Morning (2 page)

And of course, it was Sara’s fault, too. Her work was so solitary, requiring long hours of silence. For days on end she had no need to leave her house—really, she had no need to even get out of her robe. She would curl up on the sofa or sit at the dining room table and edit gothic romances until, when she raised her head, she saw that the sun had sunk and the day had gone. And she was shy. She did not know how to force her way into the intimate center of the group. They seemed so complete without her. They shared memories and jokes and references she couldn’t understand. Mostly it was four other couples and Mick the bachelor, who with Steve made an even ten, a sort of tacit closed set involved in an old island square dance of friendship. She did not know the steps. She was the outsider, stumbling at the rim. The longer she felt left out, the more she longed not to long to be included; perhaps that was perverse of her. Perhaps she had too much pride.

Perhaps everything was intertwined? All the couples but one had children, and over the past two years Sara had heard the wives announcing helplessly, “Oh, Lord, I’m pregnant, I don’t even know how it happened!” She knew how the group gossiped, how secrets were eagerly carried from person to person like treasure—she knew she could not bear it if these people knew that she was trying to get pregnant and failing. Again: her pride. Still, she had gone off-island to Hyannis to see the gynecologist six months ago. Rumors flew around the small community as abundantly as the seagulls circling the sky, and she did not want a Nantucket doctor or nurse to mention her problem to someone who would mention it to someone else—it meant too much to her.

In the first year of their marriage, like many lucky couples, Steve and Sara experienced that drawing together of spirit and mind and body that made them feel there was something basic about their love, something elemental and rare, like the birth of twins. It was as if they had thought they were separate entities, but in their marriage realized they were truly two halves of a whole, as in turning, the moon shows its bright and dark sides joined. Now there was a fissure in that whole, a hairline crack running between them, so small still that they scarcely noticed it was there.

They had not spoken of this. Sara was aware of it only because she realized that for the first time since her marriage to Steve she was relying heavily on Julia for sympathy and comfort and support. Perhaps it helped that Julia was not so close to the problem and could not be hurt by Sara’s infertility. Julia helped Sara put it all in perspective—gorgeous Julia, who had her own problem, her own secret—she was having
an affair with a married man, she was passionately in love with that married man, who had some power and fame in the state. The last thing in the world Julia wanted was to get pregnant, and the easiest thing in the world Julia did was laugh, so she was able to put Sara’s plight in perspective for her. Thank God for Julia, Sara thought. And for Sara’s sister, Ellie, who lived in the Midwest and who was a nurse. Ellie was married, a mother, and sensible; she relayed relevant scientific tidbits about fertility to Sara just as Julia had begun, in her own wacky way, to send unscientific ones. With these two on her side, how could she fail?

Perhaps she hadn’t failed. Perhaps—for it was the twenty-ninth day—Sara hurried into the bathroom and checked. No blood! Looking at herself in the mirror, she grinned gleefully, then cringed, once again regretting the haircut she had just gotten. She was getting superstitious. She was really getting nuts. First the weight, and then the hair, and now look at her.

Six months ago, after the off-island doctor had told her to relax, Ellie had told Sara about a study about women joggers who had trouble getting pregnant, who even stopped having periods. So Sara had stopped exercising and watching her diet—it made sense in a sappy way—what baby would want to nestle in a bunch of bones? A plump and cushiony body seemed much more the sort of place for a baby to nest and grow. Over the past six months, Sara had gained fifteen pounds. Soft depths. She felt good—but she looked different, and now she thought perhaps she had gone too far.

And the haircut—that had been even crazier. For years Sara had worn her thick blond hair in a simple style, parted in the middle, sleekly falling on each side to slant gently under just at chin level. She had always known she was pretty, and had chosen that severe style because she thought it made her look serious, intelligent, sensible, not given to vanity, the way an editor should look.

But a few weeks ago at a group get-together, she had heard Carole Clark announce that she was pregnant. “God, I never should have had my hair cut,” Carole had said, laughing. “Every time I get my hair cut, I get pregnant!”

Well
, Sara had thought,
hmmmm
. There
was
a connection between hair and power—look at Samson and Delilah! After waiting for two weeks, so that no one might suspect what she was doing (she was that paranoid these days), she had gone to a local hairdresser and had her hair chopped very short. She said she wanted a “modern” look, not punk, but chic.

When Julia saw her on a recent visit, she told Sara she looked like Boy George. Steve had jokingly asked if she was going to start wearing chains of safety pins in one ear. It was not a successful haircut: it was just too drastic.

On the other hand, perhaps it
was
a successful haircut. It was the twenty-ninth day and she hadn’t started her period. If she were pregnant, she wouldn’t care what her hair looked like!

Her stomach was swelling outward the way it always did just before her period—she couldn’t ignore that. So maybe she wasn’t pregnant. And her breasts were sore. That, Ellie said, could mean anything either way.

Sara looked up from her stomach to see her face in the mirror. Her blond hair was sticking up and out all over. “You’re losing your mind,” she said to herself. “Get to work.”

After her marriage, after blissful months of painting woodwork and matching napkins to placemats, Sara had grown bored and had called on her old boss at Walpole and James for help. Donald James had gladly sent her work. In the past year she had edited a no-sugar-or-salt-or-alcohol cookbook, a nonfiction book about the slaughter of seals and whales, and a dreary novel about the end of the world. Jokingly, she had said to Donald, “Cheerful stuff you’re giving me to fill my days with,” and he had replied, “Cheerful? You want cheerful?” And he had given another Boston publishing house her name, more in jest than anything else.

Heartways House, with a millionth the prestige of Walpole and James, but with more than five times the sales, specialized in paperback romances, the sort of books Sara had never even read before. To her surprise she found it a treat, like eating junk food, to edit these books, and for the past few months she had spent her days reading about lust, revenge, lace-covered bodices, heroines running from castles, dark-eyed mysterious men. The endings were all predictable—but at this point in her life she appreciated that.

Her workroom was the living room (while the spare bedroom sat waiting for its baby). The manuscripts and notebooks and pencils were stacked neatly on a shelf in the bookcase. With a fresh cup of coffee on the table next to her, and an afghan pulled up over her knees, she settled down with the latest gothic from Heartways House. It was a lazy way to work, cozying up on the sofa, still in her nightgown and warm pink robe, but she loved it. No intrusions, no interruptions, no other people scurrying down a hallway
outside the office, laughing, calling out, luring her mind from her work—just the warm silence of her house. Sunlight slanted through the windows, making a crazy quilt of dark and light squares on the faded ruby and azure Oriental carpet. Her body was still: no signs. She bent to her work.

Seraphina stood panting next to the mammoth wooden doors that led to the turret. The heavy brass keys were in her hand.

“Seraphina,” Errol called, “my darling! Let me out!”

Seraphina shuddered as fear and desire passed through her slender body like a flame. Should she let Errol out? Or should she run and fetch Jean-Paul? Which man was the murderer? Which man should she trust?

Oh, for heaven’s sake, Seraphina, let poor old Errol out
,
Sara thought
,
sighing. We all know he’s the hero; he’s the one who’s got all the money and will inherit the castle
.

After a few more paragraphs (during which Seraphina let Errol out of the turret) Sara looked up, away from the manuscript. She stared out the window at the blue sky, but didn’t really see it. She was wondering whether when Seraphina and Errol got married they would have any trouble conceiving.
That
was the real mystery, the real adventure, Sara thought, getting a baby. But no, Seraphina would get pregnant right away and deliver a healthy baby boy, just like Princess Di. For some people it was as easy as slipping down a slide.

She forced herself back to the manuscript. She had to be attentive, even with this writer, who was usually meticulous. Did she feel anything? Any twinge anywhere? No.

She forced herself to concentrate.

Errol, much to Seraphina’s (and Sara’s) surprise, once out of the turret, tied poor Seraphina up with rope and gagged her with his ascot, inflicting light bruises (and copping some feels, though the writer didn’t quite put it that way) as he did. Sara’s interest was whetted. She had been sure Errol was the good guy. She turned the page.

When I was twelve, I raised my own herd of polled registered Hereford for a 4-H project. I had five heifers who were old enough to be bred and to calve that year. I loved those heifers. I had a name for each of them. My
father gave me one side of the barn just for them and I kept their stalls full of straw so fresh and golden that a princess could easily have spun it into gold; when the sun slanted in through the high loft door, the dust motes drifted down onto that straw and onto the backs of my cows like more gold, golden coins; you could almost hear it chiming as it fell.

All animals, if loved personally and often, respond. So it came to be that every evening when I went out to the barnyard to call the cows home from the pasture, clanking the bucket of grain against the great round metal water trough and making triumphant gonglike dinner-bell sounds ring out, those five cows came running in from wherever they were. Really running. Father said he’d never seen anything like it. My brother, who was sometimes home from college, talked to us about Pavlov and stimulus-response. Whatever it was, when I called my cows in the evening, they came, knowing they would get a nice big helping of sweet ground corn and part of a bale of hay. Later, when they had been bred and were big with their calves, I would laugh to see them come running up, their enormous bellies swaying above their slender legs. It was as if all the maiden ladies at our church had suddenly run out together into the street, their flowered pillbox hats bobbing, their pocketbooks and huge corseted bosoms and hips and stomachs swinging gently above their tapered ankles and dainty tiny feet. My shy-eyed cows did have that air of refinement about them.

Sara picked up the next manuscript sheet. Seraphina was there, twisting and writhing, her bosom heaving under delicate lace. Errol had left her shut in the turret.

Sara looked back at the page she had just read. How had this realistic little memoir about cows get into the middle of the romance novel? Had Heartways House mixed up two manuscripts? But what would Heartways House, which published only romance novels and a few spy and adventure stories, be doing with a realistic piece? Perhaps one of the editors was reading it for a friend.

Sara set the page about the cows aside. She’d rather read about that than old Errol and Seraphina, she thought.
Seraphina
, really, what a hokey name.

Before she read on, she treated herself to another trip to the bathroom. Her heart
leapt: still no blood.

That evening, her work done, Sara stood in the bedroom, looking at herself in the full-length mirror that hung on the closet door. She had pulled up her newest pair of jeans—size fourteen. My God, she had never worn size fourteen before in her life, she was getting to be an absolute
whale
. And today the jeans would not quite fit. They were too big and loose on her legs, but she could not zip them up around her stomach and waist.

Despair beckoned. All day long she had hoped, but this was one of the unmistakable signs that her period was about to start—this swollen stomach that bulged out in front of her like a mock pregnancy. In a few days, after she had gone through the heaviest flow, her emptied body would suddenly slip back into shape, her stomach would tighten, all of its own accord, and she would look normal again, if not terribly slim, at least not bloated. But for now, she was stuck with the silhouette of a kangaroo. Still—her period hadn’t started.…

Bending over to tug off her jeans, she smiled at her tummy. “Hi,” she said. “Anybody home?” Then, optimistic, she dressed in a long denim skirt and several bright baggy shirts, grateful that the layered look was in. She pulled on knee-high red boots, brushed her hair up and out, and put on dangling earrings that her mother would have scorned as being fit only for Gypsies. Throwing on her red wool cape, she went out into the evening, to walk to the Atlantic Café to meet her husband.

It was not quite five o’clock, not yet dark. This was a mild November so far, and the air was gentle, the wind low. One of the pleasures of living on Nantucket was that one could walk to almost any spot in the village, along streets that were as charming as a dream. Pleasant Street curved before her like a scene from a European fairy tale, brick mansions with their walled gardens and winding stone paths next to snug cottages with blue doors and window boxes still spilling over with flowers. The lamplights and shop lights glowed golden across the cobblestones as she turned down Main Street, where, this time of year, she saw more people walking their dogs than driving cars. She slipped into the Hub to see what new magazines were in, then wandered on down to the Atlantic Café.