It all came together in a flash: loose threads, creeping suspicions, puzzle pieces—it all suddenly fitted together in the mind of Faye’s mother. The world seemed to stop spinning, coming to a standstill with a jolt, when her husband told her he’d seen a lemurian in the yard, coming down from the chestnut tree, possibly coming out of her…daughter’s bedroom..!

“Marie, did you hear what I said? …Are you okay?”

Yes, she heard, no, she didn’t think she was okay. Marie wasn’t easily shocked, but this turned her world upside down. Nothing made sense anymore…

“Marie..?”

“It’s that brother!” she hissed at her husband, “Pearly’s brother, what’s-his-name, Johnny!”

“That’s… that’s what I thought, yeah. She slammed her window shut when I called for her. You don’t think— should I go up to her room, and talk..?” Her husband seemed suddenly small for his broad-shouldered six foot one frame, a pained expression on his face, uncertain what to do.

How could she not have guessed what was going on? Goddammit! Only last week she had found some short white hairs (fur!) on her daughter’s sheets (of her bed!) , and hadn’t thought twice about it. What had that stupid idiot child been doing? She’d been acting weird for months now, but she’d always been a girl with moods… reading out loud in her room? Jesus, Marie had been dense. And a couple of days ago: Faye had asked her how important it was for a woman to have children. Children? Fuck!

“Mom,” she had asked, while they did the dishes, “is it a woman’s purpose to have children?”

“Her purpose?” she had said, a bit taken aback. She hadn’t raised her daughter to be that old-fashioned, had she? “No, it’s not her purpose. A woman can choose to work, or be an artist, be president someday, this can all be a woman’s purpose.” It was that damn school, Marie was sure.

“Can it be one of a woman’s purposes than?”

“Sure, if a woman wants to have children, she certainly should. And some may naturally feel it’s their purpose. Some children are pretty nice to have, as a matter of fact,” she had beamed at her daughter. “But a woman shouldn’t have children because society demands it, or because the neighbors look at her funny if she doesn’t, or because teachers, or the church, or men, or her husband say it’s her purpose as a woman.”

“Well, do you know any women in town, besides Miss Muller, and besides that sad widow lady, well, besides people that were dealt a bad hand, so to speak, do you know any regular women in town who aren’t married, and have children?”

Marie had thought hard for a moment. Damn this town, she thought. “Well,” she decided to say then, “I never wanted to have children, actually…”

“What? Shut up!”

“No, I’m serious! I didn’t have time for children, I wanted to have a career on Broadway, like your Aunt Liz. I wanted to be a theatre director, direct musicals and revues. I was well on my way, in fact, and Liz was writing a play especially for me… but then I met your father, fell in love, and that was that.”

Faye had been amazed. She was familiar with the story of how her parents met: her father coming in for coffee at the café where her mother waited tables, on the very last day of his visit to the Big Apple, and Faye had thought about herself never having been born if her father had gone into another café… but she had never thought about her mother actually having a life before that moment.

“Couldn’t you do both? You know, fall in love and direct musicals?” Faye had asked. She could definitely fancy herself growing up on Broadway!

“No, not really,” Marie had said, wistfully. “You see, times were changing back then. Times always change, and with it, people change. Your Aunt Liz and Aunt Vicky were teenagers in the 1920s, and those were pretty wild times. Young women said to hell with social conventions and claimed all the freedoms men had. They could do anything and be anything they wanted. And in the village where me and my sisters were raised, time had been standing still for decades, and your grandparents only allowed us girls to get off the homestead to go to school and to go to church, and that was it. Vicky ran away from home when she was fifteen. A year later Liz followed her to New York at fourteen. And this still didn’t ring a bell in the thick heads of my parents!

“I had only just been born then, so I didn’t remember Vicky and Liz, but your Aunt Minnie would tell me about them, and she had some sort of arrangement with a girl from school who received postcards and letters from our older sisters. We used to dream of life in New York, and felt like two characters in sad fairy tale, two kids being locked up by our evil parents, while the rest of the world was singing and dancing and having parties.

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“When I finally made it to New York, things had already changed a lot. The Great Depression had put an end to most parties, and women were expected to behave themselves properly again. Women didn’t get drunk, didn’t have fun with men who weren’t their husband… and then came the war, and things changed again. Women were needed to keep the economy going, while so many men were off to fight the Nazis and the Japanese. We did hard work in the factories, we fixed cars, we showed them we could do anything the men did. We were sure this was a change that would last.

“But when the war was over, the men came back, and we were expected to go back to our kitchens again, and fix our husband’s supper when they came home from work… be their servants, basically, if you didn’t have money for actual servants.

“Now, your father, of course, likes me just the way I am, and would never expect me to do anything I didn’t want, and knows how to fix his own meal, but, well, the truth is, I kind of liked taking care of him, and he liked going to work, and taking care of me that way.

“Every morning I would wake up, and wondered what I was going to do with my life, and on my shoulders would be this little angel and this little demon, like in the cartoons. On one shoulder would be my mother telling me I should behave like a good little girl, and say my prayers and go and fix my husband his breakfast and on the other shoulder was my sister Liz who’d tell me to come back to Broadway to sing and dance. And I was never sure which of the two was the angel and which the demon.

“And then you were born, and that settled matters.”

“I’m sorry,” Faye had said, and seemed to mean it. Marie had laughed at her.

Faye had asked her then, “Do you think babies want to be born?”

“What kind of weird question is that?”

“I don’t know, never mind.” They had finished the dishes by that time, so they had left it at that. Marie had felt pretty good about it, back then, this mother-daughter moment…

“I’ll go up and talk to her,” her husband said, walking towards the stairs with his shoulders slumped.

“And say what?” Marie wanted to know. “Ask her if she’s been sleeping with a lemurian?”

“Sleeping w—” her husband choked on the words. He turned to her slowly, and his face looked gray.

Faye had cracked her door open, as soon as she heard her father come back in the house. She couldn’t hear every word that was said, but she sure heard this last exchange.

‘Sleeping with a lemurian’? As bad as the situation already was, her mother had just made it worse. Now she had to deny she was sleeping with Johnny. And how could she ever make them believe her, after she had deceived them all this time? She hadn’t even gotten close to sleeping with him! She had certainly thought about it enough… but give her some credit, please!

They decided Marie would go up and talk to her daughter. Her husband slumped in his armchair. Like a ragdoll.

Marie didn’t know what she was going to say, but was sure the words would come once she laid eyes on her deranged daughter. The words would come, a torrent of words. She could feel them swirling in the middle of her head.

As she climbed the stairs she asked herself where they had gone wrong with Faye. Had they been foolishly naïve raising a daughter by letting her figure things out for herself, and not constraining her with rules and guidelines? Had they been lax out of convenience? Trusting their daughter’s judgment because they had their hands full with the twins? Or had it been arrogance? How they had judged their neighbors raising their kids. Church on Sundays, American flag in the yard, ‘cultivating bigoted little rednecks’ they had said to each other. Smirking about it!

They shouldn’t have invited that lemurian girl into their home, like it was just another of Faye’s friends. That had been a mistake. They had been proud of Faye, for befriending the downtrodden! They should have… what? How could they ever have done it different? Tell Faye a lemurian wasn’t welcome in their home? How could they rationalize that? It would go against their nature, and everything they stood for. So how could they reproach their daughter for befriending the girls brother? They couldn’t, and Marie wouldn’t. But befriending a lemurian, doesn’t mean inviting him into your bed..!

She took a deep breath, and opened the door of her daughter’s bedroom. The window was open, and the room was empty.

“Goddammit!”