Free Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann

cigarette. Wind blew against the windowpane.
    “Darling, have you been drinking?”
    “Yes, a martini, or three.” Nick laughed, but it sounded more like a fork on a tin cup. “I’m sorry, darling, I just wanted to talk to you, talk about something from before.”
    “Are you sure you’re all right?”
    “Yes, yes. I have to go now. Good-bye, Helena.”
    “Good-bye, Nick. Write to me soon.”
    Nick put the receiver down. “Good-bye,” she said to the quiet room and the wind whistling past the ash tree.
    Nick had gone to bed early that night, complaining of a headacheand crying herself to sleep while Hughes ate soup in the kitchen by himself. But the next night, when he arrived home, she was prepared.
    She had put on her red shantung dress, the one she had worn to the 21 Club during the war, and had her hair set in Harvard Square. She prepared steaks and mashed potatoes and peppered green beans. She fixed martinis and the pitcher was sweating on the marble top of the bar when her husband came through the door.
    She met him in the front hall and took his briefcase out of his hand.
    “Feeling better?” he asked, kissing her forehead.
    “Much,” Nick said. “Go into the living room. I’ve prepared cocktails.”
    Hughes looked at her, saw her hair, her dress. “What’s the occasion?”
    “A great occasion,” Nick said, disappearing through the dining room toward the bar, his briefcase heavy as lead.
    Her hand shook as she poured the martinis and she had to swab up the tears of vodka that had dribbled down the glasses. She placed them on a silver tray with olives. Nick stood back and looked at them, marveling at how something could look so clean and be so poisonous at the same time.
    Patting down her hair, she picked up the tray and walked carefully through the long garden room, her high heels clacking out a rhythm on the tile floor. When she reached the living room, she saw Hughes sitting in his blue wing chair, looking expectantly at her.
    Nick set the tray down gently on the side table next to him. She handed him one glass and took the other for herself.
    “Hughes, I’ve decided …” She stopped. “I think we should have a baby. I want a baby.”
    Hughes put his glass down and stood, taking her in his arms.
    “Darling,” he whispered into her hair, sending off the acrid odor of hair spray. “It is a great occasion.”
    “Yes,” Nick said.
    “I knew you’d want one. I knew you’d change your mind and that you’d want one, too.”
    And with that, something hard and pure that had been living inside her, a dream that perhaps had begun in the maid’s room of her mother’s house the day she married, shattered, and dissolved into her hot blood.

DAISY

1959: JUNE
    D aisy would always remember that summer as the summer they found the body. It was also the summer she turned twelve and had first been kissed, near the old ice cellar, where they now kept all the rusting bicycles. But that first flutter of skin on skin had paled in comparison to the excitement of death. When they stumbled upon it behind the tennis courts, they weren’t even sure what it was at first. Just a large lump covered with a dirty travel blanket, with something sticking out of it that looked like a man-of-war.
    It had started out like every other June she could remember. Two days after her birthday, her mother had packed up the station wagon and they had driven the two hours to the ferry in Woods Hole. They fought about the radio station. Her mother said that the Clovers were all right, because they sounded like real music. But, she told Daisy, she didn’t understand why all the music seemed to have lost its poetry. And she hated the word “chick.” Daisy smirked to herself.
    On the boat, her mother bought her a coffee, with lots of milk. Her mother always drank hers without anything in it, bitter. Young girls must learn to drink coffee, but jangly nerves are unbecoming . “Just adrop,” she told the man in the white cap