4
ALICE KNELT on the soft, spongy ground of the forest behind her house. She clutched a small tuft of mustard plant and pulled—not too hard, and not straight up, but rather gently and twistingly, a torsion that freed the roots from the sandy soil without breaking them. This was what she did most days. She roamed the woods of the Indiana dunes, absolving them of their mustard.
Samuel stood about twenty paces away, watching her. He was on the narrow gravel path that cut through the woods and connected Alice’s cabin with her distant garage. The path was maybe a quarter-mile long, up and down a hill. His cresting the hill had set her dogs to barking.
“The problem,” Alice said, “is the seeds. Garlic mustard seeds can linger for years.”
It was a one-woman crusade she waged in the dunes along Lake Michigan’s southern shore. This certain exotic mustard had found its way into Indiana forests from its native home in Europe, then proceeded to annihilate the local flowers, shrubs, trees. If she weren’t here to beat it back, the stuff would take over in just a few summers.
Yesterday she’d been reading one of the Chicago-area invasive-species online discussion boards that she moderates, her job being to tell people when they were posting in the wrong area and move their misplaced threads to different discussion boards. She kept everything nice and tidy; she engaged in a sort of pruning that mimicked in a digital way what she did most days in these woods, ripping out things that didn’t belong. And since most websites were bombarded with an unthinkable amount of spam—mostly advertisements for male enhancement pills or pornography or who knows what because it’s in Cyrillic—even the smallest and most niche sites needed a moderator to vigorously patrol the boards and delete unwanted posts and ads and spam or else the whole thing choked with senseless data. Most of Alice’s time not spent with mustard or her dogs or her partner was spent like this, beating back the advancing chaos, trying to achieve Enlightenment order in the face of twenty-first-century madness.
She was at her laptop looking in on her invasive-species discussion forum and saw that someone named Axman had posted a thread titled “Do you know the woman IN THIS PHOTO?” Which seemed definitely like spam because of its unnecessary use of allcaps words, and because it certainly did not have anything to do with that specific board’s ostensible topic, which was “Honeysuckle (Amur, Morrow’s, Bell’s, Standish, and Tartarian).” So she was about to move the post to the Odds ’n’ Ends forum and scold Axman for putting it in the wrong place when she clicked on the image in question and saw, incredibly, herself.
A photo taken in 1968, at the big protest in Chicago that year. There she was, in her old sunglasses, in her army fatigues, staring at the camera. Goddamn she was such a badass. She was in the park, in a field of student revelry. Thousands of protestors. Behind her were flags and signs and outlines of old Chicago buildings on the horizon. Faye sitting in front of her. She could hardly believe what she was seeing.
She contacted Axman, who sent her to a strange guy named Pwnage, who sent her to Samuel, who came to visit the very next day.
He stood several paces away from her, far from this patch of leafy shrub that to the uninitiated looked in no way special but was, in fact, garlic mustard. Each twig on a garlic mustard plant contained dozens of seeds, which wedged in shoe soles and inside socks and on the cuffs of jeans and were then spread by walking. Samuel was not allowed anywhere near it. Alice wore large plastic boots up to her knees that seemed appropriate for swamps or bogs. She carried black plastic bags that she carefully wrapped around each mustard plant to catch the seeds that dropped as she jostled it out of the ground. Every plant had hundreds of seeds, and not one of them could be allowed to escape. The way she held these bags when they were full of mustard plants—carefully, and at a small distance away from her—looked like how one might carry a bag that contained the body of a dead cat.
“How did you get involved with this?” Samuel asked. “With mustard, I mean.”
“When I moved out here,” she said, “it was killing all the native plants.”
Alice’s cabin overlooked a small dune at the edge of Lake Michigan, the closest thing you could get to a beach house in Indiana. She bought the house for next to nothing in 1986, back when the lake was at a record height. The water was a few feet from the porch. If the lake had kept rising, the house would have been washed away.
“Buying the house was a gamble,” Alice said, “but an educated one.”
“Based on what?”
“Climate change,” she said. “Hotter, drier summers. More droughts, less rain. Less ice in the winter, more evaporation. If the climate scientists were right, the lake would have to recede. So I found myself rooting for global warming.”
“That must have felt, I don’t know, complicated?”
“Every time I was stuck in traffic I imagined the carbon from all the cars filling the air and saving my house. It was perverse.”
Eventually the lake did recede. Now she had a nice big beach where the water used to be. She’d purchased the place for ten grand. It was now worth millions.
“I moved out here with my partner,” she said. “It was the eighties. We were sick of lying about our relationship. We were fed up telling our neighbors we were roommates, that she was my good friend. We wanted our privacy.”
“Where’s your partner now?”
“She’s away on business this week. It’s just me and the dogs. Three of them, rescue dogs. They are not allowed in the woods since their paws would pick up mustard seeds.”
“Of course.”
Alice’s white hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore blue jeans under her giant rubber waders. A simple, clean white T-shirt. She had that naturalist’s lack of attention to outward appearances, an indifference toward things like cosmetics and grooming that read not as apathy but rather as transcendence.
“How’s your mother?” Alice said.
“Indicted.”
“But other than that?”
“Other than that, I have no idea. She won’t talk to me.”
Alice thought about that quiet young girl she used to know, and she regretted that Faye never overcame what tortured her. But such was the way with people—they loved the things that made them miserable. She’d seen it so many times among her movement friends, after the movement splintered and grew ugly and dangerous. They were miserable all the time, and the misery seemed to feed them and nourish them. Not the misery itself but its familiarity, its constancy.
“I wish I could help,” Alice said. “But I don’t think I have much for you.”
“I’m trying to understand what happened,” Samuel said. “My mother kept everything about Chicago a secret. You’re the first person I’ve met who knew her there.”
“I wonder why she never talked about it.”
“I was hoping you could tell me. Something happened to her there. Something important.”
Of course he was right, but Alice wouldn’t say so.
“What’s to tell?” she said, trying to act aloof. “She went to school for a month, then left. College wasn’t for her. It’s a pretty common story.”
“Then why would she keep it a secret?”
“Maybe she was embarrassed.”
“No, there’s more to it than that.”
“She was a troubled soul when I knew her,” Alice said. “Small-town girl. Smart, but also a little clueless. Quiet. She read a lot. Ambitious and driven in a way that probably meant she had big-time daddy issues.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll bet she had a dad who was always disappointed in her, you know? So her anxiety about being disappointing to her father was swapped out for a drive to be special to everyone. Psychoanalysts would call this replacement. The child learns what is wanted of her. Am I right about that?”
“Maybe.”
“At any rate, she left Chicago right after the protests. I never even got to say goodbye. Just all of a sudden, gone.”
“Yeah, she’s pretty good at that.”
“Where did you get the photo?”
“It was on the news.”
“I don’t watch the news.”
“Do you remember who took it?” he said.
“That whole week is a big blur. Everything kind of merges with everything else. I can’t really remember one day from the next. Anyway, no, I don’t remember who took it.”
“In the photo it looks like she’s leaning against someone.”
“That would probably have been Sebastian.”
“Who’s Sebastian?”
“He was the editor of an underground newspaper. The Chicago Free Voice. Your mother was attracted to him, and he was attracted to anyone who paid attention to him. It wasn’t a good match.”
“What happened to him?”
“No idea. That was a long time ago. I left the movement in 1968, right after that protest. Afterward, I didn’t keep track of anyone.”
The mustard plants Alice pulled were about a foot tall, with green heart-shaped leaves and small white flowers. To the untrained eye they looked like any other ground shrub, not at all out of the ordinary. The problem was that they grew so quickly they stole sunlight from other ground plants, including young trees. They also had no natural predators—the local deer population ate everything but the mustard, leaving it free to colonize. It also produced a chemical that killed off bacteria in the soil that other plants needed for growth. A perfect botanical terror, in other words.
“Was my mother in the movement?” Samuel said. “Was she, like, a radical hippie or something?”
“I was a radical hippie,” Alice said. “Your mother definitely was not. She was a normal kid. She was dragged into it against her will.”
Alice remembered her young, idealistic self, how she refused to own any possessions, refused to lock her door or carry money, crazy behavior she wouldn’t even consider now. What her younger self worried about were the hang-ups that came with possessions—the territoriality, the worry, the potential for loss, the way the world looked when you owned precious things: like one big threat always ready to take your stuff. And yes, Alice had purchased this home in the Indiana dunes, she filled it with her stuff, she put locks on all the doors, she built a wall of sandbags to contain the advance of the lake, she cleaned and sanded and painted, brought in exterminators and contractors and took down walls and erected new ones, and slowly this home came into being, bubbling up out of itself like Athena from the sea. And yes, it was true that all her former radical energies now poured into things like selecting the perfect pendant lamps, or achieving the ideal kitchen work flow, or constructing excellent built-in bookcases, or finding the most calming master bedroom color palette that ideally involved the same blue the lake took on when she looked out her window certain winter mornings, when the surface of the water was a slushy, shimmering mass that appeared—depending on the paint sample she used—like “glacier blue” or “liquid blue” or “bluebell” or a really lovely gray-blue called “soar.” And yes, occasionally she felt bolts of raw guilt and regret that these were the hang-ups that interested her, not the peace and justice and equality movements she intended to devote her life to when she was twenty.
She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.
“Who dragged her into it?” Samuel said.
“Nobody,” Alice said. “Everybody. The events of the time. She got swept up. It was all terribly exciting, you see.”
For Alice, the small true part of her was that she wanted something that deserved her faith and devotion. When she was young, she saw families retreat into their homes and ignore the greater problems of the world and she hated them: bourgeois cogs in the machine, unthinking sheeplike masses, selfish bastards who couldn’t see beyond their own property lines. Their souls, she thought, must have been small and shrunken things.
But then she grew up and bought a house and found a lover and got some dogs and stewarded her land and tried to fill her home with love and life and she realized her earlier error: that these things did not make you small. In fact, these things seemed to enlarge her. That by choosing a few very private concerns and pouring herself into them, she had never felt so expanded. That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty—because the movement required it of you—and loving something you actually loved. Love—real, genuine, unasked-for love—made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies.
Still, she could not help feeling stung when old movement friends said she had “sold out.” That was the worst of all charges because, of course, it was true. But how could she explain that not all sellouts are the same? That it wasn’t money she was selling out to? That sometimes on the other side of selling out there’s a compassion she’d never felt in her revolutionary days? She could not explain this to them, nor would they hear it. They still held to all the old principles: drugs, sex, resistance. Even as drugs began killing them one by one, and even as sex became dangerous, still this is where they turned for some kind of answer. They never saw how their resistance had begun to look comical. They were beaten by the cops and the public cheered. They thought they were changing the world and what they did was help get Nixon elected. They found Vietnam intolerable, but their answer was to become intolerable themselves.
The only thing less popular than the war in those days was the antiwar movement.
This truth was obvious, though none of them saw it, convinced as they were of their own righteousness.
She managed not to think about this too much, these ligatures to the past. For the most part she thought about her dogs, and mustard. Except when something popped up to remind her of her former life, like, for example, the son of Faye Andresen, coming to the dunes and asking questions.
“Were you close,” he said, “with my mother? Were you friendly?”
“I suppose,” she said. “We didn’t know each other very well.”
He nodded. He seemed disappointed by this. He was hoping for more. But what could Alice say? That Faye had indeed been on her mind all these years? That Faye’s memory was a small but constant and needling companion? For that was the truth. She’d promised to look out for Faye, but things got out of hand, and she failed. She never knew what happened to her. She never saw her again.
There is no greater ache than this: guilt and regret in equal measure. She’d tried to bury it, along with all the other mistakes of her youth, out here in the dunes. And she would not dig these stories up now, even for this man who so plainly needed them. The subject of his mother seemed like a splinter he could not remove. She grabbed a small bunch of mustard and pulled—not too hard, and with a gentle spin to get the roots up. She had long ago perfected this technique. For a long quiet moment they stayed like this, the only sounds being mustard plants tearing free from the earth, and the whoosh of the nearby lake, and a certain bird whose call sounded like uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh.