by Jim Nelson
One afternoon, while going over respect, Hanna realized she had failed Mrs. Grimond and Erica. She was not judging them on the content of their character. How could she? She’d never even spoken to them.
After school, Hanna collected ten tsuru in a paper bag and went to her mother. “Can I give some paper cranes to the Grimonds?”
Hanna’s mother sat at the kitchen table paying household bills. “That’s fine. Let me finish and we’ll go over in…fifteen minutes?”
“I can go myself,” Hanna said. “It’s only across the street.”
“I’ll go with you.“
“Why can’t I just walk across the street once, by myself, just me, by myself?”
It popped out just like that, a rambling spurt of objection, not exactly talking back, but brusque all the same.
Hanna’s mother remained hunched over the household checkbook writing the latest entry in its register. “I told you I’ll be finished in a few minutes. We’ll go to the Grimonds’ together.”
Hanna crunched the top of the paper bag up, sealing the cranes in tight. “I’m going right now. By myself.”
What could her mother possibly be worried about? Walking across the street by herself? They lived on the quietest of suburban roads.
“I want you to go to your room,” Hanna’s mother said without looking up from the bills. “Lie on your bed and close your eyes. I want you to think of your favorite flowers, or your favorite book. I’ll be in in ten minutes, and then we’ll talk.”
Hanna’s face felt hot. She could hear her pulse in her head. “Are you going to paint my room?”
“What’s that?” Hanna’s mother said, looking up from the checkbook for the first time.
“What color are you going to paint my room?” Hanna said.
“Where did you hear that?”
It was a phrase Hanna had heard on television many times, a technology she’d begun to realize was her most useful conduit of outside information. “That’s what they say at bridge parties. ‘What color are you going to paint the room?’ My room, right? What color are you going to paint my room?”
Her mother’s pink lips made a crimped suppressed smile. “Hanna, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Again, just as in Dr. Mayhew’s office, Hanna felt the hot streak of shame within her. Now her mother was patronizing her. Hanna rushed to the front door. She bolted down the lawn and across the street, not looking either way for traffic. Before she knew it, she was on the Grimonds’ front porch. Panting and exhilarated by adrenaline, she dared not look back across the street. The sight of her mother would break her resolve now. Seal broken, she pressed ahead.
Up close, the Grimonds’ double doors were not the dead-black they appeared from the street, but more like a rich coffee color. Their brass knockers, however, were as mighty and weighty as they seemed from afar. Hanna stood on her tiptoes and rapped the left one. She got off two sharp cracks before dropping back to her heels.
“Erica!” came a call from the inside, muffled by the imposing doors. “Get that!”
Hanna sensed her mother was across the street, arms crossed, watching the scene play out on the Grimonds’ entryway. Hanna dared not turn around and verify this. Her mother’s stern glare would magnetically reel her back to their house, where she would spend the evening in bed thinking hard about the decisions she’d made that afternoon.
Erica Grimond opened the door. She wore a heavy gray dress of straight lines and right angles. Her empty expression was framed by the pageboy cut of her dark brown hair. The rhythmic laughter of a television sitcom’s studio audience came from somewhere in the house. Without a word, Erica held the door open and stared at Hanna.
“I brought you some origami I made,” Hanna finally said, so soft she was unsure if Erica heard it. “There’s ten of them.” Still too soft.
Erica stared for a moment, then turned and went to the rear of the house. Hanna remained on the porch, feet itchy from the anticipation of assured punishment later that evening. Erica returned trailing Mrs. Grimond, a wiry-haired woman markedly older than Hanna’s mother. She bore a moon-colored face marked with umber lipstick. She wore a dark blue muumuu and house slippers and carried an oversized coffee mug with a spoon handle sticking up from it. The mug was filled with a brothy noodle soup.
“What is it, yes?” she said to Hanna.
“I brought you some origami that I made,” Hanna said, again too soft. She offered up the paper bag.
“You live across the street?” She peered over Hanna’s head and brought up one hand to make a slight wave. Hanna knew her mother was behind her, but how close? “You tell your mother she shouldn’t be letting her bridge daughter just run around the neighborhood.” Mrs. Grimond opened the bag and looked into it. “Are you selling these?”
“How did you know I was a bridge daughter?”
“Women know these things,” Mrs. Grimond said. “Is this for a church drive?”
“I’m making a thousand of them,” Hanna said. “I’m giving them away.”
Mrs. Grimond wadded up the top of the bag. “We don’t need any.”
“No, they’re a gift—“
“We’re fine, thank you.” She pushed the bag back into Hanna’s hands. “Thank you, good night. I’ll stay here and watch you cross the street. Your mother’s waiting.”
Hanna felt the shaming burn of patronization again. She looked to Erica, standing upright behind her mother, exactly as Hanna had been trained to present herself since a child. Erica looked back with a dull stare.
“Would your daughter want them?” Hanna said.
“My daughter?” Mrs. Grimond said. “You mean my bridge daughter?” She turned to Erica. “Well, what say you?”
Erica wilted a bit from her mother’s forceful, presumptive tone. Erica meekly made a nod of her chin.
“Run on home now.” Mrs. Grimond took the bag without asking and handed it to Erica in an offhand manner. “Tell your mother if she wants to come over for coffee some time, I’d love to have her.”
Hanna said goodbye and retreated down the walkway. Ahead of her, Hanna’s mother stood at the open front door of their house, arms crossed and a dark cloud hovering over her head. Hanna was going to get a talking-to tonight.
Behind Hanna, Mrs. Grimond yelled, “Erica!”
Hanna swiveled about. Erica ran down the walkway to Hanna, her soft-soled shoes slapping on the paved cement. The paper bag swung wildly from her clenched fist. The flat expression on her face and her glaring white eyes—as wide as fifty-cent pieces—gave Hanna the sense of a madman bounding at her with the intent of violence. Hanna instinctively raised one arm to protect herself. Erica hugged Hanna and squeezed tight.
“Thank you,” she whispered in Hanna’s ear.
“Erica!” Mrs. Grimond said. “Get back here!”
“Please come over,” Erica whispered. “We should talk about Hagar.”
Hanna said, “Hagar?”
Erica released her and put a finger over her lips, indicating silence. Then she turned and bounded up the steps, the bag of tsuru again pendulous with each awkward jerk forward, the unpracticed loping of a girl who got precious little exercise. Erica ran into the house past her disapproving mother, who slammed the door shaking her head.
Eight
The embossed sign on the examination room door was of the variety cheaply produced at office supply stores. It was a plastic rectangular plate with faux wood grain and white rounded embossed letters. It read Linda Mayhew, M.D. on the top line, Gefyriatrics below.
In Dr. Mayhew’s examination room, wearing a gown of the thinnest cloth tied loosely in the rear, Hanna lay back while the doctor prodded her belly with bony, cold fingers. Dr. Mayhew queried Hanna’s mother about diet, nausea, pain or discomfort, and so on, which Hanna’s mother answered more or less to her satisfaction.
Dr. Mayhew once again extended the arms and stirrups from the bottom of the examination table. “Feet on the rests, please,” she told
Hanna.
Flush with embarrassment, Hanna did as Dr. Mayhew asked. She’d hoped, almost prayed, she would not have to go through this ordeal again. She consciously knew the opposite was true, that she would be exposing her genitals regularly over the next months, right up to the last day when Dr. Mayhew reached her gloved hands fully inside Hanna’s body to extract the baby.
Dr. Mayhew rolled on the wheeled stool between Hanna’s spread legs and folded the hem of the gown up over Hanna’s knees. She explained to Hanna she was inserting a speculum, a word Hanna was unfamiliar with but guessed had something to do with vision. Cold steel inside her body, Dr. Mayhew peered into Hanna’s womb with a penlight. She hummed and mm-hmm’d, then removed the device and pulled down the gown.
“Well,” she said to Hanna’s mother, “she’s definitely passed ponte primus. As I said last time, she’s advancing faster than expected.”
“What’s ponte primus?” Hanna asked softly.
“I need an ultrasound,” Dr. Mayhew told Hanna’s mother. “As a precaution. It could be nothing. I’ll phone Oakland and let them know you’re coming.”
“What’s ponte primus?” Hanna asked more forcefully.
“You can’t do that here?” her mother asked Dr. Mayhew.
“We’re just a clinic,” Dr. Mayhew said. “We don’t have the equipment.”
“I can’t ask one question?” Hanna demanded.
Hanna’s mother stared at Hanna. “You’ll at least show some respect,” she said evenly, “to me and the doctor.”
Hanna, heated, said, “Dr. Mayhew, may I ask a question?”
“Dian?” the doctor said.
“It’s fine,” Hanna’s mother said, sounding a little exhausted.
“Ponte primus is the first full month of fetal development,” Dr. Mayhew explained to Hanna. “The cells have passed the embryonic stage and are now a fetus.”
“So how much longer do I have?”
“The finality usually occurs six months after primus.”
Six months? “But I thought it took a year!”
“The final gestation cycle takes a full twelve months,” Dr. Mayhew said. “But we didn’t detect pons anno until it was underway.”
Hanna pressed her fingers along her waistline. The pressure in her belly was palpable now, a sore knot much like indigestion. The lump was visible when she stood naked before the mirror. Without knowing, she would have mistaken it as a little extra weight. The floppy sweaters and loose T-shirts she’d worn for years hid the bump well, but her jeans had grown tight about the waist, and she’d started leaving the top snap undone.
Dr. Mayhew said to Hanna’s mother, “The receptionist has directions to the Oakland facility. Hanna should have a full bladder before she arrives. Have her drink two glasses of water before leaving the house.” Dr. Mayhew offered Hanna a sugar-free lollipop. “You’re doing great, Hanna. So far, everything is normal.”
*
“Hanna,” her mother said behind the wheel of the car, “that’s twice you’ve embarrassed me in front of Dr. Mayhew.”
Hanna flushed. She receded into the car seat. “I’m sorry.”
“Your father and I have let you talk to adults without asking permission first. We’ve taught you to read and write, how to handle money, let you wear normal girls’ clothes, and so on. It’s not right for you to talk back to me in front of Dr. Mayhew.”
Hanna, slumped in the seat, brooded. You taught me to read, she thought, but only the books you picked. And you never let me ask Dr. Mayhew questions until I demanded it.
“I could start being like Erica’s mother,” her mother said. “We could stop our lessons. You could start washing clothes and cleaning the house every day.”
Why not stop our lessons? Hanna thought. Why should I learn anything new now?
“You want that?” Hanna’s mother said. “No more parties, no more going to visit your friends?”
What friends? Hanna thought. Alondra’s dead. Cheryl’s going to die soon.
“I’ll bet you,” she told Hanna, “Erica’s mother searches Erica’s room every few days.”
That fished Hanna out of the deep pond of her inner turmoil. “What?”
“Turns over her entire room,” she said. “Checks under her bed and inside her closet. If she has one. Checks for little cubbyholes and hiding spots around the house. That’s what mothers do when they have bridge daughters. Bridge daughters steal.”
“I don’t steal,” Hanna said quietly, forgetting for the moment her acquisition of the pregnancy test and tsuru notebook.
“Bridge daughters steal money and hide clothes and food,” her mother continued. “And they can’t be left alone because they might try to hurt themselves. That’s what Mrs. Grimond thinks of Erica. She thinks Erica’s always planning to hurt herself. Would you like it if I treated you like that?”
Hanna couldn’t imagine her parents searching her bedroom. Such an invasion was unthinkable. Did Erica really face that from her own mother? Or was her mother saying it to frighten her?
“You don’t know,” her mother said, voice fading off. “You just don’t know.”
*
Pen in hand, Hanna wrote with careful strokes Dr. Mayhew beside the number 358. She’d only left one tsuru at the office for the doctor, mostly because she didn’t care much for her and her cold probing fingers.
Hanna had tired of folding origami cranes. The process had become rote. The folds came easily now, although her cranes never came out quite as crisp and regal as Aunt Azami’s. She still wished she could produce the origami as well as her aunt, but with this plateau in her skill level, she’d started to wonder if she should let go of her goal. After all, in six months, nothing would matter any more. A thousand paper cranes weren’t going to grant her more life.
For two years now, Hanna had imagined going to high school and then on to college. She wanted a college roommate. She wanted midnight bull sessions with her roomie in the hallways while they wore snuggly college sweatshirts and sweatpants and drank hot cocoa. She wanted to study under professors who’d spent a lifetime classifying stamens and pollens and stigmas, lecturing and answering her questions and leading her through her thesis. Then on to a job, a biologist or a horticulturist or even a florist like Mr. McReddy, but better than him and his greenhouse tulips with cheap dry gyp.
Would she have a boyfriend? Maybe in college. Isn’t that what bull sessions were, talking about boys? College women should talk about other things too, though. They could talk about navigating thesis committees and career opportunities. She supposed she would have a boyfriend, though, eventually. Would he become her husband, like her father to her mother? Or would she meet her husband later, when she owned her floristry? Maybe he would come in looking to buy a bouquet. For who? For me, she thought, and she flushed hot.
She did not feel an ounce of desire for a child of her own, but she knew you were expected to have one. After all, a child made a couple into a family, and that sounded good to her. She would teach her daughter just as her mother had taught her, at home, sitting together at the kitchen table. She would look over her daughter’s shoulder while she practiced forming her letters on lined paper.
A family would be her choice. A husband, a daughter, her choice. Choice, she loved the way the word sounded spoken, crisply assertive at its introduction, then softening as it faded off. The choice to marry, the choice to raise a family.
If those thousand cranes granted her a wish and let her live to adulthood, she wouldn’t bear a child. She would raise a bridge daughter. Her bridge daughter would crawl, walk, spit up food, grow feverish and ill, throw a ball, read a book, smell a flower for the first time. Then she would turn thirteen and grow round in the belly, a little chubby, a little sick in the morning. And Hanna’s bridge daughter would plan out her twin’s life—college, boyfriend, career, family—and die a little before age fourteen after giving birth to Hanna’s baby.
Still on her back, Hanna rolled her most recent paper crane
between her fingers. 379 was printed on the bottom of its left wing. Six hundred more to go. What did Hanna have to lose folding a thousand cranes? Little. What did she stand to gain? The world and more.
Wouldn’t she love her bridge daughter? Could she stand watching her bridge daughter die so she could selfishly have a real daughter?
Am I not a real daughter? she thought.
When Hanna’s bridge daughter turned eight, Hanna would teach her how to fold tsuru. That gave her bridge daughter six years to fold a thousand of them. Then she could wish herself into adulthood, just like Hanna was going to. And then she could have her own bridge daughter, and she would teach her how to fold origami.
Hanna would be the first of a line of bridge daughters who lived to old age. Bridge women bearing bridge daughters bearing bridge daughters, and there would be no more finalities.
Nine
Hanna felt bad about her gift to Cheryl Vannberg, the bouquet of a fragrance-free sunflower and the weak, leftover blooms from Uncle Rick’s bucket, little time-bombs who undoubtedly relinquished their petals the day after the bridge party. More than that, she felt bad not telling Cheryl the truth about bridge daughters and what lay ahead for her. Didn’t she deserve to know? Hanna had kept her promise to her mother not to discuss sensitive things with Cheryl, and now she regretted it. She’d always been jealous of Cheryl’s oversized life, her confidence and glamor-girl looks, and now could see her own pettiness. She wanted to make things right.
Once again riding in the passenger’s seat beside her father, Hanna held the vase of flowers with both hands, careful to prevent the water within from sloshing out. She’d purchased the flowers from Mr. McReddy’s florist shop with the gift certificate her parents had given her on her birthday, but she’d arranged the flowers herself. It largely pleased her, although she felt more carnations would have filled out its base further and created a cornucopia effect, that is, the luxurious sense of an overabundance of flowers.