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Chapter One
“Mom, can you still wear white if you’re not a virgin?”
My nine-year-old daughter, Eva, knows the perfect way to get my full attention.
I push up my sunglasses and look at her hard. This is supposed to be a special mother-daughter da
y. I took off work to bring her to the country club pool, but lately, being Eva’s mother is anything but relaxing. “Do you know what a virgin is?”
“Yes.” She sounds so matter-of-fact.
“How?” I demand, because I sure as hell didn’t tell her. My most gruesome memory is my mother sitting me down on my bed and explaining in horrendous detail “the story of the sperm and the ovum.” I’ve vowed to find a better way to introduce Eva to the story but haven’t found it yet. “You’ve had sex ed already at school?”
Eva sighs heavily. “No, Mom, that’s in fifth grade. I’ve still got a year. But I read a lot. Between Judy Blume and Paul Zindel, I know everything.”
That’s as scary a statement as I’ve ever heard. “So you know about sex?”
“Yes.” Her lips compress primly beneath the brim of her straw hat. It’s actually my hat, but she claimed it once we sat down.
I push my sunglasses even higher so they rest on top of my head. “You know about getting your period?”
“Yes.”
“You know how babies are made?”
“Doesn’t that fall under the sex question?”
Wow. She does seem to know quite a bit, and I watch her as she returns to the magazine she’s reading.
“This is so ick,” she says in disgust, turning a page in the bridal magazine on her lap. She brought three bridal magazines to the pool today and has been riveted for the last few hours by the oversize glossy publications. “There’s nothing nice in here at all.”
“Which magazine is that?”
“Seattle Bride.” She tosses aside the slender magazine with a contemptuous snort and reaches for another. “They don’t know how to do weddings in Seattle. The styles are so ugly. The best weddings are always in the South.”
I can’t stop staring at her. So hard to believe this little girl came from me.
“So, Mom, back to my question,” she says, flipping through the next magazine, Southern Bride. “Can nonvirgins wear white?”
“Yes,” I answer reluctantly, thinking this is a discussion I’d very much like to avoid. “It’s done all the time.”
“So you don’t have to wear ivory or pink?”
“That’s an old rule. No one follows that anymore.” Or there’d be no white weddings, either.
Eva pauses briefly to study a beaded gown with an equally ornate veil. “Obviously, virgins can’t have babies. Well, except for the Virgin Mary, but that was an exception to the rule, so if you’ve had a baby . . .” Her voice trails off as she looks up at me. “Probably not a virgin.”
“Probably not,” I agree.
“So you’re definitely not a virgin.”
“Eva.”
“I’m just asking.”
“It’s none of your business, but no, I’m not a virgin. Not that I had sex to make you.”
“Gross. Don’t talk about making me.”
“You’re the one talking about virgins!”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“It just is. Ew.” She shudders and slams Southern Bride closed before turning on the lounge chair to face me, her long dark hair falling over her thin shoulders. She’s so skinny that her hipbones jut out and her long legs look vaguely storklike. “Too bad you can’t wear white at your wedding, though, because ivory dresses are u-g-l-y. Ugly.”
I don’t know who this child is or where she came from. I know she’s biologically mine—she looks just like me at nine—but what about the rest of her DNA? Whose sperm did I buy, anyway?
“I could wear white, Eva, but I don’t have, nor do I want, a boyfriend. And the last thing I’m interested in is ever getting married.”
She sighs wearily. “But if you don’t even give marriage a try, how can you say you don’t like it?”
Advil, Advil, Advil. Need Advil badly. “Marriage isn’t like broccoli. You don’t nibble on a stem to see if you like it.”
“You’re comparing men to vegetables?”
I almost liked it better when Eva thought I was a lesbian.
Two of the kids in Eva’s New York preschool class were raised in lesbian households, and the kids were fantastic, funny, bright, well adjusted. At three, Eva was crushed when I told her that there would never be two mommies in our family. We were a one-mommy household.
“Just one mommy?” she’d cried. “But what about the Ark? All the animals came in twos.”
It seemed like a good teaching opportunity, so I explained that Noah’s pairs weren’t female and female, but male and female, and I hastened to add that the decision wasn’t so the world could live in harmony, but for reproductive reasons. The animals on Noah’s Ark had a serious job. They had to repopulate the world that had just been drowned in the forty days of rain.
The drowning part of course caught her attention.
As did other Old Testament favorites like Cain killing Abel, Sodom being set on fire, Lot’s wife turning to salt, and Abraham laying Isaac on an altar as a sacrifice. The dramatic illustration in her children’s Bible of Abraham holding a knife over his son particularly fascinated her. Gave her some nightmares, too. But she never forgot the story.
She never forgets anything. She has the memory of an elephant.
“I thought we were here so you could swim,” I say, trying to change the subject, wanting her to go play, be a normal little girl, although that’s probably pushing it. “The pool closes next week once school starts, and it’ll be nine months before it opens again.”
Eva glances past me to look at the crowded deep end. The pool is packed today, as it’s in the mid-nineties and nearing the end of summer.
“I am hot,” she admits, fanning herself.
“So go swim.”
But she doesn’t move. She lies there on her side, studying the girls playing in the deep end. She’s scared. Scared of being rejected again.
With me, she’s brave and funny. Articulate and confident. But around the little girls here, her confidence vanishes. She just doesn’t fit in, and I don’t know why. She had no problem making friends in New York City. She was reasonably popular at her school in Manhattan. Why doesn’t she have friends here?
“Should I go off the diving board or go down to the shallow end?” Eva asks, leaning against her arm, her dark green eyes tracking every move the girls make.
“Do what you want to do.”
She hesitates and then slips off the lounge chair and drops her towel. “Okay. I’ll swim in the deep end.”
I shouldn’t be, but I’m nervous as I sit in my lounge chair at the edge of the Points Country Club pool, watching Eva paddle around the deep end trying to get the other girls to notice her.
Just as she’s done all summer. Just as she did last summer after we’d moved here.
I try not to stare at the group of girls playing just out of Eva’s reach. Why don’t they like her? Why won’t they include her?
Eva’s staring at them, too. She’s clinging to the tiled wall and watching with wistful eyes as they splash and laugh.
Despite my studied nonchalance, I worry. I hate that wishful expression on Eva’s face. It’s so not who she is, so not who she should be.
Eva’s brilliant. In kindergarten, she read at a sixth-grade reading level. This summer, she’s managed many of the classics quite nicely. Her favorite cities are Tokyo and London.
So why doesn’t Eva fit in?
Eva’s decided she wants to be popular, and not just popular, she wants in with the most popular girls, the exclusive clique of the very rich, very pretty girls who aren’t at all interested in being friends with her. And instead of accepting their lack of interest, she’s determined to change them. Or her. Neither being a winning proposition.
Earlier in the year, I tried to explain to Eva that wanting to be liked, and wanting to be popular, is the kiss of death. I told her that she was just giving away her power, giving it to girls who don’t deserve it, but Eva shook her head and answered with that martyred saint expression of hers, “
Some people like to be liked.”
She’s right. I never needed people the way she does. I never cared what people thought. I still don’t. My parents say I marched to a different drum from the time I could walk, and I’ve made my living being different. Apart. Unique. First as a graphic designer, now as the head of my own advertising company. My vision creates my art, and my art isn’t just what I do, it’s who I am.
I knew the move from New York to the Pacific Northwest would be difficult for me. I never expected it to be so hard on Eva. I grew up here, in Seattle, and left as soon as I turned eighteen. I never planned on returning—this was where my parents lived, not me—but then eighteen months ago, a work opportunity arose and I took it. Despite my misgivings.
