Joy For Beginners (2 page)

Kate heard a voice coming through the house.

“
There
you are . . .” A woman, dressed in a loose-fitting jacket and slim jeans, came out onto the back porch. “I’m sorry I’m late; my flight was delayed.” She ran down the steps to the patio and hugged Kate.

“Ava,” Kate said, holding her.

“Did I smell my mother’s enchiladas?” Ava asked, and Kate smiled.

“I saved you some.” She started for the kitchen.

“No, you don’t,” Caroline quickly interjected. “You’re the queen tonight. You shouldn’t have to wait on anybody.” She sent a pointed look in Ava’s direction.

“I’ll get more wine,” Daria added, following Caroline into the house.

Kate pulled a chair up next to her and motioned for Ava to sit down.

Now they were all here, Kate thought.

 

DARIA CAME OUT the back door, the glossy brochure in one hand. “Hey, what’s this?” she asked. “I found it tacked to the bulletin board.”

“Robin wants the two of us to go rafting down the Grand Canyon,” Kate said.

“But . . . ?” Caroline had come out on the porch and was watching Kate’s face.

“Have you seen those rapids?” Kate replied.

The women around the table nodded in understanding, although if they were to be honest none of them had ever experienced the Grand Canyon other than to stand on its rim and look down to the river below, which looked only green and far away from that distance. But that, of course, didn’t matter. The women ranged in age, but they were all old enough to know that in the currency of friendship, empathy is more valuable than accuracy.

“It’s scary,” Caroline agreed, coming down the steps and setting a plate in front of Ava.

“Which is
exactly
why she should do it,” Daria broke in. “Kate, you’re here; you’re alive. You should do something crazy to celebrate.”

Kate simply shook her head and sipped from her wineglass, her thoughts traveling far from them, underwater. It was dark there, cold, where the waves grabbed you and took your life where you didn’t expect it to go.

“Maybe we should give her some space,” Sara suggested.

The women shifted in their seats. Ava picked up her fork and took a bite of enchilada, closing her eyes in happiness. Kate smiled, watching her.

“All right,” Marion said, leaning forward. “Here’s a thought. Kate, when is the trip?”

“Next August.” Kate regarded Marion suspiciously.

“Well, then,” Marion continued calmly. “I propose we make a pact. If Kate agrees to go down the Grand Canyon, we’ll each promise to do one thing in the next year that is scary or difficult or that we’ve always said we were going to do but haven’t.” She scanned the circle. “Everybody in?”

The women looked about at each other. One by one, they nodded in agreement.

Marion turned to Kate.

“All right?” she asked.

It was still for a moment. On the other side of the hedge, a car door opened with an electronic beep; the jingle of a dog’s collar passed by.

“All right,” Kate replied finally—and then she smiled. “But here’s the deal. I didn’t get to choose mine, so I get to choose yours.”

T
hings held on to Caroline—the ends of her sleeves caught by doorknobs, her coat in a car door, the knit of her Irish sweater snagged on an errant nail that no one had ever remembered seeing sticking out of the wall. But she had never been as good at catching, holding on to things—taxicabs, elevator doors, a husband, slipping closed and past, already on their way to another floor, another life.

Her son had nestled into her heart, all tousled hair and awkward elbows, and then he was off to college. Her parents had died. And now Jack had left her, rocketing like a boy down a water slide into the exuberance of his new, defiantly not-middle-aged existence.

“I should learn to be slippery,” Caroline said to Marion when they met for coffee a few days after Kate’s celebration in the garden. “I need to be sleek and unobtainable. All silk suits and no commitments.”

“You know what silk is made out of,” Marion commented mildly. She pushed her silver hair back from her face and studied her friend.

 

MARION WAS A PERSON who had held on to Caroline. They had met years before, when Marion was writing an article about public yet intimate gathering spots, the modern equivalents of the old woodstove in the general store of pioneer days. The bookstore where Caroline worked was a perfect example, designed as a place to linger as much as shop—incorporating a bakery and cafe, a fireplace surrounded by oversized chairs for colder days and a patio outside for summer ones. It could have felt chaotic, a party full of strangers unable to introduce themselves, but instead was more like a genial conversation—the metallic clink of silverware set against the contented sigh of a book being slid from its shelf, the murmured comments of a knitting group seated at a round table in the three-sided alcove that held—was it intentional or simply serendipitous?—the house/garden/cooking books. Smells of cinnamon and yeast settling in between the covers of books only to rise from the pages when they were opened later at home.

Caroline loved the store. She had started going there almost twenty years before, when her son was in preschool and they would go for story hour. Caroline would buy a mug of coffee and watch her little boy, engrossed, listening to tales of muddy dogs and brave princesses. A few years later, when Brad was in elementary school and she was in what she would later call her “writing phase,” she had come to the bookstore in the mornings to sit at one of the wooden tables in the cafe, pretending to write but really just allowing her eyes to slow and settle on the collage of mismatched chairs around her, the wideplank pine floors, the way the bookshelves created a child-sized maze behind her. The espresso machine would make its hissing noise and she would listen to the conversations around her, to lives that were more or less interesting than her own. Later in the evening at home, Jack would ask her what she had written, or rather, how much. She would lie and tell him the stories she had heard as if they were of her creation, grateful for the loan of them, for the free pass they gave her into a few hours floating in a world not of her own making.

After a while, however, it became obvious that the stories were not connected, were not in any case going to be a book, and Caroline had been grateful once again for the bookstore and the job she was offered as its used-book buyer. Brad had been well ensconced in school by that time, and Caroline had loved dropping him off and driving to the bookstore, anticipating the smell of old paper and warm blueberry muffins, ground espresso beans and nutmeg and ink.

It was quiet behind the counter where people dropped off their bags and boxes of books, then went to wander among the shelves or drink coffee while she assessed the value of their reading habits. First, you had to get rid of the esoteric tomes no one else would want; the beach reads that everyone else had already read and sold, sand filtering out of their pages like used-up words; the books that had been stuffed into the bottom of backpacks along with, she was sure, old bananas. For books in good condition, she would offer a quarter of the original price in store credit. Less, if people wanted a quick exit and cash.

At first Caroline had seen the job of used-book buyer as a stepping-stone to the more exciting world of the new releases displayed at the front of the store, their words freshly printed, their meanings clean as new sheets. But she quickly realized she had an affinity for the older books and their muted scents of past dinners and foreign countries, the tea and chocolate stains coloring the phrases. You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else. As Caroline had riffled through the pages looking for defects, she had discovered an entrance ticket to Giverny, a receipt for thirteen bottles of champagne, a to-do list that included, along with groceries and dry cleaning, the simple reminder: “buy a gun.” Bits of life tucked like stowaways in between the chapters. Sometimes she couldn’t decide which story she was most drawn to.

After Jack left, Caroline had found herself standing at her counter, considering the boxes and bags of books in front of her. She was, she realized one day, being traded in for a new release—and as a used-book buyer she couldn’t decide if it was the irony or the triteness of the analogy that she resented most.

 

THE EVENING OF Kate’s victory party, Caroline had been afraid that Kate would challenge her to climb a mountain or go out on a date. But Kate’s assignments were as quiet and unexpected as Kate herself. She had taken a handful of beach rocks from a huge glass bowl in the center of the table and handed one to each of them—as reminders, she said. Caroline was first, and Kate had reached across the table, putting the smooth oval into Caroline’s hand.

“Your task is to get rid of Jack’s books,” she said, and Caroline had realized she would have preferred the mountain.

 

“I DON’T KNOW if I can do it,” Caroline said to Marion, lifting up her coffee cup. She saw the expression on Marion’s face. “It’s not just because they’re Jack’s,” she explained. “They’re books. It’s not their fault—they didn’t do anything to anybody; they deserve a home.”

“So do you,” Marion replied.

 

CAROLINE COULDN’T IMAGINE a home without Jack, even though in reality she’d been living alone for nine months already. Jack had a new sleek condo downtown, bought before he even told her he was leaving, his signature on the purchase documents a commitment, he had explained. He’d bought it with his own money—his inheritance from his father. She remembered the money; Jack had said he wanted to hold it aside, for flying lessons. She had thought he meant it literally.

Now, with Jack and Brad both gone, walking through her house was like driving the curves of a familiar but poorly maintained country road. She leaned into its rhythms naturally as she walked in the front door, left her keys in the dish they had bought on a family trip to Hawaii, passed the couch she and Jack had rolled off one night when the bed was too far away, went into the kitchen where it still seemed more natural for Brad to be standing as a four-year-old, head barely at the height of the counter, asking her what was for dinner. Without thinking, she was the person that the house, the furniture, the ingrained patterns of family life expected her to be. And then when she least anticipated it there was a hole that had to be swerved around—Jack’s favorite painting gone from above the fireplace, Brad’s room cleaner than it ever had been before he went to college. How big would the holes in her life be if Jack’s books were gone?

As a child, Caroline had always loved the feeling of being surrounded by books; she had spent summers in the library, winters under the covers of her bed, knees tucked to provide a prop for the book of her choice. As she grew older, she had loved the idea of filling the shelves of her life with the roles of daughter, friend, girlfriend, wife, mother—like favorite novels she could take out anytime and reread. There was something satisfying in knowing that wherever she went, whatever she was doing, they were always a part of her.

Jack saw it differently. There was nothing romantic, apparently, in a well-stocked bookshelf.

“I’m just thinking,” Marion noted, taking a sip of her coffee, “that it might be nice to figure out how
you
want to live.”

“If you’re going to tell me that I can make lemonade out of lemons, I’m going to hurt you.”

“No, but I am saying you can make space for a life.”

MARION WAS THE OLDEST of their group, at the tipping point of fifty-five, although she didn’t seem to worry much about it. She was one of those people everyone referred to as grounded—a term that, before Caroline met Marion, Caroline had always thought of in the electrical sense, a live wire somehow muted, made functional, its power dispersed and controlled. But with Marion, the word took on a new meaning. Marion was originally from the Midwest, a geographical inheritance that didn’t so much cling as grow up through her. Her face had the openness of cornfields and river bottoms, a calm belief in herself nourished by thick, green summer air, the feel of slow water moving beneath the hull of a canoe. She had developed a love of gardening early in her life and she used her hands easily and naturally, whether it was touching the earth or the shoulder of a friend.

Marion and Caroline had often laughed at the differences between them—Marion relishing heat and time spent in the dirt, her close-cropped, getting-down-to-business fingernails often carrying thin, black crescent moons that even the most determined scrubbing couldn’t seem to clean. Caroline, on the other hand, was at best a spade girl, her favorite plants held in small clay pots. Better yet, no dirt at all. Jack had always said Caroline’s favorite garden was the ocean.

 

AFTER HER COFFEE DATE with Marion, Caroline went to the pool. There was no reason to hurry home and the thought made her pause in the changing room, one strap of her bathing suit in her hand, halfway up to her shoulder, looking at herself in the mirror. Everyone commented these days on how well Caroline had stayed in shape—a two-handed compliment, Caroline always thought, an acknowledgment of her forty-eight years held lightly in one palm. Good for you, people would say, applauding the effort, the action. Caroline had been an English major in college; she knew a verb when she heard one.