The Home for Unwanted Girls

by Joanna Goodman

  She hasn’t seen them since the summer. Occasionally, she spots Gabriel working in the field. She looks for him there every day, before she goes to sleep at night and as soon as she wakes up in the morning. She knows he’ll be leaving for Montreal soon and the thought of not having him around induces a palpable feeling of dread.

  “Get in!” Clémentine orders. “We just came to pick up Angèle and saw you standing here—”

  “I have to get Geraldine!”

  “We’ll pick her up on the way. We’ll manage.”

  Maggie climbs in first and then Violet slides in after her. It’s a 1939 Chevrolet pickup with only the one row for passengers.

  Angèle smiles at Maggie, and Maggie smiles back with a swell of fondness. They were best friends once, until Maggie was sent to English school and outgrew not just Angèle but everything French.

  Maggie’s secretly thrilled to be crammed next to Gabriel, their shoulders pressed together. She manages to sneak a few sidelong glances at his profile, trying to absorb as much of him as she can—the angle of his jawline, the shape of his nose, the curl of his long dark lashes. He turns slightly and casts his gray eyes on her.

  “Why didn’t your father come?” Gabriel asks Maggie after they’ve collected Geri at the elementary school.

  “Work,” Maggie says. “He can’t leave the store.”

  “Who would be shopping for seeds on a day like this?” Clémentine remarks.

  Her father would say you can’t just close up shop in the middle of the day. What if someone drives in from Granby or Farnham and finds the doors locked? You have to stay open, rain or shine. That’s the nature of retail: the customer is the most important person in the world. Besides, it’s catalogue season.

  Her father works late through October and November, preparing his mail-order catalogue to be sent out in time for spring ordering. He puts it together by himself, starting in September by painstakingly clipping out the pictures he gets from his suppliers, agonizing over the layout, and then typing up descriptions of each seed. This year, he’s introducing a brand-new grass, Prévert, which he invented himself after years of diligent experimenting. He spent most of last summer testing it at the Botanical Garden in Montreal, and now Prévert is ready to market. Peter says it sounds like “pervert.” Peter is doing the illustrations to help out, but he’s made it quite clear he’s got no interest in his father’s business. He wants to be an architect, not a “shopkeeper,” as he put it.

  “There’s flooding all over the Townships,” Clémentine says. “We heard it on the radio.”

  There’s a deep blue vein pulsating in Gabriel’s forehead as he watches the road. His knuckles are white from making such tight fists as they drive by a handful of cars overturned in ditches along the side of the road.

  Everyone falls silent. Maggie can’t help thinking about how M. and Mme. Phénix and two of their daughters were killed on this very same stretch of road. She wonders if Gabriel and Clémentine are thinking the same thing.

  The road ahead is invisible. The wipers swish back and forth, utterly useless. The road comes into view for a second, only to become engulfed again. Clémentine starts praying quietly.

  When she turns cautiously onto Bruce Street, Gabriel reaches across the front seat and rubs her shoulder. “Bravo, Clem,” he says. He smiles, revealing the most gorgeous dimples. It’s the first time Maggie’s ever seen him smile. There’s a tenderness between him and his sister that is nothing like Maggie’s relationship with Peter.

  As they approach the top of the hill, Clémentine suddenly jerks the truck to a stop and they’re all flung forward. Geri starts to whimper.

  “The road is flooded,” Gabriel says. “It’s practically a lake. We’ll have to walk from here.”

  They pile out of the pickup and huddle together, Geri in the middle of Maggie and Vi. The sky is still black, and the earth is dissolving into a mucky lake. The water is up to their ankles. Gabriel reaches for Maggie’s arm and holds on to her, chivalrously guiding the three girls toward the house.

  Maggie imagines he’s a brave soldier on the front lines of war, like Napoleon Bonaparte. In spite of the chill in her bones, she feels warm inside being so close to him. The grip of his fingers on her arm makes her tingle. She doesn’t want to get home, doesn’t want him to let go of her. She’d rather drown in his company than be separated from him.

  He releases her arm at their front door, having the good sense to avoid their mother. Maggie turns to him, raising her hand to wave. “Thank you!” she says. But her words, absurdly inadequate, are swept away by the storm.

  The front door opens and Maman is looming in the mudroom.

  “They sent us home early because of the storm,” Maggie tells her, still giddy from her encounter with Gabriel. Maman frowns, but even she can’t ruin Maggie’s good mood.

  They come into the kitchen, where Nicole is sitting in front of the fireplace with her doll. Maman closes the door with her usual gruffness and quickly gets to work stripping off their wet coats.

  “What are you smiling about?” Maman asks her.

  “I’m not,” Maggie says, pulling off her socks.

  “Tabarnac,” Maman mutters, not angrily. “You’re all soaking wet. Go upstairs, take off all your clothes, and put on the combinés that are warming on the heater.”

  Maggie and her sisters look at one another, perplexed, and run upstairs before their mother remembers to yell at them. Three pairs of long underwear are draped over the heater in their room, which Maman must have put out there in anticipation of their soggy return. Maggie pulls off all her wet clothes, tosses them in the hamper, and puts on her pajamas over the warm long underwear. She can’t stop shivering. Their teeth are all chattering in harmony.

  “Ma doesn’t seem mad,” Violet says.

  “Why didn’t she yell at us?” Geri asks.

  “Don’t worry,” Maggie says. “She’ll manage to find a way to blame us for the storm.”

  They laugh. Downstairs, they huddle in front of the kitchen fireplace wrapped in the patchwork wool blanket Maman made out of their father’s old suits. She hands them each a mug of warm milk and keeps checking them for fever with a brusque touch to their foreheads.

  It’s turning out to be a perfect day, Maggie thinks, savoring the warm milk and heat of the fire, the memory of Gabriel sitting so close to her in the car, and then, afterwards, holding on to her in the rain.

  “I told your father to go and get you,” her mother mutters, clanging lids as she prepares supper. She’s wearing an apron over a royal-blue-and-white floral print dress with buttons all the way down the front, like a doctor’s coat. It’s dowdy and unflattering. Ever since Nicole was born, she seems to have stopped caring about her appearance altogether.

  She always complains that motherhood destroyed her beauty. She blames her children for the gray streaks in her hair, for the two back molars that had to be removed, and especially for her expanding waistline. She was pretty once—there are photographs to prove it—but not so much anymore. Having resigned herself to her fate, or rather dedicated herself to it, the transformation has been rapid. It began with a short unflattering hairdo that she parts on the side and combs over her ears, then the serviceable floral smocks and drab cardigans, and, finally, the total relinquishment of makeup as some sort of protest.

  “Why am I surprised he left you there?” her mother natters, as relentless as the rain.

  Violet rolls her eyes and Geri giggles.

  “Well, but it’s okay,” Maggie says, trying to smooth things over. “We’re here. He couldn’t just close the store in the middle of the afternoon.”

  Maman dumps a can of peas into her cast-iron pot and turns to face Maggie. “He’s got you brainwashed, Maggie. Of course he should have closed the store and gone to pick you up.”

  “I’m not brainwashed,” Maggie says defiantly, surprising herself. “The reason he cares about his business so much is because he cares about us.”

  “There�
��s no point talking to you,” her mother says, shoving the pot of stew into the wood-burning oven and slamming it shut. “You don’t think for yourself. God only knows why you worship him so much.”

  Maman leans up against the oven door and pulls a cigarette from her apron pocket. She lights it and inhales languidly, eyeing Maggie. “One day you’ll see him for who he is,” she says, waving her cigarette. “Or maybe you’re stupider than I thought.”

  A loud crash of thunder rocks the house. Nicole starts to cry and Geri squeals with delight. Maggie has a pleasant feeling of being cozy and safe by the fire.

  “Maggie, Violet,” Maman barks. “Set the table.”

  They both get up and do as they’re told, making faces behind their mother’s back while they lay out the plates and cutlery. There’s a noise out in the mudroom and they all look up.

  A door slams. Their father is home.

  Chapter 4

  Maman pounces on him before he even sets foot inside the door. His expression immediately sags in defeat, before he’s even got his hat off. When Maggie first started working at Superior Seeds, she would observe her father’s jovial moods with curiosity. At work, he’s mostly lively and upbeat. Nothing like he is at home. In those early days, she felt privileged to be exposed to that lighthearted side of him, but as time passed, she began to wonder if his work persona was not slightly duplicitous. Why didn’t his family make him that happy? Why was it he rarely laughed with his own wife and children?

  Inevitably, Maggie came to lay the blame at her mother’s feet. She is the one who robs them all of their father’s true nature, draining him daily with her nagging and complaining. Her misery has a way of crushing even the most buoyant spirit. They all have to live around her, navigating her unpredictable temperament and her dark moods.

  It’s hard for Maggie to understand why he chose her to be his wife. She imagines he could have had any pretty girl with red lips and soft curls. Why did it have to be someone who’d had such a wretched life and was still so angry about it?

  Hortense grew up in the slums, in a house with dirt floors and no running water that burned to the ground when she was eleven. It was her father who started the fire when he passed out drunk with a lit cigarette in his mouth, killing himself and the prostitute he was with. Hortense, the eldest, was pulled out of school and sent to work as a maid for a wealthy English family, which planted a seed of resentment against all English. In her own words, she married Wellington in the hope of being rescued from destitution, and yet what Hortense despises most about him today are the very things that first appealed to her: his education, his work ethic, his steady income, and his pride.

  “Why didn’t you just go to the school and pick them up?” Maman asks their father, jabbing him in the chest with the long wooden spoon farmers use to feed pigs.

  Wellington shields his chest with his arm. “Let me in, Hortense.” He speaks in a composed manner, which has the effect of riling her up even more.

  “I would have gone to get them after work,” he says. “They would have been fine until six.” He winks at Maggie. She smiles to show her solidarity. Yet even as she tries to ignore the flutter of uneasiness inside her, her mother’s earlier accusation reverberates in her mind: He’s got you brainwashed.

  “Don’t you care about them?” Maman asks him.

  As her father removes his wet trench coat and fedora with a look of resignation, Maggie questions for the first time if perhaps it is unusual that he didn’t pick them up in the storm. “There’s no need for all these histrionics,” he says.

  Maman slams the door to the mudroom. The children flinch.

  Her father lets out a small sigh and settles at the table with shoulders slightly stooped and spirits dampened. Maman wordlessly dumps beef-and-pea stew onto his plate. He absently pushes the stew around with his fork, separating carrots and peas from the beef. He pours himself a glass of wine. The bottle is just for him. Maman rarely drinks. If she does, it’s only with her friends and siblings.

  “I’m trying to run a business,” he says wearily. “I can’t just close the store on a whim.”

  “A whim?” she cries. “You call that storm a whim?”

  “Suppose a customer had shown up at my door and I was closed?” he says. “Suppose he’d driven all the way in from another town?”

  “What moron would go out to buy seeds in a storm?”

  Geri giggles. Maggie elbows her.

  “Well, did anyone show up?” Maman asks him.

  “No.”

  Maman slams a hand on the pine table and throws her head back, laughing victoriously. Violet and Geri laugh with her, but Maggie stays quiet.

  “Maudit Anglais,” Maman mutters. Goddamn Englishman. “What kind of father puts his job before his children’s safety?” she continues, still not mollified. She is missing that innate sense of when to retreat.

  “It’s not a job,” he corrects. “It’s my business. It’s our livelihood. I have a reputation.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “My family values are precisely what drives my work ethic,” he says, and Maggie finds herself lulled by his eloquence. “If I didn’t care about my family, I would close the store whenever I felt like it, and risk losing half a day’s revenue.”

  Maggie looks from her father to her mother. It seems reasonable to Maggie. Surely it makes sense to Maman.

  “You can’t tease a strong work ethic out of a man’s family values,” her father continues. “And vice versa.”

  Maggie’s father sips his wine, nibbles his stew. His fork clinks against the china. “Excuse me,” he says, abruptly standing up and leaving the room with his glass of wine. As an afterthought, he returns to take the bottle and then disappears into his sanctuary off the kitchen.

  “You can’t hide in there all night!” Maman yells after him.

  Maggie gets up and slips away. Upstairs, she wanders down the hall to her parents’ bedroom and stands in front of her mother’s bureau, staring at a photograph of her parents before they were married. Her mother keeps it in an etched silver frame on a doily right next to her box of Yardley face powder. Perhaps it’s a reminder of happier days, proof she once wore crimson lipstick and had a slender, curvy figure. In the picture, Maggie’s father is wheeling her in a push lawn mower. She’s wearing a clingy, gauzy white dress and white high-heeled shoes with straps around the ankles. Her hair is a wavy bob, her lips a dark Cupid’s bow, and her head thrown back in laughter. She looks gorgeous and happy. Maggie searches for some clue that it really is Maman. The woman captured in sepia looks so enchanting, prone to easy laughter, hopeful.

  Has she spent too many years with a man she doesn’t love? Or was it childhood tragedy that ruined her before she even met him? Even though Maman managed to get herself out of the slums and into a much better situation, maybe a tragic childhood is a thing that can’t ever be overcome, like polio. It leaves a person crippled.

  Maggie turns away and tiptoes out of the room, remembering what it felt like to be so close to Gabriel today, to hear him breathing beside her and feel his pulse beating; to have their legs touch, his hand on her arm as he walked her to the house. She can’t wait to see him again.

  As she fills a glass with water in the bathroom, she wonders if her parents felt this way about each other at first, or if they ever do now. She hears the noises coming out of the bedroom every once in a while when she goes to pee in the middle of the night. She used to think they were fighting—that her mother was beating her father—but Peter set her straight and told her they were having sex. Maggie was shocked that they could hate each other so much one moment and then make love the next.

  She closes her bedroom door and goes over to the dresser to examine her lemon tree shoots and wildflower seeds. “Hello,” she says, lovingly pouring water into the dirt of her jars.

  The storm is still raging outside, and it pleases her immensely that, in spite of the howling wind and broken tree branches strewn all over the yard, her seeds are
calmly, stealthily growing in the sanctuary of her indoor garden, and there’s nowhere else she’d rather be.

  Chapter 5

  On a Saturday afternoon in late fall, when most of the leaves have already abandoned the trees and winter is beginning to settle over the Townships in its typically irrevocable manner, Maggie gazes out the window of her attic at the seed store, lost in her thoughts. Smoke rolls out of the chimneys across the street, and she imagines living rooms full of harmonious families sitting around the fire, laughing and talking tenderly and respectfully to one another. Inside every house but her own, she imagines, life unfolds in a more amiable, civilized manner.

  A man’s voice at the top of the attic stairs interrupts her daydreaming.

  “Calice,” he says.

  She looks up from weighing her seeds, startled to find Gabriel standing there in a red-and-black-checkered hunting jacket with a wool cap. He looks like someone who could survive out in the wilderness alone, killing bears and lighting fires with sticks and living off the land, she thinks as he takes off his cap, shakes out his blond hair, and leans up against her table.

  “You have to count all those seeds one by one?” he says.

  “What are you doing up here?” she asks him, her heart pounding. Her father must have been busy with a customer and not seen Gabriel slip past; otherwise he certainly would have forbidden him access. “The store’s about to close—”

  “Clémentine is buying bulbs for her garden.”

  It’s that time of year, right before the earth freezes and the farmers go into hibernation, before the snows falls and the farms lie buried, silent, when everyone in the area floods her father’s store to buy spring blooming bulbs for their gardens.