The Yellow Braid (16 page)

Caro said, “She’s become very special to me,
and I want to do something special in return.”

“I can appreciate your motives, Caro. A lot
of money is involved though. I mean, to be blunt, can you afford
it?”

“I’m rich enough.”

Nina’s eyes widened. “Wow! I never figured.
Then I guess we have a deal.”

“We have a deal!” Caro cried. “Thank you,
Nina.”

“This means the world to me, you know that,”
Nina said, and after a moment of silent exchange of gratitude with
their eyes, they embraced.

Nina asked, “What are your plans for
them?”

“I want to talk to Carmen about eventually
putting them in a trust for Livia. In the short term, I don’t know
yet. We’ll figure something out together. As for telling Livia, I
realize how sensitive she is about the photos. I’d still like her
to know.”

Nina nodded. “I’ll talk to Tommy tonight.
Unless he has an objection, come for supper tomorrow and we’ll make
it a low-key affair.”

***

That evening at Caro’s house, Livia
popped
Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
into the DVD player. “It’s the rage of the
literary world,” Livia had told her when Caro balked. “You’re the
only person alive not to have watched at least
one
Harry Potter movie.”

Having seen both its predecessors twice,
Livia explained the necessary plot details to Caro, who was
surprised by how much she enjoyed the ingenuity of the story.

“No wonder Rowling’s a billionaire,” Caro
said afterward.

Caro was on the sofa. Livia was lying on her
back on the floor, snug in an oversized sweatshirt against the cool
breezes coming in through the opened windows.

Livia spread her arms. “It’s hard to even
imagine that much money.”

“I agree. She’s the only woman in literary
history to reach those numbers.”

“Do poets get rich?” Livia asked.

“Not usually.” Caro’s serenity in the pale
light of the sconces made her look almost pretty, the way the
shadows danced across her features. She smiled at Livia’s fiscal
naiveté at the same time that she recalled her own literary
ambitions when she was a teen.

They couldn’t see the ocean from where they
were but they heard the roiling waves tumble into shore and
retreat. There was a sense of assurance in the sound of the ocean.
Its movement was reliable, always present, unchanging.

From her lowered position Livia said, “Did
you ever write a poem that might hurt someone you cared about?”

Unprepared for the question, Caro
nonetheless had an immediate answer, although it took her a few
moments to gather the courage to be truthful. The incident occurred
when she was first famous and still believed she had moral justice
on her side, though that wasn’t the case anymore.

Caro said, “Once I wrote a poem about the
shortcomings of growing up in the house of Italian immigrant
parents. It didn’t dawn on me how hurtful the words were until my
father made me read it aloud to the family.”

“What happened?” Livia crept on to the couch
next to Caro.

“My mother and grandmother sobbed. My sole
aunt, a dozen years younger than my mother and born in New York,
scolded me in Italian for an hour and then didn’t let me forget the
incident for three days. ‘As many days as Christ was in the tomb,’
she’d said. My Aunt Francesca was very religious.”

“Were you sorry then that you wrote it?”

“Yes and no. I felt bad I hurt their
feelings. At the same time, it’s just what came out of me
naturally.”

“Were you born in Italy too?”

“New Jersey,” Caro said.

“Hmmm, just like me.” Livia drew her knees
up under the hem of the sweatshirt and rested her head on Caro’s
shoulder.

Caro, in turn, smoothed Livia’s bangs with
her fingers in a repetitive motion. Livia’s action reminded Caro of
her daughter snuggling against her hip as a toddler. When Abby had
reached Livia’s age, she no longer bowed to such juvenile
intimacies. Caro had missed her daughter’s nearness after that.

Caro could almost taste the sea salt that
glinted on Livia’s skin. She inhaled the lingering scent of
lavender soap she had used from Caro’s bathroom. The smell mingled
with the traces of it on her own body—a metaphorical blending of
the flesh.

Only that morning, worn down by Livia’s
nagging and the high temperatures, Caro had ventured into the
ocean. She didn’t like the open water, fearful of the marine life
that she imagined rising from the depths, circling her. She
understood that shark attacks were rare. However, jellyfish, crabs,
sea anemones, and lionfish were all dangerous each in their own
way. Even the slime and tangle of seaweed, while not harmful, made
her slap the water’s surface in distaste.

Swimming alongside Livia was sweet
recompense for her apprehension, and Caro relished in the sight of
the pull and press of the girl’s muscles, the full extension of her
body. Her arms arced toward the sun, then down and through the
water again, propelling her forward. Buoyed by salt water and
exhilaration, her motion was effortless.

When Caro rotated and lifted her head out of
the water for air, she caught snatches of Livia: the crinkle across
the bridge of her nose, a sign of exertion; the fresh triangle of
freckles on her cheeks; the faint trace of a scar along her
jawbone, which Caro had never seen before, but now felt drawn to
touch.

In shallower waters, Caro boosted Livia onto
her shoulders only to let her somersault backwards with a splash.
She dove underwater and came up on Livia from below, tackling her
by her legs and her waist. They kicked and thrashed about,
inadvertently making brief contact with body parts that were
otherwise off limits, but the sensation of which Caro stored in her
subconscious.

Now, the sensual recollections of her
afternoon in the surf, combined with Livia’s intimate
repose—nestled with her head resting in the hollow of Caro’s
bosom—immersed Caro’s face in a deep red flush. Like Alice in
Wonderland, she was cascading uncontrollably down the rabbit
hole.

She’d schemed to be Livia’s mentor––her
Socrates––guiding her in her path of true knowledge and along the
journey happening upon total, perfect, and platonic love. At this
moment, though, she felt no nearer to ideal love than any other
kind of lust. Yet she was powerless to pull away.

Suddenly Caro felt exhausted, as if she’d
engaged in some kind of strenuous activity. She glanced down at
Livia, who had dozed off. A chill shot through Caro and huddling
closer to the young, sweat-shirted body, she closed her eyes, her
hands trembling above her, millimeters short of physical
contact.

After a long while fighting against a
blinding craving to kiss the soft curve of Livia’s jaw line, she
awakened her and took her to bed. When she went to her own room,
Caro pushed open the French doors to the crash of ocean and opened
her mouth, but the scream stayed inside her. She stood in the night
dampness until her insides lurched with discomfort, as if she
believed the chill could numb her heart-sick feelings. Nothing
could save her, and she retreated to her bed, a piece of her
emotional stability forever shipwrecked.

Some there are who say that the
fairest thing seen
on the black earth is an array of horsemen; some, men
marching; some would say ships… ~
Sappho

“…
b
ut I say / she whom one loves best / is
the loveliest…”

Caro let the last word sit on her tongue,
enjoying the feel of it in her mouth. “Loveliest.” The word made
her think of skinned peaches cut into sweet morsels, or honeydew
melon spooned fresh from the hollow of the fruit. They were tastes
that made her mouth water and ache for more.

Caro had first come to appreciate the appeal
to the senses Sappho’s words held when she taught the ancient
poet’s writings in a workshop. She’d explained to her students how
the individual words were common enough, but that how Sappho strung
them together was what gave them their texture and body, and
sensuality.

Nina’s photographs of Livia had the same
kind of rapture. She had managed to capture glimmerings of Livia’s
various moods: bookish seriousness, petulance, curiosity, and her
athleticism, alongside her unmistakable sensuousness.

Caro recalled watching Tommy’s nephew, Alex,
teach Livia how to body surf. He’d come to Westhampton to visit
friends but when he saw Livia get consistently dumped from her
boogie board he offered his help.

A strong swimmer and surfer, Alex
demonstrated the knack of determining which was the best wave to
ride in on. He showed Livia how to position the board in the middle
of her midriff and how to use her arms like oars and her hands like
rudders.

He showed her the technique of staying on
the board and riding over the crest of the wave as it rolled toward
shore and then how to prevent getting hit by the board when she was
thrown off.

Livia caught on quickly. After Alex went
back to his friends she continued to practice, whooping and waving
toward shore when she rode a wave in successfully; laughing even
more when she toppled off and emerged from the surf spitting out
ocean water and unwrapping seaweed from her ankles.

When Livia paddled away from shore her
golden hair split her back like a brilliant shaft of light cutting
a room of darkness in half. Her blonde braid came to be a symbol
for the beauty and innocence that was hers; Caro named the poem
she’d been writing for Livia, “The Yellow Braid.” She had a wide
back and well-defined shoulders for one so small-boned. It was that
ocean-bound image of Livia riding the surf that inspired the
beginnings of the third stanza.
A golden twist of nouns and verbsin mute
and mock displaywith flying curls of metaphors in costumed
disarray.A buried mix of hidden rhymesso seldom sought to heara
drawstring bag of adjectivesso difficult to bear.A posy from a sea
of versea weave of harvest dustthe sonnet dark, its lyrics
terse…

It was curious to Caro how this poem trickled
out over the summer. Usually, her verse came in a flood of words
and images. She would spend days, even weeks reworking a poem, but
she rarely strayed far from the initial outpouring. This poem had
forced a different writing pattern on her. She concluded why after
writing what she knew to be the last stanza.

Her poetry was always about trying to reveal
the truth of a matter. With Livia, the deep shame that shadowed
every thought of love, made it impossible for Caro to write plainly
about her. And so she wrote in rhyme and metaphor, in stuttering
starts and stops, with no one the wiser to her lust, but
herself.

***

“There’s no harm in experimenting.” Caro
snapped the color chart closed and handed it back to Tommy. She
didn’t care what he thought. The culture of beauty in contemporary
society was of youth. It wasn’t anything she’d created. Nor was
there anything she could do about it.

Tommy returned the bowl of dye to his
assistant, “Mix up a new batch.” To Caro he said, “You are
forewarned, right?”

“Yes,” she said impatiently.

Half an hour later, with the stain of
chestnut seeping along her forehead and neckline, Caro’s cell phone
rang. “Hello,” she said, holding it inches away from her ear so as
not to smudge it with dye.

“Mom? Are you there?”

“Abby, I can’t talk now. I’ll call you
back.”

“No, I’m afraid you won’t. I thought we were
okay with each other, but since you got back from the city you
haven’t returned any of my calls.”

“We are okay, really. It’s me and has
nothing to do with you.” Caro shut her eyes and sighed in
frustration at having to be so guarded with her words. “It’s been
harder than I would’ve expected to come to terms with everything
that’s happened since Marcie’s death.”

“
Maybe I should fly over to see you—” Abby
said.

“No, of course, you shouldn’t. I’m fine,”
Caro said. She tried for assurance in her voice. “Abby, I’m in the
beauty parlor packed in hair color.”

“Promise you’ll get back to me,” Abby
said.

“Later,” she said. “I promise.”

In reality, Caro didn’t know what she was
going to do. She felt like she didn’t know anything anymore. Coming
to the beauty parlor was a mistake; she didn’t have the patience to
sit quietly for any length of time so cluttered was her mind with
random fears: afraid of letting something slip that might tip Abby
off to her feelings about Livia, afraid that she’ll lose her
composure with Livia and do something—a touch or kiss that might
frighten the girl away. Caro knew she’d be devastated losing Livia
because of a character weakness within herself.

These thoughts made Caro pull at the neck of
her robe and fidget in her seat. Her skin began to itch from the
heat lamp. She waved over Tommy’s assistant to find out how much
more she had to endure.

Tommy himself answered when he held up his
opened hand and mouthed, “Five more minutes.”

Caro blew out her cheeks and huffed. All
around her women sat docilely reading
Vogue
or gossiping with their neighbor. In contrast,
Caro’s discomfiture caused a sudden feeling of doom. Or perhaps,
not suddenly. Maybe her repeated visits to Tommy’s salon and
attempts at beautification and youth had been fated from the
beginning.

She started to cry, first, from the inside.
When the assistant settled her in the shampoo chair with her head
tilted back over the rim of the sink, the tears collected on her
eyelashes and rolled off her face, mixing with the lather that
smelled of apricots and tangerines.