October 1974 – 1
October 1974
Grace Solo sat on the porch planks, coltish legs folded. In Dottie-knit sweater, jeans and striped socks, she hacked at poster paper with her old craft scissors. Stupid scissors, Grace was in the midst of fuming—snub-nosed and dull. Baby scissors—whenHolly trundled up the steps.
"Heyyy," Grace chided the squat Scots-Lab mutt, when he stopped in the middle of her homework. He wagged his stubby tail in slow time with "Angie," which Grace was listening to over and over on her portable record player because it fit her mood. Grace laughed softly, scratching between Holly's alert, pointed ears. "You're gonna get glue on your paws, goofy."
Tilting his head, Holly whined.
Grace looked sharply up from her laborious snipping. Holly never whined; it was one of the things Dad liked so much about him.
A year ago, when Mama paused in the driveway and said she and Grace were on their way to get a dog, Dad had looked blankly up from under Millie's hood. He had no objection to pets—Dad was never cruel to anything helpless, but he didn't seem to quite get what pets were for. He didn't stroke Roget's head the way Grace did, snuggled with the cat in her velvet beanbag chair (that chair, a precious birthday gift from Uncle Lando, was another thing Dad didn't get—what a...you want a chair, Gee? I'll make you a—) when they all watched Saturday Night at the Movies on NBC. Dad didn't notice Roget existed, really, unless she sat in his open workshop doorway while he worked, chattering her shrill murder-song at birds who might have the nerve to roost in the rafters. Then Dad praised her, gruffly. Good job, Rog. As though the tabby was a junior employee at his air-shipping company.
But then Mama planted her size-five feet in the gravel, impossibly stubborn for a person her size. Transport services are required, Hotshot. Dadflattened an oil-webbed hand on his chest, denim sleeves rolled up, forearms streaked with black. Half-smirk that made Mama's eyes dance. Pardon me, Your Worship? Believe you drive just fine. And Mama shot back—everything she said was fast—that she needed her hands free to hold the dog. So Dad came along, driving Mama's blue '62 Satellite. Just for the ride, mind, he groused every three miles, and in the back seat, Grace rolled her eyes. Just the ride, right. As if she hadn't heard the story of how Dad met Mama a million times.
At the pound, Dad was fidgety, tense. Warily eyeing the regimented cells, the chipped paint and no-name kibble, the aura of despair and eagerness. But he stopped in front of a particular bleak concrete pen. Inside, a little bearded dog with a sweet, lonely, clever face, maintaining his dignity even as he shuddered with hope under human scrutiny. Looking at the dog, Dad's eyes had done their kaleidoscope thing, and Mama's eyes had done their melty-chocolate thing when she looked at Dad looking at the dog. Whaddaya think, girls? Dad asked too casually, one hand hooked in chain-link, other rubbing the back of his neck. Give this guy a break?
Believe in love at first sight, Han? Mama teased on the way home, driving her own car after all. Dad up front beside her. Grace in the back with the small, sturdy dog shivering ecstatically in her arms, stealing grateful licks of her chin. Dad grabbed Mama's hand from the gearshift and kissed her palm, once-twice, growled like some animal himself: You bet your ass I do, Princess.
Dad won the draw from Mama's sunhat (of course he did, and he was a terrible, gloating winner) to name the new dog. Called him Holly, after the singer he still listened to on the jukebox in his shop. The one whose song Dad used to sing as Grace's lullaby. Not every bedtime, he was more a kiss-your-forehead, gruff sweet-dreams-baby kind of Dad, after Mama read a story, doing all the voices. But when Grace was little, when she was sick or scared, he'd pick her up and walk the floor with her. For hours, if that was what it took. Patting her back and gravel-hum-mumbling it—sing to me love's story—until Grace fell asleep on his wide flannel shoulder.
Now Grace scowled, shoved heavy waves of dark hair behind her ears, the crazy new layers that kept springing from her bun. She would not think nice things about her mother and father. Not today, when she completely hated them. Thanks to them, she was stuck with her dopey homework—a family tree she'd actually cut out in the shape of a tree, because Grace Solo was just that hopeless—while her friends, her free, ungrounded, sane-parents-having friends, were getting ready to go out to the movies.
These scissors! Grace tossed them aside. They were too small. Stupid long-fingered Dad, passing on his stupid long fingers. Grace used her own long fingers to crank up Mick Jagger's bawling. Though she strictly curtailed the instinctive flexing of her tough, hard, trained feet to the song, Grace did sing along, emphatically aggrieved. You can't say we're satisfi—
Holly whined again. Or did he? A whimper so thin it was maybe exhalation, so Grace returned her attention to her school project, names and birthdates written on orange paper leaves. It looked so...uneven, Dad with his no parents, Mama with too many. Mama had long been forthcoming about her childhood, painful and happy parts alike. She'd discuss anything with Grace, swinging in the hammock together: life, the facts of life (oh god barf), creativity, grief. To discover herself adopted, Uncle Luke's twin, to fall in love with a grouchy stranger—hey c'mon, Dad hollered from his ladder. I'm a nice man.
But Grace hadn't yet approached Dad with the sheet of mimeographed questions from Ms. Baird, for all her students to ask their family members. Questions like Where did you grow up and What's your favorite Grateful Dead song (Ms. Baird was a hippie) and What did your parents do for a living? Mama had thoughtfully answered them all, so had Uncle Luke, cheerfully, over the phone from New York. But Dad. Dad—
Dad always got this look whenever Grace, as a small child, asked him stuff that wasn't, say, how does the radio work? When she wanted to know he got his chin scar, or if he'd ever been to war, or if Dottie and Doc were his parents. Not hostile to her, never; despite what her friends thought (especially after last Friday, ugh) Han Solo was gentle. He told Grace the truth, but in such short, pained ways—it was a stick; yep; nope, but you can go on calling 'em Nan and Pop—looking so grim that it was like wrenching something from him, and Grace loved her father. So she stopped prying.
Mama wouldn't explain Dad's childhood either, she was very firm on that, last week when Grace asked.Neither would Uncle Luke. Not my story, Gracie, Luke said, serenely, down the crackling line. Not fair, Baby, Mama gently declined,wrangling a pigweed that was strangling Uncle Chewie's beets.She smiled at Grace from under the brim of her hat, her pretty face rueful, sympathetic yet resolute. You'll have to talk to Daddy yourself.
Grace had been going to, last night after supper. It made her nervous, especially with him so...what, disappointed in her? but she had to finish the project somehow. But then the phone had rung in the living room, as Grace watched Mary Tyler Moore in her floral pajamas, and Mama packed for her weekend trip to Eisley with Auntie Shara and Dr. Kalonia. Some panel on natural childbirth or something equally revolting. (There was a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves in Dr. Kalonia's waiting room, ohhh barfity-barf). Mama paused her efficient folding of a cranberry ribbed turtleneck, reached for the phone on the table beside the couch. Eyes keen as she listened, her cheeks paling.
And Dad, who was on the couch beside her, tinkering with his knife, peered at Mama. They weren't telepathic, not like the twins were, but they had been together forever and they loved each other. Loved each other so much, in fact, that Grace almost—oh, it was dumb, dumb, she knew her parents loved her too, ferocious and true, but they were so close that sometimes Grace felt...left out? Outside Han-and-Leia, their infinite loop.
Maybe because Mama and Dad didn't fight like other couples. The cabin had none of that queasy tension bubbling just undercover in Marilee's grand house; never the overt screaming of Tam's parents that woke Grace one sleepover, before they announced their divorce. Even the Damerons, mostly happy, clashed sometimes, Poe said; his dad could be careless, his mom impatient. But Grace's parents had probably never even had a fight, she thought, oddly resentful. It wasn't like Grace wanted them to split up or anything, the idea made her sick, but—maybe it would make them more approachable, when Grace was in so much trouble, to know not just the love story but that they were flawed. That Daddy wasn't just brave, skilled and devoted, but...selfish, reckless, maybe jealous. That Mama wasn't always brilliant, warm and supportive, but could be vengeful and self-righteous, using her uncanny insight to hurt.
If they were just a little...screwed up, it would make them easier to admit her own problems to.
Speaking of.
Mama slowly set the green receiver to its cradle. Grace, she said, so evenly she could only be deeply upset. That was Liz Gallagher.
In her beanbag chair, Grace pulled her knees to her chest. She studied her naked feet, bruised and grooved from her pointe shoes. Her toenails violet, navy-blue, a couple half-lost. The flesh hard and thick, calloused, lumpy, cracked. Secretly Grace was proud of her mangled feet, the evidence of her toughness and dedication. The literal bending of bone and tendon to her will. Proof of the weight, the force, of her expression. Hers were nothing compared to Miss Liz's feet, of course: those were far out, and neither of the other serious dancers in class so much as blinked at Grace's damage, they had their own. So it had been a shock when Tam had recoiled at Grace's fifteenth birthday party at the lake, pointed at Grace's toes and shrieked in a way that made everyone look. OhmiGOD. Gross! Which of course became Grace's nickname for awhile. Gross Solo. Everyone said it so playfully that Grace made sure to laugh, too.
Liz said you quit the school talent show?
Grace wiggled her hammered pinky toe. She been working on her piece for weeks, for the show. Working out her own steps with Miss Lizzie's help, not ballet but exciting modern, set to "Suffragette City." It was Miss Liz, so cool with her feline eyes and infectious laughter, her elevating standards, who got her into David Bowie in the first place. And now her beloved teacher had gone and told Mama what Grace confessed: that Grace didn't want to perform, not after Marilee changed Grace's name on the sign-up sheet.
When Grace muttered it to Mama and Dad, what Marilee had written: Gross Soloist—Mama flinched.Mama, who eviscerated condescending debate opposition on TV with barely a toss of famous hair, gone speechless with hurt. And Dad? had set about remaking The Towering Inferno with his yellow eyes. Swivelling his knife in his fingers, like he was going to open something's guts.
The name had hurt. And it stuck, at school. Marilee used to dance too, with Miss Liz, though she'd never made it en pointe. Still, you'd think she'd know how it felt, dancing—they'd used to have fun on trips in Mama's Satellite, competing at recitals. Grace had thought her friend knew how dance was part of you, thought she felt it too: that movement was the only way to shape it, or stand it, the electricity of life. You'd think she'd—well, it was true, dancing wasn't exactly cool. School dances, yes, but not the kind of work high-level dancing demanded, the camps and destroyed feet, the relentless exercises and injuries. Melting ice and binding cloth, burning liniment, the endless fear for ligaments; the sweat-wrung laundry and Epsom salt baths. The loss of all Saturdays, beat out in counts of three and five and eight.
It was all worth it to Grace when it came true onstage, in light and heat. When it became, when rhythm broke through the ache. When she leapt and was caught in air, when air changed its properties just for her. God. God, it was the reward for all the torture. Grace knew, had always known, how Daddy felt about flying, that was one thing she'd never had to ask him. In the air, you were both humble and immortal.
But this past summer, when her friends wanted to stay out late but Grace had to be up at five o'clock to get to Eisley in time for a recital, or when she missed inside jokes because she was away a week every August to teach dance at the arts camp Uncle Luke volunteered at, the preciousness had begun to slip and fade. The warm nights Marilee and Tam spent riding in cars, or in backyards when parents were away, seemed so much easier, to Grace. More urgent, more now. Not a point on a calendar, not a set of exercises, not Miss Liz running counts over and over and over and over. The inch-by-inch increments, adjustments of thigh and knee and ankle. Hips off on three. You came in late—wait, that was it, girl, fantastic!
Whether it was late or great, the end result was the same: do it again, Grace. Again.
Yeah, Grace hated her friends' music, "Piano Man" and "Rocket Man" and the Bay City Rollers. The senior athletes they partied with laughed wet and mean and smelled like goats. Heyyyy, Gross. So beer tasted like a penny pulled from a pickle jar, so what? She could learn to like it, all of it, she—
Because surely then life would get easier, the attention would stop: the comments about her gross feet, her height and snobby posture, her hair always up in its bun. Her legs—gangly to some, too muscular to others, but always wrong, so wrong Grace stopped wearing her cutoffs last summer unless she was at home, hanging out with Poe. Poe was like her big brother, he looked out for her, over vacation they listened to records, laughed and talked and swam in the lake. But back in school, he was a grade older and beautiful in a way that took no prisoners. Poe wore himself with so much confidence, eyeliner and silver t-shirt, photography portfolio and radio headphones, that no mockery could reach him. He wanted Grace to be the same way, and was nice but faintly incredulous when she was not. When she admitted to him, and only him, her bruised feelings. So drop 'em. They're mean, mediocre, predictable, dull, Poe dismissed on their way to the school darkroom. You're an artist, Grace. And that was it, matter settled. As though his judgement sucked the venom from any hurt.
But Grace admitted no hurt to her parents last night, side by side on the old yellow couch: Dad's jaw tensing and his eyes hot; Mama gutted and small, surrounded by her stylish clothes.
Her parents.
It was safe to tell her parents, Grace knew that. They were both smart, kind, they adored her, had never pushed her into dance, just girded her own ambition. Their expressions begged her to talk to them. She could say it: I'm going to quit dancing.
But she could not say it. Because then Han-and-Leia would get all Leia-and-Han. From Dad, there'd be swearing and solving. And from Mama, the empathetic press for the true story, which she got no matter what. And the truth stuck in Grace's throat. How did you ask it, as the only child of Han-and-Leia: Am I dumb? Am I ugly?
Fuck 'em all, Dad spat at last, pointing his index; Mama still wounded into rare muteness. Fuck 'em, jealous, you go get it—
It was already starting. Swearing, solving, and Mama's chin was setting itself. So Grace didn't dare tell them, or ask them, anything. Instead she mustered all her formidable bodily control to unfold, like some pliable, slender stalk, from her seat. Put on Marilee's cool laugh. It's just a joke!
From the kitchen, biting into a pear, she'd heard Mama's murmur. She's...oh. Maybe I should stay ho—
Naaah, Sweetheart. Can't teach her surrender. A squeak of couch-springs, Dad leaning over to pull Mama close. Do your thing. She'll be fine. Audible kiss of head. Tough as boots, our kid.
She's a teenager, too. Mama sighed. Those friends she's...The richvoice shook. Oh, Han. I hate it, I hate it for her.
I'll, uh. Talk to her. Hope, nerves and determination in Dad's tone. Whaddaya think, maybe I'll take her to Chewie's? Know Gee's in the doghouse, no goin' out, but—gotta eat, huh? Diner always cheers her up.
The diner. Where Uncle Chewie would hug Grace, give her extra-crispy fries and a chocolate shake. Dad would drink black coffee, slide her dimes for the little booth jukebox.She'd play songs he liked and sometimesDad would get a little misty and he'd have to get up, hope Chewie had broken something lately. Oh Daddy, so earnest beneath his hard hide. Forever thinking she was five instead of fifteen.
Mama, too. She had left, earlier this afternoon. But not before she held Grace close, pulled her endearingly low to kiss her forehead. Not finished, Baby, Mama whispered.
There was no escape, not from Han-and-Leia.
Maybe it would be easier, Grace thought now, eyeing her own solitary leaf, if she had brothers and sisters. She'd feel less like...like...some footnote to true love.
Most Grace's classmates had siblings; lots, even. Their family trees probably didn't fit on their posters. The baby boom, they were calling her generation on the news and at school. But she was a sole child, and while it had never bothered her before, today Grace felt a melancholy doubt. Not competitive exactly, yet a gnawing thought.
A boy, a brother? Would Dad have liked a son? Not instead of Grace, never, but...as well as her? A kid who loved all the things Dad did, planes and engines and making things out of wood. Grace did play pool with him, she was good, too. Good enough to beat Wedge, to Dad's delight: hell, you just don't learn, Antilles. Dad had taught Grace countless practical skills with no regard at all for the divisions others instilled between genders. But Grace also couldn't number the times people had expressed sympathy to her father, in one way or another, that such a man's man (a phrase guaranteed to make Mama grind her molars) had only a daughter. Almost nothing was guaranteed to make Daddy flare up faster, set Mama to blistering ice, but it happened. A lot.
It was odd, though. Wasn't it? That Mama and Dad stopped at one kid? Even Marilee's and Tam's parents, who hated each other, had several children. And it wasn't like the Solos never...ugh, but...okay, every year, while Grace was at Luke's camp, Mama took vacation from the paper and Dad flew her wherever he happened to go for work. Grace used to think, when she was younger, that her parents really wanted to visit Cincinnati, Des Moines, Chicago. But at fifteen, Grace was pretty sure the pair barely left their hotel. There was a way Mama sounded just this last August when she called the camp from Racine to say goodnight to Grace, to give an emergency phone number; all dizzily distracted. A warm low mumbling in the background that wasn't…far enough in the background. Barf.
So if they...still...that, if they always had, then why...
Grace sighed. Well, tough luck, perfect lovers. They were stuck with one gawky, monster-footed, awkwardly rebellious daughter.
"Tell Dad it wasn't my fault," Grace murmured to Holly, setting her forehead to his fuzzy brow.
But she knew it was no dice, as Dad had barked last Friday night, when Grace tried to explain on the drive home, tongue thick and clumsy, through hiccups. I didn't. Mean. To have so much. Mama waiting on the porch, perched like a small, vigilant bird on the wooden bench—or maybe a wise witch, Holly at her feet and Roget sitting sentry beside her. When Millie pulled up Mama stood in the quivering lamplight, tightening her pink housecoat. Huge worried eyes even huger as Grace stumbled out of the passenger door. Dad caught her by her elbows, before she fell to the gravel drive. Grace almost cried with the crazy urge to put her feet on Dad's boots and let him walk her, like he used to when she was tiny, to "She Loves You."
Gathering Holly into her lap, Grace winced, thinking of her friends again. They'd ragged her all week at school, prissy jewel-box ballerina getting dragged out of a party drunk by her father. Though they damn sure hadn't laughed at Han Solo. Stalking like atigerinto Tommy Dell's backyard, glare strafing over all the kids jumping to "Ballroom Blitz." Tommy trying to be slick, going red with shock, sitting by the pool with Marilee on his lap and someone else's lipstick on his neck. Wow hey, hey Mr. Solo, we were just—
Shut up, Dad had said, pointing at Tommy, not slowing or looking over. He found his objective in the crowd at once: the too-tall girl with too much hair (she'd let Marilee layer it with kitchen scissors before they went out, and now it was huge) and too much of Tam's makeup, in a too-big halter dress and her own rainbow sneakers, for once the one not dancing. Standing by the keg, red cup in her fingers. Hey Solo cup, kids were calling her, but for once the jokes felt fine. Yeah yeah yeah yeah laugh it up, Grace said good-naturedly, as her cup got filled again with cheap, soapy beer.
Grace.
Dad didn't yell, and that was the scariest thing, the thing that made brawny letter-wrestler Tommy shrink back into the patio lounger. Dad's voice was calm but huge as the sea, somehow carrying over The Sweet blaring from Tommy's parents' hi-fi.
Get in the truck. Grace. Right now.
Not Baby, not Gee. Last Friday night, in front of the crowd, that had been a relief. But now Grace's slanted lips trembled, and she pressed her face into Holly's scruffy, sun-dusty fur. To keep from crying, she stoked her anger. Remembering how Mama had brought Grace ginger ale and stroked her mangled hair after she threw up for an hour. But Dad had gone out to his shop, midnight, thrumming with—what, fury? Disgust?
At breakfast the next morning—Grace too green for the ham and eggs Dad was frying—Mama said Grace was grounded. Grace had never been grounded! That's not—! For how long? she'd wailed. This ain't a negotiation, Dad snarled, over his shoulder, rattling cast-iron like some jailer. Well, Mama said, more reasonably, handing Grace a banana, this is quite serious, Grace. You lied to us, abused our trust. We'll see after two weeks.
Now, one week into her sentence, Grace thought of her friends again. They'd all been at the party too. Drank all the time, Grace only ever got drunk the once. Yet they were free and at the afternoon matinee, Marilee and Tam had been talking about it at their lockers. Not that she was dying to see Herbie Rides Again, but Grace just knew they'd sneak in to see Thunderbolt and Lightfoot instead and oh, Jeff Bridges was cute, not like any of the goaty boys she knewand here Grace was, cutting out stupid shapes with safety scissors that were too small for her freakish hands!
Grace leaned over the Dad-leaf, erased the pencilled Han, inked in Henry. Dad hated that name, didn't answer to it whenever anyone called him that, but that was what it said on his driver's license, Grace self-righteously told herself. Well, whatever he went by, Dad was her impossible father; her cowlicky hair and sulky angled lips were proof of that. She might as well go find him, get this dumb project on the road. At least, being this mad at him—it was all his fault, he had to actually crash the party? Ruin her life in front of everybody?—it wouldn't bother her to hold his huge feet (thanks a lot for those, too, Henry) to the fire with her question sheets.
"Where's your buddy?" Grace asked Holly, arching a fine eyebrow.
And Holly barked, high and sharp, like he'd thought Grace would never ask.