“Oh, no,” I said, putting my groceries down as I put my arm around her and we walked toward the street. “We’re going to do much better than that. You have much to learn, my new friend. Let’s talk about cones….”
I had always wanted to live in an ivy-covered cottage.
It was at the very top of my dream list, along with winning an Oscar, or dieting my Fred Flintstone feet back down to a size seven.
But some wishes will never come true, and long ago I learned to be happy with the fact that they even make shoes in my size, and that for now, I can still afford cable to watch the Oscars.
Other wishes can’t wait to come true, and require so little to become reality, such as eighteen continuous rainy days and forty-mile-per-hour winds.
It is always beneficial if you are not naked when your dream comes true, unless it involves a Tom of the Hiddleston or Hardy variety. Sometimes, however, before you know it, you have just stepped foot into the shower when the wish fairy swirls her magic wand and from the far end of the house, you feel a giant THUD shake your universe, and for a moment, you believe in Godzilla, and that he has, indeed, just made it across the Pacific.
“HONEY!” I heard my husband scream. “Did you fall out of the shower again?”
Because naturally, when I feel my house shake, I suspect Godzilla is slamming against it, but my husband suspects me.
“No!” I yelled back. “But I’ll be right down!”
I threw on my pajamas, which stuck all over me because I didn’t have time to dry off, and ran downstairs. My husband was busy going from room to room, but I shot out the back door immediately. At first, I didn’t see it, but I did wonder why a streamer of ivy was stretched across the back deck.
And then, as my mind slowly put the puzzle together, I saw it.
I knew that goddamned tree was going to fall on my house.
I had been saying it for years. Although the forty-foot oak had provided glorious shade on the south side of my yard, where I put a chaise lounge and read my summer afternoons away, there was no doubt that someday it was going to come crashing through my roof into my bedroom, crushing me in between beams and my foam mattress like a Hostess cherry pie.
The tree had been deceased since we had moved in ten years ago, but it stood in a line of magnificent oaks and poplars that lined the side of my neighbor’s yard. Sitting on her deck, it felt like you were in a tree house, surrounded by leaves and ivy. Lots of ivy.
The ivy, it turned out, was the only thing holding the tree up. For fifty years, the vine had twisted and crept up the trunk, growing stronger, and thicker, and splitting off into new rivers of ivy that twirled and curled over the trunk and branches of the oak. By the time we had moved in, the ivy had completely covered most of the tree, and gave the illusion that it was alive and doing well. It even fooled the pair of raccoons that built a nest there. In fact, I didn’t even know the tree was an oak because it had no leaves and had always simply been a massive tree trunk that towered over everything.
But now the tree, its ivy, and the raccoon apartment had fallen on the entire south side of my house, spanning the forty feet from its trunk to the new hole in my roof.
When I got to the front yard, my neighbor Louise was standing across the street with her hand over her mouth. All she could do was point to the side of my house. I waved to her as I walked over to my neighbors, who were now missing a giant tree and needed to call their insurance company to come and lift it off my house.
I felt quite awkward doing this; it was seven o’clock in the morning, and all of their lights were out. Clearly, the tree had taken down their power line with it in the fall, and I was sure they’d want to get the power company out right away to fix it.
Which was not going to be fun for them. Several years ago, one of the tree limbs in our backyard came crashing down during a storm, leaving a live wire on the ground and our house cold and dark. It was twelve degrees outside, and the snow was still falling. We were so grateful when the power company’s truck pulled up and the line guy jumped out. We waited, staring up at the ceiling, for our lights to turn back on, mainly because I had a book due in a week. Then we heard a truck door shut, and the power truck zoomed off.
“Wait! Stop! I only have one chapter to go!” I shouted from behind the window as the truck stopped at the end of our block, then made a right turn, and vanished.
I called the power company immediately on my rotary phone (I have four), and was informed that the truck had only stopped by to cut my power off. For their safety. As for when they might return to turn the power back on, we were told we were now at the bottom of a very long list of people who already knew that the power company is only in a rush to come to your house when they don’t need to do anything but disconnect you.
For the next six days, and with the aid of two very long extension cords from our neighbors on either side, we huddled in our living room with two space heaters, a lamp, and my iPad. I finished the book before our power was turned back on, but had to walk to Starbucks to email it because our car was still frozen in ice. Bundled in layer upon layer that was topped with a thick wool shawl and my hair in a bun (there was no way I was going to sacrifice a space heater in place of a hair dryer), I was spotted on the back deck by one of my neighbors as I was taking out the trash.
“How are you guys doing?” he called. “Are you rehearsing for a play?”
It was the longest six days of my life. I couldn’t imagine surviving it with three kids. I did not envy my poor neighbors one bit.
I knocked on the door to inform them about their tree and their new status as “powerless,” and it took several minutes for my neighbor, Sara, to answer. I had clearly woken her up. Now, I was in my jammies and she was in her jammies, but one of us looked like she was modeling activewear for J. Crew, and one of us looked like Baby Jane Hudson in flannel. I’m sure I even looked drunk, since every night while I’m sleeping, one of my eyebrows walks off my face and never comes back and my hair takes on the semblance of writhing snakes.
But on the other side of that door was blond, slim, perky Sara with her hair in a messy ponytail that I saw on Pinterest, which took me forty minutes to attempt and fail, making me look more like the elderly lady in my neighborhood who walks around wearing a wedding dress and dragging a suitcase than a cute little mom of three who opens up her front door at seven in the morning looking impeccably and adorably disheveled. She didn’t even have bad breath. She made yoga pants look…good.
“I’m sorry to wake you up so early,” I apologized right away. “But one of the trees in your backyard is now in my backyard, and it’s kinda on my roof. And I think your electricity is out.”
“Oh, I thought I heard something,” she replied, and reached over to turn on the porch light, which immediately shone brightly. “Nope. Our electric is on. I’ll call the insurance company when they open. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry I woke you, but I was afraid there might be a live wire in your backyard,” I explained. “Can I…just see…the back of your hair?”
“Okay…” Sara said, slowly turning her head.
Just as I thought.
“It’s…super cute,” I said, nodding, and because I felt that my PJ bottoms had inched up my ass crack since I was still rather damp when I put them back on, I backed down the front porch facing her.
“I’ll call you when I know something,” she said.
I waved and smiled, determined not to give her a rear view if I could help it.
I got back to my house just in time to see the power company’s truck shoot away from my house and down the street.
“Oh no,” I cried. “Oh no, oh no, oh no!”
“We’re dark,” my husband confirmed when I came back into the house. “They cut us ‘just in case’ our wire was live. You’d better get your Ingalls gear on again. It’s going to be a long week.”
As soon as the clock hit nine, I was on the phone to State Farm to see what they could do to help us.
/> “I know that it’s my neighbor’s tree, so it will be their claim—” I started, but the agent interrupted me.
“It’s an act of God,” she said.
This was no time to try missionary or conversion tactics on me. I didn’t need to be reminded that there was a forty-foot tree on my house because I was a shitty person. I already knew that. Besides, I had just earned some karma when I told Sara the back of her head looked cute. Maybe God could take it down a notch and just knock a thirty-foot tree on my house the next time.
“I was raised Catholic, but I’m lapsed, and I gotta say it’s just not my thing, okay?” I stated. “I watch NOVA. I am a science person.”
But then she went on to tell me something that defies even science: Even though my neighbor’s dead tree, which had been dead for as long as the day I set eyes on it, fell on my house, it was not my neighbor’s fault.
Somehow, it was mine. And if your neighbor’s dead tree falls on your house, it will be yours. “Act of God” is apparently all the insurance company needs to say to make you liable, but I don’t even understand what that means. Which god? Which god threw a four-story-tall log wrapped in ivy on my house? Was it Zeus? Apollo? Elvis? Which one was having a bad Almighty day?
Can you give me a hint, I wanted to ask her, because I want to draw a politically incorrect cartoon about them and send it to The New Yorker.
I did not know that insurance companies had to adhere to whether something was God-related before they paid for the damage that your policy says they will. Now, a plague of locusts, okay, that was mentioned in the Bible; I can see the clause there. A bush catching fire in your front yard, again, it was forewarned; a flood that destroys the sin of man, all right, I’ll give it to you. But where in the Bible do trees fall on houses? If a fireball caused it, we have the precedent of Sodom and Gomorrah, but there was no meteor, fireball, or space junk involved here.
Frankly, I didn’t care anyway, because God did not knock my tree down. I am certain Mary would have intervened, saying, “Goddamnit, you have already thrown thirty trees down there and crushed a woman to death like a cherry pie. Take some Miralax and put that shit to bed. So what if Laurie promised if you let her win the sixth-grade relay race on field day that she would become a nun, and she forgot all about that when she started dating? It was field day. If it was the Olympics or a football game, I’d say, ‘Throw that friggin’ tree, a promise is a promise,’ but seriously. She got a bad rash down there because of that race, remember. She even has a rash right now.”
If you asked Stephen Hawking what knocked my tree down, I’m pretty sure he’d say it was physics. The wind, plus heavy rain, plus rotted tree roots is why I had a tree on my house, which also is why I now did not have electricity. And that was an act of the power company.
“And your deductible is one thousand eight hundred sixty-five dollars,” the insurance agent added, which was enough to finish all of the dental work I needed but would now go toward getting a dead tree that did not belong to me off of my house.
State Farm did send a team of guys out to cut the tree into chunks to see what kind of damage had occurred underneath on the roof.
It turns out that the tree not only collapsed in my yard but impaled my roof, tore down the fence, crushed the gate, and left decades of twisted ivy in piles three feet deep and thirty feet long on the side of my house, ivy so old that its circumference measured ten inches, like a python. I’m fairly sure that if we ever get the ivy removed, we will find an Aztec temple underneath it all.
By the end of the day, we had our electricity back on, which was good, because I had another book to finish in a week. This one.
Several Sundays later, a hillbilly family responded to Sara’s post on Craigslist for free firewood, and arrived with a Home Depot’s worth of chain saws, chains, a winch, and three trailers.
But a month later, I still have a hole in my roof, the gate and fence are still busted, and the ivy covering one entire side of my house appears to be getting deeper. I have a feeling it’s still growing, and that one or more of the hillbillies got left behind in there, trying to find their way out, because every now and then the ivy…rustles.
At least I can scratch the ivy-covered cottage off my dream list and replace it with another, more specific wish that doesn’t have anything to do with an insurance deductible. I was all set to add my wish that science would catch up to my metabolism, and then I remembered about chemotherapy.
Right now I’m just alarmed that as my husband passed my office, he mentioned, “This deductible is high. Maybe we should cut back on a few things until we pay it off. Things like cable. You don’t care about missing the Oscars, do you?”
I have to admit that I had never seen anyone shoot up in front of me before. I’ve seen people take enormous bong hits. I saw my friend Dave search in his vomit for the pills he had just taken at a Zia Records work party. I’ve known people who didn’t have any butter knives that weren’t blackened due to their love of hash. But when it came to intravenous, straight-up mainlining it, I was a baby.
There, in a small but brightly lit alley, was a young couple getting ready to Keith Richards their way to somewhere my bottle of Tylenol PM has no access card to. As I passed by them, they didn’t blink, didn’t look up, and didn’t care what anyone saw, as if their little space in a downtown alley was hidden from view in a giant opiate bubble.
You never know what you’re going to see downtown, I reminded myself, not even when you’re three hundred feet from the farmer’s market.
I’ve spent a lot of time in downtown Phoenix: I bought a dilapidated bungalow in which homeless people were squatting in Coronado, one of the worst neighborhoods in town, that made my mother cry the first time she saw it (my mother cried every time I took her to see a house I might live in) and vow she’d burn it down before she saw one of her children live in it, and then I got a job at The Arizona Republic. I loved working downtown. I was a columnist with my own office, but I completely failed to negotiate a snack assistant into my contract, which meant that when it was feeding time, I burst out onto the sidewalks with thousands of other people flocking to Chipotle, even in July, when the streets of downtown become nothing less than channels of hot, steaming lava. To be honest, I loved it.
I felt like I was finally a part of a bustling city, even the parts that weren’t so nice: the bodies sleeping or passed out on the sidewalks, the stink of urine in the alleys, the dirt lots that gathered trash and never had any hope to become something other than dirt lots. It was still the city, and someplace I had waited a long time to get to, even if it meant risking a third-degree burn between ample inner thighs to secure a shitty burrito from Chipotle.
Then my bosses became assholes. I was fired, and my days of downtown walking were over. That was fine. In time, my thighs began to heal, and the hair grew back. But as I looked around, I realized that Phoenix was done with me and I was done with it. I was sick of the heat, sick of the dirt lots, and sick of the assholes who were clogging up the freeway with New Jersey license plates. I wanted to live someplace green, clean, and where nobody had ever fired me before. I stuck a For Sale sign in the front yard of my downtown bungalow and moved to Oregon.
I did not take my mother with me when we looked for a house.
Everyone knows Eugene now because of the Oregon Ducks, but before that it was the home of Ken Kesey, the guy who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and introduced the Hells Angels to LSD, and if you ever put your lips on a bong after he did, you are royalty in that town. Kesey and his friends, known as Merry Pranksters, drove a painted Partridge Family–like bus across the country in the sixties with the Grateful Dead on board and a hallucinating Neal Cassady at the wheel. A friend of mine proudly told me that her mom was dating a Merry Prankster, although now he has a farm of mini-donkeys. It’s also the only place where you can win a city council election by claiming you dropped more acid with the Grateful Dead than your opponent.
Now Ken Kesey is dead,
and has a square named after him in the middle of downtown, with a terrifying bronze sculpture in which he is wearing a jaunty cap and reading to several equally frozen children, most likely horrified by his tales of tripping his balls off with Hells Angels. Food trucks sell tofu wraps and meatless cheesesteak subs behind him, and every year, it’s the place where zombies gather to do their Thriller flash-mob dance.
The downtown of Eugene has flower baskets hanging from the original streetlamps from the turn of the twentieth century, and we have medians in the middle of the two-lane streets that are filled with trees and shrubs, creating a canopy in the springtime that stretches from sidewalk to sidewalk. There are people whose only job is to water the flowers downtown. VooDoo Doughnuts sells goodies in the shapes of genitals and decorated with Cap’n Crunch. There are two stores a block apart that make furniture and accessories out of the giant trees around Eugene that have been taken down because they are too old or have been deemed too hazardous. We legalized pot and, as of now, you can buy it openly in pot stores that are called Cannabliss and Sweet Leaf, and the Willamette Week just advertised a position for a staff pot reviewer. I’m not kidding. My neighbor Ed is applying for it.
In Eugene, the high is the limit.
Eugene is green. People do not litter. It’s quiet, and the worst thing that has happened to me in the last ten years is that a homeless person lived in my bushes for a winter and then took a shit in my garlic bed. There are no highway shooters because there is no highway. Once I thought a tweaker died on my lawn, but when he finally woke up and wiped the crawling ants from his eyes, he said that my yard was beautiful and that it just looked like a nice place to sleep.
Eugene was everything I was looking for when I fled Phoenix. It’s rarely hot, so my inner thighs never sweat so much that I mistakenly think I peed my pants, and no one here has ever fired me, and no one hates me. I know every single person on my street. We share holidays together, and soon we are having a party for my new next-door neighbors and their three extremely well-mannered kids, to welcome them (yes, I admit this is before their tree fell on my house). He was an epidemiologist with the CDC who didn’t think he was helping the world enough, so now he’s a doctor at the homeless clinic. We’re also bringing what we’ve canned this summer—I make pickles and jams; Louise, the dean of the honors college, makes chutneys from the fruit of our neighbors’ trees; and Gemesa makes chocolate chip cookies with salted brown butter—to share and trade with everyone.