If A Tree Falls

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?   This is the question my older brother Trey, who was flipping through a psychology magazine that belonged to our father, posed to my six-year-old self in our den one day in my childhood home in the mid-seventies.   I didn’t answer him, as I went on coloring in my Puff ‘n Stuff coloring book, but I pondered the answer to that question, and what it meant, my entire childhood.   I thought of ways I could find out: I would plant a tape recorder in the woods one stormy night and come back the next morning and by pushing the “play” button, see if the fallen tree had made a sound. Or I’d simply venture out into the forest and hide behind another tree, a seemingly sturdy one, so that the falling tree wouldn’t see me, and listen. I thought I was so clever.   After a while I forgot about it and it wasn’t until I took a psychology class in high school many years later that I learned that the answer was no.

But that didn’t stop me from constructing the idea. For example, last winter, my mother, who I began calling Sadie, phoned to tell me that my brother Trey died. I had moved overseas to study art at Universitas de Lausanne and although I was devastated at Sadie’s pathetic assertion that my brother was dead, I didn’t fly back to America for what she said was to be his funeral. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t because I had no proof he was dead. Translation: If someone close to you dies because somebody told you that they died, even if you read it in the newspaper, but you never saw the body, are they really dead? My answer, of course, was no. Trey was alive. He just lost my phone number and my e-mail address and I couldn’t reach him. As a matter of fact, if I Googled him this very minute all of his reviews and credits to his name would pop up on various websites, just as they always have: “Trey Wasserman, Executive Chef and owner of The Coolest Cafe in L.A., was awarded one Michelin star–“ and so forth. Nowhere would it say he hanged himself.

This past summer Sadie had gotten some crazy notion that I wasn’t right. Whatever that meant to her I wasn’t sure. Nothing was further from the truth, because at thirty-nine I was feeling happier than I had in years. I began dating my art teacher, Jean Pierre, who was ten years younger than I was. I suspected that Sadie wasn’t right because whenever I inquired about Trey, if she knew why he refused to phone or e-mail me lately, or if she thought that he couldn’t forgive me for that awful thing I’d done to him, she would become silent. Maybe I’d frightened her somehow. I wouldn’t ask about my brother’s whereabouts in a calm manner, but I’d screech at the top of my lungs, obscenities included, right into her ear. I could picture her shaking her head to dispose of all those dirty words while her fingers moved to escort the words out even faster. Then she’d come back on the line in a low tone, which actually frightened me and say slowly, Julie-Ann, I think you ought to come home for a while. I don’t think you’re right. Then she’d start to cry. At that point I’d hang up.

Since time can’t pass without mileage, when my father, who was a clinical psychologist, had reached sixty-three, he died of heart failure. I was six and Trey was ten. I took his death hard. Although my father left us a fortune, Sadie, who was in her forties, worked long hours at the local newspaper. She made a modest salary and socked it away into our trust funds which I later used to leave the country. Trey and I seemed fine without her, but like any biddable object I lumbered for stability. Trey was my sturdy tree. Never would he have guessed that one day I’d pay him back by screwing up his life.

When Sadie phoned in late July, she told me she’d purchased a round trip ticket to come visit me since I wouldn’t go back to the States. I was surprised. All I thought was, There is a name and a face racing far from somewhere toward me. Jean Pierre and I had already planned to go on holiday to the French Riviera where he had a home, and he suggested that Sadie join us, she might enjoy lazing on the beach. His daughter Charlotte (a precocious four-year-old who had a command of three languages which included French, Italian, and English) was visiting him for those two weeks, so he figured it would be a good opportunity for her to practice her English. If I agreed, it was only to please him. I could have done without a summer with my mother.

The evening before Sadie’s arrival, I surveyed my flat. There wasn’t much to fix, she’d only stay the night anyway since we’d be leaving for France the next day. As I stood in my dress, dark and pressed like the frock of a nun, I thought, She is but a cough in the distance. I lit a joint. My brain was a serenaded field, reigning high all over the place. Feeling home-heavy, I took a walk. When I got back, my nerves were stilled and I slept so well I woke up late.   That morning, if I could explain myself in compounds, I would have been rain. Drumming all over the place to get dressed, find my wallet, my keys. Sadie’s flight would be arriving at four o’clock and I managed to get myself in the car in an attempt to avert traffic. When I arrived, I saw her at the airport gate, and noticed she had aged considerably. She looked around while the other passengers passed her rapidly, seemingly on their way to important places. A surge of anger tore through me, but I was baffled as to why or what I was angry at and concluded that every time I saw Sadie I didn’t know how not to be angry. I didn’t call out her name, I watched her for a while and a part of me hoped she would walk past me and continue her journey with some other woman. Besides, there were hundreds of me there and she wouldn’t have been able to decipher my babble among the all those lobbying for their loved ones. There was no telling what preposterous tale she would spin under one roof and in between four walls once she got me alone. But she found me.  And when she did she gathered my face in her hands and squeezed it so hard I must have turned blue. Through clenched teeth I offered to take her to a cafe for dinner. She obliged. There was not much she could do to me in a public place, namely shoot an arrow straight through me, so I assumed my mother’s urges to drill Trey’s death were kept at bay throughout eating cheese soufflee and pastry. In the end, she was too tired to shoot and by the time we got home, jetlag kicked in and she slept like a baby. Through the night I sat by my window, smoking cigarette after cigarette until dawn.  When Jean Pierre pedaled up on his bike with his daughter and two backpacks intact I thought, How perfect. Now rain will come. It is that sweet scent mixed with herbs that accumulates in the air. And just as you stretch your arms up to the sky and take a deep breath, some evil god spits in your face. And so our day began.

They all sat on the front steps, bread and coffee in hand, including Charlotte who looked like a midget in lipstick, watching me struggle to load my Volkswagen with everyone’s bags. Sadie didn’t want me to drive. I didn’t have a choice since Jean Pierre didn’t have a driver’s license. Jean Pierre sat in the passenger seat and Sadie and Charlotte were all snug in the back with books, paper and crayons. I turned the car over several times before we sputtered down the motorway to the border of France. Sadie was sitting directly behind Jean Pierre, so every time I looked in the rear-view mirror, I caught her staring at me. Her features took on the appeal of an old doily, yellowed and brittle. She made me nervous, and I thought, I am a child killer yes, but I am no murderer. I shook. I pulled the car over and took Charlotte out and told her to switch places with Sadie.

There’s only so much you could do to entertain a small child on a long road trip. We offered Charlotte carrot sticks because she was on a diet. We found playgrounds at rest stops, which I hated because it detained us. But Charlotte was bored and she wouldn’t stop chanting the Are-We-There-Yet? chant which was an old standard among restless seat-belted children. Then we hit traffic.

“Why don’t you color something for me Charlotte?” I suggested.   “Or play tic-tac-toe with Sadie?”   She was all fidgety and Sadie did nothing to entice her to play any game.   She sat resting upon her elbow, staring out the window at nothing. I glanced in the mirror and saw Charlotte nudge her.

“Let’s play hangman,” she said.

“I don’t like that game Charlotte,” Sadie said.

“Why not?” she said.

“Because I don’t,” Sadie retorted.   I didn’t know much about Charlotte, but I did know something about four-year-olds. They could be persistent.

“Why not?” she wouldn’t let up.

“Tell her why, Julie-Ann!” Sadie shouted up to me.

“Tell her what?” Jean Pierre whispered to me.

“I don’t know,” I whispered back, pretending not to know what Sadie thought my brother did. Instead, I tried to distract Charlotte, since Jean Pierre believed in letting Charlotte be Charlotte by never getting involved in Charlotte’s conversations.

“Charlotte, why don’t you read Sadie the book I gave you?” I said.

“Because I want to play hangman.”

“Sadie doesn’t fancy hangman, Charlotte,” I said. I wanted more than anything for everyone to get along. But the circle started again.

“Why not?”

“Make her stop, Julie-Ann.” Now, if I could make anyone do anything I’d make Sadie disappear, and just as I was about to try (to make Charlotte stop) Charlotte said to her again, more sinister than innocent because now this was a game, “Why don’t you want to play hangman?” and then Sadie turned animalistic and crossed a border of her own accord and blurted out in a pitch high enough to deafen everyone in every car sentenced to this hellish standstill, “Because my son hung himself!” The word “hung” bobbed in the air before it went limp, even It didn’t want to be in that car. And I shook my head slowly. Jeez, I thought. I was not a good sport when it came to practical jokes, but all kidding aside, her grammatical blunder is what pissed me off most. It’s “hanged” not “hung.” But I let that go and we drove on in silence because everyone was terrified now and the traffic started to move.   I was certain Charlotte didn’t understand the concept of one being “hung,” nonetheless I was stung with fury at Sadie’s impetuous barking and as far as I understood it, Charlotte no doubt finished the statement in her head as “And if you don’t shut up little girl, I’ll hang you too.” Substitute slap or kill for hang. I’m sure the verb didn’t matter, it sounded like a threat. Jean Pierre looked at me and put his hand on my lap. He knew I had a brother. I never told him he was dead because he wasn’t, but I didn’t think he wanted to go there. Not yet, not in that car.   So we continued to drive with Charlotte stunned into dumbness. I turned the radio on and made small talk with Jean Pierre. In his French accent and half-baked English he said,

“Your mother, she feels, incinerated, no?”

“Burned?” I knew what he meant, he was always mixing words up in an overzealous effort to expand his English vocabulary. “Do you mean incarcerated?   Imprisoned in this car?”

“Is what I said.”

When we arrived at the holiday house, it was past five o’clock and my car conked out completely two blocks from the driveway. The weather was overcast and people were already clearing the beach. After schlepping my duffle bag and Sadie’s suitcase in the heat (Jean Pierre was chasing after a speedy Charlotte) we settled in the living room with a bottle of wine. Charlotte ran up to her bedroom and wouldn’t come out until Jean Pierre promised either get rid of Sadie or to open an account for her on the social networking site her pre-school used.

“Which site is it?   My Face?  Space Book?   Because you know, the public has access to—”

“Face Space,” Jean Pierre interrupted, not looking up from his laptop. “And it’s enviously safe.” Charlotte came downstairs with photographs spilling out of her hands of her Bratz collection that she wanted her father to post. She wouldn’t go anywhere near Sadie, who had then gone upstairs to unpack.   When I went up to help her, she was sitting on the guest bed staring out at the sea. She tried to tell me something, something about getting me help.   About knowing I didn’t mean to kill Trey’s son. That it was an accident and everybody knew it was an accident. Her words were scattershot. Blah, blah, blah, and for me to stop feeling guilty, blah, blah, blah, about Trey’s suicide and that’s when I tuned her out and all I thought was, You don’t know what you’re saying. Her mouth moved but I couldn’t hear a thing. She became a tree. A broken one. She continued to fall and fall and when she hit the bottom, although I was there, she didn’t make a sound. My first instinct was to flee, as I did to Europe weeks after that ill-fated day my car lost its brakes killing Trey’s only son. The death tore him and his marriage apart. I became a prisoner in my own home. My reclusive behavior rivaled my brother’s pain until finally, as he sought therapy to deal with the death of his son, I became more depressed for causing it. Painting in a foreign country where I knew the language and wore my body thin and sickly was the only life I knew. Then at the suggestion of his psychologist, Trey finally found me. He phoned. He e-mailed. And just when I was convinced he’d forgiven me, all communication stopped. So what? People lose touch all the time. But I was convinced he was still in this world and of it.

I walked over and stood by the window looking out into the haze. The sun broke through the clouds and out burst the inevitable downpour. The waves whipped in the wind and I opened the window to let the sound in because I had to crack the silence that winced in the background. The moment gathered like warm ocean around my ankles. I told myself, If you want to keep it, you must wade further in. Although the moment was not entirely mine, it was mine enough. I was seconds ticking and had to find the door that has kept me wide open.

That moment turned to ice and I was the genetic makeup of its precipitation, stilled and thinking, What brought me here in the first place? How shiftless I’d become in all my dissolve! Because that moment couldn’t run any faster if I chased it. Because that moment was already gone.