In Bud Only Yesterday

done for the 'starters' contest

In Bud Only Yesterday

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses. -- Colette

The treehouse was built when I was five, when I was seven I moved in, and by the time I was nine it was my permanent residence. Out of my entire childhood that treehouse is what I remember most vividly. My parents were average, working-class folk, a postman and a secretary, a couple with uncomplicated aspirations -- they only wanted their slice of the American Dream. We lived in a small suburb outside of Lansing, a beige neighborhood full of prefabricated houses and lawns that always looked slightly toasted by the sun. Frankly, it was a boring place, my family surrounded by a hundred just like it. Whitebread to the core. 

The treehouse my father built me was the only thing that made our house stand out. It was a beautiful design, spacious for a child’s playplace. The deep oaken planks sat across the branches like a ship’s deck and the summer wind flew in through the windows in a pleasant cross breeze, the leaves rustling from above. Before I’d even heard of transcendentalism or read Walden, I’d already communed with nature. The treehouse was a sanctuary, plain and simple.

I was selfish with it, though. I wouldn’t let any of the other neighborhood kids come up, blowing raspberries and spitballs down at them as they stood pleading below me like serfs. No, the treehouse was mine. Populated with a child’s memorabilia, I had marked it as my turf -- the postcards my Aunt Eulalie sent me from Rome, my collection of obsidian arrowheads, the cheap pulp novels I stole from the local library, a transistor radio I fiddled with on lonely starlit nights. The treehouse was more dear to me than my own room, and a million times more cool.

When I was seven, my dad let me bring up his old army-issue sleeping bag. I spent most summer nights sleeping outside, being eaten by mosquitoes or bothered by fish flies. Moths fluttered fitfully around the oil lamp sitting in the corner, its light golden and warm, better than any nightlight. The heat melted the late midnight hours into something magical and mysterious, cloaked in darkness. School was out and I was free -- truly free -- out of the house, in my own little world. Considering how introverted I was back then, it was strange how deeply I was affected by my sister’s death. 

Her name was Mary Elizabeth and we had never been particularly close. She was six years older than me, 15 when I was nine, the year of her suicide. She was a fey creature and my memories of her are blurry. I get only flashes of her double-dutching on the sidewalk, the perfect white teeth of her smile, the red headband she favored. We rarely talked. Truly, we were like two planets in the same system, following different orbits. She was always there in the corner of my eye, and me hers, but nothing more.    

I have a school picture of her sitting on my mantelpiece in a somber silver frame. Her long stringy blond hair was in fashion back then, but it wasn’t a good look for her, made her look wraith-like and too pale. The blue of her eyes dazzles, though, caught perhaps in the camera flash. It’s a bright sky blue, expansive and divine. It’s a blue that makes me miss her. 

My mother found her one Sunday morning before church, lying in our empty bathtub, her wrists brutally slashed with Dad’s razorblades. Blood, so very, very red, streamed from her, rivulets of life, soaking the sedate pastels of her church dress, the thin white stockings stretched over her legs. It was gruesome but absolutely lovely at the same time, in the way awful things can be beautiful too. The phrase “sacrificial lamb” comes to mind. 

The screams of my mother brought me and my father running, though only my father had the presence of mind to sweep me from the room, grabbing my arm and literally pulling me away from the horrific sight. It was too late, though, the image of my sister’s corpse was stricken upon me. To this day, I still have nightmares about it. 

There is a mystery to my sister’s death. Though she is mourned and buried, her death is unresolved. The question, the burning question, of why? remains. I’m hardly the person to ask, I know, separated as we were by age and gender and the unconscious sibling rivalry for our parents’ affection. Still, I have tried to piece together the puzzle of her death, unravel her unhappiness. Her diary is riddled with the standard adolescent insecurities about her looks, her weight, her grades, boys (evidently, she harbored a crush on Chip Montaine, the sullen punk down the street who worked weekends at his father’s garage). But there is nothing pointing to suicide, no “cries for help” -- only a 15 year old girl stares back at me. She may not always be happy, but she is normal. 

Mary’s death snowballed into the breakdown of my life. Numb with painkillers and grief, my mother stopped going to work, spent her days locked up in the bedroom, daytime soaps muted on the TV. My father left straight out. For three months he was gone, just gone, to this day I don’t know where. With no parents to watch over me, I dropped out of school. It was like a Twilight Zone version of summer vacation -- all authority removed, but no joy, no sense of freedom. Mary’s death had sucked the life out of everything. I grew smelly because I stopped taking baths, a film of sweat and dirt forming over my skin. My hair became shaggy. By the end of the year, I needed three fillings from all the candy I ate, coupled with my obvious neglect of dental hygiene. I’d always hated to floss anyway.  

I was a heathen, a modern day Lost Boy. It was then that I moved permanently into the treehouse. Reeling from Mary, how her spirit seemed to haunt the house, I left. I had no other choice, the house had transformed into a mausoleum. I found it hard to breathe in there. Curtains were closed 24 hours a day, casting the rooms in shadow. The dust and the lingering scent of Mary’s blood penetrated our clothing. Everything looked necrotic. Even my own skin had turned ghastly white, my cheekbones protruding, unhealthy and bold. 

The treehouse always meant comfort and safety to me, and that’s what its encompassing wooden walls brought me those bitter months alone. My entire life receded into that crowded 6’ x 8’ space. I brought up comic books and cans of beans which I devoured cold when the hunger could no longer be ignored. I was a survivor in the wilderness of my family’s grief.

The days were long and uncomfortable, autumn sinking into winter. The nights grew fiercely cold and my child’s mind entertained grotesque fantasies of losing fingers and toes to frostbite. The chill brought Mary’s death into a startling poignance for me -- as the season was dying, so Mary’s death was reinforced. As the great oak’s leaves turned brown, fell to the ground, and returned to the earth, so Mary’s body decayed. I projected: God was sad, as I was. This was His way of showing His pain. Unexpectedly, I found myself mourning the little things about her... the sound of her laugh as I cracked a fart joke... how her skin smelt of the bubblegum bubblebath she got at the dime store on Elm... the way she stuck a quarter under my pillow on my birthdays like some confused version of the tooth fairy (whenever I did actually lose a tooth, she told me to suck it up and get over it, loser).

I missed Mary. I missed my big sister.

In the treehouse I kept an old photo of us from our family vacation to Disneyland. We were posing with Mickey Mouse, his arms thrown over our shoulders -- we looked ridiculously delighted with ourselves. Mary was golden brown from the California sun, her hair bleached an even lighter shade of blond. I too was tan, my skinny chicken legs and wiry arms sprouting from clothes I’d already outgrown. The special thing about that picture was how Mary and I weren’t staring at the camera; only Mickey smiled back at the viewer, responding to my father’s “Say cheeeeeese!” No, Mary and I were looking at each other, sharing a smirk across Mickey’s huge foam bodysuit. Our eyes were locked together, a brief moment of love and triumph forever frozen in time. We had lassoed Mickey in, gotten him to pose with us out of all the kids there that blazing August afternoon. There and then, Mary and I were a team, perfectly in sync.   

I studied that picture for hours. Since Mary’s grave was over an hour’s drive away, deep in the heart of the Lansing Memorial Cemetery, and visiting her room actually required going into the house, studying that picture was the only tribute I could pay her. I memorized its every detail, trying to recall the day with some haphazard clarity (Did she have frozen yogurt or a fudgsicle? Did we ride the Teacups or the Dumbos first? Was the red plastic whistle bought there or at the Grand Canyon a year later?). None of it really matters, I guess, but the Mary of Disneyland is the Mary I want to remember: sunny, high on sugar and adrenaline, glowing with youth and life. I want to die holding that image in my head, but the grey mystery of her suicide has reached almost mythic proportions, a toxic fog encompassing my entire childhood.   

They say there’s always a moment when a boy becomes a man, but I consider seeing Mary’s dead body for the first and only time the moment I became an adult. It was sudden, as startling as ripping a band-aid off raw skin. Boyhood to heartbroken, disillusioned adulthood, all in the space of a few breathless seconds. 

I moved out of the treehouse the day my father returned. He just showed up on our doorstep in an old suit, a sheepish expression on his face, his eyes dimmed with tiredness and tears. Years later, I’m reminded of the weary wanderers train jumping during the midst of the Great Depression, searching, always searching... but he had come home, back to us. Back to me.

 

It was three days before Christmas. 

That night, huddled in a cocoon of fleece blankets, I lay wide awake, wracked with insomnia. I counted sheep not only to bring on sleep but to keep my mind off the blistering cold. It was five above freezing and I was shivering so hard I was rattling the bones of the treehouse. About to cry defeat and give in to a slow death by hypothermia, I heard the ladder creak as someone climbed up its weather-beaten rungs. My father’s head popped up three feet away from me, alarmingly close after months unseen. His cheeks were sunken and deep purple shadows ringed his eyes, but he was freshly showered, his neck nicked from a shave. The mothball smell of his woolen sweater was comforting and homey and balanced in his hand was a mug of cocoa. He climbed inside to sit beside me, a giant in a dollhouse, his 6’4’’ folding in on itself with a kind of insectile grace. He made sure not to knock anything over.

He sat the mug of cocoa down and wordlessly gathered me up in his arms. It took me a moment to process I was being hugged. Though he was thin, his strength remained and his arms felt solid and reassuring around me. Something unlocked inside my brain -- a revelation. He was here. Dad was beside me and he wasn’t going away again... 

A tear slipped down my cheek. 

In a low voice, he said something that later, surprisingly, turned out to be true --

“It’s going to be okay, Michael.” 

The words sounded prophetic and were almost as comforting as the hug. But frozen as I was by the cold, my teeth chattering too hard for a reply, I merely lowered my head an inch in a nod, hoping he’d understand. He did -- of course he did, he was my dad. A hint of laughter tinting his words, he squeezed me tighter and said, “Let’s go inside.”        

Author's Note

sorry about the run-on sentences, i'm working a twelve-step program ;)

Reviews

[Hamkar]

I love that quote you have, must note it down somewhere...

I bet I would want to remember that Mary of Disneyland too. Brilliant story.

[VolatileVixen]

This is amazing and beautiful.

[Ed Hart]

thank you for sharing this...of course, it is horrendous; a mountain for a young girl to encounter, then have to carry...your telling is excellent and straight forward; but more than anything else is the sharing...i'm so glad to know you better