E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Beams The Garden
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-236-1
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A haunting feminist historical novel for fans of Shirley Jackson
E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80546-236-1
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
CLARE BEAMS is the author of the novel The Illness Lesson, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize,and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016. She was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
1
The house held still, and behind it the garden rested, brown turning green.
*
Doctor and doctor, Mr. and Mrs., came out onto the steps to watch the approach. They did this when they could. Welcome made a difference.
Without turning to him she said, “Remember not to talk too much.”
As if he ever did or could or wanted to when she was there.
*
George and Irene drove toward the house that held their future and saw the doctor and doctor standing at the top of the main stair, right in the maw of the gaping door. That was the way things looked to Irene: the steps the tongue, the portico the brow, the facade the wide marble face.
George slowed the car, just enough, Irene feared, to be noticed. “Jesus,” he said. “What is this place? Why are they watching us like that?”
“Speed up. They’ll think we’re afraid of them.”
“Reny, we are.”
Fear wasn’t the feeling Irene had been aware of before this moment. But as the car neared and Irene kept an eye on the doctors, waiting for them to move, she understood that all along she’d been imagining a hospital, like the one where they’d met these doctors the first time. Instead it seemed she had to face the mammoth, patient creature of this house, which was stationary, yes, but stationary like a living thing holding still on purpose only until it could take her inside. Look, even its arms were extended— two long wings, angled in, ready to close.
And she had to face these complementary doctors too, fixed as the statues that flank entries. If it were Irene standing there with the woman doctor, the match would be nearer. “You look alike, a little, did you notice?” George had said to her after their first appointment. Irene had noticed only that feeling of hard-to-place familiarity that makes a person ask,
The doctors’ eyes weighed, and Irene wondered how clearly they could see her and George through the windshield and if the doctors could read lips. “You’re really going to leave me here?” she said to George, trying not to move her mouth much.
She meant it to sound playful, but to be here they had both peddled themselves. George’s forehead gathered.
“No, it’s all right,” Irene said.
They were close enough now to see smiles rising to the doctors’ faces.
George stopped the car and came around to Irene’s door with the rollicking gait she loved. She put her hand in his so he could help her out. Every time he stewarded her lately, he seemed to be rubbing her face in his stupid hope, when she had enough of her own. She climbed forth. She touched the slippery rose-colored fabric of her new maternity suit. This was the color she’d wanted right away from the catalog’s many choices, warm and bloomy.
“Good morning!” the woman doctor called, and descended the stairs to press George and Irene’s joined hands.
George broke his grip then to reach up the stairs and greet the man doctor, still a few steps up, as if sealing some bargain.
“How was the drive?” asked the woman doctor.
“I tried to take the corners slow. For her stomach,” said George.
“What a good ” the woman doctor said.
Irene peered into her face. Not a perfect mirror, no: something similar about their chins and the hard set of their mouths, the lift of their eyebrows, but this woman’s eyes were blue where Irene’s were wheat-colored, and Irene’s hair was darker. And, of course, the doctor was older too. How old? Older than Irene’s own age, twenty-eight, but much younger, she thought, than her mother. In that middle territory, what happened to a childless woman? Irene had begun finding out for herself. Kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms full of screaming quiet. Sun on carpets, rain on doorsteps. Quiet so loud she could hear nothing else. But she wondered if for this woman doctor it might be different.
“Very promising,” said the man doctor. He had charm, but there wasn’t much to wonder about him.
The doctors led the Willards up. Stairs brought out the sluggish drag of the weight at Irene’s center, and even here she didn’t like this awareness, which had never led anywhere good before. Her body had over and over proven itself a liar. She’d started to suspect this might just be a new uncovering of a trait it had always had.
As they fed themselves in, one by one, Irene had time to notice that up close the marble of the house was in fact veined like skin.
Twin mahogany desks stood within the doctors’ study, a line in two segments whose edges did not quite meet. The doctors bulwarked behind and left George and Irene to chairs in front, as if they were disobedient students. Only Irene had been such a student. She and George had been in school together, and though she knew he loved her already, he’d never understood why she had to say just one word too much, why she had to twist her mouth, raise her eyebrow, poison the milk of someone else’s dumb joy. she’d said to him, back when she could say to him anything she wanted. She’d faced many people across many desks and each time thought,
Except the doctors could—she’d begged them to. The only other time they’d all met, when Irene had been a robed patient on their examination table, he and she had lifted her arms at the same moment to take her pulse, neither of them noticing the duplication because each was talking to George. Her body at that moment occupied the physical space of the doctors’ marriage. As an omen, how could that be bad? She’d felt suddenly able to meet George’s eyes with ease: here she was, winning fallow ground, so ready, once they chose her and set about solving whatever her trouble was, to produce every baby he’d come back from overseas wanting. These doctors had solved this trouble with other women. They were the only ones solving it. All she had to do was make them choose her.
Then they’d tipped her back on the table and put a cold, slick metal instrument inside her and peered with a light at some sore region deep within, and she’d felt the ache like a name that she’d been trying to remember.
In spite of herself, though, Irene was starting to feel less sure now. No person she’d faced across a desk had ever in the end succeeded in shaping her in any corrective fashion. George reached across the space between their chairs to take her hand again, and she let him—poor, sweet, wondrous George, who had also failed in so many ways.
“Are there any questions Dr. Bishop and I can answer before your examination?” the man doctor asked softly, considerately, as if they were fragile, or maybe his voice was just soft. Irene watched George noticing. George still had ideas about men left over from football. She hoped the man doctor’s handshake had been firm.
“Aren’t you married?” Irene said. “Aren’t you both Dr. Hall, then?”
The woman doctor spoke. “Technically, but it got confusing for everyone. So here, I use my maiden name. We find it’s easier for the patients.”
Irene wondered if this woman had wanted the feeling of having created herself out of the soil of her own life only, of having let nothing stick to her since.
“How many other patients do you have here?” George asked.
“Eighteen, at the moment,” said Dr. Hall.
“They’re all . . . ?” Irene said.
“They all have much your history.”
Irene didn’t like the word’s turning of her into a set of occurrences. She hadn’t considered the other patients much. “They’re all just like me? All at the same point?”
Dr. Bishop gave a bright laugh. “That would be a real miracle of timing, wouldn’t it? No, they’re at various stages now, but everyone joins us right around where you are now, Mrs. Willard, just about fourteen weeks.”
“Is there something special about that time?”
“All the times are special.”
Irene smiled. She’d only ever made it this far.
“But it’s the optimal time for beginning our treatment, yes. A time when the healthy fetus is growing rapidly and we can intervene to the best effect. You’re entering the stage when you’ll even begin to feel movements. You haven’t felt any movements yet, have you, Mrs. Willard?”
Irene sat up straighter. Instantly she seemed to grow a new sense there at her middle, waiting for—what? “Should I have?”
“No, no, not necessarily. It would be quite early.”
So again, already, there was a bar Irene was failing to clear, and now they would ask and check until her failure was unmissable. Irene wasn’t sure she could bear this after all, being here, herding herself with these like-circumstanced women, making those circumstances the only part of her that counted for anything. Giving up her whole life to steep here in failures, comparisons, and other women’s sounds and smells.
Panic rose and she stood—the panic climbing her throat, the weight, that central weight, pulling, stretching her between. “George—” she said.
Right away he stood too. He would...
