A Crooked Tree Read online

  Marie had threatened to march over there. “I am going to ask him, if he’s such a big Christian and so worried about the length of our grass, why doesn’t he drive over here in his Cadillac sit-down lawn mower and sit his fat Elmer Fudd butt down on its real leather seat and cut it for us?”

  We’d all laughed, even my mother. Mr. Walker did look a bit like Elmer Fudd, with bright plaid pressed shirts and khakis pulled up too far. Marie performed Stepford Wives imitations of Minnie Walker. She’d put her hair in curlers like an old-fashioned set, stuff her bosom with soccer balls so that she nearly fell over, wear a full-length apron and apply bright-red lipstick all over her mouth, smearing outside the lines. She’d carry an imaginary tray across our living room with a glass of lemonade: “I’m so busy with my Christianity and charity, dearest Harry Walker, I nearly forgot your refreshment. You must be so tired, sitting on your ass cutting these grass blades. And it must be so exhausting for you, poor Harry, to look across at that disgraceful house and those disgraceful people.” She made us all laugh with abandonment. Thomas laughed so hard that no sound came out of his mouth. I knew the grass bothered him the most, that he felt it should be him cutting it. But we didn’t have a lawn mower and we’d never gotten my father’s machines back from his cousin in the Bronx. We’d never asked, and he never offered. We didn’t get anything of my father’s back except his truck, which my mother sold, and his body. I wondered what had happened to all the cards and gifts we’d sent him. All the things we’d made him at school. I knew he kept them. I felt sick, imagining his cousin just throwing out his stuff.

  I watched Marie rolling up the garage door in the headlights of the car. Now, with her head shaved on one side, she couldn’t do Minnie Walker’s curlers anymore. Marie stepped to the side of the garage, and my mother drove in, pulled up the handbrake, switched off the engine, grabbed her pocketbook from the floor of the front seat, and went straight into the house and up to her bedroom.

  I hauled out my own school bag and folders, as well as Ellen’s, and carried them in. Ellen had brought a large art folder with her work from the school year. She had written “Ellen” in large cursive and then outlined it over and over in different colors, extending outward in a psychedelic flourish with flowers and patterns, like a Cream album cover. I opened her folder and spread the pictures out on the lower trundle bed where she slept. There were color wheels and pencil drawings, still lifes of fruit and flowers. There was a family portrait with just five figures; she hadn’t included Dad or Mom, just us. She made Marie the largest, even though Thomas and I both towered over her. In the middle of the pile was a self-portrait, done with wax and oil pastels. She’d used all blues, purples, and black. It wasn’t meant to be realistic, but it captured something about Ellen, her large blue eyes, the dark lashes and brows, how her eyes always looked hollowed out, with slight streaks of purple beneath them, the parting on the side of her head. Her face didn’t have a clear outline; it seemed to float out of the dusky shapes. There was a note on the back of the folder, done in green felt-tip:

  “A beautiful and expressionistic portfolio, Ellen. Great work all year and so artistic. I’ve left a set of oil pastels inside the folder with information about the art camp and a reference. I’ve put a green circle on the back of work I think you should submit with the application. While you are young, I have no doubt that you would be accepted. Miss LeBlanc.”

  I reached back in and pulled out the large envelope. Inside was a brochure for Chestnut Grove Art Academy Summer Camp and a smaller sealed envelope with “Recommendation for Ellen Gallagher” typed across the front. Ellen hadn’t mentioned the gift, the note, or the recommendation earlier in the car. I put all the pictures back inside the folder and left the envelope on my bed. I had to get ready for babysitting.

  Every Friday night, I sat for Mrs. Boucher’s two small boys. She was the only divorced person I knew other than my mother, except she made it look glamorous. Marie said that was the difference social class made. If you had money and social status, it was acceptable to break the rules. Mrs. Boucher wore fitted black dresses, turquoise necklaces, and large hoop earrings. She had raven-black hair that she wore down when she went out. She told me that she was part American Indian and that her hair was Shawnee, from her grandmother’s people. She was a lawyer and lived in what my mom would call a contemporary house, deep in the woods, with walls of glass that reflected the trees all around them. She called it her tree house.

  I took off my uniform and pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers. My big toes were pushing through the canvas. I’d already saved up enough babysitting money to get a new pair. Mrs. Boucher paid me ten dollars a night basically to watch television, which for me was a treat because we didn’t have one at home. I didn’t want to leave with Ellen still out on the road, but I couldn’t call Mrs. Boucher this late to cancel. I looked out the window into the darkness, holding my hands on either side of my face to block out the light from the room. Someone had turned on the outdoor lamps, probably Marie. I could see the large quartz rocks at the end of our driveway, the long grass, and the empty street.

  Marie came into the room and flopped on her own bed, across from the trundle beds where Ellen and I slept. “Don’t leave your stuff on mine.” She threw my kilt back at me. “You can stop looking; she won’t be back for hours. It could be ten or eleven before she gets here.”

  “She shouldn’t have mentioned Dad.”

  “Why not?” Marie asked. “Why should we go around walking on eggshells all the time? We’re not allowed to talk about anything, so when someone does, it’s a catastrophe.” Marie had taken off her kilt and school blouse. She tugged a black T-shirt with a picture of burning cars across the front over her head. “And once again, she just shuts herself in her room.” She shoved her heel down into a black boot. She was right, Mom would stay in there for the night. “Anyway, it wasn’t mentioning Dad that upset her so much.” Marie sat back down on the bed and started putting on thick black eyeliner. “It was the fat-boyfriend comment.”

  After Dad died, we had gone to family counseling twice. On our first visit, we each met individually with the counselor, Gwen. I told Gwen about my mother’s boyfriend, Bill, how she kept him a secret from all of us except Beatrice, that the rest of us had never met him even though he’d been around for years. That it was obvious he was Beatrice’s father, and how I was angry with my mom all the time. I never asked any of the others what they talked about.

  In our second session, Gwen brought us into the room together, and we sat in comfortable chairs arranged in a circle. I looked at Gwen and at my mother, and I knew this wouldn’t work. Gwen’s dangling earrings and sky-blue eyeshadow, her gold ankle bracelet against her tan leg. My mom’s clear, pale skin, her hair pulled back in a bun, her lack of frivolity. She’d never worn makeup and hardly ever spent a penny on herself. Gwen wanted her to talk about Dad, how things were before they split up, things that had happened. One of us had said something. Was it just me? I felt pain in my chest. Mom wasn’t going to budge; her face was set. She wouldn’t say anything bad about Dad. She didn’t tell things. There was a poster on the wall of Holly Hobbie, in her rag dress and her ridiculous gigantic bonnet, smelling a flower. We couldn’t see her face. We looked at the walls, at the green industrial carpet on the floor, at the tweed weave of the chairs we were sitting on, anywhere but at each other. My mom’s loyalty to my father hurt me. I had betrayed her over and over, most recently to Gwen, a stranger, who was writing her notes on the clipboard with a pencil that had troll hair sticking out at the end, with googly eyes glued on. Marie’s eyebrows rose as she watched her write. Gwen wasn’t going to get anywhere with us.

  Afterward my mother decided that counseling was useless, that she couldn’t bear Gwen’s sweet, patronizing voice. “We just need time,” she said. We never went back.

  Now Marie took out white powder and started blotting it across her cheeks and forehead. I watched her for a minute. Our features were different. At schoo
l, people didn’t believe we were sisters. Marie, like Ellen, was small-boned, her face petite. Mine was wider and flatter. While Marie was alert and pretty, Sage said I was more “ethereal,” as if I was always preoccupied. My eyes were a lighter blue than Marie’s, more like my mother’s than any of my siblings, and while they all had light-brown or blond hair, my hair, eyebrows, and lashes were all dark. Hippie hair, Marie called it. It just fell straight down either side of my face, all the way to my waist. It was shapeless compared to her punk cut or Sage’s layers, but I’d never really had any good ideas about how to get it cut. A lot of the girls in my class had gotten Dorothy Hamill haircuts, but I didn’t think that would suit me. I had a gap between my two front teeth, so I smiled with my mouth closed. Marie was applying purple lipstick now, so dark it was almost black.

  “I have to go babysit. Will you call me at the Bouchers’ when she gets here?”

  “Yeah.” She looked at me in the mirror. I didn’t understand her putting on her punk face when she wasn’t going anywhere.

  I went down to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There was hardly anything in it. My mother always kept the bread in the crisper drawer so it wouldn’t go stale. I took out a slice and a stick of butter to spread on it. The bread was cold, and I could barely chew. I thought for a moment I might be sick. “The Worrier,” Gwen had called me. It was true. I worried about everything. When everyone else climbed the fence of the swim club to go skinny-dipping, I stayed outside, keeping watch on the road, in case they set off the alarm or a neighbor reported them to the police. When Marie snuck out the window at night, I couldn’t sleep until she was back, imagining all the bad things that could happen to her, listening for my mother in the hallway. Even before Dad died, I was already like this. My mother had once bought us each a poster. Mine was a picture of a lion cub wailing with a wide-open mouth. “Stop worrying,” it read. “The world is sad enough without your woe.”

  For Marie she’d bought a poster of cartoon animals playing musical instruments, with the line “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.”

  Ellen had gotten “Don’t take the fun out of dysfunctional.”

  I threw the bread in the trash. I couldn’t swallow it.

  In the rec room, Beatrice was folding the laundry on the couch, and Thomas was vacuuming. They had started the chores Ellen had been told to do. Beatrice was seven, five years younger than Ellen and seven years younger than me. Ellen was right, she was coddled by our mom—by all of us, actually—but she wasn’t a brat, and she didn’t like being separated out. I sat next to her on the couch and started folding a school shirt.

  “I don’t know why Ellen was so mad at me.” Beatrice looked up. There was a gaping space in her mouth where she had lost two teeth. Her wavy hair was pulled into fat bunches just behind her ears.

  “She wasn’t mad at you. It’s not your fault, Bea.”

  “What if she can’t find her way or gets hit by a car?”

  “She’ll be fine. We’re used to going around the mountain in the dark. She knows the roads. Help Marie look out for her, okay?” Beatrice nodded.

  Thomas shouted over the vacuum cleaner: “Stop slacking on the job! Get folding. Hup, two, three, four.” Bea brightened and started rolling matched socks together.

  “I have to go. Make sure someone calls me at the Bouchers’ when she gets home.” I went back up the stairs to tell my mom I was leaving. The door was shut. I knocked. “I’m going now, Mom.” She didn’t answer.

  Marie came out into the hallway on her way downstairs. “It’s better to leave her alone.”

  “I’m only telling her I’m going.” I wanted to kick and stamp the door. I went back into our empty room and picked up Ellen’s folder, sifting through the sheets to find the green circles from Miss Le Blanc: the floating self-portrait, the family minus parents, a series of studies of a stag, just the face and antlers, all done in different gradients of black pencil shading. They weren’t childish, sweet drawings; they were stark, detached, and sad. I knew Ellen must be completely exceptional in her class. I took the note, brochure, reference, and drawings. Mom needed to know. I walked back to her room and knelt on the rug, sliding each of them under her door, before leaving.

  Our house on the mountain was a split-level. There were four floors, with small staircases of five steps between each of them. We had four bedrooms. My mother’s room, Bea’s box room, and the one I shared with Ellen and Marie were on the same floor. Bea’s was very small, and right next to my mother’s. Thomas had a large room on the very top floor. I loved the house and the woods all round it. We’d moved to the mountain after Ellen was born. Before that we rented a house in Ardmore. I don’t think my father ever felt at home on the mountain. He was different from the other dads up there. It wasn’t just his job; he had never been to school after fifth class, the same as our fifth grade. He said that in Ireland this was common for children reared on farms. They were expected to work. And my dad worked harder than anyone I knew. But he never seemed to be able to save.

  Before Beatrice, my parents went through a sometimes-together, sometimes-apart phase, but by the time she was born, he wasn’t living with us anymore. We saw Dad less after that, but I still worked with him, cutting lawns and raking leaves. He stayed in the Philadelphia area and lived in different places, but never anywhere for long. Then a distant cousin offered him the job and place in the Bronx; he had a contracting and landscaping business. We went there just once—Marie, Thomas, Ellen, and me. We took the Amtrak train from Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia, and he met us at Penn Station in Manhattan. He was standing at the top of the escalator as we came up from our platform. He had showered after work and put on a shirt and tie, something old-fashioned that he’d done when he lived with us if we were going anywhere. He never wore casual clothes, like my friends’ fathers. He’d never owned a pair of jeans or khakis or shorts. Not even sneakers, which would have looked wrong on him. He wore white short-sleeved undershirts, but never a T-shirt with writing on it; he wore work trousers when cutting grass, and he always had his wavy hair parted on the side and combed back.

  “Dad’s 1950s,” Marie would say with pride. She said it was weird how grown men in America had started to dress like little boys and had no sophistication.

  We took the subway out to Woodlawn in the Bronx, where Dad had moved. The houses were close together, with chain-link fences between them. The streets and yards seemed naked. There were no trees, a few scattered thin shrubs, and it seemed strange for my father to be in a place without leaves. At some of the houses where we’d worked with him, the leaf fall would be so thick, I could wade through it up to my waist. Dad would turn on the blower, and the leaves would swirl up all around us and fall again. In the Bronx he’d rented what he called an efficiency apartment, a room attached to another house with its own separate entrance. It had a little kitchenette by the window. He made us a steak dinner and mashed potatoes on a two-ringed electric stove. There was a tiny bathroom with a shower, and he had a couch that doubled as his bed. He pulled out foam that he kept behind the seat of his pickup truck and rolled it out on the floor, and we all spent the night, the four of us and him, in that one room together in the Bronx. He had bought new plates and forks and knives for our visit, so that he’d have enough to feed five. I sometimes still fall asleep remembering that night. All of us together, lying in the dark, talking, breathing in the one room.

  3

  I stepped out into the dark. Lightning bugs blinked around the edges of lawns where they met the woods. The night air was warm, and it felt like summer. The Bouchers lived on the other side of the mountain; it would take me twenty minutes to walk there. I had to pass the Addisons’—the “Manson House”—on the way. The Addisons had moved to the mountain from California and were a street up from us. Shortly after they moved in, people had started talking. They said that in California Mr. Addison’s company had cut down redwoods that were never used and later dumped in the Pacific Ocean, that h
e was at the top of the “Death List” Charles Manson had written in prison. A few years earlier, one of the Manson Family had tried to kill President Ford in order to save California redwoods. No one knew for certain if the stories about Mr. Addison were true. Marie had a copy of Helter Skelter, and I’d read it. There was a section in the middle of the book with photographs. I studied them intently, trying to read the faces of the young women who became part of Manson’s group, memorizing them in case I ever saw them here. I still walked away fast whenever I saw a Volkswagen bus.

  The Addisons’ house was set deep in the woods. I slowed as I got closer, preparing to run. They had lights on some sort of a sensor, so that at night when anyone passed they clicked on and lit up the house and the woods around it. I crossed the road to avoid setting them off, and about five yards from the start of their property I sprinted, running as fast as I could for a hundred yards, imagining the women assassins in the woods, waiting. I looked over my shoulder to see if there was anything coming behind me. At the top of High Point Lane, there was a shortcut straight ahead through the woods that went past the water tower and was part of the Horseshoe Trail. It was dark, but I knew the path. I’d run it often. The trail was marked by painted yellow rectangles on the trees that caught splinters of moonlight, lighting up briefly in the dark. I always felt reassured by the markers, as if in a fairy tale, telling me I was still on the right path. But tonight a wave of panic washed through me. How far had Ellen walked?

  Ahead of me, the trail broke into a graveled clearing with two towers. One was a colossal metal water tower, a hulking gray presence in the surrounding stands of oak and maple. Some days, in the late afternoon when the sun started to fall below the canopy, the trees cast perfect shadows across its flat surface, so that it almost seemed to be part of the woods. The other tower was taller, a framework of crisscrossing metal parts. It seemed like it might start moving, extending its limbs to crush human intrusion. We thought this tower had something to do with electricity. Both towers were surrounded by a high fence with angled strips of barbed wire along the top. It didn’t work; kids still climbed over and jumped to the lowest rung of the water tower’s service ladder, then pulled themselves up to scale its side. Everyone was afraid of the other one, the one that might be electric.