Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  He was remembering how much Eva had disliked coming home with him, partly because of the way he was treated in the family, and partly because of her sense of the closed circle he and his brothers and mother made. Once when they were still married, she hadn’t come for the holiday, she’d sent him with just the girls. His brothers had teased him about his “liberated” wife, about his doing all the work while she took a vacation, about being pussy-whipped. (When they divorced, nothing had been said. It wasn’t even as though she had died; it was as though she’d simply never existed.)

  “The boys,” “you boys,” as his mother called them, had been there for two days now with their families—all but Mark would leave tomorrow. Their mother’s joy in their presence was palpable, though it mostly took the form of the presentation of food, as it always had. Mark had been the first to arrive, and he’d been able to take in the scope of her effort in its pristine, untouched state: the jars of cookies, the pies and a cake ready for snacking, Rice Krispies treats, and something his mother called TV mix—pretzels, Corn Chex, nuts, and a few other dried cereals tossed with oil and Worcestershire sauce and toasted. The dinner she prepared the first night they’d all eaten together—last night, Thanksgiving Eve—was one they’d always loved: meat loaf and mashed potatoes with gravy, green beans with slivered almonds, and creamed corn. They were all skinny men, except Bill, who’d stayed in this world and whose stout wife cooked the way Mark’s mother did. At the end of the meal, the four brothers had sat with their chairs pushed back from the table, their hands resting lovingly on their swollen stomachs, and let their mother bring them cups of the strong coffee she drank through the evening, right up until bedtime. The three wives, restless and perhaps bored, had cleaned up, leaving the family to their old habits.

  Now his mother stood next to him, drying dishes, putting them back on shelves, in cupboards and drawers. She was a slender woman, and she’d been pretty, he would have said, until only a few years earlier. But she’d had a cancer scare then—one breast had been removed—and the illness, and perhaps the treatment too, had altered her. He hadn’t seen her when her hair was gone, when she had lost almost thirty pounds. But even partly recovered, she was diminished, aged. Her face seem collapsed, her skin hung in new pouches, over new emptinesses. Mostly, though, a kind of determined energy that had always marked her had vanished. Even her eyes, which had signaled that energy—a hard, snappish blue—seemed faded. Sometimes over these three days, he’d looked at her when she hadn’t known she was being watched, and her body, her face, seemed abandoned to him, like something she’d left behind.

  Now, though, animated by her sons’ presence, she was teasing the “boys” as they tried to help—flirtatious with all of them, as always. It struck him that she had loved having sons. What would she have done with a daughter? with a Daisy, an Emily? Her wiles, her way of being maternal, all these were aimed at men. Today, at the end of the meal when they could eat no more, she had scolded them, and compared them to their father. “Now there was a man who knew how to put it away,” she had said, bright, teasing.

  No one had mentioned the series of heart attacks, the untimely death, her long widowhood.

  He looked at her. She was holding a large platter now, drying it, smiling as she listened to the two younger wives in the kitchen, who had adopted something like her tone as they mocked their husbands for their gestures at helping—gestures that the husbands themselves had consciously made minimal, inept, as part of the joke.

  “Oh, ya mean these dishes are dirty?” Linda asked in a voice like Goofy’s. “Gee, a-huh! A-huh!”

  Suddenly there was an explosive crash.

  Mark looked up, around, in confusion. His mother stood, her hands empty, her face sagged in open-mouthed shock.

  And then she wailed, a sound of such deep pain, such loss, that his hands lifted from the water in response.

  But Linda was already there, holding her, and then Kate was kneeling on the floor, starting to pick up the pieces of the platter that had slipped from his mother’s hands, that had broken into hopelessly small shards which were scattered all over the kitchen.

  “Oh no!” his mother cried with a grief so powerful you would have thought she’d lost a child, a lover. “No, no.”

  Her sons had come to the kitchen door and stood, like Mark, stupid, helpless, before this sorrow that sounded so bottomless, that must connect to their father’s death, to her fears for herself, to all she’d lost or never had; but that came from a part of her she would afford them no knowledge of, give them no access to.

  And so, once it was over, once his mother had reappeared from her bedroom, recovered, her lipstick newly applied, cheerful once more, no one spoke of the scene again; and the next day the goodbyes were cheerful, teasing, and full of references to next year.

  That night, Mark’s last night home, he and his mother were quiet together. She seemed deflated to him, but maybe she was just tired. She served Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner, with scalloped potatoes she’d made that afternoon. The crusts of what was left of the pies were a little soggy by now, but Mark had a thin slice of each.

  “I keep meaning to ask about the girls,” his mother said after dinner. They were sitting in the living room, their coffee cups resting on TV tables she’d set up by each of their chairs. “I wish kids wrote letters anymore.”

  “You need to get on the phone,” he said. “The phone is what kids understand. Why don’t you call whenever you feel like it and let me know what it costs? I’ll reimburse you. Or just charge it to my number. It can be my Christmas present to you.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to start calling long distance at the drop of a hat now.” Though she was smiling, her voice was slightly testy, certainly dismissive. “I’m too old for that. In my book, long distance is still a luxury.”

  “You’re only as old as you feel, Ma.”

  She smiled. “Like I said, I’m too old.” The television sat across the room from them, turned on low. A report on the fall of the Berlin wall, with the images they’d seen many times before—the young people dancing on top of it, the crowds, the joy. Both of them watched it for a moment. Then she said, “But they’re good, the girls?”

  “They seem great to me. One’s a winner socially, one’s a loser, but that could change any time. Daisy’s coming on strong. She’s almost six feet tall, you know. Well, five-ten or so.”

  “Oh my. Five-ten! That could be hard on a girl that age.”

  “Yeah, for now it is. But the thing is, she’s going to be gorgeous. She’s going to turn heads. Emily, of course, already does, but Daisy’s going to turn all the heads, ’cause she’s going to stand way, way over anyone else.”

  “And they’re both doing good in school?” Meaning, at least in part, that she wanted her usual reassurance that the girls hadn’t inherited his problems.

  “Fantastic. Daisy’s making straight A’s, just about, and Emily seems to be doing fine at Wesleyan. We don’t see her grades till the semester’s over.”

  “I bet they grade real hard there, given how hard it is just to get in. I hear it’s just as bad as Harvard, or Yale or any of those big ones.” And she began to talk about local kids, the grandchildren of friends, her grandchildren by Bill, the children of Mark’s cousins who lived nearby, all of whom were far more vivid to her, he knew, than his own children—details of where they were going to school, where they were applying, where they might get in.

  When she stopped, he waited a moment, and then he said, “Eva seems better.” She didn’t look at him. He said, “It’s been hard for her, this last year, but she seems to be doing okay, finally.”

  Why had he brought Eva up? To prepare his mother? To accustom her to hearing Eva’s name, to having her be in his life again? He wasn’t sure actually; but it didn’t matter, since it was as if he hadn’t mentioned her. His mother said only, “Hnnh,” and then, a moment later, asked him if he wanted more coffee.

  He said no, he was fine.

  Th
e house was silent around them except for the murmur of the TV. The windows were black. He imagined her here alone night after night. He thought of the sound she’d made crying out the day before, of her nameless grief. He said, “You’re happy, Mom? It seems … kind of quiet now. Your life.”

  “Well, I don’t know that I’d say happy, exactly. But I’m content,” she said.

  He could feel something rehearsed, something self-satisfied in the way she summoned and used the word, and he understood that she’d said this before, perhaps more than once. That she’d used it to sweep aside any need to look at herself and her life, to try to change things.

  She went on. “I think this happiness business is ridiculous, really. I’m content with my lot, and I hope to stay right here, among my friends and dear ones, until they carry me out.”

  “Feet first.”

  “Is that the way?” She smiled. “All right, feet first.” After a long moment, she suddenly began to sing, an old song he remembered from his youth. Her voice was thin, but she had perfect pitch—she still sang in the church choir—and she clearly loved the words, the story the song suggested.

  Oh when I die

  Don’t bury me at all.

  Place my bones

  In alcohol.

  And at my feet

  Place a white snow dove,

  To tell the world

  That I died for love.

  They sat for a moment, and then she got up and started to clear their cups away.

  HE HAD BEEN to Santa Fe before he went to Nebraska. This had become his practice since he and Eva had been divorced—to reward himself for the work of the harvest and for the trials of the coming Thanksgiving visit home with a trip to a place he’d never been before.

  At first he had liked Santa Fe—for its exoticism, its beauty. You could have been in another country, he thought. But after the second day, he felt himself too much a part of the economy: a cog in its wheel, a tourist, meant to move from one commercial destination to another. And there was no destination, it seemed to him, that wasn’t commercial. It was hard to tell where people lived, or even whether people actually did live in the town anymore.

  He wondered if this was Napa’s destiny—to be there for the viewing, the purchasing. To be preserved in this way. Of course, the towns in the valley were less historic, less exotic than this one, and people did live in them. But more and more they needed money to do that. Big money. And though it was true that the agricultural preserve kept it in vineyards—so it would go on being farmed indefinitely—it was also maybe the only kind of farming in the universe, he thought, that could be a tourist attraction. He’d felt it as an irritation several times during crush, driving a truck laden with grapes, pulling a gondola full, waiting in the long lines of tourist traffic to make a turn, fretting about the rising heat, the time wasting. And yet, without the tourists, his work would have been worth less. Far less.

  He had a rental car in Santa Fe, and when he got tired of strolling into the shops and galleries and churches and restaurants near the plaza, he drove out into the surrounding country on several days, watching the dry land roll and change. He stopped three times at Indian pueblos and walked around, taking in the small stone-and-adobe buildings that had been there for centuries, looking at what remained of that ancient way of life. Several places charged admission, but one seemed utterly derelict; and even though several families, anyway, were still living there, he was apparently free to wander anywhere he wanted, unchecked. But this was the pueblo where he felt most the intruder, in the end, where he was most aware of his false relation to the life he looked at—it seemed so sunk in poverty, so helpless.

  He had talked about all this to a bartender in Santa Fe one night. He was in an expensive restaurant where the waitstaff was all white, and the runners, the bus boys, were Mexican and Indian. “Yeah, they work it different,” the bartender said, speaking of the pueblos. He wore a heavy brocade vest over his white shirt. “Some of them, okay, you can look all you want for five or ten bucks, but they don’t even live there anymore, it’s like a museum. They’ve moved onto their lands now, they’re out there in ranch houses with big dishes. But some others are right there, living there, even selling stuff, charging you an arm and a leg.” He shrugged. “Some of them, you can come in for free and take all the pictures you want; but go near their kiva, man, you’re in trouble. And then there’s a couple so disorganized that they don’t even think of making money. Just, whatever. Got a drink? Got a buck?” He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall counter. Behind him, in front of the antique mirror that lined the bar, was a display of expensive malt liquors, most of which Mark had never heard of. “It’s all over the map,” he said.

  Mark had liked Albuquerque better, what he saw of it on the day he spent there before he caught his plane to Lincoln. People were living there anyway, a mix of people, and the sense of high tourism was absent. It made him think of the valley again, the valley as it had been when he got there and as it was now. It made him think of all that was for sale in Napa, of all the big arguments about the wineries: should they be selling caps and T-shirts and jars of mustard? What corrupted? What was sufficiently connected to the making of wine to belong?

  He was grateful, he thought, to be just a grower, a manager. Life was easier when you stayed free of those questions. He sold grapes. He sold his knowledge of the soil, of farm machinery and trellising techniques and pruning and irrigation and the timing of things. He didn’t have to think about the tourists, about the presentation of wine, about the art on the labels, about whether aprons were a wine-related product or not. He was removed from all that. It was true that he didn’t very often anymore have dirt under his nails or embedded in his skin, dirt that you couldn’t wash off, dirt that said, I’m a farmer first of all. But he was a farmer. It was all he’d ever been really good at. And he was glad of his work.

  MARK THOUGHT of this again as he drove back up the length of the valley in the light late-November rain, coming home from his trip. He passed the expensive restaurants, the new, huge wineries, and he thought about it, what he’d made of his life, what he’d done. When he’d come to the valley, there had been perhaps twenty-five vineyards. Now there were at least three hundred, and scores of other small, private ranches that made their own wines or sold grapes to wineries or a little of both. He had contributed to that. That was his job, and he had done it well. But land, which had cost three or four thousand dollars an acre when he and Eva arrived, cost forty or fifty thousand now, and the price would only go higher. His clients, even the ones with the smallest ranches, were rich, and there were things about most rich people that bothered him, that he didn’t like to deal with.

  Still, the work was the same, and the pleasure of moving around with the workers, of laboring beside them, was always there. He didn’t much like the paperwork or the sense of being on call when a machine broke down, when someone didn’t like the way an irrigation pond looked from the back deck; but he liked his ability to fix things, to make things right. The soil, the machines, the tools, the seasonal patterns of work—these were all the same, were familiar and comfortable to him.

  Was he happy? He thought of what his mother had said, that she was content: her self-satisfaction in announcing that. He hadn’t liked her in that moment, he realized now. She had said what she did because she didn’t want to try, because she’d always been afraid to try. She never wanted to risk changing anything. And that probably connected to her unresponsiveness when he mentioned Eva’s name. His saying Eva’s name, his reintroducing Eva, was asking his mother to acknowledge or comment on the risk he was taking. To react to it somehow. And she wouldn’t, or she couldn’t—because that kind of effort, that kind of risk and hope, was something she’d turned away from in her own life.

  But he wanted more from his life than she did from hers. He wanted happiness. If Eva would come back to him, he thought, he could be happy with his life. That’s what he wanted to try for, wanted to risk hi
mself for.

  But he knew—he had seen it when they were last together—how hard it would be for Eva to want to try that. Even without John and his death, it would have been hard for her. How could she trust him again, or want him? When he’d been such an unreliable jerk? He had to give her all the time she needed; he had to let her be in charge.

  He fisted his hand and punched the steering wheel. This was it. He’d been thinking of Eva the whole time he’d been gone, he’d been planning various ways they might have their next encounter, but now, no: he decided now that he wouldn’t call her. He’d wait in this way too. He’d let her call him when she was ready.

  The valley was wider now, and beautiful in spite of being at its darkest, at its most drained of color. Some of the lower hills were green with pine, some were rolling bare fields studded with the sculpted trees that looked like the ones you saw in the background of Renaissance paintings. The rhythm of the vineyard rows planted across the valley floor was deeply, humanly satisfying. This was home. This was where he wanted to be. With Eva.

  With Eva and Emily and Daisy and Theo.

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER, a Tuesday, he saw Eva with a date at the movies in town. He was there with a date himself—or at any rate, with an amiable, sexy woman he had slept with occasionally. Lorie Douglas. She slept with a lot of people occasionally. She was known for it. But they were just friends now. Each of them called the other when he wanted company, wanted a partner to do something with. Lorie had called him last night and asked him to meet her at the theater. They planned to have a drink afterward and compare Thanksgivings. She had spent twelve hours stuck in the airport in Columbus, Ohio, when her connecting flight couldn’t land at O’Hare. “So you’ll be buying, my friend,” she said. “I’m owed, by someone, and it might as well be you.”