The Sabbathday River (14 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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Heather said yes, her heart sinking a little. A grocery run would cut further into her time with Ashley, and given the lost afternoon just past, this seemed downright punitive. The lack of an automobile had an endless impact on their lives, Heather thought. Pick, who felt, with her encroaching arthritis and lagging reflexes, that she was no longer capable of driving, had sold her car when Heather had gone to Hanover and bought, with the proceeds, enough aged and stacked hardwood for the next five winters. Heather could drive perfectly well, but returned home to utter vehicular dependence—not altogether a bad thing, as it had turned out, but frustrating. Pick sometimes caught a ride with one of the Hodge sisters. But perhaps they'd been busy.
“Hands all right?” she asked, sipping her milk. Pick's knuckles seemed to be growing hourly. Just looking at them was painful.
“You have something to say to me.”
“I do?” Heather said lightly. She noted a moment of déjà vu.
Pick had declined to look up. The work in her lap was something Heather hadn't seen before, or else had failed to notice: a blur of blue, tinged with pink, more crumpled than folded. Her eyes widened.
“I would say you did,” said Pick, but even though she said it sternly, she also smiled, and so Heather smiled back.
“I'm not hiding anything,” Heather said, and Pick put down her needle and laughed. She had always had an extravagant laugh.
“What I want to know is, how'd you have time to get up to this? You're just about always home. You go to work, you come back. You're here all weekend.”
Heather crossed her legs. It was getting slightly more difficult to cross her legs. “He drives me home,” she said simply. Then, because this mattered, she said, “He loves me very much.”
“Is he going to marry you very much?” her grandmother asked.
“He's already married,” Heather said. Then a small laugh escaped her. “Very much.”
“I see,” said Pick. She took up her work again, poked her needle at it, then put it down and sighed. “How are we going to do this?”
“Well,” said Heather brightly, unwilling to let the mood pass, “pretty much the same way people always have, I guess. Aren't you just supposed to spread your legs and push?”
Pick looked up, and Heather caught her breath. Arthritis aside, Pick had always been only one age to her, the nether district after middle age but simply short of old. She was like one of those teenagers, Heather thought, who leapfrog up ahead of themselves to plain and broad maturity, then let the years go past, resigned to it, until they catch themselves again. Now, abruptly and before her eyes, Pick had abandoned her static berth and leaped ahead once more. Afraid to meet her gaze, Heather looked away.
It wasn't only gratitude, though Pick, she knew, had had no obligation to accept her errant daughter's child, let alone to raise it, let alone to love it as Pick had loved her. Between herself and her grandmother there had always been an essential consonance, so dissimilar, Heather thought, from the general friction of daughters and mothers. Perhaps the generation missing between Pick and herself had taken that friction away with it, leaving this pleasant, if quiet, vacuum of years. Pick's mothering—her surrogate mothering—was hardly involved. Intimate talks on the terrible beauty that was womanhood were not within her
ken, let alone her protocol; but she had loved Heather utterly in her own standoffish way, feeding her first and then teaching her to feed herself, then to cook for herself, then to provide for herself, and always to be—more or less contentedly—alone, since alone was what you could count on in life. “I'm not saying this is the answer to my dreams, you know. I won't say that.” She shook her head. “What is that, coffee?”
Heather looked down into her own cup. “Milk,” she said. It was nearly cold by now.
“Good. It helps the baby's bones.”
Her heart leaped. “I know. I think maybe it's a girl.”
“Maybe a girl.” Her grandmother shrugged. “Maybe a boy. We won't throw it out, either way.” She sighed. “I wouldn't count on me for much heavy lifting, though. Hands aren't up to much.”
“Of course not, Grandma. I'll do everything myself. I
want
to do everything.” She crossed the room and sat beside Pick, then leaned close. “I'm so happy,” she told Pick's white, translucent ear.
“Well, you'd better be,” Pick said. She wagged a crooked finger in Heather's face. “I can tell you right now, no one else is going to be. Like mother, like daughter, they're going to say.”
“I don't care,” Heather said fiercely. “I just care about the baby. And—” She stopped herself.
“Him,”
her grandmother snorted. “Well, it's no good thinking about him, whoever he is. I don't suppose
he'll
be here at four in the a.m. when the baby has gas.”
Heather giggled. Pick glared at her. “Oh, that's funny, is it? Just you wait, my dear. You'll never work as hard for anything as you will for a belch, I can tell you. And
you,
I've never known a child with so much gas!”
“Grandma!” Heather yelped. Pick unfolded the fabric on her lap. Even half finished, it was an amazing thing, impossibly pieced with tiny parts of cotton, pink and blue in a hexagon mosaic. The bits of fabric couldn't have been larger than half-inch squares, Heather thought, and the intricacy of their placement was dazzling. It was a show-off quilt, she understood, a demonstration of what Pick still could do with her unlovely hands. And it was a competitive quilt. For as much as her grandmother was enjoying this, her own thrilled response, Heather knew she would enjoy far more showing the finished effort to Ina and Janelle Hodge. The Hodge sisters, with whom Pick had walked an edgy sixty
years of mutually disapproving friendship, had been virtually enshrined as local repositories of native craft, and were forever bringing round their latest clippings from
The Boston Globe
or
The New England Monthly.
Ever since that person had moved out from New York and whipped up all the women to hook rugs and make quilts, Pick was wont to say, those girls had heads on them altogether too big for their bodies. For her part, Pick wasn't interested in sewing quilts for some housewife in Milwaukee who ought to get off her duff and make her own.
“Well?” she said, admiring her own work. “What do you think? Acceptable for a girl or for a boy, so you can go on and have whichever you want. Of course, don't go having twins now, cause I don't think my hands have got another one in them.”
“Oh, Grandma,” Heather managed.
“You know,” said Pick, “it's no terrible thing to raise a child alone. Most women do, anyway.” She frowned. “I raised your mother alone, never mind Sam was here every day of it. I raised you alone. You could take the men out of the picture entirely with no loss, as far as I'm concerned, if it weren't for money and what people are going to say about you in the supermarket. But I don't know many men with that much money anyway, and I never cared much what they said about me. It doesn't put food in your mouth or take it away when you come right down to it.” She peered at Heather. “You listening to me?”
She touched her grandmother's face. “I'm going to name her after you,” said Heather.
A Circle of Women
AFTER THAT, EVERYBODY SEEMED TO NOTICE AT once, glaring at the bulk of her winter coat with, first, suspicion, then a singular expression of horrified affront. Heather, for her part, couldn't see what it had to do with these people, rooted to the spot at the far end of the supermarket aisle or staring from their cars. Who they were, she wasn't even sure most of the time, though a few she knew perfectly well: Ann Chase or Sarah Copley, or the anonymous teased-and-dyed mothers of her high-school classmates. Martina still picked her up in the mornings, honking from the road so that Heather could wrap herself up and then walk, gingerly, avoiding the ice patches, down the length of the drive, but now Martina drove grimly, hardened in her silence. Finally, toward the end of February, she told Heather that Stephen Trask was letting her go on flexible hours and he himself would be driving out to Goddard Falls to pick her up in the mornings, and so the arrangements changed—though the housekeeper seemed to arrive at the center at pretty much the same time she had before, as far as Heather could tell.
It was true she hid nothing; she was too pleased with herself for that. She beamed at anyone who looked at her, even if they happened to be turning away in distaste. She had the most intense thrill from the new weight of each step, the tight substance of her abdomen. When Heather moved, the earth beneath her was ever so slightly displaced. Air parted about her, making way for her splendid condition. And she truly felt beautiful, her brown hair shiny and thick, her belly tautly round, her breasts full. Ashley loved them especially now, and laughed that he was only helping her practice for nursing. She held his head in the crook of her arm, the long ponytail spilling over her elbow. Pregnancy had made her wanton, Ashley joked. When she came, she felt the baby leap within her orgasm, like a figure skater doing spins at the center of the ice while crowds skate the periphery.
Because it was true, what he said—her hunger for him was a constant, visceral yen. At the core of Heather's bulk and the very root of her weight, something kinetic was in perpetual plea for his fingers or tongue. Every smell was mixed with the smell of their close grapplings, the smell of her own sticky center. Her vision was incessantly blurred by some encroaching memory of straining rhythms. Even their first lovemaking had not been so charged with pressure, she thought. Now, even more than then, it became difficult to concentrate on anything at all. She woke at night from the memory of penetration and had to press her thighs together for relief. When Ashley took her into the forest he might be inexpressibly gentle, but Heather yearned for violence. She wanted to slap his hands away and bring them back rougher. When he said he was afraid to hurt the baby, Heather compelled his hand—irresistible force meets eminently movable object. The thrill of seducing him spun in continual regeneration. She had never been greedy in this way before, but she loved her greed, her catalogue of new sounds, and most of all the authority of her commands. He was awed by her transmutation, her sheen of health. Sue felt terrible all the time now, he told Heather, throwing up and having pains down her leg and something awful, he confided, as if she desperately wanted to know, hanging out of her behind. Heather was politely solicitous, but the truth was that she preferred not to hear about Sue, even about her discomfort. She preferred to be allowed to forget about Sue entirely; a reasonable barter, she thought, for the unalterable fact of Ashley's marriage, and her own dearth of demands on him.
Sue was using the obstetric service in town, Ashley said, so Celia Trask drove her to Hanover to see a midwife there. The midwife believed that less was more, that women should be in charge, that caesareans were a misogynist curse of the patriarchy. Heather had no idea what she was talking about. The baby was all right? she asked the woman. Of course, the baby was fine. Heather thanked her and went home.
She had no intention of stopping work. She loved her work, not least because Ashley was around so often now; the center, fresh from its second winter, had sprung a few leaks and suffered chronic flooding from the spring thaw. They didn't actually speak to each other, but Heather could watch him through the window from her chair in the lunch bar, zipped to his elfin chin in a red down jacket, excavating the retaining wall from the slope down to the swollen Sabbathday. The shock of his particular beauty had not ebbed. She might know the smells in his most hidden places and the metallic tang of his nipples, the furthest vicinities of his mouth and the most intimate grammars to his pleasure, but there remained an involuntary jolt when her eyes found his shape in the distance. That other women did not seem to stare at him, were not struck motionless by the cataclysm of his beauty, was something that gave her comfort, since it seemed to confirm that Ashley had been intended for her alone.
Sue still came to swim, but less regularly, and Heather had not needed to be told of her gestational woes to see that Ashley's wife was unwell. Where she had walked with grace, slender in her unadorned and businesslike maillot, Sue now waddled painfully in a frilled maternity suit, a kind of waterproof muumuu in falsely bright Hawaiian colors. Her legs had thickened about the ankle, and her thighs were scrawled with the magenta graffiti of varicose veins. Painfully, Sue lowered herself into the water, and painfully she moved up and down her appointed lane. Heather, peeking discreetly from the doorway, shook her head and touched, unthinking, her own belly, stroking the head of the child she had already named, and pitied her.
The winter broke. Mud season left its usual mess. Celia Trask drove her into Hanover, where she bought a vast pair of overalls at Rosie Jekes and had her hair cut blunt to her chin—Celia's treat. Celia, doubtless on Stephen's instructions, was trying to be pals, a campaign somewhat doomed by the fact that she and Heather plainly did not like each other.
They went to Peytonville for baby things—singlets and undershirts, a mobile that chimed and turned hypnotically. She did not like most of the things she bought. They weren't good enough. But the choice was narrow and she didn't know when she might get a chance for another expedition like this. The important thing was Pick's quilt, and it was finished now, its border etched in the palest green meander, offsetting the precise abundances of blue and pink. Heather readied the room next to her own and went on with her life. She was waiting for something to happen, and then something did.
On a Friday in June, she was stooped behind the reception desk rooting out a new box of membership application forms when the drift of a body moved heavily in her direction, and then stopped. The person said nothing, but there was threat in its silence. It stood in attendance, keeping its own counsel. Heather, already alert, climbed awkwardly to her feet.
It was Sue, naturally, her jaw slack, her face sleeplessly white. The two women stood eye to eye. Heather was still unconvinced. Sue might, reasonably enough, have come to say something unremarkable—about the pool hours, for example, or the need for a changing table in the women's locker room. She wouldn't be the first, and Stephen was always telling people they should feel free to tell him what they wanted at the center, that it was their center, after all, and his charge was to serve the community. It could be that, but as the silence lengthened Heather knew it wasn't. She had never heard Sue speak, and she used this time to wonder what Sue's voice was going to sound like when she got around to opening her thin and livid mouth—not what she was going to say. By now, Heather had little doubt what Sue was going to say.
But Sue, for the moment, said nothing. Instead, she reached slowly, with rigid concentration and commendable aim, for the swell of Heather's right cheek. Heather thought, for one crazed moment, that Ashley's wife was going to pat her, as one might pat a child on the head, or a friend to say, “Wake up!” But it wasn't a pat. It wasn't a slap either. Sue's face remained motionless, but it seemed to harden. Heather caught a whiff of something sour—her mouth, her bitterness trapped between folds of unwashed skin—then, impossibly, she felt Sue's fingers tighten around her palmful of flesh, dig deep, then twist. She could not see her own cheek, of course, but she saw it anyway, as if on television or beneath a microscope, a melon-ball scoop of injured tissue being
wrested from her body, as if Sue were doing her a favor and saving her life by cutting out this bad thing. She felt nothing, but she knew enough to think that strange. From cheek to brain—why was the pain taking so long to reach her? Sue's jaw set, but she retained a perplexed expression, as if she, too, were in the grip of some great and angry hand. Heather's mouth dropped open, but her voice had rushed to the place that was being gouged from her skull, so naturally she couldn't speak. The edge of her eye saw Stephen, frozen and perplexed, in the doorway to his office, an amazed woman with her skinny daughter in matching bathing suits, the shocking sweetness of Ashley's face in stunned profile as he reached for his wife's claw, and finally, as that familiar hand met the thing that was wrenching her face, Heather felt pain. It was terrible pain.
“Mm,” her throat managed. She batted at the hand, but it had fused itself to her.
Sue's voice, syrup and lead, said:
Slut.
Ashley slapped his wife. She burst into tears and let go. The air hit Heather's cheek like alcohol in the raw places, and she pressed her palm against it hard, as if to push the flesh back to where it had been.
“Come on,” Ashley yelled, grabbing Sue's elbow, his voice raw and livid. Heather had never heard him so furious, and this, at once, became more shocking than the queer, slow-motion assault that had just taken place. She gaped after him as he dragged his wife away, pushing her into her own car and climbing in after, deflecting her blows as she tried and tried to hit him.
Stephen was at Heather's side, pulling her back. But Heather did not want to stop looking at Sue. At Sue and her husband, soldered in combat behind the filmy glass of Sue's Ford—in that angry, enclosed space that was their marriage. She wanted to break the window. She took a step in their direction.
“Heather,
please
,” Stephen said. He gave an unmistakable yank. For the first time Heather looked at him.
“What?” she said, her voice oddly calm. There was a crowd, she noticed now, but they were awfully quiet.
“Come into my office,” he said, unnecessarily, since he was both heading there and dragging her after him. He sat her in a chair and went to the lunch counter for ice. Her face was already numb. Stephen came back with a bag wrapped up in a towel and pressed it against her. She couldn't feel a thing.
“I don't think you need stitches,” he said. He was trying to be helpful.
“Of course I don't need stitches,” she said tersely. “I can't believe this.”
“You can't?” Stephen said. He took the comfortable seat behind his desk. “Which part of it shocks you? That Sue Deacon isn't a dummy? Or that she isn't a wimp?”
Heather glared at him.
“What was she supposed to do, Heather? Keep her eyes closed or keep her mouth closed?”
“She didn't exactly use her mouth,” Heather said, rubbing the ice over the senseless flesh of her cheek.
He sighed. “You want to know the truth? I'm pretty amazed it took her as long as it did. You're having his
baby,
for Christ's sake.”
“It's got nothing to do with her,” Heather shouted.
He glared at her. “Don't be stupid. It's got everything to do with her. Every time you show yourself in public it's a billboard about her marriage. How would you like it if somebody paraded your most intimate secret up and down Elm Street? You can't possibly be so naive, Heather.” He paused. “Or so insensitive.”
This took her aback.
“Yes.” He warmed to his argument. “Deeply insensitive. The woman is having her first child and her husband's off messing around with somebody else.”
“Me too.” Heather was petulant, though it was hard to be fierce with the ice against her cheek. “I'm having my first child, too. You think she'd be good enough not to show up at my job and attack me. I ought to call the police or somebody.”
“That,” he chided, “would be extremely unwise.”
They looked at each other in silence. Then Stephen shook his head. “Listen, Heather. I wasn't going to bring this up for a while, but it seems like a good time now.” He considered his own hands, folded before him on the desktop. “I don't know what your plans are after the baby. I don't know if they include coming back to work.”

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