Joy For Beginners by Erica Bauermeister Read Free Book Online Page B

into her chemotherapy.
    Caroline stared at the date. She hadn’t known. That simple fact could mean so many different things about her husband, their relationship, and she realized as she stood in the kitchen of their cottage that it had been years since she could have said with any certainty which one was true. Gently, she put the paper into the front of the book and laid it back on top of the refrigerator. Then she took the last of the boxes out to the car.
     
    MARION AND CAROLINE Sat in the front porch chairs watching the light disappear from the sky, blankets around their shoulders, the air chill on their faces. Marion looked over at Caroline.
    “You’ve done good work,” Marion said. “Come sit in front of me and I’ll work on your shoulders.”
    Caroline gratefully moved over in front of Marion’s chair. Marion had taken classes when she was writing an article about the various massage schools in town and it turned out she had a real gift, but she had simply laughed at the idea of trading journalism for massage.
    “I’ll just give to my friends,” she had said, and she had been good as her word. Kate had said the one upside of chemotherapy was Marion afterward.
    Marion placed her hands on Caroline’s shoulders and held them there, pushing down gently, firmly. Caroline’s shoulders relaxed, her chin lifted.
    “You had a big day. You doing okay?” Marion asked.
    Caroline nodded. She sat, eyes closed, feeling Marion’s hands find their way into muscles, her fingers moving gently, searching as if they could hear something ears could not.
    When was the last time, Caroline wondered, that Jack had touched her, she had touched him, like this—a natural overflow of affection, as simple and essential as water? It had been like this early on, Jack’s fingers resting for a moment on her lower back, her cheek, as he passed by.
    When their son was born, so early, the doctor had said that massage was important; it would help him grow, be able to go home sooner. Caroline had sat by Brad’s bassinet in the hospital, her fingers moving in small circles over his chest, in soft, long sweeps down his bird-bone legs and arms, love flowing through her fingers into his body. Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me. Her life reduced to one child, two hands, hers.
    It had been three weeks before they could bring Brad home, to a house that Jack left every morning, his parental leave long since used up, leaving Caroline in a cashmere world of skin. She would watch Jack get dressed, buttoning, zipping, buckling, while she lay cocooned in bed with the baby. What could touch you in a land of metal elevators and wooden desks, when all that was uncovered were hands, a face? She, who spent her days in bare feet and a bathrobe, living skin to skin with another human being, could not imagine at the time. Did not even think about it, her own world so full that any human being besides her baby was at best an appendage in her life.
    But now, she wondered. How cold it must have been in all those clothes.
    When was the last time she and Jack had really touched each other? Maybe that’s what Jack had meant when he talked about wanting to be in love—not just hands on skin, but that feeling of being seen, understood. Maybe it had just become too hard, with all those lawns to mow and grocery lists, all the accumulated roles of their lives between them.
    But sitting there on the porch, Caroline realized with a sense of small quiet surprise that the roles in her well-stocked bookshelf of life were leaving, had left, one by one as they had come. Kate was healthy again. Brad still called home for his mother-fixes, as he called them, but he was no longer the reason for Caroline’s life. Cooking and cleaning were simpler now, fertility, or not, no longer an issue. She knew how she liked to dress, didn’t spend a lot of time worrying or shopping. And now she was no longer a wife—all the caretaking slipping away, leaving her weightless,