What Every Girl Should Know

by J. Albert Mann

  I sigh. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Where else would you be?” he scoffs.

  Thomas Higgins. My personal undertaker . . . his words dragging me deep into the dirt. Where else, indeed. But though my body may be bumping around in this broken-down wagon, my head can’t seem to accept it. Do I tell him I’ve imagined a hundred other places to be? Do I tell him I always believed I was on my way to one of these places?

  No.

  Because then I’d have to admit I don’t even know where these places are, or why I want to head to them.

  Becoming a doctor had always been the dream. And even if it had been more my father’s dream than my own, I’d been fine with his choice. Because doctor had really just been a word to stand in for the feeling of being or doing something important, which has sat in my stomach all my life. Which still sits in my stomach, even as Thomas makes the turn off Market Street.

  But if I told my brother this . . . that I ache to be and do, I think Thomas Higgins’s head might explode all over the wet street.

  He glances at me and then back at the road. “Pull yourself together, Maggie.”

  Yes, my irritable undertaker, it is my head that’s exploding. It is my insides that won’t stop jangling around like a loose harness. It is my legs that are itching to leap from this wagon and run.

  But like Thomas said . . . where would I go?

  Escape Is Impossible

  A month of O’Donnells.

  Thirty-one straight days of forty arms and forty legs swinging about the house. More than two hundred fingers reaching for bread at dinner and two hundred toes to be covered by blankets at night. More than twenty mouths flapping out noise and huffing in all the air. And when I opened my eyes on Saturday morning, I was completely unable to stomach day thirty-two.

  It was easy to get lost in a crowd. This I knew all too well. I dressed quickly, threw on my coat and boots, and made my escape.

  A stiff breeze had my eyes watering as I passed by the necessary. Even this early in the morning a line had already formed. There wasn’t enough coal ash in the world to tamp down the awful smell in that outhouse. My mother would choke if she knew I’d been peeing in the woods like an animal. But the active bowels of twenty Higginses and O’Donnells had made it necessary.

  I was scrambling past the barn when my father caught sight of me. I froze. Would he stop me? Call me back? Send me inside to my chores? But he did none of these things. Instead, he gave me a knowing wink, and with permission given, I took off like a jackrabbit for Emma’s, where it would be quiet. And warm.

  I knocked on Emma’s large front door, using the iron knuckles hanging there for just this purpose. I loved these knuckles. At home we had to use our very own skin-and-bone knuckles to get our door to open, and when it did open, it wasn’t opened by Bernadette O’Boyle in a white skirt and blue apron.

  “Hello, Bernie,” I said, whipping past her to get to the warmth.

  “Margaret Higgins, you wait,” Bernie growled. “I haven’t announced you.”

  “Emma!” I shouted.

  “Bedroom!” Emma called back.

  Bernie rolled her eyes as I hopped up the wide spiral staircase, down a long red carpeted hallway past a table set with white orchids, and into Emma’s bedroom.

  “Shut the door.”

  I shut it. And then there were two heads, four arms, and four legs in a large room with one feather bed and one roaring fire . . . if you didn’t count all of Emma’s ridiculous dolls strewn over the floor.

  “Hurry, pick her up, she’s crying.”

  Emma used her chin to point at a half-dressed doll at her feet. She had another in her arms that she was feeding with a glass bottle.

  “It’s not crying,” I told her.

  Emma rolled her eyes. “Maggie. It’s pretend. Use your imagination.”

  “To make a baby cry? I’d rather imagine stubbing my toe.”

  “Oh, Maggie,” she huffed, picking up the doll and rocking it herself.

  We were well past the age for dolls. But I didn’t say this to Emma. Instead, I pulled her copy of Gulliver’s Travels from the shelf and turned to our favorite chapter: the one with the pirates.

  Emma didn’t like to read. She liked me to read. Like Mary, Emma said I had a real talent for the dramatic. Hearing I had a talent for anything made me yearn to hear it even more.

  Less than a page into my reading, Emma forgot all about her fake babies, letting them roll from her lap. One laid face down on the carpet and the other on its side with one of its arms bent back; both were as quiet as turtles sunning on a log, unlike real babies.

  When the story heated up, Emma reached out for the twisted-back arm of the doll, picking it up by its tiny hand. She twisted off its arm as she listened to me read, her eyes staring far off . . . imagining marauding pirates. Miss Hayes called this “dramatic tension.” By the end of the chapter, Emma had twisted all the arms and legs off her dolls and was peering inside them.

  I closed the book.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m seeing how they’re put together,” she said. “Look here, how this one twists on like a screw but this one pops into place through this notch.”

  “And the head?”

  “The same as the arms and legs. Let’s see how their eyes work.”

  She popped one out and it cracked. We looked at each other and laughed. “Let me try the other one.” But before she could figure out how to remove it without breaking it, her mother knocked and entered.

  Six eyes met. Six eyes took in the scene. Two of them narrowed.

  “Emma!” Her mother cried. “Why are you breaking your dolls?”

  Emma jumped up from the floor. I jumped with her, not wanting to be left sitting among the strewn body parts.

  “I’m seeing how they’re made. What they look like on the inside.”

  Her mother’s face didn’t soften. This wasn’t a good enough answer. “You’re supposed to care for them. Not destroy them.”

  “But I haven’t destroyed them. Well, the one eye, yes, but look, Mother,” Emma explained. “See how they pop back in using the notch. Good as new.”

  Her mother was not convinced. “And when you have real children? Will you pop them back together?”

  “Perhaps she won’t have real children,” I theorized, stepping in to help. “Perhaps Emma will teach, like Miss Hayes. Emma is the best at mathematics in the whole school.”

  Emma was not really the best at mathematics, more like third or fourth best, which was still pretty good. But Nan wouldn’t have minded me telling a thumper, especially at a time like this, when it seemed very needed.

  Emma’s mother shocked me with a deepening frown. “It’s time for your guest to be leaving. Please see her out.”

  Was there not a mother in the world I could please? All I had suggested was that Emma might teach—a teacher being a perfectly acceptable alternative to being a mother, as far as I could tell. And one of the only ways possible to keep oneself from being surrounded by crying babies. At least school-aged children wiped their own noses. Well, maybe not the McGills, but most of the rest of us did.

  Emma walked me to her front door.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  She looked behind her and then whispered, “It’s not your fault. I took them apart.”

  “But I read an exciting tale, and got you into breaking things.”

  “It was exciting,” she admitted. “You’re so dramatic.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. I was dramatic.

  Everything felt better.

  But then Emma sighed. “Last month, we came home from visiting my aunt in Utica, and James had taken apart the cookstove. The whole cookstove! The legs, the ash pan, the baffles . . . all of it laid about the kitchen floor and across the dining table. Knobs and screws as far as the eye could see. And do you know what my mother said? She said, ‘Oh, James, how clever of you.’ ”

  “Was he able to put it back together?
” I asked.

  “Of course not! Father had to call Mr. Murdoch.”

  We burst out laughing.

  I gave my friend a hug. “I thought your discoveries of the doll body were amazing.”

  “I knew you would, Maggie Higgins. But I think you might be the only one.”

  “But you thought so too,” I reminded her.

  She nodded as she closed the door, but somehow it felt as if she wasn’t so sure her discoveries were amazing after all. And strangely, her words became true . . . I was the only one. Turning away from those iron knuckles on the door, I wondered what I’d find if I could pop off one of my limbs and peek inside. Would I look like all the other dolls?

  There was nowhere to go but home, and so I turned toward it. Five paces in I felt the cold. Six paces in I remembered the O’Donnells. No notched and screwed arms and legs waiting there. They were all real. Every last eyeball. Along with my mother’s eyeballs, which had surely noticed me missing.

  Five long miles later, I slinked past the barn and necessary, and then slipped through the front door. Not seeing my mother among the crowd, I breathed a little easier as I skittered over to the dry sink and began to wash the dishes. There were always dishes.

  Comfortably settled into a chore and feeling a natural part of the din of the house, I was now prepared for her to appear. But she didn’t.

  And after another few moments, I became a little alarmed that I might end up washing all the dishes without her even seeing me do it. Although there really were quite a lot of dishes for some reason. Which now had me wondering what Mary or Nan had been doing all day. And where were Mary and Nan? Or my father? Or Ethel?

  That’s when I heard the faint wail of a baby. A newborn baby. And my heart sank.

  The door to my parents’ bedroom opened. Nan and Ethel emerged carrying a bucket of water sloshing with bloody rags.

  “Another boy,” Nan announced.

  “Where were you, Maggie?” Ethel asked.

  Not here. And even though the addition of another pair of arms, legs, and eyes was nothing I cared the least bit about, I couldn’t believe how left out I felt. It was as if a second door had closed on me today and had left me standing all alone on the other side.

  The Choice

  I made a decision to never leave home again, ever . . . except for school, of course. And I’d set up camp next to the mending basket of ripped and rumpled clothes, determined to let mushrooms grow out of my ears before I moved.

  Sprawled out on the floor next to my father, space being available now that the O’Donnells had finally gone, I’d been at this basket of mending every afternoon for a week. And even worse than never reaching the bottom of it, I was pretty sure my mother hadn’t noticed my efforts.

  “Listen to this, Margaret,” my father said. He was reading Progress and Poverty. He was always reading Progress and Poverty. I’d already read Mr. George’s book, as had every Higgins who could read—on a direct order from Father. Happy was the day we finished it and handed it off to the next Higgins, it being the dullest book ever written.

  He cleared his voice and began. “ ‘On the horizon the clouds begin to lower. Liberty calls to us again. We must follow her further. We must trust her fully.’ ”

  I rummaged through the basket while he read, looking for seams and hems, anything I could use an easy running stitch to mend. I needed a few successes to keep my spirits up.

  His voice got louder, pausing at the points he wanted me to really appreciate.

  “ ‘Either we must wholly accept her or she will not stay. It is not enough that men should vote. It is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life. . . . Either this, or Liberty withdraws her light!’ ”

  I found a cleanly torn seam in one of my brother’s trousers. I licked my fingers to wet the thread, and then slid the thread, stiff with spit, through the eye of the needle, missing it. God rot it, I hated mending!

  “ ‘Either this, or Liberty withdraws her light.’ ” My father slapped his knee. “What do you think of that, Margaret? Mr. George is saying that if we do not treat her right, liberty will abandon this country.”

  His excitement infected me. It always did. Plus, thinking about liberty was far better than thinking about trousers.

  “Why is liberty always a woman, Father?” I asked. “But women don’t get to vote?” I knew my question would heat him up.

  “Yes, Margaret. Women should have the vote. All women. Just as black men now have the vote. How can we call ourselves free in this country when half of our good citizens are kept out of the polls? It’s wrong. This is exactly what George is saying—”

  “Michael.” My mother interrupted.

  “And here is Lady Justice, before us.” My father smiled. “She will send me on an errand, I am sure.”

  Mother nodded wearily. She was sending him on an errand. When Father started in on sipping whiskey and sorting out the world’s problems this early in the afternoon, he needed an errand so that the rest of us could get our work done.

  “The coal money,” she said. “We’re nearly out and still have plenty of cold weather to get through.”

  My father slowly put down his book and rose from his chair. “I bid you, adieu, my fair Margaret,” he said, bowing down at me miserably holding my needle next to the mending basket, which I swore now looked even more full than it did a moment ago. But then he glanced over at my mother’s back as she consulted with Mary about what to do with the potatoes for dinner, a daily puzzle always needing solving, and we both saw the same thing. Opportunity.

  I pinned my needle into the trousers and crept over Clio and Henry on my way to the door, faster than a flash of summer lightning. He scooted me out ahead of him, and then called back into the house, “Stealing Margaret for company. We’ll be back before dinner,” and then slammed the door shut.

  Smiling, he gave my long braid a tug. “There be nothing sweeter than liberty.”

  I agreed. And all the way into town, he magically transformed Mr. George’s dry words and endless sentences into exciting ideas that bloomed one after another. Free libraries. Free education. And his very, very favorite, freedom of the mind.

  “I think I know why liberty is always a woman,” I told him as we wandered down Market Street.

  “Why is that, Margaret?” he asked in his Irish brogue, his red hair blowing in the chilly breeze, and his blue eyes looking so closely into mine. He was listening. It was amazing to be listened to.

  “Men are allowed to be both good and bad. But women are only allowed to be good or bad. And so if a woman is good, she is only good. And worthy of being something as good as freedom.”

  He grinned.

  “But . . . ,” I said, not wanting his grin to fade, not wanting to feel like I had that day I stood alone on Emma’s doorstep.

  “Yes?”

  “I have bad in me,” I admitted, dropping my eyes so I wouldn’t see his disappointment. Instead, he laughed so loud it raised every hair on my bumpy head.

  “Always think like this, Margaret,” he bellowed. “For yourself. Always.”

  I quickly promised I always would—not caring that I wasn’t sure how else I’d think. His reaction had made me feel as if I’d swallowed the moon whole, my insides glowing mysteriously.

  We were passing a large display of bananas outside of Iszard’s Groceries. Mr. Iszard was busy carrying them inside because it was getting late. My father plucked one up and handed it to me.

  “For my Lady Liberty.”

  “They’re two for a penny today,” Mr. Iszard informed us. “They were late coming to me, and don’t have much left in ’em.”

  “Well, well,” my father said. “Now that is an honest deal, sir.”

  He turned to me, looking into my eyes, and then glanced up and down the busy street.

  The shift was changing at the factory. Market Street was crowded with men and wom
en trudging home, as well as young boys making their way to the evening shift. A shuffling and shouting of dark woolens against the backdrop of a muddy spring sleet, each huffing a cloud of white into the fading day.

  My father stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out the coal money, staring down at it in his open palm. The banana felt heavy in my hand.

  Again, he grinned.

  “My dear Lady Liberty, care to free these bananas? The choice,” he said with great fanfare, “is yours.”

  My lips quivered. Coal or bananas. The choice was mine. But I knew the choice he was hoping I’d make. It was shining straight out from under his massive red brow. Freedom was everything. There was only one choice.

  “Free them,” I mumbled.

  “What is that?” he laughed.

  “Free the bananas!” I yelled.

  And we bought them all.

  * * *

  The way home was a fantastic journey. We had three boxes full of overly ripe bananas. Father stacked them on top of one another and carried them on his shoulder. My job was to pick a bunch and pluck off one for the postmaster, and three for Mrs. Alterisi and her twins, and an especially large banana for Officer Cowley.

  A banana for every person we passed.

  People laughed at us. People laughed with us. They smiled, shook my hand . . . even hugged me. I chased the citizens of Corning up and down Market Street handing out fruit. Only old Mr. Keeler wouldn’t take one.

  “Foolish man,” he grumbled at my father. “You’re as poor as Job’s turkey.”

  “ ‘It is not from top to bottom that societies die,’ ” my father quoted Mr. George. “ ‘It is from bottom to top.’ ”

  Mr. Keeler waved my father away with one hand, walking off. “Can’t see a hole in a ladder,” he growled over his shoulder. But my father wasn’t listening because we were now surrounded by a mighty swarm of children, and as he handed a banana to each child, he looked them directly in the eye and told them, “Leave the world better, because you, my child, have dwelt in it.”

  Every pair of eyes listened to him carefully until the banana was in their possession, and then they were off.