Belonging (22 page)

“You like Todd, don’t you?”

Madaket put things away in the broom closet and closed the door. Turning, she looked directly at Joanna and, smiling, answered, “Everyone likes Todd.”

“And Doug?”

The light left her face. “I don’t know. I know he didn’t like my father—at all—and consequently I’m sure he doesn’t think much of me. Perhaps he suspects—I mean, I know this is impossible and sounds egotistical of me even to say it—but I think Mr. Snow thinks I might, oh, seduce Todd somehow and make him marry me or something.” The young woman’s hands flew up to cover her face. “I probably shouldn’t have said that. I’m embarrassed to have said that. But I want you to understand why I get so—
stupid
—around Mr. Snow. I know he’s never liked me. I know he’s suspicious of me.”

“I think you misjudge him, Madaket. In fact, Doug Snow spoke very highly of you the day you came out to apply for the job. He said you were hardworking; he recommended you highly.”

“Really?” Madaket looked surprised.

“Really. He didn’t have one negative thing to say about you.” Joanna waited a moment to let her disclosure sink in. “I suggest you give him a chance. But anyway, Madaket, I like you, and if Doug Snow ever says anything against you, I’ll just tell him to mind his own business and go back to his boards. Okay?”

“Okay.” Madaket smiled shyly at Joanna. “I’d better go finish vacuuming now.”

Madaket went off, and Joanna returned to the dining room, holding her brownie in one hand while she took up her pen with the other. She bent over her work, intending to concentrate on the letter from Dahlia Martin in Virginia, who wanted to turn a former stable into a recreation/game room and connect it to the kitchen of the main house and needed clever ideas about how to best utilize the necessary twenty feet of space. Joanna had several suggestions and sketches, but for the moment she was preoccupied with thoughts of Doug and Todd and Madaket.

Was Doug Snow really frightening? Certainly he was intense. That perhaps would be enough to intimidate a young woman; Joanna had to remember that Madaket was still an adolescent, and Doug Snow was old enough to be her father. Perhaps any paternal authority figure was frightening to her. She remembered how long it had taken her to feel comfortable with any older person in authority when she first started working at the network.

The crucial point was that Doug Snow behaved with civility toward Madaket.
Joanna didn’t foresee problems arising from them all working in the house together.

Except, she thought, and she sighed and ran her hands over her belly, whatever problems her own conscience gave her for the foolish and secretly delicious lust she felt for Doug Snow.

Twelve

Joanna was constantly amazed by the light. So much light, such a variety: the spacious, generous, steady gold of day; the shadowy, textured, flickering luminescence during a storm; the dramatic, silvery, blue-tinged intensity of a starry night. When the moon was full, the entire world seemed to expand. One night she walked along the beach all by herself under a full white moon. The sky was indigo, the air and sand were lavender, and the ocean was a shivering sheet of radiance.

She’d never cared much for light before. It had always been something to work with, or against, as she and her crew tried to set up shots in which the right objects would be spotlighted and the wrong ones obscured. For years she’d dashed into the network before light and out after dark, unfazed. She hadn’t had time to pay attention to something as trivial as the weather. Personally, she’d thought of strong sunlight as a kind of enemy who provoked wrinkles and skin cancer on her face as well as perspiration stains on her clothes. In her New York apartment, her kitchen and bathroom had been illuminated only by fluorescent lights, so that day and night were the same. The studios at the network were similarly windowless.

Now it seemed to her that every steady beam of sunlight carried with it a kind of tranquilizing force. She could hardly pass by any especially sunny spot without wanting to curl up in it and snooze like a cat. Her pregnancy, of course. She was always drowsy in the honeyed light of day.

Somehow this was all mysteriously connected with her new ability to be alone. She enjoyed the sounds of Madaket and Todd and Doug coming and going in her house; she liked lunching with Tory and was delighted by her growing friendship with Pat. But she’d discovered within her a surprising capacity for solitude. In the evenings she could sit on the chaise on the screened porch, listening to the birds and the insects, gazing at the way the light filtered through the leaves on the screens, or walk along the beach, watching the setting sun throw sequins on the waves, or even sit curled up on her sofa in the living room, staring at a patch of blue sky as it gradually, silently deepened into indigo. So much as an hour could slide by. She sat in a blissful daze, growing her babies. She imagined herself as a kind of basic creature; she fancied herself connected at last
with all sorts of things, other people, animals, plants, with even the light itself.

June deepened into true summer. She was fully in her fifth month of pregnancy. She’d already gained thirty pounds. Her babies were growing.

Every morning she’d lie in bed on awakening, just staring at the sky, half dreaming, feeling her babies move inside her with little stirring, turning movements. It felt the way a stone skipping over water looked: there—there—there. She put her hands on her belly and felt the skipping movement on both the right and the left.

“Hello in there,” she said. “This is your mother with the morning weather report. Too bad you can’t see it, it’s a glorious day. We’ll be having orange juice and blueberry muffins for breakfast; Madaket’s bringing some out fresh from town.”

Was she fooling herself to think the babies fluttered in response to her voice? She tried to envision them inside her, curled up in their wet chamber, growing.

In early June Gardner Adams had offered her the opportunity to have amniocentesis done; she had decided against it. After discussing it carefully with the obstetrician, they’d concluded that the one percent chance of spontaneous abortion from amniocentesis, as well as the attendant emotional upheaval often caused by the procedure and the period of waiting, was in this case worth avoiding. If, Gardner pointed out, something was found to be wrong with one of the babies, the sheer grief and guilt and turbulence of deciding whether or not to attempt a “selective birth” might be enough to cause a spontaneous abortion of both babies.

But even if the procedure were to go perfectly, Joanna felt an instinctive aversion to too much knowledge about her babies. Perhaps she was being superstitious, primitive, naive, but it seemed that Nature or Fate or simple Accident had given her these children, this family of hers, and she knew and felt that it was absolutely right, the right time, even the right number. Two babies. An entire and complete family.

Dr. Adams had also told her that with either ultrasound or amniocentesis they could detect the sex of the babies. No, thanks, she’d said. She didn’t want to be deprived of the excitement of the news at birth, and just being pregnant was exciting enough for now. Secretly she believed that the babies were a boy and a girl.

Joanna was stirring her first cup of decaf of the day when Doug ambled in smelling of salt air and sunshine. He held out a package wrapped in brown paper.

“Like bluefish?”

“I’ve never had it.”

“Try it. Madaket will know how to cook it. I caught it this morning.”

“This morning?” She looked at her wrist; her watch read exactly eight o’clock.

He smiled his lazy, sensual, seductive smile. “Some of us get up earlier than others.” With a nod, he sauntered off and up the stairs to work.

Often when he came down to refill his mug from the fresh pot of coffee Madaket kept hot on the stove, he’d stick his head out through the dining room door and ask, “How’re you doin’ today?”

“I’m getting stiff from hunching over this computer.”

“Well, why not come on up and help us out? We’ll loosen you up a bit.”

His comments, and hers, too, it seemed, were very lightly laced with sexual innuendo; but perhaps that was only her perception. She doubted that he found her an irresistibly sexual object in her increasingly large tops.

Occasionally all four of them enjoyed moments of congenial conversation, especially over town gossip; then Madaket and Doug and Todd all vied to describe the particular characters in colorful detail to Joanna. It seemed a special source of joy to the three natives when Donald Trump’s yacht was unable to enter Nantucket’s harbor because it drew too much water.

One especially lovely morning the sun was so bright and the air so fresh that Joanna couldn’t bear to stay tucked away inside with her paperwork. She went off in search of Madaket and found her out in the driveway, slamming shut the rear door of the Jeep.

“What are you up to?” Joanna asked.

Madaket rested her foot on the rear bumper and bent forward to retie her work boot, her long black hair, pulled back in a ponytail today, falling over her shoulder. She wore a blue cotton dress which rather resembled a child’s pinafore: loose and falling nearly to her ankles, it buttoned down the back and had deep patch pockets on the skirt. As Madaket moved, the lines of her very adult body were traced out in silhouette by the sunlight. She had a lovely, full-bodied, deeply sexual figure, with broad hips and enormous breasts swelling out over a slender waist. No wonder she wore loose-fitting dresses. Men would stare at her otherwise, would think her very body an invitation.

“I’m taking another pile of junk out to the dump. I have to go through town on the way. Need anything?”

“Just a break. I’m restless. I’ll ride out with you.”

“To the dump?” Madaket looked amused.

“Sure. I’ve never been to the town dump. As a matter of fact, I’ve never been to any dump. If I’m going to live here, I ought to know how to find it.”

“Okay,” Madaket agreed. “Hop in.”

With the windows rolled down and the radio tuned to an oldies station, Joanna and Madaket drove through the green countryside. Overhead, the sky was a delicate hydrangea blue. At the rotary Madaket turned left, taking the route past Finast and then up the hill past the windmill to the Madaket Road. Along the curving residential streets, people knelt at work in their flower beds. Farther out on the Madaket Road, rugosa roses spilled over white fences and horses nibbled new grass, their coats gleaming in the sun. As the Jeep drew near the dump, they had joined a line of trucks filled with grass cuttings and old brush.

“Everyone’s working outdoors today,” Madaket remarked. They turned into the landfill drive and stopped by the booth. The supervisor directed them to the great hill of refuse where giant backloaders scooped dirt over the trash and seagulls swooped screaming by the hundreds, looking for food. Madaket got out and dragged and tossed their load into the pile, then slammed shut the Jeep and drove back toward the main road.

“What’s that?” Joanna asked, pointing to a cement island between the entrance and exit lanes.

“That’s where you sort your recyclable bottles.”

“And that?” Joanna pointed to an odd area where used furniture and damaged appliances stood forlorn under the sun.

“That’s the take-it-or-leave-it pile. If you’ve got something that’s not good enough to sell but not bad enough to destroy, something someone might be able to use, you leave it there. Anyone can leave stuff, anyone can take it.”

“What happens if no one takes a piece?”

“I guess it gets tossed in the trash heap.”

“Slow down. Stop. I want to get out and look.”

Joanna dropped from the Jeep and walked over to the fenced-in lot. She’d never seen anything quite like it before, but then never before in her life had she seen this side of home ownership. It seemed such a melancholy, heartbreaking thing: all these objects, solid and once valuable, abandoned under the sun. A three-legged table leaned on a
perfectly sturdy wooden chair with the cane torn in the seat. An open box overflowed with pink-and-white-checked curtains which once had billowed starchily at someone’s kitchen window. Joanna was filled with a sudden pity.

“Joanna?” Madaket came up behind her.

“Look at that!” Joanna exclaimed. Stepping over a crooked push lawn mower and a stained rolled rug, she picked up a picture frame. “This is a perfectly good frame!”

“Joanna, it’s come apart at two corners, and the glass is cracked.”

“Well, we can replace the glass and glue the corners together and clean it up and repaint it and it will be as good as new. It’s beveled wood, Madaket.”

“Joanna, you can buy a much nicer frame in town.”

“Of course I can. That’s not the point. Why should this be destroyed? Just because the original owner doesn’t want it doesn’t mean it should just be tossed away!”

“Well, of course if you want it, if you think you’ll use it, take it,” Madaket told her.

So they put the frame in the back of the Jeep and took it home. Later that week during the long evenings when Joanna was alone, she worked on the frame in the kitchen, washing it, scrubbing out the crevice in the beveling with a toothbrush, gluing it together, and finally painting it a shining, clean, navy blue. She was so pleased with it when she was finished that she hung it on the kitchen wall even though she hadn’t yet found a picture to put inside. After that day, she made an outing at least once a week with Madaket to sort through the take-it-or-leave-it pile to see if anything else needed rescuing. She liked having projects which didn’t involve sitting at the computer in the evening.

Tory often asked Joanna to join her at movies or lectures or art exhibits in town or shopping for clothes. But their lives ran on different rhythms. Tory had houseguests almost all the time, and her children had houseguests. With so many people in her house to feed and wash and entertain, Tory had brought up from New York her maid, a tiny, shy, older Vietnamese woman named Lei, who crept noiselessly around the house doing her chores. Lei did not enjoy conversation, and hated the beach and the sun; but Joanna had been present when Tory said, “Lei, how would you like a nice big color television in your bedroom?” Lei had smiled beatifically, and after that Tory kept the maid supplied with soap opera tabloids and boxes of soft-centered chocolate candies, and in return Lei
adored Tory.