Where We Are Now (21 page)

“Oh….” I watched our guests swaying on the dance floor, saw the Zanninis swinging on their trapezes in the barn's dim light once again.

“You were all dependent on each other so. How could you have—”

“And so temperamental.” Her eyes filled with laughter or tears, or both. We fought over everything—over attention mainly, our parents', the crowd's. We competed with each other. Even Bianca and I did. My family tried to keep me from marrying Gaylord. Papa didn't want me to marry out of the circus. It took a long time for him to forgive us. He made us wait four years to marry. Papa said Gaylord stayed around so long he finally got used to him!”

Deprived of my vision of the Zanninis soaring happily above the rest of us, I stared at her. When I was eighteen, most other people's families must have looked more agreeable than mine. Lacking both parents, I suppose I wished for better substitutes than my uncle and grandmother.

Max and Sally waltzed in front of me dancing so perfectly together it seemed they had been married for years. Kate and Romero Garza, the boy she dated when she was at home, passed by. In the hurry of preparation I'd hardly gotten to talk to our oldest daughter. I knew she liked Max. My problem was I couldn't understand the music, Kate insisted. I'd need to listen to a lot of it in order to realize the kind of talent Max had. I doubted I could do that.

“Sally's happy with him, Mother, not raving, just steady. She's lived with him a year and a half, long enough to know his faults.”

I nodded as if I agreed when I knew those would change. Faults and virtues are as changeable as people are, but who can tell what they'll be.

I followed Sally to help her. When she pulled the heavy bridal dress over her head, I reached out to catch it.

“Your great-grandmother helped me choose that dress.” Grandmother had given me a big wedding although she was opposed to Marsh. She feared he'd be a wastrel; he didn't have a job and our plans were vague. At one point she'd said we might as well be jumping off a cliff holding hands. I'd laughed then at her over-reaction.

Annette called from the other side of the door, “Max says he's ready, Sally.”

“Give me a minute,” she answered, then whispered, “Wasn't she the one who was shot out of a cannon?”

“Yes.”

Sally pulled on a pink silk shirt and pair of jeans and reached for a denim jacket Max had given her, one blazing with silver sequined stars and pink sequined horses galloping across the back. I could still see those horses and stars gleaming through the dim light as she ran with Max to the waiting car at the end of our sidewalk.

R
omero is becoming
a lackluster Romeo. Though he calls, my daughter complains, he seldom comes down to San Diego. He lives in San Francisco where he plays cello in the symphony. Kate works on the newspaper down south. Is it only distance that separates them, or is it something else? Are there new steps to the mating dance, ways nobody's mother knows? For years I've tried to keep up with my two daughters—at a distance, of course—yet I remain essentially ignorant. Marsh and I have adjusted to the new freedoms the pill allows, but the complications following are shifting shadows compared to the dark lines drawn for us. Holding the kitchen phone in hand, looking out at our barn and stables, I try to understand what she's telling me.

“You do see each other, don't you?”

“I can't go up there a lot. I have to work most weekends, remember.”

No, I didn't. I remembered she used to take off on weekends whenever she could and a lot of those weekends were spent in San Francisco. Romero wasn't the problem. Kate, I see now, is avoiding him.

“Are you playing hard to get?”

“No.”

“Well I don't get it—I mean—You say you talk to him all the time—”

“No, Mother, he's not gay,” she jumps in before I could say I never thought he was … which wasn't true. There was always a chance. Who can know?

Kate interrupts my wandering mind. “When you were dating—”

“In the dark stone ages.” I sighed.

“OK, Mother. Some guys might do that, but not Romero.”

I thought about a few of the boys I'd dated. “Sometimes I wonder if they knew themselves. We were all so … so ignorant, vaguely aware, but mostly ignorant.”

“Well, I know about Romero.”

We'd known him, known his parents since they moved here and put him in the third grade at our daughters' school. Now he and Kate—she'd called to announce—are coming home for the weekend. They're always together in New Mexico, my grown up daughter and her boyfriend who don't see each other in California.

Maribelle Garza and I meet in the grocery store, the big one over on the west side of town where we both go to do major restocking. My basket is full. So is hers.

“Expecting someone?” She asks, leans on the cart's handle and grins. Maribelle had on black pants and a tan silk shirt; she wears no jewelry except her wedding band. Pared down. This is her personal style, one that appears effortless. From Venezuela, she married into a firmly rooted family who were here long before New Mexico joined the union. Her husband Rudy is a successful heir to generations of importers. Maribelle's known for her own talent; she's a professional concert pianist who has performed all over this country as well as in Europe and South America.

We've been friends since she and Rudy moved back here from L.A. with Romero who had already learned how to climb up to sit by his mother on the piano bench.

Both Kate and her younger sister Sally have been interested in musicians. Sally was so interested she married a country rock singer. I don't think that's Max's term for what
he does, but it doesn't matter; singers seem to be constantly redefining themselves. I don't know why my daughters have found musicians particularly appealing. Maybe it's a wandering gene of their great-grandfather's who was a country fiddler. There were no musicians in Marshall's family and, on my father's side, I knew of none. Neither Marshall nor I had the least ability or training except for the tortuous piano lessons of our childhood. When I mentioned these to Maribelle, she gave me a horrified look then clapped her hands over her ears like one of the three wise monkeys. Playing a grand piano in front of thousands seems as natural to her as breathing, or that's the way it appears when I watch her perform. Stage fright, more of a problem when she was younger she says, still waits in the wings just behind her, lurking invisibly, until she's walking toward the piano. It disappears entirely when her fingers touch the keys.

“Magic, I think!”

She wants to believe this, and so do I.

“Kate's coming. She phoned last night.”

“Oh, yes, Marianne! They are flying home together again.”

We study each other silently for a few seconds, a couple of know-it-alls who know little, both of us wondering if the announcement we've longed for will actually be made this time. We can't help ourselves; we're hopeless romantics but practical enough to have realized no matter how much we want this match, we couldn't speak for our children. Instead we sigh, make disparaging remarks about the artichokes and push our carts down diverging aisles.

I want to sit down right there in the midst of the canned goods and write my daughter. Oh, Kate, my Kate, think of the lonely years that wait before you. If Romero has become just a good friend, he is still better than no one to marry. Yes, you may fall in love with someone else later and regret it, but
you could fall in love with your husband. Take the chance. These letters are all written in my head, for I remember all the advisors I used to have and how frequently I disobeyed them. And what if Romero actually was the one who didn't want to marry?

Maribelle writes her own letters; she's told me how hard it is to tear them up. “Little pieces of paper. I see them floating without sound, floating in limbo. I'm so tired of being the careful mother. Sometimes I want to tell Romero exactly what to do! I'd love to be opinionated and demanding, like my grandmother.”

“Yes,” I said, “like mine.” Not that it would have done us any good. Our grandmothers had their say, but that's all they had. We both used their opinions for signposts and detoured every time.

Kate and Romero got off the same shuttle bus from Albuquerque. They're a good looking pair; Kate, my tall dark-haired daughter who looks so much like my mother although her hair is in little wisps about her face instead of the soft waves Mother wore, and Romero, tall as his father, with Maribelle's gray eyes. Usually he gives me a hug. Today he waves just as he jumps in a cab. I would have offered him a ride, but the Garza house was in the foothills east of town and our farm is twenty minutes south. The last I saw of him he was leaning forward speaking to the driver. The next two days he doesn't come out or call.

It's late May—cool in the mornings and evenings though it warms up in the afternoons. Early each day Kate
goes with me to check on the foals in the stable. I watch her petting a three-month-old. Like all of us, she admires the babies. When she was fourteen she had a colt of her own. Marsh and I gave one to each of our daughters to raise. There were generally dogs around for them to look after too; often they were discards, puppies thrown out of cars . We had to convince Kate that rabbits were better left wild or she would have brought them home from the pastures. Her sister Sally first collected rocks and later, stamps; Kate continued to collect animals including wounded birds even though they flew off the minute they were healed and hamsters that were continually crawling out of her pockets and getting lost in the living room upholstery. She couldn't bear to keep anything caged. I had a hard time learning to do that myself. In this, and in some other ways, I'm closer to Kate than to Sally.

I follow her around the stable listening to her clucking and murmuring to the foals. She doesn't talk to me much. Though she can get excited, normally she's not particularly effusive. She's always been the quiet one. Perhaps because she's been a reporter for over ten years she tends to listen more than her younger sister does. Her silence could mean she's relaxed; it could also mean she's feeling indecisive or angry or depressed. We are both moody creatures. I keep trying to take a reading on hers and finally give up.

“What's wrong, Kate?” We were sitting on the top rail of the round pen watching Marsh show Diego how to lunge Eula, a filly named after one of my great aunts because of her wide streak of independence. Eula kicks up her heels now as she trots round. Her high spirits made us all laugh. Marsh watches her closely. He's always careful, even with the horses we've had since they were born. We raise eight or ten a year now. Marsh does most of the training; Diego helps. Only fifteen, he's one of the best grooms we've ever had though not the first to show up from the pueblo down the road. The
Indians who work for us seem to have an innate sensitivity to horses. They never lose their tempers, never threaten or shout. Their affinity is marked by continual pats and praises, signs of affection horses need just as they need steadiness.