Bridge Daughter

by Jim Nelson

  Often in these television shows some major dramatic moment would occur. The family doctor, Scotch-and-soda in hand, would let slip he’d diagnosed the father with cancer. Or the eldest sister would announce she’d been accepted to a prestigious university like Harvard or Stanford. The bridge daughter never spoke, of course. On television, everything important happened to other people, never the bridge daughter.

  Hanna never quite understood why they were called “bridge parties.” The bridge daughter had little to do in these TV shows. She stood to one side while the rest of the family went through their weekly crises and upheavals. The bridge daughter served dinner and cleaned the house and answered the door when the bell rang. On shows set in the costumed past, she darned socks and tended the sheep pen and threw logs on the fire when the flames drew low. Even that afternoon at the bakery, a few bridge daughters were helping their mother with the day’s errands. Mute and deferential, clad in neutral-color dresses and soft-soled shoes, they were easily overlooked, but not by Hanna.

  On the drive home, Hanna asked her mother, “Is Cheryl a bridge daughter?”

  Hanna’s mother considered her answer. “Bridge daughters are supposed to stay home and take care of the family, not get their hair done and go to Napa for spa weekends.”

  “Like Erica,” Hanna said. Erica Grimond was the eldest daughter of the family across the street. They’d moved into the neighborhood a month earlier.

  “That’s right,” her mother said. “Erica’s a bridge daughter.”

  “Will she have a bridge party?” Hanna asked.

  “I doubt the Grimonds will invite us to it,” Hanna’s mother said. “They’re traditional people. They’ll only invite their family.”

  Hanna thought some more. “Is that why you don’t want me going to Cheryl’s bridge party?” she asked. “Because we’re not their family?”

  They reached a stoplight. Hanna’s mother set the car’s left turn signal blinking, click-click-click. “What Cheryl Vannberg’s mother is doing isn’t right. It’s not fair to Cheryl.”

  “But—“

  “You are not going to the party,” her mother said. “That’s final.”

  Hanna pushed back in the seat, frustrated. She considered pleading. It had worked before. She had begged her way to attending Cheryl’s extravagant birthday parties, she could try it again for her bridge party. Cheryl’s parties were more spectacular than any of the hum-drum birthday parties Hanna’s parents had arranged for her. They were worth the indignity.

  One year, Cheryl’s mother rented a pony. All the children got ride tickets in their goodie bags. The pony was saddled and muzzled and tethered to a metal pole. It walked a circular path of hay all afternoon with bouncy children on its back. Cheryl’s mother had contacted the city for permission to put the pony ride in the street before their house, a quiet road that dead-ended half a block away.

  When it was Hanna’s turn, a man in black denim and a floppy cowboy hat lifted her by the armpits and set her in the saddle. Hanna wove her fingers into the pony’s fine, soft mane, silky as down. She patted and rubbed the side of its neck. The pony demonstrated no appreciation of her caresses and merely plodded along its hay-lined track.

  Hanna wondered how the cowboy treated the pony at the stable. Was it allowed to run free in a field or was it locked in a pen? Was this the only life it knew, muzzled and saddled and restricted by blinders? She suspected she could cut the tether and the pony would continue walking the monotonous circle, unaware it could bolt and be free.

  After the ride, she dug out the remaining pony tickets from her goodie bag. She could trade them for more candy or bubble-gum-flavored lip gloss. But those tickets meant more circles for the pony, so Hanna stuffed them to the bottom of her bag. No one could use them. She wished she could buy the entire roll of tickets and set the pony free, but Hanna knew the animal would merely sidle up to its owner and wait for the next command.

  *

  Hanna’s mother pulled the car up the inclined driveway of their house. She would get the sheet cake from the trunk and Hanna would take the bags of groceries in the back seat.

  Bags in hand, Hanna chanced to look across the street at the Grimond house. The Driscolls and the Grimonds lived in stock suburban one-stories with oval front yards and attached garages. Unlike the Driscolls’ mauve exterior, the Grimond house was painted flat white with gray trim with a double-door entrance on their front stoop. Their first week of residence, Mr. Grimond installed oversized brass knockers on both of them, although Hanna had never seen anyone prefer them to the doorbell.

  A wide picture window faced the street. When the drapes were open, as they were now, Hanna could see straight into the living room. As Hanna’s eyes adjusted, she realized someone was standing in the picture window. Grocery bags in each hand, Hanna took one step down the driveway to get a better look, then took another. She wondered who of the Grimond family it may be. They had three children, twin sons and their bridge daughter Erica. Realizing it had to be one of the children, Hanna did her best to wave, the full bags weighing down her attempt.

  Clock-clock-clock. The silhouette in the window rapped the glass three times.

  Hanna took one more step down the driveway to the sidewalk. Head cocked, she tried to wave again, bags in each hand. She wondered if it was Erica. She’d never talked with her, or even met her. Erica seemed pent-up in the Grimonds’ house all day, every day.

  Clock-clock-clock, the silhouette knocked harder this time. The figure raised a shadowy open hand as way of greeting. Or beckoning.

  Then, startled, the figure at the window wheeled about to face Mrs. Grimond, who was marching across the room. Now Hanna could identify the silhouette. It was Erica, the Grimonds’ bridge daughter. Mrs. Grimond pulled Erica from the window scolding her, although Hanna couldn’t hear a word. Then Mrs. Grimond stared disapprovingly across the street at Hanna. With two sharp tugs of the curtain cord, she drew the drapes closed.

  Hanna’s mother called from the front door to hurry inside. Hanna shouted she was coming and waddled up the driveway, the grocery bags weighing her down with each unsteady step.

  Three

  The doorbell rang at ten after twelve. Hanna yelled I got it! and rushed to the front door. Without hesitating, she flung it open and ran into the waiting arms of Uncle Rick.

  “Hey squirt,” Uncle Rick said into her hair, hugging her back. His grin stretched his full auburn beard wide. “Happy birthday.”

  “Happy birthday,” Aunt Azami said as well.

  Hanna’s mother appeared at the doorway in a half-apron with her hands buried in a kitchen towel. “Ritchie,” she greeted Uncle Rick. She was the only one who could call him that. To Aunt Azami she offered a “Hello.”

  Uncle Rick was wide and beefy, bearded and hairy-armed, a grinning teddy bear of a man. Aunt Azami was his physical opposite. Thin and composed of straight lines, with little womanly figure to speak of, Azami had fine dark hair cut evenly around her head. Her bangs framed the black rectangular glasses on her narrow face. Hanna thought her glasses were very, very cool. She wished she needed corrective lenses just so she could wear the same ones. Aunt Azami also never wore makeup, which Hanna also secretly admired.

  Uncle Rick presented Hanna a scuffed-up plastic bucket. He gripped it the way a bricklayer would carry a bucket of grout. “Let’s see what I got this time.” He considered the mismatched assortment of flowers standing in the bucket’s water. “Freesia, white roses, a couple of sunflowers, daffs, some carnations—“

  “Well, don’t get any water on my floors,” Hanna’s mother warned.

  Hanna couldn’t believe the assortment he’d brought. The bucket was packed so tight the flowers seemed to be craning for air. It was like he brought her a starter’s kit for a sidewalk florist shop. Her mind began formulating bouquets and arrangements she could assemble with this raw materiel.

  “Tell you what,” he said to Hanna, “this is dripping, so let’s leave it here.” He set the bucke
t on the porch beside the front door, in the shade.

  “Thank you so much,” Hanna said and hugged him again. She kneeled before the bucket and began selecting the best of the lot for her first arrangement.

  “What’s going on, Dee,” Uncle Rick said to Hanna’s mother. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Sorry we’re late.”

  “Someone slept in,” Aunt Azami said. Uncle Rick grinned sheepishly through his beard.

  They followed Hanna’s mother inside. Hanna took her time on the porch, choosing blossoms with an eye for color and shape. When she’d selected eight or nine of the best from the bucket, she joined them in the kitchen.

  Uncle Rick already had a can of beer open. He stood off to the side and watched the women at work. Hanna’s mother was at the sink flattening and rounding meat patties for the hamburgers. Hanna’s father was still at the hardware store. When he returned he would light the backyard grill and cook them up.

  Aunt Azami produced from a muslin tote bag a wood bowl with a fastened lid. She opened it to reveal a dark, leafy green salad with roasted sesame seeds and strange star-shaped vegetables with pinkish centers. She also produced from the tote a glass jar of loose tea leaves. “I thought we could make a pot after lunch.”

  “We have coffee,” Hanna’s mother said.

  “Tea might be nice as well,” Aunt Azami said.

  “I don’t have a kettle.”

  “I brought a tea ball. I can make it on the stove.”

  Hanna’s mother, busy pressing patties, forced a small smile.

  The tension wasn’t thick, there was never anything vindictive between Azami and Hanna’s mother, but the tension was present whenever they visited. Hanna so wished it could be mended, but she didn’t even know what was broken. Her mother just seemed to dislike Aunt Azami, and Hanna couldn’t fathom why.

  Uncle Rick wandered into the adjacent room, where everyone would be eating soon. “Hey, Dee,” he called through the doorway, “where’d you get these blooms?”

  Uncle Rick was evaluating the vase of tulips Hanna’s mother had placed on the dining room table. He rubbed their petals between his thumb and forefinger the way a tailor would evaluate a bolt of bargain polyester.

  “Did you go to that shopping mall florist again?” he called to her.

  “Don’t start, Ritchie,” Hanna’s mother called back. “I like them.”

  “Bah,” he said. “Greenhouse tu’s picked early.”

  “I wouldn’t have bought them If I thought you would bring me tulips,” she called back. “But you never do.”

  “Greenhouse tu’s, a fern sprig, a little dry gyp,” he said, evaluating the bouquet’s elements in the industry parlance Hanna so loved to hear.

  Uncle Rick returned to the kitchen. “Tell you what,” he confided to Hanna, pretending to be covert, “you put together your arrangement and we’ll ditch this tulip crap. Deal?”

  “Watch the language,” Hanna’s mother singsonged while smacking a patty.

  From the bucket Hanna had selected three brilliant red freesia, a white rose with an elegant petal display, and a clutch of carnations of varying pastels. She took the morning paper’s auto section and spread it open on the kitchen table. She asked permission to use her mother’s good scissors, which was refused, so she fetched the hand shears from the garage. While Uncle Rick and her mother had verbally jabbed at each other, Hanna’s deft little hands stripped the flowers’ green leaves and snipped the stems so each was a different height, the carnations the shortest and the white rose the tallest. She cut the stems at a diagonal, to maximize the amount of water they could draw in.

  Then Hanna fetched from her room a slender ceramic vase and a bag of colored glass marbles. Her mother kept a box of powdered water conditioner under the kitchen sink. She filled the vase halfway with cold water, added two shakes of the powder, and swirled it until dissolved. Then she added marbles until there were three layers of them in the boot of the vase. She inserted the flowers one at a time, making the silken ivory rose the centerpiece and the surrounding colorful flowers its complement. So devoted to her work, she failed to notice the women had retired to the couches in the living room. Hanna’s father was late.

  “Perfect-o,” Uncle Rick said behind her. He’d opened the highest cabinet in the kitchen, the small boxy one over the refrigerator. Standing on his tiptoes to reach in, he rooted around with one hand while the other gripped his can of beer.

  “Did I do it right?” she said to him.

  “That arrangement’s a pro job if I ever saw one.”

  His hand emerged from the cabinet holding a bottle of bourbon. Hanna’s parents kept their liquor collection up there. They only brought it out for guests they intended to impress, which did not include Uncle Rick. Putting a finger over his lips for silence, he unscrewed the whiskey’s top and poured a generous amount into the can of beer. Then he capped the bottle and returned it to its place.

  “Next time you’re in the city you should come by the Mart,” he said.

  Uncle Rick worked at the San Francisco Flower Mart loading and unloading pallets five days a week, from five-thirty in the morning to two in the afternoon. The bucket of flowers he brought Hanna would normally run well over three hundred dollars, but the picks were at the end of their bloom and doomed for fertilizer, so he could take them away at no cost.

  Aunt Azami entered the kitchen. “That’s beautiful,” she said of the arrangement. She procured from the refrigerator the bottle of Chardonnay they’d brought from the city. She eyed Uncle Rick’s can of beer. “Only one more after this,” she warned.

  He tipped the can of beer at her to acknowledge who was the boss. Hanna knew he wouldn’t stop until he’d finished at least four more, and most of the remaining whiskey as well.

  Hanna’s stomach knotted again. Pressure swelled around her eyes. The walls seemed to be squeezing in on her, like a tin submarine descending the ocean’s depths.

  Uncle Rick picked up Hanna’s arrangement and admired it. “Let’s move those junk tulips out of the way and get this on the table.”

  Hanna was falling, falling away from the flowers, falling away from him.

  “Squirt?” It was Uncle Rick’s voice. “Squirt—“

  Darkness washed up and over Hanna, and then there was nothing at all.

  *

  “—maybe she’s dehydrated—” Hanna heard a woman say.

  “—been so excited about the party—” Her mother’s voice, Hanna thought.

  “—make room, give her some air—” Definitely Uncle Rick.

  Hanna lay on the kitchen linoleum with her legs stretched out. Someone had pillowed her head with a couch cushion. Uncle Rick and Aunt Azami leaned over her, their faces filling Hanna’s field of vision. A gentle soothing hand massaged her forehead. Hanna peered up and saw, upside-down, her mother kneeling on the floor tending to her. Worry-lines had made her mother’s stern face even more granite-like.

  “What happened?” Hanna said.

  “Passed out, squirt,” Uncle Rick said. “You okay?”

  Hanna took a deep breath. The salty stickiness had returned to her mouth. “I’m thirsty.”

  “Let’s see if she can sit up,” Hanna’s mother said.

  The three of them helped her up. Uncle Rick drew a glass of water from the kitchen tap. She drank it greedily, offering him a breathless Thank you when she finally withdrew the glass from her lips.

  “Should we take her to the emergency room?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Hanna’s mother said. She took Hanna’s free hand and rubbed it. “She just needs to lie down and close her eyes.”

  “I want cake,” Hanna said automatically.

  Uncle Rick laughed. “Later,” Hanna’s mother said.

  The knotting in her stomach had returned. She pushed on her belly, just under her navel. Something hard and tender was under the skin. She’d noticed it for about a week, but now it was throbbing, making its presence known to Hanna.

 
“I know what happened.” Hanna whispered to her mother that she didn’t want Uncle Rick to hear. A big confused, she asked her brother to step outside. Uncle Rick shrugged, said “No problem,” and left the kitchen.

  Hanna waited until she heard the sliding glass door shut, meaning Uncle Rick was in the backyard. She wanted Aunt Azami to hear this too. It was exciting, like procuring the final approval stamp on a club membership application.

  She said to the women, “It’s finally happening.” She needed a moment to recall the terminology. “Pons viviparous hemotrophism.” She looked to them for approval or a hug.

  Aunt Azami straightened up. She gave Hanna’s mother a concerned look.

  “Hanna,” her mother said flatly, “where did you hear that term.”

  “Some of Cheryl Vannberg’s friends told me,” she lied. She knew they’d started their periods, so it wouldn’t hurt to use them as references. “It’s okay. I know what it means.” Excited, she related what the dictionary had suggested to her.

  “Oh, Hanna,” her mother said softly.

  Hanna climbed to her feet and stood before her. “What’s wrong?”

  “You and I need to talk,” her mother said.

  “What did I do? Is something my fault?”

  Aunt Azami said, “I’ll leave you two,” and she went outside.

  Hanna’s mother sighed, “Let’s talk in your room.”

  Walking past the dining room, Hanna saw through the sliding glass door Aunt Azami talking to Uncle Rick in the backyard. Both were smoking cigarettes. While Aunt Azami talked, Uncle Rick peered back at Hanna. He held up a gentle hand, palm out, indicating peace, or perhaps his concern. Hanna flushed red. She didn’t appreciate Azami sharing her news with Uncle Rick without her permission, not one bit.

  In Hanna’s bedroom, her mother sat on the made bed. She patted the spread for Hanna to join her. Hanna wondered if she should risk showing the urine test to her mother, to prove she had pons viviparous hemotrophism and was not just making it up. Did she think Hanna was pretending to have it, like a child behind the wheel of a parked car pretending she’s driving?