The Color of Leaves

The summer between freshman and sophomore year of high school was barely two weeks old when my Great Uncle Leon called. I hadn’t yet scratched the surface of my full time-wasting, computer-game-playing potential. My mom found me in the basement, face inches from the desktop monitor, motionless but for my eyes and my index finger atop the mouse. It took a couple of tries before she managed to get my attention.

Uncle Leon she mouthed. It was a name that sounded familiar for no apparent reason. I took the phone and held it to my ear.

Hello?

So I hear you’re looking for work.

This was news to me, as I already had a job busing tables at Tony’s Coplay Family Restaurant. The $4.25 an hour wasn’t straining the seams of my wallet, but I certainly hadn’t told my mom to go hounding relatives. Being a freshly-minted 15 years old, I had a very low tolerance for this sort of meddling. I almost said no out of principle, but I was stopped by the hint of a smile in his voice. It was as if my response, whatever it was, would be the source of private amusement for him. For some reason this pushed me to agree, and two days later I walked with my mom up to his front door.

Leon’s house sat in the middle of the remaining woods that once stretched for miles around the outskirts of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and beyond. I’d never seen it before, and I’m not sure that I ever actually met Uncle Leon until that summer. I knew of him, of course. He’d occasionally grace us with his presence at holiday meals, sliding into the shadows at the edges of the room with a plate of ham and deviled eggs as if hoping we’d forget about him. And I apparently had, because the man who invited us into the house bore no resemblance to anyone I ever remembered seeing before.

He was a short man, and stooped forward as if bracing against a storm. His close-cropped gray hair matched the color of his eyes, and the edges of his mouth seemed permanently curled into the same suggestion of a smile that flavored his words. He invited us in for lemonade.

I was largely ignored while we sipped our drinks. That is not entirely true. My mom talked about me a great deal, and occasionally the sentences ended with a rhetorical right? aimed in my direction. Sometimes I’d agree, just for a change of pace.

They talked about my favorite subjects in school (History and English), my roles in the past year’s plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Bye Bye Birdie), my job at Tony’s (busboy), honor roll (with distinction). It was as if they were haggling over the price of a yard-sale lawn mower.

We finished our lemonade and I watched my mom drive off. It was at least ten minutes before she’d reach the first traffic light or housing development.

I guess, Uncle Leon said when her car had disappeared from view, we’ve had enough of a break.

I followed him outside and he handed me a rake. The intention was to clear the yard of leaves. That was fine in theory, but there seemed to be no clear distinction between forest and yard. Everything was varying degrees of trees. I would not have considered it a yard at all, were it not the place we walked after his instructions to get some of those leaves out of the yard.

The house itself was log cabin meets 70s chic, deep brown wood jutting out in boxy angles. Wraparound windows stretched above the garage, looking out on the in-ground pool, the driveway, and the endless expanse of trees.

I was in the Army, you know? Uncle Leon said, raking next to me. I nodded. I’d quickly learned my words were unnecessary in our conversations.

Korea. Never deployed, of course, but I served my country.

His face was flushed red in the mid-June heat, as I imagined mine was as well. Our sweat made Rorschach designs on the fabric of our T-shirts. The trees provided some shade, but the noon sun offered very few places to hide.

We reached the faint outline of a stone wall and started transferring leaves to the other side. Our cleared paths stretch back behind us, all but disappearing amongst the surrounding leaves. I had some serious raking ahead of me.

After the war, Leon worked for the Steel, which was what people from the Valley called Bethlehem Steel. In doing so, he followed in the footsteps of the men and women whose work had built the world’s first Ferris Wheel at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the steel sections of the Golden Gate Bridge, and, to hear him tell it, every ship in the Navy that won World War II.

We put out more steel during the War than Germany. If there was an exaggeration there, it was the implication that 10-year-oldLeon Kocher had anything to do with it. The company really had produced more steel than the whole of Nazi Germany, and over double that of Japan. By the 1950s, Steel executives were among the richest men in the world.

Wealth to rival 5th Avenue, Uncle Leon said. His half-smile at that moment seemed more genuine than hereditary. I guess that’s why they call the Valley the Little Apple. Whoever ‘they’ were, they’d never used the term when I was around, but I nodded and kept raking.

Over the next few decades, Uncle Leon moved fairly rapidly through the Steel ranks. He attended business school and began working with computers, eventually inventing the timekeeping software for the entire company. Soon he was an executive himself, married and living in the basement of his mother’s house. This is what he told me on my first day. I remember thinking that Uncle Leon talked a hell of a lot for a hermit.

–

You have a girl? Uncle Leon asked me toward the end of the summer. I went up there three or four times a month, raking and weeding and trimming his wild surroundings into submission. No matter how often I visited, we always spent the first few hours raking the leaves again. Now, granted, we were in a forest, but it was the middle of the summer. Where did all the dead leaves come from? It baffled me. I would have asked Uncle Leon about it, if he had ever given me the chance to speak. You have a girl? he had asked, and then continued on without noticing I had not responded.

I did have a girl, though. Christine. She was everything I thought I wanted in a girlfriend: someone who acted like one of the guys but who also had boobs she’d occasionally let me touch. She was exactly one year older than me, which seemed to indicate an advanced level of experience I’d come to discover she did not possess. She was the first girl who ever kissed me, clunking my head against the unpainted brick wall beneath the high school stair case and conquering my tongue with her own before I had the chance to close my eyes. Five months later, on my 15th and her 16th birthday, we performed a final first atop pool towels in the smooth, shady spot by the river. I smiled to myself. Maybe I had a girl, but my girl certainly had me.

Uncle Leon and I spent the afternoon in the small patch of sun around his pool, digging large, gray stones out of the ground. With sweat-soaked shirts draped around our necks, we stacked those stones on top of each other, continuing the little wall that ran around what I presumed to be the edge of his property. The purpose of this wall was unclear to me, as the nearest human neighbor lived a mile away. But we stacked and sweated and talked about women. By which I mean Leon talked, and I occasionally offered an affirmative noise to show I was still alive.

Women, Uncle Leon informed me, are an entirely different species. I nodded as if I understood. Not just from us. From girls, too. From themselves as children. And it happens at different times for different women, but it happens to all of them sooner or later.

I had trouble imagining the women in my life as anything other than themselves. My mom was born to be a mom. She was organized enough to keep the rest of us functioning. She sat on the church council. She brought oranges to soccer games and went in late to work when I missed the bus and needed a ride to school. I couldn’t imagine a world in which my mom existed as anything other than my mom. She was just too good at it. But Uncle Leon was adamant.

It had happened to his Connie, but at the time he was too busy to notice. While Leon was inventing software and caring for his widowed mother and loving his wife, his wife transformed from the girl he married to the woman he ultimately divorced. He didn’t notice the shift until it was far too late, but once he saw it in her he began to see it in other people as well.

I don’t think I actually opened my mouth and asked him what it was that changed, but he responded as if I did.

What happens to them? He looked at me, and his whole being became a smirk. It filled him up and dripped from his words, but there was no humor in any of it. The thing inside them that makes them who they are – and everyone has that. I do, you do. It’s what makes us human. But when a girl becomes a woman, that thing dies.

My skepticism was apparent, but he had examples.

My sister, Uncle Leon said, used to scare the crap out of me. I laughed. For as long as I can remember, my Grams has been a slow, anxious woman with a complaint for every situation. She hated the summer because it was too hot. She rarely went out in the winter because of the snow. It was always tricky finding a day to go shopping for my birthday, as she loudly opposed rain, early mornings, driving at night, and eating at restaurants without a coupon.

I guess Delores always complained, Uncle Leon conceded, but she used to do something about it.

When he was in fourth grade, Leon started getting hassled by some local boys on his walk home from school. What started as teasing and taunting escalated to threats, shoving, and fists. At some point it was suggested that an adult might want to step in. His father was less than sympathetic.

He was a very strict man, my father. Didn’t say a lot, and when he did, that was the end of it. There was no conversation. The verdict was that Leon needed to learn to stick up for himself, so that was that.

Until the day he came home with a bloody nose. Delores had largely stayed quiet throughout the whole ordeal, but when she saw Leon that day she grabbed him by the arm and marched him back out there before he had the chance to clean up his face.

The boys were still there, three of them, eating ice cream cones on Leon’s dime. They laughed to each other when they saw my Grams coming, dragging her brother by the shirt sleeve. She walked right up to the biggest one and punched him in the mouth.

If you want to fight, fight each other, she told them. They nodded and stared at their shoes. Leon never saw them at that intersection again.

Delores wasn’t scared of anything, Leon said. Not even my father. By her senior year of high school she had seven different boyfriends – one for every night of the week. She once got in trouble for wearing an Easton letterman jacket on the Nazareth boy’s night. Within a week or two, she found herself a new jacket. She was the coolest girl in the world. A female Marlon Brando.

I was learning to decipher Leon’s smirk. It never faltered, but there were times when it seemed more authentic. When it spread to his eyes. It didn’t last long, but for a moment or two he was actually smiling. That was one of those times.

What happened? I asked.

She became a woman. Got married. Had kids. Sold herself short. It happens to all of them. One minute they’re fighting bullies and the next minute they’re married to one.

It was then that Uncle Leon explained why he so rarely attended family gatherings. It had a lot to do with his brother-in-law. When he was alive, my Pappy had a very short temper. I remembered this myself. He was considerably subdued the last few years of his life, limping around his house with an oxygen machine or, more frequently, confined to his La-Z Boy in the corner of the living room. The three stairs up to the kitchen were short enough to leap at once with a running start, but they were more than enough to give Pappy trouble.

These stairs had a fairly unusual railing on one side. It was flat wood, maybe a foot wide and six feet long from top to bottom. Just enough to interrupt childhood boredom when the TV was turned to golf. Just enough for a couple of kids to slide down until the novelty wore off. My brother and I were up to the challenge, and we were at it for maybe three minutes before one of us landed too close to the La-Z-Boy and set Pappy off. It was the first time I’d ever been yelled at by someone other than my parents, and the last time I ever slid down the railing.

You can’t talk to people like that, Uncle Leon said. You never knew what was going to push him over the edge. Leon used to visit regularly, early in their marriage. The conversations were intermittent and hesitant, waiting for Pappy to snap.

I’ll never forget the time I tried to talk politics. I’ve never seen a face get so red. He told me they were all a bunch of crooks, real low like, growling. And that was the end of that. I guess I should have known better.

I nodded. I had no trouble imagining my Pappy losing his temper. My own dad was the same way, and he’d grown increasingly more irritable since he retired. There were times when logic and reasoning didn’t matter – you either kept your head down or you dealt with the consequences. Lately I was less and less willing to keep my head down. If something didn’t seem fair – like being assigned two thirds of the chores while my brother sat inside and played N64 – I said so, even if that resulted in a shouting match. Then my dad usually went out and did the thing himself, which for some reason annoyed me even more. I mentioned this to Uncle Leon, describing our recent tug-of-war with a running weed whacker. Maybe that was the problem – too many great girls married assholes.

But Leon didn’t seem like an asshole, and the same thing had happened to his wife.

After only one year of high-school-level English, I was already a pro at five-paragraph essays. Connie’s transformation seemed to be at the root of his thesis, and all the other examples were supporting evidence. If his story was written in five-paragraph format, each paragraph would have begun and ended with her.

Let me tell you about women, he said during a rare break for lemonade. I said okay, even though I was fairly confident he’d been doing just that for the better part of the afternoon. Women notice everything. When they lose that inner spark, all of their other senses improve, like a blind man who can hear you cough from down the block.

That was the argument for this paragraph. The prong to his thesis. It served to orient your readers, reminding them of the central argument being made. Then came a bit of introductory evidence. An anecdote to support your claim and hold the reader’s attention before you hit him with cold, hard facts. While he didn’t always seem to notice me during his stories, Uncle Leon always made sure he held my attention.

He was at a bar once, years ago, and my Aunt Debby came in. It was shortly after her divorce, and she was trying out the single life for the first time in over a decade. Through a crowd of over 100 people, Debby noticed her uncle on the other side of the room, within seconds of getting there. Thus: women notice everything.

I did not ask how Leon noticed her noticing him as soon as she got there. This was irrelevant. We were already on to the meat of the paragraph. Women might not have souls – a point that he never actually stated outright, but it seemed to be the implication behind his inner spark argument – they had superhuman powers of observation. They could sense things. They began packing the lifeboat before the ship started sinking, and well before the man at the helm even noticed a collision. And they always had another ship ready and waiting to take them to safety.

I nodded. All right. I could see it. My mom always seemed a few steps ahead of the rest of the world. As a kid, if I got lost in a public place she usually found me before I realized she was gone. She reminded me about upcoming tests and homework that I only mentioned once, in passing, and just as quickly forgot. When my dad and I got in a fight while she was at work, she could somehow sense it before she even got in the door, and she knew exactly what to say to minimize the collateral damage. I already knew she had superhuman senses, and I was willing to believe that other women did, too.

This is important, Jarred. A woman never leaves a man until she’s sure she’s got something better lined up.

We finished our lemonade and made our way to the shed for some shears to trim his poolside bushes. The sun was picking up speed on its way back down the sky. The air was still sticky hot, but there was a breeze now, and the tiny shadows cast by his house and deck had grown into some respectable shade. I dipped my T-shirt in the pool and put it back on. Uncle Leon kept his strung around his neck, the slight bulge of his stomach pink from the sun. For the first time all day, we worked in silence.

I thought about what he said, and I wondered how long it would be before Christine started changing, too. Would it happen gradually, without my noticing, or suddenly, unmistakably, from one day to the next? Maybe it had already started. For at least a month I had been noticing little things that I hadn’t seen before. It was still great that she could talk and act and laugh like one of the guys, but sometimes I found myself wishing for more of a girl. She certainly didn’t punch like a girl, and while she only hit me when we were joking around, it hurt more than I liked to admit. She insisted on talking on the phone every night, but after the obligatory recaps of the day there seemed to be less and less to talk about. We both enjoyed watching movies and making out – and frequently at the same time – but beyond that, there didn’t seem to be too much that we had in common. And what was the deal with her friend, Becker? She’d gone to the movies with him the day I got back from camp, even though I hadn’t seen her in over a week. Did she already sense that this ship was sinking? Was she packing the lifeboat? Did she already have another ship lined up to rescue her? Maybe she was with Becker right now.

A car passed by on the road in front of the house, and we both turned to stare at it. It was the first time I’d ever seen someone other than my mom drive down that road. Uncle Leon was about as far away from civilization as you could get in the Valley. But it didn’t seem to be far enough for him. Every year, new housing developments replaced forests and cornfields. With every steel framework that went up, Leon grew a little less comfortable in the modern, urban society he helped to create.

Was that it? Guilt? Was that the reason he chose to hide out here, away from the city and women and the one woman in particular who had replaced the girl he used to love? He said that something inside her had died, and that the same thing happened to all women. But he seemed to have changed, too. Doesn’t everybody change? Isn’t that what happens? The city Leon hid from barely resembled the one he grew up in, and the people inhabiting it were parodies of themselves. His childhood home stood on the edge of town for decades, but by the time he and Connie moved into their own place, the city had grown up around him, past him, in spite of him, because of him. They found a nice secluded spot outside of Bethlehem and lived there for ten years before Connie abandoned ship, the girl now a woman, soulless and superhuman. Leon clearly blamed her for that, but did he blame himself as well?

The shadows grew longer across the yard, and I shivered. The summer wasn’t over yet, but it would be soon. All of those green leaves were going to turn colors and clutter the yard. I learned in school that the reds and yellows and oranges were always there in the leaf, but the green chlorophyll overpowered all the rest. We only got to see what was underneath when the leaf started to die.