The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  It would be such a nice surprise for his mother, seeing them walk in as husband and wife, Ellie carrying a Brennan’s box tied with string that ended in a little bow in the center.

  Brick stood up straight and rolled back his shoulders. “Yeah. Yeah, Lil.” He turned and pulled Ellie close. “I’m—we’re on our way,” he said, his voice trembling now. “About an hour.” He hung up the phone.

  “Oh, Brick.” The look on Ellie’s face was his undoing.

  “Ellie, my mom,” he said, starting to cry. “She’s dying.”

  Ellie wrapped her arms around his waist, and he buried his face in her hair. Brick breathed in the scent of his wife, the strength of her. He would always remember this day for the worst of reasons, but he would also never forget how safe he had felt in Ellie’s arms. It was the closest he ever came to believing that God knew his name.

  Ellie stood at the dining room window and watched her daughter, Samantha, bark up orders to the Kleshinski boys. Lenny was her age, and Bobby was barely a year younger, but there they were, two lanky shadows against the setting sun, marching around the swing and hoping to win the approval of five-year-old Samantha McGinty.

  Sam was clapping, and Ellie could tell even through the glass that she was chanting something. She pounded the window frame with her fists to loosen it and grunted as she heaved open the window. The cool breeze billowed her maternity blouse as goosebumps danced up and down her arms.

  “Sam,” Ellie yelled, leaning into the screen.

  Sam took several steps toward the house. “Are you all right, Mommy?”

  “I’m fine, honey,” Ellie said, her arms draped across her swollen abdomen. “Be nice to Lenny and Bobby. You don’t always need to be in charge.”

  The boys waved to Ellie. “Sam’s helping us with our rhythm, Mrs. McGinty,” Lenny shouted. “Next we’re gonna learn the Twist.”

  The boys tried to mimic Sam, their skinny arms and legs flailing as they sang. “Come on, baby,” they screeched, “and go like this.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ellie said, laughing. She lowered the window but didn’t close it. The evening sounds of children playing always soothed her. She walked back into the kitchen and plunged her hands into the gray water, thinking about how Brick had been right about Sam’s big gift last Christmas. God, she loved that record player, just as he had predicted. It had become such a father-daughter thing for them, shopping for the latest forty-fives once a month at Hills department store, then sitting together cross-legged on the floor to listen to them.

  Ellie loved to sing the church hymns of her youth, and she and Brick could dance up a storm at the union hall dances. But that was big band music, and with a purpose. For Ellie, popular music was something to put on in the background while she dusted or folded laundry. For Brick, the songs opened a window somewhere inside him. Ellie tried not to feel left out.

  “You’re always asking me to share my feelings,” he told her once in the car after she wrinkled her nose at a song he said he liked on the radio. “Well, this tells you what I’m feeling.”

  “Really?” she said. “Patsy Cline’s ‘She’s Got You’ tells me what you’re feeling? Jay and the Americans singing ‘She Cried’ after he broke up with her is about you?”

  “That’s not what I meant. It’s not the exact words. It’s how a song loosens you up to think about things you didn’t even know were in your head.”

  “I’d love to hear about those things,” she said.

  “It’s not like that,” he said, and shut the radio off.

  Sam couldn’t get enough of her father’s music, and she had a great memory for lyrics. She only had to hear a song twice before she could sing the whole thing as if she had lived it. The Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man,” Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love”—Ellie couldn’t decide whether it was humorous or whether she should worry about how much Sam took the lyrics to heart.

  “Look at her face, Pint,” Brick had said recently as Sam sang along to Ray Charles’s “You Don’t Know Me.” “She feels it in her bones.”

  Ellie pulled the plug to drain the sink. She could not deny the relief it still brought her to see how much Brick enjoyed having a daughter.

  All through that pregnancy, they both had referred to the baby as “he” and “him.” They’d started calling him Sam, too, for Coach Bryant. Ellie had readily agreed to the name, eager to keep Brick excited about becoming a father. Their baby’s middle name would be the same as Brick’s: Samuel Paull McGinty.

  After thirty-six hours of labor, she was wheeled into the delivery room, where the last thing she remembered was someone putting a mask over her face. She awakened to the sound of a nurse asking if she’d like to hold her baby girl. She was so pink and perfect, her blue eyes as big as Ellie’s. Ellie had been nervous about how Brick would react. When the nurse finally called him out of the waiting room, he rushed to Ellie’s side and scooped the baby into his arms.

  “Brick,” she said, on the verge of tears. “It’s a girl, you know. We have a daughter.”

  Brick laughed. “Oh, Ellie. I know that. I’ve known that for three whole hours already.” He pushed back the edge of the blanket to get a better look at their daughter’s face. “Oh, look at her,” he said. “Look how beautiful she is. Look at those eyes. Her little cheeks.” He touched one of the baby’s hands, and Ellie could hear his throat tighten as the baby clutched his finger. “Look at those fingers,” he said. “They’re so long. Just like Ma’s.”

  He clutched the baby to his chest and leaned in to kiss Ellie. “She’s perfect. I love her. And I love you so much.”

  Remember this, she thought. “I’m so happy, Brick,” she said, her voice quavering. “I guess we’re going to have to come up with another name.”

  He laughed again. “I already figured that out. We can still call her Sam. Short for Samantha, right?”

  It was her turn to laugh. “Really, Brick? Are you sure you don’t want to wait for a son? You had your heart set on naming a boy after Coach.”

  Brick shook his head. “Nah, I don’t want to wait for anything. I want to call her Sam. We’ll pick a different name for our son.”

  “Okay then, she’s Samantha,” Ellie said. “Samantha Joy McGinty?”

  Brick kissed the baby’s forehead and handed her back to Ellie. “I like that. I like that middle name. What do they call it? Our bundle of joy. That’s what she is.”

  She could never have imagined this life on that snowy day that Brick had found her collapsed on the side of the road. Her pregnancy had started out as the worst news of her life, and ended up being the reason for everything good in it now. Their marriage. The move to Erietown. This house. Ellie had been so excited to have her own stove, her own living room, her own everything. She didn’t care that the front screen door had a hole in it the size of her fist, or that the linoleum in the dining room curled in two of the corners. For the first time, she felt in charge of at least a part of her own life.

  She felt bad, though, about being nearly twenty miles away from her grandparents. It may as well have been two hundred miles, because she was still learning to drive. What an adventure that was turning out to be. She and Brick had agreed that he couldn’t be the one to teach her. “I don’t have the patience you need,” he said.

  “Talk about an understatement,” she’d told her best friend, Mardee Jepson, the next day. “Could you imagine Brick the first time I hit the brake too hard?”

  “I’d want to sit in the backseat for that one,” Mardee had said, laughing. “The thought of big ol’ Brick McGinty at the mercy of his little wife.”

  At Brick’s suggestion, Ellie asked Roger Kleshinski, the father of Sam’s friend Lenny, and, more important, Brick’s co-worker at the plant. “A union brother,” Brick had said, slapping Roger on the back the first time he showed up to ride with Ellie in his station wagon. “On
ly man I would trust to teach my wife how to drive.”

  It didn’t take long for Ellie to realize that Roger was scared to death of her husband. “Every time I clip a corner or forget to signal, Roger waves his arms and says, ‘Now, Ellie, I’ve got to get you home to Brick in one piece,’ ” she told Mardee. “At this rate, I won’t have my license until I’m a grandmother.”

  Still, Ellie thanked God every day for her new life. When her grandparents had shown up at Aunt Nessa’s house right after they were married, Ellie could barely look at them, she was so afraid of their disappointment. But her grandmother had wasted no time in pulling her in for a hug. If she was angry or hurt, Ada Fetters sure didn’t show it. Grandpa Wayne had stood behind his wife, smiling shyly, as if he were just making his granddaughter’s acquaintance.

  Brick’s face was somber when he came home from work and walked into the kitchen with his hand extended to Wayne. “Sir,” he said.

  “Hello, Son,” Wayne said, rising from the table.

  Son. Ellie had nearly burst into tears.

  The two men just stood there, facing each other, but looking elsewhere. “There you are,” Ada said, springing out of her chair to rescue Brick with a hug. “Welcome to the family, Brick.” Brick patted Ada’s back with both hands, his puzzled face a clear amusement to Aunt Nessa, who snickered behind her napkin.

  “Aunt Nessa,” Ellie whispered, tugging on the back of her skirt.

  “My Lord,” Nessa said. “He looks like he’s trying to put out a campfire on Ada’s back.”

  On moving day, two months later, Brick and his high school teammate Duke Jenkins had just finished carrying in the last of the furniture donated by Nessa when Ellie’s grandparents pulled up. Ellie was standing on the front porch, barely breathing as she peered over the railing and into the bed of the truck. So many things from home. Her chest of drawers and bedside table, and open boxes teeming with signs of her earlier life: the framed scripture verse stitched in her grandmother’s hand; a stack of Grandma’s embroidered hankies, tied with ribbon, and the homemade rag doll Ada had had waiting for her the day she moved in with them.

  Grandpa Wayne climbed out of the truck and walked over to Brick. Another handshake, another “sir.”

  “Like an Amish greeting at the dry goods store,” her grandmother said, and Ellie couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, Grandma. Really. Why must they act like this?”

  “They’re rivals, honey,” her grandmother said, shaking her head. “One of them had you all to himself until the other one showed up and swept you away. They’ll declare a truce eventually.”

  They ran out of time. Both of her grandparents were gone before Sam turned three. One cool autumn evening, Wayne was late coming in for supper—a first in their five decades of marriage. Ada pulled on her coat and walked out to the field. “At fifty feet, I thought he was working on the tractor,” she said to Ellie in a flat voice over the phone. “He looked to be doing something with the engine. I yelled and yelled for him, and he wouldn’t answer. It wasn’t until I was almost on him that I realized he wasn’t moving.” Her voice broke, and she started to cry. “My Wayne,” she said softly. “My sweet, sweet Wayne.”

  It was the first time Ellie had ever heard her grandmother sob. Six weeks later, Ada was canning the rest of Wayne’s tomato crop that Brick had helped harvest when she collapsed on the kitchen floor. She never regained consciousness.

  “She died peacefully,” the nurse told Ellie as she stood in shock next to her grandmother’s hospital bed, with Brick standing behind her. “Massive stroke. We see this a lot. When one goes, the other dies of a broken heart.” Ellie leaned back into Brick, feeling faint as he wrapped his arms around her. As soon as they were in the car, he pulled her beside him. “I understand why she went,” he said, his voice trembling. “I wouldn’t want to live without you.” She leaned into him, too raw with grief to speak.

  A week later, Ellie found out she was pregnant again. After two miscarriages, she couldn’t help but think that the timing would make this one different.

  Now, she draped the washrag over the faucet and walked slowly to the dining room, collapsing into a chair. She leaned forward and pressed her fist into the small of her back. Sam would be in any minute now, and Ellie didn’t want her to see her in pain. How that child hovered.

  Brick was working so much overtime now that even when he was home he seemed to be somewhere else. Thank God for the new friends she had made in the neighborhood, most of them girls around her own age with husbands and kids and their own sets of problems. They got together in the morning several days a week. “To keep our heads above water,” Mardee liked to say.

  Ellie loved everything about being a hostess. Setting out the cups and saucers, folding the paper napkins into triangles, filling the dainty sugar bowl and cream pitcher that her friend Becca Gilley, now Mrs. Martin Bowman, had given her as a wedding gift. She usually made the coffee cake recipe on the back of the Bisquick box. She liked the smell of cinnamon filling the house, and how the girls made a big deal over her whenever she served it warm. It made her feel important and refined.

  “Even Jackie Kennedy would feel special at our table,” she said once to Sam, who was helping wipe smudges off the spoons. “You and Caroline Kennedy were born just months apart. I wonder if Caroline ever helps her mommy around the house like you do.”

  Sometimes when she hosted, Ellie would sit quietly and take in the hum of voices. It gave her a deeper understanding of why her grandmother used to show up every week for the quilting bee. Marriage was often a lonely business, she was learning. Every wife needed her women friends to keep her strong.

  The more Ellie settled into her life as a wife and mother, the more she thought about her own mother, who gave her up when she was eight. What if she’d had girlfriends gossiping in her kitchen, a husband who loved her? Ellie had never been able to imagine a woman giving up her child, but after she became a mother the truth got cloudier. Raising even one child was exhausting and isolating, but as long as she had these friends she felt less alone.

  Ellie didn’t want to know her mother, but she didn’t want to hate her, either. She just wanted both of her parents to stay away. They would never get near enough to matter to Sam, especially now that Sam was old enough to ask her own questions.

  In two weeks, Sam would start kindergarten. Ellie dreaded not having her constant companion with her in the mornings. Ellie never had anyone care as much as Sam seemed to about her, about her opinions, her moods. So often, at the slightest sound of her mother’s discontent, Sam would stop everything and lock eyes with her mother to try to understand what was on Ellie’s mind. “Mommy’s little confidante,” Ellie called her.

  She pressed her fist into her back again, and reminded herself to be grateful for the message behind the pain. This baby was going to make it.

  Her first miscarriage had been at eleven weeks, which had scared her, but didn’t feel ominous. The second time was horrible, for her and for Sam, who’d already started patting her belly and saying, “Hi, Baby McGinty.” She had been five months pregnant, clearly showing, when she woke up in the middle of the night in a pool of blood. Brick called Mrs. Kleshinski down the street to take Sam and then raced Ellie to the hospital. Within an hour, the doctor said he was sorry but it was clear she was going to lose that baby. Brick’s face was ashen. He grabbed his coat and left, saying he had to get to work.

  “He’s just being a man,” the attending nurse told Ellie, who had burst into tears. “They can’t take the pain, the misery of it. They can’t let themselves think about what they’ve lost, or what you’re going through. Try not to let it bother you. He can’t help who he is.”

  Ellie looked at the nurse’s naked ring finger and felt a surge of resentment. So free with advice about a marriage. What did she know about what a husband, what her husband, felt? Later, lying alone in the dark, Ellie considered the
unimaginable. Maybe Brick wasn’t as big and brave as she’d always thought him to be. For a few hours, she forced herself to face the possibility that her husband might be a coward, or at least about some things. Maybe he was someone who ran away from trouble. When she had gotten pregnant with Sam, had he been running toward her, or away from his fear of failure at Kent State?

  After a night’s sleep, she woke up mortified that she’d thought so little of her husband. For weeks after that, she prayed for forgiveness. A wife needed to believe in the man she trusted with her future, with her life. She had to have faith in Brick. It was as simple as that.

  Despite her sadness, Ellie harbored a secret that renewed her hope. Two days after the miscarriage, she had asked to see the doctor. He arrived several hours later, looking important and bothered.

  “I just want to know, Doctor,” Ellie said, looking down at the stiff sheets tucked around her. “Could you tell if I was having a boy or a girl?”

  His face softened as he sat on the side of the bed. “You had a boy growing inside you, Mrs. McGinty, and you can have a boy growing inside you again someday. But you have to give your body a rest. For six months, at least, use your diaphragm.”

  Ellie didn’t hear a thing he said beyond the news that she had been carrying a boy. A son. She was determined to get pregnant again, as soon as possible. She owed Brick that. He’d been so patient, so sweet about Sam. He deserved a son.

  It took so long for her to conceive again. Her body had needed time to recover, but Ellie couldn’t pretend their marriage hadn’t changed. It was as if a switch had tripped in Brick. Maybe it was the sight of all that blood on the sheet when she miscarried, or her tearfulness for weeks after. He no longer reached for her with that look of hunger in his eyes. Sometimes they went more than a week without having sex. Without even kissing hello or goodbye.