by Whitney Otto
“Check your line,” says Em.
“He said I could be Darling.”
“What?”
“When I met Preston he said I could keep my own name.”
“Right,” says Em, “as if you want to.”
Sophia is again overwhelmed by the desire to leap into the water. To submerge herself, to purify herself. She imagines swimming down the irrigation ditch until it merges with a river, then spills into the ocean. Her stroke is even and perfect and strong. “I’m too hot for this,” she sighs, setting the pole in the grass. “Let’s go to the pool.”
“You and that stupid pool,” says Em, reeling in her line. She tears off the bait, then bites the line with her teeth, returning the hook to her small tackle box.
But Sophia is now lying motionless in the grass, her hat over her face.
IN ARIZONA, Preston recalls the moment he held Sophia in his arms, slippery and almost mythical, finally fulfilling his primary impulse upon seeing her that day at the swimming pool, his willingness complete when he felt her shiver in his arms. It was then that he discovered the imperative of keeping her with him always.
As she stretched between his body and the stone he understood that a life of hunting rocks and minerals would be a cold, unyielding, and literally hard life if he did not have Sophia there to remain between himself and his vocation. A life without her would mean a life of falling into the bleak solitude of being a man with only his work to keep him company. Sophia would deliver him from this fate.
SOPHIA IMAGINES that she could have told Em, as their fishing lines floated in that brackish water, that she is pregnant. It will be a scandal and her mother will cry and Em will stand by her, yet she says nothing. It is something she cannot discuss with anyone until she comes to grips with it herself. It means her transformation into somebody’s wife (Preston’s wife); it means settling down. It means trusting that Preston will come back to her once he, too, is told.
Her father’s ghost looms up before her like a character in a German opera, his words resonant, beautiful, and dark. And she a child once again, hearing the Italian music of his voice, not understanding the language, though the meaning is implicit: All the words string together to let her know that he is leaving.
SOPHIA DOES NOT grow leaner and stronger (as she once thought she would, swimming the world over); she grows heavy. All this weight for that little Duff, their first daughter. Sophia watches the dream of her swimming moving away from her, never to be retrieved. She thinks for a moment of leaving both Preston and Duff, consoling herself that, no matter what happens, they will have each other. “Why,” she says to herself, “I am no better than my father.” She sits down, her hand resting lightly on sleeping Duff’s head.
She is angry, too, and tells Preston that if she has to stay home with the child, so does he. She will not have him wandering the world, only to bring back his found treasures heaved up from the earth, to give to her as pale souvenirs. He will not travel the world and examine its faults.
“Sophia,” he says, “are you trying to kill my research? My career?”
“Of course not,” she tells him. “I’m only saying that if I have to stay, so do you.”
“But it isn’t as if you’ll be alone. Your mother lives here. Be fair.”
“Oh, please,” says Sophia, “let’s talk about something else.”
“Honey,” he says gently, “it isn’t as if I am never coming back. I’m your husband. That means something, doesn’t it? We have a child, we have a life.” He holds both her hands in his.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she says, “that because we are married you’ll come back. Not a damn thing.” He throws her hands back to her in disgust. “Ask my mother,” she says as he leaves the room. “Ask me.”
IT IS EXPECTED that Sophia will do as her mother did; this is the legacy of the time into which they are born. Sophia lives with the inheritance of her mother, who lived with the inheritance of her mother. She is not expected to attend to her own intrepid journeys or follow her own desires. Her time does not encourage it.
Sophia can gaze out her bedroom window and wonder what it was that prevented her from seeing the world, until her revelry is broken by the sound of her child calling out to her. Certainly she is aware of aviatrices and actresses, but she cannot count herself among their group; she is so much more ordinary than they even if her drive is similar.
How free she felt that day at the quarry with Preston! How so “like herself.” In that one moment of physical, sexual freedom, where she gave herself over to him, she remembers feeling as if she were silencing the voice of her mother, putting to rest all the social expectations of a girl in her place. She laughs now (as she reluctantly moves from that bedroom window to see after her child), recalling the consequence of her actions—falling into the dark water, falling into Preston’s embrace, inadvertently falling into the life she had been raised to live.
There was a day when Preston was back in Arizona mailing her letters of love, when she believed that their marriage would, in fact, be a wondrous thing—before she knew she was going to have Duff and still thought that she would not be a woman of her day, that she would join ranks with women who saw things and did things. And she would be with Preston.
But that turned out to be over before it began.
Because: This was not a time when women could swim freely, unfettered by waiting domesticity; this was not their time.
She was only Sophia Darling. Sometimes she said that to herself as she enrolled the kids in special activities after school or involved herself with PTA fund-raisers or amassed the neglected possessions from neighbors for white-elephant sales. Or when she sat mute, quilting; she said to herself, I am Sophia Darling. That is all.
To be known as Mrs. Preston Richards was to exact a certain amount of social respect. She had gained entry into the ranks of motherhood with the birth of Duff. Even “the daughter of that poor Mrs. Darling,” her mother’s daughter, lent her a modest measure of communal visibility. These were all Sophia’s identities and parts, the parts she grew to mistrust for her duplicitous feeling when she played them.
So to say I am Sophia Darling; that is all was, in this time and place, this homemaker era, to admit she was nobody.
PRESTON AND SOPHIA have two more children after Duff, a son, Pres junior, and a daughter named Edie. Once a week, Em comes by and together she and Sophia walk over to Glady Joe Cleary’s, where they quilt with six other women. It fills an evening normally spent not talking to Preston or talking to him through the children. Sophia waits for him to complain, to register some dissatisfaction with her, because she is ready to point out all the ways in which she is very nearly the perfect wife. Sometimes she thinks she only strives for this perfection so she can toss it up to him one night when he tries to engage her in one of his discussions about the State of Their Lives. When he tells her how unhappy he is doing soil samples for landowners around Grasse.
Occasionally, she can imagine him pushing down the desire inside himself to leave and see all those places they talked about so many years ago.
But if she makes herself so perfect, so unimpeachable in her behavior, he will be forced to stay, will have no legitimate reason to leave. It occurs to her that Preston is like her father in many ways.
THERE ARE TIMES when Sophia wants to throw it all over, pack the kids in the car, and take off with Preston to all those places. See all those things she longs to see and fall in love all over again, as if love is not a finite thing but something fluid and changing, something that can ebb or surge like an ocean tide. Sophia wants to tell Preston that she loves him, wants to be less rule bound with her children; but instead she spends one night a week piecing together bits of fabric with a group of women. As if she could piece together all the things she feels inside, stitch them together and make everything seem whole and right.
WHEN DUFF IS SIXTEEN she tells Sophia she wants to go to college.
“Honey,” says Sophia, “we ca
nnot afford to send all of you and, besides, it is more important for Pres to go than you or Edie. When you are married you’ll see what I mean.”
(It is unusual for girls like Sophia’s daughters to dream of college, given their isolation in Grasse and their era, which is 1950. But they are modern girls, despite their mother.)
Duff wishes she could tell her mother about her teenage years, but Sophia only sits with Duff and Edie, dreamy-eyed, wistful about the grandchildren they will give her. Duff says, “Mom, I’m not so sure that is what I want. I think there may be something else.”
Which causes Sophia to freeze and say, “There is nothing else.” Sophia, who has grown so skilled at heading off words she does not care to hear.
DUFF, thinks Preston of his daughter, Duff is great. A little too serious and tense at times, but there is a quick intelligence there as well. He takes her to collect specimens, walks by her side. He gives Duff her own hand lens ruper to check the angles of various minerals. He instructs her in how to work the scale that assigns values of hardness to each mineral. Explains the difference between rocks and minerals. Illustrates with his palms the action of a lateral or a slip fault. Together they draw topographic maps and talk about half-lives and continental drift.
She can be very funny—not that Preston often laughs at her jokes; he does not know why this is except that it seems to be beyond him. When did he become a father and no longer Preston Richards? Preston, he thinks, would laugh at his comical daughter, but the Father cannot allow himself the luxury.
Pres, his son, looks so much like Sophia. The same straight, lean figure and deep, gray eyes. He even inherited the space between her front teeth. But water holds no magic for his son; he enjoys swimming as a way of cooling off and nothing more. There is something Preston cannot quite identify in his boy—some independence of spirit that is held in reserve by his duty-bound nature. Pres junior worries about Sophia.
He heard them talking the other night after dinner as Sophia’s hands dipped in and out of the dishwater, soaping the plates, then rinsing them beneath a steady stream of clean water. She passed them to Pres junior, who stood beside her, almost inarticulate because she was asking him about his college plans.
She said, “You do want to go to college, don’t you?”
“Sure,” he told her.
“Have you thought about where you’d like to go?”
“No. Yes. Maybe”—he appeared to concentrate on the task at hand; appeared to avoid Sophia’s calm gray eyes—“back east or maybe down south. Somewhere, you know, somewhere else.”
Sophia nodded. The front of her shirt was splattered with drops of water, as if she had been lying on her back in a summer shower.
“It isn’t that I won’t miss you,” he said quickly.
“That never crossed my mind, honey.”
“I mean, well, you have Dad. And Edie. And I’ll be home for visits. You will hardly miss me? Right?”
Sophia released the water from the sink, listened to it disappear down the drain. She smiled at her son. “Such a funny boy you are.”
Preston shakes his head at the conversation, for it is the same thing when he and Pres discuss college. His son is eager to go—far away, back east, down south—but he cannot seem to talk about it without asking over and over, “What about Mom? Will she be all right, Dad? If I’m gone will she be okay?”
Preston has to laugh. “Pres, of course she’ll be fine. I’ll still be here. God knows, I’m not going anywhere.” Which seems to reassure Pres, but only until the next bout of worry assails him.
It is Edie who is most like Preston. What does this mean? he wonders. Who am I, what does being like me mean? He shakes his head: A romantic? A wanderer? Surely he is neither of those, if he examines his life. He was once someone who moved without thought of the consequences, acted on nervy impulse. Like his marriage to Sophia, his fishgirl, who adapted herself to home and hearth with a vengeance, like someone who has something to prove or a debt to pay back.
It is Edie they should watch, Edie, who appears so guileless and unconcealed. It is Edie who has the potential to surprise.
SOPHIA DOES NOT ENJOY the freedom of color and pattern in the Crazy Quilt. The circle keeps talking about making one, then rejects it for some other project designed by Anna Neale. Sophia prefers the challenge of a traditional, established pattern. That is the true challenge, she thinks—to work within a narrow confine. To accept what you cannot have; that from which you cannot deviate.
EM, now married to Dean Reed and with a daughter of her own, says to Sophia one evening as they walk to Glady Joe’s to quilt, “How is Edie these days?”
“Good. How’s Inez?”
“Inez,” says Em of her own child, “is doing well. But Edie…” Her voice loses volume, deflates before she finishes her sentence.
They arrive at Glady Joe’s and Sophia reminds herself to ask Em later, after the circle breaks, what she is trying to say about Edie.
Of course, Sophia forgets, and as she lies in bed next to Preston, pressing her brain to recall what it was about Em tonight in their conversation during their walk, finds that all she can remember is Em’s breath hung like misty blue clouds in the cold night air.
“FOR YOU,” says Preston, pulling Sophia by the hand into their backyard.
“Oh, Pres,” she says. And there, before her, is a small pond that he had dug as a gift for her for their twenty-second anniversary.
“I thought you could wade in it or keep fish or whatever you want. I think it’s deep enough.”
So proud was he of his gift to her, so pleased when she sat by the small bank and cried into the palms of her open hands.
AROUND THE TIME of Edie’s sixteenth birthday, Sophia takes a long look at her as her daughter leans on the open refrigerator door, orange-juice bottle tilted to her lips, head thrown back. Sophia can see Edie’s throat muscles working, taking the liquid, and she is about to say, Honey, why must you always wear that awful windbreaker, when something else catches her eye. Edie’s slender frame has gone broad around the middle, down a little low, the curve of the belly unmistakable. “Oh!” exclaims Sophia, which causes Edie to turn toward her, red-faced, clumsily shoving the bottle back into the fridge, adjusting her windbreaker. Hastening her retreat.
“Look, Mom,” she begins, “I didn’t mean to drink from the bottle,” while Sophia can barely speak. How is Edie these days?
She is trembling. Sophia says, “Edie,” and cannot finish her sentence, to which her daughter screams, I said I was sorry, and rushes from the room.
Sophia slowly rises from the table, smooths back her hair with both hands, her hair that was once dark and shining but is now shot with coarse gray. She tugs at her dress and clips the tip of her nose. She ascends the stairs.
AS SOPHIA LOOKS IN on Edie, who sits on her bed, she says, “How could you let this happen?” She does not say, Why didn’t you tell me sooner?
“It wasn’t only me,” says Edie.
Sophia sighs, edges toward her youngest child, her slim figure so like Sophia’s at that age. “Let me break it to your father, in my own way. I guess the boy will have to marry you.”
Edie, sad-eyed, looks away. “I don’t know about that.”
“Of course he’ll marry you, honey,” she says quietly, comfortingly. “It’s not so bad. You’ll see.” She cannot be truly happy about this turn of events, yet she can find a way to accept them as inevitable. Her daughter will get married sooner or later and, after all, Sophia was only seventeen when she met Preston. Sophia runs her finger along the bedspread, sketching out the design for the beautiful crib quilt she will put together with the other quilters. Something with lambs and bunnies.
“That is not what I meant,” says the girl. “I mean, I don’t think I want him for a husband.”
She cannot answer. She cannot make a crib quilt for a child without a proper name.
WHEN EM WHISPERS to Sophia one night at the quilting circle, “Surely you could reconside
r the adoption,” Sophia responds loudly by saying, “This is not your business, Em.”
Then looks across the unfinished quilt they are working on to see Anna Neale coldly watching her.
PRESTON SITS with Sophia out by the little pond that she never uses. She is saying that they should send Edie to a home in Colorado to have her baby, then bring her back to finish school.
But Preston only says, “How could you give away a child of ours?”
“Pres, it’s not our child. It is Edie’s child.”
“But Edie’s our child,” he insists.
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand you, Sophia.”
“What don’t you understand? I’ll tell you what: If she would marry the boy, I would feel differently, but she refuses. I won’t have a child in my house raising her child without the sanctity of marriage. Yes, marriage. Grown-up responsibilities. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just follow our heart’s desires?”
Preston has remained silent. “She’s our daughter. I will miss her.”
“And I won’t?” Sophia splashes her hand roughly in the pond’s dark water. “Why is it always that everyone else is supposed to get what they want?” It almost shocks her, this mother’s role, her mother’s voice emerging from her mouth with such conviction. This role she essentially mistrusts; the role she cannot quite abandon.
“Why don’t you ever use this pool?” asks Preston.
“I’m busy. You know that.”
He nods his head. “Remember when you took me to the quarry? I’ve never known why we stopped. Why you stopped.”
Sophia shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know. When I became a wife and mother, I guess.”