Juno's Daughters (8 page)

And then there was Frankie. After Lilly and Miranda had ditched her, Frankie had been more shy than usual. But whenever Jenny had thought to look for her she'd found her in the penumbra of Ariel, whether he was aware of her presence or not. She hovered about the youthful actor like a bird with her eye on a bit of lost bread, as if she had only to wait and watch and an opportunity would come along for her to dart in and claim it. It was clear that she wanted to be noticed by him, but Jenny could not figure out why. He was beautiful in his way, lithe and fey and sarcastic. Talking with him around the fire, she had learned that he was from Detroit. The only child in a family named Wilcox.

“The beloved son of the Wilcoxes,” said Jenny, smiling.

He had looked at her for a moment and then added drily, “Beloved by whom?”

Jenny glanced at Frankie now, her skinny limbs folded under the blanket. Perhaps she saw what she hoped was her future self in the way he held his body. He made his lankiness work for him. He turned gangliness into grace. Jenny wondered if she could find some dance instruction for Frankie on the island. It might provide a diversion for the inevitable heartache when Phoenix left. It might boost her confidence. They didn't have a lot of extra money, but Jenny decided she could scrape together enough for a lesson or two, just to see if Frankie took to it.

She rubbed her lower back through her shirt and wondered how long she could allow herself to entertain this little romantic sizzle with Ariel's friend before making herself completely ridiculous. It was clear that Lilly would not give Trinculo up easily, and the idea of vying with her own teenage daughter for the affection of a professional actor was absurd. It was morally, ethically, and spiritually wrong. Besides that, it was impractical. Lilly was seventeen years old and adorable. What forty-two-year-old mother of two could compete with her? Jenny unfolded herself from her chair and tottered to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Her skin still dripping, she pulled back her hair with one hand and bent to drink from the faucet. She toweled her face and bared her teeth in the mirror to check for any stray pieces of potato chip or carrot.

Dale had once pulled her into a wet kiss at the Roche Harbor after-party. Though he'd apologized and she, embarrassed, had never said a word, it was a reminder to keep on her toes in the midst of all this enchanted storytelling. She could understand how Lilly, of all people, might be susceptible. She could understand, but she didn't like it. She slipped back into her chair with a frown.

“Are there any parts for girls?” asked Lilly suddenly.

Peg snorted.

Dale pulled himself into an upright position and looked at Lilly with incredulity. “You haven't read the play?”

“Not yet.” Lilly blushed and shot a quick furtive glance toward Ariel.

Ariel strolled toward her. “Prospero, my dear, is a big cheese in Milan.” He stopped just short of the couch and leaned against the wall. “A duke. Until his naughty, ambitious, betraying brother has him banished to an island where he is served by an uncouth toad named Caliban and an enchanting, chameleonesque spirit named Ariel.” He took an almost imperceptible bow. “Conveniently, one day, a boat carrying his old enemies, as well as a luscious young prince named Ferdinand, sails by and Prospero conjures a storm.” Here Ariel waved his hands around in front of her face. “That wrecks the boat and brings them all to shore.”

“An interesting interpretation,” murmured Peg.

Ariel turned away and resumed his stretching. “Oh, and Prospero has a daughter.”

“Miranda,” breathed Frankie, just before drifting off to sleep. She had burrowed her face under the blanket for warmth and darkness.

“Yes, Miranda is a
girl part
, as you say. But that role's taken.” Dale cupped his hand over the top of Miranda's head as if he were her actual father and not just her theatrical one.

“I didn't mean any
main
parts,” continued Lilly. “I'm talking about a smaller role that a girl could play.” She was silent for a moment and, perhaps reflecting on the marijuana that had made her last year in high school so challenging, she added, “with not too many lines.”

“You're persistent,” sighed Dale, “but would you be
reliable
?”

Persistent was a
very
good word for Lilly, Jenny thought, and it was unsurprising that Dale should find just the right one to describe her.

Ariel padded back over to the couch and leaned his pelvis against the back of it, looking down at Frankie and Lilly with interest. “Iris? Ceres?” He shifted his gaze to Jenny. “Juno?”

Dale straightened his back against the chair. His eyes traveled from the girls on the couch, one sleeping, the other tousled and eager, to Jenny and then back again. He tugged at his beard like an Old World rabbi. “Iris, Ceres, and Juno,” he repeated. “
This is a most majestic vision, and harmonious, charmingly. May I be bold to think thee Spirits
?”

Peg came to stand by Dale's chair. Her sari was coming undone and she had a small twig clinging to her hair. She said, “
Spirits, which by mine art I have from their confines call'd to enact My present fancies
.” There was more than a spark of interest in her eyes. “All three of them?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dale, “absolutely.” He reached for his wife's hand and drew her close.

Jenny was suddenly wide awake. They were talking about putting them
in
the play? Jenny and her daughters?

“You should only give Lilly the part if Jenny and Frankie will be players, too,” said Dale to Peg emphatically. “We want all three.”

“Please, Mom?” The cool that Lilly cultivated so assiduously was gone. She wanted this. Badly.

It didn't help that Jenny wanted to be in the play, too. Even without the blue-eyed Trinculo, in years past she had longed to burrow deep down into the center of the theater magic. To be one of the players.

Miranda tucked her hair behind her ears and looked at Jenny with curiosity. “Will you do it?”

In answer, Jenny found herself looking square in the face of Ariel, who gazed back with curiosity and perhaps, if she was not mistaken, a touch of naughtiness. Did he have any idea of the mischief his suggestion might have set in motion, she wondered. She narrowed her eyes at him, not in an unfriendly way, but her scrutiny was clear. He glanced demurely to the side and began a new round of stretches, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Jenny chewed the inside of her cheek and sighed. She suspected he knew quite well.

T
he last school bus of the year was due in ten minutes and Frankie was still in the bathroom. She stuck her head out of the door. “Maybe there's a part for Phoenix?”

“I don't know,” said Jenny. “Maybe.”

“I'll ask Dale tonight at the . . .
what
was it called?”

“The table reading.”

“The table reading.” Frankie nodded with satisfaction and closed the door.

Jenny stirred the honey in her tea and closed her eyes to take her first sip. Now that the actors were on the island, she mused, the most ordinary places, the post office, the bowling alley, the Whale Museum, all crackled with new possibility. She would have allowed herself to be drawn and quartered before admitting to Lilly that she scanned the avenues of Friday Harbor for one particular sandy-haired man. The northern light always gave her a touch of insomnia in late spring and early summer, but this year it was worse than usual. Though it was past eight in the morning, she would have liked nothing better than to climb back under the covers and listen through the window for geese and ospreys, hawks and oystercatchers.

“Hurry up, Franks,” Jenny called. “The bus is going to be here any minute.”

Frankie emerged from the bathroom with a spot of toothpaste on her chin. “Or me'n Phoenix could play the same part.” Her eyes were bright with the genius of it. “Like with an understudy. Or twins, you know, on TV shows. Like the Olsen twins.”

“I remember the Olsens.” Frankie's room had once been plastered with pictures of them. She motioned for her to wipe her face and Frankie did so with her hoodie, before putting it on.

“Depending upon the costume, we might look exactly alike. We're almost the same size, except for she's about three pounds heavier than me.” Frankie giggled. “And that's all up here,” she said, cupping her hands under imaginary breasts.

Jenny stood and stretched her hands toward the ceiling. She had been out of school for more years than she could count, but even she had that summer vacation feeling. She hoped the play might turn out to be one of her better decisions. It was, after all, Shakespeare, and an enriching activity for her and her girls to do together. Perhaps, in spite of all her mistakes and misjudgments, it suggested that she hadn't been such a bad mother after all.

She kissed Frankie on the cheek and pushed her toward the door. “Do you know what you and Phoenix are going to do when school gets out?” The last day was always a half day.

“We're going to the art store. Phoenix wants some new colored pencils.” Frankie grabbed the charms that she'd attached to the end of her zipper and pulled her hoodie closed up to her little pointy chin. “I can't wait till she meets the cast,” she said, backing through the door as her mother flapped her hands in a brushing sign, sending her out. “She's going to love Ariel.”

“Call if you need a ride home.”

“Okay.”

Jenny pulled the door shut and Frankie, standing on her tiptoes, made a kissy face against the glass. Jenny tapped at the glass with the tip of her finger and Frankie disappeared.

Five minutes later a truck bumped over the ruts toward the house and stepping back to the window, Jenny could see Elliot sitting in the front seat. This early in the summer his neck was as pink as a newborn mouse. He honked twice, loudly. She waved. He sat up straight and waved back.

Lilly emerged from her room tying her dreads back with a bandanna. She had slipped a pair of army shorts over long johns.

“I might be just a hair late to the meeting tonight. Would you let Dale know?”

“Why?” Immediately, Jenny realized the futility of that question: Whatever answer she would get was likely to be tempered with varying shades of the truth. She followed her daughter to the pantry. “No. Lilly. I will not. We're going do a read through of the entire play, and that's going to take a little while. Dale said you had to be present at this meeting if you wanted to be in the company.”

“I didn't say I wouldn't be
present
.” Lilly's exasperation was hard on the banana and granola bars she was tossing in her bag for lunch. “Just late.” She slung her lumpy woven bag over her shoulder and gave her mother one last look of persecuted innocence. “Okay?”

“It's not my permission that you need Lilly. It's Dale and Peg's. Call them yourself.”

Lilly scowled. Her bag buzzed and she flipped open her cell phone, no doubt receiving and then replying to a text from Elliot, who sat within shouting distance in the yard. She flipped the phone shut again and pirouetted toward the door with her back to Jenny. On the way out she called casually over her shoulder, “Oh, and I forgot to tell you. Auntie Sue phoned the other day and she invited me to come down.”

“Just by yourself? To visit?” Jenny followed Lilly through the door out onto the concrete step in front of the house. She could feel the chill coming up through the wool of her socks, but the sun was bright on her face. She shaded her eyes with her hand so that she could see her daughter bending to get in the passenger side of the truck. “When did she say you could come?”

“Not to visit. To stay. She said maybe I could go to that community college that they have there. College of Marin? Marin College? Whatever it's called.” Lilly's voice faded as she hopped in next to Elliot.

“She invited you to
live
with them? Lilly? What did she say exactly?”

Elliot began backing the truck toward the road and Lilly stuck her head through the window and yelled over the sound of the engine, “We'll talk about it later, Mom. Okay?”

In a moment they were already too far to hear from Jenny whether or not it was okay. Lilly go to Marin? To
live
? She had known that Lilly would probably go somewhere, sometime, but this was too soon. Barely two weeks had passed since her high school graduation. And to Jenny's sister's, of all places?

She went back into the house with a sigh. The top was off the sugar bowl, the dishes were still in the sink, and a handful of tried-on and rejected garments lay draped over the backs of chairs and on doorknobs like the limp forms of exhausted ghosts. In the mornings after the girls had gone, the house always seemed doubly empty. Triply so.

Jenny began humming to break the quiet.

Cornbread and butter beans and you across the table. Eating beans and making love as long as I am able
. She finished the verse and then headed toward the four-harness jack loom in the corner of the porch, determined not to spend the hour or so she had before work on petty chores like straightening up the house. This was a simple weave she was working on, a tapestry for a baby that was due in the fall, and as she pushed the treadles she knew she ought to take a few moments and phone her sister. A chickadee called outside the window (
chickadee-dee-dee, chickadee-dee-dee
) and the angled sunlight coming through the glass scattered rainbow fragments on the wall. She decided she would call from work in an hour, enough time to compose herself so that she would be able to discuss Sue's offer without sounding defensive and ungrateful.