Joy for Beginners

by Erica Bauermeister

You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.

fecundity

How long had she and Jack thought of themselves as in a marriage—a contract, a partnership—rather than married, entwined?

But at some point the water goes back out; it has to. And maybe you’re lucky—maybe you’re both too busy to do anything drastic. Maybe you’re good as friends, so you stay. And then something happens—maybe it’s something as big as a baby, or as small as him unloading the dishwasher—and the wave comes back in again. And it does that, over and over. I just think sometimes people forget to wait.”

She wondered where her clay had wandered from, which river it had floated down, what made it stop and settle. The teacher was calling clay common, but Daria knew better. Every particle in her hands came from somewhere, traveled to somewhere else.

Adults need to have fun so children will want to grow up.”

the only way to keep moving was to concentrate on the priority items. But when she did, she could see it sitting there, more or less patiently, like a present or a bomb, waiting to be unwrapped.

Over the years, she had forgotten what it felt like to walk with the delicious purposelessness of going nowhere.

the way life couldn’t be insured, only paid for.

Hadley had spent her three hundred and sixty-three married

When Sean died she understood for the first time how completely human beings were dependent upon a suspension of disbelief in order simply to move forward through their days.

The bowls, red when all the rest of their plates were white, because Sean said cereal deserved a happy color.

A Freudian slip. It was astonishing how often they showed up, Hadley thought, as if Sean’s death was an uneven step people couldn’t help tripping on.

the way the edges of the women were softened by their time with the babies, their voices becoming lower and more melodious, words caressing things they loved rather than darting out at the world’s frustrations.

She simply didn’t have an interest in men anymore. It wasn’t that she didn’t like them; she just knew how easily they broke.

‘You can be broken, or broken open. That choice is yours.’”

She wondered who the architect was who had first understood that basic human need to have a place, a moment, to pause before entering, to shift from the person you were outside to the one you would become when you walked through the door.

Over the weeks, the chaos had receded, giving way to soft dirt, small mysteries like welcome notes sent from the old woman who had once tended the garden.

You can tell so much about a person by the garden they plant.”

The more time Hadley spent in her garden, the more she wondered what she would do without that feeling and the way it held her to the ground, gave her something to stand on.

artemisia

woodruff

She knew some people who railed against the marks that experience left on their bodies. To Marion, they were comforting—signs of dangers survived and past, a visual history of their family life together.

“Irreversible decisions are good for the soul, word lady.”

Every photograph had a reverse side, a painting facing the wall.

lutefisk

“What would you write about?” It surprised Marion to find herself asking that question. Normally, she would run as far as she could from stories of people’s unrealized novels, their seven-hundred-page memoirs. “Marmots,” Bessie said without a moment’s hesitation.

BESSIE SAT at the tattoo station, Marion standing next to her while Kurt prepared needles and a palette of ink, his movements precise and automatic, part surgeon, part painter.

It didn’t matter that the rest of the trip might take twenty, even thirty years to complete; the angle of the ride had changed.

you just have to believe in the future and be kind to the past.”

And suddenly, she had known. As if someone had walked into the room and spoken to her, she knew she was not alone in her body anymore and, in some ways, never would be again.

she found herself waking before dawn, in mid-conversation with the characters who resided so comfortably in her dreams, and she would slip out of bed and rush to her computer, to place them somewhere solid and tangible so she would be able to find them again when the sun came up and the world was practical and imaginations were best used to figure out how to turn yesterday’s leftovers into today’s dinner.

there were no smells in outer space; they needed gravity to exist.

Emmental

edelweiss

Beneath all the day-to-day maneuverings of a personality, the base note remained constant,

human sensitivity to olfactory stimuli; whether good or bad, after fifteen minutes most of the participants no longer were aware of a scent. Olfactory accustomization was a human survival trait, the study determined.

It always surprised her, the amount of green, the uninhabited blue, after living in a city where houses steamrolled their way over hills and mountains and deserts, leaned off cliffs and put their feet in the ocean.

“When I was little my parents and I made a pact every April not to eat blackberries until the real ones were ripe in August. Northwest Lent, my dad called it—to make sure you appreciated the real thing.”

KATE HAD INSISTED on a double mastectomy, although it hadn’t been mandatory. By that point, her breasts were alien to her, a body part that had fed a baby and now grew death.

they coasted into a current that traveled quietly downstream, a few ripples on its surface, like the hiccups of a child at the end of a tantrum.

She had been a river, Kate thought, the thing that took them close to death, made them suddenly, courageously, honest.

cadre