by Whitney Otto
She can barely recall the man who fathered her, yet she feels his absence most profoundly. Recalls him tucking her in bed at night and singing to her “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” or “Pennies from Heaven.” Maybe an obscure Italian love song. Mrs. Darling insisted that Sophia was far too young to hold any memories of this man (“This wandering man,” she said), yet she does, and it frightens her to think maybe she is like him in some way; maybe she is a wanderer, too.
She suspects that her mother was at fault in his defection; then again, she wonders if he was simply incapable of supplying the extraordinary amount of love required to nurture a wife and child.
Sophia cannot shake off her mother’s touch, could not say to her mother, No, but that is not the life I want to live. She could not. This was because she was conditioned by a life without her father coupled with the longing she felt for him; not a day passed that did not include a jagged awareness of his memory. It was her pilot and her compass; it broke her young heart—not all at once, in one great crack! but, rather, with tiny little fissures and hairline fractures. It chipped away at the perimeter as well, leaving her with a heart that did not have a smooth, voluptuous silhouette but one that was beveled and sharp.
If you took Sophia’s heart and turned it upside down it would resemble nothing so much as a badly made arrowhead, one that lacked the stem to lash it to the arrow, but still had a point capable of piercing flesh.
Poor Sophia. Truly the progeny of her parents: the woman who stayed and the man who walked away. Poor Sophia, who is afraid to become like her mother, who misses a father she barely knew. So she wills herself to fall from great heights in an effort to understand her dangerous heart.
WHEN PRESTON RICHARDS COMES to pick Sophia Darling up for their date, it is still quite light outside and the summer heat has only slightly subsided. She feels uncomfortable and silly wearing makeup, certain that the perspiration on her face will cause it all to streak unattractively.
Mrs. Darling is simpering and (Sophia is horrified) flirting with Preston. He grins and goes along with her mother to the point that Sophia wants to suggest that the two of them go out on this date. Let her mother look all made up like some strange doll face.
Her dress, too, gives Sophia a trussed-up feeling, cinched about the waist, snug in the bust. Thank god the war doesn’t allow her to be wearing stockings or she’d have even more underwear on in this cruel heat. Inhumane.
After they have left Mrs. Darling smiling in the doorway of the house, it takes Sophia exactly two minutes to say, “Let’s go to the quarry.”
“MY FAVORITE SONG,” says Sophia to Preston as they pick their way along the trail to the quarry, “is ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.’ I like Frank Sinatra a lot too.”
“I’m a Miller fan myself. He’s the best,” Preston tells her. “Makes me want to dance.” He pushes aside a branch, waits for Sophia to pass safely. “Do you like to dance?”
“I do, but I’m not very graceful.”
Preston remembers her long, muscular thighs, now covered by the skirt of her dress, and cannot imagine Sophia lacking physical grace. He wants very much to hold her in his arms on a crowded dance floor and tells her, “Then you haven’t had the right partner.”
“Is that so?”
“Absolutely.”
As Sophia leads him through a seemingly impenetrable wall of leaves, which opens to reveal the quarry, he says, “Hey, you didn’t tell me this was a swimming place.” The still water is cradled by cliff rocks worn slick and smooth.
“The best swimming place,” she corrects him. “As a matter of fact, I seldom go to the pool. You were lucky to catch me there yesterday. I mostly come here.”
“I love it,” he says without facing her. “This place looks like you.”
Sophia openly stares at Preston, marveling at his comment. It is as if she makes some split decision, and says, “Okay, stay there and don’t move.” Preston watches as Sophia strips off her dress, kicks off her shoes, leaving her barefoot and in her underwear. “Don’t follow me,” she says over her shoulder as she begins making her way around the lip of rock surrounding the filled quarry. She moves with an athletic naturalness, surefooted and (he notes) she is smoothing back her hair with both hands, clipping the tip of her nose and tugging at the legs of her panties, as if she has just emerged from the water. He sees her hands go out to her sides like a high-wire walker and he imagines the rock narrowing, then widening, as her arms drop to her sides and her stride becomes more relaxed, less consciously balanced. Now the relatively small creature that is Sophia perches herself on the edge of a cliff about fifteen feet high. The dusk gathers as she ceases all movement, then, click, her arms swing to the side and up and she leaps. Her body knifes into the dark-gray water (the color of her eyes, he notes).
He wants to applaud, she looks so pretty.
Suddenly, he is afraid she won’t surface, that she has met with some freak accident there below in the dark water, and he becomes frantic. Tearing off his shoes, he jumps fully clothed into the water, only to see her shining head bob up. Preston rushes toward her with a great deal of splashing and holds her tightly in his arms. He pushes her back against the rock from which she has only recently dived, supporting her with one arm as he cups her chin with his other hand; but not before she smiles at him, exposing the gap between her front teeth, which he briefly fills with his tongue before kissing her.
THE EARTH, as Preston would say, occasionally resembles an extraterrestrial location or two. Just look at the Sahara or, if you wish to remain closer to home, Death Valley. The sand beneath his feet in the high California desert of Joshua Tree feels like lunar dust. And only someone lacking all imagination could fail to see how easily the red moonscape of the painted Sonoran Desert could be taken for Mars. And since the earth contains many of these odd plains, one only has to perform a quick leap of the mind to see that to travel the world studying rocks is to stroll the galaxy.
Perhaps it is in this spirit that Preston whispers to Sophia, as he holds her in the chilled water, about an odd-shaped asteroid called Eros that orbits the sun by falling over itself, end to end, being only fifteen miles long and five miles wide. Since it is relatively thin—four and a half miles thick—one could walk to the edge and look into the night sky at the stars and the heavens above and below. It would be a good idea, he says, to grip the edge when looking over the side.
He presses her flush against the stone wall with his heavy, clothed body. Now he is running his hand along the inside of her thighs, splitting her legs apart, nestling his body between them. Sophia thinks she will lose her breath forever, will drown and not care, will always have this sensation of inner heat and outer cold. He cradles her against the quarry rock. She trembles in his arms. She knows what she will say and without hesitation. Yes.
And all this is permitted because the quarry belongs to her.
Suddenly, she imagines walking with Preston along Eros, the star-filled sky glittering all around them as she tries to defy the mysterious drawing power of looking over the edge. She knows her father would take a chance, take in the view as her mother lingered behind.
PRESTON IS WRINGING OUT his shirt and pants. Sophia cannot look at him, though his boxer shorts are not that different from the swimsuit he was wearing yesterday as they sat at the pool. Her dress is back on, the water from her bra and panties bleeding through it, leaving large wet spots across her chest, hips, and stomach.
“If we sit here the air will dry us,” says Preston.
“I just don’t see how I can explain this to my mother.”
“Look, if we are dry when we go back she won’t know.”
Sophia stares at him. “Are you kidding? Look at your clothes. Look at my face.” He catches her eye, and for a moment neither one looks away.
“It’ll be all right,” he says. “Look.” He picks up a cloudy piece of quartz, palms it in his hand. “This is all right angles and planes. If I were to break this quartz it would crack alon
g a proscribed plane. It’s called cleavage.” He passes the quartz over to Sophia. Leaning back on his elbows, he continues, “That would be different from a fracture because a fracture is a random break. And parting is more like splitting twins apart.”
As he lays out his clothes, he is reliving in his mind the moment of holding Sophia, her singular flavor when he kissed her. The fishy smell of her lake-drenched skin. He watches her in the gathering shadows with her dirt-caked feet and water-mottled dress, overwhelmed with a desire to keep her with him always. We hardly know each other, he marvels. “Sophia Darling,” he says as he leans down to touch her shoulder, “I won’t forsake you.”
She looks up, weighing his words, testing their strength as if they are a bridge to cross, and shakes her head. “You know nothing about me.”
“You’d be so nice,” he sings. “You’d be paradise, to come home to and love.”
It was unexpected that Preston would sing to comfort her. She wonders if perhaps he is meant for her, that he came for her across the years of their lives, to compensate for the loss of her father, and be the man who will stay.
PRESTON SAYS THIS to Sophia: The sun was formed from broken stars. Our earth, its plants, and even us, are the product of the same clouds of gas and dust. You could say that we are born from stardust. He stops, then: One more thing about partings; no two are alike.
THEIR CLOTHES DRY, Preston hoists her in his arms (her dress falling back to expose her legs) and carries her back up the trail.
“Put me down,” she laughs, “you’ll hurt yourself.” But he ignores her warnings, keeps her aloft. “Come on,” she insists, but he continues carrying her, singing “Stardust,” “As Time Goes By,” and “My Man,” which he prefaces by saying, “I’ll pretend I am you singing to me,” and lifts his voice to a high girlish falsetto.
Sophia crosses her arms and grows silent. “You’ll put your back out.”
“Light as a feather, baby, you are.”
“Then why are you puffing and sweating?”
“Because I’m a man.” The word man comes out deep and resonant.
She laughs.
“Now,” he sings, “I am only going to sing my conversation to you for the rest of the evening.”
So for the remainder of their trip back to the car, Preston sings all his questions and answers to Sophia, who responds by taking his face in her hands and kissing his mouth. “Feel free to join me,” he sings at one point.
Sophia steps into the unlit house just ahead of Preston. Her mother sits waiting in the dark living room. As Sophia turns on the light, Mrs. Darling’s glance misses nothing, from the absence of makeup on her daughter’s face to the rumpled condition of Preston’s clothes. The brush of his hand across Sophia’s. All she says is “Do you love my daughter?”
“No,” Sophia answers quickly, while Preston’s voice smothers hers with his own reply. “Actually, Mrs. Darling, I do,” causing Sophia to state again, emphatically, No!
Mrs. Darling sighs, slouches in her chair, and muses—to herself exclusively, it seems—“Then what is to be done?” It is not really so much a question as a meditation. “You aren’t from around here, are you?” asks Mrs. Darling.
“No,” replies Preston. “I’m still in college in Arizona. But I can take her with me.”
Mrs. Darling turns from the couple and gazes out the darkened window into the Grasse night, then looks back in anger. “Is that supposed to comfort me? That you’ll take my only child?” There is an odd sort of amazement in her voice. “I shall be left.” Her fist goes to her mouth. “I shall be alone.”
“I love her,” is all Preston can say. Then, “I think I may even need her.”
OF COURSE, Sophia has not yet graduated from high school and Preston needs to complete his degree at the school in Arizona. Though Sophia will miss having him sing to her, she is not altogether unhappy at his departure.
Ever since their visit to the quarry she has stopped going there, preferring to swim in the public pool. She tells herself it is because she likes the crowds; she tells herself that the memory of that day and her longing for Preston becomes more acute at the quarry. Besides, the pool belongs to everybody. But it is more than that. The quarry was her secret place. Why had she brought him? To allow him to see her in her entirety.
She remembers the way she trembled in his embrace.
More than anything she wanted to tell him that her life wish is to travel the world with him, swimming in the various bodies of water marking the world, floating on her back in the Dead Sea, splashing through the Mediterranean waves. Or chill to the crisp coolness of the northern Pacific; shift for hours in the warm blue of the Hawaiian Pacific. Dive in the South Seas. The aqua Caribbean, Smith River, tributaries, and possibly rinse her face with water from an icy fjord.
She will swim and her husband will study the shifts of the moody earth; he will examine the chalky Dover cliffs, arid redgold mesas, note the striations of sunbaked seaside hills that have been pushed by tectonic plates into powerful arcs of layered rock. He will collect geodes, so ugly from the outside, so gorgeous inside. Granite, schist, gneiss, rose quartz, mica, olivine, bloodstone, obsidian. Volcanic rock. Water wears away stone; earth to ocean. And he will present her with his finds, from his hand to hers (as he had that day at the quarry), showing her what it is that he sees. Sophia will grow stronger and leaner, swimming and diving, with Preston by her side, in this marriage of basic elements found in nature.
But somehow it all backfired on her, leaving her with a feeling of having muddied something that was once clear and pure inside her. She wanted him to see her dive from sheer rock face; she wanted to show him the sort of possibilities she embodied, but in the process she neglected to tell him this fundamental thing about herself. She allowed him access to her body without revealing what was in her heart.
This is what life is like on Eros, she thinks—never knowing when you have ventured too close to the edge, lost in a dream of the view of the sparkling heavens and never of the danger.
Does she love Preston? She can barely bring herself to ask.
THE WORLD’S FIRST known irrigation system was around 3000 B.C. in India and Egypt. And there are various kinds of irrigation, depending on the chosen crop. No knowledgeable farmer would water a rice crop the same way he would a citrus grove: Rice fields are meant to be flooded, whereas the citrus grove has greater success with a sprinkling system. There is the soil-to-water capacity, which must be taken into consideration.
Water is king in the California farmlands.
Some of the produce grown around Grasse includes cotton, grapes, alfalfa, potatoes. But there is another type of field that is equally important to Kern County; the oil field, with its derrick rising from the soil like a shunt to coax the earth’s fossil fuel to the surface.
This watery world, where the oceans cover more of its surface than the landmasses, where, with the exception of the earth’s core, all else is moving, shifting fluids. Even the continents float on currents of liquefied rock.
Sophia and Em are fishing in a subirrigation ditch. It is not the most scenic place in which to spend the better part of the day, yet here they are. They know there are better fishing spots, but they come here on occasion, as they have since they were children. The trees they recline beneath and the hats they wear provide little relief from the sun, and Sophia resists the urge to jump into the water; no sane person would venture into this standing ditch water.
Em is telling Sophia that she is a lucky girl to be going out with Preston Richards, who has two very nice things going for him: He is not away in the Pacific fighting the war, and he is not from around here. “Do you know what that means, Soph? It means you might actually leave Grasse. You might marry him and leave this place.”
“You and my mother,” says Sophia, “have marriage on the brain.”
“So?”
“I’m not sure it is enough.”
“Enough what?” Em leans her elbows on her knees but look
s over at her friend.
“Adventure. Maybe. Or love or happiness or…” She laughs. “Or maybe I just want to take a tramp steamer to Hong Kong and drink Singapore slings.”
Em reels in her line, replaces the bait (“I thought I felt something”), and lifts her sunglasses from the bridge of her small nose to wipe away the perspiration. “Then why take up with him?”
A certain earnest quality enters Sophia’s voice. “Listen, I think he’s different; I think if I could have the life I want I could have it with Preston.” She hesitates. “I don’t really want to marry. Ever. And Preston, well, when I think about him as a husband all I can see is myself as a wife.” She gazes across the water, looks to the endless fields. “I don’t know what I am saying.”
“I think if you let him get away, you’ll be sorry. Be thankful that he’ll get you out of town.”
“Yes,” says Sophia quietly, “I am in need of rescue.” But suddenly Sophia feels a chill and hears an echo of her mother’s voice and she is momentarily afraid that she has just invited her own bad luck and that she will find herself old and unmarried and enormously sad. “I do want to marry,” she finds herself saying. “You get married. You have children.” Her words almost sound like a recitation. They have that quality.
“Children,” says Em, smiling, “lots of kids.”
“Children,” continues Sophia, “and everything is great. Everything will be just great, won’t it?”