The Understory

by Pamela Erens

  Next comes the wiring. The spruce is too mature for me to be able to bend it by hand. The book tells me to begin by using a root cutter to make two gashes in the trunk. Spruce, fortunately, heal quickly. I cut the trunk and grab hold of it with one fist. With the other I take a pair of pliers and slowly press the trunk away from itself, toward the S shape I now see clearly in my mind.

  When I first tried to bend a trunk in this way—I’d been working with a juniper—the tree snapped beneath the pliers and I was left with a jagged blade of wood, the foliage flung to the ground several feet away. I picked up the severed bunch of leaves and threw it away with a shudder. I felt an extraordinary sense of wrongdoing. The trunk I could not bring myself to throw away. I left it on the worktable, near me, as a reminder to be more careful, to go slow.

  I wrap wire around the trunk, securing it to the side of the pot. Now I move to the branches, and I raise or lower these and secure them with more wire. Each time I make a change I discover other changes that need to follow, intrusive branches or superfluous buds, and I go on in this way until only the fear of being left with nothing—only the idea of a plant, not the plant itself—stops me.

  My book emphasizes that wiring is highly traumatic for the plant. Afterward it must be watered, placed away from direct sunlight, and left alone for several days. It gives me an odd feeling, all this forcing and tying. I am light-headed and a little nauseated afterward. I feel sorry for the plants; I put them on the cool dim shelves and turn my eyes away. Supposedly I am making the plants resilient and strong, and if that is really true I can count on their outliving me by decades, maybe even centuries.

  Eight

  I suppose I’d played with other children before Henry; I must have. But I remember only Henry. I recall building a block castle with some other, now faceless boy, but what has fixed this incident in memory all these years is not the castle, which I can’t picture any more than I can picture the boy, but the unusually pleasant scent that drifted out of the kitchen while we were playing and that distracted me until I insisted on going downstairs to see what it was. There sat the two maids, his and mine, chatting over butter cookies and some unusual type of tea the other maid must have brought with her. The other maid smiled and asked in her Islands accent if I wanted any cookies. I stuffed three into my mouth at once, surprising even myself. They dissolved against my tongue into a velvety mush. Our maid—I think it was Anita at that time, the names and faces were always changing—told me I was being rude but her companion waved her hand dismissively and said sweet butter was good for any boy. Because of the maid I was eager to play with the boy again but on his next visit someone different was with him. I must have been very unfriendly because he never came to the house again. Mostly I liked to play alone.

  The summer I was thirteen, my parents rented a house in the Adirondacks for the season, a cabin with big exposed timbers and a stone fireplace. I can’t imagine what inspired them to take the place, for neither of them enjoyed the country. They lived for theater and parties and the city. My father never did come out on the weekends to stay with my mother and me. He remained in Manhattan, keeping track of the theaters he owned and his related businesses. He kept the maid with him, and for the first time my mother was without the help of housekeeper, cook, or driver. At first I was delighted to have my mother all to myself, but it soon became clear that my ideas of canoe rides and cookouts with her would not be fulfilled. She slept much of the time and smoked cigarette after cigarette, leaving full ashtrays all over the house which I eventually emptied. She read fat novels which fell into the bathtub when she dozed off and later turned up, swollen, in the trash.

  One morning she walked me down to the nearest neighbor’s, half a mile away. I didn’t want to go; I wanted to keep an eye on her and wait for her to come around enough to play a board game or cards with me. But when Henry appeared, after being called to the door, something earnest and shy about him prevented me from keeping my eyes rebelliously fixed on the ground. He was about the same height as I was, with serious eyes and a smiling mouth and blond hair that curled below his ears. His mother, plump and affable, ordered him to take me to his room. There he showed me a homemade camera and some glassine packages containing beetles and bugs. I was instantly envious of this orderly and carefully labeled collection and asked him to explain all about the fixative he had used to prevent the bugs from disintegrating. Then he showed me the frog he kept in a glass tank.

  “My aim in life,” he said, “is to discover a brand-new species of something. I don’t care what it is—it could even be mold. And then I would name it after me.”

  Finally Henry’s mother flushed us out of the room with scooping motions of her hands, asking us how we would ever become great scientists if we never went out of the house. I was startled by her big gestures and round sloppy body and the hint of mockery in everything she said; she was so entirely different from my mother. We hiked down into the ravine, where Henry collected leaves and bugs. Several times I wanted to go back, thinking the ravine was too steep, but Henry insisted that he’d help me; he did this all the time. He showed me the bracelet he wore, a leather strap with a metal disk hanging from it. The disk was engraved with the name and serial number of an older cousin who was fighting in Vietnam. He would wear it, he said, until his cousin came home safely. When he spoke about Vietnam his eyes grew even more serious than usual and his voice deepened. I found myself wishing that I were his cousin, doing something dramatic far away from home, longed for and worried over.

  That summer had begun cold and rainy, and in the mornings I often curled up shivering in my bed, not wanting to wake. But Henry got up and out early and would knock on my door, catapulting me into alertness. I threw on my clothes and we would go out to catch salamanders or just to trek silently through the woods, idly slapping at the trees with the branches we carried. Once, in one of the puddles that collected in the muddy trails and did not disappear for weeks, I saw a bulbous brownish object that I instantly took for the excrement of some large animal. I stepped back, disgusted. Henry laughed and poked at the thing with a stick. It went under the surface and bobbed up again. I began to think it wasn’t excrement after all: light gleamed on its surface and made it semitransparent. What is it? I asked. Henry told me that it was a great sac of frog eggs, that in a few weeks the tadpoles would emerge, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of them. This answer made me even more queasy, as I pictured millions of tails with large blind heads attached, wriggling and wriggling until the water seethed with their motion.

  In mid-July the heat suddenly, scorchingly arrived. The puddles in the road dried up overnight, and I wondered where the egg sacs had gone. Would the tadpoles all die? But Henry promised that when August came we would see tons of frogs leaping in the ponds and hear them calling from the tall grass. He and his mother came up here every summer; it was always the same.

  One morning, without speaking about it, Henry and I raced to the pond to go swimming. Henry, as usual, was faster than I was. He clambered onto a rock and stripped off his shirt. Is it possible I had never seen him shirtless before? If I had, I hadn’t taken it in. Henry gestured to me to join him. But I could not move. His body transfixed me in its unfamiliarity. It seemed to leap out at me: bold, raw, strange. His chest was skinny, a lattice of bones dotted with patches of eczema. His yellow hair was pasted by perspiration against the sides of his face. His nose was narrow, his eyebrows invisible, his hands delicate. He reached down to pull off his shorts and I turned away.

  I clutched my arms around my T-shirt as if the temperature had dropped again. I don’t feel well, I called out to him in a thin voice. I sat down in the grass, shivering, my face averted. I heard the splash of Henry entering the water and listened while he clowned around for a while, trying to persuade me to come in, until finally my absence made him feel silly. He began to put his clothes back on and I dizzily stood up to go. On the way back to the main road, as we walked in silence, I tripped over a tree root and blo
odied my knee. Henry reached out a hand to help me and when he had me back on my feet I pushed him hard to the ground. He stared at me in surprise, then rose and brushed himself off, and we went on.

  When we reached my door I ran into the darkness of my house without saying goodbye. My mother was in her room with her door closed. I lay down on my bed, still dizzy. My head and neck hurt. I slept on and off, waking nauseated and disoriented throughout the morning and afternoon. Late in the day my mother came to check on me, and found me feverish, with dried vomit on my bedspread. When I failed to get better after several days a doctor was called in and announced to my mother that I had viral meningitis. I was in bed for a couple of weeks and then slowly I began to recover.

  I never saw Henry after that summer, but I still thought about him. I was thinking about him as I washed the dishes after Patrick’s departure, wiped the counters, restored the salt shaker to its usual position. Every object seemed more correct when it was back in its proper place. But after dropping the shard of glass Patrick had taken from his shoe into the garbage pail, I changed my mind and took it out again. I was holding it, wondering what to do with it, when I noticed that Patrick had left his camera on the kitchen chair.

  I picked it up and unzipped the case. The camera was sleekly silver and surprisingly light. I pressed a button and a lens pushed out, a buzzing, perky robotic snout. I turned the snout toward me and peered into it, as if, if I looked hard enough, I could glimpse inside the pictures Patrick had made of me. I drew my thumb slowly over the grainy silver sheath.

  I wondered how far he would get before he noticed—three or four blocks? halfway across the city? Surely he would turn right back. I settled myself on the couch to read while I waited for him but found I could not anchor my thoughts. At this hour I was usually making my way into the Ramble. Snow would be falling on the sassafras and the viburnum and dusting the asphalt paths. Everything would look clean and calm. I cleared my throat and tasted the cindery phlegm.

  I wanted to wash. In the bathroom I watched the frigid water spill from the bathtub tap. It was useless to think of a shower; the last time I’d tried one the icy needles falling from overhead had sent me into a gasping dance. I wet a washcloth and scoured myself, teeth gritted, removing my pants and shirt bit by bit, trying to stay covered until the last possible moment. Lately this painstaking routine had made me acutely aware of my body: the looseness of the skin on my thighs, the wiry hair around my groin. Gray hair sprang from my chest. Sometimes, crouched next to the tap, a smell would reach my nostrils, a pungent mulchy odor which I associated with old people, and which I remembered sometimes having detected under my father’s cologne.

  But once the ordeal of the bath was over there was a heightened enjoyment in dressing for the day. The cold water shocked my skin into a feeling of deep cleanliness, against which the wool of my sweater and socks felt pleasurably abrasive. I put on each article of clothing slowly, as if readying myself for an appointment. When my keys and wallet were in my pocket I glanced at the clock and told myself that I could afford to wait a few minutes longer; it would be a shame if Patrick came back for his camera and I had just gone out. Perhaps he needed it for the holidays. I waited twenty minutes, and then twenty more. I turned the kitchen oven on again. I walked about the living room, scanned the bookshelves, thumbed through record jackets, looked through my uncle’s desk. At the back of one drawer was a slingshot my uncle had given to me on a visit when I was about ten years old. It was solid wood, with a groove down the center and a thick, supple leather strap. When I first saw it I thought it looked like a real weapon, like something a boy in days of old might have used to kill squirrels to skin and eat. My mother turned to my uncle with uncharacteristic disapproval and said, “Come on, now, Fred. He could put a boy’s eye out with it.” I was horrified: a boy’s eye? We left the gift behind, my mother murmuring her apologies, and then, years later, I found it in the drawer, and instantly felt guilty, as if I had in fact injured someone with it.

  Most of the drawers in the desk held ledger papers: lists of numbers, budgets. Every so often, as now, I pulled them out and looked at them. In April of 1969 my uncle had spent twenty-two dollars on groceries, two dollars on newspapers, nine dollars on books. May of ’69 was not very different. I had found no personal correspondence when I went through my uncle’s things after his death, nothing of a personal nature whatsoever, though I know my mother used to get letters from him—letters, although he lived only across the park. “Fred doesn’t like the phone,” my mother explained to my father. There were all sorts of things, according to her, that Fred liked or didn’t like. He liked ice cream. He didn’t like holidays. “Like, like,” my father answered. “We all know something else that Fred likes.” My mother frowned and shushed him.

  I stood at the window and stared down the block as if I might be able to will Patrick into returning from that direction. The snow was falling more heavily now and bundled figures were hurrying against the swells. The snow sifted onto the cars and the sidewalks, soft and powdery looking, though by morning it would be pushed into crusty banks against the sides of the street and laced with grime and dog urine. Church bells rang in the distance. Wasn’t forgetting a form of wishing? I asked myself. Perhaps Patrick had left his camera behind because he hadn’t really wanted to leave. If he hadn’t wanted to leave then he might return.

  I began to pull food out of my kitchen cabinets: a box of crackers, a jar of strawberry jam, a dusty cellophane package of lemon drops I could not remember having acquired. From the refrigerator, a wedge of cheese, an orange. I set these items out on a large plate and arranged them a number of times until they looked sufficiently attractive. Then I went back to waiting. I thought of Carl closing his shop early for Christmas, switching off the aisle lights one by one. Marion would also be leaving early. All over the city, stores were locking up, and the public places, my places, the parks and libraries, were emptying. People were boarding planes to their childhood homes or snaking out of town on the lit parkways. It was on one of these parkways, in another wintertime, that my parents had died. Absently I reached into the bag of lemon drops and sucked on a candy. I looked to see if I owned a book about Buddhism, though I knew I didn’t. There was plenty, though, on anarchism: Durruti, Proudhon, the Haymarket bombing. I had never figured out what had given my uncle, an accountant, a Quaker by birth, such an interest in lawlessness. Did he believe that man was naturally peaceful and good but was warped by brutal social arrangements? Or was it the violent wing of anarchy that attracted him, the rage and the bombs? I would never know. When my mother and I made our infrequent visits here during my childhood (my father always claimed another engagement), my mother talked about the work she was getting or couldn’t get, the difficulties an aging actress faced, the directors who were giving her trouble, and my uncle simply praised and encouraged her until she shook her head, laughing. They never talked about my uncle, what he did or thought about. At times I recognized how strange it was that every day I impersonated a man, a blood relative, who remained a complete mystery to me.

  The sun slid beneath the window and darkness came. At last I turned off the kitchen oven, thinking that I would pay dearly for the warmth it had given today. I put Patrick’s camera on the mantelpiece. Next to it I placed the shard of glass from his shoe, then his business card. I sat and looked at these objects. Then I got up and closed the window curtains, though usually I liked to see the apartments opposite at night: the glow of desk lamps and computer screens, and in this season the lighted trees and electric menorahs. A thick dust rose as I drew the fabric.

  It was not late, but I changed into my nightclothes and slid between the sheets of my bed. I pulled over myself one blanket, then another, then a third, and finally a thick quilt my uncle had owned. I lay on my back, my hands folded under all these layers, watching the ceiling, thinking that even now I might hear a knock at the door, might open it to find a tall man with a nervous, earnest face, asking if he might come in. And if
he did? I wondered. What would I do then?

  Nine

  One morning I find myself on the top floor of the abbey, looking for a broom. I have rarely been to this floor, which is reserved for the monks and the long-term residents. I get lost, walk down an unfamiliar hallway, pass an open bedroom. Something makes me pause at the doorway and look in. The room is a narrow rectangle furnished only with a cot, a small desk, a lamp, and a chair, but in its privacy it seems magnificent to me. The cot is neatly made and yet askew, the sheets tucked in at something of an angle instead of evenly on each side. A dark sock peeks from between the cot and its frame. When I squint I can see that the small bookshelf propped on the desk holds volumes by Freud, Winnicott, Lacan.

  I am sure that this is Joku’s room, and not only because of the hint of untidiness strenuously controlled. In the dining hall I once heard him explain to someone that his mother had died when he was only a few months old. He said that from the moment he was conscious of himself he knew that, unlike other little boys, he had no mommy. He knew that life was about missing something, desiring something—something you want so much you’ll die without it. That was why he’d become a psychoanalyst.

  I step into the room. There is a library in the abbey, but it is filled with titles like the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch and The Flower Ornament Scripture. Now that I am closer to the shelves I note that Joku has several volumes of Western poetry and philosophy in addition to the books on psychology. I have just opened The Psychopathology of Everyday Life when Joku speaks to me from the doorway.

  “Do my books interest you?”

  He waves away my startled and guilty expression. It’s all right, he tells me. He leaves his door open as a kind of discipline, so that he has no impulse to privacy, to self-withholding and secrets. If he invites trespassers, he must expect them occasionally. He drops into the chair and motions me to sit on the bed.