The Apricot Tree

The apricot tree grew in the empty lot between our house and Mrs. P’s house. Some branches were so high that only the birds, or someone on an extension ladder, could get to them, but the branches closest to our house grew heavy with apricots and hung over the easement into our yard, an unfair temptation. When the trees were at peak, the fruit hung in bunches like small bouquets, and so it was easy to pick a clump of three or four at once, and I did.    

I knew I should have waited until dark to pick the apricots, but they were so full and rosy I couldn’t resist, and no one else seemed to want them. The year before most of them fell to the ground. The squirrels took some, the rest came down in the fall winds, rotted and smelled like sour jam.

***

Mrs. P held her arm out straight and pointed at me with her index finger like the barrel of a pistol and shouted, “Get away from my tree you little Mussolini.”  

I learned about WWII in school, learned about Hitler, Stalin, and the short, bald, shouting maniac, Mussolini who was executed before I was born.

I was born in the U.S.A. after the war and that made me American even though people often told me that I have beautiful Italian eyes; but to my immediate family, the long-finned, two-toned ‘57 Dodge sitting in our driveway on the East Side of Detroit was the shiny symbol of how American we were. 

***

That those apricots were so close to our house and we couldn’t have them, that they were left to rot when I wanted them so much, made me so angry that I whispered that P’s last name was a word that rhymes with itch. I couldn’t understand why my mother smiled and waved at Mrs. P whenever they crossed paths, as if they were bosom buddies.

Wasn’t it important to point out when things were not right, were unfair, and wasn’t it important to try to right the wrong, the unfairness? And when every adult within hearing range talked about The Depression, about how everyone had so little, how some went hungry, I wondered what would happen to those apricots if there were another depression; could P stop the hungry hordes I imagined standing under the apricot tree with their mouths open, arms reaching up alleluia-style, at the miracle of those blushing ovals of sweetness?

***

After the Mussolini insult, Mrs. P continued to stare, her eyes focused on me as if she wanted to cast a spell. Her mouth was a sour pucker. I stared back as she moved on to other hurtful words. 

“Fascist!” she shouted, “Dago-Wop, go back to Italy,” an odd comment as I had never been to Italy, but I did dream about going there. Dad was born there and so were all four of my grandparents and many of my aunts and uncles. I thought to shout back, to tell her that I would love to go to Italy and that I would go someday, but I knew better than to sass an adult. Instead I just took a bite out of one of the apricots in plain view of her fury. With that she mumbled something about the police, turned and stomped into her house, into the foyer and stood behind the screen door where she resembled an unfinished cross stich.   

Dad was in the living room reading the newspaper in his recliner but must have heard the commotion. First I heard the recliner thumped to the upright position, and then came his unusually heavy footsteps into the kitchen.  

“You are more American than she is,” he said as he looked up to the ceiling to hide his anger, “Madonna Mia!” he stretched those two words into elongated syllables.  

Mom always wanted the whole story and asked why our next-door neighbor used such angry words. Dad said that she only used mean and angry words, that she didn’t know how to be kind, how to share. Then he asked, “What did you do Gloria?” 

“The apricots,”  I said as I opened my hand to show her the one I hadn’t eaten, the wet pit of another was in the pocket of my shorts. I planned to wash the pit then put it in my jewelry box with my cache of dime store earrings, my scapula, a few shiny stones and shells. Maybe I would plant it someday.

“Mrs. P is just old and cranky,” Mom said. “Maybe she doesn’t feel good.” 

“Old, cranky, and evil,” Dad added 

“Maybe we should do something nice for her,” Mom said. 

Was she serious? Something nice? I wasn’t quite sure why she called me little Mussolini, but the way she spits it out, I knew it wasn’t a compliment. I wasn’t about to go into that house with my mother dolling out sweetness as if we were apologizing, me tagging along like a naughty child.

“We could take her a pie, or maybe a jar of jam.” Mom hadn’t given up on offering sweets. 

“Apricot jam?” I said and my father held a laugh in as if his mouth was full of water.

Mom continued, “I was thinking we might show her pictures of my brothers who served in the war. Your Uncle Roland is wearing his U.S. Army uniform, standing with locals who were in the Italian resistance in the very town where your grandmother was born.” 

Years later, I read more about Mussolini’s shameful part in the war.  I also learned that the Italians in my grandparents’ small town in southern Italy had turned against the invading German army and joined the Allies. By ninth grade I knew more about WWII than many of the adults I knew did, mostly because we reviewed the facts of that war year after year. It was as if our teachers were obsessed.  When our Social Studies teacher said that Hitler was unhinged, I imagined a door hanging off the doorjamb swinging in a careless wind, not opened, not closed; she aalso had a name for Mussolini. She called him a bootlicking blind follower. The idea of a blind follower made me think of a neat row of ducklings following their mother onto a busy street.

***

In science class, we learned that ducklings followed the mother duck because of imprinting which was innate. As for Hitler and his followers, our social studies teachers never discussed, or posed questions about what it was that moved so many in such an evil direction. Those who followed Hitler weren’t ducklings, but maybe there was some kind of instinctual underpinning that led so many people to follow his orders, to carry out the sinister wishes of the arm-swinging, stiff-saluting, mustachioed menace that captivated some but destroyed so many others.

We studied the war in 7^th grade, then again in 8^th, and on into high school. We read the same paragraphs about World War II year after year, and when we did, it was difficult for me to understand two things:  First, why did the German people take a raving lunatic seriously; and second, once the world knew about the killing of millions of Jews and other non-Aryans, why did it take so long to admit what was happening, and to stop it?  

We were taught who did what on a particular date, learned about battles won and battles lost. No one ever talked about why all of the ugliness happened in the first place. They said economic conditions in Germany was a factor; but when I asked my two questions, I was told it was too complicated to answer.

Sometimes I was told to look it up.

***

I wasn’t home when the steam shovel and dump trucks came and uprooted the apricot tree.  And, before the snow came that year, a two-story, brick duplex was built so close to our bungalow that it blocked the morning sun that once dappled our kitchen floor and lit up my mother’s auburn hair as she stood at the kitchen sink making coffee. The newlyweds who moved into the bottom half of the duplex played Dinah Washington songs all day; What a Difference a Day Makes was a favorite and seemed prescient at the time.  

Mrs. P seemed to lose interest in calling me names, but she moved on to others, gave derogatory nicknames to everyone who was not “American enough”.  She called Mr. and Mrs. Lacey and their tribe of kids Hillbilly-Micks. When Maria Jimenez moved into the apartment above the cleaners on the next street over, Mrs. P called Maria and her mother Wetbacks. When the first black family moved into the third house from the corner, P’s meanness seemed to spread and many of our neighbors joined in and used a nasty slur to describe that family, a word I will not say, will not put on paper.  

On warm summer nights I kept my window that faced P’s house open, and sometimes heard P talking to someone in a language I didn’t understand. I thought it strange for someone so American to talk in a foreign language. Dad said she was probably speaking Polish which surprised me because I thought she was born here, thought she was “a red-blooded American.” 

I mourned the apricot tree, and I thought I smelled apricots long after the tree was gone. I looked for apricots in the grocery store but rarely found them. Nothing was as velvety as the skin of a freshly picked, ripe apricot. I learned, years later, that apricot trees are self-fruitful meaning they don’t need a pollinating partner to bear fruit. They could stand alone. I also learned that I could have grown a tree from a pit, but that apricot trees grown from pits rarely produce fruit, and that most fruit bearing trees are grown from cuttings of the most favorable specimens then grafted onto rootstock to produce a tree that just might grow the apricots of my dreams.

***

Year after year, we continued to study World War II, and occasionally we learned about other world events far removed from our experiences.

All the while wars of another kind were brewing in our neighborhood, in our city, our nation.

Anyone who was different, different skin color, different accent, and different customs from what was acceptable to the growing moral tribe were ostracized. I feared this negative scrutiny would lead to something worse than name-calling. I wanted some magic that would change people who spit out those nasty words, but all I could really do was make sure that those words didn’t change me. 

Afterword

Just recently, with the help of modern technology, I made contact with the child of the newlyweds who had moved into the duplex that was built where the Apricot tree once stood. That neighbor–that I only knew as a child—is now an adult, living on the West Coast and working for a movie studio in L.A.  The first memory she shared with me about growing up in our Detroit neighborhood was my parents’ open door policy to our dinner table.  She reminded me of the many days, tempted by the aromas coming from our kitchen, that she crossed over from her yard into ours, walked into our house, climbed up on a chair at our kitchen table and ate her fill of my mother’s unmatched Italian cooking.  

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Gloria Nixon-John‘s novel, The Killing Jar, is about one of the youngest Americans to serve on death row; her memoir, Learning from Lady Chatterley, deals with her life growing up in Detroit. Breathe Me a Sky, a chapbook, was published by the Moonstone Arts Center, and a collection of her poetry entitled The Dark Safekeeping was published by Mayapple Press. Gloria has also published numerous articles in texts for writers and teachers of writing. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction has appeared in many small and mainstream presses.