And thus it came to pass that one tempestuous April night, far into the wee hours, both a little high, Lauren and Saskia listened together to the storm and talked about many personal things, and did not once, either of them, take advantage of a glimpsed chink in the other’s armor to slip in a dirk. The End.
And thus it came to pass that Mr. Anderson, tenth-grade history teacher, who hated Saskia for despising his educational methods and basically ignoring everything he said all year, accused her of cribbing her final paper, “Intentional Communities in Seneca County, 1967–1978,” from some other student or paid factotum, but was thoroughly told off, nay, publicly shamed by Ms. Schwartz (Pretty Good Teacher of English, MA, OBE), who assured him that Saskia could write a paper like that with one hand tied behind her back. The End.
And thus it came to pass, after two years of awful silence, that one January afternoon there arrived in the mail a letter from Jane’s boarding school, with Jane’s name on it, at the sight of which Saskia’s face went numb with dread, but Jane said that she was doing all right, that Saskia shouldn’t blame herself too much, that Jane’s therapist had helped her see that Saskia had also been a victim of Thomas, and although Saskia didn’t believe in her own innocence for a second, still, the fact that Jane was willing to write her a letter and offer such compassionately false reassurances filled her with indescribable relief. The End.
And thus it came to pass that, following months of skirmishing in which Saskia never knew exactly what was up, or even approximately what was up, she and Shelly Landis went to the Junior Prom together and laughingly stared down the stares of the homophobic hordes that crowded the hallowed halls in those benighted yesteryears, and subsequently spent a fair fraction of the night fooling around in Shelly’s bedroom. The End.
Almost sounds like a happy childhood, doesn’t it? Saskia would like to teach this trick to everyone, perhaps offer an online course: “Ringing Down the Curtain: How to Know When to End It All, sans Gun, Cliff, or Razor.”
YA Newberry honorands (honorees?) yielded in the fullness of time to National Book Award nods. Or maybe by this point she was thinking in terms of film. For example, there was the low-budget sleeper about her ill-conceived affair with her professor (first act), followed by her ill-conceived conception (second act), with a third act of paralysis and fear—lots of staring out windows, beautifully shot by the DP in wintry rural whites and grays—but lightening in the final minutes with the birth of a beautiful baby, garnished with parsley-sprig adumbrations of a new and deeper mother-daughter bond.
She hates to say it (she really does), but that first year with Mette and Lauren on the shitty old property north of Ithaca was in some ways the happiest of her life. Just being a mother with a baby . . . For that brief season, the otherwise veiled meaning of her life became clear. If Mette hungry, then nurse. If Mette stink, then clean. Saskia’s fear and self-doubt in the first week gave way to the realization that there were two things she could demonstrably do better than any other human being on the planet, namely, intuit what Mette wanted and supply same. An ego boost, for sure. But in the service of the sweetest human interaction imaginable. (Did she already say she hated to admit it? To be clear: she believes that men might also find it incomparably fulfilling, if they’d only try it, the fuckwads.)
Of course she sometimes felt stifled, bored. The space she was asked to occupy was so small. But it reminded her of an idea that had once thrilled her, when she was a teenager, but hadn’t thought of in a long time—that fitting into a space that was defined for you, dwelling in it with acceptance, partook of the timeless and “right” actions of Homeric epic, in which formulaic language bodies forth a world of humans living by an unchanging code. Pouring water from a splendid and golden pitcher into a silver basin, generous with her provisions, she put her hand to the dirty diaper that lay ready before her.
Everything she had always disliked about her mother—her vagueness, her determined air of unreality—started to look, when helping with the baby, like gentleness, “present”ness. Saskia saw that Lauren loved babies, and since Saskia was discovering that she also loved them, it was the first time she could acknowledge that she and her mother had something positive in common. Lauren’s boyfriend Bill, another cold-molasses dreamer, also turned out to be great with Mette. She would fall asleep on him while he read on the couch, and he’d happily lie there for hours, gingerly turning the pages above her head. When Lauren went out to work in the field—she sold produce at the Farmer’s Market on weekends—she’d pop Mette in a sling around her waist. She never tired as she weeded or culled, expertly cradling Mette’s head as she bent over, continually murmuring who-knew-what to her, adjusting her sun bonnet, passing her a fresh pea pod or string bean to nibble on.
By this period, the clutch of pseudo-siblings whom Saskia had helped raise had all decamped. Melanie’s wolf in pastor’s collar had carried her off to San Jose after the hurried nuptials, and at twenty-three she already had a two-year-old boy and a baby girl, glimpsed only in cherub-trumpeted birth announcements and doe-eyed-Christ Christmas cards that arrived with neither invitations to visit nor photos of the mother. Shannon and Austin had moved out the previous year, and were currently living farther up the lake in a decrepit farmhouse that seemed part group home, part 24/7 party house, part two-level garage for the ever-reformulating grunge band. Hopelessly slow Quentin was a sophomore at Yale. The brood mother, Jo, still lived in her trailer on Lauren’s property and still shared dinner with
