Joy For Beginners (21 page)

 

“HOW’S THE TATTOO RESEARCH going?” Terry asked Marion as they walked through the gardening section at the giant hardware store. It was Saturday; the celebration of their daughter’s pregnancy had quieted to an underlying hum of joy in their lives. Terry needed to pick up some plumbing supplies—the upstairs toilet was leaking again—and Marion had promised Hadley they would use Terry’s truck to pick up some extra large bags of mulch for Hadley’s garden.

Marion told Terry about the old woman and her wedding ring tattoo. “She never even flinched,” Marion said. “And I don’t think she’ll ever have second thoughts.”

“You know, sweetheart,” Terry said, “you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t think twice if someone said you needed to get a tattoo for me or the kids. Doing it for you, though, that might be a trick.”

They hefted a bag of mulch and tossed it onto the cart.

“I think maybe you need a little inspiration,” Terry remarked, straightening up and looking around.

“How about that one?” He pointed down the aisle to a young woman, the head of a dragon emerging from the edge of her tank top, its tongue long and forked, its eyes wild. “You’d look exotic, don’t you think?” He traced the lines lightly on Marion’s shoulder.

Marion felt the tip of his finger moving in careless curves, traveling lazily from the top of her shoulder down the soft skin on the back of her arm.

“How about his?” she challenged, pointing to the red-and-orange flames that meandered up the neck of the young woman’s boyfriend. Marion ran her fingers gently from the edge of Terry’s collar up into his hair.

“I always liked tattoos here,” Terry said casually, bringing her wrist up to his mouth. His lips lingered against her skin.

“Look how short that checkout line is,” Marion commented. “We could be home in no time.”

 

MARION SAT IN FRONT of her computer, smiling slightly to herself. Soon she would go and start dinner, but now, sitting at her desk, the world and she felt quiet, whole.

The plumbing supplies were still in the truck, the toilet unfixed. Marion ran her index finger down the bones of her left hand, over the veins that were starting to raise and make themselves known. She remembered the first time she had looked down and thought, Someday these will be my grandmother’s hands. But for now, she thought of Terry, how their fingers had drifted across each other in the course of their long, slow afternoon, lingering on the softness under his chin, of her belly, the gray in his hair, the ripples of the varicose vein that climbed up the back of her left leg—the same way they had, as young lovers, touched breasts, the long sweet curve of a hip, turning their bodies into liquid gold.

She knew she should be writing notes for her article, but instead she found herself looking out the window, her eye catching on the black stone that rested on the sill. Into her imagination came the image of a young boy at the edge of an ocean, a stone in his hand—his mother standing a few yards behind him, watching her son, her face full of love and confusion. Marion wondered who they were and how they had come into her mind, what that moment in their lives meant. She wanted to follow it, follow them, as if they were a trail. She opened her computer and began to write.

 

IT WAS THE GREATEST adventure she could imagine, this fictional world of people she had never met, the way their lives unfurled into her mind and out her fingers, onto the page. Over the next few weeks, she found herself waking before dawn, in mid-conversation with the characters who resided so comfortably in her dreams, and she would slip out of bed and rush to her computer, to place them somewhere solid and tangible so she would be able to find them again when the sun came up and the world was practical and imaginations were best used to figure out how to turn yesterday’s leftovers into today’s dinner.

Over the weeks, in her mind, on the page, the boy grew into a man, his relationship with his mother raveling and unraveling. She learned quickly not to push the characters down roads they didn’t want to walk, to let them choose their own pasts; she was glad only for the chance to listen. She hadn’t had imaginary friends as a child, and certainly not during the time when anyone would have considered her a grown-up.

Maybe this is my midlife crisis, she thought, amused. My little red sports car of words.

But she didn’t care. The deadline for the tattoo article passed and she took no new assignments.

“I’ve got family in town,” she said by way of explanation.

At the end of each day, she would print out the pages she had written, the pile rising like a staircase until one day all that was left was to open the door at the top and let the characters out into the world.

 

“WILL YOU READ IT?” Marion asked, holding out the stack of pages to Daria.

WHEN SHE LEFT Daria’s house, Marion drove to the tattoo shop.

“Ready?” asked Kurt as they sat down on either side of the table.

“Ready,” Marion said.

Marion held out her hand; Kurt turned her wrist so the skin on the underside faced toward him.

“What shall we write?” he asked.

T
he other women had been angry with Ava for not being there during Kate’s illness, the implication heavy in their voices—but you’ve done cancer; you should be there, you know what to do. As if death was a marketable skill, Ava thought, an experience you got better at and could put on your résumé: “Does death well.” Well, of course yes, she did, she had and they all knew it. By the age of ten, she had learned how to be the guard dog, standing at the door of her mother’s hospital room to keep out the visitors who couldn’t handle disease—the ones with the tight eyes and the too-big bouquets of flowers, the ones who would eventually spurt out some comment about their own terrible day, about the slight of a salesperson, a twinge in the ankle that made it impossible to run five miles that morning. The ones who came to her mother, their pre-mourning hanging on them like designer shrouds, off-loading their grief onto a woman already sinking into the bed. She had learned how nervousness derailed some people’s words, how fear blinkered their vision, and when she saw those visitors coming she would quickly step outside and close the door behind her, inform them that her mother was sleeping, would likely be sleeping for some time.

It had been during those weeks in the hospital, while Ava’s father was at work, that Ava and her mother started playing gin rummy, laying the cards out across the top of the swing-armed table that rotated into position over her mother’s bed. Perhaps it was the long games, or the visitors, or the endlessly revolving door of hope and exhaustion that was her mother’s existence, but Ava had found herself developing a personal theory she called the Card Game of Life. In that game, dying people trumped everything. They won—whatever food or music or flowers or voices on the phone they wanted, they got. They won if your day was lousy, if you failed a test, if you were terrified by the sight of your mother’s face falling into itself. You dealt with that yourself because you weren’t sick; you didn’t trump. It seemed only fair, as they were losing everything else, for them to win at something.

There was a clarity to the rules that was utterly missing in a hospital room where everything was hypothetical, experimental, riveted to reality only by pain. It was only years later that Ava realized that the rules of the Card Game of Life, while blessedly clear-cut, were impossible to sustain because the players were people, themselves experimental creatures, held to reality by pain and love, their tolerance of which varied considerably.

But Ava didn’t know that back then. So she taught herself how not to inhale, when every breath told her that the scent of her mother had changed, lost its clarity, the essence of cinnamon and fall leaves that Ava had loved now damp and moldy, emitting a smell that Ava knew wasn’t going away, would only get worse, even when the doctors tried to tell her and her father about new treatments, lots of hope. She knew. Spending all that time at the hospital, her nose had become adept at recognizing death while it was still weeks away. She’d known about the man down the hall; she had sensed the change as she walked by his room, an odor like dust and cheese, with an underlying note of a brick basement in the summer. One time she thought she could smell it on a woman who was visiting a patient. She wondered if she should tell the woman, but what could you do? No one would believe you.

And then there was Kate—so many years later, but fear and sorrow are like perfume, Ava had realized. You might lose the top and middle notes over time, but the base note always stays, ready to throw you back to where you started. What was she supposed to say when people looked at her and shook their heads, reminded her of how long she had known Kate, disappointment and disapproval woven through their words. What could she say? That the possibility of the smell of death on her best friend was more than she could stand? That she didn’t know if she could play the game again, keep her face neutral, be supportive, if her nose told her things the doctor would not?

“I’m busy,” she would say, “work is crazy. I can’t fly up now.” And she would spend her nights trying to imagine a scent that was Kate—caring and thoughtful, with a small smile in the middle notes. A scent to remind Kate of herself if she started to get lost. Except, miraculously, Kate didn’t get lost, and Ava was left feeling as if she held a handful of cards with nowhere to put them.

 

SO ON THE NIGHT of Kate’s victory party, when Kate told Ava that her challenge was to do the breast cancer fund-raising walk—three days, sixty miles—Ava accepted the satisfaction in the other women’s eyes, even as she couldn’t meet Kate’s.

 

WHEN AVA was a child, back when her mother baked enchiladas and dug in the garden, Ava had loved the power of her own nose. She had delighted in how she could tell, without even looking, who was entering a room and where they had been that day. She knew if her father had gone to a Mexican restaurant on his lunch break or grabbed a hot dog from the stand outside his office building, knew when she hugged her mother after school if she had visited their next-door neighbor, who washed all her beautiful cashmere and silk by hand in Woolite, the whispery floral scents so pink and blue Ava could almost see the stripes on the bottle when she inhaled. She could tell if a guest in their house had passed the building where the newspaper was printed, or leaned over to breathe in the roses that her mother grew along the walkway to their house. She looked at people and thought about how they spent their lives traveling through the world, collecting scents they weren’t even aware of and leaving their own behind, creating a trail a child could follow. It made her feel safe to know where the people around her had been, to know that they carried their lives on their skin, a story for her to read.

A teacher had once explained to Ava that there were no smells in outer space; they needed gravity to exist. Ava understood, although after her mother died, for her it was the reverse. In her post-mother world, all there was was gravity, indiscriminately pulling everything—light, smell, taste, touch, sound—down to the flat, hard earth, below which was her mother. There was nothing above.

Everyone had tried to reach her—her father, the neighbor next door, her favorite teacher who had always greeted her in the morning with a scent of lavender and oatmeal, but who now smelled like nothing. The summer after Ava’s mother died, Ava’s father took her to Lopez Island where their cabin was a shortcut through the woods from Kate’s family’s cottage. From the time Ava was three, summers had meant Lopez Island and Kate, the two girls walking on the rocky beaches together, diving off the platform into water so cold that only children and old men seemed able to tolerate it. Kate had spent the summer after Ava’s mother died shoving things under Ava’s nose—crab shells and blackberries, seaweed and sap from a pine tree.

“Come on, Sleeping Beauty,” Kate would urge. “Wake up.”

But the world had stayed gray, for years. It was easier that way. If you didn’t smell the sulfur of the match, you wouldn’t think about how it wasn’t your mother lighting the birthday candle. If you didn’t smell Elmer’s glue, you wouldn’t remember all the Valentine’s and Christmas cards she had insisted you make—you pouting, she insistent—“Give to those you love, Ava,” she would say, and now it only made you realize you couldn’t.

 

IT WASN’T UNTIL AFTER high school that things really changed. The upscale department store nearby was hiring the summer before Ava and Kate started college and they decided that, having spent all their summers together in the past, they should work together as well. Kate got a job in the shoe department, chasing small children who would rather run than be fitted for shoes. Ava lobbied for a position in cosmetics, but she ended up next door in perfume.

“Lucky stiff,” Kate commented, coming off the end of her shift, wiping bits of granola bar from her hair.