Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“What are you smiling about?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Because he sensed her interest was real, he had grown bolder and more expansive. Even to the edge of passionate. No one else had seen this side, which she had brought out. Part of what she fell in love with was her own creation of him. “Are you going to ask me out on a date?”

* * *

Over the months of their courtship — the first boy she went on a date with, the first she kissed — Forster explained the life to her, but she was simply looking into his eyes, dreaming of their life together. She had never been in love before, didn’t know if this was it, but she liked the feeling of being a small ship riding in the wake of a larger one. He took her to the lake on the edge of the ranch, and they lay together on the hood of the car, the warm, ticking engine beneath them substituting for contact.

They walked through the rows of groves, and the beauty and silence were like being in a cathedral. She stood still, feeling her legs anchored to the earth. The quiet was like a hum, like the earth’s own metronome, a sound she had not even known she hungered for.

Forster picked an orange off a tree, then took his pocketknife out of his pants and cut a helix of peel from the blossom end. “This is the part you always eat for taste,” he said. After they had eaten half of the fruit — sugary, dripping — he tossed the other half away.

The quiet was so intense they heard the splash of a fish in the lake. If she wanted this, she would have to be the one to make a move. She took his hand and placed it on her breast.

After graduation, he returned to the ranch, worked from dawn till dusk, tirelessly, and bragged at being the luckiest man ever to have such work. Not wanting to be separated, she stopped her studies, a temporary state that turned permanent, giving up her dreams of becoming a teacher like her mother, content to share Forster’s vision. Or maybe the desires of the ranch itself seeped into her dreams, usurped others, and became her obsession as well. Regardless, she was unprepared for the demands her new life would make on her.

“I don’t know anything about farming,” she said.

“You don’t need to know anything. You plant a tree and pick the fruit.” A truth that contained a thousand steps in between.

* * *

His family paid for the large wedding, while her mother sewed her wedding gown, an old-world dress of ivoried lace and seed pearls that all the women marveled over. Overwhelmed, Claire was aware of having come from a more tenuous background, less anchored, and that of course was the precise attraction of the ranch. Her parents had lived in their new country like polite relatives overstaying their welcome, even though they had been there thirty years. They didn’t want to take up too much room. They always spoke of the old country as the real life, of California as some kind of purgatory, although they had long ago given up on leaving.

“Are you okay, mézes ?” her mother asked Claire as they dressed in her future bedroom, overlooking the backyard filled with impatient guests. Most of them were ranchers and still intended to get work done before sundown. Leisure didn’t come easily. Her mother, a schoolteacher, was unfazed by the Baumsarg family’s relative affluence, counted in acres of land rather than degrees. Her father, a scholar and book dealer, couldn’t reconcile himself to his only daughter’s choosing a life of farming over that of the intellect.

“I love him, Mama.”

Her mother looked at her shrewdly, realizing too late that they had made a mistake sheltering her so much. “Sometimes love isn’t enough.”

A thing to say to a bride on her wedding day, yet Claire knew not to take it personally. Her mother believed in keeping expectations low to avoid future disappointment, an immigrant’s philosophy.

After the ceremony, food was laid out on wooden picnic tables along the lawn as far as the edge of the orchard. At one point during the evening, Forster’s great-uncle, white-haired, mustachioed, stood up and started to sing, joined by his friends who formed a barbershop quartet. They looked out of the forties in their old-fashioned striped shirts and straw hats; they were a nostalgia act, singing at Independence Day events, football games, and once even appearing on a TV show in Hollywood.

I love you truly, tru-ly dear

Life with its sorrow, life with its tear

They honeymooned in Hawaii, not on the beach, but in the interior of the Big Island, on a friend’s ranch surrounded with cattle and fields where Forster felt comfortable — farms, always farms. One night, Claire woke to an empty bed and open door. She went out and found Forster curled on a deck chair. The dew was heavy as drizzle, and he was shivering in the moonlight.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, an alarm going off inside her.

“Look at you,” he said, accusing, jutting his chin at her. She looked down, saw the moonlight rendering her gauzy nightdress almost sheer. “So beautiful. And I’m supposed to make you happy.”

She laughed — relieved and troubled in equal parts — and knelt down to hold him. Her mother’s words echoed.

* * *

Claire moved directly from her parents’ house to her marriage house. Forster’s mother, Hanni, laughed at her cosseted ways — the silver samovar and the large collection of books as a kind of dowry.

“We have a teakettle,” Hanni said. “Don’t need that big thing.”

Claire shrugged, shocked by the rudeness of her new mother-in-law.

“Why all these books?” she asked, as Claire carried in the heavy boxes, unaided.

“Because there are none here for me to read.”

“I tell my son to bring me a tractor, instead he brings me a shiny bicycle.”

* * *

Hanni had been an attorney’s daughter before marrying Forster’s father, but the years had honed her into a rancher, with browned, wrinkled skin, sharp, angular cheekbones that reminded Claire of a hawk, a look in her eyes devoid of any vanity.

“You are so lovely,” she said, stroking her new daughter-in-law’s plump cheek with her calloused hand, accusing. “No wonder my son went crazy over you.”

“We went crazy for each other.” She would never become like Hanni. She would apply moisturizer, wear hats, would read every day, and practice the piano. She would write. The idea of losing the nascent life of the mind for a life of physical labor frightened her. She had told Forster that she wasn’t ready yet to have children, that she would make an appointment with her gynecologist for contraceptives.

Hanni winked. “When I was your age, I went to parties. Had so many beaux. I cried every night for a year when I first moved here. What are you going to do out in the middle of nowhere?”

Claire’s heart sank. The other girls at college laughed at her, leaving Los Angeles for a rural life, said she was from another age, a pioneer, a pilgrim. Taunted her that she would be barefoot and pregnant in no time. They didn’t understand that she wanted more than anything else to be rooted, and the ranch gave her that. Eventually she would have her own family, one that would not be lost. She could always go back to her books eventually.

“My mother’s parents had a farm in Hungary. My mother says without land, you are nothing.” An exaggeration, the farm had belonged to cousins, but that quieted the old woman.

“It is a hard, narrow life,” Hanni conceded. “But it can nourish. For the right person.” Neither of them at all sure that Claire was that person.

* * *

Under Hanni’s niggling supervision, Claire took care of the sprawling house herself, deciding this would be her domain. She washed dishes, ironed clothes, and mopped floors, partly drudgery but also a kind of communion. Forster taught her to take over the ranch’s bookkeeping.