The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

In their second year of planting, when the grass was finally fully established, Joan and Fancy figured out how to lay down sprinklers, and turned them on. “The water’s going to be cold,” Joan warned Daniel, but he ran laughing through the arcing sprays. “Look, Daniel,” she said, and he stopped and looked at all the rainbows dancing around their backyard.

Joan and Fancy devised the shapes and boundaries of all the various gardens, marked them with sticks and flags, then got down to work, troweling, fertilizing, and planting lilac bushes, bougainvillea, hyacinth, phlox and poppies, tulips, wild violets, and gerbera daisies, everything in various hues of lavenders and pinks and purples and scarlets and burgundies and white, a field of lavender too. Their first vegetable garden was seeded with carrots, cucumbers, radishes, domestic tomatoes, beans, and lettuce, the vegetable world that thrived regardless of the gardener’s abilities. Near the house, they built the playground Joan had imagined while weighing Daniel’s early extermination. He now had a large sandbox to play in, and a swing set, and a bright-red jungle gym that took Martin three days of hard labor to put together.

In their third year of planting and gardening, all the flowers came up, a riot of blooms. Joan and Fancy took Daniel with them to the lumberyard, bought planks of wood and panes of wavy old glass and the building specifications for a gardening shed. They sawed and hammered, figured out how to make window frames, how to install the glass, and the shed rose up behind the weeping willow tree that was still so small, Daniel shimmying up its baby trunk yelling, “Look at me,” all of twelve inches above the ground. When Fancy went home to Canada for a family visit, Joan painted the shed green by herself and stored all the gardening equipment within. By then, they had a potting table, ceramic planting pots stacked up like mismatched wedding-cake tiers, a large assortment of dinged and muddy trowels, rakes and hand mowers, bags of rich dirt for settling cuttings of delicate flowers into the pots until the new baby plants were sturdy enough for life outdoors. Sometimes, Joan escaped to the shed for an hour of quiet with a glass of wine, lowering a window for an illicit cigarette, briefly longing for the time when she had not created a different story for herself, longing too, for other ideas to flow through her mind, something beyond her rare babies.

Daniel was nearing four when Martin began flying to England, Germany, Croatia, and Russia, requested by private hospitals to operate on their citizens. Against the odds, he was having great success with his newly devised surgery, returning sight to people who lived in an underworld of 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 her life, bifurcate Joan Manning, wife and mother, from Joan Ashby, the writer, erect boundaries to prevent any accidental bleeding between the two.

Volkmann called only twice a year now to confirm Joan had received her royalty statements and checks. She no longer asked about Joan’s plans for her first novel, assumed Joan had ceased writing entirely, consumed with something like the joys of motherhood, and Joan allowed her that belief. The same was true with Annabelle Iger, who called every couple of months, saying, “Haven’t you had enough of this pastoral existence, all this mothering and wifedom? Aren’t you sick of love and diapers? Start writing again before it’s too late.” She and Iger talked of so many things, their editing days together, the men Iger was toying with, the plays Iger saw, the dance clubs Iger still frequented, but Joan never mentioned The Sympathetic Executioners or the Rare Baby stories to her either.

She was again at a critical juncture, and this time, she needed to maintain the divide, husband and children out in the real world, but on her own, the writing she did would be truly private, consecrated, known only to her. No more reading her work to Daniel and Fancy. The new baby’s arrival would eliminate her study, soon to be transformed into another nursery.

She watched the reddened sun pale and set, and she pictured a castle with a tower that soared into the sky, a moat that rendered it inviolable, an imaginary place where she would write for the next years, without Martin knowing. She would throw him off her scent, lie and tell him she was taking a break, void entirely his inquisitions. She did not want to hear him talking about her work, suggesting, pontificating, analyzing. On the walk, the names of her characters had been far too familiar in his mouth. He had her and Daniel and the child to come; that would have to be sufficient.

In that high tower, that place of pure self, she might find her way to that first novel, at last write a book worthy of the reputation she had developed. She only wanted what belonged to her—what she created, her characters, her people, those with whom she spent the clearest hours of her days. It was, she thought, the way to make that truest part of herself whole once again. And if she protected her most essential qualities, the core of Joan Ashby, she could continue to give the rest of her heart to Martin, to Daniel, to the baby inside.

She thought about Fancy. She could trust Fancy to keep her secret when Joan returned to her work, after the early months with the new one.

She looked at Martin’s father’s clock on her desk. It had taken only thirty minutes to arrive at her plans for the future. Joan opened the study door and headed toward the living room, where her family was gathered. She could hear the roll of dice, the movement of plastic pieces, Martin and Daniel laughing, accusing each other of cheating, and she was aware how those voices both attracted and repelled her.

7

The delivery-room music was raucous in her thirty-second laboring hour. The baby was ten days late, and at the twenty-fifth hour, she had still been ticking off appropriate words: troublesome, exasperating, perverse, contrary, recalcitrant, obstreperous, disobliging, and then the few u words she could recall: unaccommodating, unhelpful, uncooperative, unwanted. Wait, she’d thought, when unwanted spiked, an articulated word she hoped only she heard. And then: entirely true, entirely not true, this time, last time, true and not true. She was sidetracked, the dictionary in her brain slipping away when a nurse increased the sweet epidural drip, and the music changed nature entirely. There had been Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart sailing through the delivery room, she was not an expert in classical music, but they were easily recognizable; now electric guitars were wailing, drumbeats pounding away, licks and harsh syncopations, and Joan’s voice croaked when she yelled, “Please! Change the station.” Nothing changed and she couldn’t tell if the music and her yelling were only inside her own head. Please, she prayed then, though the years had not changed her position about God, or gods, and she had already run through the panoply of words she used to invoke, could remember.

Daniel’s birth had been rapid, like a rocket, he set a record, leaving Joan with most of her self-respect intact, but not this time, this one already determining the time line of life. Her sweat, rivers of it, started out sweet, had gone sour, then yeasty, and now there was a meaty scent she was inhaling. She felt like a sick and cowering dog.

The bright lights all at once dimmed—why hadn’t they been lowered from the start, hadn’t they asked for a calm, quiet, melodic delivery?—and then Martin was soothing her forehead, whispering into her ear, “It will be okay.”

A contraption rose over her belly, gloved hands draping reams of thick plastic over it, cutting off everything below from her view. She was in parts, leaving those on the other side to contend with what was beneath her curved flesh. Scrub caps darted around, white, pink, and yellow disks rising and falling, rapid voices chasing each other’s tight tails, words like maternal tachycardia, fetal distress, spinal block, catheter, IV lines, and Joan felt something sting her hand. Out of the cyclone came her doctor’s quiet voice, “Scalpel. Starting Pfannenstiel incision.”

How wonderful now that everything was silent, the pain and fear gone, just the slow, slow beating of her own heart, her mind in a white haze that transformed into bleedingly bright primary colors. She remembered the pictures of a C-section that she had seen in one of Martin’s medical books, the scalpel so sharp against the thin skin that the underlying yellow fat layer burst, revealing the shiny, tough, fibrous fascia, over the abdominal muscles. A scalpel nicking an opening in that tough lower layer, then pulled apart, revealing the filmy, flimsy layer, the peritoneum, the actual lining of the abdominal cavity; it, too, was opened, with sharp, thin scissors. Then a small cut through her retroperitoneal. She heard “Retractor,” and pictured her bladder pulled down toward her feet, away from the rest of the surgery, sparing it injury. A final incision across the lower portion of her womb, her uterus easily tilted up and laid on her belly, revealing the baby only to the doctor and nurses busy working. There were pictures of it all in Martin’s book and a sentence that read: Pulling gently on the head will allow the rest of the delivery. She heard “Clamping umbilical cord,” and then she heard no more.

She woke in a hospital room and wondered why she was there, wondered when someone would come to explain why she felt nothing below her waist, nothing at all. She knew she should be afraid, but something in her bloodstream was lifting her up, up, up, out of the bed, and she was floating just below the ceiling. Looking down, she was at the old dining-room table she used as a desk, the wood floor of her East Village apartment sloped under her feet, pages crawling with words flying through the air, stacking up next to the typewriter, there was a title on the tip of her tongue, that slid right off, and she, too, slid away.

She woke again, and knew she was in her hospital room, that there was, or had been, a baby. Martin was on the bed, carefully balanced, tenderly looking at her. She heard him say, “That was all unexpected,” then ask how she was feeling, but she couldn’t respond, couldn’t keep her eyes open, they were like windows slamming shut, and her last thought, It’s all unexpected, reverberated then faded away.

She woke again and Martin was in the armchair next to the bed, the baby hidden in a blue blanket. So the operation had been successful, the baby alive. “He emerged with bravado and his eyes clenched tight. He has all of his parts,” Martin said, and Joan wanted to say, “Turn down the painkillers, I can’t stay awake,” but she was gone before the words left her mouth.

She was awake and alone in her hospital room. She felt wrecked and sore and the clock hands were elongated snails inching around the black markings of the day, but perhaps it was night, and late, because she couldn’t hear the nurses laughing at their station, couldn’t hear the shush of their foam-soled shoes.

She woke and knew it was morning from the slant of the sun lighting up her hands, the veins standing out, needles inserted and taped down, and then the heavy door pushed open, and there was Martin, smiling and cradling the new baby, sitting down on the bed, transferring the infant into her arms. “Your first glimpse of your mommy,” Martin said, and Joan saw a cap of jet-black hair, skin white as alabaster, the combination giving him the look of a baby ghoul or a vampire, something medieval, potentially poisonous. But everything was where it belonged. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he,” Martin said, and Joan thought the pain meds were affecting her sight, for the baby looked so white, as if he were bloodless, when Daniel had been golden and rosy.

You’ve been in and out,” Martin said as he untied her hospital gown, pushed it down past her breasts. She hadn’t said a word yet, her throat still clenched tight, but he understood she wanted the baby’s flesh on hers. She had been right, with Daniel, about the essentialness of that first connection, not wasting it on anyone else’s baby. She was overheating, but the infant was cool and dry, not damp and sticky as Daniel had been, and even though they were skin-to-skin, the way this one looked up at her, she thought she had to be wrong, that it wasn’t an arrogant stare, a smirk on his pale lips. He blinked, then turned his head away, already his own person.

She tried feeding him. He latched on. She felt the suction between his pursed mouth and her nipple, but suckling did not interest him, he was content to lie there, just like that, before tucking back into himself. Four times she tried, before Martin paged their ob-gyn.

Dr. Hinton lifted the baby from Joan’s arms and said that because of the C-section and the meds coursing through her, he hadn’t been allowed to suck after being liberated from her womb. Dr. Hinton actually said, When he was born, and Joan revised his words because liberated from her womb expressed the gravitas she thought this birth deserved. “The suck reflex is strongest then, right after birth. Delayed gratification sometimes makes it more difficult later on. But it’s only the third day.” Joan hadn’t realized she had been out for so long. The doctor stroked the baby’s lips. “To evoke and test the rooting reflex,” he said, and the baby pulled the doctor’s pinky into his mouth. “He’s gone into full reflex, pulling my finger in, wrapping the lateral sides of his tongue around it, creating a medial trough, starting the peristaltic motion from front to back toward the soft palate and pharynx. Nothing’s wrong with the short frenulum, because his tongue’s moving forward easily. His airway is all clear, no mucous. So everything looks fine. He’s got a powerful suck, see how he’s moving his whole head, his face wrinkling and dimpling?” Joan and Martin nodded. “I’ll send in the lactation specialist. She’ll be able to help.”

But the baby had made his decision. He would not partake in such intimate nurturing, was disinterested in receiving nourishment direct from Joan’s body. At her request, his bassinet was moved out of the nursery and into her hospital room. On a frequent schedule, the nurses had her pump, then returned with bottles of her milk wrapped in white cloths, as if mother and son were about to embark together on a fine dining experience. But he did not want Joan as the source of his sustenance, his tongue touched the plastic nipple, held on, sucked once, then he turned away, closing his eyes as if to say, I’ve made it clear, haven’t I, that I don’t want what comes from her? He was fed bottles of formula instead. Her milk was donated to a baby down the hall whose mother could not nurse at all.

At least Joan could keep him tightly grooved to her body, and she held their new child for hours, letting him go only when he was solidly asleep. It had been so different with Daniel, the way love had bubbled up, until the stream was an ocean, too large to ever spring a leak. Every day in the hospital, Joan waited for this new one to grab hold of her heart, to adhere to her beat, but a cool river ran between them that neither seemed capable of fording.

She and Martin had learned its sex ahead of time, no need for mystery with the second. And they had chosen a name. But only sometimes did Joan remember that fact, to use it when she spoke to him quietly. His birth certificate read Eric, Norse for ever or eternal ruler. Neither she nor Martin had any connection to that Nordic world, but it sounded strong, as strong as Daniel Manning. Just days old, and it seemed to Joan that Eric was indeed already ruling over his world. The kisses she gave him often felt premeditated.