We were young, and some of us were beautiful, and others of us were brilliant, and a few of us were both. Citizenship demanded only an ability to create, to use our minds and hands and bodies in unforeseen ways—
Joan looked up. The image of herself in her study nearly thirteen years earlier was so clear in her mind. The analysis she had undertaken about having the baby she did not want, the choice she had made after imagining the situation as if she were a character in a story she was writing, about opening her heart, the run of delightful years. She remembered thinking the story would need some tragic arc, and she felt that sense of recollection, of déjà vu, she’d sometimes felt since Eric’s birth, and she wondered when that calamity, catastrophe, misfortune, and heartbreak might hit.
There had been, thus far, a run of mostly delightful years, even when her life seemed a mirage—sometimes lovely, sometimes not. She might be keeping an enormous secret from Martin, but they were generally happy, still having plentiful sex, the boys were healthy, usually good-spirited, sort of well adjusted, chock-full of their own wonderful idiosyncrasies. Despite her frustration about being pulled away from her work, they had spent a great summer together. Now she was about to return to the book she wanted to be writing, thirty-six school weeks ahead of her when the hours from ten until nearly three were in her possession, and she felt a pinch of fear that things could not last.
*
She was waiting for them when school let out, leaning up against the station wagon. The school had a single red door, beyond which were open-air walkways that fanned out in three directions, leading to the elementary school, the middle school, and the high school, all with separate classrooms, cafeterias, auditoriums, and playgrounds. The door was deceptive, a whole town of children and teachers was right behind it.
Eric ran out first, then raced down the steps to Joan. She ran her fingers through his hair, said, “Sweetie, how was the first day?” and Eric began talking, and she was listening, but then she saw Daniel, trailing behind a group of laughing kids. His head was down, and he was dragging his feet. Eric held on to her hand as she started toward Daniel, but Daniel ducked around her, opened the wagon’s back door, slid into the backseat, and slammed the heavy door closed. Eric whined, “Daniel,” and Daniel opened the door again, and Eric jumped in.
Joan started the car, but kept the parking brake engaged. “How was your day?” she asked Daniel. Since kindergarten, he had always leaned over the rim of the front seat to kiss her, and say, “It was good, I missed you, I’ll tell you all about it.” Today, Daniel didn’t lean over and kiss her, did not answer her question, just stared out the window looking forlorn. On the way home, Eric told them a long story about the games he had played at recess, that tetherball was his favorite, that he was the day’s champion, gave them a blow-by-blow account of a game he had played with some other little boy, filling up all the space in the car.
*
At bedtime, she knocked at Daniel’s open door. “Can I come in?” He shrugged, and she decided to ignore it.
“How is your new teacher? Do you like Miss Nilson?”
He shrugged again.
“Is she nice?”
“Yes.”
The story he had taken to school was on his desk, and Joan said, “Did you enjoy seeing your friends from last year?”
“I guess. I only know Trevor in my class.”
Daniel’s sometime best friend, whom Joan didn’t much like. He was a fair-weather kind of pal. The two were best friends one day, not talking the next.
“Are you okay with not knowing anyone else yet?”
“I guess.”
“Was it interesting to see what the others shared about themselves?”
“Kind of.”
This was not like Daniel, these shrugs, this yanking of words from his mouth.
“What kind of things did the other kids share?”
“Pictures of their vacations. One girl went waterskiing. Someone climbed a big mountain. Pictures of their families. A boy named Francis has eight brothers and sisters. A girl named Tammy brought her hamster named Giant. He was really cute.”
This was the Daniel she knew, talking with his own free will, and he continued on, identifying what all twenty children had brought in as evidence of what they thought expressed them best, of who they were, at this particular moment in time.
When he said nothing about his story, when he picked up from the nightstand the book he was reading, Oswald’s Tale by Norman Mailer, she sat down on his bed. “How did you share Henry with the class?”
“Miss Nilson had me come up to the front and read it.”
“Did you like doing that?”
Daniel nodded.
“Did the class enjoy it?”
Daniel nodded again.
“Mom,” he said, “did you used to be a writer?”
She inhaled sharply, unsure where this was coming from.
“Yes,” she said. Short, simple, sweet.
“Are you still a writer?”
What was this about?
“I am,” she said. “Once a writer, always a writer.” Though not too long ago she had debated that exact thesis.
“I’ve never seen you writing. Are you writing something now?”
Christ, Joan thought.
“Do you remember me reading you stories that I called the Rare Baby stories? You were really little then.”
Daniel nodded.
“Well, those are stories I wrote.”
“I don’t think I knew that when I was a baby. I really liked them, I remember that.”
Joan smiled. “I’m glad. I loved writing them.”
“Did you have books published?”
Once, when she was pregnant with Eric, Martin had explained to Daniel that his mother was a writer. Joan had been in the kitchen, standing over a pot of boiling macaroni, shaking out the powdery contents of a silver pouch that turned into a sticky bright-orange cheese, knowing Fancy would never have made such an unhealthy dinner, and through the cutaway above the sink, she could see Martin and Daniel on the old plaid couch. “Your mother has prodigious talent,” Martin said to their son, and Joan had stopped stirring. Martin’s choice of that adjective, the way he elongated it, had made her question whether her work—with its alarming interpretations of life—had unsettled him years ago, still bothered him, despite what he had expressed to her. Why hadn’t he chosen as a way to describe her talent great, terrific, wonderful, amazing, super, rather than the inexplicable prodigious which made it sound as if she had contracted a horrendous disease and might soon die.
Looking at her son looking at her, Joan realized she had forgotten that scene entirely, and she was certain that Daniel had too. She had never spoken to him about her life before motherhood and Martin thought she was no longer writing, so where was he getting his information from?