A Key to Treehouse Living

by Elliot Reed

  TENDERNESS

  See the woman at the park holding a baby, bouncing the baby lightly in her arms? That’s tenderness. You and your pal Ned are running through the woods and Ned falls and skins his knee on a rock. He limps the rest of the way to the treehouse. He’s trying not to cry and blood is running down his leg. After you get the Band-Aids from the treehouse wound kit and put one on his knee for him, you must pat down the Band-Aid with tenderness. If you wake up in a bed with a woman, treat her tenderly, and she will do the same for you. Don’t leave early in the morning without saying goodbye, especially if the night before she tenderly held you in her arms as you told her all about your life. She listened. That was tender of her. Still, it’s tempting to sneak away. The sunlight of crepuscular dawn, when it touches your sunburned face, is tender.

  TOILETRY BAG

  Bag that holds the things you normally use in bathrooms. Toiletry bags are small, made of shiny plastic fabric, and covered in designs. Toiletry bags are used when you’re on the road so that everything is in one place when you stop at a bathroom. If all you have is a toothbrush, you don’t need a toiletry bag. If you’re floating down a river on a raft, the best place for your toothbrush is on a string around your neck so you can find it in the dark and it doesn’t get lost overboard. If a woman has a toiletry bag in her hand, car keys in her other, a backpack full of clothes slung over one arm and a toy dog in a red leather bag slung over the other—let’s say you’re sitting in her kitchen eating a bowl of cereal when she comes in with her bags and her car keys—you can be sure she’s planning to go somewhere, and soon, and that she intends to take you with her.

  TENSE

  A toy dog meeting two full-grown German shepherds it has never met before: the toy dog will be tense. Tense is the opposite of relaxed. Tense can be a state of mind, but it can also have to do with the space of time. A TENSE moment, written in the PAST TENSE, might be this: The warden of the bunkhouse, Wilson Carmichael, held in his hands a little snapping turtle that he’d pulled from the sheets of the bunk belonging to a boy named Ernesto, and as the little turtle snapped the air, hissed, and flailed its webbed feet, Wilson Carmichael looked around at the gathering of orphans and said, “Who put this in Ernesto’s bed?” A tense moment, in the present tense, present because it’s not yet a memory when you say it: “I can’t go on a road trip with you right now, Sabi, I’m sorry,” and when you say it she’s standing there with her floral toiletry bag and her backpack of clothes and her car keys and her toy Chihuahua and a map of the Southwestern states she had spread out on the table earlier—“deserts, Anasazi pueblos, every kind of Indian artifact, slickrock canyons, I know you’ll love it,” she said. A tense moment, begun with a sentence in future tense: “I will get on that Greyhound bus after all, take it back to where I came from, tie up some loose ends, and get on with my life.”

  TYING UP LOOSE ENDS

  Picture an old net lying in a patch of weeds beside an old shack on the banks of a river. Imagine it’s the kind of net that has weights woven into it, the kind of net you throw into a body of water by twisting at the hips and flinging it like a big disc, the kind of net that, when thrown like this and then pulled back ashore, is meant to come up filled with fish. Imagine spreading out this old net, untangling its many strange tangles (you’ll need a flat, quiet, weed-free place to do this, and you’ll need plenty of time to work). Imagine the old net lying flat on a driveway. Imagine that this net has a number of large holes, places where mice ate their way through it or where fish burst through, holes from where the net got caught on a submerged log sunk deep in the mud. Then imagine you have a spool of new line, a sharp knife, and the whole day ahead of you. Imagine that each little square of this net is a memory in your head, a memory of a time something happened, or a memory of something you heard somebody say once. When you think about the sequence of things that happened to bring you where you are today, it’s like you’re looking at a hopelessly tangled, useless net. Let’s say you’re sitting at a bus stop wondering what the hell you’re doing. WHAT AM I DOING?—that’s an unanswerable question and to ask it of yourself can make you feel like you’re looking at a tangled net on the banks of a river teeming with fish. The only thing to do, in that moment, is to work with your line and your knife, square by square, repairing the mesh of your net. When at last all the holes are gone, it’s time to tie up the loose ends, the places near the edge of the net close to where the weights are. Once this is done, all you have to do is learn how to cast.

  TYPEWRITER

  A machine that writes type, used by writers to make documents that look official. You may be the greatest writer of all time but until you have a typewriter your work will not be taken seriously.

  Sabi, when I told her I wasn’t going to go along on her tour of the Southwest, when I told her that she had her important business and I had mine and we both needed to go forth alone, took it pretty well. “At least let me take you to the bus stop,” she said, and I said, “of course,” and before we got in her car she put a boxy leather case on the kitchen table, a case with a shiny metal lock and a rigid frame, and she told me to open it. Inside the case was a typewriter. She showed me how to load the paper in the top and twist the feeder until the paper came back up, showed me how to return the paper to the start of a new line.

  ULTRAMARINE

  The bluest shade of blue. Bluer than this and you’re going into purple. Less blue and you’re headed to gray, and from there you could be heading anywhere. The roofs of stucco buildings in Greece are ultramarine. In crepuscular light look up, find the first star to appear in the night—it will be in a sky that is still blue, a darkening patch of daytime sky, that’s where you’ll glimpse ultramarine. The best place to find ultramarine is through the tall, gently vibrating glass windows of a Greyhound bus in late summer.

  USHERED IN

  When somebody puts his hand on your back, pushes you gently through a door, and closes it behind you. The only way I can come up with a reason for my father’s suicide is if I make one up using what I know about myself. The reason will come from my genes: my father waded into that water because not even his photographs could show people the world as he saw it, and because he missed my mother, and because he realized that the one thing he really knew how to do couldn’t help him do what he wanted to do. At that point he decided that death would be better for him than life. When he made the decision, he also decided something for me. He decided his being dead would be better for me than his being alive. I will honor his wishes and believe he was right. I will have him silently standing behind a closed door that’s somewhere behind me.

  ULULATE

  Sounds something like an OPERATIC FALSETTO but is not, to ululate is to make high-pitched, strange noises with your throat and lungs. People ululate when they’re sad about something. Women from the Middle East are the most famous ululators though they can’t be the only ones. If you’re watching the news on a TV in a Greyhound station and a reporter is giving a live dispatch from a town in the Middle East that was bombed to rubble a day earlier, and behind the reporter are the people whose homes were destroyed, and they start to ululate, all of a sudden you’ll want to cry because although your luck isn’t the best, really, you would, if you could, give some of your luck to the ululators. All the things you’ve clung to might seem senseless in the face of what’s on the television. You’ll realize that nothing you could say is as important as what’s being said by the brokenhearted mother on the screen. You may think it’s a coincidence that ULULATE starts with a U and that you’ve learned its meaning at a time when you’re feeling so close to Z—and then, outside, in the park across from the bus stop, you see a man atop a unicycle juggling apples for a group of children. When you’re on a bus that’s leaving the station and you’re waving goodbye to a newfound friend who just dropped you off, you may, in your mind, be ululating.

  UNDERRIPE FRUIT

  Fruit that’s not ready to eat yet but that in some situations you must eat an
yway. Let’s say you were in a rush to get on a bus, that the doors of the bus were about to close and you needed to get on that bus because you needed to go where that bus was going but your stomach was grumbling and all you had was a little bag of clothes, a toothbrush, a camera, and a typewriter, let’s say that at that point you spot a withered old apple tree behind a bench where some old men are awaiting a bus of their own, and you dash over to the tree, leaving your things on a seat by the window in the bus whose doors are about to close, and, though the driver says, “We’re leaving now,” you blow past him and run flat-out to the tree, snatch three apples and run back, up the steps of the bus and through the door, which snaps shut behind you. You then sit down and bite into the first of your apples, but your teeth barely sink through the skin and the apple meat breaks off like a tiny coin in your mouth, and the underripe taste sends shocks of pain to the gland beneath your left ear.

  ULTRA POSSE NEMO OBLIGATUR

  This is Latin for the idea that you can’t be expected to do more than you are physically or emotionally capable of doing. It’s a legal term, and legal terms are written in Latin because the judges and lawyers want to keep people who aren’t judges and lawyers out of their conversations. If the law were in English, a judge would spend too much time explaining what he means to the people in court and not enough time judging them. The good news is that you can get to his level if you know what to do. First, go to the library and find the section with law books. These books will be fat and heavy, will all look the same, and there won’t be a lot of people browsing through them. Pick one out, flip to the back, find the Latin words with English translations, and spend some time trying to see if you can apply these words to hypothetical court cases against people you’ve met over the course of your life. Also memorize a few phrases that seem general enough that they might come in handy in the courtroom one day. ULTRA POSSE NEMO OBLIGATUR, for example, is a saying that could work in a number of situations. If you’re trying to explain to El Hondero why you forgive him for walking out on you, for going solo on his wild goose chase for mica in Ohio, and you want to explain it to him in a way that makes it seem official and not too emotional—if you don’t want to just say “I missed you and I was mad at you but I’m back now, let’s be friends”—you could just say “Hey, ultra posse nemo obligatur, man” and give him a high five, and that’ll make everything better. If your plan is to show up in court and try to convince a judge that he should go easy on your uncle, you’d better have some Latin in your back pocket so that you can sound official. Even better—go to the courthouse in a suit and a tie with a recent haircut and a letter you typed up on a typewriter and addressed to the judge. A judge likes having a letter hand-delivered to her when she’s alone in her chambers, drinking a cup of coffee and looking over a case, especially if the letter is delivered to her by a reformed young ward of the state.

  UNORTHODOX METHODS

  There is a method to driving a bus full of passengers. If the bus driver follows the standard method of driving a bus, he will most likely get the bus from A to Z without calamity. His method will involve staying in one lane, not exceeding the speed limit, and restricting swerves. Not all bus drivers drive according to this tried-and-true method. Some drivers employ unorthodox methods. Some drivers attempt to drive while sleeping, while shouting angrily on a cell phone, and while eating enormous sandwiches that cause condiment spill-outs on driver uniforms, curses on the part of the driver, and spastic corrections of the bus’s direction. To write a story in alphabetical order is unorthodox, but if you’re trying to tell a lot of stories all at once and you’re trying to tell them for a lot of different reasons, you must resort to unorthodox methods.

  UNEVENTFUL

  If someone says, “How was your trip?” and you say, “It was uneventful,” you mean to say that your trip went smoothly, that it did not include unpredictable events which forced you to change plans while on the run. A ride on a bus can be uneventful when in fact it was full of tiny events that weren’t really worth remembering but at the time were events of note. On my eventful journey down the river on my raft made of barrels I was faced with roiling eddies, huge, submerged trees, sudden, mid-river waterfalls that would appear and disappear again in moments, enormous fish, a burning sun, mystical visions, and a shipwreck. On my uneventful bus trip back to where I’d come from I was faced with a talkative office clerk who’d been visiting an old friend from college, a woman who ate two whole fried chickens, who sported huge fake nails which she sucked clean again and again, who nearly touched me with those nails as she made her way down the bus aisle toward the bathroom. I also experienced several strange naps filled with bizarre dreams from which I woke sweating and disoriented, and that was about it. After I’d gotten off the bus, walked a mile to the old iron bridge, climbed up to El Hondero’s little apartment and found him sitting in his chair poring over yet another map of yet another wilderness, and after he’d given me a peanut-butter sandwich, sat me down in a chair, and asked me how my trip had gone, first I told him about the events going down there, of all that had happened in the town by the river, and then I told him the trip back had been uneventful.

  UNCERTAINTY

  It is for certain that everything is, ultimately, uncertain. A sentence that begins IT IS could always be continued with the word UNCERTAIN, and this would in any context certainly be true. It has a bunch of people inside and it is driving north on a road, and among the people inside of it is a woman who has eaten two fried chickens and who is now on her way to the tiny bathroom in the rear of it. Is it a bus? Yes. Though it is not certainly a bus. It could be a very long, specialized limousine. The purpose of adding an entry entitled UNCERTAINTY is to resolve uncertainties that have, by this time, built up as a result of my private language. It is certain that I was traveling north on a bus when I saw a woman eat two fried chickens in quick succession, though she may have eaten more than two chickens—I say two fried chickens though I am certain that the parts she ate would not, if you found and reassembled them, result in two whole chickens—and it is true that I became certain, after seeing her go into the bathroom, that I would not go in there for some uncertain but long amount of time once she’d come out. Of what else was I, at that time, certain? I was certain that I would, in a few hours, get off the bus, orient myself, and then set off in the direction of the bridge over the river onto which I had launched my raft of barrels. I was uncertain that I would make it to the bridge without being confronted by some new, unforeseen obstacle. An enormous ship could long ago have destroyed the bridge while trying to pass beneath it. Would I be run over by a pickup truck belonging to park maintenance workers on an off-road joyride as I passed through a city park en route to the old bridge? Unlikely, but also uncertain. I’d recently seen a man pop out his own eye and use it as fishing tackle (see SAYNKER), which was one of many things I’d recently seen that had taught me about the hazards of expectation (see EXPECTATION). Would there be anything left of the old treehouse I’d built in the sycamore that one year it rained really hard and my uncle’s basement flooded? That, too, was uncertain, and the thought that I might be able to resolve the uncertainty of the existence of treehouse ruins was enticing . . . though I put the possibility out of my mind for the moment because it is best to tie up your loose ends one by one.

  UNNAMING

  In theory, this would be to take a name away from something that has been named. If you can figure out how to unname something without renaming it, you might have discovered time travel. A dog that belongs to a hermit and has never seen anyone but the hermit will, when the hermit dies and the dog becomes wild, still keep his name, even if nobody else knows it.

  VANITY

  A word for something that happens when you look at yourself in the mirror. Vanity is the obsession with one’s image, an obsession that appears in a mirror when you think no one else is looking. I remember the subtle shift in El Hondero’s face whenever he caught sight of it in a mirror. He would stop, bring his l
ips together, and do something like a frown with his mouth, though it was not really a frown, it was something else. The face he made in the mirror was a private expression, an expression he thought was secret, and watching it made me think of the privacy you get when you put your head in a body of water—the silence, the slowing of time, the loneliness of divers . . . I remember seeing my uncle catch himself in a mirror once, the mirror in the living room. He didn’t know I was watching him. He was crossing the room when he caught sight of himself in the mirror. He stopped in front of the mirror and a look of horror came over his face. He brought his hand to his mouth, as if gasping, then began to rub his skin like he was testing how it felt. I don’t know if there’s a subtle face I make when I look in the mirror. Am I vain? Did I ever look into the muddy surface of the river, which was sometimes a brown mirror, and try to pick out my eyes and nose and mouth as shifting shades of brown? Did I make faces at myself for an hour in the water one particularly boring day? Can you ever shake your vanity? Soon after I was back from my journey down the river I spent an entire hour at a thrift shop, trying on used suits and looking at myself in the mirror before riding the bus to Isabella’s apartment. I needed the suit for the judge, not for Isabella, who had finished exploring her inner self in Mexico City, but about that—the suit not being just a little bit for Isabella as well—I am uncertain. Right before we left to go see my uncle in prison, Isabella made her mirror-face in a mirror. She was standing in the dim hallway of her apartment. El Hondero was paging through a book on her coffee table, and I was standing there in her living room with my arms crossed when I saw her, looking at herself in the mirror, making a face I hadn’t seen before. Then she carefully put on a layer of red lipstick, smacked her lips once, and saw me in the mirror, watching her looking at herself in the mirror. We made eye contact. My stomach dropped out. She stared at me for several seconds. I don’t know what she was trying to say by staring at me like she did. Then she dropped her lipstick in her purse, snapped it shut, came into the living room, and we left.