by Lynn Darling
You can’t think about the forest without thinking about soil, Hartland said. You can’t think about soil without thinking about bedrock. And you can’t think about bedrock without thinking about time.
The last morning my mother spent in her own home, I made her French toast. She didn’t know it was her last morning—we had told her what Pearlbea had told us to think of as “a loving lie,” that she had to leave the house for a little while until we got the furnace fixed. It was true that the furnace was always going out and my mother was deathly afraid of the cold, so the lie had worked, though I doubt it would have been so successful if I hadn’t also slipped a Xanax among her daily vitamins.
“We eat the same way,” she said suddenly. It was startling to hear her make any fresh observation—for over a year her conversation hadn’t deviated from an endless loop of a few predictable sentences. In the morning it was an inquiry about how I had slept. In the car, during the day, it was about the vapor trail of a jet going through the sky and how pretty it was, and in the car at night it was about the colored taillights of the other cars and how pretty they were. It reminded me of what being stoned was like, and I sometimes wondered if any of this terrible process was ever pleasant for her.
She was right: we did eat the same way, both of us cutting up our French toast into little pieces and then eating them from the center of the plate outward to the edge. I had spent half my life trying to be anyone but my mother, but by now I was reconciled, at least somewhat, to how much I was like her—the best of me and the worst had come from her. And I thought of how, as she receded into shadow, she was taking a part of me with her, a part of all three of her children. There was no one who would ever see us as capable of such perfection as she did, no matter how religiously we disappointed her.
The residents were eating lunch when we arrived, and they made room for her at the table. She was always happy in company, at least at first, and we slipped away as they made her welcome, unpacking her clothes in the bedroom that was now hers, scattering photographs of her husband and children and putting in its new place the rosary that was always next to her bed.
Afterward, my brother and sister-in-law and I went back to my mother’s house. It was so strange: everything was exactly the same as it had been a few hours before and everything was entirely different. It had been a destination, to run away from, to creep back to, and now, still standing, it was gone.
We spent the next few days throwing out an unspeakable amount of trash. My mother saved everything—empty takeout containers and the old wooden cylinders on which sewing thread used to be wound, bolts of beautiful woolen and silk fabric, now stained and moth-eaten, mimeographed homework assignments from her years as a teacher, every kitchen utensil she had ever owned.
And there were photographs. Boxes and boxes of photographs that we dragged into the room my mother had called the study. No one ever studied there, or so much as entered the room, except for my father, who read the paper there and found a refuge from his wife. It was a pretty little room with intensely uncomfortable tufted furniture and dusty bookshelves holding hardbacks from their years as members of the Book-of-the-Month Club half a century earlier.
Holly and I sat on the floor, going through every photo, tossing duplicates and travel pictures, saving images of my mother’s childhood, those of her children and grandchildren. There were thousands of them, every family visit catalogued, every ceremonious occasion. We sat there for hours, watching the past unspool, including our own as young mothers. It had been easy of late to tell myself that Zoë’s childhood had gone by in a flash, but here was the warp and weft of it laid out stitch by stitch, the ticking minutes, the endless afternoons of feeding and changing and reading and entertaining, of soothing and humoring and scolding and doing it again and again. Wow, said Holly. Life is long.
We packed up most of the pictures to be stored in her basement—we told ourselves our children would want to look at them someday. But I took one with me. It was a picture of my mother, an eight-by-ten black-and-white in one of those paper frames that can be propped upright by means of a bit of angled cardboard.
I had never seen it before. A school portrait, probably, taken when she was about fifteen or sixteen. She is dressed in a neatly pressed white blouse with a rounded collar and a woolen vest with bright brass buttons, a jauntily folded handkerchief positioned just so in the left breast pocket. A crucifix gleams, caught in the camera’s flash. Her hair falls in tight curls just above her shoulders, having been no doubt twisted up in rags all night for the occasion. My mother had told us for so long that she was ugly that I had believed it until I was old enough to judge for myself, but here was the beginning of her unruly irregular beauty—pale skin, delicate arcing eyebrows, the large nose and the full underlip of her mouth for once not compressed into a hard thin line. And here, too, was what might have been, had she been loved, had she been told she was pretty, had anyone believed in her. There was hope and excitement in her eyes, such a willingness to please and to find pleasure, a belief that there was a place for her in the world as she then imagined it, if she only looked hard enough. There had been no love in her harsh young life: she was the daughter of Polish immigrants, a steelworker and a charwoman. Her mother had been the eldest of ten children who had grown up in a brutal and violent poverty and who considered it enough to put a roof over her children’s head and food in their mouths. My mother worked hard, put herself through night school, and hoped for happiness, but by the time it came along, in the form of a young New Hampshire soldier, the damage was too deep: it had divided her from herself. But there in the picture was the woman she could have been, on the verge of being eclipsed by the woman she would become. In the photo I could see both of them, looking out from frightened hopeful eyes, her tentative uncertain smile.
My mother worried that there was something deeply wrong with her. That she didn’t belong—because of her poverty, her looks, because her mother declared as much. She was and would always remain an outsider. It’s a look you see in the firstborn of many immigrant families—sometimes it’s erased by success and happy endings, but sometimes it hardens, and moves glacierlike down the slope of a life, and into the lives of the children who come later, transforming the soil in which they will grow up, determining which side of the ridge they will walk.
I took the picture home and put it on the mantelpiece above the woodstove and took it down again and stared at it for hours, this picture of my mother with all her dreams intact, yes, and with all her fears already formed. And when it comes time these days, as it does all too frequently, to think about what I could have done differently, I try to remember to look at that picture, because it reminds me to remember how much of what happens to us now happens because of the vagaries of ancient glaciers, because of the way in which continents collided in generations no longer remembered. You did good, I tell the picture, phrasing it the way my grandmother would have, had she ever said the words my mother longed to hear. You did the best you possibly could.
At first, after the confusion of her initial few weeks in the new place, my mother seemed happier to us than she had been for a long while. She had always liked people, but her difficult nature—opinionated, oversensitive, intrusive—had driven them away. But at her new home, she was surrounded by women determined to make her feel loved, and by others too out of it to notice her contrariness. And for a time she grew animated and participated in the word games and the music classes. She took under her wing a patient whose own dementia had robbed her of speech, holding her hand and encouraging her. She told the women who cared for her that she loved them and tried their patience with endless stories about her children—when she wasn’t excoriating them as they tried to bathe her.
But when her children came to visit her, the light would go out of her eyes, replaced by a look of watchful mistrust. She refused to walk, although she still could, and she seemed to find it difficult to put a sentence together—at least for us. She was better, the staff mem
bers said, when we weren’t around, though they were too kind to put it that way.
During one visit she did make the effort to tell us something. We have to talk, she began, but she couldn’t remember the end of the sentence, or what it was we had to talk about. My brother tried to steer her away from attempts to articulate the agenda she couldn’t remember.
So how are you, Mom? he said. How’s life?
My life, she said, is blackness and mold.
Oh really? said Chris, thinking that she was remembering some long-ago problem with dampness in the basement. And what are you going to do about that?
She looked at us, stunned. You asking me that is like a slap in the face, she said. And that was when I knew that she wanted back her solitude in all its burned and blackened beauty, and that no matter how dark the sea into which her past was slipping, no matter how little she knew of the present, or thought of the future, my mother would always remember, until she remembered nothing else, that we were the people who had betrayed her.
About a year later, I found another wolf tree. A cellar hole, so overgrown I nearly fell into it, and a tumble of old stones that looked as if design, not accident, had placed them there, made me stop and look around. The tree stood in what must have been a corner of the pasture. It was an ungraceful old survivor, lopsided, the stumps of its bony branches poking at the sky like fingers, like an old preacher in a threadbare frock coat, half mad with the prophecies no one stops to listen to. I took pictures. I walked on.
My mother lives in twilight, no longer the hectoring, insistent, urgent woman she was, storming our lives with the love and the fury that nearly drowned us all; neither bane nor blessing, not arrow, not anchor. I’m not sure she makes any more of my presence than the tree does, though sometimes I think I spot an errant gleam of recognition, which quickly fades. And when I leave the pleasant little house where she now lives, there is always a moment of utter disorientation—I don’t know where I have been, I don’t know where to go—and for that moment my mother and I are finally in the same place.
10
The Harriet Line
It is not down on any map; true places never are.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
Sometimes, you get lucky. A key falls into your lap, opening a door you didn’t know was there.
The DeLorme Map Store’s three-story revolving globe can be seen from Interstate 295 day or night, a nearly irresistible landmark to anyone traveling near the exit for Yarmouth, Maine, and a strangely reassuring presence to the congenitally lost—no matter where you are, somewhere on that expansive presence is home. A Guinness Book of World Records holder, the globe has a circumference of 129 feet, a surface area of 5,313 square feet, measures over 40 feet across, and weighs over two and a half tons.
Inside a glass atrium at the front of the store, the globe is girdled by three balconies at various levels, and so dominates the place that all the stuff for sale—state atlases, gazetteers, street maps of cities around the world, interactive mapping software, compasses, pencils, stuffed toys—seems almost an afterthought.
I had driven by the store frequently on my trips with Zoë, but I had never taken the time to go in. On the day I dropped her off for the fall term of her senior year, however, I realized that the opportunities to do so were drawing to a close.
Besides, I had a purpose of sorts. I needed, or thought I needed, the latest in topo map software, hoping to get more up-to-date information about my bit of woodland than my old paper copy had to offer. I had stared at its runic mysteries for hours before I understood how out-of-date it was: there were houses now and trails that hadn’t existed when the map was drawn. I had learned a lot about direction since I first consulted that now creased and battered bit of paper, but apparently I still clung to the notion of a map’s divine infallibility. Maps never lie, my friend Duncan, a brilliant sailor and outdoorsman, always thundered when his wife, Megan, or I would make some stupid navigational mistake. But they did get old.
I explained what I wanted to the pleasant-looking woman behind the counter. Got a compass? she asked. Yes, but not with me, I said. Know how to use it? Sort of, I said.
She walked out from behind the counter and pulled one of the store’s simplest and least expensive compasses off the shelf and wrested it from its plastic nest. Okay, she said, handing it to me. Shoot me a bearing to that sign in the parking lot. I did so, more or less correctly, by my lights, in that I was only 180 degrees off, having aligned the magnetic needle with south instead of north.
Now show me what direction a bearing of 225 degrees is. That one I got right—it was southwest, and I beamed when she awarded me a nod of satisfaction. Apparently DeLorme was very picky as to whom it would sell its products. So about that software, I said. Maybe you could just point me in the right direction?
Judy Gilbert, for that was her name according to the laminated tag on her shirt, gestured vaguely at a couple of rows of shelves containing handsomely packaged boxes. “But that’s not what you need,” she said. “What you need is practice.”
Gilbert was a registered Maine wilderness guide and had been an outdoor enthusiast all her life; she still retained the ruddy enthusiasm of a woman who would put on her hiking boots and head up a mountain at a moment’s notice. She took seriously the responsibility of saving neophytes like me from their own ignorance.
I tried to explain the problem: how I lived surrounded by thickly wooded hills, how I had this dream of wandering through them at will, how every time I tried I ended up lost and confused, unable to understand what the compass was trying to tell me. I know, I should stick to the trails, I concluded, expecting a dry concurrence.
Not necessarily, she said. And then Judy Gilbert changed everything.
It was a simple thing, really. Start small, Judy said, as small as you need to feel safe. Mark out a space for yourself with clear landmarks, so that no matter how far you wander you will run into one of them eventually. The landmarks you choose are panic azimuths, or safety bearings, the idea being that if you walk in a straight line in any direction, you will get to one of them.
Then, she said, within the boundaries you have set for yourself, figure out a place you want to get to and, using your compass, determine what direction you need to travel to get there. Follow the route you have chosen until it does or does not get you where you want to go. Do it again and again, gradually enlarging the area, but always staying within a set of known boundaries, one in each direction, that act as a sort of safety net for your mistakes.
Gilbert then sold me the expensive software I wanted, which, thanks to her, I would never open.
I started small, really small. The boundaries I set were ones even I couldn’t ignore: the walls of the first floor of Castle Dismal. I stood at the windows, leveled my compass, and took rough bearings for the four cardinal directions. Then I began to draw a map of the room on the unruled side of a piece of eight-by-ten-inch printing paper.
The northern wall contained three windows that looked down upon the steep hill and the little creek below; I drew the bare winter branches, including the white birch that saved me during chemo, and the twisty parabolas of the creek and the top of the hill barely visible in the distance. The eastern windows, the ones that spilled the morning light onto the sofa where I worked, faced a hummocky clearing under which the septic tank was buried, a pillowy meadow of snow in winter, a wilderness of weeds and goldenrod in summer. I drew the window, framing in a red fox who used to pause there sometimes near sunset. Next to it I drew the eighteenth-century pinewood spindle that hung on the wall, its wooden bobbins bound by fraying yarns of grays and white and browns.
The front door, which in true Vermont fashion was never used, faced south. I drew the doorframe and the view it looked out on: the small yard, the fragile apple tree and tattered lilacs, a thin line approximating my road, the treacherous thread of dirt and rock, of mud and ice and car-swallowing ditches that wound down to Noah Wood Road and connected Castle Dismal to
the outside world. On the blind side, the windowless wall facing west, I drew the fireplace and the woodstove that stood inside of it, and the ever-hungry, half-empty woodpile to the right. There it was, the place I had lived in for over three years.
When I was done I held the map the way you always hold a map, with north at the top, and looked out the window from the vantage point of the sofa. The sheet of paper nearly shrieked in my hand. Then, like a clumsy toddler, I turned the crude little drawing around until the birch tree I’d penciled in was aligned with the real one outside the glass. And suddenly, finally, I got it. By way of discovery it wasn’t much, it wasn’t Newton under the apple tree, or Archimedes in his bath, it was just a middle-aged woman standing in her living room, turning around a white rectangle and understanding that the world did not revolve around her. But it changed everything.
A map demands you do one of two things. Either you ignore it and the world it represents in favor of the picture you have in your head, or you learn to put yourself aside, and fit the image to what is actually in front of you. And if you are paying attention to the difference in scale between the world outside your window and the one you have just drawn, you might even smile just a bit at the dust mote that has settled on the paper, because it marks the relative size of the space in the cosmos you actually occupy.
Great doors turn on small hinges. I fiddled with a few rough doodles until a clump of cartoon trees faced the forest they attempted to represent, and found my place on the map.
Then I stood in the center of the room, near the staircase that divided the space in two, trying to imagine the newel post of the banister as the foothills of a forbidding mountain range that cleaved an unknown and undiscovered country, forcing me to rely on map and compass to get to the other side. Keeping in mind that I would have to make a set of ninety-degree U-turns to get around the staircase in order to stay on the same bearing, I headed for what lay beyond.
