Where We Are Now (22 page)

Kate keeps her eyes on Diego and Eula while she answers.

“I have a chance to … to get away, to go to Japan to teach English. I … I have to sign a year's contract.” She bent her head toward the ground, and for an instant I see my mother's profile again.

Kate turns toward me; now all I could see are clouds massing, not the evenly shaped puffy white ones O'Keeffe painted, just amorphous gray-black masses. Slowly I focus on my daughter's face. The two worry lines between her eyebrows, the same ones I have, are deeply creased.

“Mm.” I said. What else was there to say? What did she mean by “get away”? She'd lived away from us for years. We sent both girls East to school to let them find out about another part of the world. Marsh had done that; he grew up in Texas and went to Tennessee to college. I had wanted to leave Tennessee for California and was kept near home by a guardian uncle and a grandmother who feared great distance would remove me permanently; instead proximity did. Kate went off to Rhode Island, a landscape of tall brick and wooden houses, little sun, winds from the dark Atlantic whistling though brick-paved streets, snow to the second story of her dorm one year, not snow for skiers, not white drifts along rusty-red roads and on top of iced-over still running creeks but northeastern snow that stayed the long winter, went gray with industrial dirt relieved only by fresh falls. Sally went to Princeton; Kate went to Brown. From New Mexico to New England, we sent our children. Go, we said, be free, whispering all the time to ourselves, come back, come back home to us.

Finished with school, Kate went to work in Atlanta, magnolia land, my childhood country, except the old South was but a residue, like the accent there, as far as I could tell. The newspaper she worked for didn't report weddings any more. People have to pay for those stories by the inch just as they do now for obituaries. The section called
Society
when I was growing up was now called something like
Living,
and Kate sent us copies of stories she'd written about working mothers before she moved to the news side to write about the homeless.

San Diego was the next place. I began to wonder then if she'd become rootless. Does that really happen? Can people pull themselves up? I tried. But some part held, some part I've noticed, as I've grown older, I carried. I came west trailing southern dust, leaving my family yet bringing them with me. Marsh, questioning as I did, started calling Kate “Restless.” Accustomed to naming new foals every year, he also gave titles to people sometimes. Our dark-eyed, dark-haired daughter who looked so much like my mother said maybe she'd also inherited a desire to travel. She knew about the resemblance to her grandmother, had noticed the way her nose tilted, asked about the color of her eyes, seen the long oval shape of her own face in old photographs. I lost my mother when I was eighteen. Having a daughter who looked so much like her was, perhaps, a strange consolation. Did she mind? When she was thirteen, yes, when she wanted most to become herself, she might have felt haunted. Now … now she is thirty-three.

“Romero,” I decided, at last, to risk it. “Does he know?”

“Oh … yes.”

There was so much care taken with that one word even though it seemed to slip out like a breath. I thought it was measured because Kate watched me closely only when she was uncertain of my reactions. Her gaze made
me uncomfortable, made me feel too important. I wished sometimes she didn't wonder about my feelings, that she was a little more callous. If she were, it would be easier to let her go. She wants both to go and to stay, one reason she's continually found jobs at such a distance from New Mexico; distance tests her resolve. I'm sure I should not be the guiding force, nor should Marshall. What of Romero? Should he be? Have I unknowingly chosen him for my substitute?

Kate reminds me he is busy with his own life, that professional musicians have complicated schedules for practice and rehearsal. “Mother, you should know how it is. Remember how Maribelle has always planned her life, planned everything around her hours in the studio when she's in town. You used to get annoyed because you couldn't call her in the mornings.”

“Yes. Well … I got over that when I realized she had to have that time to herself. What does Romero think of you going away a year?”

“He goes off all the time himself. He's always playing somewhere else. They're quick trips. He doesn't have to be on the road like Max does. He flys to Rio, to New York, or London, or Tokyo.” Kate listed the names of great cities with pleasure as if she'd been collecting them for me.

“Maybe you'll see him in Tokyo then.”

She shrugs. “I don't know. I think we need some time apart. I told you I don't see him in California much, but he calls me every day. Or I call him. It's like … like we've got a long-distance marriage. We're too used to each other. We tell each other our days … like you and Dad do. I know everything he does, how he feels about everything.”

“It sounds a little … Oh, I don't know…. ” I could almost hear my grandmother grumbling, “Where is that boy? I thought he came home with you.” Still it was best not to blurt out opinions about Romero.

“It's unreal!” Kate put her elbows on her knees and propped her chin on her hands. She hasn't much patience with my evasions, a trait more pronounced after her years as a journalist.

The filly trots round Marsh. He hands the halter's line to Diego and shows him how to use the slack end on the horse's rump if necessary. Eula doesn't need a lot of encouragement; Diego began training by running in front of her, getting her to follow him as if they were playing. However everyone who worked for us had to learn how to exercise a horse using a lunge line, to hold onto the rope swiveling from the halter and keep the horse moving in a circle while popping a long tasseled whip in the air. The rope must be kept taut as the animal moves. Untrained or unwilling horses will try to walk toward you and stop. It isn't easy, at first, to make everything happen at once, to pop the whip, keep the horse going in a wide circle and keep from getting dizzy yourself. To remain still while the horse circles, the trainer switches the line from one hand to another and by passing it behind his back, becomes the ringmaster in a personal circus. For Marsh and me lunging is a reflex action. For Diego, Marsh knows, it will take practice. He joins us on the fence.

I didn't say anything to him about Kate going to Japan. Probably he already knows. When they were little, if either of the girls wanted to do anything one of us might disapprove, they went to the less prejudiced one first. If they were uncertain about how either of us felt, they went to Marsh. He doesn't erupt. I try not to. At least I practice trying not to. I was still silently balanced on the top rail while at the same time I ache to grab her arm and plead, “Don't go to Japan, Kate!” Marsh, usually sensitive to eye signals, is so busy watching Diego he doesn't notice mine.

The filly, seeing she's in someone else's hands, pulls the line free and trots to the pen's opposite side. Marsh leaps off
the fence to help Diego who's staring at his left hand. The rope may have burned him.

Behind us on the road down to the corrals I hear a motor. Romero pulls up, dust roiling behind him. He jumps out of his jeep without saying a word and walks toward Kate, his mouth set in a line. I've seldom seen him angry. He walks so fast I half-expect to see little sparks shooting off his heels. His teeth, clenched tight, make his jaw muscles twitch. Dark like Kate, though more olive-skinned, nearly six feet tall, a good height for her, his eyes glint in the morning sun. Obviously intent on reaching her before saying anything, he seems to be smoldering, a moving image of a romantic hero. Maribelle would have been as delighted as I was with him.

He nods at me as if I barely exist and shouts Kate's name.

She's already slipped off the fence and is running across the pen where Diego still waits in the middle examining his left hand. Marshall, just a few feet away, heads toward Eula who seems to be waiting for him, the rope dragging from her halter. Kate climbs the fence behind Diego. Romero had almost reached the center of the pen. Eula, bewildered by all the people, wheels around and starts toward the opposite side. At that moment I freeze. I usually do on the verge of oncoming collisions just as I usually feel an instant of incredible clarity. Everyone's in place. Everything's about to happen, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. If Romero grabs Kate, she will be furious.

“Don't,” I shout without knowing who I'm instructing—Marshall, Diego, Eula, Kate, Romero, myself, time itself. Maybe, most of all, I want time to freeze, and to melt to the year Kate and Romero played an angel and a shepherd in a school pageant while Maribelle and I sat in the audience nudging each other.

Instead my shout turns the filly just as she collides with Romero. He falls sideways out of her path. Kate, her back to us as she disappears toward the house, hasn't seen him fall. Marsh and Diego help him up and dust him off. Eula stands in the middle thrashing her tail as if she still wants to play. Climbing off the fence, I see Diego walking toward her, his hand outstretched.

Romero insists he isn't hurt.

“I think we'll have to spend some more time working with Eula,” Marsh says.

I looked at him asking, “Really?” teasing him a little because I know he generally enjoys working with the difficult ones. Like Diego, he has a lot of patience and an inborn sense about a horse's nature.

“This morning she's a little too nervy,” he said as he moved toward me.

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have been in the pen,” Romero said.

“It's okay,” said Marshall.

I glance sideways at Romero who still looks hopelessly angry.

“Hasn't Kate told you? She's thinking about going to Japan and she won't let me try to talk her out of it?” Without waiting for an answer, he continues. “It's ridiculous. She's a journalist, not an English teacher. I need her—” He stops abruptly. “She made me promise I wouldn't phone her while we're here.”

“Maybe just showing up is the best thing,” Marsh put his arm around my shoulders.

He's surprised me. It's not like him to offer advice to anyone unless asked.

Romero shrugs. “She says I'm a habit—She says she needs some space. We've got most of California between us. Now that's not enough!”

I look up at Marsh and see Kate has done as I surmised she might; she'd told her father first.

“I'll call her,” Marsh offers.

Shaking his head, Romero moves past us to his jeep, his shoulders set in a rigid line as though he's determined not to show defeat. I'd seen him assume the same guarded stance when he was a little boy. I would like to comfort him, to put my arms around him.

Against our wills, against our hopes, standing side-by-side against the fence, we remain silent and let him go, let him walk off alone leaving us there by the dusty road curving toward the house.

I've never been the sort of mother who absolutely has to have her children live nearby; Marsh wants them close more than I. Orphaned ten years longer than I was, he has a greater longing for family around him. I don't think he feels this way because he'd been raised by an aunt and uncle amidst aunts and uncles. That was a cocoon itself, a differently woven one, but who knows if they weren't just as capable, just as caring as a pair of natural parents could have been? Marsh's desire to keep our daughters close to home is, I've begun to think, a wish to watch the generations unfold. He's started having grandfather dreams. The night after Romero stalked off he accused me of concealing the same fantasies, and he's right; I want to hold the next generation in my lap too. But we never intended to raise a pair of fillies only to turn them into brood mares. We'd planned to do what we've done, to raise our daughters and to let them be. The last part is harder than we'd thought, something we had to learn twice. We hadn't wanted Sally to marry Max, and she had. We'd wanted Kate to marry Romero.

She didn't want to make him miserable, she said, so she finally saw him. He'd refused to understand her so long she'd decided on the way home from California she simply had to avoid him. When they met here, all she could tell him was she wouldn't do what he wanted. She wouldn't move to San Francisco, wouldn't marry him.

After he left the house—I imagined him walking away, his shoulders set in that defiant line again—Kate sat out on the porch alone for a while before coming in to tell me, “Mother, it's so hard! We've already spent a lot of our lives together.”

She wouldn't say she didn't love him. I know she can't. Their lives are as braided together as a piece of rope. In her voice I heard her sorrow, but I could also hear her longing to jerk free, to let the ends unravel and fall apart.

“All right,” Marsh said.

“Oh, well …” was all I said. I was proud of both of us and wondered if Maribelle and Rudy felt as bereft as we did.