Iam watching my daughter Lynn Margaret as she sits at the table by the window, her arm outstretched on the white cloth. She is looking at a silver bracelet with five small opals set in the pattern of a flower, which lies loose on her slender wrist. Today is her birthday, she is twenty four, and the bracelet is my gift to her. How long will she sit looking at the stone flower that shimmers pink and green in the late afternoon light? LYNN MARGARET By Sharon Lynn Pugh Ceramic by Anne Storrs ' I sit at the table too, briefly touching the bracelet and then her hand, which she closes gently but does not move. It is early October, and clusters of leaves in the great maple across from our apartment window have turned red, though most still hold the dark green of summer. It is our communion, this tree, always at this hour of thin clarity before the day turns blue. As the seasons pass, we will watch the green turn to red until the tree glows like a flame, filling our eyes with color. We will watch the leaves curl and fall, leaving the branches bare against the north sky, the wind stir them, the rain turn them black, the snow settle in a line along every limb and spear. We will watch, together, the swelling buds, the green mist when the buds break their shells, and the darkening of the foliage when the leaves come into their form, enclosing the limbs until they are hidden from our view. And then the summer. And then the fall, as now, I and Lynn Margaret, this daughter of no one but myself, coloring and uncoloring the seasons with our eyes, marking the changes of this life that, as it happens, we have lived for twenty four years. As life would have it. As Lynn Margaret, though she has never spoken a word, has ordained. We live on the third floor at the level of the foliage and the limbs, overlooking the tops of houses, which I find pleasant and safe, as if we were settled up here in a nest. Our apartment consists of a large main room with a kitchenette on one side and two small bedrooms on the other, one for each of us, Lynn’s a bit larger than mine. Our rooms have white walls, casement windows, and floors of bare wood. We walk barefoot or in stockings through these rooms, sometimes to radio music, more often only to the creaks in the boards. Like Lynn Margaret, I never speak when I am here. Even an animal would respond to the sound of a human voice, but she does not, and so I have come to let my language sleep in the folds of my brain, agreeing we have nothing to say. Because it is her birthday, I have brought home a small cake from the bakery, just a round cake with white icing and no other decoration except for a candle I’ve set in the center. I will light it when the window has grown dark, but for now I am still, my hands in my lap while I watch my daughter. In every feature, we are remarkably alike. She is wholly my daughter, as I have said, there is no mark on her of anyone else. I am sure. I have studied the curve of her cheek, the shape of her mouth, the dark color of her eyes, the texture of her hair and how it falls against her neck, even the length of her fingers and the swollen blue veins forking at the knuckles, and they are all my own, though more delicate. Do I find her beautiful, then, as a crystal turns in the window passing a rainbow through her hair? What can I say? She is mine, she is me, she is my life. When I strike a match for the candle, her eyes dart and then focus on the flame. The candle flickers in the dark room until I rise to turn on a lamp, and by then it has burned down nearly to the icing so I blow it out. I fetch two saucers, two forks and a knife from the kitchenette and cut her a slice which I lay carefully in the center of the saucer and place before her, then take a smaller slice for myself. I pick up my fork and put a bit in my mouth, the sweetness calling up an unbearable sadness as we begin the twenty fifth year of our life. Lynn draws her hands to the edge of the table but does not touch her fork. She is watching me now, intently, as tears wet my face and the moist cake slides harshly down my throat, bite by bite, until I have eaten it all. It is true. There is nothing conceivable for us to say. jIB e fo re this life I had another, though it was not as long. I was a child born late to my parents, a country preacher and his wife, who farmed a few acres behind their small house and kept a milk cow in an old barn on a ridge. I went to a one-room school until I was old enough for the consolidated junior high, but in both places I was exceptionally shy and made few friends, and this continued into high school, so I always spent my evenings with my father in the parlor, the two of us reading, or helping my mother with kitchen work. We canned, made butter and cheese, pressed apples into cider, and kneaded the dough for our bread. When I had graduated from high school, I remained at home, thinking of going to the community college in Fayville twenty miles away, and though my parents thought that was what I should do, I waited a year, not sure why but thinking, perhaps, that I must first find a reason to go. My parents were already in their sixties, and though my father had a few faithful followers left, his church was almost defunct. Naturally they wanted me to learn to take care of myself, but like me, they didn’t know what I could do. My mother thought I might be a teacher—I’d been bright in school—but we both knew I was too shy. Maybe a librarian, then. All right, it became my plan. But the community college was only for two years. After that, I would have to go to the state university a long ways away, and we didn’t know how to manage that. “Get your two years,” my mother advised, “and then we’ll figure it out from there. There must be scholarships.” That was how I would do it. I would study hard and win a scholarship when the time came. My father, always busy with his Bible or an old atlas showing the world as its boundaries were marked before the second world war, assented with silence or at most by nodding his head. Perhaps he could believe that God would provide. If so, I think he would have preferred a husband, but anyway, a job would do. D id they want a daughter, this old man and woman whose lives were sinking with the church and the small decaying community in which we lived? As a child, always quiet and obedient, I might have brought some pleasure into their thin lives, but as a woman, I had grown separate. My quietness became a kind of silence because I never spoke my true thoughts, which seemed alien in my own mind and perhaps beyond the simple language we used among ourselves. And as my body changed, I assumed a privacy to which they deferred, as if I were a guest in their house and not their daughter. I had finished high school without a suitor, and now I was at home with no further prospects since I had no close friends and was unlikely to meet anyone new. Perhaps that’s why my mother urged me to go to the community college, and perhaps that’s why I went, though I don’t think so. I never thought of marriage as something for me. I only wanted to be free, but that was what I never said. My strange wish was to live a life that was wholly my own, though Icouldn’t imagine such a life and was even afraid of it. Going to the community college was, as much as anything, a way of stepping out into that fear. The year I had stayed home did me no good when I went on to school. The students I’d known in high school were a year ahead of me now, and it was odd to be among those who had once been a year behind. And I was no better at making friends than before. I drove my father’s pickup to classes, sat in the library with my books or alone at a table in the canteen with the sandwich I’d brought, and drove home. Others were friendly, but I could never think of anything to say to them, and eventually they found me easy to ignore. Bythe second quarter, my grades were high and my teachers encouraging, but I was still afraid of what I was trying to do. Evenings I would walk up to the ridge and milk our cow. Afterward I would read in the parlor while my father made notes from his Bible or studied the maps of foreign countries he would never see. Usually my mother would bring us tea and some treat she’d baked. I saw how withered her hands were when she served us, and how my father’s face was coarsely red and creased as he bent over his work, and I wondered what they thought of so young a daughter still trying to figure out her way into the world when they were nearing their time to leave. But there was great comfort in the small things they did, and I felt a warmth sitting in the parlor with my books, turning pages, and I think now this was a time of hope for us, as if the milking and the baking and the turning of pages were the making of our lives, and I suppose they were. I truly did not notice at first that the same bearded young man sat next to me every lecture in my world history class, and just behind me in composition, although beards were not so common then, and he seemed older than the other students in the class. I first became aware of him on a day when he hadn’t been there, and he came to my table in the library later and asked for the assignment. As I was looking through my binder, he sat down at the table and began looking at the pages. “You take good notes,” he said. “Could I see the ones for today?” I nodded and handed him the notebook. He sat reading and then asked, “Could you explain these?” Someone at a nearby table gave us a sharp look. “Let’s go outside,” I whispered, and I gathered up my books when he nodded and followed him out. He led me to a bench on the grounds outside the lecture hall. It was a bright day but still winter, and I buttoned my jacket and pulled a cap over my ears. Keeping my head bent over the binder, I talked through the notes I’d takdn and felt him looking at the side of my face as he listened, but he didn’t write anything down. “May I borrow these and copy them?” he asked. “Do you mind?” I shook my head. After that he walked with me from history to composition everyday, and afterwards we’d go somewhere and talk. We knew each other’s names now, Sheldon Cartwright, and me, Julia Green. He told me one day he lived in town in a room over a hardware store where he had a part-time job. He was twenty five. He’d been married when he was eighteen, but his wife was in the next state now with their son, living with her parents. “ I had to get married,” he said. “It’s over now. Never was any good.” He was back in school now for the sake of the boy. “Do you see him?” I asked. “Sometimes.” He said no more on the subject. I didn’t know whether he was divorced or separated, but I assumed divorced. He asked me then where I lived and what I was doing in schook “I live at my parent’s house twenty miles out,” I said. “I guess I’ll be a librarian.” He laughed, but as if he were pleased rather than amused. “Yes,” he said, and kissed me on the mouth in a brotherly way. It was the first time a man had touched me. I never told my parents about Sheldon. They wouldn’t have liked a divorced man six years older than I, and I was skeptical myself though I liked Sheldon, believed that I loved him, and trusted him because he began so kindly with me. He was always gentle in our embraces and later in the lovemaking in his room over the hardware store, at least until nearly the end, and that was the one time he came to the farm. My parents never saw him. He’d left his car on the road on the other side of a mud patch where a heavy March rain had washed gutters through the gravel and trucks had gouged the dirt. I wasn’t expecting him and was surprised to see him walking into the yard as I was going up the hill to milk the cow, He followed me into the barn and watched me kneel by the udders and knead them with a gentle pull until the milk started to stream into the bucket. After the second pair, he wanted to try, but he’d never done it before and squeezed and pulled without getting any milk. The cow snorted and stamped at the mishandling, so Itook the udders back and continued the pressured rhythm that soothed her as I emptied her bag. When I was finished, he set the bucket aside and pulled me against him. “My turn, little farm girl,” he said, taking me down on a drift of hay, and this time it was different. In a few minutes, I was sitting up again, smoothing my dress and trying to brush away the pieces of straw that were all over me and tangled in my hair. “You’d better not come to the house,” I said, but I don’t think he had that in mind. He carried the milk down the hill, and then we parted with only a touch of hands as he handed the bucket to me. I went into the house with my bucket of milk, wondering if my parents would notice the smell on my thighs, but they did not. Later, in the parlor, after I had rubbed myself with a washrag and brushed my hair clean, my mother came in with the tea and some tarts she had made, still warm, with a fragrance I realized had kept them from noticing mine. My father had put his Bible aside and was looking at Java between the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. “Look how close it is to Australia,” he said, showing me, his finger moving across blue water. “Julie, some day you could go to Java. You could see the world.” He must have been thinking that a woman with a job, a librarian, could do that, and it was all right if I didn’t have a husband. He was offering me the mysteries of his maps. And this was a measure of the hope we had spun in the lamplight of the parlor, fingering our pages while my mother brought us food. When the break came between the winter and spring quarters, Sheldon said he must go visit his son. I went to his room the day before he left and stayed until nearly dark, knowing my parents would be worried and that I would lie to them. “When are you going to spend the night with me?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t while I’m at my parents’ house.” “You’re a woman,” he said. “Not your daddy’s little girl.” 22 Clinton St. Quarterly
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