Lost in the Forest

by Sue Miller

  “Okay. Once upon a time,” Theo begins, “there was a little boy, a brave little boy named … Gideon!” He raises his eyebrows at his nephew.

  “Me,” Gideon says. He almost smiles.

  “Yes. And this boy was walking in the woods one day when he met an old, old woman.”

  “Me,” Eva says.

  “No!” several others chorus, Daisy among them.

  Theo describes it, the woman, the house she takes the little boy to. He is overacting, Daisy thinks, he should pull it in.

  He passes the story to Daisy. She adds candy to the house, and a magic bird who can talk to the boy. Then she passes it to Emily.

  But Gideon won’t let Emily talk. He puts his small hand over her mouth and says, “No, no! Mumma.” She is his, not theirs.

  So Eva takes it up. The bird flies out the window and through the forest to town, where he finds the boy’s parents, and they come and get him and they all live happily ever after. Gideon tilts his head against his mother and a vague, pleased smile lights his face.

  Brunch breaks up. Emily and Ted and Gideon go upstairs to get ready for the wedding. The others clear the table and load the dishwasher. It isn’t until everyone is milling around in the hall getting coats, preparing to leave, that Daisy finds herself almost alone next to Duncan, that he turns to her and lowers his voice to be heard by only her.

  “I’m surprised you came,” he says. “Surprised. Delighted. I’d gotten used to the family parties where you were conspicuously absent.”

  “Conspicuously to you alone, I suspect. But this one could hardly be avoided. I needed to be here.” She has straightened her back; she’s at her full height, taller than him.

  “Still, it had come to the point where I expected never to see you again.”

  She nods. Then she says, “I’m surprised you would give it—that you would give me—a moment’s thought.”

  His smile, his ironic smile. “You underestimate yourself, Daisy.”

  “That I do not do,” she says, firmly.

  “Well, you misunderstand me, then.”

  “I think, actually, that I don’t understand you.” She turns her light green eyes fully upon him. “I didn’t, and I never will. But I don’t need to, really. Because whatever use you were making of me, I made use of you, too. Good use.” Her voice is hard as she says this. She smiles her own ironic smile. “I should probably thank you.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “No, I don’t think I will.”

  AFTER THE WEDDING, after the dinner at Kathy’s house, Kevin drives Daisy down to the airport. She’s catching the red eye to get back to Chicago in time for rehearsal, and he’s headed back to college. She has planned to sleep on the plane, but she doesn’t. She’s wide awake, thinking about the wedding, about her father and Kathy, about her family. And then, inevitably, about Duncan.

  She felt nothing for him, and this surprises her. Seeing him was easy. He was an old man she used to know. She is a grown woman—a grown-up, she thinks, and smiles—who used to be under his spell, somehow, when she was a child. A child like those in Theo’s fairy tales, held in some cottage in the dark forest, unable to imagine escape.

  “But you did escape,” Dr. Gerard had said to her when she used this analogy once in therapy.

  “Not exactly.” She looked through the thin aureole of Dr. Gerard’s white hair to the bare tree outside the window behind her. “I was rescued. The noble woodsman. The prince. My father.”

  “But how did this figure, this rescuer, know you were there if you didn’t somehow signal him, if you didn’t somehow find a way to call for help?”

  They had sat in silence for a while. Then Daisy said, “I know what you’re saying. You’re saying I somehow deliberately let Mark know about my affair with Duncan.”

  “I would call it his affair with you.” Dr. Gerard had her ironic smile too.

  “Okay, point taken. But the other thing, that I somehow knew what I was doing—”

  “I didn’t say you knew what you were doing. I said you managed to signal him, to make your life speak to him.”

  Daisy thought for a minute. “Unconsciously,” she said.

  Dr. Gerard grinned. “Why not? Why not the unconscious: the thing I believe in and you pretend not to.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe in it,” she argued.

  “No? Then what is it?”

  “It’s that that’s not how it felt to me. I was angry he found out. I was upset.”

  “And then relieved.”

  “Yes.” Daisy was reluctant, and it made her sound sullen.

  “But all I’m suggesting is that you take some credit for having relieved yourself, for getting what you needed from your father.”

  “Oh, that’s all.”

  “That is all,” Dr. Gerard said, and smiled across the room, across her strange magic carpet, at Daisy.

  It was Dr. Gerard who suggested she read Lolita, who felt it might help her to think about what had happened to her, how she had been abused. And Daisy had read it, she had considered what Humbert imagines Dolly Schiller, his transformed Lolita, wants to say to him at the end of the book: that he broke her life.

  But that’s not what she felt, or feels, Daisy is thinking on the plane. Her life was already broken. There was a mystery in it when Duncan took up with her, a mystery she didn’t understand. It had to do with Mark and Eva, with Eva and John, with those things that hold people together in a sexual union, or push them apart. It had to do with how that is so deeply part of who they are, an expression of something central in them. And it had to do with the way the grown-ups are reckless with that, the way that others, even their own children, can simply not matter to them in the face of that. When she first heard the words collateral damage to refer to innocent people killed in war, Daisy had laughed at the inept horror of the phrase—and then realized those seemed the perfect words too, for herself as a child, as a teenager.

  Duncan exposed the underpinnings of adult life, sexual life, to Daisy, though there wasn’t a way for her to have articulated that at the time. He completed a kind of dark education that had begun in her with the divorce, and continued with John’s death. She’d been mired in confusion for all those years, unable to take in any of the events that shaped her life except as pain to herself. Duncan had made her see what else they meant, what they might have meant to Eva, to Mark. Even to John.

  She remembers saying once to Dr. Gerard of John that she hadn’t really accepted that he and Eva had a sexual relationship until after Duncan. She hadn’t understood that essential part of Eva’s grief. She hadn’t known how much she stood outside the lives of her parents, her stepfather.

  Duncan had made her understand her insignificance. He had toughened her and hardened her, and that was wrong; but she was lost, and he had, almost certainly inadvertently, shown her a way out. Or he and Mark had, working unwittingly together.

  Looking out the plane’s window at the blackness below, Daisy remembers a terrible fight she and Duncan had in the week or so before Mark had found out about them, a fight that had shaken her deeply. She had been pushing him again to tell her what she meant to him, and if not that, then to beg her for sex. To give her something, as she felt it. In her confusion about what he was doing with her, what they were doing together, she wanted to understand his feelings, to be able to measure them somehow. Finally, in exasperation with her he’d turned away, walked to his work table—she could remember watching his hitching process across the room—and picked up his wallet. He’d taken out a handful of bills and come back to her, tossed them on her naked belly.

  She stood up, not even brushing them away, and came at him, hitting him twice before he simply held her arm, and she felt how much power he could have exerted over her at any time he chose.

  When he finally let go of her, she turned away and got dressed, wordlessly. She walked out to the car to wait for him to come and drive her to her father’s house.

  She had wept that n
ight, alone in her room at Mark’s, wept until her head ached.

  But she would have gone on with it; she wouldn’t have given Duncan up, even then—except that somehow she must have been ready to. Somehow she had signaled Mark. On the plane, now, she thinks maybe even her weeping had been a signal intended for her father. She was thinking of it while she cried, actually, she remembers that now. She was thinking that her father might hear her and come to her, and she was wondering what she would say if he asked her why she was crying. Wondering if she would have to tell him the truth.

  But he hadn’t come, and after a while she had stopped.

  BEFORE THEY LAND in Chicago, the pilot comes on the intercom to tell them that it’s four degrees out. When Daisy comes up out of the train station in the Loop, her eyes tear up instantly, her nose starts to run and pinch with freezing. Her hands hurt, even in her mittens. She has the sense that the bones of her face are in danger of cracking.

  She catches a lone cab, drifting by on the empty street. In the backseat on the way home, she suddenly realizes she’s making a little moaning noise with each inhalation, and she stops herself.

  There is no new snow, she’s grateful to see. But at her apartment she has to clamber with her suitcase over the blackened, frozen bank of old stuff shoveled up at the edge of the sidewalk.

  Inside, she’s grateful for the scorching heat in the hall, the burned smell in the dry air. It’s the same in her apartment, except in the kitchen, where the window always slides open a crack, since the two sides of the latch, one on the upper sash, one on the lower, can’t be forced to meet. Strong men have tried it and failed, as has Daisy.

  She closes it again now—the creep to open is gradual—and bends to scratch her cat, Charley, who is rubbing back and forth against her legs, his spine arched, his tail whipping in pleasure. The digital clock over the sink says 6:37. The windows are still dark. Two days of mail are piled on the kitchen table, mail brought upstairs by the same neighbor who’s fed Charley while Daisy was away. Daisy opens the cupboards. There’s not much here—there never is, Daisy eats badly—but she finds part of a package of Chocomallows and carries it with her into her living room, along with the mail.

  Daisy loves this apartment. She’s lived in it since she came to Chicago eight years ago, drawn to the city by its reputation as a good town for young actors. It’s a tiny space, two rooms and a kitchen on the fourth floor of an old town house on the near north side. It smells faintly of cat piss. This is her fault. She made the mistake of leaving the unscreened window open one night when the weather was nice so Charley could go in and out off the fire escape and catalpa tree that brushes against it. She waked to find four strange cats plus her own hunkered motionless as ornaments in the apartment—some sort of cat standoff, apparently—and the terrible odor everywhere. She laundered everything, she even washed the walls, but it lingers still, delicate and occasional.

  In the living room, the streetlights’ harsh glare is falling in, empurpling everything, making ugly what it touches. Daisy pulls the curtains and turns on a light.

  One other thing Daisy has told no one in her family about is the set designer she met last summer who has recently moved in with her—David. The magnitude of this step has been tempered for both of them by the amount of traveling he does for his work, but even so, she feels astonished by this decision, on her part and on his. She has been in love before, but has never thought she could live with anyone. There’s a line she learned as Miranda that she whispered to David the first night after he moved his few possessions in: “This is the third man that e’er I saw, the first that e’er I sighed for.”

  This had caused him to lift her nightgown up and press his lips to the white flesh of her body here and there for a while. When he was done, when he was lying next to her again, he frowned in exaggerated thoughtfulness and said, “Only the third, Daisy?”

  “I may be a little off on the math,” she said.

  He’s due home Tuesday, and Daisy has spent some of the two weeks of his absence sanding and polyurethaning the beat-up, dark floor in the living room. Now, in the lamplight, this space is transformed. It looks light and clean and fresh. The last thing she did before she left the house three days before was to move the furniture back in, including David’s one contribution, an Eames chair that makes everything else look shapeless and provisional. Now she sits down in it. Charley joins her, warming her thigh. She should try to sleep, she knows, but she’s too keyed up. She goes slowly through the mail. She eats another Chocomallow. Charley licks up a little piece of the thin chocolate skin that falls on her leg.

  Daisy is thinking of her father, of how his face looked saying his vows to Kathy—opened, hopeful. Daisy had looked at Eva then, she couldn’t help herself. Tears had been streaming down her mother’s face. Daisy had no way of knowing what they meant, but her own throat had knotted too.

  Her script is lying on the cedar chest she uses as a coffee table. She’s pulled out her own pages, highlighted her lines in yellow. She picks up the sheaf of paper now, and flips to the ending, to her own final speech. “O wonder!” she cries out in the nearly empty room. “How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in’t!”

  The fluorescence has faded behind the curtains—Daisy can see the wide stripe of pale daylight beginning where they don’t quite meet. She thinks of being Miranda, enchanted by her father into a capacity for love, astonished at what life has brought her—an innocent, open to everything. She reads the lines over and over again to herself, whispering, looking at the rhythm, the repetition in the words and in the ideas, as she’s been taught to do. It’s the people, she realizes, that Miranda is wondering at, their sheer numbers, and their beauty. The creatures, the mankind: the people! That’s where she should put the emphasis, that’s what will make it new.

  She looks up at the slant of sunlight entering the room, reflecting brightly off the floor she’s made shiny for her new love, and takes a breath to start again, sure that this time she will get it right.

  Lost in the Forest

  SUE MILLER

  A Reader’s Guide

  A CONVERSATION WITH SUE MILLER

  Jennifer Morgan Gray is a writer and editor

  who lives in North Bethesda, Maryland.

  Jennifer Morgan Gray: Was there a particular character, image, or idea that inspired Lost in the Forest?

  Sue Miller: There were multiple sources of inspiration for Lost in the Forest. I had written a short story some years ago about Mark and Eva, a short story I never published, as it seemed somehow incomplete in my own mind. It focused on Mark and his dream of getting Eva back after the death of her second husband. It ended with the scene in the book when Theo suddenly remembers his father’s death, remembers him as flying at that moment, and Mark realizes from Eva’s response to Theo that his hopes are utterly futile.

  Sometime after this, I was talking to the father of some kids I’d known from day care, asking him what had become of them, now twenty-five years later. And in thinking about those kids, and my own son, now an adult in his thirties, I began to ponder the way we were so absorbed in ourselves, we parents-who-divorced and were busy leading our own chaotic lives. I began to think about how our children might have been affected by all that. I began to think about my story about Mark and Eva, and how there might be reverberations in their kids’ lives in response to all the events that also disturbed them so much.

  And in thinking about all this, and pondering how to make a longer tale out of my short story, I reread What Maisie Knew, Henry James’s short novel about a child of divorce, of callous, fortune-hunting parents in Europe, and the way they expose their daughter to life through their carelessness about her. I thought about how interesting it would be to transpose this to the late twentieth century, to parents who think of themselves as conscientious, who know a great deal about child-rearing, and who still expose at least one of their children to difficulty.

&nbs
p; JMG: The book’s point of view shifts between Daisy, Mark, and Eva. Why did you choose to have these different voices as the driving forces of the narrative? Did you ever consider structuring the book in a different way, and if so, how?

  SM: I started with Mark because that’s how my story started, though I knew it would come around slowly to focusing on Daisy. I felt I needed Eva’s perspective, too, to explain fully how Daisy became invisible to her parents, in a certain sense. I wanted the trajectory of the book to be unpredictable, surprising, in the same way that the experience was unpredictable and surprising to Mark. I wanted it to echo the way he woke up from his own story and became aware that he was involved involuntarily and unconsciously in another story—Daisy’s.

  JMG: Daisy mentions a feeling of being “lost in the forest,” like the heroine of one of the fairy tales her family spins for Theo. What other meanings of “lost in the forest” did you hope to evoke? Were there other titles that you considered and then abandoned?

  SM: Even the title of the short story was “Lost in the Forest,” and in the short story, Daisy is a minor character. I thought of the title as applying fully to Mark, then, well before it applied to Daisy. In fact, I think it applies to all the characters. I think it’s an apt metaphor for life, for the sense of lostness we all have periodically in life, the sense of wishing for someone else, some event, some person, some religious impulse, as in Eva’s case, to help give our lives meaning. I never considered another title.

  JMG: Fairy tales—from those told at Eva’s kitchen table to Daisy’s notion of her father as “rescuer”—are motifs that weave beautifully throughout the book. While you were writing, did you envision Daisy as the heroine in a fable or fairy tale? Did you read particular fairy tales while you were working on Lost in the Forest?

  SM: I reread some of the Grimms’ fairy tales, particularly Hansel and Gretel, as that one is in many ways like the fairy tale that the family tells Theo. And I did, very much, think of Daisy as being a character in such a tale; though as I indicated above, I also thought of Mark in that way, too, his forest perhaps being the illusions he has about Eva, the notion that if only he can win her back, he will live happily ever after.