A House Among the Trees



Tommy was walking back from school on Court Street when she first saw the book. For over a year, they had been living in Brooklyn, where they rented a tall, skinny limestone house, and Tommy had found what Dad called her quotidian groove. She liked to stop at the Italian bakery, halfway home, and buy a bag of pignoli cookies. The bookstore, a block closer to home, was another favorite stop, though it meant holding off on eating the cookies, which was awfully hard when the smells of the bakery still lingered in her nostrils, especially if the cookies had just been baked and their warmth had spread through the waxed-paper bag in her hand.

She was already devouring the cookies, her fingers coated with nutty oil, when she stopped in front of the bookshop, brought to an involuntary halt by the display: the same book again and again, stacked up, lined up, fanned open. The little boy on the cover, facing the prospective reader, meeting your gaze directly, was Dani. He wore his most mischievous smile, the one that made Tommy (when she was in charge) worry what on earth he had just done and whether she’d be in trouble because of it. He wore denim overalls and a white T-shirt. His bare feet were dirty. At his side, he held a fistful of paintbrushes, an artist’s bouquet.

Above the many copies of the book, a board hung from the ceiling on fishing line. MEET THE AUTHOR! SATURDAY STORY CIRCLE, 10 TO NOON. ALL AGES WELCOME!

Tommy rolled up the top of the cookie bag and stuffed it in her book bag. She wiped her oily fingers on her skirt and walked into the store, where the girl at the counter greeted her by name.

Tommy realized that she was shaking slightly as she reached for one of the copies on the display table.

“For your brother?” said the girl at the counter. “Maybe a little young for him.”

“No,” said Tommy. “I just—just like the drawing.” She wished, for the first time, that she were a stranger here. And couldn’t the girl see that the boy on the jacket was Tommy’s brother? Wouldn’t anyone see that?

She carried the book to the back of the store, where there were tiny chairs and tables. She set her book bag on the floor and squished herself down onto one of the kiddie chairs. She heard the bell at the door, grateful the girl would be distracted.

Ivo. The boy was named Ivo. Watching him move from page to page—climbing, reaching, crouching, then running, wrestling with a panther, swinging from branches, sleeping in the grass…Tommy felt as if she were being transported back to the playground near their old apartment in Greenwich Village. Here was Dani in a pose he took at the top of the slide—or concentrating on digging a hole—or racing through the sprinkler the first day the park lady turned on the jets.

After closing the book, she sat for several minutes, uncomfortably, at the miniature table. Why did she feel as if she had committed a crime? She hadn’t done anything wrong. No—she had helped Mort Lear make this book. Shouldn’t she be proud?

But what she felt was the fear of being discovered. Of her parents seeing the book in the window of this or another store and recognizing Dani. Because they would. And then they would wonder. And they would ask.

And what about Dani himself, once he saw his own face on the cover of a book? Or maybe Dani would be pleased.

Tommy went through the next few days waiting for the discovery. She only half absorbed the books she was reading, the history she was supposed to be learning, her lessons at the piano. Her heart would accelerate the minute she heard a parent’s key in the front-door lock.

On Saturday, Tommy stayed inside all morning; to even step outside would have been to risk running into Mort Lear, going to or from his time at Story Circle.

As the days and weeks passed, and other books took the place of Dani’s book in the shopwindow, Tommy began to feel strangely angry. It wasn’t as if she’d gotten away with something; it was as if Mort Lear had gotten away with something.

But all these feelings faded as another summer loomed, the welcome return to the arts camp where Tommy could fully become her obstinate self (the Most Different Girl), away from her father’s homegrown folk songs and her brother’s burgeoning muscularity, the loudmouth antics of his friends in the room next to hers.

By sophomore year she had an after-school job shelving books at the library, and she started a club she called Plays for Non-Actors, where students who didn’t want to be one of the show-offy theater kids could read plays aloud together. She had forgotten all about Mort Lear—until one afternoon, on the subway, she saw a little girl clutching a cloth doll whose features were printed to look like Ivo’s. Tommy changed seats to get a closer look. She had the sensation that the doll was looking right at her from across the rackety car. She thought, My brother became a drawing and then a book and now a doll.

The weird thing was, nobody seemed to know except Tommy.

Not long after, she went away to college in Vermont, where she majored in English literature and spent so much time reading novels and poetry and plays that at first she forgot to have much of a social life. Her friends were the students she studied with, most of them girls. At last, in September of her senior year, she let a boy (one who read as much as she did) kiss her. His name was Scott, and his favorite writer was Henry James—which meant, she warned herself, that he wouldn’t know much about happy endings. But Scott, like Tommy, had thus far neglected to listen to his hormones, and so—in the age of sex-for-all-and-all-for-sex—they took shelter in their mutual shyness. For two months, they did little more than kiss. They moved beyond their bruised faces to necks, shoulders, arms, even ankles. They kissed in library stacks and common rooms, along wooded paths and in sandwich shops, behind a white clapboard church, beside a Civil War plaque inside a domed memorial, and finally, finally, Tommy let him undress her in his dorm room and do what they had both wanted to do all along. After the first time, they laughed at each other on and off for hours, at how silly yet how sensible they’d been to hold off.

That’s when Tommy realized she had to wake up and find something to do after college—as if having sex introduced the idea of intercourse with the wide world itself. “What are you planning to do next?” she asked Scott. “After they kick us out of here.”

“Law school,” he said. “What about you? Graduate school? I can see you teaching. You’re patient that way.”

Did Tommy want to teach? She didn’t think so. Nor did she see herself as patient; cautious wasn’t the same as patient. “Maybe library science?”

Scott shook his head. “Librarians are going high-tech. Have you had a good look at the library here? Those people are glued to their computers all day.”

Julia Glass's books