Tag: family matters

Lost and Found

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Renata Stokes glanced over her shoulder. Everything worth keeping was in the back of her old Saab station wagon. The car had never fit into the persona she cultivated of being a free spirit, but tonight it was exactly what she needed. The rear seats had been pushed down to make room for several duffle bags of clothes, two boxes of books, and a large cooler, all for her detour north to visit her mother before heading west.

When ‘check oil’ appeared on the instrument panel, she was between Albany and Saratoga Springs; it was a sign to stop. The lack of traffic on the Northway had given her the unwise confidence to press the speed limit. Renata pulled over; she’d been driving for eight hours. Once off the road, she pushed the hazard light on and closed her eyes.

A state trooper knocking on the hood woke her. Renata jumped. Still in a fog of deep sleep she tried to make sense of the large man in uniform peering into her car, making a hand gesture to open the window. 

“I was tired.” She turned her eyes away from the flashlight in his left hand. She wanted to explain how tired she really was, how she just needed to sleep for a month far away from memories in a place where she didn’t have to take care of anyone. She wanted to tell him about the one last person she needed to say goodbye to.

“Safer to pull into a truck stop, miss.” He asked to see her license and registration. While she dug into the glove compartment, he directed his interrogation at her possessions. “Anything I need to be concerned about back here?” he asked.

There was a smirk on his face when she turned back to face him.

“Moving day,” she said.

“Where’re you going? Canada?” Taking the papers she passed to him, he closely examined her picture on the license. Shinning the beam on her face he said, “Sit tight.”

The pulsating glare from the flashing lights, spun around the interior of the Saab, illuminating the bags and boxes. The contents danced in the kaleidoscopic glow. Renata could barely make out the trooper’s dark form sitting in the cruiser. She watched him through the rear-view mirror, patiently waiting for his verdict.

“This all checks out.” He passed her papers through the open window. “You know your car will be searched at the border.”

“Thanks, officer.” She smiled. “I’m not going that far.”

“The truck stop is just five miles up.” He tapped the roof. “Be careful.”

The rest area had a gas station a short distance from two large parking areas, its glow intruding into the star-filled sky. The semis were lined up in double file on a darkened end of one lot. The eighteen wheel long-haulers nestled between a few flat beds carrying well wrapped cargo were at the other end. As she drove slowly past them, it was too dark to make out if the drivers were dozing in their seats or resting somewhere in the back of the cabs. Renata pulled her car under a single streetlamp near the entrance to a brick building with a rest room sign. It was three o’clock and too early for the sky to reveal anything more than the constellations. She made sure her doors were locked.

The next morning, the station had a line of trucks waiting for fuel. A scrawny mutt tied to a post was barking. She pulled the Saab next to the attendant’s booth and waited patiently. The young worker looked harried, as if he would start growling and bark, too, if anyone wanted more than gas. Renata left the car and went over to the dog; it seemed to calm down as she came closer, wagging his tail, and pressing down on his front paws ready to play. She bent over and patted his head. The leash was too short for the pup to follow her back to a bench where she intended to sit and wait for the kid’s attention.

 “What’s your name?” she called over to the dog.

 He stopped hopelessly thrusting himself toward her and sat down with what seemed like a sigh.

Continue reading “Lost and Found” →

About The Books

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Detective Benjamin Crisp was spending his first night alone. The house he shared with his wife of forty years seemed to echo the sounds of another lifetime, one filled with laughter, children, and dogs. The children were grown now. But he couldn’t go into a room without seeing them all.

Nora had left him for a man she met at a book club. Benjamin shook his head at the reflection in the glass cabinet above the counter where he was fixing a sandwich for dinner.

A beer, a sandwich, and Monday Night Football, what could be better. And then he remembered how Nora had always tried to cook something special, he could envision her across the room busily chopping onions, while one of the dogs, probably Dusty, was jumping for a treat.

He put his meal on a tray, grabbed a paper towel and sighed— Nora always used cloth napkins. Upstairs the Raiders would take his mind off the past.

Nora had said she would wait till after his retirement party to leave. She hadn’t wanted him to be embarrassed in front of the people he’d worked with for thirty-five years. She’d showed up in a new dress. She’d been almost giddy. She looked younger. That was Friday night. Nora had spent the weekend packing. “I don’t really want to take much. Just my books, of course.” She’d put a few empty boxes next to the bookcase and started taking what she wanted. “I’m leaving you history, the civil war, and some biography. What about travel?”

“I don’t care.” His anger had left him, too. “The books aren’t important to me,” he’d said watching her till she turned around.

“What,” she’d said.

“How can you be so, so, matter of fact?” he’d asked 

He hadn’t seen it coming, the affair. Once he found out about it, he thought it wouldn’t last. He had seen this story play out too many times. The woman would get clingy and the man, always married with a family, would get cold feet. Nora and the book club man weren’t at that stage yet. It would come soon enough, and he could wait. Nora was moving into a small apartment in town in anticipation of the book club man’s arrival.

“About the books?” She’d laughed and ran a dust rag around the edges of a volume.

“I’m trying to be civil, Benny. I don’t want to fight. We’ve got to put on a good face when we call the kids.”

He remembered going into the bathroom, running the water, and crying. He wasn’t going to cry again, not over Nora.

On his second day of retirement, there was nothing to rush for. He stared at the ceiling; it was 5:30 in the morning. You’ve got to have a plan—wake up the first day and have someplace to be, someone who is waiting for you. Decide.

In the living room the wall of bookcases appeared as a toothless hag, large gaps in alternating shelves laughing at him. Benny shuffled into the kitchen to start the coffee. He waited while the machine slowly dripped out the seconds. Nora had left her mugs, the ones with quotes he had failed to see the humor in. He pulled out his favorite chipped one and filled it: black and strong. 

I bet book club man has to have two teaspoons of sugar and milk. He went back into the living room to assess the damage on the shelves. He was still a detective, after all, what was left is just as important as what was taken. 

Nora had taken the poetry and left the history. She’d taken most of the novels, but left him the McMurtry, T. H. White and his collection of Spillane. He took a sip of coffee and stood back. Travel. He approached the shelf filled with places they had planned to go. He put his mug down, closed his eyes, and ran his index finger across the spines labeled with countries across the globe. Interesting choice, Benny. He took the book on Tahiti into the kitchen and set the table.

He considered his options for breakfast, the usual wouldn’t do. In the freezer, shoving pot pies and packages of peas and corn around, behind the waffles, he found what he was looking for: a frozen piece of wedding cake.

“About The Books” was published on 10/10/23 in CafeLitMagazine

Magical Thinking

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Magical Thinking

            My mother believed in magic. Saint Anthony and the Virgin stayed with her long after she left Sister Angelina and the convent school in Westwood, California, where she lived for ten years of her adolescence. Though she stopped “practicing” before I was born, those quick little prayers of hers seeped into my childhood memory. Even now, I might call out for a saint to find what is lost and more often than not, the Holy Family’s name is taken not in prayer.

            What my mother did observe was spiritual examination from a mystical confluence of numbers and signs. Devoted to astrology, she insisted on sending me alerts of my future from whatever part of the globe she was living. For twenty years, London’s Daily Mail was my regular source of what was going to happen to me next. Little clippings, inserted in the tissue thin airmail letters of correspondence, pointed the way. Once, for Christmas, I received a twenty-page chart with astrological drawings of exactly what each month of the new year held for me.

            I can’t deny that there were times in my life that a little magical thinking helped. Just to know that things were “looking up” despite Mercury being in retrograde gave me a positive outlook. I asked her once: how was it that everyone born in October had the same future. Maybe it was after this heart felt query, she spent a small fortune on a chart that was based on my exact time of birth and the longitude and latitude of New York City. 

My mother wanted to know the birthday of every boyfriend, and, of course, once I was married my husband’s future was a constant source of revelation.

            A stranger would say they are Gemini, and my mother would raise her eyebrows, sigh, and begin a quick assessment, with a little advice tossed in for good measure.

Astrology was always there, but for a while numerology was added. Tarot readings lasted several years. Finally, it was the palm that begged for her devotion. 

“The right is what you are born with, the left is what you make of your life,” she always started. She would curl my hand into hers and look for creases below my pinky finger. “You will have two children, she pointed to the folds. Holding my palm open, she looked for mounds and crosses that signified wealth. “There, you see,” she said, as she directed me to one line or another.

I often watched her take the hand of a new acquaintance, turning it over in hers, and begin to read. They were enraptured. No one ever pulled away. Maybe it was her touch as she traced her finger across their palm, or maybe it was that they were getting so much attention and energy from her.

It would be interesting if we, unknowing sleep walkers, have destinies  based on the latitude and longitude of where we were born and what stars were in a certain position in the heavens at the hour of our birth.  

“Pisces – With a great dose of idealism, you often imagine that the world is in the palm of your hand.

My mother was born on March nineteenth, Pisces on the cusp of Aries or rebirth. She died ten years ago in June at the age of eighty-six. On the first  anniversary of her death, a robin crashed into our patio window. Unfazed the bird lingered on a branch and then moved to the railing of our deck. It waited until it was duly noticed. That might have been a coincidence, but the following year, and for two years after that, on the same date, a robin flew against the window and appeared to be expecting me to recognize her.

End

This essay is being published in the print anniversary edition of Beyond Words International Literary Magazine (November 2021)

The Night Watch

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August was relentless, night provided little relief. Peter tossed off his sheets and stared at the ceiling, a blank canvas for memories. When the morning light finally filtered through the blinds and the insects announced the fourth day of a heat wave, he turned away from the window and thought of the people who had lived in his house. They came and went in such a haphazard pattern that Peter had forgotten most of their names. Only one seemed to endure.

Mr. Hayakawa, the painter who rented the parlor floor was Peter’s original tenant. He wanted the high ceilings and a certain kind of light from the back windows. The message on the bulletin board of the ‘High and Dry’ Laundry read: Artist seeking parlor floor rental. North light wanted. Very clean, very quiet will pay rent in advance.

Paying in advance was all Peter needed to know; money was short in those days—his job at the post office didn’t cover the heating bill and taxes on the house. His sister had gotten married and moved out of the second floor flat with her husband to some place in Ohio. Peter had lost track of her there. A young couple took that apartment and now they had grown to a family of four, squeezing into the small two-bedroom space.

The third floor had cycled through a cast of singles. When the sound of roof top parties shifted to baby showers, Peter knew it was only a matter a time before a new fresh-faced tenant would appear.

Continue reading “The Night Watch” →

Talk To Me

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At three months of age, Maria Lopez Ruiz’s eyes turned blue. Not just any ordinary blue, but turquoise, the color of the sea near Porto San Sebastian, where Sophia Lopez Vargas, Maria’s maternal grandmother, lived. She, too, had turquoise eyes.

            It was a sign; Maria’s brown-eyed mother told the rest of the family that her child, the fifth daughter of a fifth daughter, would be a woman of great importance.

             Maria’s father worked at a grand resort in Las Almandas, which was over three hundred miles from Porto San Sebastian. Because of the distance, he only came home twice a year: the month of August and the week of his birthday.

It was in January of Maria’s sixth year that her mother died with the fever, leaving the family adrift. Maria moved in with her grandmother, Sophia, in the small house that overlooked the sea.

#

            “Being successful, Maria,” her grandmother always began her stories, “requires being in the right place at the right time.” As she continued to braid her granddaughter’s hair, she repeated the adventures that led her to Porto San Sebastian.

“My first marriage was arranged, or that is what my husband believed. He was from Madrid and I was from Las Rozas. He had seen me…” Her grandmother went on to describe how, at the age of fifteen, she had used her turquoise eyes for the first time. “I have not always lived in this quiet village,” she said, ending the story the way, she ended all of her stories. “And you will not, either,” she added.

“When you are fourteen, you will leave here. You will go and live with your oldest sister in a faraway place. You will become independent and a woman of great importance.”

#

Maria leaned against a pillar on the platform of the Christopher Street Subway station and rubbed her belly. She was in her fifth month with her first child and the heat was the one thing that felt familiar. Taking a deep breath, she considered how far in ten years she had come to be in this place so removed from San Sebastian.

That evening she told her husband: “If I close my eyes for a moment, I am transported home: the thick air covers me, and I can almost hear the sound of the waves.”

He laughed.

“Why is that funny?” she said.
“That’s not why I laughed it’s just…”

Maria sighed as he kneaded his fingers deep into the arch of her right foot.

“I’m proud of you. Remember when I introduced you to my aunt? We agreed to make her think I was seeking her approval,” he said.

Maria smiled and looked toward a window where the air conditioner hummed relentlessly. A sound so familiar and yet so far away, a steady summer wind rattling her grandmother’s house in Porto San Sebastian before a storm.

“Your aunt took me into her lavender bedroom, she pulled the shades and read my cards by candlelight. I know she whispered the readings to you, mi amor. It was a good thing that you had already proposed marriage, or you might have changed your mind.”

He furrowed his brow.

“You are a beautiful woman,” he said. “When we walk down the street, people stare at you. I don’t think you even notice.”

#

It was at the age of twelve that her grandmother told Maria about men who were only interested in the superficial.

“We are like this,” she gestured toward the sea with one hand, as they sat in old wicker chairs on the stone patio sipping cold tea. “Men see what they want to. It is useful.”

#

Maria’s boss, Xavier Batista, was one such man, expecting to get his way with anything and everyone he touched. Xavier moved in all the right circles at Telemundo.

“Brilliant!” He clapped his hands. “But, why just New York, Maria? Think bigger. This country is changing. You have a story to tell, use your biography. Remember my mantra: demographics. Women are our audience; this show will speak to them.

“You have been so generous to me, Xavier.” She turned her eyes toward him and could see the heat rising into his face. “If the network buys my show, how will I repay you for your advice?”

He looked at her, smiled and reached out to touch her arm. “Tell your husband who the father is.” When he began to repeat his dream of how they would move to the city of angels together, Maria moved away. “We are meant to be together—a team.”

“It is too soon to talk of these things. My husband thinks…”

He pulled her toward him. “We will work this out.” His face was now flush with color.
For several months Maria let Xavier think what she needed him to.

#

A scent of bitter fruit infused the air as Maria felt the rumble of the Number 1 train before its lights turned from the tunnel and flooded the tracks ahead. When she entered the crowded subway car, Maria stood in front of a young woman.

“Oh! Sorry,” the woman said jumping up, offering her seat. Maria sat, closed her eyes, and started to review the presentation of her show Háblame: Talk to Me.

Thirty minutes later, when she walked off the elevator onto the twenty-first floor of an office building in mid-town Manhattan, she spotted her secretary, Julia, leave her cubicle and run toward her.

“The presentation has been postponed; something happened this morning.”

Maria let Julia take her briefcase and watched as the woman put her finger to her lips.

“I’ll explain in your office.” Julia twitched like a small sand bird, weaving her way through the maze of gray cubicles.

As she followed Julia, the young employees, heads focused on screens, sat quietly typing. They didn’t look up. It was not their usual morning buzz over prefabricated walls where they stopped to welcome her.

“Xavier has resigned,” Julia said breathlessly as she closed the office door. “I mean he has been fired—resigned is what his memo to the company said.”

Maria took out her phone and saw for the first time the messages, starting twenty minutes earlier from her staff, multiply with every second.

Julia went over to a table where a carafe of coffee waited to be poured. She turned and looked at her boss.

“Are you surprised?” Maria said looking up from her phone. They had never discussed the rumors about Xavier.

“Some of the interns had problems with him,” Julia said. The cup rattled on the saucer as she walked across the office.

Maria flinched. A few years earlier one of the production assistants told her something suggestive Xavier said to her. She remembered laughing. Now the child inside of her rolled and pulled tight against her.

“Talk to me, while I get up to speed.” Maria sat adjusting a pillow on her back and logged into her computer.

“There’s an executive committee meeting in fifteen minutes.” Julia handed Maria a printout of Xavier’s letter to the company. “I told them you would be there,” she said.

“How are you feeling?” her secretary asked.

“About this…or just in general?”

“You work…worked really closely with Xavier. Did he ever…?” Julia’s voice was trembling.

“Of course not, a total professional since the first day I met him. I’m shocked.” She rested her hand over the kicking inside of her. “Give me a few moments.”

“Can we meet?” read the text from Xavier.

Maria waited and when a second text appeared on her phone she read: “Are you there?”

“Can’t. It’s crazy here,” she responded. She was walking toward the Board Room.

“I need to talk to you,” he wrote.

They all will have stories, Maria thought. Even now, on the other side of the building, the President of Telemundo was finishing telling his to the media.

“None of it is true,” Xavier added.

Maria knew he couldn’t possibly know everything everyone was going to say.

End

This story was published in Adelaide February 2020

Deeds Not Words

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In an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2015 (reviewed here), the images of women marching for the right to vote remind me of all the women who came before us, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Those women had a voice to raise, just as our voices were heard last month and all the days to follow. The difference is our ability to vote.

I hope that this month, where we celebrate Women’s History (in the U.S.), we will encounter voices both present and past, those we know and especially those that are waiting to be discovered.
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Deeds Not Words was the rallying cry of the suffragettes. Women’s Rights is a recurring back-story in my novel, The Last Daughter of Elizabeth Light.

 

 

In Chapter Three, Sydney, Australia, Maude Anderson reads to her mother, Caroline, from the London Times.

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It is the story of Emily Davidson throwing herself under the King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby.

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In Chapter Four, Caroline Light speaks to her suitor, Bernard, about her teacher Ada Wells. Later she invites her mother, Martha, to attend a meeting of the Temperance League with Kate Shepard.

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Kate Shepard

In Chapter Five, Christchurch, New Zealand, Mary Müller  speaks to Martha Light about whether she ever thought for herself without first consulting her husband.

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Mary Müller

The ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication the Rights of Women, written in 1792, are pressed forward through multiple generations.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. –George Santayana

 

 

More reading:

Sophia: Princess Suffragette

More on Emily Davidson

The Hunger Artist – Marion Dunlop-Wallace

Primary image credit: ALEX BROOK LYNN/THE DAILY BEAST

Warning

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Jen stubbed her cigarette out on the window ledge. The room behind her was quiet, her stepsisters still sleeping, lay twisted in the cotton sheet that barely covered them: Lucy faced north and Mary south, positions they had negotiated when they were six.

Hart Street was dark; there was only a hint of the morning sky. Jen looked over at her pack of Marlboro Lights. People should have warning labels: Dangerous to your health, Not fit for family gatherings, Unable to keep promises. She held the pack and counted the number of cigarettes left. If she didn’t have one now, the five would get her through the afternoon. The argument last night with her mother had kept her awake; if only her mother knew what she had to do today.

“You need to get away from him, you’re better than he is, don’t you know that?”

Jen’s mother, Maureen, was washing dishes while Jen slowly dried them. Mary and Lucy did their homework at the small table. The kitchen became too crowded when Jen’s brother walked in and opened the refrigerator door.

“You just ate, Billy,” Maureen said. She turned away from her daughter who was drying a glass and faced her son. “Look at you, you’ve grown two inches in the last month. I can’t keep enough food on the table.”

“Sorry, Mom, just wanted something sweet. Do we have any ice cream? It’s so hot tonight.”

“Not in the budget this week.” She looked over at Jen and shook her head.

“Don’t worry Mom, I won’t get fired. I told them I was sick, had the flu, and needed to be out for two days so I wouldn’t infect anyone.” She touched the bruise around her eye.

“Well, I hope they believed you, because you know….”

“I know, Mom. I know you need to cover the bills.”

When Jen’s stepfather walked into the kitchen, she turned so he wouldn’t see her face. If he had seen the black eye, he would have gone looking for Lewis, and he would have taken Billy with him. That’s what Maureen had told her.

“Having a family meeting without me?” He leaned over the table and looked at what the twins were working on. “You girls must be really smart to be able to answer all those questions with this noise.” He smiled at his wife. “I guess you two have learned to block it out?”

“I don’t think so, they keep one ear on our conversation,” Maureen said.

Lucy looked up at her father. “They call it multi-tasking, Daddy.”

“See, honey, I never heard of that, and yet, Lucy and Mary are doing it in front of me,” he laughed. “I’m going back to the game, come on, Billy. Let’s leave the ladies alone in the kitchen.” He motioned to the boy, who moved around the two girls at the table.

Maureen looked at the closed kitchen door. “He had a good day today, Jen. I’m glad he didn’t see your eye.”

Continue reading “Warning” →

Moving Day

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Lizzie Bower waited on the second floor landing while the next load of furniture was hauled up the stairs. Decisions needed to be made: the contents of her mother’s apartment had arrived on Ellis Street.

“Oh, oh…so who is sending you these things? They are all so—so beautiful!” her landlady shouted up the staircase.

Lizzie didn’t need to see her face, she could imagine Mrs. Thorn’s mouth open as each item marched up the stairs: a five foot gilded lamp from a South Hampton estate sale, a small Chinoiserie desk, an iron Napoleon camp chair with brass arm rests and a leather seat. It was a seemingly endless parade of exotic furniture and boxes whose contents could only be imagined.

“Belated wedding gifts from my Mom,” Lizzie shouted back.

Turning toward the growing piles, Lizzie showed the movers where to place the excess of her mother’s life. The men positioned the alien furniture next to the Goodwill discards that decorated the apartment; they demolished any semblance of balance the room once held.

“Jeeze, whoever packed this … supposed to use the fourteen by fourteens for books, Miss, the little ones, yah know, the ones that say: BOOKS.” The mover gave Lizzie a look as he heaved himself through the door.

“Sorry, my mother…”

Lizzie raised her eyes toward the ceiling; she couldn’t expect him to be interested in the details of her mother’s move to London. It was difficult enough for her to explain her own life, but now she had to come up with a rationale for these castoff pieces of furniture. Slicing open one of the boxes with a knife, she found dirty ashtrays and cigarette butts.

Continue reading “Moving Day” →

Frances Liked Oranges

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Combing Frances’ hair, Mrs. Buhle turned her around and tried to smile with lips too thin for the gesture. Her black eyes squinted. The skin on her forehead was marked with lines and two oval brown splotches. Mrs. Buhle was very old, but then everyone appeared very old to Frances, who was five. The woman’s shoulders were rounded, padded with a thick black sweater, fluffed like feathers. Frances tried not to move. She was sure she was going to be eaten, or at least pierced by some hidden instrument.
“Now Frances, your mother is coming to visit you today. She wants to see a happy girl. You’re a happy girl.”
This was not a question.
“I’ll take you downstairs, you can go into the front room today. Don’t look so scared. When your mother leaves, I will have a little present for you. How about that…Frances?”
Frances turned her face up toward Mrs. Buhle. Maybe she would get an orange, she liked oranges. She closed her eyes and waited for the blow that didn’t come.

“Frances, Frances, where are you? Are you hiding…sweetie?”
She was trying to hide from her mother, Maude, but her small foot stuck out from behind the large rose-colored wing chair.
“I think I can see you, I see you.” Her mother began a singsong voice.
“Come out, come out, where-ever-you-are. I have a present for you, come out, come out.”
Peering from around the chair with one eye, Frances saw her mother holding a big box with a yellow ribbon.
“Come on, come on…. I’ll help you open this big box. Is it too big for such a little girl to open? Let’s just see what could be in here. You can do it along with me, sweetie.”
Frances crossed the room, smiled and began to pull on the ribbon. The box contained a tea set, a real tea set, not play size like the one she once saw a girl playing with in a book. Frances was very disappointed.
“Give your mum a big squeeze. I have missed you so much. Give me a big hard hug so I can always remember how it feels.”
Her mother had a soft face, with blonde curls falling from under a little red hat. The hat matched the color of her lips and her fingernails. The hug pulled Frances into the folds of a white dress where an exotic scent sealed the moment.

A few days later the tea set disappeared into one of Mrs. Buhle’s cabinets. Mary was determined to get it back to their small room on the third floor.
“It doesn’t belong to them, does it, Frances? It belongs to you; it will always belong to you. I don’t care what she does to me…I’m getting it back.”
Mary was caught, standing on a chair in the pantry. Mrs. Buhle’s daughter watched as her mother pulled Mary off the chair and dragged her into the back room where they kept the punishments.

Draft From: The Last Daughter of Elizabeth Light

My mother was raised in multiple foster homes.  Once she received an orange as a Christmas present.  Her mother never gave her a yellow tea set.

Have I Been Here Before?

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At what point did it look familiar? Maybe this was one of those dreams that disappear the moment you open your eyes.  Certainly, I never climbed to the top of Mount Major before, never been to New Hampshire, never wanted to go. But now I’m here, looking out at the view, afraid of getting too close to the edge and falling off. When I pick up the scent of a past moment, I have my feet on the ground, but I’m flying. If I just raise my arms and tip into the air stream, I will be soaring. Flying dreams are the best.

“If I had ever been here before I would probably know just what to do. Don’t you?”- Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young – Déjà Vu

One of the themes of my novel, The Last Daughter of Elizabeth Light, is Eternal Return. Because my story goes backward in time, the present hints at the past. We know the results of actions before they take place. This was easier than it sounds because I was telling a familiar story: a family saga whose story unfolded like an origami bird.

From The Last Daughter of Elizabeth Light-  Frances Baker, 1990 dreaming of San Francisco 1942 :

‘Frances cringed; Milton, the manager, was standing six inches away from her face. Smelling his stale cigarette breath, she tried looking at his yellow teeth but it confused him, so she pretended to be nervous and looked at the floor.

“You know there are many girls I could have hired, Frances, but I chose you, you know why?”

Frances thought this was a question and she started to open her mouth.

“You know why, Frances, you were the prettiest one. Yes, the prettiest one of all of them. You, with your blonde hair. You had the best eyes and legs. You have legs just like Lana Turner.”

Frances managed to step backwards a few inches but he was pressing in. Reaching forward, he slid his hand from her waist to her thigh. Frances jumped and hit the wall with the back of her shoes and head. Her eyes narrowed as she moved out of his way. He tried to block her by putting one arm out to the wall.

“Frances, this is a really good job.”

Milton looked around the lobby with the glow of the concession stand at the end of the hall. The ticket booth had closed, the last show was almost over and they were alone with the muffled sound of a movie playing in the theatre.

“It would be a shame if you spoiled things for yourself. I’m going to be watching you very closely. I better not catch you doing anything wrong. You know what I mean, don’t you, Frances? I mean I better not catch you letting your mother in here for free. Everything has a price. You know we are at war now, everything has a price including this job. Where do you think you’re going? Don’t walk away from me.”

Running, Frances heard him yelling behind her. She turned down one hall, and it led to another. The door was not where it was supposed to be. She felt the wall for knobs in the darkness and realized they were all missing. Suddenly she heard the noise of planes, the building vibrated as though there was an earthquake. The theatre wall began to crumble. Frances started to climb over a slab of cement when a plane appeared to come straight at her.

Droning in some far off room, a vacuum cleaner saved her.’