Everyone outside of the town made fun of it. The town was too gluten-free, they said, too sheltered. A diorama-shrine of itself, self-congratulatory. Made with organic corn husks and biodegradable materials. “Even when there’s an election going on,” they said, “and the wars… these people are off in their own little world.”
But she liked the town. It had farm-stands, and a co-op. On Sundays, she went to the farmers’ market. Sunday was the solar plexus of the week. Sundays were vulnerable days, there was a quality of wanting, the wanting of shine, pea shoots and beeswax candles.
She lived in a converted church where she grew pansies in containers outside. Their petals were perforated with bites from small animals. In her garden, watering the pansies in the evening, the warm air was yellow with honeysuckle. But she wanted to retreat to a green underneath; a secret green.
An architect had converted the church, in 1970, into apartments. He was eighty-six; he was her landlord. He had written a play called The Co-Op. “I don’t know why I wrote it. I used to go to the co-op every Sunday, and there were these men…,” he said. “I wrote it in 1914,” he added. “Really?” she asked. “No,” he said, after a long pause. “I wasn’t alive then.”
In the church, in the town, sleep was the most delicious thing. She slid into it. She slid into it from the rough plane of whatever complex maneuver was required of her by day. She had thirty students to whom she taught rhetoric. This semester she assigned them an essay about chronic migraine, that other, that perpetual, rough plane. She deplaned there, often, against her will.
Her students, too, many of them, were sick. They referred to the author by her first name. Joan writes, they wrote. Joan says, they said. She had more chronically ill visionaries up her sleeve— whom she did not share with her students, wanting not to trauma-bond, but would if they had asked. Hildegard of Bingen, Helen Frankenthaler, Lewis Caroll, she kept many of them there, in her sleeve.
Because she was sick, she ferried notions back and forth between professionals. She liaised between nurse practitioners and acupuncturists. The Montagues and Capulets of her body. The specifics of her illness perplexed the traditional doctors, but they persisted, throwing prescriptions at it, furrowed brow. With acupuncturists and other women of the long-sweater persuasion, it was different. In the way that they looked at her and breathed performatively, prompting her to do the same, she assumed that they assumed that her solution would be found through trust in others. Yeah, they said, closing their eyes, nodding, comforting, surrogate-mommy-like, when they could hear her exhales bottoming out like deep ocean.
The semester was coming to an end, that strange hinge in the year. That quietness, that tentative rest after the last avalanche of obligation, that stepping out onto the precipice of summer.
But she feared the precipice. She felt sometimes that it was more pleasurable to push against the last of a series of difficult hedges, like an Olympic hurdle-jumper — but just running through the hurdles, blows to the shin, pushing them aside — than to taste the relief that comes just after. Like the idea of relief weighed more heavily than relief itself. Just like the edge of falling asleep felt just as restorative as sleep itself, maybe more so.
Often at that hinge, that falling edge, she remembered that there was a teardrop behind her bellybutton. It was translucent red, a glimmering pomegranate seed. She wouldn’t float away; she had a rudder, there. Sometimes she forgot. But then, she always remembered.