Juno's Daughters

by Lise Saffran

  She could still remember the iron taste of her own blood in her mouth, from the times that Monroe had hit her in the face. It tasted like shame, her own blood. Though she knew now that it had been the start of a better life for them all, she could remember feeling so sorry for herself on that drizzly afternoon they fled to Mary Ann’s, and for her daughters. Especially Lilly, who had arrived with mud-splattered tights and only a small portion of the things she owned stuffed in her mother’s backpack. Frankie had conked out in the sling—walking always put her out—but Lilly wouldn’t drop off that night until midnight, and even then Jenny could remember the shuddering breaths she took in her sleep. Jenny had felt sorry for herself, and for her girls, and even for Monroe, who had hurt her.

  “Didn’t we have good times?” he had asked on the phone, pleading with her to come back.

  When she hadn’t answered immediately, he had listed them himself, describing each as if he held a happy snapshot of the event in his hands: camping on the Oregon coast, on tour with his band in Las Vegas, their wedding on the Russian River. He drew the pictures vividly in her mind, until she could almost taste the grapes they had swiped from a vineyard growing close to the road. The dusty burst of sunshine in your mouth. What he didn’t understand, though, was that, if you were afraid, the good times never really burrowed in. Fear was like a screen that kept them just out of reach.

  Jenny rubbed her biceps, which were suddenly covered with goose bumps, though the store was warm. She was slender enough to have been more than once mistaken for Lilly from the back, but she was stronger than she’d been before. Her legs could take her up Mount Constitution on a bike and she could use a chain saw to get rid of dead trees on her property, push a wheelbarrow loaded with cinderblocks for a garden wall, and if she ever needed to, run with four times the weight of baby Frankie in her arms.

  Frankie and Phoenix jostled each other on their way to Jenny and, having arrived, dipped their slender fingers into the jar of peppermints that Mary Ann kept on the table with the cash register. Jenny smiled at the way Frankie held the candy in her cheek like a squirrel.

  “Where’s Lil?” Frankie rolled the mint in her mouth.

  Jenny glanced at the clock on the wall. “She’s coming by any minute. And then I think she said she was heading over to Snug Harbor to help wash Jack’s boat.” The ten dollars was allegedly for soda and snacks at the small camp store.

  Lilly must have seen Jenny fall to the ground holding her baby sister. She was five years old—where else could she have been? She must have been watching, but Jenny couldn’t remember noticing her. What she did remember was the way Lilly raged after Monroe left for work and Jenny began packing their things. She would not, she insisted in all her kindergarten fury, go to Mary Ann’s without telling her father good-bye.

  Frankie nodded. “In Elliot’s truck?” She looked over at Phoenix. “Maybe they have room for us?”

  Jenny raised her eyebrows. “Elliot Cooper? Is she involved with him?”

  Frankie nodded. “Don’t tell her we told you, okay?”

  “I won’t, honey.”

  Jenny tried to imagine Lilly hooking up with the lanky, brown-eyed boy she had known since junior high. He had a big Adam’s apple and a talent for drawing comic book figures. Working at his very first outdoor summer job, he must have been caught off guard in the sudden tractor beam of Lilly’s attention. Lean and dreadlocked and gorgeous, she burned through boys like kindling. All the more likely contenders on the island were probably exhausted.

  She reached out to straighten the woven bag that her daughter wore over her shoulder like a small quiver for arrows. She heard coins clinking against whatever treasures she kept in there: polished stones, abalone shell buttons, loose beads. She lifted the cap off her head and pressed a kiss against the milk white part in her black hair.

  The bell jingled and the door swung open. Bright sunlight shot through the dark corners of the store and Lilly’s laugh carried to the back, along with the words, “Tell me later,” no doubt shouted across the street to someone perched on the front porch of Café Demeter.

  Frankie jerked herself out of her mother’s embrace with a fraction of a second to spare before her sister appeared before them in ripped shorts, work boots, and a T-shirt that said Peace, Love, Entomology. No bra.

  Jenny looked from Frankie to Lilly and sighed. The moment you became an embarrassment to your children always snuck up on you. You went from lawful spouse to backdoor lover in the blink of an eye.

  Lilly grinned and reached for a peppermint. “Hi kiddos.”

  Frankie hopped from one foot to the other in delight. She was bursting from the news she had to tell her sister. “You would not believe what Mr. G wore today in Social Studies. I tried you on your cell, but all I got was voice mail. He had on those plastic sandals, you know, with the dark socks pulled all the way up to the knee.” She glanced at Phoenix, and they both giggled. “But the thing was, instead of shorts I swear he was wearing swim trunks. And I think they must have been Steven’s, too, because they were too small.”

  Phoenix nodded. “Way too small.”

  “He probably got behind on the laundry,” said Jenny sympathetically.

  No one else appeared to have heard.

  Lilly pressed her hand to her stomach and grimaced. “Don’t, Frankie,” she said. “I just ate something.”

  Jenny raised her eyebrows. “So you won’t be borrowing ten bucks after all?”

  “Mom.” Lilly glanced toward the door, outside of which Elliot Cooper was no doubt waiting, his leash tied to a tree.

  Frankie began digging in her pockets for cash to hand over to her sister. “Can we come with you?” She glanced at Phoenix for confirmation. “Cleaning Jack’s boat will go a lot faster if you have us helping.”

  Jenny saw a look pass over Lilly’s face and she guessed that boat-cleaning was the last thing on her older daughter’s mind. “Look, Franks,” said Jenny. “We only have an hour or so until we have to get ready to go to Dale and Peg’s. Why don’t you and Phoenix go to our house until then?”

  “Yeah,” said Lilly, avoiding her mother’s eyes. “I’ll catch up with you guys at the party.”

  “I can’t go,” said Phoenix. Her pert features composed themselves into an expression of utter despair. “We’re spending the night in Anacortes.”

  “Tonight?” asked Frankie and Lilly in unison.

  Frankie reached for Jenny’s bag. “Your mom must not know that Dale and Peg’s potluck is tonight.” She fished around for the cell phone, her hand emerging like a diver with a pearl, her fingers already punching in the familiar numbers.

  Phoenix shook her head. “She won’t care. She has a doctor’s appointment.”

  “In the evening?” asked Jenny, and then wished she hadn’t.

  Phoenix’s mom, Theresa, was in her early forties, like Jenny. She was also a single mother. As members of the year-round community, particularly those who didn’t have much extra money, they had often relied on each other to pick the girls up from school and had traded tips on where to find kids’ clothes cheap.

  Many of the people who visited the islands or bought summer houses there were rich in a way that Jenny had rarely even imagined when growing up with her sister, Sue, in Sacramento. Sue lived in Marin County, California, now and would not be out of place among the people who rented slips in Roche Harbor for the yachts they named Twenty One or Golden Girl or Megabite. On visits to Marin, Jenny felt the distance between herself and her sister acutely.

  It helped that on the island there were bald eagles but no high-end shopping malls. She walked over the hill to Roche Harbor and enjoyed standing on the pier and watching the boats chug in to their slips, even though she knew she’d never possess one herself. The tanned couples on board owned the boats, she thought at such times, but they didn’t own the sight of them bobbing on the water or the light reflecting off the sails. And she would walk back over the hill content.

  That peace of mind ha
d seemed to elude Theresa, especially lately. She’d grown incrementally more tense these past months as Phoenix inched toward adulthood. Groceries had always been expensive, but now they were “highway robbery.” Clients at the home day-care center she ran on the south side of the island were nosy and small-minded. The tourists were a pain in the neck. She never mentioned the eagles.

  Jenny looked at Frankie and Phoenix, standing with their slender bodies tilted toward each other like saplings, their arms pressed together in a jumble of faded fabric, pale skin, and alpaca bracelets, and she could see what the two of them with their four bright eyes couldn’t: It was only a matter of time before Theresa left for the mainland. Phoenix would be going with her, whether she wanted to or not.

  Standing behind Frankie and Phoenix, Lilly was also clearly planning her escape. She mouthed the words, “Just ten dollars?” over Frankie’s head.

  Jenny took her cell phone from Frankie and dropped it into her bag. She then extracted the money for her older daughter, who snapped it up and blew them all a kiss on her way out.

  Jenny watched Lilly go. She had had a fully-formed woman’s body for years now, and seeing her in shorts and a tank top, Jenny felt a mix of recognition and nostalgia for her younger self. She could remember the power of that youthful beauty, the way it got her backstage at concerts, invited to Florence by a sculptor who had received a summer fellowship there, and attracted, with mixed results, the attention of the kind of man Monroe had been when she met him: a brooding lead guitar player for a semisuccessful Seattle band. Lilly exasperated her and worried her in equal measure, but the worries were based in a deep sense of familiarity. She could easily see her making the same mistakes that Jenny herself had made.

  Frankie, standing in a doorway with the light reflecting off her hair and her collarbones rising from her chest like a whale-bone corset, was different. Frankie and Phoenix had taken to sketching little cottages where they imagined they would someday live. Together. Some of them were directly on the beach with French doors and English gardens. Others were suspended entirely in the trees by wires, with spiral staircases leading down to the forest floor.

  “What do you girls want to do until Theresa comes to get Phoenix? Do you have any drawing paper?” she asked them.

  “Let’s go to my house,” proposed Frankie. “We have hard-boiled eggs in the fridge.”

  She had recently mastered a recipe for deviled eggs and made them at every opportunity. Jenny figured they went through more paprika these days than all but the most dedicated Hungarian families.

  “Bye, Mom.”

  “Wait,” said Jenny, thinking to remind them that the lasagna that was in the fridge was for Dale and Peg’s. By the time she spoke the bell on the door had already rung them out.

  In a moment they had vanished, just like Lilly had. They were quick on their feet, those girls. They were gone in an instant.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Thousand Twangling Instruments Will Hum About Mine Ears

  Jenny’s truck sat mud-splattered in the lot behind the store. The sun was still high, shining all the way to Mount Baker in the distance and warming her through her alpaca wrap as she walked over the lot.

  Tonight it would set on Ariel, Miranda, Caliban, and Trinculo. As in seasons past, she would mostly think of these new friends in terms of the characters they played. Sure, there were circles inside of circles. (No one but the cast and director attended what was jokingly called the Naked Rehearsal—a final rehearsal that took place in an undisclosed location off-island and featured the cast in their ordinary clothes one last time before the full dress rehearsal. At least that’s what Jenny assumed went on. Nobody talked.)

  Jenny fished in her alpaca bag for her keys. She cupped them in the palm of her hand, unwilling just yet to duck out of the sun or take her eyes off the water. In this light, even the trees seemed to glisten. In summer it was like God took the lid off their northern world; there was more light, more people, more everything. Winter was when the islands could seem crazy-making claustrophobic or just super-cozy, depending upon whether or not you liked hearing the results to your most recent Pap test when you bumped into your gynecologist on the ferry to Lopez. The party was at five, and it was only four-thirty. She was sure she had time to pop into the grocery store on Main Street for a few minutes before heading home.

  In the grocery store there were definitely signs that the summer traffic was picking up. The ferry had disgorged the usual combination of families with impatient children reaching for saltwater taffy, killer whale refrigerator magnets, and pirate flags on pointed sticks; wealthy-looking older couples; and those who looked like they might be on a first or second anniversary or even their honeymoon. Jenny smiled at a pair of middle-age lesbians picking out pasta and she dodged a broad, silver-haired man in yachting clothes who took up a narrow aisle while he regarded the Scotch selection with a critical gaze.

  She took a second look at a pair of men waiting for service at the deli section. One of them was young, in his mid-twenties, and stood lightly and sway-backed like a dancer. He was African American, which was noticeable up in Puget Sound. He had close-cropped hair and a diamond stud in his ear. The other was white and closer to her age, though still under forty, she guessed. He stood firmly planted, with his Nikes on the floor and his basket tucked under his arm like a football. He was handsome, startlingly so. There was something about a boyish thicket of hair (a mop that needed cutting or a woman’s thin fingers to untangle it) combined with a man’s broad shoulders and sunburned neck that always made her heart beat faster.

  She saw them and caught her breath. They were actors, she was sure of it. And a couple? She pictured them cooking a meal together in some stylish urban kitchen. They would dart and weave in and out of each other’s way in the domestic choreography that she had achieved occasionally with one post-Monroe man or another, but never for long. She imagined herself sitting at a tall stool at the counter with a glass of wine in her hand, gossiping about people in New York or Los Angeles or Milan.

  A man in a Mariners cap steered a shopping cart of beer toward her and Jenny stepped out of the way. She wanted to stand there for as long as she could, relishing that her world was about to change. Suddenly, the man in the Nikes looked in her direction. He smiled and she saw (or was she imagining this?) her interest returned. It was more than just the friendly curiosity of a newcomer to the island. He gazed frankly back, taking in her high cheekbones and wide mouth, the hair falling over her dyed wool wrap, her narrow legs in faded jeans. Her eyes.

  She glanced away quickly, blushing, and hurried to the cash register with her eggs and paprika. She forgot about the milk altogether. How long, she found herself wondering, had it been since she’d kissed a man? When the days ran together like they did, full of work at the store and pots of rice boiling over and homework that needed to be checked, it was easy to lose track of time. Months and even seasons could pass by during which the only hands you felt on your skin were your own. And then suddenly it was summer, and you felt the sun on your bare back in the morning when you went out to check the mail or a strange man’s blue eyes resting on your face, and you remembered what it felt like to have a tongue brush the velvet underside of your lip.

  Jenny paid for her groceries and walked to her truck without looking back. Her heart didn’t stop pounding until she had pulled around the corner and was headed away from the harbor on Beaverton Valley Road. She followed the two-lane road past the isolated houses and pastures. The greens and yellows and browns of the landscape began to soothe her and she allowed her truck to slow. Time wasn’t really passing more quickly now that her girls were growing up, it just felt that way sometimes.

  The other day when she was looking for her checkbook in Lilly’s room, she came across a cache of love letters in her desk drawer. They looked like random notes at first, scrawled in pencil and blotchy pen on the backs of coupons or ripped fragments of lined paper. Until she noticed there were more stuffed behind the one
she held and that each was written in a different handwriting. Until she noticed the word love. Some were signed and her first thought (well, her second, after thinking that maybe she shouldn’t be reading them at all) was to wonder that the very same boys who flooded Lilly’s inbox with blunt texts asking, “wll u do me?” would use a pen and paper to compose sentences like, You are the only one I will ever love. Please don’t tell anyone I’ve written to you and I have never felt this way about a girl in my life before. She stuffed the notes back in the drawer and what she had thought then was: Will anyone write me a love letter ever again?

  Jenny swerved as a pair of tourists on rented mopeds careened past her going the other direction. Glancing at them in her rearview mirror, she caught a glimpse of her own widow’s peak and forehead. Her dark brows and blue eyes. A look passed between the two of them, Jenny and her reflected self, a look that held the somewhat exasperated question: What has happened to you?

  Before Monroe she might have walked right up to those men in the store and asked their names. She would have joked with them easily and flirted. She would have turned on her heels, her hair swinging, and known that the eyes of at least one of them might be following her to the cash register and out the door. She might even have felt entitled to their attention.

  The previous summer she and David had whiled away pleasant hours working on costumes together or speculating about visiting actors late at night. He was an easygoing carpenter, a guitar player, and, like most of the single men in her age group, someone she had known for years and years. Since she’d settled on the island, Jenny’s relationships all occurred within the boundaries of her small community, which made them more like a series of arranged marriages rather than torrid affairs. After endless bonfires and picnics, potlucks and gallery openings, small dinner parties and large celebrations, she and some preapproved local guy might appear to drift together like leaves on the wind but, really, it would be more like two planets revolving into each other’s orbits, anchored in the strong gravity of their mutual friends. Mary Ann had pushed hard for David in particular.