The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  “I want to be the trapeze girl,” she said.

  Betty’s sister, a pert-looking version of Betty, stood up and put her hands on her hips and glared at Francie. “You can’t,” she said. “That’s my job.”

  Sadie remembered when she had last taken Francie through the woods, two summers ago. The girl hadn’t been afraid of anything, even as an eight-year-old. When people came out of nowhere she stood her ground and stared at them, infuriating everyone.

  “Well, I want to do something else,” Francie said. Her face was pinched.

  “You can be the drowned girl,” Sadie said, stepping up. “You can be all wet and covered with pond grass.”

  Francie looked at her suspiciously. “Okay,” she said. “I guess that’s good.”

  “Can you moan?” Sadie asked.

  Francie assured her she could.

  “Let’s hear it,” Sadie demanded, and Francie made an awful sound, like someone being tortured. Everyone looked at her, agape. Sadie’s mother came to the screen door.

  “What is going on out here?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Sadie said. “Just tryouts.”

  Her mother stood behind the screen, a fuzzy outline in a flowered dress. Cigarette smoke billowed around her. “That sounded real,” she said. “Did someone get hurt?”

  Everyone assured her they were fine. Francie’s face was red, and Sadie’s mother hesitated. Then she spun around and disappeared back into the house.

  “Less tormented,” Sadie said to Francie. “She drowned, she wasn’t murdered.” She told her that the drowned girl wasn’t made up, that she’d once existed. “She drowned in that pond out in the pasture in 1775.”

  Francie made a face. “That’s not true.”

  “It is,” Sadie said. “She was one of the Filleys. Ask Beth.”

  No one wanted to approach Beth Filley, but most of them knew that Sadie had spent time with her, that their mothers were friends.

  “Her name was Emely,” Sadie said.

  “How did she drown?” Francie asked.

  “It was terrible,” Sadie said. “She was just a teenager, and she was married and had a baby. The baby died, and she drowned herself in the pond.”

  “Oh, you can hold a baby!” Betty said. She crossed the lawn and hooked arms with Sadie. “Do you have an old baby doll? It will be perfect!”

  Betty’s sister rolled her eyes. “I’m sure she has one. She probably still plays with it.”

  A few of the kids laughed, and Francie ignored them.

  “I’ll be Emely,” she said. “That’s fine.”

  “Just be careful you don’t run into the real Emely,” Betty’s brother said. He made a moaning sound and walked across the grass, stumbling, awkward, his arms cradling a pretend infant. Sadie bit her lip to keep from laughing.

  “That’s true,” she said. “She haunts the old Filley house. But sometimes she escapes and wanders the woods.”

  “She’ll sound sad,” Francie said. “Mournful.”

  Everyone looked at her again. Francie turned then and headed away across the lawn, away from them.

  August 21, 2003

  IT ONLY TOOK THAT FIRST round of Harvey Wallbangers to make ending the day at Kate’s a tradition for the women of the neighborhood. They tromp down and Kate is waiting, and the children get their Popsicles, or pretzel sticks, and the women get sloe gin fizzes, or tequila sunrises, or Singapore slings. Sometimes they sit in the yard on Kate’s rarely used cast-iron furniture, or in their folding chairs, the aluminum legs still covered with brook sand. Kate serves them from a tray. She asks about the pond, their day, where they plan to vacation, an inevitable breach in their routine. Everyone has someplace to go each summer—to the mountains in New Hampshire, to Nantucket, or to the cottage at Point O’Woods. They don’t all go at once, but the missing women and children are acknowledged like place cards at a table. Kate makes it a point to remember where everyone is going and when.

  “Jane’s off to Franconia,” she announces that week. She gives the children calamine lotion for their bites. She sprays on Bactine and blows on their small injured knees. She is a mother, a friend, a benefactress. She advises them all on what to wear to their husbands’ company functions, to the club for lunch with their husbands’ mothers. With her they wear their five-year-old bathing suits, the elastic sprung, T-shirts stained with jelly, spit-up, dirty handprints. She knows the women they become when they put on their black sheath dresses, their grandmother’s pearls. The drinks, after the long day in the sun, release them all, briefly, from restraint. While Jane is gone they talk about her suspicion that her husband is having an affair.

  “I think she’s overreacting,” Sadie says. They are sipping margaritas, licking the salt from the rims.

  “But the receipt,” Maura says. “Two diners ordering the exact same meal? That’s not two men.”

  Kate agrees. “It sounds like she ordered, and he said, ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’ ”

  “Or the other way around,” Sadie says. And then she holds her drink up, and cocks her head, and pretends to be a woman having an affair, a scenario that is almost true. “I’ll have what he’s having,” she says, her voice pitched up like a question, her eyes wide.

  The other women break out in laughter. “You’re good at that,” Kate says.

  Outside the children scramble in the grass, playing freeze tag. Their voices come through the window screen, and the mothers can tell they are playing nicely. Every so often someone volunteers to check. The shyer kids are in the den, still watching television, and Maura’s oldest reads a thick, hardback novel, the paper cover removed. Sadie has asked Maura what her daughter is reading, but Maura just shrugs. “She gets them from her grandmother’s house,” she says. “Old books, you know.” Sadie feels urged to lean over the girl’s shoulder one day and see, remembering the books she used to read, the dark, adult worlds she often entered. She wants to tell her to put the book away, to find friends her own age and play.

  None of the women at Kate’s have ever admitted they’ve fallen in love with someone else, as if this is a phenomenon not possible in their world. Sadie imagines the women discovering the cache of letters she’s collected all summer from Ray, perusing them in shock. When the first arrived in her mailbox at the curb she felt a shameful thrill that made her catch her breath, look about the neighborhood to check if someone was watching. Inside her house she took the letter to her bedroom and shut the door, even though it was a weekday and no one was at home. She was suspicious, at first. She remembered, with a sick feeling, the letters to Francie she’d dictated—how easy it had been to pretend to be someone else. And yet Ray’s letter sounded just like him, and it told her things she’d longed to hear, things that proved he cared for her, that there was more between them than sex. The next day, another one arrived.

  She didn’t want to be drawn in, so she put the letters away, hiding them when they came, in a book, or in the bottom drawer of her bureau under her sweatpants. But then the children were in bed, and she’d head out to play practice, the letters tucked in her bag. She’d pull over in the Cumberland Farms parking lot and find herself aching for the man in them. In the first one he told her that he had made up an elaborate story for Beth about a new woman he was seeing, a story that Sadie would be proud of. Sadie imagined him sitting alone in the old house at the scarred kitchen table where his father once poured out shots of Bushmills, where his grandfather sat cleaning his Winchester, writing the letters, licking the white business envelope with no return address.

  He talked about missing her, not just her body but the questions she asked him about music, and his childhood, the way her eyes brightened when she smiled, the freckles on her shoulders. He mentioned the clothes he’d seen her wearing, and clothes he imagined she might wear—dresses made of fine, sheer fabric, and hats with wide brims. He pictured her walking the streets of New York City with her children, visiting galleries, attending plays and readings. Sadie tries not to won
der what woman has given him his inspiration. Instead, she imagines herself as he sees her, and slowly a version of who she might become emerges. Each day a new letter chronicles his time without her—providing details of the store, of the fields and what is blooming, of the strawberries and the children arriving with their parents to pick them, and how he feels as if everyone is going on about their lives and he is always going to be there on the outskirts of town, like an outlaw. He tells her about the old movies he watches—Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Deborah Kerr, Audrey Hepburn. Sadie has rented the movies he says he’s watched, checked out the books he says he’s read from the library, and imagined what he saw in them that reminds him of her. Yesterday, she went to Lord & Taylor and bought a floral-patterned skirt, a blouse, clothing that would match the woman Ray’s created. This morning, looking at them hanging in her closet, she realized she’d chosen an outfit her mother might have worn, and she could just see her with her silk blouse, her straw purse and Ferragamo flats, slipping behind the wheel of her car to run errands.

  In the Currys’ kitchen, Kate pulls out the restaurant receipt that Jane has left at her house, and they examine the time and date, the server’s number. They analyze it like detectives, their heads leaning in and touching. Maura thinks the restaurant, a little trendy spot by the river where boaters come and dock to eat gourmet sandwiches, sounds just like Howard, Jane’s husband. Sadie has to agree. Howard is more a boater than a golfer. She can see him leaving during the workday and driving down to the marina with some girl from the office. Maura thinks her husband has given Howard some tips. They talk, for a while, about last year’s Labor Day cookout and the “great disappearance”—when Maura’s husband left to get ice and didn’t return for two hours.

  This discussion of husbands always comes around to Craig, with whom Sadie can never find any complaint. Stalwart and smart, never a harsh word. Gray suits, hair cropped neatly around his ears. She won’t tell them about the sex, the way he braces himself over her in bed, his movements quick and efficient like a wound-up toy. And then after, lying on the damp sheets, mystified with her. “You won’t tell me what you want,” he’d say. “You won’t even help me out here.” She imagines this has been the only thing keeping Craig with her—this desire to please her that is constantly thwarted. If he knew everything about her he might leave, she thinks, and so she’s kept so much of herself hidden she’s become her own mystery.

  The women want her to confess things so they will be assured she will not reveal their secrets. They know she is keeping something from them. The more she insists that Craig is wonderful the more this signals to them real trouble she is afraid to discuss.

  “He can’t be perfect,” Maura says. “No one’s perfect.”

  She says she’s heard from her own children that Craig likes to scare his. Sadie looks at Maura, surprised.

  “You mean monster time?”

  Sadie explains how Craig sneaks upstairs and hides under one of their beds at bedtime. “Then, when they go to climb in, he grabs an ankle.”

  Maura gives Sadie a look. “That’s terrible.”

  Sadie laughs, but then she thinks about it more. The drinks throw a new light on everything. “Do you think? The children love it. They love their daddy.”

  “They don’t know that’s who it is,” Maura says.

  “Of course they know,” Sadie says. “He does it all the time. They love for him to do it.”

  Kate wonders aloud how much they love it. There is a long discussion of each woman’s own childhood, and her own excitement about being frightened, and Sadie is happy for the diversion. She tells them about the Haunted Woods, and Maura and the others who grew up in town remember it.

  “That was you?” she says. “You and your friends put that on?”

  “We did it a few summers,” she says. “We charged a quarter a person. We served lemonade and popcorn for refreshments while the kids waited to be led through. My friend Betty made the popcorn at her house with their electric popcorn popper.”

  Kate asks about the Haunted Woods. Some of the women seem to be finishing up their drinks and calling to their children, as if they are getting ready to go, and Sadie has noticed Kate always seems desperate for them to stay.

  “We held it at night. The kids paid and then one of us was the guide. One year I wore a sheet I dyed black, draped like a cowl over my face. We led the kids one at a time along paths we made behind my house. We’d have a graveyard where kids would jump out of buried cardboard boxes. We’d have things flying out of the trees—ghosts and witches.”

  The women all marvel. Maura says she remembers the dark path, and things jumping out, and how terrified she was. “Wasn’t that when that little girl disappeared?” she says suddenly.

  Sadie sets her drink down carefully. “I don’t know,” she says.

  “I could have sworn that was when it happened,” Maura says.

  A few of the other women who grew up in town nod their heads, remembering. They are sure it was during one of those Haunted Woods events.

  “It wasn’t,” Sadie says, decisively now, and visibly annoyed. “That must be a rumor. You know how people associated the wrong things with each other.”

  She shouldn’t have brought up the Haunted Woods—anything related to that last summer leads, inevitably, to her mother, a topic she has never discussed with anyone, even her husband. There is a pall then over the room, a silence like those granted for the dead, each of them remembering her own version of the past but sensing Sadie’s mood, knowing better than to mention it.

  Kate turns away and busies herself at the sink, as if she will be questioned next and wishes to avoid it. No one has asked her why she left her job, or why she doesn’t talk about her husband, Walt, or son, Michael. Sadie imagines the two of them together on some sort of vacation—trekking the Alps with backpacks, studying the flora, Michael a future biologist, an entomologist, someone who will one day work in a university, and Walt, the supportive father taking a leave of absence from his job. There are photos of Michael as a child wearing glasses, a sandy-haired boy with bony arms and legs. Others of him posing with Kate and her husband as a teenager—tall and filled out, and looking like a paler version of his father. Michael’s absence is something they accept, like that of Kate’s husband, their own husbands. Kate’s grown son has simply been swallowed up by the same world where the men reside—a childless place, filled with work, lunch, meetings.

  Women from surrounding neighborhoods with ties to the walking path have also discovered the pond. They are from places beyond Gladwyn Hollow—from Pudding Hill and Whittle Lane, names stolen by developers from early town founders. They stake out their places with bedspreads and towels. They bring floats for the children, a two-man raft with paddles. They plant umbrellas and dole out cups of lemonade from large thermoses. On any given day they appear at Kate’s—women she doesn’t even know, sitting in their folding chairs on her soft grass, or changing babies, their children running up and down her driveway, drawing on the tarred surface with colored chalk. Kate always keeps diapers and snacks for the little ones. She circulates and makes introductions. She is a hostess, a greeter, and Sadie imagines that her life is suddenly filled by these women who are everything she suspects Kate, with her career, has never been.

  On days when thunderheads threaten lightning and rain Sadie and the other women always plan trips to the movies, to the bowling alley or the children’s museum. They assume Kate is having a fine day free of them and their children with their demands and quarrels and uncontested needs. They never invite her along. It is as if she is a fixture, like the path and the pond, all things upon which they rely to remain the same, perennially in wait of their return.

  • • •

  The next morning, hot and hazy, Sadie announces to the women at the pond that she is going on a little expedition through the woods. In previous weeks they’ve explored and found the stone remains of a homesite, the rocks toppled into piles along the foundation, sprung fr
om their places by frost and spring thaw, by passing fox and deer and clumsy hunters. Once this area was an open field, long before hickory and oak grew to fill it in. Two hundred and fifty years ago a family plowed and planted hills of rocky soil where their houses now sit. The settlers had their own names for places: Mount Misery, Bare Hill, Hell Hollow. Maura mentioned researching the site but this idea was quickly discarded. Most of the women have grown up nearby and have heard about family grave sites and ghost legends. As teenagers they sought them out on Halloween: the grave of the two-year-old girl who died of diphtheria, whose grief-stricken mother saved the apple she’d eaten that held her little tooth prints; the woods haunted by screams of a Native American woman murdered by British soldiers. Everyone remembers the more recent history, the land combed for missing girls. No one wants to know too much, to dwell on the past. That morning, they all decline a hike through mosquito-infested woods.

  Sadie goes anyway. She brings along Sylvia, and Sylvia’s best friend, Anne, Maura’s youngest daughter. They circle the pond looking for some sign of a path through the woods on the other side, and it is Sylvia who notices the small break in the pine. The trees on this side of the pond are older, the woods darker and cooler, dotted with wood aster, bloodroot, swaths of cinnamon fern. The girls hold hands and shiver in their suits. They wear flip-flops with glued-on bows and jewels. Sylvia imitates a ghost, and Anne does a tiny shriek, like a banshee. Sadie gives them a look. She feels the edge of what must be irritation and is dismayed with herself. Was the look the same one her mother used to give her? “Now,” her mother would have said, “don’t be a giddy goose.”

  The path is narrow and rutted with tree roots, but it is a definite path, one that someone has once treaded. Sadie imagines a Colonial woman walking in front of them, her long skirt sweeping the dead leaves, catching the leaves up in her petticoat. The path goes up a short way and then down again, and comes out in a meadow. In the distance, up on a rise, is the old Filley house—its trap rock stones shining, the wooden ell in back deteriorated from this perspective and deserted looking. Sadie stops. The girls flank her, each looking up, shading their eyes in the sun. Daisies fill the meadow. On one side of the house is an orchard, the trees bright and green. Sadie remembers them in spring bloom, the blossoms blown across the gravel drive. She looks at the upper-story window to the room where Ray took her that day, the first time they had sex. The glass is dark. Ray’s green truck is in the drive.