The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  “What have you been up to?” she asks him.

  Ray shrugs. He gives her that lopsided grin. “Same old thing. Music.”

  He joined a band she’d never heard of and went off to make records and tour after graduating from prep school. Her memories of Ray end then. She hated high school, was lost, a faceless person in the beige hallways. Every moment of her time there focused on clever schemes of escape—forged notes from the nurse to cover skipped classes; day trips with older boyfriends to Newport, Rhode Island, or driving around in their cars drinking; having sex in their boyhood bedrooms, all of them stuck, somehow, within the grid of the town—mechanics, shop workers, lightning rod installers. And then she got out and tried college to appease her father—three semesters of courses at a staid women’s college, in large lecture halls where she once again felt overwhelmed by namelessness, where the girls all knew each other, and where her ability to memorize the details of hundreds of slides of art, and construct and support an eloquent thesis, brought her excellent grades but no appreciation of her own achievement. She hated it too much to stay, eventually getting a job at Lord & Taylor, selling men’s accessories behind a counter—scarves and gloves and beautiful wallets. Across the shining aisle the women in cosmetics stood like mannequins with their garish faces. She had to carry her personal items into the store in a clear plastic tote and at the end of the day pass through the security exit like a thief. Once she met Craig the promise of a new life took over, with its babies to tend, its house—swatches of fabric, paint samples, like the dollhouse she’d decorated as a child, spending hours sewing miniature curtains cut from her mother’s discarded cocktail dresses.

  “It’s been a long time,” Ray says then. “Twenty years?”

  Sadie admits it might be longer. “What are you doing back?”

  Ray stares at her. He says his father has died, and Sadie realizes she has been cocooned in her own grief, that she has not read a newspaper or left the house for anything but errands in weeks. Ray tells her he’s staying at Wappaquassett, where Beth still lives with their mother. He says that they want him to take over the farm and the store, and Sadie tries to remember the last time she stopped at Filley’s, Ray’s father always so kind to her—giving the children apples, tiny pumpkins, putting extra ears of corn in the bag, adding a Christmas wreath for free when they bought their tree.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. She puts her hand to her chest.

  Ray stares at her again. She cannot fathom what he’s thinking. He reaches out his hand and brushes a piece of her hair from her face, gently, tenderly. She smells the cigarette, the gasoline. Later that evening, folding the children’s clothes, stacking them in small piles, loading the dishwasher, locking the doors of her house, the street outside shining and black from rain, the neighbor’s porch lights halos on the front walks, she thinks of his hand moving toward her face, the way he looked at her, and it’s as if something dormant has sprung from the ordered dignity of her married life.

  June 12, 1979

  IN HAMLET HILL THE FRONT lawns were the site of baseball games and freeze tag, the grass threadbare, littered with bikes, gloves, Popsicle sticks. Sadie Watkins was an only child, the smartest of the neighborhood girls and the responsible one asked that summer to house-sit for Mrs. Sidelman, who planned to vacation at her cottage on the Connecticut shore. Sadie’s mother vehemently refused to allow Sadie to do it, making up some excuse about its being too much responsibility, but then her father intervened, and Sadie was permitted to accept. On the last day of school in June, Sadie was given a key, which she kept in her jewelry box, and every morning she let herself into Mrs. Sidelman’s shake-shingled Colonial, checked her houseplants, and fed the cats that appeared on Mrs. Sidelman’s slate terrace after they slunk, primitive and bony, beneath the barbed wire separating Filley Farm’s pastures from the tended backyards across the street. In the evening she returned and flipped on the outdoor lights, and retrieved the mail. In the afternoons she watered the annuals in the concrete planters. The damp soil gave off a smell she liked—one she remembered from spring and crawling behind the shrubs in front of her house as a child, where lily of the valley grew, little bells on delicate stalks. As a young girl, Sadie imagined small people, like those from The Borrowers, crawling out from inside the crack of the concrete foundation and sitting with a book under the bell-shaped flowers. Her parents were notorious arguers, their shouting blooming on summer days through window screens, spilling out in tantalizing bits into the neighborhood. Sadie noticed that when she entered the room the drama of the moment faded, the heated conversation ceased, and so it was in her interest to become small and invisible, to wedge herself behind things, to flatten and slip beneath the bed, to make hideouts, to spy on everyone.

  “Like a rodent,” her father had said once, his shoes tamping down the carpet.

  Hiding in the pantry, Sadie would eavesdrop on her mother’s phone calls. Clare Watkins was an actress. She joined the community theater group, the Tunxis Players, when Sadie was a baby, and performed each season—Evelyn in Guest in the House, Elvira in Blithe Spirit, Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Raina in Arms and the Man, Hannah in The Night of the Iguana. Sadie grew up with her mother in various roles, and she was always confused about who she was at any given moment. Brooding actress? Shy cripple? Crazed seductress? Was her mother actually afraid of birds, or was it a character from a play? Sadie would lean up against the pantry shelves filled with Tang and Bisquick, with boxes of sweetened breakfast cereal, and hear her mother’s voice soften in a new way, begging the caller to Stop! and giggling like a girl being teased. All of this was disconcerting, but none of it as terrible as the times Sadie overheard her mother discuss her with one of her friends.

  “Sadie’s so serious,” she’d said once. “Where did she come from? I think the nurses gave me the wrong baby in the hospital.”

  Inside the pantry Sadie nodded slightly in agreement. She had always felt she didn’t belong to her parents—that perhaps she was a changeling exchanged by elves for her mother’s real daughter. Somewhere in a leafy glade a sunny, talkative, guileless girl was dancing and singing like Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie. Other times she would imagine that it was she, not Laura Loomis, who had been destined to disappear, that there was a secret world into which Laura had slipped, like the girls in the books she read (Jessamy, Time at the Top) who step into a closet or ride an elevator and are transported to another time and place where they are someone else—a girl in a large family, who is able to solve a mystery.

  Sadie grew to depend on her visits to Mrs. Sidelman’s that summer. She could escape there on the pretense of “doing her job,” let herself into the empty house, and then sit for hours in the living room reading, the dust motes and the warmth of the sun through the front window soothing. Mrs. Sidelman’s library was composed of Book-of-the-Month Club selections from the forties and fifties, and secondhand books with faded inscriptions: To Maureen, my little concubine, forever, Simon. Sadie immersed herself in The Catcher in the Rye, Appointment in Samarra, The Sheltering Sky, the smell of the pages one she recognized from the town library, which she would come to learn later was a combination of chemical compounds formed from the disintegration of glue and paper and ink. She turned the yellowed pages carefully. She imagined where the books had been, who had read them, whose pencil had created the marginalia. Sometimes she slipped into the kitchen and found food to eat—saltines with butter, a jar of sweet pickles.

  Each day she explored more of the house, venturing upstairs to lie on Mrs. Sidelman’s children’s abandoned beds like Goldilocks. From the master bedroom window she could see into Filley Farm’s pasture, and sometimes Ray Filley himself with his dogs, the dogs running loose and fast between the pines. Sadie had always been conscious of Ray Filley, casting him as pretend characters in scenarios she’d dream up—as a British intelligence officer during World War II or a surly cowboy on a California ranch. But that summer she sat and watched him clap his hands for his
dogs, brush his hair back, and imagined inviting him into Mrs. Sidelman’s house. What they might do, or talk about, was always open to speculation, changing from day to day. Sometimes, after Ray disappeared, his younger sister, Beth, would appear. Laura Loomis had been Beth Filley’s best friend, and after Laura went missing Beth was taken out of public school and enrolled, like Ray, in private, as if that would prevent her from going missing, too. Sadie watched Beth, small and spry, follow secretly behind Ray, and she marveled that Beth moved so fearlessly through the pastures and woods alone. Sadie quickly ducked back from the window when she saw her, as if Beth’s boldness revealed her as some sort of magical being with the ability to spot her.

  One afternoon, Sadie investigated Mrs. Sidelman’s breakfront, her desk, the kitchen cupboards. She knew that everyone had secrets: a diary hidden under a floorboard, a notebook of poems written in fading ink, a hatbox filled with high school mementos. Finally, slipped beneath a soft pile of sweaters in a cedar chest she found an old playbill: Billy Rose’s Aquacade, New York World’s Fair 1939, a swimming exposition starring Eleanor Holm and Johnny Weismuller. Eleanor posed in a white bathing suit and high heels. She had her head thrown back, her mouth open and laughing, her hair curling around her pale shoulders. Had Mrs. Sidelman gone to the fair and seen the show? Had it been a momentous occasion for her? It was a large booklet, and Sadie flipped through it quickly and a small packet of letters fell out. They were addressed to Bea Brownmiller, postmarked 1947. Sadie set the packet of letters aside. There were no marks in the playbill until the back, after the ads for Kern’s Frankfurters, Chesterfield cigarettes, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, where the cast of the show was listed and a name was underlined with a careful hand: Bea Brownmiller. Sadie knew Mrs. Sidelman’s first name was Bea from her mail retrieval. She looked at the name, listed under “Aquafemmes.” Mrs. Sidelman had been in the show, alongside girls named Constance Constant and Loretta Orleta, girls who performed at Billy Rose’s nightclub the Diamond Horseshoe.

  Sadie turned to the letters, opening each one carefully. The writer had used a fountain pen, and the ink on the thin paper in the fading light in Mrs. Sidelman’s bedroom rendered the handwriting difficult to translate, but all of the letters were written by the same man, who signed his name Bud. The letters were short, each filling only one page. Sadie could make out phrases that told how much the man missed Bea, longed for her, and imagined the smell of her perfume. He mentioned that time at the club, cherry blossoms, and a rooftop. He wrote about songs: Remember “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”? Sadie imagined these were all clear signs of love—Bea and Bud. She put the letters away for another day.

  October 16, 2002

  SADIE REALIZES THAT UNLIKE HER previous miscarriages the loss of this baby, carried nearly to term, cannot be a private grief she nurses over a glass of wine. She can’t hide her loss from the neighborhood women she’s spotted leaving for school drop-offs, who cast sorrowful glances toward her house and who send her the same covered dishes and casseroles in sympathy that they would have prepared had she been busy with a new baby. At the hospital the grief counselor, a young woman in a narrow skirt and heels, visited her with pamphlets. Sadie sat on the bed in her maternity clothes, her feet in thick socks, her full breasts leaving her feeling inexplicably empty.

  “Would you like someone to take down the baby things before you go home?” the counselor asked.

  Sadie was affronted and assured her she would do that herself. But once she was home she found she preferred to leave the baby’s room intact: crib, changing table, songbird mobile, the small blanket monogrammed with an “L.” Lily. Now she winds the mobile, stares into the crib. She would be two months old, and cooing, she thinks, and catches herself sliding into some dark place.

  She decides she must make sure she is too busy to remember the things that make her unhappy, but she has no real skills, no education, and the idea of returning to Lord & Taylor, a job she quit to start a family, is out of the question. Instead she remembers the years after her first miscarriage, before Sylvia was born, when she volunteered with the Wintonbury Historical Society. She calls up the director and agrees to meet a woman named Harriet at the same Congregational church where Max attends preschool. That morning she dresses in a skirt and blouse, an outfit she last wore before her pregnancy, to Sylvia’s school Christmas pageant. Sadie is tall and has always been curvaceous, but the skirt, she discovers with a swooning feeling, is too tight. The blouse gapes at its pearl buttons. She leaves the skirt’s clasp undone, the blouse untucked to cover it. She wants to laugh at herself, dressing up like her mother, who wore beautiful clothes every day—wool skirts, pressed white blouses, gold earrings, and lipstick. She always knew her mother was different, but now she realizes that difference was a certain glamour—a movie-star quality. She glances beyond the bedroom window to the trees waving their bright leaves, and it occurs to her, with a jolt, that the anniversary of her mother’s death has come and gone without her usual mental ritual of acknowledgment.

  Downstairs, Craig is in his shirtsleeves, his tie loose, his face smoothly shaven and pink, as if he’s come from a bracing walk. The children, who sit at the kitchen table with their bowls of cereal, cease their chatter and cast confused glances up at Sadie in her outfit, waiting for an explanation. Sadie feels, suddenly, as if she is wearing a costume.

  “Why aren’t you wearing comfy clothes?” Sylvia asks. Sadie’s clothing has lately consisted of cotton sweatpants and T-shirts, jeans and pullover sweaters.

  “I’m going to work,” she says.

  Craig opens the refrigerator and turns to look at her. He nods, so careful, lately, that Sadie suspects he has read all of the grief counselor’s pamphlets. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

  “I’m going to be a part-time historian.”

  Max smiles because she is smiling. She feels her face tight with the effort to be cheery.

  “How will I get home from school?” Sylvia asks.

  Max’s smile fades. “And me?” he says. Sadie sees his eyes fill with tears.

  Sadie knows they are remembering when she was in the hospital and Craig appeared—a glaring irregularity—at their respective schools to pick them up. She is exhausted, suddenly, from the effort of waylaying their fears.

  “I’ll only be gone a little while,” she tells them. “I’ll pick both of you up at the usual time!”

  Craig exhales and closes the refrigerator door without retrieving anything.

  “I’m glad for you,” he says. “Sounds like a nice distraction.”

  He leans in to kiss her as he knots his tie, his breath tinged with the mint of his toothpaste. Sadie suspects Craig and the grief counselor of colluding against her. She feels the urge to slap him, to let him know how feeble this volunteering adventure will be in the face of the things she cannot forget and the things she’s forgotten to remember. She and her mother have shared the same age for the last year, but now Sadie, at thirty-six, has moved into a space of time her mother never inhabited. There are no longer marked paths to avoid.

  Sadie loads the children into her SUV and backs out of the driveway. It is a crisp fall day. The sun slips through the trees surrounding Gladwyn Hollow, a neighborhood of Capes and Colonials and imitation saltboxes, all built within the last five years. The front yards are still only grass and shrubs. Behind the houses on either side stretch the woods, where the trees bend and wave and toss their leaves to blow in eddies down the street and fill the lawns with color. After she drops Sylvia at the elementary school, Sadie takes Max to the Congregational church in the center of town on the green. His classroom is warm with children’s bodies, and the teacher looks up and sees her in the doorway and then pretends she hasn’t, as if she has seen as well the shadow presence of Lily in her carrier at Sadie’s side and is awkward with sadness for her. Max joins a group of playing children, casting only one quick, doleful glance back.

  Sadie climbs the stairs to the church offices, expecting to be of help stapling or
photocopying the historical society newsletters. Harriet greets her, a small, energetic woman with gray hair like a cap and bright eyes below her bangs. She announces they are going to go through the church death records and then visit the old Latimer cemetery and match the names with those on the stones. Sadie realizes that Harriet, like Ray, knows nothing of her loss, and she accepts the projected task quietly, with trepidation. This is how you face your fears, she thinks. The church records are on heavy, crumbling paper, the ink blood-colored and difficult to decipher:

  Elisabeth Cadwell, daughter of Matthew died 3 Nov 1764, in her 15th year, “She dropped down dead almost in an Instant at Dinner.”

  Sarah Burr, wife of Samuel died 25 Feb 1806, age 76, after a long state of derangement.

  Isaac Eggleston, died 2 Oct 1811, age 67, “in consequence of the tearing off of his fingers in a Cyder Mill.”

  Abigail Gillett, daughter of Jonathan died 25 Feb 1752, age 5 years 11 months, 5 days, drowned (buried in coffin with brother, Stephen).

  Stephen Gillett, son of Jonathan died 25 Feb 1752, age 3 yr. 8 mo., drowned (buried in coffin with sister, Abigail).