by Jim Nelson
“She used to record herself,” Erica explained. “Like an audio diary. She just pressed ‘Record’ and talked about whatever had happened to her that day. How much she hated church, or how much she hated our mother.” Erica made a slight laugh. “Sometimes she complained how another bridge daughter had said something mean to her. That kind of thing.”
Erica shuffled through the cassettes. She located one with a label on it. Adult handwriting, not a child’s—certainly not the penmanship of a bridge daughter raised in the 1970s and prohibited from learning to write. In perfect feminine cursive, Driscoll bridge? was written across the plastic casing.
“Your bridge mother was named Hanna too, right?” Erica asked.
Hanna nodded, drawing closer. “What is that?” She indicated the cassette.
“Erica talks about Hanna on this one.” Erica held up the cassette. “It sounds like they were friends. They shared some secrets. My bridge mother was pretty, well…” Erica cleared her throat. “Pretty jealous of how your bridge mother lived. Your parents let her sleep in a bedroom?”
“My mother raised my bridge mother to be a normal girl,” Hanna said, eyes on the tape. “It was the 1970s,” she said, as though that explained everything.
Erica crouched to the floor. A portable cassette player plugged into a wall outlet sat beside the box of Erica’s secreted items. Erica slipped in the cassette and shut the door with a satisfying click. Finger on the Play button, she looked up at Hanna.
“I guess I should ask if you want to hear this,” she said. “I know some women don’t want to know a thing about their bridge mother.”
The question caught Hanna off-guard. Of course she wanted to hear it. Even secondhand gossip about her bridge mother would be fascinating. Her parents never spoke of their bridge daughter, not even after the divorce when Hanna lived alone with her mother.
Each family has its own unstated norm about how bridge daughters are remembered, just as every culture worldwide does. In America, bridge daughters were usually set aside once they’d given birth and died, a past episode in a culture forever craving the new and the next. In South America, families often made a small shrine in the bridge room, placing votives around a photo of the bridge daughter or a finger painting she’d made. Nordic countries celebrated the bridge daughter’s birthday with a drink of schnapps and a midnight supper of preserved fish and dry bread. In Japan, a child’s birthday party opens in silence. A bell is rung twice, the first ring marking the finality, the second ring marking the birth of the celebrating child.
“Do you know your bridge mother ran away from home?” Erica said. Hanna shook her head. Erica added, “It sounds like she came close to having Blanchard’s Procedure.”
Hanna gasped.
“You never knew that?” Erica asked.
“Never,” Hanna said. “My bridge mother didn’t even write me a letter to me before her passing.”
Erica took her finger off the Play button. “That’s not unusual.”
“Did yours?”
“Yes,” Erica said carefully. “It wasn’t pretty. Only crayon drawings, of course. She couldn’t write. I don’t know what the drawings mean. They look…violent, actually.” She shook her head. “I’m surprised my mother didn’t destroy them, to tell you the truth.”
Erica ejected the cassette from the player and offered it to Hanna. “Why don’t you listen when you’re ready?” When Hanna refused out of automatic politeness, Erica pushed the cassette to her. “I wish I could tell you I didn’t listen to it, but I’ve listened to all of them. This is the only one that mentions Hanna in anything but passing.” She pressed the cassette into Hanna’s hands. “Send it back when you’ve finished listening to it. Make a copy if you want.”
Following Erica to the front of the house, Hanna wondered what Vivian Grimond might say about the first Hanna Driscoll. Hanna knew her own tight-lipped mother was holding back about her bridge mother. Vivian Grimond might have a perspective about the first Hanna. Now infirm and mute, the elderly woman was a box locked tight.
When they pushed through the swinging kitchen door, they discovered Cynthia standing and waiting for them. She stared at her mother with an obvious gaze of boredom, silently asking When do we get out of here? that was not missed by Erica.
“I’ll be sure to get this back to you,” Hanna said to Erica. She dropped the cassette in her purse and snapped it shut.
When they reached the living room, Vivian Grimond’s moist vacant eyes seemed to greet them, but of course she was disconnected from the world about her. Ruby had fallen asleep sitting on the carpet. Her head rested against the side of the chair. She used the chair’s overstuffed arm rest as a pillow. Serene and angelic in her slumber, she sucked her thumb while holding Vivian Grimond’s limp gray hand.
Three
On the drive to the Concord shopping mall, the now-refreshed Ruby asked a string of questions about growing up in Concord: What was it like to…? How often did you…? Cynthia stared out the side window during the interrogation, bored. When Ruby ran out of questions, Cynthia spoke up.
“What did Mrs. Grimond give you?” she asked.
“It’s nothing,” Hanna said. “Something from a long time ago.”
“What is it?” Ruby asked. She turned to Cynthia. “What did you see?”
“Wasn’t it a tape?” Cynthia asked Hanna.
“It’s a tape,” Hanna admitted. “It’s a recording of Erica’s bridge mother.”
Both girls started talking at once. Can we listen to it? Can we?
“Let me think about it,” Hanna said, although she did not intend to.
—
The mall was more modest than Hanna remembered from her childhood days in Concord. She recalled it as magnificent, almost majestic, spanning what seemed a mile from end to end. Apparently, she had been fooled at the tender age of six by its expansive parking lot and open-air escalators. The mall was weedy here and there, with fast-food trash swept into nooks and gutters by the wind. Bursts of spray-paint graffiti covered some of the store windows. The anchor stores were hum-drum for Hanna’s tastes, but it did offer a Gap Bridge nestled between a novelty-cookie bakery chain and a greeting card store.
Hanna told the girls to be on their best behavior while they shopped. She didn’t want to deal with women staring her down if the girls spoke without being spoken to or wandered off by themselves. Even in this day and age, some people were put off when Cynthia or Ruby demonstrated their ability to read.
Hanna discovered the Gap Bridge was a welcome respite from the earlier revelations. Time at Iris Way had frayed her nerves a touch. She found comfort in the store’s polished hardwood floors and inviting displays. Smart summer dresses hung on racks. Tops and pants were folded in concise stacks across tables of distressed wood. With Cynthia and Ruby close behind her, she selected socks, panties, and a pack of assorted-color undershirts for the girls to wear around the house. Alabaster-white mannequins stood in the windows and atop the merchandise tables. Headless pre-pons anno mannequins in active poses mimed playing tennis and soccer, while headless pregnant mannequins in fashionable maternity wear posed in more aloof, restrained stances.
All of it was designed to appeal to mothers of Hanna’s age, women who eschewed the flat, unadorned bridge dresses of their mothers’ generation. Old-fashioned bridge dresses reminded Hanna of chambermaid uniforms, easy to wash and easy to iron, intended for domestic chores and housecleaning. They were also intended to hide the final stages of pons anno, when the bridge daughter’s hips widened and breasts swelled in preparation for the baby they would not live to nurse. The dresses around the store accented a girl’s figure the way a proper dress should.
At first comforted by the store’s tactile comforts, Hanna began struggling with the same. She knew she should be repulsed by the consumerism surrounding her. She suspected most of the clothes had been manufactured by poverty-level workers in China, and a quick check of a shirt’s tag confirmed the nation of origin. For tho
se workers, a day’s wages could not purchase even the simplest brand-name bridge dress. She grappled with the initial relief she experienced when she stepped inside, the relief that comes with the first breath of fresh air-conditioned air and the sight of spotless waxed floors. She would procure what she needed and get out as quickly as possible.
As they were visiting their grandmother soon, Hanna wanted the girls to arrive in new dresses. Hanna led them to the Late Bridge section. She pressed understated dresses against their bodies and asked which they preferred. Cynthia preferred darker earth tones with clean lines, redolent of a traditional bridge dress. Ruby liked anything with frills or cartoon animal prints. With Cynthia now taller and stockier than Ruby, the luxury of the twins interchanging outfits was a dimming memory.
“I wish I could wear pants,” Cynthia said.
“Too late for that now,” Hanna said. She was swiping through a rack of dresses.
“Pants are for boys,” Ruby said.
“It’s not about girls and boys,” Hanna said, considering a tan dress. “It’s about growing up and being a bridge daughter.” She re-racked the dress and kneeled before the girls. “This is what we’ve talked about. You’re different from the other children. You have a special responsibility.” She put a hand to Cynthia’s cheek. “That means no more pants and no more running around the yard. You have to put the child in you first. Mother’s child, yes?” She placed the same warm hand on Ruby’s cheek.
At the checkout, Hanna extracted a credit card from her wallet. Hanna Brubaker was embossed across the bottom left of the card in the square computer typeface of modern financial instruments. She lingered before handing the card to the cashier. She made yet another mental note to have the name on card changed to Hanna Driscoll. Knowing banks and their bureaucracy, they would probably demand she cancel her accounts and apply for new lines of credit. She consciously knew, but did not acknowledge, that the hassle would be enough to dissuade her from actually going forward with the change in name. She would continue to pay for goods and services as Hanna Brubaker, a person she no longer recognized.
Purchases stowed in the Audi’s trunk, each girl secure in the backseat and munching on their reward for shopping—an oversized chocolate-chip cookie—Hanna steered the Audi toward the freeway on-ramp. She merged with the sparse Sunday evening traffic and headed south for Berkeley.
—
Once home, Hanna unwrapped the purchases and threw them into the washer, a cold water cycle, before hanging them to dry. The girls ironed their own clothes, and usually they washed their own clothes too, but Hanna wanted to give them time to fix dinner. They’d prepared a lasagna that morning while Hanna fired off work-related emails and visited real estate web sites. Now home, Cynthia took the lasagna from the refrigerator and slid it into the oven. Ruby began chopping vegetables for a tossed salad. Hanna asked for them to make another vegetable side too, leaving it to them to decide.
Hanna left the girls to prepare dinner. She brushed her hair while drawing a hot bath. Hanna liked to have a soak on Sunday nights, a meager weekly reward, a gift to cap off the weekend before returning to work the next morning. With steam rising from the water and tickling her chin, she closed her eyes and reclined.
She could not stop thinking of the first Hanna, though, and what awaited her on that tape. A bridge daughter running away was every mother’s worst fear. Even if the bridge was found and returned, the worry of some harm falling upon the baby inside was immeasurable. So much potential for loss and death—the anguish her mother must have experienced when the other Hanna ran off.
Then, after all that, for her mother then to learn Hanna nearly had Blanchard’s Procedure. For Hanna to put the baby in jeopardy so she could avoid her finality and survive to adulthood—how could her mother not mention this to her, even now as an adult, and with two of her own bridge daughters?
Hanna startled awake. She’d napped, but it was not an enjoyable bath. The pricey bath beads she added to the water seemed a waste now. She drained the tub, dried off, and teased the water out of the ends of her hair. Hanna returned to the front of the house in pajamas and footies. After dinner, she’d help the girls change into their night clothes. Then they’d gather around the television to stream a movie before bedtime.
Ruby prepped toasted cheese bread, a last-minute improvisation. She stood on a footstool, a standard furnishing in any house with bridge daughters, and carefully portioned equal amounts of shredded cheese on each slice. Broccoli florets steamed on the stove, the askew pot lid shivering as steam escaped. Hanna went to the adjoining room to see if Cynthia was at the dining table, but it was already set.
Hanna tried the front of the house, the entertainment room. Built to be a home office, Hanna sometimes closed the doors while watching late night television to avoid wakening the girls. The doors to the room were closed now, and Hanna cautiously opened them.
Cynthia sat at the computer, back to the door, pushing the mouse across the desk. She held her face close to the screen, studying the web pages with some intensity.
“I told you—” Hanna said.
Cynthia jumped in her seat, scared and surprised.
“I told you,” Hanna said, voice even, “no Internet without me in the room.”
Cynthia clicked the mouse button and dismissed the web browser. The screen was empty save for the icons Hanna used to launch her home finance software.
Hanna had caught Cynthia a few times on the Internet. Usually, she was reading Hollywood gossip, which surprised Hanna. She thought of the scandal sites as a feminine pursuit. She assumed Cynthia would sneer down at the breathless reports of starlets checking themselves into rehab and whispers of who’s-dating-whom. Lately, Hanna had started catching Cynthia viewing pornography. Nothing hardcore, but always women enhanced and made-up and exposing their privates, inartistic nudity Hanna deemed unacceptable in her household.
“You’re holding something back,” Cynthia said. “You didn’t tell us everything about being bridge daughters.”
Angry, Cynthia’s cheekbones were even more prominent than usual. Cynthia had bobbed her hair the month before, which Hanna reluctantly agreed to. In her charcoal dress and girly sneakers, Cynthia didn’t look like a bridge daughter, but a boy forced to play dress-up for a desperate grandmother. The only giveaway was the pronounced bulge above her waist.
“What have I held back?” Hanna said.
Hanna felt sure she’d covered all the basics about bridge daughters with both of them. Pons anno, pons amplio, the finality. She’d discussed the gemmelius—the genetic uniform within them both—as well as the hormone fluctuations they would face until their last day.
She didn’t want to argue in earshot of Ruby, so Hanna closed the door and approached Cynthia. “Do you want me to get a book for you? An adult’s book on bridge daughters?” Cynthia’s and Ruby’s reading levels were, according to their teacher, approaching the level of a nine year old, advanced for a bridge daughter. Giving Cynthia adult-level books would be a concession more than an education. “Do you want to talk to Dr. Bellingham about what’s coming?”
“Your bridge mother lived in that little cold room, didn’t she?”
Hanna sighed. Not this again. “That was a laundry room when I was a little girl. I’m telling you, your grandmother would never let her bridge daughter live like that.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“The elderly woman across the street?” Hanna said. “The Grimond woman? She raised her bridges in a room like that.”
Cynthia burned now. “I still don’t believe you.”
“We’re going to see your grandmother next weekend,” Hanna said. “You can ask her yourself. You won’t believe her either, will you? Really, that’s very unfair of you.”
“Could your bridge mother read?”
“She could read, write, handle money. Honey, your grandmother was very forward-thinking.”
“But that’s no big deal now. Lots of bridge daughters can read.�
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“It wasn’t always that way,” Hanna said. “Things have changed. You have no idea.”
Hanna waited for Cynthia to say more. She assumed this was another of Cynthia’s spells. They’d have dinner, the girls would bathe and dress for bed, and Cynthia would be laughing at the contrivances of a Pixar cartoon in no time.
As Hanna reached for the door handle, Cynthia cried out something, a noise that meant Wait. Her face, enraged, was bone and muscle and shadows.
“You never told us about bi-grafts,” Cynthia said. “Blanchard’s Procedure.”
Hanna approached her. “Where did you hear that word?”
“You never told us we don’t have to die.”
The Internet. That must be what she was reading when Hanna walked in. Sometimes Cynthia could say the shocking, sometimes she made the petty threats that every parent must face, but it always passed. Intrauterine bi-graft, though, this was different.
“You don’t even know what it is,” Hanna said.
“I can have my baby put to sleep,” Cynthia said. “As long as it stays asleep inside me, I get to live.”
“It’s not your baby,” Hanna said, trying to remain even-voiced. “He’s mine.”
“No it’s not,” she said. “I raised him.”
Hanna took a moment to compose herself. Talking to Cynthia could be like a chess game. She had to consider her moves and Cynthia’s counter-moves, and plan how to counter those counter-moves.
“Cynthia, the child inside you comes from me and your father. You’re only the bridge.”
“That’s what you say.”
“Ask Dr. Bellingham. It’s been that way since the dawn of time.”
“Of course he’ll say that,” Cynthia snapped. “He’s on your side.”
Hanna was not unprepared for this discussion. The parenting blogs she followed, they advised how to deal with bridges discovering Blanchard’s Procedure for the first time, how to talk them down with reason and logic.
