she knew that, really, she had only one female parent. She had a pretty good idea of who her biological mother was too. It was something all of them denied when she put it to them, confronted mem with it. They all handed her the same line, saying that traditional one-on-one relationships, such as those usually associated with parents and siblings, were ultimately limiting and were not to be established or recognized within this household. They told her she must always treat each mother equally. But she noticed that they did not all treat her equally. Some were kinder to her than others, some were more open and honest with her than others, and so she was closer to some than others.
She felt closest to Mother Felice, and it was Mother Felice whom she believed to be her true mother, her biological mother. The reasons were vague, more feelings than thoughts, but they were consistent and always had been. It was Mother Felice who throughout the years had seemed most concerned with both her physical welfare and her emotional well-being.
Like today. It had been Mother Felice who had stayed in the house to wait for her. The apron and the pantry routine hadn't fooled her at all.
Her mother was here instead of at the winery because she wanted to know how her first day in school had gone.
That made her feel good.
Sometimes she wished that Mother Felice was her only mother.
She looked down into the water, seeing in the shimmering a distorted reflection of her face. She was pretty, she knew, and she liked looking at herself, though she was by no means obsessive about it. She had never been one to spend excessive amounts of time on makeup or hair care, but if she passed a mirror she invariably looked into it. She found it reassuring to see her own reflection, to know what she looked like, although it always embarrassed her if someone caught her at it.
Sometimes she wondered if she herself was homosexual. It was not inconceivable. Growing up in an all female environment, it might even be expected. She had always had a hard time talking to boys and had never really made that leap of socialization that most of her peers had made during the awkward years of junior high. At night, in bed, when she masturbated, she liked both the way her fingers felt on her vagina and the way her vagina felt against her fingertips. She enjoyed the pliant softness, the warm wetness, even the subtle pressure of the vaginal walls against her middle finger when she occasionally slipped it into the opening. She could not see herself ever touching another girl's body-^the very thought was revolting--but wasn't the joy she felt when fingering herself enough to make her a lesbian?
She wasn't sure.
Maybe the fact that she had trouble imagining herself in a romantic situation with anyone, boy or girl, meant that she was asexual. She splashed her reflection, dissolving her face in a fluid ripple. Why was it all so complicated? There was a knock behind her, and she turned around
to see Mother Felice at the window, waving. She waved J back, then looked down, opened her journal, clicked her pen. 'Today,' she wrote, 'was the first day of my senior year ...'
As one, the four grandfather clocks lined along the wall next to the door chimed six, and Vie Williams stood up, shut off the cassette player, and moved from behind the counter to lock the door. It had been a long day, a boring day, and not a very profitable one. Tourist season had pretty well run its course, and only five people had come into the shop since he'd opened this morning, all of them browsers, not buyers.
It was a taste of things to come, he knew. School had started, vacations had ended, and from now until mid-October business would be pretty much hit-and-miss.
Time was when the antique market was bullish all year, when he didn't have to depend on outside trade, when even local women wanted stained glass windows to decorate their living rooms and conservative middle-aged men bought Victrolas for their wives' anniversaries. But antiques were out these days. People bought Nagels and Neimans now, mall art for their walls, and anniversary presents consisted of televisions or VCRs.
Vie pulled the shade on the window. He was hungry and wanted to grab a bite to eat, but there were still three cartons of Depression glass he'd purchased at an estate sale a few weeks back which needed to be catalogued. He could have, and should have, done that earlier today, during the long slow stretch between lunch and closing, but he hated going through purchases during business hours. Somehow, the ritual of examining, appraising, and pricing items seemed more suited to evening than morning or afternoon.
He'd pick up a burger on the way home.
Vie retreated behind the counter once again and walked through the beaded doorway into the back room. The three cartons were on the floor, and he hefted the largest onto the long metal table which ran the length of the side wall. He took a razor blade out of the desk drawer and cut two cross slits through the layered masking tape which sealed shut the top of the box. Dropping the blade on the table, he pulled up the cardboard flaps and, one by one, began unwrapping the individually stacked plates. The pieces were good. Rose glass from the mid- thirties.
He held each up to the light, checking for flaws and chips and scratches before setting it carefully down on the tabletop. After unwrapping, examining, and setting down the last plate, he looked into the box. At the bottom, lying as if thrown there by accident or afterthought, was an old waterstained paperback. In Watermelon Sugar.
In Watermelon Sugar.
Richard Brautigan.
Whoa, did that bring back memories. He picked up the book, flipped the pages. Half of them were stuck together, glued by the hardening of some spilled beverage. The photo of Brautigan on the front was almost completely obscured by a brown stain, although the woman next to him stared out of the picture undamaged. It saddened Vie to see the book in such shape. It had been originally purchased, no doubt, by a member of what had then been called 'the counterculture,' someone young and enthusiastic, hungry for new ideas. Now that person was probably balding and overweight, dully establishment, interested only in interest rates and IRAs, the book and its fallen idol author now not even a memory.
Vie dropped the book in the wastepaper basket and sighed heavily.
He had come to Napa as a college student in the late sixties, and though he now wore his hair short and dressed respectably in the fashions of today, he still aligned himself with the sentiments of that era, still considered himself a part of that generation. Of course, those days were long gone, even here in northern California, where small conclaves of ex-hippies still lived in converted Victorian houses amidst the faded relics of psychedelia. People these days were harsher, harder, more willingly insensitive. The pace of life was faster now; there was less time to talk with friends, less time to be kind to strangers, less time to stop and smell the roses.
It made him feel depressed.
A lot of things made him feel depressed lately.
Last night he had watched a television program on the Vietnam War which, straight-faced, had portrayed the army as an upright organization of highly moral men bravely doing their patriotic duty despite the protests of an obnoxious and misguided crowd of drug-crazed college students. He had turned the program off before it ended. If there was one thing that really drove him crazy, that made him absolutely furious, it was the revisionist history now fostered by the media which characterized the sixties as an anarchic aberration, a decade in which the traditional values of America had been trashed by rioting long-haired, dope-smoking freaks. Jesus, couldn't people even remember what it had been like? What the hell had happened to the nation's short-term memory? Of course there had been a harsh element--a protest against the amoral complacency of the establishment and the immorality of the war--but there had also been a kindness, a gentleness of spirit which had gotten lost in the translation, which was never captured by movies or television shows or news retrospectives. It had been a time of turmoil, yes, but the people of that time had been open and giving and trusting and honest, filled with an optimistic generosity which in today's pragmatic light seemed quaintly naive. He shook his head. Even the hip today, their counterculture counterparts, seemed much more materialistic and opportunistic, less real, much phonier, pretenders to the throne, pseudo-beatniks dressed in black turtleneck costumes of the past, capturing only the surface details of a much more serious movement.
The times they had a-changed.
Vie lifted the box off the table, put it on the floor, and was about to crush its sides when he heard a noise from the front room, the sound of someone bumping into a piece of furniture.
He frowned. What could that be? There was no one in the store.
