Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  I was a heap on the sidewalk, stunned and gasping. The stars were wheeling overhead, and I was saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m okay,” to the circle of faces that stared down at me. “I just tripped,” I explained. “I fell.”

  I felt little at the time, although for days afterwards the agony of that leap throbbed all the way to my thigh. But that night I was only aware of a new sensation in my foot, not pain, but simply change.

  Eva nursed me home. She bandaged my foot in a bandanna someone had produced, and when our father came to pick us up, she told him, “Nell stubbed her toe.” I think she said it more to protect him from the pain of having to know I was drunk than to protect me from his disappointment or anger, and at the time I was aware of feeling both grateful to her discretion and sorry that he wouldn’t know the truth, for maybe that would have roused him from his indifference.

  But Eva slid in next to him on the pickup seat, let me loll and doze against the door while she kept him company. When we got home, she helped me into the house and up to bed, while our father said vaguely, “Goodnight, girls. Hope your toe’s better in the morning, Pumpkin.”

  In the morning I was hung over, so hung over that—despite my embarrassment—I couldn’t attempt to hide my pain. But by the time I eased myself out of bed, Father had already left to cut wood, so there was only Eva to face. She was sitting at the table, primly sectioning a grapefruit, when I hobbled downstairs. My whole body felt misshapen. My skin crawled across my hollow bones and my brain clawed at itself. My toe was a minor annoyance beside the agony in my head.

  “Hi,” I said miserably, sheepishly, desperate for sympathy.

  “Hi,” she answered, giving nothing.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Thanks for helping me.”

  She shrugged. “What else are sisters for?” she asked. She rose and disappeared into her studio, leaving me throbbing with pain and isolation.

  Eva and I spent this morning in the pantry, sifting worms and bits of web from the flour and cornmeal, killing the powdery-winged moths that flutter out of our noodles and beans.

  The first time I found worms in our food was sometime last July. I was pouring a cupful of oatmeal into the pan of water boiling on top of the woodstove, when I glanced down and saw a worm writhing its way up through the oats.

  “Ugh,” I said involuntarily, and flung the cup away from me, broadcasting oats across the stovetop and the floor.

  My father was sitting at the table, slumped silently over a book whose pages he never turned, and he looked up at me in surprise.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A worm,” I said, feeling sick and foolish. The oats on the stove began smoking and shriveling, and their smell added to my queasiness.

  “Where’d it come from?” he asked.

  “The oats. It was in the oats.”

  He closed the book heavily and pushed himself from the table. “Let’s go see,” he said.

  I followed him to the pantry, where we opened the sack of oatmeal to see a couple of dusty moths flutter into the air. Clinging to the torn paper were clots of floury web. A few slender worms writhed through the flakes of meal.

  My skin began to creep.

  “We’ll have to throw it out,” I said.

  “We can’t,” he said.

  “We can’t eat it.”

  “So what are we going to do, Pumpkin? Hop in the truck and drive to Fastco for more? We can’t throw out food now just because it’s got a few bugs in it.”

  “But we can’t eat worms.”

  “Then we’ll have to get rid of them. We’ll sift them out, just like the pioneers used to.”

  “But even if we sift them, there’ll still be the webs or eggs or something. There’ll still be the idea.”

  He shrugged wearily. “Ideas won’t kill you—and neither will eggs or webs, especially if you’re hungry enough.”

  It was a hot, hard day, sorting beans and macaroni and rice, sifting flour and cornmeal through Mother’s sifter until I thought my hand would be permanently cramped. Together the three of us moved every can and sack and box. We washed the shelves and all the canning jars with boiling water and the last of the bleach and dried them and filled them with sifted flour and sorted grain. The whole time we worked, it was all I could do to keep from crying, to think of our food infested with worms, to think of worms in my mother’s pantry.

  This morning it was a chore like any other, and I was immune to both regret and queasiness until, after an hour or so of killing moths and sifting out their larvae, I happened to catch sight of the last two bottles on the shelf our father used to call the “wine cellar.” Suddenly, I was remembering again, and though the memory triggered by those dusty bottles was of an unimportant event, I relived it with such anguish that for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

  It was in mid-August, only weeks before Father died. We were just sitting down to our dinner of corn and tomatoes and boiled potatoes, when he jumped up and vanished into the pantry.

  “The best occasion is no occasion,” he said, returning a moment later with a bottle of red wine and three of our mother’s crystal wine glasses. He uncorked the bottle, touched its lip to the rim of a glass, and poured it full. With a bow he handed it to Eva and poured glasses for me and for himself. Then he lifted his glass to us. “Here’s looking at you, kids,” he said so heartily I cringed, torn between my relief that he seemed to be trying to return to his old self and my resentment that it had taken him so long.

  He twirled the glass, sniffed its contents, sipped, and nodded appreciatively. “Well, girls, drink up and tell me what you think—is alcohol all we grown-ups’ve cracked it up to be?”

  Eva shot me a look of cold irony, and I knew that she, too, was remembering my Saturday nights at the Plaza. But she said nothing. She took a single sip and left the rest untouched. I drank mine slowly, trying not to think of Eli, and it did seem to have an unfamiliar taste—drunk indoors, out of a glass, and with my father. Father emptied his glass, then Eva’s, and then the bottle, straining as he did so to keep up a patter of jokes and talk, as though he were trying to conjure happiness out of air.

  It was painful to watch him force an animation he didn’t feel, but every flat joke and half-failed conversation only added to the tally of offenses I was, almost reluctantly, continuing to keep against him. I sat woodenly, unwilling or unable to respond until finally, the bottle finished, we each went up to bed.

  After that, all the alcohol we had left was an almost-empty bottle of sherry and a bottle of Grand Marnier so covered with kitchen grime and dust you could no longer see how much liqueur it contained.

  “We’ll hang on to those two,” Father had said, “for medicinal purposes—snakebite, frostbite, or childbirth. Which means,” he continued, “there won’t be a whole lot of drinking going on around here anytime soon, unless the polar ice caps start to shift or one of us gets attacked by an obliging rattler.”

  We do hang on, I thought as I sifted the wormy flour—and on—and all that attacks is memory, all I suffer is regret.

  I quit reading today at Hershey, Milton Snavely. Why is it that of all I’ve lost, sometimes it’s food I miss the most?

  Although I didn’t know it at the time, somewhere among those figures bending over me while the night sky reeled and my toe bled, was Eli—Eli with his mane of tawny hair, Eli with his slow hazel eyes, the stud of an emerald jabbed in his right earlobe, and a harmonica cupped to his mouth, Eli the loner, Eli who came up to me the Saturday after my accident and said, “I saw you dance.” Not, How’s your toe? Or, What did your father say? Or even, Were you hung over? but, I saw you dance.

  He never asked about my toe, although I was still hobbling. Instead he said, “I saw you dance,” and I knew he had seen both my leaps and my fall. I felt naked—proud and embarrassed at the same time. His words took my breath away. They put nipples on my breasts, put an arch and twist in my waist, and the hint o
f want in that newly discovered place between my legs.

  Those were the first words he had ever spoken directly to me, though of course I knew him, had cataloged him along with all the other Plaza-goers, and had even tried to evaluate his potential as the boyfriend who would relieve my loneliness. But although I appreciated his sly humor and the hunger of the music he played, he seemed to be surrounded by a shield of self-possession I had no idea how to penetrate.

  Eli had a remoteness I found both exciting and familiar. A loner, an observer, he always seemed to be hovering at the edge of things, and in that reticence I liked to think I recognized myself. I liked to think it was my sophistication that kept me, too, from belonging entirely to the group, and I imagined Eli and I were two of a kind, grown-ups condescending to be kids while the rest of the group were kids playing at being grown-up.

  I saw you dance, he said, and from that moment it seemed we were paired. The rest of the evening we stood facing the bonfire side by side, and I basked in the warmth of my proximity to him, in the sound of his voice in the darkness above my head. True, he played his harmonica almost as though I weren’t there, but standing beside him I felt alive in a way I had never felt before, each pore open, every cell awake, and it seemed impossible that I could be so intensely aware of his presence if he weren’t equally aware of mine.

  He didn’t speak much, but it seemed that everything he said—that he had lost his job last week when the lumberyard closed down, that he was trying to teach himself to read music, that he thought he knew where we might find more wine—contained an underlayer of meaning intended for me alone.

  I returned the next Saturday ready to marry him, ready to dump my whole sad life at his feet, to give up my plans for Harvard and live with him forever in Redwood. I had borrowed Eva’s Navajo blouse with its row of silver buttons and its wide velvet sleeves, and after the sun went down, I almost froze rather than cover it with my jacket. But although I spent the entire evening in a froth of anticipation, Eli never came.

  All that week I fretted, vacillating between my fear that he didn’t like me and my certainty that he had died. But the Saturday after that he was back at the bonfire again, and I spent the evening by his side, listening fervently when he spoke, and saying little myself. Late in the evening he played a long piece on his harmonica, something halfway between an elegy and a lullaby, sweet and hard and sad. It was a music that both flayed and cradled me and I was certain he was playing it for me, to me, about me. I was certain his music was telling me, I understand, I know, and everything’s okay.

  I was convinced we were linked by a wordless awareness of each other’s presence, and when, just minutes before my father arrived to drive us home, Eli put his hand on my waist, I swear I could hardly breathe because of the connection between us. Oh, I will always remember that moment when, even with the universe spackled above us, bright with an infinity of stars and dark with infinite space, it was impossible for me to believe that Ptolemy wasn’t right, that our own Earth, our little tribe, and Eli’s hand on my waist were not the center of everything there was.

  The next Saturday he was absent again, and I spent all that week studying with a morose single-mindedness. By the following Saturday, I had persuaded myself I had imagined the whole thing. But that night Eli was waiting by the trees at the edge of the Plaza when we arrived, watching as I called good-bye to my father and swung the truck door shut behind me.

  It was the end of April, the first warm evening of the season. The air was smooth as breathable water, the sunset bathed everything in orchid light, and there was Eli, standing on the sidewalk in front of us.

  “Hello,” he said. Eva answered, “Hello,” and cbasséd past him towards the freshly kindled fire.

  But I stopped, stood facing him.

  “Hello,” he said again, quietly this time, as though that single word were too private a thing for him to want anyone else to overhear.

  I longed to ask him Where were you last week? What do you do when you’re not here? Do you like my hair like this? I wanted to tell him about my mother’s funeral, my father’s silences, my latest breakthrough with integral calculus, what I had eaten for dinner. Instead I said, “Hello.”

  “Here,” he answered, flourishing something in my direction.

  I took it and saw it was a crimson rose, its outer petals already loose and soft, its inner petals still curved tightly around each other.

  He must have misinterpreted my silent delight because he added, “If you want it.”

  “Okay,” I answered, tucking it into my hair, where it stayed all evening while I tried to ignore its weight against my ear and the poking of its stem and thorns.

  At home the next morning, in the private daylight of my bedroom, I ate one of its petals, tucked another in my bra, and set the rest of the rose in a vase, where I studied it like an icon for the next few days, trying to extract love from those shreds of protoplasm.

  So it continued, Saturday by Saturday through May and into June. Some nights Eli would not come, and sometimes when he came he hardly noticed me. Even when he did, I always felt stiff and tongue-tied in his presence, my jokes too elaborate, my conversations too serious, my silences too long. Still there were moments when it seemed that all the electricity Redwood had lost was arcing between us.

  During the long weeks between Saturday nights, I studied calculus and memorized irregular French verbs and planned weddings and named babies. I outlined European history, read the Iliad, learned the Krebs cycle, and practiced writing Eli’s name. I held my breath for luck, wished on falling stars and four-leaf clovers. Even here it’s all so embarrassing to admit.

  My father was so immersed in his own sorrows he never noticed what I was doing, but Eva finally did.

  “What’s the deal with that guy?” she asked one Sunday morning in early June when Father was in the garden and she and I were in the utility room, washing our laundry in the heavy galvanized sink.

  “What guy?” I said as I grabbed a pair of water-laden jeans and began rubbing the unwieldy denim against itself.

  “Eli.”

  “What about him?” I asked, thrilled to hear his name spoken in my home.

  “What about him?” she echoed.

  “I like him,” I answered, vigorously dunking the jeans.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” I began. And stopped. Eva had quit scrubbing to watch me. “Because what?”

  “Because.” I said it indignantly this time, as though it were more than answer enough to such a stupid question. “He must be at least twenty.”

  “So?”

  “When’s he going to college?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it,” I said, trying to make it sound as though we had been too busy talking about other things.

  “Has he ever read a book in his life?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “What one?”

  “What difference does it make what one? You don’t read, either.”

  “Yes, but you do.”

  “So?”

  She looked at me curiously. “If I had a boyfriend, he’d have to know ballet.”

  At the time I told myself she was jealous, and after that I wrote out long lists of reasons why I liked Eli, why he was right for me, so that the next time she asked, I wouldn’t have to falter for an answer. But she never asked again.

  Sometime in mid-June, when the garden was beginning to burgeon and the summer heat lingered long into the darkness, there came a Saturday night when on the way home from Redwood our father said, “Girls, I hate to disappoint you, but I’m afraid that was our last trip to town for a little while. This is the second week there’s been no gas. We’ve got about three gallons left in the truck, but I think we’d better save that for emergencies until we know for sure when we can get more.”

  I was sitting in silent agony on the seat between him and Eva, and his words wrenched me out of my private misery, took my breath away.

  “But we’ve
got to go back next week,” I gasped.

  He was gazing into the beam of light the truck thrust ahead of itself and when he spoke, he sounded distracted. “Why?” he asked.

  “Because,” I answered desperately, unable to say more.

  Because I had to see Eli.

  I had gone into town that evening with a scheme as desperate and definite as if I were robbing a bank. I had decided I was finally going to break through the barriers of reserve that kept us apart. All week I had imagined my plan, going over and over it as though it were a movie script, lovingly changing a word here, a gesture there, until I was as certain of its outcome as if I had already lived it.

  I had decided that my need for a tangible connection with Eli was greater than either my pride or my fear, and I planned to wait until we had had our share of whatever bottle was circling, and then to take his hand and lead him from the group.

  Night after night I had watched other couples return from their forays into the trees, soft and loose and cozy in each other’s company, and it seemed that if only Eli and I could find our own nook in the shadows, away from that oppressive ring of firelight and friends, then together we would surely find a way to express the force that was building between us. I thought with our bodies we could forge a path for our words to cross, and I was convinced that if only I could feel comfortable in Eli’s company, I could slough off all my sorrows.

  I had spent all afternoon getting ready, heating water for my bath, brushing my hair dry in the sun, dressing as carefully as I could. By the time our father dropped us off at the Plaza, I felt like both a hunter and a deer as I waited for Eli to arrive.

  But he came late that night. For three long hours I suffered, watching surreptitiously as each newcomer joined us at the bonfire, each time feeling a new twist of agony when I realized it wasn’t he. Of course I was too shy to ask anyone where he was, and when, every now and then, someone asked me, “Where’s Eli?” I had to shrug, and answer as carelessly as I could, “Who knows?”