The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  Sneaking the suitcase into the house had been a nightmare. First, she lied, telling her grandmother that cheerleading practice would be running late and Becca Gilley’s dad would drive them home. Brick dropped her off at the end of the long driveway, so her grandparents wouldn’t hear her arrival. She carried the suitcase to the side of the house and hid it behind the bushes under the awning, to keep it dry until she heard her grandparents’ bedroom door close for the night. Her heart pounded as she ran outside in the frigid cold, then tiptoed as she carried the suitcase up the stairs and stashed it under her bed.

  She started packing the following week. On Monday, she threw in two pairs of underwear. On Tuesday, she added a slip and two pairs of socks. By Friday, she had added three headbands, two bows, and her favorite bra, the one with a single pink rose embroidered between the cups. One day, she hoped, it would fit again. Ellie filled her new train case, too, with things that mattered to her: a tiny blue bottle of Evening in Paris cologne, her church-school Bible, the small framed photograph of her with her grandparents, taken the summer she came to live with them.

  She’d been so excited the day Aunt Nessa bought the train case for her, for a future she was about to lose. She hadn’t yet received the letter of admission from St. Luke’s, and she tried not to think about it. After she had filled out the application and mailed it, she’d decided to keep it a secret from her grandparents. “To surprise them,” she had told Aunt Nessa. Now she lived in constant fear that her grandmother would see the St. Luke’s letter before she did. No one would care about Ellie’s broken dreams, and they would surely blame her for taking Brick down with her—and it wouldn’t be long before they knew. She had to tug hard on the tabs of her skirts to button them now, and spent all day feeling like her stomach was being cut in half.

  The day after she had spilled everything to Pastor Woodruff, it had occurred to Ellie that Grandma Ada might notice that she hadn’t had her period. For the next five days Ellie took a handful of sanitary napkins from the box under the sink and tucked them into her coat pockets, then threw them away in the girls’ bathroom at school. She’d complained about cramps at breakfast one morning, too, and was taken aback by her grandmother’s sudden interest.

  “Cramps?” Ada said, spinning around from the frying pan on the stove. Ellie was sure she’d seen her grandmother smile before adding in a somber voice, “Just part of being a woman, Ellie.” Ellie had teared up and had to leave the room. What a life of lies she was building. What kind of girl did this so easily, so willingly?

  Ellie opened the drawer to her bedside table and pulled out the small calendar with the puppy on the cover. Happy New Year from Brennan’s Department Store. She opened it and started counting the days since she’d last pretended to have a period. Four more days to go before what would have been the start of her next one. She shoved the calendar back into the drawer and tapped her toe against the suitcase to make sure it was fully hidden under the bed before heading to the kitchen.

  Her grandmother was up to her elbows in a mix of ground beef, eggs, and breadcrumbs, making meatloaf. She was humming “Rock of Ages,” as she so often did when she thought no one was listening.

  “Grandma?” The humming stopped. “I’m going to need more Kotex, please. Will you be going to Campbell’s Pharmacy this week?” Her grandmother turned and looked at her from head to toe. Ellie slowly crossed her hands over her stomach.

  “Grandpa can take me on Friday,” Ada said, returning to the bowl to toss in a cup of diced onion. “I need some witch hazel and cotton balls.” Her voice sounded flat to Ellie, and distant. Ada tipped the bowl and scooped the contents into the loaf pan. “ ’Less you need ’em tomorrow.”

  “No, Friday’s fine, Grandma. Thank you.” Ellie walked to the cabinet and pulled out three supper plates. Silently, they worked together in the kitchen, Ada sliding the loaf into the oven and setting the timer, Ellie setting the table. Ellie pointed to the metal bowl of potatoes on the counter. “Want me to peel these, Grandma?”

  Ada shrugged her shoulders as she filled a pot with water. “If you want to.”

  Ellie tried to laugh. “Oh, Grandma. Of course I want to.” She tied on one of the bibbed aprons hanging by the door and rummaged through the drawer for the peeler, silently calculating how many more suppers she’d have in the only real home she’d ever known.

  Nine, twelve, fifteen…seventeen. Seventeen days.

  Ellie set the potatoes on the table and placed the big yellow ceramic bowl next to them. She peeled the first potato in one continuous loop, held up the brown corkscrew of peel, and bounced it in the air. “I’m going to get all five of them this time, Grandma,” she said, smiling. “Boing, boing, boing.”

  “I remember the first time you did that,” Ada said, sitting down next to her. “You weren’t more than ten, and you were so pleased with yourself.” She smiled softly at Ellie. “You were such a little cutie.”

  Ellie had never heard her grandmother use such a term of endearment for her. “I remember, Grandma,” she said, pointing to the window over the sink. “You hung it on the herb nail for a week.”

  Ada stood up. “Well, those dishes won’t clean themselves, will they?”

  Ellie watched Ada wash the bowl and thought about how Pastor Woodruff had spoken in such a gentle voice about her grandmother. “She will always love you, Ellie,” he said, “no matter what. Your grandmother has known her share of sorrows, and she is a woman of faith. She knows the ultimate judge is God, not us, and all she’s ever wanted for you was a life with a good man and your own family.”

  “Not like this, Pastor,” Ellie said. “Not in this order, and definitely not with this man. My grandparents hate Brick.”

  “Don’t underestimate your grandmother,” he said, handing her a tissue. “She’d be the first to tell you she wasn’t always an old woman. She remembers what it feels like to fall in love.”

  Ellie had been thinking about that ever since he’d said it. She’d known her grandmother only as a kind old woman who’d worn the same horn-rimmed glasses for as long as Ellie could remember and curled her hair with a Toni home perm every six weeks, like clockwork. Ellie had never imagined her grandmother at her age, her future sprawled out in front of her. Did she ever dream of being someone with a different life than the one God gave her?

  Once, when Ellie was about eleven, she saw Grandpa pat Grandma’s behind when he thought Ellie wasn’t watching. Grandma had shooed him away, but she was smiling. They had four sons, after all.

  Everybody changes, Ellie figured. Everybody starts out as one kind of person and ends up being somebody else. Life does that to you, just as a river has its way with a stone. Even when you don’t notice it, life is rearranging you.

  Ada buttoned the collar of her cotton nightgown and reached for her robe. It was Wayne’s poker night, and she was grateful for the chance to undress in the open, instead of huddling in their bedroom closet. Fifty-one years of marriage, and Wayne Fetters hadn’t seen her naked since their first year together. Even then, she disrobed for him only in darkness.

  He used to complain about that, in the early years of their marriage. “Ada, honey, nobody can see you but me,” he whispered in the dark, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The only thing her mother had ever told her about sex was that mystery kept a man hungry, and home. Finally, after five years or so of marriage, he stopped asking, and for the longest time Ada felt wounded by the absence of his entreaties. What a sad surprise, to find yourself mourning the loss of something you were always told you shouldn’t want.

  She walked over to her vanity by the window and sat down on the upholstered bench, her knees parting the opening in the table’s faded skirt. She reached for the switch on the table lamp, glanced in the mirror, and thought better of it. The sun was taking its good old time tonight, and its golden glow softened her face.

  She unscrewed the li
d on the jar of cold cream and dipped her fingers into it, letting them rest there for a moment. Her hands were raw from scrubbing vegetables and canning today. When had she stopped rubbing Vaseline into her hands throughout the day? She used to keep her hands soft no matter how long a day of laundry or pulling weeds, and she felt a sense of pride every time Wayne pulled her fingers to his lips, kissing each tip. She frowned in her mirror. Every inch of her was giving up.

  She scooped out a dollop of the cream, rubbed her hands together, and then kneaded the cream into her cheeks and forehead, and into the deepening folds of her neck, careful not to smudge the lace of her collar. She dipped her fingers back in the jar and rubbed a little more cream into the sharp lines of her cheekbones, a legacy of her mother. The older she got, the sharper they became.

  Her thoughts turned to Wayne again, and how he had saved her all those years ago. Ada’s father had died when she was eight. Her mother was already sick, but no one knew it yet. Ada and her sister, Nessa, did all they could to help their increasingly fragile mother, but no matter how hard they prayed, their mother got worse. “God always knows best,” she told her daughters as they sat on the edge of her bed. “I need you to promise that you will never question God’s judgment.” Ada nodded, but Nessa was having none of it.

  “Dad is already dead,” she told Ada that night. “God can go pick on somebody else.”

  Three days after their mother’s funeral, Nessa announced that she was moving out for good, and begged Ada to come with her to Erietown. “A new life, Ada. One where anything can happen.”

  Ada clutched her hands, in tears. “I love you so much, Nessa, but I’m not made for your life. I’m made to be someone’s wife and mother, right here in Clayton Valley.”

  Two weeks later, Wayne Fetters, the tall, lanky boy she’d known all of her life but never thought about twice in a single day, knocked on the door and asked through the screen if she might step out for a moment to answer a question. Ada had barely shut the door behind her before Wayne dropped to one knee and reached for her hands. “Ada Travis, I’m not sure how you feel about me, but I know what I think of you. Would you ever marry me?”

  So like Wayne to just get to the point. She nodded and that was that. Ada shoved her clothes into an empty feed bag and they married on a Friday morning at Clayton Valley Methodist, with just Nessa and Wayne’s widowed aunt in attendance. They moved into the aunt’s farmhouse until Wayne could finish building this house just a quarter mile away.

  Ada’s eyes drifted from the window to the old woman looking at her in the mirror. Where was all this coming from, all these memories? She turned on the light and leaned in for a closer look. Her eyes were still big and blue, each side accented with wrinkled slopes like parentheses that deepened when she smiled. Ellie loved that about her grandmother’s face. “They’re like stars, Grandma, sparkling right next to your eyes.”

  Every scenario she could imagine for Ellie filled her with dread. Ellie was at least three months pregnant, she was sure of it. Even Wayne had started asking questions. “What the hell’s wrong with her?” he’d said just last night. “She hardly talks all of a sudden, and I can’t remember the last time I heard her laugh.” Ada said nothing, her only option to keep from lying to her husband.

  What was Brick planning to do? Go to college and leave Ellie behind? Forget about college and marry her? Stay in Clayton Valley for the rest of their lives? The choices were all Brick’s now. She pulled open the center drawer and looked again at the light blue business envelope addressed to Miss Eleanor Grace Fetters. She’d been hiding the letter for a week now, afraid to even mention it to Ellie.

  Ada looked at the return address—St. Luke’s Hospital, School of Nursing—and felt another wave of anger at her sister. What was Nessa thinking, filling Ellie’s head full of big ideas? Ada held the opened envelope, weighing her options yet again. Which was worse? Never knowing that you’d been right to dream? Or finding out your dream came true only after you’d lost it? Ada slid the letter back into the drawer and closed it.

  She picked up the hand mirror, a gift from her mother on Ada’s fourteenth birthday. “Save it for your wedding day,” she’d told her after Ada had peeled away the pink tissue paper and held it up to her face. Ada had run her fingers over the ivory inlay on the back of the mirror, tracing the edges of the large “A” scrimshawed in script in the middle. She had no idea how her mother had managed to order the mirror, or how she had paid for it. Her only income, beyond her late husband’s small savings account, came from the piecework she did for the dry goods store after it started selling linens and women’s clothing.

  “Women and their mysteries,” Ada whispered, flipping over the mirror. The glass was smoky and freckled with age. Every evening Ada cleaned it with the sleeve of her robe and followed her mother’s advice. This time, she lifted the mirror to her face and gasped at the sight of Ellie’s reflection behind her.

  “Hi, Grandma.”

  Ada set the mirror on her lap and turned around. “Ellie? I didn’t even hear you come in. You ’bout scared me to death.”

  Ellie was standing just inside the doorway, her shoulders hunched forward, her arms holding a sweater draped across her stomach. “I’m sorry, Grandma. I was just wondering if I could come in for a minute.”

  Ada slid to the edge of the bench and Ellie sat down, resting her head on her grandmother’s shoulder. She lifted the mirror from Ada’s lap and looked at her reflection. “Oh, Grandma,” she said.

  Ada worked her fingertips into Ellie’s curls and breathed in the scent of her granddaughter. “What is it, Ellie?”

  Ellie wrapped her arms around her grandmother’s waist and said nothing.

  “Ellie, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”

  They sat entwined, each of them with her eyes closed. “Guess I just needed to feel you close for a while,” Ellie finally said. Ada looked at her granddaughter’s face in the dresser mirror. She was just a child still, her eyes so big and blue, and so afraid.

  “Ellie, what’s going on with you?”

  Ellie sat up straighter, careful to keep the sweater draped across her stomach. “Nothing, Grandma. Just so much to do before graduation. Maybe it’s getting to me. So much change.” Ellie reached for the hand mirror on the table. “Grandma, could you tell me the story again? About what your mother said when she gave you this mirror?”

  “It was so long ago,” Ada said, stalling.

  “She gave it to you wrapped in tissue,” Ellie said. “You were sitting on the edge of her bed, facing a window.”

  Ada nodded. “She was already very sick.”

  “Which is why she gave it to you early.”

  Ada nodded again. “That’s right. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she knew she didn’t have much time left.”

  “ ‘Every lady needs a good hand mirror.’ That’s what she told you.”

  Ada wrapped her arm around Ellie’s shoulders. “She lifted the mirror to my face and said, ‘You should always be able to feel proud of the girl you see in that mirror. If you don’t like the face in the mirror, you know you’ve got to do something about it.’ ”

  Ellie lowered the mirror and set it back on the table. “Do you, Grandma? Do you always feel proud of the girl you see in the mirror?”

  Ada kissed the top of Ellie’s head. “It doesn’t matter, Ellie, who we see in the mirror. What matters is who God sees. ‘For the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’ ”

  Ellie leaned into her grandmother’s bosom. “That might scare me more, Grandma.”

  Ada wrapped her arms around Ellie. “No sweeter heart exists than yours.” She caught a glimpse of the worried old woman in the mirror, and looked away.

  Ellie’s hands fumbled as she tried to coax the folds of the road map back into place. T
he seams were already frayed and on the verge of splitting, and the last thing she wanted to do was set Brick off again.

  She had no idea how to make sense of the map’s web of fine lines and emblems. She didn’t even know how to drive. The more Brick had tried to explain it, the more flustered she had become.

  “Jesus Christ, just forget it,” he’d said, finally. “I’ll pull over every time I need to check it.” How she annoyed him. Finally, the map collapsed into its tidy rectangle. She turned on the flashlight again to read the script on the faded front. PURE TRIP MAP. Compliments of Your Pure Oil Dealer.

  She flipped it over to look at the back. “Be sure with Pure!” She stared at the four red letters, P-U-R-E, and felt the sting of indictment. Everywhere, it seemed, she was finding signs of God’s judgment. The broken latch on her borrowed suitcase. The blinding rain that had sidelined them minutes after they crossed the Ohio border into Pennsylvania. She shut off the flashlight. “Where did you get this map?” she said.

  “What?”

  She held up the map. “Where did you get this?”

  “It was in my dad’s truck,” Brick said. He looked at her again and tightened his fingers around the wheel. “What’s the matter now?”

  “What’s the matter? I’m pregnant, Brick. You’re giving up your college scholarship, and I can’t even get a high school diploma. We’re sneaking away in the middle of the night to get married by a man we don’t even know.” She flicked the map with her finger. “And now I got this bright red ‘pure’ looking at me. Another sign that God is mad at me.”

  Brick sighed. “Ellie, God doesn’t give a goddamn what you and me are doing. He doesn’t care.”

  Ellie clutched at the tiny cross around her neck. “How can you say that, Brick? Do you want us to crash now?”

  “Pint, I needed a map. I took the only one I could find. It was in my dad’s car. God isn’t going to use an asshole like him to send us a message. If God cared about what happened to us, he wouldn’t have let you get pregnant.”