THE GIRL IN THE TREE by Dale Gregory Anderson
That girl you’ve been reading about in the paper, the one who calls herself Echo and lives in a tree, that’s my sister. Nobody’s sure why she climbed up there, but it’s been over a month and she shows no signs of coming down. This morning, our backyard is filled with people – reporters, neighbors, tourists, gawkers. We live on a corner lot, and some kids have set up a lemonade stand, 25¢ a glass. They also have a pitcher of weak-looking Tang.
I’m watching everything from the kitchen, waiting for my mom to finish Echo’s breakfast so I can bring it out to her. I’m in charge of bringing Echo all her meals. My mom hasn’t set foot out of the house all month. She prepares Echo’s food, but other than that she doesn’t like to talk about what’s happening. My dad’s strategy is to pretend everything’s normal. Right now he’s out in the yard trimming the hedges, making them perfectly square, like credenzas.
There are more people than usual this morning because somebody “leaked” that Echo is finally going to break her silence and deliver a statement. It’s just a hoax. Echo isn’t going to say anything. If she were going to break her silence, she would’ve told me first. Echo and I are close. We’re not like a regular brother and sister: we actually like each other. We’re friends. Before she climbed up into that tree, we told each other everything. Well, almost everything. I was surprised as anyone the morning I woke up and found my sister living in a tree.
“Is it ready?” I say, turning from the window and flipping through the newspaper.
“Almost,” my mom says. She’s making French toast, partly because it’s Echo’s favorite, but also, I think, because there are dozens of people out there, including a local TV news crew, and by tonight everybody in the seven-county metro area is going to know what my mom served for breakfast this morning. Though she won’t admit it, my mom is afraid that sooner or later everybody’s going to start blaming her for what’s happening.
On the opinion page of this morning’s paper a Mr. Sherman T. Mulfinger has written a column about “the Echo crisis,” as he puts it. Teenage girls, he writes, are not supposed to live in trees. They’re supposed to live in houses, where they can develop healthy levels of resentment toward their parents. They’re supposed to lock themselves in their bedrooms and worship beautiful, young, feeble-minded rock stars. They’re supposed to pierce surprising and unseemly parts of their bodies.
Mr. Sherman T. Mulfinger believes that something should be done, and quick. If he were the man of the house, he would climb up that tree and bring her down forcibly, if need be. He would take her over his knee and teach her some good old-fashioned discipline.
Obviously Mr. Sherman T. Mulfinger doesn’t know the first thing about our family. My dad has never resorted to corporal punishment. We haven’t given him any reason to. Echo and I are good kids. Sure, we’ve smoked a little pot, and I’ve taken the car out on a joy ride or two, even though I only have my learner’s permit, but we’ve never gotten into any serious trouble. My dad would no sooner take us over his knee than he would take us into his arms.
In our backyard a reporter is interviewing a group of neighborhood women, checking the pulse of the community, so to speak. Mrs. Hackworth doesn’t know what to think about the situation. She’s wearing a sky-blue fleece top with a little white collar and a picture of a quaint stone path leading to a wishing well. She hasn’t formulated an opinion on the matter, she says, but she’s considering the name Echo for her next child, male or female. “It’s real catchy,” she says.
Another woman in a navy blue pants suit with ridiculously padded shoulders thinks Echo is a danger to society. She has one of those helmets of hair that all women seem to get at some point. My mom’s hair is like that, only she’s going grey. This woman’s helmet is rust-colored and a little frizzy.
“Echo,” she says, “is a tree-hugging hippie, pure and simple.” You can tell by the way she wrinkles her nose that she doesn’t like trees or people who hug them. She suggests that my sister’s act is a form of civil disobedience designed to stop the logging of old-growth forests.
I wonder how this woman, this stranger, can claim to know anything about my sister. I wonder why she’s here, in our backyard, saying this stuff. Doesn’t she have better things to do? My sister is not a hippie. She isn’t trying to stop anything. The only thing she ever tried to stop was my mom’s repeated attempts to serve canned pears with dinner. (“They’re totally gross,” Echo kept saying, and my mom finally stopped serving them.) Echo isn’t protesting the logging of old-growth forests. I’m sure she’d like to see the sequoia spared, but that isn’t why she climbed up into the tree, which, for the record, is just an ordinary, garden-variety maple. It isn’t even as tall as our house. The closest old-growth forest is over a thousand miles from here.
This woman isn’t the first person to suggest that my sister is an activist. Over the past month people have suggested that Echo is trying to save African elephants, blue whales, gorillas, snow leopards, giant pandas, California condors, Chinese paddlefish, northern hairy-nosed wombats, and Tibet. I never realized there were so many things that needed saving. Others blame it on Echo’s age. On the news the other night an expert said that Echo is doing this to get attention. “She’s a confused teenager,” he said. “She’s trying to find herself.” I hate when so-called experts assume that teenagers, as a rule, are confused. I’m a teenager and I’m not confused. I’m just young. I know who I am and what I want, and I know this is all going to change probably fifty times before I graduate from high school. But I’m not confused. I’m not “at that awkward age.” My body is weird and I’m a little shy about it, but most adults I know aren’t exactly comfortable with their bodies. Does that mean they’re confused? Every year my dad makes a New Year’s resolution to lose twenty pounds, but six months later he’s still the same. He hasn’t changed a thing. He’s living the same life he was living before. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. If I want to change something, I do it. Like Echo. I’m not sure what went through her head when she up and decided to start living in a tree, but at least she did it. Climbing that tree is the most decisive thing anybody’s done around here in a long time.
* * *
From the ground, I can’t see Echo because of the plywood she brought up there for a floor. I give her rope four quick tugs and then two more, which is Morse code for Hi and our secret way of letting her know it’s me and not some reporter. She lowers her bucket. She rigged up a little pulley with a bucket, which is her only channel to the rest of the world. I didn’t know she was so resourceful – I certainly would never have known how to rig up something like that. The camera pans away from the woman who’s been bad-mouthing my sister and focuses on me as I put Echo’s breakfast, sealed in Tupperware containers, into the bucket.
“You’re the little brother,” the reporter says. “Right?” Despite the fact that this same reporter has watched me put Echo’s breakfast in this same bucket on at least a dozen different mornings, she never remembers my name. I’ve been dubbed “the little brother.” In the paper, most of the descriptions of me focus on my bleached hair. Earlier this summer I poured half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over my head, mostly just to see what would happen. What happened was my hair turned platinum blond.
“What’s for breakfast this morning?” the reporter says, shoving her spongy blue microphone into my face. Four logos orbit the handle so that at any angle the viewing audience can identify the station.
“French toast,” I say, “maple syrup, diced cantaloupe, orange juice.” I jiggle each container as I set it into Echo’s bucket. It’s humiliating, but my mom will be proud.
“No bacon?” the reporter says. I’m just about to tell her – again – that Echo’s a vegetarian, when she cracks a smile, and I realize this is her brand of humor. I think I’ve seen her hamming it up on the local news with an extravagantly coifed male anchor.
Mr. Junkins from across the street comes charging across our lawn as the bucket disappears into the branches. “Shouldn’t be feeding her!” he says. The camera pans in on the old curmudgeon. When Echo and I were little, he used to confiscate our ball whenever it landed in his yard.
“You’re just encouraging the girl,” he says. “She’s living the life of Riley up there. Why would she ever come down?”
“That’s right,” says the woman with the rusty helmet of hair.
Thankfully, Mrs. Keffeler steps in. You can always count on Mrs. Keffeler to step in at just the right time. “I think what she’s doing is great,” she says, striking a pose for the camera. On Halloween, Mrs. Keffeler passes out condoms to older trick-or-treaters. I’ve got a drawer full. Not that I need them right now, but when the time comes, thanks to Mrs. Keffeler, I’ll be prepared.
Since day one Mrs. Keffeler has made it known that she’s four-square behind my sister. She says what Echo is doing is like avant-garde theater. “That girl,” she says, pointing into the maple tree, “is a true artist.”
The reporter turns to the camera for her wrap-up, reminding viewers that this is day 34 of the crisis on Caramel Lane. I’m not sure that it’s a crisis, but like everything else these days, news stories need a brand. “The desperate act of a lost teenager?” the reporter says. “The expression of a free spirit? Why? Why does a middle-class girl decide to live in a tree? As we continue to search for answers, rest assured, we’ll be here to bring you the latest developments.”
With that, the camera is lowered to the ground and the reporter starts reeling in her microphone cord. On his way back across the street Mr. Junkins shoos a couple of kids from his yard.
Why? That’s what everybody wants to know. Why is Echo living in a tree? Everybody wants a reason. One thing I’ve learned through all of this is that people like reasons. They depend on them. It isn’t enough to just do something in the world, you have to have a reason for doing it. People around here would be a lot happier if they knew why Echo climbed up into a tree one day in June. But she has remained silent. Nobody has talked to her face-to-face since she went up there. Some reporters have tried to conduct written interviews via the bucket, but Echo won’t answer any questions that begin with why, when, what, or how. As a result, people have been making up their own reasons, but usually the reasons have more to do with them than with Echo. I don’t know why she’s living in a tree either, but I have my suspicions. Maybe she was tired of living in our house. Or maybe she just wanted to do something different. Or maybe she climbed up there for the same reason that Zacchaeus climbed the sycamore tree in the Bible: to get a glimpse of Jesus.
Ever since Echo climbed up there my dad won’t leave me alone for a second. He treats me like his personal slave, making me mow the lawn and weed the garden and wash the cars. He used to buy Buicks because they were made in America, but he got my mom a Toyota last year because she thought it was adorable and it got good gas mileage. He makes me wash the Toyota, even though my mom never drives it anymore. She hasn’t set foot out of the house in over a month. Mostly she makes puzzles. She’s taken over the kitchen table, which is fine with me because we’re not a big meal family. Usually I just throw a French bread pizza in the microwave and eat on a tray in front of the TV.
This morning, my dad makes me help him lug a cast-iron flower urn from one end of the sidewalk to the other. It weighs about eight million pounds. Later, he makes me help him lug it back.
“I need a hand,” he says. That’s what he always says: “I need a hand.” Just when I think I finally have a moment to myself he appears in front of me and says, “I need a hand.”
Sometimes I pretend not to hear him. I turn my Walkman all the way up, close my eyes, and hope he’ll just go away. It never works. He just stands there until I open my eyes. He’s stubborn like that. I swear if I could keep my eyes closed all day he would just stand there, saying “I need a hand” every so often. But who can keep their eyes closed all day? There’s too much to see in the world, too many things to look at, even with my dad in the way.
I’m out back, lying in the sun. I open my eyes and take off my headphones. My dad is standing there. “I need a hand,” he says.
I follow him into the garage and help him get the ladder down from the wall. I wonder what he’s doing, wonder if he’s going to take Mr. Sherman T. Mulfinger’s advice and forcibly remove Echo from her tree. All I have on is a pair of swimming trunks. The cement floor is like ice under my feet. I’m shivering, but my dad is sweating. As he reaches for the ladder I smell his familiar rank odor: a mixture of onions and sweat and Old Spice.
Instead of heading around back to Echo’s tree, we carry the ladder to the front of the house and I hold it steady while he climbs onto the roof. I guess I’m relieved. I don’t want to think about what Echo would do if my dad tried to forcibly remove her from her tree. I look up and imagine my dad falling from the roof, landing in the juniper bushes and breaking his back. I see myself running into the kitchen and dialing 911. I dream about things like this all the time. In my dreams I’m always running into the kitchen and dialing 911.
“I’ll call you when I need you again,” he says from the roof and starts clearing the dead leaves from our gutters. Nobody else on our street bothers to clear the dead leaves from their gutters, but my dad is self-employed and has too much time on his hands. He doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore.
In the kitchen I pour myself a glass of Hawaiian Punch. My mom is hovering over a puzzle at the end of the table. “It looks nice out there,” she says, looking up from her puzzle and glancing at my bare chest. She’s wearing a peach quilted jacket because my dad has the air-conditioning set at about thirty-two degrees. It gives me goose bumps.
“It is,” I say, taking a sip of Hawaiian Punch. “You should come out.” She begins to turn toward the window but stops because from here you can see Echo’s tree. My mom can’t even bring herself to look at it. Earlier this summer, before everything started happening, my mom spent afternoons in the backyard in her old-fashioned skirted bathing suit, a bottle of Coppertone 8 by her side. But these days she’s housebound, like a cat.
“Is it hot?” she says. “It looks hot.”
I shrug. “It’s not bad,” I say. “But it’s freezing in here.”
“Feels good,” she says, fitting another piece into her puzzle and marking it down on a sheet of paper. She keeps track each time she puts in another piece. She counts puzzle pieces the way prisoners in old movies count days: four lines with a slash across them to make five. Most of her puzzles have over a thousand pieces. She always does the border first.
“Are you hungry?” she says. “Can I make you a sandwich?” She’s always trying to get me to eat because she thinks I’m too skinny. She thinks I starve myself. Every day for lunch she has a sandwich, a banana, a tall glass of skim milk, and a cookie for dessert. She sits at the table by herself with her People magazine, which she reads from cover to cover. She never skips articles. A new issue arrives every week and she gets behind. It’s the end of July, but she’s stuck in April.
“Maybe later,” I say.
She tells me that there’s ham and turkey. “You used to like turkey,” she says.
“I still do,” I say. “I’m just not hungry right now.” Sunlight pours through the window, lighting up the gauzy yellow curtains. My dad trudges around on the roof, his rubber soles scraping against the shingles.
My mom glances at the ceiling. “I wish he wouldn’t go up there,” she says. Outside, dead leaves are falling from the sky.
When I bring out Echo’s dinner, the backyard is deserted. Everybody has gone home. The grass is matted down and covered with cigarette butts. There’s a small black chunk that looks like the heel of a woman’s shoe. I stand beneath the tree, peering up into the tangle of branches, hoping for a glimpse of Echo, but all I see are leaves and plywood.
“Brandon?” she says. “Is that you?”
Her voice startles me. It isn’t the first time she’s spoken since she went up there, but she only talks out loud when we’re alone. “I brought you your dinner,” I say.
“What is it?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say. I shake one of the Tupperware containers. “It’s heavy. Feels like pasta.”
Echo lowers the bucket. In it, there’s a note for me, which I put in my pocket for later. I set the pasta into the bucket with two lighter containers – a salad, I imagine, and some fresh bread – along with a couple cans of Diet Pepsi. I give the rope a series of tugs: up.
The bells from the Presbyterian church down the street are ringing. The sky is an unbroken sheet of blue. Echo must spend hours looking at it. I wonder what she sees, wonder how she keeps herself from going crazy up there.
Later, in my room, I unfold Echo’s note to see what she’s written. Thank you, it says, for everything. I bring my flashlight into her old room, which is just as she left it. My parents have sealed it off, as if in memory of her. On the wall is a wooden plaque with her old name, Victoria. I have a name plaque like that in my room too. We had them made one summer at the State Fair.
In a sense, it’s as if she did die. Victoria, I mean. She vanished, little by little. She stopped wearing make-up and let her perm go flat. She grew her hair out and became a vegetarian. Behind her bedroom door she played songs with intricate, tangled melodies, songs that unraveled into other songs that never seemed to end. Or drums. Sometimes the songs were nothing more than drums. If I pressed my ear against the wall I could hear the house throbbing like a giant heart. Then it would stop, and she would emerge from her room wearing pungent oils and long kaleidoscopic skirts with deep, vivid colors – scarlet and purple and crimson and blue, all swirled together. She was Echo now.
I look at her note again: Thank you for everything. I raise the window blind and send my response in flashes of light: You’re welcome.
Today, when I bring Echo her lunch a reporter asks me about “the toilet situation.” That’s how she puts it. She wants to know how my sister goes to the bathroom. It’s funny what people want to know. It’s sad. They want the crude details. They want to know what she eats, and how much. They want to know how she’s sleeping. They want to know the particulars of her menstrual cycle.
“Tell me about the toilet situation,” the reporter says, the point of her pencil hovering above her notebook.
I start to explain about the pulley and bucket and the special containers but stop when I imagine all those strangers reading about my sister going to the bathroom. It’s the sort of thing that would end up in People magazine. I can see my mom reading about it sometime next March, at lunch, in the middle of her banana.
In the kitchen, there’s a Fed Ex package for Echo. She’s given me permission to open anything addressed to her. People have been sending letters and cards, mostly for but a few against her. They’ve also sent flowers, cookies, mosquito repellent, dried apricots, biodegradable soap, Swiss Army knives, crossword puzzles, an air mattress, a used gas generator, a contraption for collecting and purifying rain water, a 58- by 92-inch grey emergency blanket, and a beacon that would help rescuers find her if she got buried in an avalanche.
Today it’s an anonymous package from California. Inside that package is another, and inside that one is yet another. I’m about to give up when I discover, in the last package, a tiny crystal grand piano, wrapped in purple tissue paper. The keys are like grains of rice. Thought you might appreciate some music, the note says. It’s signed, A Kindred Spirit.
By afternoon, clouds have moved in and it’s raining. My mom is vacuuming the living room. When she isn’t making puzzles, my mom cleans the house. I live in the kind of house where if you drop an orange wedge on the floor you can pick it up and eat it. On Tuesdays and Saturdays my mom scrubs the kitchen floor on her hands and knees. Other days, she cleans the various bathrooms, dressing up the toilets in little outfits, furry seat and tank covers with matching horseshoe-shaped rugs. She vacuums the living room once a week, even though nobody ever sets foot in there except on holidays.
“Your father likes a clean house,” she says.
I haven’t been in the living room since Christmas. Echo got a pair of Birkenstocks that day. She put them on and started prancing around the room, her anklet of harem bells jingling. “They’re the most comfortable shoes I’ve ever owned,” she said, leaving giant footprints all over my mom’s freshly vacuumed carpet.
From the window I can see Echo’s tree. The rain has driven the crowd away. She’s made a domed shelter for herself out of a plastic tarp. It looks like a big dented royal blue igloo. I wonder if it keeps her dry. I wonder if she’s cold out there.
My mom switches off the vacuum and joins me at the window. For the first time in almost two months she looks at Echo’s tree. “Why does everything have to be so complicated?” she says, removing an imaginary thread from her sweater. I don’t know if she’s asking me a question or just thinking out loud. She sighs. “Life was much simpler in the fifties,” she says.
“Music,” Echo says, that evening when I ask her what she misses most. I’ve brought her several thermoses of hot water and a sponge, and she’s up there giving herself a bath. I’m lying in the grass beneath the tree. Every once in a while a car slows down, pauses, and then drives off. Echo has become a tourist attraction.
“I’d miss my bed,” I say.
“They say beds are bad for your back,” she says, squeezing the sponge and dribbling water onto the ground.
I send a towel up in the bucket, along with the crystal grand piano and the note from California.
Echo is quiet after that, though I think I hear her crying.
“I need a hand,” my dad says.
I’m in the den, watching an old rerun of Leave It to Beaver. I’ve seen the episode before – it’s the one where Larry Mondelo convinces The Beaver to do something he isn’t supposed to do – but I don’t feel like getting up off the sofa. I don’t feel like giving my dad a hand.
“I need a hand,” he says.
A commercial comes on, but I don’t take my eyes off the screen. I promise myself that no matter how long he stands there I won’t take my eyes off the screen.
This morning we moved everything out of the garage – everything except the woodpile, an antique black walnut roll-top desk, and a Victrola, all of which were too heavy to move. We scrubbed the floor until it sparkled. Now he wants me to help him put everything back.
“I need a hand,” he says.
I pretend he isn’t there. It’s easier than I thought. The show comes back on and I watch as though my life depended on it, as though I didn’t already know how it ends.
In the morning, the crowd in our backyard disappears. The reporters pack up their equipment and head south to Mankato, where somebody has discovered a baby in a well. It’s all over the news. Baby Allison. Nobody knows her real name – that’s just what they’re calling her. Nobody knows who she belongs to or how she ended up at the bottom of a well, but the whole thing is attracting lots of attention. The Baby Allison Crisis has replaced The Echo Crisis. I’m beginning to think that people like having a crisis in their lives, particularly when it’s about somebody else, somebody they don’t know.
It’s quiet now. Everybody is gone – everybody except Mr. Junkins, who continues to frown at our house from his front yard. A minivan pulls up and carts the kids away, along with their lemonade/Tang stand. There are no more reporters sticking their spongy microphones into my face, no more cameras watching my every move. The focal point of our community has drifted south to Mankato, to an anonymous baby trapped in a well.
* * *
I thought Echo would come down as soon as the reporters left, but she’s still up there. I guess she’s going to stay for as long she needs to. It’s been almost two months, but it could be years.
In the meantime, I bring Echo her food and take away whatever she sends down in the bucket. I don’t mind doing it, which surprises me, but this is the first time I’ve ever been responsible for anybody. I’m her brother, and no matter how long she stays up there I’ll be here for her. She can depend on me. I wish she wasn’t living in a tree, but I respect her. I know she would support me if I was the one up there. There’s nothing I could do, nothing I could tell her, that would make her stop loving me.
My dad says she’ll come down sooner or later. “She can’t stay up there forever,” he says, but he’s been wrong before. One good thing that’s come out of this is that he doesn’t ask me to give him a hand anymore. He tackles each new project by himself, the way my mom tackles each new puzzle. This is the way we live, my family, the four of us, each in our own separate world.
Dale Gregory Anderson’s stories have appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Indiana Review, and Blithe House Quarterly. He is the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and a Loft Mentor Series Award.