echoed down to me like a benediction.
“Ride ‘em, Sarsaparilla!”
Canadian/U.S. border, 1990
As I wait at the checkpoint before crossing into Idaho, the benediction echoes in my mind. What happened to that determined little girl I used to be? Would the baby I’m carrying resemble her, or the flimsy sister I’ve become in the eons since then?
The thought scares me. It’s the first time I’ve imagined this brief embryo as an actual person.
In the insulated time warp of the warm car, I remember a resilient little girl playing out the mystery of metamorphosis with the moon on her hands. And I allow myself to picture my accidentally fertilized ovum as a real baby, then a child, and eventually a young woman totally separate from me. I imagine curly hair like my own and sturdy legs, poor girl. But when I try to fix an image of her face, the features become the thin, aging visage of Lenora the last time I saw her, in prison.
It’s not what you get, the old woman at the restaurant said, but what you give. I should have asked her, is it what you give that makes you happy, or that kills you?
CHAPTER 7
Shady River, 1978
In our teens, Cincy and I invented a game that began, “If your father were here …” The scenarios started realistically, but quickly progressed into wild fictions full of money and adventure.
“If your father were here,” I told her, “he wouldn’t let you date Stan Stenson even if he asked, because of that motorcycle.”
“Well, if your father were here,” she countered, “he wouldn’t let you stay after school supposedly working on your science project with Petey Small. He’d ride up to the school on his white horse and throw you across the saddle and carry you away….”
Each new layer outdid the last, until finally our fathers metamorphosed into fantasy lovers. “But he isn’t your father at all, see,
he’s this warrior from the next village who’s loved you from afar….”And we were swept away into nonsense and laughter.
It was a surefire method for cheering ourselves up.
Cincy’s favorite fantasy was one about a fellow I’d named Lionel, who was involved in international espionage but returned to her, his one true love, for fixes of wild lovemaking before disappearing again into the mist along the river. Cincy made me tell this one over and over, adding her own creative twists. Whenever we saw a handsome stranger, she’d dig her elbow into my ribs and choke out, “It’s Lionel, come to take me away!”
“Take me, too!” I’d whisper.
But nobody ever did. Instead we went to school, and to her house afterward. Cincy grouched about her homework; I whined about the contact lenses I couldn’t afford. I’d convinced myself that my life would blossom if only I could get rid of my glasses.
“If your father were here,” Cincy scolded, “he’d tell you that you’re beautiful just as you are.” Then she shrugged, grinning. “But he’d buy you the contacts anyway.”
Sometimes, when I was alone, fragments of my missing father rose in my consciousness like a chronic toothache. The memory hurt only when I returned to it, touching my tongue to the aching spot to probe the pain. By the time I reached puberty, I was accomplished at this. Whenever I wanted to pity or punish myself, whenever I longed for the drama and sweet suffering that defines adolescence, I called up the mystery of my father’s desertion.
Sometimes, to punish both of us, perhaps, I asked my mother about him.
How had they met? Did I look like him? What was their life like before I was born? She gave short, offhand answers with a nonchalance I knew she didn’t feel.
I saw fine lines etch the pouches beneath my mother’s eyes, and watched her jawline melt into middle age. In rare teenage moments when I felt giddy and invincible, the sudden contrast to my mother’s life impaled me with guilt. I tried to imagine cleaning other people’s hotel rooms day after day, coming home to a daughter and nothing else.
“Why don’t you and Ying Su take off to Portland for the weekend?” I urged her. “Go shopping, go to the movies.” Ying Su worked with her at the inn.
“Maybe sometime I’ll do that,” Mom said, but she never went. I even suggested she flirt with the hotel manager, invite him to Portland.
“Now you’re being ridiculous,” she said. “He’s younger than I am.”
“So what?”
She gave me one of those mother looks and changed the subject.
When my questions about my father got too pointed, Mom claimed ignorance. She didn’t know where he lived now. She didn’t know where he worked. No, he never sent money; she didn’t want him to.
Once, though, she found an old snapshot of the three of us. “I’d forgotten about this,” she said, her voice sounding far away. “Keep it, if you like.”
The blurry images of a young couple and their shapeless, androgynous baby fascinated me. I resented that she’d kept the picture from me all these years.
In the photo, my father’s hair looked dark, much darker than mine. He wore glasses like me and behind their rims I could see bushy eyebrows that explained why mine required continual tweezing. The faces in the photo were small and partly shaded. Even when Cincy and I examined it with a magnifying glass, lying in her bed on a summer night in our baggy T-shirts, I couldn’t be sure of the color of my father’s eyes or the shape of his nose.
“He’s handsome,” Cincy pronounced.
I couldn’t see it. “You’re just being polite.”
She punched my arm. “Don’t you dare accuse me of such a thing.”
I laid the photo on the nightstand and switched off the light. Cincy’s room, built partly into the mountain, had no windows, so when the light went off it was like a cave. If we left the door open, a faint rectangle of moonlight from the living room windows relieved the blackness, but that night the door was closed so our talking wouldn’t keep Lenora awake.
It was well after midnight. We’d gone swimming at the new municipal pool all afternoon, and I’d cleaned Mom’s house in town before going. My muscles felt tired and my skin pleasantly sunburned.
“I’m going to be sore tomorrow,” I said, stretching my legs out on the cool sheets.
“Whereabouts? I’ll give you a rub down.”
She sat beside me in the darkness, massaging my shoulders and back while I groaned my appreciation, or giggled when she hit a ticklish spot. Then she rubbed my feet and calves.
“You should be a professional masseuse,” I told her sleepily. “You could work at one of those ritzy spas giving massages to rich people and getting hundred-dollar tips.”
“No way,” she said, her voice deep and laughing in the humid darkness. “I wouldn’t do this for anybody but you.”
“Not even Stan Stenson?”
“Well …”
Our freshman year, Cincy blossomed into a long-legged beauty. She had the black satin hair and dark eyes of her Cherokee ancestry, with high cheekbones and Lenora’s small mouth and slender nose.
Despite her looks, she wasn’t the least conceited. She talked to everybody, even the nerds and thugs most kids shunned as if they had VD. Social distinctions didn’t exist for Cincy. I considered it one of her best qualities, recognizing in myself a reticence toward people who were outwardly as uneasy in the world as I felt but kept hidden. I’d look at one of those kids and think there, but for the grace of Cincy, go I.
As it was, I merged