Joy For Beginners (12 page)

She wondered sometimes, though, what she would have done without the women who entered her life during that time. Marion, Dan’s boss’s wife, setting up a baby-holding circle and introducing her to Kate and Caroline and Daria. And then there was Hadley, Sara’s next-door neighbor, who had walked across the lawn and into Sara’s living room that morning not long after Sara moved in, gently taking one of the babies into her arms when Sara had in her exhaustion completely forgotten she was holding two. The way, after that day, Hadley would often come over at five in the evening—witching hour, they called it—and create a pasta sauce for dinner or entertain a baby, the afternoons she would take Tyler to the bookstore to find a new book, or for a walk around the neighborhood. Hadley felt like family to Sara, someone who knew what she needed without her saying a word. It was, Sara thought, just a bit like having Henry back.

 

TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every once in a while she would blaze through the house and clean everything—at which point, the process would start all over.

An afternoon came when Max and Hillary were almost one year old, Tyler closing in on six. Sara had finally gotten the twins down for their nap and had been reading to Tyler from
Gulliver’s Travels,
while Tyler made stunningly complicated constructions from his Legos on the floor in front of her. Tyler loved
Gulliver’s Travels,
the idea of a big, strapping man suddenly overwhelmed by small people, then turning into a small man surrounded by big people. For an imaginative child, the suspension of disbelief required was not a large one, and Tyler often requested that Sara read the book to him, her voice mingling with the sound of the plastic blocks clicking one into another, a musical score to his childhood.

Tyler had gone off to find the plastic cockpit door for his Lego fighter plane, a piece Sara was certain had long ago become food for the vacuum and he was equally sure was floating in his aquarium. Sara sat, thinking about the story. She looked around her, at the plastic figurines and tiny cars and stuffed animals covering her floor, the table with its snack plates still waiting to be cleared, the new puppy sniffing about the chairs in hopes of a forgotten windfall, the pile of travel books she had forgotten she had ever wanted to read.

And she found herself wondering at what point in her life she had ceased to be Gulliver and had become the strings holding him to the ground.

 

WHEN SARA LEARNED about Kate’s diagnosis, it had been like feeling the first tremors of an earthquake, the small, inescapable certainty that the way you viewed the world was changing quite literally under your feet. When Marion suggested that their group shift the focus from holding babies to helping Kate, Sara had quickly agreed, eager to return the favor Kate had so easily given her.

As part of the new circle, Sara would go over to Kate’s house for a few hours on the weekends while Dan took care of the kids, and keep Kate company as she fought off the side effects of her chemo sessions. Standing in the kitchen making soup, Sara watched Kate wading into an ocean of chemicals, as if the act of submersion would get her to her daughter on the other side; she watched Kate’s daughter’s eyes following her mother, the fear in them carefully covered when Kate would turn toward her.

Afterward, Sara would go home and hold her children, as many as she could fit in her lap, as long as they would stay. She would breathe in the sweet-sweat smell of their hair and wish she and her children and Dan could all simply melt into one, indivisible whole. But at the same time—and this was inexplicable to Sara—there was a part of her that was more restless than she had ever been.

 

SARA DIDN’T KNOW how Kate had guessed what she was feeling. But that evening of Kate’s victory celebration, Kate had looked across the table with such compassion and more than a little bit of mischief and given Sara the challenge of taking a trip alone, as if, fully aware of the consequences, she was handing a child a chocolate éclair before breakfast.

Sara had quickly buried the idea at the bottom of her to-do list, applying a natural rank-ordering that put real-world deadlines at the top—restocking her supply of boxed macaroni and cheese, scheduling the twins’ first dental appointments, making the plane reservations for Dan’s conference in New York. It sat there, a small, stark word—“travel”—as if it was something you could check off at the end of a day, an hour’s effort, like picking up milk at the grocery store. Most days, she didn’t scan all the way down the list; the only way to keep moving was to concentrate on the priority items. But when she did, she could see it sitting there, more or less patiently, like a present or a bomb, waiting to be unwrapped.

 

TWO MONTHS LATER, Henry came into town just in time for Thanksgiving, bringing with him the smells of travel, cigarette smoke from a crowded train in Poland, yeast from a bakery in Alsace-Lorraine. The toys he brought the children were not made of plastic; the music he hummed was nothing she recognized. He was her twin, and looking at him she had never felt more as if he was her second half, the one she had sent out into the world while she stayed home. She felt as if she could not stand close enough to him, listen to his stories long enough, as if doing so would make her a complete person again.

One morning, Henry saw her to-do list on the kitchen counter and whistled at its length, the sound drawing in and stopping when he reached the bottom of the list.

“Travel?” he asked.

Sara told him about Kate’s challenge.

“Where are you going?” Henry was excited. “When?”

Sara mentioned the kids, Dan, the house. Henry listened, letting the list unfurl in front of her like a red carpet leading to nowhere. He nodded, saying nothing, but after that, Sara noticed that he became more lax about keeping his things in the guest room—a photograph of a statuesque white castle finding its way onto the living room table, a package of Swiss chocolate left on the kitchen counter, a heavy flannel shirt smelling of Irish peat fires hung in the hall closet, the smell infiltrating her coat next to it, coming with her as she drove to Tyler’s school or walked the dog in the park.

When Henry told her he had found a job at a bakery and a houseboat to live in, she rejoiced. She loved having him stay with them, his easy way with the kids, the conversations she and Henry and Dan would have at night after the kids were asleep. Henry would tell them stories about a winter festival in Germany, the smell of turmeric and hot chili peppers in a port town in Tunisia
.
Even though he had been with them for almost a month, she still felt greedy for his presence and was glad he would be living nearby. The world simply felt bigger when he was there.

Introducing Henry to Daria was simple. From the moment she had heard Kate assign Daria the challenge of making bread, Sara saw the potential for matchmaking—and then Henry had come home, as if he had heard the plan that was forming in her head. After Henry met Daria, he accused Sara of trying to make him settle down and stay in the Northwest forever, but he smiled as he said it.

HENRY DIDN’T GIVE UP on his quest to make Sara travel, even after he moved out of their house. When he called, he would leave messages in various languages—Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese, forcing her to look up translations, listen to the sound of new rhythms and intonations. He and Daria went on a quest to convince the twins to eat a wider variety of foods, bringing in spices that Sara hadn’t used since she was pregnant with Tyler. The children were surprisingly excited by the foods, although it may have had as much to do with the costumes that Henry and Daria would wear; the night they cooked Indian food, Daria arrived in a sari, the glow of its green silk set against her pale skin and red hair. The twins stared, awestruck.

One Friday night in January, several months after the evening in the bookstore garden, Sara and Dan, Henry and Daria and Hadley all sat around the table in the dining room. Max and Hillary were asleep; Tyler was drawing flying contraptions while lying on the floor in the living room nearby.

“Okay,” Henry announced, “who else thinks Sara needs to get off her butt and travel somewhere?”

All hands were raised, except Sara’s.

“But what about the kids?” she asked. She could feel panic fingering its way into her throat. Under the guise of reaching for her wineglass, she did a quick head check for Tyler, listened with one ear for sounds from the baby monitor sitting on the sideboard.

“Sara.” Daria leaned forward. “When was the last time you spent a night away from your kids?”

Sara and Dan shared a quick look.

“Wait,” Daria said incredulously. “
Never
? Okay, that’s changing right now.”

Hadley spoke up, nodding toward Dan. “Sara, we’ve got it all figured out. Dan can drive Tyler to school; I can take care of the twins during the morning. Henry and Daria will come over after Henry’s shift at the bakery and stay until Dan is home again. It’s perfect—although you should feel flattered that it takes four of us to do your job.”

Sara looked at Dan. He smiled at her. “It’s a great idea.”

“I agree with Dan.” Henry’s face had what their mother always called his adamant look. “You need some adventure; it’ll wake you up.”

“But what about the kids?”

Henry looked over at her and grinned. “Remember the motto of the race, Sara.”

 

“SO WHERE SHALL YOU go on your travels?” Eleven A.M. the following morning and Henry stood at Sara’s back door, a warm loaf of bread in his hands. He was still covered in flour from work—the snow-uncle, Tyler liked to call him—but his determination was clear.

“I don’t know,” Sara said, letting him into the kitchen. “There are so many choices.” While a country checklist for Henry would have relatively few options left, Sara’s was wide open. She and Dan had driven three hours to British Columbia for their honeymoon, but you didn’t even need a passport in those days, the border guards more like bored attendants at a self-serve gas station.

“Okay, then we play. Travel roulette.”

Sara raised an eyebrow.

Henry continued, undeterred. “We find the cheapest flight and that’s where you go. Much better than throwing darts at a map. Do you have any idea how much it can cost to get to Tierra del Fuego?”

While Sara made coffee, Henry grabbed Dan’s laptop and brought it into the kitchen, cleaning the crumbs and jelly off the table before setting down the computer.

The coffee burbled and the smell of fresh bread filled the kitchen. Sara cut slices of the baguette and put them on a plate with unsalted butter and raspberry jam, the way Henry liked it. She could hear Henry’s fingers tapping on the keys, then the table, as he waited for the results of his search.

“All right,” he said, as Sara put a mug of coffee in front of him. “We got it. One month from now. Venice or Brazil.” He looked up at her. “What do you think?”

“I don’t have a passport.”

“We’ll rush it. Which do you want?”

“Henry, I don’t know. This isn’t how you make a decision like this.”

“I beg to differ; this is exactly how I make a decision like this.”

“You. You’re used to traveling. You speak languages. You’re single.”

“You’ve done twins; you can do anything. Which do you want?”

“I don’t know.” For Sara, it felt as if a giant curtain hung around her house; anything outside of it was equally foreign.

“Okay, we’ll put it up to fate. I know you; you’ll want to know where you are staying so you can tell Dan. I’ll check with a couple cheap hotels and the first city where we find somewhere for you to stay, that’s where you’ll go.”

Henry’s fingers typed rapidly, expertly.

“Have you ever thought of being a travel agent?” Sara asked.

“Hell no. Most travelers are a pain in the ass. Way too jittery.” He looked over at her and winked.

They drank their coffee, Sara staring at the back of the computer, waiting. Almost in spite of herself, she could feel excitement rising in her, small and persistent, as if the air around her was suddenly full of laughter.

“Honey,” Henry said, looking over at her, “they are on different time zones, and these countries are not known for efficiency. This could take a little while.”

They heard the little mechanical bell signaling an inbound email.

“Well, what do you know,” Henry said, reading the message. “This great little dive I know has one room available. You are going to Venice.”