by Karen Brown
She holds the girls’ hands and smells the waving grass. The sun glints off the house’s lower windows.
“A castle,” Anne says.
“Where the princess lives, trapped by an evil spell,” Sylvia says.
Their voices are soft and high. The white door in back is suddenly thrown open, and Ray Filley comes out. He is talking on the phone, his tone sharp, and the girls gasp, sensing they are trespassing. Sylvia yanks on Sadie’s hand as if to tug her back into the woods and the shadows. Ray carries a plastic garbage bag. Sadie can tell he is talking to Beth. His angry voice carries over the field of grass and flowers.
“Old Farmer Filley. The lying son of a bitch,” he says. “Did you really think he’d quit drinking? He had you all fooled. I can’t wait to tell Ludlow this bit of news.”
He shuts the door behind him and walks along the side of the house to a row of cans. Sadie watches the way his shoulders move when he hefts the bag and drops it into the can. She hears the sound of glass bottles clinking together. He seems, to Sadie, so vulnerable performing this household task.
“I found ten bottles,” he says. “And I wasn’t even looking. Wait until I start prying up floorboards.” He says something indecipherable that Sadie imagines is horseshit, which makes her laugh. Then he turns and looks at them. Sylvia makes a whimpering sound.
“He sees us,” she says.
Anne stands immobile. “Oh no, oh no,” she whispers.
Sadie doesn’t know what to do. They all stand still, looking at each other. Ray shades his eyes, trying to make them out. He sets the phone on the window ledge and waves an arm in greeting. “Hello!” he calls, his anger dissipated.
“Hello!” Sadie calls back.
The girls grip her hands so tightly she can’t wave. She tries to take a step but they hold their ground. “We’ll ask if we can pick the flowers,” she says soothingly. “I’m sure he won’t mind.”
Their hands loosen a bit. Ray starts across the field toward them, tramping down the grass. Dragonflies flit around his head. He wears a white button-up shirt, untucked, and jeans. His hair is long around his collar. To the girls he seems different from their fathers—men who never leave their dress shirts untucked unless they are in the process of dressing and in a hurry, rushing through the kitchen to grab a glass of juice. Their fathers have their hair cut regularly by the barber in town. Ray reaches them and stops. Sadie says they were on a hike and found the meadow.
“The girls would love to pick some flowers,” she says.
He looks at her and then looks at each girl in turn. She knows he wants to ask her which is hers, but he does not. He squats down in front of them and smiles. “Of course you can pick them!” he says. “Make daisy chains. My sister used to make those.” And then he focuses his attention on Sylvia, with her straw-colored hair. “I’m sure your mother made them, too.”
He glances up at Sadie, his eyes brimming with desire.
She wants to reach out and touch his hair, his face. The girls hold her hands tight.
“Didn’t you?” he says.
“Of course I did,” Sadie says. Then she squeezes the girls’ hands. “Go pick the daisies, the white ones with yellow centers. I’ll show you how to do it. We can make necklaces, or crowns.”
Both girls say, “Crowns and necklaces!” their little voices like small birds. They go out into the field to gather the flowers. Ray sits down in the grass and tugs Sadie down beside him.
She has written him back, tentative letters, ones she reads and rereads before they are mailed, making sure her identity will not be ascertained if a letter is intercepted. His notes are full of passion and a certainty that they are destined to be together, and hers are stilted, sounding like some sort of clever code. You haven’t considered the appendages, she writes. There are limbs that I cannot sever. His replies signify a stubborn refusal to consider her situation. His plans are selfish, self-serving. He tells her she should choose to be happy, that happiness is possible, if only she will grasp it. In his last letter he set a date to meet—Friday before Labor Day, at the old house. She cannot go, she knows she can’t. She can tell him now, in person, rather than spending hours composing the letter that will convey this news. Still, the result of her not going is something she fears she will always regret. Will the letters cease? Will he go away? Will he decide that any number of appendage-less women may be more pliable?
The sun on the grass, the smell of the pine woods behind them, makes her light-headed, and she says nothing about the meeting. When the girls’ voices recede Ray leans in and kisses her—first one eyelid, then the other. Sadie wants to be in his arms, spread out in the grass, or in the shadow of the pine on the needle floor. She wants him to ravish her. He pulls away and looks at her. Sadie wears her swimsuit, Craig’s shirt over it, and he slips his hand inside the shirt, inside the top of her suit. He slides his fingers over her breast. Sadie bites her lip to keep from sighing. “Not now,” she whispers. “Please.”
He moves his fingers up her thigh and down again. She clenches her fists, digs her nails into her palms.
“We could be inside, upstairs,” he says quietly, moving his fingers.
She wants to laugh, to brush his hands away, but she cannot. She closes her eyes and begins to lower herself down into the sweet-smelling tussock grass. And then he is pulling her arm, yanking her up, and Sylvia is there with her flowers in her hands, quiet and watching. Later that night, when Sadie puts her into bed, Sylvia will tell her that the man in the castle was a magician who can cast spells, and that he’s put a spell on Sadie, and taken away her real mother, and Sadie will tell her that is impossible and reassure her, even while she recognizes that in many ways this is true. But there in the field they sit cautiously beside each other, and Sadie shows her and Anne how to slice the flower stems with their fingernails and thread the stems through each other to make their necklaces, their crowns. Ray leaves them, but Sadie knows he is up in the room, watching through the window. “Next Friday,” he whispered to her before he went. “I’ll wait all day.”
They head back through the pines to the pond, and this time Sadie knows that it is Emely Filley showing them the way, the path the one she must have taken the day her baby died, when she was filled with despair and purpose. They return to the other mothers and children, the girls showing off their jewelry, Sadie sinking back into her lawn chair, her body sore and aching. She has never felt this way before. She doesn’t know what to make of it, how she might shake it or at least keep the feeling at bay. How will she cut the vegetables for the pot roast, change the sheets, drag the laundry up from the basement to fold and put away? How can she arrive at play practice, say her lines, organize the neighborhood Labor Day cookout? How can any of these things exist together with her longing?
June 27, 1979
THE BEST TIMES TO PLACE or retrieve a letter at the dead end: early morning, the air cool, the grass wet; in the evening when the fireflies dipped and pulsed along the perimeter of the woods; in the afternoon during the lull, when mothers watched As the World Turns, the curtains drawn against the glare, the lives of the Hugheses, the Stewarts, the Talbots, the Lowells, and the Turners playing out in real-life Oakdale time. The sound of the soap opera—the low, quarreling voices; the soft endearments; the discussion of what to do over coffee—was a backdrop for Sadie’s naptime as a child. She’d be consigned to her bedroom, and the daylight streaming in, the actors’ voices, soothed her—even though she never knew the plot threads or understood the characters’ complicated attractions, affairs, jealousies, and pregnancies. She’d smell the sulfur of the struck match, the smoke from her mother’s cigarette. Her mother would have the laundry basket beside her and the clothes surrounding her in neat piles on the coffee table, on the sofa.
That summer Sadie’s new desire to be away from her mother and her moods sent her outdoors, or to Betty’s, or to the basement rec room. She would meet up with Betty in front of Betty’s house by the curb, where her dog, Heidi, pant
ed in the shade of the hickories. They’d have stolen the cigarettes to smoke. They’d walk on the lawns, along the tar road, the grass dry and brittle beneath their bare feet, the cigarettes damp in their closed hands. In the pasture insects would flit up around their faces, and they’d walk to the shade, under the pines, to read Francie’s letters.
They came to know her flourishes and games, her mundane details: what color she painted her nails (Skinny Dip), how much money she’d saved from her allowance, and what she intended to do with it (buy a ticket to France to meet my pen pal Chantal). They learned of her disappointment in never knowing where the balloon she released in science class ended up (Oh, where oh where? Zimbabwe? Tahiti? Scranton?). She described her weeklong beach vacation (seaside manse), her father in his swimsuit (hairy thighs, and the conspicuous lump, like something alive stuffed in his skimpy trunks).
They never knew exactly what to make of her revelations. She still spoke of events in her life in fairy-tale terms—the king and queen were always her parents, and almost everything was depicted as fantasy or pretend. Still, Francie’s letters were increasingly filled with details that struck Sadie and Betty as things they should not know, like the questions and answers in the “Playboy Advisor” column.
Dear Hezekiah,
The king is on a rampage this morning. The queen has awoken for a day and spent too much money on summer clothes and groceries and other means of existence. Meanwhile the king is busy with his hobbies and refuses to seek another position in the kingdom. Tonight we dine on canned Beefaroni. The queen puts it on the Royal Doulton. “Don’t be a cunt,” the king says, in the foulest of humors.
Hezekiah, the farmer boy, had a limited domain. Faced with Francie’s letters, growing longer and more intimate, they had to invent things to fill his life, to flesh out the simple aspects of his day: Work to do today, he’d write. Build the fence down by the road. Caught some nice perch this morning. Francie’s new theme was a desire to escape her “castle prison.” Sadie told Betty to write that Hezekiah, too, wanted to escape the drudgery of the farm. But it’s not possible for me to leave, he wrote. It’s as if I am chained to the farm. You would understand the strength of such spells. Sadie put in lines from Bud’s letters to Bea Brownmiller: My darling, let’s pretend we can be together. Let’s just talk about our own invented life. She could only imagine Bea’s responses, guessing she must have mentioned her cottage when Bud wrote: Yes, that little house by the sea will be where we spend our later years. I can imagine all of the children, and the grandchildren coming for visits, and all that you’ve written is what I want, too, my dearest Bea.
Sadie imagined Hezekiah loping through the fields, squatting down by the stone at dusk. Hezekiah was always Ray Filley when she pictured him, but in the letters he was the type of boy who read the Farmer’s Almanac, who wore a white T-shirt and drove a tractor. He harvested the corn that summer. He painted the barn. He wore a brimmed hat down over his eyes. He told Francie about a trip to Woodbury, about apple harvesting, and cider making, and hayrides for children at Halloween.
We always do it up big on All Hallow’s Eve, he wrote. We serve hot cider and give rides up the hill through the woods on the wagon. We have the road lined with jack-o’-lanterns, and people dressed in costumes ready to jump out, to leap onto the wagon and walk among the riders.
Betty had wanted to write and scare the shit out of them, but Sadie objected.
“He’s not that crass,” she said, a word her mother applied to her father.
Betty had been on a similar Halloween hayride with her cousin in Ellington.
“The jack-o’-lanterns were amazing,” she said. “Each face was different and frightening. Once in a while there’d be one that wasn’t scary, but it wasn’t happy either. It would be this wide open mouth, like a scream or surprise.”
Sadie stared at her. Betty stared back. Sadie was thinking, trying to come up with something. Francie talked about her parents, and Hezekiah was strangely silent about his family.
“We should give him a sister,” Sadie said.
“Why not a little brother? Or better, one of each?”
Sadie said that was too much to keep track of. “Why not a sister who is sick?” she said. “A sister with some disease.”
“Leukemia,” Betty said.
They were in Sadie’s basement, sitting on the mattress they used for practicing back handsprings, or when they were younger as a bed in their games of house or an island in their shipwreck game. It was old ticking, with buttons, and covered with stains from years of use. The other things from their games—the cherry drop-leaf table, the old couch with its sewn-on lace doilies, the black cast-iron pot, the stones they’d used as a fireplace—were gone. Sadie missed them, as she missed most of what had passed of her childhood. She was acutely aware of how she had changed recently, and it made her sadder than she thought she should be. A sister with leukemia would work, she thought. Like Beth in Little Women. Sadie couldn’t help but imagine Ray’s sister Beth, her pathetic attachment to Ray, the much-perused map she’d shown her that afternoon when they were little, one charting routes of escape. Hezekiah would be a caring brother, tender and considerate. Francie would be all the more attracted to him.
We are taking my sister for her treatment tomorrow. She is ten and has leukemia. I don’t usually tell anyone about this. She is weak but still a happy kid. She likes butterflies.
Betty said it was perfect. The basement door opened and Sadie’s mother called down the stairs, “What are you girls doing?”
Sadie hoped she would not come down, but then she did, a little unsteadily, and appeared behind them. The sliding glass doors let in the light through the trees, and the speckled shadows of leaves spangled there on the indoor/outdoor carpet. Her mother was wearing her swimsuit and sunglasses. Sadie had folded the letter up and slipped it under the mattress, and they were sitting there with blank pages and the pen they reserved for Hezekiah’s letters—a fountain pen Sadie’s grandmother had given her when Sadie said once she wanted to be a writer.
“What are you writing?” her mother said.
“We’re trying to come up with a script for the Haunted Woods,” Betty said quickly.
Sadie would not have said that. She would have said they were making a list of kids and their roles. She would have said they were adding up how much money they might make. Her mother would have turned and left them alone. Instead she came forward and plopped down on the mattress, smelling of Sea & Ski. She stretched her long, tan legs out in front of her. She propped her sunglasses up on her head. “Let’s see,” she said.
Betty showed her the blank pages. “We don’t have anything yet.”
Sadie’s mother rolled her eyes. “Well, you have to begin somewhere.” She told them that a good plot would keep the kids interested as they walked along the path. “Maybe they see a headless woman, and she is just wandering by. Then they see a man holding a woman’s head, crying. It’s a beautiful head, with cascading hair, and a gorgeous face, and he holds it up and talks to it, ‘Oh, my darling Rosalee,’ he says. And the head tells him, ‘I won’t rest until I find my child. Please find her for me!’ Then they come upon a child dragging a bloody hatchet.”
Betty stared at Sadie’s mother, her mouth open.
“You look like those jack-o’-lanterns at the farm,” Sadie said.
Her mother turned to her. “Have you heard a word of what I was saying?”
Sadie shrugged. “I guess,” she said. “It sounds okay.”
She wouldn’t admit how much she liked the story her mother told, how perfect it was.
“Did the child with the hatchet cut off the mother’s head?” Betty asked.
Sadie’s mother put her arm around her and squeezed. “Maybe, sweetie.”
“But we have a drowned girl,” Sadie said. “And a wandering Victorian couple.”
“And a girl crushed by a bridge,” Betty said.
Sadie’s mother waved her hand. “Oh, you don’t need al
l of that.”
“Then we’ll have to cut out a lot of kids,” Sadie said to Betty. “They won’t be happy.”
Sadie’s mother stood up and stumbled a bit. “Then you’ll have to cut them out. They’ll survive. They can work behind the scenes, for God’s sake. Do you want a good show or a hodgepodge of a thing?”
She turned and Sadie noticed the pale blue veins on the back of her legs, the way the fat rippled there, all imperfections that gave her a certain satisfaction. Her mother tugged down her suit. “Good luck,” she said. She went to the sliding glass door and then out into the backyard.
“Where is your mother going?” Betty asked.
They watched her walk in her bare feet to the woods and then disappear into them. Every now and then they’d see the bright white of her suit moving among the trees, climbing the path.
“No idea,” Sadie said. She stood up. “I think we should use that script.”
Betty sat on the mattress, biting her fingernails. “You don’t think it’s a bit, well, much?”
Sadie said it wasn’t. It would be fine. They could still have the drowned girl. The theme would be the dead seeking those they loved. Men seeking their lost loves, women seeking their children. “Even in death,” she said, “they are searching for them.”
“Is the mother whose child killed her still searching for her?”
