AUTHOR'S NOTES: As always, I must thank you first for taking the time to read this. I hope it's worth your while! ^_^ I haven't given up on this story... I've just been swamped by mid-terms. Evil things, those. Anyway, I want to thank Ahavia, April, Lady Bethia and Jadwol for all the kind words and support. May the Sentinel-and-or-Guide fairy leave happy thoughts under your pillows!
This part is a little short, but I wanted to post it anyway, as a chapter break seemed natural here. Chapter five and six are in the works, believe it or not.
*beats the plot bunnies away from her ankles*
Feedback would make me delirious with joy-- really, it would.
-Meredith
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Cradle on the Water 4/6
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
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Whatever Ruth Sandburg had wanted in a daughter, Naomi was not it. She wasn't sure just when in her childhood she became aware of this, but the unspoken disappointment hung heavy, like a ripe peach, filled with sorrows. In a way, Naomi felt it gave her a power of sorts. They didn't want each other, but they were still stuck-- Ruth and Naomi, a reversal of the old Bible tale. Now, the young women felt her own new ripeness-- still rather-- abstract and wandered through the streets of San Francisco in a sort of hazy panic.
(You will be found out.)
Time was a noose, loose around her now, but come one month or two, she'd start to show and then...
(And then, what will you do?)
Somewhere along the line, the biblical Naomi had changed her name
(you're changing, already)
to something happier, something lighter, more free; but it had been a long time since Naomi herself had labored over the Tanauk, and she couldn't remember what it was. Something joyful, sunlight through glass-- as porcelain and delicate as she felt, pausing to gaze at her self in a department store window. Reflected over the fall fashions, the cardboard 'back to school' signs, she was still a child herself, all red hair and freckles and too many faults.
(What am I going to do?)
For a moment or two, she fretted, as if she hadn't already made the decision, as if it wasn't written soul-deep and plain on the very body that had grown in her mother's womb.
Ruth followed, and Naomi...
Naomi was a wanderer.
And maybe that's what the mistake was after all; the naming, sacred in so many cultures, reduced to a birth certificate and a number in the hulking government machine. Naomi. Nay-oh-me. What a wonderful, terrible thing to say.
She wandered into McAlpin's, fingering this soft-knit baby pajamas, that miniature, duck-festooned bib. It was like picking clothes for a doll; all the little details, tiny shoes and hats and even baby bracelets, shiny and empty, waiting for names. Joshua, she tried out, almost unconsciously, Caleb. Noah? All old, firm Jewish names. Names her mother would have picked.
(Mother, sitting at the white-wood kitchen table, "Why do you do this to me child?")
Manuel! Spanish, wouldn't they just die, Mom and Dolores and the Synagogue biddies? (silently, written along her insides, "as if I'll even be here, come this time next year.") Hideki, Japanese; Rama, Hindu; Muhammad, Arabic; Louis-- superlative French! Frank Jr. for the man purported to be the father, or maybe 'Heaven', to be completely outrageous? Absently, Naomi curved her hand over the cradle of her hips. Robert, Richard, Aaron. Zach! Who knew? Dizzily, she considered simply rolling the die, like roulette or something, here's to chance and fate and... hey, how about Destiny? More of a girl's name, really...
I'll do everything my mother didn't, Naomi promised herself, fix every mistake she made.
(And make new ones of your own.)
After a while, she went back out onto the summer-day street and played a game-- her favorite, one she hadn't played in a long time, because it made her feel all the more acutely the confines of her cage. Sitting the yellow grass near the interstate exit, she watched the cars zoom on and off the freeway.
Where to? A silent question.
(Anywhere.)
#(#)#
Dolores pulled the car up tight against the sidewalk near the grocery, a four hour replay of herself, like a movie reel played backwards. Her eyes were somehow bright and shiny, marbles dipped in water, and she pushed open the door, motioning to Naomi. For a moment, the younger woman didn't move, continuing her silent support of the building she leaned against, chewing on apple as if daring it to choke her.
(If I were Snow White, I wouldn't so much as _look_ at an apple. Not after that.)
Finally, she moved, perching on the seat like a nervous bird, purse clutched in bone-white knuckles.
"Good afternoon, my dear," Dolores said, purely pre-emble, and for once Naomi found the other woman crowed by the sight of her raised, red-ash eyebrow. She couldn't feel her face, was afraid to look in the mirror and see everything written there, plain as day. Her soul slid out of her skin when the 'Aunt' asked, "Is it done?"
Naomi scrambled inside herself, looking for her voice, "Uh-huh." The five hundred dollars was the weight of deceit, tucked into the lining of her purse. Creatively, perhaps meanly, "They gave me some pills to take, to prevent infection. Do you want to see them?"
Dolores' "No" was quick and defensive– it occurred to Naomi that she would not have known what to do if asked to produce the fictitious pills. Then, slowly, the words were written as if on the backs of her eyelids, in chalk. 'She doesn't even consider disobedience a possibility.' She drew her tongue back in her throat, to keep from giggling. She was high, giddy, a creature of magic– a total, unrepentant masquerade.
"You know it's for the best, dear," said Dolores, leaning over to place a brief, dusty kiss on Naomi's cheek, like leaves on cold stone. It sat there, Naomi could feel it as Dolores hurried the car away from this, the scene of the crime, but she didn't dare wipe it away. Oddly, she found she didn't want to.
(pictures shown at the women's rally. mothers, fine haired and almond-eyed, breaking their daughters' feet as their own were broken decades before. the scrunched, red faces of chinese girls, pleading mercy, weeping. finding only determination.
[but behind that...]
it's for your own good.)
Sometime after the highway lights and concrete pillars began to take on the look of a forest, she stretched out and, almost furtively, reached into the glove compartment. Spreading the map over her lap, she traced roads, looped around cities, states, lingering over words she liked. Sacramento– very Catholic; Alum Rock– mysterious; Salinas, like silver, an exotic mirage, and Gilroy and Stockton too old and heavy handed to be considered. Every so often, Dolores would glance away from the endless white and yellow dashes on the blacktop, smiling indulgently, as if Naomi was a child with a coloring book for entertainment. A bored teenager– definitely not mothering material.
She had no way of knowing that Naomi was already planning her escape.
#(#)#
If Blair Jacob Sandburg had ever existed in Sunnyvale, California, he would have been born in a clean hospital, with doctors tipping Naomi onto her back like some child's toy--
(Weebles wobble but they don't fall down!)
her legs spread inelegantly. His name would not have, in fact, been Sandburg at all; while his mother had sweated and heaved, her left hand, gripping the hospital bed railing, would have shown the glint of a gold ring, and perhaps some tiny gem as well. Blair Jacob Goldman would be scrawled on his birth certificate, a son to carry the name of the father, washed up on a foreign shore. The first arms he would know would be Ruth's,
("Oh, Naomi's too tired just now")
then Dolores'. He would be circumcised with all the ceremony, and there would be a party of decent size.
("Because, you know, a boy is nothing to be ashamed of when he's from a married woman.")
His curls would be kept short, and he'd sit up straight and have his mouth washed out for saying 'damn' or 'shit' or even 'bugger'. He'd go to regular school with regular boys, and to Temple on Saturday, and to the park with his grandmother and dear aunt. He would live on 231 Lilly Road, where his mother had lived all her life and her mother before, until maybe one day a stranger in a uniform would come to stand in the doorway, smelling like the jungle and the word 'Vietnam'. Ruth and Dolores would watch anxiously as Naomi froze, looking at this familiar stranger, and she would run– not away, as she wanted to– but to his arms and he would say 'I missed you, honey', even though she hated to be called 'honey'. Or else there would be box, or dog tags, and a solemn funeral with Blair dressed in a tiny black suit and the whispers around Naomi– faceless –saying, 'shame, shame, a widow already'. Life would be like that, the background of a "Home & Garden" magazine, with Dolores and Ruthie's voices for narration, 'no, hold the baby like _this_', 'keep his hair short, what is he–a heathen?' and 'oh, you don't want to do _that_')
Of course, that wouldn't happen. Not now.
(Thank God. A colloquialism, a phrase, but also an action. Thanking God. Continuous, and present tense.)
'Be glad you don't exist here,' Naomi thought at the tiny, delicate creature curled up between her hips, 'you're invisible, you can flit down between them, safe in my shadow, and they won't touch you at all.' Part of her, the old voice hammered in since before she remembered, flashed words like 'stability' and 'heritage' at her, when she caught flashes of this future, lurking like ghosts in the hall. She began to get sick often, complaining of stomach aches while Dolores nodded her sly approval and Ruth fretted. She would lay herself out on that narrow, virginal bed, staring at a ceiling that held no answers. In her dreams, abstract paintings shifted, now an animal, now a man-- sometimes two-- running along side each other. Lupine and feline paw prints in the rain forest mud. She woke up only able to think, 'alright, alright already'; knowing she would have to step out of nothingness of Sunnyvale to a place where she and her baby could exist simultaneously, without one canceling out the other. She sat on the porch, looking down the endless, yawning length of Lilly Road, thinking how all her life she'd wanted to run and run until it wasn't Lilly Road any more at all, but some other road, leaning off into a horizon that stretched forever.
Another week passed and, though she ate less, she weighed more.
Who knew it would be so hard to run away from home?