The Forgetting Tree

by Tatjana Soli

  “Then do something about it!” Claire snapped.

  * * *

  Now she avoided Forster’s calls because her guilt was overwhelming. Each day that passed made her feel a further constriction. The effects of the neglect were unavoidable: weeds crowding the driveway, dry cracks in the fields. Claire knew she would have to pull herself together. Yet how to explain that as soon as she relaxed her vigilance, she felt this deep pleasure in the moment, that as each former necessity was stripped away, it revealed itself to have been at some level less necessary than she had thought. As if weighted chains were being lifted off her. She knew she would have to return to the everyday, but for now she delayed.

  “You’re too sick to be worrying about such nonsense,” Minna replied to her complaints.

  “Forster offered to help.”

  “Why can’t you wait till I’m ready?”

  “The trees don’t wait. Fruit doesn’t wait.”

  “You want me to do this, you want me to do that. I’m only one person. Who’s going to make your dinner?”

  * * *

  Finally Forster demanded they go out to lunch alone.

  When Minna heard, she threatened to unplug the phone.

  “What good would that do?” Claire asked. “He can drive over. He’s insisting on a foreman. He’s in the right, of course.”

  Minna pouted and claimed that what with the radiation appointments in the morning and all the work in the house, she hadn’t had time to contact her cousin.

  At noon, Forster’s truck pulled off the road and started up the driveway. Claire rushed to find shoes, wanting to avoid his seeing the state of things, or, worse, meeting up with Minna.

  They reached the porch steps at the same time.

  “What the hell is this?” Forster said. She saw anger in him she didn’t remember since long before. Claire had worried about his coming inside, seeing the chaos there, but now she looked with his eyes at the surrounding farm and saw the secret was out. She was astonished at the speed of the disrepair and disintegration.

  Fruit lay rotting in the fields; the hot, melting sun tainted the air with a sweet, decaying smell. Weeds, dried to crackling, spread out between the trees, along the driveway, up through the bricks of the patio. On the porch, books and dishes wantonly covered the outdoor table, the swing, the chairs. Minna had left a blanket and book spread on the lawn weeks ago, and the regular waterings from the sprinklers had bloated the book into another kind of obscene, overripe fruit, past the point of reading. The blanket lay stiff and faded as a remnant on a battlefield.

  Forster stalked the front of the house, his face broken into a sweat unrelated to the heat. His gaze searched in each direction as if he were expecting a gun to ring out, a ghost to appear. Claire wanted to laugh and shake him, wanted to say, Don’t you realize that everything bad has already happened?

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  The cab of the truck was as chilled as the hospital, and Claire greedily aimed the vents at her face while Forster walked around and got in.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “Wait till we get to the restaurant. I don’t want to talk here.”

  “You’re looking good,” he said.

  “I look like hell. Let’s eat.”

  He chuckled. “Thank God you still sound like yourself.” He drove east, away from town, to where it still felt like open, rural farmland. They passed the white clapboard church they were married in. Claire had not been this way in a long time and was surprised that the windows were boarded up, the parking lot chained closed, the church announcement board cracked and dirty. The letters, crooked and falling, only suggested an old and long-ago invitation:

  We are people of God’s extravagant welcome.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Forster, lost in thought, looked over. “They sold the church. It’s going to be demo-ed for a retirement community.”

  “How sad.”

  “That’s the way things are going. Whether you hold on to that scrap of land or not.”

  “That scrap of land was our life.”

  They ended up in a chain restaurant in a strip mall. After iced teas were brought, Forster cut the small talk and got down to business, a trait that she used to find endearing and now found brutal.

  “I don’t know what’s going on between you and that girl…”

  “That girl’s name is Minna. What’s going on is I’m trying to not die of cancer.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Bad luck, having to replace Octavio. You of all people know how it is. No one is with you forever.” She was determined to not let Forster see how guilty she felt.

  “Running the place is a full-time job even when times are good.”

  “What do you expect?”

  “The farm’s legally still half mine. You’re running it into the ground.”

  “Minna knows an expert foreman.”

  “What the hell would she know about running a farm? I’m concerned. More about you than the farm, but it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

  Claire picked at the club sandwich she’d ordered. No chance that she could eat it. She’d have survived for a week on that sandwich alone: one day eating the bread, the next the tomato, the turkey. Later on, if she needed, gnawing on the bacon. She had learned to deconstruct life to its basic components.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes.” She had drifted, something she now was in the habit of doing.

  “Do it, or it’ll be done for you.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “If it was, I’d already have hired an attorney. Forced sale. You wouldn’t have a chance in court. I’m trying to be gentle here.”

  For the first time, Claire got scared. They ate in silence.

  “You have my word. A foreman by Friday. Come and see for yourself.”

  “What is it about this girl? Gwen and Lucy think you’re infatuated.”

  “She makes me feel needed.”

  “Your daughters needed you, I needed you. We could have left. Started over.”

  “Do you think I would have chosen any of this? You called it running away at the time. And then you all ran.”

  “And you became the expert in not living. Turning the farm into a shrine.”

  They sat in silence.

  “I’m not your concern anymore. You have a wife—not me—who you should be paying attention to. We’ve been playing this little game of ours too long.”

  “What game?”

  “This unspoken thing. Like I’m your true love. Snap my fingers, and you’ll come running.”

  Forster’s face reddened, and Claire felt shame. She had grown ruthless these last few months. She ate a few more bites of sandwich, but then pushed the rest away. She continued on because it had to be done. It was her only way to ensure the farm stayed hers. “It’s unfair to Katie. That she’s some afterthought. Don’t you owe her?”

  Now it was Forster’s turn to push his plate away. He folded up his arms. “Let’s stick to business. Who’s going to work the farm?”

  “Do you really think I’d let this farm—the thing I have left—go to ruin? My farm. After the price I paid to keep it?”

  Forster drank his coffee, not looking at her. She could tell by the set of his jaw that he would not forgive her saying those words aloud.

  During their marriage, their only respite from the stress of the ranch would be to sneak off the farm to eat at the local diner, enjoying the novelty of air-conditioning, which Hanni didn’t believe in because of the expense. They would hold hands across the table, unembarrassed, until their burgers arrived, and she’d eat his french fries, although she primly insisted on ordering cottage cheese instead. It was the loss of simple contact with him she grieved for most.

  He gave her a hard stare. “It’s dangerous when you love something too much.”

  This had been the rhythm of their fights—Claire’s slow working up to the hurt that was pr
eoccupying her, hurt niggling like a toothache, not allowing her to leave it alone, although it only caused them both more pain. Forster would endure the needling until it went on too long, then he would cut her with a sentence.

  She finished the iced tea and signaled the waitress for the check. “I’ll have a new foreman by the end of the week.”

  Driving back to the house, Forster let her off at the side of the road by the driveway entrance. “Can you make it from here? That’s not my home anymore.”

  She got out of the car. “Hasn’t been for a long time.”

  “Be in touch. I’ll work with the new man. If you don’t have someone by next week, I’ll work the place myself.” He drove off the moment she shut the door.

  * * *

  She walked down the long driveway through the crippling afternoon heat and smelled smoke from a distant fire in the hills. Fire was the thing ranchers feared the most, and yet a devastation just as thorough had occurred. The property appeared strange even to her eyes—derelict and abandoned. No people working the orchards, no cars parked by the barn, Octavio’s lean-to dusty and blown over by the wind, as if something catastrophic had occurred to the place.

  Closer to the house, Claire noticed with new eyes that the paint job had outlasted its prime—walls now faded and blistered—revealing the advanced age of the house. The annual repainting had been overdue since before Minna’s arrival. Now windows were opaque, glazed with dust and cobwebs. Most were thrown wide open, as were the gaping doors. What she saw didn’t look like home any longer, but it was like being a creature living deep in its shell—the inside known and secure, the only view possible outward. From inside, it appeared beautiful and right. How many times was one directly confronted with the surfaces of one’s life, its appearance, only to find it strangely unrecognizable? One lived buried deep inside, cozy with one’s illusions and justifications, one’s fictions, and only when confronted by large events did one have to display oneself for the outside world’s approbation. Was this where her new hunger for secrecy and privacy and concealment came from?

  In the entry hallway, dizzy, Claire was confused at the sight of the pine cabinet. Didn’t it belong in the bedroom? Why was she so confused? When had she moved it? Irresolute, nonetheless she laid her purse down on it, unsure of its physical reality, but the purse sat solidly atop it. No one must suspect these lapses. She had read in the brochures about “chemo brain,” disorientation, short-term memory loss, and she was determined it would not happen to her. Walking through the emptiness of the living room, Claire felt herself falling deeper and deeper into a dreamland. The sad lunch and the promises to Forster receded like a foul tide.

  * * *

  Minna stood at the kitchen sink, not washing the crusted dishes that overran the counters, but peeling a peach.

  Claire saw Minna, too, with new eyes. She had allowed her hair to frizz; it bunched out in an unruly dark halo circling her head, the ends orangey from sun. Claire’s dark angel. She wore cutoff shorts that barely covered her bottom, and a short camisole, which left a gaping swath of newly protruding belly. This fact, like the others of the farm and the house, noted and acknowledged more from the inside than ever openly discussed. A fait accompli that new life was stirring on the farm. Claire’s peculiar optimism in the face of so much dissolution had to be attributed to just that. Minna turned, her face brimming with joy.

  “He’s coming!” she said. “Soon.”

  * * *

  In the orchard each year, some trees appeared to be dead, with bared branches, or branches filled with misshapen, curled leaves that bore no fruit. But they had learned to leave these trees for a season, and likely as not, the next year they would produce a luxuriant bloom. As if there were such a thing as a flora depression. Foliate trauma. Claire was not one for believing in miracles. The tree had not resurrected—rather, its life was simply hidden from the eye, beating deep in the soil, trembling within root hairs, in sap, wood, and bark.

  When Minna declared he was coming, Claire had no doubt that he was her Josh at last returning. Her heart ballooned, swelled until she thought she would explode with unheard-of joy. She would gladly end in this delusion, but the next moment she realized her mistake. The idea of a foreman’s coming relieved her out of all proportion to the fact because it made her feel her faith in Minna was justified.

  This was what Forster, Mrs. Girbaldi, the girls, and everyone else on the outside failed to see. Failed because Claire, the lover of fictions and now concealment, had not allowed them to see. They only focused on the peeling house, the weedy driveway, all the things that could so easily be remedied.

  Rejuvenation was taking place from the inside out. The seemingly dead trees were simply resting, as her own poor, suffering body was resting. The farm was perhaps temporarily fallow, but it was only in a shallow rest. It would be fruitful again. Claire refused to be a woman dying of cancer—she was a woman who had lulled cancer to sleep. Healthy new cells were forming, subdividing, growing on and on, creating new skin, new hair, new eyes, new heart. Could one’s soul grow anew? Of course, Minna could not be left behind in all this—Minna the fecund, Minna the fertile, Minna the Caller of the Spirits.

  Chapter 16

  As they waited for the arrival of Minna’s phantom foreman, the temperature continued to stubbornly climb each day as if the thermometer were broken, the mercury released from the ordinary laws of physics and burst from its glass prison. The Santa Anas blew fierce, scouring sandpaper winds that stripped everything before them. Leaves pulled from the trees in the orchard; what held on looked tattered and chewed. Blossoms and miniature green fruit fell off. The moisture in the air wicked away to nothing. Fires raged in the foothills, creating their own wind that spread more fire, more wind. Bullets of flame arced through the air. The sky boiled a yellow-brown inferno.

  Their world fully contracted as Claire’s radiation treatments ended, and there was no longer any reason to leave the house. The doctor had looked at the final blood work and declared her cancer-free. She would have to be monitored every three months for the first year, he lectured. He had shaved off his goatee as a failed experiment, and his manner was brisk. Clearly, she would not be his model patient.

  Claire sat stunned that she had made it through.

  “So it worked? I’m cured?”

  “Cancer-free.”

  Claire put her arm around Minna. “She got me through this. The only way I could have made it.”

  “There’s a chance, of course, that we already got it in the surgery. We never know.”

  “Then all of this would have been for nothing?”

  “Unless we killed what was left behind. We work in probabilities, not certainties.”

  “Thank you,” Claire said, and she took the doctor’s hand and held it to her lips and kissed the back of it. “Thank you.”

  He pulled his hand away, embarrassed. On their way out, Claire averted her eyes to the chairs of sick people. As if they were on the island of the doomed, and she gratefully had temporary reprieve.

  Claire called the girls, crying. “It’s over.” She insisted they get together, begging Lucy to come home. Things would be different, she promised. A new start.

  Forster called every day about the new foreman, but he could not affect her elation. When she told him her news, he was quiet for a moment. “That’s the best news I’ve ever heard.”

  * * *

  The mood returning home from the doctor was strange—Claire supposed it was due to the fire and smoke, which had turned the sky yellow and bone-dry. Grit dirtied her skin after she walked outside.

  The expected foreman had still not arrived.

  “Are you sure…?” Claire ventured.

  “He is close.”

  Power lines had burned down so the electricity went out. Claire turned on a small gas generator, but they left the lights off through the house, only using what was absolutely essential. They sat on the lawn during those bright nights, under an orange, burning sky, and
could hear the fire like an angry beast crunching brush in the hills.

  They didn’t bother to dress, wore odds and ends of clothes like rags. Minna let her hair go wild like a napped sculpture that caught bits of lint and leaf. Claire left her head bare with its new coat of peach fuzz. In a state of waiting, during the daytime they sat in the green gloom under the avocado tree. Minna stared up into the branches for hours, lost in thought.

  “Do you know the name for these on my island? Zaboka. Sa se youn pyebwa zaboka,” she said, pointing at a clutch of avocados.

  “Zaboka,” Claire repeated.

  In absolute pleasure, Claire read and read, pure pleasure in escape, escape as in childhood, in early wife- and motherhood. Then she was drawn to tales of adventure, lost in Melville and Conrad, the open spaces of sea and exotic lands the only ones that echoed her own cavernous inside. Now she went with Antoinette to England, to the breaking of all illusions, dreaming of swans and snow. She felt an absolute freedom of self-consciousness between Minna and herself. They shared not their histories but their states: Minna, young and with child; Claire, ravaged but recovering.

  “Tell me, Minna. Tell me what you want me to know.”

  * * *

  They slept side by side on a mattress pulled outside, sheltered under the avocado tree. Their breaths intermingled. As much as it was possible for another person to share one’s mortality, Minna had taken on hers. It had started with the disease and gone beyond that to new health. What kind of incalculable debt did Claire owe for that?

  * * *

  Alone now with Minna, not only did the preoccupation with cancer fall away, but so did the decades of her life. Claire felt they were contemporaries in a way she’d never felt with her daughters, who always made her feel older than her years. Each time she looked into Minna’s unlined face, she felt it mirrored her own.

  Through the world’s reaction, one was informed of no longer being part of youth, part of what is vital, desirable. While young, it seemed a birthright, and those older had always been so (despite one’s parents’ faded pictures as evidence to the contrary). Passing into middle age was no different from being barred from one’s beloved home. One’s treasured children, now grown, banging a cruel drum in one’s face. Shutting the gate and turning the lock. Not knowing to cherish youth until it was no longer. God’s prank—to give the greatest gift at the age one can least understand it.