The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

11

Joan had never liked fairs, had only occasionally pushed through the crowded blocks of the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy when she lived in New York, down the avenues closed to traffic for the street fairs that sprung up in spring and summer there. But it was the fair here, in the place she referred to as home, regardless of how it actually felt to her, with its tie-dye artists, potter, painter, writer, that cast a spell, shifted the gears in her brain, charged up her heart, unleashed her soul. She felt the bonds loosening, her tortured body stretching, already picturing herself walking free and unfettered. There was a future out there, only a spot on the horizon, and years away, but she could see it there in the distance, with her naked eyes.

It was past midnight when she stepped outside. In one hand she held the piece of paper with the single paragraph it took her twenty-four attempts to get right, and a glass of wine in the other. Her old desk was still pitched in the grass, and she set down the paper and glass, sat down on the wooden bench they had found somewhere, a yard sale, or the thrift shop, and she looked up, searching for the man in the moon.

The last time she felt this flame she was writing the Rare Baby stories, and before that The Sympathetic Executioners, no matter its failure, and before that, her celebrated collections. Five long years of a depleted brain, worried, then certain, that the precious part of herself had been destroyed. Fiction was what she read in books written by others, borrowed from the Rhome Library, purchased from Odile at the Tell-Tale, from Sessa at the Inveterate Reader, sent to her by Iger in the form of Gravida’s prepublication copies, where Annabelle was now the senior vice president and associate publisher. Joan had not written a single line in these last years, not even an entry in those small notebooks she once stashed in various places, all discovered and used for other purposes a long time ago.

But now there was most of August to endure, before Eric started kindergarten and Daniel fifth grade. A sprawling month before Eric was gone from nine until noon, and Daniel gone until three. She could not bear the thought of delaying, of shuffling through the rest of the summer while the story was fresh in her mind. She could make notes, write longhand, but it would not be the same, she had not written that way since she was a girl. She needed quiet, emptiness, the compression of her fingertips on the keys, her Olivetti pulsing to her internal beat.

Martin never came home in the middle of any day, but she needed the boys, and Fancy, out of the house on a predetermined schedule, for a dedicated number of hours Monday through Friday.

Fancy was wonderful with them, taking them to the park to play, for bike rides along the river path that fronted the Potomac, within riding distance of the house, special trips for miniature golf or bowling and pizza one town away, but the time frame was not at all firm, sometimes it lasted for a morning or an afternoon, other times barely half an hour. And if Fancy dropped Daniel and Eric off at the homes of their friends, between the delivering and the fetching, she always ended up back at the house for the duration, busying herself in the kitchen, preparing fabulous dishes, but it was the only room in the house with a table on which a person could spread out and work.

Joan might steal time during their out-of-house adventures, but there was no certainty to it, and to truly get under way she needed what she used to have: hours that piled up in a freewheeling way, not writing in some truncated fashion. She needed to feel secure in her ability to get lost in this new dazzling world she was conceiving, and that would not happen if she had an ear cocked for a car that sounded like hers, Fancy at the wheel, the garage door opening, then the back door, suddenly accosted, waylaid by children with questions. She did not want to race around the kitchen, yanking the cord from the wall, stashing the typewriter, pen, pad, the pages she planned to write beyond that initial paragraph, the notes she would soon make, the first edited pages that would accrue, into a box in the hall closet, to be hidden beneath a pile of old jackets she had failed, since spring, to drop into the Goodwill bin in the supermarket parking lot.

It was too late to sign the boys up for day camp, and even if it wasn’t, Daniel would not willingly go. He could be found most of the time this summer past the knoll, down in the grassy glen on their land, where the two of them still sometimes had their informal chats about the books he read. He was never without the book he was currently reading and his notebook filled with drafts of new squirrel stories. Weekends were not the issue; by now, Joan was well versed in how those formerly empty hours, during which she once always worked, filled up with the needs and wants of others.

A shooting star punctured the night sky and Joan ran through a list of what she would give to have all the days available to her again. Martin did his best to be home on the weekends, to schedule tricky surgeries on Thursdays, rather than Fridays, planning his travel so that when the children woke on Saturday mornings, he was there at the breakfast table as often as he was able. When he was home, the children ran to him, jumped on his back, wanted him to play catch, kick around a soccer ball. He was a genuinely fine and good father, invested too, just not around consistently, or all that much. At the start of the summer, there had been an article in the New York Times about one of the new surgeries he was perfecting, toric IOL implantation in patients with mild or forme fruste keratoconus, and since then he was busy presenting his findings at hospitals in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and DC. When he was home, though, by noon on the weekends he set up the Slip ’N Slide she had bought at Walmart, rolling out the long plastic sheet down from the top of the knoll, then spraying it with water from the hose. Joan always joined them out there, on a towel at the crest of the small hill, yelling, “Go Daniel. Go Eric,” as the boys threw themselves on the wet plastic, their faces lit up, their smiles so huge. She had the sense, those weekends, that she was storing up memories that one day, if she needed them, she could flip through like photographs: a hot sun, a cool ride across bright-green grass, the paintbrushed colors of the flower gardens in the distance, the boys not waiting for their own turns but chasing each other down the wet runway until they careened into each other on the plastic, sending up rainbows of water, she and Martin laughing and cheering. She loved watching their trunks sliding down their pale backsides from the friction of skin on water on plastic, the way they both hauled them back up, as if she and Martin had not seen them naked from birth. Several times, watching Joan and Martin in their bathing suits sliding down the plastic through the cold water, like the children they had never been, the boys screamed in delight. They still had fun when it was just Joan who readied the Slip ’N Slide, but they didn’t scream the same way, as if letting free everything they carried inside. The proportions were off, they were growing older, and Martin was a necessary ballast, the one who was not tarred with the eternal tag of Mother.

The breeze blew through the red maples, the elms, and Cleveland pear trees she and Fancy had planted nine years before. The maples were nearly fourteen feet high, the elms fifteen, the pear trees thirteen, their spreads now impressive, no longer the stick figures they had been. In the spring, the dense profusion of white pear flowers and maple buds was beautiful. Now everything was green, the pear leaves glossily green, but a little worn out from the heat. A week straight in the nineties. But the night breeze was cooling things down, and Joan went inside.

It was past one, and she was too wound up to sleep. She poured herself more wine and remembered when Daniel was four and a half, and she and the Pregnant Six signed the children up for swim lessons at the community center. Back in the pool they had once swum in together, seven mothers standing in the water, holding six girls and one boy in brightly colored suits, colorful water wings wrapped around their tender, unformed biceps. Such trust in Daniel’s heart as she pulled him through the water. He had cinched his head back like a turtle, his eyes squinting against the splash of the water.

“I used to swim here every day,” she had whispered into his ear. “When you were inside of me. We swam together before you could breathe air, both of us in the pool. Actually, you swam in two pools, in this one, and in here,” she said, pointing at her stomach.

“So do I already know how to swim and I just forgot?” he had wanted to know.

In the second lesson, he gathered his courage, as the little girls did not, striking out on his own across the length of the shallow end, his feet kicking hard, his clear water wings flapping, his brown curls flattened against his small wet skull. He had looked like a lacewing, those slender, delicate insects with large and clear membranous wings that had discovered the roses she and Fancy planted at the front of the house, feeding, they learned, on the aphids that had taken up residence, distorting the flowers, leaving behind pale green secretions like mini-honeydews in a patch. Daniel could destroy nothing, that grin on his face, looking as if he could lift himself out of the water and fly away, so pleased with himself when his fingers grasped the concrete ledge on the other side.

Joan finished her wine and went inside. She brushed her teeth and washed her face. She was tan from the summer, her cheeks pinkly glowing from the day. She found the jar in the medicine cabinet and moisturized as she did not always remember to do. Clean T-shirt and pajama bottoms, she climbed into the empty bed, and the memory of those swim classes with Daniel gave rise to a viable plan.

She was dreaming that she was in a field, grass, enormous sunflowers, hundreds of beautiful people stretched out, languorous and laughing, on blankets and sheets, dancing to the sound of chimes and tambourines and acoustic guitars, others were handing out tiaras and crowns, crystal glasses filled with blushing wine that sparkled in the sun. They were young and old, and those like her, neither young nor old, in ball gowns, dashikis, loincloths, bathing suits, fringed jackets, and naked bodies too, in all shades, a thousand languages being spoken all at once, a chorus of sounds lifting up into the atmosphere. Hanging down from the clouds in the sky were paintings of stars, the moon, the sun. Wild horses ran in the distance, sinews caught in the sun. Over the glorious cacophony, the stampede of those hooves was fading away, the horses disappearing, racing down into a canyon she could not see.

A noise woke her. She leaned over to Martin’s empty side of the bed, her eyes were barely open, she was the tiniest bit bleary from the wine. She tried reading the hands on his dead father’s clock. It was four, or maybe five, in the morning, the hour and minute hands were too similar to discern which. The creak of wood under bare feet, nearing their bedroom, then Martin was slipping into the bed behind her, naked, running his hands under her T-shirt, cool against her warm skin, pulling down her pajama pants. He was deep inside of her when he whispered, “Do you ever think of having another child?” She did not turn her head when she said, “I never thought of having the ones we did.”

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