The Sheep Walker's Daughter

by Sydney Avey

  Our conversation is interrupted by the series of short rings that signal a phone call for me and not my neighbor who shares the phone line. I’ve always found the term party line to be offensive. If it’s my call, I don’t want anyone else to be a party to it. But there it is. I have developed the habit of monitoring my words for the effect they might have when they are passed around with a plate of doughnuts at the morning coffee hour next door.

  “Excuse me, I need to get this.” I disappear behind the doorframe, lift the telephone receiver from its cradle, and brace my shoulder against the wall.

  It’s my boss, Mr. Bradley. He inquires after my mother’s health with all the interest of a grocery-store clerk handing me my S&H Green Stamps while measuring the contents of the next customer’s cart to see how many bags he’ll need. “Do you think you can make it into work next week? The invoices are really piling up on your desk.”

  My desk at General Electric Company; I’d like to be sitting there right now. Pencils sharpened and ready to go, my typewriter square in front of me, a fresh notepad to my left, my adding machine to the right, my in-box in the corner, nothing else. My heart races like a ground squirrel that has just spotted his hole and dashed for cover. My desk is not safe, though. Mr. Bradley is a beady-eyed bird of prey circling high above, watching for one member of the colony to make a mistake. It was my mistake to take the last week of Leora’s life off work, because now I’m going to have to ask for more time.

  “Actually, Mr. Bradley, my mother died this morning.” I pick a pencil up off the telephone table and drum it on the message pad. “I’m going to need a little more time off to make arrangements.”

  “Dee.” His voice drips with disappointment, but it’s not for me or my dead mother. “I’m sorry for your loss. Take tomorrow off. I need you back in the office on Monday. I don’t know if I can hold your job past that.”

  “Mr. Bradley, you know I’m entitled to three days of compassion leave.” He will probably have to look that word up in the dictionary. I doodle with the pencil while he does some heavy sighing.

  “You’ve had a week, Dee.”

  “I took vacation, Mr. Bradley, to take care of my sick mother. Now I have to bury her. Don’t you have a mother, Mr. Bradley?” I’ve gone too far. I explain that the invoices don’t have to be paid until the end of the month and offer to return to work early next week and work late to make up the time.

  “You know I can’t pay overtime, Dee.” I snap the pencil in two with one hand.

  “I’ll take the work home. You won’t have to pay me overtime.”

  “Okay, Dee.” His voice warms like a snake that has felt the morning sun. “Let us know if you need anything.” Click. He’s gone.

  I pivot around the doorframe back into the kitchen and glare at Father Mike.

  “Okay, what does she want?”

  My jaw drops at what he tells me. My mother has purchased three spaces in a columbarium on a wall inside a chapel on the grounds of Saint Matthew’s. She wants to be walled up! This is like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. I have to ask Father Mike what a columbarium is. He explains the process of cremation and interment. There are different kinds of crypts, but apparently Leora wanted to be on display because she purchased three elaborate brass urns that will be visible behind glass. Before he leaves, Father Mike shows me a picture.

  “Why three?” I ask.

  He shrugs and looks away. Did she intend for Valerie and me to stand with her in eternity behind glass? How very like her, to assume that Valerie will never marry and that I won’t be buried beside Henry at Golden Gate Cemetery, the burial ground for war veterans. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure I ever actually made those arrangements.

  Father Mike has instructed me to think about how I want to honor my mother. She will be cremated, and interment can happen anytime. I have mixed emotions about Father Mike. His intrusion and his allusions to an intimacy with my mother that I didn’t know she was capable of irritate my stomach. On the other hand, he has cleared a path in one short visit that will allow me to move forward. Somehow, the thought of Leora shelved like a treasured book in a library of souls comforts me. Tears flood my eyes. I’ve never thought of my mother as a treasure.

  Treasure. I roll that word around on my tongue. Leora was not one who cared a lot about possessions, but she did have her treasures. The fog that rolls in from the ocean near Santa Cruz has cooled the air that sifts into the front room through the screen door, a moist chill that prompts me to begin closing up the house. I turn on the lights and go on a hunt for my mother’s treasures.

  Midnight finds me sitting on the pitted wood floor surrounded by relics I have pulled from drawers— trinkets I found in the pockets of Leora’s old sweaters, memorabilia I have retrieved from the steamer trunk in the back of the garage, and souvenirs I have discovered in a valise she kept under her bed. Among the objects that stare at me are a bright yellow gargoyle with incense-stained teeth that smells of sandalwood, a bronze bust of an enigmatic young woman with the curl of a smile forming on her lips, and a shiny teal goose with a graceful curve to its neck. As I finger the costume jewelry I’ve piled on the floor, I contemplate these things I’ve seen before—but not ever really seen. They tell a story I’ve never asked to hear.

  I can’t keep all this stuff. The sad fact is no one wants any of it. Valerie is a gypsy, moving around the world with her life packed in a duffle bag. Most likely, she’ll give up her apartment in Palo Alto when she’s done with school and return to Spain, the country she fell in love with on a foreign exchange program. Then I will be finally, irrefutably alone. How did it come to be that Valerie and I are at the end of a line that pulled apart like fragile yarn tugged too hard from a tight ball of wool?

  An aftershock of grief roars up from a deep place. I lie on the floor, rolling my head slowly back and forth on the waxy wood to relieve the pressure in my temples. What am I crying about? The trinkets on the floor? No, I’m mourning the family I never had. Surely there are people somewhere I never knew and will never know. Why did I stop asking Leora about who we were, where we came from? Because I knew she wouldn’t tell me the truth.

  Valerie isn’t telling what she knows either.

  3 — Valerie, Tangled Webs

  H Valerie I

  3

  Tangled Webs

  My novel is going to be published in Spain. Professor Warner found me in the library stacks and said, “Miss Carter, I’ve received word that Mondadori is going to take your book.” My stomach did flip-flops. Flip, I’m an author. Flop, I can’t let my mother know about this. How did I let things get this far?

  Only two people know how this book came to be: Professor Warner and Wallace Stegner, the head of the Stanford Creative Writing Program. Even though my story flowed easily onto paper after a chance remark Professor Stegner made in a seminar, it has never been easy for me to acknowledge the truth. I teased this story out of my grandmother and never told my mother that she may have a sister.

  Professor Stegner had told his class of fledgling novelists that we should create our own personal histories. “You may not know who you are, or who your character is, but you know where you came from. Write about that, and you will discover who you are, who your character is.”

  The thing is, I don’t know where I came from. Not exactly, but I’ve guessed at some of it and made up the rest. Leora gave me clues, but my mother can’t know that. Mom must not know that I managed to wrest information from my tight-lipped grandmother that she refused to tell her own daughter. I will not be the one to tell my mother that although she was raised as an only child, there might have been another one. If it’s true, Leora should have told her. That’s my only irritation with Leora though, because she was always so generous with me. She said we were kindred spirits. Strong women.

  I’ve let Mom go on thinking I’m still writing a scholarly account of the influence of the Spanish Civil War on Spanish literature. But the truth is that I set my thesis aside more t
han a year ago when I started writing an historical novel based on imagining our family history. It’s about two sisters separated during the Spanish Civil War, when many Basque children were evacuated to Eastern and Western Europe. One sister returns to Spain with her father after the war. The other sister gets caught in Russia with her mother and eventually ends up in the United States.

  Whenever I try to talk to my mother about where we came from, she gets mad. Writing my story in Spanish and publishing it in Spain means I won’t have to explain my interest in a family history she doesn’t give a fig about. I have this all planned out. I will take a semester in Spain, get back to writing my thesis, and work with the publisher of my novel to get it to press. I will dedicate my book to mi abuela, Leora Moraga.

  I’m in such a state as I walk through the quad that my shoulder slams into the bulging book bag of an undergrad. I stumble and he gives me the bleary-eyed look of a biology major that has been looking at Petri dishes under a lab light for too long. He mumbles an apology even though it’s my fault. Leora always told me I can’t walk a straight line to save my life, and it’s true.

  I stop and look up. I’ve been walking toward MemChu. Whenever life hands me a perfect moment, I come here to let the graceful Spanish architecture of Stanford Memorial Church give me a benediction. I gaze up at the cross that stands in noon relief against a cloudless expanse of bright blue sky. As the bells chime their midday greeting, I say a quick prayer. Then I veer off to the bike racks, hop onto my Silverlight racer, and speed off to meet Peter for a late lunch.

  Riding my bike invigorates me. My knees bounce the petticoat underneath my favorite circle skirt, swishing it from side to side as I pump across El Camino toward Emerson Street. My ponytail whips across my cheek in the fall wind and my eyes tear from the cold, or maybe it’s the pollen in the air. I slow to a stop in front of the Peninsula Creamery and lock my bike up next to Peter’s. My heart flip-flops when I spot Peter through the window. He is sitting at our table, drinking a Coke and talking to a couple of girls who don’t seem in too much of a hurry to find their own table. I slow down and busy myself looking at the jawbreakers in the gumball machine. I spot a blue one and the inside of my mouth moistens. When I look up again, the girls have moved back to their own booth.

  I shouldn’t do this, but I swing my hips slightly as I walk toward Peter. Coming up behind him, I run a finger along the back of his neck and tease it across his closely clipped hair a couple of times. He turns to me and a slow, crooked smile breaks across his face, but it’s his eyes that undo me. Deep set and sparkly blue, half shaded by blond-tipped curly brown lashes, his eyes catch the light and invite me in.

  “Hello, baby,” he says in the practiced way that always reminds me that Peter is a man who knows the effect he has on women. He pats the bench next to him and I drop in.

  “Guess what, Peter?”

  He raises a finger and signals to the waitress to bring me a Coke. Then he shifts his body to face me and says in all seriousness, “I’m all ears.”

  Then he wiggles his ears. “How do you do that?”

  “But we digress. What’s your news?” He rests his rugged jaw on his hand.

  “I just got the word. My book is going to be published in Spain.”

  “That’s great, Val.” Peter hunches over his Coke. He uses his straw like an Electrolux to suck the last of his soda pop from the melting ice at the bottom of the glass while making googly eyes at me. I look at him without appreciation. He straightens up.

  “Really, Val. That’s great. Does this mean you will have to go to Spain?”

  “Well, I don’t have to, but I want to.”

  “You know, cookie, you’ve never told me what this book of yours is about.” He loops an arm around me and scoots me over closer to him on the bench. Lowering his voice, he taps his ear. “I know it’s some sort of a secret, but you can tell old Pete. Just whisper it here, in old Peter’s ear.”

  I have to think about this. People are going to ask what the book is about. I whisper in Peter’s ear. “I will, but not now.”

  I explain that I have to get going so I can tidy up my apartment before my study group meets. We finish our hamburgers and fries, share a couple of long kisses by the bike rack, and then bicycle back to campus. He heads off for baseball practice and I weave my bike through the late afternoon student traffic, playing a scene in my head. Like the professors who entertain students in their elegant College Avenue homes, I will fix some ice tea and cookies to serve to my study group, and then I’ll share my news. I’m wiggling the key in my door lock when the phone starts ringing inside.

  It was a short conversation. At the same moment that tears sting my eyes, fingers of fury tighten around my heart. How could my mother not tell me!

  “I’m telling you now,” she said.

  “Was she sick?” I’m trying to make sense of this sudden void in my life.

  Leora is dead. Mi abuela está muerto. Lita is dead. If I say it enough times, in enough different ways, maybe I will believe it. My Lita is dead; I wasn’t there; she was sick for months; I didn’t know; no one told me. My mother waited two days to call me. Why? Well, why should that surprise me? After all, my mother pretty much stopped talking to me the day she learned that my father had died overseas.

  I didn’t know my father very well. He was a war hero, but I remember him mostly for the treats and trinkets he brought home from foreign countries: chocolates from Belgium, tiny wooden shoes from Holland, flowery perfume from France. He was posted to various Army headquarters most of my life. We didn’t go with him because my mother preferred to stay in officers’ quarters at the Presidio. She didn’t talk much about him when he was away. I had just returned from my year in Spain and was finishing up my undergraduate work when my father died. My mother went into her shell after that. It made me uncomfortable and I stopped going home.

  Home was never much of a place for us Carters and Moragas. My mother grew up living in hotel rooms with Leora because my grandmother traveled for her job. Mom went to high school in Portland, Oregon, and art school in Los Angeles, where she met an air corps recruit named Henry Carter and married him. That’s all I know about my mother’s life.

  I remember the military housing we lived in, but when I think of home, I think of the cozy bungalow on Lundy Lane in Los Altos even though I never actually lived there. I visited Leora a lot before my mother moved there from the city, after my father went to Korea. Leora and I would sit at the kitchen table by the window and play canasta, or pull the chairs into the living room where the TV was and watch Kraft Television Theatre. I asked her once why her living room had only a piano in one corner, a TV set in another, and a telephone table just outside the door to the kitchen. She explained that she only ever had a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchenette when she was working and living in hotels. She didn’t know how to furnish a living room and didn’t really need one, she said. When neighbors came to visit, she stood at the screen door for hours and talked to them. But she never invited them in. She didn’t play the piano either.

  Thinking about all this has calmed me down a little, but I can’t deal with my study group this afternoon. I go into my bedroom and pack some clothes. On my way out, I scribble a sign and tack it to the front door:

  Study group canceled. Death in the family. Back next week.

  4 — Dolores, The House that Jack Built

  H Dolores I

  4

  The House that Jack Built

  V alerie bangs into the front room and drops her duffle bag on the floor while I’m talking on the phone. I point her toward the bedroom and slip around the doorframe into the kitchen where I can continue my conversation in private.

  “Excuse me, Roger, Valerie just got here. What were you saying?”

  “Dee, I hope I’m not interrupting your time with your family. I wanted to call and make sure you’re alright. I just heard that your mother passed. I’m so sorry.”

  Roger is the controller at General
Electric and the head of my department. Unlike Mr. Bradley, he is patient, kind, and understanding. He’s all business too, but he is the kind of man you can relax and be yourself with. I like him.

  “Don Bradley is an asshole, Dee. I know I shouldn’t say that, but don’t let him bully you into coming back before you’re ready. Your job will be here. We really can’t operate without you.”

  “It’s nice to know you feel that way, Roger.”

  “Do you have plans for a funeral service? I … the department would like to send flowers.”

  “We’ll be doing a private interment at Saint Matthew’s. I’ll let you know.” I look up to see Valerie standing in the doorway. “I need to go Roger, thank you so much for calling. I’ll see you next week.” I hang up the phone.

  “It’s nice to know you feel that way, Roger.” Valerie mimics me. “How exactly does Roger feel? And who is Roger?”

  Valerie has a flair for drama and a nose for a story. She’s not being mean, she’s being Valerie. But I’m not in the mood. I explain that Roger is my supervisor and that he is feeling concerned, unlike the big boss, Mr. Bradley, who is feeling put out because I’ve taken time off.

  “That’s awful.” She wrinkles her nose. “What’s all that stuff on the floor?” She surveys the altar of Leora’s memorabilia arranged like a miniature Stonehenge, a mute testimony to an unknown past.

  “It’s all stuff that belonged to your grandmother.” I’m suddenly finding it hard to talk about Leora in the past tense. “If there is anything there that you want …” I picture her stuffing the teal goose into her duffle bag and think better of my offer, “I can store it for you for when …” I don’t know how to finish that sentence. When you finish your degree? When you get a real job? When you get married? Anything I say will get me in trouble.