Astonish Me (6 page)

He says, “But I worry that you’re not happy. Sometimes it feels like you’re a fugitive hiding out here, like you’re in the witness protection program. I keep thinking I’m going to come home and find a note. That’s the new suspense.”

Her feet burrow under his thigh, always seeking warmth. “I’m happy.”

He is not sure he believes her. “Good,” he says, patting the tops of her feet. “I’m glad.”

December 10, 1970

Dear Joan
,

Well, I’ve been drinking. I should say that right away. I was at a party with the girl I’ve been seeing (yes, I’ve been seeing a girl), and we walked along the river, and then I told her I was feeling sick, which is true but really I wanted to come back here to my room and write you a letter. I wonder if I’ll see you when I’m home for Christmas. Where are you? I’m sending this to your mom’s house, but I don’t even know if you’re there. I hope you’re dancing, wherever you are. If you’re taking a typing class, please quit immediately
.

Joan. About the day at the beach. I’m sorry. I was a jackass. I’m sorry for what I said and for acting like I had earned some sort of right to kiss you. My friendship isn’t contingent on kissing, I promise. But I’m not sorry for the actual kiss. I have always wanted to kiss you. Maybe you knew that. Maybe I should have told you sooner and not let it build up
.

I think we might end up together, Joan. Do you think I’m insane? Does the idea horrify you? You kissed me back at first, for a second. You didn’t say why you stopped. Then I was a jackass. That day, before, I said you were lucky because you’d decided for yourself what you wanted out of life and I hadn’t. But that wasn’t true. I realized later I’d decided for myself that I want you. Will you please just consider that I’m the right one? Just consider it. Don’t decide now. Consider it, I don’t know, forever. Or at least until it happens
.

I am going to have one more little bit of whiskey, and then I am going to mail this. And in the morning I’ll probably regret everything, but it’ll be too late
.

Love,
Jacob

January 20, 1971

Dear Jacob
,

I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner. As you probably realized, I didn’t go home for Christmas. I’ve been in San Francisco—did my mother tell you? Madame Tchishkoff helped me get a spot as an apprentice here. I’m so relieved. My foot is basically better, and the city is beautiful. My dancing has improved a lot, I think. I hope. Anyway, I didn’t get your letter for a while, and then I didn’t know how to write back. I still don’t, but I am. The long and short of it is that I adore you. I told you I know you took care of me. I don’t know if I said that I was grateful, but I am. I’ve never really had romantic feelings for you, exactly, though. I knew you felt a little differently. Maybe it was selfish of me to just let things go on. I was afraid of you bringing it up or trying something, and when you did, I didn’t know what to do. You’d think I would have decided in advance, but I couldn’t decide. Then when it happened, it felt like too much. I think you want too much from me. Does that make sense? I can’t put things into words the way you can. Is it enough to say that I’m confused? Maybe things will change. Some people seem to know themselves. I don’t feel that I do
.

But I would like us to write, even if it’s (still) selfish of me. I miss you. You are my best friend by miles and miles. Is that okay? I wish there were some way for people not to want things from each other. But now you have my address. Write me back and tell me about how brilliant everyone at Georgetown thinks you are. (Tell me about the girl, too.)

Much love,
Joan

JUNE 1982—SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

A
S THE PLANE DESCENDS
,
JOAN HOLDS THE CURTAIN TO ONE SIDE
and peers out. Desert crinkles up into scrubby mountains topped with antennae; those drop away into low hills fringed with a terraced reef of neighborhoods. Then parking lots, electric blue swimming pools, golf courses, highways, and, just beyond the plane’s falling arc, the ocean. She fidgets, flipping the armrest ashtray open and closed. The smell of stale ash and sweet mint gum reminds her of touring with the company, everybody sleeping and stretching and getting up to smoke in the back, circulating up and down the aisle as though at a cocktail party.

Jacob is already down there somewhere. A school district, flush with state money, has hired him to expand a program for gifted children. First the children are identified, then they are placed in small classes with specially trained teachers, and then they are tracked and studied over the long term. Jacob is enthusiastic, pleased to be regarded as a young hotshot, an innovator. He can build something here, he says. The system shouldn’t neglect the most promising individuals. He flew out before Joan and Harry and bought a house in a place called Valle de los Toros, one of those California towns that melt invisibly into the next, forming a continuous, hundred-mile-long patchwork of coastal domesticity.

“Really,” Jacob says to Joan as they unpack the kitchen things, “what they’ve done is taken suburbia to the next level, cut out the middleman.” He has emptied a box of newspaper-wrapped dishes, and now he makes a precarious stack of mugs in a cupboard, not bothering to rinse off the ink and dust. “People like to live in places with specific names, so they chopped the sprawl into tiny little pieces and gave each piece some fakey Spanish label. This way, we can all tell ourselves we actually live somewhere—like we have a
hometown
, like we’re living the wholesome small town life, when really each of us is just one fleck of pig snout in the biggest hunk of real estate sausage ever made.”

“Appetizing.”

“You’ll like it. Don’t think too much about it. It’s easy not to think when the weather’s so nice.”

Joan shuts the cupboard on the dusty mugs. “What do I have to think about anyway? Thinking’s not my thing.”

“Come on. You know I didn’t mean
you
specifically. I was making fun of the whole California
thing
.”

“Maybe you’re right. I don’t dance anymore. I should try thinking.”

“What is this? Why are you jumping on me?”

She shouldn’t trap him, poke at him. He hasn’t done anything wrong. “Sorry,” she says. She searches the kitchen for a way to change the subject. “We don’t have nearly enough stuff to fill these cupboards. It looks like we’re pretending to live here.”

He takes off his glasses, polishes them on his shirt, and puts them back on. “Sometimes you act like a child.”

“I said I was sorry.” She sounds more petulant than she intends. She hates to disappoint him. She fears the slow, corrosive trickle of reality into his adulation. There is a silence. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.” She gestures out the window at their patio, their overgrown lawn, Harry playing in the grass.

“Do whatever you want. Teach ballet, maybe. Or don’t. Do nothing if you want.”

Joan stares out the window.

Jacob goes on. “I don’t know how much more supportive I can be. Literally. I can’t think of anything else I can do for you. Just tell me what you want.”

“I don’t know. Nothing.” She watches Harry. “It’s the new context. I tell myself I’m making a fresh start, and then I stay the same.”

“It’s fine to stay the same. I just want you to be content. That’s really it. I don’t have a secret agenda.” He hesitates, plunges. “Most of the time now you’re here with me—really here, invested; it’s not like it was at first—and I think, good, she’s letting me know her, really
know
her the way people do when they’re
married
. And then other times you’re so distant it’s like someone’s swapped you out for a forgery.
You seem like you’re going through the motions.”

Joan looks out the window. Harry is collecting dandelion puffs, gathering four or five in his small fist before he puffs out his cheeks and blows them into smithereens.
The motions
. She has been trained to believe that the motions are enough. Each motion is to be perfected, repeated endlessly and without variation, strung in a sequence with other motions like words in a sentence, numbers in a code. “I’m trying,” she says. She is crying.

He comes to her and puts his arms around her. “I know. But I wish you didn’t have to try so hard.”

She rests her face against his shoulder, relieved the conversation is over, that they have moved on to comforting. She knows he wants her to say she loves him. He always wants her to after he has expressed any frustration or dissatisfaction. He is afraid and wants her to soothe him. She doesn’t want to say it. She wants to grasp a barre and to go through the battements.

SANDY WHEELOCK PICKS KUMQUATS FROM THE TREE IN HER BACKYARD
, dropping the tiny orange fruit into one of her daughter’s sand pails. Really she is outside because Chloe came running into the kitchen proclaiming, “The lady is doing tricks on the patio!”

“What lady?”

“Next door.”

“What tricks?”

“Belly tricks!”

Chloe had been unable to clarify (“With her feet!”), and so Sandy went out to see for herself. From the shelter of the kumquat tree, sneaking glances over the fence, she sees a slender young woman in ballet shoes, a T-shirt, and odd black overalls made of a thin, billowy material. Her hair is in a ponytail, and she is standing on a rubber mat and using the back of a metal chair as a barre, resting her heel on it and pressing her forehead against her knee. Then she briefly stands flat on both feet with her heels together before rising onto her toes and lifting one leg out and up so her pink satin shoe is well above her head. In the shaggy grass, a little boy about Chloe’s age plays absorbedly with dandelions and pinecones.

Chloe is leaping and spinning around the yard. Sandy gestures at her to calm down, but the child is lost in her game and begins to accompany herself loudly in the funny, guttural voice she uses for singing and for making her toys speak to one another. Across the fence, the ballet woman and the little boy look up.

“Hi there!” Sandy says.

The woman’s leg descends slowly, less like a leg than a settling wing, and her gaze is curious, wary, divorced from the contortions of her body. Her smile, showing small teeth, is bright and jittery. She bends to untie the pink ribbons and leaves her shoes on the rubber mat as she walks barefoot across the grass, her toes wrapped in white tape. The stranger introduces herself as Joan Bintz, and her little boy is Harry.

“I didn’t realize a family had moved in,” Sandy says. “I only saw a man.” On several evenings, she had spotted him sitting out in the late sun and reading in the same chair Joan was using as a barre. He is handsome in a bookish way, trim and dark, with a narrow face and wire-rimmed glasses, and Sandy is annoyed to discover he is married to someone so lithe, a woman who does ballet alfresco and has a son
content to play with pinecones. Sandy is still dogged by the weight she gained with Chloe. Hidden by the fence, she runs a hand over her stomach, checking on it. From a distance she guessed Joan would be in her early twenties, but, up close, she looks closer to thirty, a few years younger than Sandy. She is pretty in the way someone so thin can’t help but be pretty, with a jaw both dainty and square, a sharp nose, and eyes that are large, dark, and cautious. Sandy has the impression she has been crying.

“Jacob came out first to find the house,” Joan says. “Harry and I came later. Everything’s still a mess in there. I’m having trouble making myself unpack.” She smiles again, abruptly, quavering.

“I hear you. I still have boxes in the garage, and we moved in four years ago.” Sandy lifts the pail of kumquats over the fence. “Would you like these? This tree hasn’t gotten the memo that the season’s over.”

Gingerly, Joan ventures two fingers into the bucket and extracts one of the little fruit. “Do I peel it?”

“No, you eat it whole.”

Joan holds the kumquat between thumb and forefinger as if it were a quail egg and examines it before opening her mouth and resting it on her tongue. She chews pensively. Sandy wonders if eating is always such a production with her.

“Interesting,” she says when the tiny mouthful has finally made its way down her gullet. “Like a dollhouse orange.”

“Here, take the whole bucket.” Sandy does not care for kumquats. The tangy burst of juice does not make up for the waxiness and bitter oil of their rinds. Gary likes them and plucks them like jujubes from a bowl she keeps on the kitchen counter. “We’ve got a million.”

Joan smiles—unforced for the first time—and reaches for the pail. “That’s so nice.”

Though she would never say so, Sandy holds the opinion that mothers who keep their figures have sacrificed less than mothers who have widened and softened. Furthermore, though the idea is only half formed and well buried beneath her good nature, she suspects thin, maidenlike mothers, who might more easily find new
men, of being less committed to their children than she is. Joan is a very thin mother to be sure—and, at first appraisal, maybe too tightly wound—but her gratitude for the kumquats softens Sandy, who says, “It’s none of my business, but are you okay?”

Joan’s eyes well up. She bends her head, hiding behind the fence. Sandy observes that her forehead is perhaps higher and rounder than ideal and is gratified by the imperfection. “I’m a little homesick,” she says.

“For where?”

“Nowhere, really. I just feel uprooted. It’s fine. I’ll settle in.”

“Moving is very stressful,” Sandy says. “You’re stressed—you’d be a freak if you weren’t. Do you want to come in for a cup of tea or something? Shot of tequila?”

But Joan has noticed Chloe, who is still dancing. “How old is your little girl?”

Chloe stands on one foot and hops in a circle, arms straight up over her head like she is riding a roller coaster. Sandy studies her, trying to see what has interested Joan, but only sees a child at play. “She just turned four.”