Juno's Daughters Read online

  Table of Contents

  JUNO’S DAUGHTERS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1 - Here in This Island We Arriv’d

  CHAPTER 2 - A Thousand Twangling Instruments Will Hum About Mine Ears

  CHAPTER 3 - A Strange Fish

  CHAPTER 4 - A Most Majestic Vision

  CHAPTER 5 - Opportunities. Challenges. Ideas.

  CHAPTER 6 - Brave New World

  CHAPTER 7 - Lowering the Flag

  CHAPTER 8 - An Unexpected Visitor

  CHAPTER 9 - Wild Waters

  CHAPTER 10 - Waldron: In Three Acts

  CHAPTER 11 - Ceres Loves Trinculo

  CHAPTER 12 - I Might Call Him a Thing Divine

  CHAPTER 13 - Set Caliban and His Companions Free

  CHAPTER 14 - With Love in Her Eyes and Flowers in Her Hair

  CHAPTER 15 - For I Have Lost My Daughter

  CHAPTER 16 - The City

  CHAPTER 17 - Monroe

  CHAPTER 18 - Lost Children and Animals

  CHAPTER 19 - Home

  CHAPTER 20 - Be Fierce

  CHAPTER 21 - Love’s Labour

  JUNO’S DAUGHTERS

  LISE SAFFRAN is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines and in the anthology Family Wanted. She lives in Columbia, Missouri, with her husband and two sons. This is her first novel.

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, January 2011

  Copyright © Lise Saffran, 2010 All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Saffran, Lise.

  Juno’s daughters / Lise Saffran.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-48624-5

  PS3619.A355J86 2010

  813’.6—dc22 2010015044

  Kirch

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For Robert, Clay, and Jonah. Always.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to express my gratitude for the several writing communities to which I have been privileged to belong, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the MacDowell Colony, and Hedgebrook. My parents and brother comprise an unparalleled cheering section in all matters, and my husband, Robert, is as thoughtful, insightful, and enthusiastic a partner as anyone could wish for. The collection of guitar strummers, banjo pickers, and washtub bass players that I call my extended family is also deserving of appreciation.

  Juno’s Daughters owes a significant debt of inspiration to Island Stage Left, which graced us with a virtually private performance of The Tempest one magical summer. They bring excellent theater to the San Juan Islands for free, but any further similarities with the company in the novel are purely coincidental and unintended. I would like to thank Shannon Kelley for her generous and detailed e-mails about life on the islands. The San Juan Islander served as a further resource and in particular Susan Vernon’s San Juan Nature Notebook. Miko Lee and Andrea Maio provided crucial backstage details; Kevin Perry shared his knowledge of Seattle street kids; and Amy Stambaugh deserves credit for Rascal. Meg Klein-Trull and her girls helped me understand challenges specific to the lives of beautiful teenagers, and Jo Luloff, Melanie Fallon, Kate McIntyre, and Julie Christenson all read and commented on early portions of the novel.

  Finally, thanks aplenty to my perfectly brilliant editor at Plume, Denise Roy, and to my agent, Nathaniel Jacks, for his good sense, dedication, and friendship.

  CHAPTER 1

  Here in This Island We Arriv’d

  There was one day in early June of each year when theater-loving residents of San Juan Island, Washington, listened more eagerly than usual for the echoing horn of the ferry in Friday Harbor. It was the day the Equity actors, professionals from New York and Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon, arrived on the island to take their roles in the annual Shakespeare production. They came in their city clothes, or in brand new fleece and Gore-Tex, and fanned out to the spare rooms and converted garages and guest cabins happily offered up by islanders.

  To the tourists who poured in from Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, it was a day like any other, an opportunity for bike riding on Lopez or whale watching in Haro Strait or strolling through the Westcott Bay Sculpture Park & Nature Reserve. Islanders who, like Jenny, helped with the sets or took the smaller parts, looked forward to this day the way they watched for the blooming of the red columbine. It meant that summer had finally come.

  Dale and Peg, the founders of Props to You, had come to San Juan Island from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland fifteen years before. They had arrived like so many of their neighbors: burnt out from the city or unhappy in their jobs or marriages or looking for a safer, more uncomplicated place to raise children. Back then you didn’t have to be a Microsoft millionaire to buy a plot of land on San Juan or Lopez or Shaw. The ratio of old hippies, glassblowers, and lavender farmers to heiresses and rock stars was still higher than visitors to the islands could believe when they looked out their hotel windows at the views of Mount Baker.

  The pair of actors had arrived with all their worldly goods in a VW camper van and bought five acres of land on Egg Lake Road. At the time it was just a pasture and a barn. They lived in their van for two years until they could finish their cabin and then immediately thereafter had framed a stage out of two-byfours covered in plywood. They had begun casting their first production before the plywood was even painted. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. People who had bee
n around a while still talked about how the guy that Dale had convinced to come up for the summer and play Puck went for a psilocybin-induced walkabout on Turtleback Mountain and had to be rescued by the Washington Wing Civil Air Patrol. They talked a little less about what went on between him and Peg that summer, though they all knew. Everyone liked Peg.

  It was in February of each year that Dale and Peg revealed the play they’d chosen for the coming summer. In no time, copies would be passed around from bed-and-breakfast owners to groundskeepers to whale watching captains to real estate agents. By May it would not be at all surprising to hear the owner of an art gallery and a souvenir shop clerk on a bench overlooking Friday Harbor speculating on how mistaken identities complicated the plans of young lovers or laughing about the machinations of this or that clever servant.

  This year it was The Tempest, and by arrival day everyone on the island knew that Miranda had played a girl with multiple personality disorder on Law & Order SVU and that Trinculo and Caliban were regulars at New York City’s Roundabout Theatre. Ariel was coming from Seattle, where he had recently starred in a production of Peter Pan. Prospero? Well, of course Prospero would be played by Dale himself.

  His waist had thickened over the years and his beard, once streaked with gray, was now entirely white. It was easy to picture Dale in a long robe promising calm seas and auspicious gales. Speculation had been rife for weeks about who from the island would be selected to fill the minor roles. There was the question of the O’s (Alonso, Gonzalo, and Stephano). There were the three spirits, Ceres, Iris, and Juno. There was the Boatswain.

  Jenny had read this year’s selection with particular interest. Lord knew she was no scholar like the shipwrecked Prospero. She had dropped out of college in her second year to marry a rock musician and spent her days working in an antique store and weaving table runners and place mats from home-dyed alpaca wool. She was, however, the mother of two teenage daughters. She knew as well as anyone what it was like to raise girls on an island. She would have loved to see Prospero, even with the help of his two magical companions, Caliban and Ariel, try to keep her older daughter, Lilly, out of trouble.

  Jenny’s daughters were four years and several worlds apart. Thirteen-year-old Frankie had her sister’s jet-black hair, wide-set eyes, the same ability to sing harmony, and a dislike of what she and her sister both called “hairy fruit.” At times, that seemed to be all they shared. Her older sister, Lilly, could be foolish, but she was canny. She could tie a sailor’s knot at seven and drive a car at fourteen. She was in kindergarten when Jenny finally got up the courage to leave Monroe, and Jenny couldn’t help thinking that it had to explain at least some of the difference between her girls.

  Frankie was just a nursing baby when she last laid eyes on her father. It was that, believed Jenny with a confidence bordering on the mystical, that accounted for her younger daughter’s blessed innocence. No one had ever been unkind to her. Nerve endings, which in Lilly’s case had very early been tuned to the moods of men (and she had proved remarkably adept at that), had been free in the person of Frankie to concentrate on salt breezes and birdsong and the scratching of insects moving over the island soil.

  Jenny thought of both her children often as she read the play. She tried to decide which of them was most like Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Frankie might have Miranda’s innocence, she decided, but there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind, least of all her own, that it would be Lilly snatching up any young prince who happened to wash ashore.

  Jenny had worked for years alongside a handful of her friends and neighbors building sets and sewing costumes for the show. She had read the play twice through by that day in June and had been excited for weeks about the possibilities for incorporating yarn. Lately she had been hand-painting raw wool that she bought at a discount from the alpaca farm on the east side of the island. It was too soon to tell if there would be a market for the stuff, but she could already see it swinging from the trees on Prospero’s island.

  She was behind the desk at work, picturing a vest woven of silver and gold thread to look like armor for Ferdinand, when the bell rang at the front of the store. Her eyes traveled down the aisle packed with Native American baskets and totems, Victorian butter churns, sleds, musical instruments, paintings and prints, lamps, skeleton keys, silver tea sets, and an ever-changing collection of miscellaneous treasures, and she saw two skinny teenage girls in matching pageboy caps. She broke into a wide smile, but it melted when she realized it was only two o’clock. Friday Harbor middle school didn’t let out until three-thirty on Tuesdays.

  “Frankie?”

  “Relax, Mom. It was a teacher workday, remember? We got out early.”

  “We turned in our last book-share of the year on Monday,” said Frankie’s best friend, Phoenix, with a reassuring smile.

  Frankie and Phoenix. The girls had been friends since before they could walk. They wore their long hair tucked under their caps in a style they must have invented because neither of them owned TVs and so far they weren’t much interested in computers. On their matchstick wrists they wore bracelets woven from strands of Jenny’s leftover alpaca wool, dotted with clam shells that they turned into ornaments the Indian way, by rubbing the highest point of the curve against a stone until a small hole wore through.

  Now that Jenny remembered the teacher workday she realized that the kids had been out of school for an hour or more. In three days they would be out for the summer.

  Lilly had graduated barely a week before. Though ostensibly working at a landscaping job, she was perpetually short of cash and had called Jenny earlier asking to borrow ten dollars. At Frankie’s age, Lilly would have taken advantage of a free afternoon to careen around the island with deckhands from one of the big yachts, a joint tucked into a hollowed-out tampon container in her purse. Once or twice Jenny had almost had the sense that Lilly did what she did in part to say to her mother this is how it’s done. This is living.

  From the back door of the store Jenny could look straight down the hill to Friday Harbor and see that the ferry was just pulling away. It was the inter-island ferry, running regularly between the major islands. The large boat, cutting slowly through the water past the fishing and pleasure craft, sent a quick jolt of excitement through her.

  The show moved around during the short season, performing on San Juan and Lopez and Shaw. Major props had to be small enough to fit into a framed backpack. The set for The Merry Wives of Windsor had depended largely on the collection of oversize beer steins Jenny had found at the shop where she worked and whatever big tables could be located on the island they happened to be on for the play.

  Before the play opened in one of the big venues, there was a smaller, private performance on Waldron, one of the tiny islands without ferry service. Only the cast traveled to Waldron for the show, and the audience consisted entirely of the people who lived there without city services of any kind. Rocky and wild, Waldron was farther off the grid than most. There were just a hundred or so residents, and they grew their own food, rode bicycles or drove unregistered vehicles, and read by the light of generators. There was a community school, but no telephones or ambulances or stores. Nor (it was rumored) were there any wild animals larger then mice. The rabbits, deer, and even possums supposedly had been eaten by the islanders.

  As a builder of sets rather than an actor, Jenny had to rely on the firsthand reports of those who had gone. She’d heard that Waldron’s entire population came to the beach for the show. She could picture it. Even islands like Orcas, which rose into evergreen-covered peaks and harbored mountain lakes and streams, and others like Lopez, which were flat and mild and rural, all had private coves that were dotted with bleached driftwood logs and hidden by ancient stands of pine. It was on one such spot on Waldron that the summer play was performed each year.

  During the first half the children swarmed over the benches and on top of the rough-hewn picnic tables near the beach, their eyes shining in the setting sun. They ra
n off to play in the woods during the intermission and then crept back again when the play started, like raccoons inching toward a campfire.

  When Monroe first brought Jenny and Lilly, then two years old, to the San Juans, he had talked about wanting to build a cabin on one of the islands without ferry service, like Waldron, Obstruction, Crane, Cypress, or Doe. There was something about the wildness of the Sound, the rocky shores and ancient trees, that made even a chain-smoking guitar player feel like he could build a house out of logs. You still had to buy the land, though, and in the end all they could afford was a two-bedroom trailer on a hillside near Cattle Point Road on San Juan Island. In retrospect, it was a very good thing, too. She shuddered to think of what might have become of her and her children had they settled in someplace seriously remote.

  Jenny looked at Frankie cooing over some china animal figurines and tried to imagine her changing so much in a few years that she would skip out of a job at Café Demeter to caravan to the Oregon Country Fair as her sister had done just the previous summer. She couldn’t picture it.

  In addition to the cap, Frankie wore cords with frayed hems and a Hello Kitty T-shirt that her sister had picked up for her at a secondhand store in Seattle. She had a spray of small pimples on her forehead and a bandage on her thumb where she had cut herself trying to saw a piece of driftwood in half.

  And she couldn’t remember her father at all. Thank God. Jenny remembered for the both of them. The clap of Monroe’s hand hitting the side of her face; strangely, she heard the sound before she felt the sting. The very last blow he’d landed had had such force behind it that it sent her reeling. She had been knocked to the floor and the baby had screamed in outrage at being clutched so tightly to her chest.

  Jenny’s best friend, Mary Ann, owned the store that she had worked in ever since she had arrived at her friend’s door with an infant sleeping in a sling and a kindergartener crying at her side. It had been thirteen years now, but Jenny would never stop being grateful.