Chapter 2 The Orchard #5
Af Klint’s temple was never built, but she held the shape in her mind for decades.
Ms. Guillard lent Laurel and Maisie the catalogue from her only American show, a group exhibit at the LA County Museum of Art.
Laurel paged through it for hours, convinced that if she only looked longer, harder, she might receive the cosmic knowledge that the paintings seemed to promise.
Intersecting orbs hung, suspended, in shafts of color; circles opened into letters, and coils vibrated with energy.
In Dove, No. 3, a fizzing prism shuddered against darkness, as if a piece of the universe were being forged.
When it came time to choose her project, Laurel experimented.
She made collages like Max Ernst with paper cut from Jane magazine; she painted two Laurels, like Kahlo’s The Two Fridas.
But af Klint’s Tree of Knowledge, which unfolded in two directions, recalled a memory from childhood: weeding in her mother’s flower garden.
Like the dandelions she’d pulled—stems above, roots below—Tree of Knowledge was an asymmetric mirror image.
Now Laurel parked in the student lot and walked through empty corridors. She found Ms. Guillard in the art room.
“Ah! It’s you.” The teacher hopped down from the counter, where she had been scrubbing at a mulish patch of paint. “Come, come.”
The remaining senior projects stood against the wall, forlorn as unattended luggage. The last was a young white ash tree from Lower Orchard. Laurel had unearthed and suspended it, from branches to roots, in an open shadow box.
“You will bring it to college, yes?” asked Ms. Guillard as Laurel picked it up.
Laurel couldn’t tell whether Ms. Guillard was joking. “I don’t think I’ll have space.”
The teacher crossed her arms. “And will you take art classes?”
“Not this semester,” Laurel admitted; she had filled her schedule with general education requirements. “Maybe next.”
Ms. Guillard huffed as she walked Laurel to the school’s entrance.
“You say this, but soon you will be focused on friends and boys and all your classes for the plants”—this was how she referred to Laurel’s intended botany major—“and you will forget about Remedios Varo; you’ll forget the cup and saucer that Meret Oppenheim covered with fur.
The imagination is a muscle, Laurel. You must exercise it. ”
But Laurel was distracted. Through the window behind Ms. Guillard’s head, she saw Eli on his skateboard—or, rather, she saw him stop skateboarding. He had propped it up on one end, and he was looking at her.
Ms. Guillard followed her eyes. “What did I tell you?” she said. But she winked before Laurel walked out of the door.
Gentle heat, cutting breeze, sky the blue and pink of cotton candy: it was a perfect summer evening. She and Eli were the only people in sight.
“Hi,” Laurel said, slowing down.
“Hey,” said Eli.
He didn’t introduce himself, and neither did she. It seemed a given that they each knew exactly who the other was, despite never having interacted.
“I wondered who made that one.” Eli nodded at her project. “How did you do it?”
“I found the tree on my family’s apple orchard.” Laurel set the box down. When she crouched, Eli joined her. “I put paper around the base and marked the shadows of the branches—age-old technique to figure out how far the roots extend, or so my dad claims.”
“Your family has an orchard?” Eli asked. His eyes were very green.
Laurel flushed with pleasure at his curiosity. “Since before I was born.”
“I’ve never been to one before.”
“Not ever?”
Eli shook his head. “I grew up in a city. My parents aren’t very outdoorsy—professors. We get our apples at the grocery store.”
There was a ruefulness to his tone that Laurel hadn’t expected. She thought of the cat doors that Edner had cut into her family’s house, how they afforded a glance straight through a wall. And then she asked the question that set the rest of her life in motion.
“Do you want to see it?”
Eli smiled. His mouth was slightly open, as if he were surprised at her daring.
—
She drove in a state of exhilarated disbelief.
I’m taking Eli to the orchard, she thought.
It was preposterous. Maisie would scream.
They had plans that night, as they did every Friday.
First, they ate the fish fry at Dotty’s, feeling grown-up to be at a tavern alone; then they drove to Michael’s for frozen custard, slurped in the parking lot as moths fluttered by the streetlights.
Finally they roamed the aisles at Blockbuster, scanning the new releases, leaving with boxes of candy—Raisinets and Runts for Laurel, Dots and Milk Duds for Maisie—along with the chosen video in its plastic case.
“Would you mind if we stop by my place?” Eli asked. “I should tell my parents they don’t have to pick me up at school.”
He directed her toward a field not far from the orchard, overrun by scrub and crowded saplings. Laurel had passed it dozens of times without stopping. Now she saw that a gravel road led to a beige house with a wraparound porch.
“I’ll only be a minute,” he said. “But you can come inside, if you want.”
She wanted to, of course. As they walked to the front door, prairie grass grazed her legs, and a thistle pecked one knee: it was clear the Rosens didn’t know what to do with the land, or perhaps they didn’t care. Affixed to the entrance was a Jewish mezuzah.
“Be right back,” he said.
Then he galloped up a staircase two steps at a time, his skateboard in one hand.
Laurel waited in the living room. Inside were fascinating objects she had insufficient time to examine: a framed map, a mahogany desk with shining haunches, a two-headed brass lamp.
A faded globe, like something that might have stood in an old schoolhouse, spun slowly in the draft from the door.
(“A friend,” came Eli’s voice, stubborn, from upstairs. “I’ll be home by dinner.” And the murmur of a deeper voice, indistinct but discontented.)
Laurel entered a narrow, darkened hallway.
To her left was the kitchen; to her right was another door, cracked.
She peered through. Posters for Nirvana and Alice in Chains were taped to the wall.
Soundgarden’s Superunknown took pride of place above the bed, but the CD in his boombox was Under the Table and Dreaming, one of her favorites.
The guitar Eli had played at the talent show leaned against a window.
Beside it was a blown-up photograph: a few dozen kids in matching T-shirts, holding a banner that read Space Camp 1992.
When she heard Eli’s footsteps, Laurel rushed back to the living room. Elaborate Persian rugs, worn through in places, sat on top of other rugs—crowded bookshelves, falling dust—
“Ready,” Eli said.
—
She parked in the gravel lot next to the farm store, closed until September, and showed him Lower Orchard. The trees stood like teenage girls, proud and a little embarrassed by their fullness. Laurel told him their names: Blushing Golden, Opalescent, Fortune.
“But the best thing about apple trees,” she said, “the coolest thing, in my opinion”—as if he cared, because he seemed to, and this was so wonderful that she couldn’t stop herself—“is what happens at the roots. Some apple trees grow from their own roots, but they need more space, and they take longer to fruit. They’re majestic—whole, in a way.
But most of our trees don’t grow from seeds.
They’re grafted together from two parent trees, like babies. ”
She knew she was babbling, but high school was over. In one month, they’d both leave for college, and she would never see him again.
“This Honeycrisp, for example. What you do is cut a bud, or a branch, from a Honeycrisp tree. Then you pair it with a rootstock.” She wore one of her father’s old flannels over her camisole and jean shorts: not the outfit she would have picked for Eli, but at least she’d done more than throw a sweatshirt over her pajamas.
“The branch determines the fruit, and the rootstock—well, the rootstock is a tree in and of itself. It might be cold-hardy, or resistant to disease.”
Eli was looking closely. “And they fuse?”
Laurel nodded. “They fuse. They become one tree. But you can always tell which trees were grafted. See?”
She knelt next to a peachy Jonagold. The bottom two inches of trunk were scaly, but above that, it was smooth. At the join was a ridge, a ring. It would be too embarrassing, or too revealing, to tell Eli that she thought of it as a wedding ring—as if the tree were a couple, growing old together.
In Upper Orchard, Eli suggested a taste test. They collected Sops of Wine and Red Astrachans, Whitney Crabs and Lubsk Queens.
The Pink Pearls were just maturing, so Laurel stood in a crook of branches to find the ripest specimens.
She felt self-conscious at first, but soon her caution dropped like a leaf: she luxuriated in the sun on her knees, the strength in her calves, the electric sensation of Eli’s eyes on her.
They took their bounty to the top of the hill, from which the entire farm could be seen, and sat down.
“Now you know everything about me,” Laurel said. “And I don’t know anything about you.”
“That’s not true.” Eli bit into a Red Astrachan. “You know where I live.”
“And I know you like the Spice Girls.”
He covered his eyes, grinning. “I can’t believe I did that. I figured, no one knows me, no one actually cares. At my old school, I never would have had the guts.”
“In Chicago, right? Is that where you’re going to college?”
Eli shook his head. “MIT,” he said, and added sheepishly: “I know how that sounds.”
“It sounds fancy,” said Laurel. “What do you want to study?”
“Engineering. I have to get my master’s if I want to be eligible for NASA’s astronaut-selection program—that or become a jet pilot.”
“No ambition, I see.”
“I probably won’t get in. Almost no one does,” he said. “How about you?”
“UW,” she said. “Botany.” And thought of how small she must seem to him, going twenty minutes away to study plants.