watching her, my little girl in tights, her jacket clenched over frozen hands. So beautiful, with her mother’s face and hair, and my quickness in her eyes.
Our days are sweet and short. She falls asleep in my lap, as I read to her. And underlining it all is the other mother’s fury, which I feel ever nearing, ever darkening, defining our life the way shadows give definition to the day. That she will come is the one thing I know about the future, and the only thing I fear.
Seasons pass, however, with the calm of heaven. We are fond company, the cat on our laps, the good meals in our bellies culled, mostly, from our own beautiful garden, the books delivered and devoured. As we listen to the surf each night, I comb out her hair. Sometimes we play with it: It becomes tent, and I crouch beneath its scalpy smell; I heap it over my face and it becomes my own hair and we laugh at how ridiculous it is against my wizened face; I bind my wrists with it, and it takes her some work to free me. She is gentle and sleeps deeply. Raised on sweets and sea air and literature, Rue walks through dreams the way she walks through rooms.
But today she crouches in last year’s swimsuit, peering again at her old friends in the tide pool, and I see how tight the suit has become on her body. She is bigger, her hips and chest, her lips suddenly abloom. I stand, agitated, shaking, saying, Oh-oh-oh. She runs over as fast as she can: Her hair is so very heavy she can’t run fast or far, normally, but she does her best to help me. She asks if I am cold, and I nod, yes I am, mute. There is something wrong with my body. I cannot stop shaking; my lips can’t form words.
Rue murmurs as she helps me over the suddenly steep and long path to home, and brushes my own sparse hair from my face until I am soothed asleep.
Something has shifted. My leg clumps harder on the ground, and words come with more difficulty into my mouth. Rue takes the harder cleaning, though it must hurt her neck with all its heavy hair to support when she scrubs the floors the way she scrubs, with low grunts that remind me of something I’d rather not remember. Once in a while, I see her hair resting on the windowsills, as if to quietly steal some relief. I tell her what we need and she writes the lists: My hands shake so, my writing is illegible. I still call the orders in, and she listens with a strange look on her face: I have never taught her English, and before was careful to keep her from hearing this other language. But when it is too difficult, and the man on the other end loses his patience, Rue takes the telephone from my hand and in her lisping accent tries hard to replicate my sounds. She does well, and I am proud, but there are some comical mistakes. Instead of cherries one day, we get cheese; instead of batteries, we get tweezers. But one thing I never, never let her do is to take the envelope of money out to the porch. No matter how long it takes me and how many breaks I must take on the way to the door, I am the one to risk the delivery boy. I keep my own treasure tucked away inside, as she was tucked inside me those many years before I had ever met her, or her mother, my tiny seed waiting for the right moment to bloom.
It is somehow winter again. I stand in the widow’s walk as the morning dawns on the sea and watch a man cupping a cigarette in his palm beyond the dunes. What hair he has is golden, but there’s a pink patch of bald at its heart. Yet he is not old. His limbs are vigorous when he shakes them, and he wears the droopy clothing the delivery boys all wear these days. He scans the windows of the house carefully, so carefully that I in my black dress behind the balustrade above the house am camouflaged, no more than a mushroom. Even from here I can see his eyes are the soft green of sage. He flicks his cigarette into the weeds. Idiot, I mutter: He could start a fire. He doesn’t: At least not one I can see. He sees nothing, and the wind grows colder and he hefts one leg over the seat of his bicycle and glides away.
My limbs are full of furious energy: I have told Rue that we will make ourselves an entire set of all-new clothing, how fun! We are ripping the seams of our frocks, fairy trifles based on patterns from my faraway childhood, all swim camps and cotillions and unremembered Easter dresses. She is laughing as she rips, the excitement of destroying filling her like bloodlust. I need to keep her occupied, away from the windows; I need to think. She has rickrack in her hair and grosgrain looped over her shoulders, and even like this, silly and childish, she is a goddess.
We are laughing. Yet I smell smoke. By the time I make it to the window, however, the boy or man, or the boy-man, of the outside is gone, and only my fury remains.
Rue is so enraptured with our project that I never see her go outside, even once, even when I plead to go to our swimming hole. But now she sits frowning over a skirt she is making, and when I look at it, I feel the frown begin to spread across my face, too. There are embroidered holes in the sides and frills in the front. It is a most ugly and excessive article, an indecent thing to even look upon.
I demand to know where she could have gotten this idea: I do know that my girl is dreamy, but there is no fire to her imagination to make it dazzle in such a direction.
Rue blushes, but shrugs. She shows me a magazine she says she found under the apple tree outside, and in it I see such horrid concoctions, such stupid, bright, strange-looking people, such horrible words that if the Ministers saw it, they would kill on sight whoever was reading it. I throw the magazine down as if it has bitten me. Rue looks at me sideways and asks what it is about the world outside that I hate so. I want to tell her about everything: the rebels who methodically destroyed me, the Ministers who imprisoned us in rules, and my own old and twisted body, my hideous jail. But I look at my daughter, whom I have worked hard to keep innocent of such things, and bite my tongue. I kiss her on the musky part of her hair, and take the magazine outside and hurl it off the cliffs, into the pounding sea.
I am extra vigilant. With great effort from my body, I wait until Rue sleeps at night and steal down the hill. With rocks I lug in a wheelbarrow, I divert a stream so the path is cut off, and the delivery boys must abandon their bikes on the far side and walk the last uphill mile in wet shoes. I can hear the slop of their footsteps from afar and am ready for them far from the house, holding their pay with my trembling hand.
At night, I hold Rue’s head in my lap while she reads her novel, and scratch her warm scalp, and watch her. Finally she puts down her book and sighs and asks what the matter is.
I cannot help myself. I watch myself lose control, I watch in horror as I blurt in French: If you left me, I would die, I say.
It is not a consolation that she sits up, her whole face an O. Under her breath she asks me where she would go. And now I see it and my dismay makes me ill: A spark from my own fevered brain has just landed in her, is now lighting her up.
Once her face was a window and now it is a door, always slamming shut. She disappears, and when I call for her in the old house, the ghosts maaa like old sheep in reply, taunting me. Mornings, she smells of grass and night. I lock her into her room, and she takes off the hinges with a screwdriver. I tempt her inside with cakes and creams, but she eats the salty, hard plums from the trees out back with a twist on her lips. I cry, but she only watches me, gone hard.
I blink, it seems, and Rue is gone. The house is decrepit without her, the windows shattering one by one under the gusts, the roof shedding shingles the way I am shedding teeth.
I saw her coming, the original mother, but never knew which direction she would take: I had feared the dark and angry force of her all these years, building with every day we were distant, one sudden day erupting. I imagined her stealing my daughter from me the way I first stole her away, carrying her bodily away. I had imagined the mother marching up the hill, grown mighty with age, and carrying the girl off like a wee infant in her arms, trailing Rue’s braids in the dust.
I always thought that I would grab on to those braids and ride them, down the hill, into the town, I would tie myself into them so that when they went away in the train, they would float me like a kite behind them.
But I have known for decades that the mother is probably dead. Has been, for some time. And I should have guessed that where the mother would show herself would be in my daughter’s blood. The one thing I couldn’t give her. Though I would have. I would.
Those nights when poetry would not do it for me, I lay in the pounding of my pain, under the cold rain in the mountains as the men came in, and every moment I made myself blank, and promised myself a daughter.
And now I kneel in the little nest of braids shorn from my daughter’s head with her own hands, and wait for this old, crooked body to leave me be.
I wait. In my hunger, in my thirst, the courtship rises to me with the vividness of childhood dreams. I see it as it must have happened: the first words as he emerged from behind the pear tree, that strange beast, this man. He was unintelligible to the girl, and the sounds in his mouth put such fear in her heart, all she could do, this first time, was run. All night, though, he kept stepping from behind the pear, and by the morning her body trembled with wanting to see him. Then, slower, he coaxed her out. They met at night. It took no time. One kiss and Rue’s mother
