Evidence of V

by Sheila O'Connor

  “The general work of the institution, including the care of the gardens and poultry raising, but not heavy farm work, is done by the girls. However . . . there is a definite emphasis upon the training value of all assignments and it cannot be said that the labor of the girls is exploited.”

  —Handbook of American Institutions for Delinquent Juveniles, Vol. 1: West North Central States, 1938

  DAILY SCHEDULE

  6:00 a.m.—Arise

  7:00-9:00 a.m.—Breakfast, house cleaning duties, etc.

  9:00-12:00 a.m.—School or assignments

  12:00 Noon—Dinner

  2:00-4:00 p.m.—School or assignments

  4:00-6:00 p.m.—Recreation

  6:00-7:15 p.m.—Supper

  7:15-8:00 p.m.—Study hour

  8:00-8:30 p.m.—Preparation for bed

  8:30 p.m.—Bed

  —Handbook of American Institutions for Delinquent Juveniles, Vol. 1: West North Central States, 1938

  A Group of Girls Outside Pioneer Cottage, Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre, ca. 1930

  Maintenance

  Every girl works maintenance in summer. Once her baby’s born late October, V will go to school, but now this first hot June, she joins the pregnant and the dim, toiling in the garden for their food.

  Always on her knees now, V plucks the rocks and weeds and worms to clear the soil, works the rows of lettuce, carrots, turnips, potatoes, zucchini, radishes, and beets. When the vegetables are ripe, girls will can them in the kitchen, storing up the pantry for the winter months ahead. All training V will need when she’s paroled.

  But V’s a girl from Minneapolis, an apartment girl, a girl who never had to till the earth to eat. Summers she earned money tending toddlers on her street or selling kisses to the boys at Bryant Square. She’d sell a kiss again to get out of this garden. Once, a summer day could drift forever, rope swings and Ziegfeld paper dolls with Em, hide and seek out in the alley, doorbell ditch until the night filled up with stars. Before her mother took that husband, all before—

  Beside V in the dirt, the girl Giselle—Gazelle the others call her—listens to V’s stories, tells V that she will teach her how to run. Gazelle’s escaped three times, but now she’s pregnant. The week that she gives birth she’ll bolt again. V dries her face with her damp sleeve, fights off the thick mosquitos, imagines fierce Gazelle running through the forest, crossing the border to Ontario with her handsome Northwoods hunter. Canada. A foreign country where a runaway lives free. She’ll draw a map for V, meet her up in Winnipeg when V decides to run.

  In the afternoon a rainstorm brings them in to mop the cottage. Gazelle again kneeling beside V—her sun-white hair cut jagged to her head, a punishment, but they can’t break Gazelle—whispers all the ways a girl can run: Leap out an open window. Climb the low branch over the porch when the matron is asleep. Disappear in the darkness on the way to milk the cows.

  Don’t let your heart break here, Gazelle tells V, the baby in her belly arriving in late August, her runner’s legs lean and strong, and ready for the world.

  Recreation Hour

  They pass it on the screened-in porch with a puzzle: V, the strong Gazelle, Tress with the beautiful black braids, Bun whose plump, plain face swells up like dough.

  Secret names they’ve traded for Giselle, Therese, Bonita. Names the cottage staff can’t learn or they’ll be locked in isolation.

  V takes the name of Foxy—Foxy for her ginger curls, the clever way she cons the officers, her schemes to beat the rules. Foxy for the girl she has become.

  While the pregnant and the dim huddle at the radio for a chance to hear the dreary Philharmonic, Foxy and the Dames pretend to reconstruct an ancient mother-daughter puzzle Bun found on the shelf. A puzzle of propriety so old it reeks of must: a white-dressed, ribboned daughter with her arms around her mother. You can bet this won’t be me, Foxy says, holding back the sudden urge to sweep the mildewed pieces to the floor.

  Hell no, Gazelle agrees.

  But the puzzle isn’t all they’re doing here. In gossip cloaked by scratchy violin, Bun laments the slop work in the pig-pen she’s been assigned this month. She whispers how she bolted last November with a blanket and a sled, made it to Mankato where a butcher in an alley forced Bun to you-know-what. Now she’s ruined for the future, a whale of a girl.

  Tress tells how she was ravished, too. Ravished, the word the judge used at her hearing, like a thing a man could eat. Ravished by a boarder at a house her mother cleaned. The boarder grabbed Tress by the braid and gagged her mouth. Tress yanks her inky braid to prove the point.

  Only Foxy and Gazelle will speak of love. How much they miss their men. Gazelle’s beau a rugged hunting guide she met up near Bemidji on the run. She’d hid happy in his shack until a neighbor told the cops.

  Stories that they’ve told and told again, hoarded like the silver from a country that they’ve lost. Pasts they’re forbidden from disclosing, so they do.

  Well, Mr. C was thirty-five, V brags. A gangster with a gun. She can be their Bonnie Parker without a trail of dead. I was dancing down on Hennepin the day I was discovered. Strangers walking down the street would pay to see me dance.

  Burlesque? Bun asks, wide-eyed.

  A showgirl, V corrects. An entertainer. But, of course, I did it all. Foxy is their daring, city star from Minneapolis, a girl who lived the dark side of downtown. I wish that I could perform a number for you now.

  Me too, Gazelle says in a whisper.

  Then her fingers are on V’s, reaching for a corner of the mother’s clean white blouse.

  [Reform. To recreate, to change, to improve things for the better, to eradicate all defects, to break, to crack, to put together from the pieces, to reshape, remold, to modify, get straight, to convert, amend, revamp, to revise, restore, repair, to make something out of nothing, to fracture, to improve, to renovate, rework, to damage or destroy, to correct, resolve, to invent, to ameliorate, refine, to upgrade, to restructure, rearrange, to remedy, redeem. Reform V. Reform her pieces into story. To re-form what I have left.]

  Magazines

  such as

  the following

  may be included in the list

  of reading for girls;

  Post, McCall’s, Delineator,

  Pictorial Review,

  Ladies’ Home Journal,

  American,

  and Woman’s Home Companion

  depending on content.

  No movie magazines may be included.

  The Christian Science Monitor

  is available to girls in each cottage

  but they are not allowed

  to read

  the other daily papers.

  —“Instructions for New Employee Training; Juvenile Institutions, Sauk Centre,” 1937. Reprinted in the Handbook of American Institutions for Delinquent Juveniles, Vol. 1: West North Central States, 1938

  The First to Go

  The baby Bun didn’t want dies in the night. The other girls asleep, Bun alone at Higbee Hospital delivering the dead.

  Fragment. Finger. Foot.

  When Bun wakes, the day nurse warns her not to wallow. It’s for the best, she says. What good is another girl like this?

  True, Bun should be relieved, but instead she feels like something has been stolen, a body of her body gone against her will.

  The girls dig a secret grave out in the garden. Pretend to bury May among the radishes. (The Dames have made a pact to name their babies after months.) A cut of Tress’s braid. A thumb prick of Bun’s blood. A tiny cross Bun fashioned from stolen thread and sticks. Two pieces of the mother-daughter puzzle V stole from the box. No one can complete it now, with Bun’s poor daughter dead.

  At least she’s free, Foxy offers as their prayer. Better dead than here, God rest her soul.

 
Go up to the sky now, little bird, Gazelle adds gently.

  I’ll see you at the rapture, May, Bun says to the dirt. Her lips against the land like May can hear.

  [And where is dead May really?

  Buried in a place that Bun can’t visit.

  May, an unmarked grave

  in a local farmer’s field.

  Another state school secret

  effectively erased under waist-high grass

  and weeds.

  May

  another never-happened baby

  a stranger

  laid to rest.]

  Transfer One

  Tonight, before the matron transfers Bun to General Population, the four Dames make a vow to stay Blood Sisters, tough girls who won’t be tamed.

  The punishments ahead—cold baths and slaps, isolation, weeks of bread and water, hair shaved down to the scalp—all of that will prove how hard they are.

  Gazelle slips the stolen scissors from her hem, carves a hurried D into Bun’s arm. Another into Tress’s. Foxy next, and Foxy doesn’t flinch.

  Finished, Gazelle asks Bun to do the honor, and she does.

  Leave your mark on me, she says. I’ll miss you.

  Now all of them wear D.

  D for Dames.

  Delinquent.

  Deviant.

  Demented.

  Depraved.

  Degenerate.

  Despondent. They won’t see Bun again.

  I guess I’ll see you on the hard road, Bun says bravely.

  Or the low road, Foxy laughs.

  On the dark side, Tress says, blinking back bright tears.

  Don’t let them break you, babe, Gazelle says, pressing a kiss to Bun’s plump cheek. They can lock Gazelle up for that last kiss, she doesn’t care.

  Long live the Dames, Bun sobs, like she might break already.

  The raw welt from her fresh D burning like a promise she can’t keep, not alone in Van Cleve Cottage Two.

  Correspondence

  Every two weeks, V may write one letter to her family.

  Every week, V’s family may send one letter in return.

  For V, the state provides the stamps.

  All state school correspondence, written and received, is inspected by the officers because naturally V’s welfare must come first.

  There is no truth that censored V can tell. An honest letter from her time will never be discovered. I’m getting by just fine, she writes her mother. The girls here sure can cook. We get a nice breeze off the lake.

  One wrong word to Minneapolis, and her mail privileges will be lost.

  The Letter V Can’t Write or Send, and So She Doesn’t

  August 3, 1936

  Dear Em,

  Are you still running free? How’d I end up here, and a girl like you still loose? I can’t really write to you because we had to quit all friends. Are you best friends with Lu now? Do you ever think of me? That summer we first smoked in the cattails near the creek? A pack of cigarettes you swiped from some old man. Or the time Danny Olson took up with that tramp, and we broke his bedroom window. Hahaha.

  This summer I’m just working in the dirt. Beetles, worms, and bugs. Those fuzzy baby caterpillars we’d let crawl along our skin. I’m fat. I look just like a walrus. Don’t tell Mr. C I’m fat, or he won’t love me anymore.

  Do you still see Mr. C? Does he have another girl? Please write and tell me NO. If he doesn’t, tell him V is still his girl. Tell him his secret’s safe with me until I die. (He’ll know what you mean.) Please write back quick and tell me how he is.

  Is the beach crowded with the kids? Remember summer nights when we laid a blanket on the sand and slept there to stay cool? Or swam in-you-know-what at Cedar Lake? It’s so damn hot here I can’t sleep; I only sweat. I bet you’ve found a new friend with me gone. Ever hear my name, or am I just the girl sent off to the state school? Lu is probably happy to have you to herself.

  I can’t tell you how it is here, unless you’re interested in laundry, canning, scrubbing, ironing, and waxing. (I know for sure YOU AREN’T.) They’re training us to keep house for the rich. Not me, I’ve still got my heart set on Broadway. Maybe you’ll run with me to New York? No matter what they say, I’m not scrubbing floors when I get sprung.

  We’ve got a small gang called the Dames, four that’s down to three. The Dames are swell, the toughest in the bunch. I’m a tough girl, too. Did you think that I stayed sweet? Well, not for long. The pen isn’t the adventure you liked to make-believe.

  Keep those nasty boys away, or you’ll end up like I did. On the other hand, I’d like to have you here.

  Yours until Niagara Falls,

  Your Forgotten Best Friend,

  Eileen Sideways (aka V)

  P.S. If you walk by the Cascade, check the posters on the door. Let me know who’s singing for him now.

  [And eighteen years beyond Miss Fannie French Morse’s rousing 1919 speech, the Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre holds true to her bright dream. America’s ambitions for reformed girls remarkably consistent.]

  “Because the girls of today become the wives and mothers of tomorrow, the emphasis in training in the school is placed upon home making and home management.”

  —Minnesota Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre, “Report to Minnesota State Board of Control,” June 30, 1936

  The Wives and Mothers of Tomorrow

  Like every other prisoner, pregnant V survives on dreams. First, the baby miraculously gone. Then, on a highway white with sunshine, Mr. C suddenly appears, calls V to his Ford and they escape, start over in New York where V’s a star. The law won’t ever find V in New York.

  At eighteen, without anyone’s permission, V will be his lawful wife. She sees their fancy brick apartment, the spire of the Empire State Building just out their bedroom window, their rumpled bed, the marble basin she wipes clean of his black whiskers, the glass table where she serves him two poached eggs. White roses on the table, Mr. C bought as a gift. Mr. C dressed in his classic tie and emerald cufflinks, a starched white shirt that V knows how to mend and launder now. Mr. C happy to be far from Minnesota with his star.

  The baby gone.

  The baby always gone.

  The First Escape

  Baby August eight days old, Gazelle is gone.

  V can’t say how or where. The windows locked at night; cottage doors bolted before dinner. Somehow Gazelle has made her way across the miles of open field, hiding in the corn, moving between clusters of thick trees like a coyote.

  The things she’s left for V: Her courage. Proof V can escape. A stolen key behind the puzzle V will never find. Baby August. Without a mother to attend him, he’s the school’s problem now.

  August thrashing at the bottle, squalling for the breast. The school will only keep a baby if the mother is retrieved, otherwise the state will find a proper home. They can’t afford to feed a lost girl’s son.

  V tries to force the nipple in his mouth to make him drink, to stop his desperate crying, which is more than V can bear. If it wasn’t for Gazelle, she’d kill him now.

  Don’t cry, she pleads in whispers. Gazelle would want her son to eat. Gazelle, running toward a forest where she’ll sleep under pine and spruce. Forest after forest, living off farmers’ vegetables and berries, moving in the darkness, hiding in the day. A method she taught V, so V can follow. Gazelle, a girl at home with brothers, if her brothers were the trees. Her muscles strong and angry, just like August’s.

  Your mother isn’t coming, V whispers to his cheek. And she wouldn’t want us crying; she’d want us to be strong.

  Be strong now, she repeats. Then finally he is latching on the bottle, guzzling toward strength in V’s reluctant arms. August, already no one’s baby; Gazelle running for her life.

  Third Trimester

 
At first it was a pale shrimp curled pink inside V’s belly, now it is a mammal the size of a small cat. V feels its gnawing paws claw at her ribs, feels the burrow of its skull between her legs, a thrashing angry animal fighting at the cave where it’s been kept.

  Assigned a second day of harvest, V’s back bent and aching from the weight. Palms blistered from the work, she prays for death to take them both. The dead cat buried in a hatbox, the two of them finally cool beside V’s father in the dirt. Hello, hon, you’re here! Why don’t you sing a song for Daddy?

  Mr. C visiting their graves to weep with guilt.

  Let him weep.

  At night the cemetery watchman passes with a lantern, pauses at V’s grave to read the dead girl’s name and date. Too young, he thinks. (V imagines this the headline in the story of her life. Or carved into a marble gravestone Mr. C will buy. Didn’t she keep his secret? Didn’t she end up here?)

  Too Young, the watchman reads, but he moves on.

  Compliance

  Once Gazelle and Bun are gone, once Tress betrays their pact and names her baby George, once the power of the Dames has disappeared, V decides to feign compliance, knits like other girls in Recreation, endures their constant chatter—how skinny they once were, how much they miss their figures—another version of the babble V and Em abhorred at junior high. Why V had to quit the Glee Club. The after-school choir. (“Under the supervision of the school personnel, they learn to behave like average girls.”) V doesn’t want to be an average girl. Average is a rock along the road. Potato dull. A brain as blank as squash. As dreary as V lives now, she might as well be dead. Knit one, purl two.