TITLE: Cradle on the Water
BY: Meredith Bronwen Mallory
PAIRING: Jim/Blair
SPOILERS: all seasons
WARNINGS: Talk of abortion, swear works, het sex (not involving the boys), m/m sex, ect.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: First off, I should thank you for taking the time to look at this piece. It's still sort of in progress, but the bulk of it is done and I'm really just tweaking and tying things together. I'm hoping posting the first bit of this will get me out of my little mini-writer's block and back into action. This is my first Sentinel fic (don't run screaming from the room yet!), but not my first slash fic. New fandom... *sniffs* It's the first time all over again. *wink* That said, I hope you enjoy the story, and I would _dearly_ love feedback, should you choose to feed my greedy little muse. *puppy dog eyes*
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. I think I have to get in line, or something. ^_~
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Cradle on the Water
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
http://www.demando.net/
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They talked about her like she wasn't even there.
Vaguely, Naomi Sandburg knocked the backs of her sandals against the rung of the stool she was perched on-- but all that earned her was a halfhearted 'stop that, dear'. She puffed harshly on her cigarette, eyeing the yellow California day drawing to a close outside the window. At the kitchen table, her mother sat opposite Ms. Goldman ('Aunt Dolores'), the two of them poised fine and brittle over their tea cups, thrusting worried, half-finished sentences at each other.
"Marriage--" Dolores tried the word, as if it was somehow bitter on her tongue.
Ruth Sandburg shook her careful bob of dark hair, "They're so young."
"And the war."
They nodded to each other.
"And---"
"His number came up, Ruthie, dear god--"
"Hush. Oh, Dorie."
Their hands touched across the table, "What's a mother to do, Ruthie?"
At that, both women turned to acknowledge Naomi for the first time since they'd sat down. The young woman felt the weight of that word-- 'mother'-- on her shoulders like one of Ruth Sandburg's heavy rings. Antiquated. Something she didn't want; but they looked at her like it was her fault, all the same. Funny, no one had batted an eye about where Frank had been sticking his dick. A moment later, Naomi sighed and purposely flicked some ash onto the pristine counter. She didn't want to think unkindly about Frank-- it wasn't his fault that patriarchal ideas about reproduction still prevailed. It wasn't even as if he'd abandoned her to these cronies, either. Naomi tilted her lips briefly, just imagining what her mother would say if she knew there was every possibility that the baby wasn't Frank's. "You've nothing to smile about, Naomi," her mother said, not unkindly. Dolores eye's were more firm, gazing over the other woman's shoulders. She couldn't find anything to say to these two women, so removed from her and the slow, lazy days of '69 summer. In a strange way, their panicked, birdlike conversation touched her as much at it angered her; there was something in their eyes that said they knew the slow, wondrous, creeping
feeling of not being alone in your own body.
Slowly, she pushed herself off the stool and came to stand under the blue polka-dotted frame of the curtains. The kitchen spread out around her like a painting, with the lighting just so, and she even had a title for the piece. 'The Price of Womanhood', or something like that.
"What will you _do_, child?" Dolores stressed. The hand held out to comfort seemed somehow also menacing, skin weathered and muscles twisted with age.
"I don't know," Naomi rolled her shoulders elegantly, elaborately. "I have nine months to figure things out."
"Oh, for God's sake!" Ruth threw her hands up. They fluttered briefly, crazy butterflies in a much smoother contrast to Dolores, before alighting on the edge of the table.
Maybe I'll scream and cry, Naomi considered. Maybe I'll dash away their precious tea cups, rake the sugar and cream off the table into they splash onto the floor, soaking into their house slippers. The kitchen was too small, the house was too small, the whole goddamn world she'd lived in was too small, any place that wasn't 'just down the corner' consigned to being foreign, unimportant and strange. Even her own body seemed like darkest Africa, illuminated only by the fumbling, inexpert explorations of Frank, and boys, and her own blooming curiosity. She could use her body to have sex, to shit and piss and all those other words her mother didn't like her to use. But what was this thing, this cage of bones, that now held not just one, but two?
(I'm me and someone else!)
Queer, queer thought.
"Mom," she said, unaware how much time had passed, "It's my baby. You don't have to worry about it."
For a moment, Ruth opened her too-thin lips, but Dolores had a note high and clear that over rode everything else.
"The things you say!" her honorary aunt muttered, "You're nineteen. Who're you to have a baby? Not married, no job."
"At least," Ruthie said, "You'll not fight with your father about college, anymore."
Naomi huffed, "I can go to college and have a baby if I want to." She paced, mincing on the blue tile work floor, "I'll do whatever I damn well please."
(You will, you already do, and you're paying for it. In for a penny, in for a pound, sweet child of mine.)
"Such a selfish girl," Dolores murmured, having hurried to Ruth's side, holding the other woman delicately against her own sagging breasts. Her voice was the voice inside Naomi, bred into her, saying 'you can't do this' and 'you can't do that'. The voice Naomi smashed ruthlessly (ha ha!), with no thought for the future. And, on this crazy kitchen theater, she wasn't sure who was playing the villain.
"Oh," Ruth murmured, wilting against her friend like some small china blossom, in many ways unreal. Frowning, Naomi took the scene in, as if trying to match it with her program, find her lines, whatever would get her out of here, and fast. It was a strange tableau, intimate and blasphemous in ways she couldn't put her finger on, until Dolores pressed a kiss unto Ruth's dark, curly hair.
(No.)
"This discussion isn't over," Ruth murmured, a princess in a fortress of flesh and blood arms. God, but Naomi had seen this before, in her childhood; Mother and Father, voices raised‹ or the Goldman's next door, women in each other's kitchens. I know your problems, love, I know.
"It isn't." Dolores agreed. Blocked on both sides by Queens, check annnnd mate!
Naomi screwed up her courage and smiled anyway, saying, "I'd imagine not."
She would have flounced upstairs, really she would have‹ even if she didn't know what she was thinking or feeling, taking oppositional stance because it was her nature and her habit, her unconscious breath or air.
Except.
"Come see me out, Naomi," Dolores asked, just a little laced with sugar to hide fact of command. Slowly, Naomi pressed the butt of her cigaret into the tiny, crystal ash tray her mother left on the kitchen table. Somehow, she couldn't breathe-- she was fumbling for another cigaret and her lighter, even as she moved across the tiled floor. "Filthy habit," the older woman said, in a curious echo of Naomi's mother.
"I keep telling her to stop," Ruth Sandburg shook her head, dark curls coming to cluster over her face like a haphazard veil.
"Children never listen," Dolores sympathized, taking Naomi by the arm with one fleshy, sapphire-ringed hand. The younger girl felt curiously insubstantial, as if the house lights had already dimmed, save for the spotlight on poor, darling Ruthie, who only ever tried to do right by her daughter. By God.
(maybe I don't feel for them, after all)
It was Dolores tightening grip that brought Naomi back to reality-- to the sunset-lit, cramped porch with it's flaking white paint. Out in the natural light, Dolores seemed a little smaller, long brown braid swaying, illuminating the silver that riddled the plait. Across the lawn, the Goldman yard was pristine, save for the red bicycle abandoned in the grass, wheel spinning. Tick, tick, tick.
"Listen to me, Naomi," the older woman said, jutting her face up as if she wished to peer right down inside Naomi's pupils. "You just listen to me."
She held up one peach-painted nail, even as the younger woman's lips parted. "You talk, allathe time. Now you can just use your ears for a change."
(I talk and I talk because no one listens. Damn you, living here, on this street since you were born, since you flushed out between your mother's legs on the very same couch Frank and I made out on before we got down to doing It. Blah, blah. I might as well be speaking Chinese.)
Nodding slowly, the redhead fished in the pockets of her smock, finally coming up with a lighter and a long, ivory stick of nicotine. It felt sort of elegant to snap the rose-patterned Bic.
"Oh, fine," Dolores rolled her eyes, still standing nose to nose with the younger generation, even with the smoke drifting around her face. "Child, I don't know what got into you and Frank. I just-- I just don't know. But, no matter now. What's done is done, and not I, nor Frank nor you can take that back. I just wish you'd have thought of your mother. But I suspect you had other things on your mind that night. Was it when Mister Goldman and I took off for Vegas? Was that it? Or while I was at the bridge club, hmmm? No matter." She took a fresh breath while Naomi watched the words drop out of the aged, but oddly pretty mouth. Those eyes when suddenly a hawk-like
green, more yellow and lime than anything, and Dolores said so softly, "I love Ruthie. God knows that I do. And this, this it'll break her heart."
(Yes, on this very same street, all their lives. Ruthie Baitman and Dorie Greenburg, born just six days apart. What a talisman, that number! Diapers hung side by side on the line, matching laced panties-- blue for Dorie, green for Ruthie. In their grammar school photo, side by side in braids. Almost like twins. High school has curls clustered like a crown, and you know it-- the Foster brothers took them to prom. Always swore they'd marry brothers, just so they could be real sisters, they did.)
Naomi coughed a little, without meaning to, because there was something in those words that didn't mesh right with anything she'd ever expected to hear.
("I love Ruthie."
A warm, warm summer night, out on the moon-strewn lawn. Fireflies, same ones Mommy used to help me catch in a cherry jar.
1936? '37?
Roll over, here's Dolores without the frown lines, without the little limp from her too long pregnancy. Hair spread out on the grass. And Mother, brown-eyed like the most graceful doe, gripping her hand. "I love you, Ruthie."
Maybe?)
It was just that way, or seemed to be, in those limelight eyes.
"Here's what we're going to do," the old-lady Dolores came back into focus, jaw set, commanding Naomi's complicity. "California passed the law, just a bit back. End of days it means, maybe, but I'm glad of it now. We'll get you an abortion."
It came out so tiny, even though she meant to shout, "What!?"
"An abortion," the graying woman repeated, plopping the word off her tongue as if it tasted bad." Naomi could only stare at the woman, at the wind chimes hanging still and the red bike way out there on the lawn, so surreal.
(Come on, my girl. It's not as if you hadn't thought about it before.
Didn't you, darlin', did that word, the 'a' word, come to mind when you were sitting on the toilet at the college's free clinic? Don't play innocent with me.)
"I'll take you into San Hose next week, after I find a place to get the job done. We won't tell your mother. Wait a few weeks-- complain of aches and such. We'll say you had a miscarriage," Dolores' voice became soft, silent as the grave, "Your own mother lost two before you that way, and they say it runs in women. Sad, true, but God in His wisdom took your baby. That's how it'll be. Sad, but best."
"I--" Oh, how thick Naomi's tongue felt!
"Be a good girl," the other woman pressed down on her shoulders, as if to make her five again. "I won't let anyone hurt your mother, Naomi. Even you."
She was still standing there, long after Dolores had moved painstakingly back to her own, small white house-- until the sky was a bright, beginning-night blue and her mother called out to see what was the matter. Naomi said 'nothing, Ma'
(nothing!)
and fisted her hands in her jean pockets with a miserable sort of certainty.
(It's out of my hands.)
Closing her eyes, she thought, 'I can go in right now, tell Mom what she said. Never mind I've thought about it too-- it's that the choice has been taken away from me. A woman's right to decide, and she thinks she can just tell me. I don't owe anyone anything.'
But--
(Memories upon memories, layered like the fine bridal gown Mother had unfurled from the cedar chest that one, special time. See, Naomi? Your Aunt Dolores and I made this together, on the condition that the first one to get married got to wear it. But it wasn't a race, No-ho. Just fate to decide. Look at the flowers here? Dolores could always stitch better than I. Holidays at the beach, Ruth and her Naomi, Dolores and her boy Frank (and, later, Jonathan too). Christmases, Mother and Auntie sitting around the table, while Pa and Mr. Goldman listened to the game and said words that made the "womenfolk" roll their eyes. Everywhere, every time-- shopping, cooking, sewing. The girls from 231 and 232 Lilly Road. Yeah, sure Naomi. Say to your mother, "Your best friend, your sister under the skin, told me she wants me to get an- an--" How can you tattle if you can't even say it?)
"Damn," Naomi swore faithfully and sat down on the dirt-crusted porch steps, elbows on her knees as she listened to the wind and her own heart howl.
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END PART 1
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com