My mother was the Portugal laurel tree in the backyard. In early summer she produced white flower clusters that smelled ever so slightly of hawthorn—that spiced almond scent that lingered in the breeze most springs. Bees gathered around her flowers, becoming sluggish with the weight of her pollen. They carried it on their legs like saddlebags, returning it to their honeycombs.
* * *
She wasn’t always a tree. She was once a woman—a girl, really, who worked as a waitress at Veronica’s Café, the only place in town that didn’t sell burnt or stale coffee. She dreamt of going to college. Not to study. It was never about the studies but the dream of leaving her small town to become someone else.
Her father was a single dad who couldn’t imagine any other life but their small town. He worked for the River and Fisheries Department and was a good caretaker of watersheds and rivers. He hoped his only daughter would marry a local boy and produce grandchildren and in marrying, she would become rooted to the community, and less likely to drift away.
But Mom’s vision for the future, though vague was always someplace else. As she swept the hardwood floor at the cafe, or took coffees to customers, or fed cheap colourful dishes through the dishwasher, she imagined reading poetry on green college grounds, and running from classes to parties.
* * *
“Alissa, define your dreams,” she once said, when she still believed that it was the vagueness of her dreams that turned her into a tree. She wanted me to leave our small town and get an education in a big city. I was in fifth grade when she asked,
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I thought it was a stupid question. I was sitting at the kitchen table studying for a spelling test. My focus was on getting through the next day. I couldn’t imagine the future. I stared out the window into the backyard. She placed a hand on my shoulder to draw me back me to the present. By then the veins of her hand had silvered and her flesh had lost its suppleness.
“You can’t afford not to know, my dear girl.”
“Yes Mom,” I said. But I did not know, so I lied and said I wanted to be a concert musician in an orchestra.
“No,” she said, “you can be anything but musician.”
* * *
Lollo was a musician. I never met him, but I shared his DNA. Lollo was on an homage tour to the singer Kurt Cobain. It was the 90’s and Cobain had just died. Lollo capitalized off the nation’s grief for the singer, by writing his own subpar ballads for the recently departed. He took some of Nirvana’s lyrics and wrote his own tragic tunes around them. His teary and impassioned performances were a hit. He played his way across small towns in Canada and America, playing to crowds in city halls and school gymnasiums. He charged $3 for admission. The love that fans had for Nirvana was transmitted to him by proxy, turning him into a kind of god. And by the time he met Mom at one of his last stops, he was sure he could have her as he had so many women before her.
* * *
“You mustn’t be too easy,” Mom said one day while I watched reruns of Full House on the sofa after school. She was at it again. Masticating on the story of her life and trying to protect me from her own fate. By then she was half woman, half tree. Her knees had become two slender, silver-barked trunks. She moisturized in the evening, which offered some relief to her stiffness, but not much.
Sometimes we sat on the couch watching TV together. Often, she put an arm around me. She used to have soft, flabby underarms, and I disliked the way they jiggled when she moved. But what I hated even more was the way her arms grew taught and twisted as if forming muscles. I shuddered when she placed a dry arm-branch around me and I recoiled from her touch.
When she caught me watching Full House she said,
“That DJ Tanner only ever wants a boyfriend. Is that what you want for your life?”
“No, of course not!” I said but felt as if I had been caught naked because it was all I wanted. Then, Mom believed it was desire that turned her into a tree.
At a friend’s house we invited a few boys from biology class to play spin the bottle. I told Mom I was doing homework but in truth my friend’s mom wouldn’t be back from work until after dark. When I
kissed one of the boys in the laundry room, heat travelled through my body the way sap runs through trees. When we finished making out and he left the room, I found a mirror behind the door and sought signs of silver, tree-flesh on my face and arms, wondering if I too would turn to tree, but I found nothing.
* * *
Mom hated when my friends came over, afraid they’d snicker and stare. I told her that being a tree wasn’t that weird. Danielle’s mom kept fake, painted fingernails in a jewelry box—mementos of good times, she said. Sandy’s mom had a new boyfriend every six months and each one was an exact replica of the one before. Tanya’s mom baked obsessively and encouraged everyone to eat while she starved herself.
* * *
Lollo he was in the middle of his set when he first saw Mom. The door to the townhall opened and a slender girl stood in the doorway. For a moment Mom was a dark silhouette against the night sky. The door closed and she disappeared into the dimly lit hall. Her friend saved her a seat in the front row. Mom wore a baggy plaid button down shirt that was too big for her. The shirt slipped over one shoulder, revealing her milk white skin. Lollo looked at her shoulder, then into her eyes until she let her hair drop in front of her face, blocking his gaze. The friend who had watched the exchange turned to her and they both laughed.
* * *
“The sound was like the laughter of water nymphs at the river,” Lollo later said of her laugh. Clearly, he had a poetic bent. Lollo found her after the show, and asked if she would come back to his hotel. She said no but he could visit her at work during lunch break.
They sat on Veronica’s rotting Adirondack chairs in her overgrown rose garden at the back of the café. Mom had half an hour for lunch and she spent a week of lunches with him. He held her face with his calloused guitar-playing fingertips and said her name softly.
“Daphne.” He spun tales of his travels and she listened—eager for the siren stories of the outside world. As she listened, her dream of college dissipated like the heavy morning fog in the low-lying fields that burned up in the heat of the day and new vision took its place.
* * *
“Don’t get wooed by their stories.” Mom said, while I had string tied around my toe and was making a friendship bracelet for a friend on the back porch. “They’ll tell you pretty tales, but don’t get drawn in like I did. He said he was a poor musician with nothing to offer her but his love. Both lies, of course. His wealthy, Norwegian father was funding his vagabond adventures, though he still railed against ‘the establishment.’ But my point is, he had no real love to give.”
Lollo left town after their week of lunches and weekend in bed. She tried to find him when she discovered she was pregnant, but by then her breasts had hardened into tree knots. He would find other women in other towns. Women who were not trees.
Mom started in again. “You’re not listening.”
“Okay Mom,” I said while braiding coloured threads.
“You seem not to think this is important,” she replied. I stopped braiding and looked up into her hardened face. She wanted my full attention when she started in on one of her diatribes and the sooner I gave it to her, the sooner it would end.
“Yes Mom, of course it’s important.”
“No, you’re not listening. I fell into his bed for a few stories and the promise of love. How stupid. I should have known.”
By then she believed that it was her relationship with Lollo that caused her to turn into a tree. But I suspected she was just using it as an excuse to keep me away from boys. She had a growing list of rules taped to the fridge door.
– No friends if your homework isn’t finished.
– No shirts that reveal your midriff.
– No driving with friends who just got their driver’s licence (must wait a min. of 6 months).
– No boys.
– No late nights. Home by 9:00 pm. SHARP.
– No friends to the house.
– No boys.
I often found her scrawling dictums on the fridge with knotted fingers. No raucous music. No weed. She seemed to have mistaken me for a stereotype of a teenager. I cared nothing for raucous music or weed. I loved books and crafts. But she had turned me into a cardboard cut-out, as stiff and lifeless as herself.
* * *
When the phone rang at the house, Mom was quick to answer it. I tried not to think she was vetting my calls, but—. When her body changed, she was slow moving and the phone would stop ringing well before she could reach it. In her presence, I answered the phone the way she wanted me to. Hello this is Alissa, how may I help you? Once Jonathan, a boy from school called. He was not a crush—hardly even a friend. We were both good at math and so he invited me to study for an upcoming exam.
“Who was that?” Mom asked.
“Must have been a wrong number,” I lied.
* * *
Her metamorphosis quickened in my teenage years and when I turned eighteen, I walked into the kitchen and found her in front of the fridge with a pen balanced between the tines of a twig. She was midway through writing a new rule when her toes turned to roots, her arms to branches. I put my hand to her trunk and felt the lingering pulse of her heartbeat beneath her bark.
I sighed, relieved that the dreaded transformation had finally happened. But as I stared at the list of rules on the fridge, I stiffened. A yawning fear opened as I thought of all the choices I would have to make, or not make.
My first choice was to do nothing. I left her there beside the fridge for two weeks to keep her close to me. I maneuvered around her as I made breakfast, lunch, dinner. I chatted to her as I studied for final exams. I was as frozen as she, unable to decide what came next.
When her leaves wilted, I finally pulled her from the linoleum floor and put her in a hole that I dug in the backyard.
Each morning I water her. Each evening I sit in a camping chair beside her and tell her about my day. I kiss her trunk goodnight and I whisper secrets into her waxy leaves. Most of the time we sit in
companionable silence as I watch her flower clusters dance and wave in a passing breeze. One day, I will invite a boy to study beneath her shade.
