Juno's Daughters

by Lise Saffran

  “It wasn’t,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I mean, we didn’t …”

  Jenny held her finger to his lips. “Shhh. It’s okay. I seem to recall that you were not completely of sound mind.”

  Trinculo covered her hand with his. She gave it a gentle tug, but he resisted letting it go.

  “I should tell you, however, that she’s seventeen.”

  “Oh, geez.” He dropped her hand and reeled back against the bench as if he had been staked through the heart.

  Jenny pressed the plastic lid back on the top of her salad and eyed Trinculo with a thoughtful tilt of the head. Life as the mother of two teenage girls often seemed to call for the pantomime looks of slack-jawed surprise and elaborate double takes that he made so naturally. Too bad he was only on the island for the summer.

  Jenny held the phone against her ear with her right shoulder and began braiding a chunk of the long black hair that fell forward into her face. She could picture the ring bouncing off the granite countertops and recessed lighting in her sister’s kitchen and echoing through the large family room with its energy-efficient windows and view of Mount Tamalpais.

  “Hello?” Sue finally answered.

  Jenny sat up straight, letting her braid fall and unravel. “Hi. I hear you called.”

  “I call all the time, Jen. Thank you for calling back.” Her tone was light and teasing, but her point was taken.

  “Hey, thanks again for the laptop you sent Lilly for graduation. She really wanted her own computer.”

  “Ed and I were very happy to do it. She’s a bright girl, our Lilly.”

  Jenny felt a rush of warmth hearing her sister describe her child as “our Lilly.” She pictured that good feeling as a deer trail she could follow in the conversation, one that would lead them both to friendly, neutral ground.

  “I hear Walter is doing great at Stanford,” said Jenny. “And Katie is applying where? Oberlin?”

  “She hasn’t decided yet. We’re going to go look at a couple of schools this fall. She still has another year.”

  “Right. She’s a junior.”

  Katie was on the plump side with unruly curls and a gravelly voice that made her sound like a woman with a two-pack-a-day habit. Sue and her family had visited Jenny one summer when Katie and Lilly were about eight. They had rented a vacation house on the east side of the island, and upon visiting Jenny and the girls in their cabin, Katie had tugged on her mother’s shirt and whispered audibly in her ear, “Where’s the rest of the house?”

  Jenny had been embarrassed but oddly satisfied, too. Unlike Katie, her girls would never take a roof over their heads for granted.

  Sue cleared her throat. “Lilly should really be in school this fall, Jenny. Don’t you think?”

  A motorcycle revved its engine near the back window of the shop and Jenny’s mind followed its fading growl around the corner. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea for her to work for a year or so,” she said. “It might help her get a better sense of herself.”

  “Oh, Jenny.” Sue sighed, and as she did she sounded exactly like their mother used to when Jenny was a teenager. Oh, Jenny, don’t you want to do something this afternoon besides listen to rock music? Oh, Jenny, that outfit makes you look like a foundling. Oh, Jenny, is a C in English really the best you can do?

  What was left of lunch twisted in Jenny’s stomach. She poked at her fingernails with an unbent paperclip and braced herself for the criticism to come.

  “Of all people,” continued Sue, “you should know how hard it is to go back to school once you stop.”

  No one in Jenny’s family had approved of her dropping out of college after her sophomore year, and in spite of her promises she’d never gone back, just as they’d all predicted. Nor could she convincingly argue, Well look at me, I’ve done all right. Not as long as she bought her rice and beans in bulk and drove a truck that you could hear coming from half a mile away.

  “This is a good place for my girls,” she said, as firmly as she could. “They have friends here. It’s beautiful. It’s clean.” She was unaccountably near tears and wondered if her sister could tell. “It’s safe.”

  “I know how important safety is to you, Jen,” said Sue in a gentle voice. “But think of Lilly. She’s seventeen years old. She needs opportunities. Challenges. Ideas.”

  “The College of Marin isn’t exactly Harvard, from what I understand,” said Jenny. She sounded way too much like Lilly herself for her own peace of mind.

  “Did she apply anywhere else?”

  Neither of them spoke for a few moments after that. Of course Jenny had gone through the college brochures that Lilly had brought home during her junior and senior years, first with Lilly and then later, alone at the kitchen table late at night. She had even offered to help Lilly with an application or two, though in the end Lilly had not asked and Jenny had not followed up. The colleges that Lilly liked, with their tree-shaded quads and big brick student unions, were all so far away. And so very expensive.

  The clock tapped against the quiet in the store, and outside the window, the wind rustled the trees. The inter-island ferry, chugging in from Shaw, let out a long, wavering blast of its horn.

  “She’d stay with you, then?” asked Jenny at long last. “In your house?”

  “Walter said she could have his room.”

  Jenny ran her fingers through her hair. “I don’t know, Sue. I think it might be too soon.”

  “Too soon for you, maybe, but for Lilly …” As usual, Sue pushed just a little too far.

  “Well, she’s not going anywhere before July, that’s for sure,” said Jenny. “We’re all going to be in the Props to You version of The Tempest.”

  “So I heard.” Sue’s voice, too, had snapped back into its combative range. The deer trail had vanished and now, damn it all, they were in the thicket. “Lilly seems quite taken with one of the actors. A grown man, I gather.”

  Jenny twisted a chunk of her hair around a finger and her gaze drifted out the window to the bench by the harbor.

  Trinculo had walked her to the door of the shop after lunch. They stood there in the bright sun, smiling, each of them reluctant to say good-bye. With each of her most recent boyfriends, Jenny had felt warmth and desire, but at the end of the day she had still felt like, well, Jenny. Trinculo shifted from foot to foot with his hands in his pockets, and for a brief second, glimpsing herself through his eyes, she had almost been able to see Juno.

  Jenny adjusted the phone at her ear. “Lilly’s quite taken with everyone,” she said. The bell on the front door rang and Jenny nodded to Mary Ann, who was making her way to the back. “Look, I have to get going. We can talk about this later, okay?”

  “Okay. Love you.”

  “You, too.”

  “Big sis?” asked Mary Ann. She slung her bag over the back of the chair and handed Jenny her alpaca shawl.

  “That obvious?”

  “Mmmm. Oh, hey, I think I saw Frankie down the street by the ferry landing.”

  “With Phoenix?”

  “By herself. I’m not sure, though. But I think it was her. See you later?”

  Jenny walked down the hill toward the harbor until she saw her daughter pacing on the corner of A Street and Nichols. It wasn’t just the fact that Frankie’s hat was gone, or that she was running her fingers through her hair in the way that Jenny did when she was distressed or even that she was alone, as she so rarely had been all the years of her life. There had always been Phoenix by her side, or Lilly, or Jenny herself. It was the startling tautness in the way her body moved, a coiled-up anger and despair so at odds with the girl who filled the quills of scavenged eagle feathers with ink that made Jenny stop and stare.

  She lurched toward Frankie, who, seeing her mother, stumbled forward and fell into her. Frankie’s sadness spread like an electric charge from her body to her mother’s. Jenny took the current like a tree in a thunderstorm. For long minutes they stood locked together, startled by the bright light of
surprise. The inevitability of it did not lessen the pain.

  Jenny did not tell her daughter, Shshhh. She held her until Frankie, gulping, found the ability to speak.

  “Phoenix is moving to Mount Vernon. In three weeks.” The looming deadline brought forth a new round of sobbing. “Theresa wants her to go to high school in Mount Vernon, with her cousins. She wants her to get to know all kinds of people.” This last part was singsonged with an acidity born out of pure bitter rejection.

  “Oh, baby. Sweetheart.” Her arm firm around Frankie’s shoulder, Jenny turned her toward the harbor. “Let’s go sit down.”

  Frankie let herself be led to a bench by the playground on Tucker Avenue.

  “Theresa’s already rented out their house to someone,” wailed Frankie, “so she can’t even change her mind. They have a lease.” She pronounced the word with the dread a condemned man might use to refer to the noose.

  “Poor Phoenix,” whispered Jenny. She tried to smile reassuringly at a small boy who had stopped swinging in order to rubberneck.

  Frankie lifted her damp, splotched face up to look her mother in the eyes. It was at that moment that Jenny realized that the deeper pain had not yet been revealed, the pain that so far, alone, Frankie had been afraid to even glance at. Jenny wrapped both her hands around her daughter’s bony fingers to warm them. She did not need to ask herself what she would do to protect this child from harm. In the real world you did what you could and the harm came anyway.

  Frankie could do no more than whisper, “She wants to go.”

  Jenny’s eyes filled with tears. She pulled Frankie close and pressed her head against her chest so that she would not see her mother cry.

  Frankie’s words spilled out wetly against Jenny’s shirt. “She says she’s sad about moving but she’s lying. I can tell. All she wanted to talk about was the Appaloosa that her cousin rides and the high school gymnastics team that she’s going to join. She even bragged about the fucking Tulip Festival that they have in Mount Vernon. As if I could care.”

  Jenny allowed herself a brief, wry smile and a glimmer of hope at that fucking. It was that fighting spirit that might get Frankie through to the other side, if she could hold on to it. If Jenny had been able to muster more fight herself, she might not have stayed with Monroe as long as she had.

  “I would never drop a friend I’d known since I was a baby for some dumb Appaloosa and a chance to do gymnastics,” said Frankie, hiccupping. She was bent forward over herself like a busted hyacinth, dripping tears and snot into her lap.

  “I know, honey. And I know that Phoenix loves you. But people are different. They want different things.”

  “I would never do this. I never would.”

  “I know, baby. I know you wouldn’t.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Brave New World

  The tables in the barn were arranged in a square with a hole in the center. Dale and Peg sat at one end with their heads together, whispering furiously, only pausing in their talk to refill their coffee cups from a large carafe that sat in front of them. The binder in Peg’s lap was open to the middle, and from years previous Jenny knew that the bag at her feet was packed with a variety of items she or anyone else might need during the two-hour reading of the play, including tissues, Sharpies, safety pins, paper clips, eyedrops, and Advil.

  For the past three years Jenny had been present at the table reading as an assistant costume designer (with a strong emphasis on the assistant part, since the ideas were mostly Peg’s), but this was her first time as one of the actors. And it was also the first time attending with her daughters, one of whom stood red-eyed at her side. The other was nowhere to be seen, though it was already past the time they were to assemble. So far Dale and Peg had not noticed Lilly’s absence, however, and Jenny had to restrain herself from slipping out the door to call her on her cell. It was important for her oldest daughter to have an opportunity to make her own mistakes, she reminded herself, and suffer the consequences. She imaged her sister, Sue, saying something similar about letting Lilly go to Marin and she felt a twinge of discomfort. All she was risking here, she imagined replying, was getting yelled at by Dale. She continued the argument in her mind until Peg stood abruptly and began clapping her hands for their attention. An elf-size woman, she had the voice of a giant.

  “Okay, people! Take your seats. It’s time to begin.”

  Jenny pulled out a chair for herself and one for Frankie, as silent and still as a photograph. Mary Ann smiled at Jenny from across the room and began heading toward the chair on her other side. She had gained some weight in the past few years and her body now had the round, rolling heaviness of a country cook. She and Jenny had gotten used to conspiring on the costumes and set pieces and they had learned to mix gossip and speculation and planning seamlessly into the details of running the store and setting out inventory. The chair next to Jenny scraped against the concrete floor and Trinculo, rather than Mary Ann, dropped into it with a nod.

  Mary Ann paused and took in the scene with an appraising glance, then found a chair next to Ariel, who appeared to be wearing a bodysuit made out of plum-colored velour.

  Trinculo leaned in to Jenny. “Hi again.”

  “Hey.”

  She looked down at her hands and then glanced up again, quickly, when Frankie shifted beside her. Peg was shuffling her notes and preparing to speak. There was no time to explain to Trinculo that since they’d seen each other at lunch she’d become preoccupied by what was happening with Frankie. If she seemed distracted, she wanted to say, then that was the reason. Trinculo had worn a canvas shoulder bag to the reading, and bending to pull a notebook from it, he brushed against Jenny with his arm. Skin to skin. She flushed, and looking around the table at all the people packed into the old barn, both familiar and unfamiliar, realized that the problem was, she was not distracted enough.

  Caliban was seated directly across from Jenny and Trinculo, wearing dark sunglasses, though the light in the barn was dim. As soon as Peg spoke, he began unloading his own small supply cabinet’s worth of stuff onto the table: colored pencils, throat spritzer, small Post-it notes, and a bag of peppermints. Ferdinand chose the seat closest to the door. The rest of the chairs were filled with the handful of island people who were either musicians or had been chosen for one of the smaller parts, including Chad, who had indeed won the role of Stephano. With a look of undisguised delight, he sat next to Miranda, who wore a low-cut T-shirt and bicycle shorts. Still no Lilly.

  An owl hooted in the eaves. Frankie breathed softly through her mouth, her nose plugged from nearly an hour of solid crying. Peg laid her hands palms-down on the table and leaned toward the company, scanning people’s faces with all the intensity she could muster. If she noticed Frankie’s distraught state, she did not reveal it.

  “This is what I see.” She closed her eyes and tilted her head back toward the ceiling. “Darkness. A howling wind. Thunder like big bass drums.” She opened her eyes and turned her face toward David, who jotted something down in a notebook. “The spirits in black costumes, but layered.” Here she turned her attention to Jenny and Frankie. She frowned. “Where the fuck is Lillian?”

  “Here I am.”

  The barn door swung open and Lilly appeared in her trademark long underwear, under a short skirt this time and topped with a tie-dyed University of Washington sweatshirt. Jenny hoped that for Lilly’s sake Peg would not notice the cookie crumbs on her chin. She would have bet anything that Lilly had commanded her chariot, driven by Elliot, to stop at the Roche Harbor ice cream shop on the way, for snacks.

  Peg narrowed her eyes in a look that would have made Frankie cry. Lilly simply dragged a chair from the back of the room and began pushing it into the narrow space between Jenny and Trinculo. There was not enough room for both mother and daughter in that spot. Conscious of Peg’s glaring, Jenny moved her chair toward Frankie’s and let Lilly in.

  “Five o’clock, Lillian. I said five o’clock.”

  “I’m s
o sorry everybody, really, but the thing is, the Edisons, you know, who live out on Wold, are having this complicated irrigation system put in, to, you know, water their… .”

  In a matter of seconds Lilly had buried the entire company under a blizzard of teenage excuse-speak.

  Even Peg looked cowed. “Okay,” she said. “Enough. Take your seat and close your mouth.”

  Lilly shifted toward Trinculo and grinned. Jenny turned to give her daughter an admonishing glance and instead found herself watching Trinculo watching Lilly. He seemed unable to avert his eyes from her, no doubt finding Lilly in the flesh a hundred times more compelling than the hash-fueled Lilly of memory. He gaped and then, without noticing Jenny’s eyes upon him, he blushed a deep, crimson red. Jenny quickly turned away. Somehow, on the bench that afternoon with the salt breezes and the circling gulls, she had managed to convince herself that whatever had happened between her daughter and this man that night was unimportant. What, she asked herself now, had she been thinking?

  Caliban gazed at Lilly also for a long moment over the top of his sunglasses and then carefully selected one of his colored pencils. He scribbled something in his notebook, applied a Post-it note to the same spot, and then unwrapped a peppermint and placed it on his tongue as if he were giving himself communion, or more likely, thought Jenny, taking a hit of LSD.

  Peg took a draft of her coffee. “Act one. Scene one,” she said. “A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard. Enter a Ship-Master and a Boatswain.”

  Sally Muller had been chosen as the Ship-Master. “Boatswain!” she called.

  “Here, master,” called back Stu Barnes. “What cheer?”

  “Good’ speak to th’ mariners. Fall to’t yarely, or we run ourselves aground. Bestir, bestir. Exit.”

  Everyone laughed at Sally’s inclusion of that “exit.” Everyone except for Frankie, who sat bowed over her copy of the play, her hair falling forward, abject misery still visible on her face. Jenny placed her hand reassuringly on Frankie’s leg, but she did not stir. From the corner of her eye she saw Ariel reach into Caliban’s bag of peppermints and pluck one out. Caliban glowered and Ariel crossed his eyes at him in response. Then, with remarkable accuracy, he shot the peppermint over the table to Frankie. She sat up straight, gave him a grateful, puppyish look, and put the candy in her mouth.