Out of the Woods (6 page)

Because, as it turned out, Zoë didn't go to the University of Guam.

But I did.

3

Henry

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
Walden

I
n those days, I lived lightly in the half-empty house, walking softly on the bare pine floor, so as not to hear the echo of my own footsteps, making as little noise as possible, like a polite houseguest searching the kitchen for a train schedule while the hosts are still asleep. It was not my house, but it was not the Rileys' house, either; it seemed to belong, if it belonged to anyone, to the woods, and to its emissaries, the spider who lived in the mudroom, the mouse I found in the cupboard one day, to the silence I was reluctant to disturb. The long golden days stretched themselves like cats, then stalked off into the evening without a backward glance.

The only way to make the house mine, I knew, was to take possession, to unpack the boxes and put things away, to claim the space for my own. And to that end, I would wake up feeling strong and centered; I would open a box and get as far as spreading its contents out on the floor, the better to group them according to some sort of purpose, something I had failed to do when packing up. Accordingly, laddered black tights, printer cartridges in yellow and cyan, a whisk broom, silk scarves, a half-dozen books, a sweater I hadn't worn in years, and a cascade of Post-it notes, paper clips, hair combs, and several cartons of Mickey Mouse Band-Aids all made it into the same receptacle.

The disorder was daunting; trying to ignore a rising sense of alarm, I would scoop up an assortment of more or less office-related objects and head into the upstairs bedroom that was to be my work space. It was a small room that overlooked the meadow, perfectly adequate as a place to write, but utterly insufficient for the titanic battle that raged within it.

I had always been a messy person, and I had come very late, to the extent I had come at all, to the idea that there might be something wrong with living in a state of unending domestic chaos. I had grown up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the decade social anthropologists now define as the zenith of the American preoccupation with dirt and idealization of the perfect homemaker. Middle-class suburban homes bristled with veritable armories of cleaning devices while television ads promised spotless perfection through the aid of muscular genies emerging from toilets (a terrifying prospect to a young child) and magical bubbles that danced away the dirt. And these homes were inhabited by a generation of smart, ambitious, energetic women condemned to staking their personal worth on the shininess of their sinks and the spotlessness of their kitchen floors.

The combination was a volatile one, at least in my house, where every Saturday was witness to a clash of biblical proportions between my brash, infuriated, and infuriating mother, and a horde of witless, unbelieving Philistines in the persons of my sweet-natured but essentially indolent father, my two brothers, and myself.

To my mother, the weekly Saturday-morning cleaning was a holy crusade. To the rest of us, it was the tar pit that separated my father from the golf course and his children from the morning cartoons. It always ended badly; by the end of the day my mother was a tornado of recrimination, exhaustion, and injured feelings, and she was nearly, but unfortunately not completely, speechless with anger. Housekeeping and rage: back then they went together like Sears & Roebuck, gin and tonic, death and desire. My mother scrubbed, and cursed our laziness. She was ferocious in her quest for perfection. Any spot, any lint left behind was a slap in the face. On weekdays, the enemy was the dirt itself. But on Saturdays, the one day when she assumed she would have allies in the cause, it was our inexplicable indifference to her vision. She was smart and possessed of boundless energy and will. She should have been directing the fate of nations. Instead, she had us.

By the time I went off to college I loathed housekeeping and gloried in the disorder of my dorm room as proof that my roommate and I would not suffer the same fates as our mothers. Housekeeping was not only politically incorrect; it could literally drive you crazy, if the film
Diary of a Mad Housewife
was any indication. (I still remember the obnoxious social-climbing husband sneering to his daughters, “Your mother made Phi Beta Kappa at Smith, but I don't think she can make a four-minute egg.”) Besides, we had better things to do: stop the war, save the world, talk about boys. So I reveled in our squalor, reading Charles Dickens and rolling my eyes at his plucky little heroines whose principal virtues inevitably revolved around their tidiness and their abilities to turn even a prison cell into a domestic paradise, while listening to Mick Jagger bragging about his unmade bed. Mick Jagger or Little Dorrit? The choice wasn't even close.

Marriage to a man with an innate love of an organized life had changed all that—at least cosmetically. Our clashing attitudes could have led to an instant divorce, but housekeeping was never really an issue—Lee was a man with a quiet but indomitable force of will. I think he simply intimidated our home into staying orderly.

After he died, however, the old ways returned, and in time the apartment in New York was in shambles. I had meant to make a fresh start in Vermont, but the simple process of unpacking a box was enough to make my heart race with anxiety. Every item that I unearthed—an old grocery list in Lee's hand, a pair of socks I'd worn when I went into labor, a crayoned drawing of Simba from
The Lion King
—became a totem, at once sacred and mocking. That's when I would break down, filled with grief, yes, but also fury. I could see that the mess wasn't simply the product of my lifelong laziness or some outdated adolescent protest. No—I was drowning in the past, the artifacts of loss fossilizing around me. By never letting go of anything, no matter how trivial, I was dismissing the future, allowing it no room in which to unfold. No wonder cleaning up caused me such anxiety.

And yet I couldn't do it. The house developed claws and fangs and ripped away any notion I had of gaining purchase, and I would slide fast into the old grief, past any sense of purpose. Defeated, I would creep downstairs, curl up on the sofa, and listen to Emmylou Harris, too tired to do anything, too empty to feel guilty about it. “Hold on,” sang Emmylou, but I couldn't, not very well. I tried to think of a reason to live, not in a melodramatic way—as George Eliot said, suicide is attractive only to the young, and besides, there was Zoë to consider, Zoë who had recovered so well from her father's death, but who just the week before had called the Woodstock sheriff and convinced him to drive out to Castle Dismal to make sure I was still alive. (The phone was dead, and she hadn't been able to reach me.) No, this was a question asked of the future. If Zoë was all but gone, and writing was too frightening, and love a distant memory, what was I going to do with myself? How did one invest this part of life with meaning? Now what? I didn't know, and Emmylou didn't say.

Every night I promised myself I would climb out of this trough and get back to work, and late every afternoon I would discover to my great surprise that I had done nothing at all. Instead I knitted—I was making a red throw for Zoë's room in college—and while I knitted, I thought about what I would write when the throw was finished. On the computer, I played endless games of Boggle and Word Whomp, a word-scrambling game in which animated gophers poked their heads out of holes. When you failed to find the big seven-letter word in the allotted three minutes, they shook their heads in disappointment, but when you got it right, they would do backflips and ecstatically munch the turnip awarded as your prize. I loved making them happy.

The word games were the closest I got to writing. Some of the words I unscrambled would hook me with their inherent beauty or the chime of some subconscious resonance. Sometimes I would write them down—
gaunt, goblin, bramble, languor, dwindle
. I played for hours, until my fingers hurt. Then I would go on the Internet and research addiction to computer games, looking for symptoms of how badly I was hooked, until at last the rooms began to darken and the day was down for the count.

I don't know how long this state of suspended animation would have lasted if the ceiling in the mudroom hadn't caved in. One morning I woke to find fluffy balls of acid pink insulation drifting through Castle Dismal. I wasn't worried about them so much as I was alarmed at the idea of armies of mice pouring through the breached ceiling to complete their final conquest of the house. I called Larry Davis, the contractor who had done some earlier work on the place, and we agreed that it might be time to look toward some of the other repairs that had long been in the offing—a roof over the garage to keep the snow off, an enclosure for the solar battery, a new shed for the woodpile, a set of stairs down from the door that currently led nowhere, a rerouting of the electrical wiring that was housed in a giant column in the middle of the kitchen, making it impossible to see from one end to another. A crew would arrive on Monday.

I told myself that it was a terrible imposition—the noise and the dust and the bulky presence of strangers would keep me from writing, and I did a pretty good job of pretending to resent that fact. But of course it wasn't true. I was sick with lack of work, with not even knowing where my winter clothes were. I had two days to make room for the men and their equipment. The mudroom had to be cleared of its maze of boxes, and by the time they arrived, I had finally made a dent in setting up a kitchen, and filling a bedroom closet, and clearing a tentative space for books and papers.

There were four of them: Mike, young and handsome, a high school football star who had turned to drugs after an injury sidelined his dreams, only to sober up at eighteen when his girlfriend gave birth to their son. Calvin, his stepfather, small and strong and wiry, in his sixties, pared down by the race life had run him, but observant, weathered, a stealth wisdom playing in his eyes. Hank, gap-toothed, bashful, taking refuge in hammer and nail and the sense they made out of everything. Jimmy, round-faced, potbellied, a little lazy, hiding it, or so he thought, behind an easygoing temperament.

We were elaborately polite to one another for a day or two, making wide berths in the course of our passing, until one afternoon I sneezed—I make china rattle when I sneeze—and Mike, who was on the roof, sang out, “God bless you!” and I shouted a thank-you and we all laughed. Then it was easy and the house rang with the noise they made, and vibrated with their energy and the authority they brought to bear on the obdurate house, pounding, sawing, and thwacking it into submission, chasing away the wretched silence. They worked hard, those men, and their energy shamed me into trying a little harder.

While they worked, I would settle down to read, but instead I listened to the talk about lives so different from mine. They talked about women—Mike was moving into the trailer with his stepfather and his mom; he and his girlfriend weren't getting along. He worked days, and she worked nights so that one of them would be with their son, but they never saw each other. And the coming hunting season—the winter had been hard and the deer scarce and the freezer still needed to be filled if they were going to make ends meet. How stupid my inertia would seem to them, if I were to join the conversation:
“Well, my daughter left home, you see, and I don't know who I am now, and the days fit like a coat three sizes too big . . .”
It would sound like Urdu.

 

A
few weeks before the men had arrived, I had brought home the puppy I had contracted for in the spring, in New York. He was a fat ball of fluff, with a big head and no shape to speak of, and his hair was so white and thick he looked more like a baby polar bear than anything else. A dog had always been an essential element in the full Fortress of Solitude fantasy. I had planned to name him Carlo after Emily Dickinson's dog. Like Dickinson (before she became a recluse), I would wander the country with only my dog for company, and I would write great things that no one would see, and be at one with nature.

But if I was no Emily, the dopey little pile of sleep I had brought home from New Hampshire was no Carlo. He had, to the extent that he had any expression at all, a mild, unintelligent look, as if he might grow up to be a docile country curate, the poor, unambitious kind who yearns after the pretty girl in Victorian novels. Henry, I decided. He was a Henry.

So far our life together had been rocky. I'm not sure what had possessed me to get a dog—I had once had a wheaten terrier, and it had been a nightmare. That decision had been equally well thought out—Zoë, aged six, had lost a beloved stuffed dog, and coming so soon after her father had died, the loss loomed large; it seemed imperative that I go out and immediately buy her a real one as a replacement. The result was a turbocharged, highly aggressive puppy in the hands of an incompetent and unmotivated owner who thought the creature's crazed disposition was kind of cute until she wreaked absolute havoc in the apartment, as well as on my friendships. Two threatened lawsuits and three trainers later, I was told by the last one in no uncertain terms that the dog was too nuts to live in a city, and so Rosie went off to live on a beautiful farm in Vermont, where she has lived happily to this day.

Henry would be different.

Henry
was
different: Henry hated me. It had been fine the first few days, when he would fall asleep next to his food bowl and I would carry him to the sofa and hold him while he napped. But then he woke up.

Henry didn't want to play with me. He didn't want to cuddle or for that matter be touched. He didn't like any of the pile of educational toys I bought him. He ignored all my attempts to house-train him. We would walk around the front yard for hours—at dawn, after every meal, in the middle of the night—while I encouraged, pleaded, threatened, and begged him to do what he needed to do, without result. Then he would toddle back inside and shit on the floor. When he wasn't comatose or incontinent, he was half shark, shredding magazines and furniture and shoes and electric cords. Most of the time, I didn't even have the will to stop him, so completely oblivious was he to my presence. Except once.