The Forgetting Tree

by Tatjana Soli

  A dream of her own death released Marie. Finally she would meet Maman’s younger, inviolate self on that road, and they would move on to a freedom never granted in this life.

  In the dream, Josie and Thibant, and even Jean-Alexi, appeared, and Marie forgave them all because they had the excuse of poverty.

  Empty stomach trumped all.

  * * *

  No one would mourn Marie, either. Just as it had been for Maman. Linda would call one of the services that drove white trucks to the house and carted away all that was broken, offensive, unsightly. Those things disappeared from the neighborhood as if they never existed, to keep the illusion of perfection: a mildewed carpet disappeared this way; a drunken, violent husband carted off; a baby alligator coiled under a hibiscus bush disposed of in a metal box. It would be as if Marie had never lived in that house, her presence scrubbed away as diligently by the next girl as she had scrubbed away the dirt left by the unknown one before her, the one who had saved Linda’s life from overdose. A long succession of disposable beings. Perhaps Linda would tell James that Marie was troubled (although he understood Marie was only hungry). Perhaps Linda would hear things from Coca, or she might mix up Marie’s story with the pasts of her other cleaning girls, or more likely, she would simply forget, uninterested. The memory of Marie landing neatly in the detritus of Linda’s past.

  None of this bothered Marie; it was just a story that happened to someone else. She had sunk easily into the sea of black faces in Florida, all of them uprooted, blowing like weeds, some coming to rest in cracks where they grabbed hold—grabbed hold for life but never wanted, easily pulled loose again. Or rather wanted only to clean houses but not sit across the table to break bread. To nurse but not be cared for. To fuck but never, never, be loved.

  She felt a violent downward twisting of the earth. Her stomach turned on itself, devouring. All the contents of the morning—breakfast, pills—came up and created a purplish death-stain on the rug. Her thoughts pumped as slowly as her blood, and there was another deep drag in her intestines. She cursed herself that she worried about the stain on the carpet. Clear that this would take too long. The end. She grew ravenous for it.

  The gun, cold and heavy as a stone, welcoming, hidden away in the drawer by Linda’s bed. Before, she had not considered anything so big and violent, but now she was eager to leave this agony. As long as she didn’t disfigure her face. A bullet to the heart would be fine. Her legs were rubber as she staggered back to the bedroom, the floor like a moving ship, and she pulled hard on the drawer so that it flew off its tracks, contents sprawled across the floor. She shoved papers aside, impatient, but the gun was gone. She broke into tears as a manila envelope taped to the underside of the drawer swam into her view. Angry, she ripped it off, tearing the envelope, thoughts pumping slowly, her head packed in cotton. Green bills fluttered down into her lap. Hundred-dollar bills. Many, many hundred-dollar bills.

  She crawled to the other side of the bed and pulled out those drawers, found another envelope, more fistfuls of money. Now she staggered to the toilet and gagged herself to vomit the rest of the contents in her stomach. In the kitchen, she drank glass after glass of water. Could luck in one’s life appear in such sordid ways? Salvation by such dark means? She kicked off the high heels, hiked up the long dress, and moved like a madwoman, yanking drawers out, sending the insides flying—pajamas, panties, bras, socks, shirts, scarves. No other envelopes to be found, but the two were enough.

  She took an empty purse from Linda’s shelves and stuffed the money inside. She took nothing else than the dress and the gold sandals, strapping them back on and wobbling through the living room. On a whim, she grabbed the signed book out of its glassed prison. The book was hers, belonged to her through shared pain, and no one like Linda deserved to own it. Some things belong to one because life had earned it off one in blood and sweat. Marie made her way out the front door, careful to lock it behind her. She walked outside—a black woman in an evening dress in broad daylight. If a policeman stopped her, she would have confessed and turned herself in. She had nothing left to fight with. She would have accepted being sent back home or to prison. She would have let them kill her as they had Maman. Perhaps their line was simply not made up of survivors.

  Not a single person spoke to her. As usual. She walked on as if invisible, for over an hour, till she reached the bus station. Her feet ached. She asked for a ticket and pulled out a crisp hundred-dollar bill. The woman behind the glass was overweight, with damp skin and glasses that kept sliding down her face. Marie guessed from her eyes that she also went home to an empty room. The woman nodded as if she were about to fall asleep.

  “Can’t break a hundred, unless your fare is close to that amount.”

  “Where will this much money take me?”

  The woman blinked behind thick lenses that magnified her drooping eyes as she studied the timetables. In that affluent area, the people who went out by bus always had unhappy reasons for escape. “Where you headed? North? Not much South left from here. Key West. Not much East either, matter of fact.” She said this in a jokey way that Marie could tell had been repeated thousands of times before so that it had lost its meaning.

  No other explanation for the woman’s lack of surprise except that each day she was confronted with people who had no requirement to be in any one place—no pull of family or job or particular inclination—but instead chose place as a substitute for freedom, for meaning, for love.

  “Someplace warm,” Marie said. “Like this but as far away from here as possible.”

  The woman sighed, considering the proposition. “Two of those bills will get you to California, how about that?”

  Chapter 5

  Minna didn’t believe in the past, it was just a story that happened to someone else, to a girl named Marie, whose mother lost her face in the iron forest, but when she first saw Claire’s farm, she thought it was the most beautiful place in this world. She did not want to take off her sunglasses because tears of homecoming were in her eyes. Far as the eye could see there were oranges and more oranges, and she remembered Maman’s prophecy now come true—they would be returned to the time of sweetness.

  She was the Antoinette of the novel; the book, too, become prophecy. Antoinette goes to the convent. My refuge, a place of sunshine and of death … Marie had traveled to a foreign land only to be returned to the original Garden, her own place of sunshine and of death. Only words stood between her and the coming sweetness. Words that she had learned to use like a knife.

  * * *

  Claire’s eyes matched the pale of the foreign sky. Although she was sick, her daughters only thought of going away, tending their own wounds and interests. To them, too, the sweet of their own blood didn’t matter. Marie would be the one to stay. She would be the devoted daughter that she could not be to her own maman. They thought she was one of them because she talked like a little Englishwoman, like the queen herself. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. She talked as if gold coins were dropping out of her mouth.

  * * *

  After everyone had left the farm, Marie could finally feel peace. She heard the breathing of the trees in the morning and felt the slow, dry bake of the earth in the afternoon. The sun was again like a sweet orange in the sky, and the moon hung high like a crisp sheet. All the days were buttery. She had not known such happiness since she was a girl in her maman’s arms. She assumed Claire’s silence about her past, about the small mistakes in her story, was a form of acceptance, and Marie’s care was a form of love.

  She mopped the floors and washed the dishes and went to the store where she could buy as much food as would fit in the kitchen. No one cared, no one watched over her. A crime, but there were no punishments, not even a harsh word. She wiped the windows and made the beds and picked up each book on the shelves to read just one page. If she lived to one hundred, she would not have time to read all the books in that house. This was eternity, but she had not died yet or become angel.
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br />   Claire and she lived together, and she was content. It was as if two people shared the same life. Inside this life, it was impossible to believe the hate of the world outside. That must be what it meant to be protected. When Claire grew sick, Marie hurt because Claire was like her own maman. It pained her that Claire couldn’t enjoy all the riches in her life. But Marie reminded herself Claire would get better. And once she did, there would be no more need for Marie.

  In America she would never get over how many things each person had. The same dress served a woman at home to marry, christen her children, and then be buried in. Here one person owned more plates and cups, more knives, forks, and spoons, more dresses and oranges and books, more shoes, than the person would ever know, or miss. Cleaning, wiping, worrying over Claire’s things, made her dizzy—so Marie took them. Claire would never know or care.

  Those months of living on the ranch were the happiest in Minna’s life. They lived surrounded by trees, and she felt Maman’s spirit. She gorged each day on sweet kindness, and the salt slowly leached out of her. Claire cared so little about Marie’s blackness that for the first time she knew what it must be to be white. To not have to think of skin color at all. Marie forced herself to look in the mirror each day and remind herself she was still poor, she was still black.

  * * *

  In the months of living with Claire, Marie grew a relationship, even a kinship, with the objects under her charge. Touching each thing, she felt richer. She thought of cleaning as a meditation each day: she mopped floors and vacuumed Persian carpets; feather-dusted the piano, shuddering the black and white keys; ran a rag over mica lamps and Chinese vases; plumped pillows on the sofa into inviting shapes. She pretended she was a novitiate, and these were her tools toward salvation, but with time this feeling began to grow smaller, meaner. With time, she was no longer in awe of these objects and grew tired of them, in the way one gets with things of too little value compared to what one thinks one deserves.

  Marie cleaned less and less, and finally skipped the dining room altogether, with its large crack down the center leaf of the oak table, the showiness of the bright colors in the Chinese vase that she learned from the antiques dealer showed it was a cheap reproduction. The china cabinet with its stacks of eggshell-thin plates. Wasn’t whoever bought these things trying to put on airs? No one had eaten in the room since she had lived here. She left the mica lamps unplugged because they were so poorly wired they were fire hazards; she decided they should drink out of jelly jars because the English Staffordshire coffee cups had handles so brittle they snapped off under the least pressure like bird wings.

  The sagging sofas in the living room, the tarnished brass coatrack in the hall, the dusty rows of crystal in the bar, turned out to be lies because Claire never used them. Barren things whose only human contact was Marie in cleaning them, and then cleaning them once more.

  When the crew Forster hired came to clear out the charred trees, Marie paid them extra to move the dining-room table and chairs, the china cabinet, the sofas, and the piano into the barn.

  * * *

  Claire was weak as a small bird after the radiation, and they spent the hot days after the fires outside under the zabokas, marooned on lounge chairs in the hot shadows. Don came and sat on the porch looking hangdog. Tante had been wrong about her making babies. Marie knew this thing tugging inside her was because of him, and he would start feeling he owned it and her. If she knew one thing in this world, it was that she would never be owned again. She told Claire to make him go away, that she couldn’t stand looking at him anymore.

  “But what about our weekend in Santa Barbara? I don’t understand,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  He looked at her belly and said he wanted to marry her. That would go away if he knew the truth of what she had been. All these spoiled people in love with their lies. Or maybe he was the rescuing type, but she had no interest in being rescued. He turned angry and said he couldn’t live without her anymore, as if she were his bad drug or something. Menti, liar! Marie laughed and laughed in his face, never hearing anything so ridiculous.

  * * *

  Claire backed away from life as she always did when it wasn’t to her liking. She read that novel over and over with a dreamy look on her face, as if it were going to reveal some truth she wouldn’t get at by just looking around her. She would understand me, Marie thought, if I were a character in a book.

  Marie wanted to shake her by the shoulders until all the illusions came rattling out. Instead she peeled an orange, feeding Claire a section at a time, the sight of the juice on her fingers making her nauseated.

  “I can’t eat any more,” Claire said, and rolled away.

  “You must.” But Marie gave up, threw the rest of the fruit under a bush.

  “I don’t understand these women Rhys writes about. They’re so destructive. Why don’t they just ask for help?”

  “Life’s a lot harder than books.”

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  “No, I’m not.” Marie closed her eyes.

  “I understand about hiding things. People can be cruel.”

  That opened Marie’s eyes. “What would you know about that, silly Claire?”

  “She writes about the colonials on the island.”

  Marie shrugged. “I didn’t know those people so well. Those were the old-timers. Tucked away in their pink houses. Reading Austen and Brontë. They didn’t mix.”

  “Your pink house?”

  Marie forgot her lie about the pink house being hers. “We were isolated.”

  “You never talk of home—it’s like you’ve forgotten it.”

  “I’m not a forgetting person.”

  * * *

  Forster kept calling, kept circling. No one cared until someone else did. Marie told Claire to go have lunch and get him away. She used the time alone to call the antiques dealer in the paper, who came with a checkbook and took away the French bombé chest in the entry hall with its paw feet and gilded corners. The man had roving eyes, and he lit on the dark armoire in the living room. Marie hated it because it was so tall and hard to clean. The carved animals on it gave her the frights, especially the bears with gaping mouths. The dust always pooled in the bottom of their maws. The man nodded, and she said why not. A fat check for five thousand dollars deposited in her checking account that afternoon. Later she found out the haul was worth more like twenty thousand.

  Nothing to put in the armoire’s place, but she replaced the bombé chest with a frail pine cabinet from a bedroom. She put back the picture frames and lamp in the exact same positions they stood on the chest, but it was a poor replication. The albums and tablecloths from the drawers she crammed on the single exposed shelf. When the cabinet could not hold another thing, she put the rest in paper bags.

  Most were things Claire couldn’t miss: faded ribbons that had never been used to decorate birthday presents; a shot glass with the name of a town in Mexico and an agave plant painted on its side; a salt-and-pepper set embossed with a bronc-riding cowboy on each egg-shaped cylinder; pads and pads of paper with the names of real estate companies printed along the top. Why keep a calendar a decade old with pictures of kittens and beaches and a California poppy unfurled, its petals like the skirts of a dancer? Claire hoarded for a time of need that never came.

  Marie thumbed the albums that contained everything expected with the raising of two daughters. She felt a stab inside her, wishing that she had been that family. How was it that an accident of birth caused happiness, or its opposite? Why shouldn’t it be her and her maman in those pictures? No possibility that Claire would be found a victim in the iron forest, or that Gwen and Lucy would ever have been restavek. Even the loss of the boy would have had to be shrugged off to survive back home. Injustice an everyday happening. Marie closed her eyes and swallowed the bitter that would otherwise overwhelm her.

  She laughed at the jauntiness of a young Claire, chin jutted out at the world. She did have sp
unks then. A Claire long gone before Marie arrived. Was it the losing of her boy that changed her? In a wooden box like a treasure chest was a handful of old photos. A scrappy boy stood perched in the dark sunlight of each picture, white-blond hair and tanned face, the matching mischief of his young mother’s eyes, the same jut chin. In Marie’s favorite, he wrapped a wiry arm around Claire’s neck as if consoling her for soon leaving. Joshua. Marie looked closer, but there was no sign he knew his fate.

  At the bottom of the chest was a manila envelope softened by age, full of folds, with a singe name, Hanni. Inside were pamphlets to such places as Spain, Bora-Bora, Thailand, and Paris. Some of them dog-eared from having been looked at many times, but none were written on. Most of them new as if they had been buried before they were ever considered. She found a picture of white people in Martinique drinking cocktails from glasses bristling with umbrellas. The women had hairdos from the fifties, and big, rounding skirts, and pump shoes shaped like boats. She read the prices and realized it was a trip no longer possible to take because now it was more a journey in time than place.

  When Claire came home from her lunch with Forster, she paused where the bombé chest used to stand. A thrill of scare went through Marie at the prospect of being caught at last, but then Claire, deep in thought—resigned?—laid down her purse on the pine cabinet and moved on to the living room.

  * * *

  Claire always wanted Marie to talk, but she wanted to hear what she already imagined. Marie was supposed to speak in postcard descriptions: fiery sunsets, silky white beaches, smiling black faces. Already Claire’s mind was filled up and rejected what wasn’t already there. Something in Marie wanted to break that, push out the ugly, bloody, squalling truth. Wanted to talk about the heat and the flies, the violence, the shit and the dirt. The stuff they didn’t tell on pretty travel brochures of spiky cocktail glasses and women in boat-shaped shoes. How hard the earth floor was, how loud the shanties were with hunger, how heavy a grown man laid on a young girl’s bones. Favorite food? Any, when the norm was starvation. Marie wanted to lay the mewling thing, truth, at Claire’s feet.