In her study, Miguel pointed to the filled bookshelves, his hand in front of Peck’s own books. “Have you read all of these?” he asked.
“No, not all of them,” Peck said, which was a lie, and she looked at her long desk that bisected the room. There was her third novel, in progress, a short stack of pages. A month without the duties of teaching and grading and the stack had grown only incrementally, the work a brutal slogging that rebuffed Peck at every turn. In all her years of writing, now more than eighteen, the last ten as a published author, never had the work eluded her. Never had her teenage years in Devils Creek, the foundation of her work, been so remote. Vibrant, insistent, and original, the critics agreed about the stories and novels Peck set in the town where she was born, nothing more than a square and some streets, fields of corn, spring wheat, and sunflowers, flat unyielding plains beyond, and, rearing over the highway, those sandy cliffs rising up, the locus of all her juvenile troubles. Did the loss of her dreams last night, and the grizzled novel in which she could not make headway, signal that she had strip-mined that rich vein, or now stood too distant from those days? Had she lost those tidal feelings that lifted her old recklessness into art? She feared suddenly that she had become staid.
“Are you sure about getting rid of these walls?” Miguel asked. “If you took out your desk and the books, it could be a bedroom, and maybe you will need it. Rosita and I find that a bebé in a crib sleeps better in a room with walls, a door to close.”
Peck had not considered that she might need a spare room for someone else one day, that she might again find herself room-turned and swollen, caretaking some other life within. Peck and Miguel stared at each other for a moment, and then Peck said, “No. They need to come down. Do you want some coffee? We can talk about the particulars?”
I read on about how Peck convinced Miguel to demolish all the walls without the requisite permits, for thirty percent more than it would cost if he did the work legally, telling Miguel that, if the work were discovered, she would make sure he was not blamed. Miguel said to Peck, “I’ve always known you were an outlaw,” and when she no longer heard his work boots clumping down the internal stairs, she hoped that was still true, that she was still an outlaw. The work would take Miguel seven weekends, and when he returned on Saturday with his tools to begin, Peck cleared out, wondering where she might go, and surprised herself by spending the day, and the next day, and all the following weekends, in a nearby park, watching children at play. Then I came to this:
On her seventh Sunday in the park, Peck was on an empty park bench up against the filigreed iron fence, shaded by the thick leaves of a maple. In front of her was a boisterous mob of toddlers and older children on the jungle gyms, the swings, the slides, springing up and down on the plastic ponies, their shrill calls, punctuated cries, screams of delight or of ruin entrancing her.
Peck was startled when a stranger’s hand came to rest on her forearm. The nails were tough under the cherry-blossom polish, the fingers wind-boughed. The hand belonged to one of the old wheelchair-bound women Peck often saw rolling into the park on her own, still strong, purposeful, alive. Even the runnels carved into her face had resolve. Peck had given her a name, Sylvie, and thought she belonged on a Hamptons estate, and not where she most likely lived, at the Home for the Aging, a squat and lifeless brick building a block over.
Sylvie was dressed in unsullied white. Her white canvas shoes resting on the wheelchair ledge were unsoiled. The white bun at her neck, a pearl in the sunshine. She raised her hand from Peck’s arm and gestured around the park, as if she were a maestro, and the children her noisy orchestra.
“I’ve done all of that, dear, and I do not recommend it. I was lucky. Mine turned out exceptionally well, and so I have no complaint. But I maintain that it’s not worth the sacrifice. Find love first and only. Keep it small and private. Tend to that love every day and every night. Do not complicate love with children and their endless demands.
“Come to the park to get your fill of their delight. But avoid the abyss. Even perfect children are all just mess and demand and dirty diapers, no matter their age. Sacrifice nothing for another. Give to yourself all that you would otherwise give to a child. Be your own child.”
Her pink mouth turned up in a smile, white teeth too bright for her age, and then she engaged her chair and motored out of the park.
For an hour more Peck sat with her hands in her lap.
The scene was the same—children laughing, screaming, crying, ring flying, ladder climbing, pole sliding, skipping from here to there, holding hands, pushing one another down, slapping at will, sharing a treat—but the old woman in white had smudged what Peck had not been aware she was seeing, had not known she was hearing; her impulse to eliminate all the unnecessary walls in her home, the hand on her belly, the confusion of whiplashed anger and happy tears when she heard that Margo was pregnant again, the fact that her own baby, whoever she had turned out to be, wherever she might be living, was celebrating her eighteenth birthday that day.
In the park, the bright colors of the children’s clothing, the timbre of their young voices, lowered and darkened.
I reread the sharp words Ashby placed in the mouth of the old woman—about children not being a worthy goal, not worth the trouble or the mess, not even in the long run when they were grown and still loving—and something stormed inside of me and broke loose.
When Peck returned home, her key crunched in the lock, and she stepped into a wide-open vacant womb, bright with the sun that entered the space even as it rounded to seven in the evening. She felt freed, lifted skyward, the unsettled questions about the course of her life left behind. She opened up every window and swayed in the hot drifting current.