by Julia Slavin
The sores and blisters on my hands from shoveling had opened to pink infant skin, blistered again, and opened, never enough time for scabbing. My ankles were swollen from edema; I had to leave my shoes unlaced to fit over my feet. I had something in my neck akin to whiplash. Heating pads and hydrastis brought little relief, until one morning I was too crippled to get out of bed. During the night I heard Del, his feet crunching the dead leaves, the soles of his boots padding the new dirt I’d laid. Get up, my mind said. Enough, my body replied.
I stayed in bed for three days, only struggling up for water or to use the bathroom. I’d stopped making acorns, with the exception of an occasional passing of something minuscule and misshapen. I bled.
On the third night a limb fell against the roof and woke me. I went to the window. Light from the street made shadows in the branches: a cat, a chair, a terrier on a leash. There was my father. Now he wore a hat with a brim. His shoes were polished. You’re on your own now. He turned away from me, stepped up the branches into the crown, and disappeared in the leaves.
Later, the plastic on the window flung open and a storm blew into my room. A stream of leaves hovered over my bed. I rose to my knees. Leaves and bark slapped my face, pressed into my mouth to choke me, stuck in my hair, poked my eyes, until the wind lost momentum and the pieces of the tree piled on the floor.
In the morning I got up, showered, and dressed. I tidied up and had breakfast, a soft-boiled egg and mullein tea. Then I sat outside by the oak, some brown trumpet creeper straggling to my feet.
A group of laborers jumped off the back of a truck and made their way across the lawn. Speaking in a foreign tongue I didn’t know, they laughed and talked lightheartedly. They carried ropes and pushed a machine called a “stump remover,” a yellow ice-cream cart over a whirling blade. The ropes were thrown into the low branches and cables were tightened, power lines were secured, and the hedge between Del’s and my property was tied back. Then the foreman gave a signal and the door to the truck opened. From the cab, he slid down and limped and dragged himself across my yard: the cutter.
I stood and watched, my mind unable to process such a repugnant sight. Where there was supposed to be an arm there was a blade with continuous teeth and a motor. Where there was supposed to be a leg there were spikes on a metal thigh, blades on a steel calf. A clamp-on took the place of a foot. His hair was white, though he wasn’t old, and woven into a braid that hung down to the top of his belt. His shirt was open despite the cold day, and I could see he had only one nipple. He came to me first. He knew me. He knew the whole story. A mocking grin spread over his face. He opened his lips. Where there were supposed to be teeth there were black holes between a scattering of gray stumps. Somehow I found my voice.
“You know … a tincture of oak bark packed around the gums can help that … particular kind of … dental problem.”
He closed his mouth and stared into my eyes. Then he threw back his head and laughed, and all the men around him laughed too. But the sound of their laughter was soon swallowed by a horrible grinding, bone-crushing noise as the cutter reached under his metal arm and jerked a cord. The teeth on the chain blurred. He went up the trunk.
In seconds he was in the crown, black against the gray sky. I saw him shackle a branch in a rope and secure a cable. Then he swung the live saw around and held it to the wood. The branch plummeted, almost to the ground, but was wrenched up by the cables and held, twirling. The men scurried to the limb, unleashed it, threw it on a two-wheeled cart, and drew it to the street, where they hacked it into bits, inserted the smaller pieces into a chipper, and something resembling baby oatmeal sprayed out a bell-shaped chute. The bigger chunks were split and stacked on Del’s woodpile.
He swung from branch to branch. As he cut, the sky came through, an endless gray vastness. Soon, there was just the stripped trunk and my branch, one arm praying.
I went inside. In my bedroom, I fell back on the floor against the wall, pulled my knees into my chest, crammed my thumbs into my ears. But the sound came through, a voice hoarse from screaming. Just for me, he left the last inch of branch to split, crack, and break on its own. Then there was a shaking of the house, with each block dropped from the trunk.
When I opened my eyes the cutter was before me, in my bedroom. I felt the heat from the saw, smelled the poison on his skin. My clothes dampened from the proximity of his sweat. He brought his face within inches of mine and spread his lips. Then he wedged his fingers into his mouth and squeezed what few teeth he had together. They slid across his gums until they were perfectly spaced. From the neck up, he looked almost normal now. He stood and stretched his neck and arm. Then he dragged himself across my room, tearing a gash in my rug, scratching the floor, and clinked and clanged down the stairs to the outside.
I was embarrassed, standing by Del’s woodpile, seeing the tree this way, shape-shifted into something grotesque. I touched one of the logs. The bark was dry, powdery, and came apart in my hand. But beneath the outer skin and the sapwood, the older wood at the center was still hard and dense. They’d cut it alive. If I’d dug deeper; if my ridiculous body hadn’t given out, a little rain, some sun; if only.… I spread my hand over a cross section. Then I heard Del behind me.
“Just so there are no bad feelings, Carla, I’d like to split the wood with you. There’s a good four cord from all the cutting. I’ll have my men stack it and cover it, and you’re set.”
I tasted blood. I wanted to bite out the inside of my mouth and swallow. I wanted to rise to twice my height and stretch into the shape of a crocodile jaw, my guts the teeth that would chew him up, my heart the tongue that would spit him among the trees, do to him what he’d done to me. But it was over. The jaw drew back into myself. I have to live here.
“Kind of you, Del. But there’s trouble with my flue. Don’t know that I’ll be having fires this winter.”
“I’ll get over for a look-see in the morning.”
“Don’t want to put you out.”
“No trouble.”
I hadn’t realized how much space it took. I never realized how big this house is, too big for one, but it is my home. For a while, I carried my acorns with me on long walks, planting them here and there. I flung fistfuls along the highway, tossed them on lawns and behind stores. I planted them down every median strip in town. Every park and school. Any green spot in a parking lot. I walked to where the town ends and the farms begin and planted in fields amid the barley and timothy. I found the tree farm near the place I was born and scattered them among the pines.
Christmas in my town: We do it up. Everyone’s kids are home from school and the lawns are decorated with lights and ornaments. Heavy gray smoke floats up from the chimneys, the smell of wood and clove everywhere. In the morning I take a walk. Del steps out to wish me well, to invite me in for mulled wine, to talk about more building.
“We’re putting in a pool, Carla. Indoor. Hope the noise won’t be a bother.”
“’Course not, Del.”
“I figure if I can’t get Marguerite out …”
“Bring the outside in.”
“Swimming would help that wrenching in your back. Open twenty-four hours for you.”
“That’s too generous.”
“You’re family.”
Smoke curls over the lips of the chimneys, rolls down, curves around the trees and houses, circles my ankles, and rises up my legs. My skirt spreads into an umbrella. Smoldering holes open on my coat.
“You’re on fire, Carla! Drop and roll!” Del shuffles sideways in front of me like he’s trying to block a lineman. I turn and run.
“Now that’s the worst thing to do. You’re only feeding it. Marguerite!”
Fingers of flame run through my hair. My face foams into a blister. I lift off the ground into a cloud of smoke. Del jumps, trying to grab at my ankles. I shoot up like an arrow. I hover over Del’s human-level trees, a row of hollies. I prick a finger on a spire atop Del’s house and then fly off with the wind.
Del’s a speck. The houses are toys. Below me there are forests a thousand years old. And then color goes to white as my body shatters and seeds the clouds.
Painting House
On the night eighth grade let out, I was arrested for breaking into a storage shack behind a liquor store, looking for beer. I was fined $300, plus damages. My stepfather grounded me for the entire summer and said I had to work off the fine and damages by painting the entire inside of his enormous house. I told him painting was a boy’s job. He told me that girls didn’t get arrested, break into liquor stores, or smoke marijuana either. So I painted with my stepbrother, Phil, who was sixteen, and did whatever he told me to do. No room was ever finished. The painting went on and on. This room needed the windows scraped, that room needed another coat on the woodwork, and there was always another room that had to be scraped, sanded, spackled, taped, and painted.
In July, my stepfather took my mother to South America. Phil was left in charge.
Mom and I sat in the back of my stepfather’s Jaguar and looked out opposite windows on the way to the airport. She wouldn’t look at me. She once said she couldn’t bear the way I looked at her, as if everything were her fault and that I’d been giving her that look since I was three. The fact was, I didn’t blame her for the state of things. If I harbored any blame, it was for my stepfather, who’d appointed himself to my personal discipline committee—a committee of one. I once heard Mom tell Phil that she couldn’t understand what good could come out of all the grounding, but she wasn’t going to go up against my stepfather. Mom didn’t want to go to South America. She hated uncomfortable travel because it reminded her of being poor, but my stepfather insisted. He wanted to see Machu Picchu and Angel Falls. She wanted to save her third marriage.
As we got closer to the airport, my mother started to worry about missing the boat to the Galapagos.
“Ed and Foxy Miller took that boat and had to wait in Guayaquil for six days,” she said. “Ed says Guayaquil is the armpit of the world.”
My stepfather said that that was what travel was all about. Travel was missing boats and getting stuck in terrible places, and if they got stuck in Guayaquil for six months, then that’s what traveling was about.
My mother started to twist her gold necklace around her finger. “Not to mention what Ed said about that boat. He said that boat was the most uncomfortable experience of his life. Filthy. Sludge an inch thick everywhere.”
My stepfather’s silence said that this was also what travel was about. Travel was about sludge and filth and being uncomfortable, and if they died of malaria, if their tongues rotted out, and if their skin fell off inch by inch, then that was what travel was about. Then he yelled at Phil about haranguing him all the time for money. About how he’d never get into college with such piss-poor grades. About his driving. “The reason I never let you use the damn car in the first place is because you don’t take care of anything. You’re from the throwaway generation. Broken? Get a new one. Ask the druggie in the backseat how hip I am to your generation.” Phil flipped on the blinker and moved into the right lane, careful to check over his shoulder and in the mirrors for other cars.
By the time we drove up the ramp to the airport, my mother’s boat-travel stories had grown progressively worse, until three-quarters of the people on that boat had caught cholera and were floating for four days, not knowing where they were going. Phil stopped at the terminal entrance. “No monkey business in this car,” my stepfather said, getting out. “I should have my head examined for letting you anywhere near it.” My mother put her arms around me. I could hear her heart beating and could feel my own pulse in my head and an odd combination of familiar and unfamiliar sensations. Familiar, because this was my pretty mother with her large breasts and lily smell. Unfamiliar because she had stopped holding me when I was twelve. Now she was holding me hard.
“Why don’t you climb up here?” Phil said, driving back. “So I don’t feel like a chauffeur.”
“No.”
We drove in quiet and I looked out the window at all the things my mother had seen out her window on the way to the airport.
When we got home I told Phil I was going out. I said I’d made plans with my friend Amanda and Mom and Dad knew about it.
“I didn’t know about it,” Phil said.
I said I was going anyway and left. I didn’t have plans. Amanda hadn’t been my friend for two years. I walked up to McDonald’s and sat outside. I bummed cigarettes from some of the tenth-grade girls and split a joint in the parking lot with Andy Spector, one of the boys I got arrested with for breaking into the storage shack.
“Your stepdad’s a dick,” Andy said. Andy’s father had paid his fine and damages and said we were just acting the way kids act in the summertime. My stepfather said Andy’s father was an alcoholic and what else could you expect.
I hung around outside McDonald’s until they closed, and then walked home. Phil left the door unlocked so that I wouldn’t have to dig the spare key out of the mulch around the dogwood. Going upstairs, I tried to keep quiet. I knew which creaky steps to avoid, even in the dark. Step over one to two, three, four, skip five, skip eight, stay by the wall on the landing, skip eleven.
Phil had moved into our parents’ bedroom for the king-size bed and the TV.
“Karen,” he called.
I pretended not to hear and went into my room and locked the door. I lay down on my bed with my clothes on, my eyes open in the dark.
“Karen,” Phil whispered, and scratched the door with his fingernails. I don’t know why he was whispering. Only the two of us were in the house.
The summer I was twelve, Phil came home from boarding school with a low voice and chest hair sticking out from the top of his T-shirt. I’d started my period while he was gone, and wearing a bra. Phil, who’d ignored me since my mother married his father five years before, looked me up and down, and I looked at him as if we were new people. Then he smiled and said I’d better watch out. One Saturday afternoon we were sitting on the floor of the rec room eating Cool Pops and watching a Combat rerun, and he started stroking my breasts through my shirt and my crotch through my shorts. I didn’t stop him. I wanted someone to put his hands on me because I thought it would feel better than when I did it myself. We went on that way for the rest of the summer, and sometime during August, Phil said he wanted to take what we were doing to the next level. By this time he was moving my shirt away from my breasts and holding them in his hands, and he was wrapping his legs tightly around my thigh and rubbing himself against it. I knew “the next level” meant I’d have to touch him or even let him screw me, so I stopped everything. But he’d brush by me in the family room and I’d notice he smelled like Ivory Snow. Or we’d come face-to-face in the upstairs hall, move side to side trying to get by each other, and finally he’d move around me, leaving his soapy smell in every room he walked through.
The following spring he came home from school with a rough face and a stocky build from wrestling and lifting weights. He’d learned things: how to give a girl an orgasm with his fingers, and that if you use your tongue on a girl she’ll do anything. I wouldn’t do anything, but I liked his tongue, so I let him screw me. And then we were doing it wherever we could, whenever our parents went out. Phil wanted to do it while my mother was home, when she was out back weeding, or meeting with her investment club, or when our parents had the Millers over for drinks, to just quickly, quietly, let him stick it in, but I wouldn’t let him while they were there. And I still wouldn’t touch him. He wanted me to do it with my hand and he wanted me to put my mouth on it. I couldn’t even bear to guide it in and I never looked at it. Every time we did it I swore it would be the last time, and he’d say that was just fine and tiptoe back down the hall to his room.
Nonetheless, it continued. We worked out bargains. There were conditions and rules that were understood and honored. Miraculously, I didn’t get pregnant. In fact, it never occurred to me until he brought it up that I could get pregnant.
I assumed the secretiveness and the danger were themselves sufficiently prophylactic. And soon he started talking about taking what we were doing to an even higher level.
But now I wanted it to stop. I felt with our parents gone I could stop it. Their absence empowered me; I was the woman of the house. We weren’t the children anymore and I had a say. Phil saw things differently. We had a house. A king-size bed. We could do it all night like a real couple.
In the morning I told Phil I didn’t want to do it with him anymore. That was all I said. He was reading the box scores in The Post and didn’t look up. I said I really meant it this time. He wrinkled his forehead, brought his hands together to turn the page, and still didn’t look at me. I took my cereal bowl to the sink and heard him say, just above a whisper, “Do what? You don’t do anything.” I pretended not to hear and washed the morning dishes and the plate and glass from Phil’s snack the night before.
After breakfast we went to the paint store for more cans of linen white. Phil always insisted we get to the store when it opened so that we could watch the professional painters pick up their supplies.
The painters were men who looked older than they were. They were either rail thin, or oddly fat with muscular arms and huge guts. At seven o’clock in the morning they reeked of tobacco and their fingers were stained yellow. Some of them had shaky hands as they reached for new rollers or pointed out the paints they wanted mixed. Phil knew about some of them.
“See that one? He has a master’s degree in anthropology. He says he’s a painter because he just likes to paint,” Phil whispered, and shook his head sympathetically. “See that one? He was quarterback for Central. He used to be a good-looking guy. Then he was living on the street, draining the alcohol out of Sterno.” They all had a story. They all fell from something great to being painters. I felt we were playing with something dangerous by being there, that if we got too close to these men, whatever had grown inside them that made them amount to nothing but painters would come off on us. Phil and I were merely passing through, painting for the summer. These guys were stuck.
