Chapter One
Doreen Woods drives through the still neighborhood. It
is 7 A.M. and the August sky over Denver is already
baked to a high, hard shell. There is no breeze. It
hasn’t rained for two months and none is expected. But
at this hour, even though it’s already hot, there’s a
freshness that can’t be denied. She punches the AC
button on the dashboard but keeps her window open.
Extravagant, she thinks, like Richard Nixon, thirty-five
years ago, running the White House air-conditioning at
maximum so that he could enjoy his fireplace in the
summer.
Thirty-five years ago she was eighteen, the same age as
her son is now. She would have rather died than compare
herself to Nixon. Thirty-five years ago, she and her
generation, in their well-fed arrogance, agreed that
Nixon was bad, Vietnam was wrong, and it was time for
revolution. For the three and a half decades since then
she’s chastised herself for that arrogance, but now, in
2005, the architects of the Iraq War make the Nixon
administration look like amateurs. And echoes of the old
calls for change can be heard. It will be interesting to
see what this generation, her son’s generation, will do
with a bad war.
Cold air blasts out of the vents as she drives with her
elbow jutting out the open window. At fifty-three years
old, nothing is as black-and-white as it used to be.
She’s a wife, a mother, and a dentist. She’s
middle-class, middle-aged, and what they called back
then bourgeois. She smiles at the word. Nobody uses it
anymore, but that’s what she has become.
The elms that shade the streets stand thirsty and
exhausted. Because of the drought, Denver has become a
city that conserves water. Their lawn, hers and Miles’s,
optimistically planted in May, was dutifully sacrificed
in June when water restrictions forced them to choose
between the new sod in front and the cherry trees in
back. There was no debate. Miles is the gardener, it was
his decision and he chose the fruit trees over a
water-guzzling lawn. He’d planted the ten saplings when
they first moved to Denver from Boston. They were the
only things, at first, that gave him pleasure here. He
watered, mulched, staked, and pruned the little trees.
Now, six years later, they form a small orchard that, if
there had been moisture, would be bearing its first
fruit.
Most of the yards she passes are brown and parched, but
three houses flaunt deep green lawns and lush gardens.
All three are mammoth and ostentatious. Miles despises
the owners. “They have this infuriating sense of
entitlement,” he says. “How could anyone expect them to
sacrifice their landscaping?” Driving by now, Doreen
gazes at the green, drinking it in. She understands why
it irks Miles, but at the same time she can’t help her
surge of unwarranted joy in those three lawns,
flamboyantly breaking the rules.
The truth is that in spite of drought and war, the
mistakes of the past and the tenuousness of the future,
this particular morning makes her absurdly happy. In
spite of the vaguely disturbing realization that she has
something in common with Richard Nixon, she’s happy with
the enamel blue sky and the fine linen of her skirt. And
under the skirt her legs are still strong, though her
belly and butt have gone soft. Right now, though, she
doesn’t care because the warm air from outside mixes
with the manufactured cool and plays with her hair. The
sun is still soft enough to feel welcome and nurturing.
On such a morning she feels incredibly lucky. She has
everything she needs; more than she ever thought she
would get: a strong marriage, a son successfully grown
and going off to college in the fall, a satisfying
practice, and a beloved brother. Her elation subsides at
the thought of Adam.
Adam’s sudden decline over the last six months has been
without mercy. He was functioning well with his MS,
still building his sculptural stone walls. Then, one
freezing day in February, when he’d been down with a
cold and Doreen arrived with minestrone, she found him
unable to see or walk. When the episode ended, he didn’t
regain as much as they’d hoped. Since then the cognitive
symptoms have emerged: confusion, memory loss, and even
some hallucinations.
Adam lives in a carriage house behind one of the old
Denver mansions. She stops in every day now on her way
to work. She uses her key to open the door, not wanting
him to get up. In the small kitchen the dishes are clean
and stacked in the drying rack next to the sink. The
floor is swept, the stove is spotless, all evidence that
Miranda’s been here.
In Mexico, Miranda was a surgical nurse. Here, she’s an
illegal immigrant living with her son and
daughter-in-law. She works for cash, prefers to do a
split shift, coming to Adam’s in the morning to get him
up and give him breakfast, going home for the afternoon
to watch her grandkids, and coming back again in the
evening to give him supper, meds, and bed. Miranda makes
Adam’s illness bearable for all of them.
Walking through Adam’s tiny vault of a living room with
its high ceilings papered in William Morris is like
taking a plunge into a tangled underworld. Doreen
crosses over the threadbare Oriental, past the peacock
green settee Adam bought in Boston. The door to the
bedroom is open and she peeks in. His bed is not so
large, it’s only a queen (“Only a queen?” Adam has been
known to say), but it fills the small room. The head and
footboards are massively ornate with a canopy frame Adam
has draped with sheer white and pale blue silk.
He’s sitting up in bed, propped on pillows. His bare
chest is thin, his muscles ropy, so that he has the look
of a ruined ballet dancer. He’s holding a short string
of black beads in his right hand. In his left is a small
dog-eared book the size of a box of matches, strung onto
a leather cord. He doesn’t turn to Doreen, but keeps
staring ahead at some point in the mid-distance.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from She Was
by Janis Hallowell
Copyright © 2008 by Janis Hallowell .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
William Morrow
Copyright © 2008
Janis Hallowell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-124325-7
