The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  “Has she told her parents about you?” Joan knows little about Indian castes and how they work, or about arranged marriages, and wonders what trials might be ahead for the young couple.

  “They aren’t that happy that I’m American, but they like that I live here, and that I’ve run my own business, and that I’m starting something real. That I’m not one of the backpackers or hippies who come wandering through, never wanting to go home.”

  Vivek calls back to them. “We’ve gone twenty-seven miles, just ten to go.”

  A good time, Joan thinks, to move away from young love.

  “What a wonderful way to invest your money, in the lives and futures of others. You should be proud. I am. Have you told your father about the sale? About your plans for the center?”

  “I’ll know when it’s the right time to tell him about everything,” he says, which tells Joan that Martin still knows nothing about the sale of Solve, or that their second son is never returning to Rhome, or that he is in love and it seems to be very real. It strikes Joan again how rarely she and Eric mention Martin.

  They are in a part of the Kangra valley Joan passed through on the way to the Pong Wetland with Willem.

  “I forgot to tell you. Daniel wrote me a few days ago, said he bought himself a year’s membership at some yoga studio near him. Maybe I’ll turn around his way of thinking after all. If I can turn Daniel around, maybe I can do the same for Dad.”

  Joan doesn’t want to picture Daniel in a yoga class, standing on an unfurled mat, preparing to assume one of the poses she did for so many years, those poses restoring her sanity in those hours she was away from Eric, his minions, the house. She doesn’t want to feel this agonizing pinch at her heart.

  After all these months in India, meditating on everything, she is no closer to understanding how her eldest son’s thinking went so awry, does not know if he has processed the message she intended to send by her flight.

  This is the first time Eric has spoken of Daniel to her, and she wonders if her Buddha-like son either knows more than he’s letting on, or intuits something profound. Unless he asks her directly, Joan has nothing to say on the subject.

  “One mile,” Vivek calls out.

  “You haven’t told me where we’re going,” Joan says.

  “Masrur. But that’s all I’m going to say.”

  * * *

  Vivek refuses to join them. “Have this time on your own,” he says. “I’ll stay with the car.” And then Joan and Eric are walking on a dirt path, and the wind begins to whistle, and then the air hushes, and they round a bend, and there, in front of them, is a massive temple painstakingly carved out of rock, out of a single stone, on the edge of a large pond reflecting the temple’s myriad surfaces and planes in the autumnal sun, and Joan inhales deeply.

  “It was carved in the eighth century,” Eric says. “It’s actually fifteen temples. The central temple right in front of us is carved inside too, and there are seven temples on either side, but they’re carved only on the outside. They call it the Masrur Rock Cut Temple, and the Himalayan Pyramid, and some call it a wonder of the world.”

  Stone.

  Everything is carved from stone.

  The temple fronts, facades, courtyard, outer doors, even the pond that was built to reflect the temple to the sky, to the heavens.

  It is extraordinary to look at, and Joan touches Eric’s sleeve, and he nods.

  She steps away from him, enters the temple on her own, runs her hands over the hewn rock.

  People carved this temple, with their hands, with small tools, like those Paloma will use.

  Joan wonders how many people it took, how many decades, or centuries, to conceive this vision, make it come true. How many people died during the building, a construction possibly from hell, and if it wasn’t, how long before this contemplative and peaceful place was finished, opened to people eager for a sacred temple in which to pray.

  She passes a large family, Tibetan by the cuts of their faces, their melodic intonations, and she leaves them behind, walks deeper inside.

  The farther she goes, the cooling air takes on a mineral scent, the keenness of the born earth. She reaches the inner sanctum sanctorum, a room of rock, its walls sheared, but not made perfectly smooth, and she is completely alone. In front of deity idols she knows so little about, will never fully absorb, she kneels on the stone, feels how quickly it warms under her palms.

  She puts her hands together in namaste and closes her eyes.

  She thinks of Paloma Rosen, her flight to destiny, the materials she intends to make her own. Joan has researched so many, what a sculptor might choose, and for Paloma it will be stones and woods, loving most working in marble—a verb and a noun of pre-Greek origin: to flash, sparkle, and gleam, glassy, crystal-like rock, shining stone.

  They are similar, she and Paloma, carving away in materials that are equally intractable, hard to chisel. By amputating her past and working in stone, in marble, Paloma Rosen will hurtle herself into her future. And Joan, what is she doing precisely? Working in words, trying to hurtle herself into her future, undecided about whether, or how extensive, an amputation of her own life is required. She has not yet had any response to the two letters she has written to the Dalai Lama, a third one written and delivered by Kartar to His Holiness’s secretary just this morning. Each letter Joan has written to the Dalai Lama has expanded her story. Today’s included how welcomed she felt by the crowd in Darpan’s bookstore.

  She is kneeling in this stone temple, thinking how hard stone is, how it endures for eternity, and when she rises, she knows she is not prepared to leave this remarkable Indian world, not ready to step back into the small world of Rhome, to be with Martin, to answer the question of Daniel.

  * * *

  Just beyond the carved front doors of the temple, Joan steps out into the sunshine, and stops. Eric is next to the pond, a young woman by his side, her hand in his own. The girl is a lovely sapling tree, her hair up in a simple twist, loose pieces falling around her face like soft twigs. They are taken up with each other, and Joan studies them from a distance. They do not seem like two young twentysomethings in love for the first time. There is a maturity between them, a thoughtfulness that love has not blinded. The way their hands are clasped together, how Eric touches her cheek, how the young woman puts her hand on the back of his head, Joan sees they fit together. And it has little to do with how pleasing they are to the eye.

  She would like to say to them take life slowly, don’t rush into making babies, but life here is different, slower and faster, deeper than the modern world allows. They will figure out on their own the tribulations, enjoy every sweetness.

  Their bodies curve toward each other in a way that is beyond lust. They want the same life, consummately attuned to each other already. There will be no internal negotiations for either of them, no broken vows, no thoughts of what must be done to keep alive a love that was never expected. They will be helpmates for life.

  She walks slowly toward them and when she is ten feet away, she coughs lightly. They look up in unison, both smiling happily at her, and Eric says, “Mom, this is Amari.”

  48

  It was Eric’s only slip, calling her Mom when he introduced her to Amari. The rest of the afternoon, it was Ashby as always, and Joan was surprised by the twinges of something, of sadness, maybe of loss, when he did so. Lovely Amari, twenty-five to Eric’s twenty-two. Both of them shadowed by who they were in the lives they previously lived, so young to already carry such histories, Joan had thought, then remembered she had been the same, a life lived in full by the time she was twenty-five. Martin’s and Daniel’s lives were free of that delirious leap from childhood to special existence. Did the normality of their own passages explain certain things? Was this why Martin had overstepped her boundaries so often in the past, failed to respect her authorial privacy, wanting to be inside her head, wanting what she could not, would not, give him, an explanation about how her brain worked? Was this why
Daniel had stolen Words, to jump the divide, breach the gap between himself and his mother and younger brother? Should she have recognized he would deem his own accomplishments commonplace, lacking the rarity he so desperately desired, was it all there in that competitiveness he had shown early on? Using Joan’s own work to trounce her, to beat her soundly at whatever game was in his mind, might have seemed like fair play to him. But Daniel was not a child when he made his decision, he was an adult who knew what he was doing.

  The sun is thirty minutes from rising, the birds in the forest are still sleeping, and these thoughts are too titanic for her barley tea, her hot lentils, the day’s sprig of fuchsia petals in a celadon vase. Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise trays are never without their surprising flowers, even though it is the second week of November. Thanksgiving in Rhome is just ten days away. She has not heard back from Martin, no response to her last email weeks ago that said simply, Please do not come.

  On her pine desk are the ten stories she winnowed from all those left on Darpan’s counter. She had been wrong: the crowd, or most of them, knew who she was. Forty stories were left for her to read, many with personal notes identifying which story of hers was their favorite and what it had meant to them. She is still astonished by the geographic and temporal distance her work has traveled, humbled by the power they found in her words. Early on, she gave up trying to figure out if she was reading a story written by a female or male, the Indian names not making it easy, and decided not to worry about an evenly divided class, read only to find truths in the work. She moves quickly over the ten she has chosen, reads again their opening lines:

  The girl looked in the mirror one day and realized she was no longer small, but grown.

  Navin picked up his younger brother where he sat playing with blocks on the ground, threw him over his shoulder, and took him for a walk. They lived in fresh air, and the boy did not get enough.

  I, Rati, do not want to marry the boy my father has selected. He is shorter than me, with the body of a baboon, the eyes of an owl.

  Prasad was very, very old and he had a story to tell his family that would alter the way they saw the world.

  Feni’s name meant sweet but she wasn’t.

  Iti and Ibha were sick of praying to Buddha.

  My mother chants when she wakes up, when she prepares lunch and dinner, when she is alone in her bed. The father I never knew, I think he’s in her chants.

  Qasam is going to storm out of this fucking valley and get somewhere good.

  Wimal hid in the fort and knew she was going to die. She could hear the man sliding back the thing of his gun, the bullet dropping wherever it needed to go.

  Het, Haan, and Omu have been friends since they were children. They played games together and slept in each other’s beds, and used each other’s mothers for love when their own wouldn’t do, or was dead.

  She puts the stories aside, feels she has chosen well. Paloma Rosen awaits. Since Joan’s trip to Masrur with Eric, she and Paloma have been in picturesque Italian towns, a side-trip to Croatia, where they toured a stonecutters’ school and Paloma briefly considered renting a weathered stone house overlooking the harbor, but decided against it, kept to her plan.

  Theo Tesh Park is in Joan’s mind all at once, suddenly fully developed, wanting the chance to start to tell his own tale. Perhaps thinking of Eric and Daniel has made Theo Tesh Park so insistent right this minute, or maybe the stories she has chosen for Darpan’s writing class set him loose. Whatever the reason, she clears off her pine desk, leaves only the barley tea, flips through her notebook remembering all the things she thought and wrote about weeks ago, then, fingers on the laptop keys, she lets Theo take over.

  Theo Tesh Park is not his real name. The name he wore in his turbulent boyhood, through the losses of his teen years, is embossed on an old Sears card hidden in his wallet, used once when he was ten and his mother had disappeared again on another drugged bender, and his grandmother, his sobo Chiyo, did not drive, and Poppy, his older sister by three years could not drive, and he had in his closet only ripped jeans and T-shirts he had outgrown, and school was starting the next day. He had taken the local bus by himself to the store, already figuring out he would need to do everything in his life on his own. Trashing the Sears card would eliminate the last shred of evidence that once he was called Emilio Inari Andramuño, but it resists when he tries, a talisman against his past.

  Despite all the changes he has made in his life, he still thinks of himself as a boy from Steinbeck land, living nearly as hard as some of his characters. In high school, when his English teacher saw him reading Steinbeck’s books, she had said, Good for you, Emilio. You’ll find that the prose is supple and muscular, that he has extraordinary empathy for ordinary people, those who have been marginalized and dispossessed. He didn’t know then that Mrs. Abbott saw him as one of the marginalized and dispossessed, and even when he did, he kept reading Steinbeck, and Salinas was still the salad bowl of the world, with its farms of strawberries, tomatoes, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, and celery, manned by small and sweaty men and women and children, he nearly the same brown shade as them, but they were even more downtrodden, because at least Theo stayed in one place year-round. But that didn’t alter the truth that Mrs. Abbott was right, about his own general marginalization and dispossession, even in his own home, such as it was, blast any amen to that. The place that had been home for a long time was a rotting bungalow in poorest Hebbron Heights, but the faintest of memories remained in his head, of his early years, maybe until he was five, when his father was still around, and he, and Poppy, and their father, and their mother, and Sobo Chiyo all lived in the rich section of Salinas, in a splendid house he sort of remembered.

  Three years ago, on his nineteenth birthday, he was inside the Salinas Amtrak Station, counting his bucks. He wanted Amtrak, but could only afford to cross the country Greyhound-slow. With the ticket clutched in his hand, he focused upon the amorphous plans for his future, let go right then of the notion of familial resurrection. His sobo Chiyo was dead, he had written off his stringy, strung-out mother, unzipping men’s pants before he’d even hightailed it out of the bungalow, all for whatever crystal she might be handed in some teensy plastic bag, and he had given up hope by then that Poppy would reappear.

  His sister had skipped out of his life one day, telling him she was heading to the Pacific Ocean with a few friends for a day at the beach. The Pacific was just eight miles from home, though neither of them had been, not once in their lives, but Poppy didn’t find the ocean, or she had never intended to make her way to the beach, instead she sent him a single postcard that said: EIA—I’m hanging with a group in the great Mojave, off I-40. They’re gonna turn the desert into an agricultural oasis, and you know I’ve got a great green thumb. He knew no such thing about her, had never seen her raise a thing, and when he Google-mapped Mojave and I-40, there wasn’t a house or a gas station or a restaurant in any direction for hundreds of miles, just sprawling desert with a complete lack of access to water, and he’d wondered what the hell she was doing. Salinas was a town more than 99 percent dry land, its water calculated at a mere 0.16 percent, but the Mojave was a place even drier and more inhospitable. He didn’t understand whether that had been her plan all along, or whether she’d gotten herself caught up in something, sometimes those sorts of things happened to Poppy.

  He wrote to the PO box she’d written on her postcard, telling her to get away from whoever those people might be, because they had to be loony living out there in the desert, told her to save her money and be prepared to hop a bus when he figured out where he was going. Back then, he was only thinking about leaving. He’s never heard from his sister again, but every month he writes another letter and sends it off, like she might be some kind of wise ghost who can hear what’s buried in his chest.

  He left Salinas at 1:15 in the morning, saw California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania rolling past his worn seat. The pe
ople who sat next to him through California and Arizona slept or sang or smelled, those who got on in New Mexico wanted to talk about aliens they’d met. When the bus reloaded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, close to midnight that second day, a kindly black woman with a picnic basket full of fried chicken took the empty aisle seat next to him and shared the chicken she had flattened and battered and crisped, a succulent breast, a drumstick, then another one, passed from her basket to his hand and into his mouth, and she told him her entire family tree, reaching back eight generations, regaling him with stories that were funny or sad or bittersweet, filled with great moral lessons he never expected, finishing one and saying, “So if you liked that one, let me tell you about this one,” until she said goodbye to him at 8:30 a.m. in Lebanon, Missouri, there to welcome the birth of a second cousin’s fifth baby. He slept alone through the rest of Missouri and Illinois, but in Terre Haute, Indiana, a nice girl got on, headed back to college in Indianapolis, after a weekend at home with a family he imagined as 3000 percent normal. “We always spend this weekend, right after the New Year, talking about what we want the year to bring to us as a family, and to each of us individually.” He had not ever heard anything so lovely.

  Still, no matter what he was forced to hear, or respond to, the smiles he had to give, or the grimaces, asking this one or that to please stop talking to him because he just wasn’t interested, except for Gladys of the chicken and the biblical tales, and the college girl because listening to her family life was like eating cotton candy, he figured out his new name. Plucked right from the air, with three parts like his old one, but these three parts he had chosen himself, and they sounded good together when he whispered them aloud, incapable of identifying him as any one thing. When he stepped down from the bus near the tip of Manhattan, on Wall Street, he was Theo Tesh Park.

  He’s done every kind of shitty job to get by since landing here—dishwasher, dog walker, market-shelf stocker, a waiter in a bunch of diners owned by big, back-slapping Greek brothers, as a secret, non-union super’s assistant in rundown buildings up in Harlem and out in Red Hook. He’s manned, from midnight until seven, twenty-four-hours-a-day-three-hundred-sixty-five-days-a-year shops that sell tobacco and crap. He’s learned the really upscale neighborhoods of Manhattan, the ones with wealthy people in every apartment, trawling through and pushing away the weak nuts muttering to themselves before dawn, gathering up all the plastic and glass himself, stuff he’s turned in for nickels and dimes at the posh grocery stores nearby. Then he learned there was a far easier way to make money. But in any case, before then, he proved to himself he could survive, and this year’s resolution was to find a place he could call home.