The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  The tree stump moved then. It took a step and a branch snapped. The girls huddled together, a bundle of fabric. The shape—not a tree, not a bear—seemed to be moving in their direction. Sadie, clear headed, clever, whispered, “Methinks we should head back.” Betty’s hand tightened on hers. Sadie stared, transfixed, at the moving shape. It lumbered, not in a bear way, but in a tall-man way. She thought, Pequot, but didn’t dare say it. She felt the specter of Laura Loomis urging her to run. Betty tugged her down the path. “Move, move, move,” she said. Francie saw the two of them moving away from her, and she turned to follow them and tripped. The man in the woods wore a camouflage jacket, a brown, broad-brimmed hat.

  “Why doesn’t he call to us?” Francie said, her voice bright with alarm. “Why is he walking this way?”

  They could hear his footsteps now in the frozen snow, the crack of branches in his path.

  Sadie felt the fear rise. She was the first to kick off her pumps and run, and Betty and Francie followed, all of them running, the silent man somewhere behind them. They reached Sadie’s backyard and the sliding glass door, crying now, panicked. They got inside and locked the door and continued on up the basement stairs, and then up the stairs to the second story, where they flung themselves onto Sadie’s bed, Francie repeating, “I told you, I told you.” Her mother came to the door and knocked.

  “Girls,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  Sadie glared at Francie, who seemed on the verge of telling. “Nothing,” she said. “We’re just playing.”

  “We’re sorry, Mrs. Watkins,” Betty said. Her face was smeared with tears, but now she was laughing, giggling. Sadie’s mother made an exasperated sound on the other side of the door.

  “Be good,” she said. They heard the ice in her glass and then her footsteps retreating down the carpeted hall.

  The hems of the dresses were torn, snagged with brambles, filled with snow that melted onto Sadie’s bedroom floor. Their feet were raw and red and Sadie gave them pairs of the woolen socks she wore ice-skating. They were afraid to go back down into the basement for their clothes, but then Sadie went, flipped on all the lights, and grabbed everything, her anger canceling out her fear. In the light from the overhead bulb the basement world was transformed: the old couch with its doilies and torn upholstery; the warped drop-leaf table and mismatched chairs; the books, their spines broken and boards faded. They had dropped the candelabra on the path, left the shoes somewhere up there, too. When the snow finally came—a big storm that had them home from school for three days—she imagined these things buried under the weight of it, and then later, in the spring, when everything melted, she would picture moss growing over the shoes, the pink satin becoming part of the ferns, the pokeweed, the green world inhabited by salamanders and cottontails and the occasional snake. She would remind herself to look for the items they’d left on the path but become distracted by other things—the romance novel she was writing (The Governess), guitar lessons at the community center (“Greensleeves,” “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane”), a job as a mother’s helper (i.e., indentured servant). Two years passed in this way, and she forgot about the game, about Francie, the difference in their ages making her too young to bother with.

  At least until that May, when, bored and nostalgic, Sadie and Betty once again donned the old dresses and slipped out the basement door. They stayed off the main path and picked their way through the woods, by then a familiar place composed of young and old trees. A brook ran through it parallel to the houses, filled with brownish-looking foam that may have been the result of the DDT misted over them each summer. The planes would drone overhead while their parents sipped whiskey sours, and the children lay on their backs in front-yard grass like unsuspecting sacrifices.

  “Oh, lovely, I’ve gotten my shoe wet,” Sadie said.

  “Look at that, the hem of your skirt is muddy.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  They walked along the brook’s bank, and Sadie slid down the side in her high-heeled shoes and toppled into the water. The brook wasn’t very deep, but it was fast-moving, its bottom a variety of smooth stones, and Sadie struggled to stand. Betty watched from the bank, strands of her long, chestnut-colored hair covering her face, doubled over laughing with her hand between her legs. Pee streamed down onto the trampled jack-in-the-pulpit, wetting her chiffon skirt, probably dribbling into her pumps. Sadie felt the icy water soak into her coat. They were too busy laughing and peeing to notice anyone nearby. If it had been a boy they’d have been embarrassed. But it was only Francie, with her doughy cheeks, and her intelligent eyes dark behind her glasses. She looked at them laughing, and Sadie sensed a sort of yearning in her face. But her watching only made them laugh harder.

  “You’re going to catch something from that water,” Francie said matter-of-factly.

  When they’d first met Francie in elementary school, she had been consigned to the kindergarten playground. She’d carried a blue leather pocketbook and was always alone. Drawn to her oddness, Sadie and Betty often broke the rules to sneak over to talk to her.

  “What’s in your pocketbook?” Sadie would say.

  Francie’s lips would tighten with wariness. “None of your business.” Her hair was cut short in the pixie style mothers foisted on girls too young to have sense enough to refuse. Francie was thinner then, dollish looking, the tortoiseshell glasses heavy on her face. Sadie and Betty laughed at nearly everything she said, most of it mimicked from a grown-up and strange coming from her mouth.

  “Why can’t you just be nice and show us?” Sadie said.

  Francie knew that she should be nice, and she did like the attention. Finally, one day she undid the snap of the pocketbook and opened it up. The girls looked into its depths. There was a small change purse, the kind they made during the summers in recreation craft class when they were little—an imitation leather heart, stitched together with plastic thread. Hers was blue to match her pocketbook. She also had a handkerchief, a tiny pink one, and a bottle of Tinkerbell perfume. Sadie reached her hand in quickly and grabbed the change purse before Francie could snap the pocketbook shut. Francie’s face hardened like Sadie’s mother’s would when Sadie forgot to make her bed.

  “Give it back,” she said.

  “I’m not taking it,” Sadie said, dancing off a ways. “I’m just looking. I’ll give it back in a minute.” She opened it up and looked inside. Francie had quite a bit of change in the purse—silver, not all pennies. Sadie and Betty glanced at each other. This would buy a few packs of gum, or the little round tin of candies they loved, La Vie Pastillines, in raspberry or lemon. So they talked Francie into giving them the money. They would bring her a tin of the candy, they said. For weeks after, Francie would stand at the low fence that separated the playgrounds, small and resolute, waiting for them. That, too, had become a game. “She’s there, she’s there again,” Betty would say. They became practiced at avoiding her, except for those rare times she showed up at the door of one of their houses and their mothers told them to include her.

  Sadie climbed out of the brook and stood dripping on the bank.

  “Why are you wearing dress-up clothes?” Francie asked.

  Sadie would admit later that the question annoyed her. For a moment, standing there in the wet coat, she felt as if she and Francie had switched places, and Francie had become the older girl entitled to make disparaging comments. If Francie hadn’t seen Sadie fall into the brook, if she hadn’t asked about the dress-up clothes, spring would have simply progressed into summer, and nothing of the business would have ever transpired. Maybe Sadie would have seen her riding her purple bike in lazy circles at the end of the street, but that shapeless figure of her wobbling on her Schwinn, those annoying plastic streamers spraying from each handlebar grip, wouldn’t have prompted it. While Francie’s appearance at the brook that day was purely accidental, Sadie’s desire for revenge was not, and the plan to retaliate sprang from her surprise at the younger girl’s ability to gue
ss at her own shameful longing for childhood.

  “Go away,” Sadie said. “We’re meeting someone and we don’t want you around.”

  She took out the cigarette she’d hidden in her coat pocket. Only a bit of it was wet, and she straightened it out and lit it up. She held the lighter up to Betty, who took out her own cigarette and leaned in to the flame.

  Francie’s eyes widened. “Who are you meeting?” She took a careful step closer, pretending their smoking wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

  Sadie put her hands on her hips. Her coat opened, revealing the shape of her new breasts beneath the dress’s bodice. “A boy,” she said.

  They held the cigarettes out in the vees of their fingers.

  “What boy?” Francie asked, suddenly wary.

  “Hezekiah,” Sadie said. “You don’t know him.”

  Hezekiah, a name she’d seen on an old cemetery stone, one used for the husbands in their games (Hezekiah, dearest, bring home a nice fat rabbit for stew).

  “He lives on the farm there, over the hill,” Betty said, catching on quickly, flipping her long hair back over her shoulder.

  Francie’s eyes narrowed to where Betty pointed beyond Foothills Road, to the rise of Filley Farm’s pasture. Francie had been young when Laura Loomis disappeared, but Sadie felt sure that like all children in the neighborhood, she’d been warned. In the intervening years they’d reclaimed the woods and pastures—the parents’ vigilance, and the punishment for infractions, had lessened. The curving asphalt streets that cut through the countryside, their slate roofs and storm doors, their porch lights and decorative landscaping, were, to the parents, all reassuring aspects of safety. Instead, Sadie knew Francie was remembering that winter day and the man in the woods, the crunch of his footsteps, his anonymous menace.

  “How do you know him?” Francie asked.

  “We found his letter,” Sadie said.

  “A letter?” Francie asked, well aware that this was something mailed from one house to another with the proper postage. A letter had requirements they mastered in penmanship class: heading, salutation, body, complimentary close, signature. Sometimes, a postscript. A note was hastily scribbled, passed between popular girls in the dull hour of American history. And then Sadie told her it was none of her business. “Isn’t that your mother calling?” she said. “Are you supposed to be here?” She and Betty continued on through the woods, taking the path along the brook. They could hear Francie behind them, following them, wanting to believe what they told her was true.

  Sadie knew that this was typical human behavior. She remembered the UFOs that circled the neighborhood one summer evening, flashes of silver and iridescent violet panning across the night sky, bringing them out of their houses to marvel—parents with cocktails and cigarettes, children in cotton pajamas, everyone poised on their own wide sweep of perfect grass. Francie crept behind them and they pretended they didn’t notice her. They put out their cigarettes on a rock, and they saw her bend down and retrieve the butts, like evidence or talismans. She followed them up to the next road, and then to the dead end where a strip of old barbed wire separated their neighborhood from the farmer’s field, where beyond the asphalt curb Queen Anne’s lace bloomed and twirled its white head, and cows lowed and hoofed through muddy grass, around stones covered with lichen. There at the foot of the cedar post was one of these stones, and Sadie pretended to lift it, to pocket something in her mother’s heavy coat that she carried slung over her arm. Francie took it all in at a distance, her white face round with pleasure, while they pretended they didn’t see her.

  Years later, Sadie would not be able to say what made them revel in deceit. She might have blamed it on something pagan and impish, the fields and woods surrounding them a sort of pastoral landscape. There was the farmer riding his tractor; the newly planted corn emerging to shake its tassels, all pleasant and bountiful; the smell of manure seeping through window screens into kitchens and bedrooms, awakening in them a sort of misplaced disgust. But mostly, it was easy, because Sadie wanted the deceit to be true. She wanted there to be some mysterious boy—some Hezekiah—who had been watching her, in love with her from a distance. She’d imagine that out beyond the bay window, on the street that wound higher up the hill than hers, a boy with sweet wispy hair and lips that were always half smiling was watching. He saw her walk up the driveway to catch the school bus. He saw through the new spring growth of foxglove and pokeweed and fern, through those bright little shoots on the elms. From the fallow fields, white-sprayed with bluets, she could almost hear his sigh, his gentle breathing, and smell his sweat—coppery, the mineral smell of turned earth.

  September 22, 2002

  SADIE FIRST SEES HIM ON a wet September evening, not long after she lost her baby—a stillborn girl. She has a cold, and the damp and the falling leaves all compound her sorrow. He is a boy she knows from childhood, now a man filling his truck at the local gas station. The few streets of their old neighborhood that wound together were built on his family’s farmland. He lived in a midcentury modern house at the top of Sadie’s road. It was fieldstone and glass, built by a famous Harvard architect and reached by a long curving drive with iron gates at its entrance. On the gatepost was a plaque that announced the place, ceremoniously, as Wappaquassett. Sadie finds the adopted Algonquian place names in town ironic—Mashamoquet, Susquetonscut, Quinnatisset; “big fish place,” “place of red ledges,” “little long river.” The early settlers of the 1670s may have well understood their meaning, but they now signify parks and country clubs and shopping plazas. Despite this, the name on the Filleys’ gatepost has always seemed authentic to her—“place covered with rush matting”—as if the land was named and rightfully given over to Filley ancestors by the original inhabitants. The grounds of Wappaquassett included a barn and an in-ground swimming pool, the only one in the neighborhood of 1960s Colonials and split ranches.

  Sadie watches the man at the pump in front of her, gassing up an old truck, and remembers him as a swaggering boy, rakish, tall, dressed in wrinkled khakis, his private-school tie always askew. She tries to convince herself he was just an older boy who smoked cigarettes, who kept himself at a remove that only made him seem alluring. But she cannot deny the way her heartbeat steps up when she recognizes him, the romantic hero of all her childhood games. He is taller, broader, yet as he reaches back to replace the nozzle she notices his old fluid way of moving, the shake of his head to clear his eyes of his hair, still the same shaggy brown and long over his collar. As she watches he looks up and sees her, his face registering shock, and then a confusion that he struggles to hide. She waves, and he seems to collect himself and calls her by her old name: “Well hello there, little Sadie Watkins.” He tips his head back and laughs, something she senses with disappointment is forced. They stand under the awning in the bright fluorescence, and nod and smile.

  “You thought I was Laura Loomis,” she says.

  Through the years Sadie has lived with this misapprehension. As a child with her mother people would spot her and call the town police, and Officer Crombie would appear in the Youth Centre children’s store, rolling his eyes. It incensed Sadie’s mother to have her daughter confused with a missing girl, but Sadie had read the newspaper articles and imagined being the object of the steady, enduring love the Loomises revealed for their lost daughter. Lately, new age-progression images have appeared in the paper, and Sadie is once again scrutinized, accosted by strangers. Saying “I’m not Laura Loomis” has become second nature.

  But Ray seems more confused by her admission. “Who?”

  Sadie laughs. “I thought you may have mistaken me for someone else.”

  Ray’s smile seems pasted on. “Actually, Sadie Watkins, you look a lot like your mother.”

  She is flooded with memory—a bright rush of images that occur beyond her control: Ray Filley and her mother at the Filleys’ pool that last summer, her mother laughing, and Ray dipping his head to speak to her, a gesture so intimate Sadie, as
a child, felt compelled to look away.

  “It’s Stahl now,” she says, hoping her voice won’t betray her.

  She never moved out of Wintonbury. She stayed and married and he left, and occasionally she’d hear from other people about things he’d done, or places he’d been, his life a blur of activity at a distance from her. Until she saw him just now she had nearly forgotten him.

  His recent return makes him a stranger to the town, an outsider who would have no way of knowing about the baby she just lost. For the first time in weeks she doesn’t have to endure looks of sympathy. Instead, they laugh about the town and its history of assorted characters: the drunk, Waldo, who can still be spotted pedaling his ancient bike through the center; the teenagers who race their cars along the stretch of road between the tobacco fields; the priest, a volunteer fireman who took young boys for rides in his car with the light flashing, who was finally accused of molesting them. She leans back against the door of her car. He says her name, “Sadie Watkins,” for no particular reason, and she says his, “Ray Filley,” as if he’s been conjured up by the words on her tongue. He jokes about how he feels he’s caught in a time warp. “Even the old Tunxis Players troupe is still together,” he says.

  Sadie smiles hesitantly. “Oh, sure. What play are they doing now?”

  “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Ray says. He waggles his eyebrows, and his smile widens.

  “That’s an old one,” Sadie tells him. “Nineteen fifties old!” They have narrowly skirted the topic of her mother, but then she cannot help herself. “My mother was in that play.”

  She watches his face closely but sees he will not acknowledge her, even though she’s always suspected he had a crush on her.

  “So, a revival!” He does his laugh again, his teeth bright in the fluorescence.

  No one is around. The gas station is on the corner of Jerome and Park, next to the library, the Masonic hall. Moths flit about the streetlights. There’s a smell of wood burning, and Sadie is transported back to teenage parties on nights like these—the passing of a bottle around the bonfire, some boy’s arm heavy on her shoulder. The road is quiet and empty, and their voices are too-sharp and high against the emptiness. Ray pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers her one. “I quit,” she says. “A long time ago.” He must see her rings, notice the SUV with the elementary school magnet stuck to the side. She knows she should tell him about her children—Max, four, and Sylvia, seven; about her husband, Craig; the three of them waiting at home for the ice cream that sits, melting, on the passenger seat. But she is suddenly embarrassed by this evidence of who she’s turned out to be. She is thrown back to a time when she expected to be so much more.