She got a job in Connecticut, writing a little news section for a local paper covering regional events. Weekends, she sometimes went up to the beach, driving the little white VW she had bought. She was burning her skin. She never used sunblocks or lotions; she liked the way her skin peeled from her. It made her think of rebirth, of the way animals molted. She remembered a tarantula Daniel had once shown her. She had jittered back, annoyed that he would scare her, but then he had picked the thing up, he had shown her that it really wasn’t a spider at all, just the molting. A shell. A new spider was somewhere else.
Isadora dated sometimes. She tried not to compare everyone to Daniel, and she always failed; men always seemed to see it in her face. She thought, wryly, a little bitterly, that it was what Duse would have called a sin of identity. She never heard from Daniel, and she never contacted him again. She had dreams sometimes, but never about Daniel, never about Duse. Sometimes, she thought that lack made her hunger for them all the more.
She stopped thinking about the gift business, whether Duse had really had one, whether she herself had even had the potential. What did it really matter anyway. Duse had believed she had had a gift, but all that was simply part of who Duse had been.
Who Isadora was was something more complicated. She didn’t really share all that much with Duse. Hair. Eyes, maybe. She had shaped her life first wanting a gift, wanting to be Duse, then not wanting a gift, negating her mother. There had been Allison, too, all that trying not to repeat Allison’s mistakes with Daniel, all that trying to be more than Allison for Daniel. And Daniel, too, who should have made her glad for her differences, had been the widest hurt inside of her. She had wasted all that time trying to live right up inside of him. The cleaving together part of marriage had seduced her. All that had been part of who Isadora was, part of how she saw herself.
So that was it then. She was really the only one left. Her father was dead, Duse too, Allison had disappeared, and Daniel was lost to her. She was still Duse’s daughter—she would always be that—but she wasn’t Duse. Things that began with her mother would probably just end with her. She could guess who was on the phone before she picked up the receiver, she could have a dream or two come true, but it didn’t have to mean one damned thing, it could just be coincidence. You could always believe whatever you wanted, whatever you thought you needed.
Isadora was getting up from sitting in the sun one day, lifting her hair off her back to flounce off some of the sun sweat, when she noticed her palm flowering out. There was her meshwork of lines, that tangling. She stared into her palm for a moment, feeling the old flickering, the way it had been way back when she was just a kid in the strange paradise, how lovely it had been to believe like that. Then Isadora blurred her vision, she pushed her hand back into her pocket, shoved it deep. She would stop sitting in the sun like that. She’d go out right now and pick up some hand cream, something that smoothed, something with a good intoxicating scent to it so she’d always remember to use it, so she’d never forget.
Lifelines Page 32
