The Tree Doctor, page 1
Advance Praise for The Tree Doctor
“Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s luminous new novel provides the hope and beauty we need after the isolation and disillusionment of the pandemic. If existential despair can kill, as the narrator thinks at one point, The Tree Doctor is about the opposite: how reconnecting with the world around you—and with your own soul—will help you survive. This coming-of-middle-age novel—a rarely dramatized but radically important stage in women’s lives—will leave me thinking for a long time.”
—Celeste Ng, author of Our Missing Hearts
“Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s mesmerizing novel The Tree Doctor understands the drama inherent in having a garden. There is an unrecognized wonder to caring for plants: the genuine pleasure derived from planting new flowers, the amount of effort it takes to keep trees healthy and alive. Mockett’s unnamed protagonist herself is much like a flower in bloom. The Tree Doctor explores one woman’s sexuality at a time of life rarely written about, during a time in history that we are only now beginning to process. A beautiful and evocative, necessary book.”
—Marcy Dermansky, author of Hurricane Girl
“This is a gorgeous and completely unique novel, bristling with life like the garden it describes. It is melancholy, erotic, hopeful, meditative, frightening, and even funny—a book about solitude that is never lonely, a book that is both timeless and utterly contemporary. I finished it grateful to Marie Mutsuki Mockett for this orgy of sensory pleasures, and this opportunity to pause and consider life in a time of collective fear and uncertainty. A balm to the spirit and a lovely work of art.”
—Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility
“Sex, death, rebirth, and literature—it’s all here, in one astonishing book. The Tree Doctor made me want to go have an affair!”
—Gish Jen, author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon
“This finely calibrated, groundbreaking chronicle of one woman’s midlife awakening captivated me from the very first sentence. With deadpan humor and deep compassion, Marie Mutsuki Mockett perfectly captures the vast social, political, and cultural changes wrought by the pandemic, spinning them into a gorgeous, utterly original novel. I loved it.”
—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
“What I love about Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s work is every book has its own unique concern, landscape, texture, mood. The Tree Doctor is unlike anything I have read. In it Mockett tells many stories at once: how the most luscious flora coexists among the mundane and often impossible concerns of suburbia and cities; how reckonings operate when you are mother and daughter and wife and lover; how illness makes its way from the personal to the universal and back again—and more! A California book, a pandemic novel, a cautionary tale, a romance in which descriptions of plants brush up against scenes of global catastrophe and build into thrilling sequences of forbidden love. This is a novel to highlight and underline, to get lost in, to dream of, to share, to study, to surrender to.”
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Tehrangeles
“The Tree Doctor is a remarkable novel: sexy and profound, cerebral and corporeal. Never before have I been so turned on by trees and flowers, or laughed so much about the mysteries of sex and sexual desire. Marie Mutsuki Mockett depicts grief and self-discovery with such beauty and restrained vulnerability. I loved being in the singular world of this book.”
—Edan Lepucki, author of Time’s Mouth
“Like the best of literature, The Tree Doctor allows us to see ourselves, but reading this beautifully honed story is also an act of healing. Every page brought new color, feeling, and wisdom into my life, changing me, not unlike the narrator’s mended cherry tree with its surprising spring blooms. Marie Mutsuki Mockett is an exquisite writer.”
—Alan Heathcock, author of 40
The Tree Doctor
ALSO BY Marie Mutsuki Mockett
American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland
Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey
Picking Bones from Ash
THE TREE DOCTOR
A NOVEL
Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2024 by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
212 Third Avenue North, Suite 485
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-64445-277-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-64445-278-3 (ebook)
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2024
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023940228
Cover design: Kimberly Glyder
Cover art: Cory Feder
The Tree Doctor
One
She would always say she called the Tree Doctor because of the fuchsias, not the sickness. It was early March and the fuchsias should have been sprouting. There were eight plants and they would usually grow to reach four feet each summer if they had been trimmed properly during the winter. A few fresh shoots were growing out of the trunks, but the leaves were mostly gnarled. The leaves looked arthritic. If an elderly hand were to emerge from the trunk of a fuchsia, it would look like these leaves.
Many plants in the garden seemed to be faltering, but the fuchsias, which she had loved as a child and which supplied food for the hummingbirds, who would now have less to eat, were one wrong thing too many.
She recalled a plant nursery in the valley, near her grade school. It was seven miles away. She could not tell from the internet if the shop was open. The website showed rows and rows of plants in bloom—azaleas, snapdragons, newly sprouted tomatoes. She imagined the plants sitting there, waiting to be purchased, but unclaimed because of the sickness. She picked up the phone and dialed and a man’s voice answered after the first ring.
“Hello! G … Nursery!” There was noise in the background. She heard a woman yelling, though she could not make out the words. She heard a brief beeping, like a front-end loader, or perhaps a car reversing.
“Hello! I was just wondering if you have any fuchsias.”
“I got lots. Depends on what you want …” His voice was cavernous, but not so booming as to frighten her. It was an inviting voice, and even over the old-fashioned landline she could feel it pulsing through her ear and into her skull.
“Bush fuchsias,” she said, holding the phone away from her ear, but then his voice was garbled and she couldn’t make out the individual words. “What was that?”
“Not right now.” Her ear pulsed again.
“Wrong season?”
“People plant them in winter. Why?”
Briefly, she described the problem, idly massaging her lower back with her free hand while she spoke. She was sore and stiff after pulling weeds, a chore to which she was unaccustomed.
“How old are the plants?”
“Over fifty years, I imagine.”
There was a pause, as though he needed to finish sucking on a piece of candy. “Did you just buy the house? Doing some remodeling?” Now there was an edge to his voice.
The question surprised her. “No. It’s my childhood home. I’m back here to shelter.” She left out the fact that she was only visiting California and that the sickness had made returning to Hong Kong temporarily impossible.
“Oh.” Her answer had surprised him. She imagined him turning the phone around as if to examine it. “If you have plants that are over fifty years old, it would be a shame to throw them out.” He sounded a bit stern now.
“Yes! I agree!” Briefly she explained the condition of the fuchsias, making sure she stressed her concern for their well-being. “I thought maybe they are dying due to the drought. My mother stopped watering—”
“There’s enough water,” he growled. “Just the governor lies and tells you there isn’t.” He drew in a breath as though to calm himself. “The leaves are curled because you have mites. It’s an insect that bores. Attacks everything. You can treat it. You’ll just have to do it every year. Cut it back so it’s at fifty percent. Medicate the roots. Give it fertilizer. It’ll take time but it should come back.”
“I’ve cut it back …” She had, in fact, nicked her left index finger when she mindlessly picked up the clippers while trying to balance a box half full of clippings on her hip. Her finger still stung when she washed the dishes. It had been years since she had cut, nicked, or pricked herself, and her carelessness had momentarily filled her with fury.
“Fifty percent. And you’ll need anti-boring medication.”
“Anti-boring.” She laughed.
“It’s a kind of mite that’s microscopic. Starts at the roots and travels up the stalks and into the leaves. Twists everything. The leaves come out cu
“In some places.” She liked how much he wanted her to understand the feelings of the flowers, even if he didn’t understand her humor. “What’s the medication?”
“We have it.”
“Can I order it online?”
“You can. But—” He left the admonition unfinished. He had just helped her on the phone, and she ought to buy the medication from him. “You can order it from us over the phone. Drop by and we’ll put it in the car. You don’t even have to get out.”
“Is it busy there?”
“Pretty quiet early in the morning,” he said. “Otherwise. Lots of people are home gardening now.”
“I see.” And here she imagined a world of frightened people and unadopted flowers.
“Well, you give me a call …” He was going to hang up.
“I’ll take some,” she said, pulling the credit card out of her wallet. “However you sell it. I can come by tomorrow morning.”
“Good. Your name?”
· · ·
Just south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Highway 1 narrowed to a two-lane road and would remain that way as it hugged the coastline and winnowed its way south to Big Sur. Often this road was slow because it was the only throughway for lone, grizzled VW bus–driving sentimentalists and stalwart semi-haulers with loads of lettuce destined for the Michelin-starred restaurants and the bare-bones, backpacker-friendly log cabin grocery stores along the coast. Today it was empty. She had a feeling of exhilaration, as though she were getting away with something. She was nervous, too, as this was her first time venturing out into the world since the mandatory lockdown, and she had already put on a pair of the latex gloves from one of the two boxes she had found by her mother’s bedside. She had on a face mask, a stiff blue one that the care workers had worn during flu season last December.
Carmel Valley was now increasingly home to the superrich. She knew this only because it was what visiting golfers would tell her whenever she spoke to them in the airport lounge, waiting for the small puddle jumpers that flew from San Francisco to the tiny World War II–era airport in Monterey. She also knew because she occasionally read references to the valley in glossy magazines. But she didn’t personally know this part of the valley. For her, the valley was a place where people kept horses and where homes were simple, low, and long, in the manner of the rancheros who had settled there when California belonged to Mexico. At the first light, she made a left onto Carmel Valley Road, passing an endless line of construction equipment. The small valley cottages were, one by one, being remodeled into villas that, like women with augmented bustlines and newly symmetrical faces, would in their altered state now be worth much more than they had been previously.
She had never longed for a dream home as a goal of adulthood. But in so many of the classic books she loved to read there was some kind of magical house—Pemberley, Howards End, Tara. Even in her favorite novel, The Tale of Genji, the eponymous hero, a prince, is said to have finally surpassed the Emperor only after he has built a grand estate comprising four residences, each featuring a garden focused on one distinct season.
Carmel Valley was narrow and the hills that bordered it felt close and accessible; most peaks were only two to three thousand feet high. It was winter and the hillsides pulsed with translucent greenery—nature’s answer to the neon canyons of the city. In the summer all the grasses would turn brown and she would feel the irritating dry heat on her skin and sense the prickliness of the spiny oak tree leaves as she passed under their branches, which were awaiting a fresh season of rain. She would say she loved summer, since that was what a good Californian said, but she would be longing for this winter greenery. The nursery was located to the right, after a turn on the road to accommodate the riverbed. Farther ahead was the Carmel Valley Village, and beyond that, the reservoir.
The driveway to the nursery went up a short, steep hill and led through a wooden gate. Ahead of her there were hundreds of flowers, bushes, and trees grouped by type. There were the container fuchsias, begonias, and petunias. There were geraniums under a greenhouse roof, the profusion of scarlet petals ruffled like a row of flamenco dancers.
The man on the phone had told her she would not need to get out of the car. But there was no clearly marked location for a shopper such as herself, no sign that read “Park Here.” She sat in the SUV, gripping the steering wheel and wearing a mask. What was she supposed to do? Was there now a conventional way in which people went shopping in the world? She had seen nothing on the news or online. It was too soon, she supposed, for new conventions to be established, and the sickness was just a visitor. In the nursery proper she could see customers—mostly middle-aged women—unhurriedly pulling specially made carts with long, flat beds, on which were arranged various flowers. These were not the furtive shoppers she had expected. In fact, she was the only one sitting in her car and refusing to get out.
A couple wandered by holding hands. Married, no doubt. They had on wide-brimmed canvas hats and their leathery skin suggested years of tennis and long-abandoned sunscreen routines. The couple were wearing masks. They walked over to a very tall third figure she noticed only just now, a man wearing a bandanna over his mouth. She guessed he was Latin American—maybe Central American—from the part of his face she could see. She could make out his name spelled out in large block letters on a name tag, like something from the Large Print Book Club: “JUAN.” She wondered if his name really was Juan. Her mother’s name was Kazuko, and the one other Kazuko they had known in their small town had told people to call her Costco, like the store, because Kazuko had been so difficult for Californians to say and to remember. Juan and the married couple had a brief conversation, which ended with Juan pointing at a corner at the far end of the lot. At a tree, perhaps. What would they buy? Apple? Crab apple? Maybe a lime tree? No, it would need to be something romantic, she thought, as she watched the couple walk away, still holding hands. A flowering tree, perhaps.
She should park the car and get out. And yet if she got out now, wouldn’t she simply be succumbing to some kind of peer pressure, and wasn’t she too old for that? Still, she felt like an ambassador from the land of uptightness. She had never quite felt like a good, laid-back Californian and had been happy to go to the East Coast, where people seemed to keep an invisible tabulation of things like who was where in line, and whether or not dogs were supposed to be on a leash, and certainly whether or not someone should wear a mask—all things that, if violated, would make the average laid-back Californian say “neurotic” and maybe even “high-maintenance” and even, quietly, “kind of a pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth.”
Juan was heading her way. When he got close enough to hear her, she yelled out the window: “Hello! Hi!” As soon as she did this, she felt ridiculous clinging to her car and flagging a gardener. She was not this person! On the other hand, she had paid for the boring poison and wanted to get it.
The man seemed surprised to see her sitting in the car. She could tell from his brow that he was confused. Perhaps he was supposed to know who she was? Then the plane of his forehead went smooth and slack and she understood that he now understood she was one of those people who did not want to get out of the car.
“Yes, miss. Can I help you?” He bent over to look at her through the window, folding his tall frame into a crisp angle.
“I’m here to pick something up. I was told I could just park.”
“You paid already?”
“Over the phone.”
“What is your name? No. What is the thing? A plant?”
“Poison.”
“Herbicide?”
“No. I mean, it is a poison for bugs. A boring medication.” It didn’t sound the least bit funny in this context.
“You got a boring problem.”
“Very boring.”
“Who helped you?”
“With my boring problem?”
He rolled his eyes. “Over the phone.”
“A man. He said his name was … he didn’t give me a name.”
“Oh.” Juan nodded as though suddenly everything, even the boring problem, had become clear. “The Tree Doctor. Stay here.” Juan walked away.
