Out of the Woods

by Lynn Darling

  You’re a woman living alone in the middle of nowhere, Lynne said. Brave is polite for crazy.

  The more foreign Woodstock became, the more time I spent in the house. I tried to establish some order, but the floor remained a maze of half-emptied boxes. One black high-heeled pump sat on the kitchen counter waiting for its mate to appear. A small sea of crumpled newspaper stirred with the breeze, eddying around stacks of books waiting for a bookcase. Instead of unpacking, I moved furniture around. Obsessively I dragged carpets from one side of the house to the other, and rearranged the lamps, determined to find a combination that looked cozier. I lugged a huge table upstairs to the room that was supposed to be the study if I ever got back to work, and then back down to the room that was going to be the dining room, if I ever had friends to invite to dinner. But none of the rooms ever looked right, no matter where and in what combination I put things. Only the green leather La-Z-Boy remained where it was, too heavy to go anywhere.

  Gradually a kind of lethargy set in. The drowsy late-summer heat, the humming of the cicadas, the tumble of creek water over its rocky bed, and the rush of the wind in the trees were a narcotic, a lulling babble in my ears drowning out the imperative to get things done. The emptiness of the house was a presence of its own, an oppressively silent contrast to the murmur of life outside.

  I dreaded the evenings. I had craved solitude, but what I had found instead was a loneliness that pressed like a stone on my chest. Sometimes I was almost grateful for that stone; it kept me weighted down when I was sure I would float away, so little connection did I have to the world.

  Zoë’s departure inaugurated a second grieving for her father. I had prided myself after his death on my independence, declining to confront the awkwardness of middle-aged dating; now I had to blush at my conceit. Without my daughter I was truly alone, and I wondered if one could actually die of loneliness, the pain of it was so physical.

  I called my friend Cynthia on the West Coast. We had met in our early twenties, two young writers at the Washington Post, and while she was as deeply neurotic about work as I was, she was also the most practical, confident, no-nonsense negotiator of life and all of its pitfalls I had ever known.

  I asked her how she had handled the departure of her daughter, her youngest child. I went nuts, she said cheerfully. I knocked on the doors of women I barely knew, women who had gone through this, and said, I don’t think I can survive this. I’m pretty sure it’s going to kill me. They told me it wouldn’t kill me, and I’m going to tell you the same thing, but it will be a while before you believe me.

  The tomato plant died.

  I tried again to settle in. I swept the mudroom, put some books away, unpacked a box. But the stone would not move, and I was scared. This was the beginning, yes, but the beginning of what? I certainly hadn’t seen this coming, this feeling of being punched in the stomach, of wondering whether I could even bear it, whether the grief of Zoë’s leaving might be something I could not survive with any degree of contentment. I had never known such nights before, nights that grayed into days that darkened back into nights.

  I turned to books for solace. “No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength,” Jack Kerouac wrote. But Kerouac died before he hit fifty. What if I didn’t have any true or hidden strength? More to the point was poor Alice James, after brother Henry left for England, brother William got married, and her father died. “Those ghastly days, when I was by myself in the little house in Mt. Vernon Street,” she wrote in her journal, “how I longed to flee … from the ‘Alone, Alone!’ that echoed through the house, rustled down the stairs, whispered from the walls, and confronted me, like a material presence, as I sat waiting, counting the moments, as they turned themselves from today into tomorrow.”

  When I was little, the nuns at the Catholic schools I attended loved to tell the story of the ninth-century Irish monks who sailed across the ocean in deerskin curricles in search of a holy solitude, with little more than their prayers to guide them. For me the story had always resonated with possibility, with the faith it took to cleave to yourself, to escape the future as it had been shaped for you in favor of one of your own choosing. But when I looked back, it seemed that I had never done much to influence the path my life had taken. Life had formed itself around whatever canker or happy chance had come my way. I had moved to Vermont to change that, to reach bedrock, the essence of who I was, and to decide for myself what happened next.

  But now I remembered that bedrock can be treacherous. Take away the stuff under which it is buried—the topsoil, the dirt and roots, the living things that tunnel beneath the surface—and there is nothing to hold back the drenching rains that can carry away everything of value.

  One Sunday afternoon, the soft whisper of the trees outside convinced me it was time to take a walk. Then the quandary: where to go. Not the usual roads, down Route 106 to the country store, or Noah Wood or Long Hill Road. I felt awkward and embarrassed to be out and about on such a fine day by myself, one of the last beautiful days of September, a time when families were gathering outdoors for end-of-season barbecues and picnics. And not the woods behind my house, which were dark and strange—I was so tired of everything that was strange. For days I had listened to the slow drip of rain from the leaves of the trees and the birdcalls and the occasional wild cries and screams. I didn’t know the names of the birds, or the trees, or the animals that made those nearly human sounds. Was it better to know the names of things or not to know? When my husband was alive, we had had a summer house in a beach community not far from the city. On Fire Island, I knew, because he had told me, the name of the bird that perched on our roof every day and scolded us when we walked up the path to the house. It was a redwing blackbird, he said, a male, protecting his nest. And because the bird had a name, he acquired in my head a personality and a romance: he was our protector, too, and every spring when we came back he was there as well, our guardian spirit. Then one spring the blackbird didn’t come back and that summer Lee was diagnosed, and I hated that bird savagely and grieved for him as well, knowing full well how idiotic it is to find a coherence in two random events, to impose meaning where there is none. We name things so we can know them, and, knowing them, won’t be afraid of them. Maybe we should be afraid.

  The afternoon wore on. I went upstairs to take a nap, to mute the noisy emptiness of hours that scrabbled like little claws on a dusty floorboard. I lay down on the bed, eyes open, very still, studying a small hole in the window screen that needed patching. And then, something happened. The quality of the air shifted slightly. I was in the same place, in the same moment, listening to the same soft susurrus of the trees in the same warm wind, watching the sunlight slant through the leaves and strike the white paint of the new bed at precisely the same angle it had a moment ago, but something was different.

  I heard the heavy thud of a cat jumping down from the dining room table onto a bare wooden floor, the reassuring sound that means you are alone but not alone, that outside the room you’re in, the quiet hum of the hive continues. Ah, I thought, Eliot’s here, our old fat foundling cat, no doubt walking past the appraising, not altogether approving glance of his leaner littermate, Ezra. And I was happy and relieved because the house was no longer heavy with silence. Then there were other sounds, distant, muted: the screen door from the long-ago beach house banging, the fluting tones of Zoë’s Guyanese babysitter, a quick zephyr of giggles wafting up from Zoë’s bedroom, which could only mean adolescent coconspirators hatching complicated plots. The contradictory mix of time and place didn’t seem strange at all, merely a prelude to what came next, an anachronistic jumble of scenes and visitations, as if the chapters of my life had been tossed into the air and fallen to the floor and been hastily reassembled in no apparent order.

  Zoë came into the room as a seven-year-old, all scabs and bones and frayed ank
le bracelets, her hair the despair of every comb it ever met. You know, she said, standing by the bed, I had a really happy childhood. But your dad died, I said, and she nodded her head, a little absentmindedly, as if she had told me what she had come to say and was already thinking of what to do next. And then the smell of hot concrete and suntan oil, the tinny strains of a transistor radio, the officers’ club swimming pool at the army base where my father had been stationed when I was thirteen. I saw myself walking self-consciously toward the diving board in a ruffled two-piece swimsuit, the one my mother made for me because back then you couldn’t buy a two-piece swimsuit small enough for a skinny thirteen-year-old with a flat chest. And the girl I had been rolled her eyes at me, as if to say, I know, I know, it’s silly to feel so pleased with myself, but she was pleased and a little proud of how she looked at that moment, at the very beginning of a brand-new world. And then the scene changed again, to a large cocktail party in Washington, D.C., and it took me a moment to find myself, but there I was, in a large group of friends and rivals and colleagues, laughing, flirting, reaching for the glass of Jack Daniel’s I would regret the next morning. You see, said Zoë, who had wandered back, you were liked, and I said yes, a little surprised. And then she said: You were loved. I looked closer and saw the faces of old friends who were dear to me still and then looked even closer and there was my husband and I said yes, humbled now to realize I had been so lucky so far beyond my merits. And then I was in a car in the darkness, driving to a town I had never seen and would never see again, to write a story, deeply thrilled with the adventure of it, a young reporter on her own. And then in a room I didn’t recognize, blanketed by the night, making love with someone I wanted very much, and I felt the desire of it as the drug it used to be back then, as if diving off a high, high cliff into the blue of a bottomless sea. And then I was sitting on the sheet-covered sofa that was the best sofa in my parents’ house, all dressed up, waiting for the end of the last long hour before we went to greet my father, back from his tour of duty in Vietnam. And then suddenly, an altogether different sofa, and Lee was beside me. We haven’t sat like this for a long, long time, I said. And then I paused and added, as gently as possible, You’re dead, you know, wishing there was a kinder way to say it. And then Lee held me. I felt his arms around me, really felt them, not the way you do in a dream, but the way you do in life, and I was sure it was him, that he was really there. Thank you, I said, and I said it over and over again because he had come back to see me and then I was crying, and the tears were forcing my eyes open. I have to open my eyes now, I told him, and he smiled, a little sadly. I know, he said, but when you do I’ll have to leave. I tried hard but my eyes did open, or at least I thought they did, and I was standing on a ledge, rocky and barren, high above the sea, and I was thirsty and couldn’t drink and then I opened my eyes for real, and wept for all that had been and was no longer.

  I walked downstairs unsteadily, half looking for the images that had been so real, wondering for a second where Eliot the cat had gotten to, before remembering. I just had the dream you have before you die, I thought to myself. And for a long while after, I felt like something of a ghost haunting my own life. It would be a longer time still before I saw the thing for what it was—a reminder of the fullness and variety of all that had come before, a valediction, forbidding mourning.

  Middle age resonates with so much loss, profound and superficial: expectations die, friendships fade, hairlines recede, looks change, and health and hope are no longer givens. It becomes easy to forget the fullness that has come before; self-pity, while a dreary threadbare flannel when worn by others, has a luxuriant silky feel when we wrap it around ourselves. It was some time before I came to marvel at the images that had presented themselves so vividly, and to be deeply grateful for them. I might have no idea of what would happen next, but it seemed ungrateful to complain when there had been so much that was good in the past, whether or not I had had the wit to recognize it.

  I knew then that I would have to find a way forward, despite the fear and paralysis. We create boundaries and then we defy them, like the monks who set sail for the end of the world.

  When my daughter was a freshman in high school, her English teacher, a tall, brilliant, sardonic man, would threaten the class on a regular basis with the fate he said awaited them if they failed to turn in their assignments on time: a transcript pockmarked with mediocre grades and tepid recommendations, which would in turn ensure their eventual matriculation to the University of Guam. In such an unabashedly competitive school as hers, and placed as she and the rest of her class were on the woozy heights of the bell curve shaped by the bumper crop of babies produced the year she was born, this was a dire fate indeed.

  I never found out whether there really was such a place, or if it existed merely for the purposes of Mr. Bender’s ironic humor, but the University of Guam was always lurking at the back of my mind, a dark miasma of doom. I pictured it as a windy conglomeration of Quonset huts and concrete, a place without hope or mirth or future, and to dispel the image, I would turn up the wattage on my nagging, chivvying her about homework or urging her to join résumé-friendly clubs and debating societies in which she showed absolutely no native interest or ability. None of this had any effect on Zoë, who had spent her elementary school years at a small “progressive” school in Greenwich Village that did not believe in tests or report cards or, for that matter, arithmetic, and she still subscribed to the astounding notion that grades didn’t matter and learning did. It was an admirable principle that rendered the usual process of surviving high school and applying to colleges as crazy-making as possible, but in the end it worked out just fine.

  Because, as it turned out, Zoë didn’t go to the University of Guam.

  But I did.

  3

  Henry

  It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden

  In those days, I lived lightly in the half-empty house, walking softly on the bare pine floor, so as not to hear the echo of my own footsteps, making as little noise as possible, like a polite houseguest searching the kitchen for a train schedule while the hosts are still asleep. It was not my house, but it was not the Rileys’ house, either; it seemed to belong, if it belonged to anyone, to the woods, and to its emissaries, the spider who lived in the mudroom, the mouse I found in the cupboard one day, to the silence I was reluctant to disturb. The long golden days stretched themselves like cats, then stalked off into the evening without a backward glance.

  The only way to make the house mine, I knew, was to take possession, to unpack the boxes and put things away, to claim the space for my own. And to that end, I would wake up feeling strong and centered; I would open a box and get as far as spreading its contents out on the floor, the better to group them according to some sort of purpose, something I had failed to do when packing up. Accordingly, laddered black tights, printer cartridges in yellow and cyan, a whisk broom, silk scarves, a half-dozen books, a sweater I hadn’t worn in years, and a cascade of Post-it notes, paper clips, hair combs, and several cartons of Mickey Mouse Band-Aids all made it into the same receptacle.

  The disorder was daunting; trying to ignore a rising sense of alarm, I would scoop up an assortment of more or less office-related objects and head into the upstairs bedroom that was to be my work space. It was a small room that overlooked the meadow, perfectly adequate as a place to write, but utterly insufficient for the titanic battle that raged within it.

  I had always been a messy person, and I had come very late, to the extent I had come at all, to the idea that there might be something wrong with living in a state of unending domestic chaos. I had grown up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the decade social anthropologists now define as the zenith of the American preoccupation with dirt and idealization of the perfect homemaker. Middle-class suburban homes bristled with veritable armories of cleaning devices while television ads pr
omised spotless perfection through the aid of muscular genies emerging from toilets (a terrifying prospect to a young child) and magical bubbles that danced away the dirt. And these homes were inhabited by a generation of smart, ambitious, energetic women condemned to staking their personal worth on the shininess of their sinks and the spotlessness of their kitchen floors.

  The combination was a volatile one, at least in my house, where every Saturday was witness to a clash of biblical proportions between my brash, infuriated, and infuriating mother, and a horde of witless, unbelieving Philistines in the persons of my sweet-natured but essentially indolent father, my two brothers, and myself.

  To my mother, the weekly Saturday-morning cleaning was a holy crusade. To the rest of us, it was the tar pit that separated my father from the golf course and his children from the morning cartoons. It always ended badly; by the end of the day my mother was a tornado of recrimination, exhaustion, and injured feelings, and she was nearly, but unfortunately not completely, speechless with anger. Housekeeping and rage: back then they went together like Sears & Roebuck, gin and tonic, death and desire. My mother scrubbed, and cursed our laziness. She was ferocious in her quest for perfection. Any spot, any lint left behind was a slap in the face. On weekdays, the enemy was the dirt itself. But on Saturdays, the one day when she assumed she would have allies in the cause, it was our inexplicable indifference to her vision. She was smart and possessed of boundless energy and will. She should have been directing the fate of nations. Instead, she had us.

  By the time I went off to college I loathed housekeeping and gloried in the disorder of my dorm room as proof that my roommate and I would not suffer the same fates as our mothers. Housekeeping was not only politically incorrect; it could literally drive you crazy, if the film Diary of a Mad Housewife was any indication. (I still remember the obnoxious social-climbing husband sneering to his daughters, “Your mother made Phi Beta Kappa at Smith, but I don’t think she can make a four-minute egg.”) Besides, we had better things to do: stop the war, save the world, talk about boys. So I reveled in our squalor, reading Charles Dickens and rolling my eyes at his plucky little heroines whose principal virtues inevitably revolved around their tidiness and their abilities to turn even a prison cell into a domestic paradise, while listening to Mick Jagger bragging about his unmade bed. Mick Jagger or Little Dorrit? The choice wasn’t even close.