The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  A noise woke her. She leaned over to Martin’s empty side of the bed, her eyes were barely open, she was the tiniest bit bleary from the wine. She tried reading the hands on his dead father’s clock. It was four, or maybe five, in the morning, the hour and minute hands were too similar to discern which. The creak of wood under bare feet, nearing their bedroom, then Martin was slipping into the bed behind her, naked, running his hands under her T-shirt, cool against her warm skin, pulling down her pajama pants. He was deep inside of her when he whispered, “Do you ever think of having another child?” She did not turn her head when she said, “I never thought of having the ones we did.”

  12

  Martin was gone before she woke on Monday morning, a note left for her on his pillow. I loved you this morning, in his doctor’s scrawl. He used to leave notes for her all of the time, now less often, but as typically cryptic as this one. Did he mean that this morning when he came in, he felt love for her, as perhaps he had not felt earlier in the day, or that he loved her this morning as he always did, or that, this morning, they had made love. She blew out her breath and stuck the note in a box she had kept for years, a big blue box with a black ribbon in which something she could not recall had been given. It was filled with all of Martin’s notes and letters since his first letter to her after that holiday weekend when they met in Annapolis. Only some of them were love letters.

  The children were still asleep, Fancy’s summer hours started at ten. Joan made a fresh pot of coffee, called the Rhome Community Center, and was informed that a children’s introductory swim class was starting on Wednesday, an August special, a one-hour class held five days a week until Labor Day.

  “Yes,” the woman said, “your older child can swim then too, we only cordon off a section of the pool for the class, the rest is open to everyone. And we’ve got floats, inner tubes, noodles, and after the class, the teacher sets up fun relay races for everyone who wants to join.”

  It was nearly an Olympic-sized pool, the retractable roof open during the hot summer months, lounge chairs for the towel-wrapped kids to rest on, a snack shop that sold milkshakes, sodas, juices, and sandwiches, and Joan thought she might count on three hours alone in the house, every single weekday. She would set the hours for Fancy, tell her to take the kids to the pool from noon until three. One hundred and eighty jeweled minutes each day that she would not waste.

  She signed Eric up for the class, and when Fancy arrived, Joan drove to the new Target outside of Rhome, bought everyone new bathing suits and huge beach towels, caps and goggles for the boys, fins and a snorkel for Daniel. She wanted to make it special for him, so that he did not feel banished, did not imagine himself unfairly lumped in with younger children. He was sensitive these days, and until he saw all the kids at the pool, he would not take anyone’s word for it. There would be lots, of course; the pool was a huge draw in the summer for families all over Rhome.

  “Who wants to go to the pool at the community center every single day for the rest of the month?” Joan said when Fancy and the boys were just back from the park, flushed and sweaty from running around in the heat. There were cheers and she added to the excitement by tossing two of the new towels onto the kitchen table, saying, “Choose your favorite,” then, before the boys could tussle, handing around the presents she had hastily wrapped, no neat corners, no hidden tape, bows that drooped just a little.

  Eric immediately pulled the red swim cap onto his head, the goggles over his eyes. Daniel stuck the snorkel in his mouth and ran his hands down the kitchen walls, saying, “Look at this neat coral, and those fishes, do you see those fishes, Eric, glowing like they’ve got lightbulbs inside?” Eric lifted up his goggles and said, “I don’t see anything at all. It’s got to be real, Daniel, to be seen.”

  She handed Fancy her gift, a swimsuit in the florals she was still wearing, the modest cut something she might find comfortable, suitable. There had always been something Mennonite in how Fancy dressed, covered from shoulders to calves. Joan used to wonder what Fancy was hiding beneath all that fabric, but she was always sunny and cheery, open about everything—her plans when she was not at the Mannings, the young men Trudy fell in and out of love with—she could not be hiding scars on her body, self-inflicted or otherwise, and if she was, then she was the most talented of liars.

  Fancy lifted away the silver tissue paper Joan had found in a drawer. “Thank you so much, I just love it,” and Joan was glad she had selected well, Fancy’s smile could not be faked.

  “You don’t want to take Eric for his lessons yourself?” Fancy asked. “You had such a hoot doing it with Daniel.”

  “I thought you might like to do it this time. It really is a lot of fun.”

  She hoped Fancy understood what Joan was after. But so much time had passed since Joan read the Rare Baby stories aloud to Daniel and Fancy, since Fancy had tried to ask when Joan would return to her writing, that it was just as likely Fancy connected up nothing at all. But she could not tell Fancy directly, to do so seemed a betrayal of Martin, even of the kids. She was entitled to keep them in the dark, it was her work after all, to be done in the secret part of her life, but it seemed wrong that someone else should know what she was planning, when they would not.

  Fancy reported that Eric loved the pool, was not scared underwater, held his breath until she feared he was drowning, and liked smacking into the other kids in the class, and Daniel swam real laps, back and forth so many times she lost count, and after the swim class, the teacher taught him to do those kick turns, but he would not participate in the relay races, though Fancy said he seemed like a very fast swimmer to her. He insisted that after Eric’s lesson they come home. “I am engaged in serious endeavors and have little time to waste,” is what he had said to Fancy. He had written by then perhaps thirty of his squirrel stories.

  So it was not perfect. Barely two hours, not three, those days in the house by herself, at the kitchen table, the typewriter blazing away, but it sufficed. At least, she was moving again, headed in the direction of her original life.

  * * *

  It was the year President Clinton was tried by the Senate on impeachment charges and was acquitted. The United States Coast Guard intercepted a ship with over 9,500 pounds of cocaine aboard, headed for Houston, Texas, one of the largest drug busts in American history. A West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was shot dead by plainclothes cops in New York, inflaming race relations in the city. White supremacist John William King was found guilty of kidnapping and killing African American James Byrd Jr., by dragging him behind a truck for two miles. In a military court, a US Marine Corps captain, with the same last name as Joan, Richard J. Ashby, was acquitted of the charge of reckless flying that resulted in the death of twenty skiers in the Italian Alps, when his low-flying jet hit a gondola cable. The Supreme Court upheld the murder convictions of Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing. LEGOLAND California, the only LEGOLAND outside of Europe, opened in Carlsbad. Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar for Best Picture. A Michigan jury found Dr. Jack Kevorkian guilty of second-degree murder for administering a lethal injection to a terminally ill man. For the first time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above the 10,000 mark. In Laramie, Wyoming, Russell Henderson pleaded guilty to kidnapping and felony murder, to avoid a possible death penalty conviction for the hate-crime killing of Matthew Shepard. The World Trade Organization ruled in favor of the United States in its long-running trade dispute with the European Union over bananas. The personal fortune of Bill Gates was estimated at exceeding $100 billion. President Clinton was cited for contempt of court for giving “intentionally false statements” in a sexual harassment civil lawsuit. Two Littleton, Colorado, teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, opened fire on their teachers and classmates, killing twelve students and one teacher and then themselves. The shooting sparked a media debate on school bullying, gun control, and violence. Norman J. Sirnic and Karen Sirnic were murdered by serial killer Angel Maturino Resendiz in Weimar, Texas.
The House of Representatives released the Cox Report which detailed the People’s Republic of China’s nuclear espionage against the United States over the prior two decades. The Colombian government announced it would include the estimated value of the country’s illegal drug crops, exceeding half a billion dollars, in its gross national product. Texas governor George W. Bush announced he would seek the Republican Party nomination for president of the United States. Benjamin Nathaniel Smith began a three-day killing spree targeting racial and ethnic minorities in Illinois and Indiana. US Army Pfc. Barry Winchell was bludgeoned in his sleep at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, by fellow soldiers, he died the next day of his injuries. Off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, a plane piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed, killing him, his wife, and her sister. The Woodstock ’99 festival was held in New York. Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France. The last Checker Taxi Cab was retired in New York City and sold at auction for $135,000. NASA intentionally crashed the Lunar Prospector spacecraft into the moon, ending its mission to detect frozen water on the lunar surface. EgyptAir Flight 990, traveling from New York City to Cairo, crashed off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, killing all 217 aboard. The NTSB later reported that the co-pilot, Gameel Al-Batouti, deliberately crashed the plane, a claim disputed by Egyptian authorities. The Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit against Napster, alleging copyright infringement. At the end of the year, the United States turned over complete administration of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government, as stipulated in the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977.

  * * *

  Turbulence, dissension, horrific killings and murders, hate and racism and cruelty, the very rich and the very poor, the political with its unlimited ramifications for the personal lives of so many, a world long awry and inching ever closer to an undefined point of no return. Joan kept up with it all, but found herself on the other side.

  She was no longer writing about tragedies that blew apart people’s lives, but about something else entirely: how dreams could keep hope alive and fresh. Dreams dreamt by her array of imaginary characters who were instantly more real and alive to her than anyone else she knew in Rhome.

  Strangers all, they would ford oceans, fly through the skies, pack up old cars and painted RVs, all drawn to a new community in a sparsely populated town in a small unnamed American state. Painters, sculptors, ceramicists, writers, poets, musicians, songwriters, filmmakers, photographers, collagists, doll makers, vintners, and the predictable pot growers who followed the artists—successful artists from the old enclaves of Cologne, Berlin, Paris, London, and Santa Fe, tired of the existing tenets that codified what art could be, and those who had never been artists but had always desired to execute their mindful dreams—would all travel until they reached a narrow, single-lane freshly paved blacktop that sailed up and around purpled hills, and then dropped into a pastoral valley spread out below. They would find themselves in verdant meadows, with dandelion fields, through which brooks with cold, clear water ran, surrounded by bouldering mountains. Near the atmospheric energy vortices, the artists would build a contemporary version of the Old West, reimagined as an artists’ mecca. Buildings would rise, one-room cabins with uneven porches, tree houses with running water, modernized tepees raised above the flood line, rooming houses built with soda cans, using for insulation old rubber gathered from the side of a main highway thirty miles away, blown off the sixteen-wheelers that flew through. Meetings would be held to resolve issues rapidly so that their mecca would run well. Her key characters—Bash, Lila, Minu, Zena, Bernard, and Anton—would create their art and couple in ways that expanded the meaning of honing the work.

  By the end of the year, Joan had written fifty tight pages, and she had reams of notes and research. When she wasn’t working, everything was hidden in that box in the front hall closet under the old jackets she had held on to. Her secret was still her secret. She was writing up in her castle, in the tower she had constructed for herself, away from prying eyes and Martin’s need to expose the complicated mechanics of her mind. She was happy, in that unique, specific way that only came to her when she was at work. Her brain was never at rest. The lives of her characters, their motivations, the art they created, the fights they had, the words they spoke, ran through her daily domesticated routine, her dreams when she slept, in the yoga class she still went to twice a week, when the grueling hour was complete and she was in Shavasna. She bought another notebook, kept it in her pocket, along with a pen, jotted down abbreviated notes only she could interpret when she made breakfast, bagged Daniel’s school lunch, drove the boys to school, went to the market, made dinner when Fancy was not around. She was thinking of calling it Words of New Beginnings.

  13

  “Zǎoshang hǎo. Wǒ de hǎo er zi.” It was Martin, calling the boys on their first day of school. It was just eight on the warm fourth day of September, but Daniel had been dressed since six, in a new pair of jeans and a striped dress shirt, a junior version of what his father wore most days, wanting to look like the seventh grader he was about to become in an hour, and Eric, heading into second grade, which he said he already hated, was in his favorite blue shorts, favorite yellow shirt, his banged-up tennis shoes without any socks, which he hated as well.

  She heard Martin’s Chinese greeting on the speakerphone, which she clicked off when both boys had phones to their ears, wanting to hear his every word.

  Over the past few years, Martin had become their famous father. Articles about him and his innovative surgeries first appeared in medical journals, and then in major newspapers, and the boys collected copies of every one. Martin did not seem bowled over by the attention—he told the boys he was a doctor, not a celebrity, and the exposure was good only if it served the higher purpose of increasing funding for his research. Joan mostly believed him. She knew firsthand how fame held momentary appeal, the warmth of its bright and special spotlight, how that spotlight could overheat, melt a person down if they weren’t solid, mature, and grounded. But Martin possessed that triad of traits, neither preened about nor discounted his good fortune. In the spring, a reporter from Time magazine had spent several days in Rhome interviewing Martin, shadowing him on hospital rounds, observing a few of his surgeries, talking to the doctors and nurses he worked with, to patients who had given permission, to the boys, asking if they had any interest in following their father into medicine, to Joan, about what life was like with a surgeon whose skills were demanded around the world. She couldn’t help wondering how that article would read when it was published, whether she would be allowed her own name finally, or, as in all the previous articles, identified only as the wife. She tried not to let it, but it pricked a bit, the way she had been rendered anonymous.

  From the hall, Joan could see Daniel at the kitchen table and Eric kneeling on the living-room couch, heard their responses to their father’s long-distance questions. Martin was good at calling them frequently when he was away, opening the conversation with greetings in the language of the country he was in.

  “Yes, I have my new backpack already, and my lunch, and my newest Henry story because my homeroom teacher, Miss Nilson, called saying everyone had to bring in something to share about ourselves,” Daniel said.

  “And I made my own peanut butter and peach jam sandwich,” Eric said loudly. “And Mom said it was okay if I took two bags of Fritos, if I took an orange too, and ate it. And I will.”

  Martin was in Beijing, for the third time. On his first trip there, he performed intracapsular cataract surgeries on the eyes of seven old Chinese men. On his second, a dozen orbital surgeries on the eyes of six middle-aged Chinese women suffering from anopthalmia, enucleation, and evisceration. This time he was there to operate on the eyes of several young Chinese boys suffering from dacryostenosis; overflowing and unstoppable tears caused by infections; abnormal growths; injuries of the facial bones or surrounding tissues; and underdeveloped puncta. He planned to probe and irrigate, passing a small metal instrument thr
ough the nasolacrimal ducts, but had brought stents he would insert to open up those ducts if the simpler operation failed. He had flown out on the eve of Labor Day weekend and wouldn’t be back until Friday.

  “Are your patients nice?” Daniel asked, and a moment later Eric yelled out, “Mom, they’re the same ages as us.” The Beijing-Rhome conversation continued while Joan ran the cereal bowls and spoons under the faucet, put away the milk.

  The morning also marked the start of her third year owning the length of each school day, and she felt like a horse on a lead, pawing the ground, eager to be let loose, to run straight back into her artists’ mecca, to return to the arcadian place she was creating in that small town in an unnamed American state, to rejoin Bash, Lila, Minu, Zena, Bernard, and Anton. She had been on a roll, five hundred pages into the first draft, and then Joan’s summer writing plans turned to dust.

  * * *

  “Trudy’s left Rhome,” Fancy told Joan when she brought the boys home from their last day of school. “She went back to Canada, and I think I should go back too. Right away, if I can. I love all of you so much, and I know I’ll be leaving you in a lurch, but I feel lost without her.” Joan saw there would be no convincing Fancy to stay, so what else could she say but, “I’ll write you an outstanding recommendation, crafted to highlight all of your numerous talents, just write down where I should send it.” When Martin came home and heard the news, he left the kitchen and returned with an envelope for Fancy. “A thank-you, but not enough for all you’ve done for us.” There were hugs and kisses, and the boys walked with her to her car, and stood on the sidewalk holding her hands, not wanting to let her go, both of them crying. Then Fancy drove out of their lives.