Free Tigers in Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann Page A

serving it from the bare steel counter. He gave her mother a queer look, but did as he was instructed, as men always seemed to do.
    Daisy often wondered what invisible power her mother had that made men do that. Daisy did what she was told, too. That was because her mother was a little crazy and she knew better than to cross her, unless she really wanted to get it. But these men weren’t going to get it, not really. And anyways, they were always a bit goofy around her, not like they were afraid, but like what her mother wanted was exactly what they had been waiting their whole lives to accomplish.
    Daisy asked her mother about it once. Or rather, she asked her mother if she was pretty, because she had the vague notion that whatever power her mother had was something to do with her looks.
    “Being pretty isn’t really all that important,” her mother said. “Men like it when you have it.”
    She smiled at Daisy when she imparted this piece of information. An inclusive smile that made Daisy keep quiet. But privately, Daisy wondered who else had it and where they might have gotten it from. She thought about the movie stars she liked, but her mother didn’t really look like Audrey Hepburn or Natalie Wood, she wasn’t even pretty, exactly, so maybe that wasn’t really it . But then Daisy didn’t look like her mother, either. She was blond and blue-eyed, like her father.
    For her twelfth birthday, her mother had taken her to the Nickelodeon in Harvard Square to see Gone With the Wind . When the beautiful Vivien Leigh, green eyes flashing, told Mammy that she wouldn’t eat her breakfast, her mother had leaned over.
    “She went mad during this picture,” she whispered in her ear. “And you can see it in her eyes. You can see her breaking apart.”
    Daisy thought she could see it, too. But what she really thought about afterward was that her mother had eyes just like that and shewondered if her mother was really, truly going mad, just like crazy Vivien Leigh. Maybe that was it . That would not be so good, she decided.
    They arrived at Tiger House in the late afternoon. The car was hot and sticky and the coffee had made Daisy feel hollow. The cedar-shingled house, turned silvery from the constant onslaught of sea storms, sat on a property that spanned the length of two streets, a fact that had always amazed Daisy. The back driveway started on North Summer Street and wound between a smattering of other cottages until it opened up into their own back lawn.
    The front of the house was dominated by a double-storied, columned porch that looked out across North Water Street. On the other side of that road, a sloping front lawn led down to the small boathouse and rickety dock.
    Daisy’s great-grandmother had wanted a “bungalow,” one of the simple shingled homes the off-Islanders built to summer in. But the necessity of a summer and a winter kitchen, then a conservatory for light and a few extra bedrooms for weekend parties, had caused the original plans for the house to grow backward until what had been imagined as a boxy cottage overtook almost the entire back plot. It had been named by Daisy’s great-grandfather, an admirer of the first President Roosevelt and an avid big-game hunter with a particular passion for tigers. A large tiger skin rug, head and all, took pride of place in the green sitting room.
    Pulling into the driveway and turning off the engine, Daisy’s mother let out a big sigh. She was looking across a cluster of dusky tea roses at Aunt Helena’s next door. Aunt Helena and Uncle Avery were renting it out this summer, which meant they would all have to stay in the main house.
    “She could at least have found some people who don’t hang their laundry line in the yard,” her mother said, in that voice that meantshe was talking to herself. Rhetorical , her mother called it. That means no one wants an editorial .
    Daisy had thought it sounded fun, everyone together; her mother and aunt and Ed. And her