Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  When she was sitting up and the strength of his love had forced a wisp of color into her wan face, he would leave her, drive back through the streetlit town to the café where I sat licking the catsup from my fingers, and Eva sucked the last drops of soda through her straw.

  Silently we rode through the quiet neighborhoods of Redwood to the little hospital where our mother lay. Eva and I sat side by side, staring out at the cones of light the streetlights cast, gazing with a dull hunger at the windows of the passing houses, through whose opened curtains we imagined we were catching glimpses of normal lives.

  We were composing ourselves as we rode, making the transition from one world to another, and Father was lost in his own thoughts. At the time, the truck seemed filled with an unspeakable sadness, and yet now I remember those drives with longing. Despite all the fears that traveled with us, our father was driving, Eva and I were still children in the warm cab, the streets were still blazing with lights, and our mother was still waiting for us with a smile that would illuminate her whole face.

  This morning we discovered the bathtub hadn’t refilled during the night, and for several minutes I was certain the spring had dried up, certain we would have to haul our water from the creek, certain I would never have another bath.

  “Why would the spring dry up in the winter?” Eva asked, checking the faucet handles to make sure they hadn’t been turned off.

  As usual, her question calmed me, and together we went outside to examine the water tank, and then climb up behind the house to the little grotto where the spring seeps from the hillside. Kneeling on the earth beside the wooden cover, I could hear the murmur of water beneath, could smell its mineral scent. I shifted the cover off the concrete basin, and we could see that the drain at the bottom was clogged with silt. Instead of running down the pipe that leads to the tank in the clearing, our bath water was soaking back into the earth.

  It took much of the day to fix it, though most of that time was devoted to fetching tools, figuring out strategies, and forestalling problems. Our father had built the water system before we were born, and as with everything he made, it was both simple and temperamental—a perfect example of his idiosyncratic logic.

  There were moments, as the springwater rilled over our cold hands and we labored to repair his work, that I felt a deep connection to him. But mostly I felt exasperated by the way he had always either done things for us or left us to figure them out for ourselves.

  After Mother died, our evening trips to town continued. It was almost as though the three of us were all so hungry for routine that even a routine linked to her dying added a sort of structure to our lives. Then, too, a trip to town was an escape from the house to which we could no longer pretend she would return, from the unwieldy burden of our individual griefs. It appeared our sorrow could not be shared, even among ourselves. On the surface Eva’s suffering looked too much like my own, and our father’s anguish threatened to subsume us all.

  Besides, in the midst of the nightmare of my mother’s death there were instants that shocked me even more than the vastness of my woe, milliseconds when I felt relief that she was gone, when I recognized there was a sort of freedom in being released from a mother, in being able to live on without her. And there were other times when I felt a surge of such searing joy at being alive at all that I appalled myself. Even wracked with misery, there were moments when the thrill of living was so keen it made my mother’s death seem not too large a price to pay for such sensation.

  I was aghast at the betrayal those thoughts represented, by the callous creature they proved me to be. If Father and Eva knew similar moments they never spoke of them, and I could imagine no way to tell them of mine without disappointing or disgusting them. So we each grieved alone, and looked forward, in our separate ways, to those nights when we could escape to town.

  Every Saturday night, and, before gas got too scarce, often on weeknights, too, the three of us would pile into the truck after a hasty dinner and drive into Redwood. Once in town, there were always errands to run. We would stock up on groceries, stop at the hardware or drugstore, go to the library.

  Finally, our business completed, Father would drop us at the Uptown Café, where Eva and I had been timid regulars since the days our mother was in the hospital. There we would begin the evening with an icy Coke and the throb of the jukebox, while Father drove to a quiet bar across town where sometimes he met his friend Jerry and sometimes he sat alone, reading library books and taking measured sips of a single beer.

  For a long time we were outsiders at the Uptown. Eva and I were country girls, homeschoolers, a breed apart from the town kids who seemed to own those vinyl-covered booths and chrome-rimmed counters. No matter how carefully I tried to dress for those evenings it seemed that my clothes were always just slightly wrong, and I could never get my hair to look like the other girls’. When we first began going to the Uptown, only the waitresses welcomed us.

  The other kids all seemed so sure of themselves as they called for burgers and fries, punched their requests into the jukebox, and swirled from one booth to the next in what seemed like a sophisticated version of musical chairs. They bantered and joked. They pinched and pushed and hugged each other. They rolled their eyes. They leaned together to whisper and then exploded into laughter, and I yearned to abandon the morass of myself and become one of them.

  I’m not sure how we finally crossed that boundary, but one night a few months after our mother died, when the midsummer sun didn’t set till after nine and the air outside the Uptown was tender and fragrant in the long twilight, we found that the group in the café had swollen to include us as naturally as a stream accepts another few drops of water.

  Maybe they were attracted by what had so terrified me. In the midst of my grief and shock I knew a kind of frantic joy. Against all odds Eva and I were alive, and maybe the irrepressible knowledge of our vitality gave us a sheen that more than made up for our homeschoolers’ awkwardness. We had the passion of survivors, and survivors’ lack of caution. We were immortal that summer, immortal in an ephemeral world, and the group at the Uptown must have sensed it and opened to let us in.

  From that night on, every evening we spent in town began when we pushed against the glass door of the Uptown and entered to hear our own names ringing in our ears—”Nell! Eva! Over here! Come here!” We would hang around the café, gabbing with those who were there before us, flinging ourselves from booth to booth, sharing drinks and jokes, yelling opinions about what songs should be played next, and calling greetings to the new arrivals. Finally, when we had drunk all the soda we could hold or afford, and our group was overflowing the booths, a new restlessness would strike us. Then, in twos and threes and fours, we would spill out into the balmy evening, wander across the street to the grass-scented Plaza.

  The Plaza was a city block at the heart of Redwood, a wide square of grass ringed by an unlikely mix of palm and redwood trees, crisscrossed by a concrete path, and dotted with wooden benches and sodium streetlights. At one end was a gazebo where local quartets and jazz bands used to perform on Sunday afternoons, and at the very center was a splashy fountain into which Eva and I had once tossed the pennies our mother gave us for wishing. There we would congregate, along with the rest of the town’s young people, our faces illuminated by the buzzing, orange-tinged streetlights as we grouped and regrouped, flitting like moths from one light to the next.

  I don’t know whether it was the uncertainty of the times that added a sense of significance to those evenings, or whether to all people there comes a moment when they feel as though they are the chosen ones, blazing brighter, hotter, fiercer than anyone else ever has or will. But now it seems as though, on some pheromonal level we could already sense the changes that were to come. Now, when I look back on those evenings from the cloistered stillness of this clearing, it seems the very air was charged with urgency, and I remember feeling a sort of pity for everyone who was not us.

  At eleven o’clock, our father
would pull the pickup along the south side of the Plaza, and we would hurry to meet him, calling our good-byes over our shoulders, running like Cinderellas across the dark grass, crossing the vast divide between the keen immediacy of Saturday night and the sad and interminable rest of the week.

  Despite the fact that, at the Plaza, I was surrounded by people whom I called friends, I still felt achingly alone. My days were spent studying, isolated with my books, tapes, and dreams of Harvard. I longed to be with someone as I had once been with my sister, back in those days before she had begun dancing, when she and I had lived like twin streams, chattering and laughing through the forest.

  At first I tried to find a best friend among the other girls who congregated at the Plaza. But I was a newcomer and it seemed they had all known each other forever. They were friendly with me, but with each other they shared an entire universe of jokes and memories and a knowledge of TV shows, algebra teachers, and school lunches I soon realized I couldn’t hope to replicate.

  So I abandoned my wooing of the girls and began to consider the possibility that a boy might put an end to my loneliness. Of course I had observed other relationships between the boys and girls of our group, had seen them flare and die, and had even added my observations and speculations to the web of gossip that surrounded them. I studied those couples with a confused longing as they talked together for hours, or gazed silently into each other’s eyes. I saw them vanish into the darkness of the trees and watched them emerge much later, their faces soft and puffy, their clothes rumpled and mis-buttoned as they stood blinking beneath the streetlights. And I thought perhaps my sorrows would ease, if only I, too, had a boyfriend.

  But I had no idea how to get one. Under those streetlights my knowledge of Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, and Romeo and Juliet seemed to be of little help. “Don’t you ever want a boyfriend?” I once asked Eva. But she only answered “What for?” with such astonishment that I could think of no reply.

  I always thought Eva was the prettiest girl at the Plaza, with her blond hair, her dark eyes and dancer’s legs, and yet she never seemed to notice any of the boys who, in elaborate displays of nonchalance, drifted her way during those long summer evenings. She was nice to all of them and yet so self-contained that not one of them ever made her giggle or blush. She never kept surreptitious track of any of them as they made their rounds from streetlight to streetlight. They saw that and sought out other girls. And only I ever seemed to notice what she had lost.

  One autumn night, as a group of us stood on the dark grass beyond the reach of the streetlights, someone passed me a bottle. I could feel the slosh of the liquid it contained and I knew a moment of fear and rapture as I raised it to my lips. I leaned back into a long, bare-throated swallow and handed the bottle on as the shock of the alcohol ripped through me. I bit my tongue to keep from sputtering and was thankful for the darkness that hid my tears. But when the bottle circled back, I took another drink and found the next swallow was easier. It was almost like going down the high slide in the park for the second time—the slide was just as steep, but there was a line of other kids waiting impatiently behind me, and besides, I had survived one plunge, had learned the surge and tingle were worth the fear.

  For one thing, after that first drink, I began to feel a warm, new comradeship with the people whose mouths had also touched the bottle’s lip. It seemed my loneliness eased a little. Nobody said anything different, but somehow the usual talk meant more than it had before, as if our words were a kind of code that only hinted at all that resided beneath them.

  After that night, I was always there when the bottle appeared, and I drank whatever it contained, usually beer or wine, occasionally rum, or gin, or brandy. It became the sweetest moment of the week, to stand with that ring of friends in the dark, drinking from a bottle that traveled from hand to hand. It was a ritual that sometimes Struck me as religious and at other times seemed like a children’s circle game, but always it helped to soothe my gaping loneliness.

  Sometimes I wonder if someone will ever come for me, if there will ever be a boy—a man—for me to open to. I wonder if I will always be like this, alone, always forced to content myself with myself, my own hand tucked between my legs so that my body makes a kind of circle, a zero, enclosing the clean emptiness of nothingness, a Möbius strip or an ouroboros—the serpent that swallows its own tail.

  I yearn for someone to claim what I long to give. And still Eli’s is the only face I have for my desire.

  All last winter the Uptown Café seemed to grow darker, Saturday by Saturday. Sometime after Christmas the neon sign in the window was turned off. One by one the fluorescent tubes overhead burnt out and weren’t replaced. Slowly the Cokes seemed to get weaker, the fries more rancid, and the burgers shrank until they almost disappeared. The jukebox broke and was never fixed. Paper napkins and straws vanished. And more and more often, long before the 9:00 closing time, the fat proprietor would come huffing around to each booth saying, “Okay, kids. Cafe’s closing. You gotta go now. Come back soon, okay?”

  We would grumble, order sodas to go—as long as there were still paper cups left to put them in—and reluctantly bundle ourselves to leave the café for the damp chill of the winter night.

  By late January the power outages were becoming more frequent than the winter storms could account for, and by the end of February, the city of Redwood could no longer afford to keep the streetlights on in the Plaza. Of course we all made sour jokes about Third World countries in which the peasants’ power went off whenever the castle lights were turned on, but in a way we almost welcomed the lack of the streetlights’ glow and buzz. The night grew larger and closer and more stirring, and it didn’t take more than an hour or two of milling in the shadows for us to discover fire.

  It became another ritual, building that bonfire. Someone figured out we could use the concrete trough of the empty fountain for a firepit, and gradually everyone got in the habit of bringing something burnable to the Plaza—a splintered two-by-four, a branch, a piece of twisted plywood, an armful of pinecones.

  When enough wood and trash had accumulated in the fountain basin, someone would strike a match, would touch it to the scraps of paper and dried grass at the bottom of our pyre. We all watched quietly as the fire snaked up through the tangle of twigs and boards and the first sparks rose to the stars. For a long moment we were aware of the new darkness that pressed in against our backs, but soon our solemnity would collapse and we would turn our attention again to each other, to the web the group of us wove each Saturday night.

  Week by week, as the weather began to grow a little warmer, the rumors grew wilder and more threatening. We heard that a new kind of hemorrhagic fever was sweeping the country, as well as more virulent strains of TB and AIDS. We heard that the rioting was increasing, that smoke from the fires of Los Angeles had grown so thick the airports had to be shut down, and freeways were clogged with cars that had been abandoned when their drivers could no longer see to steer them.

  Even with the power gone entirely, it’s funny how little those rumors meant to us at the Plaza on Saturday night. They were part of our entertainment, something to speculate about, a fuel for our conversations, but little more. The world beyond the Plaza was crazy and out of our control, but that was nothing new—hadn’t the grown-up world always been like that? What mattered to us were the events inside the circle our bonfire cast, for it seemed that nothing as compelling could possibly be taking place elsewhere.

  Sometime in March, there came a bottle of whiskey that burned like lighter fluid when I swallowed it. Again and again, I took my turn at it, until finally the bottle came round no more. Suddenly the night was more aromatic, keener and fuller than it had ever been, and I felt a deep regret that I had never before been open to all its beauty.

  Regret seemed a familiar emotion. My mind groped around itself, as though the light had been turned off in a familiar room, until I stumbled over the pain of my mother’s death. Mournfully I reminded
myself she had been gone for almost a year. But even that pain was not as acute as my sorrow over the loveliness of the night.

  “It’s a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful night,” I said to Eva. My mouth felt as though I had just come from the dentist’s, but my eyes were sharp with tears.

  My sister looked at me strangely.

  “It’s like music,” I said. “Beautiful music. Water Music. Beautiful night water music.” Then I was dancing.

  I shrugged off my jacket, kicked off my shoes, tugged my socks loose, and I was dancing across the grass, leaping and turning and running, dancing to the music of the night. I was dancing to the stars, dancing instinctively what it had taken Eva years of training to learn. All of those people, those kids in their thick clothes, I pitied them. They didn’t understand what I knew in all my bones. They didn’t know their own sweet muscles, the power of their own fine lungs. Gravity and I had come to some new agreement. My body was a moment’s conjunction of flesh and fire and a music only I could hear, and I understood I could make it do whatever I bid.

  As I danced I decided that I, too, would become a ballerina. I, too, would ignore my mother’s wishes and follow in her footsteps. I knew in my newly discovered muscles that I could be as good a dancer as Eva—maybe better. We would train together, dance together. We could share her studio as we had once shared the forest. I would never be lonely again. Together, my sister and I would devote our lives to dancing.

  I was turning back to find Eva, to call to her through that marvelous darkness, Now I know. I understand. Watch me! Look at me! when a final, glorious tour jeté catapulted me onto the sidewalk at the Plaza’s center, and I glissaded my bare foot across the concrete, scraping my big toe over it as though it were chalk instead of flesh.