The Wild Wood by Mildred Clingerman (F&SF, January 1957)1 opens with a family trailing around town looking for a Christmas tree. Margaret, the mother/narrator, has had enough, but their insistent four-year-old daughter drags them down a side street, and they end up at “Cravolini’s Christmas Tree Headquarters”.
While her husband and daughter go into the depths of the barn-like structure to find the perfect tree, Margaret is surprised by the owner, Cravolini, who touches her forearm—this gives Margaret a brief vision of the pair of them in a cabin, and the feeling that they have met before. Her husband interrupts the encounter before she can make sense of it, and she goes to join the rest of them:
Don led her down one of the long aisles of trees to where Bonnie and Bruce were huddled beside their choice. Margaret scarcely glanced at the tree. Don was annoyed with her—half-convinced, as he always was, that Margaret had invited the pass. Not by any overt signal on her part, but simply because she forgot to look busy and preoccupied.
“Don’t go dawdling along in that wide-eyed dreamy way,” he’d said so often. “I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got that look—as if you’d say yes to a square meal or to a panhandler or to somebody’s bed.” pp. 124-125
The sexual frankness here is not the first instance of this in the story—during an earlier embrace, her “frank desire” is referred to—and both pale in comparison to the second encounter between her and Cravolini while she is looking at four blue candles:
“Do you like those candles?” he asked softly.
“Where is my husband?” Margaret kept her eyes on Bruce’s fine blond hair. Don’t let the door open any more. . . .
“You’re husband has gone to bring his car. He and your daughter. The tree is too large to carry so far. Why are you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid. . . .” She glanced fleetingly into the man’s eyes, troubled again that her knowledge of his identity wavered just beyond reality. “Have we met before?” she asked.
“I almost saw you once,” Cravolini said. “I was standing at a window. You were reflected in it, but when I turned around you were gone. There was nobody in the room but my sister . . . the stupid cow. . . .” Cravolini spat into the sawdust. “That day I made a candle for you. Wait.” He reached swiftly behind the stacked packing boxes that held the candles on display. He had placed it in her hand before she got a clear look at it. Sickeningly pink, loathsomely slick and hand-filling. It would have been cleaner, more honest, she thought, if it had been a frank reproduction of what it was intended to suggest. pp. 125-126
The rest of the story tells of further visits over the years, with Cravolini repeating his behaviour and Margaret unable to tell her husband. Then, on the climactic visit (spoiler) she meets the sister at the door of the store, who directs her to a bed at the back. When Margaret gets there she realises she is now the body of the sister, and she watches herself leave the shop with her husband and family. Cravolini has “the proud, silly spirit” he desired.
I’m not sure the possession ending makes much conventional sense, but the story works on a dreamlike/nightmare level, and is notable for its unconcealed sexuality.
*** (Good). 3,450 words. Story link.
1. I recently bought this writer’s collected short story volume, The Clingerman Files (Amazon UK £2.99). I suppose I should really get into it, but I rather like coming across stories like this, and Stair Trick (F&SF, August 1952), one by one in the wild.