The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  Joan picked up the book and let the pages fly. Then she closed her eyes, opened randomly, put her finger on the print, and looked down.

  “Daniel,” she said. “A Hebrew name. The biblical prophet and writer of the Book of Daniel was a teenager when taken to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in 607 BC.”

  “We’re not Jewish,” Martin said.

  “We’re not anything, so does it really matter? What do you think of the name?”

  “Daniel Manning,” Martin said. “I like it, it’s strong, the two names work well together.”

  They looked at each other and Martin said, “So is that this little guy’s name? Daniel?”

  “Yes,” Joan said. “I think it is.”

  If Martin wanted to look up the name’s other meaning, the book was right there beside her. She did not know why, not exactly, not in thoughts she could have articulated, but it seemed right to her that Daniel meant “God is my judge.”

  5

  Joan saw their reflections in the glass doors, mother in the hospital-required wheelchair, blanket-wrapped baby in her arms, father standing behind, the bizarre manifestation of an instantaneous miracle, all at once a family. Then they were through the doors, and the baby was in the infant seat hooked into the back of Martin’s Toyota, and Joan felt the frigid clouds on her skin, and they were on their way home.

  Within hours, the snow began falling. They moved Daniel’s crib into their room, and during the nights, while Martin slept, Joan lifted the baby out and breast-fed him, marveling at his perfect weight in her arms, his sated burps smelling richly of her own milk. In the mornings, at the living-room windows, she gazed out at the frozen range of white with peaks, summits, and ridges, and each time Joan bent down to kiss Daniel’s soft forehead, he was already looking up at her, his eyes studying her face, never once looking away.

  It took no time for her to fall deeply in love with her unexpected child, with the rigors and rituals of unwanted motherhood, with having Martin home, so naturally fathering, doing all that he could, cleaning the kitchen, changing the diapers, singing to their infant son in his crib. They were dreamily nesting, just like the no-longer Pregnant Six had engaged in, and Joan found it utterly satisfying, thought then she might be capable of having more than one dream, might possibly thrive in the pursuit of both.

  She was not writing at all, did not expect to sit at her desk in these early days, but happiness, pleasure, elation, sweetness, treat, treasure, and gratefulness were added to her list of favorite words. Daniel was so good, easy to satisfy, to fill up, to put to sleep, and she knew it was only luck that had created this angelic child.

  And then Martin returned to the hospital and the lab, a husband around only at dawn and at night when the stars were their brightest, and caring for a baby with only two hands, no matter his goodness, was like boxing up the Sahara with a spoon. Showers, if at all, happened in the late afternoon; she subsisted on crackers and cheese, relied on Martin to market, the hamburger meat, the steaks, the fish he bought sliding into the freezer and never considered again. She kept up with the laundry, but otherwise the house was a mess, and still she resisted Martin’s suggestion of a nanny to help out.

  “I’m wary of having another body around the house all day long,” she said. Martin insisted, striking where she was weakest. “A nanny could let you get back to work.”

  * * *

  Eight weeks in, Joan stepped into her study for the first time since giving birth. Illuminated by the cold winter light, the room was a frozen preserve. The typewriter on her desk, lifeless and cold, the dictionaries she hadn’t reshelved still sat there, hulking books she barely remembered paging through with delight, finding words she once lovingly, ecstatically, used in her writing. When Martin returned home that night, she agreed.

  A week later, Joan opened the front door to a tall young woman wearing a high-collared, long-sleeved dress in bright tropical colors, magenta and teal and cobalt blue and orange. Flower earrings budded from her earlobes, and her hair, the color of wet sand, was pulled back tight in a ponytail. It was barely thirty degrees outside, high drifts of snow in front of all the houses, small paths from front doors to road, but the young woman wore no coat, no hat, no gloves, and did not seem at all cold.

  “I’m Fancy,” and she shook Joan’s hand with a hidden might. “Sorry,” she said when she saw Joan’s face. “I think I’ve gotten rather too vigorous. I joined the gym at the community center, been working out with weights every day since landing here in Rhome.”

  At the kitchen table, she tightened her tight ponytail, and said, “So I’m Canadian, grew up on Lake Ontario, the eldest of seven brothers and sisters. There comes a time when all chicks must leave the nest, and when my time came, I grabbed my best girlfriend, Trudy, her family lives down the block from mine back home, and we jumped on a bus and kept traveling until we stopped in Rhome. Strada di Felicità is just so pretty, and it seemed to me like this would be an interesting place to live, the way the town is a bunch of circles, getting larger and larger and larger, all the lovely stores, the lovely houses, so I turned to Trudy and said, ‘This is the place, you game?’ and she said she was, so we got off the bus and got down to business. We’ve got an apartment over Rudolph’s Delicatessen on Tennessee Place. Such good food there, I must say. And I loved learning that the Italian man who founded Rhome thought every town should have a Street of Happiness running through it. I figured I could be happy in a place with a Strada di Felicità. And it’s true, we are, the two of us, and we just love the busyness of the town, how there’s always people out and about.”

  Joan thought Fancy’s Canadian hometown must be minute indeed, because Rhome was charming, but sleepy, even with the hopefully named street.

  “When I saw your advertisement for a nanny at the community center, I thought, ‘Fancy, that’s the job for you.’ And now looking at you, such a pretty mother, I know I made the right decision to call. I’m nearly twenty, the oldest in my family by five years, so I’ve got tons of experience taking care of little ones. I practically raised my siblings myself. And this might be important to you, to gauge my seriousness, so I’ll tell you now that I have no interest myself in men or romance. I leave all that to Trudy. Do you mind if I make us some tea? That’s a nice kettle you’ve got on the stove. Just point me to the cabinet with the cups.”

  Joan did not laugh although she wanted to, listening to this Fancy, this odd young woman with her whirlwind of words, and instead said, “The cups are in that cabinet,” pointing to the cabinet next to the sink, “and there are all kinds of teas in the drawer next to the fridge. Choose whatever you’d like.”

  Fancy was up and out of the kitchen chair, smoothing down her tropical dress, opening the cabinet, taking down two cups and saucers. “Nice, bone china,” she said. “My family’s never had much, but we always drink our tea from bone china, keeps it hot and makes one feel regal.” Then she was opening the drawer and inspecting the boxes of teas. “Orange Pekoe okay with you?” and when the kettle whistled, Fancy brewed them tea strong as coffee, telling Joan, “This is what our queen, the queen of England, drinks, tea just this black.”

  Steam swirled up from their cups and Joan said, “Isn’t Canada an independent country now? I didn’t think the Queen still ruled there.”

  “Well, it’s a little hard to pin our independence down to just one date. Some say it happened in 1867, but the truth is, it wasn’t official until 1931, and it’s only eight years ago that it was finalized, with the Canada Act of 1982. But the queen is still the official head of state, and she is our monarch. All Canadian children learn to speak the queen’s English, and we are taught our table manners by imagining we are dining with her, that she is sitting just across the table from us. For instance, did you know that the proper way, the queen’s way, of consuming soup is by sending the spoon through the liquid, away from yourself?”

  “I don’t think I did,” said Joan, unable to picture the way her spoon moved through sou
p when she ate it.

  Joan sipped her tea and Fancy drank hers down in two large gulps. “Nice, isn’t it, when tea is sharp and powerful?” and Joan said that it was and then led Fancy out of the kitchen, down the short hallway, and into the baby’s room, where Daniel was asleep in his crib.

  Fancy took long strides across the room, leaned over the crib, her head falling forward, as if loose from her neck, and said, “He’s a beautiful cherub and sleeping so well. What time did he go down for his nap?”

  “Thirty minutes ago,” Joan said. “He should wake in an hour.”

  Fancy straightened, and Joan thought she must be close to six feet, a good six inches taller than Joan, just a couple of inches shorter than Martin. A basketball player in flowers.

  “I’m so glad you’ve got him on a schedule,” Fancy said. “Too many mothers today think naptime is catch as catch can, which is nonsense in my book. A child on a sleep schedule is a happy child indeed.”

  Fancy stepped back nearly to the doorway and Joan watched her take in all of the room, her eyes moving from painted blank walls to bookcase to closet to changing table and back to the walls. Joan was waiting for the day when Daniel crayoned pictures and she framed them and hung them up.

  “This is a lovely nursery,” Fancy said. “I’m so pleased you chose yellow for the walls. Did you know that the yellow wavelength is relatively long and its stimulus is emotional, so it’s the strongest color, psychologically? A yellow like this lifts spirits and self-esteem. It is the color of confidence and optimism. Living within it will help the cherub’s emotional strength, his friendliness, his creativity. If you had chosen a brighter yellow, it could have caused his self-esteem to plummet, given rise in him to fear and anxiety, irrationality, emotional fragility, depression, anxiety, and a propensity for suicide. Or maybe in you, considering how much time you probably spend in here with him.”

  “Yellow can do all of that?” Joan asked. She had not considered the psychological ramifications when she and Martin chose the paint at Olinsky’s Paint & Hardware in town, she had simply liked the shade.

  “Definitely. Just think of that phrase, ‘He’s got a yellow streak,’” Fancy said. Joan thought that had to do with cowardice, rather than suicide, but who knew, perhaps cowardice could lead to suicide.

  “Do you mind?” Fancy said, opening the closet door. Then she was murmuring to herself, “Nice sheets all lined up, nice clothes all hung up. Nice spare comforter for the crib. I’ll show you how fast I am,” and instantly Fancy was lifting the sleeping Daniel from the crib, cradling him in one long floral arm, stripping the mattress, remaking it, yanking the sheet tight as the navy vice admiral used to make Martin do, fluffing the small comforter, and in two minutes flat, Daniel, still asleep, was laid back down.

  She was, Joan thought, a wacky kind of Mary Poppins. She hated that movie as a child, all that officiousness, as if children could not know their own minds, when Joan herself certainly did, but watching Fancy, Joan’s perspective altered.

  Fancy ran her fingers over the colorful mobiles hanging above the crib, checking for dust, Joan thought.

  “I hope you won’t be offended, but you could use my help. I can nanny and clean, and neither will take away from the other. And I was thinking, if you hired me, I could cook sometimes, if you’d let me. You have a very nice kitchen, and Trudy and I, our kitchen is just a pass-through sort of thing, not enough counter space to make anything real, and I miss cooking, which is a conundrum, I will say, since I swore I would never cook anything ever again once I hightailed it from home. All those mouths to feed morning, noon, and night.”

  She was a Mary Poppins, an original kind of fairy godmother in action, now at the bookcase, checking out the novels on the shelves that Joan read to Daniel while she nursed, as he nodded off for a nap. She was reading him the second of Trollope’s Palliser novels, Phineas Finn. Since he had manifested as a real baby, sometimes Joan bent to convention and read him silly children’s books, about dogs and spots and hills and pails, which were stacked in the case as well.

  “That’s quite a variety of books you’ve got there,” Fancy said, then continued on without taking a breath. “This is what I would suggest. I’ll be here by seven every morning. And if you trust me, you can give me a key. And if you want, or need me, I’m happy to sleep in here, with the little darling, stay over, take the night feedings to give you some solid sleep. I’ll just need a camp bed I can fold up and put away, or a mattress I can blow up, and a light blanket, nothing more. Otherwise, I’ll be out of your hair when the little one is down for the night.”

  Fancy was offering to nanny and cook and clean and was willing to take the hateful night feedings, and Joan hired her on the spot.

  “How wonderful. I can start tomorrow, if that’s good for you. And apologies, I forgot to ask you, what do you call the cherub?”

  “Daniel,” Joan said. “Yes, please start tomorrow. Is there a list of things you’ll need?”

  “I’ll get the lay of the land in the morning, and if it’s easier for you, we’ll make the list together, and I’ll shop for whatever we need. I don’t have a car, but I’m licensed to drive, so if you’ve got a car, I can use that.”

  “I do. It’s in the garage. Should we talk about what you’ll be paid?” Joan asked.

  “Whatever you think is right,” Fancy replied, and just like that Joan had an extra set of fast-moving hands helping her again.

  * * *

  Fancy was a miracle of competencies, a helpmate in motion, the way she danced around the kitchen, bathing slippery Daniel in the sink, bundling him up in a snowsuit, covering him with blankets, pushing him in the carriage over the Mannings’ land, up and down the snowy hillocks all the way to the property lines.

  “Come spring, I’ll help you plant grass, if you want, and flowers, too, you’ve got so much space out there, you can’t even see your neighbors. Once the snow melts, it would be a shame to leave it unloved.” Fancy made the offer each time she came in with the baby hocked over her shoulder, Daniel blowing spit bubbles, his eyes dancing around.

  Fancy sang to Daniel when she put him down for his naps, baked cakes and chickens while Joan napped too, or closed herself up in her study and sat at her desk, her hands folded in her lap, the Olivetti’s plug pulled from the socket, coiled on the white painted floor.

  Martin liked Fancy too, calling out, “Hello, all my good people,” on the rare evenings he was home early. “It’s so great walking into the house,” he told Joan, and it was true, Fancy kept everything under control. The kitchen was always fragrant, something delicious cooking in the oven, a cake frosted on the kitchen counter, and the baby on the table, cooing in his portable bassinet.

  On those early evenings of Martin’s, he stayed in the kitchen, making himself a drink, talking to Fancy, playing with Daniel. When Joan grew tired of trying to remember how writing was once as natural to her as breathing, the typewriter still unplugged, no paper rolled in, she listened to the laughter, to the baby’s happy gurgles, to Fancy’s funny voice going on, and Martin jumping in, talking about this and that and nothing at all, until she gave into the delight, rose from her chair, and joined them all in the kitchen.

  6

  It was Fancy’s fourth month with them when Joan plugged in her typewriter, rolled a piece of paper onto the platen, put her hands on the keys, and wrote a first sentence, then a second, then the typewriter keys were quietly rat-a-tat-tatting, sounding to her like a symphony, her heart beating to the rhythm, her breath falling in line with the tune.

  Each word she put down shined, imbued with love for her son and for her husband, and with appreciation for this nanny they hired who already felt like a member of the family Joan never wanted. But the words belonged to her alone, and for the first time since becoming a mother, Joan found herself on the firm ground she inherently recognized. She was, she realized, out of the abyss.

  During every one of Daniel’s naps, she secreted herself in her study, calming Fancy
when she worried that Joan was wearing herself out, was planning on weaning the baby too quickly.

  At first, she was writing about a quirky young woman like Fancy, but within days Fancy disappeared, and Joan was writing about babies. Unusual babies, rare and wondrous, odd and strange, philosophical babies who could opine about almost anything. Her creations had turquoise hair, or ears meant for elephants, or toes and fingers fused together that did not alarm but instead allowed for happy paddling in baths and ponds, or hearts that beat outside of their chests marking their levels of happiness, or an ability to speak multiple languages immediately after letting out their first cry. Their traits, their characteristics, were elegant and weird, and varied from story to story.

  The babies in “The First Play Date” compared their experiences while they had been inside, discussing whether the wombs they had chosen to inhabit had been cramped or roomy, whether the water had been too cold or just right, about the one-eyed sharks some saw coming at them nightly, while others said they never saw such a thing, just used the time to practice their acrobatics.

  In “Our Needs, Our Dreams,” babies in a hospital nursery fervently discussed the difficulties they were having managing their miasmic ids, their enormous desires to come first, to always be heard, to be fed at the first pang of hunger, wishing someone, their parents or the nurses, understood their incomprehensible babble, for they had so many nightly dreams that needed immediate telling.

  In “Twins,” a solitary baby in his crib stared up at the fluffy white clouds he could see from his window and soliloquized about how it felt watching his twin die in their mother’s womb, when just moments before they had been playing a chatty patty-cake together, how awful it had been barreling down through the tunnel alone, leaving her behind, a pale specter beginning to disintegrate.