The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay

by Beverly Jensen

  Avis waggled her cigarette. “Hoo-hoo!”

  Idella sighed and looked away. She felt like a broom handle standing there next to Avis, who was smoking so stylishly—blowing her smoke out in long, slow puffs that whooshed.

  “Come on,” Avis said, suddenly putting the cigarette out in a potted plant. “Let’s get in line for the can. I need to oui-oui, if you understand my French.” The line inside the ladies’ lounge was solid, snaking out past the mirrors of the outer room where women were applying more lipstick.

  “Too many cows, not enough stalls,” Avis whispered. “Let’s go to the upper level. Maybe the line’s shorter.” Before Idella could protest, Avis was walking right up the fancy curved stairway, as smooth as you please, nodding and smiling like she owned the place. Idella could barely catch up, her purse whapping against her knees as she climbed.

  “Avis, we’re not supposed to go up here.”

  “Pooh. A can’s a can. Look, it’s a shorter line.”

  It was shorter, and Idella suddenly was so glad to be able to pee that she didn’t care if they were supposed to be using the upstairs bathroom or not. When she finished, she stepped up to the line of sinks and washed her hands. A young girl handed her a towel. “Why, thank you.” The girl nodded. Idella heard the clink of coins. She noticed the little glass trays on each sink. Lord, she didn’t have any change. She stood there, frozen, wanting to give the towel back, but she’d already used it.

  “Here you go. That’s for the both of us.” Avis had come out of her stall and put a whole dollar in the girl’s dish.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Not at all.” Avis smiled and took a towel from her. She turned to Idella. “I’ll just powder my nose on the way out.”

  “Avis,” Idella pleaded under her breath, “let’s go back to our seats.”

  They walked past the remaining line, mostly old ladies, who were slow to get there. At the end, staring at them with those blinkless eyes, was Miss Lawrence. Mrs. Brumley was next to her. Idella forced herself to stop and smile.

  “Why, my dears, what a treat to find you up here!” Mrs. Brumley suddenly recognized them. “Are you enjoying the show? Isn’t it exciting? How sweet you look, Idella.” She spoke too loudly. “And, Avis, my dear, how stunning you are. Positively. Are you enjoying it?”

  “Very much, Mrs. Brumley, thank you.” Avis certainly was enjoying every minute of this.

  “I had a feeling the opera would find a friend in you.” Mrs. Brumley nodded and smiled. “It touches your inner passions, my dear. Just wait till the climax! It’s heartbreaking.”

  There was a sound of chimes, and the lights flickered.

  “I think you two had better return to your seats.” Miss Lawrence placed a protective hand on Mrs. Brumley’s shoulder. “It’s quite a ways back down.”

  All the way down the stairs and back to their seats, Avis mimicked Miss Lawrence. “‘You’d better get back down to your places.’ The old witch.”

  “Shhh!”

  “I hope she pees her panties before she gets a stall.”

  “Avis!”

  The curtain rose as their fannies hit the seats.

  Idella sighed, sat back, and waited patiently for the curtain to fall.

  It startled Idella clear out of her seat when the soldier pulled a knife and killed, actually killed, Carmen. She got her whole song in, though, before she let go. Then the soldier kept on singing, right over her dead body. Finally there was a roar of shouting and clapping.

  Now roses were being thrown onto the stage for the singers. Idella enjoyed seeing them all lined up taking great bows and smiling, gathering up the bouquets. Carmen was back on her feet, smiling and nodding. People all around Idella were shouting “Bravo!” and standing up.

  “Come on, Della!” Avis yanked on her arm till she was standing. “Bravo! Bravo!”

  Idella tried to clap, but her bag was too big. She stood clutching it amid the uproar. That whole last part since intermission, Avis had been awfully still, hands folded on her lap. Now she was practically on the ceiling with her wild clapping and yelling.

  They stood till the last rose was thrown and the last singer had left the stage.

  “Get your things, Avis. They’ll be waiting for us.” Idella had put on her coat ten minutes ago.

  Avis draped her coat, borrowed and stylish like everything else she was wearing, over her shoulders and walked up the aisle ahead of Idella.

  “Jesus,” Idella muttered when she found Avis waiting on the sidewalk. “Keep me waiting and then charge ahead, why don’t you?”

  “Oh, that was lovely, just wonderful.” Mrs. Brumley came rushing up to them. She was lit up like one of those chandeliers, and there were tears in her eyes. She grasped Avis’s hands and looked right at her. “You know now, my dear, don’t you? You understand why I come here every season. You must come with us again.”

  Miss Lawrence loomed out of the crowd and took hold of Mrs. Brumley’s elbow. “Let me give you girls money for the bus. Mrs. Brumley gets overstimulated at these operas. She needs a quiet ride home.” Miss Lawrence handed Idella exact change for two bus fares. She’d had it ready. “Do be careful coming in and going up to the bedroom.” She steered Mrs. Brumley toward a waiting cab.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” They were finally on their bus. Avis had gone from being all atwitter to stone quiet. Now, by God, she was sitting here on the bus crying, tears rolling down her cheeks. Idella hadn’t seen Avis cry for years. “What has gotten into you?”

  “Nothing, just nothing.”

  “Are you sick or something?” Idella whispered.

  “No, I’m not sick!”

  “Well, all right, then!” Idella looked out the window. Avis sat there sniveling the whole time the bus rolled along, picking up passengers and letting them off. “Two more stops,” Idella whispered.

  “I know, goddamn it, I’m not blind.”

  “Well, you don’t have to bite my head off!” Idella had had enough. She wanted to be in bed and done with all this.

  They got out of the bus and walked along in silence, Avis keeping a few steps ahead, as usual. It was so annoying. Suddenly Avis stopped deadbolt under a streetlight and turned around to Idella.

  “Yes, I am sick! I’m sick, Idella!” She was yelling.

  “Why, Avis!”

  “I’m sick of being kept in my place. Of being told what to do and where to go and where to sit. Of being out of place and too loud and not good enough. I want to have things like other people—like the people that get to go to the opera when they want to, and take cabs, and wear beautiful dresses like this. I look good in this dress, goddamn it! I look wonderful!” She twirled about under the yellow light. “I want to feel like those singers did onstage. Carmen let herself be big and loud as she pleased. She wasn’t afraid to live, Idella.”

  “But it got her into trouble, Avis. She got killed.”

  “I want to open my mouth that wide and have no one—not even you—tell me to keep it down, to turn it off, to sit on it, by God! I don’t want to crawl around on my hands and knees and do for everyone else in the whole damned world for the rest of my life. Just because we came down from Canada poor as church mice doesn’t mean we’re not as good as anybody else. That Lawrence dame is a glorified servant. She’s nobody! She wipes her ass like everybody. They all do!” Avis was yelling up to the sky, her arms flung out from her sides. People were crossing the street to avoid her. “They all shit and wipe their asses!”

  “Avis, please!”

  “Please what, Idella? Please, please, please, please, please! I’m tired of asking for things!” Suddenly she crumpled to the curb and sat, huddled, her knees up under her chin. The air seemed to leave her entirely.

  Idella opened her purse and took out the handkerchief. “Here, take this. It floated in this trunk all night. You might as well make some use of it.”

  Avis reached for it. “Thanks.” She started to laugh. “That’s you all over
, Idella.”

  “What?”

  “A square handkerchief in a big brown purse.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound too interesting.” Idella took Avis’s hand and helped her up. “If you weren’t my sister, I might hit you.”

  “I thought that because I am your sister you’d hit me.” Avis was blowing her nose, thank heavens. The storm seemed to be over.

  “You’re right.” Idella gave Avis a whack on the behind with the purse. “O-lay!”

  Avis laughed and took her coat off her shoulders, swooping it around like a matador’s cape. Idella came charging through it with her head down, her purse in front of her like a shield.

  “O-lay! O-lay! O-lay!” They were both shouting it and charging like bulls from streetlamp to streetlamp.

  “‘Toria-dorie bum da bum-bum bum!’ Sing, Idella, sing! We’ve been to the opera! Let’s sing! ‘Bum dum ba bum dum, la la la!’”

  “‘To market, to market, to buy a fat ho-o-o-o-o-g!’” Idella sang out. “‘Home again, home again, jiggity-joo-o-o-o-g!’”

  “Oh, brother.”

  “‘To market, to market, to buy a fat p-i-i-i-g!’” Idella let loose. “‘Home again, home again, now we are d-o-o-o-o-ne!’”

  “No, no, no, Idella.” Avis laughed. “That’s the plum-bun verse.”

  “Oh.”

  “Jesus, if you can’t get Mother Goose straight, you’ve got no career in the opera.”

  “No.” Idella giggled. “I guess I don’t.”

  They jigged and jogged together until they reached the old brownstone and sneaked quietly in, giggling past the sleeping ladies, up to the attic room.

  “Home again, home again,” Idella said, thankfully pulling her blanket up to her chin.

  “Now we are done.” Avis sighed.

  They lay side by side on Idella’s narrow bed. Their bones were familiar, lined up against each other.

  “What’s a plum bun anyway?” Idella whispered.

  “How the hell would I know?” Avis started to giggle. “A bun with a plum, I guess.”

  “Just asking.”

  “Go to sleep, Della.”

  “Okay.”

  “O-lay.”

  Panfried

  Scarborough, Maine

  July 1930

  Idella and Edward rolled over the hot sand until Idella was dizzy with him, until her hair was gritty and hopeless. Laughing and flea bitten, they rolled toward the water over broken bits of mussel shells and slimy blobs of seaweed. Sand was in her bathing suit and under her nails and between her toes. It clung all up and down her wet legs. The long fingers of a wave slapped over them. “Cold! Oh, God, it’s cold!” Idella screamed. She was as happy as she had ever been.

  She squirmed out from under him and ran back to their blanket, splaying herself across it. He followed. “Oh, Eddie, how will I get cleaned up enough? What’ll I tell Mrs. Gray? I’m all over sand. It’s in my ears, even.”

  He leaned over her and put the tip of his tongue in her ear. “Did you get sand under your suit?”

  Idella leaned up on her elbows. “I’ve got to start the Grays’ supper. I only have the afternoon off, not the whole day like you.”

  “I took the whole day. I didn’t have it. I took it.” His mouth was on hers, his lips soft and open and warm. “Mmm,” he said. “I like eating sand like this.”

  “We’d better stop.” She disentangled herself, then gathered up their towels and shook them out. Idella loved being with him. Even though he was a full six inches shorter, that didn’t matter. He was still handsome. With Eddie she felt like she was a desirable woman. After all, she was nearly twenty-two. And . . . well, they had gone pretty far in Eddie’s car—farther than she’d ever dreamed of going by choice.

  She’d met him at a dance at the Grange. She was dancing with Raymond Tripp, and along came Eddie and tapped him on the shoulder and cut in. She’d been startled—and pleased. That’s when he told her about selling whiskey off the pier at Old Orchard Beach. She thought he was enterprising and bold. Dad would have drunk up all the profits.

  The next week Avis came up from Boston and wanted to go out to Old Orchard. It had taken some swishing around on Idella’s part, but finally they got out to the pier. And there was Eddie, coming right up and taking her hand. Avis was madder than a wet hen. She went stalking off. But Idella didn’t mind. They’d walked along the pier and then under it. They’d had saltwater taffy. And they’d kissed, eating that candy, all sandy and melty in their mouths. They lay there under the pier, hearing the waves and the music and the sound of footsteps up above and seeing the moonlight coming down between the boards.

  Idella folded her dress and stockings and rolled them into her towel. “The tide’s gone out. Let’s look for sand dollars on the way back. They’re good luck.”

  She walked ahead of him, searching for signs of the flat white shells. “They like the tide pools. We used to find them up in Canada when we were kids and make believe they were real dollars. My sister Avis would use hers to play poker with Dad. I kept mine in a cigar box. Most dollars I ever had.”

  “What happened to them?” Eddie was walking along behind her, watching as she searched the edges of tidal pools.

  “Got thrown out probably.”

  Eddie stopped and poked his toe at something white. He bent down and scraped it clear. “Well, now, this isn’t a whole dollar.” He picked out broken bits. “I guess it’s spare change.”

  Idella took the biggest piece from him. It had traces of a star pattern, as though etched by delicate needles. She smiled and closed her fingers around it. “You have to start somewhere. Found money. I’ll take what I can get.”

  They walked until they came to the point of rocks that jutted out into the water. Mussels and periwinkles, exposed by the tide, were sharp to walk across. Strands of seaweed were slick underfoot. Eddie took her hand.

  “Look at that man out there.” Idella pointed to the smooth, steady strokes of a swimmer along the shore. “I think that’s a marvel. Can you swim like that, Eddie?”

  “I never learned to swim. Knight’s farm had a pond where the kids would all go, but my mother wouldn’t let me. Said I’d drown. Said it was full of cow dung and I’d get sick and die.”

  “Couldn’t you just go anyway?”

  Eddie laughed. “You don’t know my mother. She’d of come tearing down to that pond, and I would have jumped in and hoped, by God, to drown.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Oh, my, all right.”

  “I can’t swim right either. The water is too cold up in Canada. None of us girls were allowed to go in. Men’d go out fishing from the cliffs. And on Sundays we’d all climb down the ladder and have picnics on the little strip of beach. But it was rocks mostly.”

  They had rounded the point to the bay side. Here the water was flat and calm. There were many more people. Mothers lined the scalloped edges, holding discarded plastic shovels, their eyes trained on their children.

  “One time a couple of boys drowned down by the cliff shore. When I was seven. Mother was eight months along or so with my sister Emma. I remember clear as day seeing her run across that field. She lifted up her skirts, with that big belly, and ran to get to the ladder. Down over the edge she went, down to the beach to try to save those boys. But they were gone.” Idella and Eddie kept walking, angling between blankets and shoes with socks stuffed in them. “Who knew that she would be dead one month later? So healthy she was. Who knew? And me just seven.”

  Eddie stopped. Idella was startled by the abruptness. He turned toward her. The sun was behind him, but she could still make out the lovely clear blue of his eyes, prettier than the water.

  “I want you to come up to the house for supper this Saturday and meet Mother,” he said. “She’s been asking. You might as well meet her.”

  “Do you think she’ll like me, Eddie?”

  “No telling.” Eddie smiled and shrugged. “There is no telling with her, Idella. She don’t think right
sometimes.”

  This was not reassuring.

  Prescott Mills, Maine

  July 1930

  Eddie had come down Fletcher’s Hill to meet Idella at the bus, thank God. She was nervous enough already.

  “She’s been sitting there since lunch, watching and waiting.” Eddie helped her down and pointed at the house on top of the hill, where he lived with his parents. “It’s that big gray house, see. She’s on the porch. It’s screened in so you can’t see her, but she’s watching.”

  “Goodness! She’s been watching since lunch? Here it is almost supper.”

  “She’s been cleaning all week. Starched the curtains. Had them things stretched out on racks all over the house.”

  “Oh, that’s a big job. Doing curtains.” Idella wondered if she should mention to Mrs. Jensen how nice the curtains looked. “You mean the sheers, Eddie? She did the sheers?”

  “Hell, I don’t know what you call them. The curtains. She borrows them racks from Milly Masterson with the nails all over the edges. I cut myself on them every damn time, bringing them over for her. Look here.” Eddie showed her where he had been scratched as by a cat’s claw across the base of his thumb.

  Idella touched her fingers to her lips lightly and patted Eddie’s thumb. “There.”

  Eddie smiled, took her arm, and started up the hill, Idella wobbling in her new shoes.

  “Your mother doesn’t get out much? She’s not in any clubs or anything?”

  “Hell no. She sits on that porch, is all. You’ll like my father, though, and he’ll like you.”

  “You mean your mother won’t?”

  “There’s no telling, Idella. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “Oh. I see,” Idella said, not at all sure if she did. She felt like she was being led to market.

  Eddie opened the front gate for her. It hung down off its hinges, dragging across the dirt when he pushed it. “There’s another damn thing I’m supposed to fix,” he muttered.