The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  And he loved her, obviously. He didn’t have to do these things for her, after all. He didn’t have to drive her home, or take her by the Stop & Shop if she needed something, waiting outside where he could be seen by everyone. He didn’t have to hold her by the roadside before she stepped out of his car, out of the world of light, and tell her—unnecessarily, as it happened, because he had told her before—that she was beautiful. Married people seldom had as much, at least the ones Heather could see. She began to look at them now, these paired-off people, in the supermarket or the sports center, or flashing past in their own cars as Heather drove by with her lover. She saw how marriage hardened the husbands and thickened the wives, how conversation between them became competitive, then punitive, before finally crusting into silence. The couples aged separately, companionable or acrimonious, but ultimately unconnected, like horses yoked together and apart at the same time. If this was marriage, Heather thought, she was not unhappy without it.

  Not that it didn’t pain her, seeing Sue. She seemed to see Sue everywhere now, like a word you learn the meaning of and then suddenly begin to hear on everyone’s lips. This person had been yanked from anonymity and hurled into a state of ubiquity by Ashley’s brisk nod in the parking lot as she climbed in beside him one afternoon, his hushed “My wife’s car. Let’s go.” Heather watched for it after that, and indeed it seemed to turn up regularly in the early afternoons, because Heather had known Ashley’s wife for months, she realized now. At least by sight: a tall figure in a flannel shirt, with one rope-thick blond braid down between her shoulder blades and a liquid gaze that slithered past Heather at the reception desk as Sue walked through to the women’s locker room. She came to swim her laps, before the kids appeared for lessons and churned up the water. Heather, who couldn’t swim herself, had no way of telling whether Sue was a good swimmer, but she certainly kept at it for a long time, droning up and down her allotted lane, her goggled eyes dreamily examining the ceiling with every other stroke. Even before she had known her for who she was, Heather had envied this person, admiring her strong though inelegant legs, her bright hair, loosened from its braid afterward, stiffened with chlorine. This person who needed nothing from her, who even brought her own towels in a faded UVM gym bag, who barely deviated in her course to flash a membership card at the unremarkable person who sat behind the reception desk.

  Now that Heather knew Sue, she saw Sue. She saw her at the Stop & Shop, listlessly tossing groceries into one of the rickety carts, and at the Laundromat, reading The Boston Globe as Ashley’s clothes were purged of their evidence, and at Tom and Whit’s, snapping through the pages of the seed catalogues. Heather herself found it curious that, even in her heightened awareness of Ashley’s wife, she bore no special animosity toward this person. That Sue declined to take notice of her was not, in itself, an offense. She was used, after all, to being taken no notice of, and in any case, Sue was a contained kind of person. Where Ashley was gregarious, she seemed to give off a chill of courteous self-sufficiency. She had no family here, Heather reasoned, but then again Ashley hadn’t either. They had come together from Burlington, where they’d met as students—not to stay, but for the summer only, so Ashley could work for the builder who’d won the sports center contract.

  Heather, amazed, considered the chronology. She would have been a junior in high school, up in Goddard Falls, without a car of her own. She would barely have ventured into town all summer. She had only the sparsest memories of the sports center taking shape on its riverbank at the end of Elm Street, carapace to corpus, with its small army of bronzing men crawling over it. And yet he had been here, nearby, all along.

  Then, when the work ended, he quarreled with the builder. The builder, he said, was a coarse man, and stupid. He did not know how to treat a client. He did not know how to make a building. Ashley began to find clients of his own. The following spring he’d tacked a solarium onto the back of Stephen Trask’s ranch—an ugly thing, in his own opinion, but there wasn’t much you could do to a ranch that wasn’t ugly—and so found his way back to the sports center and a regular, if part-time, salary as handyman.

  Heather looked past his shoulder, idly smelling the flannel of his work shirt. She had noted Sue’s detergent and begun to use it for her own clothes. She loved to sleep in sheets that smelled of Ashley. The forest darkened earlier and earlier now, and they had to keep the motor running for the warmth. Already the windshield would be matted with leaves by the time they finished, and Heather had a vision of the forest heaving up and covering her, in her pleasure and happiness, to keep her safe with Ashley and him safe with her. But through the leaves, the skeletal fingers of pointing branches remained, awaiting their winter accusations.

  She took Ashley’s hand from its resting place deep in her own hair, held it to the last of the light, and kissed it. The fine thing—that thing that was not herself, and not him, but a consummation exceeding them both—had begun to thrill her, a ghost of an idea, a quickening of love, a potent and dangerous infusion of delight. Her secret.

  Ashley sighed, moved lower, and, as if by clairvoyance, kissed her abdomen. “You’re so great,” he said, to it or to her.

  “Who?” said Heather, frowning.

  He laughed. “Oh, I don’t know. What’d you say your name was again?”

  “I haven’t named her,” Heather said. Then: “I mean, it. But I bet it’s a girl.”

  The wind found a crack in a window and stole inside. The sheen of sweat between them iced over. Ashley’s expression didn’t change, but it edged into stone.

  “How long?”

  She reached down to him, to his face. To her intense relief, he kissed her finger as it went by.

  “Two months.”

  They were two months old themselves.

  Ashley said nothing. From outside, the rumble of the river as it passed them by. Nocturnal things woke up on all sides and spoke their minds. The shadow where his face had been only moments before began to shake from side to side.

  “It’s all right?” Heather said. “You don’t mind?”

  “No,” he said. “But it’s funny, you know.”

  By queer coincidence, his wife was pregnant, too.

  Chapter 13

  An H Like an A

  “YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL ME, HEATHER?”

  Stephen Trask had her in the family room, a faux-pine chamber choked with matching chairs which all seemed to La-Z-Boy back. She could hear Celia in the kitchen, telling one of the boys to keep his hands out of the spaghetti sauce.

  “Well,” she heard herself say, “no.” She wasn’t leaping to conclusions here.

  Stephen glared at her, and Heather was a bit taken aback. If she’d known this was to be the purpose of his invitation she would have said no, flat-out. She hadn’t wanted to come home with him for dinner anyway. Going for dinner at the Trasks’ meant a lost ride with Ashley, a trade-off that seemed grossly unfair. But he’d never asked before and Heather hadn’t known how to refuse. Now, tense in her absurdly relaxing chair, she braced for the next assault.

  “I can’t stand to see you do this,” Stephen said, gritting his teeth. “You know, I can’t stand this.”

  She tossed her head. “There’s nothing wrong. Everything’s fine. Everything’s great.”

  “Everything’s not great, Heather.” He stopped, regrouped, and leaned forward, his chair bowing into the room. His high pale forehead furrowed in concern. “I know you had a rough time in Hanover. I know you felt you couldn’t hack it. I understand that. But you can try again.”

  “I don’t want to try again.” She sipped tomato juice. She had asked for tomato juice because she had read that it was good for the baby, but she had no particular taste for it.

  Stephen shook his head grimly. “No, I wasn’t thinking of Dartmouth. I can appreciate that must have been a shock. But you could go to UNH, Heather. They’d take you in a flash. Listen,” he said, urgent, “you’re doing a terrific job at the center. It’s worked out rea
lly well. But it never occurred to me you wouldn’t try college again.”

  “But why?” She shrugged. “Why should I? I’m happy here.”

  Celia came in, bumping Heather’s chair with her shin. Her blond hair was wedged back in the haircut that had not even looked good on Dorothy Hamill. She was a smugly maternal woman with two sweet chins, a torso wrapped densely in fat. She had some wine in a glass with a long stem. Noting the charged silence, she readjusted her smile into a frown of concern. Heather felt as if she were facing some kind of oral exam.

  “You know how long it’s been since Goddard Falls produced somebody capable of getting into an Ivy League school?”

  It all felt so distant, and Heather sighed accordingly. It felt like somebody else’s story by now. Her concerns were more immediate, and incidentally far more pleasant. The spaghetti sauce smelled good. She wondered what Celia put in hers; Heather’s own never smelled like this. “Is that garlic?” she asked.

  Celia looked at her husband.

  “Heather, Christ, what the hell are you up to with Ashley? Where do you think that’s going to go?”

  To hear his name spoken aloud, his name and her own in one breath, was a rush. Involuntarily Heather smiled. “I love him,” she informed them.

  Celia, to her credit, did not react. Trask groaned loudly. “Oh, Heather. I really wanted more for you.”

  More from you, she interpreted this to mean.

  “You’re not exactly being discreet,” he said tightly.

  Heather sat up straight. “I’ve got nothing to hide. I’m happy.”

  “You’re carrying on with somebody who’s married. At least,” he said gruffly, “that’s how it’s going to be seen.”

  “I don’t care,” Heather said, because she didn’t.

  “Other people will care,” said Celia. Her voice was soft. She was the good cop.

  “That’s fine.” She shrugged. It seemed as if people were usually angry at her, anyway.

  “But why should it be fine for you, Heather?” Stephen insisted. “Why should that be enough for you, an affair with a man who’ll never leave his wife? And he never will, Heather, I can assure you. You’re young and you’re bright, and you have a real opportunity to make something of yourself. You think your classmates could go to college like you did? You could be anything—a doctor, even. Or, I don’t know, a business person. You could have seen something of the world.”

  “But I don’t want to see the world. I like it here,” Heather said simply. “I like my life. I like working for you and living with Pick. And she’s not too strong anymore, you know. She needs my help for things. And I’m in love,” she added, as if this settled things. It should settle things, after all. It was a vast event, dividing time, changing the course of history.

  “Ashley,” said Celia Trask carefully, “is very handsome. He has not been the most constant of husbands.”

  Heather turned to look at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?” She was honestly perplexed.

  It meant, Celia told her, that she wasn’t the first girl he’d paid attention to, but Heather just stared. Surely Celia could understand that nothing Ashley had done before had the slightest relevance to Heather. After all, Ashley was married. If she were to be angry about anything it would be that, wouldn’t it? She faced them. She felt a little sorry for them.

  “It’s kind of you to be concerned about me,” said Heather. She paused, eyeing the quilt tacked to the wall behind Celia’s head. One of Celia’s own, star-patterned, pieced with ugly modern calicos. Heather wondered why you would bother to make such an ugly quilt in the first place, and then why you’d hang it on the wall. Quilts were to keep you warm, in her view. Pick had made her a quilt when she was a little girl, pieced from the dresses she’d worn and outgrown. It was a fan quilt, intricate and precise, but even so it had never occurred to her to do anything with it but throw it across her bed. Things were really so uncomplicated when you got right down to it. It was only people messing up the simplicity that got you in trouble. That got you up against this, she thought, letting her gaze drift back to the Trasks’ intense, expectant faces.

  She took a breath. “I was good in school. I mean the school part of school,” Heather acknowledged. “I took it seriously, at least, because I wasn’t distracted by the other stuff going on, and I was sort of interested. I was good at the tests and that, but you know, I really wasn’t any more into that than I was into the, whatever you want to call it, social world.” She paused. Something occurred to her. “I don’t want to be a doctor!”

  “You can’t want to stay here all your life,” Stephen said.

  “What’s wrong with here?” Heather said, fully perplexed.

  “But—” He stopped himself, and she understood: she was disliked here. She had always been disliked here for her contented alienation. Now she would be disliked for Ashley and the baby. But it had never bothered her before, and it wouldn’t now.

  “I have everything I need in Goddard,” she told them, beaming. “I have work I love, I have friends.” She nodded to them. They did not react. “I’m happy.”

  Down the hall, a great thump as one of the kids leaped off the top bunk onto the floor; the frail house shuddered.

  “You deserve—” Celia began, but her husband cut her off.

  “Heather, look, just send an application in to Durham. It’s January now. School doesn’t begin till September. You’ll have tons of time to figure it out, but you’ll at least have the option. And you can stay at the sports center till then.”

  She balanced her empty cup on the arm of the tipping chair. It was filmy with red glaze, which made her smile. “The baby’s due in summer,” Heather told them. “I couldn’t possibly go to college in September.”

  You give it back, shrieked Phillip, who was nine. Celia, shaking her blond head, excused herself. Stephen was staring at Heather. For the first time, she felt a bit bad for him.

  “It’s what I want,” she said instead. Then: “But I am sorry.”

  Stephen said, “Is this about your mother, Heather?”

  She stared at him, wide-eyed. It had never been clear to her why she was supposed to care that much about her mother. The once or twice she had tried to explain this to people they had simply failed to accept what she was saying, but the utter truth was that Heather did not dwell on Ruth, or long for some idealized version of her mother. Ruth’s reputation had both preceded her brief career in high school and lingered long after, even to the years of Heather’s own enrollment. She had been the kind of girl who slept with your boyfriend and then had the temerity not to be sorry about it. She didn’t stay long, in any case. She went to Boston (though California had featured more consistently in her tirades against Goddard Falls and her parents), returning only to deposit her child with Pick. Heather had not the faintest idea where she had been since. And this person was supposed to influence her life?

  “It’s nothing to do with my mother,” Heather said. “I don’t know why it should.”

  Celia called the boys to dinner. Heather, suddenly convulsed with hunger, wondered if it would be rude for her just to stand up and go into the kitchen. Pregnancy had sharpened her senses and whittled down her needs into basic things. “Smells good,” she said pointedly.

  “I’ll help you,” Stephen said. “Any way I can, I’ll help you.”

  She made herself not smile and thanked him. The armchair, tipping forward, popped her up like an ejector seat. She ate three helpings of spaghetti and, much to his amusement, Phillip’s broccoli. Everyone conspired to talk of something else, until Stephen could drive her home.

  The night was bone clear, picked white by the chilly moon. She could not remember a more rapturous winter, Heather thought, fingering, beneath her sweater, the ridge of her gold chain, Ashley’s Christmas gift a month earlier. It had a charm, too, a letter H shaped slightly off, with the two vertical strokes just perceptibly inverted. As if, she had thought, examining it for the first time, those parallel line
s might somehow meet, at some unspecified point down the line, if only one waited long enough. To squint at it made it an A, Heather thought. A is for Ashley. It was her most favorite object.

  Stephen had a truck, which rode high, and Heather felt as if she were surveying her own lands, stretching in the pale light as far east as the pine-dark Presidentials: everything hers. She rode a cushion of elation, her gold charm between her breasts, just touching, when she leaned forward, her precious abdomen. Stephen was silent until he turned at her drive and bumped down its rocky length.

  “Pick know?” he said, bringing the car to a stop.

  “I don’t think so.” She had her hand on the door. She wanted to get out.

  “She’ll have to know. If you’re not going to give it up.”

  “Give it up!” Heather’s voice was low. She flash-flooded with anger. “I wouldn’t dream of giving it up.”

  Stephen nodded sagely. “Well, remember what I said, Heather. And call on me. You were right to say we’re your friends. Now you’ve got to treat me and Celia like friends.”

  “Thanks for dinner,” Heather said lamely.

  “All right.” He sounded grim. “Best to Pick.”

  It was warm inside. Heather’s grandmother had long ago gotten into the habit of overheating the parlor and kitchen even as the upstairs bedrooms shivered in blue cold. Pick was next door, not quite awake in her chair, so Heather said a quiet hello and went to wash up what was left from dinner and put away the meat loaf. She always did the dishes now. Whatever agility was left in Pick’s fingers went to sewing, or turning the pages of The Goddard Clarion, her chief pleasure. She heated up some milk for herself. Milk was good for the baby, too.

  “Have fun?” Pick said when Heather sat on the couch.

  “Yeah. Celia Trask puts a ton of garlic in her spaghetti sauce.”

  “Can’t stand garlic,” Pick said. She took off her glasses, pinched her eyes, and replaced them. “Can you pick up some groceries for me tomorrow?”