Joy For Beginners (5 page)

CAROLINE WENT to the pool the next day, wanting to swim before work, needing to be somewhere simple, clean and blue. She craved the shift that happened when she moved from the loud and echoing world to one of muffled, round quiet, the energy pulsing down her legs as she pushed off the wall, propelling herself forward through the caress of the water until she finally remembered she needed to breathe, and forced herself to surface.

The pool had been Caroline’s solace after the chaos and smells of the hospital when Kate was sick. No need to think, just water then air, a quick breath before her face and mind descended gratefully back into the quiet below her. She had started swimming farther and longer, delaying the moment when she would have to leave and return to the world. Occasionally she had missed dinner at home and she was surprised that she cared less than she thought she would. She had declared herself proud when she found that Brad and Jack had figured out a quick dinner for themselves, applauding their self-sufficiency when in fact her primary emotion was relief.

After Kate’s diagnosis, things had changed between Caroline and Jack. It was as if for Jack bodies had suddenly turned into mine fields—liver, lungs, heart, breasts, ovaries, brain—all quietly waiting under the surface to be triggered, blown up. He had started reporting to Caroline with a grim satisfaction about people they knew, even marginally—the neighbor who had collapsed while playing soccer, a coworker’s father who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He read articles in the paper about environmental causes for immune diseases, began training for a marathon, brought home giant plastic bottles of supplements with multisyllabic names and insisted she and Brad take them as well.

Caroline had had difficulty being patient—it was she, after all, who sat in the hospital, who held Kate as she retched into the toilet, watched death tease and poke at her friend like some schoolyard bully. And suddenly she had been frustrated, angered even, by her husband’s seeming inability to take care of himself. The things she used to do for him and take such pleasure in now were all signs of his own inadequacy. Make your own damn coffee, she wanted to say, and she had been shocked at the sound of the voice in her head, its sharp, mean edge.

Now, as Caroline swam through the water of the pool, from the back of her mind came something Jack had said during their one truly horrible fight. Kate had had a bad reaction to chemo that day, and after Caroline left the hospital she went to the pool. She came home late, without calling. Jack had met her at the door and informed her, his voice tight, that she’d missed dinner. She yelled, told him he was selfish; she was on the front line, she said, not him.

Jack had looked at her, the anger in his eyes turning into sadness. It’s only called a front line, he said, if there’s another one behind it.

WHEN CAROLINE ARRIVED at the bookstore that afternoon, her hair still damp from the pool, she could feel the change in the air. An author event was scheduled for that evening, another big name, and the bookstore was already seeing an increased traffic flow as word got around. Anticipatory cache, Caroline called it.

As the time approached, Caroline stood at the front door, welcoming customers and directing them back to the cafe area where the tables and chairs had been rearranged to accommodate a large crowd. The author wasn’t there yet, but Caroline had gotten used to late entrances during her stint as coordinator, had even gotten to the point where she smiled a bit to herself at the newly minted authors who showed up the requested fifteen minutes early.

Her cell phone rang and Caroline looked down, seeing a number she didn’t recognize. She opened her phone.

“This is Mary.” The publicist—not a good sign. “I just got a call. She’s not coming. One of her characters died unexpectedly today. She says she’s in mourning and can’t see anyone.”

“I have a roomful of people here.”

“And I wish I had an author for you.” The publicist’s own exasperation simmered beneath their mutual knowledge of the author’s sales record.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Can you tap-dance? Seriously—I’m sorry; I owe you one.” And the phone call ended with a click.

The glamour might not yet be apparent in her job, Caroline thought. But drama, there was plenty. She headed back to the cafe.

 

“I’M SORRY,” Caroline announced to the assembled crowd. “It appears our author will not be able to make it tonight.”

There was a shifting in seats, a disgruntled murmuring.

“I want to thank you all for coming, anyway,” Caroline finished lamely.

“Wait, that’s it?” Annabelle, Caroline’s trainee, stood in the back of the room, a portrait of dismayed innocence.

“Well. . . .” Surely they wouldn’t want her to tap-dance.

“We can do better than that,” Annabelle said.

Caroline raised a questioning eyebrow; the crowd turned to Annabelle.

“What if . . .” Annabelle cast about for ideas, and then proceeded with excitement. “What if we don’t need an author for a reading? What if
we
read? I mean, maybe not
her
book, that might be a little strange, but we could read other ones, right?”

The crowd shifted, some of the customers gathering their things and leaving, but others leaning forward in their chairs, interested, listening. Annabelle looked to Caroline for reassurance; Caroline shrugged and smiled.

“Okay,” Annabelle said determinedly. She pointed to Caroline and two regular customers from the crowd. “We four will each go find our favorite passage from a favorite book. Everybody else can buy coffee or cookies or something and we’ll reconvene in a few minutes.”

The espresso machine steamed into action; the cash register opened with a satisfying pop of commerce. Caroline headed into the aisles, searching for her selection. A favorite book. A favorite passage. She passed the coming-of-age novel that had spoken to her as a college student, a memoir that had been given to her when she was a young mother, the one that told her she was not alone. Books that had arrived in her life over the years like playmates, or a loving grandmother, a slightly wicked boyfriend. More family than family, some of them.

She thought of the people waiting to hear her selection. She felt a responsibility; she was in charge of the event, after all. What would they think of her choice? What would make them happy? Her hand pulled back from the Elizabeth Gaskell novel she had been about to take from the shelf, reached instead for the recent release she knew was a favorite among the bookstore’s clientele. They had hand-sold hundreds of copies over the past year. The critics loved it; the narrator was opinionated, the language quick and bright.

She walked back to the microphone, where the other three readers were waiting. The crowd reassembled in their chairs, laughing as they tried to balance coffee cups and plates with cookies.

“Now,” announced Annabelle, “we’re going to try something we do in my family when we are playing poker. We call it ‘pass the trash,’ but I think we’ll probably have to give it a new name here.”

“What?” said the man standing next to her.

“We are each going to pass our selection to the person to our right. That way we’ll read through someone else’s eyes. It’ll be more fun.”

Annabelle turned to Caroline and pushed a book, its pages opened, into her hands.

“Here,” Annabelle said, pointing to a passage. Caroline’s eyes instinctively took in the words.

Caroline looked up and saw Annabelle watching her, a smile on her face.

 

THE CROWD WAS GONE, their excited voices disappearing into the night. The evening had been a great success; after the four read their selections the event devolved into a kind of friendly free-for-all, customers hopping out of their chairs and picking books, passing them on to strangers and friends, reading aloud into the microphone. More events were planned for the future.

Caroline was rearranging the chairs; Annabelle had found the broom and followed behind her, chasing crumbs. She was humming under her breath, a contented, happy song.

“So, did you know . . . ?” Caroline asked. Annabelle looked up, her eyes clear and innocent.

“That those are your husband’s books I’ve been going through all week? Yes.”

“How?”

“Caroline.” Annabelle sounded older suddenly, amused. “It’s a bookstore. We specialize in stories.”

 

 

WHEN CAROLINE GOT HOME, She picked up the phone and called Marion.

“I’m going to the beach house,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

 

CAROLINE AND JACK had found the beach house more than twenty years before, on a camping trip they took to celebrate Jack’s completion of graduate school. Money had been tight—Jack about to start his first real job, student loans still competing with grocery money. But there
was
a job, an offer so grown-up and full of possibility that it felt as if the door to adulthood had opened to reveal a candy store; and as they drove along the coast that day, looking for the campground, Jack was planning the big house they would have someday, the safe and clean neighborhood they would live in.

It was Caroline who spotted the collection of windbattered cottages clustered along the beach like abandoned oyster shells. They reminded her of the philosophical and religious retreats she had seen on the East Coast when she was growing up, each little house an almost-twin of the next, the very smallness of their size quieting physical movement, inviting contemplation.

As their car passed the first of the houses, Caroline had seen a sign and begged Jack to stop. And while he had been worried about reaching the campground in time to claim a good site, he smiled at the excitement in her voice and pulled over.

Caroline looked more closely at the sign when she got out of the car.

“Jack,” she said. “They’re for sale—all of them!”

They had strolled along the row of abandoned cottages like Goldilocks choosing a bed, pretending they had all the money in the world and possession was merely a matter of preference. The first cottage was too close to the road; the next was not quite angled correctly to take full advantage of the view, they had agreed, delighting in the maturity of their insights. They walked, holding hands, until they reached the end of the row where they saw a cottage set a bit farther apart, looking across a dune to the water.

“That’s the one,” Caroline said, pointing, and Jack laughed.

When they walked around the back, they had found an unlocked window, and after a moment’s hesitation they pushed it open, the wood of the window squealing against the frame. Jack boosted Caroline and she scrambled through, feeling like a nine-year-old. As she walked through the house to the front door to let Jack in, she breathed in, expecting dust and mold, but was greeted instead by the smell of fresh sheets and sunshine that seemed to come from the walls themselves.

She had gazed around her at the tiny rooms, at the windows that would open, she knew, to sand and water and sky. The light shimmered through the tattered lace of the curtains, played along the ridges of the faded white ship-lath walls.

“I’ll take care of you,” she said aloud.

She had opened the front door, her face radiant, and pulled Jack inside. They made love on the rag rug that had been left on the living room floor. Six months later, on Caroline’s birthday, she opened an envelope to find the deed to the cottage inside.

They had cleaned and painted, replaced the cracked window in the bedroom, scavenged furniture from garage sales. Over time, people had bought the other cottages and a community of sorts had developed, neighbors you could ask for sugar or lighter fluid when the only store, some five miles away, just felt too far. Their son had grown up spending stormy winter weekends at the cottage and as much of the summers as Jack’s schedule could accommodate. By the age of five Brad could imitate a seagull with stunning accuracy; by ten he could catch any Frisbee thrown the length of the beach. They had celebrated birthdays and anniversaries here, hosted an annual summer party where friends from the city pitched tents on the beach and gathered around a fire pit on late August evenings when the light stayed in the sky until ten at night and the stories went on longer than any child was supposed to be awake.

As important as the cottage had been to them when Brad was young, the frequency of their visits had stalled out almost completely when he went to high school. He had things to do, Brad told them, and Jack had said they should encourage his independence. Caroline didn’t fight it; she was busy taking care of Kate and working. Then came the time last November, when Caroline had come to the cottage for a weekend with Kate and found a book she didn’t recognize on her bed stand, and she finally realized whose independence Jack had been wanting to encourage.