The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. Cherise Wolas
barely recognized shapes, or no shapes at all.
Joan was on the bed watching Martin pack for his tenth trip abroad—lucky scrub caps, the funny clogs he wore during his long surgical days, his toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, two suits, shirts, ties, his shiny leather loafers, a winter sweater, jeans, and snow boots all went into his travel bag.
He turned to her suddenly. “Come on, Joan. You’ve let me read a page here and there, but why can’t I read the Rare Baby stories from start to finish? I’ve got all these hours on planes and it would be great to read something other than medical journals and the newspaper.”
Three and a half years writing those stories and they still felt like a secret to Joan. She had all the audience she needed in Daniel and Fancy. She touched her belly and wondered if she would read them aloud to the new baby. There was always going to be a second child, and soon there would be.
She watched Martin’s mouth moving. He was still talking, inveigling her to let him read the work, but Joan was thinking of something else entirely, of how the news she was pregnant again had spurred a sort of silent trade-off: Martin no longer opened her study door without knocking, did not enter unless invited.
She tuned back in when his mouth clamped shut, his face clouded with hurt, and she thought she ought to give him the benefit of the doubt. She climbed off their bed, went into her study, gathered up five of the stories, and handed them over. She watched as he placed them neatly inside his briefcase.
A week later, back home, unpacking his bag, he pulled out her stories, all marked up, and her heart was once again beating too fast. She felt churlish, though, and remonstrated, when he pulled out a wrapped package and gave it to her. He had brought her a present, but when she opened it, there was a frightening device in her hand, antique and rusted, and Martin said, “That’s a scleral depressor from the early twentieth century. I found it in a store in Cologne. Isn’t it great?”
He turned it over in her hand. “You insert the tip between the globe and the orbit, the space occupied by the probe displaces the retina inward and creates an elevation. It helps locate and diagnose lesions that may otherwise go undetected, like retinal holes, tears, or vitreoretinal adhesions. It’s used to assess patients who present with complaints of flashers and floaters, or who are at risk for peripheral retinal anomalies, such as high myopes or those with a history of blunt trauma.”
He returned the depressor to its velvet-lined box. “I saw it and thought since I’m traveling to so many places, I should keep a lookout for these kinds of things, start a collection of old tools of the trade.”
She felt the ghosts of eyes touched by that tool, the coldness of the metal still singed her palm.
Then he said, “Come on. Let’s take Daniel for a walk.”
It was Sunday and they were Fancy-free. Daniel was in his room, on his bed, the novel she was reading to him—The Happy Island by Dawn Powell—on his lap, and he was pretending to read.
“Mommy, listen to me,” and he read, “Everyone who knew James knew of his Evalyn, and that a visit from the Inspector General could not cast a town into greater confusion,” and Joan was shocked. She recognized the sentence from the book, and he read on, “No one found her agreeable. Desperately James told stories about her to make her appear interesting, but she only emerged a more intolerable figure than before.”
She called out for Martin, and when he stood at Daniel’s door, she said, “He’s reading already! Whole sentences without sounding out the words. Just like I did, but I was older, five, when it happened.”
Martin kneeled before Daniel. “Are you reading now, my man?” and Daniel nodded and began telling his father about the bachelors of New York City, and Martin looked up at Joan.
When everyone was zipped into their winter coats and out the front door, Martin whispered, “Maybe we should make sure he reads age-appropriate books.” That wasn’t going to happen on Joan’s watch, but the battle could wait for another day.
They walked the wide streets of their development, the paving all complete, young trees bare-limbed in the cold, and were quiet for a while.
“So about your stories. I loved them all, but especially ‘Otis Bleu Sings.’ The way that baby could belt out an opera without any teeth in his mouth.”
Daniel twisted around in his stroller and called out, “Mommy already read me that story.”
They made rights and lefts through the neighborhood and all the while Martin was telling her his thoughts about the stories, the emotions he experienced while reading her work, then asking her questions. “How do you develop these characters? How does your brain hit upon these creations? What makes you think as you do? Are the stories based at all on Daniel, on the things he does? Are you imagining the new baby inside of you when you write?”
It was perhaps the hundredth time Martin quizzed her this way, wanting to dive into the depths of her mind, to know exactly how she put things into place, now asking specifically how she came up with the traits of her rare babies, their names, their family configurations, the outrageous things they did and said. This obsession he had to expose her processes, to aerate the pure elements of her work, he seemed to want her fully oxidized. She did not bask in his interest, as genuine and real as it was. Instead, she felt as if she were standing back at the abyss, and if he did not stop, if she could not stop him, she would fall into the darkness for good.
In the kitchen, after their walk, Joan told Martin he was in charge of dinner and closed herself up in her study. She sat at her desk and wished she were configured like other women who welcomed such keen attention, or at least like other writer-mothers who seemed to connect everything together, who handled with relish the confusion of it all, combining writing with motherhood, everything out in the open. There was a heroic disorder to their lives, but she could not abide it. This coalescing amalgamation of the disparate parts of her life—writer, wife, mother, pregnant woman again—was not what she had ever wanted. She had a baby, was going to have another, was writing about babies, had a husband who wanted to know everything about what their baby did in his absences, about how the baby inside was treating her, what her rare babies were up to, and how they had come to be. She was consumed by domesticity: the normality of her flesh-and-blood family juxtaposed against her manifested world, which was mystical, numinous, sometimes supernaturally odd, filled with erudite babies illuminating what others could not see.
She put her shaking hands on her typewriter, watched them settle, all the while feeling the impulse to walk out, to disappear, as she had considered doing when she told Martin she was pregnant the first time, their incongruent stances about the life she was carrying rocking her entirely, an earthquake upending the life she had anticipated for herself.
Her soul, she realized, was in disarray, and this second pregnancy was not helping. It was not at all like the first. She had morning sickness day and night. She was not miraculously glowing. A second baby would intensify the disorder she needed, somehow, to compartmentalize.
Over the next several days, she read through all fifty of her Rare Baby stories. They were beautiful, the writing strong and densely molded, but she did not want to publish such a collection, did not want to be yoked forever to these creatures who had been intended only to help her maneuver through that first vital metamorphosis.
She would not read them aloud to the new baby, when it finally arrived. She could not indulge in this exercise any longer. If she did, she would slip entirely away, become irreal, an outline when she was made more solidly than that. It was the first Joan Ashby, the realest Joan Ashby, the one who was neither wife nor mother, that she was in immediate danger of losing. She had to eliminate the concentric circles that dominated her life, otherwise she would not be able to carry on building the family they were building, would want only to cut the bonds that tied her down.
With Daniel, she had imagined herself as a character who would hang on to the love she had been given and love her unwanted baby, and she had done that exceedingly well. She would do it again when the new baby arrived. But before that happened, she needed to reframe her existence, fracture