Juno's Daughters

by Lise Saffran

  Frankie tugged him into the house by the arm. “What’s in the bag?”

  He smiled down at her. “A present for you, actually. But don’t peek.”

  Phoenix followed behind, momentarily forgotten.

  Jenny scooped the pile of yarn off the table and tossed it into the basket on the floor. She pulled the pitcher from the fridge and surreptitiously swept a trail of crumbs into the sink with a frayed towel. Then she tucked the towel in her back pocket.

  Ariel pulled out a chair. Jenny kept a collection of chopsticks in a mug in the center of the table. Ariel plucked one out and used it to stir his tea.

  Frankie perched beside him. “Do you want some sugar? It’s just raw sugar, unfortunately,” she said, giving her mother a disapproving look.

  “Raw is fine.”

  She leaped up. “Lemon?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Phoenix was on the phone by the window, calling her mother to come pick her up.

  Lilly, who was foraging in the fridge, had her back to them all. She emerged with a package of tortillas and a jar of peanut butter. She pulled a chair back at the other end of the table, and before sitting she held them up in her hands. “Peanut butter wrap?”

  Ariel wrinkled his nose. “Thank you. But no.”

  Jenny poured herself a glass of tea. “Have you been enjoying the day off?”

  “It’s been incredibly boring, to tell the truth. Trinculo is in a sulk, and the last thing I want to do is hang around the apartment with his mooning.” He swung the plastic bag in front of Frankie’s face like a ball of yarn before a kitten. “So I went shopping.”

  Jenny looked up sharply. Wasn’t mooning a word that necessarily carried an object with it? Kind of like, well, lusting? The private thoughts she’d been having about Trinculo brought heat to her cheeks. How pathetic to think that her imagination provided the most intimacy she’d experienced in months.

  Lilly brightened. “He’s mooning?”

  “Perhaps he was just waiting around for an invitation to a tea party,” said Ariel. He looked at Lilly, who was smearing bits of tortilla with peanut butter and folding them into little packets before popping them in her mouth, with distaste. “Foolish to wait around,” he continued. “If you want something,” he lifted his glass, “you should just go get it.”

  “What do you mean?” Lilly stopped chewing.

  “Well, like I was saying to a friend just this morning,” he glanced over at Jenny. “Where would Romeo be if he’d never declared himself to Juliet?”

  Jenny narrowed her eyes. Was this friend he was talking about Trinculo? And why, for heaven’s sake, was he telling this to Lilly? And had he really just winked at her? She stabbed at the ice in her glass with a chopstick. “Well, he might be alive, for one thing.”

  Lilly groaned. “God, Mom.” She looked at Ariel. “My mother does not have a romantic bone in her body. She is the original buzz kill for romance.”

  Jenny sat back in her chair, stung. “I quit school to follow a rock and roll band, Lilly. If that isn’t romantic, then I don’t know what is. And look where it got me.”

  Frankie glanced up. “It got you us,” she said.

  Jenny softened. She reached across the table to touch Frankie’s cheek. “Yes it did, sweetie. It got me you.” She turned to Ariel, eager to change the subject. “Why don’t you show us what’s in the bag?”

  Ariel pulled the bag back and rested it on his lap just as Frankie reached for it. “You all know what’s coming up on Tuesday, don’t you? Peg’s famous rehearsal au naturelle.”

  Frankie covered her face with both hands and groaned. Phoenix hovered in the doorway, watching from a distance.

  Jenny’s forehead wrinkled as she looked at Frankie. “Peg seems to feel it’s very important, though I don’t know why. The other day she went on and on about stripping off your id and blah de blah.” She looked at Frankie with sympathy. “But you know you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

  Lilly pressed the tortilla bag against the table with her palm to reseal the zip-locking edge. “You’ll only be naked for like thirty seconds,” she said. “Peg just wants the nude-o-rama for when you’re on stage. When you’re not acting you can wear your clothes.”

  Ariel leaned forward. “What our illustrious director said was, and here I quote, I want to look at the stage and see flesh, not Tshirts and tank tops and modern waterproof sandals. He reached into the bag and pulled out a piece of fabric. He shook it so that they could see what it was: a flesh-colored bodysuit made out of a very thin material. It was the size a slender thirteen-year-old girl might wear. It had two bright red dots drawn on it where the nipples would be.

  Frankie clapped her hand over her mouth.

  Lilly reached for the suit and shook it out before all their eyes. She peered at the nipples and then her eyes traveled farther south. “What about the pubes? Frankie has pubes, you know.”

  Frankie and Phoenix locked eyes. Their shared horror overcame the distance between them.

  Ariel gazed coolly at Lilly for several heartbeats before saying, “Pubes aren’t really in fashion now, darling, are they? I would expect you’re bald down there. Or am I wrong about that?”

  Lilly turned bright red and hopped up from the table. “I’m going to go take a shower.”

  Jenny watched her bend to put the tortillas back in the fridge and thought, not without admiration, that it was quite a feat to have made Lilly blush. She turned back to Ariel. “Can I get you something to eat? We have some tabbouleh in the fridge. It’s nice and cool on a hot day.”

  Ariel put his hands on his thighs as if prepared to hoist himself up from the chair with great effort. It was a funny gesture, thought Jenny, for a man so unusually light on his feet.

  “I should really get back to town,” he said. “Trink will eventually stop sulking and want to begin drinking. I should be there to support him.”

  “Did you walk?” she asked, trying to picture him trudging alongside the hot shoulder of the road.

  “I do what I have to do, sugar.” The look that he gave her then, half-mocking and half-sympathetic, seemed to imply that he knew all she had been thinking and more. It was odd. They were so different in so many ways, and yet it had been a long time since anyone on that island, with the exception of Mary Ann, had seemed able to read Jenny so easily.

  She turned. “Phoenix, honey? Did you call your mom?”

  “Yeah. She’s coming to get me.” Phoenix’s reply was unusually soft for such a bold girl. Bold, perhaps, only in comparison to Frankie.

  “You might want to walk back,” she said, turning to look at Ariel once more. “But if not, we can ask Theresa to give you a ride.” Jenny was curious to see what Theresa would make of Ariel.

  He sipped his tea. “I wouldn’t turn down a ride back to town.”

  Theresa came too soon for Phoenix, who had overcome her shyness and was sitting at the table with Frankie and Ariel, gossiping about various TV and film actors whom Ariel had met in New York and Los Angeles. They didn’t hear her truck and so she appeared in the doorway suddenly.

  Jenny stood up from the table. “Ariel, this is my friend Theresa. Theresa, this is Ariel.”

  Phoenix broke in, “It’s not his real name.”

  Theresa glanced down at her grime-stained clothes before shrugging and holding out her hand to Ariel. “I bet this seems like the total sticks for you. Are you from New York City?”

  Jenny smiled. This was the Theresa she remembered from all those years ago. The one who would show up at Jenny’s place with a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of wine and sit on the porch with her while the girls climbed around on fallen logs.

  Ariel shook his head. “Seattle.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed.

  “I do go to the Big Apple quite frequently,” he added. “When I’m in a show there I usually stay with a friend in the Village. Are you familiar with Greenwich Village?”

  Theresa’s eyes shined. “Oh, s
ure. I mean, I’ve heard of it. I haven’t been able to get out there yet.”

  The Big Apple? Jenny gave Ariel a sharp look to see if he was making fun of Theresa. There was no mockery in his face that she could see.

  “Have you been in a lot of shows? And TV and movies, do you do that, too, or mostly just the theater?”

  “I had a small part in Two and a Half Men. And I’ve done some commercials.” He drained his glass and set it delicately back on the table. “I’m primarily a stage actor.” He turned to Jenny with a mild but lingering look.

  She straightened. “Theresa, would you and Phoenix mind giving Ariel a ride into town?”

  Theresa beamed. “We’d love to.”

  Phoenix pulled herself reluctantly away from Ariel and Frankie and went to get her things. Just as he was about to get up, Frankie spontaneously grabbed Ariel in a hug. She looked surprised at herself, but delighted when he did not pull away. Jenny, too, was surprised at how easily he seemed to sit with Frankie’s obvious affections. He was snippy with almost everyone else, even Trinculo, but he was enormously gentle with her.

  “Thank you,” she said softly, not meaning just for the leotard, but for everything.

  He patted Frankie on the head and extricated himself gracefully from her grasp. He lifted the leotard off the table, tucked it into the bag, and slipped it to Frankie like a spy handing off the secret papers. “I figure you’re naked enough as it is, at thirteen,” he said.

  Lilly had clearly been waiting for Ariel to leave before coming out of the bathroom. She emerged with a faded towel wrapped around her body. “Is he gone?”

  Frankie looked at her sister as if she could not believe her ears. “Ariel?”

  “Yep,” said Jenny, clearing the glasses off the table.

  “Good.” Lilly sent drops flying from her dreads as she swung her head. “He can be such a bitch.”

  Frankie ran past her. “God! If there’s anyone who’s a bitch around here, it’s you!”

  Lilly watched her go and then turned to Jenny with her eyebrows raised. “Is she still crushed out on him? Poor thing.”

  Jenny grabbed a handful of grapes from the fridge and dropped into the soft chair by the window. “I think she’s just fine, actually. Better than fine.”

  Lilly shrugged. “You always take her side.”

  It didn’t bother Jenny, really, that the afternoon’s peace and cooperation had frayed. She had long since learned that when you were raising children, no phase lasted for long, either good or bad. At about six months old Lilly had begun to make a sound like a cat in heat. She howled and screeched whenever she opened her mouth, and Jenny and Monroe had looked at each other in horror and amazement. Just when they were beginning to think there was something wrong with her and that they would have to spend their lives listening to that sound, she stopped. By the time Frankie began to exercise her vocal chords in the same way, Jenny was no longer looking Monroe in the eye. It didn’t matter, though. She knew that all she had to do was wait. This, too, would pass.

  Lilly disappeared into the back room to get dressed and then, apparently having second thoughts, reappeared in her bathrobe. She perched on the edge of Jenny’s chair.

  “I want to ask you something.” She waited for Jenny to meet her gaze.

  “Okay.”

  “Just this one time, will you put aside the mom thing and give me your honest opinion? Please?”

  “I’ll try.” It took every ounce of self-control Jenny had for her not to laugh out loud. The mom thing? Is that what Lilly thought these last eighteen years represented to Jenny? A thing that she could just put aside?

  “Should I just come out and tell him directly that I’m in love with him? Do you think that’s what Ariel was trying to say this afternoon? That I should declare my feelings for Trinculo so that he knows it’s okay to, well, you know … ?”

  “No. Don’t.” The words jumped out of Jenny’s mouth before she even knew she was thinking them.

  “Why not?”

  Lilly looked at her with interest, apparently convinced that Jenny was speaking to her as a woman now, instead of as her mother. Jenny cringed inwardly. If she only knew.

  “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “Oh, great.” Lilly stood up and looked down at Jenny with disgust and something very much like pity. “That is so you. Typical. As if getting hurt was the worst thing in the world. I feel sorry for you sometimes, Mom. I really do.”

  Lilly headed for her bedroom, shaking her head in disbelief.

  Jenny buried her face in her palms. In less than a week, she was going to strip naked in front a group of people that included not just this girl, but also her friends and neighbors and a man she might well be in love with. In light of that fact, Jenny had two questions for herself, and she thought it might not be a bad idea to take Lilly’s advice and put aside the mom thing while she searched for the answers. The first? Was she utterly out of her mind? The second? Was it too early for a glass of wine? She stood up and headed for the kitchen. Only the second, she decided, could be answered definitively.

  CHAPTER 9

  Wild Waters

  On the day of the naked rehearsal, the cast assembled at the dock in Friday Harbor as instructed. Peg had arranged for them to be ferried somewhere, she didn’t say where, by Leroy Jones, who captained a whale-watching boat out of Deer Harbor, on Orcas. Apparently he, like they, had been sworn to secrecy about where they were going (but unlike the rest of them, he would actually know where it was before they arrived). Lilly scoffed at the idea that they would be followed by paparazzi, if that was what Peg was afraid of. Jenny suspected that Peg, her face lit up with expectation while she chatted on a bench with Caliban, simply liked the intrigue that the whole thing interjected into the middle of their summer preparations. In Dale and Peg’s world, after all, drama was to be embraced rather than avoided.

  It was bright and windless, but the heat had broken from the previous week. Along with lunches and thermoses filled with iced tea and lemonade and the random bottle of white wine, they had sweaters and jackets and hiking shoes. Peg had hinted that they might all go on a walkabout after the rehearsal. Chad had brought his guitar along and he sat on the bench playing it while everyone waited for the boat. Frankie and Lilly had rediscovered through the play how much they liked singing together and they provided harmony for him and a few of the other deep-voiced Os on “The Needle and the Damage Done.” Trinculo had borrowed David’s harmonica and was screwing around on it tunelessly.

  Frankie wore her flesh-colored leotard under her clothes, a fact that Ariel, now stretching elaborately at the railing as if it were a balance bar, had confirmed with a quick lift of her T-shirt.

  Jenny listened for a while and then stood up and wandered over toward the edge of the dock. She took her sunglasses off to polish them with the hem of her T-shirt and was momentarily blinded by the glare off the water.

  “I’ll tell you where we’re headed, if you want.” For a large man, Dale had an uncommon ability to sneak. His breath was hot in her ear.

  She turned. “Blakely?”

  He whispered. “Stuart. Peg has a friend with property on the east side.”

  “Oh.” She looked back out at the water. An oystercatcher hopped onto a rock near the water’s edge, close enough so that she could see its scarlet beak and gleaming red eyes.

  Dale stood by her so close that their bodies touched from the shoulder to the elbow. “I feel like you’ve been avoiding me,” he said.

  Jenny sighed. “How are things going between you and Peg?”

  Dale turned to face her. His hair was windblown and the sunburn on his nose and cheeks made him look like he’d been drinking. “She doesn’t mind, I told you. She wants an open marriage.”

  “Geez, Dale. You and I are old friends …”

  Dale looked despondently at his hands on the railing. His fingers were thick and sprinkled liberally with the white hair that covered his chin and head. “You’re hot for th
at jester, eh? You, Ariel, Miranda, and even, I suspect, my own sweet Peg. Well, good luck is all I can say.” He smiled sheepishly. “Actors are a notoriously unhinged bunch.”

  Jenny leaned against the wood railing, picking at its flaking paint with her fingernail. Water lapped against the rocks below to make the steady pat, pat, pat sound of a baker kneading dough. A seagull cried and then landed nearby, looking at them carefully in case they might be holding food. The description of Peg as sweet was a bit incongruous (generous, brilliant, unconventional all worked, but sweet?), but the more important fact was that Dale thought she was interested in Trinculo. Is that what all this randiness was about? He was threatened by the new guy?

  Finally she said, “He kissed Lilly.”

  Dale appeared to think about that. “I’ve kissed Lilly.”

  Jenny turned and punched him in the shoulder. Hard.

  “Ouch.” He rubbed his arm. “Just once, okay? I was inebriated and it was late and, well, she reminded me of you.”

  “God, Dale. You are such a jerk.”

  He looked out at the water. “Sorry.”

  Jenny said, “You should be.”

  A forty-something-foot twin outboard motorboat chugged into the dock. The seagulls scattered into the air and the wake churned up the water against the rocks. The captain cut the engine and came out on deck to toss David a rope.

  “Our ride is here, people,” called Peg from her perch standing on a bench. “Get ready to load up.”

  Jenny searched for her girls and finally saw them jogging back from the ice cream shop holding cones. Frankie’s T-shirt was so thin and worn that in a certain light the nipples that Ariel had inked on to her bodysuit were visible. Jenny hoped Lilly would keep her mouth shut about that and resolved to pull her aside before boarding to make her promise. The boat was large by whale-watching standards, but with the whole cast on it, it would be crowded to capacity with no opportunity for a private conversation. She shouldered her bag and saw first Trinculo’s Nikes, then his brown legs.

  She said, “I think Peg wants us on the boat.”