Anteaters Don't Dream and Other Stories

Dawson's Folly

DawsorTs Folly THE DAY WEMOVED into this house, I saw the tree house in the middle branches of the sycamore just as clearly as if it were already built. I don't mean I thought, Gee, wouldn't it be nice to build Brian a tree house. I mean I sawthe whole thing there in front of me. Right down to the balcony off the third floor and the dormer windows on the top. I stood there, holding the box with Meg's mother's dishes in it, just staring. It drove Meg nuts. "Reg, if you drop that box, you're out of this family." I turned slowly, still seeing the neon-colored trim on the shutters and door. "I mean it," she warned."Break one handle on one teacup, and you can kiss your wife and son goodbye." I laughed,but I put the boxdown on a table. Then I turned back and looked out acrossthe yard.The sycamoregrowsat the edge of our property, but it throws its shadow over everything. Its branches—tiny snippets at the bottom and top, foot-thick monsters in the middle—all reach toward the kitchen. And "5 so help me, the tree house I didn't start building until this year was still there, spread out across the four sturdiest limbs. I don't know why,but it made me feel incredibly smug and happy. Alittle crazy,granted. But mostly happy. Brian was young then, maybe three. That's one reason I waited so long to start work on the tree house. That and the fact that myjob kept me away from home more weekends than not. Myterritory was in the Midwest, and even though I tried to change it everychance I got, there wasalways someone with more seniority who bid the Northeast. It got to be a standing joke with Meg and me. "Hi, stranger," she'd saywhen she met me off a flight from Chicago or Minneapolis. "My husband's away.Want to come home with me and playhouse?" She'd put her hands on her hips and purse her lips, looking at me from under her eyelashes like someone out of a movie. So it wasn't until Iwent on disability that I could even think about building the tree house. When I did, when I started ordering lumber and stocking up on paint, it was asif no time had passed at all. I sawthe house just asvividly,as precisely,as I had when we moved in. And what I sawwas not your ordinary , apple-tree fort, slapped together out of fallen branches andtwo-by-fours. My vision, the image I'd nursed for five whole years, was more like a Victorian circus tent than a tree house. The first story was painted lime green.There was a pink carved molding above the door and around the shuttered windows. The second story was what the paint store called "crushed violet," with gold flower boxes under windows cut in the shape of DAWSON'S FOLLY 116 stars. The third story was chrome yellow with cookie-cutter designs in the cornice. Years ago, before I'd met Meg or gone away to school, I wanted to be a commercial artist. I drew cartoons in the margins of all my subject spirals—everything except trig, where I was too lost and sweaty to doodle. I spent hours copying latemodel cars from magazine ads. And when I was sending out college applications, I snuck in a couple of fairly well-known art schools. This betrayal so horrified my mother that Ifinally passed up the one that accepted me in favor of what she called a "real college." So sometimes I wonder if it isn't the repressed artist in me, a renegade with baggy pants and paint under his fingernails, who dreamed up this tree house. Who started hanging around hardware stores and lumber yards, asking the yard men questions and making a general fool of himself.Who stayed up late nights, poring over magazines and overdue library books with titles like You Can Convert Your Garage or Thirty Woodworking Projects for the Home Hobbyist. In the beginning, Brian, who's in third grade now, didn't share my enthusiasm. I even had to tell him what a tree house is, for god's sake.When I'd explained it to him, when I'd gotten the whole bottom floor in...