Lost in the Forest

by Sue Miller

  Now Eva was standing at the podium set up in front of the rows of chairs. She waited, smiling, while everyone sat down and slowly fell silent. She made some announcements—future readings, books that had come in. Daisy could see the writer, who had come down the hall and was standing at the entrance to the room, waiting for Eva to finish. She was fiftyish, carefully groomed. Her hair was stiff, her makeup perfect. She wore a beige suit, and a lot of jewelry.

  Eva started her flattering introduction. Daisy looked at the book she had in her hands as she listened. The author photo was on the front cover. The woman faced the reader with her arms folded across her chest. The photo was slightly overexposed, so that everything distinctive about the face was erased. The author—her name was Joyce Garabedian—was neither young nor old in this picture, Daisy would have said. Just, perhaps, absent. Or abstract, anyway. An abstract woman.

  Now Eva said her name and she came forward to the podium. She nodded, acknowledging the applause. When the room had quieted, she began to speak.

  She wasn’t going to read, Joyce Garabedian said. Instead she wanted to tell her story, the story of how she’d come to write her book. She held it up, as though the audience might not know what book she spoke of. Daisy, whose hands were moving more slowly now since she didn’t want to make any noise, listened and watched her as she worked.

  Joyce Garabedian described her life as it had been. A high-powered job that she hated, as an attorney; a high-powered husband who was rarely home, and when he was, was critical of her, of how she looked, of what she cooked, of how she’d furnished and kept their house. She described the house, a pretentious apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She said, “But the point here is I didn’t know I hated my job. Or my house. Or my husband. I would have said that everything was marvelous. Wonderful.” She smiled. “This was your classic unexamined life.” She pivoted behind the podium and spoke to the other side of the room. “And then one night I was having dinner with a friend, a friend who was seriously depressed—which I didn’t feel I was, not at all. I mean look at all I was accomplishing, look at how busy my life was. Depressed people couldn’t do all that stuff.” She lifted her shoulders, gestured with her hands while she spoke. Rings flashed on her fingers.

  “And I was trying to focus her on the upside of things, so I asked her, ‘Well, what makes you happy?’ And she couldn’t answer. I was shocked. She couldn’t answer. She said to me, ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’ And finally she shrugged and turned the question around. She said to me, ‘What makes you happy?’ ”

  She paused for a long moment, surveying the room, almost smiling. When she spoke again, she spoke slowly. “And that was what did it. That’s what changed everything. Those four words. What. Makes. You. Happy. Because, my dear friends, here was the hard truth.” She leaned forward and said in a lowered voice, an intimate voice, “I didn’t know either.”

  Then she stood straight and looked around again at the audience. Daisy’s hands, which had been moving steadily, lifting a book, opening it, tucking the flap in, setting it on the table, had stopped. Joyce Garabedian said, “The honest answer? Nothing. Nothing made me happy. And I suddenly knew that. I knew. But of course, for the moment I faked it. ‘Oh, certain things at my job.’ ‘Coming home to my lovely apartment.’ I can’t even remember what I said. I invented a couple of things. But all the way home in the cab that night, all the next day, the next week, I kept asking myself that question.

  “And my answer scared me. Scared me enough to start me on the long process of self-examination, self-questioning, and finally self-actualization that I record for you in this book.” She lifted it again and set it down, looked up once more.

  “And that’s where I want you to start. What makes you happy? What does make you happy?”

  Daisy was thinking about her own life, about happiness. She remembered the paper she’d gotten a D on in the spring, the paper with the two sentences about happiness. She thought of John. She thought of Mark in the hillside house.

  Joyce was saying, “If you have even a fragmentary answer for yourself, you’re ahead of where I was. You’re in better shape. Maybe you’ve got kids, or you love to cook, or you play the guitar, or you go jogging among these gorgeous vineyards you live in.”

  Her sparkly hand lifted toward the front window. “Maybe sex makes you happy.” She smiled and her eyebrows lifted, and there was general laughter.

  Why? What was funny about that, Daisy wondered. Sex did make her happy—the moments as it began, opening herself, wanting it. And then when it happened, the feeling of it.

  Then it faded; of course it faded. Was that what was funny? Daisy picked up another book.

  “Whatever works,” Joyce Garabedian was saying. “That’s what tells you where to start. Do more of that. Feed it, I say in the book. And I tell you how to do that, how to make what gives you joy more central to your life. We even look at what you lie about for clues. If you say, ‘Oh, my house,’ while knowing full well that it doesn’t, well, then you need to look at that. There are two possibilities as I see it that connect to that lie. The first is that you feel your house ought to make you happy. It ought to. And therein lies the problem. Because nothing, my dears, that you think ought to make you happy is ever going to. And the second possibility is that you would in fact like it to, but for various reasons it doesn’t. And exploring those reasons will help you get there.

  “But maybe some of you are like me, the way I was. When you ask yourselves that question, what you come up with, looking in the mirror, is a big fat blank stare. What makes me happy? I don’t know. Nothing. And it’s for you ladies especially,” she raised her finger, “that this book will be most helpful.”

  Daisy didn’t know either. That was true. She didn’t know what made her happy. But it was something that would come to her, that would arrive, she thought, and then she’d know it. She’d know it instantly. It would come into her life the way Duncan had come into her life. She’d look up one day, and it would be there. Only it would be real; it would be better than Duncan.

  Duncan, having Duncan, had made her believe this, she realized with a start. That things could arrive, that things could change. Her hands began to move again, lifting Joyce Garabedian’s book. Her life wasn’t like Joyce Garabedian’s, who was pushing the book hard now, laying out a series of steps she had taken and recommending them to her audience in order to discover the life they truly wanted to lead.

  But Daisy by now had tuned her out anyway. There was no connection. Daisy’s life would be different. Special. There would be no steps, no strategies in this cheesy way. What good was it, after all, if you had to work at it?

  The audience was asking questions now, and Daisy, listening half attentively, noted how skillfully Joyce Garabedian kept referring them back to the book, telling them just a little of what they wanted to know and then citing a whole chapter that would explain everything to them.

  When she was finished, the applause was prolonged. She had trouble making her way back to the signing table, so many people stopped her and wanted to say something. Daisy pulled the chair out for her, and offered her a choice of pens, but she had her own, a fancy silver one with a real nib. Daisy began handing her the books, and the women stepped forward.

  The line for signing was long, and Joyce Garabedian talked expansively to many of the audience members who stepped up opposite her and spoke to her of their problems, their hopes. It was late when Eva shut the door on the last customer and turned off the window lights. Callie had left to walk Joyce Garabedian and her escort to their car, so Daisy and Eva were alone.

  Daisy had already begun picking up—she’d started as soon as the last book was signed, when there were still plenty of people in the store—and Eva came back from the front of the store and joined her. For a while they worked silently, staying as far apart as they could. But when they got to the chairs and began to pass each other going up and down the hall, Eva stopped in front of her and said, �
��I’m so furious with you I can hardly speak.”

  “I’m sorry I was late,” Daisy said. Her voice was cold, and Eva’s face tightened. She moved away.

  They each carried several more loads and then Eva, coming back, stopped in the hallway again as Daisy was approaching her. “Why? Why were you so late?”

  Daisy set down the chairs. “Practice ran late.”

  Eva looked hard at her. “Daisy. I called over. Someone told me practice was done much earlier. At four or so.”

  “Yeah, but a couple of us stayed on and shot around for a while after.” She shifted her tone. “I’m not all that good, Mom. If I’m going to make the varsity team, I’ve really got to work on it.”

  Eva sighed, and Daisy knew it was okay. She’d won. “Couldn’t you have called?” Eva asked.

  “I didn’t notice, Mom. There’s no clock in there. And I was all sweaty so I had to shower and clean up and I didn’t even want to take the time to call then, I was rushing so much.” She lifted her chairs again. “I’m sorry. I said so, didn’t I? I am sorry.” Daisy realized that she was actually feeling impatience with Eva—Eva, to whom she was elaborately lying, after all. Impatience for Eva’s slowness in yielding to her lie, in forgiving her. But it didn’t change anything to recognize the unfairness of this—it was what she felt.

  They walked home in silence. It was chilly out, and Daisy held her whole body rigid against the cold. The movie was still going—the marquee was lighted—but the rest of the town was as quiet as it usually was at this hour on a weeknight. Tourists and vineyard owners would still be dining in restaurants, but the shops were closed and there was almost no street traffic.

  As they turned onto Kearney Street and approached their house, Eva said abruptly, “Sometimes I can’t stand it.”

  Daisy, who had been thinking about happiness, about Duncan, about sex, was startled. “Can’t stand what?”

  Eva was quiet for a moment. “Can’t stand how hard it seems, how complicated it is—life—without John.” Then, passionately, “I hate coming home, sometimes. I hate it.”

  “God, Mom.” Daisy felt that she was being blamed somehow, accused. That Eva wouldn’t be saying this to her unless she was still angry. That her mother’s sorrow was connected to her, to all that she didn’t do, couldn’t be, for her. And what this produced in Daisy was the impulse to turn away. She simply couldn’t add her mother’s sorrow or confusion or anger to her own. She didn’t have the strength to carry any more than she felt she was carrying.

  “Get a grip,” she said, and went ahead of her mother up the walk to the lighted house.

  WHEN EMILY came home from college for Thanksgiving, Eva and Theo and Daisy all drove down to the airport to meet her. Daisy hadn’t known what she would feel, how she would respond, but when she saw her older sister, small and pretty and frowning among the other passengers streaming toward them, she called out Emily’s name and watched as she turned, trying to locate her, and then did, her face opening in pleasure. Daisy ran forward, ahead of the others, and she and her sister held each other a moment, and then backed away, laughing and awkward and embarrassed, so Eva and Theo could have their turns.

  She had missed Emily, she’d been aware of that, but in thinking about it through the fall, she’d concluded that she’d missed her even more when she was still around, because of all that had changed between them. When she thought of being close to her sister, what she remembered was the early time in the house on Kearney Street when they still shared a room; or the years when they were little, in the house on the hill. And maybe most of all she missed the person she had been in those days too, before she had a sense of herself as awkward and clumsy, a sense that intensified as Emily became prettier, more elegant, more popular.

  She remembered with a deep, inexplicable pleasure certain games they had played in their hillside home, prolonged fantasies in which they took parts—princess and wicked stepmother, orphan and kindly rich lady. There was a game in which they pushed the furniture into new arrangements and had to cross the living room without allowing their feet to touch the floor—the floor, where crocodiles or skunks or dragons lived. Sometimes Eva let them make a house under the dining room table, draping it with sheets. They brought all their dolls and moved in, and often Eva let them take their meals under there. They would eat in the dim light in what felt like utter secrecy, worlds away from their ordinary life.

  Emily, of course, directed all this. She made all of it happen. Left to her own devices, Daisy would have read, or made pictures, or, later, written stories or poems. And as she was more and more left to her own devices after the move to town—as Emily stepped into her own life—that’s what Daisy had done, until John interceded. But even then, even after she herself had moved away from Emily, after she had come around to thinking of Emily as shallow, as bossy—even then when Emily beckoned her, as she occasionally did, Daisy had responded with a kind of eagerness she sometimes felt as pathetic in herself.

  She had tried to prepare herself through the fall for Emily’s return from college. She didn’t want to feel so eager if Emily should pay attention to her or invite her into her life in some way. And there was a sense in which her relationship with Duncan connected to this resolve on her part. It was like armor against her sister. It was an adventure, an element in her life that Emily couldn’t have guessed at. Something about it, about having this experience that Emily didn’t know about, couldn’t imagine, excited Daisy and made her feel in some way superior to her sister.

  Lying in bed on Emily’s first night home, she thought again of Emily’s descriptions of sex with Noah, and it made her experience of sex with Duncan seem compelling. She thought of the strange, beautiful images that filled her mind when he played with her and she came—rain glittering like silver coins in the air, falling and falling on wide green meadows; or houses she was moving through which opened up, room after unexpected room, each one more full of light. She thought of how open and familiar her own body felt to her, all the parts of it that had frightened and disgusted her before, now so charged with power.

  But when Emily asked her casually on Thursday night if she wanted to go shopping for Christmas presents with her on Saturday, Daisy said yes without even stopping to think about it. Yes. She did.

  “There are, like, huge sales,” Emily said.

  “Yeah,” Daisy said.

  “Maybe we could get something for Mom and for Mark together.”

  “Sure,” Daisy said. “Cool.” She realized that she didn’t care what they did. Just the idea of having been chosen by Emily again was enough. She felt, she realized, just as she had when Duncan had arrived in her life: rescued. Rescued from herself. It was like wearing the heavy makeup Maria had put on her at Eva’s birthday party, and the black bathing suit with its too ample cups and the rhinestone belt. The sense of another self, another way of being in the world. It was news. News about herself. She remembered how everyone had looked at her that night, and how she’d wanted to stay in the costume because she felt suddenly that she could be anyone she chose to be. She remembered writing out the poem that Mark had asked her for, and then, on impulse, writing out that other one, the one that announced her feelings, the feelings of newness and possibility and happiness.

  And she felt that way again, she couldn’t help it, when Emily asked to be with her.

  SHE WAS UP early on Saturday. It was chilly out, and drizzly, but Daisy didn’t care. She came down into the kitchen and turned on the overhead lights. Eva had left half of a baguette out on the island, and Daisy decided abruptly to make French toast. The butter smoked in the pan, the sopping bread sizzled. The kitchen filled with vanilla-scented smoke.

  She took her plate to the island. She got the maple syrup from the refrigerator. It was cold and thick as she poured it on. She took a bite and chewed slowly, the sweetness and cold making her teeth ache. She was about to take another bite when Theo came in. He had dressed himself, clearly—nothing was tucked in and his fly was still op
en. He was carrying his wallet in both hands against his chest. This was a gift from Eva, bought for him last summer after he’d returned the money he’d stolen. A reward for having gone straight after having been a thief, Daisy supposed. She had smirked when she saw it then. She smirked now.

  “Going shopping?” she asked sarcastically, weighting the word. It occurred to her that she sounded like Duncan.

  His head bobbed enthusiastically. “I’m going with you.”

  Daisy shook her head. “No, I’m going with Emily. Emily and I are going by ourselves.”

  “Nuh-unh, Daisy,” he said with a teasing emphasis. “Emily told me, and I’m going too. Mom said I could.”

  Daisy set her fork down. Of course. Suddenly she understood it all. Emily had invited them both. It was a project of Emily’s. She was a project of Emily’s. Emily would manage them; she’d be in charge of their togetherness. She’d speak to friends of the day and of the time with them as a virtuous act. What did you do on your break? Oh, I took my brother and sister Christmas shopping, you know, to get stuff for the parents.

  Daisy got up from the island, unhungry. She took her plate to the sink and watched the half-eaten toast slide from it. She turned the water on and punched all the food into the disposal. The machine roared and gurgled as she ran it.

  Theo had climbed onto a chair. “I am hungry,” he announced when Daisy turned the disposal off.

  “Then fix something for yourself!” she said, and left the kitchen.

  She lay in her room and listened to the rest of the house wake up. She heard Emily in their bathroom, taking a shower, then the long silence while she fixed her hair and fussed with makeup. She heard Eva’s radio in her room, tuned to the news. She heard them talking when they went down to the kitchen. Someone else made French toast too, she could smell it.