The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  There had been other times her mother had been taken to the hospital, although Sadie had never quite understood the reason as a child. Often her mother would be awake, though listless, and issuing orders.

  “Call Charlene,” she’d tell her father. Charlene was Betty’s mother, and Sadie would be told to go to Betty’s house, where she’d stay until her father came to get her. Your mother had a case of nerves, he’d say, or Your mother is allergic to scallops.

  Even though Sadie knew she should go to Betty’s this time, too, she did not. It was dark, and she needed to turn on Mrs. Sidelman’s porch light. She went through the open garage up the driveway to the road and saw the shrubs along the house filled with fireflies, heard Mrs. Frobel putting her youngest to bed. She could sense the world beyond theirs alive with movement and activity—movie theaters and restaurants in Hartford, the intersections of their own small town filled with cars heading out to destinations Sadie could barely imagine—and into this world her father raced in his Lincoln Continental, her mother spread out on the backseat. Girls and boys met up in the town center, their cars all in a line and the windows rolled down. She pictured Ray Filley one day driving off into this world, his hand easy on a steering wheel, one tanned arm hanging out the window, his other around a girl. When she returned she saw her father’s suit coat draped over his chair, his unfinished eggs, the two plates he’d set out for Sadie and her mother. Sadie cleaned up the kitchen. She went upstairs into her mother’s bedroom, the charged air settled and calm in her mother’s absence. She smoothed out the rug, picked up the spilled pills, and put them back with the few left in each container: Seconal, Nembutal, Valium, Benzedrine. In the bedroom she put the lamp back on the end table. It was too early to go to bed, and she felt keenly aware of being alone in the house. She remembered the horror story the girls all told about the babysitter and the man calling from the upstairs extension, “Have you checked the children?” She thought about Laura Loomis walking home from a friend’s house, the approach of a strange car. Sadie went downstairs to sit by the phone in the kitchen. The night air came in through the open window, and with it came the sound of crickets, the throaty sound of the frogs. She’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table when the phone rang, her father reassuring her that her mother was resting comfortably.

  “Too much sun today,” her father said, his voice forcibly cheerful.

  Sadie pictured her mother sleeping peacefully in a hospital bed, served sugar cookies and ginger ale by nurses. She felt disappointment that her mother wouldn’t suffer any consequences for what she’d put them through, but then she knew, too, that she should feel relief that she was safe. All of this had built, by morning, into a nagging resentment.

  Betty had run out of cigarettes, and Sadie claimed she had only been able to steal one, so they shared it, sweating and uncomfortable in the long grass, the insects whining in their ears. Really, Sadie had taken her mother’s entire pack of Salems and hidden it at Mrs. Sidelman’s.

  “Maybe Beth would let me come over and swim, too,” Betty said.

  Sadie tried to guess whether Betty was being serious or not. “Maybe if your mother went over there.”

  Betty rolled her eyes. “Like that is ever going to happen,” she said.

  Sadie tried to imagine Betty’s mother, Charlene, sitting by a pool without children hanging on to her arms, asking for food, or crying because they were struck by a sibling. She saw the incongruity of Charlene and Patsy’s being friends. Even Sadie’s mother was only friendly with Charlene in a stingy, almost grudging, way. Later, Sadie will surmise that this was due to all that Charlene knew about Sadie’s mother’s hospital visits and her essential use as a babysitter.

  “You’re so lucky you have a mother like yours,” Betty said.

  “Let’s just read the letter,” Sadie said. “It’s too hot to stay out here.”

  They’d exchanged letters every other day for the last week, and Francie’s letters were growing longer, written in colored ink on lined notebook paper. She drew designs along the borders—swirling paisley, hearts and moons and stars and clusters of grapes. She filled the pages with clever stories about her family and her pet gerbils, Pierre and Marie.

  Dear Hezekiah,

  Today we had an adventure! Marie escaped and is currently unaccounted for. The king and queen are beside themselves thinking they will put a foot into a shoe where she is hiding and crush her. Oh, the plight of a lost gerbil is one we will never have to endure. So small! And the world so large!

  The farmer boy didn’t need to write much to convince Francie he was real. He said he had chores on the farm, and he hunted and fished in the pond they’d seen when they went on explorations as children, choosing a swath of green hillside showing over the trees in the distance, and heading out with Scout canteens and peanut butter crackers. It didn’t matter what they wrote back. Any sort of acknowledgment seemed enough to keep her writing. Sadie guessed that Francie had a fascination with Grimm’s fairy tales. When she was punished for some small household infraction:

  My bedroom is a tower, and I will forever watch the world from it. I am thrown into the dungeon and the blackness is deep and desolate. The queen is asleep, as usual, cursed by some evil incantation. She is on the sofa, or in my room on my twin bed, always sleeping. When I try to waken her she startles and stares: “Do as your father tells you,” she says groggily. Or: “Be good.” The king says, “You’re looking more like your mother every day.” I am trapped in this sleeping world, disheartened; I picture you, writing from your sunny meadow, waiting among the trees to retrieve my letter, and I have hope.

  Sadie always read the letters out loud, assuming her near-perfect Francie voice. That day she began to laugh, and then Betty began to laugh, and Sadie couldn’t finish.

  “What does she mean?” Betty asked, laughing. “Let me see.”

  “What does she ever mean?” Sadie said.

  They both pictured Francie as a miniature of her mother—with her glasses and her mousy hair, her round cheeks and stocky frame—and they began laughing more. If their laughter came from some anxious place that saw, too, Francie’s mother’s escape into sleep, her inability to oversee her household, to care for her children, they couldn’t articulate it. If they recognized the fear in the letters, they didn’t acknowledge that Francie’s drama intrigued them. Didn’t the fairy tales they knew as children always supply a happy ending? Betty yanked the pages from Sadie’s hands to read them herself, and one of the pages blew off over the grass. They shrieked and chased after it, but it became caught in an updraft, tugged away into the swampy marsh, and they let it go. They never imagined once during this time that Francie believed she knew who she was writing to, and if Betty noticed the details Sadie added that made Hezekiah seem more and more like Ray Filley—how he looked forward to duck hunting with his two Labrador retrievers in the fall, how he was getting a band together in his garage and letting his hair grow long—she never mentioned them.

  They walked back through the field to the road and wandered down that, their bare feet stinging on the hot concrete.

  “What do you want to do?” Sadie said.

  She had never been at a loss for something to do summers before. A plan had always presented itself: some minor event provoked a mystery that needed to be solved, a book prompted her to re-create its scenes in games of house. As they approached Betty’s, they saw a group of kids had gathered under the stand of hickories. They were arguing, and Betty’s mother called to them to get along through an upstairs window screen. Betty’s sister saw them approach and asked them to help plan the Haunted Woods. Sadie had already said she would not do it this year. It went without saying that they were too old, but she also held a grudge about The Memory of the Fleetfoot Sisters, the play they had all quit. She was reluctant to initiate anything else. The Aquacade would never happen unless she approached Beth, and after yesterday, last night, she doubted she would ever do that. Her desire to follow through with anything seemed to be f
ailing her.

  “Your house?” Betty said.

  Sadie’s house had always been the locus of invention, a Colonial with a traditional floor plan—slate entry, carpeted stairway, living room to the left, dining room to the right, kitchen, family room. Upstairs: four bedrooms and a landing with a wooden railing and turned wooden finials. The presence of so many empty bedrooms had never seemed unusual to Sadie until now. Had her parents planned to have more children? Had the plan somehow gone awry? The downstairs living room was also empty—a long open space awaiting redecoration, with wood floors, a large bay window at one end, and interesting acoustics. Here they rehearsed winter choral productions, Sadie and her friends standing in a semicircle, their reproduced music held aloft in their hands. Sadie’s mother listened to their rendition of “We Three Kings” as she prepared lamb chops, as she boiled the water for the peas, the potatoes, her gin and tonic set on the Formica counter, her cigarette balanced in the plastic ashtray on the table.

  Sadie and Betty went in through the front door to the living room. Her father had come in late the night before, his face slack with exhaustion, and stood in Sadie’s bedroom doorway.

  “She’ll be home tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “She’s going to be fine.”

  Sadie had pretended to be asleep and only mumbled a small assent, and he’d stood there, watching her, wondering, maybe, if he should go in and make sure she was all right. But then he turned and sighed and went into his bedroom, and Sadie heard him climb slowly into bed with a soft groan.

  In the living room, Sadie saw her old Barbie case set on top of a table that had become a catchall in the corner—bags from G. Fox filled with items for the League of Mercy, old board games that Sadie never played, a pile of clothing that needed ironing. The living room had always been the site of an elaborate doll neighborhood, each section of the room commandeered by a different girl, each house constructed of found items: upturned glasses for tables, a book or a shoe box for a bed, a wooden jewelry box with drawers for a bureau. Some girls, like Betty and Sadie, used their doll cases, filled with clothing hung on pink plastic hangers. Upright and opened, the case served as a ready-made closet, a partition, part of a wall of a house. Behind it the dolls ate, slept, read, and dreamed, put on tiny shoes and outfits whose flimsily sewn seams and snaps often tore. The dolls went to each other’s houses and rang the bell.

  “Hi, Midge! What are you doing today?”

  “Oh, it’s you, Barbie. I need a dress for the party tonight. I’m going shopping.”

  “What party?”

  “Steffie’s party, didn’t you hear? Aren’t you invited?”

  The dolls had arguments that led to stomping off in a huff.

  Sadie was the best at this. “I need a drink!” she’d scream. She’d take her doll across the room and out into the slate hallway. Beyond the living room was another world, one in which the dolls might get lost and need to be sought. Sometimes it was a city, or a town with department stores and restaurants, but other times it was a wilderness—woods, dark paths, mountains. To move the dolls they were held about their legs and made to hop. This hopping/walking wasn’t paid much attention. It was an accepted part of doll activity that included the inability to hold a glass or brush back hair, to make any expression other than the tiny half-smile of satisfaction. They were Barbie, Midge, Stacey, Steffie, and Skipper. They were blond, brunette, mod, popular, and fashionable. There was one boy, and no one wanted to use him. He was placed at work, a remote area, and they mostly forgot about him.

  Seeing the cases abandoned there on the table, Sadie opened them up and took out the dolls. She and Betty sat on the floor by the open window, and beyond the cicada whine they could hear the occasional shouts of the boys on their bikes.

  “Look, it’s Beth,” Sadie said. She took off Skipper’s pink dress. “Oh no! I’m flat chested!”

  Betty laughed uncertainly, and Sadie took out all of the dolls and stripped them of their clothes.

  “We’re nudists,” Sadie said.

  “Let’s set up the house,” Betty said.

  Sadie had already propped open the case. She dragged the table over and told Betty to set up the downstairs apartment for Ken. “We live upstairs,” Sadie said.

  They propped up the boards from the games and used the old clothes as carpets and beds. The preparation of the houses took up the time until lunch. They stopped and made sandwiches in the kitchen, and brought them back to the living room. It was hot now, hotter than before. The dolls were lying out on the roof of their apartment in the sun.

  “I don’t know how I could ever have worn clothing in this heat,” Sadie said.

  “Oh, neither do I,” Betty said.

  “Ken is coming over tonight for drinks,” Sadie said.

  Ken, meanwhile, was lounging fully dressed in his apartment on the couch.

  “What will you wear?” Betty asked, sitting her doll up.

  “What a silly question,” Sadie said. “Nothing, of course.”

  They returned to their apartment to get things ready. They set up the tiny dishes, pretended to fix a meal. They styled the dolls’ hair. Sadie thought they should do their nails with real nail polish. She slipped upstairs and took a bottle from her mother’s bathroom, trying not to think about the way she’d looked on the floor, running back down the stairs as if she were being chased. They were doing the dolls’ tiny nails carefully, taking turns, when Sadie heard the garage door open, and her father came in, and then her mother, the same gold sandals tapping across the kitchen floor. She dropped the doll and put the cap on the polish. She jumped up and Betty, seeing her face, did the same. They slipped through the front door and out onto the lawn before either of her parents saw them.

  “What’s wrong?” Betty said, her eyes alert.

  “She’ll be mad about the nail polish,” Sadie said simply. Betty accepted this, as she had always accepted any excuses Sadie made.

  They crossed the street to Betty’s house, and Betty’s sister came out and begged them once more to do the Haunted Woods.

  “No one knows what they’re doing,” she said.

  “Maybe we can just help,” Betty said.

  They would be consultants, Sadie said. They would design and direct, and the older children would construct it all, play the roles of the dead, guide the younger ones through. Sadie said they should make it bigger, have it in the Filleys’ pasture this year, instead of Sadie’s backyard. They would follow the cow paths. They’d mark out the trail with sticks sprayed with glow-in-the-dark paint. Sadie drew a map and selected the sites: rocking horse boy (under large pine), girl crushed under the rickety bridge (middle of the main path), dead trapeze artist (hanging from sycamore), graveyard with two emerging corpses (on the uneven ground beneath the old apple trees), Gypsy woman with crystal ball (by the barbed wire fence entrance), Victorian man and woman out for a stroll (Roaming: “Isn’t this the promenade? Can you tell me how to get to the promenade?”). The Haunted Woods was just a place where ghosts appeared, Sadie said. If one ghost happened to be an ax murderer, well, so much the better. If another was his victim, searching for his lost hand, that worked, too. Betty’s sister caught on immediately and began assigning roles.

  The first year they put on the Woods, Sadie had agreed to play Laura Loomis. She dressed in clothing similar to the outfit Laura was reported to have worn—the navy shorts, the rainbow shirt, the sneakers. They covered her outfit in fake blood. All of the kids knew it was her but one, a girl who came running out of the woods crying, saying she’d seen Laura Loomis. Sadie had followed her out, protesting and laughing. All of the parents stared at her—some at first shocked into thinking she was the real Laura making her appearance. Mrs. Battinson stifled a scream. (Cynthia Loomis was a close friend.) “This is monstrous,” she cried, and the show was called off after only an hour and a half.

  That night Sadie’s mother had come into her room and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “What could you have been think
ing?” her mother said.

  Sadie had told her she didn’t know. She’d cried, and her mother had hugged her and smoothed her hair. “You’re a good girl,” she said. “I told them that. You just made a mistake.”

  Her mother had always been on her side and forgiven her. It felt like now Sadie was supposed to reciprocate, to understand and forgive her mother. Somehow, though, she could not.

  The goal with the Haunted Woods was to lure children from the surrounding neighborhoods, and this required the tacking up of cardboard signs on telephone poles all up and down Wadhams Road. Children would come on their bikes, or their parents would bring them in station wagons from neighborhoods farther away. The date was chosen—Friday, July 6.

  That afternoon, Francie showed up and asked to be included. She wore a pair of seersucker shorts, her legs emerging wide and white from the cuffed hem. Everyone had moved to sit under the maple tree on Sadie’s front lawn. Overhead the leaves fluttered. The grass was dry, the sky inexorably blue. Someone started up a mower on Foothills Road. Francie stood on the fringe of the circle, waiting. Betty said she could have the job of refreshment server. But Francie was adamant about being included in the Woods.