We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A sauna,” they answered in tandem, Chloe dashing towards it with girlish bounce. My eyes widened appreciatively. I had been in a sauna exactly once, when I’d gone to the gym with a girl from college, a primped and stenciled-in WASP from Long Island who had treated me to a rather grueling day of self-maintenance in SoHo.

  “But…it’s a wine barrel,” I said.

  “Already airtight,” Beau explained. “Perfect for a sauna.” I reached the door of the hobbity structure to peer over Jack and Chloe’s shoulders. It smelled woody and rich, and heat gusted into my chilled face.

  “Was this actually used for wine?” Chloe asked. Beau nodded, grinning.

  “Shit, that’s awesome. Can we?” Jack asked.

  “After dinner. It’s not hot enough yet. It should be up to at least one-eighty,” Louisa chided. “Shit, I left the stew on the stove. Let’s go eat. It’s too dark to walk the fields now anyway. We can do that in the morning.” She led the way back to the big cabin, her breath puffing out in frozen clouds.

  * * *

  We ate Moroccan vegetable stew and seared lamb chops (for us carnivores—Jack and Chloe were both vegetarians), seated on the floor of the cabin and drinking Bordeaux from tin cups. The woodstove and the wine pinkened us all, and Louisa’s rosy complexion was particularly aflame, a violent fuchsia that darkened as her lips did. We chattered about potential, our words filling the cabins with dried basil and hanging bulbs of garlic; we fluffed up down quilts and stoked the woodstove with pine to keep us warm in the long winters as we imagined a season here. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, sprawling across one another like a litter of puppies, we built a dock on the pond, we carved out new nooks in the root cellar, grew an acre of corn and learned how to grind it into meal. We were abuzz. We smoked a serious spliff. When the food was eaten and the dishes cleared away to a bucket near the stove (there was no running water) and the joint was all gone, we grew antsy and stripped naked, donning just our boots and our coats and dashing to the sauna. Self-conscious about my poky hips and narrow shanks, I kept my undies on, while everyone else cavorted nude. I marveled at their bodies: Louisa, pallor and blaze; Chloe, graceful lines and impossible symmetry; Beau, curved muscles and springy elegance; Jack, burnished down, long, strong legs, and a surprisingly large cock. I was thoroughly seduced—by their bodies, by the still forest surrounding us, by the homely hearth around which we sat roasting.

  We ran through the snow, shrieking with glee and relying on the alcohol to insulate us from the cold until we reached our toasty sanctuary. We flung our coats on the hooks that lined the outside of the sauna and shucked off our boots as close to the door as we could, piling into the cylindrical jug, bumping up against one another’s cold skin. Inside, we sweated and giggled and continued our speculations. Chloe wanted a piano. She could be wildly impractical in her desires for beauty, a fact Louisa was quick to point out, not without admiration. Bolstered by the general giddiness, I suggested an outdoor oven, a proposal met with coos of delight and general rhapsodies on the subject of wood-fired pizza. Jack resolved to standardize his haphazard beer-brewing methods and promised us regular offerings of stout. We dashed out into the snow whenever the heat grew unbearable, and finally, sweaty and thirsty, we trooped back to the house, thoroughly enchanted by our daydreams. Louisa unfurled blankets, pillows, and sleeping bags, Beau stoked the fire, and we collapsed on the bare floor, limbs akimbo.

  Morning was the first dose of reality in our persistent and ongoing attempt to escape it. The fire had died in the night, and as I cracked my eyes open, I realized I could see my breath. The wooden floor was hard beneath my shoulder, and my arm had fallen asleep after I had been wedged against the wall, unable to turn over. I met Chloe’s eyes as she poked her head up out of the nest, blond hair snarled fetchingly. She mirrored my expression of bleary suffering, then yawned. I was thirsty, but I couldn’t quite remember how to acquire water; although the whiskey had been free-flowing, the other liquid of life required more effort. I seemed to remember Louisa coming in from outside with a jug, but then it might have contained snow, placed on the stove for melting. Chloe stealthily stood up and crept outside. When I joined her, the three-headed body beneath the blankets stirred, and soon we were all up and grumbling in rather close proximity. The stove was revived, a pot of coffee was brewed semi-successfully, and after a rushed and brutal trip to the “facilities” outside, I felt better.

  In the light of day, we were a little more sedate, less grandiose, and less blithely confident in our rugged abilities. We were stiff and cold, thirsty, and bashful about our absurd projects. Beau alone seemed undaunted; it was he who finally shattered the inertia that had us lounging on the floor with empty mugs.

  “Hey, you kids. Let’s go for a little walk.” We lurched to our feet and returned outdoors, the fresh air bracing and harsh. Chloe wryly pointed to our messy trail of footprints, coiling towards and around the sauna, and Beau led us on a path into the woods. The sun barely penetrated the boughed pyramids that grew up around us, and none of us spoke, not wanting to drown out the crunch of snow as we trudged deeper. We had walked for what seemed like an hour, but was certainly less, when Beau stopped, pointing to a half-concealed NO TRESPASSING sign that hung askew from a lone fence post. Squinting closer, I saw other posts driven into the ground, and here and there a limp strand of barbed wire joining them together in a bedraggled border.

  “This is the property line,” he explained. “Everything from the road to here is part of the property.”

  “Who owns that?” Jack asked, pointing across the barbed wire to the forest beyond, identical to the one in which we stood, but made foreign and sinister by its belonging to someone else.

  “Local farmer. Owns about two hundred acres, most rented to the huge agribusiness assholes that farm most of the land around here,” Louisa spat out. “GE corn. They haven’t ‘developed’ this part of the property yet, but they will. Tried to buy the whole parcel off my dad. Thank God he’s a stubborn hippie.” We walked the edge of the property line, curling back towards the cabins. The sun was getting higher but still barely visible through the trees. Louisa pointed out two deer-hunting stands up in the trees, explained that there were deer, pheasants, rabbits, and wild turkeys on this property. We walked through a cleared field that had once been planted with alfalfa and now lay fallow. The fresh air cleared my head, and I began to regain the almost deranged sense of well-being I’d felt the night before. This was good land, I could feel it.

  We walked for nearly two hours, Louisa and Beau guiding us around and pointing out hidden details—you can find mushrooms in this woodland; there are always pink lady’s slippers here in the summer; wild strawberries grow between these two fields; all those worrying-looking weeds are actually wild raspberries and blackcaps. Finally, we stood back near the cabins, the sun nearly as high as it would get in the sky, the drip of melting ice and snow audible.

  “Welcome home,” Beau said simply.

  * * *

  From the first, Beau treated the land as though it belonged every bit as much to him as it did to Louisa. He was comfortably proprietorial, the self-assured heir before the benefactor has passed on. His assumed ownership seemed natural, though, and we all grew to feel in some measure as he did about the Homestead: it was ours. The names on the deed were just so much legalese, symptomatic of the flawed system we railed against, and we believed our cooperative cultivation of the property served to undermine the network of global capital we resented and mistrusted.

  But my own sense of belonging took several months. After that first chilly evening out in the country, we were like unlanded peasants bewitched by the promise of future rootedness. I can’t remember if we ever really articulated the plan, whether there was a moment when Louisa sat us down and said, in her quick and authoritative schoolmarm voice: “Listen, we all babble on and on about everything we see that�
��s terribly, hauntingly wrong with the world, and here in front of us we have a chance to try out something else, to counterpropose. Let’s quit our bitching and see if we can’t do better.” Either way, we never needed her to say it. I’d like to think it was a meeting of minds, that we found our way to one another and knew, in a moment of kismet, what we were destined to do together.

  We thought homemade pickles and working for ourselves under the broad, open sky would save us. We really did. Everything was so irredeemably fucked-up and horrifying that the only answer seemed to be self-sufficiency, homegrown zucchini and big crocks of sauerkraut. We knew we were being idealistic, utopian even, but we didn’t care. What were the alternatives? Wait for the icecaps to melt, for the workers’ revolution, for the government to do something about the future that was so clearly evaporating before our eyes? Better to try something, even if that something involved composting toilets and bathing in the murky cow pond. We thought we had a responsibility to take action because of our privileged vantage point, to lead our misguided cohort away from Whole Foods and Apple to a compostable, probiotic future. The Homestead was five answers to a dilemma that needed billions of responses, but we could hardly make things worse, right?

  Absurdly, we thought we were a we. We thought it was ignorance and shortsightedness that blinded everyone else to a self-evident reality. But what we didn’t know was that our collective reality would blind us even more.

  Chapter 3

  I don’t know whether Louisa’s certainty and charisma alone would have been sufficient to draw me in. I was hungry for a way out of my sabotaged life, but ultimately, I was practical. Would I have thrown my lot in with them without the promise of something so prosaic as sex? Though I like to think of my motivations as high-minded, I’m not sure that accounts for how quickly I converted. I suppose there was the difficulty of my ulterior motives, which I had yet to acknowledge to myself—it would be many more months before I would really examine the possibility that I had bound myself to these people because of what had come before. In the beginning, I felt simple desire. If there is such a thing.

  After our first visit to the Homestead, it was safe to say I was infatuated. It had been such a long time since I had felt close to anyone, had felt anything like a sense of community, and I found myself craving that sensation. I wanted to fold myself into a chair and watch these strange new people talk in their brusque shorthand about the vagaries of corporate America. After meeting them just a few times, I missed them. Had I been more worldly, I would have perhaps recognized my preoccupation as a crush. As it was, I just craved them.

  After finishing another dull shift of catering (an event on campus, listless pasta salad under fluorescent lights while everyone stared at the clock and waited for the day to end), I found myself, without excuse, lurking by the café where Beau and Chloe worked. I couldn’t justify being there with anything other than the truth: that I hoped to get a glimpse of one of them. I was evidently smitten; this boldness would have usually been unthinkable for me. I strolled through the hall; their restaurant was located inside a larger building, a former school, and there were other shops I could ostensibly be patronizing, were I asked to explain my presence.

  My heart sank on seeing the dimmed lights; the café was obviously closed. I caught sight of myself in a mirror and cringed—what was I doing here? My hair looked flat, and my eyes darted unattractively with anticipation. I had just turned on my heels, preparing to flee, when I collided with Beau, who was walking around the corner with a bus bin.

  “Young Mack,” he said, clearly unruffled. I couldn’t say the same for myself.

  “Um, hi. Sorry. I didn’t mean to— I mean, I was—”

  “Look at you,” he said simply, holding eye contact. “You look so pink and alive.” I imagine this comment did nothing but deepen my complexion.

  “It’s cold out,” I said, stupidly.

  “You always seem to be just arriving from somewhere. Some adventure.” Beau settled the bin more sturdily on his hip and looked at me with frank interest. How could he possibly find me interesting? Adventure? I’d just come from working an extremely tedious departmental meeting and was almost shaking with boredom and the desire to make something of myself.

  “Well, actually, I was hoping to find some more adventure,” I said. I prayed that I sounded saucy.

  “Oh my. Did you have anything in mind?”

  “Mack!” I heard. Turning around, I saw Chloe. She wore an outfit almost identical to mine (simple pencil skirt, clogs, T-shirt—the uniform of food service) and yet she somehow looked composed and elegant. I felt frumpy.

  “Oh hi,” I said.

  She folded me into a quick hug. “What a nice surprise. What brings you out this way?”

  “Mack was going to invite us on an adventure,” Beau said, quirking one eyebrow at me.

  “Oh, really?” Chloe said. “Well, that’s hard to turn down. Where are we venturing?” She tugged the elastic from her fine blond hair and it tumbled over her shoulders.

  “I, uh. It’s not quite dark yet. I thought maybe we could walk. To the waterfall,” I added. This was not much of an adventure, but my mind was blank. Obviously, I had come with no plan other than low-key stalking. Beau and Chloe looked at each other, and both smiled in what seemed like approval.

  “We’re running late with the cleanup today,” Chloe explained, with another glance at Beau whose meaning I couldn’t quite decode. “We’ll be done in just a few minutes. Wait for us?” she asked, as though it would somehow be putting me out, as though I hadn’t come here desperate for a sighting of them. She led me to a chair where I could wait, and I absently fiddled with my phone, trying to look as though I could entertain myself. I made a show of not watching them hungrily, even when Beau approached me. I glanced up in faux surprise.

  “Hey, follow me,” Beau said with a cock of his head. I did not need to be asked again. I trailed him downstairs, into the bowels of the restaurant. I watched where my clogged feet landed, the uneven tip of the staircase making me dread a klutzy fall. Beau carried a large mixing bowl under his arm, and as he walked he slotted it away on a shelf without really looking: the muscle memory of an oft-repeated movement. He continued into another room and opened the steel door of a walk-in. He gestured me inside with a subtle bow, and I flinched at the cold air. Once inside, we were pressed close to each other, and I could smell his skin and his low-bunned hair, tangy with sweat and food and him.

  “Um,” I said.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  “Um,” I repeated.

  “Don’t worry. This isn’t some corny pickup from a romance novel,” he said, chuckling. “It’s just a nice surprise for a nice girl.” I looked at him, then obediently closed my eyes. “Okay, open your mouth.”

  “I thought you said this wasn’t a pickup line,” I protested, though I still didn’t open my eyes.

  “Trust, wee Mack.” He waited for me to open up, which I did, though I hoped my face conveyed that I wasn’t falling for this. (I was.) I could feel his fingers near the edges of my lips, pausing before he popped something into my mouth. I had expected a cliché, a strawberry or whipped cream, maybe, but my mouth was filled suddenly with something solid, heavy. I bit into the sides of the tiny cold ball, feeling a familiar, satisfying crunch, letting the taste of butter run over my tongue.

  “Is that…?” I asked mumbling around the treat.

  “Chocolate chip cookie dough,” he said. I opened my eyes to see him grinning at me, warm pleasure on his face because of my own pleased expression. He popped a ball of dough into his own mouth.

  “It reminds me of my mom,” I said. “And of my mom worrying about salmonella. Your mom didn’t have a paranoia about raw eggs?” I asked, savoring the last chocolate chip melting in my mouth.

  “My mom didn’t ever bake me cookies,” he said brusquely and held open the door
of the walk-in. I regretted having mentioned his mother.

  “Hang on,” he said, leaning against the open door, barring my exit. He held my forearm with his hand, the calluses of his fingers hot and dry against my skin. The warmth of the kitchen and the cold of the walk-in collided, and I shivered, caught in the strange slipstream. “Don’t tell Chloe about that, okay?”

  “What, about the walk-in?” In the throes of my delusional crush, I thought he didn’t want me to tell anyone about this odd moment of intimacy, the way he had stood so close to me while I shut my eyes and opened my mouth so willingly.

  “About the cookie dough,” he said. I must have looked puzzled. “Chloe’s the one who makes it. It drives her nuts when it all disappears before she can bake it. If she knows it was me, she’ll fucking kill me,” Beau added, smiling goofily.

  “Ah. Your secret will die with me then.” Silly as it was, I was thrilled to share it with him.

  * * *

  —

  The waterfall towards which we were headed was at least a mile from the café, and the wind churned spindrifts of snow up into our faces and down into my clogs. It was too cold to qualify as brisk, but it could, I supposed, legitimately be called bracing. We walked quickly, noses tucked into jackets and hands into pockets, making conversation only occasionally. Chloe sidled closer to me to get warm, and I was shocked with pleasure when she hooked my arm in hers, as I had seen her do with Louisa. We stamped our feet in time, laughing at how cold we were and how foolish we were to be outside.

  “I don’t know, you warm-blooded creatures,” Beau said. “It’s too damn cold for this nonsense.” He nevertheless seemed exhilarated, and at some point, he raced ahead in a fleet-footed scamper that Chloe and I didn’t even try to match. He disappeared onto the playground that bordered a school and we lost sight of him among the uprights of the jungle gym, his graceful body slinking through the monkey bars and behind a slide. We forged ahead, and Beau chucked snowballs at us from behind his childish parapets.