Joy For Beginners (20 page)

As she was picking up a head of lettuce, a young man stocking the shelves caught sight of her hands.

“Cool,” he commented approvingly, before going back to stacking the carrots in a huge pyramid. A woman standing near him looked at Marion’s nails, and then quickly away.

Marion went to the front of the store and picked a checkout clerk she knew, a normally disgruntled longtime employee. As Marion signed the credit card slip, the clerk saw her nails.

“Getting divorced?” The clerk’s face was compassionate.

In the parking lot, a little girl stared at Marion and giggled; her mother followed her daughter’s gaze.

“Grandchildren?” she said to Marion, with a conspiratorial wink.

 

MARION CALLED DARIA. “Why would you want to deal with that all the time?” she asked.

“
Now
you are starting to ask interesting questions,” Daria replied.

 

MARION FOUND an old bottle of nail polish remover. As the purple dissolved, her nails reappeared, quiet and pink, a crescent of white arcing across the top. When she finished, she put the cap back on the bottle, grabbed her purse and car keys and headed out to the local tattoo shop.

Marion’s neighborhood was on the northwest side of the city, looking out over the water, set apart from the mainstream by both geography and culture. It had once been an enclave of Scandinavian fishermen, the houses small, the land swept clear of trees, as if any vegetation would inhibit the sight of the water from which the men gained their living. Stores had sold lutefisk and pastries that crumbled under your fingertips, leaving trails of hard, bright granules of sugar. Over time, the fishermen and their wives had grown older and a younger generation moved in, planting trees and tall condo buildings. Diners turned into French bistros. The Sunday farmer’s market offered homemade soaps and knitted hats, and vegetables that used to be grown in backyards nearby.

The tattoo shop was one of the few holdouts, along with the bar next door, the two inextricably grown together over the years. Marion didn’t know how long the shop had been there; she remembered it from when they first moved in almost thirty years before, but it seemed like such an organic part of the landscape that it was hard to imagine the street ever being without it. A quietly simmering presence, squat and solid, curtains drawn at eye height—above them you could just catch glimpses of walls covered in white paper filled with lizards and stars and skulls. Marion had never been inside, although once the door had been open as she passed and she had seen a sign on the front desk: “We don’t care what your cousin paid for his tattoo in Wichita.”

Marion pulled up in front of the shop. The door was closed, but she could see pedestrians craning their heads as they passed, trying to look over the top of the curtains to catch sight of the designs on the wall, the people inside. Marion sometimes wondered who spent more time looking at tattoos—people with them or people without them—and then realized which camp she fell into.

THE MAN BEHIND the counter looked up as Marion walked in and gave a quick scan of her skin. She wished she had a tattoo to hold up, like an identification badge, an entry ticket.

“I’m writing an article,” she began. She didn’t expect excitement or even interest from the man in front of her. Some people were thrilled at the prospect of finding their way into print, a boost for their business, a possible photograph, but her assumption—correct, it appeared—was that that would not be the case here.

The man’s hands were a crossword puzzle of words and letters; sailor and hula girls sashayed their way up his arms. Marion thought idly of the Green Stamps books her mother used to collect when Marion was a child, the prize you would get upon completion. This man must be almost there, she thought.

“I’m wondering if it would be okay if I talked to a few of the artists, watched a bit,” she continued.

“I’ll have to ask Kurt. He’s in charge.” The man didn’t move.

“I don’t care if she watches.” The voice came from the corner of the room. Marion turned and saw an older woman, easily in her eighties, sitting in one of the plastic chairs lined up against the wall. She had a notebook in her lap, open to a design of an elaborate ship at sea.

“Are you getting that?” Marion walked over, intrigued.

“No, but it’s fun to look. I’m getting this.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a wedding ring, engraved with flowers and leaves. “I’ve worn it every day for the past sixty years. They had to cut it off me. Arthritis.” She lifted up her curled hands, the knuckles large knobs. “I’m Bessie.” She looked at Marion and smiled. “Who do you write for?”

“Magazines, newspapers. Stuff-of-life articles, mostly.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“It’s good work.”

“I always wanted to be a writer when I was younger,” Bessie said. “I suppose everybody says that, though, don’t they?” She chuckled.

“What would you write about?” It surprised Marion to find herself asking that question. Normally, she would run as far as she could from stories of people’s unrealized novels, their seven-hundred-page memoirs.

“Marmots,” Bessie said without a moment’s hesitation. “The way the snow melts, bit by bit, on Mount Rainier in the summer. I used to take my kids camping when they were little. I always wished there was a way to keep that feeling through the winter, you know, the way you would press a flower.”

Bessie looked thoughtful for a moment and then turned to Marion.

“So, what would you write, if you could write anything?”

“Fiction,” said Marion without thinking. “Stories.”

“And why haven’t you?” Bessie asked.

As the two women looked at each other, Kurt walked out from the back of the tattoo shop and called out Bessie’s name.

BESSIE SAT at the tattoo station, Marion standing next to her while Kurt prepared needles and a palette of ink, his movements precise and automatic, part surgeon, part painter. He turned on the tattoo gun and the sound punctured the air.

“Are you sure, now?” Marion asked Bessie over the sound of the machine. “You can’t take this back.”

Kurt turned off the motor with a quick look of annoyance. Bessie turned to Marion, her eyes softening as she saw Marion’s expression.

“Honey,” Bessie said, “the clock runs faster than I do these days.”

Point taken, Marion thought. She had never felt the simple urgency of time more than in the past few years, as her ovaries creaked into silence and she had gone for months and then a year without the gush of blood or the deep purple sadness that came with it. She had understood that something was ceasing within her and, more important, would never start again. The cold reality of it had struck her, as if, perched on the crest of a roller coaster, the rest of the ride was suddenly, irreversibly clear. On the way up, the vista had been infinite, the time to look about sometimes agonizingly long; now there was only the certain and dispassionate knowledge that there was one set of rails on which to travel, the ending immutable and about to begin. It didn’t matter that the rest of the trip might take twenty, even thirty years to complete; the angle of the ride had changed.

She couldn’t have told you whether the hot flashes came from the knowledge, or the knowledge brought them on. The heat would rise from within her, rolling out from the core of her being, cleaning out the brush of her life in its path—the unsaid things, good and bad, anger and frustration she had never expressed, flushed out of her along with the sweat that sprang to the surface of her skin.

As if to mirror the process going on inside, she had been overwhelmed with an almost desperate need to purify her life—plowing through the closets and shelves of her house, clearing out fashions she no longer cared about or fit into, books she never intended to read, odd condiments and dusty spices used once years ago. It was, in a strange way, like going back to the girl she had once been, who was strong and spare and didn’t have things. Or maybe it was just that if you didn’t have things, they couldn’t be taken away.

And yet, she realized, sitting in the tattoo shop, the things she had held on to were the results of the irrevocable decisions in her life, the commitments she had leaped into without thought, with only the sure and perfect knowledge that it mattered not where her feet landed because her heart was certain. Standing at the altar with Terry, conceiving their children, she had felt a marvelous, liquid sense of clarity. Making those decisions had required rational thought only to determine when, but never if. She had known in her soul what she wanted and the only painful thing would have been not to move forward. It didn’t matter what happened along the way, who changed or how. She knew.

So why couldn’t she do it now? she wondered.

Bessie was looking at Marion as if she understood all of this and was amused by it, as if—and this Marion found ironic, given the line of her thought—Marion was somehow young and inexperienced.

“Tattoos are a little like wedding vows, aren’t they?” Bessie said. “You grow up and change, even though the words you said don’t. My husband always said you just have to believe in the future and be kind to the past.”

“Ready now?” Kurt asked.

“But won’t it hurt?” Marion looked at the crepe-thin surface of the woman’s skin.

Bessie snorted. She sounded like Daria when she did that, Marion thought.

“I had six kids.”

The tattoo man took Bessie’s hand gently, like a courtier. She inclined her head in a nod and relinquished it to him. They leaned toward each other and the tattoo man placed the vibrating needles on the edge of the leaf design that had been transferred onto her finger.

 

MARION WAS MAKING COFFEE the next morning when the phone rang.

“Mom?” her daughter’s voice came across the lines, lit with excitement. “I’m going to have a baby!”

But you are a baby, Marion opened her mouth to say. I’m still holding you in my arms.

“You are the most beautiful, wonderful girl in the world,” Marion said.

Jeanne’s voice bubbled on, filled with stories. How quickly they had conceived, how ridiculously long it took for the narrow white stick to illuminate its plus sign, how Marion should come and stay for a month when the baby was born.

“We have a room all set up—for Dad, too, if he wants to come.”

But all Marion could see was a dimly lit hospital room, her daughter lying in the clear plastic bassinet just a few feet from her—a distance that had felt impossibly far, filled with cool and weightless air, without the pulse of blood, a heart. Marion remembered carefully maneuvering herself out of bed and walking over to her child, lifting up the small body, bundled like a loaf of bread, and bringing her back to bed where she curled in the curve of Marion’s arm.

“You’ll come, won’t you?” Jeanne’s voice was suddenly unsure.

“With cameras and baby clothes and so much advice you’ll be kicking us out by the end of the first week,” Marion promised.

 

MARION HAD BEEN TWENTY-SIX when she realized she was pregnant for the first time. She remembered lying next to Terry, drowsy and relaxed after hours of loving exploration, hearing the sounds of her husband’s breath moving in and out with sleep. And suddenly, she had known. As if someone had walked into the room and spoken to her, she knew she was not alone in her body anymore and, in some ways, never would be again. For even after the children were born, it seemed as if they instantly started creating memories and associations, as if, no longer sharing a body, they were weaving the ties that would hold them to each other, wind them into each other’s hearts.

And now, twenty-eight years later, her daughter was pregnant.

There were moments in life, Marion thought, when you reached back, baton in hand, feeling the runner behind you. Felt the clasp of their fingers resonating through the wood, the release of your hand, which then flew forward, empty, into the space ahead of you.