Adrienne Celt - The Daughters

There’s wind blowing against the building, but it seems weaker than it has been, as if it’s coming from farther away.

“Did you know?” I ask him. “Already, I mean, before?”

He shakes his head. Maybe.

“I don’t know what I knew,” he says. “I don’t even know what I know.”

“Yes,” I say. I know the feeling.

There’s a patter of rain, or perhaps hail, on the window. But just one wave, and then it stops. As if someone threw a handful of pebbles up to get our attention. A tree creaks. Quiets. John puts more water on the stove to boil.

Bright light and a lake as large as a sea.

As the months creep by after Kara’s baptism, heat leaks back into Chicago and we all begin to unbutton our jackets. Slowly, because sometimes the heat is sucked back out. Sixty degrees followed the next day by thirty, a light rainstorm turning into a shower of snow. Like always during this transformation, I have been imagining a giant sleeping in the ground. He breathes out and the city is flush with warmth, but when he breathes back in we all shiver again.

Or put another way: the residents of the city are dancers glowing with effort, sweat on our napes. We spin until a girl in red strolls by and then we all freeze like popsicles, bent at odd angles depending on how the music has melted us.

Chicago is full of joy with the onset of spring. People smile at one another walking down the street, and tulips push crazily through the soil. Garden plots in front of apartment buildings turn barbaric with color. We all guzzle water and fruit and wine.

It’s late May, and Kara and I are at the lakeshore. I perch on the concrete steps, Kara propped up on my lap, and point out the boats far from shore. I’m not sure she can focus across that distance yet, but she follows the direction of my hand and then gazes up at me with wonder. The boats themselves are not even looking at us. We are nothing they care to see.

For the past months I’ve been a shorebound creature, keeping a modest radius from my home. But tomorrow I will wake up and be a traveler again. I leave for Milan at five a.m. and won’t come back for two weeks. There are gowns bagged up and ready for me to throw into a taxi, and a suitcase full of cotton shirts, iron-pleated skirts, and sandals. It will be warm in Milan, and I will be singing Violetta Valéry from La Traviata .

There is a tinkling and a rumbling behind us. A cart pulls up behind a bicycle, parking in the half-full lot I walked across to reach the lake. The bicyclist, dressed all in black, jumps down and hops inside the cart, which is painted to look like a stage. In fact there is a real red velveteen curtain, and when a gloved hand pulls it back, a rabbit-shaped puppet appears. The little stage has my full attention by now, and a few other giddy sunbathers amble over to watch.

A light crackling precedes the music. The sound has the warbling quality of an old record player, but how, I wonder, could a record player fit inside that silly wooden box? The song is ragtime, two-step, soft-shoe. The rabbit puppet is joined by a green snake with a hissing pink tongue, and they hop around each other, dipping in time to the shuffling beat.

John is going to stay home with the baby.

“Take the trip,” he said to me. He pointed out that he went to New York a month ago to sing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream . “Have fun. Live a little.”

“Have you been reading pamphlets from a travel agency?” I asked. “Come Visit Picturesque Italia! Be the Envy of All Your Friends!” We are playful. It’s something that we’re trying out.

Somehow the puppeteer manages to keep his hands invisible for the entire song. This doesn’t seem like it should be possible, and so I applaud when the puppets bend at the waist in a bow. In piping voices they welcome donations, and a little girl runs up with a dollar from her father’s wallet, which the snake accepts in his mouth, speaking a garbled thank-you.

The music begins again and I lift Kara up by her underarms, placing her feet down on the pavement. They don’t yet lie flat — the logic of putting her weight on her own two legs is still the dream of a dream. But as the rabbit and the snake bounce against each other— rag-mop, shoe-bop —she toggles up and down, hilarious with her own mobility.

A vessel cannot be judged separately from its contents. They change one another — the beautiful glass decanter bloody with dolcetto or sparkling with water over lemons and ice; the jar of pennies a different thing than the jar when it was full of apricot jam. When a crevasse in the earth is filled with salt water it’s called an ocean. Filled with fresh water, it’s called a lake. Even though to the seasick eye, the horizon might be just as distant, ruptured with waves.

The genius of music is that it makes the internal external, ferries the heart into the mouth or the fingertips, then into the ears of passersby. What was inside me moves inside you, yoked to both. In this way we share blessings and curses and affairs of love. The puppets mock and punch one another and then hug furiously. They butt heads and mouth along with the song’s gentle nonsense— pin-drop, clue-hop, do-wah-de-laddle . Kara’s feet shuffle against the ground; she is like an ice skater, slipping, except that I keep her aloft, and we both laugh with delight.

John hasn’t asked about my plans for the trip. He has told me about it, weaving magnificent stories in advance. I listen with interest. Try to hear nothing in his stories but the pleasure of them, the dips and turns. No meaning, only voice.

“You’ll probably meet some rich count, who will of course fall madly in love with you,” he said recently. Sara was at our apartment, playing with the baby. That is something we’re trying, too. I still haven’t seen where she lives, but once in a while she will come over and stay for a short time. Eat a meal with us. Hold Kara in her arms. We talk sometimes about Ada, but neither one of us yet knows what to say about that. Ada weighs heavily; she always will.

As John spoke, Sara and I glanced at one another askance.

“Sure,” I said. “Who wouldn’t?”

But John wasn’t really listening to me. “And then you’ll have to break his heart. But he’ll tell you that his love was just for your singing, and send us magnificent presents until his untimely death at age sixty-seven, since he can’t be close to you, but his gifts can direct the course of your life.”

“Will he send gifts to you?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah.” John splayed on the couch, watching my mother pat Kara’s belly and help her scissor-kick from her back. “He’ll actually send me the best ones. He’ll think we have a bond, and then eventually we will. Because I will be forever bonded with the man who buys me a really fine Swiss watch. A silver watch. Because gold is a little, you know”—he pursed his lips—“ too too.”

I squinted at him.

“Do you need me to leave you alone with these fantasies? Because we girls could just step out for a minute, if you like.”

“No,” he said, swatting at a fly. “But just, you know. Tell him I am partial to those watches with moon dials in them. Those are pretty nice.”

I felt a little ill, but when I looked at him he was smiling. He was inside the story, it seemed. Nowhere else. It is my job to believe that is possible.

The sun is hot on the back of my neck, and I loosen my hair from its elastic band so it can provide some shade. I sweep Kara up into my arms and fish around in my pockets for some money. A couple of quarters and a five-dollar bill. I give Kara the bill, closing her fingers around it. She is not to be trusted with change yet. It always goes immediately into her mouth. I am forever making spitting faces— pew pew! — and sticking out my tongue to get her to mimic me.