The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  The summer clouds skid through the sky and Esme knows that after Labor Day, Howard will not return home. He will go somewhere else, somewhere unknown. She wonders if he will ever appear for the girls’ birthdays, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas, when wrapping paper and bows flower the carpet.

  Sometimes against her wishes, her heart turns tender, and she nearly hopes Howard finds what he is after. She thinks it likely they may never see him again, that in order to move on he will need to forget he once had a hand in creating a world he didn’t want. She thinks destiny will always win out over second-best, that it’s an impossible burden on those left behind.

  My own eyes were glassy when I reached the end. I thought Esme was right about destiny: how those compelled to find it will follow it anywhere. And I wondered how I might apply such a valorous philosophy myself. Howard’s words made me understand that I no longer wanted to wish that I was living an alternative life, I wanted to be living it, no longer stuck in some state of suspension. I closed my eyes and tried to picture what my real life might look like, but all I saw were red spots behind my eyelids that crackled into fine lines that turned black. I thought then that I had never missed anyone as Esme knew she would miss Howard, and no one had ever missed me that way either. I asked myself—didn’t I want to be missed? And then I asked myself the antecedent question—didn’t I want to be loved? I believed that I did, but I did not grasp that to attain such, meant first finding a version of myself that I could love.

  I gathered up my drink and Other Small Spaces and returned to my bedroom, where I stretched out with the book hanging over my head. More than once, I thought it looked like a guillotine.

  In that way, I read “What We Learned,” “Playing Detective,” “The Good Italian Death,” “The Fertilized House,” “Orange Moon,” “An Unexpected Conversion,” and “Deep in the Valley,” the one I first read when I was eleven.

  It was eerie how I could relate to each story: the sugariness of childhood disappearing with a series of explosive frights; the youthful compulsion to discover the secrets of other family members, and the aftermath when those secrets are revealed; siblings provoking one another with dares that result in disaster; the adult children of a dead man left to contend with the mess he left behind in a life wrecked halfway through; even a woman’s struggle with herself, with the tricks her mind plays, with the way her body betrays her, until she takes matters into her own hands. Every story resonated, opened the door to my early years, reminded me of my pointed hopes, forced me to consider where I was standing, how I had failed to leap big into the life I long desired, all those ancient and highly concentrated emotions flooding through me.

  I was spent when I finished Other Small Spaces. From my bedroom windows, the streetlamps grinned whitely in the middle of rampant nature. The weather had dialed up again, the rain was approaching monsoon conditions, a tidal wave was washing over the street.

  It was nearly eight, and I had planned to meet friends at a neighborhood bar, but I stood fixed in place, unable to go through the actions required to get myself cleaned up and dressed, thinking it would be base to introduce my regular life into what I was experiencing. The word reverence came to mind; what I thought I was feeling. I wanted to encourage the flow of such a rare emotion, feel its escalation within me, until there was an eruption, Pompeii, Vesuvius, Etna, the molten reverence prying open the constrictions that held me back, harnessed me, kept me chained up. I wanted to do what I rarely allowed myself to do: take a beat, revel in the unnatural sense of expansion that I had not felt since I created worlds for Henry the Squirrel to conquer with the words I plucked from the air, the only time in my life when I had truly shaped something from nothing.

  I found a boxed pizza in the freezer, and turned on the oven, peeled the icy disc from its cardboard backing, thinking about shrinking spaces in which some of Ashby’s characters felt most comfortable; her boy-named women; her recurring motif of water—in glasses, tubs, lakes, the ocean, an emptied pool; the search her characters undertook to find that juncture where they had turned away from happiness or watched as others stole it away. Her damaged people braved on, moved forward, recaptured their lives or started anew, took small steps or bigger leaps to find themselves in another state of being, even should that state be death. In her work, hopefulness accompanied even death. Evan and Karen, Nina and John, Robbie and Luke, Esme and Howard, Aster and Orlanna, the girl deep in the valley who knew she lived in a small box growing smaller still, and all the others I had read about, grew to know intimately, talked to me as I put away the bottle of scotch, happy for having not drunk more.

  Ashby’s stories were part of me by then, running through my veins, integrated into my soul, and my connection to her was so formidable that when I closed my eyes I saw myself writing those stories, felt that Other Small Spaces was mine.

  I ate the pizza, and then I returned the book to my nightstand and looked at Fictional Family Life waiting to be read the next day. My heart felt large with possibility, and rumbling through me was something that nearly resembled joy. I expected that I would not easily glide into sleep, but I slept as deeply as if I were a child once again, certain of his own outstanding future.

  Recording #3

  On Sunday, I woke early, bursting with self-determination, and dropped to the floor. Five push-ups, then five more, then ten in one go; sweet pain I had forgotten about. Another ten and I stayed down for a while. Then, with disbelief, a final ten gutted out, barely, but I had proved something, whatever it was, to myself. The muscles in my arms seized, seismic quakes rolling up from brachialis to biceps to pectoralis major, triceps and deltoids quivering, guts rolling; tactile evidence of worthwhile accomplishment, the way my swim coaches had wanted us to feel after practices, the burn of exploit and achievement.

  By five a.m., in clean sweatpants and sweatshirt, and with the coffee brewing, I surveyed Fictional Family Life, as I could not do the day before with Ashby’s first collection.

  The cover was divided into thirds. The top third was a blue-green globe with countries out of whack: Colombia next to Russia, Russia next to the Eastern Pacific Ocean, with the Galápagos Islands nearby, and Turkey on the other side.

  The middle third was an intricate pen-and-ink drawing of a castle encircled by slender trees. There was grass and a pond and a white dog with faint yellow patches in the distance.

  The bottom third was a street of identical suburban houses, one with a blue door.

  I flipped the book over to another black and white photograph of Ashby. Gorgeous still, but less feral than she had been on the back of Other Small Spaces. A crown of curls, her smile full.

  The dedication read: Testify to the creation of lives and the requisite heroism in creating one’s own, and I felt something shift inside of me which I would not understand until much later.

  The acknowledgment was enigmatic: You know who you are—JA. I did not know and wished I did.

  The collection was also divided into three sections: “The Travels of Boys,” “The Rx of Life,” and “Familial Truths.” Each contained six stories, the shortest ran thirty pages, the longest sixty.

  With Other Small Spaces, I had moved past the trauma of reading my mother’s work, but on the verge of stepping forward into Fictional Family Life, I admit that had the sun been shining that second day of the holiday weekend, I might have interpreted it as a sign to limit my penance, to decide I had fulfilled it to the best of my ability. Instead, the rain was punishing, a testament to my mother’s power.

  I drank my coffee at the great-room windows and imagined the concrete squares of the sidewalk buckling, the street surrendering, the tar peeling back to reveal the shoring asphalt, sinkholes ripping open and caving in, my wall of windows shattering, submerging me right where I stood. I suddenly remembered my dream from the night before. It wasn’t the old nightmare I was used to, death of a mother by a child wielding a two-by-four. Instead, I was wearing goggles and swimming through my neighborhood. The teenager who
lives with his single father across the street was balanced on a yellow surfboard, paddling upstream, and tugging a drowning old couple behind him. I was treading water, looking up at the people gathered on rooftops digging for the courage to dive into the cascading surge. Someone yelled out, Who’s got the coordinate for Noah’s ark? and in the dream I had thought that figuring out the coordinates would be a good task for my squirrel.

  I wondered for a moment what it might mean, but then I turned away from the outside world, refilled my cup, and assumed my position on the couch. It was time to begin.

  I paged forward to the first section, “The Travels of Boys,” and then to the first story, “Simon Tabor Introduces Himself.”

  When I was eleven, I believed I invented masturbation. Since then, in the early morning hours, I follow an exact routine: I briefly wake, pull my pud, traipse into my bathroom, turn the light on low, and pee. When I return, I push my dog back over to his side. Hercules snores a lot and sometimes I have to squeeze the wet black pad of his nose until he takes a big gulp and goes quiet. Then I crawl back onto my side of the bed and am gone, dreaming my fantastic lives. In these dreams, I am never who I am, a boy who lives a scrubbed truth, the subject of a medical file that reduces me to:

  Patient Name: Simon Tabor

  DOB: 1/28/1973

  Hair/Eyes: Dark Brown/Dark Brown

  Height/Weight: Short/Light

  Diagnosis: Factor XI deficiency

  In my dreams, I am ageless in a way that makes me understand that although I will soon be sixteen, I am not quite yet a man. In those other lives, I am called Deo or Abel or Icarus or Zed, and I speak Spanish, Russian, Turkish, and the watery babble of the great old tortoises. My chronology is all over the place: I live in this century or in the last, or in one way before that, raised exotically in Medellín, Moscow, Istanbul, or the Galápagos Islands. Depending on which dream I dream, my father is the former top lieutenant to the reigning drug lord of Medellín, or a fur-trapping Russian foreign minister, or a Turkish Ottoman pasha, or the man who discovered the Galápagos. My mothers are always tall and thin and beautiful and remind me of different kinds of full-blossomed flowers with tantalizing aromas. Whoever I may be in sleep, that boy wanders the globe and is intent on daring adventures.

  To be clear, I know that I did not invent masturbation, a surprising fact I discovered when I read a book whose title currently escapes me, but in which the main character is so engaged. Regardless that human instinct guided me in a practice as old as the eons, the result left me unshakeable in my belief that I could invent, create, and manifest other realms, which has been a godsend, given the basic facts of my restricted life.

  I felt excitement shoot through me: there would be stories wrapped inside other stories, wrapped inside other stories, wrapped inside other stories, an archaeological dig that would reveal new treasures as one dove deeper and deeper. I wondered what I would find at each level, what the beating center would look like.

  The next story, “Simon Tabor Explains All,” started like this:

  I am diseased. I always do like saying it that way, as if I were a doctor in some West African village in a paint-peeled hospital curing some awful virus and have been inflicted after saving thousands with my amazing medical skills and ministrations, or as if I were patient zero who contracted some never-before-seen deadly flu, or, well, you understand what I’m doing here. But the truth is one false move can spell the end of my life. A splinter gone uncaught or deliberate tearings of the flesh. From the inconsequential to the major, nearly anything might set my blood free, and that is my disease. Everyone these days wants to be set free, and so do I, but not with my scarlet blood pooled around my cooling, bluing body.

  Still unclear? Well, people today are sort of stupid, so I will spell it out: I am a hemophiliac. And I am the rarest kind, because not only isn’t there any cure in general, no one has yet come up with a concentrate I could take, that would provide my body with what it’s missing: factor XI. Apparently, XI is sneaky and wily, eluding the medical researchers. They have developed concentrates for hemophiliacs deficient in other factors, but if you’re an XI, like me, you’re out of luck. So I must guard my body’s eight or so pints of blood that keep me alive, as one pinprick would cause spillage until I die. And until I have attained my own transcendence, I do not want that to happen.

  Here are other basic facts of my life. I have been confined to my room since I was brought home from the hospital. Photographs show me as a handsome infant with almond-shaped eyes and a full head of black, corkscrewed curls. I had many visitors in those early days, as evidenced in Polaroids snapped by Judah, my father. I was two when pictures of people kissing and hugging me ceased to be recorded because the visitors had fallen away, something that still greatly disturbs my mother, Pearl, all these years later. What disturbs me more: there is not a single picture of me taking first steps out on the grass, or swinging on a swing at a park, or playing a game of dodgeball with neighborhood kids. Except for the trip from hospital to home, I have never been outside, and that has made my life simultaneously horrendous and incredible.

  My domain is spacious and airy, the only room on the fourth floor of our enormous house, a thousand square feet belonging only to me. Up here, I experience firsthand all kinds of weather: the sun slanting across the room and catching at my eyes when I am reading on my bed; the heavenly feeling of being cloud-caught when the sky billows; the white noise of slapping rain, drops sometimes landing on my face when I am at my desk working away and a window is slightly ajar; fresh spring breezes that toss up from my mother’s gardens the scent of sweet alyssum, and rustle my pillowcases, my notebooks, the journals to which I subscribe—artistic, political, and literary—and leave all over my room, stretched open like dancers in wide pliés to the pages I am currently reading.

  A Turkish rug runs from my desk at the north-facing windows to the door, and the entire south wall is filled up with long shelves chock-full of books. Over the years, I have arranged my collection by publication date, which provided an interesting historical scope; alphabetically by authors’ last names, which was dull; alphabetically by title, but so many titles began with The that I found it disconcerting to run my fingers over the spines and read The, The, The, The, The, The, which began to sound like thugh, as if I were a slow boy sounding out a difficult word. Currently my books are arranged in a crescendo of colors based on the covers. Books with red covers are grouped together, and books with blue covers are grouped together, and those with white covers, and green covers, and mustard-yellow covers, it goes on and on because books are wrapped up in more colors than you might realize. This visual coordination is very pleasing to my eye, and I put on the top shelf a violet gem of a book, slim and small, that glistens like a miniature stained-glass window behind which there might be some kind of treasure.

  That violet book, called The Summer of My Shimmerlessness, is my favorite, although I have never read it. But as this summer might prove to be the summer of my own shimmerlessness, it is first on my list of “Books to Read.” I turn sixteen soon, and from what my sisters have told me, and from what I have learned from reading, sixteen is monumental; one hill climbed, a new vista to see, and I want to climb that hill on my own two legs, see the vista that surrounds, breathe in fresh air. But, as always, in the wide-awake hours, I am forced to compress, down to nearly nothing, my expectations about what I desire.

  Through the tall rectangular windows that reach the ceiling, I can gaze north, east, and west, and see rolling grass, soaring beeches and dwarfed willows, and the pond, lichen-encrusted, its water burred by the skin of algae the gardener forgets to scrape away, home to primordial koi. When Hercules is let out of my room to do his business, I hear him racing down the long winding staircase, his paws outstretched until he bangs through the doggy door. Then he is a blur of white fur against the blue-green grass, barking at the tall trees and small bushes, skidding to a stop to find me at the glass. He barks and barks, gets busy digging a
hole, then trots off into the silvery beeches to find something: a lost pink ball, a desiccated beetle, a mouse fastened between his jaws and still squirming. Once he buries his find, he looks back up at me and bows, his little daily gift to his owner and master who loves him so much.

  I have refused all the technological advances my parents offer up—television, phone, radio—and instead I rely on the written word and on my own imagination. Why should I torture myself by allowing in the outside world that I can never, will never, visit. I like imagining I live in very olden times, am Plato or Socrates or Marcus Aurelius, and have only my eyes to clue me in about what might be important and my brain to work through what I learn and observe. And I do intently observe from within my room all that unfolds out there, that spins in my head, that I experience in my dreams.

  From my cloistered vantage point, I have spent many happy hours looking out over our oceanic backyard, to the speckled stone fence that surrounds our property, and then beyond, to a wide street with miniature houses, or at least that is how they appear to me. I have been told that those houses, much smaller than our palatial homestead, are of normal size, comfortable residences for families of four. I have never been able to assess that truth for myself, as, of course, I have never walked that street, or any street. My binoculars are well worn from all my investigating. Life out there is like watching a soap opera for the deaf. I track happiness sheltered between clasped hands, see the wounding anger that sparks from bodies when half of a couple stomps off and leaves the other behind. I have seen friendships dissolve with a pointed finger in a face, and love bloom with one glance. I am good at interpreting the source of pleasure, upset, the onset of veneration or lust. I notice emotions the way others notice the weather, which I have already said that I notice as well, along with birds. I am a birder par extraordinaire; all of my sightings written down in a notebook simply labled Birds.