Connie Willis - Daisy, in the Sun

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Introduction “Daisy, in the Sun”

During the London Blitz, Edward R. Murrow was startled to see a fire engine racing past. It was the middle of the day,

the sirens had not gone, and he hadn’t heard any bombers. He could not imagine where a fire engine would be going.

It came to him, after much thought, that it was going to an ordinary house fire, and that that seemed somehow

impossible, as if all ordinary disasters should be suspended for the duration of this great Disaster that was facing

London and commanding everybody’s attention. But of course houses caught fire and burned down for reasons that

had nothing to do with the Blitz, and even in the face of Armageddon, there are still private armageddons to be faced.

Daisy, in the Sun

Connie Willis

None of the others were any help. Daisy’s brother, when she knelt beside him on the kitchen floor and

said, “Do you remember when we lived at Grandma’s house, just the three of us, nobody else?” looked

at her blankly over the pages of his book, his face closed and uninterested. “What is your book about?”

she asked kindly. “Is it about the sun? You always used to read your books out loud to me at

Grandma’s. All about the sun.”

He stood up and went to the windows of the kitchen and looked out at the snow, tracing patterns on the

dry window. The book, when Daisy looked at it, was about something else altogether.

“It didn’t always snow like this at home, did it?” Daisy would ask her grandmother. “It couldn’t have

snowed all the time, not even in Canada, could it?”

It was the train this time, not the kitchen, but her grandmother went on measuring for the curtains as if she

didn’t notice. “How can the trains run if it snows all the time?” Her grandmother didn’t answer her. She

went on measuring the wide curved train windows with her long yellow tape measure. She wrote the

measurements on little slips of paper, and they drifted from her pockets like the snow outside, without

sound.

Daisy waited until it was the kitchen again. The red cafe curtains hung streaked and limp across the

bottom half of the square windows. “The sun faded the curtains, didn’t it?” she asked slyly, but her

grandmother would not be tricked. She measured and wrote and dropped the measurements like ash

around her.

Daisy looked from her grandmother to the rest of them, shambling up and down the length of her

grandmother’s kitchen. She would not ask them. Talking to them would be like admitting they belonged

here, muddling clumsily around the room, bumping into each other.

Daisy stood up. “It was the sun that faded them,” she said. “I remember,” and went into her room and

shut the door.

The room was always her own room, no matter what happened outside. It stayed the same, yellow

ruffled muslin on the bed, yellow priscillas at the window. She had refused to let her mother put blinds up

in her room. She remembered that quite clearly. She had stayed in her room the whole day with her door

barricaded. But she could not remember why her mother had wanted to put them up or what had

happened afterward.

Daisy sat down cross-legged in the middle of the bed, hugging the yellow ruffled pillow from her bed

against her chest. Her mother constantly reminded her that a young lady sat with her legs together.

“You’re fifteen, Daisy. You’re a young lady whether you like it or not.”

Why could she remember things like that and not how they had gotten here and where her mother was

and why it snowed all the time yet was never cold? She hugged the pillow tightly against her and tried,

tried to remember.

It was like pushing against something, something both yielding and unyielding. It was herself, trying to

push her breasts flat against her chest after her mother had told her she was growing up, that she would

need to wear a bra. She had tried to push through to the little girl she had been before, but even though

she pressed them into herself with the flats of her hands, they were still there. A barrier, impossible to get

through.

Daisy clutched at the yielding pillow, her eyes squeezed shut. “Grandma came in,” she said out loud,

reaching for the one memory she could get to, “Grandma came in and said…”

She was looking at one of her brother’s books. She had been holding it, looking at it, one of her

brother’s books about the sun, and as the door opened he reached out and took it away from her. He

was angry—about the book? Her grandmother came in, looking hot and excited, and he took the book

away from her. Her grandmother said, “They got the material in. I bought enough for all the windows.”

She had a sack full of folded cloth, red-and-white gingham. “I bought almost the whole bolt,” her

grandmother said. She was flushed. “Isn’t it pretty?” Daisy reached out to touch the thin pretty cloth.

And… Daisy clutched at the pillow, wrinkling the ruffled edge. She had reached out to touch the thin

pretty cloth and then…

It was no use. She could not get any further. She had never been able to get any further. Sometimes she

sat on her bed for days. Sometimes she started at the end and worked back through the memory and it

was still the same. She could not remember any more on either side. Only the book and her grandmother

coming in and reaching out her hand.

Daisy opened her eyes. She put the pillow back on the bed and uncrossed her legs and took a deep

breath. She was going to have to ask the others. There was nothing else to do.

She stood a minute by the door before she opened it, wondering which of the places it would be. It was

her mother’s living room, the walls a cool blue and the windows covered with Venetian blinds. Her

brother sat on the gray-blue carpet reading. Her grandmother had taken down one of the blinds. She was

measuring the tall window. Outside the snow fell.

The strangers moved up and down on the blue carpet. Sometimes Daisy thought she recognized them,

that they were friends of her parents or people she had seen at school, but she could not be sure. They

did not speak to each other in their endless, patient wanderings. They did not even seem to see each

other. Sometimes, passing down the long aisle of the train or circling her grandmother’s kitchen or pacing

the blue living room, they bumped into each other. They did not stop and say excuse me. They bumped

into each other as if they did not know they did it, and moved on. They collided without sound or feeling,

and each time they did, they seemed less and less like people Daisy knew and more and more like

strangers. She looked at them anxiously, trying to recognize them so she could ask them.

The young man had come in from outside. Daisy was sure of it, though there was no draft of cold air to

convince her, no snow for the young man to shrug from his hair and shoulders. He moved with easy

direction through the others, and they looked up at him as he passed. He sat down on the blue couch and

smiled at Daisy’s brother. Her brother looked up from his book and smiled back. He has come in from

outside, Daisy thought. He will know.

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Connie Willis - Daisy, in the Sun

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