Hunter Gatherer by John C. Williams

The forest is a garden if you know how to see. Jan steps carefully on the spongy ground and scans the carpet of green. Until this year, all those leaves had blended together in a kind of blindness. Now she is learning them one by one: Wood Sorrel, Plantago, Watercress… She kneels down and grazes the points of the leaves with her fingers, counting. The new leaves are the best to eat. She plucks one and brings it to her nose. She’s learning to smell as well as to see. And like so many shades of green, or shapes of leaves, or colors of budding flowers, there are scents to learn. Bitter and woody. Tangy and sweet. Grassy. Tart, lemony. She turns the leaf over in her hand, studies the veins, the soft fuzz on the underside. Is this mint? Yes, yes. She rolls the leaf into small tube, places it in her mouth and chews. It’s bitter and pungent and fills her senses. She forces herself to keep chewing and swallow. She must retrain her tastebuds as well.

She knows nothing, nothing.

Jan stands up and her knees crack. It is warm and humid even under the canopy. The forest crackles and buzzes and chirps with life. She scans the small ridge above, sloping down to the deciduous tree line. How far off the trail did she wander? She takes a breath and feels as if time has grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back to self-consciousness. She looks down and tries again. And from a verdant collage she begins again naming what she sees. Brassica. Wild onion. Arrowhead. Naming is an act of love. She squats down and grazes the leaf-tips with her fingertips. She leans her face into the aroma and resumes foraging.

Walking back with her canvas bag bulging with food, Jan thinks of that moment of being in it –present and focused, wonderfully lost – and how doubt and worry kept yanking her back. Even now, part of her feels foolish. Why? So much to unlearn. So much to shed. The trail turns rocky as it passes over a small, dry stream bed winding down the hill. As she steps carefully from rock to rock, down, down, then onto a wobbly stone, she thinks, this is it. There is only now. It’s a comforting thought, but easy to forget. Her life has been a flight in fear from ignorance; bent forward and worrying about the future. So much stress. Even this next step. If she slipped and twisted her ankle, if she fell…? Imagining tragedy comes so naturally. She watches her hiking boots navigate the rocks as if they are someone else’s feet. She looks up and pictures the path ahead, converting memory into distance, into time. She can’t help it. Listen to the forest. Soon the path levels off, drops down, and the warm spring sunlight finds her. She reaches into her bag of greens, takes out a single sprig of leaves and holds them to her nose and breathes in the aroma. Clover. She did it. She foraged alone.

“The fuck, mom?!”

Rachel sits on the porch with photo albums in her lap, rummaged from the now disordered boxes on the curb. Yesterday, Jan had felt brave and liberated as she placed those albums on the curb, along with the boxes of books, clothes, and other detritus of her life. She can see now that Rachel is hurt. What is she doing here, anyway?

Jan gets out of her car with her knapsack and bag of greens and smiles at her daughter.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

Rachel stands. “You threw out our family photos?”

“Do you want them? You can take them.” Jan climbs the steps and leans forward to hug but Rachel backs off.

“What the fuck, Mom?”

Jan unlocks the door and steps inside.

The house is a cramped, mustard-shingled salt box on a narrow lot – tiny compared to the houses where Rachel and her brother grew up outside Boston. As Jan’s husband’s finance career took off – State Street, Fidelity, KPMG – they had traded up to bigger and bigger houses – each one grander than the last. The more space and light and sloping lawns, the less air there was for Jan to breathe. Room after room of stuff. Ken loved all of it – the physical manifestation of his success, the joy of giving his children everything he could only imagine – and he had imagined – growing up in Southie. And for years, Jan enjoyed it too. Or she tried to. It’s so hard to make sense of it now. The houses got bigger, but she felt smaller. Finally, she fell out of their story altogether and landed, alone, unforgiven, in Manchester-By-The-Sea.

Now, Jan walks past the pile of U-Haul boxes in her cozy future living room, and into her narrow kitchen and sets her bag on the counter. She can hear the door close behind Rachel as she takes down a colander and fills it with handfuls of her foraged greens.

“Taking your time to unpack, I guess,” she can hear Rachel mutter from the other room.

Jan places the colander into the sink and runs water over the leaves. Rachel sets the albums on the counter behind her and opens the top one. Jan can hear the crinkle of the page turning and pictures the photos of her children’s faces, poolside and smiling.

“What else have you thrown out?”

“Nothing important.”

“These are important.”

Jan shuts the water and turns to face her daughter. “Is everything all right at school?”

“School’s out, Mom,” Rachel says impatiently as she lifts the album and turns the open page toward her mother. She and her brother, twelve and ten, squint up at her from a beach towel. “Where was this, Block Island?”

Jan smiles and nods. Rachel turns the album around and flips the pages. Her dark hair is pulled back. She shakes her head. “I can see why you would want to get rid of these.”

“I remember it, Rachel. Every moment. If you want them, please take them.”

“But if I hadn’t driven up today, they would have been gone forever.”

“And you wouldn’t have ever noticed. Why the surprise visit?”

Rachel sighs and closes the album. Jan can see her mother’s face in her daughter, even her disappointment. Maybe especially.

“Mom, what’s going on?”

Jan turns back to the sink. “I’m making a salad. Are you hungry?”

Jan had planned to eat only what she found this morning. But, shaking the water out from the colander, she realizes it won’t be enough for Rachel. She has some tomatoes from the farmer’s market, maybe a can of tuna. Olive oil. Lemon. Living off the land can wait another day. She sets about making the salad, feeling her daughter’s presence, which she supposes is meant as some kind of intervention. Some kind of talk. That would be ironic, since talking, confiding, opening, sharing were things that Rachel adamantly refused to do with her mother growing up. Jan’s fantasies of mother-daughter closeness – which never went away – were continually thwarted by Rachel’s intuitive sense of her mother’s needs and the imperative to deny them. It wouldn’t have hurt as much if Rachel had not been so close with her dad. Even her little brother Nick. The three of them were so easy with each other and in the homes they built, a life that Jan felt increasingly allergic to. They teased her for years: Mom the Hunter Gatherer. They hadn’t expected her to leave, which they collectively seemed to have experienced as a kind of betrayal. Ken especially. Rachel, evidently, is angry enough to drive up here for a talk.

 

Jan serves the salads in shallow glass bowls heaped with green leaves, sliced tomato, and pink chunks of tuna. She and Rachel sit across from each other at a small table in the otherwise bare dining room. Rachel picks carefully at her plate.

“This isn’t lettuce,” she says.

“No, that’s Wood Sorrel. It’s kind of like clover, but tastier. I picked them this morning.”

“Tastes like grass.”

“Pick around them.”

They eat in silence. Jan can taste the mix of flavors from the forest floor – the lemony lobes of Oxalis, the thrilling rush of mint.

“I did email you that I wanted to come up this weekend.”

“I didn’t see it, I’m sorry.”

“You stopped reading emails?”

“No. But I’ve stopped checking every day. I’m down to once a week. Monday mornings. That’s a big accomplishment compared to every three minutes.”

“When you were a lawyer.”

“I still am, technically.”

“When you were a practicing lawyer.”

“What is it you wanted to talk about, Rachel?”

Rachel puts her folk down and turns away. The sunlight from the window catches her face. She bites her lip softly and Jan can see tears welling in her eyes. “Rachel,” she says softly.

“You disappeared. It’s like you want nothing to do with us. Dad is… You threw out our fucking family photo albums!”

“They’re just things.”

“They’re my childhood! They have meaning. And what is this you’re living in?” she raises her hands to the low ceiling. “You can live anywhere.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Rachel stares at her. “Mom!”

Jan sits back. She looks at the spare rooms, the kitchen. The tiny yard outside the window. “Frankly, I was feeling like it might be too big. When all those boxes and furniture were delivered from storage, I couldn’t believe all the crap I’d accumulated. Why do I need to hold on to books I don’t remember reading and will never read again? If you think about it, we carry so much with us…” Jan looks down at her plate. “When I got to the albums, I had this moment of clarity, Rachel. Even those precious photos of my children are just objects. I don’t need them to remember. You are inside of me. When I put them on the curb, I felt lighter.”

“The purpose of photographs is to keep them.”

Jan nods. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

Jan scrapes Rachel’s untouched salad – all those leaves carefully chosen and plucked – into the compost bucket under the sink. She can hear her daughter rummaging through boxes in the next room and feels a pang of guilt with every thud and shove of what has become a rescue mission of sorts. A rescue mission of things. Jan soaps and washes the bowls in the sink where the sunlight creates silky rainbows in the bubbles. Each bubble is an apology. A million apologies that changed nothing. She has apologized most, she thinks, for being herself. For not being the daughter her mom wanted her to be; or the wife Ken expected; or the mother her children needed. The inconvenience of her own limitations in the lives of others. She sets the plates and forks into the rack and dries her hands with a towel. She walks into the hallway and finds Rachel on the living room floor beside open boxes, building a stack of books.

“Let’s go for a walk,” says Jan.

Rachel pauses but does not look up.

It’s still warm as Jan leads Rachel out onto the quiet street of low, clapboard houses in shades of grey-blue, off-white and faded yellow, packed close together on narrow lots. She chose the neighborhood for its short walk to town, to the T station, to the beach. If, in the shedding of unessential things, she gets finally to her car, she could live on foot here. Even now she wonders if she will have the courage to go that far. Certainly, Rachel, trailing moodily behind her as they make their way downhill, would take it as proof that Mom has finally gone over the edge of sanity. Jan has tried many times to explain her choices to her family, but no one has ever really listened: how she felt herself dying a little bit more every day in her office, under those fluorescent lights, under the constant, manufactured stress of tasks and deadlines; how watching Rachel and then Nick play as babies, then as toddlers, woke something inside her about what it means to be alive, to be human in the world. Something about how those little feet pushed down against ground so those eyes and hands could reach up, up to gasp the world. Why was wonder reserved for children? Wasn’t there another way to be in this world? A better, ancient way? She’s been searching, explaining, and apologizing for over twenty years.

Jan reaches the Old Burial Ground, with its thin, worn gravestones scattered like crooked teeth, and pauses. To the right, the road snakes down into town. But she can almost smell the water, so she turns left and crosses the street. Rachel trails behind. The road soon narrows to a single lane, cooler under the patchy shade of trees. Ash. Cottonwood. Jan scans the plants on either side to see what she can name but can find very few she knows. Dandelions are edible, especially these early budding leaves. Even the flowers. So many weeds we discount, and discard are full of life-giving nutrients…

“Where are we going?” Rachel asks impatiently.

“Singing Beach.”

“I didn’t bring my suit.”

“The water’s still too cold, I think.”

“I was joking.”

The canopy of trees converges above them in a deepening shade. Jan listens to the sounds of their footsteps in the buzzy, chirpy air, which grows saltier as they near the shore. She is waiting for her daughter to speak, to express her disappointment in words, in questions she can at least try, again, to answer. She catches herself projecting forward, girding for a conversation that has not happened. She tries to center herself again in the now: walking with the mystery of her adult child. She pictures the present as a membrane, a tiny slice of now between a future that does not yet exist and a past that is gone forever. Every footstep, every breath, gone. This day, this hour, a childhood, a marriage, gone. It’s the hardest thought to hold onto – this perpetual present – the place where children live.

They step out of the trees into the wetland reeds and the air sours with the muck of decay and still water. The path is now dry, sandy dirt and rises gently until the shoreline reveals itself. It’s low-tide and the pale, broad stretch of beach curves away to the right, lapped by persistent, knee-high waves. High, rocky bluffs, capped by stately houses look down from above.

“Why do they call it Singing Beach?” Rachel asks as she steps beside her mother.

“I’ll show you,” says Jan and leads her down the path to the sand where she sits on the ground and unlaces her boots. “Take off your shoes.”

Rachel takes a shallow breath, plops next to her mother, hesitates, then unties her sneakers.

“And socks,” says Jan, pulling off her heavy stockings and stuffing them into her empty boots. Rachel shakes her head slightly as she slips off her ankle socks. Jan rises and holds out her hand to her daughter, who takes it and lets herself be pulled up.

Still holding hands, Jan and Rachel step barefoot into the sun-warmed sand.

“What are we doing?”

“It’s made of shells. Feel it.”

“What?”

As their feet sink in, the coarse sand, flecked with pink and purple dots, slides softly beneath them.

“Listen,” Jan whispers.

“What am I listening for?”

“Shh!”

Jan watches their footsteps splash in the sand, listening for the faint murmurs of friction.

“It’s singing. Do you hear it?”

Rachel doesn’t answer but watches their four feet, concentrating: step…step… step… squeak… She catches her breath and squeezes her mother’s hand. Jan looks up to see her daughter’s smile, briefly, before it vanishes.