Queen of the Fall

by Sonja Livingston

  She rises early and walks fast before making breakfast and heading off to stand on corners with signs demanding rights for hotel workers and fair wages for the tomato growers of Florida, or to remind people on their way to soccer practice and shopping trips that we are at war and war kills; then drives home to work with her husband on letters to the editor about health care reform or runs off to read stories to kindergarteners whose families have no books before stopping to visit a friend in a nursing home, to drop a birthday gift for the man whose family has died or moved away. The two of them, my parents-in-law, nearly eighty now, think nothing of loading trucks with medical supplies for Cuba from the launch pad of their backyard. When they hear of hardship or injustice, their first response is action, which I notice and admire because I’m the sort to sit around eating cake while replaying secondhand stories and wondering what they might mean. Not so with my mother-in-law, who is out of her seat and grabbing a jacket; off to help a friend from Sudan; off to work at the overnight shelter for street people; off to register voters in Erie, Pennsylvania; off to deliver the cap she cap for a new baby—off to do more in one day than I manage in a good week. Still and all, around this one story, around this one woman, there is a slump.

  But I have not yet said how it tastes, Klotilde’s cake. If I say it is rich with warm overtones, you will not know. If I say that there’s the slightest suggestion of coffee, that it inhabits the space between wistful and brooding, that the cake itself might be more rightly called a torte—still I will not have said enough. The cake is a woman looking over her shoulder as she boards a one-way train. It’s the scratch of an old record, the words of a song you almost remember, the month of November as it gathers into a final sigh and gives itself over to December.

  It’s a wisp of a story, really, of the sort that’s been told time and again; only the minor details vary—a woman abandoned to the desert, her husband flown off to the golden domes of home. She’s young and there’s a child who will never know the man gone away, so that as we eat the cake, I can almost hear a lullaby, the voice all loam and gut, the words in Czech or Hungarian or Romanian—or all them perhaps—because, in truth, Klotilde is nothing so much as the scent of vanilla and the froth of beaten eggs. And more than Klotilde, it’s my mother-in-law who’s caught me—this woman who does daily battle with the world, with energy left over for reading to schoolchildren and baking cakes—the way she shakes her head and refuses to be soothed about a neighbor from four decades prior, denying me the lie of a happy ending, that makes me take notice.

  Still, it’s a delicious cake and my mother-in-law is a splendid baker, so I lift my fork for another bite, savoring all that is known, while absorbing—at least for the moment—all that can’t be made right. We make our way through the icing into layers of sugar and rum and salt. The way they come together. The way each is needed. All of this, as I take up another forkful and let Klotilde’s cake fall dark and sweet into my mouth.

  Mock Orange

  JUNE, AND THE SEASON for mock orange is upon us. It grows by the garage out back, a gangly shrub breaking into blossom, hiding the places where the wood has begun to rot. The flowers are like cream whipped by an overzealous hand, tossed about in sprays, falling from arched branches. Thank God for the mock orange, which allows me to look out the window and into the rain that does not stop.

  I’m pregnant, her email said, and something caved in on me then, a heart or a lung collapsing in the space of time it took to read the message, changing for an instant my ability to breathe. In another instant, the message seemed like glass, or else I became glass. Either way, something was suddenly hard and clear and my niece’s pregnancy became nothing more than a sound I’d been listening for since the baby shower I threw for her mother seventeen years before.

  An immediate response can help to hide certain collapses, so I emailed back right away to show that I did not judge, that I still cared, that I was not hollowed out. I wrote a few well-intentioned words—sounds hard and you are such a special person—threadbare words, but no less true for overuse. Becoming pregnant at sixteen does sound hard, and she is special. She is, in fact, the most beautiful girl in the world.

  Will it rise off her still, that quality which seems so much like confidence but is simpler, a grace certain people are born with—something in the face that makes others notice, something in her manner, quiet but full, that draws people in—will it still be there? If you passed her in your car—maybe she’s laughing with a group of friends, maybe she’s waiting for a bus on Lake Avenue, or sitting alone on a porch with broken front steps—would you see the light coming from her or would she be to you just another pregnant girl in the city, belly looming like the moon over her tiny feet?

  What will I see when I visit? Will I be funny, my humor making little shelters in which to hide? Will I swing by Donuts Delite on my way, bring a box of sugar and flour as balm? I cannot know how it will go, because I have not yet brought myself to see her. And so this is the moment suspended. The space between imagination and reality. I hold myself here for as long as possible because it’s delicious, this not knowing, though it exacts its price. I delay scheduling a time to see her until I can delay no more and set the date for Sunday, two days from now.

  Years ago a cashier said how much my niece resembled me. It was Christmastime and she was four or five then, my youngest sister’s child. She wore a winter coat trimmed in faux fur, her shiny black shoes making her look like a tiny present. Her hair was a mess under the hood, I remember, but even with the tangled hair, she lit up the children’s department, eyes touching down on walls and shoppers and racks of ruffled dresses.

  “You two look just alike,” said the girl as she put our things into a bag.

  My niece rewarded the clerk with a flash of eyes—she was always a little speck of something, flirting with the world before she could even walk—while I searched the beaming child’s face. People often mistook her for mine but only because she was at my side as I bought child-size mittens and school supplies or signed her up for gymnastics class. No one had ever suggested we look alike. The same round face, of course, the same full mouth. But my sister’s father is Iroquois and her husband is Puerto Rican, so my niece is Native American and Hispanic and a vague European mix—a dark-eyed girl who looks nothing like the pale-skinned aunt at her side. Still I remember the cashier’s words that Christmas, her little coat, the uncombed hair, and all of it seems to me now a gift.

  Mock Orange is named for orange trees that grow in Florida groves, whose blossoms perfume the air each spring. The mock orange is not a real orange though; it is not even a proper tree and does not produce any usable fruit. The shrub is largely ornamental, valued primarily for the way it mimics the orange’s delicate scent. Yet even among mock oranges, there is great variety, some offering such sweetness you could close your eyes and imagine yourself among flowering trees after a spring rain, while others are so weak their perfume is nothing more than a wish.

  See her at the art gallery in Philadelphia, standing before a panel of Tiffany glass, jewel tones swirling behind her, scarlet and gold, and the way—even with all the color—she outshines the panel of glass. Here she is as a three-year-old in Vermont, extending her hand to touch a cow. Now she’s a five-year-old in a swingy dress at the hippie festival in Ithaca, a tie-dyed kerchief crowning her head. Now she’s in my lap in a horse-drawn carriage trotting along the beach in Maine, the one with the boardwalk and the Ferris wheel, where the French-Canadians come. Here she is wearing her cat mask, refusing to speak to anyone in the entire state of South Carolina, offering only meows to waitresses and hotel clerks. Now she’s at the aquarium, insisting on touching the stingray, taking in all the fishes, pressing her fingers against the glass, though I have told her time and again not to. A girl of two and five and twelve, laughing and crying and falling asleep in my arms—a girl who, despite it all, I’ve never been quite able to hold.

  A colleague once asked if I sponsored a kid from one of thos
e Save the Children organizations. I followed his stare to a photograph on my desk, one in which her oversized eyes look especially dark. Those eyes hanging open and her tan skin were the source of his confusion, and I knew him well enough to shame him but just shook my head at how wrong he had it—because when I think of give and take and what it means to love, I would say that for as long as I’ve known her, she has been sponsoring me.

  She is mine, and I am hers. Bound by the fact that her mother was pregnant at a time when I was pregnant myself. I lost the child I’d hoped for, but my sister’s baby was healthy and she named her for me. A daughter. One I believe my little sister has done her very best to share.

  Her mother is the youngest in our troubled family. Left on her own at twelve, my sister waded through foster care and group homes into drugs and street life, and was eventually caught up in cross fire. I was the family member notified the night she was shot. My older sister is the strong one, but the people who notify families of tragedies did not know such things and somehow found me. I raced to the emergency room, the air electric, my sister’s body a trembling mass, papers to sign, a pile of cheap jewelry handed over, someone asking whether I wanted to see a chaplain and what religion. I don’t remember the priest or what words were said. Only the image of the tarnished jewelry has stayed with me, the feel of the metal cold and wet in my hand.

  The bullet went clean through, as if her skin were butter. But skin is not butter—except in the face of bullets and sometimes love—and anyway, I tell you this not to create pity or to heighten the drama, but for context. Before my niece came into the world, there was her mother struggling with pain of her own and before her, another mother with her own set of injuries. Generations of wounds gone untended. So many shots fired, so much skin like butter.

  People will sometimes ask, “When did you know you were no longer poor?” They ask because I seem to have transcended a childhood spent in poverty, which indicates a certain distance between myself and the thing transcended, a certain analytical tackling made possible only by removal from the stimulus—a certain precision, let’s say. But I am not precise. I am not removed. I am only lucky in some things and unlucky in others. As to the question of when I was no longer poor, I sometimes believe poverty ended the day I realized I could go to restaurants as often as I wished or buy the shoes I wanted without waiting, or the moment I had access to an automatic icemaker—the magic of the machine, all those frozen cubes at the touch of a hand; I have never felt so rich. But now my niece, a brilliant and beautiful child, is pregnant and while the baby itself is not poverty (how could a child ever be?) the fact of his coming is—the tradition of longing and babies and incomplete mothering. No, a baby is not poverty, but early pregnancy and dropping out of school is, and the fact that I am not surprised. How I feel myself growing older as I write these words. That I knew and could only watch it unfold. That is poverty.

  Grant me, then, this moment. Allow me talk of moonlight and flowers; let me make of this moment whatever works to bring her, while I can still can, as a child to my side.

  She was gay for awhile, this girl so very much like the sun tilting into morning, you could not help but swoon. We were driving from Santa Fe to Tucson, then north to Phoenix and Flagstaff and back again. She was thirteen, her phone an extension of her body. She chatted to friends back home while I took in the landscape, begging her out of the car to see the meteor crater, the Petrified Forest, to pose near a rusted-out car in the desert. Always she obliged, stepping out of the car, dark hair pulled back—and have I said, about the hair, how it contains the slightest trace of chestnut? But most of the time she was on the phone, and even when we stopped to meet a friend in Truth or Consequences, she refused to join us in the hot springs, choosing instead to soak in her phone. It was in that quirky desert town that she spent all her money on a ring with an opal set into the silver, a ring too large for her hand.

  “For a friend,” she said when I asked, her mouth so full of secrets her lips could not help but bloom—even when she was a toddler, she was never really a child.

  “That’s generous,” I said. “But don’t you want something for yourself?”

  “No,” she said. “She’s a good friend, my best friend.”

  She told me in Tucson over brunch that the ring was for her sweetheart.

  “I’m sorta gay,” she said. We both laughed, she for how funny it sounded and I because I couldn’t be happier. A gay niece suited me fine. A gay niece might defy the odds and graduate from her urban high school, where fewer than half of the students make it through. A gay niece might not have the burden of pregnancy added to an already heavy load.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m happy for your gayness.”

  She talked about how it was hard to tell some people, and the conversation was serious for a turn, but then the French toast came and she told me about the girl she loved. Celina, it turns out, a girl named for the moon.

  More than three years have passed since we were at Truth or Consequences. The desert, the hot springs, the ill-fitting ring—all ages ago.

  It’s raining now, and the sound is soft but unending against the surface of things. It is not pretty, this rain. The leaves on the maple out back have become so glossy they hardly seem real. I woke early this morning and now it’s evening and still the rain does not stop.

  “Maybe we should sit down with her—talk straight about her options,” My older sister is standing in her mudroom, husband at her side; both have worried looks as talk turns to our niece.

  “I think she knows her choices,” I say.

  My sister seems surprised. “Could a pregnant teenager really know her options?”

  She’s a mother and I’m not, but I have to wonder aloud where she grew up. “What girl in the city doesn’t have every teacher, social worker, and doctor warning her about pregnancy? Do any of them not know about birth control, safe sex, and abortion?”

  “But she may not know all the options,” she says gently, as if I am missing something, and I think we’re talking about adoption now.

  “I’m sure she knows them, Steph.” When she doesn’t look convinced, I try another tactic. “At the very least, she would have seen the movie Juno.”

  In the movie Juno, an unusually well-adjusted high school girl becomes pregnant and spends her time hobbling around under the weight of a growing belly, forsaking junk food and continuing to attend high school. The girl manages to marvel at and care for her unborn child, yet give it away because she understands that they’ll both be better off. The character is so captivating; it’s tempting to think that my niece, who is a movie buff, will have admired her enough to consider the hard love of giving up a child. But only it’s a film, a fiction, and even the smartest pregnant teen I’ve met is less certain about her place in the world than such a character, her unborn babies anchoring her to solid ground for the first time in her life.

  What can be said of a shrub that bears no serviceable fruit? Is flowering enough? And where is the sense in a blossom named for the sweetest fragrance but that sometimes has no scent?

  Juno is named for the Roman goddess. Wife to Jupiter, the goddess had no shortage of causes for jealousy and spite, but in her manifestation as Lucina, Juno was said to help ease the pain of childbirth. In the ancient world, women and girls ripped the braids from their hair as they labored, loosening their clothes and calling out to the Juno Lucina for help. The name Lucina is thought to come from the Latin word for light because a newborn was said to have been “brought to light” with Juno’s intercession—but isn’t it equally possible that Juno was called Lucina for the way she helped provide the world with new light, for what baby does not shine brighter than the sun itself?

  My niece’s parents don’t seem upset. Divorced now, they’re planning to throw separate baby showers. I think of birthday parties delayed over the years, or missed altogether because there was no money, no follow-through. I think of the quinceañeras my niece attended for other girls, cousins and f
riends, the one she’d wanted for her own, all the big talk about dresses and favors and venues—but in the end their lives were too much about survival to allow for party dresses and invitations. Not getting what you want, and not believing you ever will—this is the tradition we come from. But now a shower. We are pretty good at baby showers. Everyone playing games, a pile of presents, the easy familiarity of babies.

  She will not give the baby away. And why should she, when it is the truest thing she’s ever seen rise from herself in this world?

  “It’s tough.” My husband doesn’t really know what to say. He thinks maybe I should cry. “If she’d been raised in another place, if she’d had even just a bit more of a solid footing, think of what she might have done,” I say. Of course, she can and will still do many things with her, but I can’t quite see that now and while it’s not a funeral, the feeling is there, the mourning and his trying to be kind because kindness is the best one can offer when one does not understand.