Out of the Woods (3 page)

And then the sight of Zoë in her prom dress, hovering at the door, with a look on her face that asked, How do I look? Not in the casual, is-there-anything-amiss way of every day, but the question of a girl transformed, wondering, has the miracle occurred? A little abashed, for the first time in a long time, nervous, expectant, hopeful. And yes, yes she was, radiant and beautiful, a young girl alight, kindled by the excitement that only can come to one so young.

She came home late the next morning straight from the after party, wobbling along in SpongeBob SquarePants pajama shorts and her high-heeled silver sandals, drifting happily in the afterglow of a night that had been everything she had hoped, such a rare thing, even in childhood.

She left for a trip to Europe a few days after that. Crossing the street to the grocery store, I was reminded of how I'd felt the first time I crossed the street after she was born, the care I'd taken, awestruck at how much it suddenly mattered that I take such care. And now?

 

T
he shadow the scarecrow cast was lengthening. The birds had long since departed. I was somewhere west of Maine and east of Vermont, but that was about all I was sure of. New England was apparently parsimonious when it came to road signs, and the ones I did encounter were confusing. Did the right-hand-turn sign indicate the road immediately in front of it or the one just slightly beyond? Why would a road running east to west give you the option of going north or south?

Maine had been straightforward enough. I had headed west on Route 25, ambling past small towns and villages, Gorham and Standish and Cornish, admiring the staunch English names, so different from the suburbs in which I had grown up, the Camelots and Mantuas—fanciful, almost poignant attempts at imposing history and romance on the raw and recently constructed.

But in New Hampshire the road I was following betrayed me, disappearing off the map altogether before popping up quite a while later, dressed in a different color (did that mean something?) and going off in what looked to be a nearly circular direction. In between I wandered around in a chaos of wrong turns and misunderstood directions from the few living souls I encountered; at one point I found myself on the outskirts of the White Mountains. I contemplated cutting through them, a plan that failed due to the lack of an actual road, before threading my way for hours around the fingers and inlets of pine-shrouded lakes until I emerged somewhere a good deal north of where I was meant to be.

There was more—the wrong interstate in the right direction, the right interstate in the wrong direction, not to mention simple road signs transformed into opaque Zen koans by frustration and fatigue—until I reached the point that I wanted only to find a motel room with a working TV where I could hide for the night. To that end I exited whatever interstate I was on, numbly driving past wide, thickly planted cornfields, stripped of their yield and beginning to yellow.

That's when I found the scarecrow, stopped to take a picture, and ended up sitting on the side of the road, wondering how I could be so hapless. Finally, I got back in the car and headed off in the direction in which my guide was striding. That road, miraculously enough, took me to the road that got me to Route 4, the way into Woodstock.

An hour or so later I started up the hill to my house in a dusky darkness, the remaining light from the setting sun obscured by the overhanging branches of the maple trees. Three-quarters of the way up, in the middle of the road, stood a large object, its shape obscured by the shadows. As I crested the rise, however, an errant patch of sunlight illuminated the form just as it unfolded its enormous wings and, with a great beating motion that stirred the dust at its feet, rose silently into the air.

Earlier that day, caught up in my tremulous worries and excited visions of the future, the sight of a great blue heron on an empty country road would have struck me as a sign, a message from the future that all would be well. But I was too tired and too humbled for any such egocentric nonsense now. I was simply grateful for its beauty, the unexpected grace of its presence. I gunned the car over the last hill and turned into the driveway.

The house was almost pretty in the twilight. The overgrown grass was alive with wildflowers, and the mysterious vine that was choking the porch railing and encroaching on the front door was a brilliant green; it looked lush and welcoming against the soft gray of the shingles. To my delight there was an apple blushing on the scraggly tree at the top of the drive. Inside, I knew, the bare rooms would be dark, and there was an odds-on chance the lights would not be working. There would be no food, and probably no sheets on the bed. So I stayed outside for a moment longer, tracing the smooth curve of the red apple ripening on a tree that stood in front of the house that might be home.

2

The University of Guam

I am mainly ignorant of what place this is.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
K
ing Lear

T
he morning after I arrived, I made a cup of tea and waited for the familiar sense of contentment to appear, the way it always had done the first morning of my visits. But you look at a place differently when you plan to live in it, no matter how often you visited. A trill of unwelcome unease surfaced.

The house that was to be my Fortress of Solitude was located in a part of Woodstock that bore little resemblance to the area with which I was familiar from my August rentals. After that first summer in the pink house in the village, I had stayed in a succession of converted barns and carriage houses in the surrounding hamlets to the east and north, all of them located on good roads in spectacularly beautiful countryside, a panorama of rolling, manicured green hills punctuated by occasional flocks of sheep or a small group of black-and-white cows gathered picturesquely near an old stone wall, and crested by sun-dappled stands of timeworn trees.

Such beauty came at a price: the upper Connecticut Valley, in which Woodstock is situated, comprises some of the most expensive real estate in the state, and the surrounding areas of Barnard and Pomfret and Bridgewater are home to the extravagantly wealthy.

I had almost despaired of finding anything I could afford when, at the end of a long day of driving about with Lynne Bertram and her two yellow Labs, Lyla and Sandi, she hesitated. There was a place a little farther afield, she said. It was remote, it was off the grid, the road was bad, she hadn't seen it, but yes, it was affordable.

Let's go, I said. Later, the frantic need I felt then to claim some part of this unfamiliar place would seem inexplicable to me—after all, the only thing I really knew about Vermont was that it was not New York. But perhaps, at the time, that was all it had to be.

We drove south from the village on Route 106. Most of the cleared land to the left belonged to the Green Mountain Horse Association—the area was the birthplace of the Morgan breed of Thoroughbreds—and the barns and corrals, the steeplechase courses and parking lots for the horse vans, bespoke a world of wealth and obsession that sheltered in the surrounding hills. On the right a few more modest houses were strung out along the shoulder of the road—a stone cottage, a faded red barn, a 1960s-era chalet-style A-frame, a thinly disguised trailer—followed by tree-shrouded lanes that swung away discreetly up and out of view before they could permit a glimpse of the larger estates.

We passed through the village of South Woodstock—a cluster of buildings that included a general store and the post office, and the stately Kedron Valley Inn, where generations of shiny blond ponytails and polished black riding boots had put up during the summer show season—and continued on up the road past a heavily wooded stretch of land, until we reached a wide-aproned turnoff to the right. We bumped along for a half a mile until the road intersected a rocky creek and a much narrower unnamed dirt road diverged to the right, wedged between the steeply rising ridge to one side and the creek on the other.

It was March, and mud season had rendered the road little more than a boulder-strewn streambed. Lynne's SUV was having a tough time making it up the steep climb, the left side of which was sheathed in ice, while the right was a grid of waterlogged furrows. Lynne wanted to turn around, but by then I had caught a glimpse of white shutters and a curl of smoke rising above a screen of maple trees. Within the hour I had seen the house, and that summer it was mine.

The house was twelve years old then and had been built nearly single-handedly by a retired engineer and his wife, Bob and Tess Riley. The Rileys were in their late sixties when they moved to Vermont from Maryland. Initially they had simply planned to invest their limited savings in a larger house in a less expensive place. Instead they bought a ten-acre patch of hillside belonging to four hunters, whose sole improvement to the place had been the construction of a slapdash deer hunting stand high up in one of the larger maples. There was no water, no septic field, no electricity, and no road bigger than a footpath.

Riley himself knew nothing about building houses, apart from some rudimentary plumbing and carpentry skills learned at his father's knee. He and his brother walked the woods until they found a flat part large enough to lay a foundation; they cleared enough room for a house and garden with a single chain saw. They moved in when there was nothing more than bare walls, a rough plank floor, and a five-gallon plastic bucket for a toilet.

For the next ten years the Rileys hammered sawed plumbed wired jerry-rigged and improvised their way into a home of their own. The result was an idiosyncratic marvel. The ground floor was laid out according to an open plan, with half of the floor on a level three steps higher than the other. The steps themselves were bisected at a ninety-degree angle by the staircase, necessitating a tricky little dance movement to get from one set of steps to the other. A short hike from the kitchen, on the far side of the mudroom, a kind of pantry lay in wait, dominated by an enormous gas-powered chest freezer, like the ones on TV that tend to fill up with dead bodies. The pantry adjoined the garage, which had been truncated and angled away from the driveway to make room for a plastic greenhouse that had enclosed Tess's orchid-raising operation.

The house was still unfinished when the Rileys decided to sell—they had no wish to put it on the market, but they were out of funds, and Tess had developed emphysema; she could no longer walk upstairs to their bedroom or down the hill to the creek that had first charmed them into buying the place. After the sale, the Rileys moved to the neighboring town. Tess died five years later, a difficult, angry woman to those who didn't know her, famous in the neighborhood for rushing out of the house to scream at the horseback riders who had the temerity to pass her house on what was in fact a public road. Bob Riley, a tall, thin, quiet man, would fall in love with his next-door neighbor; last I heard, they were looking for a house that was neither his nor hers but theirs.

By the time the Rileys moved out, the house had evolved into a proud testament to one couple's stubborn imaginative vision, but it was also an awkward eccentric dwelling whose deficiencies were tempered by unexpected grace notes. The wiring was a tangled nightmare that hung in loops from the basement ceiling, the garage had no roof beyond the already sagging tar paper and vinyl sheeting, the fireplace lurked in a kind of no-man's-land between the living and dining rooms, the living room was a small forest of wooded columns thrown up wherever it looked like more support was needed. There were doors that led out to nothing but blue sky and stairs where none were needed and walls that never got to where they were meant to be going. But there was charm there as well. Bob Riley had taken the time to carve a delicate motif of undulating vine leaves along the door lintels and the wooden banister, and those small bits of loveliness hummed a kind of tune to me every time I passed them.

When I bought the place I thought I had put aside enough money to fix the most glaring problems, but most of that money had gone to solving a series of mysteries in the plumbing system that had generated astronomical heating bills. I would just have to live with the rest, including Tess's wallpapering choices—giant lurid vegetables (kitchen) and depressed farm animals (mudroom).

 

I
t was very quiet that first morning of my permanent residency, overwhelmingly so. The sky was gray with low unbroken clouds, the air heavy and still. It had been a dry summer and the water level in the little brook was too low to make much of a stir. Even the summertime buzz and hum of the insects was hushed. I walked from room to room, which still smelled of sawdust and mouse droppings and dust in the way of uninhabited country houses, and looked out each of the windows. The house sat in former swampland and, except for a small meadow to the east that covered the septic field, was surrounded by steeply rising woodland. Fifty years earlier, this part of Woodstock had been populated with small family farms, but the forest had long since devoured most of them, and the woods outside the windows were dark.

The house was nearly empty, except for a few items the Rileys had sold to me: a bed in one of the rooms upstairs, and downstairs, a dark green leather La-Z-Boy recliner whose spectacular ugliness was matched only by the instant discomfort experienced by anyone who ventured into its depths. In the past, I had almost admired the chair's utter refusal to meet even its basic duties of form and function, but that morning it was too perfect a synecdoche for the house itself.

I had bought a few pieces of secondhand furniture in New York before I left; they would be delivered soon, and the mere thought of them provided some comfort. I had deliberated carefully over those few cautious purchases. They represented the first time I had chosen my own furniture. As a young woman, I had raided my parents' house for castoffs, while nearly everything in the loft had been handed down from my husband's family. I had taken nothing from the New York apartment, because it seemed wrong to loot the place that was still home to my daughter. Besides, the pieces of polished chrome and leather from the 1950s reflected a long-vanished world of New York sophistication that had been Lee's but never mine. They would look out of place in my new home and I didn't want them: they were part of what I was leaving. I had lived too long in the rubble of a life that had exploded with my husband's death. The new furniture—a wobbly and scratched-up green nightstand from a secondhand store in the city, a gigantic white painted table from a Kmart in Lebanon, New Hampshire, a lamp with a base of curling leaves and metal roses and an oversize shade of battered parchment, so atrocious it was attractive—wasn't much to look at. But these pieces represented my first attempts at defining what sort of life I wanted to live now. Perhaps when they arrived, these ordinary artifacts would mute the echoes my footsteps made when I walked into the rooms, and still the voice that was beginning to wonder what I was doing alone in this house in the middle of nowhere.

We begin in dreams, tatty, foolish, romantic; we end in ashes, which, if we are lucky, allow us to begin yet again. The carapace that had been my fantasy of life in Vermont would burn off slowly, and I would cling to it as long as I could, because even as I watched it begin to evanesce, I could not imagine what would take its place.

 

S
ome part of my brain, in those first few weeks, knew that the wise thing to do would be to simply get back to work. “There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than busyness,” a scolding voice reminded me, quoting from Robert Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy
. I had proposals for a few magazine stories I needed to write, and notebooks to comb through in search of ideas for longer projects, but the assertion of authority required to unpack the boxes, the conviction that I had anything left of a writer's curiosity and passion, were packed away as well. Besides, these were the days before the stock market crash and the recession, and there was just enough money trickling in on which to get by—just enough, if you factored in my la-di-da attitude toward going into debt. (I wonder, sometimes, if there wasn't a drastic drop in the number of midlife crises taking place in this country once the bottom dropped out of the American economy.)

Since I couldn't seem to focus on work, I made lists. Long lists, of everything I needed to fix, or understand or abandon or acquire. At first there were a lot of short lists, but in the end I boiled them down to two: List Practical, and List Metaphysical, which I kept in a notebook labeled
F OF S
(for Fortress of Solitude, I'm afraid).

List Practical was very long and covered everything that needed to be done around the house and grounds. The items ranged from Buy Tomato Plant to Deal with Electrical Wiring, to Learn Difference Between Weeds and Flowers, and the list grew like kudzu as each day taught me another thing I didn't know.

List Metaphysical was much shorter:

Get Sense of Direction

Find Authentic Way to Live

Figure Out How to Be Old

Deal with Sex

Learn Latin

This last item might sound as if it should have gone on List Practical, if it went anywhere at all, but I figured if I became the kind of person who ended her day at the kitchen table (when I had a kitchen table) with her head bent over Cicero, then all the other items on the list would have been taken care of and I would probably have some time to kill.

The biggest item on the first list was becoming remotely comfortable with living off the grid, which meant an immersion in a set of responsibilities and chores that were as foreign and exotic to me as the customs of a country whose language I didn't understand.

It would have been daunting if the system worked with clocklike efficiency, but this was not the case. About a year after I had bought the house, I had replaced the balky backup generator that rumbled into noisy life when the sun was shining brightly and it therefore wasn't needed, and retreated into sulky silence when it had been raining for three days straight and there was nothing left in the solar battery to power the lights. The new one was a model of efficiency, but it nevertheless required the same level of care as a three-year-old with a bad cold. A young man named Dave came over to teach me about logging oil levels and working hours and how to switch the thing from automatic to manual in order to maintain the equipment. This, in turn, involved dealing with an enormous colony of wasps whose nest was established in the generator shed. Probably want to get rid of that, Dave advised. At night, he said, when it was cooler, and they were asleep. Or better yet, wait for fall.

The solar power system was even more complicated. Outside, on an alarmingly fragile-looking wooden platform, were the twelve gray solar panels that would have to be swept with a broom whenever it snowed. Inside, in a corner of the basement, lurked a massive bank of solar batteries and the inverter, a bewildering, blinking, flashing, button-festooned electronic box that coordinated the rest of the system as well as its interaction with the generator.