Juno's Daughters (5 page)

“Almost.” Frankie held a less than perfectly clean kitchen sponge under the tap and used it to apply the temporary tattoo of a flower to her left check. “Want one?” She held the sheet out to her mother.

“Sure.”

Jenny chose a rose that reminded her a little of the cover of the Grateful Dead album
American Beauty
. She'd never admit it in mixed company, but the shows the band played in the outdoor amphitheater in Santa Cruz still popped into her mind whenever she heard the phrase
perfect happiness
. No matter how glum she was, the opening chords of “China Cat Sunflower” never failed to lift her spirits. She extended her arm to Frankie, who centered the small square of paper and applied the sponge.

Jenny looked at her daughter's head, bent in concentration, and smiled. After thirty seconds, Frankie peeled the backing away. The skin under the rose was taut and shiny. Jenny ran the tip of her finger over it and it did not smear.

“Looks good, Mom,” said Frankie.

Jenny turned her arm in the light. “It does.”

“Do you think Lilly will be there already when we get there? Should I bring one for her?”

“Sure. How about that snake?”

“Oh, Mom, that's so unfair,” Frankie said, but she took it with her, running ahead of Jenny to the truck.

T
here already was a handful of cars parked in the field when they pulled off the road at Dale and Peg's. Phinneas's dented Subaru sat on the grass alongside David's truck. Next to that she recognized the Volvo belonging to Stu Barnes, who owned the Peacock House Bed and Breakfast. Mary Ann's car was parked up in the actual driveway. Jenny guessed that was because Mary Ann brought too much food to carry from the pasture; she usually did. Jenny didn't see Elliot's car anywhere, but that didn't mean that Lilly wasn't around. She could have hitched a ride with any of the others.

“Hey, come back,” she called to Frankie, who was halfway across the field and headed at a fast clip toward the flickering fire. Smoke filled the air, which was already fragrant with the smell of cut grass and pine needles and fog.

Frankie turned around reluctantly and dragged her feet back to the truck. Jenny draped the blanket around her shoulders and retrieved the lasagna. With her hip, she knocked the door to the truck closed and the two of them started in the direction of the house. She could already see people waving to them from the circle around the fire. The line of trees beyond the pasture looked almost purple against the darkening sky and high above a few birds of prey looked for field mice or rabbits in the tall grass of the hillside beyond.

“Hey, it's Beauty and the Beast,” called Phinneas from a few feet away.

He loved teasing Frankie. He pulled off her cap as soon as she was close enough and held it up beyond her reach until she grabbed him around the waist and made him give it back.

“You're going to have to stop saying that, Phinneas,” said Jenny, nodding hello to David, who was splitting wood and tossing it into the fire. “You'll damage her self-esteem.”

Phinneas turned, his goatee and long face making him look like a hippie version of the god Pan. “How do you know I was referring to
her
as the Beast?” Seeing Jenny blush and look down at her boots, he came forward and gave her a kiss on the cheek. They had been a mismatched pair, the two of them, and their romance had been particularly brief.

He said, “It's your self-esteem we should be worrying about. Beauty.”

Dale was huffing and puffing around the barn, dragging more chairs out into the yard. “Well, hello there.” He stood up and put his hands on his hips. The scarf that he had draped rakishly around his neck had come loose and was flapping in the rising wind. His cheeks were rosy above his white beard and he resembled nothing so much as Santa Claus, though Jenny imagined he would welcome a more virile comparison.

“Your Lilly called a while ago and asked to have someone come get her at Snug Harbor,” he said. “I sent Sally. Trinculo wanted to see the other side of the island, so she took him, too.”

Trinculo, Jenny remembered, was the clown. He spent half the play drunk out of his mind, the sidekick of the butler, Stephano, who found a hidden cache of wine. She pictured a funny-looking character-actor type escorting Lilly back from Snug Harbor and smiled warmly back at Dale. Over his shoulder, Jenny caught a glimpse of a young woman coming out onto the porch. The house was made of rough wood beams and the porch was strung with lanterns and a variety of wind chimes that rang loudly now in the evening breeze. They would be tied up and silent during the rehearsals and readings of the play that took place over the summer in the barn.

Dale held his hands out for the lasagna. “Can I take that in for you?”

“That's okay, I'll get it. Peg in the house?”

He nodded. “Making mulled wine. We brought a bag of cinnamon sticks back with us from Sri Lanka. Formerly Ceylon.” He leaned in close. “The American customs agents were very suspicious.”

She laughed. “And they had every reason to be.” Jenny shifted the casserole dish to her other side and started toward the house. “Watch yourselves around the fire,” she called back to Phinneas and David, who were playing keep-away with Frankie's cap.

“Yes, Mother,” called Phinneas, before being tackled onto the tall grass.

Dale and Peg's ancient dog, a half-paralyzed chocolate Lab named Alice, wagged its tail at her and struggled to rise as she walked by.

“Stay right where you are, old woman,” she cooed, and set the lasagna on the grass for a moment so she could scratch Alice behind the ears. “
You
understand that some people have responsibilities to attend to,” she said. “Not like some silly potters we know.”

Alice thumped her tail and then laid her head back on the cool earth.

Jenny lifted her dish and approached the girl on the porch, who was looking out over Dale and Peg's property to the horses on their neighbors' pasture. Jenny guessed her to be about twenty-three or twenty-four.

“Hi, I'm Jenny. Are you Miranda?”

The girl nodded. “I guess I should be grateful you didn't guess Sycorax.” Her eyes were pale blue and her skin was very fair.

“Or Caliban.”

She laughed. “I know Caliban from New York. You should have seen him as Valmont in
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
. He was alluring. You won't believe it when you meet him. He's the pudgy one at the bar.” She inclined her head toward the house. Several people standing around in the kitchen were visible through the large picture window behind Miranda. One of them appeared to be the willowy African American man from the grocer's.

Jenny felt her pulse quicken. She tilted her head slightly to see if she could see his companion from the store, but she could not.

Suddenly the front door opened and Peg emerged with her arms outstretched. “Jenny, darling. Come in. Come in. I see you've met Miranda. Let me introduce you to Caliban, Ferdinand, and our charming, charming Ariel.”

Peg lifted the lasagna out of Jenny's arms with one hand and pulled her in with the other. She wore a green sari that appeared huge on her tiny frame and had a row of silver bracelets jingling on her arm. She was barely five feet tall and at fifty-something still had the body of a thirteen-year-old boy. Her nose was pointy and always appeared to be crinkled up in mirth or skepticism. The straight hair that reached to her shoulders was a red that no one would have believed was possible in nature if they did not know that Dale and Peg's grown daughter, a banker in Charlotte, North Carolina, had had hair that same color all her life.

Once inside Peg propelled Jenny in front of the small crowd in the kitchen with a little push to her behind. “Let me present the lovely and talented Jennifer Alexander. In addition to making positively wonderful creations on her loom, Jenny is an indispensable part of our stage set team.
And
, she is the mother of two equally gorgeous girls who, you will find this hard to believe, are almost grown.” With this she cast a stern glance at a heavyset man of about thirty-five who leaned against the sink with a bottle of beer in his hand. He was wearing a sport coat and a skinny little tie. “Please note that I said
almost
grown.”

He lifted the bottle to his lips without speaking. Was this Caliban, Jenny wondered, really someone who had been so alluring as Valmont in
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
? He seemed pretty uptight. Well, that was the magic of the theater, she supposed, that it could transform a pinched party guest into the uncivilized offspring of a witch and a demon.

A boyish blond beside him wearing a T-shirt that said
JC Rocks
lifted a hand from his side in a bashful wave. Clearly this was Ferdinand, who falls hopelessly in love with Miranda the moment he sees her. She made a note to herself to keep an eye on him around Lilly.

Jenny craned her neck to look behind him down the long hallway. She wondered if the man in the Nikes could be somewhere on the sunporch in back. It would be a level of self-deception that Jenny could not reach to try to convince herself that she had worn glittering earrings (that David had once referred to only half-jokingly as
lures
) for anyone else.

“In any event, you must be very kind to Jenny,” continued Peg, “because she is a great favorite of ours.”

“And particularly of Dale's,” added Phinneas, who had managed to slip in unheard behind them. “But Peg, being Peg, forgives him for that.”

“Don't mind Phinneas,” said Peg, swatting at him with a dishtowel and missing as he ducked. “He hasn't gotten laid in who knows how long, and his sexual frustration gets translated into snarkiness.”

“
You
know exactly how long. Or did I say something I shouldn't have,” countered Phinneas, wisely dodging back out the front door with a beer in his hand.

The personage who Jenny had by now deduced to be Ariel shifted his weight against the counter. His hips were almost as narrow as Frankie's. “Well,” he drawled, looking at the door through which Phinneas had disappeared, “I might be able to be of some assistance to that young man.”

“I don't know about that,” said Mary Ann, emerging from the back to give Jenny a quick squeeze with an arm around her shoulder. “Phinneas is a bit of a caveman under all that clay dust and glaze. I don't think they make 'em much straighter.”

“A
bit
?” Peg chortled, and set Jenny's lasagna on the kitchen table next to platters of salmon, homemade banana bread, and pita chips with hummus. “He's the original Hetero Erectus.” She leaned in and whispered to Ferdinand. “Get yourself a cup of that mulled wine, dear, and no one will be able to tell that you're blushing.”

Jenny followed Ferdinand to the mulled wine and allowed the first sip to travel through her body on a warm current. She smiled at Ferdinand, who nodded at her shyly and ducked out the door.

Caliban raised his eyebrows and looked after him. “First show, you know. Ariel will have him on his knees in no time.”

Jenny tried not to appear shocked by what he'd said. “You're from New York City?”

She could feel him sizing her up from half-lowered lids and got the distinct feeling that he was not impressed with what he saw. Well, let him gape. By July he'd be wearing fleece, too. Starlets who arrived at the dock in full makeup often left wearing Birkenstocks with their hair in braids. There was no telling what might happen to a guy, she thought as she cast a wry glance at Caliban's outfit, who would wear a tie to a bonfire.

He said, “I'm from Brooklyn, actually.” He took another swig and added, unnecessarily, “Do you know where that is?”

She gave him a wide-eyed stare. “Near Manhattan, right?”

“Across the bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge.”

“I've heard of that.”

Any one of the island residents walking through the kitchen right then would have seen the look of mischief on Jenny's face and paused. She was well-behaved, was Jenny, except for those moments when she wasn't. Those were always worth staying around for.

Ariel pushed himself off from the counter and practically glided toward the front door. Jenny had taken ballet for seven years as a child and it had been three times that long since she'd seen a dancer's gait. “Mr. man here is from Tacoma. Double-you. A.”

Caliban sighed. “I spent a summer vacation up here in the San Juans once, as a child.”

Jenny took another sip. “Fond memories?”

He met her eyes. “Well, memories, in any case.”

Frankie pushed into the kitchen on a cool draft, her hair wild around her face, and grabbed Jenny's hand. “We're singing ‘Way Downtown' next. You
love
that song.” Seeing Caliban, she ducked her head shyly. “Hi.”

“Hello.” From the way he looked at Frankie, Jenny deduced that children were not a regular occurrence in his world.

“All right, sweet pea,” said Jenny. “Let me get a refill.” She ladled more wine into her cup and smiled fondly at her baby. Her rescuer.

Frankie grabbed a corn muffin from the table on her way out the door. After the warm kitchen and Caliban's contempt, the evening air hit Jenny's face like a splash of water. A chorus of male voices rose over the snapping of burning wood.

David was picking on the banjo and Phinneas, one boot propped on the plastic tub that formed the base of his instrument, was plucking away at the string. Dale sat on one of the kitchen chairs that had been dragged into the pasture and did the fancy guitar work he had become famous for, the product of what he liked to call his misspent youth. Around the fire and in clumps on the grass there were a couple more unfamiliar faces amid the neighbors, waiters, gas station attendants, librarians, and salespeople among whom Jenny and her daughters spent their days. But still no sign of the man she had seen with Ariel that afternoon. She began to doubt that he was part of the company after all. Perhaps he had just been standing next to Ariel by accident, waiting for a cut of beef to take home to his vacation rental. And his children. And his beautiful wife.