Out of the Woods (2 page)

For the first time in years my hours were for hire, freelance agents ready for any employment. Zoë's summer camp was one of those shoestring operations where the 1960s lingered on, sustained by large doses of Joni Mitchell and politically correct entertainments like the daylong reenactment of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which was offered up under a broiling sun for Parents' Visiting Day ceremonies. No cell phones or computers were permitted, which meant that Zoë and I were unbuckled from each other for the first time, apart from the handwritten letters detailing cold morning swims, mean girls, kind counselors, and an aggressive mold population that was slowly turning everything in her tent, including the inhabitants, an alarming shade of gray.

Every morning I walked down the steep hill and bought coffee and a pastry from the somewhat self-consciously European but extremely good café and then trudged back up again, amazed at the spaciousness of the day ahead. In the beginning I took the coffee and the pastry up the winding stairs to the odd little crow's nest of an office at the top of the house, where I tried to make headway on a book I was supposed to be writing, although most of the time I just watched the progress of the indefatigable wasp who was patiently attempting, so far unsuccessfully, to wedge himself through a gap in the screen that covered the window. In the afternoons I would calm my anxiety over the work I didn't do by climbing Mount Tom, a gentle old hill laced on its southern side by an easy switchback that used to bring turn-of-the-century ladies and gentlemen up to the summit for the view. Or I would walk along the Ottauquechee River and up into the hills on rolling country roads, hypnotized by the green buzzing beauty of the place.

In Woodstock I felt lighter, at least when I wasn't trying to work. Here was a place where I was none of the things I had been, not widow nor wife, not mother, a place where I would not encounter the ghosts of old selves and old lives. A place where I could imagine being a woman alone in a future still safely far away.

One morning I walked past a woman hunkered down over some window pots outside the Yankee Bookshop, planting orange and scarlet dahlias. She was blond, buxom, and barefoot, in her forties, presenting a round face full of frank curiosity and a glint of mischief in her bright blue eyes. Her name was Susan Morgan, and she was the owner of the store.

She looked me up and down. You can't be on vacation, she said. You look terrible. The snaky dread began to fill my lungs. I'm writing, I said. Or not writing. Mostly I'm having a little bit of a breakdown. It's kind of a full-time job. Then I stopped. In New York, people tended to discuss breakdowns and anxiety attacks with the same casualness they did the difficulty of finding a cab during the afternoon shift change. But Woodstock wore an air of such self-complacency that the comment felt like very bad manners. Susan looked at me thoughtfully and asked a few questions about where and with whom I was living. I told her. Well, that's the problem, she said. You're too alone. Of course you're going crazy. Why don't you write here?

Normally, I would have thanked her kindly and moved on—I had a complicated ritual when it came to writing that stopped just short of human sacrifice; it was not easily transported. But I was desperate, and the project was long overdue. The next day I brought my laptop to the bookstore and Susan set me up on a couple of billowy floor cushions in the travel section. I wrote two chapters.

 

T
hat was the first of many visits to Woodstock. A month later, the World Trade Center fell and the night sky was lit by two beams of blue light marking their place and the way in which the future had changed forever. Woodstock, its beauty, its safety, took on a talismanic quality; I returned every summer while my daughter was in camp. I came to know a few people a little, the way you do when you see them on the street while doing errands, or behind the counters of the stores you frequent. Their warmth in welcoming me back each successive summer was gratifying. And though I barely knew them, I wanted to be one of them, no longer an outsider like all the other visitors with their impatience and their restlessness.

I found a real estate agent, Lynne Bertram, a woman whose own roots ran deep in the area—she was the daughter of Wallace “Bunny” Bertram, who had operated the country's first mechanical tow for skiers, fashioned out of 1,800 feet of rope and a Ford Model T up on Gilbert's Hill just outside of town. When she wasn't selling real estate, Lynne helped her husband, Nelson, to run a two-hundred-acre farm, where they raised Scottish Highland cattle, enormous beasts with great shaggy heads and arcing horns, and a small but ever-growing flock of sheep, whose lambs she named after French cabaret singers. In her spare time she presided over an orchard of ancient apple trees and a spectacular flower garden. She was a handsome woman and had been a great beauty and a professional ski racer on the international circuit in her youth. She was not one to mince words.

We sat at the counter in the coffee shop, where Lynne reminisced with her cousin Sandy, the café's manager—Lynne had been the flower girl at the wedding of Sandy's aunt, and they talked about the dresses the grandmothers had made for the bridal party—and I envied the way in which they were stitched into each other's lives.

We ate grilled cheese sandwiches and I told Lynne what I wanted. A small windfall from a real estate sale had made it possible for me to buy a house out in the country—nothing fancy. I'll see what I can do, she said, and eventually she found me the house at the end of the road. I hadn't spent much time there while Zoë was in high school, and when I did go I went alone. Zoë had come with me once, her freshman year, but she had a city kid's allergy to the country: she couldn't sleep; it was too quiet. So the house became my retreat, the place where I could slip away when the noise of life began to overwhelm. I thought of it, a little sheepishly, as my Fortress of Solitude, like Superman's Arctic redoubt in the comics. When I was a girl, whenever family life became too intrusive (which, of course, was nearly always), I would lie in bed and read about his trips there and envy him desperately. One day, I had promised myself, I would have such a place of my own. And now I did.

In those days, I visited the house like a shy courting lover, stealing a weekend here and there, or a week of Zoë's high school spring break. I brought flowers and books and other votive offerings, and because I was there so rarely, the place remained a Shangri-la, both intimate and exotic. I was entranced, like many a refugee from the city before me, by the seeming simplicity of my life there, the quiet order of the hours. Because I depended so much on the sun for power, my days followed a simple progression: I would get up just before dawn and watch the first of the light cast a leafy shadow play across the living room wall while I drank my tea. The window by which I sat overlooked a small meadow that gleamed gold and green in the early-morning light; sometimes, I would linger there, hoping for a deer or bear or moose to wander by. By the late afternoon, I was upstairs in the rocking chair in my bedroom, where I could take advantage of the last of the western light while I read or knitted and dreamed of a life where such ordinary pleasures and welcome constraints could be the rule rather than the exception. And now they were about to be.

 

C
oastal Route 1 ambled past Portland, where I picked up Route 25, which seemed to head west in approximately the right place. The late-August light slanting across the road had the valedictory quality of late summer, and I wasn't sorry to see the season come to an end. I wanted autumn to arrive quickly; I want everything to be over. I was so sick of good-byes.

The spring had been endless. Zoë had been admitted early decision to Bowdoin College, and the whirlwind of anxiety and deadlines in which we had lived from the beginning of her last year in high school had abruptly given way to the torpor of the second-semester senior. I discovered with some wonder how much real estate in my brain had been taken up over the last three years by deadlines and the ratios of applications to admissions, by grade point averages and achievement scores, and by the emergency consolations required by midnight meltdowns over the entire spectrum of late-adolescent angst—from the fatal mediocrity that would result in her rejection by even the stoner college that was her safety school, to the dismal number of tags and pokes, whatever they were, that determined her popularity on Facebook, and therefore her self-worth. Now the days were devoid of most of these woes, and I realized how little thought I'd given to what was to replace them.

The school counselors talked about a phenomenon called “fouling the nest,” in which the child of your bosom begins to act like the scorpion in your shoe, an adolescent's defense mechanism, apparently, to make it easier to leave home. I would look at the ceiling and count the days until her departure, thrilled not to be dreading it anymore, on the rare occasions of her bad behavior. But then something would happen, Zoë would play a song that had been her favorite when she was twelve, or her two best friends would saunter in, with a strange new self-possession that had come in the mail with the acceptance letters, and I would remember the night I had nursed one of them through her first wretched encounter with vodka, or some silly afternoon I had been lucky to be a part of. And I wondered if I would ever know the women they were on the verge of becoming, now that the road had opened and they were setting out in so many different directions. The memories skittered like dry leaves along the bare wooden floors of the apartment, echoing and reechoing, and then swirling away.

Around this time, I went to a book party with an old friend. It was held in one of those beautiful old West Village apartments, crowded with a worn velvet sofa, easy chairs, and a settee draped in quilts and vibrant silk cushions. Thin spring sunlight filtered in through a big bow window overlooking Washington Square Park. A gray cat dozed amid the chatter of perhaps a dozen guests, worldly, successful people from a variety of walks of life. There was a grave, bespectacled Turkish photographer, a celebrated biographer, a stylish editor from a well-respected publishing house, and a plump grandmotherly woman who had known the author since she was a child.

The guest of honor was a woman about my age, whose sixth novel we were celebrating. She was married to an old college classmate of mine; they had six children. She was a professor at an English university and the official American translator for an eminent novelist. She was dressed in a black dress and black stockings that should have looked dowdy but instead came together in the kind of elegantly careless disarray that is somehow the hallmark of confident British intellectual women of a certain age.

We were introduced and she was very kind, but when she asked me about myself, I could think of nothing to say. I mumbled something about being at a turning point, about my child going off to college, and trailed off midsentence, unable to remember what I did with my days.

I walked back home, shaken. This woman had done more with her life in one month than I had done in years. To witness her world, the assurance with which she seemed to move through her life, was to recognize the distinction between a real person and a ghost. I tried to muster a more accurate image of my own life, the work I had done, the friends I cared about, but my confidence was fading fast, and as I walked along, the city in which I'd lived for so long felt cold and alien, its endless variety providing no solace. Everyone looked strange—the doughy, exhausted guy in the coffee shop changing a soggy coffee filter for the millionth time, the hard-edged scramblers charging down the street barking into their cell phones, even the people who usually made me smile, like the compact young woman dressed in four shades of turquoise, neat as a pony in her high heels, rushing along on the stream of her own vitality.

I came home to find Zoë standing in the kitchen, dressed up for a night out in an old crocheted dress with torn black stockings and hand-me-down spectators, staring disconsolately at a tub of frozen chili. I had barely seen her for the last few evenings, but that night her plans had changed at the last minute and she was home alone. She couldn't get the container open. The microwave wouldn't work. She was hungry and close to the tears too little sleep and a surfeit of emotion bring. I smiled, happy to have stumbled into a temporary reprieve. I made her dinner, and we sat down together on the old blue sofa, watching animated movies from her childhood late into the night, counting the last moments of her childhood as they ticked away.

 

I
began to make plans and lists and more plans, and lists of plans, charms against the uneasiness conjured by the book party and Zoë's looming departure. I would move to Vermont, to the little house I had bought. I would buy a dog and live in the country. I would reinvent myself, a woman alone, solitary and self-contained.

I trolled the Internet, in search of a car that could make it up my cranky dirt road and a puppy easy enough to manage with my paltry lack of disciplinary skills. Gradually the rough draft of a new self emerged. I saw myself striding through the countryside, needing no companionship but the noble hound who followed close to heel, the evening a cozy pastiche of firelight, softly playing jazz and great books. At times the vision was so real, so beguiling, that I was impatient to be off; I couldn't wait for the beginning of this perfect new life. I navigated the streets of the city with an already nostalgic fondness.

Zoë was skeptical. You're going to live alone, in the middle of nowhere, in the country? Besides, she said, what will you wear? Flannel? She liked the idea of the yellow Lab puppy I eventually contracted to buy, or did until she discussed it with her friends. They say you're getting another little blond baby to replace me, she reported with some indignation.

If the spring seemed at times to never end, the last weeks of her senior year cascaded by in a torrent of ceremonial moments savored, a looking back that was finally divested of sorrow and mourning. It began with a graduation party, at the house of an old friend, one of the first people I had met when Lee and I moved to New York: We had been pregnant together, and our daughters had been born six weeks apart. Now we stood in the fading warmth of a spring evening, looking at each other and at the parents we had known over the years, fellow travelers through the rapids of childhood, men and women who were grappling with the same images, light and dark, all of us runners at the end of the race, and I wanted to lift a glass to each and every one of them and say, Well done.