Dawn #3
I’d avoided Vineland for a decade because no matter how many adults read and raved about them, they were mostly a reminder that I didn’t have kids of my own to read them to.
Sticking around and waiting for Clark to marry me all through my early and mid-thirties had seriously set me back in my prospects.
I caught myself wondering how old Dennis was and if he was also allergic to marriage.
I’d googled him, of course, and from his academic career, it appeared that he was close to my age; he’d done undergrad and graduate school at NYU (it was satisfying to know I’d been right about him being a New York transplant), followed by a fellowship at the Sorbonne and an assistant professorship at CalArts, where he published a rather popular biography of Alfred Hitchcock before getting hired at Berkeley.
It was possible that he’d been married once before.
One of the front windows of the bookstore was dedicated to Vineland, with all five of the released books in enticing stacks starting with the first, which I was about to purchase, Phoebe and the Burning Vines.
Plus, there was a splashy poster heralding the sixth and final book, Vineland Transcendent.
I found the imagery of the covers a bit strange for kids’ books, with their bright painted depictions of grapevines—those pleasing stripes of trellised grapes that, in the case of the books, undulated softly over hills. It was obviously vineyard imagery.
Every cover was some combination of purple, blue, and green, though the first one also had a flare of bright orange edged with red in the shape of a doorway. Though it was clearly a fire, it looked strangely inviting.
But why were these kids’ books romanticizing vineyards? There must be some twist on that theme, surely, because there was no way they would be so popular if they were glorifying wine to children. I had to admit, my interest was piqued. And my god, did I want a glass of wine.
How nice would it be to read this book while sipping a nice cold rosé? Or maybe a spicy zinfandel, since the fog was rolling in and the evening promised to be chilly?
Want to grab a drink?
STOP IT.
I tried to stay in the moment as I walked home. I’d been walking a lot lately; I found that the movement and the scenery going by kept my mind off drinking. Barely.
Alfie jumped all over me as soon as I let myself in.
It had been too many hours since his usual walker had come to take him to run around in Golden Gate Park, and for some reason his affection really stabbed my heart that day, so I sat on the floor and let him lick my face, then lie in my lap, belly up, for his favorite tummy rubs.
I recalled how I’d sobbed in a mindfulness class when the teacher mentioned the uncomplicated love of a pet during a loving-kindness meditation.
Loving-kindness we were supposed to be directing at ourselves.
I’d realized in that moment that I’d only experienced consistent loving-kindness in my life from one person: my mother.
I’d never even considered offering it to myself.
Once I had taken Alfie out and put a veggie pizza in the oven, then made myself as enticing a glass of cranberry juice, seltzer, and lime as I could, I settled down on my teal velvet couch, which I’d snagged from a set I’d done for a 1970s Hamlet.
There was a text from Audrey:
What did he say to coffee?
I replied:
I haven’t suggested it yet.
She replied with a rolling-eye height_1em, and I set the phone face down on the coffee table.
Alfie curled up in my lap as I opened Phoebe and the Burning Vines and started to read.
For as long as Phoebe could remember, the vines had been neglected.
Long before she was born, there had been a fire that ravaged the land and burned the vines all the way into the roots.
The people believed this to be a sign that vines should not grow where they lived.
So instead, they planted trees that produced the ripest peaches and apples, and they raised chickens, and cows, and sheep.
For years, no vines grew, until one day insistent shoots poked their heads up out of the dirt that had long been ash but had, in the course of years that brought rain and animal excrement and wind and sunshine, become fertile earth once again.
They grew to overtake the trees and strangle the chickens and drive out the cows, who knew better.
The vines were so strong as to be untamable, and people began to abandon this beautiful place they had called home for generations, leaving the vines to the sun and the cursed hills.
On her twelfth birthday, Phoebe Richards accepted the Dare of the Vine, as did all children in the valley town adjacent to the mountain of vines. For it was told that someday there would be One who could walk through the vines to the Other Side.
Each child set off on this adventure to the clapping chants of the other children and usually returned moments later, covered in cuts, and smiling, relieved they were not the One and relieved to have risen to the required challenge.
Phoebe assumed the same thing would happen to her. Even her mother, whom she loved with the fierceness of children who have only one parent to do the job of two, had kissed her goodbye after feeding her birthday cake for breakfast and had told her to “show those vines who is boss.”
Like it was a joke.
Because the morning was fine, Phoebe tried to settle her nerves in the hammock tied between two mighty trees outside her bedroom window. Her father had knotted the hammock himself, before he died, and so when she lay in it, she felt as though she was gathering his strength to her.
The hair on the back of my neck tingled.
I, too, had grown up with a hammock made by a dead man, not a father but a grandfather I’d never met. Mom kept it in a trunk to preserve it, keep it safe from the rot that would inevitably destroy it if it was left to the elements.
When we did take it out, we tied the hammock between two redwoods outside my bedroom window.
It had been something like an antidote for my nerves when I was a kid.
Mom used to suggest taking it out anytime I seemed stressed.
I remember one time, when I was just a little older than the character Phoebe, I had turned myself inside out about a speech I had to give in Civics.
I’d practiced and practiced, in front of Mom and in front of the mirror, and the night before I was due to give it, my hands actually shook as I pushed tortellini around on my plate.
“Sweetheart, you’re going to be great,” Mom said.
“I don’t know why—I just get so scared.”
“I can understand that,” she replied. “No matter how many times I have to give a speech or an interview, I still get nervous before.”
“You do?” It didn’t seem possible. Mom always seemed to be speaking at this association for female entrepreneurs or that organization for organic winemakers. She’d been on the covers of magazines!
“I do,” she said with an understanding smile. “Just like I still get nervous anytime I need a shot at the doctor’s office.”
“I know,” I moaned. “Me too.” As if she didn’t know.
As if I hadn’t practically broken her fingers anytime a doctor needed to do anything to me, which she’d attributed to the time I’d fallen out of a tree I’d been climbing when I was three.
I couldn’t remember that incident, but apparently I’d had a cast on my arm for weeks, and I’d never climbed another tree.
“Let’s have dessert in the hammock. That always helps me,” she suggested.
My heart instantly lightened at this suggestion.
Leaving our dinners virtually untouched, we scooped ourselves big bowls of ice cream, topped with chocolate chips and the wild blackberry preserves that Grandma Joan made; then we got ourselves into the hammock, facing each other so that my feet were up by her waist, as hers were by mine.
It must have been spring, because it was still light out, though the sun was descending and I could see bits of a peachy sky between and above the trees.
I’d felt comforted by her steady presence.
I’m sure the hammock in the book is just a weird coincidence, I thought as I got myself a plate of hot pizza and settled back into the couch to continue reading.
But when Phoebe faced the vines—a brilliant green and purple tangle of leaves and fruit and branch so dense it made an impermeable wall—the sound of her school friends chanting faded away and the vines began to glow gold.
Soon they shimmered, then erupted in flames that doused themselves as soon as they’d burned an arched entry for Phoebe to walk through.
It was an opening with no door, all darkness, but the darkness was inviting, not foreboding, and so Phoebe took one step forward and then another and another until she was inside.
Then a door that hadn’t been there before shut firmly behind her.