The Yellow Braid (5 page)

Yet, it wasn’t only the sea-foam eyes or the
straight nose or the rose lips set in a firm chin that made Caro
pale from the sheer amazement of Livia’s prettiness. Nor was it her
freshly tanned skin. It was Livia’s expression; she owned a poise
in spite of the way she chewed at her lower lip. Caro couldn’t bear
to dwell on her any longer. Poem or picture—Livia could raise
either to life!

“Yes, I am,” Caro said. She adjusted herself
and gestured for Livia to join her under the cover of the canopy.
“Do you like poetry?”

Livia nodded, and then sat cross-legged at
Caro’s feet.

“So where’s home, Livia?”

“It used to be Westchester, but I don’t know
where after the summer,” Livia said.

“Oh, why is that?” Caro asked.

“Mom and my new step-dad have to figure that
out depending on where he opens up his business. Right now they’re
in Thailand.”

“
Thailand…t
hat would be a big change,” Caro said.

Livia looked away toward the ocean.

Caro held up a bottle of iced green tea from
the cooler. “It’s all I have.”

Livia accepted the drink. “Are you here just
for the summer too?”

“Yes,” Caro said. “Reminds me of when I was
just a little older than you and I used to come and stay with my
sister and her husband.”

“Are they still here?”

“Not anymore, but I remember the fun we used
to have,” Caro said.

“Like what?”

“Clamming was one of my favorite
things.”

Livia’s eyes brightened. “Me, too! Uncle
Tommy and I go so much Aunt Nina is sick of clams. She says she’s
running out of recipes.”

“I love them cold on the half-shell,” Caro
said.

“Maybe you can come with us one time.”

“I’d like that.” After Nina and Tommy had
warned Caro of Livia’s shyness, she was glad how open she was. “So
tell me more about your interest in poetry.”

“I’m a poet, too.”

“How wonderful! What do you write
about?”

“Different things,” Livia said.

“Like what,” Caro asked.

“Stuff,” Livia said curtly.

“Nothing you can share?”

“Not today.”

“Another time, maybe,” Caro said.

Livia handed Caro the half-empty bottle.
“I’ve gotta go.”

“You’ll come back,” Caro urged, inching
forward with each word so that by the time Livia was standing
outside the cabana, Caro’s chin jutted out of the opening.

Livia glanced over her shoulder, shrugged,
and then took off through the human netting of beach-goers who had
settled to within a couple of yards of her tent.

Caro dropped back onto the squat canvas
seat. “Well, I’ll be,” she muttered, and wondered what caused
Livia’s sudden turn-a-round in her mood. Did she bore the girl or
maybe she expected too much from her? Thinking back to herself at
that age, Caro remembered she’d kept her writing private.

She smiled to herself, and wondered what
else she might have had in common with Livia at twelve years old.
Caro recalled one time slinking out of the local record store with
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in a brown bag. She made it home without
meeting any of her friends, but upon opening the back door, her
younger sister, Rose, ambushed her. Pulling the record from its
paper sleeve she flapped it in the air and scuttled into the
kitchen where Tereza was helping their mother prepare supper.

“Looky, looky,” Rose sniggered and
brandished the record under Caro’s nose. “You’re such a weirdo.
Everyone at school thinks so.”

Caro lunged for the record and missed.

Rose pranced around the kitchen.

“
You’re such a dork,” Tereza said to Rose.
“When are you going to act like a
normal
person?” She shook her head in condemnation, then resumed
setting the table.

Caro’s mother split her loyalty depending on
the kind of day she had at work: on occasion she defended Caro;
other times, she took her frustrations out on her middle child,
about whom she once remarked that her odd features and pleading
mouth reminded her of the guppies in the fish bowl next to her
daughter’s bed.

That evening, her mother shook her ladle at
Rose in disapproval. “Give the record back right now,” she
ordered.

“Here,” Rose said, and flung the disc in
Caro’s direction.

The record slid passed Caro on the linoleum
floor. Stumbling to retrieve it, Caro mis-stepped and the record
cracked under the weight of her heel. “Look what you made me do,”
she screeched. “That was all the money I had.”

“Sor-ry,” Rose said, jutting her chin out at
Caro.

“No you’re not. You’re happy it broke,” Caro
yelled.

“Shut up, Caro,” her mother warned. “Rose
said she was sorry. I’m sick of the two of you always bickering.
Just shut up. You’re giving me a headache.”

“No! I saved for three months, and now I
have nothing. Make her pay for it!”

Her mother stomped across the room to Caro.
“I’m not warning you again.”

Caro grabbed the wooden spoon from her
mother and dropping onto the floor, she began smashing the cracked
record. “I hate you,” she screamed. “I hate all of you.”

***

Caro had been in the house for about an hour,
potting a basil plant when Livia climbed the steps to the deck and
hesitantly held out a sheet of paper. “Here.”

Caro saw in the nervous lines around Livia’s
mouth how difficult it was for her to have come. She accepted the
proffered poem. “Sit over there if you want.”

Livia sat on her hands on the edge of the
divan.

The script was clean for a pre-teen, and
bold enough that Caro didn’t need her glasses. “Clock Shop,” she
read and began to recite:

Time is harsh outside the walls of the clock
shop

where the occasional passerby takes out her
watch to see

where she has to be, reminding me of my
mother

looking at her watch in some foreign city
far away from me.

Centuries of history reign inside the clock
shop where chimes

and gongs keep track of time like a
fisherman trawling for his catch,

too busy to take notice of the minutes
passing or the correct time

and no one takes out their watch because
clocks are all around you.

In a world where time can be an enemy and
where the hour

is often spent waiting for a woman to check
her watch

I embrace time when I am in the
clock shop
.

Livia didn’t wait for Caro’s response. She
asked, “Do you believe in wishes coming true?”

“I do. I know they don’t come true all the
time, but I believe in the power of thoughts to turn wishes into
realities.”

“Even if they seem impossible?”

“That just means having stronger faith.”
Caro noticed that Livia was staring at the tower of her aunt’s
house. “I noticed you spend a lot of time up there.”

“I feel like I can see to the other side of
the ocean. Uncle Tommy said he’s seen sharks and dolphins with his
telescope.”

“Have you seen anything yet?”

“Not much, but he said I will as long as I’m
patient.” Livia puffed up her mouth and blew out a stream of air;
she seemed to deflate.

“It’s hard to be patient though, isn’t it?”
Caro remarked.

Livia gave a slow nod.

“Livia, there you are. I kind of thought
so.” Nina rounded the corner of the catwalk and joined them. She
said to Caro, “I told you she was shy and now it turns out that she
likes coming over. I didn’t fully realize what I was doing when I
told her you were a poet.”

“I’m happy you did. I enjoy her company.”
Caro folded Livia’s poem in quarters and tucked it under her
coaster, hidden from Nina’s view.

Nina cupped Livia’s chin. “I need for her to
realize that photography is as important to me as poetry is to
her.”

“
I do,” Livia said. “I just don’t like to
pose for
your
art.”

“Anyway,” Nina clucked in dismissal. “And
how are you faring,” she asked Caro.

“Better than I thought I would. It’s been so
many years since I vacationed for any length of time. So having you
and Tommy and Livia next door is turning out to be really
nice.”

“Then I know you’ll feel free to come
knocking any time. In fact, come for breakfast tomorrow about ten.
Sundays at our house are long and leisurely and I make a bakery or
crepe surprise. Right, kiddo?”

Livia gave a quick toss of her head.

“Sounds delicious,” Caro said.

Standing behind Livia, Nina pulled the
length of her niece’s braid through her hand. “In the meantime,
Tommy is waiting for his girls, so we need to leave.”

Livia sucked in her bottom lip as she peered
at Caro and then at her poem.

Caro patted the coaster, indicating its
safekeeping.

Later, with thoughts of Livia still alive,
Caro booted up her computer. Her gaze fixed on a spider building a
web in the corner of the ceiling. She studied the miniscule black
body releasing centimeters of thread for its design until her focus
dissipated and she stepped into the obscure world of creation.

Fantasy liberated Caro from the constraints
and rigors of reality. It was where she was her most uncensored
self, a place she disappeared to almost daily, if even for seconds.
It was where the stuff of her poetry came from.

She began to type—a halting cadence of her
fingers on the keyboard.

A golden twist of nouns and verbs

in mute and mock displaywith flying curls of
metaphors in costumed disarray.A buried mix of hidden rhymesso
seldom sought to hear…

Caro waited for further inspiration in
stillness, her fingers resting in place on the keys. She typed and
deleted several times, all false starts. An hour later, after
numerous permutations she began to grumble. “Hear
what
?” She
sucked in her breath and stared at the emerging poem for several
minutes as a dread rose from her belly.

No matter how many poems she’d written,
beginning a new work produced such fear that the taste in her mouth
made her throat close. And it was only with great effort she
reassured herself that after the piece settled for a day or so
she’d add and revise until the flow and melody of the words
revealed the truths she intended.

Caro believed that writing in any genre was
an exercise in excavating truths, so she tried always to go inward
as far as she could. For example, she used to write poems about
Abby during her growing-up years. But once Abby was in high school,
trying to find the truth about their relationship became
increasingly difficult as her daughter began to distance herself
from Caro emotionally, talking more to Zach than to her.

Caro thought it was a developmental stage
Abby was going through and so she gave her daughter space. In
retrospect, Caro concluded that Abby took her mother’s silence as
not caring because by the time Abby entered college she confided
almost exclusively in Zach. The few times Caro tried to talk to
Abby, her daughter’s standard reply was, “Thanks anyway, Mom. Dad
has it covered,” or for topics about the men in her life, it was
“My friends understand better.”

Caro could not—dare
not—d
efine what her
relationship was with Livia. Did she now even utter the
word,
love
, aloud?
Even as she repeated it to herself, the notion of loving Livia both
frightened and excited her.

Platonic love was not, as Caro previously
understood, confined to its contemplative aspects of beauty and
knowledge. Rather, homosexual relations were acknowledged as long
as the coming together helped to produce greater virtue in each
partner. A way, Caro thought sa
rdonically—just as today—of making same-sex love morally
digestible.

When I look on you a moment,
then I can speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a
delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see
nothing, and my ears hum, and a wet sweat bathes me, and a
trembling seizes me all over.
~
Sappho

Caro exited Westhampton Bakery holding a
large cappuccino. She had her sights on a vacant bench and hurried
toward it, keeping watch for anyone ready to challenge her. The
town was always full of activity at mid-afternoon, when the bathers
and sated sun-worshippers cruised the shops along Main Street.

Caro typically avoided the crowds but after
happening upon a letter from Marcie that she’d found inside the
cover of her planner, she found the bungalow too quiet, and drove
to town.

She was just sitting down outside the bakery
when—

“Caro!”

Caro’s head snapped in the direction of
the voice at the same moment she heard the automatic clicking of a
camera shutter. Instinctively covering her face, she jerked her
hand upward and coffee spilled, splattering on to her pants. “What
are you
doing
?”

Nina lowered the camera. “Thought you might
like to have a souvenir.”

Caro flicked the dripping liquid from her
fingers. “Don’t do that again.”

Nina handed her a rumpled wad of tissues.
“Sorry.”

Caro blotted the wet spots. “I don’t like
having my picture taken.”

A few awkward moments passed. “Can I buy you
another?” Nina offered.

Caro unclenched her jaw. “This one’s
fine.”

It was only when they sat that Caro saw
Livia on the other side of the street in front of the
confectionary. A boy came out carrying two ice cream cones and
handed one to her.