short story - “treelawn”
Basking in the summer heat, the old sturdy oak tree showers my mother’s front yard with a steady downpour of thousands of helicopters. They fall like confetti thrown into the air after a wedding, spinning at random and speckling everything underneath. Keeping low to the dry prickly grass, Ginger chases them instead of insects, batting her gentle white paws at them as the baseball buzzes by her ears at sixty. Strike. Smoke. The snap of a firecracker. Saturdays are cleaning and yard-work days, my mother always told us. Infallible. The house was spotless, the yard unfinished. I could see my mother’s rear perched in the air as she dug weeds from the mulch that lined the base of the front porch. She gasped between pulls, letting us hear her hard work. Pitching to my father was so routinely simple, I pictured him behind the mask during real games. Muscle memory. He lobbed the scuffed leather ball back to me and took a drag of his cigarette while wiping the sweat from his sunburned forehead. The front of his red t-shirt was soaked, his arms browned from the elbows down. I could see the scar on his knee from the other side of the yard. “Three screws in there,” he’d tell me. Yet he refused to wear shinguards or a mask. Not in an attempt to be tough but to give me a concrete reason for accurate pitching. I hated the thought of hurting my father. “After twenty more I’m gonna need you to cut the front and back grass for your mother,” he advised me while squatting in the driveway. That meant she’d be upset with him if I didn’t do it. “And make sure you don’t skip the treelawn and the side of the house. Get around the tree better than last time.” I consented just loud enough for my mother to hear me while hurling another pitch across the crowded lawn. ****************************************************************************************************** I had been so busy we hadn’t talked in weeks. It was starting to hit the long, frigid, seemingly endless stretch of winter in the northeast, which always makes me sore and worn out. Stepping over the dirty clothes and entertainment magazines, I stomped through the uncomfortable living room. I rubbed away the condensation blocking my view from the tall front window and squinted through one eye for a peek, fighting the glare off the incandescent snowflakes. All the front yards were joined by a seamless white sea. The maple tree the city planted on my treelawn several years before I lived there looked famished from a steady diet of snowstorms and inconsiderate plows. Its leaves had fallen off and been buried alive on the sidewalk under a sheet of dirty trodden snow. The tree’s frozen appendages, a skeleton of charcoal streaks in every direction, seemed to be begging the sky for sunlight and warm rain. I dialed her number on the black cordless phone that reeked of morning breath and cigarettes. The usual lady answered and I mumbled, “Extension 225 please.” Three seconds of Kenny G. “Hey, mom. It’s me. What’s goin’ on?” “I had a wonderful weekend, how about yourself?” She sounded awfully happy to be at her job that she disliked so much. Our conversation was brief and to the point; we both had some other things to take care of. She notified me that she and John went to a bed-and-breakfast for the weekend and had a great time. Newlywed getaways. Red wine, maple syrup-drenched pancakes, a warm real-wood-burning fireplace and plaid flannel blankets. A log cabin surrounded by an army of skyhigh pine trees whose scented needles made the mountain air spicy and warm. I peered through the front window in hopes of seeing on my street a pine tree alive with lush needles and heavy cones—no sign of life. She added that she thought the oak on her treelawn was dead. Struck by lightning or something. As if it had just dawned upon her, she hazily recalled that the tree hadn’t even blossomed in the spring past. “Isn’t that bizarre, that the tree just didn’t—don’t know.” The other line was beeping in my ear. “Mama, I’m gonna grab that call, I was waiting for someone. I love you, talk to you this week.” She reciprocated. I pressed the blue rubber button and said hello. It was Paul. He went to Georgetown. Getting his degree in business after deciding that medical school was only for the eldest men in his family. We hadn’t talked much lately. I told him that the tree in my mother’s front yard was dead and that the city had just cut it down. The bearer of bad news. “The oak was a wonderful tree, that lived a life of good will toward all and provided an environment for a fruitful family,” I eulogized in a suspenseful baritone voice into the receiver. He started to laugh. I’m sure it had been a while. “So you mean to tell me that all our thoughts have been chopped into wood bits by some fucking machine and mixed with cow shit? What a scam,” he jolted. The topic struck a chord in Paul not often found, one that makes him really spark and burn, fuming about exactly what’s on his mind. I had almost forgotten what the oak looked like as I compared it to the sorry tree in my dreary front yard. “The city should have consulted us first. That tree had so many of our thoughts and now they’re just scattered in some fucking ghetto public park, feeding ugly daisies that get run over by little shits on BMX bikes.” Maybe this wasn’t a laughing matter at all. He and I wasted so many nights with that tree. During the summers before college, when my parents were confirmed asleep we’d quietly creep outside onto the front porch, lugging the usual bag of tortilla chips and a twelve pack of cheap canned beer. We’d tiptoe in our sandals, khaki shorts and cotton golf shirts, whispering anything we said. It was always the same, sitting there on my mother’s white wicker furniture, drinking our excuse to talk about the problems in our young lives, chapping our lips with salty chips and cigarettes we stole from my father. The heavy air seemed to make the oak tree’s leaves sag and swell. They would be partially illuminated by a fluorescent street lamp at the end of the driveway, causing a small patch to appear bright yellow against the black canvas of cars parked in the street and modest brick houses, like a flashlight hand-animal morphing on the wall in a dark bedroom. We’d stare at that patch of leaves and ponder everything from beer tasting like peanuts to God forgetting to wake up after his day of rest. Girls, school, stress, our messed up families. Music, future plans, love, existence. I usually talked more than Paul. He would focus on the illuminated patch of leaves mainly, slug mouthfuls of beer while sincerely listening, and mutter infrequently, “Those fucking leaves.” One night a thunderstorm started while we were on the porch performing our ritual. Large raindrops rapidly pelted the side awning like a shelling of bb’s and lightning spread through the skyline like blood vessels. Whispering wasn’t necessary. I lit a candle and a cigarette. The candle was no match for the wet winds that swarmed through the covered porch. We didn’t speak a word that night. Just stared, listened, thought, probably even prayed. I heard Paul sniffling in the dead silent basement that night when we went to sleep. I think he was crying. I never asked. I didn’t even attempt to cool off Paul’s feelings about the tree being cut down. He didn’t fall for my changing the subject to women either. I told him I had to get going. Class started in twenty minutes. After hanging up the phone I stared blankly out the window, blurring my vision by steaming the glass with my own warm breath. I didn’t want to look at the damn pathetic scene. I smiled and pressed my forehead against the moist glass, leaving a circle mark, laughing to myself about the oak tree being cut down, blasted to bits and mixed with cow shit.