The Forgetting Tree

by Tatjana Soli

  Minna jumped in the air and gave a yell, then danced around the pool, the glow of the pool burnishing her skin. Wind started to blow in the trees, and the moon was covered by swiftly moving clouds that bunched against each other. When she came closer, the candles caught the necklace, made it flash and spark as if on fire. Claire felt a great contentment seeing it on her, as if it had been returned to the person who could give it its due. How she would have liked to trade places and live her life in Minna’s young body.

  “Dance with me,” Minna commanded, but Claire couldn’t. Even though she took joy in the sight of Minna, her ease and lack of inhibition, it made Claire feel even more prudish, more nunnish. Minna’s dance brought to the surface all Claire had never been, that was no longer possible. Had there ever been a time when she could have been more like Minna, less like herself? Why had she rushed into marriage, rushed into maternity, without any experience or thought to what she was losing thereby? She regretted nothing, except that making one choice canceled out the possibilities of so many others. As she continued to watch, there was the smallest opening in Minna’s dance, like a dervish spinning for enlightenment, a pinhole through which Claire caught a glimpse of other possible lives than the one she had chosen.

  * * *

  After dancing a few minutes, Minna arched her body into a bow and dove into the pool, her dark form slicing the light open. Claire cringed, thinking of the necklace, but after Minna swam, she walked up the steps, glistening wet, and the necklace shone even more brightly. The things of this world were meant to be used, or they wasted. The necklace had always scared Claire—she would try it on, take it off, opting for something smaller, duller. Over the years, she had cleaned, preserved, and hidden it away in its velvet box. Wasted it. Minna was a perfect fit—the two matched in boldness.

  “I’m so happy tonight,” Minna said.

  Claire realized that she was, too. So happiness could be like this, dependent on nothing.

  “I don’t want this to ever end. I never want to leave you.”

  Claire wanted to say, Me, too, but she didn’t. “You’re going to go find a man. If not Don, someone.”

  “I have Don. When I need him.”

  They laughed.

  “This is as good as it can be,” Minna said.

  “Watching you reminds me of Antoinette swimming with Rochester.”

  “You and your books.” Minna turned away, suddenly annoyed. “You ignore what’s right in front of you.”

  Claire cursed herself for breaking the mood. They were silent, the harshness of Minna’s words jarring both of them.

  Minna stretched out on the concrete, water beading off her body. “There was a book,” she said, her voice conciliatory, “that made an impression on me. Called Temporary Shelter.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I never read it.”

  Now it was Claire’s turn to be irritated. “Why not?”

  “Because … the title told me everything I wanted to know. If I read it, and the author meant it to refer to the cost of cats in China, well, then the whole thing would be ruined, don’t you see?”

  “No, I don’t see. That’s absurd.”

  Minna lifted her eyebrows and sighed, summoning the infinite patience of talking to an especially dim-witted child. “What you want are the holes, the gaps, the blank spaces that your imagination can fill. There’s nothing in life more deadly than finished.”

  “I can think of things.”

  Minna rolled onto her stomach, resting her head in her cupped palms. “What about men? I never hear about anyone. Was Forster the only love of your life?”

  “That’s all over for me.”

  “Why?”

  Claire pointed to Minna’s breasts. “I don’t have those two lovelies.”

  “A woman is more than her boobs. There’s what’s between her legs, too.” She reached her hand between her own legs and laughed.

  Claire said nothing, the deep heat of a blush rising up her body.

  “Would you like Don? I mean, he’s a good lover. I could arrange it.”

  “Don’t be absurd.” Claire thought of Rochester, how he cast sidelong glances at Antoinette, how sometimes she seemed so alien. She did not like this side of Minna, this coarseness. Was she trying purposely to provoke? “Should I seduce him wig or sans wig?”

  “I hate that mop.” Minna wagged her behind back and forth, then carried the glasses inside as a few raindrops spat across the pool. “If you change your mind, he’s yours.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Minna is Minna, that’s all.”

  “I’m going to bed. I’m tired,” Claire said. “If we’re lucky it might rain.”

  August rain in California every bit as rare as the necklace around Minna’s neck.

  * * *

  Dressed in her nightgown and in bed, Claire read. The sheets were crumb-filled and musty and hadn’t been changed for a long time. Minna came in wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Her scalp was tan-colored and smooth, as if she had shaved her hair off, and Claire did a double take before Minna burst out laughing.

  “I shaved the hair off,” she said, pulling off the wig that was now a simple latex scalp.

  “That was expensive!” But then Claire too, laughed. “Gwen will be furious.”

  “Don’s picking me up.”

  “The bed needs changing,” Claire said, grumpy, dreading the empty, creaking house overtaking her. She didn’t want to have to go downstairs and languish in front of the TV to avoid the loneliness of early morning. “Have him sleep here.”

  “Here?”

  “I don’t want to be alone,” Claire said, brusque, as if she were giving something away.

  “Are you sure? I can send him home afterwards.”

  “No, I want you two here.”

  “Even though we are sinning?”

  “I’m not that old-fashioned.”

  * * *

  But Claire went to sleep right away, not wanting to be confronted with Don’s presence after all. Despite what she said, a part of her wanted Minna’s company to herself. Hours later she woke up to noises outside. Rain, a miracle in August. She went to the window to witness it and saw Minna and Don swimming in the murky pool. Quickly she took a step back.

  They circled each other, tighter and tighter, and then Donald grabbed her, and she yelled, kicking at him as they struggled, then kissed. Claire stood in the lonely dark, unseen, and felt a molten thread. She had assumed desire was dead inside her. Was Minna testing? Taunting? She remembered those long-ago days when Forster’s and her lovemaking had formed the center of their days and not just its afterthought, and later its memory.

  She did not move away, but stood, riveted. Don carried Minna up the steps of the pool and laid her down on the lounge chair. He stood above her, gazing down, and Claire knew that loveliness that he looked upon. Even after all these months, Minna’s beauty still had the power to shock. “Inside?” he asked. Minna shook her head. “Crazy girl,” he said. Minna stayed absolutely still for the longest time so that Claire held her own breath, then Minna smiled and arched and spread her legs apart. Donald lay on top of her, unable to stand the separation any longer.

  Claire’s own legs turned liquid. A siren’s call, the knowledge that she should move away quickly, but she didn’t. What was wrong with her own sense of propriety that she stood there like a Peeping Tom? Minna pushed his face away from hers and looked up into the darkness of the window and then … smiled. Knowing and feeling Claire’s watching. Yet another consummation between them.

  Minna wrapped her legs around his hips, and Claire broke away, fled into the bathroom and barred a door no one would try to open. She sat on the cold, sobering tile with her back against the door. Of course, she could not stop seeing them, the image burned onto her retina. She turned on the shower, undressed, let the hot water pelt down on her. Tears mixed with water. The sight of them unspeakable and beyond lovely, a perverse, indecipherabl
e gift.

  Chapter 14

  Minna, voicing alarm that Claire’s weight loss might put the upcoming radiation treatments in jeopardy, went on a campaign to fatten her up. She cursed at her own prior laziness and went into a frenzied bout of cleaning and washing and cooking that lasted a week before sputtering out once again. During that period, she dressed up every day and drove to the grocery, coming back with improbably large bags of groceries for only two people. She cooked island dishes of spicy hot fish, basted pork chops, and baked a delicious dessert of layers of yellow cake, slathered with guava preserves, covered in a thick coating of whipped cream.

  None of it gave Claire an appetite, but she couldn’t disappoint her. That’s what Minna counted on; each uptick on the scale was considered a personal victory. Her solicitude touched Claire, thinking no further to its root cause.

  * * *

  On one of those shopping days, Claire stood in the kitchen, making a stab at the piles of dirty dishes. The more Minna cooked, the more dishes stacked up, and with three or four meals a day being prepared, the place was in constant turmoil like a restaurant. Claire scoured away at the copper handles of the sink, which had tarnished from neglect. When Octavio knocked at the back door, the disruption so startled Claire she dropped a plate against the dish rack.

  Embarrassed, she straightened the scarf on her head. No mistaking the look of shock when he saw her up close. She wished there were a porch and screen in between them as at their weekly meeting, or that they were out in the orchards, with open spaces to distract them. Just moments before, she had felt stronger than she had in weeks, but still, health was a relative thing—compared to her former state, she probably appeared forlorn indeed. Her old robe hung on her like a tent; the skin at her temples was so thin and fragile that nets of blue veins were as visible as the lines on a map. Of course, there was the not-hair thing—not only missing from the scalp, but also not eyebrows, not eyelashes. A stripped and boiled look.

  “Disculpe por molestarla—” he said.

  “No, no. Come in. We haven’t had a chance to visit.”

  “Esta ella aquí?”

  “No.” Claire knew that as observant as he was, he would have noticed the car was gone, had probably watched Minna drive away over half an hour before.

  “There is something you must see. Lo se estas enferma.”

  “Let me dress.”

  “Apurate, por favor. Before she returns.”

  Claire threw clothes on without thinking, dread in her heart, an echo of the first trouble, the one after which nothing was ever the same. After each large trauma, one was never as devastated, or as strong, again. Octavio, she feared, was determined to reveal something that there would be no recovering from.

  She dressed and returned to the kitchen, steeled, ready to blame the messenger.

  They talked of the recent rain as they headed, inevitably, toward the portion of the farm that was unofficially off-limits. The explanation given to newcomers was not vetted by Claire; she didn’t want to know how he chose to handle it. Sometimes she could tell the workers knew from their eyes, but now that pity could be for multiple causes. Many of the men came from rural areas of Mexico, religious and superstitious in equal parts. The death of a child was seen as a tragic omen. Octavio was too practical to make unnecessary difficulties for himself. Perhaps reticence was chosen as the most productive course.

  As they continued walking, Claire noticed workers in ones and twos dropping the work they were at and mobbing behind them. Sweat began to form under her arms, at the back of her neck. Crowds now frightened her. By the time the asphalt road gave way to gravel, twenty or more workers were ganged behind them. At the last bend she saw the vévé, a symbolic drawing, on the ground, made from cornmeal that stood out yellow against the brown earth.

  Since Paz’s firing, Octavio had spoken carefully of Minna, but now he spewed a bitter list of grievances: “She treats the workers badly. Bossing, cursing, threatening to have them fired.” Appalled at Minna’s cruelty to Paz before she quit, her disregard for Octavio, her arrogance to those whose names she didn’t bother to learn, still Claire had stood by and done nothing since her last chastisement to make sure the bad behavior ended. She turned a blind eye, and Octavio was no longer allowing that to continue. She felt both anger and gratefulness to him for forcing her to deal with that delinquency. Was it possible that Minna was really bad? Especially when she was capable of such tenderness to Claire?

  She leaned on the further excuse that this was a cultural difference, that owning a plantation in the Caribbean implied very different things. Weren’t there stories from the old days in California—ranchers who got it into their head they could play God? Who beat their workers? Took the laborers’ daughters as common-law wives? It was only a recent phenomenon that employees were prized and well treated. In a perverse light, couldn’t the ranch be seen as a modern incarnation of a plantation? The Baumsarg farm had always had the reputation of paying high wages and treating people well. Claire had lectured Minna on this but suspected she only paid her lip service.

  * * *

  Now Claire stopped and stared down at the vévé, as intricate and temporary as a Tibetan sand painting that monks destroy at completion.

  She recognized the figure’s purpose from Minna’s room—a drawing to call down the iwa, the spirits—but she dreaded to find out what more lay ahead.

  “The men are not happy,” Octavio said, but Claire no longer listened, driven by the sight in front of her.

  The lemon tree had been transformed. The lower limbs sawed off, exposing the trunk, the cut spaces like wounds, the base saturated in red, yellow, and green. Figures were painted—a man with three horns coming out of his head, a mother clutching a child. Snakes and crosses. A rope hung from the fattest upper limb, and on it were strung empty liquor bottles. The rope and bottles couldn’t be denied as resembling a noose, and the stubbed candles in the ground suggested miniature headstones. Nothing terribly upsetting after seeing Minna’s room, yet here, in the open, the tableau had a menacing feel.

  “The workers, they say this is malo. That she has cast un espiritu maligno on the ranch.”

  Claire laughed in his face, loud and scornful, so that the workers behind her were sure to hear. “I told Minna to do this. This is her artwork. An art installation. I can’t help that some don’t understand—”

  “A few men have been in car crashes. Some of their wives have had miscarriages.”

  “Surely you’re not going to blame those things on this?”

  But Octavio would not back down. “She came and offered me money if I say nothing.”

  “Really?” Claire said, trying to hide surprise. “That’s hard to understand because I already knew about it. Maybe she just wanted to surprise me when it was completed.”

  “She hit me when I refused to take her money.” She saw his face turn a brick color, sweat beaded on his forehead.

  “I think you misunderstood her.”

  “A lo mejor, maybe,” Octavio said. “But some of the men see these things and think they make maldición. They don’t want to work here any longer.”

  “Well. Well.”

  “Why do you let this happen?” he pressed. “This is something very dangerous here, entiendes?”

  A car was speeding down the road; Claire had been straining to hear it all along. Absurdly, she wanted to bolt and run away. It came into view with Minna’s tight face behind the windshield. She skidded to a stop in the gravel, jumped out of the car as if it were on fire.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I insisted Octavio give me the grand tour,” she said, needing to lie to Minna more than to keep up pretenses in front of Octavio.

  “Get in,” Minna ordered.

  “Why did you do this?” Claire said, not moving, and her tone, shrill and pleading and intimate at the same time, canceled the witness of the men around them.

  A shadow passed the corner of her eye. Ready for the superna
tural, Claire was surprised that it was simply a piece of rotten fruit that hit Minna in the neck. It burst wet against her skin, ran down her blue blouse; flecks of reddish gore even splattered as far as Claire’s white T-shirt. A tomato.

  “Who did that?” Minna yelled, but the crowd of men just stood, impassive and quiet as stones.

  Claire turned to Octavio. “Help us.”

  As she spoke, a whole volley of oranges and dirt clods hit Minna in the back, on her arms, her legs. Hit Claire, as she tried to protect Minna with her own body. The words bruja and puta, and other words, until Claire’s own curses joined the roar. Octavio yelled for the men to stop, then, when that proved ineffective, ran into the crowd and cuffed the nearest ones. Claire ran for safety, pushing Minna ahead of her, to the car.

  By the time they reached the house, Claire was shaking.

  “Why the tree? You know how I feel!”

  “The spell needs to be in place.”

  “You tried to bribe Octavio.”

  “Never. He lies.”

  “You are crazy. You’re making me crazy.” The evidence of the tree had been a break in the trance—a moment when the frog realized it was boiling.

  * * *

  Claire sat in the chair on the front porch and waited, ready for more trouble. Another attack by men. Her mental state snapped so naturally right back to fifteen years before, it was as if the intervening years had never been. When Minna brought her a glass of water, she hissed at her, “Get in. What are you doing out here?” Turning Minna’s words back on her. Minna’s eyes filled with hurt, and Claire relented, all the while scanning the driveway.

  “I should have told you,” Minna said. “It’s my fault.”