Household Gods

Umma apparently knew. “Dear” Mother and a couple of upwardly mobile sisters, was it? Then they probably didn’t just drop in to visit, the way Brigomarus felt free to do; and that was a relief. It was enough of a tightrope walk to keep Umma’s image going in this tavern and in the neighborhood, without trying to fool Umma’s own mother into believing that Nicole was Umma.

So where was Umma? Back in West Hills trying desperately to cope? Floating somewhere in limbo? Or – with a jolt that made her gasp – dead? Dead and… gone?

For now, Nicole focused on a simpler problem. “Don’t you worry about it,” she said to Julia. “Everything’s going to be fine, and Brigomarus will figure out he’d be smart to keep his nose out of things that are none of his business.”

“How can you say they’re none of his business?” Nicole hadn’t pegged Julia as a worrier, but neither had she presented Julia with a problem that pertained directly to her. “You’re part of his family. They’ll all be up in arms when they hear what you want to do, mark my words.”

In the United States of the late twentieth century, family was a pallid thing – so pallid that Frank, damn him, could abandon his with hardly a backward glance, and abandon it without disapproval from anyone but Nicole. If anything, his colleagues were jealous he’d latched on to a new, young, sexy girlfriend. And Nicole herself, while she liked her sisters well enough, lived two thousand miles away from them and didn’t call as often as she should, let alone write. She’d hardly thought of them at all in the week before she came to Carnuntum, except to wish she could palm the kids off on them for a couple of days after she found out Josefina was heading for Ciudad Obregon.

On the whole, Nicole had liked things that way. She hadn’t cared for it when Frank bugged out, not even a little bit, but she’d enjoyed being free herself, ever since she’d got big enough to tell her mother no and make it stick. If she didn’t have to kill herself over money and her job, she liked responsibility, liked being, from day to day, the only one who really took care of the house, the kids, her life in general.

Julia sounded as if family disapproval in Carnuntum was like being shunned in an Amish community – Nicole had seen something on television about that, and been caught by the intensity of reaction to something that amounted to the silent treatment. Silence was lovely, she’d thought. So was being left alone. She could have used a lot of that when she was growing up, stuck sharing a bedroom with a sister she could barely stand the sight of, who’d grown up into a reasonably decent person but with whom Nicole had next to nothing in common.

It seemed Umma had about the same relationship with her sisters as Nicole had – but The Family meant far, far more.

Well. So it did. She d weathered infidelity, shed weathered divorce. She could weather family disapproval, too. She was her own person, first, last, and always.

She said so, loudly and emphatically. She had no real hope of raising Julia’s consciousness, but maybe, over time and with repetition, some of it would stick.

Right at the moment, Julia didn’t look enlightened. She looked horrified. Nicole was used to working hostile audiences; it was what a lawyer did for a living. But Julia had a look that warned her to go slow or she’d lose the case. She tried one more time, regardless: “I am my own person. You can be your own person. Family doesn’t have to dictate every breath you take. It isn’t even your family! I’m not worried about it. Why should you be?”

Julia’s chin was set, her face closed. She wrapped herself in a cloud of flour, slapping together another batch of bread for the evening crowd, immersing herself in work to keep from listening – or perhaps to keep from screaming at her mistress to shut up.

She visibly relaxed when Nicole dropped the subject. Nicole sighed. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” she murmured in English, and started, painfully, to laugh. Julia’s startled expression only made her laugh the harder.

Family you could escape, but even in West Hills it was sometimes hard to escape the neighbors. Not that, there, they dropped by and wanted to borrow a cup of oil and stay on for a chat; it was more like hard rock at three A.M. and dog poop in the front yard.

In Carnuntum, there wasn’t anything at three A.M. but maybe an early rooster crowing, but during the day plenty went on. The day after Brigomarus came to pull his sister into line, Nicole looked up from chopping scallions to find herself face to face with a vaguely familiar figure. It was the voice that jogged her memory, high and rather thin, with a touch of what people in Indiana used to call adenoids.