The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  “How can you tell?”

  “You don’t usually mope around.”

  “I’m not moping.”

  “You’re not playing Giant Step, either.”

  Rosie’s tone was conclusive. As one of the younger children in a large family, she had learned early to put forth opinions with a confident air, and she could rarely be shaken from them, even by indisputable evidence to the contrary. Rosie believed there was always room for dispute.

  “I just don’t feel like it,” Helen asserted.

  “Could if you wanted to.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Do so, too.”

  Helen searched Rosie’s defiant, freckled face for any trace of bluff. She was not above it. But this was too tender a topic for Helen to let Rosie get away with a fib.

  “Makes you feel kinda sick,” Rosie described, “and like you don’t want anyone looking at you. And me, I even get worried sometimes … well, can maybe anybody … smell me.”

  Though she stressed the word smell, her voice was almost inaudible when she said it.

  “But you get used to it,” she continued more robustly. “And it doesn’t always hurt. My mom said it ain’t nothin’ next to having babies.”

  “I didn’t ever know you had it,” Helen said, impressed. Rosie was thirteen, too, but a few months younger than she.

  Rosie nodded. “A few times. Five now, I think. Or maybe four.”

  An electric bell on the side of the brick building rang loudly and long. Children began swarming into lines. A pack of boys some distance from the building were jostling one another against the chain-link fence. There were usually five or six who waited until the last possible moment to line up. Lloyd Mackey was always among them. Helen remembered Billy often being part of such a pack, too, but now he was in his second year at high school. They didn’t have recess in high school.

  Rosie and Helen stood up from the bench, but neither girl took a step. For Helen’s part, she didn’t want to leave because for the first time since that alarming night in her bathroom, she did not feel alone. The pamphlet from the library had said menstruation happened to every girl, but she still felt her experience to be overwhelmingly solitary and unique. Rosie’s bluntness had broken through that.

  “When my sisters got it,” Rosie said seriously, “they stopped being much fun. They used to throw balls with me and jump off swings and all, and after, they only wanted to lay around looking at movie magazines and trying new ways to comb their hair.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno.” Rosie looked at Helen appraisingly. “You won’t change, will you, Helen? I’m sure I won’t. I don’t care what anybody says.”

  Helen wondered how Rosie could believe herself capable of standing firm against the forces of nature. The library pamphlet, which the librarian had taken from a drawer behind the checkout counter, had revealed that the messy business of periods was only the start. More changes were coming. Some would be upon them soon, others down the road, after they were married. The pamphlet was hazy about men’s part in making babies, but it was clear they were essential.

  “Rosie, do you know about the nest?”

  “The what?”

  “You know, the blood. How it’s for a baby.”

  “Oh, yeah, that. Kinda nutty, huh?”

  A few teachers had come out onto the yard, their Miss Thompson among them. The girls started walking toward the lines of children.

  “But how do the babies get in there?” Helen dared to ask. She figured in the O’Brien family of eight children such information might be more available than in her household of close-mouthed adults.

  “My mom said it’s like a garden. The dad plants a seed and a baby grows from it.”

  Helen frowned. The pamphlet, though it used medical terms and diagrams, had presented a similarly inadequate metaphor.

  Grinning, Rosie linked her arm in Helen’s and inclined her head confidentially. “But I heard my brother Jimmy telling his friend Tom a joke about a tootsie roll and a lifesaver, and I think that’s the real scoop.”

  An ungenerous person would have deemed Rosie’s face plain, but even an ungenerous person would have to admit it had a certain elfin charm, especially when Rosie was smiling, as she was now, her upturned eyes sparkling with merriment at her own boldness.

  They had arrived close enough to the lines to hear Miss Thompson clapping her hands to signal for silence. The eighth-graders always led the school in. Rosie ran ahead. Helen reached the end of the line just as it began to move forward. Lloyd and fat Ron Greenberg thundered up from behind and cut in front of her. Ron, his wrinkled shirttail hanging out of the back of his pants, didn’t look at her, but Lloyd approximated an apology by turning around and winking at her. Another day she would have said something, and Lloyd would probably have let her go ahead of him, but today it seemed unimportant, a child’s matter.

  She walked up the two flights of stairs to the classroom in a daze. The joke about the candy was still not the bald information she craved, but it was more vivid and felt more genuine than any of the facts she’d had laid carefully before her over the past few days. She didn’t have to puzzle it out. It made sense to her so quickly, she realized she must have possessed the answer somehow all along. She felt embarrassed at knowing and embarrassed on behalf of all the mothers and fathers of her acquaintance. She wished she could un-know it. She resented Rosie for telling her.

  Miss Thompson was writing page numbers on the blackboard, and Helen’s classmates were taking out geography books. She did, too, opening to a chapter titled “The Dark Continent.” She shook off her disgruntlement with Rosie. After all, she had asked. She had wanted the secret, for a secret it clearly was. It was just that she’d never before considered that asking and finding out could result in a burden of knowledge impossible to ignore, an actual weight on the mind and heart. She wondered if further revelations lay in store. And she wondered what other hidden things she already knew.

  CHAPTER 7

  OCTOBER 1937

  Helen heard honking and paused in her raking to look up at a V-formation of Canada geese flying by. They were the first flock she’d spotted this year. They seemed bulky in the sky, their wings pumping valiantly, necks strained anxiously forward.

  After they’d passed, Helen became aware of another sound, the metallic swish, swish of a grass rake. She went to the plank fence and stepped onto the wooden soda crate kept there as a stool. Next door, working intently at the far side of his yard, Billy Mackey was also raking. His task was harder than hers, because the Mackeys had more trees, including three old apple trees. He was wearing baggy wool trousers and a snug sweater vest, and he had rolled his shirtsleeves up. Yellow jackets were circling him, disturbed from feasting on the rotten windfall fruit he was raking up along with the leaves.

  Helen delayed calling to him. There was something enjoyable about watching him when he didn’t know she was there. She admired how the muscles of his arms moved with each pull on the rake and how his torso twisted rhythmically like a little piece of a Fred Astaire dance. His sandy hair, usually tamed with brilliantine, had shaken loose with his exertions, and a couple of locks hung down over his forehead, the ends curled like commas. She wondered that it didn’t bother him, and if she’d been close enough, she didn’t think she could resist reaching out and pushing it back for him.

  “Hey!” he said in greeting, noticing her at last. She’d been standing there only a minute, but it had seemed much longer.

  “Hey,” she answered.

  He leaned his rake against a tree trunk and walked toward her. He was smiling, and to see that smile warmed her ridiculously.

  “What’s cookin’?” he said when he reached the fence. He had to tilt his head to look up at her, and when he did, the errant locks of hair fell back off his forehead. Her desire to brush at them with her fingers remained, however.

  “I’ve got to rake our yard, too,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

&nbs
p; “How come your brother’s not helping you?”

  “Basketball practice.”

  “Oh, right,” Helen remembered. Lloyd Mackey was the star of the eighth-grade team.

  “But I’m gonna leave some for him,” Billy said. “Maybe in the corner where there’s the most apples. Darn yellow jackets bit me twice already.”

  He held up one arm to show her a red swelling near his elbow, then turned his head and pointed to another, meaner swelling on the side of his neck. Helen felt a quick, dropping sensation in her gut, like when her father drove too fast over a dip in the road.

  “Want some baking soda?”

  “Naw. Can’t even feel the one on my arm anymore.”

  He backed away, turning after a few steps and trotting to where he’d left the rake. Helen climbed down and resumed her own raking. Soon she’d accumulated three satisfying piles.

  “Helen, hey, Helen!” she heard from the Mackey yard.

  She went to the crate. Billy was right at the fence, his hand over one ear, a grimace of pain on his face.

  “Got me again,” he said. “I’ll take that baking soda this time.”

  She hopped down and ran into her kitchen, where she mixed baking soda and cold water into a paste in a small Willoware bowl.

  To get around the fence, Helen had to go to the front of her house and up the Mackeys’ driveway. She found Billy on a bench next to the garage, his head leaning back against the garage wall.

  Businesslike, she set the bowl on the bench, scooped up a gob of paste, and applied it gently to the angry lump on his ear. He winced, but he didn’t complain. He made no objection when she smeared some paste on the bite on his arm, and when he saw her swabbing up more from the bowl, he obligingly turned his head so that she could reach the bite on his neck. Her fingers trembled a little as she put the paste on his neck with a careful, stroking motion. He glanced sideways at her with a questioning look.

  “It’s getting dried out,” she explained. “Doesn’t want to stick.”

  As if to prove her right, two powdery clots, one from his neck and one from his ear, broke off and fell inside his collar. Laughing, he stood up and pulled his shirt out of his pants, shaking his shirttails to let the clots of dried paste fall free. Helen laughed, too, and sat down, leaning her back against the garage wall and wiping her pasty hand on her pleated wool skirt. Billy perched on the forward edge of the bench, his body angled towards her as if he were about to relate something important. Though he was still grinning, his expression had turned serious, and Helen wasn’t sure which part to address, his easy smile or his vehement eyes.

  “Did you see the geese went by before?” she said.

  He shook his head no. She looked up into the sky, searching for geese, listening for their noise.

  “Hey,” he said softly, “Florence Nightingale.”

  He must have been moving as he spoke because when she turned her face to him, she was surprised at how near he was. There was only a small space left to close before his mouth was on hers, a feathery swipe of lips, then a brief withdrawal, then a firmer press, less tentative, long enough for her to feel his breath against her cheek, long enough for his hands to cradle her hips as if he wanted to steer her. She clenched her fingers around the splintery edge of the bench and twined her ankles together beneath it.

  When he pulled away, she regretted his leaving. She knew she was supposed to be outraged, that she should slap his face like they did in the movies, but instead she wished fervently that he’d kiss her again right away.

  Billy abruptly stood.

  “Gee, Helen, I hope you don’t think I’m a heel.”

  Helen looked down from his worried face and began scuffing the dirt with the toe of one shoe. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Instead she gave a shrug of her shoulders so slight it could have been taken as reproof or release or a little bit of both. He waited, but she continued to watch her foot kick up dust.

  “Well, it’s not like it was a real kiss,” he finally said in a different, louder tone. His voice had lost all trace of plaintiveness.

  She looked sharply at him and found that he didn’t appear as decisive as he’d sounded. But she saw, too, that he would not back down.

  “Didn’t seem like you minded much, anyhow,” he said, and he dared a smirk.

  Now she did feel like slapping him. Not for the kiss, but for the amusement in his face, however much put on. Maybe, even, because it was put on. She grabbed the bowl and ran down the driveway.

  In her own yard, she crouched behind a bush that hid her from the sight of anyone looking out a window and from Billy, should he decide to peer over the fence.

  In a few minutes, she heard the sound of Billy’s rake again. And he was whistling. She put her hands over her ears and started counting aloud. When she reached a hundred, she decided, she’d go into the house. Her father could scold all he liked, she’d do no more yard work today.

  Walter was in a temper that evening, but it wasn’t about Helen’s shirking. He was stony throughout dinner. Emilie kept casting assessing glances at him, but she didn’t question him, which told Helen that her mother already knew the source of his irritation. Her grandmother chose to ignore his mood, and it was taken for granted that Helen wouldn’t be inquisitive. The three females maintained intermittent conversation on easily exhausted topics—Helen’s homework, the butcher’s new kittens, the possibility of frost overnight.

  Helen was surprised when her father made a rare after-dinner appearance in the kitchen, where she was scraping the plates and her grandmother was filling the sink with hot soapy water.

  “Nanny,” he said, “if you would join us in the living room?”

  The request, though polite enough, was not really an invitation.

  “We’ll soon be done here,” Ursula said.

  “Helen can manage on her own,” Walter countered. “Let her finish one job today.”

  “Very well,” Ursula said. “Helen, don’t forget to wipe down the stove.”

  Helen washed and rinsed the dishes and flatware and pots. When she couldn’t dislodge some bits of crisped pork from the roasting pan, she put it to soak. She went into the dining room to brush crumbs off the tablecloth. The sliding doors to the living room stood slightly ajar. When she heard her father mention her name in a loud voice, she tiptoed quickly to the partially closed door to eavesdrop.

  “To have a neighbor tell me what my own daughter is up to!” her father was saying.

  “I thought it was Emilie Mrs. Durkin told it to,” her grandmother replied calmly.

  “The point is that you planned to have Helen perform at a seance next week without so much as a by-your-leave from either of us. I won’t have it, Nanny. I just won’t have it.”

  Helen was startled. Her grandmother hadn’t consulted her, either, about another seance.

  Emilie spoke then, but her voice was so low, Helen couldn’t make out what she’d said.

  “It’s unseemly for a girl of her age to exhibit herself like that,” Walter asserted.

  “I was not much more when I began.”

  “You weren’t my daughter.”

  “Nein. And still I am not. You cannot forbid me.”

  “Walter doesn’t mean—”

  “Don’t presume to explain me, Emilie. What I can forbid, Nanny, and what I do forbid is for Helen to assist you in any way with your séances.”

  “The girl has a gift,” Ursula said, as if she were noting something as obvious as the furniture around them.

  “A gift for what? Charlatanism?”

  “Walter! My mother is not a charlatan!”

  “No? And will you swear you have never tilted her table with your foot, or moistened an envelope with alcohol so that she might see through to the secret question sealed inside, or some other such shenanigans?”

  A lengthy silence ensued after this outburst. Fearing that one of the adults might be about to slide the door open, Helen reluctantly turned away. Then she heard her grandm
other’s voice, hard and strong.

  “You are right, Walter,” she was saying, though somehow she made it sound like she was telling him he was wrong. “Sometimes my Emilie must help. Even if she doesn’t like to. Sometimes it is the kindest thing, instead of sending a sitter home still with fears and questions. But do you really doubt the dead can reach the living?”

  Now Helen could not even consider leaving her listening post.

  “Ursula,” Walter said. It was the first time Helen had ever heard her father use her grandmother’s name. “I am a man of business. I have a practical mind. I believe that God could not mean so marvelous a creation as man to end at death, but I don’t know if spirits can return to our world, or if they would want to. You say they can and do. I won’t dispute that. I know you to be an honest woman at heart, in spite of the seance mischief. But I will not have my daughter become a target for people sunk in grief, nor for nonbelievers ready to ridicule.”

  “She truly has a gift,” Ursula repeated.

  “She’s a child,” Walter countered.

  “She is not so much a child anymore. Emilie told you? At such a change, the ability to meet spirits, it grows.”

  Helen blushed fiercely.

  “That’s neither here nor there. She is still child enough to be under my direction.”

  “Nanny,” Emilie said, “how are you so sure Helen has a gift?”

  “I have seen it at work.”

  “Well, I’ve seen nothing,” Walter declared. “Nothing at all. Have you, Emilie?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “No buts. There is evidence, or there isn’t.”

  “And must you be witness, Walter, to trust that something is true?” Ursula challenged.

  “Not always. But certainly if it’s something that could well be an exaggeration or someone’s imagination.”

  “Then there can be only one answer.”

  A quiet followed. Helen pictured her father and her grandmother staring each other down, like in the game she and Rosie played to see who’d blink first. It was Ursula who broke the silence, though Helen did not suppose from that that she’d been the one to lose the contest.