Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun by Tom Carson Read Free Book Online Page A

looks. In my mother’s mind, nothing that was or ever had been true of her could be a generality. By then, however, a little alarm bell was lodged in her daughter’s brain.
    Only on movie screens has the bliss stayed unalloyed. Otherwise, I was never to confront true loveliness in women—I mean the kind that’s a painting that breathes, a Charles Ives concerto for face and voice, with lashes that dip as if tasting their own eyes’ forbidden fruit before showing it to you like a one-armed bandit’s jackpot—without intimations of terror at both what beauty had license to do and what the world apparently had license to do to it.
    Once adolescent torments were done, I was relieved that my own case was no special cause for concern. By college I did have some assets, starting with my lanky frame’s long legs. If I’d been younger when Sixties fashion produced its masterpiece, a miniskirt would’ve been my Jolly Roger. Beyond the gams, the Buchanan bod had its drawbacks, including a bosom whose bulge would’ve looked like the most minor of Indian raids on a map. My favorite description of my physique in the nude was Cadwaller’s: “Friendly.”
    One of the minor blessings of being my age is that you’ve by and large quit noticing—all right, assessing— other women’s looks too. So feeling the old fear and wonder creep into my bones whenever, either in person or her grandpa Chris’s photographs, I see Panama Cadwaller laughing and cavorting wounds me, stuns me, makes me want to protest at life’s reminder that the thing and the thing’s perils aren’t done.
    Like her untamable hair and unlike the blue-gray whorls I’ve outed as the mimsy borogoves here on daisysdaughter.com, Hopsie’s great-granddaughter’s eyes are as dark as tributes to Goya. When I told her so, she batted them and teased me by pouting false ignorance: “Aw, Gramela! You mean the beans ,right?” So far Panama’s eyes are famous only to her relatives, of which I am one by marital proxy and geezery prerogative. But since she occasionally chatters of trying acting, they may yet end up suspended on billboards over some carnival wasteland or another.
    I’m fairly sure now they’re closed. It’s only a little after seven a.m. on June 6, my second D-Day—my, I’m certainly whizzing through these posts, aren’t I?—and her school in Manhattan’s already out for the summer. Luxuriously free from now ’til fall, she probably isn’t out of bed yet: her dark hair spangling a cool pillow like a messier sun turned black in the developing room, her hurled limbs turning sleep into one more athletic event where teenagers take the gold just by breathing.
    June or no June, I’m astonished her dad lets her sleep in that outfit. What can you be thinking, Tim? Sleeveless ribbed undershirt hiked up nearly to ribcage by a restless fist. Innocent (well, let’s pray) plum in panties I wouldn’t have risked wearing on my wedding night to Abelard, let alone Murphy. In frontal view, the tiny red bow at waistband’s center would’ve alarmed me less if it’d just been a mite nearer—honestly, would another inch be such a sacrifice?—her belly button. Are you awake yet, Panama?
    No matter. Even asleep, you know your name at birth was Pamela ,a tribute to me you improved on by refusing to be anybody’s namesake. The mimsies were thrilled when I caught on it wasn’t just baby talk: “Panama!” you insisted at three when grandpa Chris tried to correct you. Used to it himself, he worried you’d hurt the elderly, dentition-mulling (yes, the teeth were shot back in my seventies) guest’s feelings.
    Panama it has been since. That stubby act of defiance was what first let your Gramela imagine that—via some osmotic smearing of unguents, and spared the claptrap and forceps in between—I’d produced a great-granddaughter.
    Your looks don’t unnerve only me. In spite of my mimsial whimsies that you’ve somehow inherited the Buchanan gams, I played no