The Home for Unwanted Girls

by Joanna Goodman

  Maggie’s father puts the two cans of DDT into a brown paper bag and rings it up on the cash register.

  “I need credit,” Clémentine says.

  More snickers.

  “Credit?” her father echoes with contempt. Wellington Hughes does not extend credit. It’s his policy. It is the policy, and his policies are like commandments. Thou shalt not extend credit.

  “Our season starts in a couple of weeks,” she explains. “I’ll be able to pay you then.”

  Maggie wipes a film of sweat from above her lip. She realizes for the first time how hard life must be for the Phénix kids. The truth is she’s never really considered it before, not even when she was friends with their little sister, Angèle. She’s heard her parents talk about them—the divorce and the dead father’s drinking—but she never paid much attention. Today, though, she finds something about their prideful audacity very compelling.

  “If I let you take this bag on credit,” her father says in his smooth French, “everyone in town will start coming to me in the off-season and promising to pay when corn season starts.”

  Gabriel pushes in front of his sister and unfastens his watch. He drops it on the counter and shoves it toward Maggie’s father. “Here,” he says. “Take my goddamn watch to show we’re good for it. It was my father’s. It’s gold.”

  Wellington’s upper lip twitches and he thrusts the watch back at Gabriel. “This isn’t a pawn shop,” he says, scowling.

  Gabriel makes no move to take back the watch. After a moment, Maggie’s father suddenly pushes the brown paper bag of DDT across the counter to Clémentine. “Here, then,” he says. “Take it. But don’t come back until you can pay for it.”

  “Thank you,” she says, never once lowering her head or her eyes in shame.

  Maggie’s father looks disgusted. When Gabriel still makes no move to reclaim his watch, Clémentine grabs it and pulls Gabriel toward the door. On their way out, Gabriel looks directly at Maggie, as though he’s known she’s been here all along. Their eyes lock and her heart accelerates. His expression is defiant, full of hatred. His lips curl into an indolent sneer, and she realizes, with some shock, that the sneer is directed at her.

  She notices her father watching her sternly. His warning is understood. Thou shalt not date French boys.

  Chapter 2

  Maggie has taken to hiding in the Phénix cornfield for two reasons. The first is to avoid having to do her chores. The second is to observe and hopefully get noticed by Gabriel while he tends to his corn.

  It’s August and corn season is in full swing. She’s sprawled on the ground between the rows, reading a True Romance magazine, ignoring the ants crawling all over her bare legs and tickling her skin. She’s content here with the sun burning her back and the tall stalks sheltering her from her mother’s nagging. She can hear Maman’s voice all the way from their backyard. Ranting, ranting. Her sister Violet has knocked some clothing off the line and Maman is furious. Poor Violet, but better her than Maggie.

  “You again?”

  Maggie drops her magazine and looks up, pretending to be startled. He’s standing above her, shielding his eyes. He’s shirtless, wearing only blue jeans. His skin is brown, as dark as her father’s cigars.

  “I like reading here,” she says.

  He crouches down beside her. She holds her breath. A trickle of sweat moves slowly down the slope of his neck.

  “Tabarnac,” he says, examining an ear of corn. “The earworms are feeding on the silks.”

  “Have they penetrated the kernels?” she asks, knowing all about insect infestations from her father.

  Gabriel shakes the husk of one of the ears. “Hopefully it’s loose enough to protect the corn. They should be all right as long as the damage stays on the surface.”

  “Maybe you should have planted earlier,” she says, sounding like her father. The condescension, the lecturing tone. She instantly regrets it. Gabriel gives her an annoyed look and stands up.

  “Stick with your romance magazines,” he scoffs. “Leave the farming to me.”

  Why did she have to open her big mouth? Maman always tells her she’s got a big mouth and she’s right.

  Gabriel turns his back to Maggie, and her eyes are riveted to the jutting curve of his spine as he moves through the rows of corn, bending methodically to inspect the ears. As she watches him work, admiring him and reflecting with embarrassment on what she’d said, all the other dramas and obsessions in her life fall away like the corn tassels scattered around her.

  “Maggie!”

  She hears Violet’s panicked voice before her sister even appears.

  “Maggie!” Violet cries, shoving stalks out of her way. “Maman wants you home now!”

  Maggie stretches out like a cat, acting as though she’s not afraid of their mother, even though she’s actually terrified. They all are.

  “You better hurry or . . .”

  Or she will beat them with the wooden pig spoon. Or lock them out of the house without supper. Maggie turns back around to give Gabriel one final longing gaze. He catches her looking and she waves, but he doesn’t wave back. Violet observes this, but doesn’t say a word. “Let’s go,” she says nervously, grabbing Maggie’s hand and jerking her to her feet.

  They trudge out of the cornfield just as the sun is beginning to set. “We better run,” Violet says. And even though Maggie doesn’t like to come off as wimpy as Violet, she knows her sister is right. They have to run.

  Their house sits at the end of a long road that’s lined on either side by a dense row of towering pine trees, and they run all the way up the dirt path that rises steeply from the cornfield and winds its way through the woods. When they get to the clearing where their gray stone Victorian sits nobly as the centerpiece of the property, Maggie and Violet are both drenched with sweat and panting like dogs. The screen door slaps shut behind them and there she is, Maman, standing at the stove with the wooden spoon in her hand. “Où t’étais, Maggie?” she asks, her voice soft but menacing. Where were you?

  Geraldine is already setting the table, and two-year-old Nicole is on the floor playing with her British Ginny doll. Ever since their older brother, Peter, went to boarding school in Sherbrooke, it’s just a house full of girls.

  Violet rushes over to the table to help Geri, getting herself out of the line of fire.

  “I was outside,” Maggie says.

  “I know you were outside. Doing what?”

  “Reading.”

  Maggie attempts to hide the magazine behind her back, but it’s pointless. Maman snatches it out of her hand and stares at it mockingly. “What does this say?” she asks.

  Her mother can’t read or speak a word of English. She is pure laine French and has never made any effort to absorb even the rudiments of the English language, not for her husband nor for the bilingual community in which she lives.

  The Eastern Townships is mostly farm country, containing pockets of both French and English who live in relative harmony—that is, relative to Quebec, where the French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility but don’t mingle the way other more homogeneous communities do. The same could be said about Maggie’s parents, whose union has always been a point of bafflement for Maggie.

  Her father earned his diploma in horticulture at eighteen and got his first job at Pinney’s Garden Center in the East End of Montreal. He was the assistant manager when Maggie’s mother showed up one day looking for a plant to pretty up her apartment in the slum of Hochelaga. She was a poor French-Canadian maid who had never stepped foot outside the slums, and he a literate, cultured Anglo, but he fell in love with her the moment he spotted her dark red lips and soft black curls that day at Pinney’s.

  Today, French is the official language of their household—a testament to their mother’s stubbornness—but their father won on education. As a result, the children all attend the English Protestant school, making English the official language of their future.

  The f
irst time Maggie ever heard English was when she was five, on her first day of school. When she confronted her father about this sudden upheaval in her life—the switch from French nursery to English school—all he said was, “You’re English.”

  “Maman’s not,” she pointed out.

  “But you are,” he said. “French is the inferior language. It’s imperative that you’re educated in English.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means speaking only French will get you nowhere.”

  “But you speak French.”

  “That’s why I’m successful. You must never forget how to speak French as your second language. It’s a means to an end, Maggie, but it doesn’t make you French. See?”

  She did not. And when the kids at school started calling her “Pepsi” and “frog,” she was even more confused.

  “Why do they call me a Pepsi?” she asked her father one night, sitting on the floor of his cramped office.

  The room was once the maid’s quarters, but quickly became his sanctuary—not much larger than a closet, it’s the place where he keeps his seed catalogues, books, homemade radios, tools, notes, and sketches of the garden he will one day plant in the backyard. There’s an old mahogany desk and a typewriter crammed in there, too, and the room always reeks of cigar smoke. He can stay locked inside for hours with his music, his House of Lords, a bottle of wine, and whatever project he happens to be tinkering with at the time. He always keeps it locked because he says a man needs his privacy.

  That night, he looked up from the Dale Carnegie book he was reading and removed his bifocals. He reached out and touched Maggie’s knee. His hand was warm and comforting. “Because Pepsi is cheap and sweet and that’s why the French Canadians drink so much of it, and why they have rotten teeth. But you’re not a Pepsi. You’re English, like Daddy.”

  After that, she learned English quickly, out of sheer survival. Nothing was more important than speaking perfect English—and not just speaking it, but being English. Fitting in at school required a complete transformation—including how she dressed. She traded in the baggy dresses her mother preferred for plaid kilts and crisp white lace collars and penny loafers that her father ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue. She traded in her mother tongue for a new, more elegant language. Eventually, she began to feel English.

  Nowadays, out of fear and obligation, they still speak French to their mother, whose presence in the house is mighty and unavoidable. But Maggie’s allegiance is to her English side—her father’s side—because he rarely raises his voice and he is the beacon of reason in an otherwise erratic household.

  “What does this say?” her mother repeats, her voice rising as she points to the cover of Maggie’s magazine.

  “‘True Romance,’” Maggie mutters.

  Violet snickers.

  “True romance!” her mother scoffs, shoving the magazine into the garbage. “Disgusting.”

  “She pretends it’s her and Gabriel,” Violet reveals.

  “Gabriel Phénix?” Maman says, with interest.

  Violet looks at Maggie with a flicker of guilt, even as she’s answering their mother. “That’s why she goes to the cornfield,” she tattles. “To see him.”

  Maggie glares at Violet, silently letting her know she’ll pay for this later.

  “I never thought you’d be the one to fall for one of us,” Maman says, grinning.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Your father will say Gabriel’s not good enough for you because he’s French,” her mother responds. “But I was good enough for him. Remember that.”

  She steps back with a satisfied look on her face and turns back to the stove.

  Upstairs in her room, Maggie checks on her indoor garden. She’s been planting seeds in her mother’s old mason jars since she was a toddler. She keeps them in neat rows on the bureau beneath her window, which allows for plenty of south-facing sunlight and warmth from the heater behind it. Over the years, many of her most successful annuals—sunflowers, tall zinnias, marigolds, radishes—have been transplanted into clay pots and still thrive outside in their backyard all summer long.

  Her father used to call her Joanie Appleseed when she was very young, and although the nickname was eventually forgotten, her passion for planting has never waned. It’s the feeling of ownership she gets from the entire process, starting with the choosing and collecting of the seeds, the cleaning, sowing, and then constant nurturing to help coax them to their wondrous fruition.

  Her newest endeavor, undertaken last year, is a collection of lemon trees, which she hopes will start producing fruit in another couple of years. She’s fond of her lemon shoots—some as many as ten per jar—and enjoys observing their intricate root systems prepare for the lemons.

  She’s also got some wildflower seeds planted in her jars, but they’ve required a lot more effort and commitment than she’d counted on—a much longer drying time as well as rigorous cleaning to get them perfectly crunchy for sowing—and they still haven’t yielded much reward. She had to use Ma’s good rolling pin to crush their hard capsules, an infraction for which she paid dearly when Ma found out. Examining her wildflower seeds now, she can’t help but feel disappointed with their pace of growth. She picked the seeds in May, despite her father’s warning about how stubborn and temperamental they could be, and just as he predicted, most of them still haven’t sprouted.

  As she carefully pours water into the soil of the mason jars, she glances out her window at the cornfield. Gabriel is still there, wandering in the fading sun, detasseling his corn. She’s full of marvelous feelings, watching him out there on his land.

  She wants to hold on to this tingly resolve, this new exciting motive for opening her eyes in the morning when she hears Maman’s voice barking her name or feels those hard, callused hands shaking her awake. Her parents say she’s willful; that when she sets her sights on something, she doesn’t relent. Beware of the Démon Noir, her mother often warns.

  Gabriel pulls a tassel off one of the corn plants and sprinkles it on the ground. Maggie touches the dirt inside one of the jars to make sure it’s just damp enough. She doesn’t want to drown her precious lemon shoots. She packs the dirt down gently and then wipes her hands on her skirt, never taking her eyes off Gabriel.

  Chapter 3

  As quick and ordinary as an exhalation of breath, summer is over. The nights turn chilly and school resumes. Maggie starts ninth grade at St. Helen’s School. It’s an all-girls school, which suits her fine because she’s lousy in gym and there are no boys to make fun of her while she’s square dancing or playing Indian dodge ball. The school motto is Loyauté Nous Oblige and it’s written on the crest of her tunic.

  “Who can tell me where Napoleon suffered his first military loss?” Mrs. Parfitt asks, glancing anxiously outside. It’s raining hard and the wind is rattling the windows.

  Someone yells out, “The storming of the Bastille!” and Mrs. Parfitt lets out a burdened sigh. “Maggie?”

  Maggie enjoys history because it’s about facts, not interpretations. Facts are reliable, like seeds. “The invasion of Egypt in 1798,” she responds.

  Audrey scribbles Teacher’s Pet across Napoleon’s forehead in Maggie’s textbook.

  Maggie sits beside Nan and Audrey, her two best friends since third grade. They’re both blond Anglo beauties who look nothing like her. Maggie has black hair and black eyes, inherited from her Huron ancestors.

  Nan pokes her in the arm and whispers for her to look outside. A couple of the bolder girls are already at the window, squealing and pointing. In an instant, the sky darkens to black. Rain is falling in sheets and the wind is beating against the glass like fists. The world outside is a distorted blur.

  Maggie worries about how she’ll get her sisters home safe, knowing her mother will hold her responsible. That’s the burden of being the eldest and having a mother who places no value on common sense.

  “It’s a hurricane!” someone yells.
>
  “It’s not a hurricane,” Mrs. Parfitt reassures them, but her voice is submerged by the sound of two dozen screaming girls. She stands there helplessly as the classroom disintegrates into anarchy. “Everyone stay calm.”

  After a few more minutes of pandemonium, the students are released early. Maggie stops by Violet’s seventh grade class to pick her up.

  Maggie’s mother doesn’t drive and her father can’t leave the store, so she knows no one will show up to claim them. It’s Maggie’s daily responsibility to collect Geri at the elementary school and walk both of her sisters home. Today will be no different.

  When they get to the front door, Mrs. Parfitt is already there. “How are you getting home?” she asks, wrapping a plastic kerchief over her head. Her breath smells of butterscotch, from those candies she sucks all day.

  “My father is coming,” Maggie lies, too prideful to tell the truth. Mrs. Parfitt nods, opens her umbrella, and heads outside, where she’s quickly swallowed up by the storm.

  Maggie and Vi follow her out. The rain assaults them, their lightweight twill swing coats doing little to keep them dry. The combined force of the wind and rain almost knocks them to the ground. They cling to each other, linking arms and meeting the storm head-on, but it’s senseless. Within seconds, their flimsy umbrella breaks and they’re soaking wet. They look at each other and laugh helplessly, then plunge headlong into the storm.

  They hold tightly to each other, pummeled and pulled by the wind as they flail blindly forward. By the time they reach the corner of Rue Principale, it feels as though they’ve traveled miles. Maggie can feel her sister’s body trembling beneath the flimsy twill. She worries Vi will catch pneumonia or consumption, so she pulls her close and wraps an arm around her. Just as they’re about to cross the street, the sound of a honking horn causes them to jump back.

  With a burst of hope, Maggie searches the street for her father’s Packard. The heavy rain has completely obscured the road and she can’t make out any of the cars. She has to squeeze her eyes shut to keep them clear. A pickup truck suddenly emerges next to them and stops at the curb. With a sinking heart, Maggie sees it’s not her father. As the window rolls down, Maggie glimpses Clémentine Phénix’s face. Gabriel is in the passenger seat with Angèle sandwiched between them.