“Thank you,” Martin said. “I know what this means.”
She was still down in the abyss, unable to see the treacherous path she would need to climb, to find traction again beneath her feet, and so Joan said nothing, remained silent, practiced what she thought Joan would do—stay quiet, keep her own counsel, figure things out.
Every so often, Martin thanked her again, and again, and again, always in a whisper of words, until the light bled out of the sky, the blue turning a sad, desolate gray. At the back door, before Joan followed Martin inside, she looked up once more, tried thinking of the sky as something more, as the heavens, the place where wishes were sent, where they were granted, but it looked only like an old rag wrung completely dry.
2
Even to herself, Joan Ashby could not deny the truth: she was a pregnant goddess. Hormonal forces had turned her naturally good health into something patent and extraordinary. Her skin glistened, the whites of her eyes radiated, and her long hair, always a waterfall of black curls, was growing at a breathtaking rate, had already reached the small of her back, a perpetual tickle against her naked skin when she slept. Her eyelashes had become palm fronds over her bright-blue eyes, which had also altered, the color exotically deepening, eyes that startled her when she looked up while brushing her teeth. She had always been objective about her beauty, but even she was surprised when she glimpsed herself in a mirror; she was a goddess, and in the bath, a new nightly routine, she felt like a mermaid.
She often silently thanked the baby for being more thoughtful than she had expected it to be. She had feared it would punish her, for not wanting it, but she suffered no morning sickness or exhaustion, and as it grew, it kept itself nicely contained, swelling her gracefully, not wrenching Joan’s natural physical delicacy into something cumbersome and ungainly.
The friendly people of Rhome frequently stopped her on the street, telling her she was a gorgeous mother-to-be, sometimes asking, sometimes not, before reaching out and rubbing her belly, every one of them saying, “For good luck,” though whether she was to bring them good luck, or they her, she didn’t know. At night, after her bath, when Martin wanted to do the same thing, she often said, “Please don’t. I’ve been rubbed so many times today, I feel like a Buddha.”
She was not the only pregnant woman in tiny Rhome. There were six others, but she was the town’s first star. The celebrated writer from New York, with the dashing husband who was a neuro-ocular surgeon, who’d purchased a house out in the new development that was not formally named but some had taken to calling Peachtree, which made no sense to Joan. There were no peach trees in their neighborhood, no trees at all, not yet, no grass or gardens, just neighbors set far apart who waved to one another as they backed out of freshly graded driveways.
Small-town life had its benefits; she was not pursued like a fox by hounds, as she had been back in New York, her banal errands there somehow worthy of recording, a constant irritation because everyone shopped at the market, read the paper at the Laundromat, bought fresh fruit from the greengrocer. In Rhome, however, she wasn’t completely anonymous. The Tell-Tale and the Inveterate Reader, the town’s two bookstores, one on either end of the pretty main street, imaginatively named Strada di Felicità, had been artistically displaying her books in their windows for months, and the books had been flying off the shelves, so people recognized her from her photographs on the back flaps, from newspaper articles about her in the New York Times and Washington Post that featured a picture, but they approached her diffidently, politely, with charitable words, asking that she inscribe the title pages of her books, wanting to know, after rubbing her belly, when the baby was due, if she had any favorite names in mind, if she and the doctor were having an easy time settling in. Joan smiled graciously at the gentle intrusions, introduced herself properly, learned names and professions, engaged in a different version of life’s chitchat than perhaps the locals were used to; she tended to dig quickly past the superficial, asking pointed, gritty questions. But she could see they liked her, and she felt welcomed, even if it was the baby that served as the icebreaker, the pregnancy making her seem less formidable, easier to approach.
Only once did a man tail her, when she was five months pregnant and taking a break late in the day from the novel, the new paragraphs still in her mind:
The magazine was glossy and expensively produced, printed in Englewood, New Jersey, and each month, there were twenty pages of classifieds under a single heading: Kind Killers Wanted. Each ad a heartfelt request seeking the services of executioners. The one that caught Silas and Abe’s attention read:
WANTED—CARING FATHER KILLER: My father once was a delightful man, a high school principal, who was fair and firm. He would be appalled if he knew how he groaned every hour of every day, if he knew the thick auburn hair that was his secret pride had thinned down to strands, exposing a skull tender as an egg. I can tell that he knows he has veered far from his course, that he has lost the thread of his life. He used to sling words with aplomb, but his eyes now reflect an awareness that he is regressing to an infantile state. He should not suffer this way. Please respond if interested. Will pay going rate.
The man tailing Joan froze in his spot on the sidewalk when Joan wandered into a store, then followed in her wake when she resumed her stroll. She turned to look back at him and white stars exploded in the air, the flash of the man’s camera, a photographer stalking her, and Odile, who owned the Tell-Tale, flew out the front door of her shop and gave him hell. When the man yielded instantly, throwing his hands protectively around his camera and running fast down the street, Joan knew he wasn’t a regular among the mob that used to trail her in New York—none of them would have given up so easily. But Odile didn’t stop yelling until he disappeared around the corner.
There were requests that she give readings at the bookstores, at the library, that she jump into the town-run book group held monthly at the Rhome Community Center and lead all of Rhome’s serious readers. She made a list of recommended books for the group’s leader, an elderly chatterbox named Renee, who said, “I’d be happy to step aside, absolutely happy, happy to do that, thrilled to be one of your followers. I’ll make sure we have fresh-baked cookies and real lemonade at the center for book group. What’s your favorite? Oatmeal? Chocolate chip? Butter? Just tell me, and I’ll make sure all is in order. We’ll get you a comfortable chair too, not one of the metal ones the rest of us use.”
But Joan declined everything that would have swallowed her time, kept her from working on The Sympathetic Executioners, the status of which her agent, Volkmann, was checking on regularly: “You’ve disappeared from the civilized world, so we have to make sure your voice rings out from that hinterland you’ve gone to, and is especially loud and clear. So write fast, Joan, write very, very fast.”
Martin, too, frequently asked how the book was coming along, usually when she was in her nightly bath, when she needed absolute quiet to let her brain think on its own, to let the baby roll around without being slapped down. Each time, when he said, “Can I read something?” his smile and eagerness left their imprints behind, papering over her peace. Other Small Spaces was already hugely out in the world and she had been finishing the last of the connected stories that became Fictional Family Life when their courtship began. During their weekend visits with each other, she had seriously assessed the impact of burgeoning love on her work, whether love altered the time she spent at her desk in her East Village apartment, or at the Friedheim Music Library at Johns Hopkins when she was with Martin in Baltimore. But her output had not slacked off. She had written most of The Sympathetic Executioners with him in her life, experiencing his magnanimous nature, his respect for her creative intensity, when she returned to him spacy and otherworldly at night. Not once had he ever presumed to ask to read her pages, and if he had, she would have debated whether the relationship could survive. Now, when she was pregnant with his child, he was turning into a man claiming such a right. She knew he did not mean
it that way, but more than once, after such a request, she had the desire to take her belly and what it contained, and walk out the door. “Maybe soon,” she would say, not meaning it at all.
Several times a week, Joan was at the community center, in her maternity bathing suit, swimming slow laps. The other pregnant Rhome women swam too, breast-stroking up and down the lanes, keeping their heads dry, talking about their sex lives now that they were ballooning, about their food cravings. The only thing Joan craved was the buoyancy of water. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, at noon, she pinned up her abundantly long hair, pulled down the swim cap, and swam the crawl with her head underwater.
Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa were the “Pregnant Six,” as they had taken to calling themselves, childhood friends who had gone away separately to university or college, then traveled, before returning home for good. In the locker room afterward, when they talked, Joan was surprised that seeing the world had not altered their desires, their plans, did not convince them to settle down somewhere more interesting—any large city really—to participate in the bigger life she so recently left.
The women huddled around her, wanting to know whether New York was as dangerous as they heard on the news. When they told her of the countries they visited after receiving their degrees, they called that time “our youth,” and it was the usual trio: France, England, Italy.
Where had Joan been, they wanted to know. She did not mention all the countries she visited while touring for Fictional Family Life, and said instead, “So no one’s been to India? That’s the country I want to see. Ever since I was a kid.” She and Martin had not taken a honeymoon, would not do so now that she was pregnant, but it was to India that Joan wanted them to go. It didn’t matter much that Martin waffled about it, said he had no interest, did not want to be immersed in the dirt and the poverty, who knew when they would take a trip anywhere with life already altered.
The Pregnant Six felt as Martin did about India, and Joan did not explain her fascination with the country. She wasn’t sure if they were readers or not—none of them spoke to her in the star terms the other Rhome locals did, did not mention that they knew she was a writer—and so she did not say India beckoned loudly because of the books she had read in her childhood, by E. M. Forster, R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and others, all describing ways of being, of seeing, landscapes alien and wild, completely different from what she had seen from the windows of her parents’ house—other similar houses with backyards and front yards, identical trees and flowers planted in the same neat arrangements. Even in spring and fall, when the flowers were blooming, the world around her had been soaked in sepia, but in the Indian stories she read, flora and fauna teemed and seethed, and hard lives were fully, vibrantly lived out in the streets; everyone had a story to tell, their own or somebody else’s. Those small and poor Indian towns in the books had been immensely more interesting to Joan than where she was growing up. The books had been a touchstone, as both reader and writer.
The questions Joan asked of the Pregnant Six in their post-swim conversations, when everyone’s skin reeked with heavy-duty chlorine, allowed her to glimpse beneath their placid surfaces, their constant giggles, the way they brushed stray hairs off one another’s faces, complimented a pedicure color. They were not unsubstantial women. Carla owned Craftables on Laurel Place, just off Strada di Felicità. Joan had wandered in and immediately out, the place a warren of cubbyholes filled with colorful skeins of knitting yarn and embroidery thread. Needlepoint samplers hung from fishing lines. There were trays of beads and amulets, and silk cords on which those beads and amulets were to be strung, in every shade of the rainbow, each color bunched together, thick as horses’ tails, hanging on hooks. Carla also ran a knitting group at the store, and an embroidery group, and three times a year she brought in artists who created original drawings on needlepoint canvases for her customers. “It’s commissioned self-art, really, if that’s a real thing. Because the customer only has a picture on mesh until she needlepoints it herself.” Joan had seen the prices on those original samples; Carla charged upward of five hundred dollars. An excellent business apparently for Rhome, shilling out the goods for pursuits unfathomable to Joan, but she had dashed down a few notes later, about a town buried beneath an avalanche of yarn, the people unaware of the disaster because they never walked out their front doors, too busy knitting and needling their lives away.
Dawn owned Boulangerie de Rhome, next to the Inveterate Reader. After college, she had taken a thirty-two-week intensive pastry-arts program in France, and opened the store immediately upon her return, with funding from her father. “I paid him back years ago with interest,” she told Joan, holding her hand up for slaps from all the others. She was up at four each morning, working in the kitchen behind the shop, turning out all kinds of French breads—Pain a l’Ail, Pain au Froment, Pain aux Noix, Pain au Beurre, Pain Beignet—as well as the recognizable baguettes, and Joan’s favorite that she bought each week, Pain Bâtard, bread that came out of the oven lopsided, in odd shapes, were mistakes. There were cast-iron French bistro tables in the shop and cooling cases filled with neat rows of delectable petit fours, tarts and tortes and éclairs, custards and curds and ganaches. Martin had already deemed Boulangerie de Rhome off-limits for himself. He had not, he said, known he had such a sweet tooth.
Meg and Teresa’s vocations were more ordinary; both were teachers, Meg of sixth graders at Rhome Elementary, Teresa of physics at Rhome High.
Augusta and Emily were lawyers in practice together. “We focus,” Emily said, “on family and matrimonial law, including adoptions and divorces, as well as real estate, trusts, wills, and the execution of estates.” It sounded to Joan as if they were the town’s grim reapers, covering everything from cradle to grave. She wondered how a town Rhome’s size generated sufficient legal matters to keep them both employed; its population was somewhere around seven thousand. Did that many houses change hands? she wondered. Were there so many people needing to bequeath vast estates? And although the six were proof that the town had no issue with fertility, she wondered about the number of adoptions they facilitated. She had not seen, as she did in New York, the Russian and Chinese children pushed around in strollers by parents who clearly did not share ethnicity with their bundles of joy. But apparently the town brought most of its legal work to Augusta and Emily, because sometimes one or the other was too busy to make it to the pool at noon.
If Joan had not inquired, she would have learned only that the Pregnant Six had all married boys they knew, but had not dated, back in junior high—two Bills, one Jim, one Dave, one Kevin, and one Steve—and were proud of their expanding bellies, their bounteous breasts, Augusta especially, who said, “This is the first time in my life I’ve worn a bra.” When they spoke about their stores, their teaching responsibilities, their practices, their accomplishments, they were individual, stand-alone women. But when they massed together, as they always did in the locker room, they colonized, insect-like, the group emitting a high drone. Perhaps it was the similarity of their haircuts, blunt and bobbed, in various versions of butterscotch, that gave them the appearance of a hive. When Joan joined them there, the last usually to leave the pool, they were buzzing about, like a collective on a mission to haul back crumbs to those left behind. And yet, when her entry split them apart, they resumed talking in normal voices, laughing about how many times a night they rose to pee, bemoaning, with pride, the loss of their figures, the weight they had gained, quick to share tips and advice, including Joan in those sessions.
“Joan’s the lucky one,” they said. “At your age, you won’t lose your figure at all, and whatever changes will spring back fast. We’ll have to work harder.” Before this accident of life, Joan never imagined worrying about her figure having to spring back. And she wondered why the Pregnant Six seemed intent on stressing their ages. Perhaps by small-town standards they were old for first-time motherhood, all of them thirty, treating her as if she were
a member of a different generation, though she was not that much younger than any of them. If the baby came late, she would be twenty-six when she gave birth.
The Pregnant Six liked talking about how their priorities would change. It was husband, then work, then themselves, but soon it would be baby, then husband, then work. They set themselves up as the wise ones, with inside knowledge, though all of them were novices at pregnancy, at eventually being mothers. During those locker-room cabals, Joan silently bucked at their certainty about how they would conduct their new lives, pronouncements solid as stone. Joan thought there was something between her own mother’s disinterest and this hovering the Pregnant Six were already embracing. It should not be impossible, she thought, to keep her different aims and goals separated, to move back and forth between simultaneous worlds, to live her various lives as they unfolded in parallel universes.
* * *
With so many expecting in Rhome, the community center decided a prenatal yoga class was a good idea, to be held twice a week at one in the afternoon, a lunchtime retreat for the women in the midst of their busy days. Teresa had been consulted about the chosen hour; she sat on the community center board and thought yoga after swimming would make a nice combination. Joan did not hear about the new yoga class until they were all in the locker room after swimming one day, and the Pregnant Six stripped off their wet suits and pulled on loose track pants or shorts, bra tops and T-shirts, then clamored around Joan, who was still in her own dripping suit, and said she had to attend, smiling and encouraging, reaching out to touch a sodden curl, telling her they would have fun.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 5
