Juno's Daughters (21 page)

Jenny counted threads out for the fringe and then divided each group in two. Frankie, in her infuriating, adolescent way, had asked if she was desperate. She
was
desperate, to tell the truth, a lot of the time. Desperate for fingers on her skin, a mouth pressed against hers, a long nap in some gentle man's arms after sex. She had been happy to find that weaving often soothed those longings, in a way that some of the other things she'd dabbled in, such as poetry and pottery, never had. It was the repetition, perhaps, and the slow accumulation of fabric under her hands. Sometimes she got up in the middle of the night to sit at her loom. It wasn't working today, though, for some reason. She threaded the needle full of wool through the fringe and her mind kept slipping back to that night. To Trinculo.

Jenny started when she heard the truck on the gravel drive. She had lost track of how long she had been at her loom. She stretched her back and went to stand by the door. She braced herself for Lilly's fury. Whatever Lilly brought, Jenny told herself she would be ready for it.

The door swung open and the girls sauntered in holding large Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccinos from the Starbucks at Roche Harbor. Splotches of green and white paint covered their shorts, tank tops, and hands. Frankie had a stripe of paint in her hair.

“Hi, Mom.” Frankie ducked her head shyly, as if she were the one who had hit Jenny and she was waiting to be forgiven.

“Hi, honey.” Jenny would be taller than Frankie for a year or two longer, but that was all. She bent to kiss the top of her head. Her hair smelled like smoke, sunlight, and salt. Jenny guessed they had taken a detour to the beach.

“Hey.” Lilly acknowledged Jenny with a quick nod.

“Hey, back.”

Jenny watched as Lilly removed her iPod from her pocket and stuck the buds in her ears. She flopped into the soft chair and swung her legs over the armrest. She nodded her head to the music and slurped her drink through the straw, just as she had so many times before. She took her phone from her other pocket and began texting someone, probably Miranda, without casting another glance in Jenny's direction. Jenny had expected fury, wailing, accusations, but here was Lilly offering none of the above. All she exhibited when she looked at Jenny was a peculiar flatness. It was disconcerting, to say the least.

Jenny followed Frankie into her bedroom and found her sitting at her desk, sorting her colored pencils. She sat on the bed.

“So what did you guys do?”

“We painted the rock.” Frankie swiveled on her chair. “Lilly wanted to write something mean about you, but I convinced her not to. So instead we wrote
The Storm Is Coming
and then the date of the first San Juan show.” She grinned. “It was my idea.”

Jenny nodded. “Very clever.” She smoothed the edge of Frankie's bedspread with the palm of her hand. “What did Lilly want to write?”

Frankie scowled. “Are you sure you want me to tell you?”

“No.” Jenny smiled encouragingly at Frankie. “But tell me anyway.”

Frankie twisted her fingers together. “She wanted to write
Jennifer Marie Alexander is a
. . . mmm . . .
is a slut
.” She looked up. “I don't think you are one, Mom. Really, I don't.”

Jenny came to stand beside her. She rested her hand lightly on her daughter's hair. “I shouldn't have hit you, sweet pea. I'm so sorry.”

“It's okay, Mom. I deserved it.”

“No. You didn't.”

Jenny bent her knees to look Frankie full in the face. Her blue eyes were still luminous and fringed with heavy lashes, but they were newly shadowed underneath from lack of sleep. A smattering of early summer freckles covered her nose. As any mother did, Jenny looked at her children at least fifty times a day. She looked to see if they were doing what they were supposed to (homework, or drying the dishes, or picking their socks up off the kitchen floor) and she looked to see if their clothes had holes in them or covered their body parts adequately and she looked at them, frequently, with a kind of buzzing awe that these
creatures
, these long-legged, opinionated, beautiful creatures had sprung from her own ordinary body.

Knowing her girls so completely, and loving them so much, it was almost impossible for her to look at them clearly. It rarely happened. Perhaps it was her own fatigue, borne of worry, or perhaps it was because of the sense that their lives were on the verge of changing abruptly and in significant ways, but this afternoon the light hit Frankie just right. Jenny was suddenly, just for a moment, able to see Frankie as she appeared in the world now, at thirteen, unencumbered by shimmering images of her as a nursing infant, a toddler in rain boots, a preschooler crawling into Jenny's bed in the middle of the night. She was able to see her daughter through the eyes of a stranger, a person who did not love Frankie, and she shivered. She was beautiful, yes, but no goddess. She was a mortal, trusting child.

“You
never
deserve to be hit,” said Jenny emphatically. “Not by me. Not by anybody.”

“Okay.” Frankie looked down at her lap. “I don't want to talk about it anymore, if that's all right.”

“Okay.” She nodded toward the empty Frappuccino cup. “Are you still going to want some dinner?”

Frankie nodded. “I'm starving.”

Jenny pantomimed the same question to Lilly.

“What are you trying to say?” Lilly removed one of the ear buds and raised her eyebrows.

“Are you going to be hungry for some spaghetti?”

“Don't worry about me. I'm fine.” She fit the tiny white knob back into her ear and rolled the volume up.

Jenny could hear voices rising like spirits through the forest of Lilly's hair. “Do you want a million dollars?” she asked then, “and a Jaguar convertible? How about a plane ticket to France?”

Lilly shrugged her shoulders but did not remove the earphones. “Whatever. I said I'm good.”

Jenny continued to look at her intently and, though Lilly was quite aware of her mother's gaze, she did not raise her eyes. In her right earlobe she had the two silver earrings, one above the other, that Jenny had given her for her fifteenth birthday. In her left, just an onyx stud. The line of her jaw, sparsely dusted with translucent peach fuzz, had grown sharper than it had been just a year ago, though the ladybug-size mole by her mouth was the same. It was like she was seeing a mirage, thought Jenny, or one of those optical illusions where the old woman turns into a young girl and then an old woman and back again. If she squinted, she could see her daughter grown, without the dreadlocks, sitting at a kitchen table somewhere paying bills.

Jenny bent at the knees until her face was right at the level of Lilly's. Even then, her daughter pretended not to notice her. She was pretty good at it, too. A born actress. Jenny reached out and plucked an earphone from the delicate shell of her daughter's ear.

“What do you want to study, anyway?” she asked. “In college.”

Lilly stared. Jenny could almost hear the spell Lilly was wishing she knew how to incant. The one teenage girls through the ages had wished for. The one that made your mother disappear. “Entomology,” she said finally, as if she suspected that the quickest way to get her mother to vanish was simply to answer the question.

“Bugs?” Jenny was amazed.

“Well, for organic gardening, you know. Integrated pest management.” Lilly dangled the earphones in the air between their faces like a hypnotist's watch. “Do you mind?”

Jenny laid her hand on Lilly's leg. “Remember ‘Immigrant Song'?”

When Lilly was about the age Frankie was now, before she had discovered Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, she had been introduced to Led Zeppelin by an older boy. Jenny had been surprised to find that such boys, with their black Stairway to Heaven T-shirts, Viking haircuts, and carpeted Econoline vans still existed in the year 2005 in the Puget Sound. Lilly had been surprised that her mother had heard of Led Zeppelin.

With Lilly looking at her as if she had lost her mind, Jenny sang, “We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.”

At first it seemed like Lilly might not remember singing “Immigrant Song” with her mother all those years ago, their voices shaking the house.

“ ‘We sail our ships to new lands'?” Lilly added, unable in the end to resist the lure of the critic. “I mean,
puhleeze
.” She shook her head and fit the earphones neatly into her ears.

Jenny left her and went into the kitchen. She pulled a big silver pot out from the bottom cupboard and filled it with water. Stupid as the lyrics may be, she thought, Lilly had not, in fact, forgotten them. She thought of the time before Frankie was born, when that lanky, pierced, seemingly indifferent stranger was still her only, miraculous child, and set the pot on the stove. She reached for the last box of dried spaghetti and, not realizing it was open, scattered it all over the kitchen floor.

On her hands and knees gathering up dried noodles, it struck her that among the many things that new parenthood and first love shared was the feeling that what you were experiencing was entirely unique. The second time you fell in love you could no longer maintain the illusion that what you felt with your beloved bore no relationship to what the garbage man, or your school principal, felt with his. And after the second baby, you could no longer convince yourself that you could not possibly love a child as much as you did the first. You even started to suspect that perhaps your parents had been as giddy and ecstatic about you when you were a baby. For a lot of people, Jenny included, that could be unnerving.

By the time Lilly was born, Jenny rarely talked to her mother. She tried to imagine her mother lying in bed for hours looking at each part of baby Jenny's body, or kissing the soul of her foot or watching her sleep. If she had done those things, then what could have happened in the time between then and now, when she heard her mother's voice on the answering machine and walked into the other room without picking up the phone? Whatever
had
happened, could she keep it from happening to her and Lilly?

She glanced from the kitchen to Lilly, who was nodding her head, eyes closed, her feet swaying off the ground. She would soon be gone. She brushed the pasta lightly to get the dust off and dumped it in the pot. She looked again at her daughter, comfortably lost in her music and so far away in the world of her own heart, and felt a premonitory ping of loss.

J
enny and Mary Ann reopened the store after the three-day run of the show in Lopez Vineyard. It was midseason now and the island was swarming with tourists. The serviceberry bush behind Jenny's house was heavy with fruit, and every morning she and the girls woke to a cacophony of birds: robins, thrushes, flickers, towhees, waxwings, finches, chickadees, siskins, juncos, quails, crows, and others feasting and calling to their companions. In the three-day break before the first San Juan performance, Mary Ann had said she thought it might be a good idea for them to sell some stuff for a change, considering the fact that they both had to eat and for them, unlike the birds, serviceberries would not suffice.

Jenny answered the call of the front doorbell and spent a few minutes discussing the merits of a set of 1930s china with a woman from Portland who promised to come back later with her husband. She returned to the back of the store to find Mary Ann taking a rest from the inventory. She was perched on the chair with her feet on Jenny's stool reading the
San Juan Islander
.

“Peg's going to love this,” she said. “The part about the
stark beauty of design and direction
. Good thing they didn't see her yelling at Chad and Miranda for messing up their makeup backstage.”

“I'm glad they finally got together, though. The tension was killing me.”

“It was killing all of us.” Mary Ann lowered her feet to the ground. “Sit.”

Jenny obeyed.

Mary Ann shook the wrinkles out of the paper and smoothed it against her lap. “I love this, too. Listen, as
Ariel adopts balletic poses
. How true is that? And,” she raised her eyebrows at Jenny. “The
double-jointed Jester, Trinculo
. Is that accurate, would you say? Is he
double-jointed
?”

Jenny laughed. “None of your business.”

Mary Ann looked her in the eyes. “May I ask about his intentions?”

Jenny grew serious. “Geez, I don't know. Go back to New York, I guess.” She tried not to smile but couldn't stop. “Though he did mention something about auditioning for next year's show.”

“Hmm,” said Mary Ann. “That sounds like your kind of arrangement.”

“What?” said Jenny. “A boyfriend who's never around?”

“You said it, I didn't.”

Jenny chewed her lip. “You're right. I did.” She pointed at the paper. “Have you gotten to the part yet about the sweet-voiced spirits who are both earthy and ethereal?” She waved her hands in the air around her head. Being ethereal.

“Changing the subject, I see.” Mary Ann dropped her reading glasses lower down on her nose and scanned the review again. “How is the other spirit doing, anyway?”

“Fine, I guess. Giving both me and Trinculo the cold shoulder. Basking in the adoration of the crowds.”

Jenny suspected that she would have to force Lilly into some kind of heart-to-heart before she left for California. She wasn't crazy enough to think that Lilly's studied nonchalance didn't mask a whole mess of hurt, and besides, she had not yet had the opportunity to ask about her visit to Monroe. She comforted herself that they would have plenty of time to talk in the week before Lilly was to leave the island after the actors had gone.