough little weed trees, rabbits and deer and even more outrageous things—wolves! panthers!—to reassert themselves? Or maybe New York was incurable, a sinkhole of sludge and heavy metals and petroleum. An industrial whatchamacallit. Chernobyl.
These were diverting thoughts, or at least she meant them to be, but Sophie was aware that this was just another way of thinking about Jer, her and Jer, and whether they could be reconstituted into their former pristine state, or whether they were a doomed biohazard and should be sealed off for all time. She thought that was kind of a neat way to put it, she wished she could tell Jer, except it was likely he wouldn’t appreciate it.
At the coffee shop she said hello to Danny and Rose, who said hey, didn’t think you were working, and Sophie said I’m not, I’m just hanging out. She stowed her canvas bag behind the counter and fixed herself a chai latte. She sat in a corner booth where she could see the front door. Behind her a few of the gamers, the regulars, the total losers, hunched before their glowing computer monitors. She wondered if they thought they were pathetic, like everybody else did, or if their protective fantasy worlds extended to shield them from real-life opinions. Sophie didn’t know which games were worse, the war/crime ones, bulging with muscles and danger and sleek, disposable bad guys, or the alternate universe ones. The big pasty kid in the corner, the one who wore the same sweatpants and South Park T-shirt every day he came in? Sophie happened to know that his avatar was a Lord of Fire demon with special powers of invincibility and mind control.
Jer was only her third real boyfriend. She had a private calculus which determined real; it had less to do with sex and more to do with expectations. So far none of her expectations had been met. They had not even been approximated. She honestly didn’t think it had been her fault, but she guessed nobody ever did. Still, she had entered into each arrangement in good faith. She had been anxious, maybe too anxious, to please. Hence, eco-terrorism. But how did you stop caring about a thing, a cause or a boy, once your caring was no longer wanted?
Her phone buzzed, making her heart leap, but it was only her mother. Sophie decided to answer it, as not answering would require the extra effort of calling back later. “Hi, Mom.”
“Oh good, there you are.” Sophie’s mother always began conversations that way, although “there” was anywhere covered by the satellite network, and like everybody else, Sophie had often taken advantage of this to report that she was somewhere she was supposed to be, instead of the questionable or forbidden place she actually was. “I’ve been so worried.”
“Don’t be,” said Sophie, with some rudeness, because her mother was always worrying, a generic, nonspecific cloud of worry. Emotional pollution.
“It’s so hot there,” her mother said, from her home base in Michigan. “I saw it in the papers. I hope you’re staying hydrated.”
Sophie said that she was, and there was a little pause. The weather was one thing, but the untidy circumstances of Sophie’s life made for trickier conversation. “How’s Jerry?” her mother asked brightly.
“Fine. He’s starting a new band.” A
piece of information she could offer up without revealing much of anything.
“Oh, that’s nice. What’s the name of it?”
“Polite Sleeper.”
“What? Never mind. What fun would it be if people actually understood it? I had a dream about you last night. You were getting married, but not to Jerry. Don’t ask me how I knew it was somebody else, I just did. In the dream you and whoever it was were driving away from the ceremony and you had a golden halo around your head, like one of the saints.”
“Well that’s weird. Was I wearing the big white dress? Saint Bride?”
“I suppose you were, but that’s not the important part. Everybody there seemed to think it was perfectly natural that you were a saint.”
“How about the lucky guy? Was he a saint too?”
“Now dear, you know the wedding is really the bride’s big day.”
“Yeah, fine,” Sophie murmured. She mistrusted this dream business, the oracular quality people invested them with. She mistrusted her mother’s dreams in particular.
“I think it means you’re destined for something wonderful. Not sainthood, exactly. There’s already a Saint Sophia, she’s the patron saint of widows. But some other kind of shining, special life. No matter what things might look like now. I have to run, honey. Daddy says hi.”
Thanks, Mom.
She was waiting for a chance to talk to Rose, a little girl-talk with the hopes of soliciting an offer of couch space. Just in case. But before she could do so Danny came over to sit with her, and this was not so good, since Danny had a major crush on her. There were some offers she didn’t need.
“Sucks when it’s slow,” he said, dumping his weight onto the bench in a way that irritated Sophie.
She asked him how long he’d been there and Danny said practically all day. Since one. No, closer to noon. He was one of those people who always tried to make things sound more interesting and remarkable than they really were. “It has been sooo boring. Look up ‘boring’ in the dictionary, and there’s a picture of—”
Do Not Deny Me Page 22