The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  On a heated Wednesday night in early July, Peck called Margo at the usual time. She pressed the phone to her ear, ready for the obligatory dipping-in before settling down to a tell-all when Margo rushed ahead. “I have to tell you, I’m nearly five months along, but I waited to make sure nothing went wrong this time.”

  Peck was surprised that Margo had held the secret tight, though it wasn’t news that should have startled her—her sister and brother-in-law had been trying for a third child for a while—but something serious unraveled within Peck anyway. With the phone cricked against her chin, Peck rose from the couch and walked into the kitchen as Margo detailed her now-dissipated worries.

  When Margo said, “Now that the iffy stage is past, we’re teaching Bug and Bea about the new life growing inside of Mommy,” Peck retrieved the bottle of Jim Beam from the back of a cabinet. Bourbon was Peck’s out-of-bounds drink, the way it released the memories of her wayward youth, her long-ago ability to find trouble even in a place as small as Devils Creek, but Margo’s news had already opened that door, and so Peck poured herself a shot and tossed it back.

  “Mom and Dad are excited, of course,” Margo said, and Peck poured herself another. In the kitchen’s low light, the burnished liquid of her past gleamed, waiting to be swallowed down once again.

  She tossed the second shot back as Margo said, “I want you to be this baby’s godmother, Thessaly.” The bourbon burn hit the back of Peck’s throat and she coughed.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Margo said. “My screw-up. I should remember. I do remember. I’ll never get why you ditched Thessaly. I would want to be a Thessaly. I always did want to be you, Thessaly.”

  The rising fumes of the bourbon brought back all those times of mistaken youthful frenzy when Peck was fifteen and up on the Devils Creek cliffs, and the boy, five years older than she, cleverly used his silent mouth, his broad hands. Once, she had thought all of life was there in his arms, with her back pounded into the dust, the distant stars suddenly close and bright, the moon waxing and waning.

  “Will you do the honors?” Margo said. “Teach this child everything I can’t teach it. Love it as much as I love you?”

  On Thursday morning, when she woke, Peck did not remember the end of her conversation with Margo, whether or not she had agreed to shepherd, in some unclear way, her sister’s unborn child, but she knew that she had not dreamt while she slept, and she wasn’t sure the bourbon was responsible for that intimidating blank. She had not had a dreamless sleep since she was fifteen-year-old Thessaly on Traynor land in Devils Creek, sneaking out most nights and running to the cliffs where she met the boy and got naked, and afterward drank enough bourbon to kill something, although it failed to kill that which it should have. That year, when her body swelled, she began dreaming every night, about many things, and always saw herself writing in notebooks, and on large pieces of paper, sometimes using a pen, sometimes a pencil, once or twice a quill she had only ever seen in movies. The family divided about whether the baby should be kept, given away, or done away with from the start. Her father wanted the baby brought up a Traynor. Her mother wanted Peck to have a chance first at a life of her own. Peck would leave them all downstairs to argue it out and, when she wasn’t in school, she cloistered herself in her room, started writing in the diary she mocked when given to her on her twelfth birthday. Nine months later when certain decisions were lost and the diary was all filled up, Peck sweated, pushed, and screamed, and figured out that her stories, about whole lives blown apart on the land, were really about faith eliminated.

  In the hospital, Peck saw her daughter for an instant before the baby was delivered to her new life, which Peck hoped would unfold in California or Florida, someplace with an ocean that had endless tides and starfish and shells.

  Such thoughts as these, and more, had been brought on by Margo’s news, the omen of bourbon, and a night bereft of the dreamy lifeline to her own lost past. Peck rose from her bed, unglued her eyes, and rinsed the cobwebs from her mouth.

  In the kitchen, she dropped the half-empty bottle into the trash and started the coffee. When the drops were fat and slow, she thought the time had come to finally take action, to do what she had long desired.

  An hour later, she was pointing out to the building’s assistant super the walls that sliced apart living room and dining room, and those that enclosed bedroom and study.

  “Can you tear all these walls down, Miguel?” she asked.

  “If it’s possible, of course, I will do it for you, Peck,” he said, and she followed him through the apartment, listening as he tapped each wall from top to bottom. The taps sounded hollow to Peck, which she thought was a good thing, that particular structures were not essential.

  In her study, Miguel pointed to the filled bookshelves, his hand in front of Peck’s own books. “Have you read all of these?” he asked.

  “No, not all of them,” Peck said, which was a lie, and she looked at her long desk that bisected the room. There was her third novel, in progress, a short stack of pages. A month without the duties of teaching and grading and the stack had grown only incrementally, the work a brutal slogging that rebuffed Peck at every turn. In all her years of writing, now more than eighteen, the last ten as a published author, never had the work eluded her. Never had her teenage years in Devils Creek, the foundation of her work, been so remote. Vibrant, insistent, and original, the critics agreed about the stories and novels Peck set in the town where she was born, nothing more than a square and some streets, fields of corn, spring wheat, and sunflowers, flat unyielding plains beyond, and, rearing over the highway, those sandy cliffs rising up, the locus of all her juvenile troubles. Did the loss of her dreams last night, and the grizzled novel in which she could not make headway, signal that she had strip-mined that rich vein, or now stood too distant from those days? Had she lost those tidal feelings that lifted her old recklessness into art? She feared suddenly that she had become staid.

  “Are you sure about getting rid of these walls?” Miguel asked. “If you took out your desk and the books, it could be a bedroom, and maybe you will need it. Rosita and I find that a bebé in a crib sleeps better in a room with walls, a door to close.”

  Peck had not considered that she might need a spare room for someone else one day, that she might again find herself room-turned and swollen, caretaking some other life within. Peck and Miguel stared at each other for a moment, and then Peck said, “No. They need to come down. Do you want some coffee? We can talk about the particulars?”

  I read on about how Peck convinced Miguel to demolish all the walls without the requisite permits, for thirty percent more than it would cost if he did the work legally, telling Miguel that, if the work were discovered, she would make sure he was not blamed. Miguel said to Peck, “I’ve always known you were an outlaw,” and when she no longer heard his work boots clumping down the internal stairs, she hoped that was still true, that she was still an outlaw. The work would take Miguel seven weekends, and when he returned on Saturday with his tools to begin, Peck cleared out, wondering where she might go, and surprised herself by spending the day, and the next day, and all the following weekends, in a nearby park, watching children at play. Then I came to this:

  On her seventh Sunday in the park, Peck was on an empty park bench up against the filigreed iron fence, shaded by the thick leaves of a maple. In front of her was a boisterous mob of toddlers and older children on the jungle gyms, the swings, the slides, springing up and down on the plastic ponies, their shrill calls, punctuated cries, screams of delight or of ruin entrancing her.

  Peck was startled when a stranger’s hand came to rest on her forearm. The nails were tough under the cherry-blossom polish, the fingers wind-boughed. The hand belonged to one of the old wheelchair-bound women Peck often saw rolling into the park on her own, still strong, purposeful, alive. Even the runnels carved into her face had resolve. Peck had given her a name, Sylvie, and thought she belonged on a Hamptons estate, and not where she most likely live
d, at the Home for the Aging, a squat and lifeless brick building a block over.

  Sylvie was dressed in unsullied white. Her white canvas shoes resting on the wheelchair ledge were unsoiled. The white bun at her neck, a pearl in the sunshine. She raised her hand from Peck’s arm and gestured around the park, as if she were a maestro, and the children her noisy orchestra.

  “I’ve done all of that, dear, and I do not recommend it. I was lucky. Mine turned out exceptionally well, and so I have no complaint. But I maintain that it’s not worth the sacrifice. Find love first and only. Keep it small and private. Tend to that love every day and every night. Do not complicate love with children and their endless demands.

  “Come to the park to get your fill of their delight. But avoid the abyss. Even perfect children are all just mess and demand and dirty diapers, no matter their age. Sacrifice nothing for another. Give to yourself all that you would otherwise give to a child. Be your own child.”

  Her pink mouth turned up in a smile, white teeth too bright for her age, and then she engaged her chair and motored out of the park.

  For an hour more Peck sat with her hands in her lap.

  The scene was the same—children laughing, screaming, crying, ring flying, ladder climbing, pole sliding, skipping from here to there, holding hands, pushing one another down, slapping at will, sharing a treat—but the old woman in white had smudged what Peck had not been aware she was seeing, had not known she was hearing; her impulse to eliminate all the unnecessary walls in her home, the hand on her belly, the confusion of whiplashed anger and happy tears when she heard that Margo was pregnant again, the fact that her own baby, whoever she had turned out to be, wherever she might be living, was celebrating her eighteenth birthday that day.

  In the park, the bright colors of the children’s clothing, the timbre of their young voices, lowered and darkened.

  I reread the sharp words Ashby placed in the mouth of the old woman—about children not being a worthy goal, not worth the trouble or the mess, not even in the long run when they were grown and still loving—and something stormed inside of me and broke loose.

  When Peck returned home, her key crunched in the lock, and she stepped into a wide-open vacant womb, bright with the sun that entered the space even as it rounded to seven in the evening. She felt freed, lifted skyward, the unsettled questions about the course of her life left behind. She opened up every window and swayed in the hot drifting current.

  On the table at Peck’s front door was a package from her father. Inside, an oversized black leather book with Traynor embossed in decaying silver leaf that sprinkled over her hands. Devils Creek snow in the late days of a Manhattan August. She paged through old pictures of her father’s siblings, their childhood faces not hinting at the angular people they would become. His parents and grandparents had a foot-planted firmness, though they stood tall and narrow on a dirt path, Traynor land rolling behind them. She had never met her father’s family. They had all been buried deep in Peck’s hometown, sepulchral limestone marking where they rest, sayings that summed them up, before her father married her mother. She wondered why her father had sent this album to her now, tied in somehow with the baby’s birthday, but what it meant, what she was supposed to take from it, she did not know.

  On the last page of the album, Peck looked at a photograph of her parents kissing, a courtship kiss given and received when life looked like clear sailing, which it mostly was for them. A small envelope was tucked behind their picture, her name dashed across the front in her father’s hand, the flaps of his envelope taped down, his words jailed within.

  In her outlaw past, Peck acted without thought, but these days, she bided her time, heard words unsaid in shivering silence, sensed what was empty in a choked heart. She could not read her father’s words today, words that would remind her of what he wanted her to know: that she ought to try again, find the right man, have another child, remember from whence she came, no matter the name she tossed away, what she left behind, the daughter raised by others.

  The clock on the stove read just past four. She plunged her home into darkness and got down to her skin. By the light of the fridge, she poured herself wine, then stood at the windows and stared out at the sky. Despite the unholy hour, the moon was still invested and lively.

  She fit herself into the couch’s furrow and tipped the wine into her mouth. She heard a ting when the glass rocked on the wood floor, then settled. Down six stories, out on the avenue, the traffic whooshed like the river back home when it was close to cresting its banks.

  In the dark, Peck inspected her bared body, the moon’s marbling sliding over her breasts and thighs. She imagined her home dark and convoluted again, the absent walls back in place, her nakedness hidden, the moon far away.

  One day she would read her father’s letter, as a message from the grave or a fortune freed from the cookie. She knew when she did, his hopes for her would no longer matter, his dreams like the walls she had once brought down, that she always would have chosen an outlaw life, would never regret the baby given away.

  When I finished the story, Christina had been sleeping for a long time, despite the streetlamp throwing an orange glow through the uncovered window. She lay next to me, but gone was the young shark, replaced by the child Christina must once have been, curled into herself, her sharp knees looking tender and scraped, tucked against her full bouncy chest. I thought how it is only in sleep that our innocent selves are preserved. I felt myself old then, flat on my back, still as a corpse, on the familiar brink of the deep trench filled up with my old childhood anger at Ashby. When I saw I was still clutching the book, I threw it hard against the wall, heard it thud and fall to the floor. Christina did not even turn over.

  I don’t know how much time passed before I fully unraveled the story, realized that Peck Traynor was Ashby’s fictional stand-in, that this was Ashby debating the pros and cons of motherhood, written years before I was born, written before my mother met my father.

  When I was little, my mother said I had chosen her, and I had liked that notion, that somehow, even as a fetus, I already held all the power I would need in my life. And I had grown up being told how much my father wanted me. But right then, I realized never once had my mother said that she had wanted me, had waited impatiently for my arrival. And I thought, Why the fuck did I select a mother whose achievements yanked the dream I had been born with—to be a writer—out of my hands?

  I looked at the facts: I was not the longed-for first child I had always imagined. I had ruptured Ashby’s life, yoked her, prevented her from forging ahead with her own destiny, free of husband, of children, of chains that bound her to the earth. I was the curvature in her spine that spoke of tragedy, the way I had turned her days outward, the fullness of me stagnating her glorious imagination, crud on still water, mucking things up, blanketing that fire in her, goodbye to her work, to her serious future. And those Rare Baby stories of hers that she had read to me, now they made sense. She had written about unparented, unusual creatures because I had not been wanted, had not been rare, was just an average baby then, an average man now.

  Still, I understood that she learned to love me, and I did feel that love, and she was good to me, encouraging what I had been born with: a love of reading and writing. She talked to me about the books I read, read my squirrel stories aloud. Our happiest times took place in that world we both preferred—of stories and writing, and long, long novels—a world where our being mother and son was irrelevant. It was never the umbilical cord that connected us, but our love of words, that’s what we shared during all my growing-up years.

  One could say, but you were young, Daniel, give the writing another go, and I did, in college, a million times. I still sometimes fool around here and there. I’ve got tons of crappy first and second and third paragraphs, some stories I even managed to write all the way through. But every time I try, begin to write something new, remember the power I felt when I was engaged that way as a child, I think of Ashby, of
who she is, and my own pursuit seems insipid, fruitless, a tilting at windmills, and I scratch it all out, or hit Delete, Delete, Delete.

  Christina exhaled a small snore and turned over, and I faced three truths—my mother had not wanted me; she had, unwittingly I’ll admit, destroyed my faith in myself when it came to writing fiction; and I would never soar to the grand heights my mother, father, and brother had.

  I watched the sky lighten, saw the sun sidle up, and the thought that came to me was a surprise. “An Outlaw Life” was setting me free, giving me the power to make my own fate, to follow, in some way, the tenets Peck Traynor subscribed to, what Ashby herself believed. I could simply discard entirely this useless version of myself.

  I rose then and dressed, and even my clothes felt different on my body, seemed meant to be worn by someone else entirely. I said goodbye to Christina, to Carlos Wong, left behind my cardboard furniture, left a resignation note on the desk of a partner to whom I supposedly reported, but had never met, collected my thesaurus and novels, the spare suit, shirt, tie, socks, and underwear folded into a file drawer in my cubicle for deals that required I work through the night. I had banked nine months of substantial pay, pay for the birthing of my own new self. I hopped a plane with two vows in my fist: I would do whatever it took to make a name for myself, and never again would I read another Ashby story.

  Recording #2

  I see the humor now: that when I hopped that plane four years ago, with those vows clutched in my fist, I was heading home, to Rhome, to my mother, who had long ago written “Deep in the Valley,” the story that decimated me at eleven, and “An Outlaw Life,” the story I thought had set me free at twenty-two; and to my father who would describe the newest surgery he was devising, where his travels would take him next as he healed people’s sight the world over; and to my brother who would regale me with the minutiae of his computer program responsible for his fucking success, and watch as he ran Solve=MC2 from the Manning homestead, bossing around his team, strutting like the big man he was, at only seventeen. But home I went, to the renovated house I had so rarely stayed in, and I conquered. Or rather, I stayed as briefly as I could, heeded my father’s advice, and used the substantial earnings from my aborted venture capital career to buy an apartment in Washington, DC—aware that I might never again have such a bundle of cash. I moved in and took my Wharton undergrad degree, and the business acumen and glib patter I developed out in the Valley, and talked my way into Think Inc., one of the country’s most prestigious financial magazines. I applauded myself for the display of gumption that landed me the job. I could not make my own fortune, but I could write about those who did, and although writing magazine articles was not what I envisioned for myself as a child, I thought I would try to be happy. It was, after all, writing of a sort.