The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  “It won’t be the same without you,” they cried out. “You’ve got to come, at least once.” She had never been invited into a group, a clique really, and it was entirely because of the baby.

  Her instinct was to decline, but one Friday, in her sixth month, after her swim spent pondering the family of tombstone carvers who had appeared in the novel—a mother and father and three daughters given free rein to choose the gravestones, to decide on the embellishments and the epitaphs of those eliminated by the sympathetic executioners—Joan found herself in a small mirrored room, standing on a mat, listening to a broad-shouldered woman telling them about prenatal yoga. The woman’s hair was a brazen red, a fakery that failed to impart the youth she must have been after.

  “Hi, everyone. I’m Lannie. By your wet heads, I’m guessing you’ve been swimming, which is good cardiovascular exercise, but yoga will help you stay limber, improve your balance and circulation, keep your muscles toned, and teach you to breathe right and relax, which will come in handy for the physical demands of labor, birth, and motherhood. I’m going to show you several poses, but we’re going to start with ujjayi, a special breathing technique which will prime you for childbirth. Ujjayi will let you fight the urge to tighten up when you’re in pain or afraid during labor. You’ll take in air slowly through your nose until your lungs are completely filled, then exhale completely, until your stomach compresses.”

  There were laughs and the Pregnant Six grabbed at their bellies.

  “Yes, of course,” Lannie said, “but you’ll still be able to feel it from the inside. Now watch me.”

  She inhaled until her large nose narrowed and her chest rose up like a bulwark, then there was a whoosh of an exhale that went on forever, which Joan found loud and annoying.

  “Got it, everyone?” and the Pregnant Six yelled, “Got it.”

  They were their own cheerleading squad, and despite their inclusion of her, Joan felt distaste, remembering the horde of girls at her high school, she younger than everyone in her grade by several years, fourteen when she was a senior, and those girls, in short swingy cheer-skirts and crop-tops, roamed the hallways, making what they believed were pithy, hurtful remarks in superior voices that made some kids cry. About Joan they once said, “There’s the girl who sure loves her pens. Wonder what she does with them alone in her bed.” An unclever comment that had failed to land, proving to Joan, again, how easily people cracked away at others’ humanity, the pain they inflicted comforting something inside of themselves. She couldn’t help wondering what the Pregnant Six said about her when she was not among them, when they were massed and crooning together.

  They practiced ujjayi breathing, their exhalations out of sync, until Lannie said, “Okay. Good enough for the first time. We’re ready now for our first asana. Virabhadrasana I, a standing posture, the first of the three warrior poses.

  “Yogis are known for their nonviolent ways, but the Bhagavad Gita, the most respected of all the yoga texts, is actually a dialogue between two famous and feared warriors that takes place on a battlefield between two great armies spoiling for a fight. What is commemorated in this pose is the spiritual warrior who bravely battles against the universal enemy, avidya, which is self-ignorance, the ultimate source of all our suffering. What you all want to work at battling in yourselves.”

  It was obvious to Joan that Lannie had memorized her yoga patter, but into Virabhadrasana I Joan went. Then Virabhadrasana II and III, Tree, Downward Dog, Cat-Cow, and good old-fashioned squats, out of place when Lannie was talking on about the meditative benefits of yoga, silencing their inner dialogues, and learning just to be.

  Joan found she was curiously limber and graceful doing the poses, that she enjoyed heeding the instructions, ceding control for the hour, focused not on her novel’s unfolding story, as she did when she swam, but on the mystical way she was contorting her body, watching herself in the mirror transitioning easily from one pose to the next, despite her belly, and the sloshing, along with a kick or two, from inside. When she looked at the others, she was surprised by their precious way of holding themselves, mincing through the poses, hands rarely straying from their cargo, as if they were vessels for the world’s next great philosophers.

  “Time for Baddha konasana, sometimes known as cobbler’s or tailor’s pose,” Lannie said. “Drag your mats to the wall. Backs up tight and straight against it, put your soles together and let your knees fall apart—

  “Meg, you’re not grounded. Get grounded. Yes, spread those ass cheeks apart so you’re stable.”

  At last, they were told to lie on their sides on the mats. “Time for a pregnancy-modified Shavasna, corpse pose. Get comfortable. Eyes closed. Arms and legs relaxed. Palms facing upward. Now, inhale. Pull that breath into your lungs. Now, exhale. Force all that air out of you. Now, everyone, tense your entire body gently. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Now, let go. I’m going to shut off the lights and you can stay as long as you want.”

  * * *

  When Joan opened her eyes in the darkened room, she was alone, her mat the only one left on the floor. The clock above the door read 3:05; the class had been over for more than an hour. She felt happy, hazily happy, a feeling that lasted as she drove home, and through two more hours of writing, and through dinner with Martin, laughing when he told her about the day’s mishaps made by the residents assigned to him, listening carefully to him describe the initial steps for a radical surgery he was conceiving that might be able to restore sight in a permanent way for certain ocular diseases. Through it all, she honestly felt the glow of pregnancy; she had not felt it, not truly, before.

  In bed that night, lying on her side with her back to Martin, straddling the body pillow as if it were a horse, she said, “I liked the yoga a lot. I’m going to do the classes with Lannie, but after the baby comes, I’m going to find a real yoga teacher and real yoga classes, even if I have to drive to another town.”

  Martin yawned and said, “Sounds good. Whatever you want to do sounds good to me,” and then he was lightly snoring.

  Joan thought about her old neighborhood in New York, the yoga studio she had often passed. Not once had she thought of opening its door, going in, checking it out. She felt her heart softening toward the baby a bit more; the way it was offering her something new in exchange for room and board.

  3

  Silas and Abe were left in a wicker basket at a firehouse, to the right of the red bay doors, found by the captain, who looked beneath the tattered blanket and discovered twins, nametags pinned to their onesies. A cooler bag was next to the basket, diapers on top, nursing bottles below. When the captain pulled out a bottle, it was full. All the bottles were full, each one labeled Fresh Breast Milk in fluorescent pink ink, and dated; the one in his hand dated that day.

  The captain carried the basket and bag into the house, and his husky men, who threw themselves into fires, cooed over the babies, made goo-goo faces and trilling sounds, changed them and fed them while he called Children’s Services.

  The woman from the authority arrived and said, “At least they’re infants. That’s the key. They’ll be placed in a heartbeat.”

  The captain said, “Please make sure they’re kept together. Hard enough start to life, without them having to go it alone. They’ll always be looking for each other, if you don’t do the right thing.”

  It wasn’t what the woman wanted; separating them would make her job easier, but the captain made her swear, and she, a failed mother herself, agreed.

  During the following years, as infants, toddlers, young boys, then teens, Silas and Abe moved across the Midwest, from Kansas to Iowa to Indiana, coming to rest in Illinois. Their various foster parents, four sets in total, all of good cheer, made sure the boys had plenty to eat, warm comforters on their beds, books to read and television to watch, basketball hoops for H-O-R-S-E, and the benefits of fine public-school educations. And they were good boys—both blond, sunny, and light—handsome boys popular at the schools they attended, and wit
h the girls who sidled up. Sweet and shy girls liked them too, not just the fast ones whose hips molded early into sensuous curves, whose breasts jiggled inside red or black bras.

  For the past five years, Silas and Abe had lived in a three-story house in Chicago. Of all the houses they’d lived in, this one felt most like home. Their foster parents were an accountant and his piano-teacher wife. Short people from hardy stock, although the hardy stock was unclear because both wore thick glasses, were blind without them. The boys called them Frederick and Shirley, but when talking about their days at school, about their nightly and future dreams, sometimes their minds slipped, and to themselves, they replaced Frederick with Dad, Shirley with Mom. That was how close the twins felt to them.

  On their eighteenth birthday, they crashed down the stairs for Shirley’s annual birthday-king breakfast—pancakes, waffles, omelets, thirty strips of bacon, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. Bottles of boysenberry syrup and maple and a jar of Marshmallow Fluff on the dining-room table, along with an enormous sheet cake sprouting twin sets of eighteen candles. Streamers decorated the room, and from the ceiling, a homemade sign read: HAPPY BIRTHDAY! YOUR FUTURE AWAITS!

  When the platters were emptied, the orange juice finished, the cake plates smeared in frosting, Shirley shooed them into the living room. Silas and Abe resisted. They had been raised well by all their fosters, to bring their manners with them wherever they were, to help out. “We’ll clean up,” the boys said, and Shirley shook her head. “Not necessary. We have a gift for each of you, the kind of gift that gives and gives.”

  Under the arch that led into the living room, they slipped off their shoes, Shirley’s rule: No shoes on the carpeting. But she surprised them. “Not necessary this time. Tie those tennis shoes back up right now. Keep ’em on, you’re going to need them. Now go and sit on the couch.”

  The boys retied their laces and tiptoed over the carpet, looking at each other sideways, acknowledging silently the freakishness of being allowed to do the forbidden. They sat on the couch, just inches apart, and in came Frederick and Shirley, both barefooted, each wrestling a large present in their arms. They placed the wrapped packages just beyond Silas and Abe’s tennis-shoed feet.

  Shirley sat down at the baby grand and played the birthday song. Frederick clapped his hands and sang along. Then Shirley twirled around on the bench and said, “Ready? All right, go! Rip those bows right off, tear through the paper. We’re not saving any of it this time.”

  The boys looked at each other again. What was meant by all these new instructions, the breaking of her inviolable rules? Shirley had a trunk in the basement filled with used wrapping paper, ironed precisely, and bows, second-, third-, and fourth-hand, that she kept in plastic bags.

  They shrugged and did as instructed.

  When the wrapping paper was off, standing before them were brand-new rolling suitcases, the fabric in army green. The suitcases were nice, but not what the twins had been hoping for, which was one of two things: to be adopted by the Jacksons or given a used car they could share.

  “Thank you very much,” they each said.

  “That’s just the first gift,” Frederick said.

  “Yes, like we said, this is a gift that will keep on giving,” Shirley said. “Go on, boys, unzip the suitcases.”

  Inside the bags, each found new T-shirts, socks, underpants, jeans, and pajamas, and at the bottom, underneath the everyday attire, the boys pulled out black suits, crisp white shirts flat in their store packaging, marked 13 ½-inch neck, one tie each, in the same design, Silas’s in red, Abe’s in blue. The boys were confused. Shirley had recently taken them shopping for the summer clothes folded away upstairs in their shared room. They had not worn suits to their high school graduation and wondered why they would be given them now, when summer was just starting, when they would be lifeguarding at the public pool, in swim trunks and flip-flops all day long. They were looking forward to marking themselves with zinc oxide. Their faces in tribal patterns.

  “Thank you, Frederick,” said Silas.

  “Thank you, Shirley,” said Abe.

  “You’ve been so generous to us,” Silas said.

  “Why suits?” asked Abe.

  The Jacksons did not answer, but Frederick said, “Now put everything back in and zip up the suitcases.” Which the boys did.

  “Now roll them over here, to the front door,” Shirley instructed, and the boys obeyed.

  When the twins were at the front door, with their suitcases beside them, and Frederick and Shirley facing them, like short tackling blocks, Frederick said, “Put out your hands for the last birthday gift.”

  Two white envelopes. They peeked inside; a wad of crisp bills, marked by Shirley’s iron.

  “That, boys, is a thousand dollars each,” Frederick said, and Shirley reached between them and opened the front door. The boys turned their heads and looked outside. The four of them stood there in silence, staring through the open door, down the walk lined in daisies, to the street, where cars were neatly parked. A little girl on a yellow bike rode past and beeped her horn.

  “It’s the way it works,” Frederick said at last. “We really are sorry.”

  “Wait, what?” Silas said.

  “What works what way?” Abe asked, his eyes wide, never moving off Frederick’s face.

  Then Shirley said, “You’ve been selected, so there’s no reason to delay the inevitable. Anyway, we need your room for the next set of needy kids.”

  Over the years, the Jacksons had said the twins would never have to go, would not be fostered out at eighteen, would stay with them for as long as was right, through college and graduate school. Silas was interested in architecture, Abe in medicine. There had been talk, when they were younger, that the Jacksons would make sure that by the time the twins walked out the open front door, they would be set up for life. What Shirley said made no sense to them, but clearly something had happened, or gone wrong, to change the minds of their surrogate parents.

  Silas and Abe protested, then yelled, then grabbed on to the frame of the front door, but Frederick and Shirley, short as they were, were much stronger than they looked, stronger than the boys expected, all that hardy stock, and they found themselves outside the Jacksons’ home, outside of their home, they thought, the handles of their rolling luggage gripped tight in their fists.

  Silas did not look back, but Abe did, and he saw the front door slam, heard the lock turn.

  It was a shock they could not process, standing halfway down the flowery path. Everything they owned, collected, cared for, was on shelves and in drawers, in the closet, up in their room. Silas had a prized baseball he caught at a Chicago Cubs game, and a mitt he was still oiling, yearbooks signed by all the girls, and Abe thought of his microscope, a present from the Jacksons last Christmas, and the books he had acquired so far in the Netter Collection: tomes on anatomy, biochemistry, cardiology, and epidemiology. He had planned to use his lifeguard earnings to purchase, at the end of summer, the volumes on anesthesiology, infectious diseases, and pathology. There were also the two dirty magazines his friend Tad had given him, tucked under Abe’s mattress, naked pictures of gorgeous girls with their beavers fully exposed. Silas had lost his cherry, but Abe had not.

  “What are they talking about? Selected for what?” Silas said. He was the tough twin, but tears were spilling out of his eyes, down his cheeks. He was cross-legged on the sidewalk, his face hidden behind his hands.

  All their life, until this moment, Silas had been their leader, the more dominant twin, the one who made the plans, who led the way, but it was Abe who said, “Pull yourself together, Silas, we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to find a place where we can think. A place that has a phone. There’s the minimart three blocks down, let’s go there. We’ll get Yoo-hoos and sit on the curb and figure out what to do. We’ll call Frederick and Shirley. Maybe this is all just a joke. An initiation of sorts.”

  When Silas did not move, Abe laid his hand on his brother’s sh
oulder and softly patted until Silas nodded, and rose, and followed Abe.

  Thirty minutes after their kingly breakfast celebrating their eighteenth birthdays, they were rolling their luggage down the street, the wheels loud in the noon quiet of the summer Sunday.

  On the corner of Unsworth Avenue and Third was the Exxon station and the minimart behind it. A man in a mechanic’s jumpsuit was pumping gas for a pretty woman in a white Mercedes. “You Silas and Abe Canwell?” Abe nodded for them both. “You’re expected. Go on into the market. Ask for Milt. He’ll give you what you need.”

  Joan finished reading the opening pages of The Sympathetic Executioners and dropped them to the floor. She was stretched out on the living-room couch because she no longer fit at her desk. The couch, a hand-me-down from a colleague of Martin’s who had moved on to another hospital five hundred miles away, was ugly, tight checks in blue and green, but it was deep and comfortable and supported Joan firmly. Physically, she was as comfortable as she could be these days, but her heart felt squeezed tight, and it wasn’t the baby agitating her.

  She had finished writing the novel by her own deadline, two weeks in advance of her estimated due date, the necessary time to catch her breath, before making final edits, bundling it up, and sending it off to Volkmann. She had imagined a third book tour, wondered what she and Martin would do when it was time for her to leave Rhome, leave the baby behind, and travel again. She had wondered how old the baby would be when that happened, and if she would feel torn away and unmoored, or find herself stepping lightly and fast.

  For the last seven days, she had not peeked at all at the manuscript; instead she kept herself out of the house. Mornings she spent at Dawn’s Boulangerie, though Dawn was not there, eating warm Pain Bâtard with butter and raspberry jam, drinking mugs of decaffeinated Earl Grey, and making lists of unusable baby names, like Plutarch, Reimann, and Winchester; Esmeralda, Clothilde, and Aine—names that would encourage targeted bullying, a few impossible to pronounce. She read them to Martin at night, to hear him laugh. After, she swam in the overheated community pool, catching glimpses of the cold weather through the large windows and the clear retractable roof. Gloomy skies every day, rain, sleet, one brief snowstorm that left no evidence behind. The yoga class had ended, but she slid into the warm water with pleasure, with relief at being weightless, thinking the baby must feel as she did, floating in its pool of amniotic fluid.