Love in Anguish

Dolores Diggory was so offended by Virginia English’s Love in Anguish’s climactic scene that she buried the romance novel in her backyard. She’d fallen in love with its hero, a swarthy young gent named Armand who was forced to depart his lover, Melissa, by the call of battle. Dolores read nearly four hundred pages of the book, hoping, waiting, even praying for Armand’s return, but on page 377 Armand’s Jeep ran over a landmine and was blown to bits. Armand, bleeding profusely, was helicoptered from the battlefield and shipped back to the States. He made it to a military hospital where Melissa was called to his side, and there, amid tubes, heart monitors and ventilators, Armand managed to take Melissa’s hand and pull her ear close to say his final words: “I’ll always love you.”

And then he died.

Dolores hurled the book across the room.

At first she considered burning it in her fireplace, but there was something spooky about burning books—Hitler and all—so she decided to bury it instead, right there in her backyard next to the marigolds and periwinkle. She tried to dig a hole with a garden spade but it wasn’t deep enough, so she went to Sears and bought a shovel and dug a hole deep enough to plant a tree. Then, she tossed the book inside and swore never to read the author’s work again.

She felt a little silly about it when the whole affair was done, but after all, she thought, it was all part of her new stress-free life. She’d bought the best-selling self-help book, The Stress-Free, Perfect Life by Robert M. Berkoff, Ph.D., when her own perfect life—which was formerly in the state called “marriage”—had ended the previous spring. Her husband, Richard, told her he didn’t find her attractive anymore, and he moved in with Nicole, a twenty-year old college student. The fact that Richard was forty-three, and the fact that Richard and Dolores had a nine-year old daughter did not matter, and he pursued his own perfect life, otherwise known as the state of “moving in with and do a twenty-year old until she figures out that you’re old enough to be her father, and then coming back to your wife to beg for forgiveness when you’ve gotten the whole sex thing out of your system.”

It worked in Richard’s favor that he was 6’4”, played football in high school, and attracted women when he walked into a room.

Dolores had decided she’d never forgive him—she would hit him in the head with a frying pan instead. And that’s what she kept telling herself, all the way through the separation, the divorce papers, the court date, Richard’s remarriage, and all the rest.

She felt hurt. She felt pain and anguish and heartache. She felt betrayal and resentment. She felt overwhelmed. She felt sinful but sinned against, felt ridiculous and made the fool, felt astonished and angered and humiliated. She felt fear for the future and nostalgia for the past. She felt a need to go back and correct something about herself so Richard would stay, but felt realization that nothing she did would ever change Richard or his choice. She felt love and hate and fear and loathing and insolence and silliness and shock and aloneness and emptiness and futility. And most of all, she felt helpless, completely, totally, and irreconcilably helpless.

When she finally realized she’d never get to hit a repentant Richard in the head, Dolores broke down and bought The Stress-Free, Perfect Life. Then she decided to follow its advice by ridding herself of anything that caused her pain or stress. “Get those things out of your life,” The Stress-Free, Perfect Life said. “Whenever there’s stress, imagine throwing your problems out and burying them in your backyard.”

So that’s when she began burying books.

The second book she buried was Jumping into Love, a romance/adventure novel about a couple that met on a bungee jump. Dolores had never bungee jumped and never would, but it excited her to read about people who did, but she decided to bury the book when her daughter, Bethany, told her that Daddy and “Aunt Nicole” had gone bungee jumping the week before. “And they said they’d take me some time,” she added.

“The hell they will,” said Dolores.

She waited until Bethany went to school and then retrieved her Sears-bought shovel and buried the book a few feet away from the first.

Bethany lived with her mother for two weeks at a time in the two-bedroom house with one bathroom, a half-kitchen, and plumbing problems. Then, Bethany stayed with Daddy and Aunt Nicole at the five-bedroom upscale home Nicole’s father (an investment banker) bought them as a wedding present. One day, while Bethany was at school, Dolores drove to Aunt Nicole’s house and snapped a photograph of it from her car. Then, she buried the photo in her backyard.

The Stress-Free, Perfect Life says there are two parts of every life: those stresses you can control, and those you can’t. Among those stresses you can control are items related to diet, exercise, and leisure time, and those you can’t are physical illnesses and acts of God. She attributed Nicole’s large, perky breasts, tiny hips, and insatiable sex drive to an act of God. She attributed diet, exercise, and leisure to something else. So, she joined an aerobics class, stopped eating hamburgers and tried to make fish and chicken at home. And she read romance novels, historical fiction romance novels, and action adventure romance novels, often crying herself to sleep.

The one thing Dr. Berkoff’s book forgot to mention was money. Richard taught college literature. He never made much money when he and Dolores were married. He made even less now, since he’d been fired for having an affair with a student. But just because Nicole’s family was rich didn’t mean Richard’s alimony checks went up. His lawyer saw to that. And after a few months of her new, perfect life, Dolores discovered that she’d have to find a job to pay her bills.

This caused Dolores great stress.

She had not liked her job before having her baby (she’d worked as a phone receptionist at a small company) and did not want to return to the work force. But her financial situation quickly deteriorated. She searched The Stress-Free, Perfect Life for a section on alternatives to working, but could not find one. She just kept rereading the part that she liked: “Imagine throwing your problems out and burying them in your backyard.”

So, one afternoon when she’d dropped Bethany off at a friend’s and returned home to find a mailbox filled with overdue bills, she admitted her stress and buried the bills in the backyard.

Creditors soon began calling the house and leaving threatening messages on the machine. So, when Bethany returned from a weekend with her father, Dolores told her that burglars had broken into the house and stolen the telephone and answering machine. The girl rolled her eyes and told her mother to bring the phone back, but Dolores didn’t bring it back, and the next morning there was still no phone, and Bethany questioned for the first time how the grass in the backyard kept getting dug up. Dolores told her it was a mole.

“There’s no moles in the backyard,” Bethany said.

“Are you disputing my authority?”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“No, ma’am.” And then, Bethany added, “Nicole doesn’t make me call her ma’am.”

“That’s because Nicole isn’t old enough to be a ma’am,” said Dolores. “She’s young enough to be your sister. Your father has some sick Lolita-incest thing going on.”

“What’s Lolita?”

“None of your business,” said Dolores.

She forced Bethany to do her homework while she herself sat down to glance through The Stress-Free, Perfect Life for advice on how to deal with belligerent children. She didn’t find anything.

The thought flashed through her mind that she should bury Bethany, or at least Richard and Nicole, or at the very least pictures of them. But then she decided that might be going a bit too far, leaning toward voodoo or occult or some bizarre devil ritual that frightened her too much to think about. Dolores decided burying things might be symbolic after all, and she should just picture throwing dirt on Nicole and her other problems without actually doing it.

Bethany was out for the weekend when they turned off the electricity.

Dolores had expected it—after all, just how long could she go burying the mail before someone turned off something—and she started to call and pay the bill over the phone, but then realized the phone was in the backyard under three feet of dirt. Rather than despair, she decided she’d just rough it for the weekend, until Bethany came back, until the girl could see how Dolores had lost everything because she didn’t have enough money, and then Bethany could go straight to her father and demand he send her some cash. Maybe even a big fat check. Sure, the food in the fridge would spoil, but what did that matter? Richard would come back and solve everything.

Dolores walked through the dark house, grabbed her book and took a lawn chair outside to read. It was then that she noticed it for the first time.

In the middle of her yard—right in the spot where she’d buried three days worth of bills and junk mail, one Jane Fonda exercise tape, two Harlequin romance novels, and the remains of a box of Krispie Kreme donuts that she’d purchased, begun to eat, and then buried out of an overwhelming sense of guilt from the calories, carbs, and fat grams—there stood a tree.

Her yard had always been bare of trees—after all, she liked to plant flowers—but now there stood a tree, twenty feet high at least.

Dolores rubbed her eyes, but the tree remained.

She went in the house and tried to make herself a cup of coffee. The coffee maker wouldn’t come on because the electricity had been turned off. Instead, she reached in the cabinet and poured herself a shot of vodka. She took an extra shot, just for good measure. And after the third shot, she returned to the backyard. The tree was still there.

It had thick green leaves and heavy limbs, and the bark was soft and appeared to be peeling off. In the spots without bark, the trunk was a soft purple. Just above her head, where the leaves grew especially thick, Dolores saw a tiny piece of fruit. It was round like an apple but flat on the bottom and top, and its skin was a bright pink color, like the inside of a grapefruit. It was beautiful, this piece of fruit, the most beautiful thing Dolores had ever seen.

“This is the fruit of my stress?” she thought. She wondered how it might taste, bitter or sweet, soft or hard inside. She thought of looking in the book to see if Dr. Berkoff said anything about fruit, but then realized it was ridiculous, that trees didn’t just grow in people’s backyards, that it was impossible what she was seeing, yet there it was, the tree, and she looked for pages of her romance novel in the leaves or print from the phone bill in the bark, but she saw none. She only saw the rich color of the pink fruit, its soft skin beckoning.

“It’s the fruit of what I’ve done,” she said aloud, adding, to no one at all, “I can do with it whatever I want.” She was glad she hadn’t buried Richard or Nicole. Who knew what fruit they might yield. But she’d yielded this—this bright, beautiful pink thing, and she was proud.

Finally, she gave in and went to The Stress-Free, Perfect Life and looked at the index. Burdens. Problems. Stress. Trees. Troubles.

Trees?

The section read, “If you physically bury your stress, then it will become a tree that bears fruit.”

And so it had.

She couldn’t find any passages on just what to do with the fruit, though, nothing that told her to eat it or forbade eating it. After all, she thought, Eve was forbidden the apple, right? That’s why she’d gotten in trouble—for disobeying, right? Not for the act of eating. Dolores didn’t want God cursing her for all eternity if she reached up and ate a piece of juicy pink fruit. Still, she reasoned, there was no serpent about—at least, not if you didn’t count Richard.

Ha ha. What do you know, she thought. I buried my stress and became a comedian.

She moved her lawn chair to the base of the tree and stood on its seat. It strained a bit under her weight and didn’t bring her much closer to the fruit, but it did give her an extra boost where she could just reach a branch. She grabbed onto it and pulled. She hadn’t done a pull-up since PE class in high school, and she hadn’t climbed a tree since God knew when, but she put her feet against the purple trunk and managed to climb up inch by inch until she could pull her full weight onto its lowest limb. It creaked. She thought of the mulberry tree she climbed in her front yard as a child. This limb wasn’t as sturdy as the ones that supported her on the mulberry. When she finally pulled herself onto the branch and looked up, the pink fruit was several feet away. “Okay,” she told herself. “You can do this. You can conquer your problems and get that fruit.” She sounded like the self-help book now—had she read that very quotation just a few pages before? She couldn’t remember now.