The Daughters

by Adrienne Celt

  “I don’t know.” I lick my lips. I was afraid for so long, and now here we are. Talking. It’s not so hard. I look at John, who doesn’t seem to agree. “I don’t want something to happen to me without you knowing the truth.”

  At this, he softens. Just a bit.

  “Still though. Why?”

  “Because,” I say. “You’re the right father. The one who loves her.” I’m not quite brave enough to say us. “I wanted to make sure I told you that.”

  John keeps waving people away as we talk—they must think I’m very badly broken to stay so long on the ground, crying. And there may be some truth to that. But as much as I want us to be alone—two souls on an iceberg, together, at sea—I want to move forward with the ceremony more. For the moment at least, John agrees. To fix things. Keep them going.

  Eventually it’s established that I can stand.

  “Who is the godmother supposed to be?” I ask. Realizing that I do not know. It was meant to be Ada, but if John has picked someone new in the meantime, I wasn’t aware of it. Life goes on, despite our best intentions.

  “Michelle said she’d do it,” John tells me. “Pinch hitter.”

  “Can Sara?” My emotions are like bats, flying around my head at odd angles. I can’t understand where they come from, where I’m getting my ideas.

  “Your mother?” His hands in his pockets, John looks up at the ceiling. “That’s what you want?”

  I try to take it as a good sign that he isn’t looking to fight me. So I nod and he goes over to talk to the priest, while I lean against the altar, smiling with what will I can at the little audience. John comes back with Kara in his arms, and the father with him. We look at one another as if to gauge tempo, all waiting for a signal from someone else.

  “Haven’t you done this before?” I ask the priest. He is gentler with me than I deserve.

  “I wanted to make sure you were well, my dear.”

  John hands Kara over, her white gown fluttering around her and her face creased with confusion. The priest crosses his fingers over her head, raises a golden cup, and trickles it slowly over her forehead.

  “Ego te baptizo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” the priest chants, his voice high. “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

  He then calls for godparents, spiritual sponsors, to guide Kara’s admission into the church. Sara, having been primed, comes up to stand with us, and one of the altar boys hands her a lighted candle. She tries to smile but gives up. Her face is serious. She raises one eyebrow at me, silent.

  “And the second sponsor?”

  From the audience Rick stands up and brushes off his tuxedo pants. The action is reflexive, as they’re perfectly crisp and clean. His hands are white and manicured, as always, as if washed in boiling water and scrubbed with steel wool. I watch the flame of Rick’s candle travel up with him to the podium. The side of the candle is emblazoned with silver paint, and a single drop of wax drips down its length only to be caught in the paper base.

  “And now the child’s mother and father will join me as we present her Christian name and invite her to join the society of God.”

  John stands by my side. His hand brushes mine but moves away, so we’re close enough to feel heat radiating off each other, but not touching. The priest whispers in Kara’s ear and her face breaks open, bright red with sobs. Addressing Sara and Rick, the priest gestures over Kara’s form.

  “Do you believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting?”

  Ada always told me that Greta slept beneath the earth and would come forth if she was needed. Perhaps resurrection is another talent we all hold in common. I wonder what I might be asked to give up for that.

  Rick and my mother assent to the priest, and hold out their candles as he crosses Kara three times.

  “Receive this burning light,” he says. “And keep thy baptism so as to be without blame: keep the commandments of God, that when the Lord shall come to the nuptials, thou mayest meet Him together with all the saints in the heavenly court, and mayest have eternal life forever and ever.”

  Later, in our apartment, John and I sit at the kitchen table drinking tea. Kara is asleep on the floor beside us, in her car seat. She cried all the way home—the water was too cold, or there were too many people. Or the music was too loud. Who can say?

  “So we made your mother the godmother, huh?” John says. He has retreated back into himself, no more hand on my forehead.

  There’s wind blowing against the building, but it seems weaker than it has been, as if it’s coming from farther away.

  “Did you know?” I ask him. “Already, I mean, before?”

  He shakes his head. Maybe.

  “I don’t know what I knew,” he says. “I don’t even know what I know.”

  “Yes,” I say. I know the feeling.

  There’s a patter of rain, or perhaps hail, on the window. But just one wave, and then it stops. As if someone threw a handful of pebbles up to get our attention. A tree creaks. Quiets. John puts more water on the stove to boil.

  20

  Bright light and a lake as large as a sea.

  As the months creep by after Kara’s baptism, heat leaks back into Chicago and we all begin to unbutton our jackets. Slowly, because sometimes the heat is sucked back out. Sixty degrees followed the next day by thirty, a light rainstorm turning into a shower of snow. Like always during this transformation, I have been imagining a giant sleeping in the ground. He breathes out and the city is flush with warmth, but when he breathes back in we all shiver again.

  Or put another way: the residents of the city are dancers glowing with effort, sweat on our napes. We spin until a girl in red strolls by and then we all freeze like popsicles, bent at odd angles depending on how the music has melted us.

  Chicago is full of joy with the onset of spring. People smile at one another walking down the street, and tulips push crazily through the soil. Garden plots in front of apartment buildings turn barbaric with color. We all guzzle water and fruit and wine.

  It’s late May, and Kara and I are at the lakeshore. I perch on the concrete steps, Kara propped up on my lap, and point out the boats far from shore. I’m not sure she can focus across that distance yet, but she follows the direction of my hand and then gazes up at me with wonder. The boats themselves are not even looking at us. We are nothing they care to see.

  For the past months I’ve been a shorebound creature, keeping a modest radius from my home. But tomorrow I will wake up and be a traveler again. I leave for Milan at five a.m. and won’t come back for two weeks. There are gowns bagged up and ready for me to throw into a taxi, and a suitcase full of cotton shirts, iron-pleated skirts, and sandals. It will be warm in Milan, and I will be singing Violetta Valéry from La Traviata.

  There is a tinkling and a rumbling behind us. A cart pulls up behind a bicycle, parking in the half-full lot I walked across to reach the lake. The bicyclist, dressed all in black, jumps down and hops inside the cart, which is painted to look like a stage. In fact there is a real red velveteen curtain, and when a gloved hand pulls it back, a rabbit-shaped puppet appears. The little stage has my full attention by now, and a few other giddy sunbathers amble over to watch.

  A light crackling precedes the music. The sound has the warbling quality of an old record player, but how, I wonder, could a record player fit inside that silly wooden box? The song is ragtime, two-step, soft-shoe. The rabbit puppet is joined by a green snake with a hissing pink tongue, and they hop around each other, dipping in time to the shuffling beat.

  John is going to stay home with the baby.

  “Take the trip,” he said to me. He pointed out that he went to New York a month ago to sing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Have fun. Live a little.”

  “Have you been reading pamphlets from a travel agency?” I asked. “Come Visit Picturesque Italia!
Be the Envy of All Your Friends!” We are playful. It’s something that we’re trying out.

  Somehow the puppeteer manages to keep his hands invisible for the entire song. This doesn’t seem like it should be possible, and so I applaud when the puppets bend at the waist in a bow. In piping voices they welcome donations, and a little girl runs up with a dollar from her father’s wallet, which the snake accepts in his mouth, speaking a garbled thank-you.

  The music begins again and I lift Kara up by her underarms, placing her feet down on the pavement. They don’t yet lie flat—the logic of putting her weight on her own two legs is still the dream of a dream. But as the rabbit and the snake bounce against each other—rag-mop, shoe-bop—she toggles up and down, hilarious with her own mobility.

  A vessel cannot be judged separately from its contents. They change one another—the beautiful glass decanter bloody with dolcetto or sparkling with water over lemons and ice; the jar of pennies a different thing than the jar when it was full of apricot jam. When a crevasse in the earth is filled with salt water it’s called an ocean. Filled with fresh water, it’s called a lake. Even though to the seasick eye, the horizon might be just as distant, ruptured with waves.

  The genius of music is that it makes the internal external, ferries the heart into the mouth or the fingertips, then into the ears of passersby. What was inside me moves inside you, yoked to both. In this way we share blessings and curses and affairs of love. The puppets mock and punch one another and then hug furiously. They butt heads and mouth along with the song’s gentle nonsense—pin-drop, clue-hop, do-wah-de-laddle. Kara’s feet shuffle against the ground; she is like an ice skater, slipping, except that I keep her aloft, and we both laugh with delight.

  John hasn’t asked about my plans for the trip. He has told me about it, weaving magnificent stories in advance. I listen with interest. Try to hear nothing in his stories but the pleasure of them, the dips and turns. No meaning, only voice.

  “You’ll probably meet some rich count, who will of course fall madly in love with you,” he said recently. Sara was at our apartment, playing with the baby. That is something we’re trying, too. I still haven’t seen where she lives, but once in a while she will come over and stay for a short time. Eat a meal with us. Hold Kara in her arms. We talk sometimes about Ada, but neither one of us yet knows what to say about that. Ada weighs heavily; she always will.

  As John spoke, Sara and I glanced at one another askance.

  “Sure,” I said. “Who wouldn’t?”

  But John wasn’t really listening to me. “And then you’ll have to break his heart. But he’ll tell you that his love was just for your singing, and send us magnificent presents until his untimely death at age sixty-seven, since he can’t be close to you, but his gifts can direct the course of your life.”

  “Will he send gifts to you?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah.” John splayed on the couch, watching my mother pat Kara’s belly and help her scissor-kick from her back. “He’ll actually send me the best ones. He’ll think we have a bond, and then eventually we will. Because I will be forever bonded with the man who buys me a really fine Swiss watch. A silver watch. Because gold is a little, you know”—he pursed his lips—“too too.”

  I squinted at him.

  “Do you need me to leave you alone with these fantasies? Because we girls could just step out for a minute, if you like.”

  “No,” he said, swatting at a fly. “But just, you know. Tell him I am partial to those watches with moon dials in them. Those are pretty nice.”

  I felt a little ill, but when I looked at him he was smiling. He was inside the story, it seemed. Nowhere else. It is my job to believe that is possible.

  The sun is hot on the back of my neck, and I loosen my hair from its elastic band so it can provide some shade. I sweep Kara up into my arms and fish around in my pockets for some money. A couple of quarters and a five-dollar bill. I give Kara the bill, closing her fingers around it. She is not to be trusted with change yet. It always goes immediately into her mouth. I am forever making spitting faces—pew pew!—and sticking out my tongue to get her to mimic me.

  She sniffs the five-dollar bill and rubs it against her cheek, but I’m successful in maneuvering her towards the rabbit. The soft puppet hands clap together around the money and then the rabbit bows. The top of its head brushes Kara’s arm. She gasps and grabs at it, but it easily eludes her, as does the snake. I wonder how the puppeteer can see beyond his curtains. There isn’t any evidence of a peephole or mirror.

  Soon I’ll be on a plane, shrugging and squirming to try and find a comfortable position. Then pulling out my headphones and falling asleep listening to Verdi and maybe Puccini, for fun. And when I step off the plane, I’ll stretch my arms wide to open my lungs, wide enough that I can inhale the whole of existence. All the Italian exhaust fumes and espresso oils and the musk dabbed behind women’s ears. Pomade on men’s hair. I’ll walk briskly to baggage claim and let a kind stranger with my name on a placard pick up my things and place me in a car.

  Kara will stay behind and learn things and I will scramble to catch up when I return. Not her first words, her steps, but maybe her first taste of mashed pears and the thoughtful way she considers them. Sometimes at night she looks up as if yearning for stars, and I wonder what it is she sees. The sky is mostly blank in Chicago—too much pollution, too much light. But if her vision is still blurred by newness, maybe the streetlamps and headlights look to her like distant suns. A motorcycle rocketing by, like a meteor.

  This has become my wish for her, though she is daily more delighted by Mozart and Handel: that she sees things I cannot. The more she looks like me, her face resolving into my own baby pictures, the more I dream she will grow up to be blond and blue-eyed and inscrutable. I imagine her leaning over a microscope, a telescope, handily bandying a screwdriver or pipette.

  I imagine her dreaming about Greta, huddled by the stove in that warm wooden kitchen while the scent of bread dough intermingles with cook smoke. Or about Ada, the great-grandmother who will perhaps loom larger in her childhood imagination. A foreign princess exiled in an unfamiliar land. A woman whose hair was soft and dark until the day she died, who knew just how to lay her hand on my cheek to help me fall into sleeping.

  I don’t try to keep Ada alive through storytelling. But she does come up almost every day, in my words, in my thoughts. The soft sock I feel in my gut when I hear her name. When I speak it.

  Tomorrow I will put on a purple gown of silk that has been steamed smooth, so the skirt flares liquid like the arms of an octopus. I will use my lips and tongue and teeth, my lungs and belly and throat and spine. I will bend into notes and make the very windows shake. Make women and men in the audience cry.

  And someday Kara might wear scuffed sneakers. She might sneak out to watch meteor showers and trick me into learning the names of false constellations. Come home from science camp bursting with data about skeletal formation and the sound wavelengths in various parts of my chest. Blood thumping through my arteries carrying chain upon chain of unreadable DNA.

  When she is ten she might run ahead of me in the park, the soles of her shoes flashing white-white-white as she goes. Jump up and tumble into the grass to pinch clover flowers into a necklace, a chain. And if I turn my back she’ll scramble up into a tree. Her toes finding secret purchase where the bark puckers. She’ll sit on a branch several feet above my head, swinging her legs and leaning her weight on her palms, laughing at me as I stand resolute below her holding out my arms.

  Acknowledgments

  Immense gratitude to Peter Turchi, Mike McNally, Melissa Pritchard, and Tara Ison, who saw this book through many strange permutations, and always offered generous guidance and love. Thank you for being my teachers.

  To Branden Boyer-White, always my first reader and mind-twin: I have no idea what I would do without you, and I never want to find out. Appreciative adoration also to Angie Dell, Rachel Andoga, Lyndsey Reese, Sarah Hynes, Laura Ash
worth, Sam Martone, Corie Rosen Felder, Beth Staples, Mairead Case, and Molly Backes. I am lucky to have such brilliant and talented friends.

  To Katie Henderson Adams, an editor whose value and charm cannot be overstated. Your careful insight and infectious enthusiasm made this a much better book, and I cannot thank you enough. Much gratitude to everyone at Liveright, especially Cordelia Calvert, Will Menaker, and Peter Miller.

  To Emma Patterson, a true friend as well as a wonderful agent. You have been a delight from the very beginning, and I look forward to working (and emailing) together for many years to come. Thank you for being my work’s greatest advocate—even to me, sometimes. Thanks also to Sarah Cornwell for bringing us together.

  To my coworkers at Google, for their unflagging support—

  To the Ragdale Foundation and the Willapa Bay AiR, for providing time, space, friendship, and sustenance (of every variety)—

  To the Jewish Studies Department and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, for awarding me fellowships that allowed me travel to Krakow, Warsaw, Singapore, and Montreal in pursuit of this book—

  To Caitlin Horrocks, Kevin McIlvoy, Antonya Nelson, and Andrea Barrett, for their generous readings and advice—

  To Kara Hitchko and Lucia Ballard, for the use of their names, and for their friendship—

  To the friends whose emails and phone calls I doubtless neglected while working on this book—

  To my family, for believing in me and loving me always—

  Thank you.

  And finally, thanks could never be enough for Dave Clark, who not only loves me but also knows when to be close and when to give space—which is an invaluable gift. You are pretty great, sir.

  Further Praise for The Daughters

  An NPR Best Book of the Year 2015

  Winner of the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award in Fiction