Belonging

by Nancy Thayer

  “Yes, of course. But—”

  “It’s just that I’m worried about getting these books done before the babies get here. And my energy is limited, and besides, Madaket, I can’t pretend, I just don’t know a thing about food except how to eat it and I guess I don’t really want to learn. I’d be grateful if you’d just go buy everything you need. I trust your experience and taste. Buy the best quality, that’s my only qualification. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Madaket answered. Her eyes were bright. “This is going to be fun. And oh, you’ll be amazed at what I’ll be able to make for you!”

  The young woman was practically wriggling, puppylike, in her eagerness. Joanna found it endearing that anyone could get so worked up over kitchen equipment. “Well, let me give you a blank check. Go now, why don’t you. Never mind about the breakfast dishes. They’ll wait.”

  “No, no, I’ll do those first. Then everything will be clean and in place when I come back.” Madaket jumped up, then turned back. “Perhaps you should give me two checks. Then I can run into town and buy some fresh Bartlett’s lettuces and veggies.”

  “Yes, you do that.”

  Madaket flew off. Joanna bent over her papers.

  Three hours later Madaket returned, glowing. Joanna lost count of the trips Madaket made through the central hall from the Jeep to the kitchen. At last Madaket appeared in front of Joanna, breathless. “Would you like to see it all?”

  “Not now, thanks. I’m sure you bought great stuff.”

  “Here’s the receipt. I know it’s a lot of money, but you needed so much—”

  “That’s fine, Madaket. That’s great. Thanks for doing it.”

  “Well, I’ll fix you a nice lunch, then I’ll unpack it and wash it all and put it away.” She sounded as happy about the prospect as if she were going to a party.

  The following day the gentle rains surrendered to a true summer storm. Wind howled and shook the windows. Raindrops as hard as marbles were thrown against the house, their staccato clatter competing with the more general buzz of the Snows working on the second floor. Joanna had Madaket carry her files into the dining room, and she sat at one end of her long pine table, working intently, until the seductive dark aroma of chocolate came curling around her like a crook. Dropping her pen, she went into the kitchen. Madaket was bending over the oven, taking out a pan of brownies.

  “My mouth is watering.” Joanna reached out her hand.

  Madaket tapped it lightly. “Don’t touch. You’ll burn yourself. They need to cool a bit before I can cut them.”

  “Oh, all right, but I hope they cool fast.” Joanna went back to the dining room and her work.

  When Madaket finally came in to Joanna, bearing a plate of brownies and a glass of skim milk, she asked, “Would you mind if I took a plate up to Todd and his father?”

  Around a mouthful of warm, melting chocolate, Joanna replied, “Of course not. It would be cruel not to, with this aroma wafting through the house. They must be salivating like mad. Oh, Madaket, this is ambrosia.” She sipped some milk, then stretched and yawned. “I’ll come up with you. I need to move this old body, and anyway, I’d like to see how far along they’ve gotten. Here, I’ll carry the plate. You bring along some glasses of milk.”

  On the second floor they found both men in the center of what was now a long, open room. Splintered boards and nails were scattered all over the floor and plaster dust coated the room and the men as well. Both men had stripped down to white T-shirts and jeans, and over their chests and backs the white cotton was nearly transparent from perspiration. Her city senses were snagged by the fresh, brute, stimulating scents of sawdust and sweat in the air. Doug straightened up, turned, and hitched up his jeans, which were riding low on his narrow hips. Joanna was suddenly stunned with lust at the sight of the two muscular, very physical men. She had to clear her throat to speak.

  “We thought you might like to take a break. Madaket just made these brownies.”

  With his forearm, Todd wiped sweat off his forehead. “Great. Thanks.”

  He approached Joanna and accepted the plate from her, then turned to Madaket and took a glass of milk. Joanna saw Madaket’s face as Todd approached her: the young woman’s black eyes scanned his face briefly, intently, greedily, a living camera snapping a shot to keep forever. Then she dropped her eyes. But when Doug Snow reached out to receive his glass of milk from her hand, Madaket did not raise her eyes, but stood paralyzed, and when the older man said, “Thanks,” her nod of reply was so abrupt it looked as if she had flinched.

  “Well,” Joanna exclaimed, “you’ve gotten the wall down. It’s going to be a good-sized room.”

  “We’ll need to redo the floor and the ceiling,” Doug pointed out, indicating the rough, jagged parallel lines left from the wall.

  Joanna talked to him a bit more about the work he would do, or rather listened to him, nodding in what she hoped was an intelligent fashion. Really, she was thinking: what’s going on? Did this man emit sexual electromagnetic currents to which her pregnancy had tuned her sensitive body? For as Doug gestured, Joanna found herself captivated by the track of sweat through the white dust that had sifted onto the curly, ash-colored hairs on his taut, powerful arm. The veins stood out on his arms and hands, and his hands were abraded and swollen; his flesh would not feel soft like her flesh, but hard and rough. When he moved, his long, lean, solid thighs swelled within the fabric of his jeans. Doug’s strength was physical, and physically obvious in his every movement, unlike that of the men she’d worked with every day at the network whose strength was in their minds. They used the cut and expense of the fabric that hid their bodies to indicate their power.

  She came out of her trance to realize that Madaket had already gone down the stairs. Todd was leaning against the window, looking out at the rain while he ate.

  “I’ll leave you to your work,” Joanna said, “and get back to my own. It seems like you’re getting a lot accomplished in a short time. Thanks.”

  When she returned to the first floor, she found Madaket in the kitchen washing up the bowls and pans. Joanna took another brownie and leaned on the counter companionably.

  “Don’t tell anyone, but I find both those men really sexy,” she confessed to Madaket in a low voice.

  Madaket’s black gaze flashed over Joanna’s face then back down into the sink of soapy water. “Mr. Snow, too?” she asked.

  “Mr. Snow especially. He’s got such an aura of intensity about him. I find him terribly interesting.”

  Madaket smiled grimly. “I find him frightening.”

  “Doug Snow, frightening?”

  “Yes.” Stacking the final pan in the drainer and pulling out the sink plug, Madaket turned to dry her hands on a dish towel.

  “How odd. I don’t get that feeling. I mean, Doug is shorter than Todd and slighter. And older. Todd’s bigger and has that rebellious teen idol look about him.”

  Madaket bent over with a whisk broom and a dustpan just then, so Joanna could not see the young woman’s face when she said, “If Todd were a rebel, do you think he’d be working for his father?”

  “You mean he wanted to do something else?”

  “Oh, I don’t mean he’s ever talked to me about this personally. We know each other because we both grew up here, but I certainly don’t run with his crowd, but everyone has heard, everyone knows—Todd was a great football player, and he’s smart. He could have gotten an athletic scholarship to college, perhaps even an academic one. But his father didn’t want him going off to college. Didn’t want him to leave the island. Wanted him to work with him. And that’s what Todd’s doing.”

  “You like Todd, don’t you?”

  Madaket put things away in the broom closet and closed the door. Turning, she looked directly at Joanna and, smiling, answered, “Everyone likes Todd.”

  “And Doug?”

  The light left her face. “I don’t know. I know he didn’t like my father—at all—and consequently I’m sure he doesn’t
think much of me. Perhaps he suspects—I mean, I know this is impossible and sounds egotistical of me even to say it—but I think Mr. Snow thinks I might, oh, seduce Todd somehow and make him marry me or something.” The young woman’s hands flew up to cover her face. “I probably shouldn’t have said that. I’m embarrassed to have said that. But I want you to understand why I get so—stupid—around Mr. Snow. I know he’s never liked me. I know he’s suspicious of me.”

  “I think you misjudge him, Madaket. In fact, Doug Snow spoke very highly of you the day you came out to apply for the job. He said you were hardworking; he recommended you highly.”

  “Really?” Madaket looked surprised.

  “Really. He didn’t have one negative thing to say about you.” Joanna waited a moment to let her disclosure sink in. “I suggest you give him a chance. But anyway, Madaket, I like you, and if Doug Snow ever says anything against you, I’ll just tell him to mind his own business and go back to his boards. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Madaket smiled shyly at Joanna. “I’d better go finish vacuuming now.”

  Madaket went off, and Joanna returned to the dining room, holding her brownie in one hand while she took up her pen with the other. She bent over her work, intending to concentrate on the letter from Dahlia Martin in Virginia, who wanted to turn a former stable into a recreation/game room and connect it to the kitchen of the main house and needed clever ideas about how to best utilize the necessary twenty feet of space. Joanna had several suggestions and sketches, but for the moment she was preoccupied with thoughts of Doug and Todd and Madaket.

  Was Doug Snow really frightening? Certainly he was intense. That perhaps would be enough to intimidate a young woman; Joanna had to remember that Madaket was still an adolescent, and Doug Snow was old enough to be her father. Perhaps any paternal authority figure was frightening to her. She remembered how long it had taken her to feel comfortable with any older person in authority when she first started working at the network.

  The crucial point was that Doug Snow behaved with civility toward Madaket. Joanna didn’t foresee problems arising from them all working in the house together.

  Except, she thought, and she sighed and ran her hands over her belly, whatever problems her own conscience gave her for the foolish and secretly delicious lust she felt for Doug Snow.

  Twelve

  Joanna was constantly amazed by the light. So much light, such a variety: the spacious, generous, steady gold of day; the shadowy, textured, flickering luminescence during a storm; the dramatic, silvery, blue-tinged intensity of a starry night. When the moon was full, the entire world seemed to expand. One night she walked along the beach all by herself under a full white moon. The sky was indigo, the air and sand were lavender, and the ocean was a shivering sheet of radiance.

  She’d never cared much for light before. It had always been something to work with, or against, as she and her crew tried to set up shots in which the right objects would be spotlighted and the wrong ones obscured. For years she’d dashed into the network before light and out after dark, unfazed. She hadn’t had time to pay attention to something as trivial as the weather. Personally, she’d thought of strong sunlight as a kind of enemy who provoked wrinkles and skin cancer on her face as well as perspiration stains on her clothes. In her New York apartment, her kitchen and bathroom had been illuminated only by fluorescent lights, so that day and night were the same. The studios at the network were similarly windowless.

  Now it seemed to her that every steady beam of sunlight carried with it a kind of tranquilizing force. She could hardly pass by any especially sunny spot without wanting to curl up in it and snooze like a cat. Her pregnancy, of course. She was always drowsy in the honeyed light of day.

  Somehow this was all mysteriously connected with her new ability to be alone. She enjoyed the sounds of Madaket and Todd and Doug coming and going in her house; she liked lunching with Tory and was delighted by her growing friendship with Pat. But she’d discovered within her a surprising capacity for solitude. In the evenings she could sit on the chaise on the screened porch, listening to the birds and the insects, gazing at the way the light filtered through the leaves on the screens, or walk along the beach, watching the setting sun throw sequins on the waves, or even sit curled up on her sofa in the living room, staring at a patch of blue sky as it gradually, silently deepened into indigo. So much as an hour could slide by. She sat in a blissful daze, growing her babies. She imagined herself as a kind of basic creature; she fancied herself connected at last with all sorts of things, other people, animals, plants, with even the light itself.

  June deepened into true summer. She was fully in her fifth month of pregnancy. She’d already gained thirty pounds. Her babies were growing.

  Every morning she’d lie in bed on awakening, just staring at the sky, half dreaming, feeling her babies move inside her with little stirring, turning movements. It felt the way a stone skipping over water looked: there—there—there. She put her hands on her belly and felt the skipping movement on both the right and the left.

  “Hello in there,” she said. “This is your mother with the morning weather report. Too bad you can’t see it, it’s a glorious day. We’ll be having orange juice and blueberry muffins for breakfast; Madaket’s bringing some out fresh from town.”

  Was she fooling herself to think the babies fluttered in response to her voice? She tried to envision them inside her, curled up in their wet chamber, growing.

  In early June Gardner Adams had offered her the opportunity to have amniocentesis done; she had decided against it. After discussing it carefully with the obstetrician, they’d concluded that the one percent chance of spontaneous abortion from amniocentesis, as well as the attendant emotional upheaval often caused by the procedure and the period of waiting, was in this case worth avoiding. If, Gardner pointed out, something was found to be wrong with one of the babies, the sheer grief and guilt and turbulence of deciding whether or not to attempt a “selective birth” might be enough to cause a spontaneous abortion of both babies.

  But even if the procedure were to go perfectly, Joanna felt an instinctive aversion to too much knowledge about her babies. Perhaps she was being superstitious, primitive, naive, but it seemed that Nature or Fate or simple Accident had given her these children, this family of hers, and she knew and felt that it was absolutely right, the right time, even the right number. Two babies. An entire and complete family.

  Dr. Adams had also told her that with either ultrasound or amniocentesis they could detect the sex of the babies. No, thanks, she’d said. She didn’t want to be deprived of the excitement of the news at birth, and just being pregnant was exciting enough for now. Secretly she believed that the babies were a boy and a girl.

  Joanna was stirring her first cup of decaf of the day when Doug ambled in smelling of salt air and sunshine. He held out a package wrapped in brown paper.

  “Like bluefish?”

  “I’ve never had it.”

  “Try it. Madaket will know how to cook it. I caught it this morning.”

  “This morning?” She looked at her wrist; her watch read exactly eight o’clock.

  He smiled his lazy, sensual, seductive smile. “Some of us get up earlier than others.” With a nod, he sauntered off and up the stairs to work.

  Often when he came down to refill his mug from the fresh pot of coffee Madaket kept hot on the stove, he’d stick his head out through the dining room door and ask, “How’re you doin’ today?”

  “I’m getting stiff from hunching over this computer.”

  “Well, why not come on up and help us out? We’ll loosen you up a bit.”

  His comments, and hers, too, it seemed, were very lightly laced with sexual innuendo; but perhaps that was only her perception. She doubted that he found her an irresistibly sexual object in her increasingly large tops.

  Occasionally all four of them enjoyed moments of congenial conversation, especially over town gossip; then Madaket and Doug and Todd all vied to de
scribe the particular characters in colorful detail to Joanna. It seemed a special source of joy to the three natives when Donald Trump’s yacht was unable to enter Nantucket’s harbor because it drew too much water.

  One especially lovely morning the sun was so bright and the air so fresh that Joanna couldn’t bear to stay tucked away inside with her paperwork. She went off in search of Madaket and found her out in the driveway, slamming shut the rear door of the Jeep.

  “What are you up to?” Joanna asked.

  Madaket rested her foot on the rear bumper and bent forward to retie her work boot, her long black hair, pulled back in a ponytail today, falling over her shoulder. She wore a blue cotton dress which rather resembled a child’s pinafore: loose and falling nearly to her ankles, it buttoned down the back and had deep patch pockets on the skirt. As Madaket moved, the lines of her very adult body were traced out in silhouette by the sunlight. She had a lovely, full-bodied, deeply sexual figure, with broad hips and enormous breasts swelling out over a slender waist. No wonder she wore loose-fitting dresses. Men would stare at her otherwise, would think her very body an invitation.

  “I’m taking another pile of junk out to the dump. I have to go through town on the way. Need anything?”

  “Just a break. I’m restless. I’ll ride out with you.”

  “To the dump?” Madaket looked amused.

  “Sure. I’ve never been to the town dump. As a matter of fact, I’ve never been to any dump. If I’m going to live here, I ought to know how to find it.”

  “Okay,” Madaket agreed. “Hop in.”

  With the windows rolled down and the radio tuned to an oldies station, Joanna and Madaket drove through the green countryside. Overhead, the sky was a delicate hydrangea blue. At the rotary Madaket turned left, taking the route past Finast and then up the hill past the windmill to the Madaket Road. Along the curving residential streets, people knelt at work in their flower beds. Farther out on the Madaket Road, rugosa roses spilled over white fences and horses nibbled new grass, their coats gleaming in the sun. As the Jeep drew near the dump, they had joined a line of trucks filled with grass cuttings and old brush.