From EDDA
With the unknown charging down on her, the collective kindness felt like a righteous happily ever after. But if the death of her mother, laid out on the dining table of Olympic Lane, was the beginning of strange, pregnancy took the cake— the shape-shifting, voluminous middle, the Venus of Willendorf breasts, ravenous with no room for food.
On an early September morning, Mount Rainier stark and beyond the city, her time came. The Lake House women peeked in while Edda hollered without restraint. At a certain predictable stage, she vowed what other happily married women have said through the centuries, that she would kill the bastard who did this to her. She meant it more than most.
Malaga and Madrid took turns sitting by her and letting her squeeze their hands purple. Dr. Paul sent a midwife. On the whole, labor went well and the baby was delivered in time enough, thirteen hours, to open the house by 9 p.m. so that the day wasn’t a loss.
When the placenta was safely delivered and a flushed Edda held the newly cleaned little girl in her arms, Valencia sat on her bed and handed Edda a glass of chilled champagne in The Lake House’s best crystal.
The nurse wrapped the child so that she looked like a cocoon with a head. She instructed Edda that the baby had just come from a tight place. She had a lot of change to deal with, light, air, and no boundaries. Swaddling would comfort her until she got used to her new circumstances.
"There's so much I don't know," Edda said, and added, “This should have earned me a few less centuries in Purgatory.”
“She’s beautiful, perfectly, exquisitely beautiful,” Valencia said. “She looks like you.”
“Maybe.” Edda could never see how babies looked like anyone. “Except….”
“Except,” said Valencia.
No birthmark. Edda undid the bottom of the blanket and cupped a tiny foot in one hand, the baby’s charcoal eyes not yet showing their true blue, the perfect cheeks, the bow mouth, the classically proportioned features, and amazing black hair for a creature who should be bald.
Yes, she had known a baby was coming, but now that she held her, she realized she hadn’t had a clue. Not really. The last curtain of denial fell away. The first one—how long ago it seemed—had been that she was pregnant at all. Then that pregnancy was a human being forming inside her. Now, she held someone, warm and wiggling and confused in her arms. This vulnerable life depended on her. She gazed into her daughter's eyes and felt herself pour into the mystery of them—a bond for which her love of Betty had been practice.
Betty, who'd been kept outside during labor, was allowed back in. She jumped on the bed and, after spending an overly long time with her nose glued to the baby's toes, wrinkling her eyebrows and popping her eyes, she curled up in her place at Edda's knee.
“It’s a person,” Edda said incredulously. “A real person.” But still, that didn’t describe what, or who, she held in her arms. “How strange it must be for her…. she doesn’t know what just happened.”
“Your belly has been her planet," said Valencia," and she knows you. It’s not too complicated for her yet. She was on the inside. Now she’s on the outside.”
“I won’t let her down.”
“I know you won’t.”
“She can be who she wants to be and think whatever she wants to think. I'm not going to be like my mother."
Valencia nodded. "From what you've told me, I don't think you could be if you tried…What’s her name?”
The child in Edda’s arms was so new, so inexplicable, that to put any name to her seemed ridiculous. She knew what she wasn't. She wasn’t a Mary or Alice or Betsy. “I don’t think she has one.”
“You have to call her something.”
“Delores, I guess…Delores Rose.”
Delores wasn’t perfect either, but it would have to do. No human name would fit her. Rose was closer. It was a pretty name, soft, feminine, friendly. A name she could grow into. A girl named Delores Rose could be happy.
“I’m going to be the best mother, you’ll see,” she whispered to her daughter. "You’re never going to cry, not if I can help it. We’ll never be alone; we’ll be friends. It’s you and me, baby. You and me.”
At three-years-old, Rosie snuggled into bed with Betty and Edda when Edda wasn't working at the big house. Nights with that little body pulled tight to her torso, fragrant black hair on her shoulder, and sandwiched by Betty in the crook of her knees, was all Edda could ask of most days.
The rest she tolerated well enough. She'd gone back to work, this time for Valencia, seven months after Rosie was born. If sex work was an exotic choice, castigated by outsiders, it could be as stifling in its repetitiveness as any job. Even so, it was lucrative and The Lake House was top of the line. Women made appointments and were often booked months out. Demand was high. As a new mother, she was given latitude to set her own schedule and develop a roster of regulars that she, for the most part, enjoyed. She leaned into her role as La Belle Dame sans Merci with a sangfroid that suited her, made bundles, spent lavishly, and loved her little house beside the lake with daughter and dog.
At four, Rosie clasped the charm bracelet onto Edda' wrist. She loved the gold miniatures of the bus, the bull, the bullet, the bee,
"B is for…"
"Bull!" she yelled. "B is for bus!"
That B was for the bee cracked her up every time.
The Eiffel tower, the fifth charm, was made of platinum and the tiniest rubies. Edda explained that it didn’t begin with a B but was from a V.I.P. which stood for Very Important Person. Adrien had been a Parisian, sojourning in Seattle the previous the summer, homesick and overseeing the construction of a new freighter. He spent most evenings and a lot of money at the Lake House and everyone, including Edda, set their caps at him. He was a V. I. P. until the ship was finished and he went home to his wife, his daughters, and his mistress in Genoa.
"It was a goodbye gift," she told Rosie. "A merci and au revoir, which means thanks and see you again, but we won't. He'll stay over there and we'll stay here. That's the way it goes."
Rosie listed the little icons as she touched them, "Bus, Bullet, Bull, Bee and That's The Way It Goes."
Adrien had been Lucas-like, in his uniqueness, the cuts of his suits, the height of his collar, his respect for the women of the Lake House, an esteem for their beauty and femininity different than his American counterparts, and yes, his accent and disposable income. She might have settled had he asked. Edda saw him go with an unsettled pang. After Adrien, no one came close, not for years and years.
At five, sitting on a stool beside her vanity, Edda daubed Rosie's wrist with Tabu and applied lipstick, holding her little jaw steady in the same gesture as Billy once did, teaching her how to blot her lips and make kisses on the tissue, marveling at her beauty, the arc of her eyebrows, the blue, blue eyes, the heart-shaped face.
"You are the joy of my life," she said, planting a cherry kiss on the perfect little nose.
Rosie grew to fulfill Valencia's observation at her birth. She looked so like Edda that they were the proverbial two peas in a pod. In advance of her second birthday, Edda bought matching clothes from a New York company that specialized in such things. The mother-daughter look-alike outfits were trending. That year, red camisole tops and swingy red and white polka-dot skirts. Cherry patent leather shoes with ankle straps and ladybug buttons. They were a hit wherever they went, and Edda went out of her way to stay coordinated from then on.
The birthday party, planned and carried out by Valencia and Edda, was high tea on the lawn, attended by all the Lake House women in their Sunday going-to-the-races outfits. Being the only little girl on the compound, she was spoiled with a hill of stuffed animals, topped by a pair of little moccasins from Valencia, trimmed with seal fur. Balloons and a three-tiered cake. Later, the pony rides would come, the rented sailboats and Baked Alaska, but from the start, Rosie's birthday was an event, the tea served sweet and spiked with bourbon and cream.
Delores Rose—Rosie when she was sugar and spice and all that’s nice, Delores when in trouble—dressed like Edda until she was nine, which was as long as it pleased her to do so and not a day longer. At ten, going on sixteen, she rebelled.