The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  My first published article, “Gold Rush of the Future,” was about a young, hard-charging chief executive I nicknamed Golden Boy. He reinvented prospecting for gold in the twenty-first century with an innovative financial mechanism called gold streaming—Wall Street panhandling by purchasing stock in Golden Boy’s company, which funded the mining companies: a conglomerated modern-day version of the miners of yore. Golden Boy had the gift, had raised more than a billion dollars during his first swing through the venture capital markets, the hedge funds, and the investment banking firms. He said the accumulation of investment funds was intoxicating, but he most loved the weeks he spent hanging out with the actual prospectors who talked about the sheer exhilaration that accompanied the hunt for gold, the lust and greed that sweetened the entire enterprise. In one of our several telephone interviews, Golden Boy said, “It’s an addiction that bit me hard in the ass, my friend, took a solid chunk from most of one cheek,” and I felt the cold mine air on my skin, the weight of gold nuggets in my palms, the bump of a bulging wallet in my back pocket.

  When I handed in the finished piece to my editors, I did not feel the elation I expected with the imminent publication of my first article, conceived by me, my first byline on top. I realized that Golden Boy reminded me of my brother—the certainty they each had in their synaptic goods, the novel business models they invented, each tearing up their worlds with their genius and their ability to make patent what so few of us can see. People like that always do reach the pinnacle, and both Golden Boy and my brother had. I was not of their ilk, and I realized there were far more people like me than like them, and that those of us who had no extraordinary skills with which to dream big might be very interested in the unconventional ways in which ordinary people catapulted themselves beyond their origins and into the financial stratosphere.

  I made a decision then never to write again about venture capitalists, or about the CEOs of major companies, or about people born with a deep and abiding talent they had found and mined well; I held a grudge against anyone who achieved their success by virtue of incomparable intellect, stellar schooling, connections, or the injustice of winning a hereditary lottery. I searched for the average people, the ones who weren’t prodigies, weren’t members of Mensa, who lacked obvious genius and had no mastermind skills, whose futures had always been of absolutely no interest to anyone, including themselves; rags-to-riches of a sort. I set these stories within a larger milieu, that of the global financial markets, the trends in financing, and the like. It was the kind of column the magazine had never published before, and it became my specialty.

  As a result, newly anointed adults, aware that people of all ages were hitting jackpots in unbelievable ways, found in my articles some kind of direction and inspiration. Because of me, Think Inc.’s readership soon expanded beyond its stodgy demographics of number-crunching wonks interested generally in how the financial world was going to react to what was coming down the pike, and specifically in the bare bones of how one thing or another would affect investments they had made or might want to make.

  I was surprised to find that the actual writing of the articles did not intrigue me as much as interviewing those regular people, rooting through their lives at will, uncovering their tawdry secrets, although never did I expose my subjects’ past frailties in print. The secrets belonging to those I wrote about had no personal effect on me, other than empathy, and I found something comforting in the tales of uninspired lives that once ran amok; that even for those who had screwed up terribly there could be magical redemption, and a redemption that included monetary riches. There was, for instance, the rotund and smiling pie maker, sweet as sugar, who took his grandmother’s recipe and built an empire of pies. What he hid away was his long prison stint in his youth, twelve years for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a juvenile record long sealed, which I got my hands on. In confidence, he told me that dreaming of his grandmother’s kitchen, remembering how he helped her make her pies, his hands in the dough, the smell of cherry and lemon and peach baking, had kept him alive, the happy thing he thought about when he was staring at walls and bars, fending off even tougher kids in the prison yard, telling himself that with such delicious things in the world he ought to get his head on straight, come out of prison with his eyes on that gustatory prize. And there were the twins I wrote about—two eight-year-old girls with freckles and pigtails who designed bracelets of neon beads that girls in every first-world country wanted. Their marketing man was their father, whose idea was to donate the first monies received to third-world countries, putting the bracelets on par with other kinds of trinkets that had altruistic appeal to shoppers. The father had lost his job as head of marketing at a multinational when his cocaine and prostitute habits were discovered. Although he was not indicted, did no time in jail, he was summarily fired, divorced, and ruthlessly kept from his children. Destitute and desperate, he returned to his parents’ heartland farm, a place he had scrabbled hard to get out of, going cold turkey with the drugs, turning himself into a celibate, finding some peace amidst the squealing pigs. When I wrote about the girls and their beads, the company was a nonprofit; now it’s for-profit, and has expanded into all kinds of unisex kid-centric jewelry, and the father, he built a house near his parents’ farm, runs the $500 million business from there, only goes into town for groceries and to fill up his old Ford truck.

  My point is: I became alert to the secrets all people keep, and when I sensed I was in the presence of a secret, I had to explore it. That is what happened on a June summer weekend sixteen months ago, when I was home for a rare weekend visit in Rhome. It was still early on Sunday, and my father was already at the hospital when I went in search of my mother, and found her in the glen, standing at the lip of the pool, ready to dive in and swim her hour of laps. “Can I borrow your car?” I asked. I wanted to take a memorial drive around Rhome. “Of course, love. Keys are in the bowl. Have fun,” she said.

  And then I was in the garage, staring at boxes I had never seen before, six large brown boxes in a row, every single one marked Joan Ashby in big black letters.

  Of course, I knew it was an invasion of her privacy to root around in her things, but my work had inured me to such breaches. The sixth box was the one most securely taped up, and that was the deciding factor, how I knew where to start. I pulled back the tape carefully, opened the flaps, and found myself looking through hundreds of photographs of people I did not recognize. I dug deeper, and pulled out dozens of colored folders, then a huge stack of orange folders marked Rare Baby Story with titles next to each one. And then, when I reached the bottom, I came upon an enormous manuscript. I gripped it tight and pulled it free.

  The title page read Words of New Beginnings. I was sure I was holding another collection of her stories, and I was curious why it wasn’t bound and in bookstores, furthering her remarkable reputation. But when I flipped through it, I realized it was a novel, that Joan Ashby had written a novel she finished long ago, on August 10, 2007, precisely, according to the handwritten notation on its title page, and I wondered if the book had been at the bottom of that box ever since, so many years out of sight, out of mind.

  Though it changes nothing, I did not read a single word then, but I was overwhelmed by my discovery, gripped by an uncontrollable need to possess it, a desire, perhaps, to punish my mother for having such an enormous secret, for being imbued with genius and wasting it.

  I put the manuscript on the front seat of her car, then replaced everything else in the box, exactly as it had been, smoothed the tape back down, hit the garage door opener, and raced down the hill into Rhome, where I paid a small fortune to have a copy run off. In forty-five minutes, I was back at the house, the original manuscript returned to its resting place at the bottom of that sixth Ashby box, the old strips of tape replaced with new, the copy in my overnight bag, the overnight bag pushed under the bed in my room, and when I reached the glen, my mother was still swimming.

  She rose up out of the wa
ter with a happy, brilliant smile, and I searched inside of myself for the guilt I thought I should feel, but didn’t. What I felt was a rage I couldn’t explain, and the spectacular falsity of my own responding smile. I remember thinking that any minute she would pick up on the strange emanations I had to be sending out, a regular skill of hers, but she didn’t.

  “I’ll dry off and make us some fresh coffee,” is what she said to me, “and we can have one of our great chats.” I nodded and said, “Terrific.”

  The subjects of my articles had taught me that there is always a price that must be paid for doing wrong. And I had done wrong: by keeping my mouth shut when I uncovered Ashby’s secret, by making a copy of that unpublished novel for myself, knowing that I intended to spirit her secret work away with me when I left Rhome, and so I set my own price, the harshest penance I could think of to cause myself the most harm: reading Ashby’s collections from cover to cover.

  Later that afternoon, I asked if I could read her books, and when I saw her hesitate, I wanted to say, Hey, Mom, I already read “Deep in the Valley,” which fucked my own dreams entirely, and “An Outlaw Life,” so I know you never wanted me, thanks very much, and I know what you’ve been hiding, so what’s the deal with this internal debate I see you going through. But then she nodded and led me back out into the garage, opened a different Ashby box, and handed over two thick, hardcover books.

  That night, on the train back to DC, with her purloined secret and her published collections packed in my duffel, I imagined I was transporting explosives.

  I walked into my stifling, airless apartment a few hours later, but I didn’t throw open the windows until her secret manuscript was tucked away deep in a drawer, her collections on my nightstand. I didn’t actually want them in my sight, but it seemed I owed her that—a display that would explicitly remind me of the wrong I had done.

  While the summer lingered on, those two books sat like an overwhelming dare I did not want to face. I forced myself to take their stock each morning, and their voracious strength, so close to my head when I slept, spun a nightmare that made me leap from my bed like clockwork at three a.m., the metronome of ashbyashbyashby in my ears, my body slick, my heart thrashing, my mind flailing. I would turn on the light and sew together the images, each remembered fragment moving the narrative forward. Then I would retrace it all from the start, as if I could revise my subconscious. A boy, a mother, a two-by-four, a bloody head wound, a cover-up, and a grave. The same dream over and over again.

  With autumn came the awful news that in the first quarter of the coming year, Think Inc. would be eliminating their traditional monthly print format and transitioning into new media. They wanted me to stay, to succeed in the new environment, but I had to be able to winnow my twenty thousand–word articles down to a few succinct Web-friendly paragraphs. The full text of my articles would be in the semiannual print versions of the magazine available to subscribers who paid for the golden upgrade, but it was mandatory I truncate my work for the new site. I tried desperately to cut and trim my articles, both published and pending, and considered new angles by which I could come at my subjects in an organic way that would work for the Web site, but I wrote long-form and detailed and my attempts at cogent compression were futile.

  When I realized I would be remaindered, with some kind of severance, I carefully considered how I could capitalize on the small name I had made for myself, my own mark on the world, even though that mark disappeared when people trashed an issue of the magazine that contained one of my articles.

  I grappled with what to do and decided to write a book investigating the effects the global economy was having on worldwide entrepreneurship. I drafted a seventy-page proposal with clever chapter summaries and polished entertaining briefs about the people I would highlight. I thought: Who wouldn’t want to read a book that detailed how the most unlikely among us discovered the idea that made them rich, the steps taken, the sacrifices made, the preposterous results obtained which changed their lives and sometimes the lives of the population at large? I was confident that with such a book under way, I would leave the magazine with a signed publishing contract, become a pundit regularly sought out for Sunday-morning talk shows. I imagined receiving the advance, working from home on the book, traveling to small towns to interview people, eventually being sent out on a book tour, giving speeches at business schools and universities, commanding high rates for my insights.

  My editors, enthusiastic about my proposal, championed it to their publishing connections. Although the publishers liked my proposal, and could see a book like mine on their lists, I lacked, they said, brand recognition, notwithstanding that I worked for a national magazine, had a good reputation, and my pieces had won two commendations for journalistic excellence. The advice was to submit the proposal again when I had a larger social media platform that demonstrated I commanded an audience in the millions.

  With my proposed future dead in my hands, I was overwhelmed by confusion, unable to figure things out, saw no clear next phase. I wondered then whether my bewilderment stemmed directly from my failure to absolve myself of my sin, not making good on my self-imposed penance to read those damn books.

  I decided to spend the whole of the Columbus Day weekend inside, foregoing the moderate fall weather, reading those extolled Ashby collections from cover to cover, whose mere existence I had long despised. I tried convincing myself I would be setting out on a voyage like that undertaken by Christopher Columbus and his crew, but when I woke at dawn on Saturday of his holiday weekend, I felt nothing remotely akin to the Spaniard’s yearning to discover the unknown world, his pride in sailing for honor and queen, his elation when the three ships were freed from their moorings. Instead, I felt violently ill, as if I had been seasick for days, and the open ocean ahead of me was no docile thing, but a mad navy sea with gargantuan whitecaps churning in a circle around the globe.

  I picked up Ashby’s debut collection, Other Small Spaces, and I remembered its heft of serious intention, how it felt in my hands when I was eleven. I had not paid any attention to the cover back then, but now I did.

  It showed a large keyhole through which one could see a book-lined room. A person of uncertain gender sat in a high-backed chair, hands folded in supplication, face lifted. Its eyes were black dots that suddenly lengthened into rays that bore through the keyhole into mine. It was a daunting cover, and I thought that might be the point: that reading Ashby’s work required fearlessness and readers ought to be ready.

  I was too wound up to engage the book as I would otherwise normally do—author photo, dedication, acknowledgments, table of contents, if there was one. I felt twitchy paging forward to the first story. Then I was there, opening the door to my own nightmare, to the fears I thought I had put to rest. The title of the first story was “Killing Close Friends,” and I was shaken completely. It took enormous will to continue on, to force myself to drop into my mother’s world.

  Slice the carotid arteries of the self-pleased, so certain their literary pursuits are bound for success; gut the recipients of fellowships and stipends and prizes and contracts; poison those with imitative talent, for they decimate the genuine; smash those who presume that inherited blood fates their work valuable: they are all cockroaches skittering across the shower tiles in the dead of night and ought to be smacked flat with a manuscript that sputtered at liftoff, the match meant for igniting, wet from tears.

  Those were Evan’s thoughts. The expected Congratulations!—or any sentiment of faked delight in Karen’s good fortune—was lodged deep in her pharynx, the critical organ for vocalization, digestion, and respiration. Not only could Evan not talk, she felt nauseated, bilious, and vomitous, and she could not breathe. She could not draw a full breath into her lungs, not even a repulsive cleansing breath, as Karen said to her now, aflutter, “Take a cleansing breath! I think it’s a panic attack, Evan.”

  The boy’s name bestowed upon Evan was of various origins, but she preferred the Celtic translation:
young warrior. She felt like a warrior, even as she stood sick of stomach, of lungs, of heart, of head, in the kitchen of the apartment she and Karen have shared since college and through their graduate school program nearing its end. She is ready to pick up the long sharp knife Karen was just using to slice into a loaf of French bread, but has put down, to retrieve for her best friend a paper bag into which Evan can inhale and exhale.

  Karen paws the kitchen cabinets, rifles through the pantry, searching and searching, while she never stops talking. “You know a panic attack just feels like you can’t breathe. But it’s not lack of oxygen at all. It’s the carbon dioxide concentration in your blood decreasing below the normal level because you’re expelling more CO2 than your body—Oh, here’s a bag—”