The Sweetheart Season

by Karen Joy Fowler

  It was an unnecessary skill on this particular night. The sky was streaked with silver gauze. Moonlight touched Margo’s hair so that it glowed. Holcrow, a city boy from Los Angeles, said he could find his way with just that if he had to, just the light coming off of Margo’s hair. He was trying to flirt with her, but she was not a girl who flirted. “There’s an uneven patch here,” she cautioned him politely. “Watch your feet.”

  Tweed pushed her nose into Irini’s leg, herding her around the rough spot. It was a tender gesture and made Irini forgive her for being such a dog. And it helped that Holcrow stumbled a bit, even after Margo’s warning, but it didn’t help much. They walked on toward the water. Tweed left them for appointments of her own. The sound of the falls rose to cover the sound of the frogs.

  They passed the empty, eyeless sauna. The kitchen windows of the Törngren house were golden smears like butter pats in the darkness. In another moment Margo would leave them and they would walk back in the dark alone together. It was a long way to the Törngrens’, which meant it was also a long way back. Presumably Holcrow would escort her.

  Holcrow in his spotless white shirt. Irini with her hair like an overblown and stinking chrysanthemum.

  “I can make it from here,” Margo told them.

  Then someone screamed. It was a thin scream, an unconvincing scream. There was a second, which was better. Sissy Tarken dashed along the path by the water. Her face was pale; her eyes were huge and dark. She seized Irini by the arm and Irini felt all five of her fingers dig in, nails first. “I saw her,” Sissy said. She pointed back toward the falls, upward, in the vague direction of the moon. “She’s there! Behind the falls. In her apron.”

  “Saw who?”

  Sissy was breathing too hard to answer. She stood and took in great gulps of air. She shook from head to toe. Irini considered slapping her, but only nicely and only for her own good.

  Instead Holcrow put his arms around her. The moment he touched her, she stopped shivering. “Easy now,” he said. He kissed her forehead. “It’s all right. Everything is all right, sweetheart. Who did you see?”

  “In her apron! Maggie!”

  “You saw Maggie Collins wearing an apron up by the falls?” Margo said disapprovingly. Margo was a girl who didn’t like nonsense. “What made you think it was Maggie?”

  “Don’t I know what Maggie looks like? Doesn’t she own this whole town? She had a knife.”

  “What kind?” asked Holcrow.

  “Serrated! And she spoke to me. She told me I would spend the rest of my life cooking and cleaning for some man. She reached for me with her witchy fingers.”

  “Maggie? Witchy fingers?”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “I’ll go up to the falls and look,” Holcrow told her. “You stay here with Irini and Margo.”

  “Don’t leave me alone.” Sissy clutched at him. “I want to be with you.”

  "We’ll all go," said Margo.

  If this were a movie, it would be the moment they split up. You would be in your seat, telling them not to, but they would do it anyway. Nobody ever listens to you. Instead they walked together past the mill and up to the falls with Sissy gasping and gulping and popping like a hooked fish. The closer they got to the falls, the colder the air became.

  The cold entered Irini through her lungs, raced for her heart. She would have liked a normal sound, an unconcerned bird, an ordinary frog, and there might have been just such a sound, only she wouldn’t have heard it. The falls were a solid wall of noise. She wished that Tweed had stayed.

  Behind the wall the rocky path was damp and dark. No moonlight penetrated the water. They walked from one side of it to the other, feeling along the stone interior with their hands. “Nothing here,” said Holcrow finally. “Nothing and no one. Do you see, Sissy? Everything the way it should be.”

  They turned to walk back, Holcrow and Sissy leading, Irini behind Sissy, Margo to the back. Margo knelt suddenly. “Irini,” she whispered so that only Irini would hear, gesturing for Irini to come. “What’s this?”

  She held something up. Something glimmered dully in the darkness. Irini couldn’t quite see. She stepped back and Margo placed something in her hand. It was a set of measuring spoons. “You had those in your pocket,” said Irini.

  Margo looked at her.

  “You had them during the permanent. I remember.”

  Margo grinned at her.

  “That’s not funny, Margo.” Irini laughed. It was an odd laugh, a short gasp, the appropriate laugh for something that was not funny, because it was funny all by itself. Irini was afraid she might not stop laughing. Margo had done that to her once before, during the Christmas concert when Irini had been too nervous because of an upcoming solo and Margo had decided a funny face would relax her. Irini had been given the page’s part in “Good King Wenceslas,” but then she couldn’t sing it, she was laughing too hard, and Scott Moodey had already started the “Hither page and stand by me.” Fortunately Arlys had seen the problem and sung it for her.

  “Sire, the night grows darker now and the wind blows stronger. Fails my heart I know not how…” Irini was shuddering with laughter.

  “So give them to me if they’re mine.” Margo reached for them, shook the spoons so that they rang like little bells.

  “Anna Banana-peal,” Irini said. She was embarrassed, because she had allowed Sissy Tarken to frighten her and Margo had not. Sissy was waiting down the path, limp in Holcrow’s arms.

  “She told me I would spend the rest of my life cooking and cleaning for some man.” Sissy’s face was streaked with tears and eye makeup. Black liner ran in sooty streams from the corners of her eyes to her temples. It gave her a flattened, exotic appearance, like a figure off an Egyptian tomb. “Irini! She made it sound like something bad!”

  She rubbed her face; She looked at Irini again. “Did you get a new permanent?” she asked. “You look real puffy.”

  29

  Well, this was an occasion. It had been a long time since anyone in Magrit had seen a ghost. When people tried to work it out, they decided that old man Kinser had been the last. He had seen Opal May, up above the Falls, all decked out in her wedding dress, and then, only seven months later, seven being a kind of magical number—seven brothers, seven swans—he ended up trussed in his own fishing line like a fly in a spider’s web, haunting Upper Magrit like all the rest. It couldn’t have been the Nadeaus, because the Kinsers were Upper Magrit themselves.

  Sissy took to her bed and bloomed there under a steady stream of visitors.

  Her mother combed her long black hair artfully over a snowy white pillowcase and rouged her cheeks. Mrs. Tarken was delighted. Sissy was to be married. It was so kind of Maggie to come and tell her, while there was still time for Sissy to finish embroidering daisies on the tea towels in her hope chest. It was better than catching a bridal bouquet. Mrs. Tarken changed her bedroom slippers for pointy-toed pumps and did her own hair. She drew an imaginative shape over her mouth with dark red lipstick, squeezed into a little sheathed number. She walked down to the grocery like a queen, smiling tenderly at all the Magrit mothers whose daughters did not have Sissy’s prospects. She purchased a large ham for dinner without accusing Mr. Moodey of having his thumb on the scale. She hummed “If I Loved You” to herself as she walked back home with her ham wrapped in white paper like a wedding gift.

  The May girls were the primary skeptics. They could not, of course, visit the Tarkens for themselves and had to settle for Irini and Margo’s accounts, which, the Mays pointed out, were as full of holes as cheesecloth. Why would Maggie appear to Sissy with promises of marriage when Mike Barr was obviously gaga over Fanny, coming practically every Saturday now to watch the Sweethearts and sit in the stands? When Helen was seriously seeing her Purple Heart guy.

  Claire had the most prospects of all. Out of her own pocket she had bought two train tickets to take Ruby all the way to Kenosha to see the Comets play the South Bend Blue Sox. The game had been eye-op
ening in a number of ways. “There were people there watching,” Claire said. “Lots and lots of them. Like fans. You really can’t imagine the excitement. It made me kind of proud to be on a team. And the girls were so good.”

  “Better than Ruby?” Irini asked.

  “Not even close. You should have seen her. You should have seen her face. Like Kenosha was a candy store and she was the girl with a nickel.”

  Taking Ruby had been an act of such kindness. That it resulted in a reward so immediate was the kind of rare occurence which makes you suspect there’s a God. The two of them had gone out dancing with the Blue Sox afterward and Claire had come home with so many phone numbers she couldn’t even remember which number went with which girl. The episode had changed her enormously, adding a vivacity to her original sweetness, and both of them so intense as to make her irresistible. So why, Tracy asked, hadn’t Maggie appeared to Claire?

  Or to Tracy? When Thomas Holcrow was so very close to asking her out.

  “What was Sissy doing all by herself up by the falls at night? Taking in the night air? In a pig’s nose,” Cindy said. No one had shown any interest in Cindy yet. After all those games in the sun, Cindy’s freckles had come out very strong. Maggie recommended bleaching them with alpha hydroxy acid, but this was 1947 so she called it lemon juice. It didn’t seem to do a thing and it still doesn’t. Take it from me. But the freckles didn’t make Cindy any less pretty, except for making her feel so.

  In spite of the considerable evidence, Irini just couldn’t make herself see Sissy as the kind of girl Sissy was. Irini and Sissy used to go into the woods around Collins House and make fairy castles together. They would press bits of slate into the dirt to form the ballroom floor, rub the stones with water until they shone. They would make tiny thrones from large leaves, transplant a mossy strip of carpet to lead up to them. When everything was done, they would pick the fairies themselves—morning glory flowers, with green bodices and petaled skirts. The next day, the flowers would have danced until they wilted. It was a game for babies and Sissy and Irini had last played it about two years ago when they were seventeen.

  It was a game Irini had invented. This was the main thing to remember about Sissy, that she was a follower. It was this kind of imagination that Sissy had. If someone else had seen Maggie somewhere else, then Sissy was just the sort of girl to see her too. But not at all the sort to see her first. The more Irini thought about it, the more it troubled her. She remembered Sissy in Holcrow’s arms, her eye makeup blacking her face like a pharaoh or a chimney sweep.

  Maybe they did all know what she was doing up there by the falls. But who was she doing it with?

  Even Ada, preoccupied as she was, with India’s independence only weeks away, came to call on Sissy. Holcrow had had a private word with Mrs. Ada after the episode and she drove right over. Everyone must understand, she told Sissy, after the obligatory concerns and respects, that Mr. Henry was in no shape for this news. Maggie had, after all, appeared to Sissy in the exact same spot where Maggie had first contacted Henry through that marvelous aroma. It was the magic that had set everything else into motion—the mill, the millpond, eventually Sweetwheats itself. Sissy’s vision was an unfortunate debasement of the original.

  It was not so hard to keep a secret from Henry these days. His only informants lived in Rio and Dover, where the weather was shockingly fine. Our Maggie is not in the habit of roaming about at night, threatening young girls with bread knives, Henry would no doubt say bravely, if the story ever did get to him, but it would kill him all the same.

  A world away, Gandhi, on the brink of his great success, was in no better spirits. He took no satisfaction in the successful campaign against the British. His thoughts instead were entirely taken up with communal violence and the failure of his philosophies in eradicating four hundred years of racial and religious hatred. He had tried to voluntarily put the Muslims in charge of a United India as a way to avoid the creation of Pakistan. When Congress refused to agree, he withdrew from debate. He blamed himself, searched his heart for weakness, fasted and meditated. Offered congratulations on Britain’s departure, he replied that condolences would seem to be more in order. The Congress party was afraid he would quite spoil the party.

  Ada had no inkling of this. She imagined that Gandhi was enjoying the culmination of his life’s work, that he would be honored and feted on August 15 and that he himself would celebrate hard, in whatever manner it was that ascetics celebrated.

  And yet, her own thoughts were running curiously parallel to his. Ada too had been meditating on the problem of communal hostility. Specifically she had been meditating on the fission between Upper and Lower Magrit. The drowning of Upper Magrit had occurred long before Ada appeared on the scene; she had no personal responsibility. But she had profited. It was a shame—she conceded it—that Henry had drowned Upper Magrit for what turned out in the end to be only forty-odd years of milling. Phantasmical odors notwithstanding, Magrit was too far north to be wheat country, and if Lower Magrit hadn’t wanted the mill so much, someone might have told Henry so. It had never been a good idea. And then that business with the Nadeaus. Most unfortunate.

  But ancient history, after all. Water, as one might say, under the bridge. Henry had been grieving for his mother at the time and had hardly been himself. Much good had come of the mill, many good breakfasts, much good advice. This was because Henry was a good man, a well-intentioned man.

  Now Sissy’s specter, reminding, as it must, everyone of the original, seemed to give the problem a new urgency. It was time to end the cycle of recrimination and regret. Ada examined the motives of the satyagrahis, in this case, herself. In the past she had tried to stay out of town affairs. She had been afraid that as Henry’s wife she would wield more power than she had earned. But her heart was pure. The cause was good. She committed herself to discipline and flexibility. And so, on the first of August, with Irini in a batting slump and Henry deep in a silent depression, with Tracy upset about Ruby, and Sissy either too worn out or too glorious to make practice, and with Maggie stalking the countryside armed to the teeth, Ada brewed herself a cup of tea, borrowed a gelatin drum from the school, and launched Magrit’s first satyagraha campaign.

  Such a campaign begins with negotiation and arbitration, not to be confused with bargaining and barter. Essential principles cannot be compromised, but demands must be reduced to the lowest acceptable minimum consistent with the search for truth. Ada focused her initial efforts on that point where the rift was deepest—the hostility between the Tarkens and the Mays. This put the Doyles dead in the middle.

  Ada typed up a flyer and ran it off for Norma to deliver with the mail. “Anyone who is interested in restoring the peace between Upper and Lower Magrit should come to the school auditorium on Tuesday evening at 7:00,” it said in mimeographed purple. “Refreshments will be served.” And the Doyles’ flyer had a special hand-written message added. “Please be there, Irini. I need you.”

  “ ‘Step into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly.” Irini’s father was reading over her shoulder, although Maggie always said that was rather rude. “Now we’ll see the result of all that spinning.” He paused and thought again. “Ah well. She’s surely less of a nuisance than the first Mrs. Collins. Isabel Collins and her nasty little hatchet.”

  He stepped out onto the porch for the paper, made a painful, involuntary noise. “It’s bright out there,” he said, in explanation on his return. “The sun is beating down.”

  By Tuesday night it was pouring great gusts of rain. The Doyles took the car the few blocks to the auditorium. The windshield wipers folded together and fanned apart again with hypnotic precision, sweeping away sheets of water with every metronomish click. Irini ran for the auditorium door, a copy of Women at Home held over her hair so that the rain wouldn’t amplify the curl. She stepped in a puddle and so much water splashed into her shoes she had to remove and empty them. She walked into the auditorium barefoot as a goose girl.


  Thomas Holcrow was already inside setting up the folding chairs. “Where’s Walter?” Irini’s father asked him. The sentence was accompanied by a thunderous boom. Irini’s father had to repeat himself.

  “Home with his grandfather. Mr. Henry was feeling peaked. And Walter said it was Mrs. Ada’s show.” Thomas Holcrow was wearing a pale blue sweater. It darkened his bluish eyes and, draped at his waist, did nothing to obscure the outline of his shoulders.

  Norma Baldish and her parents arrived to represent Lower Magrit. They sat in chairs toward the back and talked quietly among themselves. Arlys took the seat next to Irini. “I know the Törngrens were planning to be here,” Arlys said. “I guess the rain stopped them.” Water streamed down the auditorium windows as if the room were a submarine just surfacing. Thunder popped in the faraway hills, clapped in the downtown street.

  Holcrow had been overzealous with the chairs. No one else came to sit in them. At seven-thirty, Norma spoke up. “Do you think we could start? I have a deer to dress.”

  “I don’t mind the poor turnout at all,” Ada said. She raised a hand to tuck the side of her silver hair back into place, although it had never been disordered. Her face was bright, but Irini couldn’t tell if it was zeal or disappointment. “A single acorn and all that. A small group can move the mountains if it’s the right small group.”

  “I think we should be using Robert’s Rules of Order,” Mr. Baldish said. “We really need to agree on procedure at the outset. If we’re going to move mountains we should do it in an orderly fashion. If we can agree on procedure now, it will save us a thousand arguments down the road.”

  “I’m not really familiar with Robert’s Rules,” said Ada. “The important thing, I think, is that we’re all familiar with the principles of satyagraha.”

  “I move that we adopt Robert’s Rules,” said Mr. Baldish. “Now someone has to second the motion.”

  “I second it,” said Irini’s father. “But just for the sake of discussion.”