Follow the Sun

by Sophia Rhodes

  “Something the matter?” she asked.

  “Uh, are you going home now?” I asked dumbly.

  Rosario looked puzzled. “Well, yeah.” Going by her expression, what she really meant was, Why do you care.

  “Oh, good,” I said, reaching for the door. My hand stopped of its own volition, unwilling to open it yet. Abruptly, I turned around and extended my hand. “It was really nice meeting you.”

  Rosario clasped my palm and shook it. “Me too,” she smiled.

  My cheeks burned. “I guess you’re busy all the time, right?” I stammered. “What do you do when you’re not working? Do you go out?” I could hardly bear to look at her, my face was on fire.

  “Sometimes,” she said evenly. “I play downtown on the weekends.”

  Suddenly I realized that I was still holding her hand. “Sorry,” I mumbled, pulling away awkwardly. “Where do you play? I’d love to come and hear you sing sometime.”

  She looked right into my eyes. “I’m not sure if it’s such a good idea. It’s not the kind of place a girl like you goes to.”

  I pictured a rough-around-the-edges, dirty watering hole where pool-playing bikers listened to rock’n’roll and smoked tobacco. How bad could it be? “I’m not as prissy as you think,” I ventured. “Betcha I’ll get in.”

  She shook her head. “I mean, it’s not the sort of place someone like you would go to,” she repeated. She seemed reluctant to spell it out. “Down on Central Avenue and 38th, there’s this bar called Brothers where I sing Saturday nights. They have cool Negro jazz performers and most of the patrons ain’t white either…” her voice tapered off as she looked at me.

  “You think I wouldn’t go because it’s a Negro bar?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t I? I’m not a racist. And besides, I love jazz.”

  “No, Diana.” Rosario sighed. “Besides the fact that you’re seventeen, it’s not your thing.” She exhaled, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something. As I stared at her expectantly, she made up her mind. “It’s a women’s bar. For women only. You understand?”

  A flash of realization hit me. For women only. She meant a queer bar. I closed my eyes, blushing all the way down to my toes. How could I be so stupid? I’d been right about Rosario all along – she was a queer, like the folks I’d read about in the newspaper when police rounded them off in the bushes or when they did raids on sissy joints, the type my mother referred to as bulldagers.

  “Oh,” I said dumbly, staring at my shoes. “I see. Sorry about that.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” Rosario said calmly.

  I could hear my heart pounding a rapid beat in my throat. It was a wonder she couldn’t hear it also. She was leaning back in her seat, a resigned smile playing on her lips, and I just knew she’d been in this situation before, having to tell someone that she was queer. I wondered how the other person had reacted.

  Tongue-tied, I opened the passenger door and slid out. Still holding onto the handle, I finally managed to say, “Thanks very much for the ride. I don’t know how I’d have made it home without you.”

  She nodded. “Not a problem.”

  I slammed the door and watched her pull out into the road and speed off into the late afternoon haze of Sepulveda avenue. I stood on my heels for the longest time, watching that cherry-colored Studebaker until it had shrunk to a pinpoint and then disappeared into the reddening horizon, then turned and shuffled my feet at a snail’s pace toward a place that wasn’t really home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I had cried my eyes out when I was told we were going to leave Cambridge. Now that was a place that made sense – a compact city with leafy wide boulevards and a central heart made up of antique stone buildings. Unlike California, the sense of history in Boston was palpable. I grew up relishing the smell of old books in Cambridge’s century-old library with its medieval turrets, and there was hardly anything I adored more than the feeling of downtown cobblestones underfoot or the smell of acrid sea-moss that swept in from the harbor and left a taste of salt on my lips.

  My father taught me to love our town with the intensity reserved for a historian. Born and raised in New England, he met my mother Lillian while working as a tour guide for the Boston’s famous haunted places walk. Somewhere between the Athenaeum, supposedly visited by the spirit of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Central Burying Ground, which holds the wailing bones of witches and thieves who were hung in Boston Common, he had made her acquaintance. His vibrant retelling of popular ghost stories had her spellbound.

  By the time I came along, his love of history was well-appreciated and he had already made tenure as professor at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, which he affectionately called “Boston’s Left Bank”. He had to arm-wrestle my mother, who had been quite keen on naming me something fashionable like Susan or Mildred, into agreeing to name me after his great-grandmother Diana, a Hungarian expatriate who’d been brought to America by an Austrian dolt who made it a habit to get drunk every night and demand his supper steaming on the table. After she got herself into a bit of a pickle that involved her husband’s skull and a frying pan, a very pregnant Diana ended up running pirate ships on the Caribbean seas during the early 1800s.

  I admired my infamous great-grandmother’s ferocity, the manner in which she clawed her way through life like a rat trapped inside a potato sack. Without anything to lose, she thought nothing of robbing, cheating and drinking along with her pirate mates. But as much as my father would have liked for me to end up with a smidgen of her fiery and fearless personality, my name was the only thing I shared with my great-grandmother.

  Far from a troublemaker, I turned out to be a gentle, curious child who everyone likened to my father. My early memories involve the two of us gathering colorful fall leaves on our quiet street in the suburbs and walking to the university campus hand in hand. To everyone, he was a quiet, bespectacled man with a sweet disposition; to me, he was an ingenious daddy who enjoyed watching me learn, his perpetually-curious mind always involved hands-on in my experiencing this new and wondrous world.

  He would join my random explorations by laying down on the ground beside me, squinting at flies and various critters and whispering: “So Di, what do you think they’re thinking right now? About being watched by these monstrous creatures?” and I would giggle and make up stories about secret fly kingdoms or cavernous realms which gargantuan earthworms called their own. He bought me a telescope that I used to spy on every bug, insect and wiggling muddy thing I could dig up from the earth and slap onto the cold surface of the lens.

  Aside from his goofy sense of humor, I never understood what had drawn my mother to someone as unorthodox as my father. As a young woman, my mother was a fluttering social butterfly; always attractively-dressed and perfectly coiffed, she liked to shop, go to lunch with her girlfriends, and gossip an afternoon away on topics like the latest fashion and movie star news. To think that she would choose to marry a man who had his nose a foot deep into a dusty volume on medieval history was incomprehensible to many of her friends. I would hear them sometimes in the living room, whispering in hushed tones over coffee and crumpets about this one’s husband and that one’s; how Margie’s beau liked his secretary a little too much, and did you see who Doris’ husband was having dinner with at Le Crème Brulé last Saturday?

  I’d pause behind the door, listening for the complaint I came to expect from my mother, and almost on cue, she didn’t disappoint: “Oh, dear,” she would exhale dramatically. “But at least Doris gets taken out every so often. Who’s there to take me to the theater?”

  “Come off it, Lillian,” her best friend Patty would scoff. “You have a beautiful home, a decent allowance, the latest model dishwasher…life’s not so bad for the old girl, is it?”

  “Good God, don’t ever say that! I can’t bear to see how fast I’m aging these days. I swear that man will put me in an early grave.”

  By that point I’d tiptoed back to my room, skipping the predictable debate over cosmetic pro
cedures and facial treatments. It wasn't that I didn’t want to sympathize with my mother; we simply had nothing in common. I was so much like my father that she’d grown to resent me. Each time she looked at me, I reminded her of her failed dream of having a Shirley Temple daughter with whom to share color-coordinated outfits. Anybody could see that my mother felt lonely and tried her best to supplement that emptiness with shopping and luncheons, but as hard as I tried, I had no interest in spending hours at the mall trying on clothing, preferred instead the comforts of curling up in bed with a good book.

  Over time, a vast silence crept between us, stretching our differences to the point of causing an irreversible rift. She saw me as my father’s daughter, a spy sent by him to torment her. To her chagrin, we didn’t even look alike. Her hair was light, golden and puffed up like a halo around her face. Her rouge was vibrant red, velvety and dramatic like her prized Chanel Jumbo purse and reptile skin pumps. Her nails carefully lacquered, she never missed an appointment with her beautician. And as for me? I was none of the above and we both knew it.

  In the last year or two before their divorce, my parents hardly addressed each other with less formality than one demonstrates a casual acquaintance. Pleasant but distant, my father chose to bury himself in his research, effectively ignoring his part in what could have been a reconciliation. My mother, in turn, threw tantrums and blew copious amounts of money on trinkets and weekends away with the girls. I was left to fend for myself, the expectation being that since I’d always been more mature than my peers, perhaps on account of being an only child, I’d find a way to see myself through this difficult period.

  Only once did I overhear my mother’s concern with my new habit of holing myself up for hours in my room with a book. “Do you think Diana is too withdrawn for a girl her age?” she asked Doris one Saturday afternoon. “I just don’t know what to do with her anymore, God only knows I’ve tried.” To this, Doris had shrugged. “Ach, you know teenagers these days. They’re always brooding over one thing or another. Don’t let it bother you, honestly dear.”

  The week before I found out what was in store for me, there wasn’t anything that stood out as particularly different about our routine. My mother was on the phone more often these days, speaking in a raspy, hushed tone and blowing her nose into a crumpled pink handkerchief. I thought nothing of it, figuring she was doing her usual complaining to her friends about this or that. Surprisingly, it was my father who approached me first on Wednesday night as I was listening to a Benny Goodman record in the living room.

  “Diana, can I speak to you for a moment?” he interrupted with that pinched look on his face that instantly made me wonder if I was in trouble. I stood away from the record player and followed him into the office, where he beckoned me to sit in his overstuffed leather chair.

  He cleared his throat twice before he started. “Honey, you know things have been difficult between your mother and I.”

  I nodded wordlessly, waiting for his next words, hoping they would not be what I dreaded most to hear. They couldn’t possibly be getting separated, could they? That would be ridiculous. He hadn’t even tried to mend things with Mother.

  His eyes were liquid brown, big and sad as he finally locked his gaze with mine. “Diana, we’re getting a divorce.”

  My mouth opened in protest, but before I could say anything, he waved his hand and continued. “I want you to know that we’ve put a lot of consideration into this. If it were up to me, I would still try to work on this marriage. This family is everything to me. But your mother…” his voice trailed off as he shook his head. “Sweetie, your mother isn’t happy. She hasn’t been happy here for a long time.”

  A flood of emotion engulfed me; choking back tears, I managed to squeak, “What’s wrong with her? Why does she have to be unhappy? Why can’t you two work this out?”

  My father let out a deep breath. “We’ve talked, sweetheart, for so long. We’re all talked out and it’s no longer as simple as that.”

  “But why, daddy? You’ve managed like this for years, why do you have to do this now? Why?” I could no longer keep my voice down. Sobbing, I persisted. “I don’t want things to change. What happens now? Is mother leaving? Why didn’t either of you say anything sooner?”

  I had never seen that look in my father’s eyes. They were bottomless orbits of pain. Defeated, he finally said, “Diana, listen to me. Your mother has someone. They’ve been together for a long time now, longer than I thought. She wants a divorce so she can be with him. And she wants to take you with her.”

  I don’t remember what happened after that. Light bulbs were going off in my brain and I felt as though I’d just been smacked upside the head. It had never occurred to me that my mother would do such a thing. Even that she might leave our family would have been more of a realistic prospect than her taking me along with her to God knows where. After all, where would we go? Why would she want to saddle herself with me? She didn’t even talk to me most days. If she had a boyfriend, why couldn’t she just leave me and my father alone and go off with her new beau?

  My father came around his desk to comfort me, but I couldn’t hear any more beyond the deafening noise inside my head. “I don’t want to go, daddy,” I sobbed, clutching on to his well-worn brown corduroy suit that he wore whenever he smoked his pipe. “Please don’t let her take me away. Why can’t I just stay here, with you? This is my house too. I’m not going anywhere!”

  He held me a long time. I hadn’t been in my father’s arms like this since I was a little child and he’d carried me off to bed over his shoulder. How I wished I could still be in that moment, sucking my thumb, secure in my blissful little world.

  “Poppet, you are legally still a minor. I asked her to let you finish high school here and allow you to choose, you’re old enough for that. But she just won’t listen. She’s right, you know. Any court will give her custody – I’m fifteen years her senior, what do I know about raising a teenage girl? She’s your mother after all. They say children belong with their mothers. Daughters especially.”

  Furious, I shoved myself away from him. “But what about fighting for me, daddy? For what I want?”

  As his gaze slowly drifted toward the window and the skinny tree outside, reluctant to face me, I screamed at the top of my lungs: “Do you really think this is what’s best for me? I want to stay in my home, go to my school – all my friends are here! My whole life is here, daddy – everything!”

  My father had given up on me as easily as he had on his marriage. In the next couple of weeks, he seemed content to drift off into his research material and putz around his office while my world fell apart around me like a house of cards. He had checked out completely, entered his own dream world where nobody could reach him, and totally shut me out in the process.

  I was nearly halfway through my last year of high school. I’d skipped sixth grade and I was the youngest in my senior class, but I’d grown up with those kids. Everybody knew me, the teachers liked me and I was on the yearbook committee, for pity’s sake. How could parents be so selfish? I wrote in my diary. It’s always about what they want, what they need, and they justify everything under this pretty ribbon of ‘it’s in my kid’s best interest.’ Not that it hardly ever is.

  As it turned out, my mother was rumored to have had several romantic interests over the years and had actually met her current boyfriend at one of the regular soirees hosted by Radcliffe’s History department to which my father had been invited but declined to attend. Albert had nothing at all to do with history; he had come as a companion to an elderly friend who was the guest lecturer that night, whom he knew from their shared hometown in Southern California. Albert worked as an administrator at a local college while his next-door neighbor was a professor at Berkley. Having never visited New England before, when his neighbor invited him to come along as an aide, Albert saw an opportunity to take a free trip and make some connections along the way. Of course, the most significant connection he made was wi
th my mother – over shrimp appetizers and sweet Madeira wine.

  The week after my parents announced their impending divorce, I figured out that my mother must have started her affair approximately six months earlier. It had occurred to me that I could figure out the precise date by going over our phone bill.

  My hunch proved itself correct a half hour later, as I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of my father’s office surrounded the by a mountain of bills. Judging by the volume of long-distance calls to a place called Woodland Hills, CA, they must have fallen heads over heels. From June onwards there had been daily calls, sometimes two or three in a day. What was my father thinking? How could he not notice what was going on?

  “You’ll be happy in California, you’ll see…” my mother tried to inspire confidence but a raspy unease lingered in her voice, causing it to break.

  “You don’t sound so sure of it yourself,” I snapped back.

  “It’s a big move and there are a lot of things to consider, yes, but I don’t doubt we’ll be happy there. And no more dreary winters, what do you think about that, poppet?”

  “I like snow, remember? My best sport is ice-skating! I don’t see why you won’t at least let me finish my school year.”

  She pursed her lips, a sign the conversation was over. “I won’t sit here and argue endlessly. This is the right time to go, everything has been arranged, and we’re doing this whether you like it or not.”

  “Yeah, mom, that’s a great way to inspire me, just hold a gun to my head,” I muttered. “You think I’ll be happy living with a man I’ve never met?”

  “Don’t be melodramatic, Diana,” my mother retorted, flicking her hand as in ‘I’m not going to bother with you anymore’ before she walked out of the room.

  November in New England is so depressing. The sky is as oppressive as an enormous anvil coming down to crush your ribs and leave you breathless. The hours of daylight were getting shorter in the same way as my days in Cambridge were coming to an end. It was an interesting parallel, how the shrinking of the light mirrored the increase of the dark fear inside me.