Bridge Daughter

by Jim Nelson

  “How? Cheryl has everything.”

  “Hanna, I know that if you look at it from Cheryl’s point of view, you’ll see just how little she really has.” He gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Are you sure you want to go through with this? It’s not too late to turn around.”

  “I want to see Cheryl one last time,” Hanna said.

  Then, after a few minutes, she asked, “What does pons anno mean?”

  “’Bridge year,’” her father said. “The most important year of your life, honey.”

  *

  Hanna was not excited about the party, or cake and ice cream, or the chance to ride a pony again. Although Cheryl’s glamour wowed Hanna when she was eleven and twelve, she’d grown to see Cheryl’s presence as souring and annoying. Cheryl made everything about herself, always, no matter the situation.

  It only got worse when Cheryl’s bump grew visible. She treated her pregnancy as an elevated status, a sign she was graduating to adulthood while the other girls remained little children, as though Hanna and the rest were still playing dress-up dolls and making mud pies. Once, cradling her sheer round belly, Cheryl told Hanna, “God chose me.” Hanna later realized Cheryl was actually saying God didn’t choose you.

  Hanna’s father guided the car around a corner. “Oh—you are kidding me.”

  Although the street was not blocked by a pony corral this time, the entire front of the Vannberg house was made up like a circus tent, red- and yellow-striped fabric down over the front with thick ropes projecting out from the corner eaves. A clown in full regalia, right down to the oversized maraschino-red shoes, blew up balloons and dispensed candy from a bag. A juggler in the driveway spun hoops about his arms, wrists, and ankles. Cheery organ music came from the house. Legions of kids swarmed in and out of the wide-open front door and ran circles about the lawn. It looked nothing like the bridge parties on television, tasteful adult-only dinner parties with roast beef and wine.

  Hanna took a helium balloon from the clown and laughed when he honked his nose and waddled off. One of the boys on the other end of the front lawn waved to Hanna; she’d met him at Cheryl’s birthday party last year. Hanna did not feel like seeing him again, and told her father they should go inside.

  In the entry foyer, Cheryl’s aunt sat at a folding table acting as the party greeter. Hanna traded her invitation for a colorful paper sack of goodies and tickets for a raffle being held later. She also received a stick-on badge with her name written in sparkly cursive script. Hanna’s father placed his name tag on the pocket of his button-down shirt, hiding the old ink stains there.

  “Cheryl is in the back of the house,” the aunt said, and she pointed them down the hallway. “You should say hello.”

  The living room was a somber affair compared to the circus outside. The drapes were shut and two shaded side-lamps were on low, making the room oddly dim for one o’clock in the afternoon. Only adults were present. Most wore the kind of clothes one would wear to church or a funeral. They sat on the couches and in a circle of high-backed dining chairs, while the remainder stood. One way or another, each managed to balance a small paper plate of hors d’oeuvres on their laps or armrest while drinking wine from plastic cups.

  At the far end of the room, Cheryl sat in a cushioned chair with extra cushions for back support. Her feet were up on a maternity footstool. Like her mother, she wore a flowing, flowery dress, one most likely purchased for this occasion and none other, and an excess of make-up. Her hair was up. Hanna could smell the hairspray from across the room.

  “Come in,” Cheryl said to Hanna and her father. “Mom, it’s Mr. Driscoll and Hanna.”

  Cheryl’s mother greeted them both, shaking Hanna’s father’s hand warmly. “Dian couldn’t make it?”

  “Under the weather,” Hanna’s father said.

  It had only been a few weeks since Hanna saw Cheryl at the bakery, and yet she’d gained considerable weight. Most of it was around her neck and face and in her upper arms, exposed by the sleeveless dress. The garland in Cheryl’s hair reminded Hanna of the green ferns Hanna’s mother placed on the turkey each Thanksgiving.

  Hanna offered Cheryl the bouquet and said, “Congratulations.”

  Cheryl accepted the flowers with a warm smile. She put her nose to the sunflower and drew in deeply. “They smell wonderful.”

  “These are for you too,” she said, offering a paper bag of tsuru.

  Cheryl raised a marigold paper crane from the bag for everyone to see. A few of the adults ooo’d at the craft. “Did you make these?” she asked Hanna.

  Hanna nodded, tempering her proud smile. Then, “Are you feeling okay?”

  Cheryl slumped a little, a weak deprecating smile her admission. “I’m feeling fine, but I’m taking some medicine for the baby.” She looked down on herself. “It made me balloon.”

  “It’s just a precaution,” Cheryl’s mother intervened. “The weight will come off after the delivery, honey.”

  “I’m so glad you came,” Cheryl said to Hanna, sounding surprisingly sincere. “I wish I could see you after the baby comes, but I’m taking her to Oregon.” She rubbed her distended belly through the loose flowery dress. “We’re going to go live with my aunt and uncle until she’s four.”

  “Fresh air,” Cheryl’s mother said.

  Hanna surveyed the room. The adults sunk back into the couches and chairs, giving each other knowing looks, little raised eyebrows and suggestive grimaces. Hanna felt a tinge within her, a kind of revulsion she’d lately started to experience more and more often.

  *

  After the raffle, adults and children gathered in the dim living room to watch Cheryl open the gifts that had been stacked about the brick fireplace. Just like on television, the gifts were largely for the coming infant, little booties for the feet, rompers for carpet-crawling, and so on. Most of the boys looked bored, and they snuck out to play tag on the front lawn. The girls watched Cheryl through intrigued, fascinated eyes, most a bit jealous of Cheryl enjoying the center of attention once again. Hanna wondered how many of them were bridge daughters, how many of their bodies were ticking down the days until they too began to taste a salty queasiness in the back of their mouths.

  Then it hit Hanna. None of them were bridge daughters. Bridge daughters would be dressed like Erica Grimond, wearing functional gray dresses of flannel and linen, not festive party skirts. Bridge daughters only left the house to help with errands, never to attend festivities and eat frosted cake. Even the bridge daughter, the girl the party was honoring, wasn’t supposed to be there, the center of attention. Cheryl was supposed to pick up dirty plates and answer the door and put out a hot supper when the time arrived. The adults’ stiffness and arched eyebrows, the other girls’ fascination with a glamorous bridge daughter preparing for birth—what was going on here was not the norm. Hanna recalled her mother calling Mrs. Vannberg “brazen.” Without consulting her dictionary she now had an idea what that word meant.

  Once the gifts had been unwrapped and Cheryl’s thank-yous and hugs distributed around the room, Cheryl’s mother announced cake and ice cream. The kids rushed for the kitchen. Hanna’s father was talking to Cheryl’s father, Carter Vannberg. He had a perfectly round head, bald and car-wax shiny on top. Hanna had never seen him in anything but a vest and tie and white shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, just as he was dressed now.

  With the help of a female relative, Cheryl rose from the chair, one hand on her back for support. She took tiny steps while regaining her balance. “I just need to stretch my legs.” Hanna was stunned. Cheryl was huge, much larger than she appeared sitting.

  “Can you help me decorate my room?” Cheryl said to Hanna. “With your paper cranes.”

  Hanna couldn’t recall a single time where Cheryl asked for Hanna’s private company. Puzzled, she said, “Of course.” She offered a hand. “Do you need help?”

  “I’ll do okay,” Cheryl said, walking in slight steps down the hall, right hand out for balance.
/>   In Cheryl’s bedroom, they took the cranes from the bag and distributed them around the room. Cheryl wanted a few on her bed stand, so she could see them when she awoke. She asked Hanna to place others on a high shelf alongside photos of Cheryl and her mother posing before California’s trademarks: the Hollywood sign, the Golden Gate Bridge, Disneyland, all sights Hannah had never visited. Cheryl placed three cranes on the window sill positioned so they appeared to be gazing longingly out at the backyard swimming pool and the children splashing about.

  “I wish I knew how to make these,” Cheryl said wistfully.

  Unthinking and a bit nosy, Hanna picked up a bottle of prescription pills on the bed stand. Along with warnings and doctor information, the label read GEFYRAPROGESTAGEN.

  “They make me feel sick,” Cheryl said. “I never want to eat.”

  “Not even cake?”

  “No,” Cheryl groaned. “I never eat but I keep getting fat.”

  “Maybe it’s the baby.”

  “That’s what my mother keeps telling me, but I don’t think so. It’s those pills.” Cheryl dropped her voice. “Can I tell you a secret?”

  Cheryl put a finger over her lips. She motioned for Hanna to close the door, which she did. Then Cheryl went to her clothes closet and drew back the sliding door.

  “I can’t bend down,” she said quietly. “Reach in the back, in the corner. Pull up the carpet.”

  Hanna got on her hands and knees and felt around the back of the closet. The bedroom’s peach wall-to-wall carpeting extended to the rear of the closet. Just as Cheryl indicated, the carpet was loose in the corner. Hanna pulled it back and, without Cheryl’s prompting, felt around the hard exposed flooring. A board was loose.

  “It should come right up,” Cheryl said.

  Hanna got a fingernail under the board and pried it up. She removed it and set it beside Cheryl’s feet.

  “You shouldn’t have to reach down very far,” Cheryl said.

  Hanna reached her hand in the hole, then retreated, worried about rats. Don’t be dumb, she told herself, and reached in again. She pulled out a compact wood box with a hinged top and a simple brass latch. Cheryl took it from Hanna and popped it open.

  In the box rested a ream of leafy light-green cash, more money than Hanna had ever seen at one time. Cheryl scooped it out and fanned it. Singles and five-dollar bills, but also some tens and twenties. Hanna saw two or three fifty-dollar bills in the arrayed bills. A crisp, never-folded hundred-dollar bill crowned the top of the stack.

  “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” Cheryl asked.

  “Where’d you get all that?”

  “My parents,” Cheryl said. “Every so often I take a little money from my father’s billfold or my mother’s purse. Or keep some of the change when my mother has me buy something.”

  How much money do the Vannbergs keep around the house? Hanna thought.

  In response to Hanna’s facial expression, Cheryl said, “I’m not stealing!” in a high whisper. “They won’t miss it.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “A few months ago, I started to think I should have some of my own money.”

  Hanna’s eyes goggled. “You got all that in just a few months?”

  “My parents use cash for everything,” Cheryl said. “My father says that’s how you get the good service.” She stuffed the money back in the box and snapped the lid shut. “Do you know how babies are made?”

  Hanna nodded. “I read a book about it. I could give it to you.”

  “Does it have pictures?”

  Hanna nodded, although she didn’t find the pictures in Mother & Baby as useful as what was written beneath them.

  “I have to be with a boy, don’t I?” Cheryl bit her lip. “I’ve kissed a couple of boys.” She named them for Hanna as proof. “But that’s not enough to make a baby, is it?”

  Hanna, mindful of her promise, said, “What does you mother say?”

  “God put it there,” Cheryl said. “’Nature’s way,’ my father says. My mom calls her ‘little Cheryl’ some times.” She shook her head, looking almost ready to cry. “I don’t understand…”

  Hanna replaced the wooden box in the hole and returned everything in the closet as she’d found it.

  “If I phone you,” Cheryl said, “can you come over and get the money for me?”

  “For what?”

  Cheryl’s parents had placed a maternity chair in the corner of Cheryl’s bedroom. A padded footstool allowed her to rest her ankles. She almost fell into the chair. She started crying, the first time Hanna had ever seen her do so.

  “I might call you from the hospital.” Cheryl pointed at the head of her princess bed. On the embroidered pillows sat a stuffed cartoony lion with a pink mane and a rainbow-colored ball at the end of its tail. “I might call you and say I want Mr. Fluffens. Can you come over here and get the money and bring both of them to me at the hospital?”

  Hanna sat on the floor at Cheryl’s feet. “What will you do with the money?”

  Cheryl wiped her face dry, using fingertips to avoid smearing her makeup. “I’ve been a good daughter,” she said. “Me and my mother, we talk about everything. But I feel like something bad is going to happen to me. I feel like my mother’s hiding something.”

  Hanna took a chance. “Have you ever read about bridge daughters?”

  “I’ve seen them on TV,” Cheryl said. “But I’m not like them. I’m different.”

  “But this is a bridge party.”

  “Just for fun,” Cheryl said. “My mom calls it that to make it sound more sophisticated. But it’s not a real bridge party. Like my rodeo last year? That wasn’t a real rodeo.”

  Hanna said, “Maybe I can get you a book,” thinking she might have to steal Mother & Bridge Daughter for Cheryl. “You should read it.”

  Cheryl’s cheeks were bright red from the crying. Strawberry blond curls dangled down both sides of her face, their ends sticky-wet. They got into the foundation on her cheeks, now starting to cake up.

  “I can’t read books,” Cheryl said. “My mom has always been there for me.”

  Seven

  Every surface in Hanna’s bedroom overflowed with loose tsuru, all numbered. Cranes were in the hallway bathroom too, in the medicine cabinet and in the green fern hanging from the ceiling and around the toothbrush rack. Hanna wanted to showcase each and every one of them. Bath steam had deformed many of the cranes.

  When her mother complained about them, Hanna convinced her to allow her to distribute tsuru as gifts around the neighborhood. It would allow Hanna to relieve the pressure of finding new places for the little paper birds. Without more room, she was going to have to start storing them in a box or suitcase under her bed. She hated the idea of keeping them where they couldn’t be admired, even in passing.

  Hanna’s mother advocated and practiced a reformed method of raising bridge daughters, but nothing so unorthodox to allow Hanna to run around the neighborhood unattended. Together they dropped in on nearby homes with unsolicited offerings of origami cranes. It posed more of a problem than Hanna expected. Some of their neighbors seemed put out by the gift, as though taking in ten paper cranes was akin to storing the Driscolls’ spare furniture in their garage. Hanna’s mother explained Hanna was “going a little crazy” with origami and assured no gift was expected in return. From her mother’s facial expressions, Hanna developed the suspicion she was communicating to the neighbors that they could destroy the cranes after they’d left. This bothered Hanna at first, but she placated herself by remembering that the goal was to fold a thousand cranes. What came of them was secondary.

  Back at home, Hanna obsessively noted in her register which neighbor received which run of numbered tsuru. She flipped the pages of the notebook with a distinct sense of pride as she tracked the whereabouts of each crane. She had crossed the 200 mark, one-fifth of the way to her goal and her wish.

  She was also down to the last few sheets of the origami paper Aunt Azami had gifted her. O
nce her supply was exhausted, she would have to start cutting writing paper into perfect squares. With this new source, her next cranes would be of flimsier bluish-white paper with thin college-rule stripes. Hanna hated the idea of quantity over quality, but when you’re making a thousand of anything, expediency takes on a logic of its own.

  Alone in her room, she finished four cranes from the last of the Aunt Azami’s paper. From the two hundred and fifty sheets in the ream, she’d produced two hundred twenty-one cranes. The rest of the paper had been used by Aunt Azami on Hanna’s birthday to teach her how to fold (which didn’t count toward the one thousand, Hanna decided) and the various cranes Hanna had botched and couldn’t salvage. She used the final sheet of Aunt Azami’s paper as a template to cut squares from her pack of writing paper. The downtown stationery store might carry origami paper, but her mother refused to buy more without good reason.

  “You’ve got too many of those things around the house already,” she told Hanna. “Honestly, why do you need any more?”

  Of Hanna’s gift-giving throughout the neighborhood, she’d avoided the Grimonds across the street. Erica knocking on the window was not the only source of discomfort Hanna had experienced with the family. In the few months they’d been in the house, the Grimonds remained distant from the rest of the neighborhood. Their twin sons , kindergarten-aged, were as shut-in to the house as Erica. When Mrs. Grimond and Erica pulled down the driveway in their Plymouth, off to the supermarket or some other errand, Mrs. Grimond failed to make eye contact with Hanna, even when Hanna waved. Erica, on the other hand, stared back intently from the rear seat, saucer-eyed and expressionless. She failed to wave too.

  *

  Hanna’s mother used the morning hours and the afternoon to home school Hanna. Her kitchen-table curriculum for Hanna included reading, writing, penmanship, arithmetic, treating others with respect, and America. For the lesson on respect, they would together read an excerpt from the newspaper or a book and discuss how the people in the story had been treated. Hanna’s mother always emphasized that people shouldn’t be judged by their outward appearances but by the content of their character. The phrase had an elegant ring to it—the content of their character—and Hanna took its meaning to heart as best she could.