Justin would wake in the warm blankets in his own room. His younger sister was sleeping somewhere in her own bed in upstate New York, her husband beside her, her four children in their beds. His brothers lived in various places in Upstate New York, all safe as far as he knew. And knowing all of this, he would be grateful that he couldn’t go back, that he couldn’t be trapped, and that time went only forward and never back.
II
November 17th, 1957
Joan had worked at the dress factory for five years—since just after her senior year in high school, when she’d been a skinny girl who favoured high, tight ponytails, her blue eyes rimmed by dark lashes. She looked at old photographs, the ones in the yearbook where she was posing at the top of the cheerleading triangle or singing in the choir, and she couldn’t remember a single time when she had not been loved. She wished she could remember being that girl.
It wasn’t that millwork was particularly hard. It had simply made her an adult. Now she wore heels and dresses. She cut her hair fashionably short and set it every night in rollers. She wore the matte red lipstick of women in magazines. She was an adult. She was beautiful, like women in the movies who clicked their heels and smarted off to the men who flirted with them and snapped their compacts closed. Like those women, she’d leave the town she came from, though the women in movies always came from somewhere in the Midwest, with farm boys back home who pined for them. Leaving Farmington would be easy: nobody was pining for her. She’d come back for Christmas, of course, to go to Mass with her parents and see the piles of white lilies and listen to the songs about God and Jesus and Mary swell and overwhelm the church, filling the big, empty place with their insistent repetitions about love and miracles. She would open presents and eat her mother’s molasses-soaked fruitcakes, the candied cherries sticking in her molars, making her teeth hurt. But she would not live here.
Since she was only temporary, she could enjoy walking to the factory, wearing her apron and pulling her hair back, collecting her cheque and putting the money under her mattress. It was a lark. It was almost like acting: she would get up in the morning and dress herself as though she was going onto a movie set.
Her mother sometimes called her conceited, said she thought she was above the company. And though Joan knew pride was a sin, she couldn’t help it—she thought she was above the company, usually. The company bored her stiff and the idea of spending her life like them made her want to do something truly scandalous, like take a train to Boston and become a lounge singer, or live a bohemian life in New York City, where she’d wear trousers and black turtlenecks and smoke marijuana. She’d heard about women like that in magazines and they always came to bad ends, pregnant or scorned by fast men, their names ruined. But those were just stories. She thought it might be different in real life.
Joan walked to the mill from her parents’ house in Old Farmington, where she kept her girlhood room in the attic, a room she had begged for at the age of twelve. The room was cramped and slope-ceilinged and always too hot or too cold, but she loved it. It was her own prayer closet (though she did not pray), her secret room. In the summer, she opened her small window, unbuttoned her shirt, and sprawled out on the floor and read magazines in the almost altogether, the wind cooling her back. In the winter, she wore two pairs of socks and wrapped herself in a quilt and read. It was enough to be alone, separate from the house downstairs that clattered and hummed with ugly, voiceless energy.
Her parents wanted better for her, they said. They had wanted her to marry a fellow Catholic and have grandchildren for them, just as her sister Patricia had, as her brothers Arthur and John had. The boys both lived in New York and came only for holidays, their smiling wives in demure coral lipstick, hair stiff from monthly permanents. Her brothers made their money doing things that made Joan too bored to even remember, things with numbers and pieces of carbon paper. They had secretaries and meetings.
Patricia, Joan’s older sister, still lived in Farmington. She was tall and gaunt, and her children clung to her like briers. When she and the children came to visit—all four of them under ten and therefore almost impossible for Joan to talk to—the house warbled like an aviary with their restless, directionless energy. Patricia sighed, screamed at the children, and smiled tightly at any questions about her life. “We are fine,” she always said. “Just busy. Just living our everyday life.” She said the words everyday life as though describing something necessary but completely miserable, like a dental appointment. She talked to Joan as if Joan didn’t have an everyday life.
“We don’t need things to be new,” she’d say, smiling her unhappy smile. “Not all of us have to be entertained all the time,” she added.
Patricia often asked Joan when she was going to complete her duties as a woman and find a husband and have children. “You aren’t getting any younger,” she would say.
Joan had no desire to complete her duties as a woman if those duties made her as unhappy as her mother and sister seemed, but she needed them, for now, and was grateful that her mother let her live at home, though she knew that she was a kind of burden—proof that the parenting and care they had lavished on her had not been enough to make her a good, faithful Catholic woman.
Joan did not love the church, as she knew she should. She didn’t believe that the fat man in a toupee at the front of the congregation, in his heavy, curtain-drab robes, had any closer connection to God than she did. She saw how the priest looked when he placed the wafer on her tongue, the wine glass against her lips. He liked the power, and he liked to put his hands in places that most women wouldn’t allow a strange man to touch. He lingered when he laid the bread on her tongue. He sometimes touched her chin when he tipped the glass. She knew enough about life to know what his looks meant. She didn’t mistake them for the love of God.
But she didn’t blame him either—best to get pleasure where you can, she thought.
Joan wanted to be a writer. She didn’t know quite what she wanted to write yet—maybe plays, or movie scripts, or shows for television. She scribbled ideas in a notebook her mother had given her a year earlier for Christmas—a leather-bound thing that shut with a cheap tin lock.
She had hundreds of plots and character sketches. She had started the dialogue for some of them, scenes that moved quickly, wittily—at least she hoped—but she never felt free to complete them. Just when she felt that she might be ready to write more, to finish a whole scene, when she had her pen poised above her spiral-bound notebook, she’d hear a creak or a crash from below: her mother moving furniture, cleaning, washing dishes, crashing the pans together to make it clear that at least she was working, even if nobody else was. The urge to write left as soon as Joan heard Betty’s fretful movements. Her parents were down there, disappointed in her, wishing that she were a different person, wishing that she wasn’t still there, in the bedroom where she used to study for spelling tests and have slumber parties.
Joan spent her days after work scribbling as best she could, and her nights reading the big leather-bound novels she got from the library—the Brontë sisters, Dickens, and gothic romances, mostly. Reading about little Jane Eyre, locked up inside herself for so many years, finally free at the end, finally mistress of her own house and husband and desires, made Joan think of herself in her attic. She wasn’t quiet and she wasn’t plain but she was trapped and had to go through the motions until she could be free. But she would get away when the time was right. Everything happened when the time was right.
She sometimes went to the movies by herself or with a girlfriend—somebody who didn’t pop her gum during the movie or insist on buying a package of loud candy. She would sink down in her seat, allowing the sounds to fill her, allowing the colours to overwhelm any thoughts that might be trying to crawl up and distract her from the blonde in a pink dress running across a cornfield, from the man in a blue suit pacing his office, smoke billowing from his nostrils and mouth.
J
oan had almost ended up like her sister. Just a few years before, she’d stood crying for joy in front of her high school sweetheart Richard Wallis’ house after she’d missed her period for three weeks straight the summer after senior year. Then, she had wanted, more than anything, to have her life fixed for good, to have her days made clear and coherent and filled with duty and purpose. You couldn’t make the wrong choice if you had a family, a husband, a little house—it was right, and everyone thought so. Just keeping a house running was some kind of miracle, according to most people, something a woman was specially made to do. So Joan had let him pull her skirt up in the car after they had gone to see some movie with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—she couldn’t remember much of the movie, but something about it had made Richard turn and press his wet, moving mouth against hers. She had gone through with it because she wanted to be a good sport, and she thought maybe this meant that Richard loved her enough, and maybe, if he married her, she’d finally be able to leave home.
Instead of embracing her and offering marriage on the spot, Richard had given her money to go see a doctor in Albany famous for his discretion, to make sure she was in a condition. Joan had gone with Richard on the pretence that they were going on a date in Albany to see the new Fred Astaire film. As she entered the examination area, a white, antiseptic little room without even a droopy watercolour of foliage to break the monotony, she wished desperately that she really were going to see a film full of lurid colours and dance numbers.
She put her feet in the cold stirrups and flinched when the doctor snapped on his gloves, tensed when she felt the pressure of his fingers.
“I’ve never done this before,” Joan said, hoping he would soothe her. She was shocked that a man her father’s age was looking at places she never let anyone look. She had imagined that she’d be dressed in a white robe and that everything would be done by X-ray machine. She hadn’t imagined his hands, or the cold metal, or the pinch and stretch of her skin. Her forehead perspired.
“Don’t tense,” he said. “Please relax.”
She tried to relax by closing her eyes and thinking of her attic room—how warm it was, how when she got home the first thing she’d do was bring a big glass of Coke up to her room and sip it slowly as she read a book.
Soon, after a few pinches, the doctor told her to slide back up, unlace her feet from the stirrups, and put her clothes back on. He left the room abruptly and she hurried to dress, unsure of when he would return.
The doctor, who even looked like Joan’s father, with his bushy brows and a tired, heavily lined mouth, said there was nothing wrong with her besides a little nervousness, which sometimes caused women’s troubles and delays in the natural cycles. He told her that she would have her monthly visit as soon as she stopped worrying so much and calmed down. He gave her some pills in an orange bottle, each as big as the multivitamins her mother took every morning with her orange juice. He didn’t say what they did, just to take them at night if she had trouble sleeping or felt particularly nervous. She shook the bottle and the pills thunked heavily against the glass.
Joan left the office red-faced. She wanted to take a long, scalding bath. She wanted to be by herself. She picked up a movie magazine in the lobby as she waited for Richard to return in his father’s black car.
As she waited, she read an article about Joan Crawford, who had saved up money on her own to go to drama school, then ran off to Hollywood to make herself famous. Joan liked sharing a name with this woman in heavy shoulder pads, her eyebrows thick, hair glossy. The article was accompanied by a full-page spread of Crawford in a bathing suit, reclined on a one-armed divan, her red lips and black hair like ink against the creamy upholstery. She was almost forty and still beautiful. She thought about Joan Crawford riding the bus from the Midwest to Hollywood alone and recalled the doctor resting his gloved hands on her thighs, applying metal to her thinnest skin. Joan Crawford wouldn’t let herself be embarrassed by such a thing.
She was free now, just like Joan Crawford. She wasn’t bound to anyone or anything anymore—the doctor had said that everything was normal. No baby. And she was lucky to be free, to have her body all to herself, to not have to marry Richard, whom she wasn’t sure she liked all that much anyway. She’d never really thought about it before. She’d only known that he liked her, and that had seemed like enough. She looked up from the magazine, Joan Crawford’s face flattening and darkening as the glare moved across the page. She looked around the empty waiting room. She almost wished for somebody to tell about her good fortune, her freedom, but there was nobody. Richard would be coming any minute. She put down the magazine and closed her eyes. She was alone.
Richard slowly drifted out of her life after that day. She did not cut things off abruptly—she was too used to his company, too afraid of hurting him—but gradually she grew colder to his embraces. As he talked about baseball, about how he wanted to be on the Farmington Town Select Board like his father and grandfather had been, and described the kind of life he wanted—quiet, happy, filled with soft chairs and shag carpet and a camping trip every once in a while, nothing too rugged, maybe a pop-up trailer at the local National Park every summer—Joan grew more and more certain that she had to let him go. He was a sweet, kind, perfectly normal boy, and he bored her. He was no longer the only way out of her parents’ house. She began to see the things about him that her mind had skimmed over before—he picked his teeth after dinner, he spit on the sidewalk, he only liked to watch movies that were funny or about war. She couldn’t remember saying anything definitive. She could only remember his presence, and then his gradual absence. That, too, brought relief.
Joan decided soon after that she would work until she’d saved up enough money to live wherever she wanted to live and do whatever she wanted to do. She figured she’d need at least a few hundred to take the bus to her next home, wherever it was, to get an apartment, to feed herself until she found a job. She gave herself three years at the most. By then, if she didn’t have enough money, she’d go anyway—she’d have a whole five years of work experience, so she wouldn’t be in such bad shape. She didn’t know where she wanted to go—maybe Boston, maybe New York City, maybe even Montréal. She’d had three years of French in school and a Berlitz book that she practised with every night before bed. She could make it wherever she decided to go.
She applied for a sewing position at the New England Textiles factory, just a few blocks away from her parents’ house.
Joan got a sewing position, kept her girlhood room, and saved her money under her mattress. She gave her mother ten dollars a month to help with expenses. Betty always shook her head and pursed her lips, as though Joan were presenting her with a pack of pornographic cards instead of money. But Betty always took the money and bought lavish Sunday dinners that Joan ate heartily, gratefully. Joan thought she should savour those meals, that someday they would be a sweet, distant memory.
On November 17th, Joan walked slowly to work; she’d be leaving soon, there was no point in hurrying. It was beautiful outside, the sun warm against her wool jacket. She listened to the click of her shoes against the pavement and watched the last, yellow leaves detach in the wind, swirling down and collecting where the street met the jut of sidewalk.
Today, Joan was going to give her two weeks’ notice to Tony, the foreman at New England Textiles. Tony had been the boss for the last two years. He was no trouble. Just a gross, brutish man—he smelled like oil and perfume, his hair always slick, his suits food-spotted and sloppy, hanging from his thin body like rags from a scarecrow. But he was relatively quiet (not a chatterbox, a quality Joan couldn’t stand in men or women) and content to let everyone do their job as they had before he arrived. He wasn’t poor, Joan was sure, but he dressed as though he got all of his clothes out of the Saint Mary’s consignment shop.
“I’m not here to change anything on you ladies,” Tony said on his first day, when he gathered all the women together to i
ntroduce himself.
He flashed a grin and Joan noticed that his teeth were perfectly formed and white.
Tony had made mild overtures of affection toward her. Once he placed his hand on her shoulder when she happened to be out back smoking on her lunch break, eating a tuna fish sandwich while watching the river flow angrily over the boulders and rocks that choked it. She’d been watching the foam gather in furious little explosions when she suddenly felt pressure on her shoulder. She turned, frightened, almost dropping her sandwich. But it was only Tony. She had been thinking of the river, how it was going fast enough for somebody to drown in it, and she had a sudden vision of him picking her up and pitching her into it.
“I’m glad somebody else is out here,” he said. “I hate to stand around and smoke alone.” He shook a cigarette loose from the pack bulging his shirt pocket. He had taken off his usual droopy sports jacket. His dress shirt was the colour of old bone. Yellow stains crept up the collar and cuffs.
Almost Dark Page 8
