The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  “‘You become the neighborhood,’” I say, gliding my hands across the tops of the blades of grass, feeling their chemically treated ends prickle like gelled hair. “Do you remember her saying that?”

  My mother pauses a moment, then shakes her head. “No, actually.”

  I do. More than once. Though I can’t remember when. And even now, I don’t know what it means.

  My mother shakes her head again, but harder, like a dog shedding water. “You know, I really do have no idea how the pranks started. I think he might have brought her up a cold shrimp platter the first weekend he lived here. As a new-neighbor gesture, you know, not realizing. I don’t think he’d ever met a Jew before, either, let alone known anything about keeping Kosher. But not long after that, she got him the gift subscription to Hustler, with the note that said ‘To go with your shirts.’ Then he hid a bunch of those black, rubber June bugs all over that sukka she put up every year around back, on strings so he could make them scuttle across her little folding picnic table. Do you remember any of that?”

  I shake my head. “Just the picnic table. And ears of corn? Did she hang ears of corn in there?”

  “He put rubber bugs in those, too. After that, it was on. Seemed like one of them came up with a new torture for the other every single week.”

  Instead of smiling some more, my mother starts muttering again. At least now I can hear her. “She was so lonely,” she says. “They both were.” Then some things that I don’t catch. The sky purples over our heads, and the breeze brushes past.

  “So, this one time…” I finally prod.

  She looks surprised, as though she thought she’d still been talking to me. Her braid swings like the tongue of a bell, and her body vibrates. “Sorry. Yes. This one time. I assume she got the clothes from Madolyn. Tell me you remember Madolyn.”

  “Good God, how could I forget them,” I say, and my mother says them right with me, holding her hands a good two feet in front of her breasts, and there we are smiling again. Mother and daughter. We glance together across the street toward Madolyn’s duplex. “You don’t think she still lives there?” I ask.

  My mother doesn’t respond.

  “Whose ex was she again? The Family Affair guy?”

  “Not him. The one from the knock-off. With the beard.”

  “Oh my God, Mom, do you remember what she told me? When I was just sitting out here with the turtle, minding my seven-year-old business? She came across the street in this tiny black dress, and she had to have been as old as Mr. Busby, right? Sixty, at least.”

  “Older,” says my mother.

  “So it’s just me and the turtle, looking at the sky. And here comes Madolyn and her shadows. And she stands over us. And she puts her hands right on her boobs. And then she says…” I try for a smoker’s rasp, though it doesn’t quite come off. “Just remember, Girlie. I got these for the husband. But I kept ‘em for me.” And then she turned around and went right back home.”

  My mother just nods, and takes a long time doing it. Her voice comes out sad. “That would be Madolyn. She was always so nice.”

  Nice?

  More silence. Another sudden, nervous glance up in the air from my mother, and I know this can’t last long. “Sorry I interrupted. You said Evie got something from her?”

  “Oh. Right. Very possibly the same little black dress you just mentioned.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “And some fishnets. And some red lipstick. And some stilettos. Jesus, Ry, they had to have been seven inches high.”

  “Wait…she borrowed that stuff for herself? To wear?”

  “For Mr. Busby.”

  At the gurgle in my throat, my mom actually grins. “It was horrible, really. And ingenious. You wouldn’t think that sweet old woman…Mr. Busby’s daughter was worried about him skulking around here by himself. She got him to take out a Personals ad in the L.A. Weekly. I helped him write it. And then I guess, maybe when I was trying to convince Evie to let me watch her husband sleep for a couple hours so she could go out and see a movie or something some evening, I must have let it slip. And that’s what gave her the idea, which is why it was kind of my fault.”

  “You’re telling me she answered his ad?”

  “Made a date, told him she’d be by to pick him up. She didn’t tell him who she was, of course.”

  “She actually went through with it? Went to his door dressed like that? What did he do?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. That is, I couldn’t quite see. She made Madolyn and me hide in the hedge. All I could hear over our laughter was his screaming.”

  “That’s…” I start, and don’t know how to continue. I want to keep her talking about this forever, or at least long enough for me to get the picture straight in my head. Not of Evie, but of my mother crouched in a hedge with a friend, laughing. “I can’t believe you haven’t told me this before.”

  I know it’s the wrong comment even before I finish. My mom’s mouth twists, and her shoulders clench inward. She folds her arms across her chest.

  “What happened after that?” I keep my voice light.

  “Stan died,” says my mother.

  The sun goes, dragging all that color behind it, and around us, the apartment buildings lose their depth like false fronts on a set. Across the street is Beverly Hills. A whole other world. You can tell by the curlicues on the street signs.

  Without warning, my mother starts to swell. Her arms come loose and drop to her sides, and her spine arches and her head tilts all the way back as her mouth falls open. The moan seems to surge out of the grass and up her throat, rattling her teeth as it bursts out of her.

  “Mom,” I gasp, grabbing for her hand, scrambling up on my knees to try getting an arm around her.

  The moan stops. My mother holds her position, completely frozen, like a sculpture of my mother moaning. Then her eyes pop open.

  “Do you remember that sound, Ry?”

  “Remember it? What the hell are you—”

  “You don’t,” she says. “I’m glad.” Then she folds her arms back across her chest and lowers her chin and sits there, holding herself. “I’m so glad.”

  Usually, by this point on our Sunday evenings, I’ve dutifully offered up the most innocuous details of my work life and my grad-school plans and my relationship with Danny (since I have no intention of actually bringing Danny), for which my mother trades seemingly grateful nods and sometimes an anecdote about women’s feet from the shoe store where she works. Most weeks, she doesn’t break down, especially if I have her back in her apartment and ensconced in front of her Tivo’d “American Idol” episodes—all of which she also watched when they were first broadcast—by eight. This is the first night in years where I’ve lost track of the time, even for a little while. And yet, I’m all too aware we’re on dangerous ground.

  “Do you want to go home?” I ask gently. I even touch her shoulder, and she doesn’t pull away, though she also doesn’t unclench.

  “It usually started around 2 a.m.,” she says. “Sometimes earlier than that. Mostly not, though. You really don’t remember?” There are no tears, now, just a gauntness that seems to have surfaced in her chin and cheeks.

  This is what she’ll look like, old, I think, for no good reason.

  “The most amazing thing is that I really think she had no idea she was doing it. I think she did it in her sleep. By the third or fourth night after Stan died, I couldn’t sleep at all for knowing it was coming. Somehow, being woken up by that, to that…it was just too much world, too fast.

  “There wasn’t any lead up. It came like an earthquake. That sound I just made, only a lot louder. And a thousand times as heartbroken. It went on and on and on, like she didn’t even need to breathe. Then it would stop for maybe an hour, and then there’d be aftershocks, these quicker, more jagged moans. Those were so loud that that suspended light in my bedroom started swinging back and forth. You couldn’t drown them out. I tried the fan. I tried headphone
s. Nothing worked. It was liked they’d crawled inside my head.

  “Which reminds me. This was also when the spiders came.”

  That, at least, triggers a memory. Up until now, it’s been like watching my mother recount a completely separate life. Part of which she’s made up, or at least exaggerated, because I may have only been seven, and I’ve always slept heavy, but surely I would have heard what she’s describing. And retained it.

  But those webs. Everywhere, on everything. “I remember them,” I say.

  Mostly, I remember the wolf spider outside our front door. We had bougainvillea climbing the iron grating on either side of our little stoop. And for months that spring and early summer—the last months we lived here—this one bulbous, pregnant wolf spider would weave a new web between them every single night. We discovered the web the first time when I raced out the door one morning, headed for the park, and wrapped most of the strands around my face. I don’t think I started screaming until my mom did, and she didn’t start, she later said, until she saw the spider itself dangling just under my earlobe like some outsized, nightmare earring, clawing with its hairy legs as it tried to scuttle up the air into my hair to hide. My mom whacked it into the bushes with her hand, then spent half an hour calming us both down and picking the insect carcasses and threading out of my curls.

  We weren’t laughing, then. Or ever, really, about the spiders. There were too many of them, attracted, the TV said, by the freakishly humid spring, the eruption of greenery and insects that draped the hillsides and gardens of midtown L.A. and made it look, for just that short while, like somewhere living things actually belonged.

  But we developed a sort of affection for our lone wolf. Or fascination, at least. The way one might for a house ghost. Some nights, before sending me to bed, my mother would bring me to the front couch, draw back those bay-window curtains, flick on the porch light. And there she’d be, gray and translucent and hairy, scuttling back and forth seemingly in mid-air between the columns of bougainvillea, floating on her milky white egg-sac as though it were a balloon. Every morning, we took a broom, said we were sorry, and brought the web down so we could get out of the apartment. But we left the spider herself alone.

  “Ry?” says my mother, startling me by brushing a fallen curl out of my eyes. She’s never touched me, much. Not since I was very young. “What are you thinking about?”

  I catch myself leaning away and feel bad, but too late. My mother has already withdrawn her hand. I try to smile, get some nostalgia into my voice. I’m surprisingly close to feeling some. I gesture toward the front stoop. “Our furry-legged friend.”

  She looks at my hands. Then the front of the apartment. Then she bursts into tears.

  “Sorry,” she says fast. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  I reach to comfort her. But it never did any good when I was a kid, and it doesn’t now. The sobs grab her by the shoulders and shake her.

  They stop sooner than usual, though. And when my mother lowers her hands from her face, there’s a steeliness in her jaw I don’t remember seeing. “I’m just being stupid, as usual,” she says. “It wasn’t really that. It wasn’t real. Obviously. It was just that time, those moans. I hadn’t slept in so long, and those things were crawling over the place, and I missed your fucking asshole father, and…” her voice drops into its murmur. But lo and behold, it climbs back out. She looks at me. “It wasn’t real,” she says. “I want you to know I know.”

  I have no idea what to say to that. “We should get you home,” I say eventually.

  “Evie came down a few times that week after Stan died. Mostly in the evening, just to sit. You and I used to steal lemons off the trees by that condo complex around the corner, and I made lemonade, and the three of us would come right out here. Right about this time. We’d watch the spiders dancing up the walls and the sun going down and that turtle nosing around in the grass. Mr. Busby was away, I think his daughter’d taken him to Bermuda or something, and it was so quiet around here.

  “I kept trying to ask Evie how she was doing, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She talked about maybe going to see her sister in Maine, but not like she was really planning to do it. You showed her our wolf spider. She said there were lots more up under the eaves. She claimed she could hear them on the roof at night, and that she had a resident, too, who hung out by her bedroom window. An even bigger one. She didn’t like its eyes.

  “One night, later than usual—I was in a robe, and I’m sure you’d already gone to bed—she knocked on the door in tears and asked me to come out. She was in a robe, too. This horrible cream thing with blue lilies all over it. She was grabbing her arms to her chest.

  “‘They’re biting him,’ she kept saying. ‘They’re biting him. My poor Stan.’ Then she showed me her hand. It was all purple on the back, she had this huge spider bite. Really nasty.

  “‘Evie, my God, you’ve got to treat that. Come in,’ I told her. But she wouldn’t. She said she had to get back. That they kept climbing on Stan and running around on him. She wasn’t making much sense. Mostly, she was sobbing.

  “I do remember one thing. At some point, she just started saying the word ‘Gone.’ And when I’d gotten her some lemonade and held her for a while—and I swear, Ry, she was thinner than you, it was like holding a garden rake except that she was so soft—she stuck her fingers under her glasses and wiped her eyes and said it again. ‘Gone. What do people even mean when they say that? How can someone go? Go where? To me, he’s as here as he ever was. He’s right in the next room.’

  “Know the worst part, Ry? What I remember thinking was that that was true. The guy’d been gone for ages. Months and months before he died. In a way, she was right.

  “And somehow, between comforting her while she cried and getting her lemonade and wrapping her poor, old, squishy hand, I missed that part about the spiders biting him. I didn’t think a single thing about what that meant until later that night, when Mr. Busby came home from his trip.”

  The silence seems almost peaceful at first, an organic lull in the conversation. But it lasts too long. My mother’s staring up toward the windows of the upstairs apartment, and her mouth has formed an ‘O.’ Her shadow stretches out long beside her on the grass, like a web she’s spun, or gotten stuck in.

  “Mom. Seriously. I don’t need another moan-demonstration.”

  She blinks as though I’ve dumped water over her head. As though she has no idea what I’m talking about. Yet again, I feel horrible. But this has gone on for so many years.

  “I didn’t know he was back,” she says. “I mean, we were friendly, he even had me bring in his mail sometimes. But it wasn’t like with Evie. He kind of kept to himself.

  “If I’d known he was back, I would have warned him. But I didn’t, and right on time at about 2:40 a.m., Evie went off. It was particularly horrible that night. God, Ry. Lying there in the dark, I think I started doing it along with her, under my breath, just to keep from going crazy. Only then—remember, I hadn’t slept through the night since Stan died, so for maybe eight days running—I started thinking maybe it was me making the sounds, and that really freaked me out. And then the music exploded.”

  And there it is again. A surprising wisp of smile floating over her face. “His choice was inspired, in a way. I mean, he must have put some thought into it, after the moans woke him up. All of a sudden, these fat, thudding drums boom out his windows. And this bass. Buum, buum, buum-bumm, dugga-dugga. Rattled that picture of you on the Griffith Park merry-go-round right off my wall.

  “I could hear him yelling, too. Mr. Busby. ‘Hear that?’ he was shouting. ‘Cause I’m sure hearing you, Old Bat.

  “You know, you slept through that, too? I swear, Ry, sleeping through the Northridge quake must have trained you, because you never even moved. I jumped up, threw on my robe, and ran around to Mr. Busby’s. He was holding one of his stereo speakers out his living room window, aimed straight up at Evie’s. Every time the bass hit, his whole body quiv
ered like the windshield of a car.

  “Well he saw me. I’ll never forget it, he was wearing these flashy green pajamas, I’m pretty sure they were the most reflective article of clothing I’ve ever seen on anyone. And he was having the time of his life. Grinning ear to ear. He was kind of irresistible that way, like a big overgrown lab. In reflective green pajamas. And he shouts to me, ‘Evening, Girl. Think the old woman knows I’m home?’

  “‘Stan died,’ I told him.

  “Sorry,’ he yelled. ‘Lot of moaning going on. Can’t hear ya.’

  “I told him again. That time, he understood. ‘Ah, shit,’ he said, and quivered when the bass hit him. He ducked inside and shut off the music. There were lights on halfway down the block, and Madolyn was out on her lanai, yelling.

  “Mr. Busby stuck his head back out, shouting, ‘Yeah, yeah, go back to bed’ to the whole world. Then he threw his hands up to his hair, and he started rooting around and saying ‘Goddamn. Is it on me? Can you see it?’

  “I helped him get rid of the rest of the web he’d stuck his face through. Then I got lemonade, and he got a box of Wheat Thins. And we just stood together at his window, all night. Him and me. He kept looking up at Evie’s windows. Sometimes he’d say, ‘So she’s been doing that a lot? That sound? Every night?’ And sometimes he’d say, ‘Poor old bat.’ Finally, sometime around dawn, right when I told him I had work and got up to go in, he said, ‘Hey. Want to see my wheels?’ And he took me around to the driveway to show me the car his daughter had bought him.”

  “I’ll bet it was shiny,” I say, though I’m entranced yet again. How is it possible that I know so little about the life my mother led here, before she became the way she is?

  “You bet right. And not just shiny. Pink and shiny. And a Jag.”

  My jaw drops. “I didn’t know they made pink Jags. Or that anyone on this side of Olympic had that kind of money.”

  “His daughter bought it for him. And this is the thing about Leyton Busby, Ry. This is what I think Evie never understood. That was all he wanted to talk about. It was all he cared about. I don’t think he cared about the car itself one little bit. ‘She paid half down,’ he told me. He never even walked around it, he just stood there in his shiny pajamas, which his daughter also bought him, beaming away. ‘Half. To cheer me up, she says. Like I need so much cheering.’”