The Longings of Wayward Girls

by Karen Brown

  They brought the baby to Sadie and Craig in the hospital and let them hold her. She was wrapped in the same sort of hospital-issued flannel blanket that Max and Sylvia had been wrapped in, and Sadie noted her perfect features, her stillness, in disbelief that she couldn’t bring her home, change her diaper, hold her to her full breasts. Over a year has passed, but Craig has said nothing about the nursery she’s left set up, absorbed back into the world of work, believing, perhaps, that it is already dismantled behind the closed door.

  It was Sylvia who finally brought it up a week ago.

  “Will that room be another baby’s?” she said. Her eyes were bright and hopeful.

  Sadie had to tell her that no, there wouldn’t be another baby, even though she had not discussed this with Craig yet. They had the two of them, and wasn’t that enough? Sylvia said that sometimes she went into the nursery with her doll and pretended she was the new baby. “I put the clothes on her. I change her diaper. I wind up that thing over the crib and listen to the music.”

  Sadie knows she should have taken it all down by now, put an ad in the Yankee Flyer. Someone would have happily come with a truck and hauled it all off—immaculate things, brand-new, never used. Of the women in the neighborhood, only Maura knows about the nursery. Her daughter, Anne, told her after playing at the house. She came by the other day with the excuse of dropping off a school announcement, tapping on her back porch door.

  “You know, that extra room would be a great playroom for the kids,” she said. She had brought Sadie a catalog filled with playroom items—shelves and baskets, tiny wooden kitchens, pretend food in real-looking packages, a vanity with a mirror, a table with little blocks and drawers built into it for storage. Sadie agreed, and Maura hugged her and left her with the catalog. But she has still not ordered anything. She often found herself at all times of day in the nursery. She’d sit down on the carpet in the center of it and cry. One day Max had a temper tantrum about his Little Bear shirt being dirty, and Sylvia led him into the room and shut the door.

  “Where is your brother?” Sadie asked.

  “I put him in the crying room,” she said.

  Sadie accepted the room’s new distinction, and it became the place each of them went to be alone, to stare at the flitting birds, the pale green walls, at the way the light came through the blinds and threw the shadows of the leaves there. Sadie wonders if Sylvia is in the room now, having a quiet cry about her mother being gone. She wonders if Craig knows where the waffle mix is kept, how to blow on Max’s food first so it isn’t too hot, which shorts are his new favorite pair, how he likes his hair wet to keep the cowlick down. For the first time Sadie allows herself to see the limitless list of things that Craig does not know, the things, vital and important to her children’s lives, of which he is oblivious. She lets herself acknowledge what must surely be their confusion, their frustration with their father, whom Max will not allow to tie his shoes because he doesn’t know how to make the bunny ears first. She sees the place she fits, the gaping space that she has left behind—cavernous, like the hole left by an excised tooth.

  She looks over at Ray, asleep on the bed, his hair over his eyes, his soft mouth. She is as complicit as he in this whole seduction. She slips from the room and closes the door. The house is quiet save for the clock. She can see that the tide is out, the water still and the fog floating over it. She goes out onto the porch and through the screen door to the beach. Emma and Pietro have wooden chairs, old heavy Adirondacks, and she sits down in one and buries her feet in the cold, wet sand. If she doesn’t plan anything, if she simply lets Ray take her away, the future is a comforting unknown. Yet, when she tries to actively imagine a life with Ray—an apartment in the city, a career—things shift and distort, as if there is a series of doors sliding open and closed that she must navigate in order to exchange one life for the other, her children always trapped behind the one she doesn’t choose.

  Out along the fog line Sadie sees movement, a breaking of the water, and a small white bobbing. She watches it come from one end of the beach until it is directly in front of her, and she can make it out—someone swimming in a white bathing cap. Whoever it is has long arms and accomplished strokes, measured but steady, the splash barely perceptible, the small froth kicked up by her feet like the churning of a boat’s motor. Sadie watches the figure slide through the water past her, past the next jetty, where she turns and begins her slow pace back again. A sailboat unfurls its sails, the rising sun making them bright on the horizon. The fog begins to burn away, and the swimmer’s approach seems to falter. Sadie watches with concern. The strokes have stopped, and the person is paddling in feebly, until she is near Sadie’s beach and she can stand in the shallow sandbar. The woman wears a navy blue suit, an old-fashioned style with an anchor sewn onto the skirt, the top portion jutting out, filled with wire. She seems to drag herself through the water, and Sadie stands, worrying, and goes down the beach to the water’s edge to see that it is Mrs. Sidelman.

  “Are you all right?” Sadie asks. She splashes into the water and takes Mrs. Sidelman’s arm and helps her up the beach to the chair. Mrs. Sidelman allows herself to be aided, leaning a bit on Sadie and wetting her clothes in the process. She breathes heavily and lets herself be helped into the chair. She leans her head back and raises a shaky hand to remove the cap.

  “I thought I could do it,” she says. “I used to be able to. I felt strong enough starting out.”

  Her voice is thin, filled with exhaustion. Sadie remembers that Mrs. Sidelman was once an Aquafemme, and she smiles at the memory, opens her mouth to share it, but then realizes that she cannot. Mrs. Sidelman looks up at Sadie, and her eyes grow wide.

  “You’re the woman from last night,” she says.

  “You’re Mrs. Sidelman,” Sadie says. “I’m Sadie. Sadie Watkins?”

  Mrs. Sidelman shakes her head. “Yes. Yes, the daughter, of course. You look just like your mother.”

  Sadie knows people think it is a nice thing to say, a compliment, so she smiles and keeps quiet.

  Mrs. Sidelman looks behind her at the little blue cottage. “Are you staying here?”

  “We’re visiting friends,” Sadie says.

  “You and that Filley boy,” Mrs. Sidelman says.

  Sadie hears her disapproval, but she nods. “Ray,” she says. “Are you cold? Would you like a towel?”

  Mrs. Sidelman says that she is fine, her cottage is right down the beach.

  “So, you still come every summer,” Sadie says.

  Mrs. Sidelman looks at her then, cocks her head, her eyes intent. “Yes, I do,” she says. “So, you’re married to the Filley boy.”

  “Oh, I’m separated,” she says. “From my husband.”

  Mrs. Sidelman eases herself forward in the chair and stands. “Oh,” she says. “Well, I’d better get home.”

  “Just separated,” Sadie says, standing up. “Just lately. Would you like me to walk you back?”

  “Like a dog?” Mrs. Sidelman says. “It’s mortifying to grow old. Yes, you can walk with me.” She reaches out and holds on to Sadie for support. Sadie feels the papery skin, the slender bones of the woman’s arm. Mrs. Sidelman seems tiny now, not the tall, imposing woman she remembers.

  She looks up and Sadie is surprised to see that her eyes are warm, filled with kindness. “I always picked the most responsible girls to take care of my house,” she says.

  They walk down the beach, past the rows of shingled cottages, some quiet, others with occupants just awakening to sit on the porches, the steam from their coffee spiraling through the screens. Sadie says the coffee smells good, and Mrs. Sidelman invites her to stay for some. Her cottage is the largest on the beach—brown shingles with a copper roof.

  “Oh, I should get back,” she says. And then she thinks about where “back” is and feels a wave of confusion and guilt, as if Mrs. Sidelman already knows what she’s done and is passing judgment. “Back to Ray. He’ll be waking up.”

  “Sit down
here on the porch. The coffee is already made. I’ll bring you a cup.”

  Sadie protests, but Mrs. Sidelman ignores her and goes into the cottage, the screen door banging shut behind her. She comes out with a tray—coffee and buttered triangles of toast. Sadie sits down. The porch is open, the breeze coming off the still water cool. The fog is slipping away in strips. “It’s just that they’ll wonder where I am,” she says.

  Mrs. Sidelman stares at her. She pours cream into her coffee and stirs. “Who?” she says pointedly. “Who will wonder?”

  Sadie shakes her head. “Well, Ray and our friends.” But she knows that isn’t the answer.

  Mrs. Sidelman’s spoon clinks against the side of her cup. She begins to tell her about the neighborhood. “Mrs. Hoskins passed,” she says. “You would probably have guessed that. The Battinsons are still there, and the Frobels. The Schusters moved away, and I’m sure you know about the Donahues.” She glances up at Sadie, her eyes searching. “Poor Mrs. Bingham died this year—cancer. But young families have moved in, and I have a new girl watering my plants this summer.”

  Sadie lifts her cup to her lips and finds her hand shakes.

  “Do you have any children?” Mrs. Sidelman asks.

  “I do. A girl and a boy—Sylvia and Max,” Sadie says.

  Mrs. Sidelman smiles at her. “I’m sure you’re a wonderful mother. You were always so imaginative as a child.”

  Sadie feels cornered, the way she did at Cherrystones when she first spotted Mrs. Sidelman and there was suddenly someone present who knew the girl she was, the woman she was destined to become. It doesn’t matter that Mrs. Sidelman is old and out of touch, that her ideas are from another era when marriage and child rearing weren’t options you questioned. Sadie realizes that all of this time she has believed what she has done is forgivable, an offense that might be explained away, and now, sitting across from a woman whose saved love letters prove she, too, had choices, she’s afraid she’s been wrong.

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” she says. “I may not be as good a mother as you think.”

  She tries to say it lightly, as if she is joking, but Mrs. Sidelman doesn’t respond. She places her spoon on her saucer carefully, letting the quiet expand.

  “Some days I think I may be as terrible as my mother,” Sadie says.

  Mrs. Sidelman looks up at Sadie sharply, her expression fierce. “Your mother made a mistake she couldn’t correct.”

  No one understood that Sadie had, at times, wished for her mother to actually succeed at killing herself. The multiple hospitalizations could only have been other times she’d tried, she’d reasoned long ago—enough times for Sadie’s initial terror to transform to resentment, to believe that her mother’s attempts were games, that she would always emerge victorious in the hospital, watching her soap opera in her matching nightgown and robe. Truthfully, that last summer her mother had surprised her each morning by being alive, each afternoon by baking brownies and Rice Krispies treats, her hair washed and styled, her clothing clean and pressed, as if she’d just come in from bridge club. So, when Sadie got off the school bus that September afternoon, only two months after Francie’s disappearance, and went up the leaf-strewn walk into the house, she expected her mother to greet her. Instead, the house was empty. She called for her and then hesitantly investigated the rooms—trying not to imagine her mother twisted in the bedsheets, or in the bathtub in a puddle of blood, or hanging from a rafter in the basement. When her search uncovered none of these things she was more relieved than suspicious.

  Sadie shrugged off her coat. She made herself a peanut butter sandwich. The kitchen was spotless, as usual, but there wasn’t a note folded on the table, telling her where her mother had gone. She took her food and her book bag up to her room and sat on her bed. That part bothered her, a little. Her mother always left a note, and since school had begun she rarely went out when Sadie was expected home—as if Sadie might be next in line to be taken, like Francie and Laura Loomis. Outside the window, bright leaves flapped on the tree branches. Sadie pressed her face up against the cold window and peered into the backyard and the woods. There was Mrs. Sidelman, standing with her rake, paused in her work and staring over toward Sadie’s house. “What?” Sadie asked out loud, her breath fogging the glass.

  Sadie’s bedroom was adjacent to the garage, and she heard it then—the sound of a car engine running. She thought her mother was just getting home from the store, from an afternoon play practice, from Westfarms Mall. She went down to the den, and tugged the door to the garage open, and peered in at the Coupe de Ville. The light was dim with the garage door closed, the smell of exhaust strong and noxious. There was her mother behind the wheel. She wore her camel-hair coat. Sadie heard the radio playing under the chugging of the engine. She called to her mother, but she saw that she just sat there, staring out the one window into the woods, into the spaces between the trees where the dried cornstalks lined the fields. Through the window Sadie saw Mrs. Sidelman peering in, clutching a rake. Their eyes met, the horror of the moment equally shared, a parcel shifted back and forth and back. Something in Sadie clicked.

  Her mother was dead.

  She knew it with a matter-of-factness that surprised her even then. There was no clutch of panic, no rush to open the garage door. She didn’t stumble back from the sight. She turned and shut the door. She went to the kitchen phone and called her father at his office. He was out, his secretary said. “Can I take a message?” Sadie said to tell him that her mother was in the garage in the car, and she hung up. Since Francie’s disappearance she’d been waiting, apprehensive, for the punishment she deserved—for Betty to confess and implicate her, for Francie’s body to be found—and yet she never expected her mother’s suicide to be the outcome of her fear. That day, something at her core seized up into a hard, impermeable knot that she now sees has never loosened, that as time passed she must have grown used to.

  Mrs. Sidelman came to the back porch door moments later. She was there, knocking, demanding to be let in. “Sadie Watkins,” she said, her teacher’s voice firm. “Open the door.”

  But Sadie did not do it. She went up to her bedroom and sat on her bed until she heard voices downstairs, the rush and stumble of strangers’ footsteps. And then Betty’s mother came up the stairs and entered her room. She sat beside Sadie on the bed, cautiously, as if Sadie were a wild animal that might bolt. Sadie could feel her trying to control her sobs, and she looked over at her, dry eyed, knowing that she, too, should be crying. But she only felt relief. Charlene put her arm around Sadie’s shoulders, and then helped her pack a small bag of clothes and walked her across the street to her house just as the ambulance, turning into Sadie’s driveway, bumped up the curb.

  Sadie remembers the expressions of the people around her, first at the Donahues’, and then later at the funeral—their tear-stained faces, the women’s smeared mascara, the men’s red-rimmed eyes, their awkward embraces. She recalls being held by strangers, inhaling their various complicated smells. For a long time after there were those looks—soft, sad smiles. None like the one Mrs. Sidelman gave her through the garage window, the one she gives her now.

  “I went out to rake leaves,” she says. “I heard the car running, but it was like background noise, and I didn’t give it much notice until I realized what it was. I wish to this day that I had gotten there first, that I might have spared you that.”

  Sadie remembers the leaves blowing about the driveway, the swirls of them, their beautiful flattened shapes on the walkway. Mrs. Sidelman reaches out and takes Sadie’s hand in her own.

  “Your mother loved you very much,” she says. “I remember one Easter she had you in the most adorable matching dress and spring coat. You had a straw hat and a little purse and white gloves. She brought you over so you could show me before you left for church. She always told me how proud she was of you.”

  Mrs. Sidelman went on to describe her mother’s praise—stories of Sadie’s good grades, the poems Sadie
wrote her for her birthday, her confidence that Sadie would one day find a greatness all her own.

  “Oh, she had such high expectations of you,” she says.

  Sadie feels she is hearing about some other child, some other life. Then she remembers the card in the suitcase, and realizes that at one time she had high expectations for her mother, too—and her mother wanted to remember that. Mrs. Sidelman pours more coffee. Her spoon hits the side of the china cup. A seagull squawks from the jetty. Her smile is calm, her silence a space waiting to be filled. Sadie wishes she could take it all back. She thinks about Ray asleep in the cottage nursery, about his plan for them to run away together that doesn’t seem like a plan at all anymore, just a series of beds and sex. She feels the first cold edges of shock at what she’s done, and her urge is to shock Mrs. Sidelman in turn, to startle her so she’s not so alone.

  “I’ve been sleeping with Ray,” Sadie says. She doesn’t say “having an affair” or name Ray as her “lover,” words that sound adult and old-fashioned, that might be ascribed to her mother. “We met, secretly, twice. And then we planned to meet last night, and somehow—I don’t know—we drove off together.”

  She wants the woman to stop smiling. She is furious with herself, with Ray and his foolhardy life, with her mother, who left her with an emptiness she has no idea how to fill, much less name. Why she wants to lash out at Bea Sidelman is as inexplicable as anything she has done in the last twenty-four hours, the last twenty-four years.

  “I’ve left them,” she says then. “My children, my husband.”

  Saying the words makes them real, the finality leaden.

  Mrs. Sidelman watches Sadie, her eyes fixed, and Sadie keeps talking, telling her more. She talks about Lily, the little girl she lost, how she went into labor, how it was only three weeks early and they were safely checked into the hospital.