by Karen Brown
“Don’t worry,” Sadie tells her. “We’re responsible restaurant patrons.”
She sucks her drink through a straw and chews on the celery. Ray puts his cold mouth on hers and they kiss. She tries not to see herself as she looks now, giddy, making out in a restaurant, the kind of woman she would normally despise and talk about. It is a relief to be the type of woman she despises, a woman like her mother. She sees that it is so much harder to be the other.
“I feel like I could just burst,” she tells him.
Ray grins and kisses her again. He is all intensity and focus. Sadie feels he has closed out the rest of the world for her.
Other patrons enter the dining room. Two couples, the women in sundresses, the men in polo shirts; another older couple and a young girl that Sadie imagines is a granddaughter or a niece; and an older woman who seats herself at a small table near them. She has on a peach-colored sleeveless blouse. Her shoulders are tan and strong for a woman her age. She wears her white hair back in a chignon. Sadie looks at her, and cannot stop looking. She is someone she knows. Sadie cannot place her—not a woman from Gladwyn Hollow, not a Tunxis Player. She feels light-headed with the threat of being recognized. One of the children’s teachers? A historical society member? She doesn’t want Ray to see. But he is busy cracking the lobster claws and pulling out the meat. The table is littered with the bright remains of the lobster shell. He dips the meat into the butter and holds it up for her and Sadie opens her mouth. The older woman orders a drink from Emma. Sadie can hear her voice, low and authoritative.
“A Manhattan, please,” she says.
Sadie thinks if this were the era in which women wore gloves this woman would have now taken the opportunity to remove them, tugging at the fingers of each hand, setting them inside her old-fashioned purse. And in a flash she knows who it is. She remembers the letters: My darling Bea, you must never forget me. She remembers a fall day filled with the scent of swirling leaves and car exhaust, and she feels her stomach drop the way it did on the Ferris wheel as a child. Ray leans over to kiss her and she is suddenly wary. What will Mrs. Sidelman think of her? She pulls away, just a bit. Ray freezes.
“What?” he says.
Sadie sees him take in the dining room, lighting on each of the guests, looking for the source of her refusal.
“Nothing,” she says. She kisses him lightly on his mouth. His lips taste of butter, the tartar sauce that came with the clams. “It’s nothing.”
But Ray has seen Mrs. Sidelman. He slinks down into the booth as if he is hiding.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he says. “It’s that old bitch from the neighborhood.”
Sadie shushes him. “Mrs. Sidelman,” she says.
Then Ray reaches out and takes Sadie’s face in his hands. His eyes are haunted and mournful. She cannot imagine what has come over him.
“It’s just Mrs. Sidelman,” she says softly, reassuring him. “She’s harmless.”
But between them is now a widening painful silence, into which pour their respective memories. Summer 1979.
“It’s nothing to do with us,” Sadie says. “Don’t think about it.”
The food is unappetizing now, the mess of the table an embarrassment. Sadie’s head is foggy from the drink. Emma comes by and removes some of the plates and asks them if they’d like another round. Ray says yes. He has his chin in his hand. Every so often he peers around Sadie to look at Mrs. Sidelman. Sadie dreads glancing her way. She won’t do it.
“We should go,” she whispers.
“Why are you whispering?” Ray asks.
The dining room is fuller now; the voices of the patrons rise and fall, a regular din.
“She can’t know who we are, can she?” she says. “It’s been too long.”
“She must be ancient,” Ray says. He is fiddling with his fries, stacking them up in a small pile in the plastic basket. When his beer arrives he gulps it down. Emma pours out water from a pitcher, her arm rising over them, languid and colorful.
“Have you picked out a name?” Sadie asks her.
Despite the waiting customers, the orders she must be tallying in her head, she smiles and leans against the back of the booth. “Cecilia,” she says. “From Frances Burney.”
Emma places her hand on her stomach. Her T-shirt rides up and Sadie can see a bright blue vein under the pale skin. Beside her Ray sings, “Cecilia, you’re breaking my heart / You’re shaking my confidence daily / Oh, Cecilia, I’m down on my knees / I’m begging you please to come home / Come on home.”
Sadie stares at him in surprise. His ability to sing is another thing she’s forgotten about him.
“Simon and Garfunkel,” he says.
Emma laughs, a sound more melodious than her speaking voice. “You’re good.”
And then Mrs. Sidelman leans toward them. “Burney was a brilliant satirist,” she says. “Cecilia was an heiress who could only keep her money if a man agreed to marry her and take her name.”
Emma turns and smiles at Mrs. Sidelman. “That’s it exactly,” she says.
Sadie feels she should announce herself now. I’m Sadie Watkins, she could say. She might invite Mrs. Sidelman to sit with them. But she says nothing. Emma looks at them, then back at Mrs. Sidelman.
“Check?” Ray says, his voice low, a mumble.
Emma saunters off, slowly, slowly, as if she is walking through a field or easing herself into cold water. Sadie worries that Mrs. Sidelman will continue to speak, but she has turned to her drink and seems to be absorbed in thought. She remembers Mrs. Sidelman’s house, the shelves filled with books, the carefully placed vases and crystal on the sideboard, the painting of the woman whose eyes bored into you like an accusation. She was a retired teacher. Her family helped found the public library, and she wrote arts reviews for the newspaper. Sadie remembers her mother standing on the back deck with her drink, watching Mrs. Sidelman in her backyard with slit eyes after the woman had reviewed The Glass Menagerie.
“Clare, don’t be such a bad sport,” Sadie’s father said. He was sitting at the patio table with the paper. The grill smoked, and every so often he folded the paper and got up and checked the steaks.
“Everyone else said that my Laura was brilliant. What’s wrong with her?”
“She has to say something interesting. Reviewers like to rile things up. What do you care?”
“I hate the way she fiddles with everything over there. Look at her plucking up weeds with those veiny hands. Look at her flat ass and her old-fashioned shorts. She hasn’t had sex in years.”
“It’s just the Hartford Times.”
“What are you saying? Just the Hartford Times?”
“I’m not saying anything.” Sadie’s father sighed and folded the paper and lifted the grill lid. Smoke billowed up, the smell of burning fat.
“You mean it’s not the New York Times. You mean it’s nothing,” her mother said softly, almost petulantly.
Sadie was in her bedroom above the porch, listening through her window. She heard her father shush her mother. She pressed her face to the screen and looked down and saw that her mother had climbed into her father’s lap, and he was smoothing her hair.
Emma takes her time coming back with the check. She’s busy, they can see that. She brings Mrs. Sidelman a bowl of chowder and then she leans over Sadie and tucks the check under Ray’s plate. Ray doesn’t even look at it. He has the money in his hand, ready to go. Sadie feels as if their time together has been spoiled by Mrs. Sidelman, even though the woman hasn’t acknowledged them.
“God, I hated that woman,” Ray says. “Didn’t you?”
Sadie isn’t sure why Ray feels this way. Mrs. Sidelman would let Sadie play with her old reading textbooks, with the workbooks and the dittos left over from her days as a teacher. Sadie had a pretend school and taught the younger neighborhood children how to read, sitting in rows on Mrs. Sidelman’s picnic table benches. Sadie’s mother would catch her over there and make her come home, sometimes sen
ding her to her room with no explanation.
“I did hate her,” Sadie says quietly, remembering her mother’s irrational punishment. She is angry and sad and doesn’t understand why.
Ray tells Emma to keep the change, and she smiles her mysterious smile and thanks him with her jingle-jangle voice and moves away. Sadie begins to slide from the booth, but Ray takes her face in his hands and brings his mouth to hers in a slow, luxurious kiss, as if she is some exotic food he craves. And suddenly she could stay there in the booth forever, kissing with Mrs. Sidelman’s eyes on her, imagining her mother watching as well. Look at me, she wants to say. Look, look, look at me.
July 2, 1979
AFTER LUNCH AT BETTY’S THEY composed their last letter to Francie. They went back out into the pasture to work on the Haunted Woods sets—positioning items in the various rooms, smearing more fake blood. Francie returned, smelling of the Noxzema her mother must have awakened long enough to spread on her sunburn.
“I’m not allowed in the sun,” she said. She stood in the shade, stubborn and somewhat forlorn. Sadie tried not to feel sorry for her. Late that afternoon one of Ray’s dogs appeared, sniffing around the kitchen and the empty pots and pans.
“Shoo,” Francie said. “Shoo!”
Ray himself appeared in the open field, the other dog by his side. He stood there for a moment, watching them. Francie seemed to disappear behind a pine, while the other kids looked at him and then looked to Sadie. Ray came up to the living room set. He scratched his stomach under his shirt and glanced at the headless dummy, positioned in a folding aluminum lounge chair covered with a quilt. They’d made a television out of a square of plywood, and Sadie had painted a scene of invading aliens, their silver saucers marking a night sky.
“What’s all of this? Dear old Dad’s lost his head?” Ray said. He wore his tennis shoes and a pair of seersucker shorts. His hair had grown long, lightened from the sun. He glanced at Sadie and then pretended not to notice her.
Sadie hated the way he mocked them, and she hated that she was in a position to be mocked. She turned to Betty. “Let’s go,” she said quietly.
“Games all over for today?” he said. Sadie felt her heart step up, but she said nothing. Ray walked along the path to the next set and picked up the candelabra. This time he looked directly at Sadie, as if he knew this was all her doing.
“You have candles out here?” Ray said. “You know that’s a fire hazard.”
“We’ll be ever so careful,” Francie said, stepping out suddenly from behind her tree.
Sadie wished she had never allowed her to be part of this.
“Please, don’t ruin the show,” Francie said. She had her hands together, pleading.
Ray looked at her, amused. “Who are you?”
Francie seemed surprised at his question. Sadie held her breath, waiting for the revelation. She suspected then that she’d made Hezekiah too much like Ray. Francie bit the inside of her cheek and got a sly look, as if she was going to play along with his pretense of not knowing her.
“I’m Francie,” she said. “Francie Bingham.”
“Bingham?” Ray said. He smiled. “So, my father says that your father whittled your two little brothers in the basement.”
Betty glanced at Sadie and put her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. Sadie watched Francie’s expression flatten out to become no expression at all. “That’s not very nice,” she said.
Ray ignored her and began to walk up the path, perusing the rooms.
“Look at all of this,” he said, marveling.
He turned to them with what seemed like a new appreciation. But then he narrowed his eyes at them.
“You’ll need to get all of this junk off our property when you’re done,” he said. He shook his head and laughed softly.
He left the woods and went back across the open field. They could hear him singing, his voice carrying over the trees. “Your everlasting summer / You can see it fading fast / So you grab a piece of something / That you think is gonna last, / You wouldn’t know a diamond / If you held it in your hand, / The things you think are precious / I can’t understand.”
“What’s he singing?” Betty said.
“How should I know?” Sadie said.
“It’s Steely Dan,” Francie said. “ ‘Reelin’ in the Years’?”
Betty exchanged a glance with Sadie. “How do you know?”
Francie smirked. “I listen to the radio?”
She stepped past them with her Noxzema smell. “I have to go home now.” She stopped a little ways up the path and turned. “If you want me to help you with the crib, I will.”
“I don’t have the crib anymore,” Sadie said.
“We looked this afternoon and it’s gone,” Betty said.
Francie paused, as if she doubted them.
“You’ll have to find one somewhere else,” Sadie said. They watched her leave the path. They knew where she was going, through the field to the dead end to find the letter they’d left.
Dear Francie,
The time has come for us to escape. I can barely contain my happiness. Can you meet me just before midnight on the 4th? Take the path through your Haunted Woods, across the pasture. Through the woods on the other side is the pond. I feel it is only appropriate we meet at the place where your character, Emely Filley, met her fate. I’m enclosing a token of our bond. I will look for your letter of confirmation.
Hezekiah
They’d enclosed a bracelet they’d made—tiny multicolored beads strung on elastic. Betty was satisfied that this would be the end of the letter writing, and Sadie had talked her into inviting her to spend the night on the fourth, so that the two of them could sneak out to hide in the woods and watch for Francie.
The next day they returned to the pasture midmorning to discover a battered-looking crib set up in a section of the woods along the path. Francie was there, her eyes swollen from her sunburn. She’d had the boys trample down the spot she’d chosen, and she’d decorated the area with cast-off children’s toys that Betty recognized from her own garage. Francie explained that she’d gotten the crib from the Battinsons, that Betty’s mother had given her the toys that morning. Jimmy Frobel announced that they were out of fake blood, that someone needed to go to Drug City to replenish it.
Francie came up to them in a huff. She had a bucket in her hand, and she pointed out an empty pack of Parliament cigarettes and three cans of Schaefer beer. “I found these,” she said. “Someone was hanging out here last night.”
Sadie looked into the bucket. She knew that Francie believed Ray was Hezekiah, and she wanted to separate herself from the Haunted Woods, from childish things. She wanted the upper hand. “Oh,” she said. She glanced at Betty. “I thought you said you picked them all up.”
Francie’s eyes widened.
“Sorry about that,” Betty said. “Guess I didn’t see them all in the dark.”
Sadie tried not to laugh. “You won’t tell on us, will you?”
Francie’s mouth tightened. Sadie put her hands on her hips and turned to Betty.
“Let’s find a ride to the center,” she said.
They left Francie in the woods. They planned to check the dead end for her reply letter, but Mrs. Donahue was heading into Shaw’s Supermarket and offered to drop them off at Drug City. On the way there, past the roadside grasses, beneath the overhang of old trees, Charlene Donahue chatted about the lobster bake. “Can you believe it’s tomorrow?”
She would pick up corn at Filley’s stand.
“What games would you girls like to play?” she said. “What about the ring toss? Or the egg relay?”
Betty looked to Sadie in the backseat. Sadie rolled her eyes. Mrs. Donahue must have been looking back at her in the rearview mirror. She grew quiet, and Sadie felt a rush of guilt. Mrs. Donahue had provided for her numerous times—a bed and meals, sometimes even clothes, a lunch for school. From Betty’s mother, Sadie learned how mothers were supposed to be.
“What about the sack race?” Betty said cheerfully.
Mrs. Donahue sighed. “I know you girls are older now,” she said. “But it would be fun for the others.”
Sadie agreed. She tried to sound sincere, but she’d lost her enthusiasm for an event that was so clearly designed for the adults, with lobsters steamed over an open pit, the redwood tables stretched end to end, the table of Beefeater and Smirnoff and Chivas, the ice in the bucket—all reserved for their parents, and only a few games halfheartedly set up for the children, and hamburgers and hot dogs thrown on the grill as an afterthought, charred by a drunken cook, so that even as an adult Sadie would still associate the taste of burned hamburger with the annual summer event. The parents regaled and drank around the fire, and the children were let loose in the neighborhood after dark, pedaling their bicycles up and down the street, wondering when to go to bed.
“The sack race is fun,” Sadie said.
Charlene said she thought Mr. Frobel still had the burlap sacks in his shed, and Sadie’s father had gone down to the shore today for the lobster. “Girls, it’s going to be so much fun this year,” she said.
And Sadie chimed in to say what she was expected to say and not what she was thinking, which was easier than hurting anyone’s, especially Charlene Donahue’s, feelings.
The town center was simply a crossroads that had grown to include—along with the library, the town green, and the Congregational church—a new outdoor mall composed of a maze of sidewalks and shops. That day it was overtaken by young people, who carved their names into the benches by the large fountain and chased each other around with plastic cups of water. Betty’s mother dropped them off at the drugstore and said she’d be back after she did the grocery shopping. The kids by the fountain were from their class at school, but Sadie felt instantly leery. She paused in front of Drug City and watched the way the boys grabbed the girls around the waist, the way the girls laughed and slapped at the boys’ arms. It seemed as if a glass wall separated her from them. Betty waved, but Sadie said she didn’t like gangs of children, and Betty agreed she didn’t want to get wet, so they steered clear of them. They went into Drug City, down the cool linoleum aisles, looking for the fake blood. Sadie eyed the lip gloss, the dangling earrings on display. After, they paced the sidewalk near the parking lot, waiting for Betty’s mother to pick them up. A car idled alongside them and the driver called out.
