Joe would have come with me had I asked him, and the girls would gladly make room for me on their blanket. But I want to have a thought, an action, a memory that I haven’t run past anyone. I want to see a little bit of the movie by myself.
At the bottom of the hill I go past the pear trees, those difficult, unlovable pears. The Otts have five children, and when they were young each of my girls had an Ott of similar age to play with—-sleepovers back and forth, campfires and homework dates, all of them ultimately disrupted by the gnarled pear trees. One by one our girls became evasive about the Otts. They loved them in the summer, but as the days got shorter and colder, they started to cancel their plans at the last minute, and in the winter they would have nothing to do with the Otts outside of school. I might have suspected something amiss at our neighbors’ house were it not for the fact that the seasonal disenchantment worked in both directions: Young Nelsons would not visit young Otts, and young Otts wouldn’t come to see young Nelsons once the weather turned cold. One day I picked up two of the Ott girls from school and brought them home with us. I don’t remember why but it wasn’t an uncommon situation: We all picked up other people’s children and they picked up ours. Maybe Patsy Ott was taking her older boy to have his braces tightened or maybe two of our children had partnered on a science project, but when it came time to go home they cried. They could not stop crying.
“What?” I asked them. “I’ll walk with you.”
They would not be walked and would not be consoled. Finally, Maisie, who might have been nine, gave me a high sign to follow her to the bathroom. She shut the door quietly behind us and sat down on the toilet lid, pulling up her knees to make herself small. “Drive them,” she whispered.
“Drive them next door?”
She looked at me, her green eyes huge. Maisie was about to cry herself.
“Why? What’s out there?”
Some kind of oath was involved in all of this. I never got that part straight. The dangerous thing was infinitely more dangerous if you spoke its name. But Maisie was hard up against it now, and she wanted to save her friends. “Pear trees,” she said.
“What about them?”
She closed her eyes, shaking her head in despair. “We can’t walk past them and there’s no other way to get there.”
It was true, they weren’t allowed to walk on the road.
In the summer the pear trees were fine. In the summer, all that is hideous about a pear tree is hidden by leaves and pears. But once those disguises were removed they were nothing but acres of murderous psychopaths emboldened by darkness. To cross the naked pear orchard at night was to run the gauntlet of death. The branches jutted with dark knives: child snatchers, child killers. Turns out it wasn’t just the Nelson children and the Otts who believed this about pear trees. Nearly everyone who grew up on an orchard in Grand Traverse County had had issues with them at one point or another, and then they forgot, or, worse, remembered and thought it was funny. I gathered up all the children, theirs and ours, and told them we were going to the Dairy Bar for soft serve. A week from now the Dairy Bar would close for the season, and so we needed to get in all the frozen custard we could, even if it meant spoiling our appetite for dinner. When all of us were sticky and full, I drove the Ott children home, their dignity intact.
“It’s the pear trees,” I whispered to their mother at the handoff. I could see the memory cross Patsy Ott’s face, pear trees.
Maisie announced her plans to sleep between us that night, certain the trees would march up the hill and smash their horrible branches through her bedroom window to carry her away. But as soon as the lights were off she bolted up. “They’ll take Nell!” she cried.
Joe, who had come in late to the story, put his arms around her. “They won’t take Nell,” he said. “Not if they’re looking for you.”
“Daddy, they’re trees,” she gasped. “They don’t know the difference.”
So Joe got up and brought back her sister, sound asleep. We made a space for both of our younger girls in the bed. We didn’t think of Emily because Emily had her own room and surely, pear trees knew better than to mess with her. It all comes back as I walk through the orchard at night, the four of us in bed, and how quickly we fell asleep.
When I crest the hill it’s Duke I see, his enormous face rising like a moon in the distance. Across the Otts’ field the farmers and their families and the pickers all sit apart from one another, one family to a blanket, maybe two dozen blankets spread around, the light of Duke pouring over them. I’m too far away to hear what he’s saying but I can make out the sad cadence of his voice, which blends into the soundtrack, which folds into the evening saw of crickets. He is a movie star, an actor. He is incalculably more than the person I knew, and he is that person as well.
I don’t remember exactly what part of the movie we’re in. He’s staring out at a barren landscape. He says something to the woman beside him without facing her. Her hair is long and tangled and it blows in her eyes. I saw The Promised Man ten years ago when it first came out and I never wanted to see it again. I don’t remember the character’s name, but everything we need to know about the trouble he’s in is there in his face. He loves his wife, his two beautiful daughters, of this I am certain. His family doesn’t know he’s lost his job. They don’t know how much he’s been drinking. He’s been making mistakes, then stealing to cover them up. The action of the film takes place in the brief window of time between the people Duke is working for finding out what he’s done and his family finding out. He’s trying to give his family a few perfect days before it all goes to hell, or he’s trying to maintain his denial for as long as he can. Even this far away I cannot bear to see how afraid he is. That had always been Duke’s magic, that with all his beauty and charm he was able to let the audience see how small he was, how terrified, how deeply in love.
We never had time to go to movies when the girls were young, or not the kind of movies that required a babysitter. The concept of date night had yet to reach northern Michigan, so the few movies we saw in the theater revolved around singing cartoon dogs. Because Emily was at the height of her fervid misconceptions about her paternity then, she insisted on seeing Duke’s new film, and since it was rated R, we said no. Every morning she’d leave another review on the kitchen table that she’d printed off and highlighted so I would know that not only was it Duke’s best film, it was a culturally important film. He was long past his stints in cop shows and family features by then. He was a serious actor, and this was the picture that would forever cut his ties to that earlier career we had all enjoyed.
I told Emily she wasn’t going.
“How can you tell me not to see it when you don’t even know what it’s about?”
“That’s why there’s a rating system, because parents don’t have time to see every single movie in advance of their children.”
“I’m not asking to see every single movie. I’m asking to see this one.”
Around and around. I used to wonder if this was what parents felt like trying to shield their daughters from Elvis. Duke was everywhere: His picture in the paper, his voice on the radio, his reruns on television, his movies in the movie basket. I don’t know why I tried to fight it. Maybe I should have taken her to the theater and bought two tickets, because I had no sense of whether I wanted to keep her from seeing an R--rated movie, or if I wanted to keep her from seeing another Duke movie, or if I just wanted to prevent her from having something she wanted because she tortured me every minute of the day.