2. January 1965
CHAPTER 2
January 1965
JUDE
Hope and Faith, whose eighth birthday is the following day, are standing in the middle of the living room, arguing over a doll.
“I got that for Christmas,” Hope says, glowering at her identical twin. “Santa brought that for me .”
“You can share, Hopey,” Faith says in a bossy tone of voice. “Mama said we have to share everything.”
Jude is standing in the kitchen as her girls go back and forth over this damn doll, and it’s taking all of her willpower not to add a splash of vodka to her orange juice to soothe her jangled nerves.
Being a mother has been one of the great joys of her life, though Jude doesn’t think that it’s a job she does particularly well. When she’d gone into the hospital to give birth, she’d expected to come home with one giant, lumbering baby boy. A baby who would turn into a toddler and tumble all over in the grass, break things, and show a natural curiosity for the world that might guide him on his own adventures, leaving Jude free to mostly observe.
Instead, she’d been handed a tiny, squirming baby girl covered in slippery vernix, and the doctor had immediately gone back down between her legs, telling her to keep pushing. Much to Jude’s dismay, a second girl had emerged, and Vance, her patient, stoic husband—waiting outside the delivery room as fathers generally did—had been informed that he had not one boy, but instead, two girls. He’d come in to Jude’s room as soon as he was allowed, standing aside from her hesitantly, a look of shock on his handsome face.
“So,” Vance had said, laughing and crying at the same time. “I guess we have two weddings to pay for.”
Jude, flooded with hormones and exhaustion and terror, had begun to sob openly. “Twins,” she said, shaking her head. “I had no idea.”
Vance laughed louder. “Honey,” he’d said. “How could you have known? It was a total surprise.”
“But what will I do with girls ?” she asked, her eyes skating towards the window and focusing on the gray sky outside the hospital window. They were living in Texas at that point, and the January day was overcast, but not rainy.
Vance shrugged. “You’ll love them. You’ll read to them and sing to them and raise them up right. You’ll teach them everything you know about being a woman and a mother.”
His words were meant to be soothing, but instead, they’d struck fear into Jude’s heart. How could she teach anyone how to be a woman and a mother when she barely remembered her own mother? When her sole impression of womanhood was a stepmother who had shunned her for most of her childhood? She’d had a few teachers to whom she’d looked at with admiration; women of superior patience and femininity, but as far as a mother figure…well, she hadn’t seen her own mother since 1941.
“Jude?” Vance had asked gently, as if he were calling her back down from a high place, begging her to join him. “Everything is going to be okay. I know you’re tired right now and probably hurting, but I promise, things will be good. The babies are healthy and they’re beautiful.”
“Do they look…” Jude couldn’t bear to finish the question. She’d spent her life trying to look as American as she possibly could, and it was so ingrained in her, the importance of blending in, that she immediately wanted that for her daughters.
“They look gorgeous,” Vance had said forcefully. “Perfect in every way.”
Once he’d left to get a cup of coffee and to look at the babies in the nursery, Jude had allowed herself to stare at the sky until it lulled her into a hazy sleep-state. While dozing, she considered all the many ways she’d tried to acclimate and assimilate to her surroundings over the years: she’d stopped speaking Japanese altogether, to the point that it was but a distant memory that tickled the back of her brain now. She’d immersed herself in all things American: the music, the movies, the pop culture. And, as a teenager, she’d gone so far as to start dying her dark hair a mousy blonde, though there was nothing she could do about her dark eyes. It had all worked, at least in Jude’s estimation, to help her blend in and be what she needed to be to survive, but she feared for her brand-new baby girls that they’d spend their entire lives doing the same thing: trying to be something different, something elusive, something better than what they were.
“Mommy!” Faith calls out now, coming into the kitchen with one fist on her tiny hip. “Hope is being mean to me.”
Jude sighs and sits in a kitchen chair, patting her thighs. Without words, Faith sits down on her mother’s lap and turns to look right at her, eyes imploring her mother to intervene. To solve the problem. To be the voice of reason.
My beautiful girls , Jude thinks, tucking Faith’s hair behind one ear.
“Remember what I told you?” she says to Faith, glancing at the doorway to the kitchen as Hope appears there, looking sheepish. She is holding the doll in her hands.
“I remember what you told us, Mommy,” Hope says. “You said that someday we might only have each other, and so we should always be nice. Not everyone gets a sister.”
“That’s right,” Jude says, pulling out the chair next to hers for Hope to sit in. Once both girls are seated, she looks back and forth between them. “I hope that Daddy and I are here for a long, long time, but in life, sometimes people grow up and their very best friends are their brothers and sisters. You come from the same place, and you understand each other. That’s important.”
“Just like you and Aunt Mary and Uncle Oliver?” Faith asks innocently.
Jude swallows hard before answering. She and Mary and Oliver are not close. Her girls know them, of course, and have met their children, but for their entire lives, Jude has been pitted against Mary and Oliver, so the relationship is not a warm one, but rather a functional one.
“Aunt Mary and Uncle Oliver and I have different mothers,” Jude explains. Outside the kitchen window, a bird flies in and lands in a tree, catching Jude’s attention. She watches it momentarily as it flutters its wings and settles. “And there are things about our childhood that make it hard for us to be best friends.” She is afraid of saying too much, and so she stops there.
“Like what?” Faith pushes.
Jude shakes her head. “Just the way our father was.” Michael Harper had died before his granddaughters were born, and therefore Hope and Faith have no face, no memories, to assign to this man who was their grandfather. “He raised us differently, or rather, he let Grandma Bea raise us differently.”
The girls know their grandmother and are on good terms with her, but then again, they’re only eight years old. Jude fully anticipates that some of Bea’s feelings towards her husband’s oldest child will trickle down to Hope and Faith as they grow up, but as of yet, Bea has been consistently kind to them on the occasions when their paths have crossed.
Bea had remarried after her husband’s untimely death from lung cancer, and, in a weird twist of fate, she’d married a widower named Irving, a former Navy man who’d lost his wife, Esther, in a car accident, leaving him with his children, Chester and Ann, to raise alone. Of course, Irving and Michael Harper had known one another, as was already established when Michael suggested that Irving’s wife escort his young daughter from Japan to Los Angeles in 1941, but the eventual melding of the families had been enough for Jude to put as much distance between herself and Bea as possible. There is no way in hell she wants to spend holidays with Chester or to allow him anywhere near her girls.
“Are you raising us differently?” Hope asks, frowning at Jude.
“I’m raising you differently than Grandma Bea raised me, Uncle Oliver, and Aunt Mary, but I’m not raising you differently than each other ,” she says, hoping that this distinction will make sense to her girls. “I love you both the same, and I want you both to understand that neither one of you is any less or more important in this household.”
The girls look at Jude with serious expressions, and she realizes that there’s no need to drive the point home today; she has plenty of years to show them and to tell them how important they both are to her.
“Now, why don’t you two go and play—nicely—while I finish making the cake for your birthday party tomorrow?”
At the words “cake” and “party,” Hope and Faith suddenly adopt a whole different attitude. Hope holds out the doll with a look of mild reluctance, and Faith smiles at her gravely.
“Thank you,” Faith says, accepting the doll. A brief flicker of regret passes over Hope’s face, but Jude gets them both on their feet and sends them off to play so that she can gather the ingredients for the lemon cake and buttercream frosting.
With the girls chattering happily in the front room, Jude moves around the kitchen, tying her apron around her waist, pulling a mixing bowl from the cupboard, and taking flour, sugar, eggs, and butter out and setting them all on the counter.
As much as the idea of a party thrills the girls, it does less to inspire joy in Jude; she’s always been more of an observer than a doer. Given the choice, she’d generally choose to sit on the sidelines and keep to herself. By tucking herself away from others, she’s more readily able to blend in, to hide the things about herself that she knows she should not share. But by keeping herself removed, she also misses all the opportunities for real friendship. Real camaraderie. True depth and understanding.
She’s lived the past twenty-four years of her life this way, and it’s hard to imagine suddenly doing it any other way.
By the time Vance gets home from NASA that evening, there’s a frosted cake resting on a wire rack, the food has been prepped for the next afternoon’s party, and Jude has vacuumed the entire house, cleared the pool area, and set up a table and two long benches beneath a tree. Hope and Faith have both taken a swim, showered, and are sitting in an oversized hammock reading books peacefully.
And—though she tries to remain completely steady on her feet—Jude Majors is already drunk.