The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  As I press the shutter release, I imagine the Cook Island house as empty today as it was thirty years ago. That emptiness had been rich with possibility, though, a whole week of fun stretching out before us. Now, even in the warm afternoon light, the emptiness looms dark and murky, as bottomless as the Chesapeake.

  Ginger presses a knee against the wheel to hold the boat straight, then pulls a barrette from her trouser pocket—found-ebony to match the suit buttons—and battens down her hair. The long loop from law school is gone, her hair now barely long enough to catch in the clip. She cut it all off after Betts’s husband, Zack, died, and she donated it to an outfit that made wigs for children going through chemo, although she never told me that. She only said she needed a change. Laney was the one who told me Ginger gave up all that beautiful hair for some kid who was as bald as Betts’s Zack was when he died. I don’t think Betts knows that to this day.

  “You okay, Ginge?” I ask.

  A few strands escape around her face, whipping against her cheeks as she realizes I’m addressing her. “I was just imagining who you Ms. Bradwells would be if you were poets,” she says brightly, with the smile that isn’t a smile, that is only the same screen she has always thrown up to mask sorrow or disappointment or wounded pride. “You, Mia, would be Elizabeth Bishop: the way she never settles, she’s always going somewhere. And something about her reaction to the moose: ‘Why, why do we feel / (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of joy?’ ” She doesn’t look at me as she speaks, as she repeats the phrase “this sweet sensation of joy.” Nor does she turn to Betts when she says, “Betts, you’d be William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow, simple and pure and fun.” When she does look at Laney, her pale eyes are as tired as they ever were in law school. “I was thinking of you, Lane, as Marianne Moore. ‘The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.’ ”

  Laney considers this in silence or restraint or both. “What about you, Ginge?” she asks.

  Ginger’s eyes do actually brighten—although not enough to match her voice—as she decides that she would be Emily Dickinson. “ ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—’ ”

  “Slanted beyond recognition sometimes, as I recall, and maybe not quite all the truth!” Betts laughs then and we all laugh with her, a gentle sound that barely registers over the motor, the waves, the wind in our ears.

  “And your mom, Ginge?” Laney asks gently. “Which poet would she have been?”

  It’s hard to imagine any poet capturing the spirit of Faith Cook Conrad. It’s hard to imagine her as anyone but herself. When I think of Ginger’s mom, I think of that poster from the mid-1980s, the women who showed up at art museums naked but for gorilla masks, to draw attention to the dearth of work by women artists included in museum collections. I think of the newspaper photos of Faith arriving at the steps of the U. S. District Court for Idaho dressed as Susan B. Anthony on life support during the appeal for Idaho v. Freeman, where despite her efforts the Court upheld state rescissions of earlier Equal Rights Amendment ratifications, killing any chance the ERA would become law before the deadline for ratification passed. I think of her arriving at a men’s steam room with a tape measure, singing “Is That All There Is?”—which in reality was Gloria Allred trying to end the Friars Club’s all-men policy, but it’s the kind of thing Ginger’s mom crowed about even if she didn’t do it herself. Humor, she always said, was a much more effective way to get press coverage for something you cared about than was rage.

  I think, too, of the many ways Faith urged us to care, the monthly letters she made us write to The New York Times, calling their resistance to addressing women as Ms. rather than Mrs. or Miss “a total crock.” She always called on Saturdays rather than weekdays or Sundays; a Saturday call undercut any excuse we might have to avoid rolling stationery into the typewriter—this in the days before you could simply email a petition link. “If change is needed and it doesn’t start with us, then where the hell does it start?” she liked to say. “Timing and persistence are everything, and if you’re persistent, your time will come.”

  Did she have the nerve to say that to her daughter after Ginger was passed over for partner? If you’re persistent, your time will come. I used to believe it myself, before my marriage failed, long before the current state of newspaper sales and advertising left me without a job.

  Ginger slides a carefully manicured hand down the boat’s white steering wheel, then back up again. “Maybe you guys can help me clear out Mother’s things,” she says. She stares ahead the way she does when anyone touches anything raw in her, the way she did that time she’d insisted that if our mothers were the ones forcing women members on a club that didn’t want them, we’d be the ten-year-olds alone on our towels at the pool, the debutantes no one asked to dance. If we got pregnant, maybe the guys would marry us or maybe we’d get abortions or give up our babies, but no one would read about it in the Times.

  I raise the camera, framing the circle of the wheel, the straight line of the horizon, the textured triangles of her jacket and the triangular bow of the boat. In her admission—that even though the house and all its contents have been left to her, Ginger has not, in the months since her mom died, returned to Cook Island to sort through her things—I feel the ebbing away of a small anger I’ve been nursing since Faith died. Faith was important to the rest of us, too, but maybe Ginger’s refusal to have us at her mom’s funeral wasn’t the same kind of selfish thing Ginger has always done, the way she tries to hoard everyone close to her lest they abandon her for someone else.

  “You have clothes on the island, Ginge?” I ask. Betts’s suitcase was in Laney’s trunk—they’d all had breakfast together—and Laney and Ginger took mine when they ran for the car. But Ginger took the Acela Express from New York this morning, meaning to train back with us in tow tonight.

  “Not so much as a swimsuit,” she says, her gaze fixed on the uncluttered horizon.

  “None of us brought swimsuits this time,” Laney says gently, and although it’s obvious why—we brought clothes to wear to the theater, heels, the light evening jackets in which Laney and Betts and I now huddle, little protection against the wind of the bay and the speed of the boat—still, it seems a bad omen, as does the silence that settles over us.

  I squint against the coloring sunlight, wondering if the shadow darkness I think I see at the horizon now is anything at all, torn between wanting this journey to end and not wanting to arrive at Cook Island again.

  Cook Island. I remember Ginger telling us that even though it looks like two islands, the two ends are attached by a strip of earth barely wider than the one-lane no-name road that crosses it, connecting her family’s half of the island to the public end: the little white village with Haddy’s Market and Brophy’s Bar; the fishing docks; the Pointway Inn where the four of us had dinner with Ginger’s brothers and Trey Humphrey and Doug Pemberley before we went stargazing all those years ago, where Doug and I stayed the week he asked me to marry him.

  We all watch silently as the horizon shadow grows closer, taking shape, but just barely, a raggedy outline that is the tops of the trees—hackberries that Ginger once told us “drop shit everywhere but are the only tall things that grow in this salt pit, unless you count my brothers and me.” The high slate roof of Chawterley asserts itself as a flatness in the treetops then, and because I see the roof now, the house, too, emerges: three stories of green shingle bleeding into trees that are not the new-leaf-spattered tangle of limbs they were that spring break but rather a tired camouflage tinged with yellow and dying brown. I can make out the white trim of all those windows now, the stone chimneys rising over the blue-green of the roof, the pale foundation stones washing into the sand or the fall-dying marsh grasses—what does front Chawterley?

  I finger the electric tape holding the back of my Holga in place, resisting the urge to turn the lens on Ginger or Laney or Betts, to look without being seen. The words are on the tip of my tongue: I came here o
nce without you guys, with Doug Pemberley, remember him? I don’t know why I never told you. But I would have to shout the words to be heard over the wind, and I can’t imagine shouting them. Because Ginger’s friend Max is on the boat? Because it feels a bit like a betrayal, not to have told them? Because even now I don’t understand why I returned here with Doug Pemberley, why I ever thought I could marry him, why I still need the lifetime guarantee I know doesn’t exist.

  Ginger turns the wheel a degree or two, setting our final course, headed directly toward the pier taking shape now: a long stretch of wood reaching out into the bay, with what looks to be a great blue heron perched on one round wooden post. The little boat tied up there, or one like it, was the way we got to town that spring break, up through the winding marsh streams that riddled the island—“guts,” Ginger called them, or “channels,” or “cricks.” The mail is brought here by boat from the mainland, and the garbage truck is a trash boat, the school bus also a boat. It’s the way you arrive and the way you leave, the way even Trey Humphrey left. The way Faith, too, must have left, her body taken to the mainland to be cremated. It doesn’t make sense to bury anyone on Cook Island; the rising ocean levels caused by global warming are slowly absorbing it into the Chesapeake.

  A second little boat is upside down on the shore—which is disconcerting, finding something unexpected already. Why two skiffs? As if ready for the eight of us again to race through the marsh channels, shouting and laughing into the darkness. I remember the longing I felt as we first arrived at Cook Island, impatient for the end of law school and the beginning of whatever life would have in store for me: marriage and jobs, apartments and houses and children. I remember imagining owning a summer home like Chawterley with Andy, something grander than his parents’ cabin, somewhere more exotic than a small Midwestern lake. I remember wondering if Mom would have wandered so—frighteningly? Is that what she was, frightened?—all those summers if she and Dad had had a place like this to get away to, if she’d had a family and a future she was willing to embrace.

  The details of that first night on Cook Island flood me, then: the bright stars and the splintered roughness of the pier, the drip of bay water down my back after that initial cold plunge, the wet tug of my swimsuit as I’d pulled it from my unlined body, leaving me wearing only the small diamond engagement ring on my left hand, my promise to Andy and his to me. I remember the slick push of the cold, dark water as I dove back in again, the startling shock of something wrapping itself around me, refusing to let me go. I was twenty-four and unmarried, undivorced, unaged—and as quick to laugh as Ginger and Laney and Betts were when the water daemon I screamed in terror of turned out, in the sweeping beam of the lighthouse, to be only a tangle of seaweed and marsh grasses clinging to my skin.

  As I settle in to the reality of the second skiff now—Max’s, of course; he would have run from the village down to the Chawterley pier to bring over the Row v. Wade—it occurs to me that it was Max’s boat we stole that night we went gut-running with Frank and Beau and Trey and Doug. “Borrowed,” Ginger and Trey had insisted. Does Max know we took his boat? Would he want to know? Would he even care? I think of the things I know that I never wanted to, and I imagine how I might start to tell the Ms. Bradwells what I’ve done, knowing I should.

  It’s Ginger’s voice, though, that breaks the silence as we approach the pier. “Anne Sexton. My mother would be Anne Sexton,” she says softly, uncertainly. “ ‘I’m no more a woman / than Christ was a man.’ Except Mother would never have killed herself.”

  She begins issuing directions before any of us can respond. She puts me at the helm again—just for a second, she says, just hold it straight—and she lowers the sail, then directs Laney and Betts to take their heels off and hurries them to the front of the boat. She sticks a coiled length of rope in Betts’s hands, then turns to Laney and says, “When we’re close enough, you’re going to jump across to the pier.” Then to Betts, “You just toss her the line when she’s ashore.”

  She’s setting them to their tasks when Max pokes his head up from below, the lenses in his fashionably nerdy glasses catching the light as he peeks around at her. He must know Ginger pretty well, because he doesn’t emerge. He allows her the entire stage.

  “How do I stop this thing?” I mouth to him. Despite the fact that the sail is down, there is a reason the heron’s cackle is sounding alarm, its black flight feathers springing to action, opening into a wide blue-gray of gracefully pumping wings.

  Ginger, with her back to me at the front of the boat, can’t see Max grin in response, a smile that matches the nerdy glasses, that makes me like him all the more. His neck is going just as surely as ours are—his neck and his hair; how does he pull off boyish and charming even with his wrinkled neck? He looks a little like that heron, but in a good way.

  “Hold on tight,” he says, his words blowing toward me, “so you won’t fall overboard when we smash into the pier.”

  He disappears below just as Ginger turns and heads back toward me, her jacket still improbably spotless, its shawl collar still perfect at her neck. I point to the heron, and Ginger turns and looks. “Wish on it!” I call out as we watch the bird skim low over the water, then rise up on the wind.

  “WISH ON IT!” Ginger had called out all those years ago, that first night on Cook Island—not pointing to a bird or to a shooting star but rather to our champagne cork rising up over the mast. The cork from a bottle we’d brought all the way from Ann Arbor, stored first in the trunk and then in the galley fridge. In the gunshot echo of that cork pop, we’d sent our wishes up into the night sky, into the hoot of an owl and the gurgle of briny-grassy water sucking around in the marshes, the thrum of insects pressing in under the bottomless stars.

  “Who’s up for skinny-dipping under the moon?” Ginger had called out, already pouring champagne as the cork plopped into the bay. We’d accepted plastic cups spilling foamy white, and skinned off our shoes, dropped our jeans, pulled off our sweaters, all as lighthearted and full of laughter as Ginger was.

  She was pale pale pale as she stood naked in the moonlight, no swimsuit under her clothes like the rest of us. Her face, still baby-fat round then, seemed a reflection of the moon itself as she raised her cup.

  “All the planets will be aligned this week,” she said. “There’s going to be a syzygy Wednesday night. All the planets banded together on the same side of the sun.”

  “Like us,” Laney said. “Like we’ll always be, banded together on the same side, even when we aren’t sharing rooms or houses anymore.”

  Betts had said, “To the Syzygy Bradwells!” then, and we’d all raised our cups together, our unspotted hands clicking plastic on plastic as we shouted, “To the Syzygy Bradwells!”

  AS GINGER TAKES the wheel back from me this time, skinning off her pumps, I imagine she might wrap a whole poem around that funny word: “syzygy.” I imagine her stirring the word into the awkward call of the great blue heron, mixing these two things that don’t go together at all and capturing in iambic pentameter the joy of being who we were the last time we arrived together at Cook Island, four happy young women just weeks away from graduating into lives we were sure would be more real than the days and months and years we’d shared. It’s the kind of poem Ginger would do well—not that I know the difference between good poetry and bad. The kind of poem I want her to find inside herself. A poem about a time when we could strip down to swim naked in the cold water of the bay, focused on the wide stretch of our wings, on the few bright planets in an endless darkness that would, in just moments, break into beautiful dawn.

  GINGER

  THE CHAWTERLEY PIER, COOK ISLAND

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

  SKINNY-DIPPING: YOU have to wonder how different that shitass week at Cook Island might have been if we hadn’t shed our suits that first night, when we were still road dead after driving all the way from Michigan in that tin can of Mrs. Zhukovski’s. That’s what I’m thinking as my feet touch the rough wood
of the Chawterley pier now. A night: mysterious, tender, quiet, deep; / Heavy with flowers; full of life asleep; / Thrilling with insect voices; thick with stars; / No cloud between the dewdrops and red Mars.

  My biggest worry then was about the miniature Sonnets from the Portuguese I’d stolen, protected in a sandwich baggie all the way from Ann Arbor to keep it dry on the boat. Mother could have told you all about that goddamned “volume,” which was what she called it: that it was published in London in 1900, by Leopold B. Hill; that the cover was hand-colored (cream-yellow leather embossed with a rose-vine border of Christmas-morning red and green and gold, with a paste-down panel of a golden-winged peacock); that its value was so low that my theft of it was only a misdemeanor. She could recite every one of its flaws from memory, too: the fading o and first n of Sonnets; the slight bend where the covers overlap the smaller pages they bind; the missing corner fragment of page twenty-three. But it was the peacock on the cover I was drawn to when I was thirteen, when I slipped it from its proper place among Mother’s miniatures. The lovely peacock sitting on the shelf in Mother’s library, his unreadable face turned toward a puff of angel-white clouds, his elaborate back turned to me.

  I have this idea that my relationship with Mother must have been easy at some point, when I was three or seven or nine. Every child imagines her mother loves her, doesn’t she? Every mother imagines she loves her child. So how is it that we cross over from love to something more … complex? Is anything more complex than love?

  The first poem I wrote, when I started writing again, was about that night after Mia and Laney and Betts came with me to Cook Island, the moonlit bay water slipping over our skin. The second poem, oddly, was about the music Betts made on her zhaleika. Or that’s what I thought it was about. My teacher, when I went back to taking classes, decided it was about motherhood. So maybe it is. Maybe the bagpipe-y, oboe-y sound of that weird reed instrument, the giggle of it, is the sound of Betts and her mother, the sound I wanted to make with my own mother but never thought I could. The sound I want to make now with Anne.