11

11

Joe didn’t want to talk about it last night when we went to bed, and when I wake up in the morning he’s already out there. He’s wondering if Maisie or Nell will have children, and if those children who won’t grow up here will want to take over the farm someday. He’s thinking about what will happen to the farm without another generation of family to protect it after we’re gone, after Emily and Benny are gone. He is thinking about Emily and Benny being gone. He is thinking about the developers who relentlessly sniff the perimeter of our land, the strangers who knock on our door in February to ask if we wouldn’t rather spend the winter in Florida. They are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford. And that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario, the one where the trees eventually die? Joe isn’t thinking about that one and I know this because I’m not thinking about it either.

When Maisie and Nell come downstairs for breakfast I can tell they’ve been staring at their own bedroom ceiling for most of the night, running through the same worst cases. Maybe we should start a family mentalist act, see if we can make a living reading one another’s minds. Maisie’s phone dings at the table and she takes it out of her pocket and stares at it for so long that Nell and I stop and wait for her to tell us.

“What?” Nell says finally.

“Someone’s trapped a litter of feral kittens in their barn and wants to know if I can come by and kill them this afternoon.” Maisie puts her head down on the table.

“Who?” I reach for her phone but she grabs it away.

“We’ll have to see them again,” she says. “You’re better off not knowing.”

“Let them kill their own kittens,” Nell says tiredly. It’s true: Ignore the kittens and you’ll wake up one morning to find the cats outnumber the mice. But still, people need to kill their own kittens. You don’t ask your neighbors to do that for you.

Maisie sighs. “I can’t think about this right now.”

The back door opens and Joe is there looking so worn out I wonder if he got any sleep at all. Joe pretty much never comes back to the house in the morning once he’s gone out. Hazel raises her head and issues a single bark of acknowledgment.

“We’re taking the day off,” he says, jingling the keys in his pocket. “We’re going to the beach.”

We stare at him like he’s someone we’ve never met. “We can’t go to the beach,” Maisie says. “There’s too much work.”

“There’s always too much work and I’ve decided we aren’t doing it today. I’ve already sent Emily home to get her suit.”

We continue to sit. Nell pours milk in her coffee to cool it.

“Go on.” He stands there like a teacher who’s just announced Class dismissed. This is the part where we’re supposed to fly out the door.

“Let’s pick for a while,” I say, looking for the middle path. “Then we’ll knock off early and go to the beach.”

Joe shakes his head. “We never knock off early, in case you haven’t noticed. That’s why we have to do this in the morning, first thing. Go.”

“It’s Tuesday,” I say. “Since when are we off on Tuesday?”

“It’s Thursday,” he says.

Thursday? I wonder if this could be true.

“Are you going to the beach?” Nell asks her father. She tests the coffee. Still too hot.

“I’m going to go check on a couple of things and then I’ll come down.”

“So we’ll work until you’re finished then we’ll all go together.” I meant it to be helpful, Joe can’t do everything by himself, but my suggestion flies all over him.

“Could someone in this family listen to me for a change? I just went through this with Emily. She’s crying. She’s useless. All of you are tired and useless and I want you to go and have some goddamn fun.”

“?‘Some goddamn fun’?” Maisie says. “Oh, well, when you put it like that. I’ll go kill the kittens and then meet you at the beach.”

“Kittens?” Joe asks.

“We’ll go,” I say to him.

He turns around to look out the window above the sink. “Do it now. I don’t want Emily down there by herself.”

This is the fire that ignites us because none of us wants Emily to be at the beach by herself. We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands. I head upstairs for my swimsuit, towel, and hat. When I come back down Joe’s gone and the girls tell me to go.

“We’ll clean up and make the sandwiches,” Nell calls as I am out the door. “We’re right behind you.”

I take the two--track away from the orchard and towards the woods until I find the smallest break in the trees, a path I know to look for only because I’ve come this way a thousand times. It’s like stepping into a book, one turn and everything changes: cool instead of hot, dark instead of light. Instead of cherry trees, eighty--foot hemlocks and red oaks and white pines, and between those hemlocks and oaks and pines are giant rocks dressed up in mossy sweaters. The girls loved nothing more than to lie on those rocks when they were little, press their faces into the cool, shaggy green and pretend they were mermaids flung from the sea by a towering wave. They squeezed their legs together and flopped them like sad tails. A century ago these very rocks must have been in the orchard, and those ancestors who are buried up the hill beneath the daisies must have dug them up and dragged them here. They had already cut down all the oaks and pines, planed them into boards and sent them out into the world to be reassembled into houses and ships. Tired as they were, the ancestors took the time to pull the stumps and burn them. Then they planted the fields with cherry trees. Maybe they had left the half mile of woods that stands between the orchard and the beach because they’d lost the strength to cut it down. Maybe the men lived to be fifty before a rock or a tree or a horse tipped over and crushed them. Maybe the women died at forty--five giving birth to their eighth or ninth or tenth child. Maybe they never went to the beach in the summer, not even once. Maybe picking cherries really is the least of it.

At the edge of our woods is the shore of Grand Traverse Bay, our corner of the choppy, gray--blue behemoth that is Lake Michigan—-the dark stand of woods, and then a dozen feet of pebbly, sandy beach, and then the water that stretches out forever; the trees and then our eldest daughter alone on the beach, hugging her knees. I sit beside her and she tips herself into me, her head on my shoulder, her glorious hair falling across my chest, and for what feels like a very long time we watch the cormorants skim the water.

“Everything should stay like this,” she says.

I tell her that I wish it could, even though I know she means the temperature of the lake and I mean this summer, everyone home and together. As sad as I am for the suffering of the world, I wish to keep this exact moment, Emily on the beach in my arms.

“We didn’t mean to tell you last night. I’m not even sure we were going to tell you at all. Lots of people don’t have children, you know. I could have just waited until I went through menopause and then said I’d forgotten.”

“You never know.” I try to make my voice neutral. “You might change your minds later on.”

I feel her head move sadly against my neck. “It’s bad enough having to worry about what’s going to happen to the farm. I can’t imagine worrying about what would happen to our kids.”

“Every generation believes the world is going to end.”

She raises her head. “Is that true? Did you and Dad think it was all going up in a fiery ball?”

She is so close to me. I can see the faintest remnants of long--ago freckles on her forehead. “No. I said it to make you feel better.” Joe and I thought about the plays we wanted to get tickets for, the price of rent, whether or not we should go out to dinner, how soon we could afford to have a baby. We didn’t think anything would end, any of it, ever.

Emily returns her head to its comfortable spot. “I know it seems like I’m upset that Benny and I aren’t going to have children, but I don’t even know what that means, really. I want to marry Benny but if I have a biological clock it hasn’t kicked in. Maybe women don’t have biological clocks anymore.”

“It’s not like humanity’s stopped having children, you know. It’s still going on.”

“That’s because humanity doesn’t live with Benny Holzapfel, and if I didn’t live with him it wouldn’t be any less true, I just wouldn’t have to think about it.”

“We couldn’t begin to list all the depressing things we’re not?thinking about—-all the things that have happened in the world, the things that are happening right now here in Michigan, the things that are going to happen in the future—-no one can hold it all.”

“Emily died in childbirth,” my daughter says.

“What?”

“She died giving birth. I remember thinking about that when we read the play in high school, like it was a bad omen.”

We had named our daughter for the plucky girl in the first act, the smartest girl in her class. We had not been thinking about the third act at the time.

Emily shakes her head. “I’m just talking. I don’t think I’m going to die in childbirth.”

Which doesn’t mean I can get the thought of her dying out of my head. “So it really is the cherry trees?”

She nods. She still isn’t looking at me. “I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t tell you.”

“This would be the day.”

She takes in a deep breath, giving me just enough time to flash through every horrible thing that might have happened to her without my knowing it. “I never forgave you and Dad for burning those trees.”

“Which trees?” We have burned a great many trees over the years.

“I think I was nine. I don’t know, I might have been younger. If it had happened before, I don’t remember. I think you used to burn trees when we were in school or else you sent us to the neighbors’ or something. Dad said they were old, they weren’t putting out enough fruit anymore so he had them pushed out.” She turns to me then, her cheeks wet with tears. “Look at me!” she laughs, rubbing at her nose. “I’ve been to hort school and I still can’t talk about this. We begged him not to do it. I said I’d bring out buckets of water. Fuck.” She pinches the bridge of her nose and waits. “I’ve burned so many trees since then but that first time I couldn’t stand it. You set them on fire like it was some kind of party. ‘You’ve outlived your usefulness! Time to die!’ The neighbors were standing around drinking cider. All I wanted to do was save them and I couldn’t save them. I’m sure I’m going to miss having children. I’m sure in twenty years I’m going to feel awful about it, but for now all I can think of are all these trees that aren’t going to make it and how we’re going to pull them all up and burn them.”

The men had come in the afternoon with a 4WD loader. They sank the tines down into the ground and then bulldozed the trees, pulling them up to shake off the dirt before piling them to burn. By the time the work was done it was nearly dark and we set the fire. I remember it now, our girls screaming as if the plan had been to throw them into the blaze as well. Had they just not remembered, or had they really never been there before? Those fires are enormous and I worried about keeping up, all three of our girls were runners. I had to keep them safe. Maybe we did send them away before that. Maybe this was the time we decided they were old enough. Old trees have to be pushed out but we didn’t need to turn it into a party. We’d told the girls that the trees were our life and how good they were to us and how they took care of us because we took care of them. The night air was bitter on that autumn night but one by one we pulled off our jackets. The flames shot twenty feet over the pile of branches, throwing bright--orange sparks up to the stars. Joe couldn’t leave, he and the neighbors had to make sure the fire didn’t get out of hand, so finally I pushed the girls into the station wagon and drove them around until it was done, until they’d cried and kicked and slapped at the back of the seat for such a long time that they wore themselves out, falling asleep against their will. When we got home Joe lifted Maisie out of the car and I took Nell, but Emily was awake. That night she said she hated us, and that she had always hated us, that she would always hate us.

Hazel runs out of the woods and right away starts frantically digging a hole in the sand next to Emily. She digs and digs, then sticks her head in the hole she’s made to see if it fits, then takes it out and digs some more.

“Here we are.” Nell throws herself down beside us. “Our day off.”

“Let me try to ruin it for you.” Emily wipes her face with a towel.

“What’s your dog looking for?” I ask Maisie. When Hazel stops digging long enough to look up, the sand--colored dog is covered in sand.

“Treasure,” Maisie says.

“If we’re going to be miserable and cry, let’s do it in the lake.” Nell stands up to pull off her T--shirt and shorts. The girls had taken the time to put their swimsuits on under their clothes. I take mine out of my bag, glancing up and down the beach.

“We can hold up our towels,” Maisie offers. “Make you a towel tent.”

But I decline, taking my clothes off where I stand and then struggling into my one--piece. They have seen me and I have seen them, even if they’ve forgotten. They follow me into the water, screaming at the cold.

“You said the lake was getting warmer,” Maisie yells. “If all hope is lost we should at least get a decent swim out of it.”

The four of us go out straight and strong. We don’t have a swim platform, we don’t have any destination at all; with a little orienteering we could swim to Wisconsin. I drop beneath the surface and open my eyes. It’s as if someone bought up all the diamonds at Tiffany’s and crushed them into dust, then spread that dust across the water so that it sifts down evenly, filtering through the shards of light that cut into the depth. We are swimming through eternity, my daughters’ bright mermaid legs kicking out towards deeper water. I stay beneath the surface and marvel for as long as my lungs can hold.

“Swimming is the reset button,” Pallace used to say.

“Swimming starts the day again.”

We swim and we swim and we swim, and when we’ve exhausted ourselves we turn and head back to shore. Duchess the German shepherd is there now, having bunched one of our towels into an unsatisfying bed while Hazel keeps an eye on the cheese and mustard sandwiches Maisie made. We shake out the remaining towels and crowd together.

“Tell us the happiest day of your life,” Nell says.

“You and you and you,” I say, looking at each of them, their dripping swimsuits and wet, tangled hair.

“No, seriously,” Emily says. “You have to keep it in the context of the story. What was the happiest day of your life at Tom Lake?”

“The happiest day of that summer wasn’t at Tom Lake.”

They deem this to be an acceptable variant, as long as it’s the happiest day within that limited period of time. They stretch out on their towels in the sun to listen and dry.

“There’s a small setup before we get to the day itself,” I say.

“Certain scenes require setups.” Nell covers her face with her hat.

Duchess emits a sigh of unspeakable boredom then gets up to leave.

“Really?” Maisie says to the dog.

Duchess goes and stands in the lake, gulping at the water before turning to cross the narrow beach. We call for her to come back, come back, but she doesn’t listen to us. She follows the path into the woods and is gone.

After opening night the director’s work was done, which had not been the case in the community theater, nor the case in college. But Tom Lake was professional theater, which meant that Nelson would take a bow after the first performance and be off to his next job in the morning. All of us wondered what that next job would be but as far as I knew, none of us had asked him. That was why I stuck around at lunch break one day shortly before we opened, when everyone else ran off to the lake to swim. I wanted to find out where Nelson was going. He was younger than many of the actors in the play but he had never been one of us. He never came to the lake. He was the adult and we were the children rushing off to swim.

“Traverse City,” he said when I asked. “Have you been?”

“I flew into the airport there,” I said.

“Airports don’t count. Traverse City is very pretty, not that that’s saying much. It’s very pretty everywhere around here.” He was sitting alone in the front row of the theater with his notebook and a bag lunch. He offered me half his tuna sandwich, which was incredibly generous. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten lunch.

The blossoms were off the trees and the fruit hadn’t fully come in and the boxes of bees had been taken away to their next job and still, everything was beautiful. “What are you directing in Traverse City?”

“Nothing.” He opened a large bottle of seltzer then looked around as if hoping to see a glass. “There isn’t a glass,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“Do you mind sharing?” he asked. When I shook my head he took a drink from the bottle and handed it to me. “I have an aunt and uncle who live there and I promised to come up and be helpful. I’ve been saying I’d do it for a couple of years now but I keep getting diverted.”

“By plays?”

“Things too good to pass on kept coming along, and then I’d be on the wrong side of the country. So when Tom Lake asked me to do this, I thought, that solves the problem. I’ll finally be in exactly the right place. That’s a long answer to a short question:

Once we open I’m going to spend the rest of summer in Traverse City.”

“What kind of help do they need?”

“They need all kinds of help but my first priority is to sort out their finances.”

“You’re good at that?” I wished that I was good at something as useful as bookkeeping. I very nearly told him I could sew.

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t say good. I’d only say I’m better at it than they are.”

I asked him what his aunt and uncle did for a living while eating his sandwich and drinking his seltzer.

“They’re cherry farmers. Have you ever been to a Michigan cherry farm?”

I shook my head.

A little light broke over Nelson’s face, the same quiet light the actors saw whenever we did something right. “You should come and see it.”

“The cherry farm?” I was thinking about that first drive down from the airport and how I’d wanted to stand in the middle of the road and do one slow rotation. It felt like years ago.

“Do you have a car?” Nelson asked.

“Pallace does.” Sebastian was up for a couple of days and if Pallace wanted to get somewhere, Sebastian would take her. Pallace would lend me her car.

Nelson opened up his notebook and started drawing a map: the roads, the mileage counts, the names of the farms I would pass and the name of the road where I should turn. “Come tomorrow,” he said. “Come for lunch and I’ll show you around. You can swim in the lake if you want.”

Tomorrow was Monday, our day off. Opening night was Thursday. I was going to see the director’s family’s cherry farm.

Uncle Wallace was muttering when he came back from break and everyone else was laughing. Who could keep their mind on another rehearsal? Not even Nelson’s persistent calm could snap us into focus. Uncle Wallace wove around the stage in the pointless configurations of a squirrel. George dropped his lines and then stared at me as if it were my job to pick them up. The whole thing was a disaster, which meant good luck. Sebastian was around more often now that Cabaret had opened. He claimed he was in danger of losing his job, though I think he said it to impress Pallace. No one would fire Sebastian. As soon as rehearsals were finished, Duke and I hustled out of our costumes so we could find him.

“You weren’t at the lake,” Duke said to me, sliding the pins from his hair as we walked. He put them in his pocket. “I even went down and felt around on the bottom. You weren’t anywhere.”

“I talked to Nelson. I asked him where he was going next.” I must have looked happy because Duke stopped short, folding his arms across his chest.

“Did he offer you a part?”

Oh, Duke of the wide dark eyes and thick black lashes. Duke who had gotten too much sun even though we’d been told not to because it made more work for the makeup people. I shook my head. “Nothing so glamorous.”

“Then what’s with the smile?”

“His family has a cherry farm in Traverse City. He invited me up to see the farm tomorrow.”

“I bet he did.”

I laughed. “I’m excited! Haven’t you ever wanted to see a cherry farm?”

“I’m from Michigan.”

Somehow I hadn’t thought of there being cherries in East Detroit. “Well, I’m from New Hampshire and I’m going.”

“How are you going to get there?”

I knew what he was thinking. He didn’t want me in the car with Nelson. Men were not impossible to decipher. “Pallace will lend me her car.” I wasn’t certain of this but the more times I said it, the more it seemed true.

He looked at me another minute and then finally smiled. Maybe he was happy for my happiness. Maybe he still hoped Nelson would give him a part in another play later. Maybe he really just wanted to keep an eye on me. “If it’s going to be that much fun we should all go together, the four of us. That would be all right with you and Nelson, wouldn’t it? If it’s not a date?”

I rolled my eyes at the stupidity of it all. “It’s not a date.” And it wasn’t. But that didn’t mean I was supposed to show up with three extra people.

“Good!” Duke cried. “Then it’s settled. We’ll all drive up in the morning to see the director’s cherry farm.”

“The cherry farm!” Emily cries, and Maisie and Nell raise their fists in the air.

Parts of this story they already know, and this is one of them. The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.