Lost in the Forest (34 page)

B
EFORE 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

S
UE
M
ILLER

A Reader’s Guide

A C
ONVERSATION WITH
S
UE
M
ILLER

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.

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.

JMG:
Eva thinks, “She wants life. More. More of something. She doesn’t know what.” How does this yearning inform Eva’s actions after John’s death? How does such a yearning also influence the novel’s other key characters, including Gracie, Daisy, Emily, and Mark?

SM:
Certainly Eva is desperately lonely after John’s death, and her willingness to use Mark as a source of comfort in this period is part of what confuses him about his possibilities. Indeed, she momentarily considers some kind of relationship with him, but pretty quickly dismisses the possibility. But I think of this yearning as also more inchoate in Eva, and as connected to the kinds of yearning Mark has, and Daisy, too—to be rescued, to be made happy by some event, some arrival in her life. So in a certain sense, I think of this state of yearning as part of the lostness of the book’s title, and of all the characters.

JMG:
What about Duncan intrigues Daisy? What other attributes does he possess that might be attractive to her, and how does he repel her? In turn, what does Daisy represent to Duncan?

SM:
Daisy is initially drawn to Duncan simply because he pays attention to her—momentarily, he actually reminds her of her stepfather, John. He also lets her feel, for the first time, her sexuality, her attractiveness, which none of the other adults in her life have noticed, or let her know they’ve noticed. In addition, he doesn’t have a story, as Daisy notes. She needn’t feel much for or about Duncan—he’s a kind of tabula rasa, a fantasy figure. For a while. It’s when she starts understanding that of course he does have a story, even if he hasn’t shared it with her, that she begins to be repelled by him.

What Daisy represents to Duncan is more mysterious. It’s never clear in the book what’s driving him, and I didn’t feel I needed to make that clear. She is, of course, lovely, and he sees that—and perhaps understands that no one else yet has. He catches her in a moment of perversity—stealing from her mother—and her response to his catching her is defiant and brave, in a way. These qualities in her interest him, clearly. Why they result in his seducing her is something I didn’t think I needed to explore. Or I thought that exploring it would take me too far from my main characters.

JMG:
Teenage Daisy is compelled by the writers Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. What about these two authors resonates with her? Were there any authors who spoke to you in a similar way when you were Daisy’s age?

SM:
Certainly Plath’s rage, particularly her rage at her father for dying, the sense of herself as in pain, and the intensity of her poetry—all these would echo Daisy’s own sense of herself and her world. I think with Dickinson, it’s clearly the use of language that intrigues and delights Daisy, the surprising way she expresses things Daisy has perhaps thought about but not had words for. For myself at that age, there were fewer direct connections with writers I was taught—I remember reading Melville in high school with not much sense of recognition. But I read
Jane Eyre
on my own, over and over, actually, thrilled at the sense of a slow
making of a self out of unlikely materials, and at Jane’s triumph over all adversity.

JMG:
Daisy believes she is “collateral damage” in her parents’ relationship. Do you think that her assessment is correct? Do Theo and Emily avoid feeling similarly in their places within the family structure? If so, how?

SM:
I wanted to have Daisy be uniquely vulnerable to the events in her family’s life. Her shyness, her unattractiveness at the moment of the story, her greater vulnerability to her parents’ divorce and the birth of Theo, her greater devastation at John’s death—all these mean that she is very fragile, very in need at exactly the moment when her parents, too, are most fragile and in need. I think Theo and Emily do avoid similar feelings, though they certainly have complicated reactions, too, to family events. Theo’s denial of his father’s death, his hoarding money—these might be interesting to a child psychiatrist investigating his grief. And Emily’s sexuality, her perhaps too ready turn to support from the outside world, may not be as healthy a pair of responses as they seem. But each of them does, truly, have resources that Daisy doesn’t, and they suffer less because of this.