Sara T. Baker

Synopsis of Shadow Dance

A novel by Sara Baker

A study of grief, love and interdependence, Pastorale explores the psychic dislocations caused by early, tragic deaths. When, in the middle of winter, Bostonian Anne Williams loses her three-year-old son and young, brilliant husband, Philip, in a freak accident, her response is to seek refuge in the remote farm in western Massachusetts where the accident happened. Rejecting the commonplace advice of her family and friends to get on with her life, she abandons her career as a history professor and finds a solace of sorts in nature and solitude. Meanwhile, Luke Williams, Philip's younger brother, still in Boston, is tormented by the secret guilt and resentment he feels towards his dead brother. His tangle of feelings hinders his attempt at following the family tradition of academic prowess.

Alone on the farm as summer comes to an end, Anne becomes interested in weaving and spinning. Eventually, she expands her interests to include a small sheep farm, hoping that she will be able to become self-sufficient. In the process of running this enterprise, she hires Joel, another misfit in the small community of Milledge. Joel has run away from his dream of becoming an architect and is hiding out from himself and the world. He skeptically takes on Anne's sheep raising project, sure that she is doomed to failure, and will soon return to her former life. She finds him taciturn and overbearing; he finds her aloof and pretentious. Yet in the long cold nights of birthing sheep, of building fences and stalls, they develop a grudging respect for each other. Surprising themselves, they become lovers, happily cocooned together during the snowbound winter until Anne inadvertently becomes pregnant. Knowing that a child will force them back into the world, Joel begs her to abort. She refuses and they become estranged. When the boy, Orion is born, it feels to her like a recompense for all that she has lost.

Almost two years have passed since the accident, yet Luke is no nearer to any semblance of an adult life. He drags his feet on his studies, and has now moved into an apartment in a crumbling blue-collar neighborhood. One day, waiting for the bus, he is robbed and beaten. In order to recover without involving his disappointed and disapproving parents, he asks to stay with his sister-in-law, Anne. He comes to find not the bucolic retreat he'd imagined, but an embattled couple and the constant needs of child and animals. He meets and becomes fascinated with a girl in town, a drifter, Virginia, who loses her job as a waitress at a sandwich shop Luke frequents. Impulsively, Luke offers Anne's home to her, offering as well employment through the winter. What he doesn’t know is that Virginia appealing fragility masks an obsessive, fragmented soul. The foursome are caught in an increasingly tightening web of possession and desire on the isolated farm. Always in the background linger the ghosts of Philip and Daniel; Anne and Luke are haunted by their unfinished business with the dead. When Virginia finally breaks with reality, her actions force the others to make hard choices about how to live.

Chapter 1

In winter you can see the forms of things, Anne thought as she steered the car carefully up the long icy drive leading to the farmhouse. Although she'd come here every summer of her life, she'd never come in winter. It surprised her now to see the emptiness of the snow-covered fields. Where before the farm had been teeming with summer life--mosquitoes and tree frogs, the green-leafed business of garden and forest--now the trees cast blue shadows on crisp snow. The shadows distorted the landscape, causing flat terrain to look hilly, making depressions where none had been before. The old house, built on a rise, looked as tall and thin and parsimonious as a New England spinster. The oak that shaded it in summer stood naked, its twisted branches penciled lines against the gray dusk sky.

With a shudder of apprehension, she revved the motor for the final ascent up the hill. She had envisioned something else, something rustic, yes, but also warm and inviting. But how could that be, without someone there to turn on the lights? Ice encrusted weeds scraped the side of the car; gravel crunched under the tires. The house didn’t look any less bleak up close. In the headlights she saw that the porch sagged even more than she remembered. Paint hung off the clapboard in tatters. A shutter swung from one hinge, at a slant, giving the place the exaggerated look of a carnival haunted house. It’s just because it's empty, she told herself. After a few days it will look like itself again. Still, she was disheartened by the sight of it.

She drove to the back steps, turned off the engine. Without the constant motion, her husband and son woke up.

"Are we here?" Phil stretched out his long legs and arms, lifted his head, and shook back his longish blond hair. She loved it when he did that. She wanted to tell him he reminded her of a rock star, but she knew he’d hate that. He did not share her taste for the Grateful Dead and The Band.

"It looks awfully dark and empty,” Phil said.

Anne frowned. It was one thing for her to think it, another for him to say it. Phil felt no real bond with her grandmother’s house and thought it was crazy to open it in the winter. He had been reluctant to drive up in the snow, hadn't wanted to spend their Christmas vacation without his family. But she had insisted and now she was afraid he might have been right.

“It’ll be fine once we get some lights on, make a fire.”

He gave her a long look. “OK, if you say so.” And heaved one of his sighs, sighs which set her teeth on edge.

Daniel kicked the car seat. “Out, out, out,” he said, holding his arms up to his mother. Phil turned to the back seat, wrestled with the release button, then pulled Daniel out of the crumb filled vinyl car seat. “Yuck. Don’t you ever clean this thing?”

Anne dug in her purse for the skeleton key. “It’s not exactly high on my list.”

“Mommy,” Daniel shrieked. His father held him off his lap, tried to dust crumbs from him.

“Mommy,” he whimpered.

“He wants you.” Phil started to hand Daniel over to Anne.

“Hold him a minute. I’ve got to find the key. O K, got it. Come here, baby.” Daniel crawled over to Anne’s lap, and gave his father a triumphant smile.

“He always wants you,” Phil folded his arms across his chest and looked out the window. His face clamped down, the way it did when he was in the grip of some emotion he was ashamed of.

Chapter 17

Luke saw a faint flashlight beam bouncing through the woods. "I'm over here, Anne," he called.

Anne appeared above him, her face distorted and ghostly in the reflected light. "Are you OK?" she asked.

"I guess."

Anne sat on the rock next to him. She turned off the flashlight. He couldn't see her. All he heard was water dripping off the leaves onto the ground.

"Do you think about them?" Luke couldn't say their names.

"All the time." Anne's voice was steady, controlled.

"Then why," Luke paused and drew a long breath, "why?" He jerked his long pale head towards the house.

"Don't make this into a trial, Luke." She was quiet a moment. "I'm not apologizing for either Joel or Orry."

"OK, so you were lonely. I can understand that. But why that man? He’s so, so--crude. I mean, my god, Anne, the way he just banged into the house like that--"

Anne laughed. "I know, I know. He loves playing the rustic. He’s really--” She faltered. “He’s really decent." Her voice was uninflected. "But I have no intention of making a life with him."

"I guess no one could take Phil's place," Luke said. Luke's foot scraped the ground.

She shook her head, made an impatient sound. “You know, sometimes when you talk about Phil, it sounds as if you're talking about a god or something, Luke. Your whole family talks about him in hushed, reverent tones. Now that he's dead, it's worse."

Luke stared out at the lake. He felt his jaws clench.

She continued. "You know why we came up here, don't you? In the winter, instead of staying for a round of holiday parties? Why we fought ice and snow to come to a drafty old house?"

"No." Luke's voice was dull, his tone indifferent.

"We were trying to save our marriage. It sounds hokey, doesn't it? Like some daytime talk show that, of course, we would never watch. But I almost left Phil that fall." He heard her take a deep breath. She lifted her hand, palm up, then let it fall. Luke saw it out of the corner of his eye like the wings of a falling moth.

"You....!" He couldn't imagine it. "You seemed happy enough to me," Luke sorted through several layers of new perspectives. Each one was like a photograph taken from a slightly different angle--each one shocked him and none seemed true. "You were a happy couple, the perfect family." Luke couldn't see Anne's face clearly in the dark, not really, just the outline of a pale oval. But when she spoke her voice seemed very close to his ear, and though she was speaking softly, it seemed to fill him, to become the air he breathed, to be inescapable.

“How can I explain it to you? I know you loved Philip; I did too. I don't know how to tell you...I felt played out." She took a deep breath and exhaled forcefully. He could make out her hands across her chest, flexing and unflexing. "You know how he was. So serious, so correct, he expected the same high-mindedness from me. If I told a dumb joke or read a popular book or gave Daniel, god forbid, candy or let him watch cartoons, then he'd get all stony. He'd disappear into himself, and leave me alone with my folly. It just wore me down," Anne stood up and began pacing by the pond, cradling her elbows in her arms. "So when you say I was lonely, yes, I was lonely, but I'd been lonely for years." She kicked a stone into the water. "Shit."

“I don’t want to hear this,” Luke said.

“You have to hear this. I have to tell you this. I'm sorry, but I do.... It would have been a lot easier to drift along. If I hadn't been so miserable I would have drifted along." Anne walked away from Luke, her back to him. "I insisted we come up here. I wanted to get some perspective, to get away from the routine. So you see, in a way I feel responsible."

Luke fought a spasm of nausea. He wanted her to take back everything she had said. He wanted them all to be the way they were, everyone intact and happy, even if he had to play second fiddle to Phil. Because if they were intact he wouldn't have to fight this awful guilt, this rising bile.

She stopped pacing and looked out over the pond. "It's too hard, you know, men and women. All the formulas you grow up believing, none of them seem to help. Not the traditional fairy tales, not the liberated ones. In the end, it's like a thick wall grows up between you and you can't begin to find the right words, the gestures to let the other person in. The only things that really matter between men and women are children. Everything else is beside the point." Her voice in the night was hard, a blade Luke could almost see.

He stumbled to his feet. He stood looking at Anne and his eyes filled with angry, unwanted tears. "You've gone nuts out here. How can you say those things about Phil? He was a good husband to you."

"Was he a good brother to you, Luke?"

"Of course he was. Listen, it's wrong to talk about him like this. Here, in this place."

"He was a good brother as long as you adored him. As long as you kept your place. You can admit that much."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that as long as we reflected his glory we were fine. It's when we left his orbit that things got dicey."

"Where did you pick up language like that?" His voice rose, squeaking.

"Luke, Luke," Anne put her arms around him. He tried to contract his body underneath his clothes so that she couldn't touch him, then shook himself from her arms.

"Leave me alone, OK? I don't want to hear any more of your theories." He began to walk up the bank toward the house, slipped and cursed and got up again.

"Want the flashlight?" Anne called out after him. But he just kept walking.

AND NEW WORK

Synopsis of Horography

Horographer: 1.)One who reckons time. 2.) One who practices the art of constructing instruments for making the hours, such as clocks, watches and dials. 3.) One who writes an account of the events of a city since its inception.

Seventeen-year old Josh, uncharacteristically high, runs over a runner late one night. The victim, David Masters, is a preeminent and loved citizen of the community: an activist of civil and environmental rights, and a candidate for state representative. Josh’s parents, Hal and Helen, rush to the scene of the accident after Josh calls them on his cell phone, but when they get there his father turns on him in rage, while his mother looks on helplessly.

Until that night, Josh has never gotten into any trouble. He is a good kid, a movie buff and would-be filmmaker. His mother worries about his tendency to be a dreamer. While not popular, he has a circle loyal friends. Hal, Josh’s father, a bitter man who owns a clock repair shop, has been removing himself emotionally from Josh and his mother, Helen for years. Hal feels himself a failure, having been unable to get a mechanical engineering degree due to a learning disability. This sense of failure has distorted his relationships with his wife and son. Helen has spent years propping up Hal and fiercely protecting Josh, leaving behind her once-passionate love of painting.

The night of the accident, Helen and Hal fight, and Hal moves out to a room over the shop. Josh is released on bond and Helen, stung by her son’s sudden distance from her as well as her husband’s abandonment, finds herself in free-fall.

David’s wife, Meg, is a teacher at a school whose population is largely poor and at risk. She, like David, is idealistic and committed to social change. Unable to have her own children, she pours her love into her students. Although devastated by her husband’s accident, she witnesses Josh’s emotional abandonment the night of the accident and is marked by it. Out of her own grief and loneliness, she attempts to contact the family, hoping to ameliorate Josh’s situation. But her early efforts are spurned by Helen, who is sunk in a deep depression. Meg gets to know Hal then under an alias, when she brings a clock into his shop to be fixed. The clock she brings in turns out to be very rare and valuable; Hal becomes obsessed with the clock, a find which he feels will make up for all his past failures if he can procure it for a collector he knows. He also becomes obsessed with Meg, to whom he turns to talk about his problems with Josh. Ironically, although Meg doesn’t really like Hal. Meg finds herself in the unlikely situation of hearing Hal bare his soul about his frustrations as a father.

Meg watches as David sinks further and further into his coma. Yet underneath his immobile surface, parts of David’s consciousness are awake. He feels his wife and her distress. He remembers parts of his life, mixing them all up. As Meg relays Josh’s life to him, he is reminded of all the lost boys he has spent his life trying to save.

Josh, on parole and working at the Good Shepherd Home for children with multiple handicaps, is floating in limbo. He actually likes his work at the Home: he feels useful, but more importantly, he doesn’t feel like a freak. At school, he has alienated even his closest friends. He becomes more taciturn and withdrawn, much like his father. Libby, the girl he loved from afar, pursues him, revealing that she too feels like a freak. They are happy for a while, until her parents suddenly decide to move to New York City. Josh takes a dive. He becomes obsessed with David Masters, with whether or not he will live or die. Abandoned by his own father, Josh imagines what it would have been like to have Masters as his father.

Helen wanders Wal-Mart, sleeps at strange hours, her once meticulous house-keeping a distant memory. She goes to an art opening one night, forcing herself out her lethargy. She meets the artist and with much trepidation decides to take an art course from him. With no one to answer to, she becomes immersed in her work-- no longer cooking or even trying to keep up with Josh. She and Josh live under one roof, but live separate lives. She finds herself falling in love with her art teacher. Her life as a wife and mother seem to belong to someone else. Both Hal and Josh are taken aback by her single-mindedness.

One night, Josh, driven by despair over his loneliness and his parents’ self-involvement, impulsively gets on a bus to NYC with nothing but his cashed paycheck—no cell phone, no clothes, no plan. He envisions a new life with Libby, and sees himself as a character in his own movie. High with hope and love and an ability to forget sticky details, he feels he is starting on his real life.

However, when he gets to New York, several hard facts await him. He has been robbed on the bus, and Libby, in addition to having cut off all her hair, doesn’t want him. Not wanting to go back, but not knowing how to proceed, Josh takes the little money Libby gives him to buy a bus ticket home and wanders the streets. Now that he is in the city, he doesn't want to go home. He doesn't examine his motives, just feels a compulsion to stay as far away form his home, form the man in the coma, from himself as he can.

Hal and Helen are frantic that Josh has skipped parole. Thinking Josh may have gone to see Libby, Hal flies to NYC on the pretext of going to see some of his colleagues. Hal feels very discomfited and unequal to the task of rescuing his son. But when he finds Libby and learns that she has given Josh money for a bus ticket home, Hal takes it at face value, turning all his attention to the dealers and buyers he hopes to find to sell Meg's clock. He is caught up in a sense of power and possibility. He wanders through the streets of New York, much like his son had just a day earlier. His attention is caught by an exhibit in an art gallery that reminds him of Helen's work. He realizes with astonishment that she is actually talented. In this new environment, away from his protective cocoon, he is able to think of in new ways. Instead of focusing on his own inadequacy, his sense of betrayal, he begins to see Helen as separate from him. Eventually, he arrives at his colleague’s shop, and is drawn back into his world of clocks. Yet at what should be his hour of triumph, he is distracted. He feels as if he is about to solve a puzzle, a puzzle about himself and Helen and Josh.

Josh, exhausted and disoriented, as been picked up by a rich Wall Street trader who thinks he is a prostitute. Josh, exhausted and disoriented, accepts the proffered ride. When he realizes what the man wants, Josh threatens to bloody him if he touches him and wants to get out of the car. Ted convinces him that he just wants someone to talk to for a while. Josh, needing sleep and food, agrees to go for a drive along the shore, thinking that he’ll figure it all out after he sleeps a little.

Ted starts to take Josh to his family home on Cape Cod, but decides to turn around and head to the Jersey shore. When Josh wakes up, he finds them driving into the decaying amusement park at Asbury Park. Ted spills his life story to Josh--a story of betrayal on many levels. Asbury Park holds a lost romance for him—it was where he felt his true life began. Josh finds himself feeling wary of Ted, but also sad for him. He is moved by Ted’s story, but also frightened by it— a cautionary tale of alienation and secrecy.

In the eerie setting of the abandoned amusement park, Josh tries to distance himself from Ted's growing mania by pretending it is all a movie. But what happens there forces Josh out of his imagination and in to harsh realities. When Josh calls Hal for help once again, will Hal be able to respond?

Excerpt

It was all mixed up for Josh—the fight between Liz and Libby, the joint, the kiss, braking as the guy appeared out of nowhere, the sickening thud of the car hitting the body, the delay between the sound and what it meant, the guy lying there twitching, his shorts twisted weirdly on his legs, his head at a strange angle and then the dark sticky blood seeping underneath, the retching sound that was him, and then the lights and sirens, and then Hal. Looking up, Hal’s face was the only thing in focus, and he was flooded with relief at the sight of it. He wanted to jump into his arms and cry “Daddy!” like he used to when Hal would come in to soothe him out of a nightmare. He could almost feel Hal’s hand smoothing his hair, telling him it would be all right. But then Hal’s face distorted into something else, like some Stephen King creature, something dangerous and rageful. And that’s when Josh knew he was wrong. He was guilty. He, Josh, was evil, not even human.

Now, walking to school, his mouth cottony and dry, his legs like the sacks of sand he’d hauled last spring to make a dam for the flooding river, it came over him again. There was no way out of this. He didn’t know who he was today, but it bore no relation to the blithe idiot he was yesterday.

His father had gotten him out and explained about the trial date, about the probation officer, about who they’d get as a lawyer, about how he’d have to go into treatment for substance abuse, everything, but he never looked Josh in the eye. His voice was cool, mechanical; he almost seemed to enjoy being in charge. Josh was used to his father’s disapproval, but this was something else—something icy, something hard. His father had dropped him at the house and told him as he got out that he would be staying at the shop for awhile—if Josh needed him to just call him there. Then he pulled away from the curb and drove down the street and Josh felt a longing, a homesickness come over him as the car diminished and disappeared.

He had seen the headlines at the newspaper stand on their way home. Everyone would know. But Josh found with surprise that he really didn’t care. He tried to blame Andy in his mind, but he couldn’t. It was just the luck of the draw—Andy smoked all the time and never got caught; he hardly ever smoked and his name was splashed all over the papers. A curious detachment settled over him. What will be will be. Except. Except for Libby. Suddenly he remembered Libby and suddenly he knew he cared. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him, now. A tide of choking bitterness swept over him.

The backpack was heavy and he shifted it on his back. He was almost through the field now and the noonday sun beat down on him. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck, behind his knees. He squinted in the bright light, saw the sunlight flash off the cars parked in the school parking lot. For a minute, he thought about not going in and facing them at all, of just staying in the field, or even of escaping, somehow. He stood and smoked, relinquishing the heavy backpack for a while. He tried to think of this as a film and how he would direct the protagonist. Yes, in the film version of his life, he would decide to split, hotwire a car and head for Mexico. He would also be a foot taller, have six-pack abs, and be a babe magnet. Naw, that wasn’t really his style. In the film, he would be as he was, slight, disheveled, confused. That was more like it. Not an action film --no, a quiet film.

He reached down to pick up his backpack and suddenly he saw David Masters lying there with the blood seeping out and Josh got sick all over again. He vomited like a dog in the tall scratchy weeds. It was real, it wasn’t a movie. And the man might die. And then he would be a murderer.

He got up, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, combed his hands through his hair, then plodded slowly towards the red brick building.

Excerpt

Helen kept her cell phone on, something she usually never did. Hal had called when he arrived and that had given her some measure of assurance that at least something was happening. But she prowled around the house, nervous as a cat. She had spent most of the night cleaning, doing dishes, vacuuming, changing sheets, doing laundry, as if the order she created at home could somehow bring Josh back.

It was as if she had always known something like this would happen, as if she had been waiting for it all her life. The first time she had felt this awful helplessness, this feeling that Josh would slip beyond her ability to help him, was when he was circumcised in the hospital. She looked on at this child who had only a short time before been safely ensconced in her body. He opened his mouth and howled, his eyes looking at her in astonishment and betrayal. That was her first experience of the cold gnawing in her gut that would become her constant companion all the years of his growing up.

It would happen when he was a toddler and he’d run into the street, heedless of her cries. It would happen when he ran off in stores, and she would be frantically looking through racks of clothes, peeking under changing room doors, her face hot with humiliation and helplessness. It would happen when he’d try to do his homework, and not listen to directions, get frustrated, throw his pencil across the room, and hit himself repeatedly on his head. It would happen in the doctor’s office when she tried to help him with a math problem and he threw the book at her. It would happen when he would lose assignments, shoes, lunchboxes; when he would need to be told things thirty-two times; when he was late for school every morning.

There was the anger, then the guilt over being angry with him for his messy room, for his spaciness, for the constant interruptions when she was on the phone. He was the sweetest, most loving child. But he wore her out.

She had hoped that when he had gotten treatment he would better. And he was, for a while. But in high school she suspected that he didn’t take his medication. Her brief respite from worry ended, and with its demise began the “coddling” Hal had accused her of, a word she despised. She suspected that Hal was jealous of the attention she gave Josh. But what was she supposed to do? She had needed to keep a connection, to be there if he fell.

But he had withdrawn from both of them. It was natural and necessary, she knew, but she wished Hal had been more onboard with him. If only Hal had reached out to his son! She had seen Josh make overtures which were ignored or simply not noticed, and every time it had killed something in her. She knew Hal suffered in his own particular hell, but knowing that didn’t make her any less sad, or angry.

She fixed herself another cup of coffee and went into the sunroom, where she was working on her self-portrait. She had resisted this assignment, for while female figures and faces had appeared in her work, and her one blatantly biographical collage, she had never done a straight portrait. O had said it was absolutely imperative and would not give her an out.

She looked at the painting now, cold to it. The palette was predominately grayed, with strong black lines so that it was almost a drawing. It described a woman sagging with gravity, her abundant flesh folding over itself, the nipples rosewood and large, pointing downward, and out, one smaller than the other. The face was partly obscured by dark, wild hair falling over her shoulders. There was an odd look in the woman’s face, of surprise and attention, a naked look, more naked than the body.

She remembered the sensation of really looking at herself as she painted. At first, it was painful, and all the old mantras her mother had recited, “you’d be pretty if you’d just lose some weight:” and the ones she’d made for herself as a teenager,” you’re a fat slob;” all started up, like a cicada chorus, or tree frogs on a summer night. But then, as she had looked at her body in terms of line and volume, the chorus had faded away and something else took its place.

At first it had simply been the engagement with the problem solving aspect of the assignment, how to work with fidelity to what she saw, to render this curve accurately, to suggest the bones beneath the flesh, the musculature. But as she worked, a calm came over her. Sitting there naked, she began to feel new things about the body taking shape in front of her. O had said that anything closely observed becomes loved, that observing is love. And she began to feel a warmth, a release in her body as she painted it. She saw that this soft, large body of hers was a mother’s body, that it suggested warmth and nurture. The bounteous hair at her pudenda, something she had always been shy about, seemed lush and strong and animal. As she painted, as images came to her, she would make quick, small, sketches on the border of the painting, of leopards and jungles, of bears and cubs, of frogs on lily pads, the curves echoing the curves of her body.

Now she looked at the painting critically. It clearly had problems with proportion, the face too small for the body. One leg was too prominent, the depth perception was all wrong. The sketches around the borders were pretentious and ugly, now that she really looked at it. Who did she think she was? An artist? She was just a fat, ineffective woman, who, despite her best efforts, had finally let her son down and alienated her husband.

She picked up her largest brush and squeezed black paint on the dried colors of her palette. Then, very methodically, she painted over every last inch of the painting.