What Every Girl Should Know

by J. Albert Mann

  “Yes, Father,” Ethel said, not catching his tone.

  “How about you, Margaret?”

  I hung my coat next to Ethel’s, ignoring him.

  He sniffed. “I smell oranges . . . or is that conformity?”

  Father had never been against organized religion. He had said a hundred times that many people needed it to keep them on the straight and narrow, while others did not. He believed he was one of those who did not. He also believed his wife and children were those who did not. I didn’t know what I believed. I was there to find out. I was a true freethinker.

  Ethel and I headed upstairs to change out of our church dresses and into our work dresses. Weekends we spent doing the family’s laundry, since all weekdays were now filled with hill laundry.

  “I’ll pin,” I told Ethel, taking a basket of wet clothes to the back door.

  Outside, our yard was strung up with so many laundry lines it looked like a very large spider had taken up residence. It was a chilly April afternoon, but sunny. The crisp air cleared my mind, and also allowed me to be away from Father.

  I’m not conforming. I’m looking. For what everyone else sees. Everyone but him.

  The cold bit at my fingers as I pinned wet rag after wet rag onto the line.

  There is order in religion. And acceptance.

  I picked up another rag, but dropped it when my fingers were too stiff to keep hold of it. A bit of quick rubbing and breathing brought them back to life while I tried not to think about the wrathy faces of the crowd the day Bob Ingersoll came to town.

  So . . . maybe not acceptance. But order. And order is not bad.

  I carried on with the pinning. I was on my monthly and not feeling well and wished to be done with this.

  The door opened behind me.

  “Maggie,” Ethel said, planting a large basket of bed sheets next to my feet. “Mother says to hang these sheets right away.”

  “But there’s no room.”

  “Mother says to take our clothes down. The hill sheets need to be dried first.”

  “But it’s the weekend.”

  “Mother says.”

  “I’m bleeding! And now I’ll have to wear cold, wet rags to school tomorrow while they sleep in warm, dry beds?” I raged, gesturing toward the hill.

  Ethel shrugged and then turned around and disappeared back inside.

  I looked down at the long lines of rags and diapers I just hung. “Damn it all to hell!”

  I reached up and ripped one off the line. The pins popped into the air and vanished into the grass.

  Damn any order that has me forever pinning wet things to a laundry line. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!

  And before I knew it, I was ripping everything off the line with pins popping and scattering all over the yard. The church fathers have freedom. The rich on the hill have freedom. My father has freedom. But the only freedom I’m ever going to have is inside my own head. And they can all get the hell out of it!

  An hour’s labor undone in the blink of an eye, I plopped, exhausted, onto the cold grass.

  My mother appeared from the house with another basket of sheets and surveyed the situation. “Handily done,” she said, “but can you hang them as fast as you can remove them?”

  “That’s not going to work. I’m not a child anymore.” The irony of my little fit hit me at the same time I realized how true my words were.

  She plucked a pin from the grass and began, picking up speed as she hung. I reached out and recovered two pins, clutching them in my hand, and watched her. But then I climbed to my feet and joined in, grabbing a sheet and racing to the other side of the yard.

  “We can get it all up,” she called, breathlessly, hanging as fast as she could now. “Ours and theirs.”

  “We can’t.”

  “We can!”

  I pinned the sheets and diapers closer. And closer.

  She did the same. Both of us knowing it would take all day long for it to dry hung like this.

  Ethel came out. She watched us running back and forth from the baskets to the lines. “What are you two doing?”

  We didn’t answer. We were busy hanging the entire town of Corning’s bedsheets on the line in record time for no good reason I could think of.

  Ethel jumped in, grabbing a basket.

  “I’ll hang all the menstrual rags on the chicken fence,” she called over her shoulder.

  “No!” my mother and I shouted together.

  “On the line inside the barn?” she asked.

  “Better,” huffed my mother.

  We were done within an hour. We collected the baskets and then stood and took in our work. Our yard looked like a hurricane had hit it. My mother’s cheeks were red and her eyes bright. Her body was not bent over in a coughing fit, but standing straight and strong while she inhaled the fresh spring air, with laundry basket on hip.

  “Happy Sunday, Margaret Louise,” she said.

  Still facing the laundry, she smiled. The first one I’d seen since Henry died. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling too.

  Damn her for making laundry fun.

  Citizens

  At first I thought it might be a dream.

  Chickens squawking.

  Mary in her nightclothes. Sliding out of her bed.

  I wiggled away from Ethel, who always slept in the middle. We told her it was because she was safest between us, but truly it was because the middle of the bed was the worst position to occupy, and neither Nan nor I wanted it. Mary’s bed was empty because she was tiptoeing out of the room. It was not a dream.

  The chatter of the chickens became louder, and I was truly awake. I leaped from bed and followed my sister down the stairs and into my parent’s bedroom.

  “Mother, someone’s in the hen coop,” Mary whispered.

  My mother did not need to hear this twice.

  “Michael, wake up. Michael!”

  “What is it?” he asked, still mostly asleep.

  My mother was already out of bed, tugging at him. “Someone’s in the hen coop.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Michael, get up!”

  Father dragged himself from bed.

  Mary ran to the window and peered into the blackness. Again, I was right behind her.

  Our breath fogged the rain-speckled glass, and I couldn’t see farther than a clump of grass growing next to the sill. But the chickens sure were streaked over something.

  My mother lit a lamp as my father stumbled out of the bedroom in his trousers and shirt, fumbling with his cuffs. Not even thieves deserved less than his best. She handed him the lamp and he opened the door, holding the lamp up to the dark night. Mary and I cowered behind him, craning to see. We jumped at the sight of the men in our yard, as if we’d all just now fully woken up. There were two of them, huddled in the dark. Each of their fists was wrapped around a hen’s neck, making it difficult for them to unlatch the gate and make a run for it.

  “Hey, you there!” my father shouted. “What do you mean by coming to a man’s house in the middle of the night and stealing his chickens? What kind of citizens are you?”

  Mother pushed us aside. “Michael!” she shrieked. “They’re stealing the hens! Go out there and stop them!”

  “It’s raining.”

  “Give me that lamp.”

  My mother snatched the lamp from his hands and ran out into the spring night in her bare feet. The hens laid eggs. Eggs we ate. Every day.

  “Drop those chickens!”

  At the sound of my mother’s shouts, the hounds started in, snarling and barking from their pens. This considerable noise livened up the thieves, and they struggled harder to untangle themselves from the hen coop gate. One of the men dropped his hen. The other tripped over it.

  I could feel my brothers and sisters gathering behind me, those that were free from a crib.

  “Now then, Anne!” my father shouted. “Let them have one chicken. The boys are most likely just hungry.”

  This sent my
mother into a mighty frenzy.

  “NOT A SINGLE HEN! NOT ONE SINGLE HEN!”

  The O’Donnells lived nearly three quarters of a mile away, but they surely were sitting bolt upright in their beds at this very moment.

  My father threw his hands in the air as if this was all too much. “Come now, citizens,” he called out to the men. “Do you see the trouble you’re causing here?”

  The men saw it, or at least they heard it: My mother screaming. My father shouting at her to return to the house. The dogs barking. The babies crying. And of course, the chickens squawking up a feathery storm.

  The men rolled out of the henhouse on top of each other without a chicken in hand. Picking themselves from the wet ground, they lumbered off between the trees and into the dark night while a rogue hen squawked off in the opposite direction behind the barn.

  My mother took off after it.

  “Anne!” my father called.

  We stood in the doorway, a crowd of us now, and stared out into the rain where my mother had disappeared around the side of the barn. The hens settled. A whistle from my father quieted the dogs. The babies kept crying—whistles didn’t work on them. None of us moved.

  About ten heartbeats later, Mother stomped into sight, chicken in hand, and I realized with a happy pang that I had never doubted her. She splashed through a yard of muddy puddles over to the henhouse, where she opened the gate with ease, tossed in the hen, and latched it shut.

  We backed away from the door as she approached, her presence so large and commanding, it needed the entire doorway, doorframe to doorframe, to allow her through.

  “To bed, all of you.”

  In a flash, I was under the warm blanket curled up next to Ethel, the only one of us who was still fast asleep.

  Mary had Richard tucked into bed with her. Arlington had stopped crying, too.

  But I couldn’t sleep. Not even after my frozen feet had warmed. Instead, I watched Mother turn the corner of the barn over and over, her nightgown whipping in the rain and the chicken firmly in her grasp.

  I could tell my sisters weren’t sleeping either—Nan snored if she was sleeping and Mary cleared her throat if she wasn’t—and I wondered if they too were swollen with a strange joy over the memory of our mother striding out from behind the barn.

  I fell asleep with excited tears in my eyes.

  But I woke later to the coughing. Coughing that didn’t stop.

  Not for a long time.

  Blower Dogs

  The school term had only four weeks left in it before summer break, but Joseph said they couldn’t wait.

  “It’s better to go now,” he said. “The jobs may not be there in a few weeks.”

  He didn’t add that it was also better now because our mother had been delirious with pneumonia since the night of the chicken thieves and she wouldn’t know they’d quit until it was too late. But he didn’t have to add this. We all knew it.

  Education was everything to my mother, and though Mary might have missed endless amounts of school over the past year, even she still continued to attend. Not anymore. Now four of my mother’s children would be leaving school permanently. Joseph, John, and Thomas to the factory and Mary to stay home to care for the house and babies until Nan and I returned in the afternoon, at which time Mary would walk the five miles to the Abbotts to take care of their house and babies—with all the money they made supporting the ever-growing Higgins household.

  My father hadn’t left my mother’s side. He did not take part in this decision.

  At first, I also refused to take part . . . by knocking over my chair and marching away from the marble-topped table. But this just made the vote take longer. Mary righted the chair while Thomas hauled me back by my ear. And when I returned to my seat—against my will—Ethel was sitting in Nan’s lap and I burned even hotter. Ethel was mine to soothe.

  I was the only one to raise my hand against. But then Ethel changed her vote and raised her hand with mine, and I mostly forgave her for seeking comfort from Nan. Although we still lost the vote.

  We left in our usual group for school and split up in town. Nan, Ethel, and I headed to St. Mary’s; Joseph, John, and Thomas to the factory. The first day was the worst. I could barely watch their backs as they walked down State Street toward the smoke. Ethel was the only one of us who didn’t understand.

  “Will they meet us later in school?” she asked.

  “No, Ethel,” I snapped. “They will not meet us later in school.”

  “Maggie.” Nan grimaced.

  “Don’t grimace at me, Nan. It’s time she grew up.”

  My statement rang with so much truth it stunned Nan into silence. A silence so awful, I snatched Ethel’s hand and held it all the way to school.

  After about two weeks, it was just those awful first few moments away from them that burned. I counted the steps between us . . . one, two, three . . . to keep my feet walking in my direction as I listened to their voices moving away in their direction. The factory was only a few blocks downhill from school, but it was another world. A world without the possibility of becoming something other than a factory worker. It was an end, not a beginning.

  Walking home was better. We’d had the whole day to grow accustomed to their absence. On the way home, Nan and I walked like normal people. And Ethel hummed.

  “Stop humming,” I told her.

  Ethel didn’t hear me . . . because she was humming.

  “Ethel, cut it out.”

  She still didn’t listen, so I walked up ahead to be away from her. Nan kept up.

  “Maggie?” Nan said.

  “Hmm?”

  “I should really like to be a writer.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you think I will be?” she asked.

  This she had never done—question it.

  “Nan . . .”

  She reached out, and with a touch of her fingertips to my sleeve, stopped me from saying another word. She didn’t want me to lie. But she also didn’t want me to acknowledge the truth . . . that she would be next to leave school.

  And then me.

  And then little humming Ethel. Who still sometimes sucked her thumb between us at night. Who knew nothing of fiery furnaces and molten glass and blow pipes. Neither did Nan. Nor I.

  Of course, we’d seen the almighty iron wheel the roughers used to cut the patterns, and the smaller stone wheels dripping with water used by the smoothers. There wasn’t anyone in Corning who hadn’t been inside the factory for one reason or another. But we’d never stood all day next to the raging furnace burning as hot as hellfire through which the gaffers remelted their glass at the end of their pipes so they might blow it out into tableware, chemist jars, thermometers, and light bulbs.

  Women could never be gaffers, the men who blew the glass. It wasn’t allowed. Neither could we be roughers or smoothers or cutters. All those took years to learn, and women were only expected to work until they married and began having children . . . despite any skull protuberances they might or might not have.

  My brothers had become “blower dogs,” apprentices to the gaffers. They could aspire to blow glass one day. Although how much a gaffer earned depended on how fast Joseph, John, and Thomas could fetch and tote around the heat of the ovens. So, it had better be fast. They arrived home each night dried out like raisins, covered in dirty sweat and shrunken from the heat of the furnaces.

  Mary washed their clothes right away so that Mother didn’t see . . . so she didn’t know. She would, of course, find out, as my father and I took turns nursing her through yet another brush with death. But when she did, there would be nothing to be done but her duty . . . which was to climb out of her sickbed and deal with what she found when she did.

  It was what Mary was doing. Her duty. When Mother splashed through her first puddle that rainy night without her shoes, she set up Mary’s destiny to step into them. Mary was good at being our mother. She’d been practicing the job for years.

  “I think Mary
should have liked to have been a theater director,” I said.

  “That is true,” agreed Nan. “And she would have been so good, don’t you think? She knows everything about the theater and she has such moral clarity.”

  “Moral clarity is definitely a Mary trait.” I rolled my eyes and sighed.

  Nan gave me a poke with her elbow. But she knew I was playing.

  We walked along. I thought of Mary, and what she would be now instead of a theater director. And then Nan—kind and loving Nan, who excelled in writing and languages, and reminded every one of us Higgins how much goodness there was to be found out there in the world. And to be written about.

  I stopped still and turned to my sister, whom I loved so very, very much.

  “You will be a writer, Nan.”

  She threw her arms around me. “And you will be a doctor,” she whispered into my thick braid.

  It was the first time we’d ever said these things to each other without believing them.

  Ethel walked by us . . . humming.

  Evicted

  It’s because of the chicken thieves, he said.

  We are safer in town, he said.

  It’s my decision, he said.

  But I saw the look on my mother’s face when she read the letter. And I watched her take in the old cookstove, the opened front doorway scattered with discarded boots that none of us had worn since summer began, and the sun streaming in through the dirty windows. I saw the look—and I knew. We were being evicted.

  It seemed even three blower dogs and a part-time maid didn’t make enough money to keep twelve skinny citizens in a run-down cabin . . . and we were soon to be thirteen. My mother, after another near-death experience, was pregnant again.

  We had until the first of October to leave, but it was decided we would move out before school began. The morning of the move my father was off looking for a job. But we didn’t need his help. With my mother as foreman, Thomas and Joseph taking care of the marble-topped table, and the rest of us toting the clothes and pots and dishes out to the wagon, we packed up every button and stocking belonging to a Higgins in less than five hours.