by Mary Rickert
I kind of liked it. It was peaceful, all right? And it did smell good in there. And everything was clean. So I’m looking at this big statue they got of Jesus on the cross? He’s got the crown with the thorns on his head, and he’s bleeding, and I don’t know why, but whenever I see statues and pictures of Jesus and shit like that, I sort of hate him. I know that’s insulting to many people, but he annoys me, with that crown piercing his skull and those nails in his feet and hands and shit. I never understand why he didn’t do nothing about it, if he was so powerful and all? “You belong in Voorhisville,” is what I thought, and I guess I said it out loud ’cause that’s when a voice behind me goes, “Excuse me?”
So, I turned and there he was. At first I thought he was the priest, but he set me straight. We talked for a long time and then after a while he said we had to go somewhere safe. I kind of laughed, because ain’t churches supposed to be super safe, but he took my hand, and we went up to the balcony. I don’t know why, we just did, okay? That’s where it happened. I know me and Elli ain’t been getting along so much here, but she’s right: it ain’t bad, what we did. I know, doing it in the church makes it seem bad, but it was good, okay? Like how they said it would be, not like … not … Okay, I’ve been with boys my own age, and I’ve had bad, and this was not like that. And I ain’t just talking about his dick. I’m talking about the feeling. What’d she call it? Holy.
But that don’t mean that Voorhisville ain’t all stinky and shit. We don’t gotta lie about that. We should tell it right because what this shows everyone is that something like this could happen anywhere. If it happened in Voorhisville, it could happen in any town, and I don’t see that as being a bad thing.
TAMARA
The third anniversary of Shreve’s fiancé’s death fell on a Saturday when yoga class was scheduled, but she decided to teach anyway, and was glad she did. She started class with a short meditation. She didn’t tell the women what to think or feel. They just sat there, breathing in and out. Shreve thought about her plans. After class, she would go home and change into something comfortable (but not her pajamas, as she’d done for years one and two), make herself a nice pot of tea, light a candle, and look at photographs.
By the time she opened her eyes, those hard minutes had passed. On that day (though not everyone remembers) Voorhisville smelled like chocolate. Emily Carr woke up at 4:30 and began baking. By 6:30, when Stecker’s opened, she was waiting there with a long list of ingredients. She baked chocolate bread, and a chocolate cake (layered with a raspberry filling), a chocolate torte, and good old-fashioned (why mess with perfection?) chocolate chip cookies. Though the day was warm, she also mixed up some Mexican hot chocolate, which she poured into a large thermos. She made a batch of chocolate muffins and six dozen dark chocolate cherry cookies. Then Emily filled several baskets with cookies, muffins, and slices of cake, torte, and bread, and began delivering her treats to the neighbors.
“But why?” they asked, to which she just shrugged. Until, when she got to Shreve’s house, she said, “Let me know what you think. I’m going to open a bakery and I’m trying to find out what people like.”
At that point, Emily began to cry. Shreve invited her inside. Wiping her eyes as she stepped into the warm living room, Emily said, “I’m happy. That’s why I’m crying. I’m so happy.” Then she noticed the photographs spread across the floor, the wedding dress on the couch, the stricken look on Shreve’s face.
“My fiancé died,” Shreve said, “three years ago today.”
Emily, who had forgotten the date entirely until Bobby Stewart said, “What is this? Some kind of September eleventh thing?” resisted the impulse to ask Shreve if he’d been one of the thousands. Instead, she said, “There’s a thermos of hot chocolate.”
Shreve looked from the basket to the photographs, the wedding dress, the box of tiny bells. “I don’t know what to do.”
“We could go to the park.”
That’s what they did. On that mild September evening the women sat beneath the oak tree in Fletcher’s Park, ate too much chocolate, and became friends.
The following Saturday, after Emily’s first yoga class, the women went garage sale-ing together. Both women appreciated a bargain, and both women had appreciated Jeffrey, though they wouldn’t know this until October, when they confided their fears to each other and—like high school girls, giggling, nervous, and unsure—went to the drugstore for pregnancy tests, which, oddly, were all sold out. They drove all the way to Centerville to purchase them, during which time they told their stories of the stranger with blue eyes and thus discovered that they had shared a lover.
“Did you notice how he smelled?” Shreve asked.
“Chocolate,” Emily said. “Do you ever get mad at him? The way he just left?”
“Actually, I sort of prefer it this way. I’m not looking for anything else. You?”
Emily shook her head. “It’s the weirdest thing, because normally I would. I mean, I think so, at least. I’ve never done anything like that with a stranger. But for some reason, I’m not angry.”
Were the women of Voorhisville enchanted? Bewitched? Had a great evil befallen them? It was hard to imagine that anything bad happened that autumn, when everyone glowed.
Later, they had to agree it was more than strange that they all got pregnant, even those using birth control, and none of them suffered morning sickness. It was also odd that, given the obvious promiscuity involved, no one got an STD. But that fall, all anyone cared about was that the women of Voorhisville were beautiful.
Lara no longer stood at the small window in the upstairs hallway spying on her neighbor. Yes, Sylvia was beautiful. She had always been beautiful, even at her husband’s funeral, her face wracked with grief. But there were many beautiful women in Voorhisville. Why hadn’t Lara noticed before?
One morning, shortly after September eleventh (she later recalled the date because she’d eaten Emily’s chocolate cake for breakfast), Lara stood naked in front of the bedroom mirror. Why had she spent all that time studying Sylvia? Lara turned, twisting her neck to get a sideways look.
She decided to begin painting again. She would paint her own strong legs, the sag of flesh at her stomach, her tired eyes. She had to paint all this to try to express the feeling she had, of no longer being a sum of parts. Her parts would be there, but that’s not what the painting would be about. It would be a self-portrait, Lara decided, and it would be huge.
When Lara realized she was late she phoned the pharmacy. “I’m not coming in today,” she said. She didn’t offer an explanation. Even as she said it, she wasn’t sure she would ever return to work. She knew how this would sit with Ed. He wouldn’t like it, but it wasn’t as though she expected him to support her; she had her own savings.
As Lara dressed, she thought about Jeffrey. She’d taken a huge risk; he could have been a psycho. He could have stalked her. Or told Ed! Instead, he disappeared. For weeks, Lara looked for the hearse, but she never saw it again. He was gone as mysteriously as he’d arrived. She’d been lucky, Lara thought—guilty, yes, but lucky.
It didn’t even occur to her she might be pregnant.
Theresa Ratcher knew she was. She would say, later, that she knew immediately.
When Lara drove past the Ratcher farm on her way to Centerville for art supplies, Theresa Ratcher was standing in the driveway, shading her eyes, as though expecting a visitor. The women waved at each other. Lara sighed. Even Theresa Ratcher was beautiful in her old housewifey dress, her clunky shoes, her corn-colored hair in a messy ponytail.
Theresa watched the car arc over the hill with one hand on her tummy, which had not been flat since Elli was born fifteen years ago. Pete would never suspect a thing. Why would he? Why would anyone? She closed her eyes and tilted her face towards the sun. “What are you doing?” Pete said. Theresa opened her eyes, wide, as though caught. Her husband’s face had hardened with time, and he smelled of manure, but she loved him. She placed her hand on his crotch. Af
ter a moment, she turned and walked away. He followed, surprised when she didn’t go into the house but walked behind the barn, where she lay down on the grass and lifted up her dress, revealing her freckled thighs, the white crotch of her panties. This was very much like how it had happened, when, still teenagers, they’d made Ellie.
Here’s your dad, Theresa thought.
* * *
What all (or most) of the women of Voorhisville would have said was that beautiful was everywhere that fall: it was in the light and shadows and the muted green leaves that eventually burned into a blaze of color, it was in the duct-taped houses, in the bats that flew out of St. Andrew’s belfry each night, and the logey bees buzzing amongst the pumpkins and squash.
Beautiful was in the women, the way they talked, walked, the things they did: the stretch of limbs in yoga, the scent of chocolate from Emily’s kitchen. Jan Morris had never written so proficiently—or, she felt (and the writers in the workshop agreed) more beautifully. Lara Bravemeen began painting again, which caused an argument with her husband, a fight Lara could only think of as beautiful in its passion.
Strange things were happening to the women of Voorhisville. Anyone could see that.
“Like bones, and skin, and blood,” Elli Ratcher later said. “What could be more beautiful than that? What could be more strange?”
THE MOTHERS
We, the mothers, understand the enormity of the task involved in relaying the events that preceded the seminal one. We appreciate the impossibility of incorporating each personal account into this narrative, and, after much discussion and several votes, made the decision to tell this story through the voices of a representative few. It is an imperfect solution, we know, but then again, we are in an imperfect situation. However, we would like to stress that we reject the penis-glorifying tone that’s been taken, as though we, the women of Voorhisville, were only completed through penetration. We would like to make it clear that we believe the women of Voorhisville were always beautiful, always interesting, always evolving, always capable of greatness.
TAMARA
The Veckers own the big white house on the hill. They pay people to do their gardening, mow the lawn, trim the bushes. Several Voorhisville residents think it’s unjust that the Veckers win the Gardeners’ Association’s blue ribbon each year, as well as the grand prize for their Christmas decorations; that big house outlined with thousands of little white lights, all those windows and doors bordered too, so that it looks like some strip mall.
Nobody is exactly sure how the Veckers got to be so rich. Even Cathy Vecker, twenty-five years old and recently returned from Los Angeles, looking a good deal older than her age, has no idea where the family money came from. The topic never held much interest for her. Cathy knew everyone was not as fortunate as she was; but what could she do about it? Whenever she thought about all the poor people—Roddy Tyler with his duct-taped shoes, for instance—it just made her weary.
Because what could they do? The Veckers were rich, but they weren’t that rich; they were no Bill Gates, that’s for sure. Even Cathy, who had never been good at math, knew the numbers didn’t work out. The world had more people than dollars in the various Vecker accounts. If the Veckers gave away every cent they owned, nobody would be rich, and the Veckers would join the masses of those without enough. For a while, Cathy had worried that she was becoming a socialist, but once she worked through the logic, she was relieved to discover that she was just a regular rich American.
Being a rich American meant Cathy could follow her dreams. She moved to Los Angeles to pursue modeling and acting. Cathy Vecker was pretty. She was not as beautiful as Sylvia Lansmorth, but everyone knew that Sylvia was exceptional—though overly attached to her roses. Sylvia’s husband was gorgeous too, or had been, before he died. He was a carpenter. Cathy’s mother and grandmother hired him from time to time for special projects.
Cathy had never been happier for the Vecker money than she was upon returning from Los Angeles. She was thrilled she didn’t have to come up with an immediate solution to the challenging question of what she would do with her life. It wasn’t that she meant to shrug the question off—she had every intention of addressing it eventually—but it was a relief not to have to rush to a conclusion, get a job waitressing or something.
Los Angeles had been an experiment, and she’d failed miserably. All the women in Los Angeles were gorgeous. It was kind of weird, actually. Also, Cathy discovered, she couldn’t really act. It wasn’t until she saw a recording of her audition that she recognized that. Why hadn’t anyone told her? Why hadn’t someone just said it?
By the end of August, Cathy had narrowed her choices to going to college—though she hadn’t applied, she felt certain her family connections could get her into St. Mary’s or the university—or opening a small business. She was bogged down in the details. What would she major in? What kind of business would she start?
Then she became distracted. She thought she was falling in love, or at least that explained the powerful attraction, the chemistry, the reason she did it in the back of a hearse, like somebody who couldn’t afford a room somewhere. Later, Cathy had to admit there was something about it that felt dangerous and exciting. She thought she’d gotten that sort of thing out of her system in Los Angeles, but apparently not.
He didn’t ask for her phone number, but she didn’t worry. She was a Vecker. Everyone knew how to get in touch with the Veckers. By September, she realized he wasn’t going to call. By the end of that month, despite the Pill—which Cathy had been taking since she was fifteen, when she had her first affair with Stephen Lang, who (she didn’t know it was a cliché at the time) cleaned their pool—Cathy guessed she was pregnant. A quick trip to the drugstore and a home pregnancy test confirmed it. Cathy knew she should be upset, but honestly, she wasn’t. She placed her hand on her flat stomach and said, “I’ll do this.”
She decided she’d start a community theatre, right there in Voorhisville. A Christmas play in December, maybe a musical; possibly Our Town in the spring; something modern in-between. It wouldn’t have to make money. The Veckers could do this. They couldn’t support the world, or America, but they could do this. Cathy could run it, even while she raised her child, and she could live off one of the Vecker accounts, and she could do something good for Voorhisville.
The senior Mrs. Vecker received the news—first of the pregnancy, then of the community theatre—with the traditional Vecker attitude. Cathy was worried her grandmother would be upset, but it turned out there had not been an exact alignment between Grandma Vecker’s own wedding and Cathy Vecker’s mother’s birth; a matter covered up, at the time, by an extended European honeymoon. “Didn’t you know that?” Mrs. Vecker asked.
Whereas Grandma Vecker said, “It’s quite clever of you to start without the man hanging around. Everything you need from him, you’ve already got.”
* * *
After her husband died, Sylvia Lansmorth found herself in the unusual position of being rich. Well, not rich, exactly, not like the Veckers, but she no longer had to work at the canning factory, a job she’d held since she was fifteen. Who would have guessed that Rick Lansmorth—who was, after all, just a carpenter—had the foresight to take out sizable life insurance policies for both of them? But he had.
All these months later, Sylvia was still finding the wooden figurines Rick had been working on during his chemo; tiny creatures that fit in the palm of her hand: a swan tucked in his toolbox (she’d been looking for the hammer); what appeared to be the beginnings of a wolf (the shape formed, a few lines cut for fur but no eyes or mouth) on the kitchen windowsill; a tiny mouse with a broken tail in the garden. Rick used to sit outside wrapped in blankets, even when the sun was hot, and Sylvia guessed he’d thrown it in frustration. Not the sort of thing he would normally do, but dying had been hard.
Sylvia was not living the life she’d imagined when she was a high school girl who thought her job at the canning factory was temporary. She used
to look at the women working there and wonder why they stayed. Now, Sylvia knew. It just happened.
She and Rick had planned to leave Voorhisville. First, he tried building up a clientele in Centerville, but he was just another guy with a toolbox there. People in Voorhisville knew and trusted him, and while there wasn’t much work, what work there was, he got. Then he moved to Alaska. The plan was that he would get established before Sylvia joined him. They missed each other, of course, but it was a sacrifice they were willing to make. They thought they had time. Instead, he came back to Voorhisville with cancer and stories of moose.
After Sylvia quit her job, she spent a great deal of time in the garden; so much so that, as fall approached, she realized that her main occupation had been dying, and she didn’t have anything to replace it with. She would have denied that she had wished for it, or expected it; she would have resisted calling it a miracle; but just when the garden started to look barren, she discovered she was pregnant, the result of one single sexual encounter with a stranger she had no desire to see again. Sylvia had gotten quite good at crying over the past year. Why couldn’t it be Rick’s child? Why couldn’t he still be alive? What could possibly come of conception in a hearse? How Freudian was that?
Sylvia considered an abortion. Then she got in her car, drove to Centerville, and went to the Barnes & Noble, where she spent a good deal of money on pregnancy and parenting books.
“Wow, we’ve really had a run on these lately,” the clerk said.
Sylvia liked having a secret. It wasn’t that she was ashamed. She just liked having this private relationship with her baby. Once her neighbor, Lara Bravemeen (whose upstairs windows brooded over Sylvia’s garden) asked why she’d stopped going to yoga, and she just shrugged. Sylvia had recently discovered that most people accepted a shrug for an answer.
In January, Sylvia learned that Lara Bravemeen was pregnant too. Their children could play together. That is, if the Bravemeens stayed married and continued to live next door. Lately, there’d been a lot of shouting over there.