CLAIMING KIN

By Laura Marello

Andrea has an unusual sense of smell. She grows up to be a pheromone researcher for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a perfume maker in Paris. But one idea haunts her: who is her real father? Is it the man her family says is her father, or is it his live-in companion? Andrea follows them to San Remo, where she tests her hypothesis, with startling results that disrupt her family on both sides of the Atlantic. {Laura Marello}

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781550717594

Laura Marello

Laura Marello is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and a Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown Fellowship. She has enjoyed writer's residencies at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Millay Colony, Montalvo Center for the Arts, and the Djerassi Foundation. Laura Marello grew up in New York and Los Angeles, and has lived most of her adult life in northern California. She is the author of Claiming Kin(Guernica 2009), nominated for the PEN/Bingham Award.

Book preview

LAURA MARELLO

CLAIMING KIN

 PICAS SERIES 64

GUERNICA

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2003  

For my mother

Part One

Pottersville 1960s

Andrea is behind the barn; the breeze of mosquito wings laps her face. Iodine in the air, she slaps at them, smears one on her shoulder. Iodine in a cut. She brushes the mosquito off her shoulder, airs her fingers, waving them like waving to him; she skids her fingers in the grass until they are green as knees, menthol as a cough. She loops one finger under the spaghetti strap of her seersucker playsuit, stands the strap’s knot up on her shoulder bone, leans her prickly back against the wood barn back, insects burrowing into the rough wood.

Dying, sliced mid-belly by the guillotine of her fingernails, fumes like burnt hair, sweat like iodine, she picks the mosquito off, forget the mosquito, leans her back against the barn, there is no dry cool place, not even inside the wood planks, splinters raspy as toast.

Andrea points to the hillock where he must appear this time, lines her eye along the arrow of her arm, gun finger pointing, her own sweat against the sun comes up like mist of golden powder. Baaaaammm, he must come, Papa must come, her arm drops, its underside wetting her thigh, moist printing of sweat against sweat, vapor of gunpowder rising.

Mustn’t point. On his hillock Curtis cart-wheels from tree to tree; resident jester pogoes his own land, dancing on a post, bouncing on his head; she shuts her eyes to chase him away, points her arrow again, eye down the barrel, pointing to the hillock where it is easiest to make Papa appear, Papa must appear.

So softly, padding street shoes, polished leather, sea salt in his hair, Andrea screams, taking the bone with her the minute the grass turns to seaweed; she runs to the front of the barn, in through the doors, hides behind the cow belly, the seaweed stronger and stronger. Then scotch, breath sweet as vomit. Then a language she doesn’t understand. She throws the bone at him. He evaporates. Oh why can’t I be nice to my papa, Andrea whines, blinking into the cow’s eyes.

Why can’t you even come when I call you, Andrea? Georgia, her mamma, is a slit between the barn doors. And why are you howling, did a bee sting you?

Andrea shuffles through the hay, making her feet musty like Uncle Zacharias’s boots. I was playing cowboys and Indians, Mamma. She dances hay-feet in circles around Georgia, Mamma, who picks up the bone and looks at Curtis’s hillock, as if she knows who comes. How-wow-wow-wow, how-wow-wow-wow. Mamma grabs Andrea’s upper arm; Mamma is petunias embedded in the gold gunpowder.

I told you not to go on Curtis’s land; Zacharias sets traps.

Squealing, I didn’t go, Mamma, she wants to swoon in Mamma’s sweet petunias, roll in her dusty powder.

Why do you rub your face on my arm? 

I’m kissing your arm, Mamma, I didn’t go, pow-wow-wow-wow. She jumps rope with no rope back to the home place, seersucker spaghetti straps flapping, Uncle Zac on her feet, sweet Mamma gold on her temples, Oh Papa, why can’t I be nice to you, hoping Mamma leaves the bone in the dirt because that is the best bone for conjuring.

In the morning before breakfast, children are scattered across the Thompson hills like landslid rocks. Grandma Thompson stands at the kitchen window counting to one hundred over the cracked eggs, thinking it is a game of hide and seek. She is it; she is the only one who is not a child. But she does not chase after them. They come back, they come back.

Mamma Thompson nudges Grandma and she stops ranting. Grandma whips up the eggs. Sssh. You go hide too. You go pick thirteen peaches. Mamma slips out to the tree. No one knows but Grandma that they are all children. No one knows who Grandpa is to her. The eggs spit in the skillet.

Grandpa is lodged on a slope in the willow grove, throwing pebbles over the bridge into the creek. Each pebble offers him a price. Mundy harvest got two pennies more, drops another pebble. Parker harvest got a decent offer. Drops in three. I got thirteen mouths to feed countin’ my own.

He checks the mailbox. Checks the sky. Licks his finger to the wind. Shrugs his shoulders. Blinks. God willing. He starts back, stuffing the last pebble in his trouser pocket. Not knowing who he is to her.

Papa Thompson watches Mamma pick thirteen peaches, thinking thirteen is an unlucky number, thinking it is an unlucky day to bring the harvest to town, thinking he claimed the Thompson family by marrying Mamma, but is tied to it by the blood of his sons and daughters. Blood he made.

Mamma Thompson lets the peaches roll from the rim into the basket, not caring that Grandma will rub every bruise. In her mind she leafs through the closet, trying to find a skirt with summer flowers. Please her boy. All she ever wanted was to please her boy Curtis.

Mamma sinks her arm into the basket, submerging to the elbow. Fingers a bruise. Maybe if she pleads, Papa will let her go with him to see Curtis. Bad luck living near the P.O. She will bring her boy a fruit basket.

Without ever being told, the Thompson children know the gravity of leaving the land. So whenever one of their papas, or uncles, or grandpas back the truck out onto the road, the children come running.

It seems they come out of nowhere: Judd surfaces in the frog pond like a submarine; Dominic bursts from the mounds; Andrea scrambles down the hill from the horse pasture, all of them out of earshot.

The boys, Dominic and Judd, stand still together, share a conspiracy of recognition, shuffling their sneakers in the dirt by the truck tires. Goin’ to town? Judd mutters, as they watch the corn or tobacco or a broken-down tool being loaded into the truck bed.

Andrea doesn’t share the boys’ reverence. She becomes frantic, hurtles into the truck bed while it is being loaded, stamps her sneakers on the metal grooves, chanting, Where ya going? Take me, take me, take me to San Remo to see Papa Luigi! as if she were singing a jump rope rhyme and not talking about her own father.

Andrea’s song draws Grandma Thompson to the kitchen window. Watching Andrea, Grandma feels inspired to begin one of her own stories. If the screen door is the only door shut, the boys hear and plug their ears with their index fingers, snickering.

Andrea is soothed by these stories. She climbs down from the truck bed, helps chain and latch the back gate, then stands completely still as the truck drives away. She never says another word, as if she has forgotten San Remo and her papa.

As soon as the truck turns the bend and can no longer be seen through the willow trees, the children scatter. Grandma Thompson fades from the window.

Today’s ritual is like any other. Papa Thompson backs the truck out, the grind of the tires out of earshot. The children come scrambling from all directions. Grandpa Thompson tilts the truck gate flat, loads sacks of corn. Goin’ to town? Dominic echoes. Andrea jumps on the truck chanting; Grandma Thompson is drawn to the window.

Quieted by Grandma’s story, Andrea jumps down, helps latch up. Mamma Thompson emerges from the kitchen carrying a food basket for her boy Curtis, and wearing his favorite skirt, the one with the summer flowers. Mamma sandwiches herself on the seat between Papa Thompson, who is driving, and Grandpa who is riding.

They drive off. The children scatter. Grandma Thompson fades from the window. But the knowledge that the land is essential to his grandchildren doesn’t comfort Papa Thompson today. It does not reach him. In town, on Main Street by the P.O., Papa Thompson must visit his son Curtis.

Judd won’t swim in the creek. He swims in Aunt Violet’s frog pond. Says the creek rushes him, says he can’t feel his own skin with the water pushing by. Can feel it standing still, sunk under water. Can feel the frogs woosh currents onto his arms. Comes up slimy as one. Like rotten spinach hovering over the breakfast table.

When it’s too bad, Crystal, his mamma, makes him take a shower, or eat breakfast on the stoop. Rotten spinach over his own eggs then. Comes in through the screen, though. Judd’s eyes are starting to pop, turning fluorescent like those sea-fishes that live so deep under the water they grow lights on their scales. Won’t be long now.

Dominic has his mamma’s, Georgia’s, agitation. He is cursed with it. It follows him. He follows her. He is worse off than she, having inherited the agitation instead of acquiring it, not knowing its source in secrets and soon in dreams. He only knows he must protect his mamma from something. So he worries. And he follows her.

When caught at it, usually by his cousin Judd, who does not want to be left out of anything, Dominic claims he is playing War and Mamma is the enemy. But he is too old for that now. The battlefields, sacred Cherokee burial grounds, are terrain for intruders, a dog or deer; now he says he heard rustling, or felt the ground tremble.

He is older than Judd. He can do what he wants, as long as he has some excuses. For Georgia, his mamma, he does not invent. Mamma does not ask.

Sitting in the grass where the horse pasture slopes down to the home place, Georgia watches the shapes of Zacharias and Grandma behind the kitchen window. They have been telling stories since the truck left. It is evening. The truck should have been back at noon.

Grandma has retold every story Georgia ever heard: the one about the ducklings, the amputated frogs, the boy from the State Clinic. Sitting on the mound, filled with quiet, Georgia doesn’t