The Sabbathday River (19 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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Then, as she looked out over the crowd, she saw him, in his bright red car, pulled over to the opposite side of the road and idling while he watched her. She couldn't see him clearly, because there was glare on his window, but it seemed to her that he must be proud of her, seeing her like this, refusing to betray him, or herself, or their child, by feeling the shame they seemed so determined to make her feel. And she felt, to her surprise, suddenly beautiful then, taller than she was, and with the leanness she no longer had. And with this new, remarkable idea, she looked again at some of the men in the road and saw plainly that, even at this moment, they wanted to put their hands on her. She smiled at them, to let them know she knew, then she turned to the policeman. “I want to go home,” she said. “Can I go home?”
He looked relieved. “Well, sure,” he said in his kind, baffled voice.
Heather took a step. Ann objected.
“What do you want me to do?” he said in exasperation. “Put her in prison? For breast-feeding?”
Ann sulked. “Can't you give her a fine?” Her voice rose to outrage again. “You think it's okay what she did? You think it's okay for her to come up on my porch and take her clothes off? This is our busy season, you know! We've got a business going on here. Do I have to let her use my business to make a display of herself?”
“I don't think—” Nelson started, but Heather, incensed, started moving off. The men let her brush them as she passed. She held Polly a bit aloft, to keep her clear. A single hand—unmistakable—touched her breast.
“Fuck you!” Heather snapped over her shoulder.
“Hey!” said some indistinct woman. “You watch—”
“Can't you just leave us alone?” said Heather.
She stepped onto the road and looked up. She was glad he was gone. Someone edged in front of her, a human impediment.
“I'm just trying to get home,” said Heather.
But she was already home. That was the point, entirely.
Polly Catches Cold
HE WAS IN AWE OF HER. HE AS MUCH AS TOLD her this. She did it all well. She made it seem effortless: her mothering, her beautiful work, her strength, and above everything, this—her consummate lyricism with the instrument that was his body. How deeply they were connected, he as much as said, trying to touch that place, that specific place, where they met. These were the only times, Heather thought later, when she was not confused. He banished the imprecise with his fingertip. He made her the very things he said she already was.
That first foray into Goddard had left her depressed, but oddly energized once the depression wore away. This was how it was to be, after all, Heather reasoned, and after all, it wasn't so bad. She had lost no actual friend, at the end of the day, or the good opinion of any person whose good opinion she particularly valued. Now that the ice was broken—weil, shattered—she began to bring Polly along on more frequent excursions: to the sports center, where she dangled her before Martina, who cooed reassuringly over the baby even as she avoided
Heather's eye; to the Stop & Shop, where she nodded placidly to her neighbors and then pointedly ignored them.
And to the mill, where Naomi did indeed have a playpen up in the attic, though it had not been much used. They had gone up together, the first time, Naomi leading, chatting backward over her shoulder about how she'd hoped to have more kids around, she liked kids, but after a year of its sitting vacant, taking space in the workroom, she'd stowed the playpen here. The banister jiggled. Polly was in the office, asleep in her car seat under the glare of Mary Sully. The attic was jammed with overflow brochures and crates of order forms, filled but unfiled. Also a mountain of shopping bags and supermarket cartons of material: old woolen pants, torn sheets, shredded quilts. “I know, I know,” Naomi groaned. Heather was staring. “I've got to get it all sorted out. Maybe after the holidays. What I want,” she told Heather, “is to build a whole wall of shelves here”—she spread her arms. “I mean, have it built. Then I'll go through everything and sort by color. For restoration work, it's the only way. Now it's a nightmare. People are wasting all their time rooting around in these bags for what they need. It isn't Ashley's fault.” She frowned, hands on her wide hips. “He says he'll do it whenever I'm ready, but I just can't face the mess. Out of sight, you know.” She smiled. “Well, I think I see it.”
They maneuvered the playpen between them, lifting it down the staircase; then they put it in a corner of the workroom. It was early, and Heather was the only one there. “Are you sure about this?” she asked Naomi. “I mean, are you sure it won't distract people, having the baby here?”
Naomi shrugged. “If it does, it does. We'll cross that bridge when and if. But, I mean, this is my point. You should be
able
to bring your baby to work. I know you have your grandmother and all, but what if you didn't? You'd still have to make a living, wouldn't you?”
“I guess,” said Heather, wiping the dust off the playpen with a rag.
“So don't you think women should have universal access to child care? I mean, it's a women's issue, isn't it?”
Polly woke in the office and bleated in protest at the unfamiliar surroundings.
“Lunchtime,” Heather said brightly. “Or is it afternoon snack?”
It took Naomi a minute, then she perked up again. “That's another thing. How do you breast-feed if you have to go to work and your baby can't come with you? Maybe if more women could take their kids along,
then more women would breast-feed. And that's better for everybody.”
“It is?” Heather said. “How come?”
“Well, medically. Isn't it? That's what they tell me, anyway,” Naomi said. “It's what I'm going to do.” She went abruptly red.
And then they were uncomfortable in tandem, each looking over the other's shoulder with wordless symmetry.
“That's good,” Heather said finally. She went out to her daughter.
Polly, as much as Heather could tell, loved coming to the mill. She was fascinated with human faces, and stared and stared, even when they refused to stare back. Heather brought the baby almost every morning, around eleven, and stayed until it was dark outside. Pick, she thought, liked the peace at home, and Heather did not doubt that it was good for the baby to be out in the world. She was too good for the women in the workroom to make any justifiable complaint at her presence-she cried only to get Heather's attention when she was hungry; then, her goal attained, she stopped crying—and Heather watched with some bemusement as the women struggled to maintain their resentment in the face of this irresistible child. To Heather herself they behaved as if she were not there, but this was what she was used to anyway.
Ashley came often, usually in the late afternoons. He was re-siding the back of the mill, picking off the spongy clapboards and baring the bees' nests beneath them to the hard winter sun. Of course he was discreet when they met. He gave none of those bitter, watching women the satisfaction of his attention to her, and she could only admire the restraint with which Ashley held himself in check before this audience, the skill of his perfect indifference. Heather herself was not so skilled; when Ashley was near her, her eyes were compelled to him. She sat near one of the windows, the better to see his legs spider past, his hot breath fog the panes. Even this far into their pairing, she thought, even with all that had happened, the year gone by, the child they had made, it had not lessened at all for her—this shudder of pure, sweet shock at the plain beauty of him. She liked to recall her first sight of him, half hidden in the ceiling, with only his legs reaching down to her, his narrow back descending, his long hair tied behind in a frayed red bandanna. The memory of his tongue, touching and traveling the hurt surface of her eye, still had the power to hobble her for an instant, and it occurred to her that, in her own case, love had indeed begun in the eye of the beholder.
She began coming when he came, in the afternoons, and staying until
most, if not all, the other women had gone to their homes. Polly slept about this time, and Heather would lift her, inert and heavy, from the playpen into Joseph's car seat in the back of Ashley's shiny new car, where she slept on. The back of the station wagon felt inexpressibly luxurious to Heather, who for the first time could stretch her whole length out beside Ashley once his tools and ropes had been pushed aside. With even this small increase in available space, she felt some of the urgency of their coupling dissipate and, in its place, a feeling of leisured sensuality. It was far from comfortable still, but there seemed just slightly more time now than there had previously been—time, for example, for some random touches, some kisses without particular purpose. Heather thought she had never been so happy as when he touched or kissed her this way—for the sake of those gestures themselves and not as precursors to something else.
And through this—the sounds and motions and even the smells—Polly slept. She went deeply down into herself and became almost stony, her eyes moving steadily, contentedly, behind their eyelids, reading the text of them while behind her her parents thrashed and spoke. It occurred to Heather, at times, that this was not, probably, good for Polly —to hear this, to know this was happening just out of her sleeping sight—but the baby seldom woke, and when she did, she sat still and uncomplaining until her mother noticed her.
Between Polly and her father there was a detente not so much chilly as simply devoid of warmth. The baby saved her most persistent staring for Ashley, Heather noticed, as if she were compelled to memorize him and determined not to break her gaze. She stared impassively but steadily, her huge blue eyes affixed to this permutation of her own beauty, but she never lifted a finger in his direction, and when Heather tried to propel her toward him, to lift her into her father's arms, the baby stiffened noticeably and clung to Heather's arm.
Ashley appeared not overly distressed by this. He seemed content to admire his daughter from this small distance, and to attribute her sweetness and loveliness to Heather entirely, as if she had been singularly responsible for Polly's composition. He saw none of his own features in her, despite how assuredly Heather pointed them out, and appeared not eager to hear the baby praised.
Look,
Heather would say, holding Polly's first hair to the light of the car window, where it shone white-gold.
Isn't it gorgeous?
Like yours,
Ashley said, pulling her down again.
And her skin, my God,
Heather said, lifting the baby's sweater to show an alabaster back.
I'm not surprised,
said Ashley.
You have beautiful skin.
She wondered if it had to do with Joseph, his boy with Sue, but Ashley never mentioned Joseph either, except to say that he had not slept well the night before, or that he hadn't had clean clothes in days because the baby took so much work. She had heard of fathers for whom their children did not really seem to register until they were of an age to have conversations and play sports, but she wondered why Ashley did not indicate this if it was the case. It did not bother her for her own sake, but she had not realized until now how closely enmeshed with her love for him was her wish that he love their child, and this small chill of disappointment began to work at her, just slightly, then just slightly more.
The holidays arrived, clad in ice. Heather, during the first round of storms, kept the baby home and herself harried with work for the Christmas rush. Polly learned to roll at will. A first strata of her clothing no longer fit, and Heather tearfully consigned these things, much of them her own work, to a box in her closet. Every year, Pick—ossifying in unsentimentality—expressed indifference to Christmas, but every year, quite by coincidence, she also managed to end up serving turkey on the day itself (Janelle Hodge, Pick would remark, had happened to mention it was on sale at the Stop & Shop) and baking a pie with the last of her apples, their mealy texture compensated for by extra sugar and, Heather was fairly sure, a substitution of rum for the usual vanilla. This had been the norm always, even when Heather was a child, but she had not really begrudged it until now. Polly, Heather thought, must have all of it: the feast, the gifts, the tree. But she understood that the most elaborate celebration would only be lost on a four-month-old, and she was content to let this first Christmas pass without too much fuss.
The cold hiccupped abruptly after New Year's, the snow breaking down to premature slush. For the first time, the logging road into the wood was not navigable and the wagon only churned its wheels in gray mud. Heather sat, frustrated, as Ashley got out of the car and pronounced it hopeless to continue, and they had to go back to Nate's Landing, where someone—some teenager, most likely—had spread around gravel. When Polly slept, lulled by the spinning of wheels, they fucked on grit, but briefly. Heather did not like the openness of the
trees, the bald stretch of the Sabbathday River rushing away beneath its caul of blue ice. She wanted her time with Ashley, but she wanted to leave, and he obliged her, driving her back to the mill, where she put the baby back in her own car and drove home to supper, her thighs sticky against the wool of her pants. Four months on after the birth and she was still heavy, her belly a smaller version of its rounded, pregnant past, her thighs thick. She caught unwelcome glimpses of herself each morning in the mirror affixed to the bathroom door, stepping laboriously out of the bath and trying all ways to get her towel to wrap around herself. The weight had wrapped her lower half, laying claim to it while leaving her arms and neck slender to taunt her. The milk, she decided, lifting one of her dense and tender breasts to examine a calloused nipple, was keeping her like this, but she loved nursing Polly and dreaded the day her daughter might prefer food from another source. And anyway, there were other advantages to nursing, Heather mused. It had held off her period, and with that, she knew, her fertility. She could happily forgo her waist for that.
On the morning of the day that would change Heather's life, she did not have time for a bath. Polly had coughed through the night. She breathed raggedly through her mouth, and finally wept at her own dis- .comfort. Her nose ran green and thick, and Heather spent hours trying to make her comfortable. The fever—if there was one at all; she was bad at telling, and she didn't want to wake Pick—never got too bad, and she was more regretful for the baby than concerned. Toward dawn, Polly fell into exhausted sleep on Heather's belly, and so Heather lay, still, despite a full and throbbing bladder, through the next hours, recalibrating her day against the new mandate of Polly's cold. When Pick rose, later than usual, she was not well herself, and stood in the doorway with one palm pressed against her right temple, as if feeling for the source of her pain.

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