Tree Music

The guy upstairs, Mark, was trying to hook up an entertainment center with four huge speakers. I knew we were in for it when I saw the "Rent To Own" truck deliver it earlier. We lived in an apartment made over from an old house with dropped ceilings and bad acoustics. You could hear your neighbors argue and pee. We were trying to sleep.

"Crazy instructions." Mark slammed something down that sounded like a hammer. I poked Bill. The music boomed into our bedroom, all base. I heard Mark opening a beer, pictured the mean look his face. Bill smiled. He found Mark's tantrums a source of amusement, so I knew my husband was smiling.

We lay close, touching, and he pulled away. "I'm broiling. It's so goddam hot." He turned on the air conditioner. I looked up at the ceiling. I could hear Stella. I knew her teeth were out; she had that funny lisp when she talked. Welfare made her get a job Telemarketing, but she only wore the teeth when she worked. I heard Mark and Stella arguing, over the sound of the stereo.

Just the way I looked at things, maybe, but I thought it was wrong to get too neighborly. So I'd ignore the door when Stella came to borrow toilet paper or coffee or Mark to use the phone, but Bill lent them money which he kept track of in a little black book. I think he enjoyed their leaning on him. Their pit-bull stared at me with bold, black eyes, dared me to look away. He peed on the skinny tree in the back yard. The tree died.

The day the pit-bull chased me around the house and up the steps into our apartment, I said, "Damn it, Bill, we gotta get outta here, sweetheart."

"You should have stood your ground and stared it down."

"The more I think about it, we've got to move."

"I don't want to talk about it."

Their music filled every space. Bill had his own CD with small speakers sitting on a table holding his baseball-card collection.

"Bill, I'm so sick of arguing. Honey, we need a change."

"I suppose you've been talking to Alberta?"

Your sister! "That's the most asshole reasoning I ever heard."

Then Bill sat up and looked at me. "It's fine. I love you."

A part of me loved this place too. My mama taught me to make the most of what god gave us, so I fussed with plants that wouldn't grow on windowsills because they needed more sun. Bill erected a birdhouse in the back yard that was used by all the tenants. The birdhouse was more like a bird-hotel with a lot of doors and windows. The birds didn't seem to notice the beer cans and yellow garbage bags, the weeds sticking out from the cracks in the sidewalk. These were mostly sparrows so I decided maybe they were used to the neighborhood.

"Birds depend on you once you start feeding them, don't they?" I asked Bill, but he didn't answer.

My friend Jane gave me a phone number, and I found the perfect apartment in an exclusive west-side neighborhood. You needed credentials to get an appointment, so I told the woman on the phone we were selling our home and faked an address.

Bill and I drove up in our old, beat-up Celebrity, and from the window I saw the red brick apartment made to look like a private home. The edges cut cleanly into the lawns; in the center sat a tree at least a hundred years old.

"I'm at home already." I said.

"Where's a store? And I don't like neighbors watching me when I run." Bill frowned.

"Think of where we came from."

"Where I want to stay."

The owner, a lady, walked stiffly, and talked without looking at us much. When she did, her eyes squinted, cold and judgmental. She let it drop that she had a five-year waiting list as she showed us the garden plots in the back. She wore a little hat, which looked silly in summer, and high heels and a business suit with a brand label showing. We could have a garage for ten dollars more a month, but we might have to wait two years. And if we had any problems, put them on a yellow pad hanging in the basement. And she drove away. We were in.

I hummed in the new house, washing my dishes, fixing the cupboard. I looked at the tree in front when I vacuumed our sky-blue carpeting. I hung suet and seed from the branches. I wrote a poem about neighborhoods with trees, about people who discussed books and nature.

Bill started running, but the neighborhood was too quiet he said. I told him to listen for the song of the red cardinal, the song sparrows. I talked about the wind whispering through trees. But the swish of rain on the pavements, the sight of squirrels chasing each other under our tree wasn't Mark and Stella and the little black book.

"I'm taking my run by Nick's from now on," Bill said. Nick's Cigar and Magazine Store carried newspapers, also adult fiction.

"You know crack-dealers and prostitutes hang out there. Suppose you get your picture in the paper and it gets around here?"

"Goddamit, who cares. All the good lottery tickets come from Nick's."

So one morning I put on my jeans and a red-checked shirt and took a run with Bill to check out his new route. Most of the stores were empty: furriers, bridal salons, furniture stores, sewing machine repair shops with For Sale in their windows, and graffiti. Finally we came to Danny's Diner, home-fries, scrambled eggs and toast for a dollar thirty-five.

"And seconds on everything," Bill reminded me.

"Big deal."

"Loosen up, Adrian."

"And no air-conditioning."

"The people are friendly."

"And boring."

Danny kept the door of the restaurant open so you could feel the heat, hear the clatter of dishes, loud-talk, and country music coming out before you went in. In the window sat a wilted palm tree with dust on the leaves. Danny carried on conversations with his patrons from the other side of the restaurant. He swore the picture of Kenny Rogers on the wall over the cash register was from the time he ate there. The waitress spit out the specials. She said, "Look on the wall if you don't want the specials."

We jogged back from the streets with the grim characters and empty faces to where the streets were clean without holes and dust and clutter. As different from Nick's street as the Iraq pictures that bounced off our TV screen.

The old man next door took a walk in the evening. He was tidy, stooped over, slow in gait. He'd bend over and pick up a tiny matchstick, a stray leftover from yesterday's garbage collection, a blown-away newspaper section. We'd exchange greetings and talk about the way the bugs were eating away at the trees. He said if a tree turned brown earlier than the rest in the fall, it meant the tree was ready to die.

Across the street lived a stocky, blond woman who never looked up from her raking and scrubbing her sidewalks. She told Bill to move his van when he parked it in front of her house for a minute. "Now you see why I run down by Nick's," he said.

Then the old man next door died. I didn't know him except to pass the time of day. Still I missed his twilight walk, his care for the street. I looked through his window and the rooms were empty

The wind blew the leaves down from my maple tree in early September. I looked to everything for companionship. In front, my maple tree's branches seemed like friendly arms. My computer man, Brian, made fun of me in an amused sort of way, and his friendship grew and was something I looked forward to more than I cared to admit. The street was my friend, but still I was lonely. I wrote a poem and showed it to Brian.

Mirrors of my life send pictures of ghosts.
Idols of a type, they trickle away as most heroes do.
Holding a piece of my soul.
Passion fades and dies when alone.

He looked embarrassed and reminded me that poems are made by fools, but only God can make a tree. I decided computer people were too technical to understand and crumpled up my poem and threw it away.

When the new lady moved in next door in the old man's house, the wind howled and left diamond smudges on the boughs of my tree. Then the bluster turned into a full-fledged winter storm with a six-foot snowfall. I didn't get to meet her, because the winter lingered until spring blossoms.

I'd hear her laugh, a little tinkle-bell sound in the evening as she chatted with neighbors. I'd watch her antique birdbath attract yellow evening grosbeaks, red robins, purple finches, and red-breasted nuthatches. I took a book about birds out of the library and went out at five in the morning with my book and binoculars.

Here was my answer to a friend who would understand me. I'd feel comfortable, and maybe we'd go shopping and do the things friends and sisters do. So next time I saw her there in her big sun-hat, I decided on my strategy. I'd go over and praise her flowers. I'd take cookies, and she'd ask me where I ever discovered such a wonderful recipe. I'd tell her all about my mama making something out of nothing, and this would get us talking and we'd go in for tea. We'd go shopping and at Christmas we'd hang candles in our windows for each other to see.

I quite missed the old gentleman, "As a mutual lover of nature, I wish you were here to see your backyard." I told him.

I made cookies, took the cookies to the lady, along with my recipe all written out with a flair pen. I had it in my mind, after I told the lady about my mother, to just get in the point that I was a writer and that I could see her garden from my window. Well, call me too shy for my own good, but what I wanted to say about me being a writer and my husband a business man who would rather be a truck driver never came out. She thanked me. I left.

Next try, I took my bird book to tell her about a goldfinch I had seen at her fountain, but she said, yes, she had put a certain feed out, and knew all about them. I couldn't think of anything to go on with. I could hear my phone so, I'd better run, I told her.

Bill seemed more at ease with the lady than I did. He called her Joan, and she called him Bill.

"The worms got 'em, Bill." They were looking at the brown leaves, the blossoms closed tight and dead.

"Too bad. Let me give you a hand with that." He moved Joan's lawn chair and couch and a beach umbrella. I could see them clearly from my window, hear their voices drifting in from the island of Joan's garden. Bill's came over in his deep base I always said belonged on TV, hers trickling out of her throat, little sprinkles of notes soft as a harp. Then she asked him to stick around for some of her spiced iced tea. He scuffed the ground with his foot and said, "Next time, Joan."

"She did it deliberately. Green-thumb lady put up a fence. Not just a little fence, but a large, scalloped, can't-see-through type," I told Bill.

Out by the fence I could see the old gentleman picking up a bit of paper, shaking his head up and down.

"She doesn't like me, that's the reason."

"Oh, come on. You're paranoid!" Bill said.

"I mean it! I turn her off or something"

"Take it easy. Why must you try so hard?"

"All I wanted was people with trees, a place to grow into." Bill shrugged.

The night Bill helped the lady across the street change her tire, the wind whispered through the pine trees. From my front window I peeked at my old maple. Between the branches, stars flickered in the black sky. It was quiet except for the crickets, the low hum of a plane tracing a finger of light in the inky sky. I had this funny tight feeling somewhere in the deep center of my stomach, that this was the only part of the street I'd ever know, ever belong to.

The next morning I heard sounds, harsh thumps like someone digging a grave. Bill ran out to the street. I grabbed a robe.

Bill looked at me. "The tree had to go, Baby," he said, "it was sick." He put his head down. "I tried to get them to hold off, but they wouldn't listen."

"The tree had a disease," the caretaker said.

But why my tree? Why of all the trees on this tree-lined street did my tree have to get sick?

Sometimes in the night, when I woke up in a nightmare, I'd take an old bench out and sit under the tree. The branches fell like tendrils over my shoulders, and the air scarcely moved, and I felt Okay, like when my mother's breath touched my cheek, when I was a kid and screamed in the dark.

"I have a surprise," Bill said.

"I want to move. I don't fit."

"You fit, Baby, what the hell. . . . .?"

"I think it's that the tree represented security"

"Like Mark and Stella did for me?"

"Yes."

"It doesn't matter, does it, where we are? Security is us, not where we live."

"I'll try harder to make it work."

"So will I, Babe." He looked at me and grinned wickedly. "I've got something better for us to do, but first. . ."

He came carrying a pail with a little sapling with tender green leaves starting to come out and enough of a trunk to make it already seem substantial.

"This is in memory of the old tree," he said.

I saw an elderly gent stopping to watch. I didn't bother to tell Bill because I knew he didn't see him.

The next day I made little invitations inviting everyone to our "Open House." Everybody came, even Joan. Danny brought pizza. Mark came too, and Stella wore her teeth.