They were raised in loud houses, many years apart, the mother in a small suburban town, the daughter in the city the mother had dreamed of, both driven mad by desire, sensitive, inured to insecurity, the thick, rusted metal chains of never enough.
The mother, the oldest of three girls, had left home and learned languages her sisters didn’t understand, Japanese, German, Italian, had left her parents with girls with problems. They were named after the Brontёs: Anne, and Charlotte and Emily. Her parents never bought her a car, taught her to drive, but she was always moving, always gone. She wanted to marry a man they’d like, a Jewish man who had read the novels by the great women, stories, and she married a midwestern Catholic who loved newspapers, biking and steak.
In 2006, when Anne had her third child, a girl named Lola, she’d already been a mother for four years. She thought she understood it, the children, and they were going to send the kids to public school. Anne was a tough woman with thin skin and she always said she bruised like a peach, wore long dresses year round. She liked patterns with birds, big swirls. Until Lola was 10, when she began wearing braces with teal rubber bands and pinched her ears when she forgot the times table, Anne worked full time, moving jobs until the one that was on the same street as the kids’ school came around.
They never went to public school. Anne stopped working in an office, and Lola spent a lot of time in bed with her—crying about her clothes, sleeping with her when her father was away, stroking her mother’s calves with her toes as they tried to fall asleep. Anne liked Lola’s toes and when she was born, the doctor said they were the most beautiful baby toes. Anne liked when other people told her what was beautiful. This was the beginning.
The two never stopped spending nights together, around the house, undressed after the day, Lola in her father’s t-shirt and stretched cotton pants that hung off her hips and Anne in a floor-length night dress. In these costumes, they sat in the middle of their curved, jam-colored couch, telling each other secrets in between television episodes. Lola crossed her legs like she was on a classroom carpet and Anne played with the knobs of her toes and ran her thumb against chipped nail polish. And sometimes they’d talk about the future, and also the past. Anne always reminded her that when she was a girl, she thought her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world, and she’d ask Lola if she agreed, if she thought her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world.
They sipped ice water with lemon, Lola telling Anne about the girls, Anne telling Lola about the women. With her curly hair and quiet laugh, Lola was small, and her braces fixed her smile, but only mostly. Lola loved these nights, the way the house was lit by amber light, wondering if everyone she knew was crazy or if everyone was crazy, telling stories.
Lola moved out, like most children do, and craved everyday those nights when they sat together, and Anne said her forehead smelled like baby, like sweet. And the streets around the house stayed the same, infatuating, dull, houses side by side. Lola worried all the time, and so did Anne. Lola wondered all the time. But she knew it would be a life of wanting—needing to be gone and needing to be right where she was, in the eye of intertwining stories and jewel tones, on the couch or even back in bed, but not alone.