And in This Episode

The house was a wooden foursquare, now clad with beige vinyl, in a working class neighborhood. Nothing remarkable about the structure, other than it had once been the childhood home of Mary Beth Fisher, Esq. Her place of origin. She had learned to crawl and tie her shoes and ride a bike and deliver a paper route and joined the Debate Team, all the standard phases, until leaving for college at age eighteen.

Things got murky after that. During Mary Beth’s freshman year at Memphis State, her mother decided that she and Daddy needed a new start in the suburbs in order to survive empty nest syndrome (they didn’t).

Mary Beth and her new boyfriend, Tony, climbed out of her car and eyeballed the house from the sidewalk.

“I don’t see a plaque. There should be a plaque,” Tony said.

“Here lived a kid who ate paste,” Mary Beth said.

Tony was technically a ‘gentleman friend-in-training,’ her late mother’s term. Far from being a gentleman, Tony was a pony-tailed contractor who chewed gum. He and Mary Beth had met downtown at a climate protest march two weeks prior. Mary Beth’s training process with the rare boyfriend included parking across the street from her childhood house and sipping iced coffee through a straw and reminiscing about life before law school. Not many guys could handle it. Tony was doing okay.

“My folks moved so many times, I never really got attached to any one place,” Tony said. “Had a couple stints in trailer courts. The duration roughly corresponded to how long my stepdad could maintain his good-boy mode, before falling off the wagon.”

“Maybe that’s why you became a contractor,” Mary Beth said.

“What do you mean?”

“Building solid, durable homes. A form of compensation.”

“You’re a deep one,” Tony said, “by the way, you kind of look like the willow tree in the side yard.”

“It’s why I never cut my hair,” she said, shaking out her curls. “I’m glad the tree is still standing.”

The weeping willow was the house’s protector spirit, a grand, sweeping expression of nature’s chutzpah. Her father, Mike, wanted to cut it down, afraid the tree would fall on the roof in a storm. Mike worried about things like that. Mother’s nickname for him was ‘General Malaise’. He was a decorated veteran of Operation Desert Storm. One day Mike came home with an axe and Mary Beth threw a weeping tantrum. It lasted for hours. Her father finally relented and built a small playhouse under the overhanging boughs. The site of many sleepovers. The playhouse was long gone, as was Mike.

“How many owners since you left?” Tony asked.

“I don’t know. A couple, three.”

“Have you ever been back inside?” Tony said, scratching his stubbly chin.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because we were on the receiving end of one such return visit when I was about nine years old,” Mary Beth said.

It was a summer afternoon, mid-week. School had just let out and Mary Beth was home all day. Mike worked at the post office. To save money, he hadn’t turned on the air-conditioning yet. All the windows stayed open. Mary Beth and Mother were finishing lunch. Tomato and cucumber sandwiches, her mother’s favorite. They heard an excited knock at the screen door in front. Her mother told Mary Beth to go answer it. Hello? A tall, skinny woman with a lollypop dangling from the corner of her mouth pushed her way in and announced that she and her family were driving through, on their way west, and she wanted to show her kids the house where she grew up. Would that be okay?

Mary Beth relayed the question to her mother, but she didn’t have a chance to respond. The woman waved at two giggling, aw-shucks teenagers in the back of the truck. They jumped out and hurried up the front steps and brushed by Mary Beth and disappeared upstairs. The woman explained that her husband, waiting in the driver’s seat of the idling truck, could not understand her sentimental attachment to this dump. She launched into a manufactured account of long ago memories of playing hide-and-seek in the basement, while the teenagers ransacked the bedrooms upstairs. When Mary Beth figured out what was happening and raised the alarm, they fled (with Mother’s purse and jewelry box) out to the waiting truck and drove away.

“Maybe that’s why you became a lawyer,” Tony said.

“Yeah, could be,” Mary Beth said, “you’d think I’d be a prosecutor, instead of a public defender.”

“Maybe you felt some pity for their desperate scam,” Tony said.

“My dad was pissed. The neighbors heard an earful. My parents had a curious habit of only ever fighting in public. They seemed to need an audience.”

“Or a jury.”

“Right, exactly. Guilty as charged.”

“Are you afraid to go back in the house? Is that why you park outside? Or do you just prefer this voyeuristic distance?”

Mary Beth sighed a confused acknowledgment. “What if I get emotional and start to cry? What if I don’t like their furniture? What if I try to reenact the crime and steal something?”

“Do people actually do that? You probably see a lot of weird stuff in your job,” Tony said.

“I don’t trust myself to keep it together,” she said.

“And in this episode,” Tony said, “Mary Beth rents a chainsaw and cuts down the willow tree.”

Mary Beth turned away and coughed, irritated with this one bad habit of Tony’s. He prefaced all his commentary with that lame phrase. It bugged Mary Beth, a chronic binge-watcher of reality TV, though she wasn’t sure why. “And in this episode...” Of course, she had a few quirks of her own, especially with handshakes. A spillover from her professional life, at every greeting and every leave-taking, Mary Beth stuck out her hand for a firm shake.

On their third date, Mary Beth and Tony attended a community band concert in the park. They brought a picnic and went for a hike around the reservoir. Mary Beth packed a thermos of her tomato consommé and invited Tony to guess the secret ingredient. He pegged it: orange juice.

On their fourth date, Tony gave Mary Beth a tour of the Habitat for Humanity project that he was supervising. Twenty new homes on the grounds of a former munitions plant. They slept together after the fifth date, another climate protest march. It went pretty well. Things overall were going well for Tony and Mary Beth. Both had secretly vowed never to marry, but nobody had to know just yet.

On the last Thursday in June, Tony was scheduled to inspect a demolition site in a strip mall near Walnut Street. To kill some time, he swung by Mary Beth’s childhood foursquare and saw a ‘For Sale’ sign out front. He got an idea, one of those ideas that feel brilliant and inspired, and quickly boomerang. He pulled over and reached for his phone. Tony called the listed real estate broker and made an appointment to tour the house on Saturday. He texted Mary Beth and lined her up for a mystery date.

Bob Canfield was the listed broker – ‘Over ten million in sales!’ Bob was a dedicated pro. When the current owners ignored his recommendation to spray-wash the green mold off the north side of the house, Bob Canfield did it himself, right before the showing. As Tony and Mary Beth drove up to the curb, he dropped the hose and waved at them frenetically, like a long lost relative.

“Bob should have his own reality show,” Tony whispered to Mary Beth, climbing out of the car.

She smiled nervously, both touched and skeptical of Tony’s surprise scheme.

“Relax, this way the house will be empty,” Tony explained, “the owner has to vacate while we get the tour.”

Bob Canfield hurried down the front steps to greet them, but he tripped and almost fell on the sidewalk. Tony managed to catch him by the arm. Assuming he was dealing with young marrieds, Bob launched into a spiel about a great starter home. “This is the place where the gals who identify with Ginger on Gilligan’s Island discover they are really Mrs. Thurston Howell III.”

“Those steps are a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Mary Beth said. She offered a firm handshake.

“Not to worry,” Bob said. To demonstrate his concern over the liability issues with these steep steps, he promised to negotiate an agreement for a re-grading and a safer approach to the front door.

“General Malaise always complained about them,” Mary Beth muttered, as an aside to Tony. “Please do not mention that I grew up here.”

Tony winked his assent.

They followed Bob into the house. Mary Beth tied back her hair in a bun and clutched at a handkerchief. Bob started with the dining room. He behaved like a docent in a museum, guiding his clients from room to room, delivering a detailed speech about the daily activities of an imaginary family in each space, featuring fantasized characters named ‘Little Sally’ and ‘Little Joe’.

“Here in the breakfast nook, you can see Mommy and Daddy and Little Sally and Little Joe eating their cereal and reading the morning newspaper and Daddy reads the baseball scores out loud and they discuss their plans for the day.”

“Here in the living room, you can see Little Sally practicing the piano, while Mommy sits in a rocking chair with her knitting, and Little Joe and Daddy play a board game on the floor.”

At first, Tony thought it was funny. Mary Beth, not so much, but she went along with the gag. She felt oddly placid and numb. She noted the corner shower that had been added in the downstairs bathroom and the new tile above the kitchen counters. As they proceeded to the central staircase to view the three upper bedrooms, Tony became visibly uncomfortable. Mary Beth knew him well enough to spot it. He folded in his upper lip and chewed his mustache, along with his gum. She thought maybe, as a contractor, he had spotted a code violation or something.

She gave him a nudge in the ribs. They were standing on the staircase landing, pausing to watch the willow tree fronds brush against the window in a breeze. He sighed and whispered, “Turns out, I’m the one who can’t keep it together.”

Mary Beth kicked into lawyer mode and cut short the tour. She interrupted Bob’s description of bedtime rituals in Little Joe’s room. “Excuse me, Mister Canfield. Thanks so much for your great presentation. This is a very interesting house. Tony and I are going to take a few minutes out in the car to discuss things, and we’ll get back to you.”

Tony didn’t want to sit in a car. He wanted to walk. They wandered two blocks to the convenience store and bought a couple of sodas. Outside, Mary Beth pointed the way around to a bench in the alley. “This is where the cashiers take their smoke breaks,” she said.

Tony shook his head and said, “Sorry, something got under my skin back there. It was something about the disparity between Bob’s idealized vision of family life and what I actually knew as a kid. Really stung.”

Mary Beth said, “Don’t apologize. I know what you mean. I felt the same way, although with a different effect. It was like bursting the voyeuristic bubble. Like, girl, just let it all go.”

They finished their drinks and tossed the cans in the recycling bin. Mary Beth said, “I used to come here after delivering my paper route to spend the collection money.”

“Bob Canfield is probably wondering what happened to us,” Tony said.

“He can wait a little longer,” Mary Beth said. “He can go play hide and seek in the basement with Little Sally.”

Tony glanced left and glanced right and flashed a grin. “Let’s make an offer.”

“Are you nuts?” she said.

“Let’s buy the place and tear it down,” Tony said.

“You are nuts,” Mary Beth said, “and despite that cool guy demeanor, kind of angry underneath.”

“We’ll start over, from the ground up. Build a new place, do it right. We’ll make it super-efficient, solar panels and all.”

“You really want to build a house together?”

“Think of it as an investment project,” Tony said.

“An investment in what?”

“Little Mary Beth and Little Tony.”

She laughed and said, “And in this episode, Mary Beth takes a sledgehammer to her parents’ bedroom. I don’t know. I’m going back inside to get a chocolate bar. Do you want one?”

“If you think it will help.”

“Don’t move,” she said, back stepping away, “Take a minute. Clear your head.”

A few minutes passed. Tony slumped on the alley bench. He gazed at the cigarette butts in the dirt and spared the lives of several ants underfoot. More than ten minutes passed. If Mary Beth had bolted, it served him right. Had he really suggested tearing down Mary Beth’s childhood home? And why did he ever think she would like the house tour? What was he trying to prove?

Tony barely noticed when she rejoined him and slid in close. Startled, he turned and peered into her eyes. She stuck out her hand for a shake. Was this goodbye, he wondered?

“Look, I’m really sorry,” Tony said, “the entire plan was ill-conceived.”

“Not to worry. Here’s the deal, we save the tree,” Mary Beth said, “we tear down the house, but the willow tree stays.”

“Wait, what are you telling me?”

 “Do you want me to draft up a document?” she said, “Should we put something in writing?”

“Not sure I’m following you exactly,” Tony said.

“I was never that good at contract law,” Mary Beth said.

“You actually want to do this?” Tony asked

“Yes, if it can happen without hurting the tree.”

Tony smiled and nodded. “I also want a clause that says you never cut your hair.”

“Agreed,” Mary Beth said, and they shook on it, firmly, and gobbled down the chocolate bars.