by Karen Brown
Constructed in the pasture and woods was a domestic nightmare—the rooms of a house like any of theirs, set off from the path, filled with scenes of horror: a kitchen with a woman in an apron holding rusted gardening shears, a living room with a headless man watching television, a child’s bedroom in disarray, bloody footprints across the floor, a library with books covered in bloody handprints. The children who paid the twenty-five-cent entrance fee would be led along the path and shown the rooms, the story of what happened in each slowly unveiled by visitations from the dead. Each dead visitor had lines to say that told part of the story, and each longed for someone who had died and for whom they were searching, but the nature of their death was part of the mystery.
Francie objected that her character didn’t have a place in any of the rooms. They were all sitting in the shade, swatting the bugs. Francie’s face was sunburned. She’d been relegated to the open field, where she was to stand, dripping wet, with her baby, and where she’d wait, most afternoons, for her cue. Her glasses slid down her nose.
“Why can’t my baby have a nursery?” she asked.
Sadie considered this. She hated for it to be a good idea, to admit this to Francie or to Betty, who’d lately been wondering why they kept up the letter writing.
She claimed she’d gotten bored with Francie’s letters, complaining that she was strange, that her family was weird. But Sadie suspected Betty had begun to feel guilty about fooling her, as if Francie had guessed who they were and they might be caught and suffer consequences. The more that Francie confessed (How I so long for a kindred spirit; I do dream of becoming a famous singer; Even though I lock my bedroom door it is always open in the morning) or begged Hezekiah to run away with her, the more Betty protested that they should stop. Sadie hadn’t told her that she looked forward to the letters, that she’d picked up on a hidden context that intrigued her. For some odd reason she had begun to feel aligned with Francie and her desperate sadness. This was only one of a number of things Sadie kept from her friend that summer, and it bothered her, but not enough to ever confess. She turned to Betty. “Don’t you have an old crib?”
Betty looked at her askance. “Yes. But my sister is using it.”
Francie said they’d given their crib to the Frobels. Giving away the crib meant that the parents were finished with having children, that their family was complete. Once in a while a family had to get the crib back—like the Gruenbergs, whose children were grown and gone, the crib long ago handed down to some needy relative, when Donnie was suddenly conceived.
“There’s one in your basement,” Betty said. She bit the inside of her cheek and pretended to be absorbed with the fringe on her jean shorts. Sadie hadn’t wanted to bring that up, and Betty knew it. The crib was hidden in the back by the furnace, disassembled and leaning against the cement wall with the mattress. Francie looked at her hopefully. Sadie rolled her eyes.
“I guess,” she said. She wasn’t sure how to get the crib without anyone seeing. Her mother had been different since her latest hospital visit. Sadie knew it wasn’t a change brought on by a new medication. Those altered her mother in other ways. She’d become sleepy and dazed. A new smell would come off her skin. This time she was simply trying to be nicer—baking cookies for Sadie, imploring her to take them with her to share with her friends. Coming into Sadie’s room and sitting on the end of her bed at night, reminding her how she used to tell her stories. “Which was your favorite?” she said.
And Sadie, annoyed, mistrustful, told her she didn’t remember.
“None of them?” her mother said, as if she should have known her stories would make no lasting impression.
Sadie had just wanted her out of her room, her weight off the end of her bed. She dreaded these confrontations, the way her mother had recently been giving her odd looks, then quickly looking away when Sadie caught her.
“How did you grow up so fast?” her mother had said that morning.
She’d sat at the kitchen table in her matching nightgown and robe, the nylon fabric airy and insubstantial, the sleeves edged with lace. She had a cigarette and a glass of orange juice. Her hair, recently lightened a platinum blond, was held away from her face with a tortoiseshell headband, and without makeup her face was open and childlike, her normally red lips pale and chapped. Sadie noticed her hand holding the cigarette shook, and she looked away, not wanting to feel sorry for her.
“I know you’re still mad at me about what happened,” her mother said.
Sadie hadn’t realized that was the case until just then. Her mother had never attempted to explain her mysterious hospital visits before. Sadie glared at her. “So?” she said. “What do you care?”
“It won’t happen again,” her mother said. “I’ve already promised your father.”
Sadie didn’t think this mattered at all, but as she sat in the pine shade she felt the day had been altered by her mother’s promise. The sky outside the screen door had been blue, the air cool and absent of humidity. Bees swarmed the clover in the lawn. “Have fun today,” her mother had called, and Sadie, stepping outside onto the porch, let herself imagine she was like any other mother. Taking the crib now seemed wrong.
“I don’t know if I can use it,” Sadie said.
Betty laughed. “Oh, like your mother is ever going to have any more kids,” she said.
“Why don’t you ask her?” Francie said.
Sadie glared at them. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I will.”
Francie gave her another pleading look. Betty said she was going home to eat lunch, and she stood and made her way down the path. Usually, Sadie went with her, but today Betty didn’t once look back. The other kids had taken off as well. Sadie told Francie she had to go, and Francie got up and followed her out of the pine woods and into Betty’s backyard. In two days it would be July 4, the day of the annual lobster bake, and the parents had already begun their own preparations, hauling the long picnic tables to the Donahues’ side yard. Some of the kids had gathered around the fathers, who’d been digging the pit. “Stand back,” Mr. Donahue said, his shirt wet under the arms. “Back, for God’s sake!” The cicadas screamed overhead, their dark bodies and shining wings dotting the leaves, the shrubbery.
“I can help you get the crib if you want,” Francie said. “We can sneak it out tonight.”
Sadie said she didn’t think nighttime would work.
“Early tomorrow then?” Francie said.
Sadie felt drained by her persistence. “We’ll see,” she said.
It was the same with the letters—Francie insisting that Hezekiah meet her and make good on his promise to flee, and Sadie having trouble coming up with some excuse to avoid it. They parted at the street, and Sadie watched Francie get on her bike and pedal down under the hickories to her house at the bottom of the hill. Betty came to her screen door.
“Is she gone?” she said.
Sadie laughed, and then Betty laughed, and Sadie went inside to make herself a sandwich, the bread and ham and cheese spread all over the counter, and Betty’s sisters and brothers stepping up to make a mess with the mustard, dropping crusts of bread on the floor and stepping on them, spilling Hi-C down the sides of their glasses. Sadie and Betty took their food outside to the back deck. Here, under the umbrella, Charlene Donahue sat with her feet up.
“How’s your mom doing?” she asked Sadie. Betty’s mother wore her red hair in a shag. She wore her usual summer attire: Bermuda shorts, a sleeveless cotton shell, and no makeup—a regular mother was how Sadie described her, making Betty roll her eyes. Charlene lowered her dark sunglasses and peered at Sadie over them, and Sadie felt ashamed of all the things Charlene knew about her mother.
“She’s fine,” Sadie said cautiously.
“I heard the play opened,” Betty’s mother said. She plopped a bean bag ashtray on the arm of her chair and lit a cigarette. Sadie knew they were Virginia Slims—Betty stole from her mother, not her father.
Sadie nodded. The play wo
uld run for three weeks.
“I can’t wait to see it. She’s always so good.” Betty’s mother sighed and smoked the cigarette, staring off at the pasture behind the house. Then she stubbed the cigarette out and pushed herself up. Sadie heard her inside cleaning up the kitchen and wondered what dreams Betty’s mother had for herself, if all mothers had them, bottled up beneath their mother exteriors. Betty said that Francie was the most irritating person she’d ever met.
“You know you can’t take that crib,” she said.
Sadie chewed her food slowly. She nodded. Once, she and Betty had dragged the crib out for one of their games. They’d set it up in the basement themselves, and put their dolls in, and played with it an entire winter afternoon, until Sadie’s mother came to the basement stairs to tell Betty her mother had called. Betty had said she’d be right up, but Sadie’s mother had come down and noticed the crib. She had walked up to it and put her hands on the railing, standing there a moment staring at the dolls, watching them as if they were alive and wriggling, or rolling over, or doing some other kind of live baby activity—cooing, batting at a rattle. Sadie’s mother had even reached her hand in and placed a finger on one of the baby dolls’ rubber hands. Sadie had watched her mother’s face darken, her smile falter, and then she’d turned toward the stairs where they had retreated, her voice hard with anger.
“I never said you could take this old thing out,” she said. “What made you think you could rummage through my things?”
Betty had mumbled something that sounded like an apology and hurried up the stairs. Sadie was left with her mother’s rage and accusations, with her insistence that they take the crib apart again, demanding the tool they’d used and stabbing at the screws, until her father came home and found them, took off his suit coat, and under the bare basement bulb took the crib apart himself. Sadie had relayed the story to Betty in school the next day through a rebus letter—half pictures, half letters, their own secret code formed back in fifth grade.
“You don’t want your mother to get mad again,” Betty said. She glanced at the kitchen window where her own mother stood, washing cups.
Sadie doubted her mother would notice it was missing. “It’s because she saw it,” she said. “We reminded her.” Though of what they reminded her was still unclear, and neither of them mentioned it now.
“I can’t believe Francie called us stuck-up in that letter,” Betty said.
“Who does she think she is?” Sadie said.
And like that, the rift that seemed to be forming between them disappeared.
August 29, 2003
RAY DROVE FOR AN HOUR and stopped at a motel near the Connecticut shore, a shingled building built low to the ground, surrounded by a salt marsh. The motel was Ray’s idea, and Sadie wonders, lying in bed, what other women he has brought here. They have just had sex, yet her body still aches for him. This is the meaning of the word “cleave,” she thinks: a bond forged through violence. He props his head up in the semidarkness, his face inches from her mouth.
“Sadie, Sadie,” he says. “Your hair is dirty.”
“I didn’t have time to wash it.”
She is sickened by what she has done—betrayed her children, her husband with his happiness and pressed shirts, his careful concern.
Ray drops his head to her breast. He sighs. His hands slide along her body, find a place to settle. He has yet to explain the duffel bag, left in the truck. There was never a plan in place for this, and it didn’t even occur to her to pack a bag. They drove mostly in silence—Ray deep in thought, his brow furrowed, and Sadie too afraid to hear the answers to her questions: What are you running away from? Do I even figure in your plan, or did I stumble in at the wrong time? She closes her eyes. If I had come an hour later, she wants to ask, would you have even been there? The motel sheet is starched and cheap. She doesn’t know how she will go back, so she refuses to imagine that yet. This, like her escape from her neighborhood earlier, gives her an odd sense of relief. Outside the summer storm has followed them with its heavy skies and thunder.
“I love this,” she tells him.
He makes a sound of agreement, a kind of grunt. She isn’t sure he understands that she means the weather, that she’s leery about admitting she loves the sex. Him.
“I used to run outside in thunderstorms with an umbrella,” she says.
“You had those cutoff jean shorts. Skinny legs.” His voice is deep and thick, satiated.
“The tar road would have that smell.”
She tries not to imagine what is happening without her, but the images surface like those in the View-Master she had as a child—the 3-D scenes falling into place at the click of the button, whole little worlds opening up, ones you could stare into for a long time, so filled with detail you might never see everything. Ray falls asleep. She gets up and puts on her damp skirt and blouse, a decisive action, but now that she stands at the screen door of the motel, she is paralyzed. She watches the rain puddle in the sand and ground shells of the parking lot. If she breathes in deeply she can smell the briny scent of the tidal marsh. It is nearing dinnertime. Other women will have come down the path, and she imagines Max and Sylvia swallowed up in the confusion of their children, all of them vying for an ice cream cup, the women settling into chairs around the kitchen table. They will have just beaten the rain, and maybe a handful will have gotten caught up in it, emerging from the woods to dash across the Currys’ wet lawn.
Kate will make them the tequila sunrises she made for Sadie, Maura, and Jane earlier. She wishes, for a moment, that she could be there with the neighborhood women, sipping her drink, listening to the talk. Max would tug her arm and tell her he had to use the bathroom. She feels a small, dull ache. Your sister will help you, she’d say. Go get Sylvia. For every little thing that Sadie does for her children she can easily come up with someone else who might do it for them. She suspects she is entirely replaceable. It is as if, after having given birth and nursed them, her use has ended. When she tries to picture returning to the scene she has left, she cannot. There is no place for her.
Sadie knows Kate will give her a reasonable amount of time to have completed her errand. Maybe they didn’t carry saffron at Shaw’s, she’ll think. Maybe she had to go into the next town to the A & P. She will call Sadie’s house, letting the phone ring and ring. Once the storm passes she’ll take the children by the hand and walk them over. She’ll peer into the front bay window and try the door, which is wide open. Sadie feels her heart sink, imagining Kate stepping inside, seeing the laundry heaped on the couch—sundresses and shorts, T-shirts and pajamas, Craig’s boxers, undershirts, and socks. There is the dust on the cherry tables, toys scattered on the floor. Kate will see the house is empty and take the children back to hers.
“Who wants macaroni and cheese?” she’ll say.
Max will sit dejected on the den couch. “I want ice cream.”
“Maybe ice cream after dinner,” Sylvia will say. Sadie realizes that Sylvia will sense something is amiss, that she needs to step in and play her role. She’ll sit down beside Max and take his hand in hers. Max will swat her hand away. Sylvia won’t be deterred, and she’ll take his hand again.
“Who wants to play upside-down house after we eat?” she’ll say. She’ll raise her hand in the air, and Max will look at her glumly, then raise his hand, too.
Kate will prepare macaroni and cheese, which Sadie knows Max will not eat. He will refuse to take a bite, until Sylvia says, “No game . . . ,” in her sweet, high voice, and he will relent. Afterward, the children will ask Kate for a hand mirror, and they will walk around her house side by side looking down into it, pretending they are walking on the ceiling. Sadie doesn’t know what Kate will think of her children and the odd game Sadie taught them. She’ll continue to call Sadie’s until Craig answers, home from work. She’ll speak to him in hushed tones on the phone. Then, Sadie thinks, his footsteps will sound on her slate walk, a metallic ring of his shoe soles on the slate. He will yank
on the screen door, scrape his feet on the mat. Kate will hand over the children to Craig, who will stand there in the foyer clutching their hands, his eyes lost and dark, as if to say, What now?
Sadie can see his baffled expression. She knows Kate Curry will not be able to rush him out the door. His eyes will beseech her.
“Do you have family you can call?” she’ll ask him.
The streetlights will come on, buzzing to life with their pale violet beams. Someone will be mowing a lawn; a group of children will play in the twilight, catching fireflies. Max will squirm at the end of his father’s hand. Sylvia’s eyes will be wide with the knowledge that something is wrong, that her father, commander of the household, keeper of checks and balances, bedtime despot, is at a loss.
Craig will shake his head. “No one locally.”
“Sadie’s family?”
Craig will do a short shake, almost irritated. “No.”
“Grandpa is in Brightview,” Sylvia will say. “It’s assistant living.”
