The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

LITERATURE MAGAZINE

Fall Issue

(RE)INTRODUCING JOAN ASHBY

Joan Ashby is one of our most astonishing writers, a master of words whose profound characters slip free of the page and enter the world, breathing and enduring, finding pain or solace, even happiness, seeking a way forward, or a way out, their lives keenly and deeply observed. From the muscular to the sublime, her language renders precisely the shadowy contradictions she finds in human behavior, capturing, distilling, and purifying the complex, ambiguous, often porous lives her people navigate. Through the powerful lens of her work, readers discover the secret hearts of their own temperaments.

Enthralling, riveting, often shocking, her stories are as undeniable as her talent. She has said that reaching the marrow of her people, their quintessential facets, requires her own fortitude, an ability to simultaneously engage and detach, to be passionate yet impassive, and sometimes even remote.

We have been allowed to explore the notebooks she once religiously maintained and still possesses. Labeled Favorite Words, Books I Am Reading, Quotes Never to Forget, Stories, and How to Do It, they are fascinating reading, for in them the young writer announces, if only to herself, who she is, who she intends to be, what she intends to accomplish in her life.

In the notebook titled How to Do It, thirteen-year-old Joan Ashby articulates nine revealing precepts she was determined to follow in order to become a writer:

1. Do not waste time

2. Ignore Eleanor when she tells me I need friends1

3. Read great literature every day

4. Write every day

5. Rewrite every day

6. Avoid crushes and love

7. Do not entertain any offer of marriage

8. Never ever have children

9. Never allow anyone to get in my way

Eight years after penning these precepts, she burst onto the literary scene with her brilliant collection about incest, murder, insanity, suicide, abandonment, and the theft of lives. She was just twenty-one, the year was 1985, and Other Small Spaces was an extraordinary accomplishment. An instant sensation among reviewers, critics, and loyalists of literary fiction, it was a surprise entry on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, where it held for two weeks. The subject matter was disturbing, but the book’s unique heralding quality deeply touched readers whose adoration of the work turned rabid and created word-of-mouth interest beyond its initial fan base. Several months later, when this unsettling debut by such a young writer was crowned with the National Book Award, the anointment generated unprecedented attention and controversy. As a result, an enormous domestic audience searched it out, and when the collection was translated into thirty-five languages, its audience became universal. Amidst such excitement and furor, the book reappeared on the bestseller list and remained there for a year, the rare story collection to attain such status. Soon, Joan Ashby was a writer known throughout most of the world.

In 1989, four years after the publication of Other Small Spaces, Ashby continued her tremendous success with the compelling and complex Fictional Family Life, a collection of superbly interlocked stories with a sixteen-year-old boy at its center.

Fictional Family Life spectacularly demonstrated Ashby’s vast range, and the world again responded. At twenty-five, she had a second acclaimed collection. When the book was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, it catapulted to bestselling status and remained on the New York Times list for its own remarkable year.

It has been nearly three decades since Joan Ashby published anything new, and in our desire to introduce, or reintroduce, Joan Ashby, we are reprinting excerpts from both of her collections.2

We start with “The Last Resort,” and “Bettina’s Children,” the stories that bookend Other Small Spaces.

THE LAST RESORT

For a month, Owl Man has been saying he will let me out of here if I am honest. Again and again, he says to me, “Just once, I want you to do what I’ve asked. Wake up and write down the thoughts that first assail you.”

“Owl Man, assail is a glorious word,” I say to him five mornings a week when I am hauled in here at ten sharp by colossal black-as-night guards dressed all in white, my scrawny biceps in their paws, my paper-slippered feet dragging behind me. It’s a lesson in geometry, the way they gently unhinge my angles and joints until I am seated in the brown leather chair that faces its mate, where Owl Man sits. The guards always wait until I swallow my pills, and when they leave us, Owl Man says, “Let’s tackle these easy subjects again. What’s your name?”

“Guess,” is my regular opener.

“Can you tell me where are you?”

“The Last Resort.”

Sometimes when I say that, Owl Man smiles.

Today it’s the same routine: Released from my barred and locked room by Jim I and Jim II—my names for them, though the tags on their broad chests say Terrence and Golly V., one American, one clearly Indian-from-India—I’m dragged down a bunch of hallways to Owl Man’s office. Then it’s me in my seat, the cone of water in my hand, the pills down my gullet, the guard’s usual question: “You okay here, Doc, we can stay outside, be available to you?” Terrence does all the talking for he and Golly V., and despite my sustained fury, I think it’s sort of nice how Terrence has Golly V. under his wing, the same way the pills are winging their way into my bloodstream.

This morning, after Owl Man shuts the door, but before he begins the usual grilling, I jump in and say, “Got something for you, Dr. Samuel Swann,” and it’s fun watching his head rear back because I’ve used his real name.

In the beginning, my hands were shackled, bound together with those plastic handcuffs, but today I’ve been delivered with my hands belonging to me. I hold them up now, say, “No weapons, just something I’ve got for you, something that will make you sing and set me free.”

Slowly, so slowly, I reach down into the crevice between breasts once lovingly admired and pull out a sheaf of pages. Already the handwriting looks foreign, shaky and disturbed, not at all the beautiful penmanship that used to win me gold stickers in childhood.

“You want to know the thoughts that assail me when I first wake? Well, here you go. Ten pages of my true beliefs,” and I drop into Owl Man’s flushed palm the whole of my life.

He asks me something real then, his voice nearly tender. “May I read these pages aloud? So we both can hear what you have to say?”

My head is doing the weird pill dance, swinging back and forth like a dying flower in a strong wind, the petals about to fall to earth, to be trampled and turned into crap that sticks, with other crap, to the bottoms of soles. Amidst all the head-bobbing, I say, “Here’s my offer. You find the relevant parts and read them out loud, or I shut this down. I don’t want to hear all of it again, not from start to finish. I’ve lived it once, would rather not return for another visit.”

“Which would you prefer?”

“I don’t know Swann, you’re the doctor. I’m fairly certain that in my real life I own a lovely apartment and have two cats who adore me, and once, not even that long ago, I used to have friends, and a serious profession, and I went to movies, and thought about going to the ballet and the opera, and I took hot baths, and never worried about offing myself, and I had a man who loved me and knew how to make me yell out in delight. So, what will it take to get me out of here and back home? What’s going to have the most ameliorative effect?”

“Ameliorative effect,” Owl Man says. “I like that.”

“Me too,” I say, in a calm voice that surprises us both.

Owl Man begins to read and I am convinced, first, that I am a wizard with words, how I make them arch like green leaves over tiny beauteous flowers, and send them soaring like silvered planes that leave behind fairy dust in the blue firmament, that I am a remarkable talent. Second, that I am shocked by the person I have become. I do not recall writing, just this morning, about my desire to kill everyone I have ever known. All the throat-slitting, the fish-gutting, the stranglings I intend to inflict on the people I thought I still loved.

Swann’s harmonious tone stays even, but I feel a million insects shivering up through my insides, taking up residence in the thin layer of skin that no longer protects me well from the world. When he comes to a stop and looks at me, I pretend I am lamb-calm, whistling through the wind.

“So the gist is, you would like a clean slate, live in a world where you can start fresh, become someone else, have no ties to the past, eliminate everyone currently entwined in your life.”

I don’t answer, just study his hanging diplomas in their fake wooden frames, think about the havoc I would wreak in a second on the supposedly innocent, how I would demonstrate to every one of them, in slow and painful ways, the taint lodged so deep in their hearts—

BETTINA’S CHILDREN

When Bettina was twelve years old and already half an orphan, her great-aunt—the aunt of her still-living father—gave her a series of books that told the story of Nurse Claire Peters. These books were not picture books; nonetheless Bettina could picture Claire, bright in her white uniform, beautiful despite the small white cap atop her lush blond hair, walking hushed hospital corridors, entering room after room, moving from bed to bed, her cool hands bringing relief, her changeling voice flowing from blue to violet to purple to the prettiest of greens, different colors for different maladies, the right ones always returning her sick and sometimes crotchety patients to vibrant life.

In Bettina’s mind, Claire’s lips were always shimmering in Claire’s favorite pink lipstick, and Claire’s eyes, observant and alert, the color of purified honey, were opened so wide that she always saw the truth of it all: what people were like when death was upon them. She held their hands then, to bring them forward to the light.

It took Bettina nearly that entire year to read the twenty-book series straight through, wishing with juvenile hope that her curly brown hair would turn as golden and straight as Claire’s, that one day her own lips, thinner than she would have wished, but prettily bowed, would look nice in some similar shimmering pink shade, and when Bettina stacked all the books in her closet, she had decided she would become a nurse.

In nursing school, Bettina found peace with her own uninteresting looks, turning herself outward, focusing quietly, privately, on her natural healing talents; she was often several diagnostic steps ahead of the doctors to whom she was to defer. In the books, Claire never aged or thought about romance, despite being surrounded by handsome doctors, but in her own daily chores as a nurse, Bettina found true love.

At odd times in the staff’s cafeteria, she would see one of the emergency room doctors, the tall ascetic one, but otherwise their paths did not cross: Bettina worked up on a general floor, and he down below, where the world washed ashore its human traumas.

One day, that emergency room doctor bought her a tea, a few days later a lunch. Standing in the cafeteria line next to Bettina, he looked down upon her from his great height and said, “I’m Jeffrey Caslon,” and Bettina nodded and slid her tray up to the cashier, and he said, “Oh, no, I’m paying. After all, this is our first date.” She had not realized it was any such thing.

Some weeks later, on a crisp and starry night, Dr. Caslon led Bettina outside, kissed her with a fervency she returned, and, at his request, Bettina transferred to the emergency room, aligning their shifts. She had not thought she would like her new assignment, but she relished its feral nature, the way the maimed, the shot, the stabbed, and those mysteriously sick arrived in the impure hours past midnight. Six months later, they had a small wedding in the chapel on the hospital grounds. A few months after that, their life then combined into Jeffrey’s spartan bachelor flat, he inherited a substantial sum from an old great-aunt of his own.

When Jeffrey said to Bettina, “Would you consider moving to Africa? Do our part to make the world a bit better?” they were in the emergency room, facing each other across the body of a middle-aged man who, in death, exhibited the true dourness that had infected his soul.

Bettina needed no time to consider. She would be Claire Peters on a grander stage, with money in her pocket, love in her heart, her portable nursing skills freely available to those whose locus of birth created lives rife with disease, with too little to eat, with water that was unclean.

Soon, the Caslons were in a remote part of Nigeria. Jeffrey spread his inheritance around, hiring locals to build them a house, and the clinic they named the Caslon Clinic. They received the first shipments of medical equipment brought, on its last leg, in a rickety plane that landed on a dusty strip beyond the village, used as a playground by the native children for their made-up games.

The Caslons were a great draw; their pale skin, their small features, the certainty they exuded, the smiles they bestowed, all of it warmed the villagers.