The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  Sadie and her mother took the car down their street to the next, through Wappaquassett’s gated entrance and up the long curving driveway, a trip that took all of five minutes. Her mother had her drink in one hand and the steering wheel in the other. She drove her new Coupe de Ville, cranberry red with white leather interior, a car that floated along the narrow tar roads of the neighborhood. The car nosed up the driveway’s incline to the top.

  “You’re going to hit that shrub,” Sadie said.

  Her mother said she would not, and then laughed when she did. “You were right,” she said. “Smarty pants.”

  It used to be that when her mother hit various stationary objects—trees, mailboxes, a bike abandoned on a lawn—Sadie would laugh along with her. These things became secrets they kept from her father, from the owners of the objects, as if the objects weren’t really of any consequence to their owners, or if they were, they shouldn’t have been.

  “It was an old mailbox,” her mother would say. “Jim Frobel should have replaced that rusted thing a long time ago.”

  That day Sadie suddenly saw it all differently. “You should be more careful,” she said as her mother realigned the car in the driveway and put the car in park.

  She turned to Sadie and lifted her sunglasses. “Are you judging me?” Her eyes were pale blue and glassy, ringed with liner, heavy with mascara.

  Sadie said she was not.

  Her mother leaned in and kissed her on the forehead. Sadie smelled the lime and gin, felt the thickness of her lipstick, and she reached up and wiped it away. Her mother turned off the car and climbed out.

  “Help me with all of this, would you?”

  It was up to Sadie to carry her mother’s silver mesh cigarette case; the copies of her script; her straw bag with sunscreen, extra limes, and the new Cosmopolitan, her Chanel No. 5 scenting everything with notes of jasmine. They went up the two levels of stone steps and Sadie’s mother rang the bell. The door was large, constructed of oaken planks. It was Beth who came and pulled it open.

  “Look who I brought,” Sadie’s mother said.

  Beth gave a bright, false smile that she dropped as soon as Sadie’s mother walked past. “Where’s your mother?” Clare called out, the gold heels of her sandals echoing across the foyer.

  “Outside,” Beth told her. She sighed and shut the door. She was shorter than Sadie now. She had her dark hair cut neatly to her shoulders, and she wore what Sadie took to be a boy’s oxford.

  Beth stood looking Sadie up and down. “Look at you,” Beth said quietly. “All blossoming.”

  Sadie instantly wished she hadn’t come. Gone was the soft-spoken, easygoing Beth of summers past. Sadie usually didn’t feel comfortable in other people’s houses. The color schemes were different; the air was charged with the smell of an unusual food, or a damp odor coming up from the basement, or the musty smell of the recently used vacuum. At Betty Donahue’s house her younger sisters and brothers—all chestnut-haired and freckled, copies of each other—squabbled over who would watch what on television, over a ball they’d bounce in the driveway, the sound of it ringing against the blacktop and the aluminum siding. They fought over the Cap’n Crunch, their father’s bottle of Pepsi, the last Hostess cupcake. They threw things and struck each other. They slammed doors and played radios too loud. The mess of Betty’s house was something Sadie could never get used to: clothes strewn everywhere—clean piles, dirty heaps, lone socks behind the toilet, wet towels flung over the glass shower door, handprints, smears, torn screens, ashtrays filled to overflowing, highball glasses, saucers, wrappers, crumbs.

  The Filleys’ house was unlike any other house in the neighborhood. The sunlight came in from all sides through the huge windows and shone across the wood floors. The walls were museum white, and every surface was clean and clear of clutter except the den, which seemed as if it was the only room the family ever used. It was here that Beth led Sadie, into the dim, wood-paneled space where the blinds were closed, and the only light came from the television—an episode of The Andy Griffith Show was on. Beth sat down on the sectional couch and pulled a blanket up around her.

  “When I have children I’m going to raise them like Andy Griffith does,” Beth said, her voice sullen.

  The episode was the one in which Opie kills a mother bird with his slingshot. He apologizes to his father when he is caught. Sorry isn’t enough, Andy says. At this line Beth began to laugh. Andy opens Opie’s window and tells him to listen to the baby birds crying out for their mother. And she’s not coming back, he says. “I love this part,” Beth said.

  Sadie sat down on the end of the couch. “It seems cruel,” she said warily.

  Beth stopped laughing and in the television glow Sadie saw that she was crying. “It’s so sad,” she said. “Funny sad.”

  Sadie watched Beth wipe her cheeks. They sat there until the show was over, then Beth flung the blanket off of her and stood up. She went to the built-in cabinet, pulled out a backgammon set, and began setting it up.

  “I suppose you’re here for this,” Beth said moodily. “You think you can finally beat me just because you’ve grown some breasts?”

  Sadie wasn’t sure how to respond. “I’ll play if you want,” she said.

  Beth looked at her in the dim light. Then she closed the set and all the pieces fell into the case. “Forget it,” she said. “You don’t sound enthused.”

  Sadie heard someone shuffling past the doorway. “Be nice to the little neighborhood kids,” Ray said. He stopped and leaned on the door frame. Sadie hadn’t seen him up close in a long time. He was much taller than she had been able to tell from the distance of Mrs. Sidelman’s window. His voice held a new quality—a sly tone that she hadn’t recalled from the times he’d raise his hand in greeting passing by her house on his bike. She felt her face redden.

  “Why don’t you play with her?” Beth said, disgruntled. “She seems perfect for you and your new interests.”

  “What’s perfect for me?”

  “Oh, please,” Beth said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice your new love interest.”

  “You don’t need to worry about any interests of mine,” Ray said, his voice suddenly harsh.

  “Don’t I?” Beth said. “Who else will worry about them? I’m all you have, you know.”

  Ray stared at Beth, annoyed. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about covering for you the other day when the car mysteriously disappeared, or pretending I know where you are when I don’t. It’s exhausting.” Beth crossed her arms and blew her hair off of her forehead. “It’s practically unfair.”

  “What do you want, Beth? Money?”

  Beth’s eyes were still red from crying, but she looked ready to start again. “Really, Ray? That’s all I get?”

  “Well tell me what you want! I can’t read minds.”

  Beth sighed, a small quavering sound that made her seem as pathetic as the nest of orphaned birds on the television show. She looked away, and Sadie saw her wipe at her tears.

  “I just want my brother to myself,” she said softly. “Like it used to be.”

  Ray rolled his eyes. “I’m going swimming.”

  Beth turned to him, her face a mask of unhappiness. “Exactly,” she said. She threw her hands up.

  As usual, Sadie listened to their banter, confused by all that was going unsaid. It was as if she had disappeared from the room. “I’d like to swim,” she said.

  Both Beth and Ray looked at her. “Of course you would,” Beth said. “Go see what our sweet mothers are doing. Maybe you can offer to refresh their drinks.”

  Beth turned then and left the room, and Sadie heard her stomping up the stairs. She stopped once and yelled over the railing.

  “Next time I’ll just follow you when you leave for your little tryst. Won’t that be a pretty mess?”

  Ray stiffened with anger. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “If I find out you’ve followed me, that’s it, Beth.
I mean it.”

  Sadie heard Beth slam her bedroom door. She was in the awkward position of an eavesdropper caught out in the open. She wasn’t sure if she had done something wrong, if she should go after Beth and tap on her door and urge her to come out the way Betty did with her little sisters. But then Ray brushed past her and she felt the heat that had stricken her face travel the skin of her arm, down her body, all of her limbs suffused with it, and instead of checking on Beth she followed Ray out to the pool, out into the hazy sunlight. There was her mother, her head back in laughter, her script arranged in her lap, her long legs kicking out on the chaise. “Oh, Patsy, you are too much!” her mother said.

  Ray moved slowly around the pool to the diving board. He shed his shirt, kicked off his scuffed boat shoes. Sadie went to a chair in the shade under an umbrella. Her mother read a line, and then Mrs. Filley read the next line, hamming it up, making Sadie’s mother laugh.

  “Patsy, you have to be serious,” she said. “How will I ever learn my part?”

  She lifted her drink to her lips, the ice sliding around, and then she placed it onto the brick patio.

  “I’ll start over,” Mrs. Filley said. She deepened her voice to read the part of Shannon from The Night of the Iguana:

  SHANNON: How’d you beat your blue devil?

  HANNAH: I showed him that I could endure him and I made him respect my endurance.

  SHANNON: How?

  HANNAH: Just by, just by . . . enduring. Endurance is something that spooks and blue devils respect. And they respect all the tricks that panicky people use to outlast and outwit their panic.

  SHANNON: Like poppy-seed tea?

  HANNAH: Poppy-seed tea or rum-cocos or just a few deep breaths. Anything, everything, that we take to give them the slip, and so to keep on going.

  SHANNON: To where?

  HANNAH: To somewhere like this, perhaps. This verandah over the rain forest and the still-water beach, after long, difficult travels. And I don’t mean just travels about the world, the earth’s surface. I mean . . . subterranean travels, the . . . the journeys that the spooked and bedeviled people are forced to take through the . . . the unlighted sides of their natures.

  SHANNON: Don’t tell me you have a dark side to your nature.

  HANNAH: I’m sure I don’t have to tell a man as experienced and knowledgeable as you, Mr. Shannon, that everything has its shadowy side?

  “You’re such a marvelous Deborah Kerr,” Mrs. Filley said.

  Sadie’s mother jiggled the ice in her glass. She stood up and tugged down the back of her suit, and then slipped into the pool and disappeared under the surface. Ray had already climbed from the pool when her mother came up the ladder out of the deep end.

  “Let me read the guy’s part,” Ray said.

  Mrs. Filley grinned. “Then I can be Maxine.”

  Sadie’s mother walked, dripping, over to her towel. Her suit was a white two-piece, her stomach flat and tan against the fabric.

  “Oh, let him do it, Clare,” Mrs. Filley said.

  “I can read, Clare,” Ray said. He smirked. He leaned down and grabbed the script, then reached for his mother’s pack of cigarettes and shook one out.

  “Just the opposite, honey, I’m making a small point out of a very large matter,” he said.

  Sadie saw her mother give the faintest hint of a smile, and then she was all business, lighting the cigarette, saying her lines. Afterward, Mrs. Filley went inside to refresh their drinks.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” Sadie’s mother said.

  “You’re just an old New England spinster,” Ray said. “What do you know?”

  She smiled then, and Sadie watched her lean in very close to Ray’s face. She wasn’t sure if it was her mother leaning close, or Hannah Jelkes from Williams’s play. Her mother kept her eyes open. Their lips were so close Sadie thought they might be kissing. And then she pulled away and said something to him, low and barely discernible to Sadie listening in—something about rehearsing more of the scene. “The basement door, darling,” she said. “At the back of the house?” She said it all in a careless way, her face bland. And then Mrs. Filley came out with their drinks. “Here we go,” she called, clacking over the brick patio in her mules.

  “I think we’re done with the script for today,” Clare said quietly. She kept her gaze averted. She stretched back out on the chaise with a little satisfied smile. Ray rose and walked once again to the diving board, his suit low on his hips, his wet hair tossed back. Sadie’s mother glanced over toward Sadie in the shade of the umbrella and she seemed startled, and then angry.

  “Where is Beth?” she said. “Why aren’t you swimming?”

  Sadie was at a loss, unable to strip off her shorts and T-shirt to reveal her body in the new bikini. Where once her mother might have called to her to come to her, slide her legs over to make room for her on the chaise, there was only her mother’s silent appraisal. Sadie watched her lean toward Patsy, holding her hand to her mouth to hide her words, as if she were passing on a secret Sadie could only imagine was about her. Patsy let out a hoot. “Now, you are too much, Clare!” Patsy said.

  Ray’s body hit the water, made a smooth arc, and glided just below the surface. Sadie rose and left the pool by the iron gate. She glanced up as she passed through and Beth was staring through the bedroom screen, her face intent and dark. Sadie went around to the front and started down the drive to the street. She could hear her mother calling to her.

  “Oh, Sadie, don’t take it so personally!”

  She wondered how many other places she would discover where she no longer fit. The idea of it made her ache, a pang as physical as the phenomenon of Ray’s closeness. She went to Mrs. Sidelman’s and let herself in with the key she kept in her shorts pocket. The quiet of the house, the order of the books on the shelf, the hum of the refrigerator, all calmed her. She saw Betty cross the street and knock on the front door of Sadie’s house next door, saw her turn to leave and wander back across the front lawn. Still, she didn’t call out to her. She took a book from Mrs. Sidelman’s shelf, Rabbit, Run, and opened it.

  June 20, 2003

  ONE JUNE EVENING DURING PLAY practice at Vincent Elementary School Sadie watches in surprise as Ray Filley comes inside and sits in the back of the auditorium. Mrs. Bennett, the stage manager, notices him and waves.

  “Oh, it’s Ray Filley,” she says from the stage. “Ray’s given us a generous donation. Isn’t that right, Ted?”

  Ray sits quietly in the back row. He lifts his hand in greeting but says nothing.

  “We can’t tell you how much we appreciate your support,” Ted Whittle says. He beams, holding his two hands together in front of him to show his indebtedness. Sadie is embarrassed to be among these people—too old for their parts, overly theatrical, the women with their glasses on their noses, the men with tufts of hair growing out of their ears. She isn’t the youngest in the group—there’s the high school girl there playing Charlotte. Still, she feels her face flush.

  Two weeks before Craig surprised her—got a babysitter and showed up at rehearsal. She saw him walk in and immediately forgot lines and cues, bumbled through scenes, wooden and distracted. Afterward, he greeted her awkwardly backstage with an invitation to dinner, his suit coat thrown over his shoulder.

  “You were great,” he said. His smile was false, hesitant.

  “You don’t have to say that,” she told him, furious with embarrassment for them both.

  They went to the restaurant, and Craig admitted he found it strange, seeing her up on the stage, pretending to be someone else.

  “It’s disconcerting,” he said. “Watching you flirt with another man.”

  She had to assure him that she was playing a role. “And badly, I should add,” she said. They agreed he wouldn’t make any more surprise visits to play practices. She had too much wine at dinner, and driving home she fell asleep in the passenger seat, only to awaken, disoriented, and in a panic, after Craig had pulled the car into the garage
and hit the automatic door, closing them in.

  She thinks she will never be able to say her lines with Ray there but is surprised to find that his presence makes her performance better. She plays the role of Hannah—her mother’s role that last summer—a woman full of pent-up emotion. Ray’s eyes on her only make her more aware of her power. Ted Whittle, the director, is thrilled with her.

  “You’re luminescent,” he says. His hair is gray and slicked back with some sort of cream. He wears wire-framed reading glasses. “You’re a star, just like your mother.”

  Sadie understands that his praise is sincere, but she doesn’t trust his opinion in the least. She isn’t anything like her mother. These are washed-up people who dream of being stars themselves, who tried to make it on Broadway and failed, who take the train to New York and audition for commercials and never receive a part. They live, like Sadie and her husband, in neighborhoods of postwar Colonials and Capes, their dreams tucked safely away under gables and eaves, behind storm doors and screens. After rehearsal Sadie walks past Ray as if he is invisible. As she passes him he reaches out a hand and brushes his fingertips along her arm. She hears his soft little intake of breath. She is filled with desire but afraid, so she pretends to be impervious.