The Longings of Wayward Girls (7 page)

“you come home every afternoon,” she said, her eyes wide, as if she were revisiting the lurching ferry, the closedin smells of the dormitory. “you don’t sleep in a room with twenty girls, and nuns patrolling the hallways, listening for any little noise.”

sadie ushers Max and sylvia through the morning preparations with singing and happy bantering: Guess what I’m putting in your lunch today? A brownie! who knows what day it is? It’s Daddy’s birthday! she writes little notes with colored markers and drops them in their lunch boxes. she loads them into the car. she puts in a tape of songs Max likes, ones that sylvia sings along to, changing the names to their own the way sadie did when sylvia was small.
There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Sylvia, dear Sylvia, there’s a hole in the bucket, dear Sylvia, a hole.
she comes to the stop sign and ray is there, parked on the side by the woods, near the rotting cedar posts of the barbed wire fence.
With what shall I mend it, dear Max, dear Max, with what shall I mend it, dear Max, with what?
The children sing; the taped music is tinny and ridiculous. sadie realizes that even as an adult ray still makes her feel like a child.

when she returns he is still there. she drives to her house, parks her car in the garage, and then walks back down the street. The lawns are muddy, the grass yellow and flattened. soon the men will be out with their fertilizer spreaders, their pruners and mowers. she raps on ray’s window and he rolls it down and smiles at her. His eyes are green, the color of the truck. she feels a warmth rush down the length of her body, a weakness in her legs. “Get in,” he says. Her skin feels hot. she gets into the truck and smells the dirt ground into the floor mats, a powdery whiff of old hair pomade. They have never been this close before, and she feels his proximity, a flash of gooseflesh on her arms and legs, senses the tension in his hand, which plays absently with the gearshift. He glances over at her and then away, fiddles with the knob on the radio. His silence is a pent-up one—she imagines he is holding his breath, waiting for something from her. she slides along the seat, leans against him, and takes his face in her hands. His cheeks are rough, unshaven. His eyes close, and she kisses him, listens to his groans of pleasure, her own sighs filling the cab, the seats making everything impossibly awkward. when ray puts the truck in gear, his face flushed, she pulls away and opens the truck door.

“what are you doing?” he says.
“I’m getting out,” she tells him. she slips out of the truck, into the spongy grass by the woods. she smells the damp, the snow melting. Her mouth feels bruised.
“so what was this? Just some
necking
? Are we in junior high?”
sadie laughs at that. “necking! yes, that’s what it was.”
she wants to start at the beginning, to have what she never had from him. she wants kissing, and fondling, and the feeling of venturing into a forbidden place. she shuts the truck door and walks up the road in the direction of her house. behind her she hears his truck pull away, and she feels elation and regret. she folds the laundry, empties the dishwasher, peers out her front window, waiting. It is nearly spring. The snow clings to the grass beneath the hedges. The sky fills with loose clouds. It is Craig’s birthday, and she bakes a cake. Preoccupied, she lets the layers overcook in the oven, but she hides them beneath the chocolate frosting and decides no one will be the wiser. she wraps the gift the children picked out at sears—a cedar shoe-shine box, one sadie told them was exactly like the one her own father had, and a necktie she chose at random, its colors muted and conventional. she creases the striped paper, tapes the edges.
Good enough,
she thinks, although she feels a nagging sense that these gifts are inadequate, that she doesn’t even know what present Craig would like. she hasn’t taken the time to ask, to think it over. she is usually a good gift-giver, and she feels a brief flash of guilt that she brushes off. she knows that after lily’s death, he would accept any gift from her and the children, and knowing this, she has chosen anything.

June 15, 1979

S

adie left Mrs. Sidelman’s immediately after spotting Francie and went to betty’s house with her news, but betty had to first do the dishes and sweep the kitchen floor, and then she and sadie had to make a circuitous

route of the neighborhood to shake her younger sister, who had traipsed out the door after them. The cicadas revved up in the trees, their sound an explosion of noise that followed them up to the dead end, where they discovered Francie’s first letter. she’d written it on flowered stationery, the kind that parents give to children when they go to camp.
Dear Hezekiah,
it said. reading on, the letter revealed aspects of her family life—her little brothers camping out in the hall closet, her mother sleeping all afternoon on the couch, her father and his woodworking hobby.
He carves puns out of wood,
she wrote.
Shoe tree, water gun, bookworm. He is now making a train track that one day will run through the entire house, upstairs and down.
They read the note in the upstairs bathroom at sadie’s house. This was the only room with a lock. They sat on the closed toilet lid, where they often sat together to read the
Playboy
s her father had hidden in the vanity drawer. As little girls, they had mixed up potions in paper Dixie cups on the counter— toothpaste, shaving cream, old spice.

“The whole family is crazy,” betty said. Her eyes feigned shock beneath her bangs.
sadie told her to wait a minute, and she slipped from

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the bathroom and returned with a sheet of her mother’s stationery—heavy, ivory-colored paper—and a pen. “what is that?” betty asked.
sadie held the paper and pen out to her. “Tell her they sound
eccentric,
” sadie said. “He doesn’t care about her family, anyway. say:
I find you incredibly intriguing. I want to know more about you.
”
betty stared at the pen and paper, and hesitated. but they both knew she was the best at making up handwriting. Hadn’t they spent one long winter day copying the slanted script off of old postcards and letters from betty’s grandmother?
“Come on, Hezekiah,” sadie said.
betty took the paper and pen and grinned. “so what was that again?”
It was a weekday, and sadie’s father was at the office. Her mother was downstairs talking on the phone. betty invented a handwriting that was part boy’s messy cursive, part arthritic scrawl. she wanted to write
I think I love you.
They laughed until they cried at this, a Partridge Family lyric. sadie finally decided it was too soon. “He has to woo her,” she said, wondering, as she said it, where she’d ever heard of such a thing. They sprinkled sadie’s father’s old spice on the envelope. They’d used one of his old
Playboy
s to write on, May 1974, Marsha Kay in sheer bra and panties. And then they slipped out to the dead end, past boys building a go-cart out of plywood, past girls running through a sprinkler, their legs speckled with grass. no one knew where they were headed. no one followed them. They had their cigarettes, and after they left the note they lifted the barbed wire and kept walking through the field’s tall grass, its black-eyed susans, dame’s rocket, and chicory, the kinds of flowers they used to bring back in damp fists to their mothers on their birthdays. They sat down in the middle of the field in the tall grass and no one could see them.
“she’ll look today,” sadie said, predicting what would happen next.
she practiced smoke rings. In a year she would be caught with ritchie Merrill, an older boy who drove a motorcycle, on the schusters’ bed while babysitting their eight-year-old. The news would spread, and she would become infamous in school, and she and betty would no longer be friends. but that summer neither of them knew that this would happen. In their bliss they believed they were forever bound in their conspiracy against Francie. They would always press their foreheads together, and stare into each other’s eyes, and know exactly what the other was thinking. It was the beginning of summer, and they could predict nothing more than what they’d come to expect from summers past: the possibility of days of endless letter-writing, and grape-flavored ice cubes, and gum-wrapper chains, and a new attraction to plan—their own Aquacade, where they would convince beth Filley to let them use her pool and devise an elaborate swimming performance, all of them in matching suits, doing flips and headstands in the water, dreaming about being watched and applauded. They would have their stack of books from the library as they always did—
Flambards
and its sequel,
The Edge of the Cloud.
They expected that boys would continue to keep clear of them, that they’d find evidence of them—murdered robins riddled with silver bbs, muddy trails in the woods littered with potato chip bags, and soft drink cans, and trampled violets—but that they’d remain elusive as they always had. sadie would form the basis of her knowledge about sex from Mrs. sidelman’s books, from the bits of the love letters she’d been able to read, the man, who did not seem to have ended up as bea brownmiller’s husband, discussing the plumpness of her lips, the curve of her hip, the strangely intoxicating scent of chlorine in her hair.

April 3, 2003

R

ay returns the next day, and the one after that, parking in the same place at the end of sadie’s street. she avoids him for a week, and then he stops

coming, and she feels as if somewhere inside of her a space has been carved out. The day he comes back she walks down there, purposely passing the truck, letting herself feel the longing, drawing it out until he puts the truck in gear and drives alongside her.

“Going for a walk?” he says to her over the chug of the old truck’s engine.
she won’t look at him. she looks ahead, places her feet carefully on the pavement until the truck forces her to the side of the road, to the mud, to the brambles beginning to bloom.
“stop it,” she says through the passenger window. “Just stop it.”
He looks at her from under the brim of his Filley Farm work cap. His eyes look startled, as if she’s just given him a slap.
“I can’t,” he says. she notes the longing in his voice, and her heart swims. she takes hold of the passenger-door handle and tugs the door open and climbs in. He gathers her into his arms, his mouth wet and searching. They kiss on and on, and then he puts the truck in gear and this time she allows him to drive her away. They take the back road up the mountain, past Filley’s gravel lot filled with sleek Mercedes, Audis, a lexus.

58

smoke billows out of the stone chimney. His father opened the produce store fifty years ago as a seasonal roadside stand. now it’s popular with the wealthy people who come over Avon Mountain to buy native corn, fresh eggs, or Christmas trees and mulled cider.

ray has her pulled in tight under his arm. At the stop sign, he leans down to kiss her.
Like teenagers,
sadie thinks, a little abashedly. He tells her that the manager, ludlow, keeps the fire going in the hearth, and she tells him that people like that—stopping in for tea, or coffee, or fresh cider, sitting around that hearth with home-baked crumb cake. “I remember your father would come in and chat with everyone,” she says.

ray laughs and shifts the gears of the old truck with his left hand, removing it from the wheel to reach over so he doesn’t have to let go of her. “oh, yeah, fresh from the fields with his mud-splattered pants and chapped hands. The old new england farmer.”

sadie looks at him carefully. His voice is harsh, as if she has opened up some old wound. she leans up and kisses his neck. each part of his body, she suspects, will be like a new territory.

“Get your pumpkins, get your yellow squash, peppers, beans, get your fresh eggs,” he says in a barker’s voice. “now they’re all ready for spring—the bulbs, easter.”

“will you stay?” sadie asks him.
she can’t imagine that the life he’s so far revealed to her— as a pampered prep school boy, or traveling to Aspen skiing,
to europe, or on the road with his band, playing gigs in dark
rock clubs—has even remotely prepared him to run a store,
much less a farm.
“It’s like some kind of joke,” ray says, looking pained.
even the truck is his father’s, one of the old faded green work
trucks he insisted on driving everywhere. ray tells her that
when he flew in from Florida his sister, beth, picked him up in it. “oh, she thinks it’s hysterical. ‘It’s your truck now,’ she
says.”
sadie shifts uneasily on the old vinyl seat, sits upright away
from ray and feels the springs beneath the upholstery. she
hasn’t yet considered beth as part of this. she remembers her
obsession with ray and almost asks him if his sister is still following him around, but decides against it.

“How is beth?” she asks, trying to be kind.
ray laughs. “she teaches elementary school in Granby,” he
says. “If you can believe that.”
sadie finds this incredible, but she won’t say so. she imagines one of her children, one of her friend’s children even,
assigned beth as a teacher, and knows she would be uneasy
without really knowing why. she’s relieved beth teaches a few
towns away.
ray tells her his parents divorced years ago, that his mother
used to accuse his father of playing the “country bumpkin.” “He drank, too,” ray says. “There was that.”
After the divorce, his father moved into the old Filley
homestead, built by his own great-great-grandfather. He quit
drinking, went to AA, and was sober, as far as anyone knew,
until he died.
“I don’t come back here often,” ray says. “but when I have
the old place always seemed more like home than wappaquasset.” He says the name of the house he grew up in with a hint
of distaste, and sadie laughs. ray laughs, too, and she slips
back under his arm.
He drives down Duncaster road, the woods on either side
belonging to him, and then the fields where they grow the
corn, the wildflowers women buy now in paper cones for
fifteen dollars. He drives the truck over potholes, asphalt dislodged by tree roots. He pulls down a long, winding gravel drive lined with forsythia, to a rambling house made of trap rock. The house sits on a wide plot of open land, the woods encroaching in back. They sit in the truck and watch the wind knock the plaque by the front door (
Oliver Filley House, 1765
),
watch it whip the forsythia’s bright shoots against the blue sky. when he gets out, sadie follows him. she asks him how
his father died, and ray tells her it was a heart attack. They
go into the house and sadie smells the old plaster, the paint
and sanded wood. she smells linseed oil. ray pauses in the
doorway to the kitchen and points to where ludlow found
his fathers when he didn’t come into the store for two days
in a row.
“Two days?” sadie says.
ray shrugs. “I guess no one checked in with him every day.
I know I didn’t monitor his life. I don’t feel guilty about that.” They stand in the doorway to the kitchen where his father
fell. ray tells her that the day beth picked him up at the airport
and brought him to the house the soup was still in the pan,
congealed and mottled with mold, the can on the counter. “she didn’t even clean up?” sadie says.
“This place gives her the creeps,” ray replies.
The morning sun bounces off the chrome handles on the
stove and the refrigerator. ray turns to sadie. “we used to
come over here and play hide-and-seek when we were little.”
He tells her how beth found a secret hiding spot behind a
panel. one of those places in old houses that held stores for
the revolutionary war or escaping slaves. she called it her
hidey spot. He points to the open, nearly empty room that
sadie imagines is the main living area, the chestnut floorboards wide and scarred. “There, beside the fireplace.” “what happened?” sadie asks.
ray smiles. “old Grams and Gramps Filley used to tell
us they had a ghost. when we were playing one day beth got
stuck in the hidey spot and just freaked out.”
“Didn’t anyone know she was there?” sadie says. ray shakes his head. “My grandfather was dead by then.
My grandmother never knew about it. we were little—beth
was probably about seven. I would have been nine. I had quit
playing the game when I couldn’t find her and gone outside.” The panel beside the fireplace is sealed up and painted and
looks exactly like the one on the other side. sadie imagines
how sylvia might crawl into such a place to hide, and then she
tries not to think about sylvia. outside the wind picks up and
rattles something against the house.
“How did she get out?” sadie asks.
ray tells her he heard beth crying, and eventually, he figured out where the sound was coming from. “After that, it was
our secret, me and beth’s.”
sadie remembers the glee beth took in frightening her
with the old house’s ghost story, back when laura loomis
had been missing only a year, and sadie had mentioned, more
than once during their backgammon marathons, her fear of
what might have happened to her. “beth never seemed like
the type to scare easily,” sadie says.
ray laughs. “Horseshit,” he says. He laughs some more
and crosses his arms. “I can’t believe I just said that. My father
used to say that.”
sadie smiles. she likes to see him laugh. she realizes she
rarely saw him laugh when they were younger—he always
seemed preoccupied, older than his years.
“It’s my house now,” ray says. He takes sadie in his arms.
“And I always liked the ghost. I used to imagine it was like
Georgie, in those books I read as a kid.”
sadie wants to remind him that the ghost is a woman,
emely Filley, but like many of the things she seems to recall
so clearly, she decides not to bring it up, to let him know she
remembers. He leans in and kisses her then, his hands moving
along her waist, up over her breasts. He tugs her toward the stairs and then up, sadie barely taking account of the rooms they pass, their doors opening off the long hallway, most of them empty. ray takes off her clothes, keeping his mouth busy with hers. she feels his fingers, quick and desperate, working the buttons of her blouse, and she thrills at his desperation, the person she imagines she’s become. He pushes her down onto a bed that has been slept in, the quilt hastily shoved back, the sheets wrinkled and smelling of him. she nestles in his arms, warm, safe, the house’s timbers groaning like an old ship, the windowpanes, buffeted by the wind, banging in their frames. outside, the crocuses peek from between the wall’s fallen stones, the grass brightens, the leaves unfurl like little green cloths, all wet and wrung out and wrinkled. The smell of manure fills the fields. ray tells her he remembers when she was a girl and would come swimming at the house. He
says he used to like watching her.
“watching me where?” she says. “In the pool?” He says nothing for a moment. His hand keeps moving
over her thigh.
“when?” she asks him. “How old was I?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “How old are you now?” “you know how old I am,” she says.
The bedroom is papered with pink peonies and wild roses.
The sun filters through the old glass to fall pale on the wood
floor, on the dust beneath the dressing table. This was once
his grandparents’ room, he tells her.
“I used to like watching you and your friends play your
little games,” he says.
His hand moves up along her waist, slips over her breast.
she can’t think clearly when he touches her. she forgets what
she was saying, what word comes next. “oh,” is all that escapes. she wants to tell him she’s loved him her whole life,
dreamed of him, invented scenarios of the two of them together. but his mouth brushes hers, and words became secondary. she focuses on his lips, his tongue, his hands moving over her skin. she luxuriates in her ability to stretch out her limbs on cool sheets. she hears the wind outside, the birds’ shrieks, the soft moans that slip from their mouths. Then she hears a disturbance downstairs. A chair being pulled out from under a table, a woman’s voice:
“ray!”
He slides off of her, stealthy, quick, exposing her body to the room’s draft. He gathers his clothes from the end of the bed and glances back at her with his finger to his mouth. she sees his erection disappear inside his boxers.
“beth, I’m up here, getting dressed,” he calls. “I’ll be right down.”
ray leaves the room and shuts the door, and sadie props herself up in bed. Though they live in the same town, she hasn’t seen beth in years and tries to imagine her mischievous eyes, her small, pouting mouth, on the face of a grown woman. sadie remembers how the teenage beth always pretended things, so that you never knew what she really thought. Parts of their conversation come up the stairwell, and sadie lies under the quilt on ray’s grandmother’s bed, waiting, listening, trying to make it out. It feels just like when she was younger and tried to spy on ray and beth while they sat around their pool or walked the dogs down the street. even then she could never quite understand much of anything they said, as if they spoke a foreign language, and listening only filled her with a dislocated longing.
“Did the ghost take a turn last night?” beth says. “Any rattling in the attic? Footsteps on the stairs?”
“what do you want, beth?” ray says.
“Groaning? Moaning? Glowing shape in a long gown standing in the hall?”
“It’s not a her,” ray says dully.
“Gramps said it was.”
“we have no idea—he, she, it.”
“That’s disrespectful. remember when Mommy used to
freak when we referenced her in the third person and she was
right in the room?”
sadie hears nothing for a few moments.
“Are you sad?” beth asks him. “you seem sad.” “what do you want? why are you here?”
“I just came to see if you’re ready to come home,” beth says. “I’m not staying in that house with you and Mother,” ray
says.
“well, then I’m going to make you lunch, like I used to.
Pickle sandwiches. A little gin and Coke. remember gin and
Cokes?”
“sorry, I can’t. I’ve got things to do.”
“I thought we’d play Chinese checkers.”
“you thought wrong.”
“you sound mad.”
sadie cannot hear anything more between them, though
she can feel the vibrations of their movements downstairs.
someone opens a window. someone slides a chair along the
floor. she scans the room for her clothes. she didn’t pay attention to where he tossed them, and she sees them now draped
over an upholstered chair in the corner. she slips from the
bed, crosses the cold floorboards, and as she gathers her clothing, she notices a suitcase tucked behind the chair. It is covered
in plaster dust. The clasps are mottled with rust. A vintage
American Tourister. sadie remembers the old commercials—
a suitcase being thrown from a train, tossed around by a gorilla
in a cage. she pauses. The suitcase is familiar—turquoise faux
leather with metal trim, a 1970s suitcase like one in the set her
mother had. she remembers the blue brocade taffeta lining,
the satin pockets. she sets her clothes down and listens for
beth and ray. she hears their voices far off, outside, down
below her window. Maybe ray has convinced beth to leave and is walking her to her car. Although she knows she should respect ray’s privacy, she feels compelled to open the suitcase. she doesn’t, for a moment, think she’ll find anything inside, but when she lifts it to the bed she can hear its contents shifting. she wonders whether her mother loaned her suitcase to ray’s mother, Patsy. she hears beth’s and ray’s voices return, and she struggles with the stuck clasps. one of them is bent,
as if it’s been recently pried.
“why won’t you?” beth says, whining like a child. “I’m busy, beth. I’m occupied. In the middle of something.”
“oh. I see. A groupie? out-of-town something?” sadie hears a long pause and ray’s mumbled response. “Is it a
local
something? That Donahue woman? The one
that had twenty brothers and sisters?”
sadie strains to listen. After that summer, betty Donahue
became someone she saw only in passing from a car window,
from a distance at a high school party. Could ray have slept
with betty in all of those intervening years? she feels an irrational rush of jealousy. beth’s voice is high-pitched. she
rattles out names of other women from town, from her own
neighborhood, ones sadie sees at Park Ave. Pizza, Drug City,
shaw’s supermarket, pushing strollers down her street. sadie,
her heart thudding, wonders if ray has somehow had sex with
all of these women since he’s been back. she stands in front of
the suitcase, naked, and realizes that she doesn’t really know
ray Filley. she’s only seen him a few times as an adult, between his gigs. she remembers him stacking Christmas trees
at the store, his hands in bright orange work gloves, his face
bearded and different. she was with Craig and sylvia, before
Max was born, and pretended she didn’t know him, convincing Craig she didn’t like the trees, that they should look elsewhere. once she saw him in line at the drugstore, wearing a
wool cap, looking hungover.
beth’s voice comes bright, cajoling, up the stairwell. “Is
she here now?”
sadie sets the suitcase back behind the chair. she takes her
clothing with her to the bed, but there is no time to put anything on. beth’s footsteps are quick on the stairs. sadie hears
ray clambering after her, telling her to stop it, to come down,
to leave it alone. beth bursts into the room. sadie can tell from
the shock on her face that she didn’t really believe she’d find
anyone. beth’s brown hair is disheveled from the wind. she
still wears her pink wool coat and gloves. sadie notices that
beth’s face is creased and aged, and she wonders, fleetingly,
if she, too, looks as old. beth freezes, one hand on the door. “oh,” is all she says. “oh well.” sadie watches beth’s old
face deflate, like Max’s does when he has hold of something
and loses it—a toad, a ball, a crab on the end of a string tied
around a mussel shell.
ray doesn’t say anything. sadie can see the shadow of him
in the hallway. beth looks at sadie in the bed and then turns,
quickly, and brushes past ray. she goes downstairs and the
slam of the front door echoes up the stairwell.
ray steps into the doorway. sadie stares at him, unsure, the
sight of the suitcase awakening a memory that is too distant
to access quickly, one that blots out the shock of being discovered in ray’s bed, that diffuses the desire she felt for him. “what will she do?” she asks. “why did you let her come
up here?”
“she won’t do anything.”
“she knows who I am.”
ray comes into the room and sits on the edge of the bed.
He stares at her, his eyes softening. “Does she?” He puts his
hand out and touches her face.
sadie doesn’t know if she is angry or not. ray doesn’t seem
to think she needs to be.
ray leans in and presses his mouth to her forehead, to her cheek, to her lips, parted in an effort to speak. Certainly beth will tell other women, the way that women do. sadie herself has done it, even told her husband gossip she’s heard. Didn’t it make her seem better than they were in his eyes? but ray seems to think otherwise. sadie wants to dress and leave, and he presses her back into the mattress. “she might come back,”