The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  “Break,” Professor Danko announced.

  Elyse slowly unwound from her position and stepped down from the stool. Her muscles ached as they thawed out. Accepting the robe from the teacher, a paunchy, weathered guy with a long, steel-gray ponytail and residual acne scars texturing his skin, she nodded her thanks and wrapped the soft terry cloth around her body.

  The professors at Massachusetts College of Art were excruciatingly scrupulous about not messing with the models. In the case of Professor Danko, that was just as well, but the guy teaching the life painting class Wednesday evenings, Professor Rubierra, couldn’t have been older than forty and had a lean, wiry build and eyes so dark they were nearly black. Sometimes, when she caught peripheral glimpses of him wandering among his students, critiquing their paintings, she wished he was just a little less scrupulous. She wouldn’t mind seeing him stripped down to bare skin.

  She wouldn’t mind seeing Mark Gottlieb stripped down to bare skin, either, she thought as she chugged some water from a chilled bottle. She wouldn’t mind seeing him naked, his eyes not clouded by tears, his breath not reeking of booze. She wouldn’t mind seeing him smile.

  Becky seemed to think that made Elyse a bad person.

  Fuck her.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  FLORIE’S LITERATURE class—English Epic Tradition—would be meeting in ten minutes. She was going to miss it.

  The kitchen in the Jubilee Christian Center had been left a mess after last night’s revelation supper. Whoever had prepared the fried chicken had left spatters of grease all over the stove. The oven was caked with so many layers of crud an archeological examination would probably unearth a year’s worth of baking and roasting spills, layered like the earth’s strata, so each relic of crusty food could be linked to a specific date and meal. The counters were blotched with spills that had dried before they’d been wiped, and the sink’s drain cover was clogged with bits of old food. It was Florie’s job to clean the room, and so she would.

  English Epic Tradition wasn’t the course she’d hoped it would be, anyway. She’d thought they would be reading books about King Arthur. Ivanhoe. A Tale of Two Cities. Maybe even Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. When she’d skimmed the syllabus and discovered T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land on it, she’d given serious consideration to dropping the course. But she needed one more 300-level course for her major, and anyway she’d survived The Waste Land once before. In fact, she’d received an A-minus on the paper she’d written about it back in Mr. Schenk’s high school class: The Waste Land as a Meditation on Death.

  Mr. Schenk probably hadn’t even read her essay. She’d dug it out of the bottom drawer of her desk at home when she’d decided not to drop English Epic Tradition, and perused it to see if it might be of use in her current seminar. She’d found all sorts of errors in it—misspellings, dangling participles, a pathetic over-reliance on semicolons. But still, it had that large red A-minus scrawled across the title page.

  Cutting class wasn’t her choice. But Father Joe always said that good Christians allowed God to make their choices for them. If God wanted her to scrub the kitchen, she would scrub it, knowing it was God’s will that she miss today’s session of English Epic Tradition.

  The kitchen was old, not surprising given that the building itself dated back a good eighty years. The floor was a scuffed checkerboard of linoleum tiles, the refrigerator white enamel and nowhere near large enough, the cooking range at least a decade past its warranty date. There was nothing pretty or homey about the room, which was bathed in yellow light from buzzing fluorescent ceiling fixtures, augmented by the thin daylight filtering through the window. The kitchen actually had two windows, but one had been fitted with a venting fan that blocked off half the frame.

  Not that she was complaining about the light. Not that she would dare. Father Joe had asked her to clean the kitchen, and she was glad of the opportunity to serve him and their entire community. Serving the community was the same thing as serving God, Father Joe always said.

  This afternoon, serving God meant scrubbing the gummy skim of grease that coated the stove top. The non-abrasive cleanser she was using didn’t seem to have much effect on it, but she was afraid a powdered cleanser would leave scratches all over the surface. Instead, she pulled a knife from the silverware drawer and used its edge to chisel off the grease, slowly, carefully. If she damaged the stove . . .

  Well, she wouldn’t damage it. God wouldn’t let that happen.

  “Hey, there, Florence,” Father Joe’s voice reached her from the doorway.

  She turned and smiled, wondering if she should correct him. Her name was Flora, not Florence, and everyone had called her Florie since the day she was born. She’d corrected Father Joe about her name enough times that correcting him again might seem impertinent. As the center’s spiritual leader, he deserved respect.

  And she did respect him. For a man so young—he couldn’t be much older than thirty—he had accomplished so much. He’d founded this ministry, raised the money to run the center, counseled his flock, and guided them. With his short, neat hair, his crew-neck sweaters, and his khaki pants, he looked as if he’d bounded in from the set of a 1950s sitcom, and Florie took comfort in that. He seemed familiar enough that she didn’t go all tongue-tied in his presence, but distant enough that she knew not to chide him for always getting her name slightly wrong.

  “When was the last time this stove was cleaned?” she asked, still smiling so he’d know she wasn’t criticizing. Not that he could be blamed for the filthy condition of the range. He never did any of the cooking.

  “That’s a good question,” he said, flashing her a dimpled grin. His teeth were so white his smile seemed to glare in the filmy light. She wondered if he used a bleaching product to make them so shockingly bright, but then realized he probably didn’t have to. All he had to do was pray.

  God answers our prayers, he always said. Maybe Florie ought to try praying for whiter teeth.

  “I’m sure you’ll get it spic-and-span,” he said. Spic-and-span? He even talked like a character from a 1950s TV show sometimes. “Let me know if our cleaning supplies are running low. Mary Ann is going to the supermarket later today, so if we need any new sponges or soap or whatever, now is a good time to let her know.”

  Florie glanced at the row of cleansers lined up along the counter: glass cleaner, chrome cleaner, scouring powder, non-abrasive liquid in a drippy white plastic bottle. “I think we’re in good shape,” she said.

  “Great. God be with you,” he said, then rotated on the heel of one buffed cordovan penny loafer and bounded out of the kitchen.

  “God be with you,” Florie called to his back.

  She returned her attention to the stove, which, she had to admit, looked cleaner than it had when she’d started work on it twenty minutes ago. She was a little disappointed that Father Joe hadn’t asked if she had a class to attend or some other obligation demanding her time. He knew she was still a student. A sizeable chunk of the members of Jubilee came from the UMass campus. Some had graduated, some had dropped out to devote themselves full-time to the church and its activities, and some, like Florie, were struggling to complete their degrees.

  She wouldn’t be struggling if she didn’t spend so much time at Jubilee. She knew that. She knew just how often she’d missed a class in order to fulfill a duty here at the center. Yet how important could getting a degree in English be, compared to dwelling in the heart of the Lord? What she did here had to be more essential than listening to a dreary lecture on Paradise Lost.

  The Jubilee Christian Center was Paradise Found, as far as she was concerned.

  Sighing, she tugged her rubber gloves to keep them from slipping off—once her hands started sweating, the gloves tended to slide, leaving the fingertips empty and baggy. Lately, she’d been thinking a lot about quitting school, even though she was less than a
year from graduation. Analyzing novels, memorizing French declensions, charting the correlation between poverty and obesity in Southern states . . . She supposed she ought to care about how obesity would impact the expenditure of health care dollars, and when she’d declared her major in English literature she’d truly enjoyed analyzing novels. As for French grammar, well, Elyse and Becky had pointed out that April never went to France, and at one time Florie thought she should go in April’s place. Surely that was better than having sex in April’s place.

  Not that she was judging. Only God had the right to judge.

  She decided, as she removed the curved aluminum drip pans beneath the burners and carried them to the sink to be washed under the faucet, that cleaning a kitchen was a holy act. There was a sweet, simple satisfaction in polishing a drip pan until it gleamed, until you could view a warped reflection of your face in the rounded surface. You scrubbed and the dirt vanished. You washed, you dried, you witnessed the effectiveness of your work. No questions hung unaddressed, no mysteries unsolved. You committed the act and you saw the result.

  She still remembered the first time she’d stepped across the threshold into the Jubilee Christian Center last spring. A Sunday morning after a Saturday night. Her friend Sarah had dragged her to a frat party that night—not really dragged her; Florie had wanted to go. Not because she liked frat parties but because she wanted . . . forgive me, God, for being so petty . . . a boyfriend. Twenty years old, still a virgin. Still a virgin because she’d never been in love. Unlike Elyse, who didn’t think love had anything to do with sex, and unlike Becky, who wasn’t convinced love existed, Florie was certain it did exist and had everything to do with sex. She wanted to experience love.

  The party had been standard fare: a dark, crowded basement room, the floor gummy with spilled beer and the air heavy with the sour scent of it. Music had boomed from a sound system, so loud talking was nearly impossible. Perhaps that had been deliberate. People went to frat parties to drink and dance and score, not to talk.

  Within minutes of their arrival, Sarah had been swallowed up by the crowd. Viewing the gathering as if it were a seething, carnivorous beast, Florie had edged along the wall, not wanting to venture deeper into the room and find herself devoured like Sarah. Eventually, she’d arrived at a bar atop which sat a fat, barrel-shaped beer keg and stacks of plastic cups. She would have preferred a soft drink, but no cans of soda or bottles of lemonade had stood on the bar.

  “Here.” A beefy guy in front of her had filled a cup with beer and handed it to her.

  “Thank you,” she’d said, then realized he hadn’t heard her so she’d said it again, shouting this time.

  He’d filled a cup for himself and they’d started to talk. Or shout. He hadn’t been bad looking. A little too chunky, like a football player who’d quit playing and let his muscles melt, but he’d had a pleasant face and hair the color of an Irish setter’s fur. His name had been Rick. A business major. A junior like her.

  He hadn’t asked her to dance, for which she’d been grateful. She enjoyed dancing, but she looked clumsy moving to music, utterly lacking grace, and she’d been relieved not to have to flail about the dance floor and let him see what an oaf she was.

  Definitely promising, she’d thought.

  And then they’d ventured upstairs into a hallway, and he’d started groping her and kissing her on the neck, slobbering beery saliva on her skin, and she’d politely asked him to stop, or at least slow down, and he’d pawed her breast and spilled beer down the front of her shirt. She’d asked him to stop again, and he’d spun away from her and vomited onto the floor.

  She’d left the frat house, her head aching, her eyes stinging. All right, she hadn’t expected to fall in love that night. But she’d wanted to. She’d wanted that promise, the hope that a boy might consider pursuing a relationship with her. She’d gone out a few times with guys she met in her classes or at parties, and invariably they’d been dull or dense, or they’d pushed her too hard for sex. Or they’d gotten drunk.

  I want love, but I don’t want this, she’d thought as she’d hiked along a paved path, passing couples holding hands, inebriated kids reeling across the lawns, people driving their cars too fast on the winding campus road. From open windows people screamed, giddy with the freedom of being a college student on a Saturday night.

  I don’t belong here, she’d thought, for not the first time.

  She had no idea where she did belong.

  The weariness of not knowing had caused her to sink onto a concrete bench. She’d cupped her hands over her eyes and wept while Saturday-night revelry swirled around her. The hoarse rumble of a motorcycle. A song resonating through a window, the melody barely discernible beneath a thudding bass line. The air cool and black around her, carrying the scent of dewy grass and auto exhausts and beer, beer, beer.

  She belonged nowhere.

  When she’d stopped crying, she’d opened her eyes and noticed a flier on the bench next to her, pastel-green with thick black letters: JUBILEE CHRISTIAN CENTER. SUNDAY SERVICE TOMORROW AT 10 A.M. ALL ARE WELCOME.

  Every letter capitalized, as if the words had been screaming at her.

  She’d been raised Methodist and attended church with her family whenever she was home. But at college, she’d slacked off. No one except for the devout Catholics seemed to go to church at UMass. None of her friends here attended church. Elyse and Becky—her only friends back in Wheatley—didn’t go to church, either. Florie didn’t even know the location of the nearest Methodist church.

  If someone who belonged nowhere was welcome at the Jubilee Christian Center, maybe she should go. The odds were pretty good no one named Rick would wind up stinking of beer and groping her there.

  Thank you, God, she thought now, as she toweled dry the last of the silver drip-catchers and inserted it under its burner. She mouthed a silent prayer of gratitude that Jubilee had indeed welcomed her, that she finally belonged somewhere, that she was no longer plagued with questions. She now knew that things happened for a reason, and that reason was God.

  Why was she tall and awkward? God wanted her that way.

  Why was she still a virgin? God wanted her to save her heart and her body for a worthy man.

  Why was she cleaning the kitchen instead of attending her English Epic Tradition seminar? Cleanliness was next to Godliness.

  She didn’t need a tree. She didn’t need a candle or words that rhymed with May. She didn’t need mysteries that vexed themselves into knots inside her brain and left her tormented. She didn’t need bleak, desolate poems that ended in Hindu chants and made no sense.

  Why did April die? It was God’s will.

  Once you accepted that, she acknowledged as she draped the towel across the oven door handle to dry, you didn’t have to worry about the questions anymore.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THREE CREDITS, he thought. After this semester, just three more credits and he’d be done.

  Earning three credits seemed as daunting as running a marathon up Mt. Everest. One thing Mark had learned about himself was that he was not good at running. No Iron Man, he. He wasn’t good at swimming, either.

  Drowning . . . he was damned good at that.

  Strolling toward Commonwealth Avenue after his last class of the day, he pulled a plastic bottle from his pack and took a slug. The bottle looked innocuous enough, the sort an athlete would fill with Gatorade and carry to practice. Mark’s bottle was filled with vodka.

  So he was a drunk. Big deal. There were worse things in the world.

  At least he hadn’t had any vodka before class. He couldn’t say his mind was clearer without a few hits of firewater, but he didn’t want his profs to smell booze on his breath, and there was a limit to how many Tic Tacs he could pop before the insides of his cheeks began to sting.

  Three more credits. He could do it. />
  Another swig, and he screwed the cap back onto the bottle and returned it to his pack. If liquor was so bad for you, how come it made you feel so good? He’d had a mother of a headache, but a quick double dose of Absolut had eased the pressure behind his forehead. The too-bright afternoon softened against his eyes. He felt vaguely human again, almost like someone who could actually jog up a mountain.

  The walk back to his apartment was far shorter than a marathon. No more than half a mile from the BU campus to the neighborhood of semi-slummy Brighton apartments that housed so many students. Remy was long gone from Mark’s apartment, replaced by his kid brother Aston, who was currently enrolled at Emerson College with the dream of becoming a Broadway star. Good luck, buddy—but he was an okay kid, almost as cool as his brother, who was right now working for an NGO somewhere in Malawi, building schools or sewers or something.

  Remy had gotten on with his life. That was Mark’s goal, his sole ambition: to get on with his life. He hoped it wasn’t too much to aspire to. As dreams went, it seemed a hell of a lot more attainable than Aston’s, at least in theory.

  The stores and pubs along Harvard Street bustled. The neighborhood had gotten halfway to gentrification and then stalled out, leaving a hectic hodgepodge of pretentious eateries and seedy dry cleaners, vegan delis and basement barber shops. Cars and trucks double-parked along the curbs; pedestrians jaywalked, darting between cars and tuning out the blaring horns of irate drivers. Thanks to the vodka diluting his bloodstream, Mark found the horns easy to ignore as he slipped between two idling trucks, dodged a maniacally pedaling cyclist, and sprinted across the street.

  If he could survive the walk home, surely he could survive one more three-credit course next semester.

  And then . . . then he’d figure out how to take the next step, how to move his body another few inches forward. Unlike Remy, he would not wind up saving lives in a third-world country. His soul was a third-world country, and he was still trying to figure out how to save his own life.