Astonish Me. Maggie Shipstead
end up together, Joan. Do you think I’m insane? Does the idea horrify you? You kissed me back at first, for a second. You didn’t say why you stopped. Then I was a jackass. That day, before, I said you were lucky because you’d decided for yourself what you wanted out of life and I hadn’t. But that wasn’t true. I realized later I’d decided for myself that I want you. Will you please just consider that I’m the right one? Just consider it. Don’t decide now. Consider it, I don’t know, forever. Or at least until it happens.
I am going to have one more little bit of whiskey, and then I am going to mail this. And in the morning I’ll probably regret everything, but it’ll be too late.
Love,
Jacob
January 20, 1971
Dear Jacob,
I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner. As you probably realized, I didn’t go home for Christmas. I’ve been in San Francisco—did my mother tell you? Madame Tchishkoff helped me get a spot as an apprentice here. I’m so relieved. My foot is basically better, and the city is beautiful. My dancing has improved a lot, I think. I hope. Anyway, I didn’t get your letter for a while, and then I didn’t know how to write back. I still don’t, but I am. The long and short of it is that I adore you. I told you I know you took care of me. I don’t know if I said that I was grateful, but I am. I’ve never really had romantic feelings for you, exactly, though. I knew you felt a little differently. Maybe it was selfish of me to just let things go on. I was afraid of you bringing it up or trying something, and when you did, I didn’t know what to do. You’d think I would have decided in advance, but I couldn’t decide. Then when it happened, it felt like too much. I think you want too much from me. Does that make sense? I can’t put things into words the way you can. Is it enough to say that I’m confused? Maybe things will change. Some people seem to know themselves. I don’t feel that I do.
But I would like us to write, even if it’s (still) selfish of me. I miss you. You are my best friend by miles and miles. Is that okay? I wish there were some way for people not to want things from each other. But now you have my address. Write me back and tell me about how brilliant everyone at Georgetown thinks you are. (Tell me about the girl, too.)
Much love,
Joan
As the plane descends, Joan holds the curtain to one side and peers out. Desert crinkles up into scrubby mountains topped with antennae; those drop away into low hills fringed with a terraced reef of neighborhoods. Then parking lots, electric blue swimming pools, golf courses, highways, and, just beyond the plane’s falling arc, the ocean. She fidgets, flipping the armrest ashtray open and closed. The smell of stale ash and sweet mint gum reminds her of touring with the company, everybody sleeping and stretching and getting up to smoke in the back, circulating up and down the aisle as though at a cocktail party.
Jacob is already down there somewhere. A school district, flush with state money, has hired him to expand a program for gifted children. First the children are identified, then they are placed in small classes with specially trained teachers, and then they are tracked and studied over the long term. Jacob is enthusiastic, pleased to be regarded as a young hotshot, an innovator. He can build something here, he says. The system shouldn’t neglect the most promising individuals. He flew out before Joan and Harry and bought a house in a place called Valle de los Toros, one of those California towns that melt invisibly into the next, forming a continuous, hundred-mile-long patchwork of coastal domesticity.
“Really,” Jacob says to Joan as they unpack the kitchen things, “what they’ve done is taken suburbia to the next level, cut out the middleman.” He has emptied a box of newspaper-wrapped dishes, and now he makes a precarious stack of mugs in a cupboard, not bothering to rinse off the ink and dust. “People like to live in places with specific names, so they chopped the sprawl into tiny little pieces and gave each piece some fakey Spanish label. This way, we can all tell ourselves we actually live somewhere—like we have a hometown, like we’re living the wholesome small town life, when really each of us is just one fleck of pig snout in the biggest hunk of real estate sausage ever made.”
“Appetizing.”
“You’ll like it. Don’t think too much about it. It’s easy not to think when the weather’s so nice.”
Joan shuts the cupboard on the dusty mugs. “What do I have to think about anyway? Thinking’s not my thing.”
“Come on. You know I didn’t mean you specifically. I was making fun of the whole California thing.”
“Maybe you’re right. I don’t dance anymore. I should try thinking.”
“What is this? Why are you jumping on me?”
She shouldn’t trap him, poke at him. He hasn’t done anything wrong. “Sorry,” she says. She searches the kitchen for a way to change the subject. “We don’t have nearly enough stuff to fill these cupboards. It looks like we’re pretending to live here.”
He takes off his glasses, polishes them on his shirt, and puts them back on. “Sometimes you act like a child.”
“I said I was sorry.” She sounds more petulant than she intends. She hates to disappoint him. She fears the slow, corrosive trickle of reality into his adulation. There is a silence. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.” She gestures out the window at their patio, their overgrown lawn, Harry playing in the grass.
“Do whatever you want. Teach ballet, maybe. Or don’t. Do nothing if you want.”
Joan stares out the window.
Jacob goes on. “I don’t know how much more supportive I can be. Literally. I can’t think of anything else I can do for you. Just tell me what you want.”
“I don’t know. Nothing.” She watches Harry. “It’s the new context. I tell myself I’m making a fresh start, and then I stay the same.”
“It’s fine to stay the same. I just want you to be content. That’s really it. I don’t have a secret agenda.” He hesitates, plunges. “Most of the time now you’re here with me—really here, invested; it’s not like it was at first—and I think, good, she’s letting me know her, really know her the way people do when they’re married. And then other times you’re so distant it’s like someone’s swapped you out for a forgery. You seem like you’re going through the motions.”
Joan looks out the window. Harry is collecting dandelion puffs, gathering four or five in his small fist before he puffs out his cheeks and blows them into smithereens. The motions. She has been trained to believe that the motions are enough. Each motion is to be perfected, repeated endlessly and without variation, strung in a sequence with other motions like words in a sentence, numbers in a code. “I’m trying,” she says. She is crying.
He comes to her and puts his arms around her. “I know. But I wish you didn’t have to try so hard.”
She rests her face against his shoulder, relieved the conversation is over, that they have moved on to comforting. She knows he wants her to say she loves him. He always wants her to after he has expressed any frustration or dissatisfaction. He is afraid and wants her to soothe him. She doesn’t want to say it. She wants to grasp a barre and to go through the battements.
SANDY WHEELOCK PICKS kumquats from the tree in her backyard, dropping the tiny orange fruit into one of her daughter’s sand pails. Really she is outside because Chloe came running into the kitchen proclaiming, “The lady is doing tricks on the patio!”
“What lady?”
“Next door.”
“What tricks?”