by Sonja Yoerg
She hadn’t known what to expect when they went to bed, him bringing twenty years’ experience under the covers with him. She should’ve guessed he wanted what he wanted and he got what he saw fit to take. He wasn’t particularly gentle and he wasn’t particularly mean—at least as far as she could judge. What did she know of such things? Mostly she was glad to fall asleep afterward and gladder still to see the light peeking around the drapes. She looked forward to each new day—piles of sweet, fat shrimp to eat, and the warm sand pushing up between her toes.
• • •
“Honeymoon’s over,” Eustace declared as he supervised the bellman stowing their cases in the trunk.
She missed the sea even before it disappeared from sight. He turned on the radio, hung his elbow out the window, and hummed along. She stared out at the houses in the towns they passed, wondering if any of them might contain the sort of life she was about to have. The fancy neighborhood in Raleigh intrigued her especially, and she wished they could slow down and have a closer look. But naturally she couldn’t ask Eustace that.
They drove past the cemetery coming into Aliceville. Helen and all the other town kids always held their breath the whole way past, so as not to invite bad luck, but either she forgot or she decided she was no longer a child and took in air the way she usually did. Aliceville looked the same and it didn’t. The drugstore, town hall, liquor store, and the other buildings along Main Street appeared to have shifted over a few feet. Maybe that’s what marriage does, she thought. One day you’re holding your breath lest a ghost fly up your nose and the next you’re coming home as married as your own mother.
Eustace navigated the rutted drive leading to Helen’s house and parked next to a shiny red Chevy truck with a dealer sticker in the window. Her daddy’s rattletrap was nowhere in evidence.
“Looks like your daddy got himself a present,” he said.
“That’s not Daddy’s. He wouldn’t know where to look for that sort of money.” Eustace raised his eyebrows, and she realized she’d contradicted him.
“Let’s get your things, Princess.”
They got out of the car. Helen noticed another layer of paint had peeled off the house. The weeds crowded the path and laid claim to the first step. Shame rose in Helen. She ran her hands down the crisp pleats of her skirt and reminded herself that although this ramshackle cottage might have been her home, it most assuredly wasn’t any longer. Eustace had taken care of that.
Her daddy appeared in the doorway. He must’ve expected them because he’d put on a shirt. He swiped his mouth with the back of his hand, hitched up his trousers, and grinned.
“Welcome back! Look at you, Mrs. Helen Riley. You’re brown as a nut.” He gestured toward the truck. “How do you like it?”
“You picked a beauty, you did,” Eustace said.
She said, “But, Daddy, how . . .”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Eustace wink at him. Then her mama came and shooed everyone inside, reeling off a million questions about their trip. Helen would have to be content to riffle through her feelings another day, or forget about the meaning of that truck entirely.
• • •
Eustace’s house was close to town. He let her do with it as she pleased, not that she had a firm idea of what ladies with money did with their houses, their gardens, or their husbands. She had help in every other day, which unnerved her some, as she wasn’t used to having Negroes around. Louisa was about as old as her mama, and no doubt had children Helen’s age. At first Helen busied herself in some part of the house Louisa wasn’t, but soon decided it was foolishness. She learned Louisa didn’t mind chatting as she shelled peas or scrubbed the floors. Helen asked a lot of questions about running the house, and would have asked more but for fear of appearing ignorant. One day she got up the nerve to ask Louisa what other ladies did all day. She laughed. Helen joined in and pretty soon the two of them were doubled over. They spent the rest of the afternoon making Helen’s famous butterscotch pie.
The house was large, with a wide front porch and a shaded backyard. When Helen was alone, she stayed in the kitchen. If Louisa had done all the cooking—or if it was too hot to eat—she brought her sewing in there, or a book. The yellow gingham curtains and the ticking of the stove clock calmed her. Her mama came to call if she was already in town on other business. She never stayed long. She lit from chair to chair like a butterfly visiting flowers, then proclaimed she was needed at home and blew out the door.
Eustace left early for his law office in town or, if there was a trial, the court in the county seat. More evenings than not, he attended meetings of one sort or another, leaving Helen to her books and the radio. Weekends he took off hunting or fishing, but always returned in time to take her to a party, or the country club. She took great care with her appearance for these outings, knowing Eustace expected her to outshine the other ladies to such a degree that her age would be set aside. A quick study, she discovered which hairdos and styles of dress earned her admiring and envious looks from ladies and gentlemen alike.
She had been married only a month when she woke light-headed and queasy. She put two and two together and was equal parts scared and thrilled. Straight off she knew it was a girl. Eustace didn’t realize, but they’d picked out the child’s name at Tybee, the last night they sat on the beach. The moon shone like a silver dollar tossed on a velvet spread. Eustace had his arm around her. Same as when she lay against him in their hotel bed, he was the only thing between her and the on-and-on darkness. The salt lifted off the sea, and she breathed it in.
“What cities, do you suppose, would want me for a princess?”
“Paris, for a start.”
What a beautiful word. It drifted lightly, like a promise to a child. “You been there?”
“A long time ago. With my family.”
“Did you eat snails?”
He let out a bark of a laugh. “No. My mother tried to force them on me, but I got my way. Even then.” He lay on the sand and pulled her on top of him. She felt herself blush, though not a soul could see her, not even him. There wasn’t even that much moonlight. He put his hand on her breast and squeezed until she gasped. “And now I’ve got you.”
CHAPTER FIVE
ELLA
Ella had been waiting forever for school to end. School was always boring, but today every single period seemed stuck in some bizarre time warp. In history class, Mrs. Bragarian droned on in super slo-mo. Normally Ella’d zone out or doodle her way across a few pages pretending to take notes, and the forty-seven minutes would dribble away. Not today. During biology, she snuck a couple of nonobvious looks—okay, more like stares—at Marcus Frye. But not even His Most Gorgeousness could distract her today. Which was another way of saying she was preoccupied.
When she finally got home, she stuck her head in the barn because her dad always wanted her to check in. Like some creeper in a panel van was going to haul her off between the bus stop and here. She waved hi and he waved back, but he didn’t turn off the sander, so that was that. Prince Charles was playing baseball or hanging out with the Master Stoners or up to something else—what did she care? He’d been working all the angles since he was born. As long as it didn’t involve her, more power to him. He wasn’t home; that was the point. If he was, he’d be trying to get her to do his homework, or hitting her up for money or, worse, telling her a story about his friends. Daring Deeds of Dickheads. Awe-Inspiring Adventures of Assholes. And her mom was still in L.A. visiting her lunatic mother, the drunken stunt driver. She wouldn’t be home until . . . When was it? Tonight? Tomorrow? Whatever.
The point was no one was around to bug her. She had all the peace and quiet she needed for the project she’d been thinking about since she woke up.
Last night she had this dream. She was standing in the middle of an enormous lawn that stretched all the way to the horizon. The puffy clouds overhead started link
ing up until the whole sky was a mass of cotton balls. Snow fell, but it wasn’t cold. The snowflakes were ginormous, the kind you can see the shape of when they land on your skin for the split second before they melt. The snow got thicker, and swirled around her until she was in the middle of a snow tornado. It wasn’t scary. She tingled all over with excitement.
Then the best part happened. The snowflakes turned into words. As they spun past, she read them, only it was more like knowing than reading. Potent. That was one. Gamble. Heretical. (She wasn’t sure what that meant.) Greening. The dream went on for a long time, and when she woke up she could remember every single word. At school she thought about writing them down but knew that wasn’t what she should do.
First things first. She pulled her stash of weed from the tummy of her Build-A-Bear and rolled a joint. Most kids were into alcohol, probably because it was a cinch to get and parents generally looked the other way. But booze was mundane and bourgeois. Weed was for artists and dreamers. Leaning out the window, she took a couple of hits, then spit in her palm and snuffed it out. It was good shit, and she didn’t want to overdo it. She had work to do. After she put away the weed, she kissed the bear on the nose and gave the room a couple of squirts with orange oil spray. Her mom thought she was addicted to the stuff. Well, you could put it that way.
She found straws in the kitchen and fishing line in Prince Charles’s room and went to work. Writing the words on little rectangles cut from index cards took her an hour. There turned out to be exactly one hundred, which creeped her out a little. Whatever. It’s my brain, she thought. I have to learn to deal with what it dishes out. Making the mobiles took another hour and a half. It wasn’t easy to get the length of the straws and strings right so the words balanced. She wondered if she should choose which words hung together, but scotched the idea. That was the sort of thing her mom would do. No, first her mom would organize them alphabetically or by parts of speech, then decide she needed a spreadsheet.
Ella climbed a stool and attached the mobiles to the ceiling. She was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to tack things to the ceiling, but this was necessary. Critical. Vital.
See? It was working already.
She’d been writing poetry since she could talk. Her very first one went like this: Kitten shark / kitten dark / Kitten bark, bark, bark. Made her laugh every time she thought of it. And, sadly, it was better than a lot of stuff she’d written recently. Which was exactly why she needed a revelation. She got that everyone’s work changes as they get older. She got that it was normal to cringe at poems she had written three years ago. That was her rhyming phase, for Christ’s sake! Sonnets were her next thing. She read every book about the Tudors she could find and her poetry got all Olde Tyme Englishy. Still rhyming, but more complicated with iambs and all that. She was so into it she forgot how to spell the regular way, and her grades in English tanked. After that she broke into free verse. So freaking pleased with herself you’d think she invented it. The breakthrough gave her a better window into growing up than getting her annoying period did. Her mom presented her with books like How to Survive Being a Mutant Teenager and PMS: Nature’s Battle Cry, but all she wanted to read was Wallace Stevens. She tried to copy his style but realized she was out of his league—at least for now. Instead, she wrote some drifty pieces that might have been song lyrics for people too stoned to follow a verse. They didn’t suck, considering her tender age.
But since then her poems were garbage. She couldn’t even stand what she wrote last month. Total unmitigated drivel. Derivative drivel. She’d been hoping for some sort of epiphany. The wordstorm had to be it.
Ella lay down in the midst of the paper scraps. Above her, the mobiles stirred a little, twisting and rocking. She could make out the words from here—that was important. Her mind stepped from one floating word to another—gallant, clapboard, feverish, necessity—and she smiled.
It wasn’t a swirling storm, like in her dream, but an ocean. Each white card was the crest of a wave, catching the sunlight like a diamond chip. She watched from above, suspended in the endless sky, while her words danced upon the water.
• • •
She lay there for who knows how long. In a wordstorm-and-weed-induced trance or something. Then she gradually came out of it, checked her phone for the time, and remembered she had a shitload of homework. She learned a long time ago it was easier to do the work than argue with her mom about why she wasn’t doing it. Her mom was fixated on the idea that Ella was smart, and so there could be no excuse for not getting As. In reality, there were lots of excuses. Not feeling like doing it, for example. Or not wanting to come off as a nerd with no life by handing in every assignment complete and on time. Because even if you weren’t one of the cool kids (and she was 100 percent not), you had to at least fake having something going on other than school. None of the kids knew about her poems—talk about social suicide!—but they knew she was pretty good on guitar. A guy in her grade who was on the edge of cool almost asked her to be in a band. At least that’s what someone said. That was enough to save her from Loserville. But nothing could save her from homework. Or her mom.
Most of the time it wasn’t difficult. She’d hang out on her special chair in her dad’s workshop and read or do math problems. He didn’t insist on digging into her life, which was a relief. Sometimes she’d think out loud, and they’d end up talking. She adored the smell of wood and varnish, and the sound of the hand planer rasping like a baby dragon. The big saw was too loud to think around. Diesel hated it, too, so that’s when she’d take him for a walk.
Prince Charles didn’t do homework. He outsourced it. And he cheated. He’d had some close calls, not that their parents had a clue. His shenanigans had started early. In first grade he set up convoluted trading sessions at lunch so he’d end up with exactly what he wanted to eat. Didn’t matter who had it, or how many trades it took. It was pretty funny, watching him work the other little kids, making them believe they really wanted a bag of wheat crackers more than a brownie. They’d start to cry or get mad, and he’d give them half of their brownie and tell them they wouldn’t get that kind of deal the next day.
But Charlie wasn’t little anymore. He’d get caught eventually, and it wouldn’t be so cute. Not that it was any of Ella’s business. She made a point of knowing some of what he was up to, in case it came in handy, and sometimes he got weed for her at a decent price, but other than that, who cared?
CHAPTER SIX
GENEVA
Monday evening traffic was light on the Golden Gate Bridge as Geneva headed north out of the city toward home. She lowered her window and a crisp breeze blew through. Twenty miles offshore a wall of fog sat on the water like a layer of meringue. Tonight, or tomorrow night at the latest, the fog would climb over the headlands and enter the bay. A few days later, when the land had cooled, it would shrink and gather itself again, waiting for the warm valleys to call it in. She loved the fog cycle. It was predictable, yet never the same. And the way it crouched offshore, then slunk inland, reminded her of an animal on the hunt. Fog made her think of redwoods, especially the ones along her driveway. From April to November they drank only fog, catching mist along their drooping branches. When Ella was five, Geneva led her under the largest of their redwoods. The fog lay thick as cream, and when they stood under the canopy beneath an umbrella, water fell in sheets around them. Ella looked up at her mother, wide-eyed and openmouthed, as if Geneva, and not the tree, had made it rain.
She drove past the redwoods and the house came into view. She and Tom had toured the property with a real estate agent a few months after they married. The wisteria over the porch and the apple trees in the yard lent a romantic note, but when Tom’s foot went straight through the floorboards in the kitchen she had seen enough. He frowned as he inspected the rafters, the foundation and the roof, so she assumed he had come to the same conclusion. Later she learned his frowning was mostly for show. He told her the plac
e was perfect.
“Are you sure?”
“Trust me.”
He drove the price down, closed the deal, and set to work. For a year, they devoted evenings and weekends to the restoration. To save money, they mined the barn for lumber, hardware, and fixtures. They suspended interior doors on overhead rails, turned bridles and halters into drawer pulls, and installed a stable door leading to the garden to encourage a breeze on warm days. They saved for last a small bedroom with a view of the backyard. On painting day, Geneva stood by the open window because the fumes made her queasy. Tom dipped his brush in a can of daffodil-yellow paint and drew a smiley face on the T-shirt stretched over her rounded belly.
• • •
She left her roller bag and handbag next to the car and headed for the barn. Diesel lifted his head when she opened the door but didn’t get up because Ella was using him as a footstool. Years ago, Tom had moved an old overstuffed armchair into the barn. If Ella couldn’t be found in her room, she was in the chair reading or doing homework while her father worked.
Geneva breathed in the familiar scent of sawdust and realized how glad she was to be home. She called hello and walked around the workbench where Tom was sanding an artichoke finial.
He set down his work and opened his arms. “Welcome home.”
They embraced.
Ella waved. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hi, Ella.”
Geneva kissed the top of her daughter’s head, happy she wasn’t hiding in her room. At the same time, she couldn’t deny feeling jealous that Ella usually chose to be with Tom. When she acknowledged her insecurity to Tom, he had pointed out he worked at home, and had more time. He also said Ella, a perennially quiet child, was no more talkative in the barn than elsewhere. But their conversations were not the point. Tom had a simpler relationship with Ella than she did, and with Charlie, too. When the children were small, Geneva was the undisputed center of their universe. She couldn’t remember when it had begun to change, but it had. Maybe her personality was better suited to infants and toddlers, and Tom’s to adolescents. If true, then her most intimate days with her children had passed. Her rational mind told her she ought to accept these changes, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. And being the de facto disciplinarian didn’t help.
