The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  Dear Brick,

  She stared at his name, took another draw on the cigarette.

  I’m writing this because I’m scared. I want to tell you we got a problem, and I don’t want you yelling before I can finish explaining.

  She set down the pen and balanced her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. Brick had bought it for her in Niagara Falls, when he was with Ellie and the kids, of course. “You never take me anywhere,” she had said to him when he handed it to her. “I make you feel like a man, but she still gets to be the woman in your life.”

  That argument had ended like all their other fights because she could not say no to Brick McGinty. All he had to do was reach into her blouse and nibble on her ear, and the heat rose in her like steam.

  When was the last time he’d done that?

  As you know—It was your idea for me to use the diaphragm because you said using a rubber was like taking a shower with a raincoat on. She paused. She’d driven alone to the doctor’s office for that appointment, and lied to everyone—the receptionist, then the nurse, then Dr. Harris—about how she was secretly getting married in a month to a man in her hometown of Foxglove. “He’s not Catholic,” she’d whispered to each of them. “Mama needs more time to get used to the idea, but we don’t want to wait.”

  Rosemary ground out her cigarette. “Jesus Christ,” she said, remembering the first time she didn’t use the diaphragm. “What the hell was I thinking?”

  She heard a car pull up in the lot and glanced out the window.

  “Shit.”

  Rosemary stood up quickly and felt another wave of nausea, so she sat back down. She could hear Aunt Lizzie’s heels echoing in the stairwell. The door was unlocked. There was no stopping this.

  Aunt Lizzie tapped on the door. “Rosie?” She turned the doorknob and frowned at the sight of her niece at the table. “You’re as white as a ghost.” She closed the door and sat down at the table. She felt Rosemary’s forehead. “Your head’s a little warm. How are you feeling?”

  Rosemary stood up from the table and ran into the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet. She retched as her aunt stood in the doorway. She pulled on the lever to flush, and ripped off a piece of toilet paper to wipe her mouth.

  “How far along are you?”

  Rosemary dropped the wad of paper into the toilet. “I’m not sure,” she said, speaking into the bowl. “Two months maybe.”

  “Je. Sus. Christ.”

  Rosemary closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. “Aunt Lizzie, I’d appreciate it if you’d save me the lecture. I already know how screwed I am.”

  “Who did this to you, Rosie?”

  “Aunt Lizzie, nobody did anything to me. I was a willing participant.”

  “Wash your face,” Lizzie said. “I’ll wait for you in the kitchen.”

  Rosemary splashed cold water on her face and brushed her teeth, and sat down across from Aunt Lizzie.

  “It’s not one of the Sardelli boys, is it?”

  “I’m pregnant, not insane.” She covered her face with her hands. “I’m in trouble, Aunt Lizzie. Big trouble.”

  “So, you finally met Brick McGinty.”

  Rosemary started to sob. “What am I going to do?”

  Lizzie lit a cigarette with Brick’s lighter. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from him? How the hell did you meet him?”

  “He started coming to the bar more often. I know you don’t believe it, and I can see why you wouldn’t, after I talked about how I wanted to meet him. But I didn’t do anything before he became a regular at the bar. What am I going to do?”

  “Well, you’re going to have a baby, I guess. Unless you—”

  “Never.”

  “Women do it now. There are doctors in New York.”

  “This is my baby. My chance to do something good in the world.”

  “Rosie.”

  “I’m having the baby.”

  “Not here, you’re not,” Lizzie said. “We could send you away. To family.”

  Rosemary shook her head. “I’m never going back to Foxglove. You can’t make me go back there.”

  “Who are you talking to here?” Lizzie said. “I’m the one who saved you from Foxglove, remember? Danny’s sister lives in Scranton, about five and a half hours from here. She’s married, they have two kids. You can have the baby there.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then you let Danny and me adopt it.” Rosemary yanked her hand away, and Lizzie’s voice grew louder. “You know how much I’ve always wanted a baby. Danny never wanted to adopt a stranger’s baby. But this. This is family. And you.” Lizzie shook her head, blinking back tears. “And you could move away and start over. Nobody would ever have to know.”

  Rosemary crossed her arms as she leaned against the back of her chair. “You’re serious.”

  “You got a better plan, Rosie? Brick McGinty is never going to marry you. He’ll deny the child is his. Your baby will grow up a bastard child.”

  “Aunt Lizzie, how could you say that?”

  “It’s not what I think, Rosie. It’s what everyone else will think. And how are you going to support it? Take care of it?”

  “Him.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You keep calling the baby ‘it.’ ”

  “Well, you don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

  “I know,” Rosemary said, placing her hand on her abdomen. “I can feel him.”

  Lizzie scrunched her cigarette in the ashtray. “You think he’s going to want this baby. That you’re going to tell him you’re pregnant and presto chango he’s going to leave his wife and children so that he can marry you.”

  “I don’t care if Brick ever lays eyes on this child.”

  “Lie to yourself if you want, honey, but don’t lie to me. I know you. You think everything changes when he finds out you tricked him and got pregnant.”

  “Aunt Lizzie, I did not trick him. We had been fighting. And drinking. We made up. I got caught up in the moment.”

  “Make sure you’re standing in a crowded room when you tell him that.”

  “This baby is mine,” Rosemary said, more softly. “I’m sorry, Aunt Lizzie, but it would kill me to have my child not know I was his mommy.”

  “Oh, Rosie, you have no idea,” Lizzie said, dabbing her eyes with a paper napkin. “You have no idea how hard this is going to be.”

  “I know, Aunt Lizzie. But you won’t leave me alone in this, will you? You’ll be the best aunt ever.”

  “I’ll help you,” Lizzie said, her voice resigned. “But you do have to decide what you’re going to do about Brick McGinty. We have to talk about what comes next.”

  “Why does he need to know?” A car door slammed and they both startled. Rosemary squeezed her aunt’s hand. “That could be him.” Rosemary picked up the lighter and slipped it into the pocket of her robe before looking out the window.

  Five cars in the parking lot. Not one of them was his.

  Ellie stood at the kitchen window and watched Sam cup her hands under the apple tree to yell up at Reilly. “No, no, to your right. See them? There must be seven right there. Throw ’em down one at a time.”

  Sam covered her head with her arms and ducked as an apple landed inches from her feet. “Not throw.” Ellie could hear Reilly’s high-pitch protest. “Okay, okay,” Sam yelled. “I should have said drop. Just drop them down to me.” She caught three in a row, laughing as she tossed each one into the basket. “There you go. We’re on a roll, Reill.”

  Ellie walked away from the window wondering yet again how short, squat Ellie McGinty could have produced this tall, willowy girl. Not yet a teenager, but by last fall she had shot up taller than her mother and was all limbs, arms and legs flapping about like those of a marionette. Over the summer, Sam had sprouted breasts an
d an attitude.

  “Mouthy and oblivious,” she’d described her to Mardee. “Glides into a room like she owns it, completely unaware of the perverts gawking at her.” Mardee just laughed and patted Ellie on the back. “Oh, boy. Here we go.”

  Ellie missed her little girl, and how she used to hang on her mother’s every word. Now, whenever Ellie tried to confide in Sam she noticed a subtle shift in her daughter’s demeanor. As if she’d heard enough, Ellie thought. As if it were no longer special to know her mother’s secrets.

  Ellie’s eyes stung as she recalled last night’s exchange. Sam had been finishing the dishes as Ellie wiped the stove top and mentioned how she missed Brick, who was working overtime again. Sam sighed, loudly, and looked away.

  “Something wrong, Sam?”

  “Nothing that isn’t always wrong,” Sam said, draining the sink. “I mean, there’s always something, right, Mom?”

  Ellie threw the rag onto the counter and walked out of the room. Two hours later, she was still sitting on the couch alone while Sam blasted Motown in her bedroom, guaranteeing Brick’s bad mood when he finally walked through the door.

  Ellie was tired of refereeing between those two. Brick didn’t like Sam’s music, and he didn’t like most of her friends for the same reason. “She’s going to date black boys, that one,” Brick said. “I’ll be damned if that’s going to happen in my house.”

  Two weeks later, on the hottest night in July, Brick pulled into the driveway just as Gary Colbert strolled by the house and smiled at Sam on the porch swing. Brick insisted to Ellie he would have let it go if he hadn’t seen Sam giggle and wave at the boy with a look he’d never seen before on his daughter’s face. “Like she had a crush on him or something,” he said. “Our Sam.”

  Brick yanked Sam off the swing so hard she had a big bruise on her upper arm the next day. “It was an accident,” he told Ellie just as Sam was walking into the kitchen for breakfast. “I said I was sorry.”

  Sam’s face was defiant. “No, you said you didn’t mean it. You never apologized.”

  “Jee-zuz Christ.”

  “You can’t make me hate black people just because you do,” Sam said, glaring at Brick. “And you can’t stop me from loving who I want. My body, my heart.”

  That did it. Brick grounded Sam on the spot, for two weeks. “I hear you as much as mention that boy’s name, and I’ll lock you in your room until school starts.”

  “Fine,” Sam yelled as she marched upstairs to her room and slammed the door. Minutes later, Stevie Wonder was belting out “I Was Made to Love Her” and Sam was grounded for the rest of the summer.

  “You had to blast the Motown,” Ellie said to her tearful daughter the next morning. “You knew that would set him off.” Sam wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I’m not going to be like you, Mom. I’m not going to put up with him acting like my opinions never matter.”

  What was she teaching her daughter? She’d been asking herself that ever since, trying to see herself through Sam’s eyes. What did Sam make of Ellie’s life? Ellie was vice president of the Women’s Guild at church now, and PTA president at Reilly’s school. She read the Erietown Times every day now, too, before Brick got home, so that Sam could hear both of her parents discussing the evening news. Did Sam even notice?

  Ellie looked out the kitchen window again. The kids’ basket was almost full of apples, and the sight of it reminded Ellie of the other basket in the living room, full of Brick’s work clothes waiting to be ironed. She’d been washing them for nearly three years now after his temper tantrum about Bill Grandin during the strike. Not because she wanted to, but because he had told her that was how it was going to be. “What have you got to do all day anyway?” he’d said. “It’s not like you have a job.”

  She made a decision to do more at church the very next week. She needed to be with people who saw her as someone other than Brick McGinty’s wife, or Sam and Reilly’s mother. At Erietown Presbyterian, she was Ellie McGinty. Soprano in the choir. Devotions leader at the Women’s Guild weekly luncheons. Organizer of the after-church coffee and cake in the fellowship hall. “There’s talk that you should be Guild president next year,” Donna Dickerson had told her last fall after choir rehearsal. “I’m going to nominate you, if Laurie Madison doesn’t beat me to it.

  Ellie turned to look at her. “I had no idea anyone would want me.”

  Laurie patted the gold cross hanging around Ellie’s neck. “We joke that your nickname is ‘Call Ellie.’ Need to wrangle a new coffeepot out of Pastor Shiflet? Call Ellie. Need a cleanup crew for the annual Father’s Day dinner? Call Ellie.”

  When Ellie shared that conversation with Sam, her daughter had actually looked pleased. “President of the Guild?” Sam said. “You mean, like in charge of everything?”

  “Well, I guess I would be running things,” Ellie said, smiling shyly.

  “Pretty cool, Mom. It’s not a career, but it’s something.”

  Someday Ellie might tell Sam how that had made her feel. Maybe.

  Ellie glanced up at the clock. Only four o’clock. Another long evening without her husband, who was working overtime again. She looked at the full dish rack. Why didn’t they have a dishwasher by now? All that extra money he was making, and she couldn’t name one new thing in their house. Her allowance hadn’t moved up by a dime.

  She thought again about the basket of clothes in the living room. Every week, she had done exactly as she was told, washing another load of his filthy work clothes, and then ironing them because that’s how he wanted them before he got them filthy again. She reached under the sink to pull out a paper bag from Kroger, and walked to the living room. She grabbed a handful of the clothes and heard Sam’s approaching footsteps as she started shoving them into the bag.

  “You want me to iron those, Mom?”

  “Nope.” Ellie picked up another handful and crammed them into the bag.

  Sam spoke more slowly. “Would you like me to help fold them before you do that?”

  “Nope.” Ellie crammed the last two shirts into the bag and handed it to Sam. “Put this on the back porch.”

  Sam took the bag, but didn’t move. “You sure you want Dad to see his clothes like this?”

  Ellie picked up the empty basket and started walking back into the kitchen. “I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life. If your father wants his work clothes cleaned and pressed, he can get them laundered by Bill Grandin, just like everybody else at the plant.”

  “Cool,” Sam said, hugging the bag to her chest as she followed her mother. “Hope I’m here when you tell him.”

  As soon as she saw his car, Rosemary knew something was wrong.

  Ever since their first night together, Brick had parked behind the bar, next to her old Thunderbird, and waited for her upstairs in her apartment. This time—the last time, she would always remember—his car was parked on the side of the building, next to her apartment stairwell. His engine purred, the exhaust pipe puffing clouds of vapor into the night as he sat behind the wheel, blowing smoke through the window that was barely cracked open.

  His eyes narrowed as she approached him. Ah, she was getting this Brick tonight. Angry Brick. Victim-of-the-World Brick. She knew him well. “Hello, stranger,” she said. “I was beginning to think you’d left town.”

  He rolled up the window and cut the engine. She turned and walked toward the stairwell. She heard his car door open and his left shoe land on the gravel. She turned to face him and leaned against the doorjamb. He closed the car door with a soft thud and shoved his keys into his back pocket.

  She raised her face toward the night sky and started softly counting aloud. “Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.” She put her hand on her hip and forced a smile. “Seventeen. Seventeen days since you’ve been here.”

  Brick said nothing as he approached. She nodded toward the stairwell. “I�
��ve got some hamburger upstairs. And that pepper jack you like. Want me to make you a cheeseburger?”

  He threw his cigarette on the ground. “Can’t stay.”

  She looked down at the ground and watched the cigarette’s ember flicker. Stay calm, she told herself. She shifted and threw her hair back before meeting his eyes. “Is that any way to treat your girlfriend?”

  “Keep it down.”

  Rosemary took a step toward him. “Brick, I—”

  He held out his arms and pressed his palms against her shoulders. “No. Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  He took a step back. “We have to talk.”

  “Of course we do,” she said, reaching out to touch his face. He took another step back.

  “Dammit. I said don’t.”

  Her arm fell at her side. “Brick, what’s the matter? Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick about you. And I have—”

  He plunged his hand into his pants pocket and started jingling his coins. Rosemary clenched her jaw. This was not how this was supposed to go. Not here. Not like this.

  “Brick, I have to tell you something.”

  He shook his head and looked at the ground. “I can’t.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head again, his fingers working the coins. “I can’t do this anymore. It’s wrong.”

  “Brick, wait.” She shivered and folded her arms across her chest. “You don’t know what I have to tell you.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “This isn’t working.” He looked around before continuing. “Look, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. She didn’t deserve this. Ellie. Ellie didn’t do anything to deserve this. And Ellie needs me.”

  The sound of Ellie’s name on his lips emboldened her.

  “Oh, we’re saying her name now, are we? The woman you said I was never allowed to mention? Ellie? Ellie needs you?”

  The outdoor lights on the bar flicked off, casting them in darkness. “Vinny’s closing up,” she said. “He’ll be out here any minute. Let’s go upstairs and talk, where no one can hear us.”