Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  Mark is talking now about how the overgrown land behind his house has been cleared for a vineyard by his neighbor, affording him a startling new view of the mountain. They both speak of the skyrocketing real estate prices in the valley, of how grateful they are to have bought when they did.

  And now she’s suddenly talking about Theo, the child who doesn’t even belong to Mark. She has felt the impulse growing in herself, and in her ease with him this evening, she gives over to it. She explains about the trouble Theo’s been having in day care, about how he apparently can’t seem to stay long with any one activity. Sometimes he gets angry, he has a tantrum—his caregiver has to give him a time-out, an expression Eva detests, and can’t say without a mocking emphasis. She tells Mark she thinks this is related to John’s death, to Theo’s not accepting John’s death. “He never speaks of it,” she says.

  “Well, it was pretty awful. He probably doesn’t like to think of it.”

  “But don’t you think he needs somehow—I don’t know—to confront it? I know that sounds like psychobabble, but I think … I can’t help feeling he doesn’t really believe John is dead. And it can’t be good for him to hang on to that fantasy.”

  Mark doesn’t answer for a minute. She can’t tell what he might be thinking. He’s turned away, looking at the fire. But now he looks over at her and smiles. “I’m sure he’ll be all right, Eva. I know he will.” Somehow, for no good reason, this reassures her, her spirits feel lighter.

  When they go back into the kitchen so Eva can pull the meal together, the kids hear them and come downstairs, and there’s the pleasant sense of milling around that has happened only occasionally since John’s death. Mark is showing Theo a trick where they hold hands and the little boy walks up Mark’s body until Mark flips him over. Emily is talking to Eva about the college catalogue she’s gotten in the mail from Wesleyan, and one of the courses she’s thinking of taking next year—and Daisy is sitting on the counter, listening. Emily stands next to Eva while she talks, more or less leaning on her. Eva finds this odd, this impulse to physical proximity. She can’t imagine having wanted such a thing from her own mother. But when Emily talks to Eva, she often touches her, idly rearranging her mother’s hair, straightening her collar. And now that both girls are taller than she is, Eva sometimes feels swamped by them—by Emily’s impulse to tell her everything, by Daisy’s presence and the needfulness she feels in it, by being touched in this idle way whose meaning she doesn’t truly understand.

  Now she pokes Daisy off the counter and hands her a bowl of salad to take to the table. Then they are all trailing her, picking up the dishes and glasses she asks them to bring.

  As Mark comes into the dining room with their wineglasses and the bottle, he asks Eva where she wants him. She’s setting Theo into his booster chair, pushing him in. “There,” she says, pointing. “At the head of the table, please.”

  Theo frowns; he looks over at Mark. After a moment he says, “Why is Mark’s place called the head of the table, Mumma?”

  Eva is moving to her place, sitting down. “Hmmm,” she says. “I suppose the idea is that you’re supposed to think of the table as being like a person. Imagine it standing up, imagine if we just tilted it. It would make a big, rectangular body.” Her hands mimic the shape. “Over there, on top,” her finger makes a circle in the air, “is the head. So Mark is at the head.”

  After a long beat, Theo’s frowning face opens, and he cries, “And me and Daze are the arms!”

  “Right,” Mark says.

  Eva drinks a little wine, the wine Mark has brought as a gift.

  “And I am the leg,” says Emily grandly, her hand rising to her small bosom. “The only leg. This happens to be a one-legged table.”

  Theo picks up his glass of milk, and is just taking a swallow when Mark says, “A peg leg.”

  Theo’s milk shoots out of his mouth, splattering the table and his plate. “A peg leg?” he yells, delighted.

  “Oh, Theo!” Eva is up, in two steps at Theo’s place, wiping up in front of him with her napkin.

  “Well, he said peg leg, Mumma. That was funny!” He turns. “That was funny, wasn’t it, Mark?”

  “Wipe your face, sweetie. Use your napkin.” She is picking up his plate to get at the milk underneath it. “It was funny.”

  “You know me,” Mark says. “Famous wit.”

  Theo rubs his face thoroughly, extravagantly, and as he finishes, he begins to call out, “Peg leg! peg leg! peggy-leggy! leggy-peggy!”

  Eva sits down as the chant goes on. “Enough!” she says. “Enough, Theo. We get it.”

  He falls silent, and everyone begins to eat, passing the bowls around. Theo is looking at Eva now. She watches as an idea visibly dawns. With the delighted emphasis he reserves for bottoms, for sexual body parts, for bathroom functions, he announces, “Mumma is the table’s butt!”

  Eva makes a face across at Mark.

  “Right, Theo,” Daisy says in a world-weary voice, a voice meant to suggest, Grow up, why don’t you?

  Theo turns to Mark and says it again. “My mom is the table’s butt!”

  Eva can see that Mark doesn’t know what to say. He’s not used to this boyness. She leans forward toward Theo. “Hey, mister,” she says. “Listen up. I’m going to tell you a story.”

  Theo turns to her with his wicked grin. “A story about a butt!” he says.

  “No, because we’re all heartily sick of hearing about butts. This is a story about a little boy.” She has a sip of wine. “A big boy, I mean. A big boy, who … Let’s see. Got lost one day. Lost in the forest.”

  He is suddenly attentive, the smile gone. “Was there a wolf?”

  “There was not a wolf,” Eva says firmly. “It was not that kind of forest. But night was coming on and the woods were getting dark, and the big boy was far, far away from home.” She taps her wineglass. “This is very nice, Mark,” she says. “Made from some of your grapes?”

  “Tell!” Theo says. “Tell it!”

  Eva smiles slyly. “Oh, Emily knows what happens next. Don’t you, Emily?”

  “Me!” Emily says. “Thanks a lot, Mom.” But she’s used to this game, one they often played when John was alive. He had invented it to keep Theo sitting peacefully at the table through a long meal. Emily stops and thinks, and then she carries on. “Okay. Well. The boy was very scared, but he didn’t cry. He knew he had to be brave, because … he was all by himself, and no one else could rescue him. It was his own fault he was lost, too, because everyone had told him not to go into that forest, they told him over and over that it was dangerous in there, but he went anyway, because what he liked to do best of all was stuff that people told him not to do.”

  “He was bad.”

  “He was not bad exactly, but he was really naughty. But all of a sudden the boy heard …” Emily raises her eyebrows, opens her mouth in mock surprise. “Guess! Guess what he heard.”

  “What?”

  Her smile is open and teasing. She doesn’t answer him.

  “What? What? What? What?” Theo is rocking his body with each cry.

  “Daisy knows,” she says. “Ask Daisy.”

  Daisy shakes her head, biting her lip.

  “What?” Theo says to Daisy. “What he heard?”

  “Come on, Daze,” Eva says.

  Daisy meets her eye with a face so pained that Eva is startled.

  But then she looks away from her mother, across the table at Theo. After a moment, she starts, hesitantly: “He heard … hoof-beats.” She is unsmiling. “And then he saw it: a beautiful white horse, running toward him. Even in the pitch-dark he could see it, it was so white. And it said …”

  She gestures rapidly, erasing herself. “Well, it didn’t say anything, because horses can’t talk, but it trotted in circles around him in the woods, and the boy knew that he should follow the horse, that special white horse.”

  Daisy’s voice is soft and rhythmic and compelling, and Theo claps his hands eagerly.


  “So he did, he followed. He could see the horse ahead of him, he could see the white legs going in and out of the dark trees, and the horse, tossing its mane. And sometimes it whinnied, and he knew it was calling to him, and sometimes, when he almost couldn’t see it anymore, then he would see it, waiting for him to catch up, and he’d know which way to go. And then …”

  “What?”

  “And the-en …” She pauses. It’s time to pass the story on, this is the way they do it. She looks at her father. The back of her head is to Eva, the long, carelessly gathered fall of thick dark hair. “Then, Mark knows the end,” she says.

  Eva can see Mark’s surprise. And Daisy must see it too, because her voice is uncertain as she says, “Right, Dad?”

  She has remembered, as Eva has—maybe they’ve all remembered—how much this was John’s game. How much it is not Mark’s. Daisy has picked the wrong father.

  “Unh …” Mark meets Eva’s gaze and frowns. “Yeah.”

  Eva watches him trying to recall the way they went, the stories she used to tell the girls, to read to them. She feels her body tense.

  “Yeah,” he says again.

  “So?” Emily says, openly teasing him now. “Come on, Dad.”

  “So.” There’s a long pause. “He followed that horse.” He drinks some wine. “Up hill and down dale.”

  “Excellent, Mark!” Eva says.

  He smiles at her and continues. “Until he saw ahead of him a clearing.” He turns to Theo, and as he goes on, his voice becomes more comfortable in the narrative. “And when he came to it, he saw it was where the woods ended. Below him were the lights of his town. And he looked around to thank the horse, but it wasn’t there; it was gone. Did I imagine it? he thought. Who was that white horse, anyway?”

  Eva laughs.

  “But he didn’t have time to figure it out. He ran as fast as he could down the path to his village, through the streets of the town to his own front door, and there was his whole family waiting for him, and he hugged them, and they lived happily ever after.”

  At these words, although she’d known they had to come, Eva feels a strange shift, it seems in her heart. Or maybe it’s just relief—couldn’t it be relief?—that everyone’s managed this without John. That the awkward few seconds when she and Daisy, anyway, felt his absence, and Mark’s not-John-ness, is over.

  That they’re done.

  Now Theo shouts triumphantly, “The! End!” and everyone laughs. Eva doesn’t think anyone has noticed her moment of pain.

  WHEN SHE SAYS good night to Mark, he kisses her on the cheek, holding her for what seems to Eva a moment too long. A moment that fills her with yearning, in spite of herself. But yearning for being held itself, she thinks. For John. Not, she is certain, for Mark.

  As she’s getting ready for bed, though, she thinks of Mark and the way it was in the orange juice days when they first met, when it seemed they couldn’t get enough of each other. Even when they were angriest at each other—and they fought often and hard: tears, yelling, slamming doors, things tossed around—even then they could find each other again through sex, through the way their bodies worked together.

  One night when he was driving them home from someplace, they started arguing about something. Eva got so mad at him that she turned to open the car door, her impulse simply a desperation to get away. Mark reached over to grab her, and the car shot off the road, rocketing violently into a deep ditch. When they came to a stop, they sat still for a moment, panting. Then they turned to each other. They touched each other to be sure the other was whole, all right. They wept together in fear and relief. They laughed and compared the bruises that were already emerging. And before they got out to look at the damage, to see if they could push the car, they made love on the front seat, hidden by the hard slope of the shoulder from the headlights that occasionally strobed by on the road. Eva remembers the sound of a rushing river somewhere in the dark below them, and the way it felt to be riding Mark like a jockey, the steering wheel bonking her knee with every thrust forward.

  She remembers it. It, and other times. Once when she was menstruating heavily and he had her on the kitchen counter, so that when he stood up to come into her, his face was violently smeared with blood. The first time they were able to do it after the long wait for the stitches from Emily’s birth to heal. Times in the shower, times when they’d leave a party early and barely be in the door before they’d begin. Times that had once made her hungry for him when she called them up.

  After they separated, she’d been able to recast all of these times. Or rather, they’d recast themselves. They came to seem repugnant to her—ugly, forced, extreme. Symptomatic of some inability between them to make themselves happy, even sexually, in a daily way, an ordinary way.

  She’s agitated now, more wakeful than when she came upstairs. She’s angry with herself for thinking of fucking Mark. She pulls her bathrobe on and goes down the wide stairs to the first floor.

  As she passes back to the kitchen, she sees that Emily and Daisy are at the dining room table. Their faces turn to her, it seems guiltily. Books and papers are spread out around each of them. She steps forward into the room and speaks sharply to them: Why are they still up? Didn’t they do any homework at all at their father’s? Why can’t they organize their weekends better?

  She watches as their faces close over with dislike for her, with anger. Emily answers her patiently and condescendingly. She’s wearing too much eye makeup, Eva thinks. She looks like a raccoon. Eva would like to say this. She would like to tell Emily how cheap and ridiculous she looks.

  Ah! she’s cruel. They are right to hate her. Who wouldn’t? “An hour, then,” she says.

  Daisy protests.

  “One hour. That’s it. If it’s not done, it’s just not done.”

  As she crosses the hall to the kitchen she can hear them begin their low murmurs of contempt for her. She turns on the overhead light and winces at the reflected sight of herself in the glass of the French doors—her dark hair frazzling gray, her face white and pouchy.

  She opens the refrigerator and stands in its exhalation of cool, slightly rotted-smelling air. After a moment, she reaches for a half-full bottle of wine. This is not what she wants—she doesn’t know what she wants—but she pours herself a glass. She’s full of anger—at herself, at the girls, at Mark. Standing at the kitchen counter, she drinks.

  The wine is too cold, too sharp.

  It was a nice day until just now, she thinks. She’s trying to calm herself. She makes herself remember Theo, swimming, his little body working so hard to get across Gracie’s pool. She thinks of the game they played at dinner, the fairy tale and the white horse.

  Happily ever after, she thinks.

  And for the first time on this ordinary day, it comes to her: her sorrow, her sweet, sad familiar. Almost gratefully she bends under it, tears thicken in her throat. Leaning her upper body over the counter for support, she begins at last to weep.

  Chapter Three

  MARK HAD AN AFFAIR; that was the simple way to explain what went wrong in his marriage to Eva. The girls were small then, six and three, his dark-haired daughters. Daisy still had the stubby fat fingers of babyhood. He adored these fingers. In fact, sometimes Mark felt nearly dizzy with the intensity of his love for both of his daughters, with his consuming adoration of their physical beings, his fascination with every phrase that fell from their lips. With their lips themselves, delicate, perfect, framing the words.

  But he’d forgotten his love for Eva. Or rather, he’d misplaced it. He knew it was still there somewhere, but for the moment, he didn’t know how to get to those feelings.

  The problem, it seemed to him, was that she’d sunk so heavily into motherhood, into managing all their lives. He’d barely be in the door at night before she would start rattling off her list—what needed to be done to get supper on the table, what had broken in the house that he’d have to fix, soon! what one or the other of the girls had taken to doing that h
e’d have to help her deal with. Oh! and had he picked up milk? (or Pampers, or dog food) on the way home? And why was he so late? and since he was so late, how come he couldn’t have called?

  It seemed to him that what she wanted—without ever articulating it and maybe without even understanding it—was for him to have had to live through her day, to be as stuck, as mired, as she was. This is what made her angry and cold. He felt too that there was a kind of squalor to their life at home that couldn’t help but feed both their misery. Dishes always sat undone in the sink. The children’s projects—spilled paints, scissors and scraps of colored paper, dried-up playdough, toys—were always spread on the dining room table, on the floor. Books, dolls, blankies, dress-ups were everywhere. You couldn’t sit down without first having to pick up whatever child’s toy you might have sat on. Sometimes, coming into the house, he felt he couldn’t stand it. Once, within a few minutes of arriving home, he had filled the sink with soapy water and started to wash all the leftover dishes, to wipe the smeared and crumb-scattered counters. When Eva came into the kitchen and saw what he was doing, she charged him.

  “Oh, stop it!” she cried out. “Just fucking stop it, stop it, stop it!”

  He thought at first she just wanted to hit him, to pull him away from the sink. Then he realized she was tugging at the apron he’d put on, trying to tear it from him. He yanked it over his own head and threw it on the floor, and Eva burst into tears.

  She let him hold her that time. “I just can’t do it,” she sobbed, while he said to her, over and over, “I only wanted to help. I was just trying to help you, Eva.”

  He saw how it had happened. They were living out in the country, she was too much alone, she had to manage the house and the girls and the shopping and the meals. There was the house itself, with its tilting floors and the doors that didn’t quite shut, the faucets that dribbled water. It took half an hour to draw a bath. There was the long rainy season to endure, the girls cooped up, fussy, wanting to be entertained and read to. There was the dry, hot summer and the dust that coated everything. He understood much later that she’d been depressed and overwhelmed. At the time, though, he mostly hadn’t cared to understand, because her anger at him made him angry at her. He had simply turned away from her. He sought comfort first in the life of the girls’ world, the intense love for them that was like a shield against Eva’s sorrow, a blameless weapon against the anger he felt coming from her. When he arrived home, they were the ones he greeted with love, the ones he touched, the ones he smiled at.