Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“You’re an artist, Minna.”

Claire had taken in only half of the room, and by far the half of lesser importance. The remaining two walls were painted a bold yellow, the color of blazing sun, bleached coral beaches, the stuccoed walls of mean villages. All manner of figures and symbols and words filled these two walls with a sense of menace proportionate to their unintelligibility. Claire reassured herself that it was only a matter of familiarity and comfort would surely follow. In a spirit of exploration, she excavated the nearest, largest of these words: OGOU BALANJO. Underneath it, smaller letters read SPIRIT OF HEALING. Then, like a bend in the road, a view that was formerly invisible presented itself: the drawing of a white woman, round-faced, with empty blue eyes and long strands of stylized, yellow hair. But one noticed this only much later because what riveted the attention was what she was holding — a salver at waist level, on which rested her two breasts. The chest area above the tray was blank as an unmarked map, scored only with two small X ’s where the breasts should be, like the cartooned X-ed eyes of a dead fish. Above her head, written out in strips of Christmas tinsel, were the words SAINT AGATHA. Below her large, round, clawed lion’s paws were the painted words PATRON OF BREASTS.

“Is it magic?” Claire asked.

“It’s the beginning.”

“She’s me?” The figure was so monstrous — a mockery or a kindness, she couldn’t decide — that she felt unmoored as if punched. She stood there, stranded, as Minna waited to catch her swoon, helping her onto the floor. Claire kept looking up, hypnotized by the figure, who only grew in power when observed from that vantage.

“I’ve upset you?” Minna sat on the floor next to her and held her hand. “These are powerful majik, sanp . To heal you.”

Claire nodded, sickened and awed, mesmerized by the eyes of the woman, flat and placid. She felt that if she sat there long enough, looked hard enough, she would find the answer to many things that had eluded her. Meanings so covered by time and evasions and half-truths that they were all but forgotten. The more time she spent looking at Saint Agatha, the less fantastic, the more normal, she appeared, until it was Claire’s own bare walls, her timid Germanic landscapes and faded English botanical prints in the rest of the house that lacked reality.

“She’s beautiful?” Claire whispered, feeling unqualified to judge even that because the figure was so far beyond the dull concepts of beauty or ugliness.

“You like her!” Minna jumped up, excited as a schoolgirl, and waved her hands back and forth across the walls as she described her future plans for more drawings, as if the surface of the walls weren’t already buckling under their duty. Her happiness took away all Claire’s opposition, the menaced feelings of alarm. Of course, they were just drawings, primitive renderings no more powerful than pictures in a magazine, book, or cave. Harmless.

But after that first visit, Minna’s door again remained resolutely shut. Somehow Claire understood that the powerful contents needed to be bottled tightly, sealed like a drug or alcohol. The room was so foreign now that for all practical purposes it had ceased to exist as part of the rest of the house and became like the exotic grafting of the lion paws on Saint Agatha, or the grafting of more delicate fruit on rugged rootstock. As time went on, such permutations on the everyday began to seem more and more possible. Another of Minna’s pictures that Claire had barely had time to glance at on her way out of the room: a fish tail attached to a woman’s lower body. The house, too, had become mermaidized.

* * *

Gwen arrived, a combination of long rest weekend and inspection. She was pleased by the pristine quiet of the ranch house, disturbed by her mother’s waning appearance. She carried in a large box with a bow from the car.

“A present?” Claire opened it to find a Styrofoam head with a blond wig perched on top of it. “Oh, no.”

“You’re going to need it, so might as well get a nice one.”

All day long Gwen’s voice could be heard in the living room, on the phone to clients. Minna hid away, mostly in her room, presumably painting. “So she’s an artist now?” At night, Gwen drank down a whole bottle of wine while Claire sat on the sofa listening to her complaints about her underemployed husband, her long hours at the office. The bitterness in her voice left Claire exhausted.

They quieted when Minna left for a date with Don.

“Great. She’s here a couple months and has a movie-star boyfriend.”

“She’s had a more difficult life than she’s let on.”

“Those,” Gwen said, pointing her finger out the window at Minna’s disappearing back, “are the kind of women who get what they want.”

* * *

Saturday night Claire became feverish. After consulting with a nurse on the phone, Gwen helped Minna bathe her with cool washcloths, then watched as Minna brewed up an elixir that Claire eagerly drank down.

“What’s in that?” Gwen asked.

“My maman taught me folk medicine. Natural ways to bring healing.”

“Got anything for stress?”

“I can make something for you.”

Within an hour, Claire’s temperature was down, and she slept comfortably.

“I’m so glad we decided to hire you,” Gwen said.

“Do me a favor?” Minna asked.

“What?”

“Don’t trouble your mother with your problems. She talks about you and Lucy all the time. She worries. If she felt you were happy, it would ease her mind.”

Gwen weighed her options and decided not to be insulted. She had not let on her shock in the change she saw in her mother — the new frailness. It hit her full force, her mother’s mortality, so hard to reconcile with the steel-minded mother who had raised them. The idea of her failing to heal scared Gwen.

“Minna’s worth her weight in gold,” she said to Claire the next day.

“She fights with Paz. Octavio doesn’t trust her.” She tried to minimize her feelings for the girl.

Gwen wasn’t fooled. “She’s taking good care of you. I’m happy you’re in good hands.”

* * *

Living with the vicissitudes of her rebellious body, Claire lost her taste for ordinary diversions. Minna was her midwife, introducing a whole other way of existence. While Claire could no longer tolerate watching the news on television, or listening to Mrs. Girbaldi’s neighborhood gossip, she could sit outside for hours watching the trees, her thoughts swirling like a leaf riding a swift current of air. The old urgencies of the farm, which had before so preoccupied her, Paz’s complaints, Gwen’s and Lucy’s constant dramas, all began to mercifully recede.

Time, too, lost its normal sequence. Minutes became dense, rich as whole lifetimes. Claire would leave an afternoon of daydreaming filled with ephemeral wisdom as if she had been away on a long year’s journey and come back with a box filled with treasure. But she had gone nowhere, traveled no farther than a few footsteps. She hated the word detachment, but there was that — a shifting as if from a northern to a southern exposure — the whole world appearing newly draped.

* * *

Still, when Claire went out into the judging world, to the hospital or more rarely to the grocery, she clapped on the wig that Gwen had bought for her, or she wrapped her head in the colorful scarves that regularly arrived like bouquets from Lucy, or she wore Forster’s old baseball cap, brim pressed low to her bare head, but this was for the world’s sake, not her own. Patients dressed as much for others as themselves. They knew the battle being fought, grew proud of their scars, but the nonsick were visibly relieved not to be confronted with rude reminders of mortality. So the diseased attended to their illnesses discreetly in their shrunken, compromised world.