The Middle Distance

Half-way up, Katherine changed her mind about needing to reach the tree’s canopy, but a careful study of the branches beneath her revealed nothing about how, precisely, she might go about climbing down again. “A 62-year-old woman stuck in a tree,” she said, not loudly enough to be heard by the small crowd on her front lawn. While she considered the proper course, she blew at a strand of hair which had come free from the fancy braid she had worn for the party that was now tickling her left eyelid. The distraction caused her to lose her balance, and she fell hard onto the thick branch on which she had been standing.

“Oh, God, hon! Are you okay?” called Peter from the lawn.

Katherine managed a jovial laugh for the benefit of their guests and called back, “Only my pride. And my rump.”

“Well, at least we can’t see up your dress now,” he said. Just like a man to be concerned with such things, even at a time like this. But, yes, her dress. It would be ruined now. If not by the fall, then from the climb itself. She had factored in that loss, though, when she opted to do this crazy thing.

Notwithstanding the ache in her backside, it felt nice to sit and rest her body. Supported by the elm’s mighty trunk, she found that she could even stretch her legs along the branch and cross them. Her palms looked red, now that she was able to study them, and they were blotched with random constellations of dirt-caked sap. Katherine had never been one for fussing over her hands — manicures and hand masks and the like — but she was a reasonably well-off middle-aged woman, and, outside of May planting in her back garden, it was unusual for her to see them in such a state. There was something satisfying about the way those constellations hung on, even when she scraped her nails across them. Maybe she would have them forever, markings that would signify to everyone she met that she was an adventurous woman. Assuming she made it out of that tree alive, that was.

“So, hon,” Peter called, “are you about ready to come down?” The others offered words encouraging her return. She risked a glance down at them, fearing that she would lose her balance and fall, but her branch had her, held her. Peggy and James were there, and Trish and Jen, and Peter, of course. Someone had even wheeled out Katherine’s elderly father, who had started all this. He stared up at her with a quizzical expression as if she were a rare bird who had flown from Timbuktu to perch in their familiar elm. The others beamed placating smiles at her, as anyone might when encountering a lunatic whom they didn’t want to startle or provoke.

“Not yet,” she called down. “I’m resting.”

“Okay, but what about dessert? And cocktails?”

“Go on without me. I’ll be along.”

“Can you at least tell us what this is about?” Peter called. The smile on his face was not present in his voice. From this height — 30 feet, she would guess, though she’d never had cause to test her accuracy at gauging distances — she could see how thin Peter’s hair had gone on top. The setting sun cast a distracting glare on his scalp.

Katherine struggled to find words to express what had driven her up that tree, but she was let off the hook when another in the group spoke.

“What was that, Tish?”

“You’re a Kat in a tree,” she repeated, louder, prompting polite laughter from the others. Tish had played a role in this too.

It was Jen who finally asked, “Kat, honey, are you stuck? Do you need us to figure a way to get you down?”

“I’m fine,” she lied.

“Hon, it’s okay,” Peter said. “You say you’re fine, but you look …”

“I look like what?”

“Stuck, okay? You look like you’re stuck.” When she failed to push back on this, he showed her his palms in a gesture of surrender. “Fine,” he said, “I’m calling the fire department.”

Katherine motioned to stop him but nearly fell out of the tree, prompting the group to variously reach for her like they could tip her back onto her branch or else clench their fists and make their bodies rigid in defiance of the coming tragedy. She didn’t fall, though. All on her own, she righted herself and stayed planted. “Peter,” she called, “don’t call the fire department.”

“Hon …”

“Dear, this is not a big deal. I don’t want to be a spectacle.”

“You’re stuck in a tree, Katherine.”

“Yes,” she allowed, “my private tree on my private property. I don’t want to draw attention; I mean, the big truck and the lights and the siren …”

“And the ladder,” Peter added.

Katherine began again to protest, but instead she lost her shoe — a beige, flat slip-on — and was briefly consumed by its fall. It turned over once on its descent before landing on her father’s lap. She imagined herself falling, doing one rotation like an Olympic diver, and landing squarely between the armrests of her father’s wheelchair. Only, she wouldn’t land so perfectly; she would hit the ground or an arm rest or both; she would squash the poor man even if he did catch her, and she would break every bone in her body if he didn’t. “Fine,” she called. “Call them. It’s just — God, it’s just so embarrassing.” She would make the paper. Everyone would know.

“Nonsense,” called James, “it’s unimaginably charming. You’ll be thought of as a modern-day Zelda Fitzgerald.” James taught American literature at the university and was likely not the best judge of how this stunt would be received by the community writ large.

“You know, our grandson, Gene, is a climber,” his partner, Peggy, said, more helpfully. “Mostly rock climbing, but he does canopy climbing too, doesn’t he James? Out in VanNote Woods?”

“He does, at that,” James said. “I suppose we could call him — ”

“Yes!” Katherine insisted. “Do that instead! Call the boy!”

She watched as Peter and James discussed this option in voices that were too low for her to hear. Finally, Peter said, “Okay. Peggy is going to call him.”

“Tell him I climbed up here to save a cat or something, will you?”

Peter didn’t dignify this. Her husband wasn’t one to suffer fools — nor was Katherine, typically — so her actions that evening felt to her, in a way, like a betrayal of their shared principles. Had it been foolishness that had driven her up that tree, though? It hadn’t felt that way at the time, and, as embarrassed as she was, it didn’t feel foolish to her now. She had been in her right mind leading up to the party, and there had been no hitches in her planning. Ostensibly, it was a gathering to celebrate Peter’s retirement, but these were all close friends, nothing overwhelming, nothing that would send a woman up a tree. Dinner had gone well, with Peter doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of conversation and charm. Katherine had sat next to her father and mostly occupied herself with seeing to his needs and making sure he was comfortable.

When Tish had noticed their little group of two, set apart from the larger conversation, it had been with good intentions that she turned to the elder man and asked, “So, Malcolm, do you have any advice for Peter to get him through retirement? You look like you’ve taken to it well.” This, too, was a kindness; Katherine’s father did not look well in the slightest. He was 96 and much diminished. A person needn’t have known him in his younger days to see that.

“Odd,” her father had said after some deliberation. “One finds it unnerving to be put out to pasture.” Withered though he may have been, he still possessed what, to Katherine, sounded like the deep and resonant voice of God.

“Dad, you stay active,” she had said, only because all eyes were still on them. “We play board games, and you have your books and your shows.”

“Oh, I love boardgames. So fun,” Tish said in a placating tone. She seemed to recognize her error in engaging him and was attempting to steer things back to a cheerier course. To Peter she said, “You’ll have to take up golf now, Peter, so you aren’t always under Katherine’s feet.”

“I suppose it would be worth learning that damned game to keep her from murdering me. What do you say, hon?”

“I’ll pay for the lessons,” Katherine had said.

After every leg of this exchange, the table had laughed uproariously, collectively willing an atmosphere of jolly goodwill. All but Katherine’s father, who undid their efforts in an instant when he said, unprompted, “As a younger man, I sometimes imagined myself growing older.” He held his gaze in the middle distance, rather than addressing the falling faces that surrounded him. “Now that I have arrived here, however, I see that I had no idea what it was I was trying to imagine. It’s the same with you. Your peers begin to retire, ill health and disease take their first pass through your cohort — far from their final appearance — and you feel old. You fear that feeling, and you lament lost days from not so long ago — ten years back, five even. But you aren’t old, not yet. You don’t know what aging is. Neither did I. Aging, as I imagined it, was a shuffling walk, lost muscle mass, spotted skin, expanding holes in the memory and the mind. I saw age as you see me now, hunched and confined to this chair. But that’s not the true thing.”

For a moment the table was silent, a group of scolded 60-something-year-old children who were unsure precisely what offense they had committed but whose collective guilt left no doubt that they were culpable. It was Peter who had broken the silence by asking, “So, then, what’s the true thing, Malcolm?”

Her father took so long to answer that Katherine had wondered if his awareness had dimmed. It had become more common these days, his fading in and out. She was relieved to think that, perhaps, no answer was coming. But then, of course, one had. “Do you recall, Peter, putting on your socks tonight? Not the selection of the pair that best matches those fancy trousers, but the actual steps involved in dragging them onto your feet and up your legs?”

Peter did a short performance of thinking and then shaking his head, even though Malcolm wasn’t watching.

“Being old,” he continued, “is to be forced to do with deliberation what you have previously known to be effortless. You, the newly retired man, think you understand because, in middle age, you let go of childish dreams — climbing a mountain, for example, and learning to play that clarinet Kat bought you all those years back. There’s a cost to letting those things go, it’s true, but that isn’t old age, only its precursor. Being old is losing those things that you’ve never considered until they become a struggle. It’s accepting that a point will come when no amount of tenacity in performing those tasks will keep them under your control, and you’ll have to let them go. Being old means not dying. It means waking up tomorrow with your body incrementally more restricted for the time you lost sleeping, to spend another day pondering all you’ve lost of yourself and wondering if you’ve become less yourself for it.” Here, he had tossed his hand. “But … boardgames help a bit, I suppose.”

No more had been said on the subject. On the faces of their guests, Katherine had seen recalcitrance that was not altogether unfamiliar to this group of white, liberal academics who were well acquainted with expressions of remorse for the privileges they enjoyed. Relative youth in this case. They hadn’t looked young to her, though, as she glanced around the table, and she hadn’t felt young herself. It was Peter’s face, mainly, that had gotten to her, so somber and deflated. Never had the uneven topography of his once-smooth skin looked so stark to her. She had been forced to look away. The conversation had started up again after that, everyone performing gaiety, other than her father who receded into his common, silent disinterest.

Katherine hadn’t kept up with the conversation. Her gazed was fixed on the trunk of the elm, which was visible to her through their front window. She was wondering how long it had been since she’d run her fingers along the grooves of its bark, how many more good years she had before she was no longer able to stand under her own volition and walk on dependable legs out the front door and through the yard to stand beneath its canopy and stretch her arms high and with no limitations in the joints of her shoulders to touch it as high up as her body could stretch. It had become an imperative thought, and so she had risen from the table and placed her napkin on her plate, and then she had walked wordlessly through the front door with the intention to do just that. Voices called after her, but no one stopped her. This was her home, after all, and she was of sound mind. By the time they came out as a group to see about her, the impulse to climb had already overtaken her, and she was out of their reach.

At dusk, she saw a small colony of bats take flight from inside their chimney. She was troubled by the thought of those filthy creatures living in such proximity to where she and Peter bathed and cleaned and cook and ate. Worse was the fact that, until now, she’d had no knowledge of them being there. There had been no telltale scratching or squeaks or guano bombs splattering onto their hearth. Indeed, had she died before she saw them take flight, and had some clerical aid to a theoretical almighty asked her if she was the same Katherine Herring who’d had an infestation of bats in her chimney, her unadulterated answer would have been no. She would have insisted that a mistake had been made; she would have demanded to be returned to her body and given a credit for some number of additional good years for the inconvenience. What else was there that she’d never seen or known about in this world, in this town, in her yard, in her body? Too much, certainly. Too much for her to ever experience it all. The thought caused tears to well in her eyes, a mourning for herself, for her safe life, poorly used.

“He’s here,” she heard Peter call. She had known already, of course; she was looking down not just on their home but on their driveway too, and on the street a good distance beyond. Their guests had gone home, having realized that there would be no saving the evening. Peggy had wanted to stay to see Gene, but James was feeling dyspeptic and had convinced her that their presence would only slow down his rescue of their friend and hostess. When Peter hurried to the driveway to greet the young man, that left only her father staring up at her. It was sometimes hard to tell these days when he was engaged with the world outside himself, and the darkening evening didn’t help matters, but she knew he was, and to prove it, she waved down to him. He didn’t wave back; instead, he responded by speaking, a mere low rumble from this distance.

“What, Dad?” she called, loud enough to make Peter glance in her direction from the driveway. She paid him no mind. To her father, she said, “I didn’t hear you.”

His chest expanded slowly with the air it would take to project up to her, and then he said, “I would save you if I could. On my way down, though, after I’d reached the top.”

Before she could respond, Peter led the young man to the elm. He evaluated the situation with a youthful energy — something in his easy gait and the way he smiled up at her with the confidence that he would never find himself in such a state, but that he could be depended upon to save others who had — and Katherine perked up in response to it, sitting up a little straighter on her branch. The young man carried a coiled rope over one shoulder, and he held a harness in the opposite hand. His shoes tinkled with each step he took from some sort of crampon that had been affixed to them. “Howdy,” he called up to her, and she returned the greeting. “Stuck up there?” he asked. He may have had a slight rural drawl, something that neither James nor Peggy spoke with, but that was the Midwest for you. She adopted it herself without meaning to when she confirmed that, yes, it appeared that she was.

They were losing light, so the young man didn’t waste any more time. After a quick preparation of his rope and harness, which he didn’t put on but rather clamped to the back of his belt, he darted up the tree like it was his ancestral homeland. In no time, they were eye to eye. “I’m Gene,” he said. “Are you Katherine?”

It was so ridiculous a question, that she answered, “No, I’m Anne. Katherine lives a few branches up.”

Gene laughed mightily at this. She could tell, even in the dark, that he was tan and fit, if not precisely handsome. He wore one of those beards with no mustaches that she supposed was, for reasons she couldn’t imagine, coming back into style with the youths. He adopted a standing position with his legs spread wide and straddling two branches. Incredibly, he stayed balanced that way without the use of his hands, freeing them to retrieve the harness from his belt and coach her in the humiliating process of strapping it to her body. As he was tightening its buckles, he asked, “So, are you trying to get into canopy climbing or what?”

“No. It was only an impulse. One, I think it’s fair to say, that has passed now.”

“Glad to hear it. It’s a dangerous hobby, or can be. Especially for an older gal like yourself.”

“I’m perfectly fit and capable,” she said defensively, as if she hadn’t spent the last several hours stuck in that very spot.

“You wouldn’t be if you slipped and fell off that branch. You’d probably hit a few dozen more on your way down. Your bones would be smashed all to heck before you even hit the ground.”

Katherine opened her mouth to give a more fulsome defense of herself, but she could think of none.

“Don’t worry about it,” Gene said. “I’ve rescued buddies from way higher up than this, and those are experienced guys my age.”

“You’ve climbed trees bigger than this one?” It made sense that he would have if he were serious enough about this hobby to own gear, but somehow it seemed unimaginable to her that anyone anywhere had ever climbed to a height greater than this one.

“Are you kidding,” he smiled. “This is a fine old elm, but it’s nothing compared to some I’ve monkey-climbed. Trees twice this old, at least, and that much taller too. I think you’re all done-up here. Can you see if you can stand for me?”

Katherine didn’t feel like she could stand. Standing, even with this expert to guide her, seemed impossible. She didn’t hesitate, though, because he was watching her — a used, frayed rag doll that had been tossed into a tree and forgotten — and doing the impossible was necessary if she was to save face. Well below her, the other two also watched. Peter gave an encouraging whoop when she succeeded in standing. She grabbed two branches above her head for support. She had been resting for a long time by then, and her arms felt strong, even as her back and legs screamed from sitting on the hard surface of the branch.

Gene began to instruct her in just how they were going to maneuver down, but she was only half-listening. She would lean on his expertise, step by step, when the time came. Back on her feet now, though, she saw clearly how little she had left to go; it was no farther from here to the top than the distance she had already managed, and on her own, with no harness or rope to save her. “What are you doing?” Gene asked when she began to climb. She needed to stay focused, though, and so she didn’t answer. Let him figure it out. Let him follow her up and put his skills to the test by getting her down again. Peter began saying her name over and over, a mantra of his growing worry, but she chose to receive it as a chant of support. Her father stayed silent, resting that booming God-voice which had, for now, stayed strong even as his body had weakened. Katherine had no doubt that he was watching her — hesitant, free, ascendant — from the chair that fixed him to the ground, and she knew that he was pleased with her.