‘And you mean they put it up inside you?’
‘Yup. All the way. And it hurts.’
‘What if it doesn’t fit?’
‘Oh, it fits. They make it fit.’
‘And then what?’
‘Then you have a baby. That’s why you don’t do it until after you’re married. Except you know Elaine Simko in the eighth grade? She did it with a boy and started having a baby, and that’s why she had to leave school. Nobody even knows where she is now.’
‘You sure? Elaine Simko?’
‘Positive.’
‘Well, but why would she want to do a thing like that?’
‘The boy seduced her.’
‘What does that mean?’
Sarah took a long, slow suck of her popsicle. ‘You’re too young to understand.’
‘I am not. But you said it hurts, Sarah. If it hurts, why would she—’
‘Well, it hurts, but it feels good too. You know how sometimes when you’re taking a bath, or maybe you put your hand down there and kind of rub around, and it feels—’
‘Oh.’ And Emily lowered her eyes in embarrassment. ‘I see.’
She often said ‘I see’ about things she didn’t wholly understand – and so, for that matter, did Sarah. Neither of them understood why their mother found it necessary to change homes so often, for example – they’d be just beginning to make friends in one place when they’d move to another – but they never questioned it.
Pookie was inscrutable in many ways. ‘I tell my children everything,’ she would boast to other adults; ‘we don’t have any secrets in this family’ – and then in the next breath she would lower her voice to say something the girls weren’t supposed to hear.
In keeping with the terms of the divorce agreement, Walter Grimes came out to visit the girls two or three times a year in whatever house they were renting, and sometimes he would spend the night on the living-room sofa. The year Emily was ten she lay awake for a long time on Christmas night, listening to the unaccustomed sound of her parents’ voices downstairs – they were talking and talking – and because she had to know what was going on she acted like a baby: she called out for her mother.
‘What is it, dear?’ Pookie turned on the light and bent over her, smelling of gin.
‘My stomach’s upset.’
‘Do you want some bicarbonate?’
‘No.’
‘What do you want, then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re just being silly. Let me tuck you in, and you just think about all the nice things you got for Christmas and go to sleep. And you mustn’t call me again; promise?’
‘Okay.’
‘Because Daddy and I are having a very important talk. We’re talking over a lot of things we should have discussed a long, long time ago, and we’re coming to a new – a new understanding.’
She gave Emily a wet kiss, turned out the light and hurried back downstairs, where the talking went on and on, and Emily lay waiting for sleep in a warm flush of happiness. Coming to a new understanding! It was like something a divorced mother in the movies might say, just before the big music comes up for the fadeout.
But the next morning unfolded like all the other last mornings of his visits: he was as quiet and polite as a stranger at breakfast, and Pookie avoided his eyes; then he called a taxi to take him to the train. At first Emily thought maybe he had only gone back to the city to get his belongings, but that hope evaporated in the days and weeks that followed. She could never find the words to ask her mother about it, and she didn’t mention it to Sarah.
Both girls had what dentists call an overbite and children call buck teeth, but Sarah’s condition was the worse: by the time she was fourteen she could scarcely close her lips. Walter Grimes agreed to pay for orthodontia, and this meant that Sarah rode the train into New York once a week to spend the afternoon with him, and to have her braces adjusted. Emily was jealous, both of the orthodontia and the city visits, but Pookie explained that they couldn’t afford treatment for both girls at once; her turn would come later, when she was older.
In the meantime Sarah’s braces were terrible: they picked up unsightly white shreds of food, and someone at school called her a walking hardware store. Who could imagine kissing a mouth like that? Who, for that matter, could bear to be close to her body for any length of time? Sarah washed her sweaters very carefully in an effort to keep the dyed color alive in their armpits, but it didn’t work: a navy blue sweater would bleach to robin’s-egg blue under the arms, and a red one to yellowish pink. Her strong sweat, no less than her braces, seemed a curse.
Another curse fell, for both girls, when Pookie announced that she’d found a wonderful house in a wonderful little town called Bradley, and that they’d be moving there in the fall. They had almost lost track of the number of times they’d moved.
‘Well, it wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Pookie asked them after their first day of school in Bradley. ‘Tell me about it.’
Emily had endured a day of silent hostility – one of the only two new girls in the whole sixth grade – and said she guessed it had been all right. But Sarah, a high-school freshman, was bubbling over with news of how fine it had been.
‘They had a special assembly for all the new girls,’ she said, ‘and somebody played the piano and all the old girls stood up and sang this song. Listen:
How do you do, new girls, how do you do?
Is there anything that we can do for you?
We are glad that you are here
For you always bring good cheer
How do you do, new girls, how do you do?’
‘Well!’ Pookie said happily. ‘Wasn’t that nice.’
And Emily could only turn her face away in a spasm of disgust. It may have been ‘nice,’ but it was treacherous; she knew the treachery implicit in a song like that.
The grade school and high school were in the same big building, which meant that Emily could catch occasional glimpses of her sister, if she was lucky, during the day; it also meant they could walk home together every afternoon. The arrangement was that they would meet in Emily’s classroom after school.
But one Friday during football season Emily found herself waiting and waiting in the empty classroom, with no sign of Sarah, until her stomach began to knot with anxiety. When Sarah did arrive at last she looked funny – she had a funny smile – and behind her lumbered a frowning boy.
‘Emmy, this is Harold Schneider,’ she said.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’ He was big and muscular and pimple-faced.
‘We’re going to the game over in Armonk,’ Sarah explained. ‘Just tell Pookie I’ll be home for dinner, okay? You won’t mind walking home by yourself, will you?’
The trouble was that Pookie had gone into New York that morning, after saying, at breakfast, ‘Well, I think I’ll get home before you do, but I’d better not promise.’ That meant not only walking home alone but letting herself into the empty house alone to stare for hours at the naked furniture and the ticking clock, waiting. And if her mother ever did come home – ‘Where’s Sarah?’ – how could she ever tell her that Sarah had gone off with a boy named Harold to a town called Armonk? It was out of the question.
‘How’re you gonna get there?’ she inquired.
‘In Harold’s car. He’s seventeen.’
‘I don’t think Pookie’d like that, Sarah. And I think you know she wouldn’t like it. You better come on home with me.’
Sarah turned helplessly to Harold, whose big face had twitched into a half-smile of incredulity, as if to say he’d never met such a bratty little kid in his life.
‘Emmy, don’t be this way,’ Sarah implored, with a quaver that proved she was losing the argument.
‘Be what way? I’m only saying what you know.’
And in the end Emily won. Harold Schneider slouched away down the hall, shaking his head (he could probably find another girl before game time), and the Grimes sisters walked home t
ogether – or rather in single file, with Emily in the lead.
‘Damn you, damn you, damn you,’ Sarah said behind her on the sidewalk. ‘I could kill you for this—’ and she took three running steps and kicked her little sister solidly on one buttock, causing Emily to fall on her hands and spill all her schoolbooks, the loose-leaf binder breaking open and scattering its pages. ‘—I could kill you for ruining everything.’
It turned out, ironically, that Pookie was home when they got there. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, and when Sarah had told the whole story, crying – it was one of the very few times Emily had ever seen her cry – it became clear that all the mistakes of the afternoon had been Emily’s.
‘And were there a lot of people going to the game, Sarah?’ Pookie inquired.
‘Oh, yes. All the seniors and everybody…’
Pookie looked less bewildered than usual. ‘Well, Emily,’ she said sternly. ‘That wasn’t good at all, what you did. Do you understand that? It wasn’t good at all.’
There were better times in Bradley. That winter Emily made a few friends with whom she fooled around after school, which tended to make her worry less about whether Pookie would be home or not; and during that same winter Harold Schneider began taking Sarah to the movies.
‘Has he kissed you yet?’ Emily inquired after their third or fourth date.
‘None of your business.’
‘Come on, Sarah.’
‘Oh, all right. Yes. He has.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘It’s about like what you’d imagine.’
‘Oh.’ And Emily wanted to say Doesn’t he mind your braces? but thought better of it. Instead she said ‘What do you see in Harold, anyway?’
‘Oh, he’s – very nice,’ Sarah said, and went back to washing her sweater.
There was another town after Bradley, and then still another; in the last town Sarah graduated from high school with no particular plans for college, which her parents couldn’t have afforded anyway. Her teeth were straight now and the braces had come off; she seemed never to sweat at all, and she had a lovely full-breasted figure that made men turn around on the street and made Emily weak with envy. Emily’s own teeth were still slightly bucked and would never be corrected (her mother had forgotten her promise); she was tall and thin and small in the chest. ‘You have a coltish grace, dear,’ her mother assured her. ‘You’ll be very attractive.’
In 1940 they moved back to the city, and the place Pookie found for them was no ordinary apartment: it was a once-grand, shabby old ‘floor through’ on the south side of Washington Square, with big windows facing the park. It cost more than Pookie could afford, but she scrimped on other expenses; they bought no new clothes and ate a great deal of spaghetti. The kitchen and bathroom fixtures were rusty antiques, but the ceilings were uncommonly high and visitors never failed to remark that the place had ‘character.’ It was on the ground floor, which meant that passengers on the double-decked Fifth Avenue buses could peer into it as they made their circuit of the park on the way uptown, and there seemed to be a certain amount of flair in this for Pookie.
Wendell L. Willkie was the Republican candidate for President that year, and Pookie sent the girls uptown to work as volunteers in the national headquarters of something called Associated Willkie Clubs of America. She thought it might be good for Emily, who needed something to do; more importantly, she thought it would give Sarah a chance to ‘meet people,’ by which she meant suitable young men. Sarah was nineteen, and none of the boys she’d liked so far, from Harold Schneider on, had struck her mother as suitable at all.
Sarah did meet people at the Willkie Clubs; within a few weeks she brought home a young man named Donald Clellon. He was pale and very polite, and dressed so carefully that the first thing you noticed about him was his clothes: a pinstripe suit, a black Chesterfield with a velvet collar, and a black derby. The derby was a little odd – they hadn’t been in style for years – but he wore it with such authority as to suggest that the fashion might be coming back. And he spoke in the same meticulous, almost fussy way he dressed: instead of saying ‘something like that’ he always said ‘something of that nature.’
‘What do you see in Donald, anyway?’ Emily asked.
‘He’s very mature and very considerate,’ Sarah said. ‘And he’s very – I don’t know, I just like him.’ She paused and lowered her eyes like a movie star in a close-up. ‘I think I may be in love with him.’
Pookie liked him well enough too, at first – it was charming for Sarah to have such an attentive suitor – and when they solemnly asked her permission to become engaged she cried a little but raised no objection.
It was Walter Grimes, to whom the engagement was presented as an accomplished fact, who asked all the questions. Who exactly was this Donald Clellon? If he was twenty-seven, as he claimed, what business or profession had he been in before the Willkie campaign? If he was as well-educated as his manner implied, where had he gone to college? Where, for that matter, was he from?
‘Why didn’t you just ask him, Walter?’
‘I didn’t want to grill the kid over a lunch table, with Sarah sitting there; I thought you’d probably have the answers.’
‘Oh.’
‘You mean you’ve never asked him anything either?’
‘Well, he’s always seemed so – no; I haven’t.’
There followed several tense interviews, usually late at night after Pookie had waited up for them, with Emily listening just outside the living-room door.
‘… Donald, there’s something I’ve never quite understood. Where exactly are you from?’
‘I’ve told you, Mrs. Grimes. I was born here in Garden City but my parents moved around quite a lot. I was raised chiefly in the Middle West. Various parts of the Middle West. After my father died my mother moved to Topeka, Kansas; that’s where she makes her home now.’
‘And where did you go to college?’
‘I thought I’d told you that too, when we first met. The fact is I haven’t been to college; we couldn’t afford it. I was fortunate enough to find work in a law firm in Topeka; then after Mr. Willkie’s nomination I worked for the Willkie Club out there until I was transferred here.’
‘Oh. I see.’
And that seemed to take care of it for one night, but there were others.
‘… Donald, if you only worked in the law office for three years, and if you went there right after high school, then how can you be—’
‘Oh, it wasn’t right after high school, Mrs. Grimes. I held a number of other jobs first. Construction work, heavy laboring jobs, things of that nature. Anything I could get. I had my mother to support, you see.’
‘I see.’
In the end, after Willkie had lost the election and Donald was working at some vague job with a brokerage house downtown, he contradicted himself enough times to reveal that he wasn’t twenty-seven; he was twenty-one. He’d been exaggerating his age for some time because he’d always felt older than his contemporaries; everyone in the Willkie Clubs had thought he was twenty-seven, and when he’d met Sarah he’d said ‘twenty-seven’ automatically. Couldn’t Mrs. Grimes understand an indiscretion like that? Couldn’t Sarah understand?
Well, but Donald,’ Pookie said, while Emily strained to hear every nuance of the talk, ‘if you haven’t told the truth about that, how can we trust you about anything else?’
‘How can you trust me? Well, you know I love Sarah; you know I have a good future in the brokerage business—’
‘How do we know that? No, Donald, this won’t do. It won’t do at all…’
After their voices stopped, Emily risked a peek into the living room. Pookie looked righteous and Sarah looked stricken; Donald Clellon sat alone with his head in his hands. There was a little ridge around the crown of his well-combed, brilliantined hair, marking the place where his derby had been.
Sarah didn’t bring him home again, but she continued to meet and go out with him severa
l times a week. The heroines of all the movies she had ever seen made clear that she couldn’t do otherwise; besides, what about all the people to whom she’d introduced him as ‘my fiancé’?
‘… He’s a liar!’ Pookie would shout. ‘He’s a child! We don’t even know what he is!’
‘I don’t care,’ Sarah would shout back. ‘I love Donald and I’m going to marry him!’
And there would be nothing for Pookie to do but flap her hands and cry. The quarrels usually ended with both of them collapsed in tears in different parts of the musty, elegant old apartment, while Emily listened and sucked her knuckles.
But everything changed with the coming of the new year: a family moved in upstairs that Pookie found immediately interesting. Their name was Wilson, a middle-aged couple with a grown son, and they were English war refugees. They had been through the London Blitz (Geoffrey Wilson was too reserved to talk much about it, but his wife Edna could tell dreadful stories), and they’d escaped to this country with only the clothes on their backs and whatever they could carry in their suitcases. That was all Pookie knew about them at first, but she was careful to linger around the mailboxes in the hope of striking up further conversations, and it wasn’t long before she knew more.
‘The Wilsons aren’t really English at all,’ she told her daughters. ‘You’d never guess it from their accents, but they’re Americans. He’s from New York – he comes from an old New York family – and she’s a Tate from Boston. They went to England many years ago for his business – he was the British representative for an American firm – and Tony was born there and went to an English public school. That’s what the English call their private boarding schools, you know. I just knew he’d been to an English public school because of the delightful way he talks – he says “I say,” and “Oh, rot,” and things like that. Anyway, they’re wonderful people. Have you talked to them yet, Sarah? Have you, Emmy? I know you’d both love them. They’re so – I don’t know, so wonderfully English.’
Sarah listened patiently enough, but she wasn’t interested. The strain of her engagement to Donald Clellon was beginning to show: she was very pale, and she’d lost weight. Through people in the Willkie campaign she had found work for a token salary in the offices of United China Relief; she was called Chairman of the Debutante Committee, a title Pookie loved to pronounce, and her job was to supervise the rich girls who volunteered to collect nickels and dimes along Fifth Avenue to help the Chinese multitudes in their war against the Japanese. The work wasn’t hard but she came home exhausted every night, sometimes too tired even to go out with Donald, and she spent much of her time in a brooding silence that neither Pookie nor Emily could penetrate.
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