HOME FOR A CHANGE

   The house the girls grew up in wasn’t special at all. It was just a tatty suburban ranch-style house, one in a long row of tract houses that wound their way up a dusty dead-end street.

   Their parents bought the house when it was brand-new and smelled of fresh-laid cement and cheap new wood. On moving day, the three little girls ran excitedly from room to room, opening and shutting the flimsy sliding closet doors. Everything was cheaply new, the bathroom and kitchen fixtures still squeaky clean. Floors gleamed, waiting to be scarred and dented. Linoleum lay flat and un-yellowed, window-glass still bore strips of identifying tape, pipes had yet to feel the rush of water through their lengths.    

   Only a few of the houses were inhabited. Next door to them lived an elderly couple, the MacGregors, whose chief pastime seemed to be spying on the children. Mrs MacGregor would post herself by one window to watch the children leave for school in the morning. Once they had reached the end of their driveway, she would move as quickly as her arthritis would allow her to the front window, where she would stand and stare until they disappeared from view. All the way down the street, the children could feel her eyes on their backs.

   Few of the houses in the tract had trees, save the lone palm the City had planted in everyone’s front yard. You could walk up and down the street and see almost nothing but one palm tree in front of every single house. A few residents had managed to plant cacti and ice plant in their yards, but except for those palms, there was only the odd spindly, stunned-looking tree gasping under the combined force of sun and wind.

   The children’s father planted an elm tree in the front yard and, like many of the neighbors, ice plant along the sides of the house.  Mr and Mrs MacGregor watched their every move. Why an elm? Mr MacGregor asked. The children’s father shrugged and smiled noncommittally. He had chosen an elm tree simply because someone had offered him a free seedling, but he hardly wanted to tell Mrs MacGregor that.

   The soil was poor and the sun and wind were merciless, but a collection of eclectic plants gradually joined the elm and ice plant: a macadamia nut tree dropped prickly leaves that hurt when stepped on but never broke the skin, a pepper tree grew to a staggering height and rained down tiny red peppercorns with dry, papery covers. Rough lemon trees with tough, bumpy-skinned fruit were planted just outside the children’s bedroom windows and cast their butter-and-honey fragrance into the hot night air. Shrubs and bushes shot up in profusion all around the house, and their father, in a fit of enthusiasm, began a cactus garden that he periodically added to in haphazard fashion. An apricot tree grew from a tiny seedling to a fruit-bearing tree, and in the backyard a paper mulberry with great furry leaves grew into a seedling-sprouting monster.  

   The children’s father loved plants and trees but lacked the skill or inclination to arrange them in a harmonious or logical manner. What he created instead – quite unintentionally – was a paradise for his children. Bushes and shrubs sprang up in pathways and grew too close together, creating dense, lush cover. A bougainvillea grew, unchecked and un-pruned, up the patio supports and produced a multitude of blossoms to be woven into cats’ collars and wound around stuffed animals. Mint and weeds grew exuberantly in waist-high patches, making a fragrant adventure playground. Trees were planted willy-nilly, providing shade and hiding places for playing children, but raising the eyebrows of the MacGregors who knew what good gardening was and wasn’t.

   The children did not know that their garden was foolishly crowded with expensive water-guzzling plants and ill-placed trees. They played with their cats under the elm, picked the apricots and rough lemons, and watched fat bees drunk with citrus-lust stumble from lemon blossom to lemon blossom. They chased katydids and grasshoppers in the overgrown mint and squeezed the fat, juicy leaves of the ice plant.

   Near the clothesline grew fig trees; the fruit ripened under the sun, to drop and rot in sticky-sweet heaps under the spreading leaves. Wasps, hummingbirds and dragonflies danced dizzily through the summer haze like airborne jewels. On summer nights, the children and their parents drank iced tea with slices of rough lemon. They gazed at the stars and talked about wasps and fig reproduction. 

   All too soon, their dead-end street disappeared into a rash of new construction. New houses were built – each one with a single palm tree in the front yard – and the street grew, snaking up through the hills and joining even newer streets. The view of the desert and the surrounding hills gave way to a tangle of clotheslines and barbecues.  New people moved into the houses and more trees were planted. And yet their own house looked, to their eyes, completely different from the ones around it, an oasis shrouded in trees, overgrown with bushes and shrubs and cacti.

    The MacGregors’ own front yard was a model of careful planning and chemically-assisted botany, their flower beds seemingly laid out with spirit level and yardstick.   Mr MacGregor looked askance at the father’s messy garden with its shaggy grass and overgrown trees and shrubs. He complained that the snails sheltering in their ice plant attacked his flowers. Their pepper tree shed its papery peppercorns all over their grass; their elm, unsprayed, harboured hairy caterpillars that ended up migrating into Mr MacGregor’s garden.

   Mrs MacGregor kept a sharp eye out for the children’s misdemeanours and warned their mother that they could easily be ruined if the neighborhood ‘went bad.’ Every time the children’s father brought home a new tree to plant in their crowded tree-choked garden, the children could feel the MacGregors eyes on them, watching, judging.

   Only when another family moved in directly across the street did the girls finally escape Mrs MacGregor’s scrutiny. Unlike them and virtually everyone else in their all-white neighborhood, the new people were black. Suddenly the children found that Mrs MacGregor was eager to talk to their parents over the backyard fence. She would even waylay their mother as she arrived home from work or stepped outside with the garbage.

   For years the children and their mother were forced to listen to Mrs MacGregor’s stories about the black family. Where was the father? Where did the family get their money? Mrs MacGregor wanted to know. The black family’s mother left the home every morning in a nurse’s uniform, so the answer seemed obvious, but Mrs MacGregor had her doubts. The noise those children made and the endless comings and goings!  She drank tea with the children’s kindly, long-suffering mother and bent her reluctant ear with silly, baseless gossip and blow-by-blow accounts of the black family’s innocent activities.

   Years passed. The house grew older and shabbier. The cactus garden grew into a no-man’s-land of overgrown and dangerously spiked plants toppling over onto each other, prickles and spears spilling out in all directions in sickly, top-heavy piles. The elm tree barely survived a particularly bad caterpillar infestation. The pepper tree’s roots caused the asphalt driveway to buckle and shatter. Never should have planted it there in the first place, Mr MacGregor grumbled.  

   The macadamia nut tree, however, after a childless decade, suddenly bore fruit, furnishing enough nuts for the entire neighborhood. Shortly after, the children grew up and moved away, one by one; their parents grew old and died, as did the MacGregors.

   Decades later, in a fit of nostalgia, the two younger sisters drove past their old house on a rare trip back to their hometown. They lived far away and had children of their own now, but they could not resist stopping for a look.

   The elm tree was a ragged, overgrown version of its former self. They could see that the macadamia nut tree and rough lemons were gone, as were the cactus garden and palm tree. The grass, no longer indulged by their water-wasteful father, had grown dry and brown and was knee-high in some places. Only the dandelions and foxtails seemed to be flourishing.

    The two women lingered so long in front of the house that the current resident grew curious and came out. The sisters squabbled briefly and discretely, and the older sister won. She approached the stranger shyly. We used to live here – we grew up in this house. We hate to intrude, but would you mind --? The man was kind, happy to show them around. Perhaps they could tell him how the sprinkler system worked?

   It doesn’t work, laughed the older sister. Our father designed it, and he was technologically challenged. He could barely operate a lawn-mower.

   The man took them and their small, bored children, around their old house. Sorry, he apologized, I’m not much of a housekeeper and I haven’t gotten around to decorating yet. This was obvious. All the scars were there still – the long tongue of black metal showing where they’d knocked a strip of enamel off the bathtub, the worn wallpaper a cat had clawed to shreds – but all the joy and mystery of childhood were gone. The fig trees were just an overgrown mess swarming with hornets, the mint a leggy, yellowed tangle of vegetation. Trees had been hacked down, the stumps sticking up everywhere. The paper mulberry had been allowed to get away with murder: far too many seedlings had sprouted and were well entrenched in the thick, dry grass.

   The two women and the man stood looking down at the stump of the macadamia nut tree. It bore fruit for the first time the year I left home, said the older sister, trying to keep her voice level. Macadamia nuts in California – no one believed us!  The man was surprised. A macadamia nut tree! Is that what it was? I took it out because my children didn’t like it. They kept hurting their feet on the leaves.  

   He and his wife were separated, the man told them. He only got the kids over the weekends, so he wanted to keep them happy. The women nodded. They were mothers, so they understood, but part of them – the part that had loved that tree – secretly thought: Wimps.

   Why had she insisted on looking at the house, the older sister wondered. She felt like weeping from sadness and disappointment. So much was the same, but paradoxically everything was different. The house looked so old and shabby. Had it always been that shabby? And there was no magic in it at all.

   The sisters thanked the man for showing them around, apologized for the sprinkler system and its incomprehensible workings. They were on the verge of taking leave when the older sister mentioned the MacGregors next door. Two elderly people with too much time on their hands, she told the man. And terrible racists, too:  Mrs MacGregor was so incensed when a black family moved in across the street.

   Both families are still there, the man told them. Nell’s retired now; she lives there with her son and his children. And as for the MacGregors, the children and grandchildren of the couple you knew live there now. They’re not racists; they get on famously with Nell’s grandchildren – you ought to see those kids playing together – in and out of each other’s house all the time.

   As if on cue, a black child came toddling out of the MacGregors’ house. The child crouched down and examined an ants’ nest, taking no notice of the two sisters and their children or the man they were talking to. Soon, a middle-aged woman came out, a younger, sweeter-looking version of Mrs MacGregor. She took the child’s hand and the two crossed the street together.

   The sisters watched them go, hand in hand, two inhabitants of a different world.