The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  Someone was assigned the role of starting up the music, the record player hidden in the laundry room, the list of songs taped to the wall, the speakers set up in the area of the stage, and the wires snaked under the laundry room door. Each cue was recorded as well—the girls broke into song and were discovered by a talent scout, and like most musicals the transition from speaking line to song was awkward, made more so by the scratching sound of the needle on the record and the difficulty of lining it up exactly in the dim laundry room lighting.

  Sadie had typed up the script on an old IBM Selectric her father had brought home from the office.

  SCENE: An office in disarray. An old wooden desk sits in the corner. On the walls are posters of the Fleetfoot Sisters under spotlights, their arms looped together and singing in front of a microphone. The posters are peeling off the walls. Some are on the floor. There is a sense of neglect and of time having passed. An old man (OLD ROGER) shuffles into the room.

  OLD ROGER.[Scanning the posters] I remember those days. Ah yes. The Fleetfoot Sisters were at the height of their fame. I’m the one who discovered them, you know. They weren’t really sisters. Take this one, the shortest and sweetest of voice. Lottie. Yes, Lottie. She was working in a shoe store. And the most miserable girl you’d ever seen.

  Sadie’s father’s secretary ran copies of the script, and then Sadie held the tryouts. No one really came for those. Everyone already knew who would play which roles. Sadie herself would play Old Roger, wearing one of her father’s winter suits and a hat, and Jane, one of the discovered girls. Young Roger was the only role she couldn’t cast. The boys would only participate in the annual Haunted Woods held every year at the end of the summer. Then they were always available to climb trees and glide bedsheets down strung fishing line at certain cues, to make howling noises, smear themselves in fake blood, and arise from cardboard-box graves. But they refused to play a talent agent who discovers the fabulous Fleetfoot sisters. Sadie cajoled them and attempted to bribe them. “You don’t have to sing,” she said. “You’re just the guy who talks the girls into joining the troupe!” But there was little she could offer that they would consider. In the end she had to relinquish her role as Jane, the woman discovered singing out her open window as she washes her dishes, and play Young Roger. She did this for the play, she said.

  “I’m willing to sacrifice to keep the play going.”

  And it was a sacrifice. She had already picked out the silver lamé dress her character would wear, one her mother had on in a photograph labeled Officer’s Club, 1971. This went to Darlene, one of Betty’s sisters, the only one who could fit into it properly. Another of Betty’s sisters took Darlene’s spot as Genevieve, the klutzy but brilliant singer of “The Man That Got Away.” Practice was scheduled every day, and Sadie typed up a contract that everyone had to sign to commit to showing up on time. The performance would be held in three weeks. They met in her backyard, in the cool grass under the apple tree. Sadie always let them in the sliding glass doors, believing that the allure of being the stars of their own show, of performing in front of the neighborhood families and hearing their applause, was enough to keep everyone showing up. They practiced for a week in the larger half of Sadie’s basement. They’d emerge in the humid afternoons to find the ice cream man had come and gone, the boys’ baseball game had ended. Plastic kiddie pools dotted the yards, abandoned, filled with spiraling cut grass. First one of Betty’s sisters, then another quit the play, the lure of their usual summer activities, the boys’ planning of the Haunted Woods, too much to give up. And eventually Sadie retreated to Mrs. Sidelman’s, to the books, the love letters, to the emptiness of the rooms. She felt the disappointment keenly, as if there was more at stake than just the play.

  But then one morning, as she sat at Mrs. Sidelman’s bedroom window watching for Ray Filley, she saw Francie Bingham make her way up the road toward the dead end on her bike. The Binghams’ house was at the very bottom of the hill where the newer houses sat on flatter plots, with younger, less substantial trees. There the brook often overflowed its banks, seeped into the grass and thwarted Mr. Bingham’s feeble attempts to maintain a lawn. How he spent his days was open to speculation. He had some type of hobby shop in his basement and maintained a vendor booth at the Eastern States Exposition. It was said that Mrs. Bingham worked in the high school cafeteria, although this was later proven to be false and unduly cruel information. There were three children—Francie had two younger brothers who looked the same and were thought to be twins, but this, too, was untrue. The Binghams didn’t socialize with anyone in the neighborhood, and no visiting cars were seen parked in their driveway, the tarred surface already cracked and threaded with weeds. That they were different was acknowledged by the imposed distance the neighbors kept from the Bingham house. Children invited to play were told by their mothers that they had to clean the gerbil cage, or by fathers that they had to rake the leaves—as if the parents, operating as an orchestrated unit, sensed something amiss and invented reasons to prevent them from going there.

  Francie didn’t usually venture up the hill on her bike, so her appearance was suspicious. Sadie turned from one window to another to watch her, and then went into the guest bedroom to view her better. From here she could see past Mrs. Hoskins’s house through a stand of sycamore. Francie pedaled furiously up the last bit of hill to the dead end. Sadie saw her red cheeks, her hair stuck to her forehead. She saw Francie drop her bike and look about, as if to check if anyone was watching, then kneel down, lift the stone, and deposit something small and bright beneath it. Around Sadie the house became a vacuum of silence, and suddenly she felt her days there, like a stay in a sanatorium, were over.

  March 22, 2003

  THROUGH THE FALL AND INTO the winter months, a time in which the boundaries of the world outside Sadie’s house seem to narrow, when at night the cold descends and covers the neighborhood like a tight lid, Ray Filley begins appearing places. She thinks it is a coincidence at first—that it is a small town, and now he is back in it, and why shouldn’t she run into him at Shaw’s Supermarket buying steaks one evening in November, at the bank with his deposit slip one morning in January, at the post office in front of the stamp machine in February, the cold curling beneath her coat collar, the parking lot filled with slush? Everyone has errands, she thinks. They make light of these encounters, inquire about the appropriate holidays. Ray laughs and shows his bright teeth.

  “You again!” he says, raising his arms in the air. He wears a plaid wool shirt and a hunting cap, and his long hair hangs out around the cap’s flaps. Or he has on jeans and a leather coat and hiking boots. When he smiles his eyes crinkle up at the corners.

  “I guess I’ll see you over at Battinson’s dry cleaners next,” she says.

  She doesn’t ask him why he’s still in town, how long he’ll stay. He asks her nothing about her family, her life. Instead, they exist in a strange alter world in which nothing exists beyond the moment they share.

  Then one afternoon in March Sadie tells him she’s joined the Tunxis Players. The revelation feels overly personal, as if she’s performing a kind of striptease. “We’re doing The Night of the Iguana,” she says. It is the play her mother was in that last summer. She sees his face and knows he remembers, but he only nods and says, “Well, well,” and nothing more about it. He tells her he’s moved back into the old Filley Farm homestead.

  “My father was living there until he died,” he explains when she seems surprised. “I like fixing up old houses,” he adds.

  When they separate, Sadie feels people eyeing them, as if the space they occupy gives off its own heat. She lets herself imagine that there is something otherworldly at work, that their accidental circling of each other might be attributed to some alignment of magnetic fields, to the start of a cycle of preordained events. But then Sadie sees his truck, an old Filley Farm work truck, idling in the Vincent Elementary School parking lot after play practice, and she knows that he’s investigated the Tun
xis Players’ rehearsal schedule. She must now accept that her childhood longing for him has somehow been made manifest, that he has been seeking her out, tracking her movements about town. But for some reason she refuses to do so. She gets into her car and lingers, waiting for the other players to head home, watching the string of taillights disappear, and then she pulls up alongside him. Ray rolls down the window and she continues to pretend they have just bumped into each other. They say things that she mulls over later, trying to read into them.

  “So the nightlife here is the same as ever,” he says.

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  He shrugs, but she sees a line of bewilderment between his eyes.

  Sadie smiles ruefully. She imagines how it all looks to him, A. C. Peterson’s restaurant with its sprung booth cushions, its cracked Formica; the John Brown’s lounge, still smelling of popcorn, the sons of the old regulars now hugging their beers at the bar. She imagines him walking into the bar, how they’d all wave at him and welcome him in and buy him rounds of drinks, their hands heavy on his back, his shoulders. Sadie and her husband have gone there with couples at night after dinners out, and new music comes out of the same jukebox in the dark corner. The men at the bar talk about the girls they used to date, the ones that got away. They all married local women, work in family businesses, for the insurance companies, like Sadie’s husband, or in local town agencies—law enforcement, fire department, DPW. Some of them wear loosened ties, others have on work pants, boots, and flannel shirts. They are the Seckingers, the Battinsons, the Mayocks. Sadie knows that Ray has never fit in. She must admit she has never fit in herself.

  For the next two weeks, when she emerges from play rehearsal, she finds Ray’s truck parked in the school lot. Neither of them mentions why he is there, the pauses in the conversation in which neither of them speaks seeming natural and yet weighted with what they do not say. They look at each other, or he fidgets with something in his truck. The parking lot lights leave them partially in shadow, his expression difficult to read. And then, “I hear they’re going to tear down the old Bascomb house on Terry Plains.”

  “They’re going to have some sort of a ceremony before they do it.”

  “Will you be going to that?” he says.

  Sadie feels like she is still in character from The Night of the Iguana—her part that of Hannah, a woman who keeps her emotions carefully in check. When she says, “Look at the time,” it’s as if he’s entered the play with her, saying his own line on cue: “We seem to have wasted it pretty well.”

  Sadie drives home, up three hills, along a wide open field, past houses set back from the road behind split-rail fences, to her own house in Gladwyn Hollow. She leaves the windows open so the cold air blows through. She did this as a teenager driving home, airing the smoke out of the car, out of her hair, so her father wouldn’t smell it. She isn’t sure what she is airing out now—the remnants of the words they spoke, the heightened tension, the scent of what she must confess is desire from her skin and clothing? She parks the car in the garage and steps into her house—warm and lamp-lit—and feels instantly caged. She drinks a glass of water at the sink. Craig will be upstairs in bed, reading something for work, the television on. The children will be asleep in their rooms, their faces lit by nightlights plugged into the wall sockets. In Lily’s room the streetlight outside will leave a pale stripe across the crib’s patterned sheet. Craig will glance up at her and smile when she comes in, and she worries he will set aside his work, and slide down alongside her in the bed, and smell something on her skin, some evidence of everything she hasn’t been saying to Ray Filley in the parking lot.

  • • •

  She has just gotten used to the predictability, the imposed parameters of their meetings, when Ray appears one morning at the end of her street. She is taking the children to school. It’s a Monday, and the children are unhappy about going. They have projects they began over the weekend—Sylvia’s amusement park for her tiny dolls, and Max’s block city where his Matchbox cars careen and park. They want to wake up and continue their play, and Sadie is as sorry and disgruntled as they are that they cannot. She remembers the worlds she used to create, the sadness she felt on Sunday evenings when she knew they would have to be abandoned. Her mother, too, hated Sundays, telling Sadie how as a child she dreaded the impending return to school, the ferry to Staten Island, the skies dark overhead. Still, when Sadie complained about going to school her mother refused to listen.

  “You come home every afternoon,” she said, her eyes wide, as if she were revisiting the lurching ferry, the closed-in smells of the dormitory. “You don’t sleep in a room with twenty girls, and nuns patrolling the hallways, listening for any little noise.”

  Sadie ushers Max and Sylvia through the morning preparations with singing and happy bantering: Guess what I’m putting in your lunch today? A brownie! Who knows what day it is? It’s Daddy’s birthday! She writes little notes with colored markers and drops them in their lunch boxes. She loads them into the car. She puts in a tape of songs Max likes, ones that Sylvia sings along to, changing the names to their own the way Sadie did when Sylvia was small. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Sylvia, dear Sylvia, there’s a hole in the bucket, dear Sylvia, a hole. She comes to the stop sign and Ray is there, parked on the side by the woods, near the rotting cedar posts of the barbed wire fence. With what shall I mend it, dear Max, dear Max, with what shall I mend it, dear Max, with what? The children sing; the taped music is tinny and ridiculous. Sadie realizes that even as an adult Ray still makes her feel like a child.

  When she returns he is still there. She drives to her house, parks her car in the garage, and then walks back down the street. The lawns are muddy, the grass yellow and flattened. Soon the men will be out with their fertilizer spreaders, their pruners and mowers. She raps on Ray’s window and he rolls it down and smiles at her. His eyes are green, the color of the truck. She feels a warmth rush down the length of her body, a weakness in her legs. “Get in,” he says. Her skin feels hot. She gets into the truck and smells the dirt ground into the floor mats, a powdery whiff of old hair pomade. They have never been this close before, and she feels his proximity, a flash of gooseflesh on her arms and legs, senses the tension in his hand, which plays absently with the gearshift. He glances over at her and then away, fiddles with the knob on the radio. His silence is a pent-up one—she imagines he is holding his breath, waiting for something from her. She slides along the seat, leans against him, and takes his face in her hands. His cheeks are rough, unshaven. His eyes close, and she kisses him, listens to his groans of pleasure, her own sighs filling the cab, the seats making everything impossibly awkward. When Ray puts the truck in gear, his face flushed, she pulls away and opens the truck door.

  “What are you doing?” he says.

  “I’m getting out,” she tells him. She slips out of the truck, into the spongy grass by the woods. She smells the damp, the snow melting. Her mouth feels bruised.

  “So what was this? Just some necking? Are we in junior high?”

  Sadie laughs at that. “Necking! Yes, that’s what it was.”

  She wants to start at the beginning, to have what she never had from him. She wants kissing, and fondling, and the feeling of venturing into a forbidden place. She shuts the truck door and walks up the road in the direction of her house. Behind her she hears his truck pull away, and she feels elation and regret. She folds the laundry, empties the dishwasher, peers out her front window, waiting. It is nearly spring. The snow clings to the grass beneath the hedges. The sky fills with loose clouds. It is Craig’s birthday, and she bakes a cake. Preoccupied, she lets the layers overcook in the oven, but she hides them beneath the chocolate frosting and decides no one will be the wiser. She wraps the gift the children picked out at Sears—a cedar shoe-shine box, one Sadie told them was exactly like the one her own father had, and a necktie she chose at random, its colors muted and conventional. She creases the striped paper, tapes t
he edges. Good enough, she thinks, although she feels a nagging sense that these gifts are inadequate, that she doesn’t even know what present Craig would like. She hasn’t taken the time to ask, to think it over. She is usually a good gift-giver, and she feels a brief flash of guilt that she brushes off. She knows that after Lily’s death, he would accept any gift from her and the children, and knowing this, she has chosen anything.

  June 15, 1979

  SADIE LEFT MRS. SIDELMAN’S IMMEDIATELY after spotting Francie and went to Betty’s house with her news, but Betty had to first do the dishes and sweep the kitchen floor, and then she and Sadie had to make a circuitous route of the neighborhood to shake her younger sister, who had traipsed out the door after them. The cicadas revved up in the trees, their sound an explosion of noise that followed them up to the dead end, where they discovered Francie’s first letter. She’d written it on flowered stationery, the kind that parents give to children when they go to camp. Dear Hezekiah, it said. Reading on, the letter revealed aspects of her family life—her little brothers camping out in the hall closet, her mother sleeping all afternoon on the couch, her father and his woodworking hobby. He carves puns out of wood, she wrote. Shoe tree, water gun, bookworm. He is now making a train track that one day will run through the entire house, upstairs and down. They read the note in the upstairs bathroom at Sadie’s house. This was the only room with a lock. They sat on the closed toilet lid, where they often sat together to read the Playboys her father had hidden in the vanity drawer. As little girls, they had mixed up potions in paper Dixie cups on the counter—toothpaste, shaving cream, Old Spice.