Mothers and Daughters

“Don’t you miss your family?”

“No,” Julia said. “Not yet.” She paused. “Is that a horrible thing to say?”

“Not if it’s the truth.” Millie wagged her sister away with her hands. “Don’t ask me. Listen, don’t ask me. Come on, let’s see this remarkable valley.”

They came out into sunshine. They came out into balmy warmth. They came out onto a rolling green vista of hills dotted with cottages, of streams rushing, cutting through the green, of slick-wet rocks, of air you could taste, a blue sky pinned to the edges of the world, bright white clouds hanging lazy overhead, the sound of chattering birds, the hush of unimaginable peace. A grin came onto her mouth. They rolled down the windows of the car, and the breeze touched their faces, a breeze that stirred memory inside her, brought it welling up into her throat. This was summertime. This was every summer she had ever known, every dreamed-of summer, imagined and real. There was a timelessness to the valley. A timelessness to the slow and lazy descent of the automobile effortlessly navigating the mountain curves, a timelessness to the sparkling fresh bounding water of the streams and the river and the grass beyond, the brightest grass she had ever seen in her life, storybook grass set against a storybook sky. She caught her breath. She held her breath and felt the sun touching her arm where it rested on the sill of the car, and the soft gentle breeze catching at her hair. She could feel her hair fluttering against her cheek. She wanted to stop the car and lie in the thick grass, suck juice from the thick stem of a blade of grass caught between her teeth, spread her hair behind her on luxuriant thickness, open her blouse, feel the kiss of the sun on her naked body. She knew this valley, oh she had been in this valley when the world was new, walked in it alone with the same sun shining overhead, and the same ancient streams, and the same idle smoke drifting from ancient chimneys, her valley. She said aloud, “It was worth it.”

She wished she were alone. She felt she was about to cry, and she wanted to be able to cry alone, without her sister there.

She drove slowly. She wanted to savor this time. She wanted to remember every curve, every curious twisting of rock, each rill, each sound, each painfully sweet assault of blue and green and white and sparkling silver. Sensuously, she opened herself to the valley, succumbing to it as to a lover.

They ate lunch in the town of Brig. Everyone spoke German. The ladies’ room was filthy. There was one towel on the roller mechanism, and it had been used repeatedly, and fat women in flowered house dresses rolled the towel and dried their hands on the same smudged material over and over again. There were young men singing and marching in the streets, knapsacks on their backs. They loaded the car onto the train, and made certain they asked for first-class tickets. The ride was fairly comfortable. A man sitting next to them was eating bread and cheese, and for the first time in her life, Julia felt like an American. The man knew what she was, and his knowledge touched something inside her, so that being an American suddenly became something of which to be very proud. She was a tourist, true, and she had heard all about the terrible Tourist and the impression he created abroad, the fat Texas oil millionaire with his Leica camera around his neck and his cigar in his mouth, desecrating the cathedrals of the old world, treating Europeans like foreigners on their own soil, generally playing the stereotyped role of the fat American capitalist boor. She had heard the stories, and she was a tourist, yes, but she felt completely and utterly American, and the feeling was a good one. She did not know whether the man sitting across the aisle eating bread and cheese liked Americans or disliked them or was indifferent to them. Nor did she particularly care. Being American was enough. She had never been farther west than Pennsylvania nor farther north than Massachusetts, nor farther south than Washington, D.C. But sitting in a first-class coach on a train racing through tunnels toward the Italian border, she suddenly felt the overwhelming geographic length and breadth of her country, was suddenly intimate with grain fields and mountains and seashores and deserts and canyons and cities and towns. All of America, all of its people and places, suddenly surged into her and became a part of her, giving her an existence separate from her own — and yet indistinguishable from it. She was an American. The title gave her pleasure.