Joy For Beginners

Table of Contents

 

 

FICTION

The School of Essential Ingredients

 

NONFICTION

 

500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide

 

Let’s Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England

Copyright © 2011 by Erica Bauermeister

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bauermeister, Erica.

Joy for beginners. / Erica Bauermeister.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-51604-1

1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology) in women—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.A9357Y

813’.6—dc22

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

 

THE WOMEN WERE DUE to arrive soon; it was quiet in the house, and Kate was glad of the impending company. She was still not used to being alone with her body. For the past eighteen months it had been the property of others—doctors certainly, but also friends, relatives, her daughter—its boundaries and capacities something they measured, gambled on, watched with loving or terrified or clinical eyes. Now the medical professionals had declared it hers again, handing it back like an overdue and slightly scuffed library book. In the weeks between the doctor’s appointment and her daughter’s departure for college, Kate had filled the space around them with lists and plans, shopping trips for desk lamps and extra-long twin sheets for Robin’s freshman dorm room. Now Robin was off and away and Kate felt sometimes as if she was living in two empty houses, one inside the other.

So it was nice to have the prospect of guests, even if they were hell-bent on jubilation. Kate had heard the excitement in her friends’ voices when she invited them to dinner, a thank-you for all they had done for her, she explained. But Marion had quickly renamed the evening a victory party and insisted that it be a potluck.

“You wouldn’t take the fun out of it for us, would you?” Marion had asked.

As Kate moved about the kitchen from stove to refrigerator to sink, she passed the bulletin board that served as a central hub for reminders and memories, its surface a collage of photographs, a calendar, old ticket stubs and coupons and take-out menus. The week before Robin had left for college, she had surreptitiously added a brochure. Kate had spotted it in the morning when she came into the kitchen to make coffee—the glossy photograph leaping out at her, an extravagantly yellow raft vaulting through churning brown waves, water drops flying off its sides in rainbows. Kate’s friend Hadley, who had once worked in marketing, always called those photos “adventure porn.”

When Robin had come through the kitchen, Kate pointed to the brochure with a raised eyebrow.

“They’ve got two openings for next summer,” Robin said. “Wouldn’t it be fantastic?”

Kate had looked at her daughter’s eyes, so full of anticipation and, deep underneath, a plea for normalcy. They had spent too much of the past year in a world full of exit doors, Kate thought. They could both use a promise that they would be here a year from now.

How could you say no? And yet as Kate had looked at the raft, the water, the size of it all, that had been exactly what—in fact the only thing—she wanted to say.

 

THE DOORBELL RANG, ten minutes early. Caroline, guessed Kate with an inward smile, as she opened the door.

“I thought you might want some help,” Caroline said as she entered, arms overflowing with a wooden salad bowl and a bottle of champagne. She put them down on the small table by the front door and gave Kate a quick, fierce hug.

“What needs doing?” she asked, as she headed toward the kitchen.

Kate followed her and gestured to the wrought iron table on the back patio. Caroline walked over to the silverware drawer, sidestepping around Kate, who had opened the refrigerator to get out the sour cream.

“Cloth napkins?” Caroline asked, a fistful of forks in her right hand.

“The green ones in the sideboard.”

“How’s the house without Robin?” Caroline called as she rummaged through the drawer in the dining room, pulling out seven napkins.

“Quiet. And yours?”

“Empty.” Caroline laughed softly. “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?”

The kitchen was quiet for a few minutes. Kate could hear the soft clink of forks against knives as Caroline set the table outside. Kate lifted the foil on the pan and the scent of melting cheese and roasted chicken, caramelized onions and a subtle undercurrent of salsa verde rose up from the pan. She inhaled memories.

The doorbell rang again.

“I’ll get it.” Caroline went through the house to the front door. “Marion’s here,” she called out.

“With the last tomatoes from my garden,” Marion said, standing in the doorway, her hair loose and silver. “Hello, darling Kate.” Marion took Kate in her arms and held her for a long moment.

Behind Marion came two younger women, one of them with a cake in her hands.

“Sara, did you bake that?” Kate asked, surprise in her voice.

“I wish—the only thing I’ve put in an oven since the twins were born is chicken fingers,” Sara replied, pushing her hair back from her face with her free hand.

“She wouldn’t have even made it out the front door if we hadn’t been carpooling,” Hadley commented and handed Caroline a loaf of bread.

“Last but not least,” a voice came from the bottom of the stairs. “I’m no cook,” Daria said as she entered, all red hair and curls, handing a bottle to Kate, “but I know a good wine when I see one. Now, can we start celebrating?”

 

THE PLATES WERE ALMOST EMPTY, the light gone early from the September sky. The edges of Kate’s patio were lost in the foliage beyond, its contours lit by the back porch light and the candles on the wrought iron table, around which the women sat, talking with the ease of those who have settled into one another’s lives. Out on the road the occasional car drove by, the sound muffled by the laurel hedge that held the garden within its green walls. Everything felt softened, the garden more smells than sights, emitting the last scents of summer into the air.

Kate looked at the women around her. It was an incongruous group—it reminded Kate of a collection of beach rocks gathered over time by an unseen hand, the choices only making sense when they were finally all together. Daria and Marion were sisters, Sara and Hadley neighbors; Kate and Caroline had met when their children were in preschool—individual lives blending and moving apart, running parallel or intersecting for longer or shorter periods of time due to proximity or a natural affinity. It had taken the birth of Sara’s twins, and then Kate’s illness, to weave their dissimilar connections into a whole.