It didn’t add up and Marilyn didn’t like it. She didn’t like the way Tracy Paul quit writing. How Mary Tudor-Johns moved across the country. How Anne Horowitz smiled awkwardly at the slightest hint of something she might deem single-life. Like a drink, for example. Like staying out an hour later than usual, for example. Like a one-night stand.
It was enough to drive Marilyn mad.
But she had a plan.
A gathering, if her former close friends could stomach calling it that, in which each of them might be reminded how good the good days were before men. A simple, no-frills party in Marilyn’s loft overlooking the Water Walk. Hell, they might even take the walk themselves, drinks in hand, tucked in the same brown paper bags winos used all over the city. Yes, Marilyn was looking for, planning for, hoping for, something a little more exciting than a Tupperware party of hysterical former friends. Tonight she wanted to show them the people they once were, the nights they were missing, planting seeds of once-familiar liberation into their dizzyingly predictable current states of adulthood.
Anne was the first to arrive. All makeup and ponytail, skirt and heels. Aren’t we partying? she asked, squinting as she smiled, revealing how long it had been since she used the word. Marilyn told her yes, indeed they were partying, and took note of Anne’s glance as it began at Marilyn’s own flat shoes before taking the elevator up her pantsuit to her wild, big black hair. Marilyn had no illusions. She knew she looked the part of the crazed feminist, a woman with no man. But she liked the minute concern she saw in her old friend’s eyes.
You look…like Marilyn, Marilyn.
It was the best Anne could be expected to come up with and Marilyn simply nodded, having decided hours ago not to allow a single small-talk smile to grace her own face. Not tonight. Tonight was about strength, about reinvigorating a boring, once-vibrant clan.
Mary and Tracy arrived together, which registered in Marilyn’s gut as a logical extension of being lost-in-marriage: Wives usually went out with wives. It wasn’t enough that the men dominated four-fifths of their lives; that last sliver couldn’t be faced alone, no no, had to be met hand in hand with a fellow sufferer.
Marilyn! Tracy said, making to kiss both Marilyn’s cheeks, a gesture Marilyn didn’t see coming. It went awkwardly, but Marilyn did not feel embarrassed. She’d decided, too, hours ago, not to permit herself a single flushed face tonight; the idea was to inspire, not to spread a mood of loathsome inadequacy. Mary assisted in this way, by being as cheerful as ever and even asking jokingly, What’s to drink?
Marilyn told her she was glad she asked, that Evelyn could let herself in (a purposeful statement, to be sure: THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS EVELYN MIGHT DO ON HER OWN), and that she hoped the girls were ready for a night on the town, even if that town was Marilyn’s own loft.
Things started well. Very well. And Evelyn did let herself in. And the five formerly close friends sat on Marilyn’s couches and talked about old times and drank a little too much and swore and joked and complained. It was the last bit that led to talk about their home lives, married life, and how distant the past seemed to them now. Marilyn, who had strategically skirted any talk of the past, tried, in vain, to direct the conversation back to the present, reminding the women that they were still young, it had only been five years after all, that any life they wanted still waited for them, that anything could be achieved if the right amount of energy was put into it. These loftier statements, made three drinks deep, didn’t do much to stem the tide of domestic topics, and eventually Marilyn found herself feeling downright bad. Here her oldest friends had convened at her behest, here she’d gone out of her way to direct the flow of conversation, here she’d set out to re-liberate these women-turned-girls, and before eight o’clock she’d completely lost them. For Christ’s sake, the things Anne and Mary were talking about sounded like the program for a children’s show. The way Tracy apologized for ripping Jeff had Stockholm syndrome written all over it. And Evelyn!
Marilyn had to get up. Had to leave the room, take a deep breath, recalibrate, and enter the living room all over again. She had to remind herself of her goal this evening and how far she was from achieving it. What they needed, she knew, was to get out of the fucking loft. They needed to take the Water Walk to the casino, a restaurant, even a dance club. Anything to remind these ladies what independence once felt like.
Standing before the bathroom mirror, eyeing herself in her white pantsuit and wild hair, she had no doubt the eyes her glasses magnified were obvious in their anger. How to drop that? Drunk people could smell anger. Went out of their way to either avoid it or confront it head-on. Marilyn didn’t want either to happen. The women were laughing in the living room. This was good. But what were they laughing at? Because there was a big difference between finding it funny how the dishwasher always seemed to break at just the wrong time and rediscovering one’s self-worth.
A walk, she told herself. Just get the girls out of the loft.
Decided, she returned to find a fresh drink for herself on the table. Happy homemaker Mary had made it. Marilyn said thank you and made no attempt to gauge the conversation, where they were at, how deep they were into it, whether or not it was a topic of merit or not. Rather, she split it in two.
You guys wanna go out for a bit?
Oh, the way they reacted, oh, the way they looked at her, then each other, then their watches, the windows, the floor. Could they go out for a bit? Could they? Was it in the ledger of things they could see themselves doing these days? Going out? Or was it so entirely outrageous that Marilyn may as well have suggested they eat the plants?
Noises by the front door then. A huskier voice. Marilyn, still standing, looked from the door to Evelyn, just as Evelyn’s face broke into a smile.
Adam’s here! Evelyn said, rising to answer a door that had not yet been knocked on.
Marilyn looked to the others just as they looked away.
In that moment, she knew. She knew the night was a bust. Knew that her friends were aware of how she felt and what she was trying to do by inviting them out. She hadn’t stood a chance from the start. A waste is what it was. Evelyn opened the front door and a murder of drunk men stumbled into the loft.
Trying her best to accept what had happened, that a silly effort to rekindle the independence lost to her old friends had gone belly-up, Marilyn lifted the drink Mary made as Adam and Jim, Tony and Nate, barked ridiculous jokes, knocked a picture off the wall, and barreled into the living room. Each moved to his respective wife, wobbly waters parting, revealing, with them, a fifth man, alone, unclaimed, still walking toward Marilyn herself.
Who was he?
I hate this shit, he said, reaching out a hand to shake hers. She took it. Every time we go out we end up back in.
Marilyn, still not over the surprise of the men showing up, still not over having lost what little grip she had on the night, raised her drink.
You want a sip…?
Her few words climbed up into an unfinished question.
Richard, the man said. And you have no idea how much I do.
B Scared
Staring out her living room window, sitting upon the ledge, K thought of the girl she’d seen doing the same up high in the Turret in the woods. She tried not to look in the direction of the spire of that tower but found herself doing it anyway. After all, who would notice? B and Q hadn’t told M.O.M. about their journey in the morning’s Inspections. And K certainly hadn’t, either. And with that, the three had done something, indeed: intentionally withheld information from the Parenthood for the first time in their lives.
But that wasn’t exactly true. There were instances of what Judith Nancy called “white lies” (Nancy had even titled one of her thrilling books White Lies) and there wasn’t a Letter Girl in the tower who hadn’t blamed something she did on someone else, hadn’t said she was studying when she wasn’t. This, K was partly
able to fool herself into believing, was precedent, proof, that lying wasn’t the end-all, wasn’t evil, and certainly wasn’t reason to be sent to the Corner. Never mind that pretending to read the mathematics textbook was nothing like finding strange (horribly strange!) girls in a second tower in the woods; K needed to believe it was okay to do what she’d done.
Drawing what she’d seen was, for her, a kind of therapy, despite knowing that a paper trail could be dangerous.
And B, watching these drawings come to life, as the Boats board lay inert and unplugged between them on the carpet, grew increasingly obsessed with the punitive room in the basement: the Corner; the longtime boogeywoman of the Letter Girls.
“I don’t want to be sent away,” B said.
“Sent away to where?”
As is often the way with best friends and sisters, they didn’t need to voice the conclusion they’d both suddenly arrived at. But B still did it.
“Is the second tower the Corner?”
K nodded. “Maybe.”
“Does that mean…does that mean J is over there?”
“Maybe.”
The idea that the second Turret was the place they’d long feared, that it was there that girls were sent when they were spoiled rotten…
“That might explain the hair on the face,” B said. “Rotts. Placasores. Oh, K…we saw the Corner!”
“Wait. Hang on. We might have seen the Corner. But that doesn’t explain how there were so many girls over there.”
“So many girls.”
They thought about this new theory. They talked about it. They poked holes in it. But both kept returning to it, in its simple, original conceit: The second tower is the Corner.
Despite articulating no good explanation for the other girls, despite having no idea how a girl might get from a room in the basement of this tower to an eighth-floor window in the other one, the theory simply made too much sense to be wrong. And they needed to be right about something.
“We should ask M.O.M.,” B said. The stressed smile on her face revealed more than just the pride of having solved a difficult riddle. K saw relief there. It was killing B, she knew, not to tell M.O.M. what they’d found.
“I don’t think so,” K said.
B tried to maintain her levity, but it was not easy. “I don’t get you, K. We skip out on Film Night, hoping to find a stick in the dirt. Instead, we find…that…and you want to keep it all to yourself! Why?”
“Well, now I wanna know if J is there.”
“There’s one very easy way to find out.”
“Is there?”
B looked hurt. Not like K had offended her personally but rather had offended every detail of the world B lived in, the world B felt comfortable living in. “What are you saying, K? What exactly are you saying? Because, at first, I was under the impression that you just wanted to think about what we found. Isn’t that what you said we should do? And here we’ve figured it out, that place has to be the Corner, but you still want to hide it from M.O.M. Why? Because you suddenly don’t…trust her? And why not? Because she expressed interest in your drawings?” B looked to the new drawings, the ones of a potbellied Inspector with hair on her face walking the glass hall of the second tower. “I think you’re taking this all way too personally, K. That’s what I think. You don’t like that the Parenthood is interested in your drawings for any reason other than they are good. That’s it, isn’t it? You want accolades, not questions. You want a pat on the back without anybody saying, Hey hey, what’s this in your drawing? Do I know you anymore?”
B got up. So did K.
“Wait a minute,” K said. She reached out for B’s arm, but B pulled it back. “Hey! Aren’t you interested in finding out if J is over there? Aren’t you interested in why she was sent in the first place?”
“Of course,” B said. Then, “No. You know what? No. I’m sorry, K. But this is a matter for M.O.M., and every minute we hide it from her is another minute of us falling deeper into this craziness! Think about it, K. Do you want to be sent over there? Do you want to live in that second tower with all those…those…terrible girls?”
K looked to the window, to give herself a second. If she stared too long into B’s eyes she’d either cave or say something she’d regret.
She thought fast. Because she had to. It had never been something she prided herself on, thinking fast, being more quick-witted than her sisters, but now she simply had to be. And as the words came pouring, smooth, out of her mouth, she began to question her own motives, for when had she ever sounded so…convincing? And was this sudden ability to convince B born of genuine concern for what was out there (and why the Letter Girls had never been told about it) or was it simply a matter of wanting to be right?
“B, I’m thinking this way to protect M.O.M. Truly. You’ve seen how much work she’s doing lately…do you think she needs to be burdened by our silly trip into the pines? And besides, what exactly happened out there? How was your Inspection this morning? Did they say you have Rotts? Did they say you have Vees?”
“No. I was declared clean.”
“Of course you were. So, there you have it. We did this terrible thing, right? We skipped out on Film Night. We went out on our own and we saw a second tower. But we both passed our Inspections today, too. I don’t see any reason in the world to drop this on M.O.M.’s lap. The poor woman has enough going on as it is.”
B’s eyes grew distant and K knew she had her. For now anyway. Whatever she’d said, it was working. And with B, once a thing started working, in the end it worked.
“Fine,” B said.
“Okay?”
“Yes. Okay. Fine, K. I get it.” She looked to the window. “Kind of.”
K took her arm, and this time B let her. K led her to the window. “Come here,” she said.
“What?”
“I wanna show you something.”
“What?”
At the glass, K pointed. “You see that Yard? You see those pines? All still here. So is the room we’re standing in. And so is your body and your mind. We didn’t break anything, B. We didn’t ruin something. And we were both declared clean today. We’re not spoiled rotten.”
B smiled. “You’re right.” She looked down at the Yard. “It was fun, wasn’t it? I mean…it was completely…crazy.”
B laughed, and it sounded so good to K. K said, “We’ll figure out more about it. But until we absolutely have to, I don’t see any reason to bother M.O.M. Like the Judith Nancy books: Some adventures should be for the young girls alone.”
B looked her friend, her sister, in the eye. A last beat, an unspoken agreement. For now. Then she made for the door. Halfway, she said, “How, K?”
“How what?”
“How are we going to find out more about it?”
K silently chided herself for having said it the way she did. “The same way we find out more about everything…by using our limitless minds!”
K laughed at her own imitation of Professor Hjortsberg’s sluggish speech.
“Okay, K. See you later tonight.”
“Okay.”
B left. K turned to the glass again.
Staring into the pines, she saw herself there, not using her mind at all but rather her hands, her feet, and her eyes.
Going Back
Moonlight again. The pines again. But this time K was alone.
Fleeing the Turret was simple. The Letter Girls hardly ever left their floors after sundown, and K, having mastered the art of taking the stairs quietly (including, of course, the opening and closing of the stairwell doors), relied on her routine as she arrived first at the ground floor, then waited for Inspector Rivers to make her rounds—not once, not twice, but three times—before slipping out of the stairwell, hurrying to the Body Hall, and stealing out through the kitchen again. The Turret floodlights illumina
ted all of the Yard but K took the shortest distance across, from the back door to the pines bordering the Orchard entrance, just as she had done with B and Q. Wearing her black slacks and turtleneck, she sank easily into the shadows and marveled at her own opacity; her hands seemed to be free-floating in the darkness. Safe at the border of pines, she turned to study the tower in full. Once she was satisfied nobody had seen her, not even a sister, she waited another minute more. Then, using her compass, she headed out for the second tower.
She thought about J on the way.
It’d never been hard to recognize the stronger attributes of her sisters. Indeed, the Parenthood stressed looking for such things. And while all the girls were intelligent, J was bright in a different way; she was what M.O.M. called optimistic. When the other Letter Girls (K included) fretted over their exams, J used to say, I know as much as I know until I know more.
“I know as much as I know until I know more,” K said now, trekking through the pines, alone. The compass declared her direction true, and her watch let her know she was already halfway there.
Would someone find her missing back home? Inspector Rivers, perhaps, checking the bedrooms? And if so, would B tell her where K probably was?
K couldn’t worry about that now. She’d reached the lights of the second tower (the Corner?) and she could see the tips of her black boots on the forest floor. She stepped fully into the new light and used the trees to hide, one by one. The memories of what she’d seen last time out were impossible to ignore: the naked backs, the short hair, the plodding Inspector.
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