The Longings of Wayward Girls (16 page)

July 2, 1979

Dear Hezekiah,
I am so sorry to hear about your sister. And I feel we
are now compatriots in sadness. It is a heavy curtain that is
drawn around us. Even your sunny fields, your busy days,
aren’t enough to waylay that sorrow. I wish we could follow
through with our plan to run off together. There’s been another
addition to the already frightful tradition of suspense and upset
in the kingdom. The queen put all of the king’s woodworkings
in trash cans and set them out at the curb for the garbage
collector. Thankfully, he found them before they were taken.
Next time, she says, she will light a bonfire in the backyard. I
am happy to have the summer end, to return to the normalcy
of study. Where do you attend? I am looking forward to your
All Hallow’s Eve hayride. I’d like to bring your sister a gift—
it is a small china box painted with dragonflies. [Drawing
included.]
Yours in understanding, Francie

Dear Francie,
My sister has taken a turn for the worse and is now
watched over by the nuns in a private hospital. She is peaceful
there and likes the sound of their rosaries. She says she has a
good view of the rolling hills that reminds her of our farm, and

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a birdhouse where the finches come to feed. Sorry to hear that your mother doesn’t appreciate your father’s art. It seems you are an artist as well. I’ve shown your drawing to my sister, and she has pasted it up on the wall of her room. I feel that soon we may be able to put our plan in place.

Hezekiah
Dear Hezekiah,

I have often considered joining a cloister, but I must be of a certain age before they will have me. I am not very religious, but I am used to being persecuted and alone. The queen is once again comatose on the couch. “Passivity is a form of rebellion,” the king says. I often think about the little girl who disappeared five years ago, and I picture her living out in the woods in a little hut made of pine branches, hunting with a handmade bow, reading books she’s stolen off shelves of houses she slips into at night. Sometimes I wish I was her, rather than me. I am set to play a character in our neighborhood Haunted Woods—a grief-stricken ghost named Emely Filley who drowns herself in a pond over the loss of her infant. You remember the girls you first met? They are the ones planning the event. I think they are creative girls, but very stuck-up. They think they are clever, but they are not. When do you think the time will be right?

Yours truly, Francie

Dear Francie, I do remember those girls—but they don’t understand me
like you do. Corn to harvest this week. I feel obligated to stay a
little longer. Wait for word from me—I promise it will be soon. Hezekiah

work on the Haunted woods became a daily activity. each morning everyone would meet on betty’s front lawn and then move through the backyard to the pasture. one of the boys stole his father’s wire cutters to make an opening through the barbed wire fencing. They used one of the old cow paths, narrow and meandering, as their main route. The path curved under pines; around the old swamp; through an abandoned apple orchard, the tree trunks mottled, the branches like spines; and finally through a small field. From the field they made their own path back, marking it with the fluorescent spray-painted sticks and rocks. In the heat of the day when the cicadas were the noisiest they took breaks under the pines, the needles fragrant and soft, the bases of the trees covered with moss. sadie had a handwritten script. The props required were elaborate—her mother’s long evening dresses, the candles and the candelabra, a maple table and four chairs, stacks of books, wood for the construction of perches in trees, platforms for beds, fishing line, copper wire, nails, an old push lawnmower, galvanized buckets, pots and pans, assorted dolls, bedspreads and sheets, the fake blood and red tempera paint that could only be purchased at Drug City.

Constructed in the pasture and woods was a domestic nightmare—the rooms of a house like any of theirs, set off from the path, filled with scenes of horror: a kitchen with a woman in an apron holding rusted gardening shears, a living room with a headless man watching television, a child’s bedroom in disarray, bloody footprints across the floor, a library with books covered in bloody handprints. The children who paid the twenty-five-cent entrance fee would be led along the path and shown the rooms, the story of what happened in each slowly unveiled by visitations from the dead. each dead visitor had lines to say that told part of the story, and each longed for someone who had died and for whom they were searching, but the nature of their death was part of the mystery.

Francie objected that her character didn’t have a place in any of the rooms. They were all sitting in the shade, swatting the bugs. Francie’s face was sunburned. she’d been relegated to the open field, where she was to stand, dripping wet, with her baby, and where she’d wait, most afternoons, for her cue. Her glasses slid down her nose.

“why can’t my baby have a nursery?” she asked. sadie considered this. she hated for it to be a good idea, to admit this to Francie or to betty, who’d lately been wondering
why they kept up the letter writing.
she claimed she’d gotten bored with Francie’s letters, complaining that she was strange, that her family was weird. but
sadie suspected betty had begun to feel guilty about fooling
her, as if Francie had guessed who they were and they might
be caught and suffer consequences. The more that Francie
confessed (
How I so long for a kindred spirit; I do dream of becoming
a famous singer; Even though I lock my bedroom door it is always open
in the morning
) or begged Hezekiah to run away with her, the
more betty protested that they should stop. sadie hadn’t told
her that she looked forward to the letters, that she’d picked up
on a hidden context that intrigued her. For some odd reason
she had begun to feel aligned with Francie and her desperate
sadness. This was only one of a number of things sadie kept
from her friend that summer, and it bothered her, but not
enough to ever confess. she turned to betty. “Don’t you have
an old crib?”
betty looked at her askance. “yes. but my sister is using it.” Francie said they’d given their crib to the Frobels. Giving
away the crib meant that the parents were finished with having children, that their family was complete. once in a while
a family had to get the crib back—like the Gruenbergs, whose
children were grown and gone, the crib long ago handed
down to some needy relative, when Donnie was suddenly
conceived.
“There’s one in your basement,” betty said. she bit the
inside of her cheek and pretended to be absorbed with the
fringe on her jean shorts. sadie hadn’t wanted to bring that up,
and betty knew it. The crib was hidden in the back by the furnace, disassembled and leaning against the cement wall with
the mattress. Francie looked at her hopefully. sadie rolled her
eyes.
“I guess,” she said. she wasn’t sure how to get the crib
without anyone seeing. Her mother had been different since
her latest hospital visit. sadie knew it wasn’t a change brought
on by a new medication. Those altered her mother in other
ways. she’d become sleepy and dazed. A new smell would
come off her skin. This time she was simply trying to be
nicer—baking cookies for sadie, imploring her to take them
with her to share with her friends. Coming into sadie’s room
and sitting on the end of her bed at night, reminding her how
she used to tell her stories. “which was your favorite?” she
said.
And sadie, annoyed, mistrustful, told her she didn’t remember.
“none of them?” her mother said, as if she should have
known her stories would make no lasting impression. sadie had just wanted her out of her room, her weight
off the end of her bed. she dreaded these confrontations, the
way her mother had recently been giving her odd looks, then
quickly looking away when sadie caught her.
“How did you grow up so fast?” her mother had said that
morning.
she’d sat at the kitchen table in her matching nightgown
and robe, the nylon fabric airy and insubstantial, the sleeves
edged with lace. she had a cigarette and a glass of orange juice.
Her hair, recently lightened a platinum blond, was held away
from her face with a tortoiseshell headband, and without
makeup her face was open and childlike, her normally red lips pale and chapped. sadie noticed her hand holding the cigarette shook, and she looked away, not wanting to feel sorry
for her.
“I know you’re still mad at me about what happened,” her
mother said.
sadie hadn’t realized that was the case until just then. Her
mother had never attempted to explain her mysterious hospital visits before. sadie glared at her. “so?” she said. “what
do you care?”
“It won’t happen again,” her mother said. “I’ve already
promised your father.”
sadie didn’t think this mattered at all, but as she sat in the
pine shade she felt the day had been altered by her mother’s
promise. The sky outside the screen door had been blue, the
air cool and absent of humidity. bees swarmed the clover in
the lawn. “Have fun today,” her mother had called, and sadie,
stepping outside onto the porch, let herself imagine she was
like any other mother. Taking the crib now seemed wrong. “I don’t know if I can use it,” sadie said.
betty laughed. “oh, like your mother is ever going to have
any more kids,” she said.
“why don’t you ask her?” Francie said.
sadie glared at them. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I
will.”
Francie gave her another pleading look. betty said she was
going home to eat lunch, and she stood and made her way
down the path. Usually, sadie went with her, but today betty
didn’t once look back. The other kids had taken off as well.
sadie told Francie she had to go, and Francie got up and followed her out of the pine woods and into betty’s backyard.
In two days it would be July 4, the day of the annual lobster
bake, and the parents had already begun their own preparations, hauling the long picnic tables to the Donahues’ side
yard. some of the kids had gathered around the fathers, who’d been digging the pit. “stand back,” Mr. Donahue said, his shirt wet under the arms. “back, for God’s sake!” The cicadas screamed overhead, their dark bodies and shining wings dot
ting the leaves, the shrubbery.
“I can help you get the crib if you want,” Francie said. “we
can sneak it out tonight.”
sadie said she didn’t think nighttime would work. “early tomorrow then?” Francie said.
sadie felt drained by her persistence. “we’ll see,” she said. It was the same with the letters—Francie insisting that Hezekiah meet her and make good on his promise to flee, and
sadie having trouble coming up with some excuse to avoid it.
They parted at the street, and sadie watched Francie get on
her bike and pedal down under the hickories to her house at
the bottom of the hill. betty came to her screen door. “Is she gone?” she said.
sadie laughed, and then betty laughed, and sadie went inside to make herself a sandwich, the bread and ham and cheese
spread all over the counter, and betty’s sisters and brothers
stepping up to make a mess with the mustard, dropping crusts
of bread on the floor and stepping on them, spilling Hi-C
down the sides of their glasses. sadie and betty took their food
outside to the back deck. Here, under the umbrella, Charlene
Donahue sat with her feet up.
“How’s your mom doing?” she asked sadie. betty’s mother
wore her red hair in a shag. she wore her usual summer attire:
bermuda shorts, a sleeveless cotton shell, and no makeup—a
regular mother
was how sadie described her, making betty roll
her eyes. Charlene lowered her dark sunglasses and peered
at sadie over them, and sadie felt ashamed of all the things
Charlene knew about her mother.
“she’s fine,” sadie said cautiously.
“I heard the play opened,” betty’s mother said. she plopped
a bean bag ashtray on the arm of her chair and lit a cigarette. sadie knew they were Virginia slims—betty stole from her
mother, not her father.
sadie nodded. The play would run for three weeks. “I can’t wait to see it. she’s always so good.” betty’s mother
sighed and smoked the cigarette, staring off at the pasture behind the house. Then she stubbed the cigarette out and pushed
herself up. sadie heard her inside cleaning up the kitchen and
wondered what dreams betty’s mother had for herself, if all
mothers had them, bottled up beneath their mother exteriors.
betty said that Francie was the most irritating person she’d
ever met.
“you know you can’t take that crib,” she said.
sadie chewed her food slowly. she nodded. once, she and
betty had dragged the crib out for one of their games. They’d
set it up in the basement themselves, and put their dolls in,
and played with it an entire winter afternoon, until sadie’s
mother came to the basement stairs to tell betty her mother
had called. betty had said she’d be right up, but sadie’s mother
had come down and noticed the crib. she had walked up to
it and put her hands on the railing, standing there a moment
staring at the dolls, watching them as if they were alive and
wriggling, or rolling over, or doing some other kind of live
baby activity—cooing, batting at a rattle. sadie’s mother had
even reached her hand in and placed a finger on one of the
baby dolls’ rubber hands. sadie had watched her mother’s
face darken, her smile falter, and then she’d turned toward
the stairs where they had retreated, her voice hard with anger. “I never said you could take this old thing out,” she said.
“what made you think you could rummage through my
things?”
betty had mumbled something that sounded like an apology and hurried up the stairs. sadie was left with her mother’s
rage and accusations, with her insistence that they take the
crib apart again, demanding the tool they’d used and stabbing at the screws, until her father came home and found them, took off his suit coat, and under the bare basement bulb took the crib apart himself. sadie had relayed the story to betty in school the next day through a rebus letter—half pictures, half
letters, their own secret code formed back in fifth grade. “you don’t want your mother to get mad again,” betty said.
she glanced at the kitchen window where her own mother
stood, washing cups.
sadie doubted her mother would notice it was missing. “It’s because she saw it,” she said. “we reminded her.”
Though of what they reminded her was still unclear, and neither of them mentioned it now.
“I can’t believe Francie called us
stuck-up
in that letter,”
betty said.
“who does she think she is?” sadie said.
And like that, the rift that seemed to be forming between
them disappeared.