by Nancy Thayer
We’ll have to do something about this, Sara thought. Eventually. The end of the novel was surprisingly bleak.
One night at a dinner party, I looked around the elegant dining room table and realized that I had slept with every man seated there. I excused myself, saying I had a sudden headache, and left the room and the party. I knew I had to change my life, and I did, on the first opportunity offered to me. An American banker, fifteen years older than I, visiting London and not aware of my past, became smitten with me and asked me to marry him. I did not love him, but I was not certain of my capabilities for love anymore. And he offered me the security I needed. So I went back with him to the United States, where he set me up in a fine old house in a fine old city. He provided me with every luxury, and we were compatible. It was not unpleasant. My husband worshipped me—but I was uncomfortable with this worship, which I knew was based on my looks, my fading, failing beauty. It was a relief when he died from a heart attack at the age of sixty. It was a relief to be left alone, with enough money to provide a secure hiding place, a place where I could remain comfortable and solitary, with no one to watch me age.
I had come a long way from the Kansas farm where my parents knelt and lifted and strained in the dirt in their ceaseless task of renewing the earth and its animals, a necessary ritual with the stately repetitions of a dance. Often I sit remembering that farm, those tasks, the people I loved (who are dead now), and I also remember that the only sound of appreciation for their performance was the heartless crack of applause when a thundercloud rolled its lightning overhead. And I remember that the only gold that was tossed to those slavish dancers was the gold of sunlight that fell like glittering coins through the well of the barn where it disappeared among the soiled straw, never to be touched, never to be picked up and carried off to buy them freedom. I had realized early in my life that the gold in that place was only an illusion.
So I had done this much: I had escaped. I had freed myself from a repetitious drudgery, I had seen places in the world where real gold rimmed the plates and paintings and limbs of women. I had possessed real gold myself. I had been admired and adored by many—I had given happiness to many. I had loved and been loved. I judge my life to have been entirely satisfactory. I see years ahead during which I will be able to sit here alone, remembering the freedom, the gold, the far countries, the lovers and their gifts.
It is only sometimes, when the sunlight steals across my room to strike a spark against a prism in a chandelier so that the air trembles with the possibilities of more radiance than I had guessed at, when I feel just as I felt as a young girl, hearing the doves cry out in the barn as the sun sliced golden through the everyday air:
There must be more. But where?
But where?
Sara was not satisfied with the way the novel ended. When she was once again seated in the hot blue living room, with the assorted animals, whom she was coming to learn to know by name, snuffling and purring around her, and Fanny seated across from her in the embracing depths of the sofa, she at first spoke of other things, trying to find just the right moment to give Fanny her criticisms—hoping that the inscrutable and moody Fanny would not take offense. Once again the stone-faced Eloise brought them a cart laden with delicacies and a sterling silver pot of smoky Lapsang souchong tea. Once again Sara spoke first of herself: her meeting with Morris, her doctor’s advice, her fear of surgery.
“Some women actually love being in the hospital, being fussed over and lifted and lowered and rearranged, but others, like you and me, hate it,” Fanny said. “I think it’s losing control we’re afraid of.”
“I think it’s death I’m afraid of!” Sara laughed. “I have so much I want to do in this world, and the thought that one careless slip—” She couldn’t continue.
“I know,” Fanny said. “Really I do. And I sympathize. If it weren’t for that fear, that a surgeon would have some fatal moment of stupidity, I’m sure I would have had several face-lifts by now. Not to mention having everything else lifted, too.” She laughed. “But really, Sara, you know these things are safe. And it sounds as though you really need this procedure. Especially if you have one tube blocked. I think you should go ahead and do it. Soon. Really I do.”
Sara smiled at Fanny and raised her cup in a sort of toast and sipped her tea. All right, she thought to herself, if you can tell me what to do with my body, I can certainly tell you what to do with your book!
“All right,” she said, smiling but serious. “I’ll make the appointment as soon as I get home. It shouldn’t put me out of commission for too long. You know I’m longing to get this book to Donald James, and he’s wild to see it.” She opened her notebook. It was difficult making out the print in the dim blue light of the room. “Do you think we could have more lights on?” she asked.
“Oh, well, electric lights make everything so garish, I always think,” Fanny replied. “It is daytime. I’m sure we’ve sufficient light to read by.”
This time there was no mistaking the will of iron cloaked in the lilting luscious voice. For God’s sake, what vanity! Sara thought impatiently. We’ll both lose our eyesight just to keep it dark enough in here to hide her wrinkles. But she smiled and said, “Yes, you’re right. This is fine.”
For a few moments Sara pretended to study her notes. Really she was searching for just the right words to say. If Fanny shied away from light on her face, how would she handle the harsh light of judgment on her book? At last Sara stared at the author. She took a deep breath.
“Is this a novel?” she asked.
Fanny, who now held the fat cat and was stroking it, looked up at Sara, startled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, is this fiction?” Sara pressed, her judgment making her bold.
“Why yes, my dear, I thought you understood that absolutely,” Fanny said. “Of course it is fiction.”
“Then you must change it,” Sara said. “You can’t do this to your readers. You make us care so much about Jenny, you make us curious, you take us through her life, where so much happens, until we are longing for her to be happy, to be loved and to honestly give love back. You can’t let her end up this way. You can’t let the last relationship of her life be the sort of marriage you describe. And then such bitter loneliness.”
For a long moment Fanny did not speak. Sara was silent, too, biting her tongue, refusing to take back what she had said.
“The requisite happy ending,” Fanny said at last, sighing.
“In this novel it is fitting,” Sara said.
“But it would not be true.”
“What ‘truths’ do you care about, Fanny?” Sara asked. “A novel is fiction, but it must contain truths. It must seem real. I can believe Jenny’s life up to a point. She was a prisoner of her insecurities and her beauty, but she has been brave enough to get herself away from the farm and to other countries, she has had the courage to lead an interesting life. It isn’t believable that she would settle at last for a loveless marriage and then loneliness. Don’t you see? It’s not real.”
“But it’s very real,” Fanny insisted. “Jenny has no choice, at last. She got old, you see.”
“But what is she at the end of the novel? Only about fifty years old!” Sara protested. “Are you saying that once women turn fifty their lives are over? No men will love them? That’s ridiculous! Steve will love me when I’m fifty, I’m sure of it. And I’ll love him, even though he’ll probably be bald and have a paunch. People might be attracted to each other at first because of looks, but real love isn’t so superficial.”
Fanny smiled. “You are so passionate about this,” she said.
“And another thing,” Sara pressed on. “Her writing. All through her life she writes. In Mexico she wanted to be a writer, she even managed to get things published. In England she worked as an assistant on a fine magazine. She cared about writing, she was not just a beautiful face and body. What happened to that side of Jenny? I really can’t imagine her, no matter how much money she ha
s, just curling up in a hole forever. She would be so bored.”
Fanny ran her fingers across her forehead in a light, obscuring gesture. “Yes,” she said softly. “I do see that. I can do that for Jenny.”
“And friends!” Sara continued. “After all these years, Fanny, Jenny should have some friends.”
“Then you’ve missed the point completely,” Fanny said, her face changing, her voice becoming harsh. “Jenny never really had friends. She didn’t know how to have friends—”
“Couldn’t she make friends? One friend?”
Fanny rose, took up the poker, and fussed with the fire in what seemed to Sara an attempt to hide her agitation. At last she turned back. “I have had trouble all along with the ending of this novel,” she said. “I have felt like a fortune-teller who suddenly has lost the ability to see through the crystal ball. I’ve had sleepless nights about this, I assure you. Sara, I want to trust your instincts, but I cannot go against my own.”
Sara gave the writer time to collect herself. Fanny’s hands were shaking slightly now, her mouth was working.
“Novels can be revised,” Sara said quietly. “Even lives can suddenly, at the last hour, change.”
Fanny looked at Sara. “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, that’s true.” She sat down, took up her notebook and pen. “Very well. Jenny can have her work, and that in turn can give her friends. That is plausible, isn’t it. True?” Now she was almost smiling.
“Yes,” Sara answered, smiling back.
Fanny scribbled on her pad. She looked up at Sara and said, “That’s the difference between life and fiction, isn’t it? Jenny can have whatever life I give her.”
After her meeting with Fanny, Sara had run over to the CVS pharmacy in Harvard Square. She carried her purchase, hidden in a brown paper bag, as protectively as if it were jewels, back to Nantucket.
It was the meeting with Fanny that had given her the courage to do this. She understood Fanny’s hesitation about meddling in something that should happen naturally. For Fanny it was writing; for Sara, it was getting pregnant. Part of Sara still believed that because she and Steve loved each other so much, and loved making love with each other so much, a natural and even inevitable consequence would be pregnancy. But perhaps the natural needed a little help—and that was just what she thought she had in her brown paper bag.
It helped that she had been in Cambridge today so that she could buy the item at a pharmacy where no one she knew would see. In December, when she had the prescription for prenatal vitamins filled on Nantucket, the little white-haired old lady behind the counter, the pharmacist’s wife, had embarrassed Sara so terribly she had nearly fled from the store.
“How far along are you, dear?” she had asked, as she came shuffling out from the back room with Sara’s prescription vitamins.
Sara had stared at the woman, trying to decide what to say. At that moment, she heard the front door of the pharmacy open and close. She heard female voices. She did not turn to look. If that was part of the group, she would die on the spot!
“When is your baby due?” the old lady repeated, in the ringing tones of the slightly deaf.
“Oh, oh, I’m not pregnant,” Sara said. She threw the old lady a blinding smile, as if pregnancy were the last thing on her mind.
“But these are prenatal vitamins,” the old lady yelled. “They’re expensive! If you’re not pregnant, you don’t need such expensive vitamins.”
“Could I please have them?” Sara asked quietly, not smiling.
“Of course,” the old lady said, and exchanged the package for Sara’s money. Sara hurried from the store, glancing quickly at the two women—she didn’t know them, had never seen them before, thank heavens.
But this item she had bought in the blissful anonymity of Harvard Square. No one knew she had it, not even Steve. Well, Ellie knew, for she had recommended it. And Sara felt good about it—felt smug. Here was the combination of science and magic she had been wishing for.
Chapter Seven
Seven o’clock in the morning.
Again.
Sara had been waking up at seven o’clock every single day for centuries, it seemed.
Steve moaned and turned on his side, pulling most of the covers with him. Sara reached for the thermometer and put it in her mouth. The five minutes took forever to pass. There was something urgent she needed to do.
At last she rose from the bed, slipped the thermometer into its blue case, pulled on her robe, and hurried into the bathroom, putting the thermometer on her Plexiglas table next to the accompanying chart and pen.
And there was the kit in all its blue-and-white plastic glory.
Usually the little table held crystal decanters full of pastel bath oils, Royal Doulton china dishes full of scalloped soaps, perfumes, dusting powers, body lotions. All that had been pushed aside, jumbled up in a corner to make room for her new treasures: the thermometer, and now this kit.
It was an ovulation-indicator kit. Ellie had called to tell her about it. The thermometer, Ellie had said, only told a woman when she had ovulated. This kit would tell a woman just before she ovulated that she was going to, so there wasn’t the chance of missing the day as there was with the thermometer.
She had been using the kit for several days now. She had the routine down pat. She took the small plastic cup and crouched over it, urinating, grinning as she did so, thinking to herself: I’m mad, I’m mad, I’m the mad scientist. She set the cup on the table and hurriedly washed her hands.
With a clean medicine dropper, she took some of the urine from the cup and put it into a tiny tube already containing a clear liquid. Then she had to wait for fifteen minutes. She looked at her watch. It was ten minutes after seven. She had to time this portion of the test very carefully.
While she waited, she noted her temperature—the same as the day before—and marked its spot on the temperature chart. She was beginning to see the black line that recorded her temperature as an endless repetitive road to nowhere. For five months now it had jigged and jagged along, rising when she ovulated, only to plunge when she started her period. If she was to get pregnant, the temperature would stay high, would not take that dreadful fall that carried her emotions with it. Ellie had reassured Sara that she should take great comfort from the chart: it proved that she was ovulating regularly, that her system was functioning nicely.
“But not nicely enough!” Sara had replied.
Today was the fifteenth day of her cycle. Today her temperature should have risen, but it hadn’t. What did that mean? Sara sat on the carpeted bathroom floor and leaned back against the tiled wall, closing her eyes for a moment. The ovulation-indicator kit said that the day she ovulated her urine specimen would turn bright blue and that the change on that day from the color on previous days would be the most extreme. She kept the color of her tests, rated from one to six, on another chart. So far, each day for the past four days, her urine had remained a frustratingly clear color that scarcely deserved a one on the chart.
“Oh, body,” Sara said aloud, “come on!”
She looked at her watch. Ten more minutes to wait. She raced out to get the letter she’d received from Julia yesterday, and brought it back with her to the bathroom. Eight minutes left. She sat down on the floor, leaned against the wall.
“At last!” Julia had written in her fat loping scrawl. “I’ve found it! The advice you’ve been waiting for! Oh, what would you do without me? I really can’t imagine. Now it’s up to you to find a spell for me to use to get Perry away from his clamtrap wife!”
Paper-clipped to the note was a Xeroxed page from a book devoted completely to ancient reproductive rituals. Sara checked her watch. Five minutes to wait. She read.
Whether or not the woman was fertile could be tested; for example, by watering corn with her urine. If it grew she was not barren. If it did not, a variety of remedies were at hand to increase her fecundity. Sea holly was recommended by Elizabeth Okeover; nutmeg would ‘help conception an
d strengthen nature,’ asserted Miss Springatt; sitting over hot fumes of catmint was suggested by several authors. Anything that warmed and invigorated such as brandy and hot baths found favour. Nicholas Culpeper, self-proclaimed student in physick and astrology, provided in his Directory for Midwives (1656) typically elaborate instructions on how to aid conception. In addition to good diet and exercise he recommended wearing amulets such as a lodestone or the heart of a quail; drinking potions of eringo, peony and satyrion; eating ‘fruitful’ creatures such as crabs, lobsters and prawns; and consuming concoctions of the dried and powdered wombs of hares, the brains of sparrows and the pizzles of wolves.
“Darling, I’m combing the stores of Boston to find you some hare wombs and wolf pizzle!” Julia had scribbled on the bottom of the note.
If she finds it, I’ll use it! Sara thought. And why not. Here she was, sitting on the bathroom floor in her robe. She hadn’t combed her hair or brushed her teeth. She had taken her temperature and peed into a plastic cup. She felt like some superstitious primitive native waiting for a cloud to pass over a mountain, giving her a sign. And she wanted a baby so much she would go to a witch doctor or drink pizzle of wolf—she would do anything!
The time was up. Sara rose, took a tiny plastic stick and dipped it into the tube holding her urine and the solution. Now she had to wait five minutes more. She brushed her teeth and combed her hair. Now she looked civilized even if she was acting like a heathen.