Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

“Don’t tell me you’ve never been to Muir Woods before,” said Jess.

“Never with you.”

“You have to promise you won’t have an agenda.”

“No agenda,” said Emily.

“And no hectoring!”

“How is hectoring different from lecturing?”

“It’s louder.”

Jess carried a volume of Robert Frost when Emily picked her up.

“What’s that for?” Emily drove her new Audi along the coast, and the ocean rose and dipped in the sun.

“To read. To meditate!” Jess said blithely, and she thought, To avoid hectoring if necessary.

“Okay,” Emily said, bemused and, sensing Jess’s unsaid reason, a little hurt.

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” Jess intoned as they took the path down from the parking lot. She had imagined finding a spot to read and meditate, leaving Emily to walk alone for half an hour, but the trees were so tall, and the light filtering down so green that she forgot her stratagem, and her troubles as well. The saplings here were three hundred years old, their bark still purple, their branches supple, foliage feathery in the gloaming. They rose up together with their ancestors, millennia-old redwoods outlasting storms, regenerating after lightning, sending forth new spires from blasted crowns. What did Hegel matter when it came to old-growth? Who cared about world-historical individuals? Not the salamanders or the moss. Not the redwoods, which were prehistoric. Potentially posthistoric too.

Jess closed her eyes to inhale the forest with its scents of earth and pine. “Couldn’t the Veritech Foundation be for forests?” Jess asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because our mission is math education.”

“But without trees there would be no math,” Jess said. “Let alone math education. Without trees we’d suffocate—literally and figuratively.”

“How do you suffocate figuratively?”

“You box yourself into received ideas, so you can’t breathe. You can’t even see where you are and you just … die from lack of perspective. Did you know that tribal peoples aren’t even nearsighted? Nearsightedness is a result of reading and staring at computer screens.”

Emily took off her glasses and gazed up at the blurry canopy. When she slipped her glasses on again, she much preferred the finer view. She saw the fertile detail all around her, the spores speckling the underside of ferns, the pinecones extending from every branch, pine needles drifting down and carpeting the mossy ground. Fecund, furrowed, teeming with new life—even the fallen trees blossomed forth with lichen and rich moss and ferns. Every rock and stump turned moist and rich, every broken place gave birth. Each crevice a fresh opening, each plant a possibility, putting forth its little hook or eye.

“You see?” said Jess. “And this place is tame. Up north you feel like an ant looking up at a blade of grass.”

“I’m not sure I’d want to feel like an ant.”

“Why not? Don’t you like to feel small sometimes?”

“No,” Emily said honestly.

“I do. I like it. I prefer feeling insignificant,” said Jess.

“I don’t believe that.”

“I didn’t say worthless , I said insignificant , as in the grand scheme of things.”

“But why?”

“Because humans have such a complex. We’re so self-involved. You have to get out to a place like this to remember how small humanity really is.”

And Jess was right. Numbers didn’t matter here. Money didn’t count, and all the words and glances, the quick exchanges that built or tore down reputations had no meaning in this place. The air was moist. Fallen leaves, spreading branches, and crisscrossing roots wicked water, so that the trees seemed to drink the misty air.

Jess said, “All your worries fade away, because …”

Emily finished her thought. “The trees put everything in perspective.”

“Right. It’s like your soul achieves its focal distance.”

The word soul startled Emily from her reverie. She turned on Jess. “You’re dropping out of school, aren’t you?”

“No—I never said that! I might take the semester off, just so I can catch up. And we’ve got a major appraisal coming up at Yorick’s….”

“Jess …”

“I was actually making a serious point.”

“And I was asking a serious question.”

“I’m not talking about graduate school. I’m talking about how you can come out here and know your place in the universe.”

“And what would that be?”

“Very small. Very tangential,” Jess said cheerfully.

“You’re so bright,” said Emily.

“I thought we said no hectoring.”

“It’s not hectoring—it’s my … I just want you to do well.”

“I would rather be well than do well,” Jess said beatifically, and laughed at her sister’s yelp of frustration.

“You actually seek out platitudes.”

“I only do it to annoy.”

“But you believe that stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s the disturbing part, isn’t it?” Jess said wickedly.

Emily folded her arms across her chest. “When are you going to embark on a career?”

“Don’t you think,” Jess asked, with just the slightest edge in her voice, “that you have enough career for both of us?”

“I worry about you.”

“Well, I worry about you,” Jess countered. “You’re in this crazy industry where people eat each other alive. No, wait”—she stopped Emily from interrupting—“it’s in all the newspapers and the chat groups. Microsoft taking out Netscape. Veritech suing Janus.”

“You heard about that?” Frankly, Emily was surprised to hear that Jess followed any news at all.

“Yeah, I read this whole article—did you see it? Anything you can do I can do better: Janus takes on the storage sector. Veritech fights back . It’s online, on The Motley Fool.”

“You read The Motley Fool?”

“Doesn’t everybody?” Jess asked. “Actually,” she confessed, “Dad sent me the link. Are you really suing Janus for eighty million dollars? Isn’t that, like, an expensive thing to do?”

“It’s just part of doing business,” said Emily, affecting a calm she didn’t feel. Lawsuits, particularly the big one against Janus, were a huge drag on Veritech’s finances and corporate energy. “We can afford the legal fees, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s not what I mean. There you are, getting and spending, and you’re with this guy who’s in the thick of it—but you’re not really with him, because he’s so careerist he won’t come out here to be with you.”

Emily started walking, brisk and purposeful, as though they had to complete the trail loop. “I don’t think you should bring boyfriends into this. I don’t think you should talk about Jonathan—who actually works—when you’re with someone with no visible source of income or direction….”

“Direction! Leon travels for his beliefs. Jonathan travels for his share price. There’s a difference, don’t you think? Leon has a cause. Jonathan is just another greedy, techno-freak gazillionaire.”

They waited on a wooden bridge for a Japanese family taking pictures. A couple sauntered along, with hands in each other’s back pockets. A small girl, only three or four years old, sprinted past in a green hooded sweater, and her little feet beat against the wood planks as she raced away, to hide, to fly. Her parents called after her nervously, “Wait for us, honey. Not so fast!” Now Emily stood perfectly still, and she said nothing, and Jess knew by her silence that she was truly angry.

“You worry about me,” Jess ventured nervously, “so why can’t I worry about you?”