by Karen Brown
The Vincent school hallways smell of wintergreen paste, and oak tag, and tempera paint. The linoleum squares are worn. In the classrooms chairs are placed on top of desks, their painted metal legs chipped. The school reminds her of her innumerable childhood projects: the dioramas in shoe boxes, Excellent!s on mimeographed tests, the ribbon for the one-hundred-yard dash, spring recitals in which she sang “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.” Sadie experiences a strange, clutching longing and sees that the past is suddenly, unexpectedly, part of who she’s become, despite her best efforts to forget it. Her eyes fill with tears. And Ray is beside her, his footsteps stealthy, his body warm. Everyone calls good night and floods the blacktop, the school doors clanging shut. No one thinks it unusual that she has stopped to thank their new benefactor. She and Ray linger in the hall. He looks into her face and his eyes darken.
“What’s wrong?” he says.
Sadie wipes her eyes. “Nothing. I mean, I don’t know.”
Outside crickets cluster by the school’s brick foundation.
Ted Whittle saunters past and holds the door for them. He has the key. Sadie doesn’t want to leave the heat of the hallway, the little wooden doors with the teachers’ names, but she and Ray follow Ted outside. There are extended thanks and good-byes. Ray explains that they are childhood friends, and Ted says, “I’ll let you two catch up.”
And that is it. He climbs into his Camry. He takes a long time adjusting his seat belt, the radio. The crickets chirp. The moon is out, the stars. The night is filled with muffled sounds. Sadie feels her heart race. She watches the Camry pull away.
“How can you do this to me?” Ray asks. His voice is anguished, his face pale.
Sadie tells him she is a married woman. She has children. His sister has seen them together. She doesn’t mention the extraordinary feeling she has that she has stepped into a play of another sort.
“Goddamn it, I told you she doesn’t care. She hasn’t mentioned it at all.”
They stand in the parking lot and he takes her in his arms.
“Don’t, don’t,” Sadie says. She brushes him away and walks to her car. Ray follows and takes her arm. “I said don’t,” she shouts at him, wriggling free, fumbling with her keys, all the time hoping he will stop her. He takes her arms and turns her around and holds her pinned to the car. She doesn’t try to flee. She looks up into his face. “Oh, let me go,” she says. He leans down to kiss her and she turns her face away. He lets his head fall to her shoulder.
“Hold me tighter,” she whispers. “Tighter.”
They crawl into the car together like lust-filled teenagers, and Sadie feels both aroused and absurd, as if the role in this play is not quite suited for her. She knows that she should stop at every moment she succumbs. They climb, kissing, into the back of the SUV to avoid the children’s car seats. The fogged-over windows make it seem they are somewhere safe, beyond detection, that there isn’t a main road nearby, upon which occasional cars pass on their way to Cumberland Farms for milk, their headlights flashing like a beacon across Ray’s forehead, Sadie’s breasts.
• • •
The next day she has marks from his fingertips—on her arms, her thighs. Her mouth feels bruised and raw. And yet it’s as if she’s been sparked to life, and she’s become the protagonist of the latest erotic novel the neighborhood women pass around. Craig steps from the shower, his torso pink and clean, and she invites him back to bed, pulling him under the sheets, where she has removed her nightgown. The sex is furtive, silent, so as not to wake the children. Sadie feels less guilty, somehow, her conscience more clear, as if the sex with Craig cancels out the sex with Ray. After, Craig keeps his eyes on her as he dresses for work, his expression satisfied and happy. Sadie lounges beneath the sheet and listens as he waylays Max outside the door, taking him downstairs for breakfast so she can sleep. Instead she lies there, awake, awash in new guilt.
She told Ray last night that she could no longer meet him, but she doesn’t know whether she means this or not, and she could tell by the way he looked at her that he knew she wasn’t sure.
“This is leading nowhere,” she said to emphasize her point.
“We make each other happy,” Ray said. “Maybe it doesn’t have to lead anywhere. What’s wrong with just this?”
He grinned at her, looking the happiest she’s ever seen him. She cannot say what is wrong with it, why she denies herself the happiness she feels with him. But, lying in bed after Craig has left, Sadie feels only abject and used.
• • •
Later that morning, she wears Craig’s Brooks Brothers shirt as a cover-up at the pond. She still worries that her transgressions will have spread and sullied everything, that she cannot simply hide them like the physical marks on her skin, but no one behaves any differently toward her. The pond is her place, her discovery, and the women all look to her as their savior.
“If it weren’t for Sadie,” they say, “we’d be at the Wampanoag club pool, roasting on the concrete.”
At all times of day, women tramp up and down the wooded path. Those with children who nap, those who have scheduled dentist appointments and music lessons drag back early, the children angry and crying. No one thinks the Currys will mind the women and children passing through their backyard, treading a path through their grass, noisy and boisterous. The Currys’ son, Michael, is college-aged, off somewhere in Europe, someone has said. Both Walt and Kate Curry work in Hartford—Walt in insurance, Kate as an attorney. Their house is a Colonial, one of the first built in the neighborhood. There are French doors leading out to the patio, and that morning Sadie saw Kate standing there wearing an apron and yellow plastic gloves, and smoking a cigarette. The door was cracked, and the smoke snaked out, a thin white cloud.
“I could smell it,” Sadie tells Maura up at the pond. “She looked like my mother used to, standing there.”
Maura and the women circling her in their lawn chairs know what she means—their mothers with their hairspray and L’Air du Temps, with their bold print dresses, everyone back then reaching into coat pockets and purses for their cigarettes the moment they came out of church—the church the only place they couldn’t smoke. Sadie wonders why Kate would be home during the day.
“Maybe it was a maid,” someone suggests.
Sadie says the woman’s hair was done. She had on pearl earrings.
“Maybe she’s working from home,” Maura says.
Sadie thinks that is the most reasonable explanation.
“Or she could be taking a sick day,” Jane says.
“To clean her toilets?” Maura says drily.
Sadie worries she will emerge that afternoon to order them off her property, and she suggests making another path. But the day wears on, and they forget about Kate. Most of the women have dinner planned—meat defrosting, vegetables already cut and placed in Tupperware—and so they linger. The children make a fort, towels draped over sticks. They build it on the sandy bank and play house, pretending to cook over a fire for their own imaginary families. Sadie has remembered the bug spray, so everyone stays, lounging by the pond, watching the water striders skate across the surface where it is still and deep.
Heading back, Sadie always feels what she’s come to call the end-of-the-day sadness, a weightiness that arrives with summer. She is reminded of summers of her youth—the lawn cool in the mornings, the sun just coming up, and a breeze moving the drapes of her bedroom. Her father would have gotten up and gone to work. Her mother, at least in those early years, would be talking to her own mother on the phone, or watering zinnias, or absently stirring her coffee, the clink of the spoon inside the cup a sound she now makes herself. The whole day stretches before her, a luxury she feels each time she treads the path up to the pond, a spaciousness that depletes as the day draws to an end. As a child summer seemed interminable, but as an adult she knows otherwise. It is in this mood that Sadie and a group of women descend and emerge from the woods toting bags and towels and assorted toys
, the children singing something from television. They step onto freshly mown grass and meet Kate Curry.
She wears a pair of shorts and a white sleeveless blouse. Her dark hair is pulled back in a neat ponytail. She still wears the pearl earrings. Kate is older than they are, a woman who’s worn suits and argued cases in a courtroom—an intimidating presence. Around her eyes are the fine lines they notice on everyone but themselves—Worry lines, Sadie thinks. But Kate doesn’t seem worried, only happy to see them. She smiles and waves and invites everyone inside. “For a snack,” she says. And then she squats down in front of the children the way they tell you to do when you speak to them, and says, “You’d like a snack, wouldn’t you? A Popsicle? An ice cream cup?”
Sadie thanks her but begs off. “So close to suppertime,” she says.
But Kate must know the children will plead and make it impossible to drag them off. It isn’t that Sadie doesn’t want to go into her house, but that she has her mind set on getting home, on taking her burden of unspoken sadness back to her own crumb-littered counters, sagging couch cushions, to the Colonial woman’s diary on her nightstand that she’s had for months and still hasn’t really read. But the children and Kate win out, and Sadie and the other women file through the French doors into Kate’s spotless kitchen. The children are shown the den and the television, where they can sit with their ice cream. Kelsey Simons asks for a place to change the baby, and Kate shows her a downstairs guest room, and then after she is done the place to put the sodden diaper. Kate’s house seems suddenly to fill. They sprawl at the kitchen table, and she offers them a drink. “Gin? Vodka?” Sadie laughs, even though she senses it would offset the end-of-the-day feeling. And then Maura pipes up, her broad face rosy from the sun. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”
Kate makes them Harvey Wallbangers, the recipe taken from her mother’s old copy of Come for Cocktails, Stay for Supper. She brings the drinks to the table in tall glasses, and everyone laughs about them—a drink from their parents’ day. The children come in and ask to play in the backyard, and Sadie sees that Max’s face is sticky from the ice cream. She gets up for a paper towel but Kate is there first, and Sadie marvels that Max stands still for her, stiff and straight like a soldier, and lets her wipe his face. After the children have run out the back door, Maura shakes the ice in her glass as if to announce a change in subject.
“My mother-in-law asked me this morning if I loved her son,” she says. “Can you believe it?”
Sadie says she cannot. She notices a tone in Maura’s voice that she can sometimes detect in her evening phone calls—a brashness, as if she might do or say anything.
“What kind of question is that?” Jane says.
“Maybe she thinks you married him for his money, or his looks,” Kate says. She stands leaning against the counter, a pitcher of the Harvey Wallbangers at the ready.
“Of course I married him for those things,” Maura says. She laughs, and the other women, Kate included, laugh, too.
Sadie feels a stirring, a strange trepidation. “Those things,” Jane says, shaking her head. She nudges Sadie, expecting her to agree, probably thinking of the story Sadie has told her of how she and Craig met: “The Ambitious Attorney Falls for the Lowly Department Store Clerk,” she’d called it. But Sadie is thinking of Ray instead—his sloppy clothes, his mysterious life performing in bars and clubs. She remembers his soap smell. Last night in the Vincent Elementary School parking lot he begged her to promise a time and a place to meet again, his face lit with yearning.
“How will I get in touch with you?” he asked.
“Write me a letter,” she said wistfully. She worries she’s pushed things too far, that the present nudged up against the past will mean the last of Ray Filley, that she will have just her memories of the sex, of his fervent proclamations, to carry her over for the rest of her life, and she accepts this state of things, this limbo from which she believes she will never be released.
June 21, 1979
THE DAY AFTER SADIE AND her mother went to the Filleys’, Betty came to Sadie’s house before breakfast, and they slipped off to the dead end. No one was up except old Mrs. Hoskins, who lived in the house at the end of the street. She came out and stood at the foot of her driveway in her bathrobe with her hands on her hips. “What are you doing over there?” she called in the warbling voice of old-time comedic actresses.
Sadie explained that they were working on a science project. “We’re testing the rate of decay on varying thicknesses of paper,” she said.
Mrs. Hoskins pulled her robe around her shoulders. Sadie could almost smell the mothballs, the lilac powder she fluffed between her breasts. Her hands were gnarled like the branches of her crabapple.
“It’s summertime,” Mrs. Hoskins said. “School’s over.” She made a noise as if she didn’t believe them, and turned away and shuffled into her house. As a teenager, after Sadie and her father had moved away from the neighborhood, she would bring boys back to the dead end to have sex, and once she and the boy fell asleep in the car. The next morning old Mrs. Hoskins, still vigilant, came to the car window and rapped her bony fist. “You in there,” she’d said. “Are you alive? Wake up!” She watched them scramble to rearrange their clothes, embarrassed by their bodies, as if what they had done with them had nothing to do with the pale skin showing in the morning light, the sex a ritual, and empty after, like the one thing they’d hoped for had died, and they were dead along with it.
They went into the field to read the letter, and Betty asked Sadie where she’d been the day before.
“Just at the Filleys’,” Sadie said.
Betty shaded her eyes. The sun was bright, the day already hot. Soon the cicadas would start up. “Was Beth there?”
“My mother made me go,” Sadie said.
“Since when do you do what your mother tells you?” Betty asked, challenging her.
It was true. Sadie knew she’d relented and gone with her mother to the Filleys’ at the prospect of seeing Ray. She’d wanted to wear the new bathing suit, had wanted him to see her wearing it. She hated her mother for how it had all ended up.
Yesterday, Sadie had heard her mother pull her long car into the garage and hit the back wall, crushing one of the trash cans. She heard her come into the house, the tap of her sandals on the kitchen floor. Sadie had expected her to seek her out and lecture her about how childish she’d been to leave the Filleys’ that way, but her mother had gone into her room and closed the door. When her father came in from work he asked Sadie where she was.
“Asleep, I think,” Sadie said.
It wasn’t unusual for her mother to fall asleep after a day at the Filleys’ pool. Her father stared off into the distance, as if something out the window had caught his attention. “Too much practicing,” he said. “Eh?” He reached out as if to ruffle Sadie’s hair or pat her head, but then thought better of it.
“We’ll make our own supper,” he said. He slipped off his suit coat and draped it over a chair. He pulled out a frying pan and eggs.
“My specialty,” he said.
Sadie noticed he’d gained weight. Portly, she thought, not fat. She knew from photos of her father that as a young man he’d been narrow waisted, gallant. His hair had been cropped short. In one he’d worn a tweed sport coat. Beside him even her tall mother had seemed dwarfed, tucked tightly under his arm like a little girl. Now Sadie saw, for the first time, that her father was old, older than her mother, his hair thinning, his body going slack.
When the food was ready he told Sadie to see if her mother wanted anything to eat, and Sadie climbed the stairs, dreading the confrontation with her, wishing she would just stay asleep. She knocked on her mother’s door. When Sadie was younger her mother would reply to her knock in a singsongy voice, “Come in!” She’d ask Sadie to climb onto the bed with her. They’d lie together in the dim light on the cool satin bedspread, and her mother would put an arm around her and ask her questions about her day. Sadie would smell the
gin and lime, the chlorine, the leftover scent of her perfume. That evening, Sadie expected her mother’s delayed anger. She was almost relieved when she didn’t answer, as if the silence was the only punishment she would get. Back downstairs she told her father her mother was still resting, and her father paused with his fork.
“Did she say that?” he said.
Sadie shrugged. “She didn’t say anything.”
Her father had waited a moment before he put the food in his mouth. “Go in and ask her again,” he said.
After, Sadie would believe that he’d known all along what would be discovered, but maybe, if Sadie went, there would be some reversal of fate, and the scene wouldn’t be discovered at all. Sadie knocked again, and then opened the bedroom door. In the last bit of light through the window she saw the empty bed, and she crossed the room to the master bath. This room had been taken over by Sadie’s mother—her father was resigned to the hall bathroom. Here her mother usually sat before her vanity and applied her makeup, her lotions, the compacts and powders and brushes spread over the surface of the counter, the room filled with the fumes of nail polish. Sadie went into her mother’s bathroom only when her mother was gone. She’d sort through her tubes of lipstick, her perfume, peruse the bottles of pills her mother had lined up in the medicine cabinet, sometimes taking them out to touch them and look at their colors, always putting them back the way she found them. Her mother’s bathroom was where Sadie found her that evening, curled up on the floor in her bathing suit, the gold sandals still strapped to her feet. The glare of the makeup mirror’s bulbs, the cotton rug rucked up underneath her, the way her hair covered her face, all created a surreal tableau. She knew her mother hadn’t simply fallen asleep. A pill bottle was out on top of the vanity, tipped on its side and empty, pills scattered bright and shiny on the tile floor.
Sadie felt her body freeze, as if caught in some spell. She willed herself to take a step back, then another, trying, she realized later, to remove herself from the sight of her mother on the floor. Once she reached the bedroom door she ran down the stairs. Her father needed only to glance up at her, and knew. He dropped his fork and rushed to the bedroom. Sadie listened to his footsteps pounding along the floor, his voice as he tried to rouse her mother and then on the bedroom phone extension, terse and emphatic. She heard a frantic scramble, a knocked-over lamp, the closet door sliding open. He came through the kitchen carrying her mother in his arms, moving with a speed Sadie had never seen before. He’d put a blanket around her, and as they passed Sadie, heading through the den toward the garage door, Sadie saw just a bit of her mother’s face—the eyes rolled up, her cracked lipstick. He put her in the backseat of his car, and Sadie watched from the door to the garage as he backed out, his tires making a chirping sound at the end of the driveway, his face white behind the wheel. Sadie stood in the doorway, wholly forgotten.
