The Sabbathday River by Jean Hanff Korelitz Read Free Book Online Page B

dissertations and organized protests and endless gatherings to talk and talk and talk. They did not talk much to Naomi these days. It had been two years since the last one had ventured upcountry to camp—
with her two adopted Vietnamese children—in the amorphous “space” of the A-frame. Naomi’s friends were naturally happy to hear from her when she called; they were happy to learn that her business was doing well, that she was adjusting to living alone. But they had new friends now—from work, or seminars, or the playground. Naomi understood that they found it difficult to consider her own circumstances when they neither knew nor could begin to conjure the personalities involved. There seemed less and less to say about any of it.
    Meanwhile, there were no rap sessions in Goddard, shockingly enough. Few consciousnesses had ever been raised in the church basements or around the kitchen tables of Flourish’s knitters and hookers. Naomi, for her part, would gladly have been open with them—she had never been a secretive person, especially—but here there was no one to talk to. These women showed each other little enough of their lives, and yet they seemed to find ways of revealing even less to Naomi. It was barely possible to worm from them the names of their husbands, the ages of their children, let alone the nature of their various distresses. Now and then she might be able to glean some crumb of coded information, a morose reference to the Woodstock Tavern (which was the local dialect for My-husband-is-drinking-again) or a chilly reference to a sibling, signifying a lifetime of pained acrimony. When they spoke, it was to deflect attention from themselves or to condemn one another outright. When they laughed, it was at someone else’s failing. They did not view their own lives as mysteries to be unfurled, perplexities to be distilled, imbibed, and benefited from—the word “feeling” came from a foreign dialect; it simply had no meaning. The notion of emotional exploration, let alone directed counseling or—God forbid—psychiatry, was infinitely suspect. Even Heather, with whom Naomi engaged in a sort of pantomime of friendship, kept so much back that Naomi inevitably felt the scrim of distance between them.
    At five o’clock she put together another kit for Heather, scribbled a grocery list for herself, and locked the mill door behind her. The light over the Sabbathday was pink and the leaning birches rosy over the water. Robert Frost—celebrated swinger of birches that he was—would have had little use for these sorry specimens, she thought, revving the wagon’s tired engine. The thin trunks here had no spring—unlike the birches in the Frost poem, those catapults into the universe, unlike the graceful birches that had bowed to kiss their own reflections in the
Sabbathday near the eddy where she had found the baby. These looked as if no amount of optimism could wring from them any momentum at all. They drooped their sorry lengths at an awkward angle near the mill’s back door, near the skeleton of a jungle gym so rusted as to reiterate that no child dwelt here who might inspire them to stand up straight and make themselves useful. They were depleted things, bowed by their own gravity and rooted to the spot. She sighed and tried to ease the car ahead, avoid the sinkholes as best she could in the dimming light.
    Naomi dreaded having to tell Heather about the sampler. It had been an alphabet sampler, one of Heather’s best, with an outsized A of deepest red in the upper left corner of its vintage linen and the subsequent letters flowing from it with a momentum of inevitability until the honest H. Pratt — 1985 following the final Z. Such an order would have taken her a good week, Naomi knew, since Heather would not part with a piece until she was happy with it, even as orders lengthened in their queue, waiting for her. She had been in