The Juliet Stories

by Carrie Snyder

  They begin. This was where they began.

  * * *

  * To listen to the author herself singing this beautiful lullaby go here: http://bit.ly/AEoYEQ

  GRACE

  Juliet lies on the Murphy bed pulled down from the wall, its thin metal legs snapped into position. The room, the entire apartment, is chilled, and she shivers in fetal position under a thin sheet. There is a window along the wall, slatted blinds drawn against the rising early sun, shadows easing, longer and thinner, across the carpeted floor. Everything in here is white. Out there, it is already hot. Out there, Grandma Grace is taking her brisk morning walk along the winding blacktop of the retirement village, built on Florida swampland that roils underfoot. Acres of quilted sod, laid out in rectangles, are sinking. Juliet feels herself sinking.

  She hears the apartment door open and close. She hears her grandmother’s breathing in the hallway, heavy from exertion, her grandmother’s knock on the bedroom door: “Breakfast, Juliet?”

  Juliet thinks, This was a mistake, coming here, telling. Her errors compound, interest she will never be able to pay. She needs to go home. She cannot answer.

  “Juliet. Answer me: cereal or toast?”

  But she does not answer. There is a small rush of quiet, the almost silent animal padding of footsteps on wall-to-wall carpet, and Grandma Grace returns. She opens the door with her elbow and walks around the bed to place a tray beside Juliet.

  “Eat. It will settle your stomach.”

  Juliet closes her eyes, and the tears well through her lashes.

  “Worse things have happened,” Grandma Grace says, and strokes Juliet’s cheek. “Worse things will. We will get you through this. Life goes on.”

  The phone rings, and Juliet’s body tenses.

  “If it’s your mother, I’ll tell her you’re sleeping,” says Grandma Grace.

  “What if it’s Mike?”

  “We’ll let it ring through to the machine.”

  They wait. Several mechanical beeps precede the sound of a voice, coated in static, talking into the empty living room. “Mother? It’s Caroline here. Just to say I’m on my way and I’ll be there later today. Tell Juliet I love her, and I can stay for as long as you need me.”

  “Not Aunt Caroline,” says Juliet.

  “Juliet, I’m going to sit right here until you eat something. You don’t know your Aunt Caroline well enough. She’s exactly who you need to talk to. She’s been through this herself, before it was legal. She will understand.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it.”

  Juliet nibbles on the toast crust. She feels as though her limbs are coated in heavy fur, dragging her down. The inside of her skull is lined with the same fur, inhibiting coherence. But her stomach is a prune, a shrivelled, tough wad in her gut that rejects nourishment. Juliet sits up straight and begins to gag.

  “Oh, Juliet,” Grandma Grace sighs.

  Juliet backs out of the sheets and stumbles in her underwear and T-shirt down the hallway to the bathroom, where she shuts and locks the door. The toilet seat is composed of puffy off-white plastic, the water is tinted blue, and when nothing comes up, Juliet closes the lid and sits on its fluffy cover: a lavender mat made of water-resistant synthetic wool. Lit by dim oversized bulbs set in a row above the mirror, every flat surface is clean and empty. The entire apartment is like a sterilized operating room, all the tchotchkes removed to prevent Grandpa Harold from swallowing or hiding them; only last month, after he’d started his day by swallowing his dentures (partials, but still), did Grandma Grace move him into a home for the demented elderly.

  Juliet has not yet visited, though Grandma Grace goes every day, to feed him his lunch. Juliet has been taking the opportunity, in her absence, to slide open the screen door and smoke a cigarette on the back stoop. She does not intend to smoke forever. She thinks of it as a hobby picked up in a foreign land, which will be discarded as soon as she returns to normal life.

  Seated on the toilet’s lid, Juliet swivels her hips and leans towards the mirror. Peering into her own face, she feels nothing. She is at a distance from this freckled, sunburnt, unkempt girl. This girl is not Juliet. This girl is a fragment of the real Juliet, a scrap. The real Juliet waits at home, in another country, for the return of her body.

  Grandma Grace knocks on the door. “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Can I come in?”

  The door is locked. Juliet does not answer, listening to her grandmother try the handle.

  “I wish nobody had to know,” says Juliet.

  “Nobody will,” says Grandma Grace through the shut door. “Now. Juliet. Let me in.”

  Aunt Caroline arrives bearing scented candles and a box of herbal tea. Her hug is vise-tight and her tears are expected, but that doesn’t make either easier to bear. It is evening, and outside the sliding glass doors Juliet sees fog rising off swampland like steam out of a volcano. Grandma Grace has prepared a green salad with cilantro and tomatoes and is boiling water for pasta. Fighting a lethargy that feels fatal, Juliet sets the table.

  Aunt Caroline gets right to it. “Does the father know?”

  “Hush, hush.” Grandma Grace drops three handfuls of spaghetti noodles into the pot. But Aunt Caroline wants an answer.

  Juliet sinks into her chair and rests her head on the cool china plate. Aunt Caroline is asking the wrong question. The question should be, Does the man who is not the father know? The man who is the father is irrelevant. She has already forgotten his face; richer with detail is the room they shared: two beds, a green mosquito coil on the windowsill that burned itself orange and ash. They did not share a bed all night, but afterwards moved to separate beds, in silence. The open window faced the town, not the ocean. In the morning he walked with her up and down streets, searching for something recognizable, a house preserved in her memory from childhood, but the town had been taken over by surfers, foreigners selling smoothies and yoga on the beach.

  He spoke to her in English but it was not his first language. He was kind. Without him, she would never have deciphered the bus schedules. She was not bothered by their exchange, though it was of some relief to learn that he lived in a different part of the country. He called her once, at the house in Managua where she was boarding with a mother and her four daughters, but they had nothing to say to each other over the telephone. It had seemed the only consequence of their night together would be the teasing of the four daughters, aged twelve to seventeen, who eavesdropped on the phone call and who knew about her boyfriend in Canada. On Saturdays the sisters huddled in their bedroom around the television and watched telenovelas made in Mexico. Juliet slept on her own cot, but the others shared double beds. There was space for little else: the girls stored bales of clothing in black plastic garbage bags under their beds, digging through them at dawn and pressing out the wrinkles with an iron before leaving the house. Juliet also slid her backpack under her cot, but she never ironed. She favoured paisley-patterned cotton skirts that fell in crinkles to the ankle, T-shirts, hiking boots in which she kept her American dollars.

  It was a miracle anyone found her attractive. She was appreciative. She was ambivalent. She was without excuse. There had been rum, and a lot of it. That is not an explanation.

  “You do know about” — Aunt Caroline’s voice hushes — “condoms, don’t you?”

  Juliet lifts her head off the plate. She says, “It’s too late for the safe-sex talk.”

  “You need to get tested. For disease.”

  “She knows that.”

  “This pregnancy could be the least of her troubles.”

  “Caroline,” says Grandma Grace, “your tone is not helpful. We do not sit in judgement.”

  “We should tell your mother.” Aunt
Caroline turns to Juliet.

  Juliet looks to Grandma Grace, who shakes her head and dumps the pasta into a colander in the sink. “I expected more from you, Caroline. You, of all people.”

  “What do you want to do?” Aunt Caroline sinks heavily into the chair opposite Juliet and reaches for her hand. Juliet lets her squeeze away, milking the bones of Juliet’s hand as if she might drag out one glistening drop, one tear, one bodily expression of regret.

  “I just want it to be done,” says Juliet, “and I want to go home.”

  The telephone rings. Aunt Caroline leaps to answer it. She covers the mouthpiece with one hand and whispers, “It’s Michael, Juliet. The father.”

  Juliet shakes her head. Aunt Caroline nods hers, holding out the receiver. Juliet stands and slides open the glass door, walks into a landscape as foreign as tundra. She walks barefoot through slippery grass that holds her footprints. She imagines quicksand, and crocodiles. She imagines sliding under and disappearing. She walks until the apartment, and the larger block of low stucco building that contains it, is reduced to rectangles of yellow and blue light.

  ———

  “Well,” says Grandma Grace. “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

  Aunt Caroline has gone, leaving the scented candles and the box of tea.

  “No,” says Juliet.

  “When I think of all the mistakes . . .” Grandma Grace’s voice trails off.

  “Like me, you mean? Like how I was a mistake?”

  “That is not what I am talking about.”

  “An accident, then.”

  Grandma Grace exhales heavily. With a black pronged utensil she lifts a portion of waving spaghetti fronds and lays them on Juliet’s plate.

  “I’m not hungry,” says Juliet.

  “How can a life be a mistake? Or even an accident? And yet.”

  “Are you trying to talk me out of this?”

  “I am talking about being human. The mistakes. We all make them and they pile up, Juliet. You can lie down and let them bury you or you can forgive yourself and be kind. Be kinder.”

  Juliet watches her grandmother in silence.

  “You were meant to come to me, Juliet, and you were meant to tell me first. Your mother, what choice did she have? Your Oma Friesen is a good woman, a crusading woman, but she is hard. Once she got wind of that pregnancy, there were no options.”

  “A mistake,” repeats Juliet.

  “You are young. You have your whole life. What do you want to do?”

  Juliet drops her eyes. I want to pretend this never happened, she thinks.

  There is a knock on the door.

  Grandma Grace stalks the plush carpet and checks the fisheye peephole. “It’s Caroline. I knew it would be. I knew she wouldn’t get far.”

  Grandma Grace unlocks the door, saying over her shoulder, “It’s going to be fine, Juliet.”

  “I’m sorry,” begs Aunt Caroline, not bothering to remove her shoes. “I was walking around the parking lot wondering, ‘What should I do? What should I do?’ I couldn’t just get into the car and drive away. I could not. Not when Juliet needs me.”

  “Caroline?” says Grandma Grace.

  “It was the right thing to do. I know it. I went and called Gloria. I did. I thought she should know.”

  “Caroline.”

  “She’s dropping everything. She’s on her way.”

  There is a silence so piercing it hurts Juliet’s head. She will not permit herself to contemplate the tripwire of consequences. She picks up her fork and winds a thread of spaghetti loosely around and around the scraping tines, an ellipsis of noodle that refuses to bind, that she cannot therefore lift to her lips and take in.

  Grandma Grace is stamping with fury. “This is my fault,” she rages at her night reflection in the sliding glass doors, “for raising such a stupid child.”

  Aunt Caroline hovers on the threshold.

  “Come in and shut the door,” snaps Grandma Grace.

  Juliet looks from the mother to the daughter and feels pity for each. They are betrayed by stubborn difference that persists despite age.

  Aunt Caroline says, “I am very afraid, Mother. I am so terribly afraid for Juliet’s life.” She is wearing a light jacket with sleeves that pinch around the fattest portion of her upper arm. Juliet sees that she is shaking, and she is reminded of Gloria, though the two sisters are unalike in taste and manner and form. The fork scratches the plate.

  “You are projecting,” says Grandma Grace.

  “This choice could ruin her life.”

  “Your life was not ruined.”

  “I have no children of my own.” Aunt Caroline addresses Juliet. “After the operation, my womb” — she whispers the word, pauses to eat her lips — “fell barren. If I had my life to live again, I would change just one thing. I would have that baby.” She turns to Grandma Grace. “He would have turned twenty-seven in May.”

  “That baby — that embryo — wasn’t a boy,” says Grandma Grace. “You don’t know that. She doesn’t know that.”

  “He visits my dreams,” Aunt Caroline tells Juliet. “You don’t know what you will want later. You are thinking only about what you want right now.”

  The phone is ringing. The women leave it be.

  “Hello? Juliet? If you’re there, can you pick up? Please? I need to talk to you.”

  Mike’s voice calls to them through the machine, gentle, a version of his father’s, but without the chronic marijuana cough.

  “Juliet, um, I know. I know what’s happening. Dad called. Please pick up. Can I come to you? Or will you come home? Please. I love you.”

  Grandma Grace’s lips quiver with tears she refuses to shed. Aunt Caroline lifts shaking hands together into a position of prayer, pressing fingers against chin, sodden with tears.

  The apartment is too damn white. There is nowhere to hide, thinks Juliet. She stands out like a raging wound, dirt under her fingernails, sun-cracked skin, flame for hair. She just barely evades the thought: Would the baby have my hair?

  “I hear you.” She sits at the table and says to the machine, “I hear you, Mike.”

  Grandma Grace, who is nearest, lifts the receiver, speaking into it as she crosses the room. Her voice is steady and betrays no emotion. “Hello, Mike. How are you?” From the receiver’s upper end she uncollapses a long metal antenna.

  “I want to see you too,” Juliet whispers into the heavy plastic shell, turning away, hunted by the generations in the room; the antenna swats dangerously. “But I’m not keeping it. Just so you know.”

  What he says in reply is only hers, and she will not share it.

  “I will put the kettle on,” says Aunt Caroline, her voice lifting, making of the statement a question, to which Grandma Grace does not reply. Instead Grandma Grace walks silently down the hall to the linen closest to snap sheets and count comforters. She runs a whining vacuum cleaner in the spare bedroom where Juliet has been sleeping. They hear her in the bathroom slamming cupboard doors, working, working, working.

  “Juliet.” Aunt Caroline removes the plate of uneaten pasta and replaces it with a cup of unsweetened Very Berry tea.

  “Don’t,” says Juliet. She is surprised by her own tone: harsh, not kind. She opens her mouth to soften, to apologize, but Caroline shakes her head in disappointment and stares up at the blank television, which Grandpa Harold affixed to the ceiling like the televisions in hospital rooms. Now that he is gone, Grandma Grace has cancelled the cable, but the television remains, prepared at any moment to rip out the screws and crush whoever lingers beneath.

  Grandma Grace enters the room, rage all around her like a blaze, bends her long, graceful bones and yanks open the pullout sofa. “You can sleep here, Caroline,” she says. “It’s about as comfortable as the rack.”
>
  Gloria’s plane lands in the morning and Aunt Caroline volunteers to collect her. Mike says he will grab a cab from the airport; he is calling from standby in Toronto.

  When they come through the door, Caroline has been crying, the evidence all over her face, but Gloria’s eyes are clear, her skin taut and lightly tanned, her travelling outfit a casual, flattering, unwrinkled shift that shows off lean arms and calves. She does not hurry, but comes directly to Juliet, who is hunched in some discomfort on a chair at the kitchen table, there being nowhere else to sit; before her, an uneaten bowl of cut exotic fruit arranged as if in a Dutch still-life.

  Wordlessly, Gloria strokes Juliet’s hair and face and pulls her into her rib cage, humming a low tune that Juliet does not recognize, that may not be a tune so much as a response to the moment: a flight of the voice, an answer. This is the longest Juliet can recall being held by her mother and touched with such tender regard. That may not be fair, or true. But it seems so.

  The tenderness is too much, a crush of weight, and Juliet hears herself breaking beneath it, dissolving, undone. Wild sobs are a release, but there is no relief, and almost immediately Juliet resents with intensity the scene she is creating. She is doing what her mother wants her to do: she must be made hysterical in order for Gloria to calm her.

  Juliet shudders. Her tears are scant. She has slipped to the floor and kneels in her mother’s embrace, breathing the scent of lavender body lotion and an expensive hair product that holds in submission her mother’s carefully untended locks. She sees that her mother’s hair is streaked lightly with threads of pure white. When did that happen?

  “Oh, my baby, how I love you,” says Gloria.

  Juliet thinks, She only loves me because I need her.

  “I remember when you were small enough to sleep curled on my chest. And now you are a woman. If I close my eyes, I can see you as you were, right at the very beginning, when all we had was each other.”

  Juliet lifts her head out of her mother’s lap. “And Dad.”