Joy For Beginners Read Free Page A

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.
    It would be decades before anyone would think to compliment Jack’s new girlfriend that way. Caroline had seen her once at the local farmer’s market, standing by the tomatoes, all round curves and glossy surfaces. Caroline had watched the young woman laughing effortlessly with the vendor, and told herself that tomatoes would soon be out of season, hard and tasteless as plastic—but the argument lay in her imagination, dull and powerless against the fecundity in front of her.
    Standing in the changing room at the pool, Caroline remembered how when she was younger, people used to say she was beautiful—an adjective, and one that always made her a bit embarrassed. Back in those days, Caroline had felt more comfortable thinking of beauty as something separate