We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “Of course it’s hard to keep things simple with sex,” Matthew was saying. So I hadn’t imagined it. He tugged up a weed.

  “It’s not as though monogamy is simple,” Chloe said with a shrug.

  “No, not necessarily,” Matthew agreed. “But group dynamics puts a pressure on everyone to be really communicative and open. What’s hard with two is harder with four.”

  “Only if you find being open difficult,” she said.

  Matthew quirked his mouth flirtatiously. “Do you find being open difficult?”

  “It comes quite naturally to me,” she said. After a pause, Chloe broke the stalk of the sunflower, leaving its crowned head to droop, now to regard the dirt for the rest of its tenure on the earth. With a smile, Matthew returned to his labors. Neither of them had yet acknowledged my presence.

  “Well, I’ve grown up a bit since I started with all this. I’ve had to learn a few things the hard way.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “I was the only man here, for a while,” Matthew said. “I discovered that that wasn’t an ideal…balance of the sexes.”

  “Oh, you think so?” Chloe’s knee tipped away, her foot perched on the jut of her ankle.

  “Since then, I’ve tried to be a little more gender diverse when setting up a colony.”

  “A colony?” I interrupted, not fully intending to. “Is that what you call them?”

  Matthew’s gaze was forced from Chloe to me, and I came very near to blushing. “Sometimes,” he answered. “Sometimes we call them satellites.”

  “The Collective was the original, though, right? The first ‘colony’ or whatever you started up?”

  “Yep. It wasn’t just me, of course. But it was the first one I was ever directly involved in establishing.”

  “And now? How many have you started?” I asked.

  “A few more,” he said coyly.

  “Would you, I mean, would you be willing to talk to me a little bit about it? I mean, the process but also, like, the documents you draft in the beginning, how you decide who gets to participate, all of that?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Matthew said. “Do you mind if I ask why?”

  I realized how strange my question had probably sounded. “It’s— I’m working on a project, of sorts. I guess it’s about intentional communities. I’m writing a bit about the Homestead, and some historical utopian communities. I’d just love to know more about the Collective, and some of your other…satellites.”

  “That’s your little notebook, right?” Chloe asked. I dropped my eyes, feeling silly.

  “I’ve just been putting together documents and notes. Recipes, short essays, stuff like that. It’s very…amorphous,” I explained.

  “I think it’s amazing,” Chloe said.

  “Yeah, I’d love to share some stuff with you. How about I give you my phone number?” Matthew suggested. “We could set up a time to talk it over, you can take notes, all that.”

  I nodded. I realized I was being dismissed, put off until some time when he wasn’t…otherwise occupied. His eyes had already moved back to Chloe and the angle of her knee, softened by the curve of muscle and fat that supported the joint beneath. And over that, her pale skin. I took down his number and left them in the flower patch.

  * * *

  The election happened in November, casting a pall over the Homestead. The night of the Event, we went to Rudy’s house to watch the coverage and, presumably, celebrate; Rudy had a television. By midnight, we were all staring at his screen in blank horror, our champagne flutes untouched, the liquid turning flat and sour, like our moods. We trudged back to my truck and returned to the Homestead, barely speaking. Jack was the only one who even tried.

  “This just makes what we’re trying to do even more important,” he valiantly attempted. We all nodded, but it was sorry recompense for what felt like a fatal blow.

  For the next week, we worked with grim determination, more certain than ever that the world was coming to an end. Chloe stayed in her cabin nearly the whole time, sometimes fiddling with her instruments but mostly sleeping, curled into a tight shell beneath her blanket. We all visited her to deliver tea and toast and bone broth, but she spoke only to Louisa, who emerged from the cabin each time with a worried knit to her brow. In all honesty, none of us really knew what to do, for Chloe or for ourselves.

  Fittingly, the weather began to turn in mid-November: cold sheets of slushy rain and gray days. I was almost relieved when the first snow fell; it changed the muted landscape, at least temporarily, to a sparkly white, and we all tried to muster enthusiasm for a new season.

  But, of course, we knew that the coming season would be the most difficult. Now we would learn whether we’d adequately prepared, whether we’d put up enough food, whether we had the stamina to do this. We were aware that we had safety nets; if we ran out of food, we wouldn’t starve or freeze to death, we’d simply admit defeat and creep home to our parents. It wasn’t appealing, but the stakes were somewhat lower than for the beleaguered family whose journal I read alone in my cabin. I thought of them often, wondering what it would feel like to stack firewood and know that if there wasn’t enough or it was a hard winter, one of my children would likely die. We are so removed from having to make decisions that really count, I thought almost daily, even as I confronted the decision we had just made as a country. Surely the results of the election merely confirmed this growing conviction that nothing I did could ever possibly matter; hadn’t I voted for someone else?

  I mentioned these musings to Jack one day; Jack and I had grown closer, maybe out of default. Though he certainly could be cynical, he was by far the most positive of all of us, and I found myself wanting to be comforted.

  “I just feel like there’s literally no arena where the choices I make have any impact,” I whined to him one day as we were yet again harvesting kindling that would dry in the shed all winter. “I mean, I can become a vegan, but does that affect the factory farmers? I can recycle, but what good does it do when most pollution and waste comes from corporations? I mean, I fucking voted, I was in the majority, and it still doesn’t make a bit of difference.” I threw up my hands in frustration, realizing that I was actually close to tears.

  “Hey there,” Jack said. “I know, it’s easy to get a bit defeatist. But, I mean, we have to keep trying, right? We can’t just hand over the keys and tell them, Fine, take it over the cliff.”

  “I sometimes wonder if maybe instead of trying to bring about change and battle these huge forces like ‘the corporation’ and ‘the state,’ it would be better to just let it happen. Let the state collapse, let capitalism have its way.”

  “Mack, you know who will bear the brunt of that sort of action. Or nonaction. It’s not going to be the people who have benefited from these apparatuses for generations, it’s not going to be those of us with safety nets. It’s going to be the same people who are punished whenever there’s any kind of geopolitical fallout.” Jack shook his head, appealing to my sense of class.

  I knew that Jack was aware of how keenly I felt my own class distinction, here at the Homestead. Chloe didn’t come from the kind of money Beau and Louisa did, but she somehow managed to appear their socioeconomic equal, with her knowledge of arcane vintage cocktails and her bizarrely precise sense of European geography. Though I knew she’d had a scholarship and had taken out loans for her education, these mundane concerns seemed not to touch her; she floated, as ever. Whereas I blushed every time Beau made an allusion to something I didn’t understand and flinched whenever Louisa teased me for my “peasant stock.”

  “I realize that,” I told Jack. “But maybe the situation right now is worse for the global poor than a collapse would be. Maybe they have resources, an ability to live without that—”

  “You can’t really think that. There will be fewer resources for everyone, especially the glo
bal poor.”

  “At least there would be fewer people on the planet,” I grumbled.

  Jack turned his head slowly to look me in the eye. He arched an eyebrow, and I flushed. “You sound a little like Louisa there,” he remarked.

  “Well, she’s pragmatic,” I said, not really wanting to defend either Louisa or what I had just said. I scuffed my feet along the trail, which was freezing into hard furrows. “I’m just out of ideas. And maybe running out of juice.”

  “It’s way too early for that, Mack my girl,” Jack replied with one of his earsplitting grins. “The revolution starts today!” He gave a throaty whoop and raced deeper into the woods, running for pure joy. Argos happily bounded after him, with identical spirit.

  Chapter 20

  Frost and cold temperatures began to keep us indoors more and more often. In spite of the chill, we needed to do a few hours of tasks outdoors every day, but we would regularly be driven back inside with numb fingers and bright pink ears. We passed most of the day in the big cabin, braiding strings of garlic, sorting dried herbs, and playing cards. Jack tried to teach me to knit, but my fingers were clumsy, and I had yet to finish the monotone scarf I had begun, while Jack skillfully produced socks and shawls, the clacking of his needles a soft counterpoint to the quiet, almost like a clock ticking through the season. Beau had returned home one day with a chess set, and we all took turns playing him, though he typically won. Louisa didn’t have the patience for either knitting or chess; she lolled anxiously by the window or spent time tapping out emails on her phone to her father. She had stopped speaking about her lawsuit, but I knew that she spent hours every week scratching out ideas and researching people who had had similar experiences. And staring out the window, as though she expected a truck to come cruising down the drive at any moment.

  Chloe had reemerged, looking wan and thin, but she had begun to smile again, and was dancing a little, sometimes doing a recital for us in the big cabin. She hadn’t been to class since spring, but she still worked part-time at the café where she had met Beau. I was glad to see her dressed and leaving the house, but I watched her for signs that she might want to resume hibernation. She had withdrawn from me since that night on the porch, and I wondered if she regretted it; I was too afraid of the answer to ask her directly. I’d tentatively tried to ask Beau about her mental health, but he had shrugged and raised his eyebrows, saying she was “a big girl,” and I shouldn’t worry so much. I had found this irritating, but arguing with Beau was more infuriating than just letting some of his more patronizing comments slide. There was no point fussing at him.

  Stir-crazy and out of card games one evening, we found ourselves heading to the Collective for any kind of diversion. It was frosty out—not snowing properly yet, but forbidding with the serious nip of the late fall. Although normally opposed to these social calls, Louisa had brightened at the outing and put on one of her louder dresses and a swath of bright red lipstick—the latter, I thought, intended to piss Fennel off. We hadn’t all gone as a group to visit since summer, and it felt almost formal to set out together. Chloe was wearing a white overcoat of dazzling impracticality, but she looked like a winter dryad, as though she could blow frost from her lips.

  I had to drive slowly, for the roads were a bit slippery, and the mud had half-frozen in deep tracks that sent the truck swerving unexpectedly towards the ditch. I’d grown up driving in the snow, but it still made me nervous to tap the brakes and feel my wheels fishtailing behind me. I wished I’d put sandbags or logs in the back, but I just kept forgetting.

  As I pulled into the driveway at the Collective, we all murmured appreciatively at the small colony; it looked like a cozy winter village, with lights burning warmly against the frosted backdrop. With a start, I realized that Christmas wasn’t that far away. It was a holiday my mother loved with shameless, dorky enthusiasm, and I had learned to treat it with fond distance. But I realized that I missed my mother’s cheap sugar cookies, garishly decorated with red and green sprinkles, and the fussy way she decorated the tree and lit fake electric candles in all the windows of our house, hanging a wreath on the door that would remain there until February. Maybe, I thought, I would go home for a week and let Mom feed me goulash and casseroles and other processed treats of the sort I had so recently disdained. The idea filled me with a warm, guilty pleasure.

  We piled out of the truck, rubbing our hands together in anticipation, thinking how nice it would be to make mulled wine and talk to people who weren’t the five of us, even if it was Fennel. We’d brought a few bottles of wine that, when uncorked, had proven to be cloyingly sweet, whether intentionally or not; our trades with local winemakers tended to involve a lot of product that was not exactly top notch. This wine was undrinkable on its own, but stewed with cinnamon and oranges and a dollop of rum it might make a nice toddy. Though I’m sure we were all thinking it, none of us commented that oranges most certainly did not grow locally; since Louisa had brought the citrus home, we all happily looked the other way.

  We strode up to the farmhouse, chattering among ourselves. Jack had brought a bag of deer jerky, the product of a recent hunting party, and it really was quite good, peppery and moist. He’d done much of the drying in his cabin, and as a result, he had the permanent scent of smoked meat about him, venison in his hair and skin. His loosey-goosey commitment to vegetarianism was rather relaxed at this point. I knew he was proud of his contribution, and his pleasure made me glad. We knocked on the door, which Fennel opened.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked before anyone was able to greet her. Though I’d grown used to her brusqueness, there was a sharp edge to her voice tonight that went beyond her usual rude baseline.

  “We’ve come a-wassailing,” Beau said.

  “A-wassailing,” Chloe echoed in her clear singing voice. “And Jack brought venison jerky.”

  “You can’t be here,” Fennel said, stepping outside and closing the door behind herself. She wrapped her arms tightly around her flat, rigid torso, hugging herself in the bite of the wind. “This isn’t a good time.”

  “Oh, come now, Fennel. No one cares if your kitchen is a mess,” Louisa teased. “It’s cold out here, and we fancy some mulled wine.” She held up the bottle she carried in illustration. “It’s bad luck to turn away visitors.”

  “I’m serious. You guys should go. Now.” She glanced involuntarily over her shoulder.

  “Okay, okay,” Beau said. “We should have called ahead. We’ll head home.” He seemed eager to usher us all back to the truck. Handing the car keys over to Beau, I lingered with Louisa a moment longer on the porch, waiting to see if Fennel would back down. She didn’t.

  “Come by the Homestead anytime!” Louisa sang out sarcastically as she descended the steps.

  Fennel didn’t open the door to go inside until after we had all gotten into the truck. I tried to catch a glimpse beyond her frame into the farmhouse but could see only the warm bustle of human bodies. As we pulled out of the driveway, I noticed that the black Prius was still parked there.

  * * *

  At the Homestead, we were unsure what to do with ourselves, or how much to say to one another. The awkwardness of the encounter seemed to make us all uncomfortable, and I didn’t know who knew what about whom at this stage; somehow, the constellation of hidden information had grown complex. I wanted to ask questions, to speculate, but our days of uniting in gossip about the Collective were over, it seemed. We shuffled around the kitchen of the main cabin uncertainly, reluctant to return to canasta or mah-jongg (at which Beau tended to excel, as he did chess—it was less and less fun to play with him). I could see Louisa stewing, and I had conflicting desires to placate and provoke her. We made a listless dinner, eating the venison with our mulled wine aperitif. When it came time to clear the plates and do dishes and fetch water for the cabins, everyone was testy.

  “Well, I do all the cooking. I don’t see why I have
to scrub pots every night of the week on top of it,” Louisa bitched.

  “I’m sure someone else would be happy to cook, Louisa dear,” said Beau.

  “Oh, are you volunteering? Because the only thing I’ve yet to see you cook is baked potatoes,” she retorted.

  “I like simplicity.” Beau shrugged, refusing to be baited.

  “I’ll do some dishes,” Chloe offered, unsurprisingly.

  “It’s fine, I’d rather do this than go back outside,” Louisa snapped. “Jack, can you get more water?” Jack had been dozing off by the fire, and he looked startled at this request.

  “I, uh, I’ll go out in a second? I’m just…” He shook his head to wake up.

  “Yes, of course, whenever it’s convenient for all of you,” Louisa said, slapping a wooden spoon unnecessarily against the walls of the sink. “Don’t even worry about it.”

  “I’ll get the water,” Chloe offered, and the desperation with which she wanted things to be harmonious was slightly pitiful. She and Argos wore similar expressions of discomfort, eyes darting around the room.

  “Naturally. You’ll do anything, while the boys sit around, expecting to be waited on. And here I thought we were trying not to replicate the patriarchy.”

  “I’ll get the fucking water,” I said, and stamped irritably out the door before further comments could be lobbed about. It was crisp outside, and though I wore only a thin sweater, I paused to look up at the moon, hanging high over the pond. Since it was a clear night, I vainly tried to identify constellations. As usual, I found only the Big Dipper. I wanted to stay out here, breathing in woodsmoke and frost, but instead I dragged a bucket over to the hand pump, filled it, and lugged it back to the cabin, my core warm from the labor but extremities still cold.

  Inside, the smells of dinner and human bodies felt claustrophobic. The bickering seemed to have stopped, and Chloe stood washing the dishes. While we chattered companionably for a while longer, I could tell we were all thinking of the Collective, wondering what was behind that door.