She did not quite admit to herself the pain of this, or how great a role that pain would play in the formation of her subsequent move. But that move had been years in the making, she saw now, the years she sat at the periphery of what she had made, watching the women comfort one another and take in one another’s children and quarrel and feud and reconcile. For years, too, she imagined the inventory of their products, as if in a brightly lit room, grow and grow, the quilts and rugs and samplers stacked to the ceilings. She saw how they continued past the point when every bed and floor of their own had been covered, every wall adorned, every grandchild gifted. She saw the beginnings of their restlessness.
They themselves, it was clear, lacked the next necessary thing—the next infusion of magic. They were no more capable of offering their products to the market for money than they were of suddenly donning business suits and presenting themselves for job interviews. Here, finally, was her second opportunity to interject her worldliness into their midst, and Naomi took it.
Surreptitiously, over time, she had clipped magazine articles which seemed to track the new values ascribed to the handmade, the traditional, the nostalgic. She had traced the tastemakers’ return to an unpolished and comfortably cluttered aesthetic. She saw that the homes of the wealthiest no longer made a display of their wealth by flaunting precious objects but instead favored old things and used things, battered objects left alone to show their wear. She noted the speed with which manufacturers observed and reacted to the trend, offering rugs braided by machine and importing quilts mass-produced in China, and she took note of the stratospheric heights to which the prices of antique textiles soared. She saw the path that was open to them.
Flourish began poorly. Two of her best quilters’ husbands refused to let their wives participate—a hobby was one thing, sewing for rich folks quite something else—and there was confusion over the cooperative scheme Naomi proposed, a perhaps unnecessarily complex model involving shares and dues and unwaged hours on such grunt work as inventory and advertising. They began with craft fairs in New Hampshire and Vermont, but it was soon clear that these potential customers were too much like the women themselves to value art forms redolent of deprivation and thrift. What enthusiasm there was for Naomi’s idea flagged quickly. But then, with the last of her seed money, she took an ad in a decorating magazine, informing the citizens of city and suburb alike that, in one corner of New England, old ladies were still gathering to make quilts in a church basement and still hooking rugs in their rocking chairs—and the stuff was for sale. Within two weeks, it was all gone. Within six months, the names of disappointed latecomers comprised a formidable mailing list.
She had drilled into a good vein, all right. Live rug hookers, unlike dead ones, could insinuate the image of an adored pet into a design using only a photograph, or custom work a house’s year of construction into a hooked welcome mat. Live quilters could endow a wedding quilt with dates or etch a crib covering with names, lengths, and hefts. As many as the requests for “authentic” items were, the special orders far outweighed them. Naomi began looking for more artisans. New Hampshire Profiles came to call. Good Morning New England snaked its lines down the steep church basement steps and turned its lights on the withered hands of the Hodge sisters. Inside a year, Flourish was flourishing.
And Naomi, to her own surprise, was ready. Though “business,” in the glossary of her youth, was somewhat synonymous with capitalist oppression, she had found herself keenly following the wave of catalogues that had risen to command the retail arena of the early 1980s. Indeed, she had even, willingly, offered her name to each, to be shared among them all, until every delivery of mail seemed to bulge with their glossy stock and gleaming photographs of merchandise, their stage decorations of a successful American life: woolen nightgowns, china, dollhouses, strawberry jam, clothing to chop wood in or make an entrance at the ball, furniture, picture frames, and a hundred other unsuspected but, evidently, utterly necessary items. It drove Daniel wild, that tilting stack of then unrecyclable paper, blaring materialism from one corner of their great room. The tchotchkes on those pages incensed him, the edible delicacies sent him into rages as he invoked the human deprivation of the moment—Ethiopia, India, the slums of Rio, the hollow-eyed deprivation of Soweto. He charged her with self-importance. She replied she was merely trying to give the women an income of their own. He charged her with covetousness. And that was true.
There were other accusations, inappropriate to herself, she thought, but somehow less baffling. Because Daniel was right: all around them, their fellow soldiers were sounding personal retreats, and each renunciation struck him with both distinct and cumulative vehemence. They knew one Harlem schoolteacher who had quit to publish a newsletter for independent investors. Former political agitators were suddenly Washington insiders. Naomi had a woman friend who abandoned her planned master’s thesis on H.D. to accept a scholarship endowed by Cecil Rhodes—she did, however, have the good grace to refer to her benefactor as a “fascist.” And after four years in West Virginia, a fellow VISTA worker was back home on the West Side writing ad copy for what he blushingly described as a “feminine deodorant.”
In Goddard, Daniel’s maple sugar co-op was failing, and he wasn’t doing much except reading Mother Jones and brooding. For her part, she considered herself fully evolved beyond the dungeon of gender roles in homemaking, but Naomi could not help but notice that her husband seldom reached for a cleaning or cooking implement while she tended to the business that was growing around her. The situation grew even clearer when Flourish moved out of the church basement and into a once-derelict flour mill at the edge of Goddard, which Naomi had bought in ’81. He might have helped her, she often thought now. He might have helped her with the company, shaped it, had vision for it. There was no reason why he should have considered benefiting the women of their community somehow beyond his protocol. Organizing and elevating women, after all, was part and parcel of the vision they had professed to share, back in their student days of yore, back in the life they had lived together—that vision of the world beckoning at the end of their inherited and chosen trajectory: the unions, the socialist ideal, the campaign for Mississippi, the free-speech effort, the Peace Corps, the women’s movement, the generous dignity of the land, and ultimately VISTA’s battle for the home front.
Sometimes she wished so fervently that her time had come a little earlier, that she had been on those buses down South, turning her cheek to the white rage along their route, letting some small dark child braid her hair while she taught it the words to “This Little Light of Mine.” She wished she had been there to hear King, and in the Delta for that dangerous summer of ’64, and on the boardwalk in Atlantic City that fall for the convention, with the relics of the war—the charred hull of a car, the bell still warm from the ashes of a fire-bombed church—and in Berkeley only weeks later, and again in Washington for the Vietnam marches—all those last great moments of unity. But by the time she and Daniel had come along, there had been so much refraction that their lights were little indeed—so little she wondered why they bothered not hiding them under a bushel. By the time she and Daniel had come along, people were so busy splitting apart it was no wonder they hadn’t achieved their aims: black civil rights workers who suddenly couldn’t share their movement with whites, free-speech advocates incapable of listening to anyone else, anarchists too busy leading the way to let women have a turn, women who wouldn’t share the podium with lesbians. Communes and cults, drugs and suicide and business school-truly common ground seemed so truly rare that it was some kind of miracle when kindred souls managed to collide at all. Especially here, she thought with resignation. And yet here she was, the last freedom fighter, waving her flag of quilts and rugs as the Reaganite troops swarmed victoriously over the ruined battlefield. Sometimes she wished they’d just hurry up and shoot her already.
But that was later, Naomi thought, feeling her car tip down the steep drive to the A-frame, the rocks spatterin
g beneath her wheels. In the beginning, the house had been Daniel’s manifesto of the New Family, a theoretical entity that did not subdivide into individual rooms for individual people but lived together in the truest sense. Thus, their house had boasted one great amorphous room with “areas” rather than walls, mattresses on the floor, cinder-block bookshelves, Mexican rugs in odd places and at odd angles. The smells of the stove invaded the bed linen in a cozy, denlike manner, the bare bulb of Daniel’s late-night-reading corner bored into Naomi’s sleep like a miner’s light descending a cavern, and the woodstove in the center of it all gamely chugged away in a doomed effort to heat the whole thing. Eventually, the privy Daniel had originally built was replaced, but only by an Indian batik cloth strung up on clothesline around a compost toilet he had imported from Maine. The cloth was a pseudo-barrier that did nothing to muffle sounds or interfere with smells, but even this illusion of a barrier Naomi had had to fight for.
It stood to reason, then, that when Daniel left some nine months ago, Naomi had immediately embarked on a frenzy of Sheetrock, carving out areas not much larger than area rugs and moving from room to newly demarcated room in a swoon of defined habitation. The batik cloth and compost toilet were swiftly replaced with actual walls and plumbing. The new three-sided closet was dubbed an entryway or, less grandly, a mudroom. In the new dining room, the long table sat perennially laden with tasks abandoned and pending, and there was now an actual guest room, in case she ever had an actual guest. Then, once this was accomplished, she had declared the conceptual termination of her marriage by hiring Ashley Deacon to build out, indulgently tacking a den (with television! with stereo!) and a home office onto the original structure. Rooms upon rooms, Naomi thought. Rooms for sleeping and peeing and eating. A room for eating more formally than in the other room for eating, even a room expressly for looking at television, that most shameful of solitary acts. A room for Flourish, filled with electronic objects not even imagined when Daniel had first hauled her down into this damp and wooded hollow and waved the bill of sale in her face. Subdivided so ruthlessly, the house had imploded into virtual nonexistence: a maze through which to weave, the dark wood in the middle of her life.
She let herself in through the new annex now and climbed the half flight of blond steps to the main A-frame. In the kitchen, Naomi dug out a teabag of Constant Comment and lit the gas beneath her kettle. She eyed the oven clock, immobilized at 3:24 a.m. since some unnoted morning in some year of the previous decade. Then, somewhat inappropriately, she felt herself smile. Given the queer circularity of fate-all fate, perhaps, though clearly Naomi’s—this wasn’t even her first macabre brush with the river. The event which she and Daniel had taken to calling—with prescient self-importance—the “Sabbathday Affair,” or in more sardonic moments, their genuine Deliverance experience, had taken place the first autumn of their VISTA year. They were still living at Bailey’s Motel then, their damp wooded plot and the extension of their tenure not even vaguely formed intentions. Bailey’s, long since derelict, was mouse-ridden, and its crumbling cinder blocks gave shelter to a breathtaking array of insect life, but bad conditions were a badge of honor back then, mindful as one was of one’s fellow VISTA volunteers in Appalachia, in the Deep South, and on the blighted reservations. For this reason Naomi and Daniel seldom did their laundry, preferring to recycle worn clothes or, if absolutely necessary, to run especially offensive articles under the cold-water tap (they both ran cold, really) and lay them over the towel bar for a week’s dank drying. So perhaps it was with a sense of adventure in the making that they had gone into town one Saturday evening that fall, their army surplus duffels crammed to bursting. The Laundromat was empty and they filled every washer.
This left an hour to kill, and something of a dearth of possibilities with which to kill it. There was the tavern, of course—a dubious establishment called Woodstock’s—but Naomi wasn’t a drinker and even Daniel understood that, in the tavern at least, the town’s suspicion of them bubbled over into plain dislike. And there was the porch at Tom and Whit’s, which afforded a decent observational post for the teenagers cruising their parents’ cars along Elm, the main street through town. But hey—there was the river, tantalizingly close through the patch of woods behind the Laundromat, close enough to hear when you stepped outside and beyond the range of the chugging washers. And it was hot, too, one of those September weeks when Indian summer threatens to sink back to the steamy weather no one in New England ever quite admits to. And they were young, after all, and had taken the precaution of marrying before they came here to live, and they were outsiders without a decent reputation to sully, and in any case, it was hardly anyone else’s business, was it, and even if it were, it was hardly likely that anybody would see them, would even know that they had gone to swim on this nearly moonless night.
And so they gathered at the river and shed their clothes on a boulder, and the Sabbathday was frigid and pure with its meager sliver of lunar light, and they went in slowly at first—an ankle, a knee—and then yelping at the cold and hurling palmfuls of water at each other so that each would be as chilled and as sodden as the other. The current wasn’t strong in that part of the river, but it tugged at them, and after the first moment of resisting, it felt easier to let it push them downstream a bit, so they moved, crouched in the water, feeling with their feet and never quite losing their balance, and in the low light they rounded the river’s sharp corner to a stretch where they could not have looked back and seen their abandoned jeans and flannel shirts and sneakers laid across the boulder even if there had been light to see them by, and there-memory differed on this point: Daniel insisting; Naomi, who didn’t remember much later anyway, resolutely disbelieving, attributing the claim to Daniel’s need to dramatize, or to Daniel’s being a man and thus needing to add sex to any scenario which challenged his manhood—they either kissed or actually had sex, half-squatting in an eddy. And afterward they clasped hands and led each other upstream again to their point of entry. It had been, maybe, twenty minutes in all. Maybe even less.
They were nearly on top of their boulder before they saw him: thin, his dark face outlined by darkness, and as naked as they were. They crouched, gaping, as he pulled their clothes out of the water. In his voice, a trill of hysteria. “She threw your clothes in,” he said.
“Who’s she?” Naomi heard herself ask.
“What the fuck—” It was Daniel, more perplexed than outraged.
The man straightened. His penis, at Naomi’s eye level, flashed white. She looked away instinctively and saw the girl, slight in shorts and a T-shirt. Naomi didn’t see her face. She never saw her face.
“Don’t nobody move or I’ll shoot,” the girl squeaked, and Naomi almost smiled, since the line was so trite, since she herself might have thought of something so much better were she the one holding the gun, her arms straight, glaring at three naked people in a river.
For a long moment they all peered through dimness at each other. This is what a holdup must be like if you’re blind, she thought. She had lost the use of her body anyway and could not have moved even if so inclined. Suddenly she was furious at Daniel for bringing her here, though she could not have said whether “here” was the river or Goddard itself.
“Oh shit,” the man said, though on instant replay the “oh” sounded more like “ow.” Naomi heard the actual shot at the same moment, and then somebody else’s voice—Daniel’s, on further reflection—yelping the phrase “Oh please God Oh please God …” as he grabbed her hand and hauled her up on the bank. Behind them the man fell, cursing, but she herself was running, thinking only of broken bottles, of poison ivy, of roots twisting up out of the ground to trip her. There was another shot and then, curiously louder than that, an outraged voice: “You cunt.”
The Sabbathday River Page 3
