by Jim Nelson
The ride was a quiet one until Hanna chanced to break the silence. “Why doesn’t mom like Mrs. Vannberg?” He had mentioned this before, on their last drive to Cheryl’s bridge party. “Because she’s spoiling Cheryl?”
Hanna’s father, off-guard, needed a moment. “No. Well, yes, she is spoiling her. Keep that to yourself,” he added with his mock sotto voce. “That’s not the reason. What your mother objects to is…” He scratched around his neck, from his nape to under his chin. “Since the old days, bridge daughters were taught to tend to the home, to cook and sew, and always stay close to their mother. It comes straight out of the Bible.”
Hanna never heard her parents talk about God or the Bible, and it surprised her to hear her father discuss it so easily. They were not religious people. Hanna’s late maternal grandmother, Ma Cynthia, never prayed or went to church either. Sundays were for working in the garden, which Ma Cynthia relished. Sundays she wore her big, floppy-brimmed hat and loose blue jeans with the pant legs rolled up to her shins. On hands and knees she worked the soil, weeding and transferring green plants and flowers in and out of her garden.
Now, Hanna’s father’s mother, Grandma Driscoll, she prayed and read the Bible and went to church each Sunday. So, her father would have been raised to read the Bible, whereas Hanna had heard enough sharp comments from Ma Cynthia to know she had little respect for the book.
“The story of Abraham,” her father continued. “Abraham and Sarah had a bridge daughter named Hagar.”
That caught Hanna’s attention—it was the name Erica had whispered in her ear. “What did she do?” Hanna asked cautiously.
“Well,” her father said, “Hagar ran away one night. When everyone was asleep, she took a bag of food and fled.” He searched the air before him, his eyes momentarily off the road. “‘Two jars of honey, three figs of Haran, and four loaves of bread.’ I always remember that part from Sunday school,” he told Hanna with a flash of a smile.
“Where’d she run away to?”
“Into the desert,” he said.
“Why?”
“Well, I think she thought it was her baby, and not Abraham’s and Sarah’s.”
“So what happened to her?”
Hanna’s father shook his head. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I just wanted to explain why bridge daughters are raised the way they are. Some things change more slowly than others.”
“Hagar died, didn’t she?”
He reluctantly said, “The Bible says Hagar was punished for sinning.”
“For running away?”
“Hagar gave birth to Abraham’s son in the desert. God cursed Hagar with her finality.” He added, “But God punished normal women too, because of Eve. He punished lots of people. It wasn’t just bridge daughters,” as though that equaled things up.
The drive continued on, quiet again. Hanna stared down into the vase, watching the stalks jostle and water slosh about with each turn of the car. The fragrance of the bouquet was rich and lovely. She put her nose into the flowers, the petals tickling her face, so she could fill herself with their admixture of scents. Flowers sing, she thought, they sing aroma.
*
Mr. Vannberg greeted them at the front door. He wore wool trousers and a brown banker’s vest and a white pressed shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a glass of whiskey and ice in one hand. “Come in, come in,” he said, waving them inside with the glass. “Did Liz call you?”
“I wanted to bring Cheryl some fresh flowers,” Hanna told Mr. Vannberg. “To replace the old ones.”
“That’s considerate of you,” Mr. Vannberg said. “Go on back, Liz and Cheryl are in the bedroom.”
Seeing Cheryl again excited Hanna now. Learning about Hagar gave her a tingling sensation akin to the camaraderie of soldiers or poets—she was part of an ancient path, a sisterhood shared by Cheryl and Erica and countless more bridge daughters in history, all the way back to Hagar. Her father trailing, she stepped quickly down the hall eager to surprise Cheryl with the arrangement.
Hanna entered Cheryl’s room bearing a bright, enthusiastic smile over the trumpeting bluebells tall in the vase. Mrs. Vannberg sat in the maternity chair with her feet on the stool, rocking. An infant lay in her arms, its miniscule hands and toes curled and clenching at the air. Its head lolled with each rock of the chair. Its skin looked like fresh pink rubber.
“Hello!” Mrs. Vannberg said, obviously surprised at Hanna’s presence. “How did you hear?”
“Where’s Cheryl?” Hanna said, her bubbling enthusiasm reducing in an instance.
“Right here,” Mrs. Vannberg said, nodding to the infant. “Isn’t she the most beautiful little slice of heaven?”
Hanna, fallen, felt her father’s assuring hand on her shoulder.
“Congratulations, Liz,” he said. “We’re all very happy for you and your family.”
“That’s Cheryl?” Hanna said.
“Of course. Thank you for those,” she said, meaning the flowers. “Just put them over there.”
Hanna took the vase to the night stand. The pungent smell of sour milk filled the room, accompanied by the rhythmic squeak of Mrs. Vannberg rocking the chair. A few of Hanna’s origami cranes were arranged in a circle on the night stand as though holding a meeting. The other cranes lined the shelf over the bed. Mr. Fluffens sat tall on the pillows. His polka-dot jacket, straw hat, and saber-toothed smile seemed inappropriate at the moment.
“Carter’s going to move the bed out of here later today,” Mrs. Vannberg explained to Hanna’s father.
“You already have a crib, then.”
“Oh, of course. We meant to set it up last weekend but the time got away from us. Before we knew it, the day arrived and we had to get Cheryl to the hospital.”
“When did it happen?” Hanna asked, the sobering details crashing down on her.
“Last night,” Mrs. Vannberg said. “We brought the baby home, maybe, two hours ago.”
“I thought it took a day to have a baby,” Hanna said, recalling what she’d learned from Mother & Baby.
“Oh, no, honey,” Mrs. Vannberg said. “For a bridge birth, an hour, never more. Now, look at you.” Mrs. Vannberg waved Hanna closer. She placed her hand on Hanna’s belly, fingers splayed to maximize the amount of Hanna’s distension she could grip.
Hanna retreated a step at the touch. Dr. Mayhew could touch her like that, but no one else.
Mrs. Vannberg said to Hanna’s father, “Is she in ponte primus?”
“About a week past primus,” Hanna’s father said.
“Such a beautiful bridge daughter,” Mrs. Vannberg said. “So you don’t know if you’re painting the room or not, then?”
“Not yet,” Hanna’s father said.
“Make sure she drinks a glass of whole milk every day,” Mrs. Vannberg said. “Puts some weight on her. Good for the bones too.”
Hanna went to her father, her long grim expression signaling she wanted to go home. Her father made the perfunctory goodbye and led Hanna to the bedroom door.
“Tell Dian I said hello,” Mrs. Vannberg said to their backs. “I’ll be sending announcements soon. We’ll be having a little party in a few weeks, dinner and some wine. Carter’s going to make his Manhattans.”
Hanna stopped at the jamb. She swiveled out of her father’s guiding hands to face Mrs. Vannberg.
“Do you miss Cheryl?” she said in an almost demanding tone. “The old Cheryl?”
“Oh, honey,” Mrs. Vannberg said in a mock pitying voice. “My bridge daughter was my best friend. I miss her. But now I get to watch another Cheryl grow up, all over again. It’s like having two best friends. It’s a blessing.”
Her father’s sure hands turned Hanna around and guided her down the hall. They didn’t have to paint the room, she thought, now understanding this adult encoded language. Cheryl’s pink wallpaper and cream trim and plush dolls could remain for the next Cheryl, the real Cheryl. Cheryl was dead and Mrs. Vannberg could use the remodeling money to
make the celebration even more lavish.
Seated in the car, engine idling, it came out in a blurt: “Will you miss me?”
Again Hanna’s father scraped his fingers around his neck, from nape to under his chin. “Hanna,” he said, “your mother and I—you’re carrying our child.” He gently lay his cupped hand on the back of her head. “We’re trusting you with our baby. That’s so very important.” He added, “Can you see how we see things?”
Hagar’s curse, Erica’s confinement, and the blessing of the two Cheryls, twins born fourteen years apart. This was the tradition Hanna had been born into.
Ten
When Hanna stepped down from the bus to the sidewalk, the sky-high hotels and six-story apartment houses were blocking out the setting sun, making it seem much later than five o’clock. Without so much as a goodbye, the bus driver slammed the folding doors shut and the bus heaved forward into traffic, joining the rush hour throng of cars, motorcycles, taxis, and airport shuttles.
She’d tracked her money with care since leaving Oakland. The five-dollar bill had dissolved quickly, broken into three singles and loose change by the train ride under the bay, then one of those singles broken up into more loose change when she purchased a prepackaged sandwich from a news vendor in the underground Montgomery Station. She ate one triangle of the sandwich on a street-level marble bench, the chill of the stone seat numbing her butt. The remainder of the loose change paid bus fare up Geary Street. When she realized she’d gone too far, she jumped up and asked the driver to let her off, which earned stiff remarks from him about learning to use the pull cord and kids these days thinking they didn’t have to wait for stops. In her haste to alight the bus, she left the other half of the sandwich on her seat.
All she knew was, this was San Francisco. Grimy, rude, cold, busy. Panhandlers on the corners asking for spare change, bus drivers griping, people of all stripes walking home from work to cramped apartments looking down on the congested streets below. She loved it. But she would love it more if she had a few extra dollars in her pocket.
No purse, no backpack, nothing but a light jacket over her sweater and the Geary Street wind twirling her hair in arcs, Hanna studied each entrance’s wrought-iron gate as she walked past it. After travelling two blocks, she fretted she’d travelled the wrong direction—that she’d not overshot her destination, as she’d panicked in the bus—and reversed course to begin her search the other direction. She was convinced she was on the right side of the street, but within a block of travel she worried she would have to search both sides, and maybe the surrounding streets as well.
Worse, what if Uncle Rick and Aunt Azami had moved? It had been a couple of years since they’d visited them in the city. If they’d moved, how would she know?
Then she found it. The wrought iron gate had an off-centered sunburst for its interior design, each shooting beam like the strut of a spider’s web. She tried the latch but the gate held fast. The sun had set now, it really was dark, and the incessant wind down Geary Street had turned bitterly cold. It penetrated her clothes and nipped at her skin. Searching the faces of the passersby, she wondered if she should ask someone for help, or ask if they knew how to get inside the apartment building. But why would they know? They didn’t live here. If they did, they would open the gate.
Looking about, she discovered a residence listing. It was posted in a box mounted on the entryway brick. Down the list she found “Hashimoto, Azami – 114”. Below the box was a keypad like a telephone’s. A weathered scrap of paper gave handwritten instructions in fading blue ink. Hanna pressed the pound key and typed 114.
A speaker beside the keypad clicked twice. “Yeah?” came out a tinny male voice.
“Uncle Rick?” Hanna said.
“Yeah?” Then: “Hanna, Christ, is that you?”
It all crushed down on her now, what she had done. Hanna burst out crying. She looked around out of embarrassment, not wanting these sophisticated adults to see her in this state. They didn’t. They kept walking to their next destination, and none of them were looking at her at all.
*
Uncle Rick cradled the handset on the wall-mounted phone. He looked down on Hanna with a wide-eyed, disapproving expression.
“You scared the hell out of your mother,” he said. “The hospital security was just about to call Oakland P.D. That would’ve been really bad.”
She’d pled with Uncle Rick not to call her parents, but Rick wouldn’t hear it. He tried Hanna’s home phone first, then called her father at his office, where the receptionist gave him a beeper number. This phone roundabout finally led to a call from her mother. Through the phone’s handset Hanna could hear her mother raging and crying, and every time Rick tried to get in a word edge-wise she cut him off.
“Your mom’s going to call back in twenty minutes,” Uncle Rick told Hanna. “You’re going to have two options, I think. You can go home tonight or you can stay until tomorrow.”
“I can stay?”
Uncle Rick checked the clock hanging on one wall of the narrow kitchen nook. “Your father dropped you and Dee off in Oakland, right?”
“That’s right.” In an attempt to be efficient, he’d driven them to Oakland around lunchtime. Her father had a business meeting of some sort in Berkeley, so by combining errands they could take one car and avoid parking and traffic hassles. After the ultrasound at the hospital, Hanna and her mother were to do some shopping at Jack London Square. They’d meet her father around five, have an early seafood dinner on the bay, then they’d all drive back to Concord together.
“It sounds like your mother and father are jammed up at the hospital sorting through the mess you left there,” Uncle Rick said. “So, that and traffic over the bridge, then an hour back to Concord. They might let you spend the night. Might.”
Uncle Rick motioned for Hanna to sit on the couch. He sat on the other end. “Why did you run from your mom, squirt?”
The question made Hanna scrunch up. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe to see Aunt Azami?”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Well, she’s working tonight. If your parents drive out, you probably won’t get a chance to talk to her.”
The adrenaline of running away and the anticipation of seeing Aunt Azami again, and the crying fit she had on the street, it all brewed up a strange, contradictory mixture of feelings within her, an emotional sugar imbalance. Seeing Aunt Azami would have stabilized her, she was sure. Now to hear she wouldn’t even have a chance to say hello was crushing.
“If you want,” he said, “I’ll talk to Dee and see if she’ll let you sleep here tonight. You can talk to Azami tomorrow morning over breakfast. How’s that?”
Hanna scrambled across the couch to throw a hug around Uncle Rick’s wide frame. He hugged her in return, murmuring I’ll do what I can, squirt.
*
After the second phone call with Hanna’s mother—calmer than the first and, in the end, more successful—Uncle Rick told Hanna she could stay. While Hanna jumped around the apartment in joy, he went to the kitchen to make dinner.
“What’re you up for tonight?” he called out.
Hanna listed off her favorites, mostly dishes her mother would make for her. Uncle Rick had to turn each down on the grounds that they didn’t have the ingredients, he didn’t know how to make it, or simply that he wasn’t a very good cook. Finally Hanna offered spaghetti with meatballs. Uncle Rick lit up.
“I can do spaghetti,” he said. “We’ve even got a jar of good sauce, I think.”
Hanna waited at the stove while Uncle Rick assembled the ingredients and cookware. Getting the water boiling on the stovetop seemed a milestone in the process, and Uncle Rick popped open a can of beer to celebrate.
With his shirt sleeves rolled up, Hanna could inspect his tattoos up close. One was a pinup model with curly hair posing sexily in front of the ocean. Behind her, a toothy shark leapt from a spray of seawater. On the opposite arm, a black widow nested in the eye of a thick
web. She wanted to ask why he would permanently mark up his body like that, but Hanna refrained, just as she refrained from asking him why he drank so much when he opened his second can of beer.
The apartment smelled musty, and the carpet was pilled and worn in many places. Hanna spotted cigarette burns in one corner. The plaster walls were bone-white save for one wall painted deep blue. Art hung on them all, abstract work and more realistic paintings, each heavy with earth tones and umber accents. Up close, Hanna realized they were Aunt Azami’s handcraft, signed “Hashimoto ‘83” and so on, depending on the year she’d finished it.
The kitchen was the smallest Hanna had ever seen. The utensil holders and cutting boards and spice racks left not a free square inch of counter space. The refrigerator door couldn’t fully open, as it banged into the stove opposite. A deep sink was at the end of the kitchen, but no automatic dishwasher and no garbage disposal. The oven would not hold the butterball turkey Hanna’s mother cooked every Thanksgiving.
Hanna did not miss the conveniences. This was the apartment she wanted to live in while she worked on her horticulture degree. This was the neighborhood she wanted to inhabit, reading the Sunday newspaper at the cafe downstairs and shopping every evening at the green grocer across the street for her dinner fixings.
Uncle Rick piled fist-sized knots of sauced spaghetti on two plates, set them on the petite table next to the window, and placed a canister of powdery parmesan cheese between the settings. Hanna drank a glass of milk with her spaghetti, which she devoured in big mouthfuls. By the end of the meal, red sauce tinted her lips and the corners of her mouth. Uncle Rick ate heartily too, but not as ravenously as Hanna. He laughed when she tried to force too much pasta into her mouth at once.
Uncle Rick crushed his empty can of beer with a squeeze of his hand. “You want to go see Azami?” he asked, then grumbled a burp.
