The Daughters

by Adrienne Celt

  A recognition flashed between them.

  “I should go home.” Greta flushed up the back of her neck.

  “Yes.” Lindemann didn’t let go of her hand. “You said.”

  I stared at my mother, something hot and sickly mixing around in my stomach. My spine felt rigid and my heart too high; I slid onto the floor from the bed and scooted backward towards my mother’s bedroom door.

  “So you see,” Sara said. “Greta cursed us all because her heart was untrue. She didn’t love who she was supposed to love.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. She folded her hands primly over her knee, sitting up now with her back against the wall.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  Her eyes searched mine, and though she held her mouth in a perfectly neutral pose, there was a smile hidden behind the cool mask of her face. Escaping through the seams.

  “You know.” I squirmed, feeling my tailbone scrape against the floor. “Greta wouldn’t. Do that.”

  Sara picked the dirt out from under her fingernails, making a sound like a cat testing its claws. Flick, flick, flick.

  “I know one thing,” she said. “You’re just like her. From everything Mama says about Greta, you’re her little double, aren’t you? You take everything there is to have and don’t give a damn about the people who give it to you. You always want more. You can feel the wanting under your skin right now, can’t you?”

  I shivered. To this day I can’t be sure whether it was, like my mother said, the fingers of desire I felt. Or whether it was just the flicker of recognition that the stories my mother told weren’t meant to instruct or entertain me. They were meant to destroy something. Meant to infect.

  13

  Every day now, John comes home and sits across the room from me. He doesn’t look at me. And I think, Good.

  We used to come home together and race to the door so we could begin taking off our clothing, running as fast as we could up the stairs so no one would see us unzipping, unbuttoning, shrugging out of shirts and shoes. Or if I got back from rehearsal before him, he would pick me up off the couch and give me a kiss. Hold me in his arms like he was carrying me over the threshold, and then set me back down. Put a blanket over my knees. Kiss my toes.

  He wraps Kara into a papoose and walks around the kitchen, cooking for one. The scent of sautéing onions drifts through the door while I’m taking a bath and I dip my head under the water just to escape it for a moment. I get out and drip all over the floor to dig around for a handful of bath salts, which smell like heather. It’s a quiet enough scent that it won’t make me immediately drunk, the way rose would, or patchouli. But when the salts are absorbed into the water with a patter and a hiss, I still get momentarily lightheaded. Slide gratefully back into the bath so I don’t have to stand on my own two feet.

  I hear him eating alone at the dining room table, silverware scraping, ice shifting and cracking in a water glass. He babbles to Kara in a light voice but won’t say a word to me beyond the necessary—excuse me, pardon me, are you going to be in there for much longer? And again I tell myself, This is good, when I think about how he used to talk to me almost without ceasing, memories crowding one another to get out of his mouth. Always reaching for the next story, the one that would really explain who he was.

  John once described to me a camping trip he took as a child. He grew up in Virginia, in a town surrounded by farmland, with devoted parents who drove him to Blacksburg and later to Richmond and D.C. for voice lessons. It was a safe place, he told me, and so at the age of ten he was allowed to wander and sleep out of doors with only the supervision of a redtick coonhound, Rabbit. She was named for her ears, he said. Long ones, and soft like velvet. In the morning John woke early to the sun leaking milky through the canvas of his tent. He let Rabbit out and stood in an empty field to pee, staring into the morning light with his face upturned. Bold and certain of his place in the world.

  After sharing a Pop-Tart with the dog, he proceeded to explore. His parents wouldn’t expect him home for hours. And even then they wouldn’t worry too much, knowing how close he was to the house, how easily they could drive out and find him. Rabbit loped beside him, sometimes pausing to flop into the dirt and wagger around on her back, scratching head and spine. Her tongue lolled out into the pebbles and dried leaves, picking up both indiscriminately and not bothering to shed them when she sprang back up to trot again beside her boy.

  Soon they reached a collapsing barn, old bones of a building, cracked and withering wood. John had to step over broken boards to get inside, push aside the remains of a door that still hung on a single rust-bitten hinge; the sky was visible through the holes in the roof. He should have been more careful, he told me. It could all have fallen on his head. But he wanted to see what there was to see. Wanted to know what the barn’s husk looked like, how it felt, from the inside. In his mind, he said, he could have made a second home there. A secret one. And so in a vague gesture of housekeeping, he picked up an old rusted rake and dragged it across the dirt floor, collecting pieces of debris and leaving thin schisms in the dust.

  Rabbit was sniffing near his ankles when John used the rake to flip up a piece of corrugated metal and surprised a velvet-tail rattler below. A black-banded snake, coiled up like rope. They all three startled, but while John staggered backward, the snake and the dog both leaned in. John scraped his ankles on a pile of decaying lumber, and as the snake struck Rabbit lunged, so the venomous fangs sank into her leg high up, near the chest. Then the snake was gone. And Rabbit lay on the floor, breath heaving. Leg starting to swell.

  I remember we were at a café when John told me this, in public, but he still started to cry. Or at least to tear up. He said it was too far to run back home and get his parents, or so he’d thought at the time. The swelling was so immense and came on so quickly that he could only watch, transfixed, as Rabbit ballooned in front of him. The bite was near her heart. I should have tried, he said. But she was so big, compared to him. He couldn’t carry her, couldn’t drag her behind him without hurting her more and perhaps getting bitten. So he took her big skull in his hands and lay it in his lap and watched her die.

  John told me this story not long before he asked me to marry him, and sometime later that same year his parents visited us, passing through Chicago for a night on the way to somewhere else. Over celebratory drinks, while John and his father huddled together at the bar, I asked his mother about Rabbit. Was it hard for John to lose her? Did they ever think about getting another dog?

  She grimaced while I recounted an abridged version of the tale, then took a sip of her gin and tonic. I could see her holding it on her tongue to give herself a chance to think before answering.

  “He told you that?” she finally asked.

  “Yes.” Her tone surprised me. “He got very emotional. Why? Does he not usually tell that story?”

  “Well, honey, let me ask you.” She put her hand over mine. Manicured nails, white French tips. “Do I look like a woman who’s lived on a farm?”

  I sat back, my spine straightening with a crack. We’d never visited John’s hometown, so I hadn’t seen his house firsthand, his neighborhood or childhood bedroom. But what had I imagined? To be honest, not the dried birds’ nests and pine cone collections of a country boyhood. His father was a cellist. His mother a socialite, masquerading as a stay-at-home mom. Not exactly the type of people to pick up a coonhound pup.

  “No.” I was breathless. John’s mother threw her head back and laughed.

  “Let me give you a piece of advice, honey,” she said. “John likes telling a tall tale from time to time, but he’s not really good at it. Always pushes things a little over the edge, you know. For atmosphere. That’s how you can tell.”

  “So no dog?”

  She waved her hand and picked the lime off the side of her drink, tossing it in among the ice cubes.

  “Pug. Ugly little thing he begged for. But it got hit by a car after a couple of years, and no one was too so
rry.” She smiled. “Doesn’t make for quite the same effect, does it?”

  Why did he tell me that? I remember leaning in towards his words, elbows grinding crystals of sugar into the tabletop. It must have meant something to him, or else he’d have laughed to see my face so earnest and interested. Maybe I asked a question about his childhood and he didn’t have an honest answer he thought would hold my attention. Or maybe it was simple inspiration: a dog walked by outside, healthy and smiling with the heat of July. Why not?

  When I come out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, John is dancing with Kara in the living room, slowly shifting his hips and shuffling his feet, adding the occasional moonwalk. His romance with her grows daily more intense. Sometimes he holds her out in front of him, cradling the back of her head where the skull is still knitting together beneath the skin, and smells her forehead. Long and deep.

  For now he has her balanced against his chest, and I can see her face over his shoulder, eyes open wide, stunned by their own existence. I can’t help worrying that she likes him better than me. And why wouldn’t she? I would, if I were her. He’s much more solicitous.

  I’m surprised to see crackers and Brie laid out on the coffee table, next to a bottle of mineral water and two glasses. Kara’s face gives no indication about what kind of motives might be attached to them or whether there is a time limit I need to be aware of—I’ll be nice now or never, that sort of thing—and so I slip into the bedroom and throw on some clothes, taking my time, brushing out my hair with my fingers to keep it from drying in bunches and snags. Look at the bruise on my hip, a deeper purple now. Does that mean it’s festering, or healing? When I emerge, the spread is still there, untouched. The Brie has melted a little bit, oozing out its own sides.

  “For you,” John says. And all I can say in reply is, “Oh.” But I sit down in front of the plate and smear a buttery wedge of cheese onto a cracker, licking a little bit off my thumb. I watch John, who settles into a chair on my left and pours himself a glass of water. A few companionable minutes like this are enough to break me of my own determination not to speak.

  “So,” I ask. “How was your day? Is Stan giving you hell?” Stan is John’s vocal coach, and he’s a real son of a bitch, though we love him. His heyday was in New York, and he likes making fun of John for being based in Chicago, the Second City. But he’s a wonderful stickler for the emotional power of music: he once held John for an extra hour of rehearsal because he claimed, If it was right, I’d be crying by now. “Is he teasing you very much about Parpignol?”

  John’s role in the upcoming production of La Bohème is small, a toy vendor at the beginning of Act II. It is, he says, a new father’s role. For a couple of years now, he’s been making excuses for being cast in smaller parts—I’m stuck between young hero and mature; I like playing soldiers; I don’t want to travel—but this time I think that what he says might be true. He’s been staying at the Lyric well past his meetings with Stan just to chat with the designers making Parpignol’s toys. That’s what I’ve deduced through snooping. There were crumpled sketches on the table yesterday, brightly colored balls, marionettes, wooden ducks on wheels. Maybe he wants to bring them home for Kara at the end of the run.

  “Who cares, right?” John shrugs. “He’s just an old gasbag.”

  Although it’s true, I don’t know what to say to this. It seems to be the kind of statement designed to preclude reply. I crunch through a few more crackers.

  “It’s nice to have soft cheeses again.” I gesture to the baby, who caused a nine-month moratorium. John nods, knowing.

  “Yeah.” He hefts Kara to the left and squints at her, doting. “Remember how we used to argue about what she’d look like?”

  I laugh. “Argue is a strong word, but sure. I said she was going to have blond hair, like I did when I was a baby. And you said she was going to be covered in little golden scales, and have pearls for teeth.”

  “Hmm,” he says. “We were both wrong.” He draws her close and nibbles on one ear, as if it were gold and he was checking it for purity. She squirms. “You know, though, I think she looks like me.”

  “No she doesn’t.”

  I’ve spoken before I can stop myself. Shut up, I think. Shut up, shut up. But John doesn’t seem to care.

  “Well, you know.” She has so much hair, so unexpectedly much, and so dark. John was surprised because he’d been born bald. All the baby photos in his family show perfect Gerber mouths and plastic-smooth Kewpie heads. Now he spins the small tuft of Kara’s hair around his index finger. “I called my mom, and she says Kara looks like my dad did when he was a baby. They have all those creepy formal portraits.”

  “What about her eyes?” I ask. It’s a little hypnotic, hearing how hard he’s willing to try to make this true. A storyteller to the bones.

  “Nordic blood.”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “That’s what she tells me,” he says.

  From the day she was born, we have politely referred to Kara’s blue eyes as a puzzle. There’s still a chance they’ll turn brown in her ninth month—I was surprised when the doctor told me this could happen, as though babies routinely shed their skin and emerge purple or green. Then I was surprised I hadn’t heard it before, that it isn’t invoked more often as a grand metaphor for how human beings are adaptable and all the same even in their differences. When I was in elementary school, we divided up the world into blue-eyed people and brown-eyed people. Some of the blues called the brown eyes common, but I told them it meant we had a more solid base of power. Kara’s eyes are waterways. Mine are the stony ground.

  John stands up and carefully passes the baby to me.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” he says, “now that the bathroom’s free.”

  I nod, and am just about to sit back, quietly baffled at our conversation, when he turns back and asks, “Is your mother going to be at the christening?”

  His tone is so casual I almost don’t hear the way it’s laced with ice. But he says the word mother with such emphasis that I cannot miss it. He is still angry about my outburst then, Brie or no. I pale a little. The christening’s in three days, and the last two people I want in a room together are John and my mother. I can’t see how it will help to lie now though.

  “I told her about it. So, maybe.”

  “That’s just great, Lu.” He’s going brittle again as he walks away. “Because now it’ll really be a celebration.”

  “She might not come,” I say to his back. He barely shrugs an acknowledgment, which is just as well. We both know that Sara will do what she wants. I can’t be certain about anything with her, except that she likes to stir the water. Even now, just the mention of her name causes ripples. What will happen when she sees my daughter and my husband, side by side? Eye to eye.

  I shiver, thinking about the wave of chaos I felt chasing me down the street, away from the florist’s shop. And the chaos of my own making that I feel chasing me now.

  14

  All throughout my pregnancy I sang furiously. My agent was concerned for my health, but assured me that audiences would love it. “Like a cellist who throws their bow because they’re playing too passionately,” she said. “It’s kind of weird. Aficionados like that stuff.” So I booked small concerts and private performances—the birthday of a Japanese seafood exporter, a party celebrating the IPO of a software company in Silicon Valley.

  I did seem to inspire a strange sort of passion. As soon as my belly began rounding out, I heard whispers in the audience when I walked onto a stage. Michelle shrugged when I told her. “That’s what you wanted, I thought.” She sent me designer maternity wear on loan, favoring pieces that accentuated the bulge Kara elbowed ever outward. The only one I refused to wear painted me up like a bull’s-eye, with a dot of red at the pregnancy’s crest.

  “This is crude,” I said. “People will find this really vulgar.”

  But on a night not long after I sent that dress back, I stepped out next to the piano i
n a simple black smock—my favorite accompanist, Rick, was with me, on loan from the Lyric—and a wave of enthusiastic gasps broke out, inspired by a problematic spotlight resting momentarily on my stomach. It had been contracted down to the size of a single face, and as it dilated out from my navel I felt uncomfortably vaudevillian. The applause—the frenzied, wolf-whistling adulation—nearly knocked me over. I hadn’t yet sung a single note.

  Rick must have seen me going green, god bless him. He whispered, “They’re not here to look, they’re here to listen. They’ll remember.”

  And I made sure that they did. In the early weeks of my pregnancy, my body had made a few adjustments without my say-so: unexpected notes popping out of my mouth during warm-ups; hands growing numb in the late afternoon as if a smaller set of fingers were rooting around in them, looking for a way out. But at this point, seven months in, the inconsistencies had quieted down, and I instead gained a modicum of power and range. Sometimes I felt as though no one was in my stomach at all and it was a hollow bell made to resonate like a gong.

  Nodding to Rick, I rapped my thanks onto the piano and breathed as deeply as the changed real estate in my lungs would allow. We have a little code, Rick and I, in those knocks. We use them to alert one another to changes in tempo or octave—or even our choice of song. He looked at me, a question in his eyes, and I answered with a curt nod. Yes.