Ice-cream sundaes followed her sudden departure and, later, Joan said to Martin, “I’ve always wondered if Fancy and Trudy were just friends, like Fancy always said, or if there’s always been something more between them.” They had come to know Trudy at the holiday parties and summer blow-outs in the backyard Martin liked them to throw, and which Joan had become very good at organizing with Fancy’s help. Trudy was small next to tall Fancy, mousy when Fancy was brave, quiet when Fancy could talk and talk and talk, but every once in a while, Joan caught a look passing between them, or Trudy gazing at Fancy, or Fancy gazing at Trudy, and she would wonder and wish that Fancy felt free enough to live her life completely. “Definitely, they’re together. They’ll buy a little house in that little town they’re from, on the edge of Lake Ontario, and be happy the rest of their days.” He shut off the bedroom lights, and in the dark, Joan hoped that was true, as true as the hole Fancy was leaving in their lives, as true as Fancy’s plans extinguishing Joan’s own summer hope. Later, when they discussed hiring another nanny, Joan looked ahead to the fall, to writing each day in an emptied house, and said, “No one could ever replace Fancy, so let’s not bother.”
But she wasn’t prepared for Fancy leaving, had no summer plans in place for the boys. Had she known, and over their complaints, she would have sent Eric to day camp, Daniel to sleepaway. Instead, they spent the sunny days at the community center pool. Daniel took lessons with the swim coach, wanting, he said, to try out for the school team in the fall. As a seventh grader he could do that. Eric ran around with the other kids, cannonballing into the water, despite threats of expulsion never carried out by the lifeguards. Some mornings Martin gave Joan a break and took Eric with him to the hospital, where he played on his father’s office computer, then dropped him in the early afternoon at the pool. She and the boys saw a lot of Augusta, Carla, Dawn, Emily, Meg, and Teresa there, with all of their children. The six women could field a swim team of their own, eighteen children in total. During the school year, their paths no longer crossed, all those playdates fallen away as their eldest daughters and Daniel found other friends whom they preferred, who were not of the opposite sex. It was nice they could reunite for occasional picnics in the park, barbecues at someone’s house, the children playing tag and hide-and-seek, the men, sometimes even Martin, drinking beers from the bottle.
And it had been the summer of the big challenge; Daniel’s idea, a serious competition between eldest son and mother, and it took all the love in her heart not to groan. She wasn’t sure when it had begun, but Daniel wanted to beat her at anything, at everything—if he could cut up a tomato quicker, or bike faster on the Potomac walk, or say more d words in a minute than she could. His desire to constantly test himself against her was fascinating, tiring, at odds with her own nature—never had she competed in her life. A week into the vacation, he came up with a challenge she actually liked—who could read the most novels over the summer. She agreed instantly and suggested there be a prize for the winner.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “And I know what I want. A typewriter.” He was uninterested in what Joan might want if she beat him; he thoroughly expected to win.
“Wouldn’t you rather we got a computer for home, and you can use that for your writing?” Martin asked, and Daniel said, “Dad, a real writer writes on a real typewriter, a manual one.” Eric, who desperately wanted a computer, had yelled, “No, get a computer, not a stupid typewriter!”
One night in bed, Martin said to her, “If Daniel does win the contest, how about giving him your old typewriter? It’s just gathering dust. I know he said he wanted a manual, but he could adapt. Kind of like passing down history, a hand-off from one generation to the next.”
She was stunned, relieved that the room was dark, that he could not see her face. Of course he didn’t know she was using her typewriter regularly, had been until the start of the summer, would again when the summer concluded. His suggestion that she relinquish it, even to the son she adored, framing it in generational terms, the passing of the writer’s baton, the assumption he was making that she had abandoned her writing life, would never write again, she felt punched in the stomach. She hadn’t been able to clear her mind, to think of anything to say that would not reveal what she had no intention of revealing, and then Martin said, “Probably not a good idea. He’ll want something of his own.” And she had managed to open her mouth, to say only, “You’re right.”
Sometimes Joan read quickly, sometimes leisurely, uncertain whether to let Daniel win, then decided she would, that teaching him to lose graciously was less important than the confidence that would come with achieving his goal. She stopped reading after the twenty-ninth novel, allowed him to reach thirty.
Finding a working manual typewriter had not been easy. Martin found one in mint condition, bought it from a Johns Hopkins friend whose letter-writing mother had just died. The woman had kept it oiled and working like new, stockpiled for years the ribbons it required. It sat now on Daniel’s white desk. The story he was taking to share with his new classmates had been written on that manual typewriter, his first time using it, that uncertain typing, those clunk, clunk, clunks without any rhythm. Every time Joan heard him plucking away, she felt proud, then bereft that she had not written a word during those long and hot three months.
* * *
“So what did Dad say to you guys in Chinese?” she asked when they were in the station wagon heading down the hill, at last off to the first day of school.
“He said, ‘Good morning, my good sons,’” they said at the same time.
“Jinx,” Eric yelled, and Daniel said, “Don’t be dumb.”
* * *
She was at the kitchen table by ten, a mug of fresh coffee in hand, her typewriter still in the front closet box, the pages of Words of New Beginnings in front of her. She needed to submerge herself in her own words before she could pick up where she had left off. She began at the beginning.
We were young, and some of us were beautiful, and others of us were brilliant, and a few of us were both. Citizenship demanded only an ability to create, to use our minds and hands and bodies in unforeseen ways—
Joan looked up. The image of herself in her study nearly thirteen years earlier was so clear in her mind. The analysis she had undertaken about having the baby she did not want, the choice she had made after imagining the situation as if she were a character in a story she was writing, about opening her heart, the run of delightful years. She remembered thinking the story would need some tragic arc, and she felt that sense of recollection, of déjà vu, she’d sometimes felt since Eric’s birth, and she wondered when that calamity, catastrophe, misfortune, and heartbreak might hit.
There had been, thus far, a run of mostly delightful years, even when her life seemed a mirage—sometimes lovely, sometimes not. She might be keeping an enormous secret from Martin, but they were generally happy, still having plentiful sex, the boys were healthy, usually good-spirited, sort of well adjusted, chock-full of their own wonderful idiosyncrasies. Despite her frustration about being pulled away from her work, they had spent a great summer together. Now she was about to return to the book she wanted to be writing, thirty-six school weeks ahead of her when the hours from ten until nearly three were in her possession, and she felt a pinch of fear that things could not last.
* * *
She was waiting for them when school let out, leaning up against the station wagon. The school had a single red door, beyond which were open-air walkways that fanned out in three directions, leading to the elementary school, the middle school, and the high school, all with separate classrooms, cafeterias, auditoriums, and playgrounds. The door was deceptive, a whole town of children and teachers was right behind it.
Eric ran out first, then raced down the steps to Joan. She ran her fingers through his hair, said, “Sweetie, how was the first day?” and Eric began talking, and she was listening, but then she saw Daniel, trailing behind a group of laughing kids. His head was down, a
nd he was dragging his feet. Eric held on to her hand as she started toward Daniel, but Daniel ducked around her, opened the wagon’s back door, slid into the backseat, and slammed the heavy door closed. Eric whined, “Daniel,” and Daniel opened the door again, and Eric jumped in.
Joan started the car, but kept the parking brake engaged. “How was your day?” she asked Daniel. Since kindergarten, he had always leaned over the rim of the front seat to kiss her, and say, “It was good, I missed you, I’ll tell you all about it.” Today, Daniel didn’t lean over and kiss her, did not answer her question, just stared out the window looking forlorn. On the way home, Eric told them a long story about the games he had played at recess, that tetherball was his favorite, that he was the day’s champion, gave them a blow-by-blow account of a game he had played with some other little boy, filling up all the space in the car.
* * *
At bedtime, she knocked at Daniel’s open door. “Can I come in?” He shrugged, and she decided to ignore it.
“How is your new teacher? Do you like Miss Nilson?”
He shrugged again.
“Is she nice?”
“Yes.”
The story he had taken to school was on his desk, and Joan said, “Did you enjoy seeing your friends from last year?”
“I guess. I only know Trevor in my class.”
Daniel’s sometime best friend, whom Joan didn’t much like. He was a fair-weather kind of pal. The two were best friends one day, not talking the next.
“Are you okay with not knowing anyone else yet?”
“I guess.”
“Was it interesting to see what the others shared about themselves?”
“Kind of.”
This was not like Daniel, these shrugs, this yanking of words from his mouth.
“What kind of things did the other kids share?”
“Pictures of their vacations. One girl went waterskiing. Someone climbed a big mountain. Pictures of their families. A boy named Francis has eight brothers and sisters. A girl named Tammy brought her hamster named Giant. He was really cute.”
This was the Daniel she knew, talking with his own free will, and he continued on, identifying what all twenty children had brought in as evidence of what they thought expressed them best, of who they were, at this particular moment in time.
When he said nothing about his story, when he picked up from the nightstand the book he was reading, Oswald’s Tale by Norman Mailer, she sat down on his bed. “How did you share Henry with the class?”
“Miss Nilson had me come up to the front and read it.”
“Did you like doing that?”
Daniel nodded.
“Did the class enjoy it?”
Daniel nodded again.
“Mom,” he said, “did you used to be a writer?”
She inhaled sharply, unsure where this was coming from.
“Yes,” she said. Short, simple, sweet.
“Are you still a writer?”
What was this about?
“I am,” she said. “Once a writer, always a writer.” Though not too long ago she had debated that exact thesis.
“I’ve never seen you writing. Are you writing something now?”
Christ, Joan thought.
“Do you remember me reading you stories that I called the Rare Baby stories? You were really little then.”
Daniel nodded.
“Well, those are stories I wrote.”
“I don’t think I knew that when I was a baby. I really liked them, I remember that.”
Joan smiled. “I’m glad. I loved writing them.”
“Did you have books published?”
Once, when she was pregnant with Eric, Martin had explained to Daniel that his mother was a writer. Joan had been in the kitchen, standing over a pot of boiling macaroni, shaking out the powdery contents of a silver pouch that turned into a sticky bright-orange cheese, knowing Fancy would never have made such an unhealthy dinner, and through the cutaway above the sink, she could see Martin and Daniel on the old plaid couch. “Your mother has prodigious talent,” Martin said to their son, and Joan had stopped stirring. Martin’s choice of that adjective, the way he elongated it, had made her question whether her work—with its alarming interpretations of life—had unsettled him years ago, still bothered him, despite what he had expressed to her. Why hadn’t he chosen as a way to describe her talent great, terrific, wonderful, amazing, super, rather than the inexplicable prodigious which made it sound as if she had contracted a horrendous disease and might soon die.
Looking at her son looking at her, Joan realized she had forgotten that scene entirely, and she was certain that Daniel had too. She had never spoken to him about her life before motherhood and Martin thought she was no longer writing, so where was he getting his information from?
“Yes,” she said. “I published two collections of stories. One is called Other Small Spaces and the other is called Fictional Family Life.”
Deliberately, she did not tell him he could read them if he wanted to, that there were a dozen copies of each book in English, and more in all different languages, in a box on the top shelf in the closet in his parents’ bedroom, that there was probably a copy of each on the living-room bookshelves. It wasn’t only that many of her stories were disturbing, Daniel had read tough material since he was young, but she wanted his picture of his life, of their family, to be pure, unsullied by the way his mother once thought, sometimes still did, if she was honest.
He didn’t say anything for a few moments. Didn’t ask what the titles of her books meant or if he could read them. When another long moment passed, she hoped he wouldn’t recall the other question he asked her.
“Are you writing now?” And there it was.
It was scary how fast the brain could process various rationales for not answering a question one did not want to answer. Daniel was competitive and she did not want him competing in this way, over writing, his versus hers. Martin did not know, and so Daniel could not know that she was writing, a novel, a second novel actually, because a child should never have to keep a parent’s secret. Something had happened at school that day to make him ask her these questions, but what that could be, or how it tied in with Henry the Squirrel, for she was certain that it did, she couldn’t figure out.
“No,” she said instantly, and did not take a breath, did not want Daniel to ask another searching question, wanted him only to feel good about himself. “I’m so proud of you, love. Proud of you for reading your terrific story to your new classmates.”
She kissed his forehead and said, “Don’t stay up too late reading. It’s only the second day of school tomorrow.”
She checked in on Eric again, but he was fast asleep, covers thrown off, thumb in his mouth. His oral fixation had calmed in the last years. No more greenery and pebbles, but now sometimes he sucked his thumb when he had not done so as an infant. Were his baby teeth at risk of becoming buckteeth, if he kept it up? He’d only lost one so far. Well, she thought, they’ll all fall out eventually anyway.
She poured herself a glass of wine and went outside. The moon was full, an eerie white. That déjà vu she had felt earlier in the day, the thought that tragedy was required in the story of a woman who had a delightful run of years as the mother of an unwanted baby, was it just a foreshadowing of the uncomfortable questions Daniel asked her that night, or were the questions not that important, and it was his shrugs and monosyllabic answers that were portents of what everyone said were the brutal teen years? How she would miss her wonderful boy, the son she felt closest to, the son whom she tried never to favor over his younger brother, but did, if only in her own heart, because of a crimson kinship thicker than blood, beyond DNA. Their hearts had meshed from the beginning, and then there was their shared adoration of reading, their love of writing. How she would hate it if that time were already here.
* * *
Daniel was still quiet at breakfast on Wednesday morning, but he ate the scrambled eggs she made and t
hree pieces of toast, and teased Eric until Eric laughed, and Joan thought whatever had been going on with him had passed. She waved as they walked together through the red school door, wondered if they had a ritual for parting, if Daniel messed Eric’s hair, or Eric reached out a hand to touch his older brother one last time until the end of the day.
At the kitchen table, she continued reading Words. She had warned herself against editing, but the instinct was too ingrained, and she covered the typed pages in thunderous black ink, and the pad next to her filled up with notes. Finally, she read a page straight through.
He thinks how far he has come from his childhood in Goa when he knew only bare feet and the beach and the Arabian Sea, and nearly nothing about how huge the world could be. He has made this good life possible for his family, teaching himself both English and Italian, finding this job in the Tuscan countryside, as the marchesa’s majordomo at her fine hotel, that once was an enormous farmhouse, and was still surrounded by its fertile lands. His long days are spent translating the marchesa’s directives, to his mother and two sisters who prepare traditional Italian fare for the biking groups who come for riding and good wine, and to his father and brother who tend to the olive orchards and the livestock. They are now all asleep over the barn, in the large apartment that has been their home these past six years.
The guests are at the long-planked table in the garden, their dishes scraped clean, though the briny smell of the fish dinner lingers. The wine bottles are nearly depleted, and a married man, whose wife is sleeping upstairs, is feeding an olive to a young woman here on her own. Bash hears him say to her, “Your voice makes me think of ecstatic sex in gorgeous rooms. I long to experience that with you. I want to do wonderful things to you, and for you, for a lifetime. Whatever you want to say to me, I will listen.”
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 15
