The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  They maneuvered the playpen between them, lifting it down the staircase; then they put it in a corner of the workroom. It was early, and Heather was the only one there. “Are you sure about this?” she asked Naomi. “I mean, are you sure it won’t distract people, having the baby here?”

  Naomi shrugged. “If it does, it does. We’ll cross that bridge when and if. But, I mean, this is my point. You should be able to bring your baby to work. I know you have your grandmother and all, but what if you didn’t? You’d still have to make a living, wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess,” said Heather, wiping the dust off the playpen with a rag.

  “So don’t you think women should have universal access to child care? I mean, it’s a women’s issue, isn’t it?”

  Polly woke in the office and bleated in protest at the unfamiliar surroundings.

  “Lunchtime,” Heather said brightly. “Or is it afternoon snack?”

  It took Naomi a minute, then she perked up again. “That’s another thing. How do you breast-feed if you have to go to work and your baby can’t come with you? Maybe if more women could take their kids along, then more women would breast-feed. And that’s better for everybody.”

  “It is?” Heather said. “How come?”

  “Well, medically. Isn’t it? That’s what they tell me, anyway,” Naomi said. “It’s what I’m going to do.” She went abruptly red.

  And then they were uncomfortable in tandem, each looking over the other’s shoulder with wordless symmetry.

  “That’s good,” Heather said finally. She went out to her daughter.

  Polly, as much as Heather could tell, loved coming to the mill. She was fascinated with human faces, and stared and stared, even when they refused to stare back. Heather brought the baby almost every morning, around eleven, and stayed until it was dark outside. Pick, she thought, liked the peace at home, and Heather did not doubt that it was good for the baby to be out in the world. She was too good for the women in the workroom to make any justifiable complaint at her presence-she cried only to get Heather’s attention when she was hungry; then, her goal attained, she stopped crying—and Heather watched with some bemusement as the women struggled to maintain their resentment in the face of this irresistible child. To Heather herself they behaved as if she were not there, but this was what she was used to anyway.

  Ashley came often, usually in the late afternoons. He was re-siding the back of the mill, picking off the spongy clapboards and baring the bees’ nests beneath them to the hard winter sun. Of course he was discreet when they met. He gave none of those bitter, watching women the satisfaction of his attention to her, and she could only admire the restraint with which Ashley held himself in check before this audience, the skill of his perfect indifference. Heather herself was not so skilled; when Ashley was near her, her eyes were compelled to him. She sat near one of the windows, the better to see his legs spider past, his hot breath fog the panes. Even this far into their pairing, she thought, even with all that had happened, the year gone by, the child they had made, it had not lessened at all for her—this shudder of pure, sweet shock at the plain beauty of him. She liked to recall her first sight of him, half hidden in the ceiling, with only his legs reaching down to her, his narrow back descending, his long hair tied behind in a frayed red bandanna. The memory of his tongue, touching and traveling the hurt surface of her eye, still had the power to hobble her for an instant, and it occurred to her that, in her own case, love had indeed begun in the eye of the beholder.

  She began coming when he came, in the afternoons, and staying until most, if not all, the other women had gone to their homes. Polly slept about this time, and Heather would lift her, inert and heavy, from the playpen into Joseph’s car seat in the back of Ashley’s shiny new car, where she slept on. The back of the station wagon felt inexpressibly luxurious to Heather, who for the first time could stretch her whole length out beside Ashley once his tools and ropes had been pushed aside. With even this small increase in available space, she felt some of the urgency of their coupling dissipate and, in its place, a feeling of leisured sensuality. It was far from comfortable still, but there seemed just slightly more time now than there had previously been—time, for example, for some random touches, some kisses without particular purpose. Heather thought she had never been so happy as when he touched or kissed her this way—for the sake of those gestures themselves and not as precursors to something else.

  And through this—the sounds and motions and even the smells—Polly slept. She went deeply down into herself and became almost stony, her eyes moving steadily, contentedly, behind their eyelids, reading the text of them while behind her her parents thrashed and spoke. It occurred to Heather, at times, that this was not, probably, good for Polly —to hear this, to know this was happening just out of her sleeping sight—but the baby seldom woke, and when she did, she sat still and uncomplaining until her mother noticed her.

  Between Polly and her father there was a detente not so much chilly as simply devoid of warmth. The baby saved her most persistent staring for Ashley, Heather noticed, as if she were compelled to memorize him and determined not to break her gaze. She stared impassively but steadily, her huge blue eyes affixed to this permutation of her own beauty, but she never lifted a finger in his direction, and when Heather tried to propel her toward him, to lift her into her father’s arms, the baby stiffened noticeably and clung to Heather’s arm.

  Ashley appeared not overly distressed by this. He seemed content to admire his daughter from this small distance, and to attribute her sweetness and loveliness to Heather entirely, as if she had been singularly responsible for Polly’s composition. He saw none of his own features in her, despite how assuredly Heather pointed them out, and appeared not eager to hear the baby praised. Look, Heather would say, holding Polly’s first hair to the light of the car window, where it shone white-gold. Isn’t it gorgeous?

  Like yours, Ashley said, pulling her down again.

  And her skin, my God, Heather said, lifting the baby’s sweater to show an alabaster back. I’m not surprised, said Ashley. You have beautiful skin.

  She wondered if it had to do with Joseph, his boy with Sue, but Ashley never mentioned Joseph either, except to say that he had not slept well the night before, or that he hadn’t had clean clothes in days because the baby took so much work. She had heard of fathers for whom their children did not really seem to register until they were of an age to have conversations and play sports, but she wondered why Ashley did not indicate this if it was the case. It did not bother her for her own sake, but she had not realized until now how closely enmeshed with her love for him was her wish that he love their child, and this small chill of disappointment began to work at her, just slightly, then just slightly more.

  The holidays arrived, clad in ice. Heather, during the first round of storms, kept the baby home and herself harried with work for the Christmas rush. Polly learned to roll at will. A first strata of her clothing no longer fit, and Heather tearfully consigned these things, much of them her own work, to a box in her closet. Every year, Pick—ossifying in unsentimentality—expressed indifference to Christmas, but every year, quite by coincidence, she also managed to end up serving turkey on the day itself (Janelle Hodge, Pick would remark, had happened to mention it was on sale at the Stop & Shop) and baking a pie with the last of her apples, their mealy texture compensated for by extra sugar and, Heather was fairly sure, a substitution of rum for the usual vanilla. This had been the norm always, even when Heather was a child, but she had not really begrudged it until now. Polly, Heather thought, must have all of it: the feast, the gifts, the tree. But she understood that the most elaborate celebration would only be lost on a four-month-old, and she was content to let this first Christmas pass without too much fuss.

  The cold hiccupped abruptly after New Year’s, the snow breaking down to premature slush. For the first time, the logging road into the wood was not navigable and the wagon only churned its wheels in gray mud.
Heather sat, frustrated, as Ashley got out of the car and pronounced it hopeless to continue, and they had to go back to Nate’s Landing, where someone—some teenager, most likely—had spread around gravel. When Polly slept, lulled by the spinning of wheels, they fucked on grit, but briefly. Heather did not like the openness of the trees, the bald stretch of the Sabbathday River rushing away beneath its caul of blue ice. She wanted her time with Ashley, but she wanted to leave, and he obliged her, driving her back to the mill, where she put the baby back in her own car and drove home to supper, her thighs sticky against the wool of her pants. Four months on after the birth and she was still heavy, her belly a smaller version of its rounded, pregnant past, her thighs thick. She caught unwelcome glimpses of herself each morning in the mirror affixed to the bathroom door, stepping laboriously out of the bath and trying all ways to get her towel to wrap around herself. The weight had wrapped her lower half, laying claim to it while leaving her arms and neck slender to taunt her. The milk, she decided, lifting one of her dense and tender breasts to examine a calloused nipple, was keeping her like this, but she loved nursing Polly and dreaded the day her daughter might prefer food from another source. And anyway, there were other advantages to nursing, Heather mused. It had held off her period, and with that, she knew, her fertility. She could happily forgo her waist for that.

  On the morning of the day that would change Heather’s life, she did not have time for a bath. Polly had coughed through the night. She breathed raggedly through her mouth, and finally wept at her own dis- .comfort. Her nose ran green and thick, and Heather spent hours trying to make her comfortable. The fever—if there was one at all; she was bad at telling, and she didn’t want to wake Pick—never got too bad, and she was more regretful for the baby than concerned. Toward dawn, Polly fell into exhausted sleep on Heather’s belly, and so Heather lay, still, despite a full and throbbing bladder, through the next hours, recalibrating her day against the new mandate of Polly’s cold. When Pick rose, later than usual, she was not well herself, and stood in the doorway with one palm pressed against her right temple, as if feeling for the source of her pain.

  “Maybe I ought to run you into town,” Heather said softly, keeping her diaphragm as still as possible.

  “No. It isn’t too bad. Just a headache.” She smiled ruefully. “Doctor’d just tell me to go home.”

  Polly coughed in her sleep. Heather stroked the back of the baby’s head, where white hair—rubbed off from months of turning her head against the crib mattress—was growing back shiny, dark, and fine. “I won’t go in to work today,” she said.

  Pick shook her head. “No need for that. You go on.” She paused. “I know you like to go. I’ll watch her.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” said Heather. But already her mind was working. She could. She could leave her sick baby with her sick grandmother. To have that extra hour with Ashley, the hour after Polly woke up and wanted her, for food or distraction, to have that small but irreplaceable freedom to make noise, to move in ways they couldn’t move normally for fear of waking the baby—surely Pick wouldn’t offer if she didn’t feel up to it. And Pick could always call the mill if she started to feel poorly, and Heather could just tell Ashley she had to go home. Otherwise …

  “I couldn’t,” Heather said again, just to stay her conscience.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Pick, who carefully extricated the still-sleeping Polly from Heather’s stomach, allowing Heather to escape to the bathroom. She was already expertly holding the baby’s forehead against her own cheek, pronouncing her “cool as a cucumber.” “Just a bit of a sniffle. Nothing to get nuts about.”

  “Sure,” Heather said. “I know.”

  Pick put the baby down, gingerly, in her crib, where, to Heather’s amazement, she did not wake instantly and start to howl but turned her other cheek to the blanket and continued to breathe, evenly, if still rather wetly.

  “Okay,” Heather said. “I guess it’s fine. And you’re fine.”

  “I am fine,” said Pick. “You worry too much.”

  But Heather didn’t worry too much, that was the problem. She should have worried far more. If she had called home, she thought afterward. If she had stopped work early and gone to check. If, for once, she had told Ashley that today was not a good day for them to drive to the woods, then how differently everything might have unraveled for her, for Ashley, for Polly and Pick, even for Naomi Roth, Heather would think too many months later. But she was greedy. Her greed ran through her where blood should have been, and her common concern, this drug hunger for the man whose touch was the one thing she had deemed worth pursuing in the known universe. How thoroughly the world had shrunk to this, she thought, leaving her sick house without a backward glance, revving the car like the heat-seeking missile it was, and setting off.

  She worked through the morning and went grocery shopping at midday, enjoying the freedom of maneuvering her cart without having to be careful of jarring the baby. She bought eggs and milk, a bag of anemic oranges, a pot roast for the weekend, when she generally took over the cooking from Pick, a new size of diapers for Polly. She bought yogurt and a roll for her lunch and took them back to the mill, and Ashley was there, painting the new clapboards with a foul-smelling paint, working without gloves so his raw hands were spattered white. Heather sat by the window and had her lunch, listening to Sarah Copley talk about her husband, Rory, and his habit of leaving empty ice cream cartons in the sink, as if expecting her to wash them out and reuse them. The man simply can’t stand to think of anything going to the dump! It’s bad enough he’s got every issue of The Clarion back to ’68. The women chortled and murmured their own stories. Heather put her yogurt into the trash and went back to her sampler. She was waiting for Ashley now, and for the women to leave. She didn’t mind the wait. She was anticipating the extra time later, the freedom she had grown unaccustomed to since Polly’s birth. If she thought of Polly or Pick at all, it was without anxiety—her grandmother would call if there was trouble—but with a sweet lift of her spirits, and gratitude that the women in her life would make this space for the man. Ashley was right: she did have everything, and the parts of everything all worked in concert to give her the greatest possible happiness. It occurred to her, for the first time, that the bad feeling lingering between her and so many of her neighbors had less to do with pity or condemnation than with sheer resentment. They scorned her choices, but at root, they wanted what she had, and if what she had did not include a husband who filled her sink with refuse, then there was that much more reason for them to envy her, and that much less reason for her to care.

  Ashley finished around five and packed away his tools in the back room adjacent to the office. Heather folded her sampler carefully into her bag and walked into the office. Naomi was working at the computer, her head bent forward so the green glow from the screen played out over her face as she stared deeply into it. “We have any more of that linen thread?” Heather asked. “You know, that white? I think I’ll be okay, but I might run out of what I’ve got if I have to put in all these extra flowers.”

  Naomi looked up. The green fled from her face, leaving it streaky red. Her eyes were red, too.

  “Oh, hey,” Heather said. “Are you—”

  “Okay,” Naomi said quickly. “I’m fine.”

  Heather was staring. She wanted to stop staring, but she couldn’t figure out how. Naomi, for her part, didn’t look away either.

  “Everything’s fine,” Naomi said finally. “I didn’t realize anybody was still in there.”

  “I’m waiting,” Heather said. “I mean, I was just finishing up.” She stopped. “Can I help you?”

  Naomi gave a sour little smile. “Oh no, I don’t think so. It’s just my … Well, Daniel and I decided to call it quits this weekend. It’s normal to be sad, right? I mean, we’ve been together for like …” She looked up, calculating, then found the answer and sighed. “Anyway, I’m just fine. Thanks for asking.”

  “You don’t look
fine,” Heather said bluntly. Then she blushed. “Oh, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no.” Naomi shook her head. “I know I look like shit. This is what you look like when you stay up all night screaming at your so-called life partner while he’s pawing through a box of records, trying to remember who reached into whose pocket on Bleecker Street in 1974 to pull out the dollar that bought ‘Are You Experienced?’ off some wino’s blanket. Charming, huh?”

  Huh, Heather thought, staring.

  “Well, that’s life, I guess,” Naomi went on. “I mean, they say you should never go into marriage without making sure you want the same things from life, but they don’t tell you that wanting those things and getting those things are two distinct concepts. So, God forbid you should achieve anything, right? Achieving just interferes with the almighty striving, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess,” said Heather softly. “I never really thought about it.”

  “Who thinks about it? That’s my point. Nobody thinks about this stuff. They just do what they’re told. What do you think I’m doing with myself, Heather? You think I’m enjoying this? This!” Naomi pushed out her hands, sharply, as if urging more from an imaginary orchestra around her. “I am not enjoying this.” Her voice dropped to a hush, as if she were telling herself a secret. “I am not enjoying this. I’m just doing what I’m fucking told.”