The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  There is no reversing through the tunnel.

  She does not mind all the bodies angling and stretching, the mass of hands avidly forcing bags into the overhead bins. People are scooting down into their seats, arranging their small spaces into semblances of home, kicking off shoes, settling blankets over laps, setting out treats in seat pockets, tucking magazines and newspapers at their sides.

  As she inches down her aisle on the far side of the plane, she hears opera, then something orchestral, then a woman’s heartsick voice wailing; rapid bits of music spiraling out from buds in countless ears, a curious soundtrack that accompanies Joan’s steps, the music changing form and construction, rising and falling, seeming to track the journey she is about to make, that she has already begun to take.

  Past first class, past business class, she reaches the last curtain that marks entry into economy, where the cheap seats are. The line slows again. The overhead bins are already filled with the bags of those flying in a more comfortable way.

  She should have flown first class. Business class at least.

  Why did she not think that fleeing home because two sons have stolen her life in different ways earned her some comfort, a deeply reclining leather chair, a footstool that would cradle her feet, as much gratis alcohol as she desires? Martin always flies first class when he is off to save sight and souls. This is her own soul she is going to try to save and she could have used the legroom.

  She checks the aisle numbers and here is her seat, located halfway between the restrooms at the front of economy and those in the tail.

  The first two seats in her row are already occupied.

  In the aisle seat is a solid, middle-aged Indian man who looks like he could be a champion weight lifter. His head, a gleaming brown dome. His suit is linen, his striped tie a broad knot at his throat; he is impeccably dressed for a fifteen-hour flight.

  The middle seat holds an old woman, teeny, not much bigger than a doll. She is creased and wrinkled and rheumy-eyed. Her eyes, though, beneath their cloudy scrim, sparkle like emeralds. And she is bright. She is very bright. Her cheeks rouged a happy pink. Her sweater a hot pink, the vibrant color masking the heavy load on her sloped, thin shoulders.

  She looks up at Joan and smiles. “Hello, darling. Are you here, next to me?” pointing to the seat next to the window.

  “Yes. So sorry,” Joan says.

  The big man steps out into the aisle, one hand in the pocket of his crisp vanilla suit, the matching elbow crooked. He is dressed to promenade a lady in the park, but the idea of a courtly Indian gentleman vanishes when he plows backward, forcing the people behind him to make way. There is audible displeasure, but when he glances back at the muttering, the noise evaporates.

  The old woman must make her way now. Seated, her feet don’t touch the cabin floor. One foot locates it, plants itself shakily, then she shifts forward, until her other foot finds its way. She warily lifts her body until she is standing, tottering really, and she smiles up at Joan, as if Joan’s face might provide her with the necessary strength to carry on, then she takes a cautious sideways step, then another, again and again, until she has cleared the outside armrest, and Joan can squeeze past, move into the row, settle into her seat.

  Already she is dreading the future hour when she will need to use the restroom, require them both to give way once again.

  The flight attendants roam the aisles, checking seat belts, slamming closed the overhead bins, forcing everyone’s eyes forward for the speech about emergency maneuvers in the event of a crash on land or at sea.

  Joan listens for a minute and turns away. No one on this plane would survive a crash landing on any surface.

  Then the plane is racing down the runway, the scream of rushing air, the nose lifting up, vibrating seconds of suspended uncertainty.

  They are aloft.

  Part II

  TRUTH IS BEAUTIFUL; SO ARE LIES

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, bastardized

  Satya sundara hai; jhūṭh bhi vaisa hi hai

  30

  Recording #1

  … I’ve considered how best to start, and I think it is like this:

  I, Daniel Manning, am the commoner in a family renowned for its brilliance: mother, father, much younger brother, all masters of their particular universes.

  My mother’s fame and glory blazes as bright as ever, though she ceased writing long ago, had, as I believed, given it all up. Manning, my father’s name—my name—is appended to all the miraculous ocular surgeries he has invented. And then there is my brother for whom everything has come so easy. A self-taught wunderkind whose company holds the copyright to the astounding computer program he created at thirteen, that hotels the world over are using to run more efficiently, soon to be implemented by a rash of other industries. He’s worth something like a billion now, at twenty-two.

  Oh, I was told I was special when I was a child and I believed it, until I absolutely could not. Since then I have feared my own mediocrity, wishing my own innate genius would appear. I have roiled for a long time with anger and frustration and the hot hatred of knowledge that I was not born marked for greatness like the rest of them, the small clan I am tied to for life. No one knows how I really feel, my placid exterior shrouds it all. I think, in that way, I am like my mother. Only recently did I realize that she is a cipher, a chameleon, hiding her secrets away and out of sight.

  I did not always feel this way.

  For a while, it seemed words would unleash my internal powers. I was five and a half when I began writing a whole lot of little stories about a squirrel I named Henry, and I demonstrated great talent for putting that poor squirrel through his paces, inventing dangerous situations for him to overcome, each story a whole new world I invented from scratch. The writing of those stories meant everything to me, made the earth spin right on its axis, made me feel actual and definite in a way I otherwise did not. This, I knew, was my present, and would be my future.

  Although my father talked about reading the dreams of the people he operated on when he was deep inside their eyes, and my mother told me elaborate tales at bedtime about rare babies, critical to my understanding of myself was that my parents may have been storytellers, but I was the writer in my family, the only one who wrote his stories down.

  As I look back over those early years, I remember strangers stopping my mother on the street, saying a few words, but I was only interested in tugging her away, wanting her all to myself. Even had I overheard what I imagine now were compliments and praise about her work, none of it would have resonated, for my mother never told me about her life before marriage, I was not privy at all to her past. And so, if, as a young child, I had ever known she was a famous writer, that knowledge had long emptied out of my mind by the time I learned the truth about the awesomeness of her achievements, her might and her reach. I was eleven when forced to confront who my mother really was, and I was devastated, her history wresting away what I had long believed belonged only to me. And then, when I forced myself to read just a single one of her stories, called “Deep in the Valley,” its mere existence shattered me completely.

  Perhaps if I had come up against Joan Ashby when I was older, I would not have had such a visceral reaction, would not have immediately doubted myself, feared that the best I wanted to achieve might be beyond my capabilities, beyond the gift I had then displayed. I was a competitive boy, and that I was comparing apples and oranges—an eleven-year-old versus an award-winning writer at the height of her powers—was meaningless to me. I raised my boyish defenses, threw overboard my own desires, abandoned Henry the Squirrel to find his own way, and thereafter protected myself from anything Ashby-related.

  Treacheries experienced in childhood are among the most difficult to overcome, or to forgive, as are dreams crushed when one is too young. Having to acknowledge your weaknesses can make the best of us fall into a very dark place.

  Five years ago, recently graduated from the undergraduate program at the Wharton School of Busi
ness, I was nine months into my tenure as an associate at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, intent on making myself a master of that universe. But I hated everything about venture capital. I loathed its abbreviated acronymic language, its locker-room atmosphere, that everything was measured by size: the deals, the bonuses, the cars, the outlandish vacations. I knew early on that either I did not possess whatever was required to succeed there, or I did, but the environment would make it impossible. The equation was already solving itself because I was failing spectacularly.

  I lived in a depressing apartment, my room furnished with a cardboard bureau, an air mattress blown up on the floor, a single uncapped bulb overhead. Sometimes I ran into my roommate, a guy named Carlos Wong, who remained during all of those months a pleasant phantom, although we worked for the same company, he a few years ahead of me. At the firm, he was solidly contoured, leap-frogging rapidly over those more senior. The only thing working in my favor was that I was tall, in decent shape from competitive swimming in high school and college, still deft enough with words to talk to girls, get them easily into bed.

  When Ashby was forced back into my life, I was twenty-two, and had just finished rambunctiously fucking the girl I was sleeping with. Christina leaned away, grabbed something from her bedside table, said, “Read this,” and thrust into my hand an old anthology, Best American Short Stories of 1984.

  In her few off hours, Christina was trying to expand her education, which had been purely focused on macroeconomics and statistics. She, too, was in venture capital, but she loved it, and she liked me. I liked her, and I liked her apartment, which had lamps and rugs and a good TV and food in the fridge, and a bedroom with a big bed and nice sheets, and a comforter that was not molting, and walls painted a happy shade of yellow, which reminded me of my childhood bedroom, and her bathroom, which she did not have to share, as I did with Carlos Wong, was always spotless and smelled nice.

  What I brought to our informal relationship was an understanding of the hours we both kept, my eagerness, if not talent, in all things coitus, and my willingness afterward to read and discuss with her the stories she was making her way through. She was the only person I knew in venture capital reaching for something beyond the requisite business and finance journals.

  Unlike Christina, I had always been a voracious reader. My business school education well mixed with liberal arts, and I had surreptitiously minored in English literature, always keeping the venerated Ashby at bay, which had not been easy to do.

  In my cubicle at the firm, I kept hidden a thesaurus, although the endless financial documents on which I worked resisted any linguistic zest, and novels that I read in ten-minute increments when I hid in the emergency stairwell and told myself I was only taking a break.

  So being ordered in the dead of night by a girl with great breasts to read a story called “An Outlaw Life” did not frighten me. It was the author’s name, Joan Ashby, that turned my skin cold, set my heart racing, returned to me the loss of all my childhood dreams.

  When I shook my head, Christina said, “What, Daniel?” and then I shook the book, as if eager to comply with her request. She rolled onto her back, a naked carnal display, but I could see nothing, could only feel the old hurts, the old fear coming in waves that intensified, a fear I first recognized at eleven, that Ashby’s work contained hidden dangers that would trip me up, plummet me down into some scary, inhospitable landscape, the ground pockmarked and sodden. When I was still a kid, the name Ashby would sometimes punch itself unbidden into my brain, and all I could imagine was quicksand, myself being sucked under.

  The paperback anthology in my hand turned into a hundred-pound weight, the paragraphs hurtling off the page and smacking me in the face, and I suddenly understood that time had not done its work.

  My childhood fragility, the striated pain of that earlier time, which I thought long bulwarked by years of reason and rationality and maturity, had not made me impenetrable and impervious. I instantly felt my thin skin, my hatred about not measuring up, my despair that I could not match her abilities, my sheer ordinariness, everything I felt when I read that other story of hers a decade before.

  I realized then that the tumultuous things that happen in childhood are tsunamic experiences that weaken our fleshy armor, leave deep cracks and crevices in their wake, and even when the scars are knitted together, even when there is a tough keloided ridge on top, it takes little effort to rip them wide open, where the pus still pools a hundredth of a millimeter below.

  With Christina stroking my leg, urging me to get started, I could not avoid the story, could not avoid what I had always fought against: that Joan Ashby was, is, and will always be my mother, and that she caused me to abandon my dreams.

  I focused on the first word and prayed that my courageousness would be rewarded. When I reached the end of the story, there was no reward. Just Ashby, always Ashby, blowing another hole through my impoverished heart.

  Reading “An Outlaw Life” that night is marked on my personal time line with a blood-red circle. It marked another massive splintering in my life, but this time I was all grown up, and I could throw those shards skyward, determine what I wanted to do amidst all of the breakage. This is the story that made me rethink everything.

  Peck Traynor looked forward to Wednesday nights when she called her sister Margo, telephonically breaching the gulf between New York City and Devils Creek, a little town with innocent fields and crops. Eleven digits, twelve hundred miles of highways, and one swift-moving river separated Peck from her family. Her parents, and her brother, TJ, and Margo and her husband and their children, Bug and Bea, one six, the other four, properly named Beau and Margaret, all lived just miles apart on the vast fertile Traynor land that spread north from the town.

  Fifteen years ago, newly quit of Devils Creek, where she was called Thessaly, Peck stood in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan where an old man with tumbled white hair and a gavel said from on high, “Are you sure?” She nodded. She wanted to carry forward some bond to her beginning and when she looked up at the judge, named Sykes, she said, “Yes, I’m taking my father’s middle name as my new first name.” The proceedings were intricate, but when she walked out of the courthouse legally renamed, she had forgiven her younger self for the wrong turns she had taken. Had she not veered off course, she would not have found her words, uncovered her voice, flown away to an island in the middle of everything where she could become someone else.

  Since then, every Wednesday night, Peck called Margo to hear about the family’s week in Devils Creek. When Margo’s voice ran down, Peck took over and wondered what Devils Creek residents would make of her tales about the soft-handed college students who signed up for her fall, winter, and spring semester creative writing classes at NYU; classes that inevitably cratered midway because her students, just a decade or so younger than she, misperceived the weight of their worlds, found meaningful that which was not. Unlike her students, the Devils Creek residents were smart and thorny and willfully dedicated, but their world was almanacs, rainfall predictions, growth rates, and Deere equipment, and the concept that one of their own might be a professor and, more important, a highly regarded, semi-famous writer would not compute.

  Peck knew that her family, readers all, had never read a single one of her books, not the three story collections, not the two novels. They did not know that her collections had been honored. They did not know her second novel won a major award. They would have been astounded to learn that a hairstylist tied Peck’s long brown hair up in an intricate chignon with tendrils trailing her neck, and that another woman turned Peck’s pale and pretty blue-eyed face into something golden and fetching, and that a third woman found a long black column for Peck to wear and silver heels to stand in when the press spoke to her before and after the awards ceremony. No one in Devils Creek subscribed to People or Vogue and so they did not see Peck’s photographs on bright shiny paper, the silly phrase Lit-Beauty dashed in a tough font below. She had clipped her own i
mages, struck by her slim and bare shoulders and her long curved eyelashes, and taped herself behind books on the shelves in her study. The old saw that the only publicity a woman should ever desire is on the event of her birth, marriage, and death was something the people of Devils Creek would hold true, if they ever considered it, which they did not. The news that a local girl had been nationally feted failed to make the town’s single paper, a daily comprised of ten weightless pages, eight of them classifieds. Her family was still unaware of the felicity that attended Peck and her award.

  On Wednesday nights, Peck did tell Margo about how her work was going, these days a third novel, but she did not pretend that Margo was actually interested; it was a ten-minute monologue Peck used to untangle recent kinks in her writing, and as a counterbalance to Margo’s joy in her children. And although Peck also told her sister about the men she dated and discarded, scores of men since she landed in New York, whatever their names, whatever they looked like, however they spent their days, Peck identified the wrong with each of them, or what should have been present within, but was, instead, absent completely. When she detailed those wrong or absent traits, Margo said Peck was missing something magnificent about what love provided a couple, the truth that children lay bare. “Isn’t it enough that I’ve spotted the problems right up front?” Peck often said, in some form or another, and then listened to Margo sighing her Devils Creek sigh.

  She never told Margo about all the men who sprang forward after that ceremonial evening, and then again after the pictures of her were published; that she had acquired an international dating pool if she wanted it. Men from Maine, Nevada, Rhode Island, Texas, New Mexico, and other places, and even from Italy, France, and Spain, sent her postcards, or wrote her long adverbial letters, all expressing a fervent desire to date or marry her, the most honest writing that they just wanted to bed her, to experience for themselves the wanton woman they assumed was Peck in the stories. It was only a year ago that the award altered the physical mass of correspondence she received, and her postman said, “Listen to me. Too many people know where to find you. You need to erase any reference to your address, set up a post office box, turn in any letters that seem off to the 27th Precinct. Take heed, Peck, about what’s in your hands.” Peck heeded.