Joy For Beginners (4 page)

Jack, sneaking into her room in the hostel after the other girls were asleep, sliding in next to her in the lower bunk, the mattress already warm from waiting, her body and mind utterly awake from willing her roommates to unconsciousness. His fingers running across her in the scratchy twin bed, his touch warm and light, tracing the arc where her forehead met her hair, moving down the length of her arms that she had lazily stretched—was that her?—above her head as he pulled off her shirt, his hands following the curves of her breasts and ribs and waist, sliding over her hip and coming to rest at the final curve of her spine. As her body reached for his she thought, This is why they make ceilings out of colored glass, in tiny rooms that few people will ever enter.

She had seen that expression on his face again a few months ago, when he told her about the new woman, the one he was leaving her for. A longing.

“I love you,” he had said. “But Allie—she’s still young enough to fall in love. I want to be in love like that.”

After that first night in the hostel, Caroline and Jack had traveled together, following each other’s whims through the hot streets of Athens, along the beaches of sleepy little fishing villages.

“Come back with me,” he had said, as they lay on the sand one evening, just out of sight of the little cluster of houses that called itself a town. He was about to start a graduate program in economics in Seattle, and Caroline was besotted enough to think of rain as romantic. She didn’t want to go home to New England, to her family who would think of her as the girl who had gotten on the plane, a girl she had grown past, like a train overtaking the cars on the highway, heading into mountains and valleys that her family had never seen, wouldn’t recognize. Seattle was a rain-washed slate for them to write a life on. And so she went with him.

I grew up with you, Caroline had wanted to tell him, when he said he was leaving her, twenty-five years later. You are a grown-up. But she knew, looking at his face, that it wouldn’t make any difference. That it was, perhaps, precisely the point.

 

CAROLINE STOOD on her back porch. The voices near her had hushed, blending in with the movements of the leaves and the quiet caretaking of hands buttoning shirts, adjusting hair.

Caroline leaned against the frame of her back door, waiting for them to leave, touching her cold face with her hands.

 

“I’VE GOT A JOB for you,” Caroline told her new trainee at the bookstore the next morning, pointing to the stack of boxes. Caroline’s trainee, Annabelle, had the sweet earnestness of a heroine from a Charles Dickens novel; she had not yet learned to take a hard line against textbooks tattooed with yellow and green highlighter marks, or to turn down a sixth copy of
Pride and Prejudice
when three was more than enough. And she was still far more fascinated by the owners than the books in her hands, which was the reason Caroline had been careful to bring in her boxes well before Annabelle’s shift started, leaving them in an anonymous stack by the used-book counter.

Annabelle looked at the boxes and her eyes got large, concerned.

“Oh no, did somebody die?”

“Just see what you think they’re worth.”

“I’m not going to get all these done today,” Annabelle said, worried. “The owner asked me to do some inventory work in the new books section.”

“That’s okay,” Caroline said. “They aren’t going anywhere.” She headed back to the cafe for a cup of coffee.

 

“I THOUGHT YOU might be working today.” Marion walked up to Caroline at the small table in the cafe.

“Come to check up on me?”

“Maybe. I needed a book, too.” Marion held up a book; the cover had a photo of a man with an elaborate tattoo running across his shoulder and down his arm. “Research,” she said with a smile as she sat down, studying Caroline.

“So how are you doing?” Marion asked her.

“There’s a pile of boxes at the used-book desk,” Caroline said. “Just don’t tell Annabelle they’re mine.”

“So, progress.”

“I suppose. It feels more like carrying out the bodies.”

“But you’re doing it.”

“You know what’s going to be hard?” Caroline asked.

“The beach house?”

“Oh, hell,” Caroline said, “I haven’t even thought of that.”

Behind her, Annabelle walked by, a stack of books in her arms.

ON HER WAY out of the bookstore that afternoon, Caroline saw Annabelle motion to her from the new releases section.

“I got a chance to go through a box or two before I got called over here,” Annabelle reported. “There’s a
ton
of marketing books. You could sell milk to cows after reading all those.”

Caroline nodded and headed out to her car. Jack’s marketing books had been a part of her life for so long that she had ceased to register their presence, simply moving them from the couch to the coffee table, from the bed to the nightstand.
Ten Ways to Sell Anything to Anybody
.
Eight Great Habits of CEOs
. They all seemed to involve numbers, as if you could simply count yourself to riches, like following sheep to sleep.

Jack hadn’t always been like that. When she first met him he had spent hours talking about his studies, fascinated by what he saw as the psychology of humanity playing out in the practicalities of people’s lives. His views were wide and expansive, his compassion clear; she had never thought of economics in that way and she found herself thinking that if he could make numbers this exciting, heaven knows what he could do with sex.

Somewhere along the years, things had changed. They both had, she supposed, if she was honest about it. When she had gotten pregnant, Jack started joking that she had become a bird, she was taking the nesting thing so seriously. She turned into the queen of paintbrushes and projects, learning to stencil and buying miniature food grinders so their child could eat only ingredients she had touched herself. She had a stack of cloth diapers ready before the pregnancy was six months along and her fiction reading habits shifted exclusively to books that might have interesting character names she could claim for their child.

She took Jack’s jokes with a smile, more than half of it sent, as so many things were those days, inward to the baby inside her. She had even tried to tease Jack in return, commenting on his own new behavior, which was more squirrel-like than avian, as if the world was suddenly filled with impending winter and nuts were few on the ground. But he told her it was important, and so she had dutifully looked over the retirement and college savings plans, the insurance policies for long-term disability. She had listened to his concerns about office politics and his thoughts about how the company could expand and she found herself wondering when the psychology of humanity had turned into a theory of how to get people to buy anything.

 

IT SEEMED AS IF these days she was always standing on a stool late at night, Caroline thought as she pulled the last of Jack’s books from the top shelf of the bookcase. Caroline heard her cell phone, a rippling of notes she recognized as Kate’s ring. But Caroline would have known anyway; no one else would call her this late, not even Brad. Caroline got down from the stool and answered the phone.

CAROLINE AND KATE had met almost twenty years before, a chance encounter at the coffee shop around the corner. Kate had recognized Caroline, who had been trying not to cry while standing in line at the coffee bar near the preschool where the two women had just dropped off their children. Everyone knew Caroline; her son was the howler, the one whose anguished cries at separation spiraled up the staircase of the school building, causing even the nonchalant middle-school students on the second floor to hang their coats a little faster, knock one another on the shoulder before heading into their classrooms. Caroline was the one leaving the preschool classroom with a resolute spine, which folded neatly in half when she reached the front door of the building.

Kate’s drop-off at the classroom door was almost embarrassingly brief in comparison, following behind three-year-old Robin, who strode eagerly across the common area, brown paper snack bag held nonchalantly in one tiny hand, eyes aimed forward into the day ahead, into the years when her body would finally grow into the adult she already knew she was. Robin would kiss her mother good-bye and disappear into the glories of a world filled with colored blocks and paints and other children, leaving Kate with hands so empty the only logical solution was a cup of coffee to fill them.

Kate and Caroline had started meeting at the coffee shop regularly on Mondays after drop-off. Mondays were the most likely to fall victim to the inevitable post-weekend crises of forgotten snack items, misplaced laundry and oversleeping—but that only made the coffee at the end of it, the friendly eyes of a compatriot, all the more important.

They had stayed friends over the years, even as their children had gone on to different elementary schools. They counted on each other to hold memories and identities, to remember birthdays and Mother’s Days when husbands or children might forget, to be the extra backbone when a hard parenting decision had to be made. The wife’s wife, they called each other jokingly, the third support in the three-legged stool that is the unseen structure of many marriages. When Kate and her husband had divorced back when Robin was starting middle school, the bond between the two women had only gotten stronger. So when Kate had called Caroline eighteen months ago after a routine doctor appointment, it had taken Caroline precisely three seconds to know that something was wrong.

In the thousands of calls that had happened since then, Caroline and Kate had worked out a kind of shorthand. Early on, Kate had remarked that even more tiring than chemo were the phone calls with distant friends and relatives, the endless conversations about options and treatments. So Caroline and Kate devised a system; Caroline would call and simply say, “One to ten,” and Kate would name a number. “One” would mean Caroline was in the car and headed to Kate’s house. “Five” usually meant diversion was on the menu that night—a story about Caroline’s newest book find or a discussion of Robin or Brad’s most recent love interest. “Nine” and they were off the phone in two minutes, Kate eager to enjoy the health that was surging, no matter how momentarily, through her body.

It was ironic, Caroline thought; even now with Kate fully in remission, her hair growing longer, thick and radiant, the calls were still one to ten, only now it was Kate calling Caroline, post-Jack.

 

“ONE TO TEN,” came Kate’s voice over the phone.

“Four and a half,” replied Caroline.

“Still angry about your book challenge?”

Caroline laughed. “My house has turned into Box City. What do you think?”

Kate let the phone call unwind into the silence.

“No,” Caroline said after a moment. “It was a good idea.”

“Okay,” said Kate. “You don’t have to do this by yourself, you know.”

“I know.”

When Caroline hung up the phone, she went back into the living room and stood looking at the whiteness of the empty bookcase rising up to the left of the fireplace. Caroline went to her purse and took out the smooth black rock Kate had given her the night of the victory party. Then she walked over to the bookshelf and put the rock on the middle shelf, where it lay small and dark and quiet in the midst of what wasn’t there.