Adrienne Celt - The Daughters

A bruised lip. The strange heat on my thighs. My neck, cooler than usual where the wind hit it. And my hair, which felt tugged — my whole scalp loosened. My body raggedy and strange, and beautiful.

That’s what I felt, anyway, when I only read the pleasure.

Outside I looked around myself for some orientation. There was a promising path down by the fire pit, and lacking any greater insight, I began to walk it. I had an absconding schoolgirl feeling, of being alone when and where I shouldn’t. The roads on the ranch were just brushed dirt, so every step crunched beneath me like crackers in my teeth. But when I looked over my shoulder, no one was following my noisy footfalls. No one seemed to care where I was going.

Shadows fell from the mountains, but to the northwest the desert was already bathed in sun. Elevation changes were rumpled into the hills like clothing discarded on a bedroom floor. Around me everything looked identical and mischievous. Tall spiked spires covered in green leaves, flat paddle cacti spitting needles. If it hadn’t been for the path, I would have lost my way immediately in the blur of brush and flora. As it was, I had a difficult time believing that I was making any progress — indeed, that there was progress to be made. A stage, here? Would it sit on top of the boulders, or beside them?

Then I turned a corner and saw it.

The canyon narrowed, funnel-like, towards a passage that was fit only for rib-thin coyotes. In front of this passageway sat the stage that my agent had promised me, embraced by the canyon walls. Posts poked up from each corner like turrets, perhaps to support a canopy that hadn’t yet arrived. One half of the structure, still shaded by the overhanging rock, was wet with dew. And on the other side, in the sun, sat Finn. He had a hammer in his hand. A few nails scattered around his feet.

I stopped, surprised somehow to find him there. The stage was supposed to be for me. Don’t be ridiculous , I told myself. Didn’t you want this? I brightened my face into a smile.

“Really?” I called out, hands cupped around my face to make a megaphone. “You’re building it by hand?”

But Finn didn’t seem any more delighted to see me than I was to see him. His face remained blank, officious, as thin wings of discomfort brushed against my neck. Perhaps he had come here specifically to be alone. Here, on his birthday, with his dawn thoughts. Perhaps we were the same in that way. A kinship, but not a fellowship, or a comfort.

My throat tightened up and I coughed.

“Sorry,” I said. The shape in my throat twitched, moved. Reshuffled. Finn just stared.

When I was a child, I used to play games, imagining myself transformed into a rabbit or a cat, urging my spine to flex out and my fingers to withdraw into paws with hot, dry pads where my palms had been. I hadn’t thought about those games in years, but now I felt the same urge bubbling up in me — to change and become unrecognizable. My arms might fuse to my sides, my legs harden into a single stalk. My body shift until only a hint of my head and neck remained — the suggestion of shoulders that cowboys leading trail rides would point to as a minor landmark. The lady cactus, the canyon ghost.

Finn looked down at his hands and, as if in afterthought, held a nail up to a board and hit it in. Three hits. Neat.

“Since you’re here, why don’t you sing me something?”

He didn’t glance up when he spoke, and so it took me a ridiculous moment to realize he was talking to me. But when I did, something inside me responded to the idea, as it always did. Loosening up, relaxing. Singing, after all, was simple. In that act I had no need to speak, or to remember the night before. I could simply disappear inside myself, go deep inside my body, my voice. Escape, for a short time, the weight of my life.

Become airborne.

I was thinking of the stringy skeleton of a saguaro cactus; Finn had pointed some out on our ride. He said that small animals bore inside the cacti to make hidden colonies, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking. But I liked the idea of birds nesting within me, moving through my bones. On the outside, my body would be a fortress, and inside I’d house an army of gilded flickers.

Well, that would be amazing, John’s reply came to me unbidden, and I heard also his sardonic laugh. The shape in my throat shifted.

“All right,” I called back to Finn, then walked to the stage. There was a stairway on the side, just four steps high. I walked skyward. “You want a preview?”

Finn shaded his eyes from the sun. “Equipment test, ma’am.”

The boards on the stage were unfinished. It was, I realized, a temporary structure. And no wonder — out here, the wood would degrade in the sun or end up nibbled to scraps by passing animals. Maybe, in time, it would become a nest.

Love is a rebellious bird — so says Bizet’s tragic heroine Carmen. She cries out: Love is a gypsy’s child who has never known the law. The bird you hoped to tame beat its wings and flew away. Just then John, at home in Chicago, was probably waking up for coffee. Using that same thick-bottomed mug he always liked, and washing it out so it would be ready again whenever he wanted it. He used to tease me that I sang like a sparrow, and when he did I’d hit him with things — pillows, a single shoe — because a sparrow has no range. Has no power.

And yet here I was, in the middle of the desert, and all I could think about was birds. A rush of feathers brushing against one another in my mouth, like slips of silk. And then a river of bodies sailing into the air. Flick-flick-flick-flick-flick. Leaving something behind so that I wouldn’t forget them. A seed. A feather, tickling my abdomen. Or, to call her what she is, a child.

So you see. I was wrong to think that I could run away and make my life lighter. If I hadn’t been there, hadn’t left John alone to wonder about me, if I hadn’t sung for Finn and watched his eyes dance in the firelight, there may have been no Kara. No birth. And so Ada wouldn’t have been in the hospital either, wouldn’t have fallen to the cold tile floor.

On the ranch, I opened up my mouth and let sound rumble from my deepest well. Not knowing, then, who I was really singing to. Si je t’aime prends garde à toi! I thought it was a wake-up call for the sleepers in their beds. I didn’t know it was a warning.

If I love you, you’d best beware.

I heft Kara onto my naked waist and check the temperature of the shower with one wrist. Among the things I cannot yet do is walk to the gym and swim laps in the beautiful pool there. I pay a considerable monthly fee for access to the facility, though I never use any other piece of their equipment. Why run on a false rubber sidewalk? Run from what? Why lie down on a piece of foam that is saturated with sweat and body toxins, only to lift a heavy bar above my head? The pool, though, is unique.

Sixteen floors high, the gym’s building has an atrium on its penthouse level, a bubble of steel and sea-green glass. Beneath this dome is a grotto lined in white and blue mosaic, the water never too warm and never too cool. I asked the front desk girl about their arrangement once: how had the gym’s management convinced the building owners to let them install a pool in that premium space? The girl leaned across the front desk, her eyes sparkling. It was already there , she told me. They had simply remodeled a bit, adding new tile and revamping the showers.

Baba Ada used to take me swimming with her at the YMCA — not as plush, but it was enough. She sat on the concrete edge of the pool and tucked her hair into a bathing cap, swung her arms around a few times before sliding into the water. Instead of letting me run to the shallow end and splash around with the other children, she insisted on keeping an eye on me. When I was very young this meant sitting on a chair and watching her curl into a ball below the surface, pushing off the wall like an otter. When I got older, it meant pacing her in the next lane. Each stroke I swam could be counted into measures and bars, a slow crawl allowing me to play out a cello sonata, breaststroke popping like tango.