Lost in the Forest

by Sue Miller

  “I didn’t think of that, Dad.” Her face was open, delighted.

  “Of what?”

  “Of the connection with wine! How she’s comparing the arrival of the right words with the right wine.” She frowned. “Well, maybe with a holy wine.”

  He thought of Eva, of how he’d like her to be hearing this—Daisy, talking this way. Talking to him. “Can you write it down for me?” he asked. “The whole poem?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  At Eva’s house, there was no one downstairs, but Mark could hear her moving around above him, putting Theo down. He and Daisy went into the living room. Daisy sat down in a big armchair. She leaned back, her legs stretched out in front of her. She slowly heeled her sandals off. “I would hate to be forty-three,” she said abruptly.

  He laughed and looked over at her, part woman, part girl. “Say it this way, Daze: ‘I will hate it when I am forty-three.’ Because one thing for certain is that the day is going to come when you too will be forty-three. That is for sure.”

  “Yeah, well. You may believe that, but I don’t.”

  Mark was restless, moving around the room, picking things up, examining them—the icons of Eva’s life with John. Though some of them he recognized. Some of them she’d had when they were married too: a wooden darning egg, a glass box that held the buttons from the Civil War uniform of a great-great-uncle. He stopped in front of a painting on the wall. It was a small landscape, done with thick luminous smears of paint. You wanted either to eat it or be in it, he thought.

  “The oldest I want to get is about twenty-five,” Daisy said.

  “But all the good stuff happens after that,” he said distractedly.

  “Oh, yeah. Like divorce and betrayal and dying and general wretchedness.”

  He looked at her. She had said this casually, sarcastically, but she had said it. Is this what she thought? Is this what his life and Eva’s had made her believe? And John’s too, he supposed, dying the way he did.

  He didn’t want to think this. He didn’t want her to think it.

  “No,” he said. He wanted to correct this vision. “The good stuff. Like marriage and children and getting really skilled at the work you choose. And choosing the work, too.”

  She shifted in her chair, watching him. Her hands were laced together across her belly. She shrugged and said, “Yeah, and then divorce and betrayal and all that other stuff.”

  “Also,” he said, pretending deep thought, “it must be that getting nicer happens a little later too. Probably after twenty-five. Definitely long, long after fourteen.”

  “Very funny, Daddy. And I’m fifteen, for those who don’t keep up with these things.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Remember? You gave me a bracelet?”

  He did remember. Vaguely. He came and sat down across from her. Between them was a low square table with three stacks of books on it. There were also several Matchbox cars. Mark picked one up. A convertible. “Well, how’s fifteen?” he asked.

  “You must have noticed, Dad.”

  “I guess I haven’t. How is it?”

  “Fifteen. Fifteen sucks. I hope I’m never fifteen again.”

  He set the car down. “Little fear of that.”

  “Thank God.” She sat up a little straighter and scratched her leg. She was frowning. “But I wonder what work I will be good at.”

  “Maybe you’ll run a bookstore. Eva says you’re good at that.”

  She made a face. “That’s Mom’s thing.”

  “Maybe you’ll be … an actress. You were terrific tonight, playing the dominatrix.”

  She looked at him. Her face lit mischievously, her dark brows opening her eyes wide. “Maybe I’ll just be a dominatrix.”

  He laughed. Daisy. This was fun, being with her.

  When they heard Eva on the stairs, Mark was watching Daisy’s face. It shifted—it closed somehow—and he felt a pang for Eva, for what this meant about her relations with Daisy. Before Eva had stepped in the doorway, Daisy was standing up. She passed her mother as Eva entered the room. “Night, Mom,” she said.

  “Okay, sweetie,” Eva answered. She seemed distracted. She wouldn’t have noticed, then.

  She came in and sank onto the couch at its opposite end. “Lord!” she said. Daisy was gone, pounding up the stairs.

  “You feeling better?” Mark asked.

  “Oh! Yes.” She frowned. “You mean, about Daisy at the party?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes. I was just mad at Duncan and Maria, really. I mean, don’t you think it was distasteful?”

  “Honest to God, Eva, I didn’t. Daisy seemed really fine with it. She was being funny about it just now.”

  “Funny how?”

  “Joking about it. But not in any … distasteful way.”

  “You sounded just like Duncan then.”

  “Please.” He turned toward her. She was still wearing the necklace. “Anyway, happy birthday.”

  “Yes.” She sounded tired. “Thanks.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It was a nice party, wasn’t it?”

  “Except for the distasteful parts.”

  She laughed, a snorty laugh. Then she sighed. “Am I such a stuffed shirt? I just want to protect her.”

  “From what? No one at the party would hurt Daisy. It’s a safe place for her to pretend to be whatever she wants to pretend. And she was pretending. She put it away, with the costume. Just like dress-ups when she was little.”

  “You’re right. I know it. Maybe I was just pissed off because she seemed …” Eva shrugged. “I don’t know. Suddenly to have a life. Beyond my ken, as it were. I felt it with Em too, earlier this summer, schlepping her around. How they’ll have these lives. They’ll go off. They’ll fly away, and I seem … stuck. My life seems … so set.” She laughed sadly. “Happy birthday indeed! I. Feel. Old.” Her head swung a little on each word. The necklace glittered.

  “Not you, Eva.”

  “Well, thanks. You’re sweet.”

  “No, I mean it. You’re still—”

  She threw up her hands. “ ‘Still!’ ” she cried out, and smiled. “See? Listen to yourself. Still. You mean, after all this time. Deep into your old age: Still.”

  “Nah,” he said.

  “Nah what?”

  “Nah, that’s not what I mean.”

  “Okay then,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just teasing you, anyway.”

  “I mean I want you, Eva.”

  Her mouth opened a little. He reached his hand out quickly to cover both of hers, which rested on her lap. He was aware of their warmth, and of his fingertips touching her leg through the loose fabric of her skirt. He slid toward her on the couch. He lifted his other hand to her face and set his palm against her cheek. He heard her sharp intake of breath. She leaned her head against his hand. She closed her eyes.

  Under his other hand, her hands turned up, encircled and held his fingers. A tear formed at the outer edge of her eye. He wiped it with his thumb. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, then set his lips gently on her mouth.

  “Aahhh!”

  Eva’s body jumped, and Mark turned.

  Daisy stood in the doorway, seeming to fill its frame. She had on a long T-shirt that said “Because I Say So.” Her legs and feet were bare. Her face was open in anger and shock. She held a piece of paper in her hand.

  No one spoke. Mark and Eva sat about a foot apart from each other on the couch, not touching each other at all now.

  “Daze …” he started.

  She shook her head. “Forget it!” she said. “God! I was bringing you this.” She crumpled the paper and threw it at him. He felt its sharp prick on his face. It fell to the floor, and Daisy was gone.

  They sat still for a long moment, not looking at each other. Then Eva got up. “This is one I’m going to have to deal with right away, I think.” Her face was drawn, suddenly paler.

  “Probably so,” he said. “Yes.”

  She started towa
rd the doorway, and then turned. “You better go, Mark,” she said. “I need to be just … with Daisy. I’m afraid this is going to be complicated.”

  “All right,” he said.

  She disappeared around the corner, and he heard her slow footsteps going up the stairs. A moment or two later, after he heard Daisy’s voice start, accusatory and loud, and Eva’s responding in calmer, muted tones, he bent down and picked up the paper his daughter had thrown at him, and he left.

  He kept his window open as he drove. The night air was cool against his face. The moon rode high over the mountains to his left. Only the occasional house had lights on, though when he passed the intersection at Calistoga, the Mexicans were still congregated at the drive-in.

  On the dirt road to his house, the jackrabbits scattered into the vineyards away from his lights. When he got home, he let the dogs out and left the door open. He pulled the paper Daisy had thrown at him out of his pocket and laid it on the island in the kitchen, smoothing it out. He saw that it was the poem she’d recited for him in the truck, her face lovely and rapt.

  Your thoughts don’t have words every day

  They come a single time

  Like signal esoteric sips

  Of sacramental wine

  Which while you taste so native seems,

  So bounteous, so free,

  You cannot comprehend its worth

  Nor its infrequency.

  After that, she’d written out another one:

  If all the griefs I am to have

  Would only come today

  I am so happy I believe

  They’d laugh and run away!

  If all the joys I am to have

  Would only come today

  They could not be so big as this

  That happens to me now.

  Chapter Eight

  SUMMER ENDED. Emily returned from France transformed—her hair short and swinging around her face, a clear red lipstick shaping her mouth. She’d lost weight too. Her slight tendency to baby fat was gone. She looked like Eva, it seemed to Daisy: small, perfect, pretty.

  She broke up with Noah soon after her return, and Daisy thought briefly that this might mean she and Emily would draw close again, but it didn’t happen that way. Instead, it was her girlfriends Emily wanted to see, classmates who were also going off to college in a week or two. She went shopping with them, she made lists with Eva, she packed—and then she was gone.

  One night a few days after she’d left, they were having dinner, Eva and Theo and Daisy, when Eva looked around the table and said, “And now we are three.” Daisy was startled. What did this mean? Eva was smiling, but she didn’t seem happy.

  Daisy looked away and resumed twirling spaghetti on her fork.

  When school started, the leaves were just beginning to turn in the vineyards. Daisy remembered the fall before, when John was alive, when she’d begun high school so full of hope. She had made resolutions and promises to herself in the days just before it all began again this year—that she would start anew, that she would try, that she owed it to him, to herself, at least to try.

  And she did, at first. She signed up for chorus; she told the basketball coach she would come out for the varsity team. She submitted a poem to the literary magazine in hopes of making it onto the editorial board. It was one she’d written over the summer, late one night in her room after a day in which Eva had spoken sharply to her in the store about a mistake she’d made, and then later wanted her to be friendly and conversational when someone she knew dropped in. It was titled “Me.”

  Like training a dog to shit in the gutter

  You trained me, your good daughter, never to utter

  A word. Dutiful mute. Me.

  When company comes, pull me out of a corner,

  Jam in your thumb like Little Jack Horner.

  A smile. Pull out a plum. Me.

  She did make the board, and she went to the first meeting. She went to chorus and got the music handouts. But in the second week of school, a boy, a senior, called her “Stretch” in the lunch line, and she heard others laughing. She felt the sense of her size, her homeliness, her awkwardness sweep her. She left the line and went outside and sat alone at a table. She resolved to hope for nothing, socially. To expect nothing. It would be work, only work, she decided, that she would think about.

  And she did become consumed with her schoolwork in a way she’d never been before. For Latin she often did three translations—one literal, one loose, based on the literal, and one cast in the meter of the original. When she got a C on a geometry quiz—they’d had two problems to solve and she missed one—she hung the grade on the wall by her bed so it would be the first thing she’d see every morning, reminding her to work even harder.

  In English they had moved on from Emily Dickinson, they were reading modern poets now, and Daisy was riveted by Sylvia Plath, drawn to her grim fury. “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Why should this appeal to Daisy? She didn’t know.

  She was still working at the store, on weekends and for special events—mostly readings, for which Daisy would arrange chairs and pass books over to the author to be signed. She’d continued to take money, but not as often, and smaller amounts when she did.

  She thought about Duncan, about his catching her at it, about his threat to tell. But she thought, too, about her mother’s birthday party and the way he’d behaved to her that night, as though he liked her, as though it didn’t matter, what she’d done in the store. In any case, the weeks went by and nothing happened, and she figured he’d probably forgotten all about it.

  And then one afternoon in mid-October as she was walking down Oak Street on her complicated route home from school—complicated, so no one would fall in beside her or try to speak to her—she became aware of a car moving along parallel to her in the street, at her pace. She looked over. It was Duncan. He was steering with one hand, his body leaned across the front seat toward her. When she turned, he called her name, softly. Immediately she clutched her books even tighter to her chest.

  But her first clear thought was that she was sorry she wasn’t wearing any lipstick, or a prettier top. And with that response came an unconscious dawning of awareness—awareness of why he was there, and what he was doing, speaking her name, calling her over to him. She couldn’t have articulated it, she wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but she understood that he’d come on purpose, that he had thought about her and sought her out.

  Years later when she tried to explain it to Dr. Gerard, she said that it was as though her unconscious mind knew everything that her conscious mind hadn’t a clue about yet; and this was the moment when they began to communicate with each other

  All of this might have seemed slow, nearly backward, in another person—a person like Emily, for instance. A person who understood something of her own sexual value, her interest to others. But no one had ever paid any kind of sexual attention to Daisy. She had been a homely girl, an awkward girl, a silent girl, for a long time, and her ability to read that kind of interest in herself was absent. Beyond that, Duncan, of course, was a grown-up, and a difficult, scathingly critical, sarcastic grown-up at that. And he was the husband of Gracie, who was an institution in her family.

  But she knew, as soon as she saw him, that he had thought about her over these weeks, these months. She knew that he had planned exactly this, this moment. She walked over to the car and leaned down to the window.

  “Get in,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride.” He was bent across the front seat, his face lifted to talk to her. He looked younger than he usually did at this angle.

  “But I don’t want a ride.” How could she be saying this? To a grown-up. To a friend of her mother’s.

  “Get in anyway,” he said. He sounded unoffended, unsurprised.

  Daisy shrugged and straightened up. She opened the door and got into the car. She set her books down on the seat, between them. Her breath was short, her head felt light.

  He drove down Main Stree
t and started across the valley, through vineyards.

  “Where are we going?” she asked finally.

  “I thought I’d show you what I’m working on. My studio.” His voice was heavy with his usual sarcasm. It occurred to her abruptly that this sarcasm, maybe much of his sarcasm—which had always frightened her—was directed at himself.

  “What if I don’t want to see it?”

  “I’ll show it to you regardless. Because you should want to see it. You should be curious about everything. If you’re not curious now, you might as well shoot yourself and get it over with. You’re dead anyway.” He turned right onto Silverado Road. They drove in silence for a while.

  “And then I thought we’d talk about our bargain.” He said this without looking at her.

  She looked over at him, though. He was wearing a white shirt, pressed. You could see the creases in the fabric where it had been folded. The cuffs were turned back, and his wrists and hands had light brown hairs that glinted in the sun. “There is no bargain,” she said.

  “Well, exactly.” He smiled at her, but his eyes were sober in his pale face. “The bargain we have yet to strike. The bargain in which I don’t report your malfeasance this summer to your mother in exchange for something or other.”

  “I don’t care if you do report it.” She believed this as she said it. She looked out the window at the live oaks, the coppery vines. It would be a relief. Eva would yell at her. She would yell at Eva. It would be over.

  What? What would be over?

  “Oh yes, you do,” he said. “You care very much, in fact.” And suddenly she believed this, too. That she cared, that it would be unbearable if Eva found out.

  All of this confused Daisy, and fed into the confusion she felt about Duncan and what he might want with her. What she might want with him. She couldn’t have explained anything. If someone had asked her, “Why did you go with him?,” she wouldn’t have known. If someone had asked, “What did you think was going to happen?,” she couldn’t have said.

  “What was your feeling?” Dr. Gerard asked.

  “My feeling?”

  “Yes. Your emotional state, as you drove along.”