The Yellow Wood Read online

  Well, I wouldn’t do it, either. It wasn’t fair. It was asking too much. I set my jaw. “Alexandra,” he warned.

  The next day I ignored Penny, didn’t tease her or laugh when she tripped or mock the way she talked, didn’t join in when other kids made fun of her. Didn’t befriend her, either. Herpie, who’d been dispatched to see that I did as I was told, was with me all the way home, hissing and flicking her tongue and lidlessly glaring, her slithers and narrow loops like punctuation.

  That’s why I was in trouble.

  I didn’t tell my brothers any of that. Walking on the thin trunk of a fallen tree, holding out my arms and deliberately making it sway, I shrieked as if in play, “He says I was insolent!” Daddy had been careful to explain what the word meant; his not infrequent application of it caused me shame and pride, both secret from everybody but Daddy. And I liked being able to use the big word.

  “What’s that mean?” one of my brothers demanded.

  “It means she got smart with Dad,” another of them was glad to answer. “Talked back.”

  “It’s good to be smart,” I said, insolently. “Daddy wants us to be smart.”

  “Daddy wants you to be smart,” Vaughn sneered, and blew on a blade of grass to make ferocious music.

  Now I was chanting, “Daddy is a bastard, Daddy is a creep, Daddy is a shithead, Daddy is a bleep,” skipping through the undergrowth as if I had a jump rope in my hands. It was, of course, to him that I owed the precocious facility with the language that allowed me to come up with this insolent rhyme.

  “Alexandra, cut it out,” Galen ordered.

  “Daddy is a son of a bitch, Daddy is a jerk, Daddy is an asshole, Daddy is a—” I kept skipping and twirling my imaginary jump rope while I tried to think of a rhyme.

  “Perv,” Vaughn or Will suggested, giggling.

  I fairly chortled, “Daddy is a perv.” Inescapably my father’s daughter, I was delighted by the wordplay more than by the meaning of the word, of which I had only a hazy grasp.

  “Don’t say that,” Galen warned all of us. He broke off a branch as thick as a man’s finger and as long as a man’s arm and swung it menacingly at his side. Just under the flayed bark, the flesh of what I would much later learn was called the cambium layer was shockingly moist and green, and the bark peeled in a long, painful-looking streamer past the break, and all up and down the shaft were struggling little oval leaves that flashed yellow-green in the dappled sun.

  The branch had been alive before he broke it and now, a split second later, was dead. It didn’t yet look dead or, when I reached to touch it in Galen’s hand and he let me take it from him, feel dead, but I understood that it was. Realizing what I’d just witnessed made me shudder. Galen would never have dared to do that if Daddy’d been with us. Daddy was always fiercely declaiming, “That branch, that spider, that ant, that weed has as much right to live as you do,” though he couldn’t restrain himself from killing spiders. I shivered again, wondering how much trouble Galen would be in when Daddy found out what he’d done. “Everything living uses other living things. Even vegetarians consume the life force of other living things. There’s no shame in that. But we don’t take life lightly. We have to be aware.”

  I teach that to my own kids. Even the arachnophobes in our house suppress the urge to squash the spider on the wall so the arachnophiles can slide it into a jar and release it in the yard. The kitchen counter is often festooned with cans and banana peels until I can take care of them; nobody will join me in recycling or composting, but at least they aren’t cavalier about throwing things away.

  I got this reverence for life directly and consciously from my father. I have put my own spin on it and passed it on, set it loose in the world. Just as my father intended. But I’ve never really believed he himself revered life or anything else. He just thought I should.

  Galen, Vaughn, Will, and Emily all understand something about the magic if not the sanctity of life. Galen resists the local cultural pressure to hunt and fish, and is active in political, social, and ecological causes in which it often appears I believe more than he does. Vaughn makes music, his flute or didgeridoo or bongo nearly a living creature in the near or distant wood. Emily started having babies at eighteen and did not stop until well into her forties; she does not find being a mother especially fulfilling, but she is good at it, her gift, her curse. In much the same spirit, Will gardens—out of duty far more than pleasure, but his tomatoes and roses are nonetheless sweet.

  “Daddy is a robber, Daddy is a creep, Daddy is a—”

  Of all of us, Alexandra is the one who goes out into the world. She always has; I sent her there, an emissary and standard-bearer, then lost my nerve for her and tried to pull her back where she would be safe, which naturally made her stay away with a vengeance. Sometimes I think I taught her wrong. Sometimes I allow myself pride.

  “—wizard—”

  It has been all I could do to love my father and mother, my wife, and my children. Never a friend, not my siblings or grandchildren, certainly not humanity as a whole. Considering where I started, this is no small feat. It is, however, insufficient. Therefore, I developed in Alexandra her natural ability to love expansively, to extend herself, to risk. That led her to marry a man I would never have chosen for her, an actual African from the continent of Africa, and to claim children who can only bring trouble.

  “—Daddy is a thief.”

  I taught her to explore the wood, which, though I built my house and my family and my life here, frightens me enough that I have never ventured far into it myself. At three years old, her mother preoccupied, not to say overwhelmed, by the baby and I with what was taking shape in my wife’s heart, Alexandra got lost in the woods for half a day. Her mother found her. I could not bring myself to go in there after her. Making a show of unity, as parents are supposed to do, we both shouted and both cried and both imposed a rule that she could no longer go outside the house without one of us. Alexandra looked at me, specifically me, as if I had betrayed her, and in important ways I had.

  I was always wandering off into the woods and losing track of time and place. It drove my mother crazy, and now that I’m a mother I can understand why. If my kids did half the things I did, I’d have a fit. I never got lost, though, and was aware of only enough danger to make me feel brave.

  In some way, I did it for Daddy. He’d be waiting anxiously on the front porch, and he’d scold or hug or shake me a little, but he’d also listen avidly to my tales of what I’d encountered or imagined in the woods. When I was very young, three or four, I’d bring things back to show Daddy—flowers I’d picked, bugs in a jar. He taught me not to impose my will, to let them be, to collect them only in words. “Centipede” is a nice word, and “buttercup.” And “milk snake,” which I realized only much later Daddy had sent slithering after me to guide me home.

  If I told her how once upon a time I squandered magic, both others’ and my own, she would know me better. I am not likely to tell her. It is tempting, in the way that jumping off a cliff is tempting even when one is not in the least suicidal, but I will resist. Even Alexandra, especially she, is not to know me that well.

  Perhaps she already knows. Often power derives not from knowledge itself but from the means by which knowledge is transmitted. I have not told her, but perhaps she knows. Perhaps that is why she hates me, and has stayed away all these years. Perhaps that is why she has come back now. She is my daughter, my scion, my hope and gift to the world, whether she wants to be or not.

  And having virtually no corporeal sense of her became unacceptable. Over the years she sent physical and, lately, electronic photographs, from which I gleaned she steadily put on weight, coloured and then stopped colouring her hair, married a black man—an African, but still a Negro—and adopted two older children of decidedly mixed race. Galen will make some comment about how old everybody’s getting. Emily sniffs that it’s sad ho
w Sandi is letting herself go.

  I still have gifts to give to Alexandra, whether she wants them or not. Explanations to make. Instructions to convey. To do all that, I must encounter her in the flesh. That is why I called for her. I do not know why she has come.

  Vaughn and Will veered off the path to see what had grown or decayed under a particular log since the last time they’d looked. I kept chanting bad things about Daddy, but not out loud anymore; Daddy would never hit us, but Galen would. And, besides, Daddy could hear what I was saying inside my head. I made it as bad as I could, and he loved me anyway. The persistence of his love would, not a decade later, give me both the strength to leave him and the need to do so.

  The other children have all resented me at one time or another. That goes with the parental territory. Will was a particularly rebellious teenager. I misjudged Vaughn’s interest in music and pushed him too hard, so that for a while he had to give it up altogether in order to extract me from it and make it his own again. Galen and Emily routinely lose patience with me, but only Alexandra has ever hated me. Only Alexandra still does.

  “Good morning, Daddy.”

  He’s been standing in the doorway for the last few minutes, watching me write. Across the room and behind me, he nonetheless exudes the impression of reading every word I write, and as I’ve been stubbornly typing I’ve been distracted by the need to tell myself both that he can’t possibly have access to my thoughts, and that since there’s no way to conceal anything from him anyway I might as well finish the damn paragraph.

  I keep trying to call him “Dad” or even “Father.” For a while I was referring to him as Alexander. But his name to me is Daddy, and here, in his house, in the house I grew up in and escaped and despite all my best efforts have returned to, he won’t answer to anything else.

  He says good morning. I revise the last sentence, revise it back to what it was in the first place, save, exit, turn off the laptop. First oblique glimpse of my father as I swivel in the creaky chair to face him: a frail old man in a knee-length blue rayon robe, embarrassing because it shows his brittle shins, feet in ugly fake leather slippers awkwardly apart for balance, hands grasping the doorjamb on either side, shoulders hunched; eighty-one years of constriction etched in his face, the features of which I can’t quite see for the backlight. Flooded with tenderness, I smile.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asks me formally.

  “Really well.”

  “Your old bed is still comfortable?”

  “Very.”

  He nods. I nod. We share an awkward pause. “You are up early.”

  “So are you.”

  “Oh, I am up and down all night. And all day, for that matter.” He hesitates, and I brace myself, knowing what he’s going to ask before he asks it. “What are you writing?”

  Because I’ve longed for him to be interested in my life, I’ve fiercely kept much of it from him. I’m relieved to be able to answer, “A major report for work. It’s due by the end of the month.”

  Nodding and frowning, he turns away without asking what it’s about, leaving me feeling suckered. “What would you like for breakfast?”

  She is not about to ask me to read this report of hers, and I will not risk offering. Report writing is beneath her anyway. It is not what I gave her to do. She ought to be writing sonnets, dramatic tragedies, stories about the history and future of the universe. Disappointment causes me to turn away.

  She says she would like coffee, and anything to eat except eggs. Toast, fruit, cereal, anything. French toast? I still make great French toast. (Remember?) This is not the best breakfast for someone overweight, but she says fine, and I shuffle off to the kitchen, pitiably pleased to be cooking for her again.

  I hate French toast. I’ve always hated French toast, but it was his specialty so I could never bring myself to say so. Swamped and buoyed by the conviction that Daddy knew everything, I took this as evidence of his need to control, and of my collusion.

  Whisking together eggs, slightly soured milk, cinnamon, and vanilla in a blue bowl, adding two pinches of the wild lavender that should not be a secret ingredient to her but probably is, I suddenly realize she is wondering if I might be poisoning her. The thought is fleeting and ludicrous, she gives it almost no credence, but she breaks my heart with it as only this child can do, and heartbreak makes me testy.

  Poison? “What’s that?”

  “Lavender. You remember lavender.”

  “Are you sure it’s safe to eat?”

  “I have been using it for years. You know that.”

  Maybe that’s why I couldn’t stand his French toast, why French toast in general was ruined for me. My indignation is all out of proportion. “Maybe,” I say wilfully, “that’s why I’ve never liked French toast.”

  He stiffens. He turns from the stove. “You used to like it.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I’m in this now and can’t back down.

  “You ate it every Sunday morning for years. It was a tradition.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  “So you deceived me.” He didn’t know. I always thought he knew and was deliberately forcing me to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. He honestly didn’t know, and now he feels tricked. The thought that I could trick my father is disorienting. I’m childishly ashamed, and childishly thrilled.

  The stuff he’s been whisking in the blue bowl goes into the sink. He scrapes out the pan, turns the garbage disposal on and off in a short, furious burst, runs soapy water for the abortively dirtied dishes to soak. “Help yourself to whatever you want for breakfast,” he says with that terrible cold evenness. “You know where everything is,” and he leaves the room.

  I also didn’t like learning Slovak just because we had relatives in the Old Country. Learning to write an approximation of the family name Kovalenko, before it became the decidedly non-Cyrillic Kove. I didn’t like any of it, I complained and refused and held out against full restriction for weeks and weeks. But there was a secret satisfaction in it, too.

  Daddy has left the room. He won’t come back. I’ll have to go after him, prostrate myself or at least apologize or at least make a conversational overture. Fuck that. I return to the bedroom and turn the laptop back on, intending to work on the conclusion of the report.

  But he’s done something to my head. “The man’s a goddamn magician,” I’ve told my husband more than once, raging, weeping, or chuckling wryly. “I swear he’s got some kind of magic power.”

  “Of course he does.” Martin doesn’t believe in literal magic. He grew up in Cairo, went to boarding school in Paris, admits to no tribal identity whatsoever. Because he knows something about powerful fathers, having had one and being one himself, he assumes I’m being metaphorical. That’s what I’d have said, too.

  But here in my father’s house, I am unable to write what he scorns, what he would say is unworthy of me. Of “us.” Instead I take out the folders and the disc where my novel and stories and poems that no one has ever seen have been shaping and re-shaping ever since I left this house. Under my father’s spell, I begin, haltingly, to write.

  Chapter 2

  Family. We are all family. The abused child, the black welfare mother, the panhandler with his sign plaintive (“haven’t eaten in 5 days”) or reasonable (“will work for food”) or insolent (“you have $ and I don’t how fair is that?”) or outrageous (“will kill your mother-in-law for beer”)—all are kin to each other and to my children and to me. Over the course of my life, with an effort no one else could appreciate, I have trained myself to believe that.

  But I have not had the wherewithal to actually live that way. Until I built this house in this wood, I routinely encountered all sorts of beggars—knocking on our door during the Depression, ringing bells at Christmastime, soliciting over the telephone wire, coming too close to me on a city street—and I gave them money or I refused, eithe
r way because they made my skin crawl.

  Personal connection is not my forte. I have never known how to talk to children, teenagers, women, Southerners, New Englanders, foreigners, the handicapped, the elderly. Other than the opportunistic alliances of childhood, I do not know that I have ever actually had a friend. Blacks, Mexicans, Orientals, Jews are perfectly fine people, but they are not my people.

  This is not simple hypocrisy. My personal weakness, moral and otherwise, in no way diminishes what I know to be right and necessary in this world. I am ashamed that I cannot practice what I preach. I am proud to have carried the torch as far as I was able and then passed it on.

  Loving the few individuals I have loved has been all I could do. I do not even try to keep straight everyone who can legitimately claim to be part of my family, many of them gathered here and now to celebrate Alexandra’s homecoming. Grandchildren marry and divorce before I can learn their spouses’ names. Great-grandchildren are several degrees too far removed to hold my attention. I keep wanting to call Galen’s new wife Virginia or Valerie, but I believe it is Vivian; he is nearly sixty and she not much younger, so the concept of them being first-time newlyweds, though accurate, is counterintuitive.

  Alexandra is showing photographs of her husband and children. I do not look at them. He is black. The children they adopted are not really my grandchildren. I am not obligated to remember their names. Loving them would be asking too much. She has always asked too much of me.

  The unwelcome thought strikes me that Eva Marie would have known who all these people are and how they relate to each other. All the evidence is to the contrary, of course; she has not been part of this family for a long time. Even when there were only seven of us, it was too much for her. But the thought persists, then is replaced by a truer one: Alexandra is the one who knows, because I have asked it of her.

  “You have a beautiful family,” Emily tells me warmly.