The Peach Tree Problem
By Leah Skay
My parents bought the cursed tree for the look: a punch of summery sweet pink and orange against healthy green leaves to contrast against the wash of identical beige houses in our development. The landscaping was bare bones across all properties, consisting of lone patches of clover and occasionally some dandelions. The peach tree was supposed to bring the countryside to suburbia, the aesthetic pleasure of farming life into the mundane routine of highway traffic jams and family melodrama. The scrimpy tree would someday shade a barren yard, with ample fruit for me and my younger brother to snack on when we needed rejuvenation from the midsummer sun. I was five when we moved into this house with the peach tree, and Mom told me that by the time I was eight or nine the fruit would be edible. Yeah, it would’ve been great, if it weren’t for the fact the peach tree in my backyard didn’t grow fruit; it grew sour-smelling abominations.
“What’s the point of having a fruit tree if we can’t eat the fruit?” I asked her once.
“Isn’t it pretty, though?”
It looked nice enough from a distance, as was, I think, the intention, but if I got within fifteen feet of the thing the beauty would be negated by the smell of sticky, wet rotting fruit. The vessels themselves were either hard to the touch or turned to goop at the slightest pressure. The skin was speckled with green and brown holes where the bugs crawled in. Mom insisted that the tree must’ve been diseased when we got it at the nursery and her neglect of it was because it was simply a lost cause. This was three years after its initial planting, when the tree should have been producing plump and sweet delights. God, I hated that damn tree.
What good would peaches have done us anyway? Vegetables would be infinitely more beneficial— – crunchy zucchini to fry up in a pan with breadcrumbs, yellow squash to sauté with garlic, peppers of all tastes for fajitas, cherry tomatoes for salads. Mom wove these ideas into the common discourse over the whole year I was eight. So Dad built Mom a garden as long as she promised to actually care for it. We couldn’t have another abandoned project, another peach tree problem. The neighbors would have our heads for it.
Dad built the garden over the course of a day: one long wood box that turned with the corner of the yard, one square, a path between them, ample chicken wire to keep the neighborhood rabbits from invading our crop. He came to the back door with smushed peaches in his boots and banged them against the stairs like he did when it snowed. Chunks plopped into the dry grass, making wet slopping sounds as they hit. The only solid thing left was a halved pit with a white-green center trapped in the grooves of Dad’s sole.
“Just think,” Mom said to me, “fresh vegetables every night.”
“Only if we actually go out there and pick them.”
And for the first few months, we did. I loved the feeling of dirt under my nails as I pried the peppers from their plants. Little bugs rolled into balls in my hands, worms wriggled under leathery leaves, and, despite our efforts, the rabbits snuck through the wire and ravaged our strawberries. The zucchini grew monstrously large, the size of a toddler’s baseball bat. The peppers grew heavy and fruitful, the cherry tomatoes overproducing hundreds of little vessels that our dog loved to snag off the vine as an afternoon snack.
My favorite crop was the strawberries. The plant was weaker than the others, sprouting only handfuls in comparison to the cherry tomatoes next door. On the rare occasion we did get a strawberry left without nibble marks, I relished in the sort of genuine freshness that the grocery stores wouldn’t dare compare to. Instead of white-red bodies, they were a rich, dark red like our kitchen curtains. Instead of crunching, they melted. Instead of being presentable, they were real, and that made them more beautiful than anything else. No strawberry has ever compared. I miss them.
The garden thrived because we made it thrive. Part of me wished we could leave the vegetables on the vine. They looked more beautiful there, in the dirt, than they did in the kitchen. We kept our crop in a basket on the kitchen island. The rich reds and greens dulled in the overhead light. We often ignored them, going out to collect more until the basket piled high with rotten, forgotten fruit on the bottom so guests saw only our most recent spoils. We liked how they made us look: earthly, grounded, connected.
Now I’m twenty-one and the garden is gone. Dad ripped out the wood frames, abandoned the chicken wire, and left dry soil in the stained shape of the garden years ago. We’ve replaced the vegetable basket with potatoes from the grocery store with dozens of fully formed eyes, coupons for fast food chains, and blue pens with missing caps. We’ve returned to the cycle of abandonment, forgetting our nonfatal responsibilities to the plants outside in favor of the quicker, easier methods of life inside. I come home from college to see Mom has a new passion project that she swears she’ll never abandon: household renovation. Our dining room has been sufficiently gutted, with paint swatches taped to the walls and new pieces of white molding plastered around the windows and doorways. The garage is littered with new antiques Mom acquired over weekend trips to the beaches with Dad— – mahogany tables and wrought-iron sconces for a romantic gothic study where our guest room is currently.
“What happened to the tree?” I ask, peering outback to check on the dogs. The peach tree is there, still dropping the damned smelly fruit into the yard, but the light, unexposed roots of the trunk are exposed, and half the top is gone. Branches stick out of the firepit near the back door.
“There was a storm a little while ago,” Dad says from the dining room between the punches of a high-power nail-gun. “Split the thing nearly down the middle. Mom won’t let me get rid of it.”
“I mean, it isn’t dead. The garden died and that’s the only reason she let you get rid of it.”
“It’s been functionally dead for years,” he says. “I keep trying to tell her we’ll get another tree if she wants, but she just won’t hear it.”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” I say.
And I’m right, it wouldn’t be the same if there were any other tree. Nothing will be as beautiful as that tree from afar, an aesthetic plea for a little more country in the heart of suburbia, as long as you don’t go outside and smell it. Don’t get me wrong, I still hate that damn tree, but I think if Dad were to decide to run out there with his chainsaw in a fit of rage, I’d beg him not to chop off my own head.
Leah Skay is a writer from rural Delaware currently residing in rural Japan as a member of the Japanese Exchange and Teaching program. She received her BA in Writing from Ithaca College and hopes to pursue an MFA upon her return to the states.