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In the fall of 1919, with the memory of war receding and the hospital ships in San Diego Harbor rising as the casualties healed, Linda returned to Miss Winterbourne’s schoolhouse. On that first Monday, she set out for school with Bruder one pace behind. Edmund walked with them, on his way to the hotel’s front desk, where throughout the summer his elbow had worn away the varnish from the oak.
A car sped by, driven by a man in leather gloves with a standard poodle sitting primly in the passenger seat. The man honked cheerily as his wheels spat gravel at their feet. Only six or seven years before, the road had been barely wide enough to let a buckboard and a Tin Lizzie, snout to grille, pass at the same time; now the push of the pneumatics had cleared the scrub in a wide-open swath. One day, someone would give the road a name, and the collective memory of it as nothing more than a dusty horse path would drift away.
Bruder had surprised her again, when she’d asked him if he wanted to go to school with her. She had asked for no other reason than to see his face twitch as her voice landed upon his ear. He had said, “All right. I’ll go with you.” There had been an awkwardness between them since the night in the Vulture House, as if neither knew whether the other recalled what had nearly taken place. But though Linda remembered everything, she was just young enough and too trapped in the circumstances of her life to know how to re-create the night, the moon, the treasury of the items spread between them on the mattress. Edmund’s eye had remained watchful upon her, and he had searched for further clues of indiscretion. He had whispered to Linda, “Don’t make the mistake so many girls do.” What Linda didn’t know was that Valencia had said to Bruder when they were alone next to the onion cart, “First she must discover what she wants. Give her enough time for this.” What Linda didn’t know was that Dieter worried as much for Bruder as he did for her.
Over the days and the weeks the tension had risen within Linda, leaving her with a tender longing beneath her flesh. She wondered if Bruder felt the same, but in fact he did not. Bruder had begun to love Linda, yet at the same time he remained self-contained. He existed contentedly with the firm knowledge that he wasn’t in debt to anyone, that in fact others owed him. Bruder stroked his power, as if it were a coin in his pocket. He didn’t think about it throughout the day, but he knew it was there, jingling as he walked. Others would come to him; eventually, Linda would come to him again. Bruder didn’t doubt his future; he was a patient man because he had seen so many others destroy themselves with impatience. On the way home from France, Dieter had said, “When we get back to California, I’ll take care of you.” There had been a deal, a tit had been laid out for a tat—like that other deal Bruder had struck in the beechwood forest—and Dieter and Bruder both knew what hung between them. “You may stay at my farm,” Dieter had said. “You may do what you want.” Did this extend to his daughter? Only Bruder and Dieter knew.
But Linda would perceive none of this; how could she? She saw only the clear September morning and the rolling ocean and her brother in his hotel uniform and Bruder in the pair of railroad-stripe overalls she had given him, with a red satin heart sewn to the breast. The sun gleamed upon the satin, and it flashed in Linda’s eyes, and she believed it was proof of how things would turn out for her.
Just last week, Linda had gone to Margarita’s to buy for the first day of school a new red dress and the eagle-feather hat. But while trying on the little hat, Linda had seen the curious pair of overalls, folded on a table next to a stock of fisherman sweaters and pants waterproofed with wax. “Those came by mistake,” explained Margarita. “I ordered three pairs of ladies’ candle-toe boots, and this silly pair of overalls was at the bottom of the box. Nobody will buy them.”
Linda held them to her chest. There was something about the overalls—the blue and white of the stripe, the pocket in the front bib too slim to hold anything but a comb, the satin heart the size of a large button sewn curiously between the two front clasps—that made her think of Edmund. She didn’t have to close her eyes to picture him: the overalls hanging from his shoulders; the long stripe running down his leg; his cowlick, wet from a bath, erect. “Do you think Edmund would like these?”
“Can’t imagine why.”
Linda emptied the sack of pennies onto the counter, and Margarita’s fast, fat fingers counted them in fives. “You’ve just enough for the overalls and the dress, but you’re short for the hat.”
“Will you spot me?” asked Linda. “Never,” said Margarita, folding the overalls into a box.
When she got home, Linda found Edmund in the barn, watering the hinny. He was in a pair of drooping brown pants held up by a strip of old notch leather. It struck Linda that he was somewhere between his life as a boy and his life as a man, but in a different way than Bruder. Linda imagined Edmund in several years, grown with a farm of his own and a small, bony child with a peeling nose and a wife of some sort—but who she was Linda couldn’t guess; she couldn’t even picture a face, a cheek, or the color of her hair.
She told Edmund she had something for him, and he said, “What is it? I’m busy.”
“I bought you something. I saw it and thought of you.”
Edmund lifted his eyes, and when she offered him the box his face moved, as if an itch of gratitude were running up the ridge of his nose. Linda suspected that he wanted to tell her that he wished more than anything that they could return to the days during the war, when it was just the two of them; but she knew he wouldn’t be able to say it.
Edmund moved to accept the box, holding up his greasy hands. “Maybe I should wash up first?”
“I’ll open it for you.” Together they sat on a sack of feed, their knees touching.
“Did you buy a present for Bruder?”
“Only you.”
The color rose in his cheek. He was whispering. Beyond the barn door the sunlight was white and opaque. The hinny brayed, shaking her neck, and a cock scratched at the thrown straw and then paddled its way to the rafters. Except for the noise of the farm, the world fell silent, and it was only the two of them.
The box lid fell to the ground, the tissue paper opened, and Linda pulled out the overalls. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Those are for me? I can’t wear those. It’s what a clown might wear, or a circus bear.”
“I think they’re dashing.”
“I don’t want to look dashing.” He shook his head and said that she would never understand him, and she said that she was ready to give up trying. The cock cooed from above, and the mongrel Madame, heavy in pregnancy, appeared in the barn door. She began to bark. “Linda, you want me to become someone I’m not. I can’t change for you.”
“Of course you can. Everybody can. Isn’t that what growing up is all about?”
He shook his head again and he was trembling, as if someone were pressing a bar against his chest. His eyes darted, and Linda could see that he felt trapped.
“I was trying to help you.”
“Try it with someone else.” Edmund held out his hands, palms open, and he looked incapable of ever speaking to her again. But then, almost inaudibly: “Please leave.” He spoke with such fragility that Linda rippled with shock when Edmund next threw the overalls at her. A metal button, imprinted with the horned-ram logo of a manufacturer in Lowell, Mass., hit her beneath the eye. A red fury erupted within her chest: she was certain she was bleeding, but when she touched her face she found nothing; a small bruise would bloom, and it would fade away.
Later, Linda fetched the sewing kit and the scrap basket from Valencia and went to her cottage and threaded a needle. She hated sewing, and hoped for the day when she’d never have to darn again; but like every other girl, she could stitch a hem in her sleep. As she dumped the basket of scraps onto her bed, Linda peered into her future—as she did more and more every day—and vowed not to be like every other girl. The pant legs would need another eight or ten inches; the seams would have to be let out. Linda fished for some spare cloth that would match
the overalls, but she found nothing. When their clothes became worn and stained or shredded by barbed wire or fishing hook, Valencia and Linda would force the shearing scissors up the seams and store the loose pieces of fabric in the basket. There was a swath of flannel printed with edelweiss that had once been Valencia’s Sunday dress. There was a square foot of bald wool from Dieter’s wartime long johns, and a yard of yellow muslin that had once fallen to Edmund’s ankles as his nightshirt. Cuts of teamster’s cotton blue twill, of heavy orange chambray, plaid cotton cassimere, black moleskin, falcon twill with an apple-red stripe: all from clothes that hung on the line of her family’s memory. Shirts resewn into blouses; sweaters reknitted into caps; skirts hitched to become half-leg pants or a middy or, finally, a handkerchief, embroidered by Linda and Valencia. Among the scraps, Linda found half of the white flannel sheet that had come from her bed, shredded in two after she had menstruated in her sleep one night. She had wanted to burn the sheet—the blots of blood bright and vulnerable and shaped like a pair of eyes—but Valencia had said, “No, no. The clean half is still good.” And Valencia had been right, for now the flannel would work in tailoring the overalls for Bruder—adding long cuffs, extending the seams in a way that would let his thighs and chest breathe. If only the satin heart on the breast could grow as well—how small it would be on Bruder, like a tiny stain.
When they reached the schoolhouse, Linda called “So long” as Edmund continued on his way. She watched him head down the road and waited for him to turn around and wave, but his back remained to her. Then a truck’s cloudy exhaust engulfed him, and when it dispersed he was gone.
Miss Winterbourne was on the schoolhouse steps, welcoming her students. Over the summer, she had bobbed her hair in a style that Linda had seen in the merchandise catalogs; she looked like an old woman trying to pass herself off as young. Her collarless blouse revealed her throat, which flushed when Linda introduced her to Bruder. “What level were you last term?” Miss Winterbourne inquired. He didn’t respond, and this caused the blush to boil up over her chin and into her cheek. “He was at war,” said Linda. “With my Pops.”
“Then welcome to the Calvera schoolhouse,” said Miss Winterbourne.
“I’m not here to go to school,” said Bruder. “You aren’t?” said Linda.
“I said I’d walk you to class, and I’ll pick you up, but you didn’t think I’d be—?”
“You mean, you’re leaving me?”
“Linda,” he said. “I’m a grown man.” He laughed, and was reminded that she was still living in the narrow antechamber between a girl’s life and that of a woman, and sometimes he forgot this about her because he himself had departed the room of his boyhood both early and fast. By the time he was six he’d grown used to eating in the yard with the dogs; by the time he was eight he’d learned to ignore Mrs. Banning’s screaming voice, “You’ll have to earn your way!” A mat of hair had grown upon his chest at twelve, and a hard beard on his chin at fourteen, and the last time Bruder had thought of himself as a child was years ago, just before people began to spread the cruel rumor that he had killed the kid from the Pasadena Ice Company. Bruder didn’t know his birthday, and Mrs. Banning used to corral all the boys at the Training Society whose birthdates were lost for a joint celebration on January 1, each unlucky child receiving a pair of socks with a grapefruit in the ankle of one, and an orange in the toe of its mate.
But Linda wasn’t like him, and if he didn’t envy her lingering childishness, he nevertheless admired it. Even so, he wasn’t returning to school. “I’ll pick you up at the end of the day,” he said, and then he too was gone, a figure receding slimly upon the horizon, and Linda was left alone with Miss Winterbourne. She felt her teacher’s fingers upon her neck, guiding her inside, and just as Linda was resigning herself to despondency, Charlotte appeared, chirping, “Ready for another year?”
The first day of school was long: Linda and Charlotte and the other girls were assigned to read The Three Musketeers while the boys studied algebra. Linda had trouble getting beyond the first sentence: “Meung, a pretty market town on the Loire and the birthplace of Jean de Meung …” So many things that seemed to have nothing to do with her. She wondered if Bruder had visited Meung during the war, if he could explain over supper just how wide the Loire ran, what was sold in the market, just who Jean de Meung was, and why she should care. Had he met her father nearby? The other girls—Margie Gutter, Hedda Strauss, Inga Serna, and Charlotte—each sat with her book on her desk, fingertip moistened and ready. Linda thought about sending Charlotte a note, but the flyswatter—hanging from a rusty nail next to the photograph of Donna Marròn—caused her to hesitate. She continued reading but could think only of Bruder, and she found herself writing something down:
Did you see his overalls with the little heart?
Those were from me!
Linda sent the note to Charlotte, who read it while nibbling her lip. She wrote a note and returned it to Linda. It arrived safely, unnoticed by Miss Winterbourne’s patrolling eye, but when she read it, Linda let out a little gasp.
Linda Stamp is in love!
She didn’t know what was more shocking, the note itself or Miss Winterbourne’s claw landing on her desk and plucking the note and raising it to her face. Miss Winterbourne’s eyes narrowed, and she said, “Class, I have some news.” The students perked up, hair bows and cowlicks rising and ears warm and red from stale schoolroom air pricked up too.
“You’ll be interested to know that our very own Linda Stamp is in love. Unless one of you claims this note, I’ll assume Linda wrote it herself, and she will spend the afternoon clearing the brush around the outhouse.” The students sat upon their hands and Charlotte pushed her nose into her book and Linda was alone, and although she had expected life to treat her differently, she hadn’t expected life to mishandle her so unjustly. Nor had she expected the betrayal from Charlotte, who at that very moment closed her book and claimed the note’s authorship.
At the end of the day, Miss Winterbourne sent Linda and Charlotte with a pair of scythes into the thicket at the top of the hill, and she sent Bruder, who had arrived to fetch Linda, home.
“He didn’t even argue with her,” Charlotte pointed out. “He left without you.”
“No one can argue with her.”
“But didn’t you say he does whatever he wants?”
For two hours they cleared the brush, the spiky branches scratching their forearms, and when at last Miss Winterbourne released them, they walked down to Charlotte’s house. A certain bond, too tentative to discuss, had looped the two girls together this afternoon, and each sensed it, although differently: Linda believed that Charlotte was her friend, and Charlotte believed that she would keep Linda honest. As they walked down the hill, their swinging arms brushed, and the blood from their scratches, just two tiny drops, mixed.
Charlotte lived with her father in a blackie on a strip of beach where the widowers and the loners and the gimps huddled in a village of outcasts who scraped the sea for their living. People said that these men were too grimy, too greasy with fish oil, too accustomed to scratching in impolite corners of the body, to marry. “Who would have them?” asked Margarita. “You’d be doomed to filth.” The blackies were lined with tar paper, their walls smudged with kerosene oil and pipe smoke, fingerprints and fish scales and, in the loneliest cottages, missiles of mucus launched from the nostril’s silo. Any metal that wasn’t brass, even a belt buckle or a trouser button, would pit up with salt and flake away with black corrosion. The shacks stood so close to the surf that they didn’t have front windows, only a door on a perpetually crumbling hinge, and when the wind blew and the men were too drunk to remember to properly latch things up, the storm gusts would strip the doors from their frames like a bandage torn from a wound.
As they reached Charlotte’s blackie, the sun was setting and the ocean lay calm and golden and broken by nothing but the splash of a flyingfish. Charlotte offered Linda a cup of milk and lit a lamp
and then a cigarette. Linda had never seen a girl smoke: the purply-gray smoke oozed in Charlotte’s mouth. Charlotte gave Linda a cigarette, and it dangled between her lips as she tried to figure out what to do with it.
“Did you hear they’re making plans to run electricity down here and out into the fields?” said Charlotte. “Finally someone’s remembering the blackies. Pup’s up off Point Conception chasing otters, but they say there might be lights in here by the time he’s home. I’m writing a story about it, from the rise of the first pole until the bulbs illuminate.” Lately when she set out to cover a story, she’d wear a broadcloth skirt and, hanging from her waist, a nickel watch with a shamrock etched into its case. She had started to say things like Time’s a reporter’s enemy and And that’s just the way it is and other sayings that Linda was sure Charlotte had learned from reading in the library the month-old newspapers from back east. “I’m going to tell the truth, and that’s just the way it is.” And soon Linda learned that the way it was in Charlotte’s stories, no matter how far from the truth, was accepted without skepticism: Margarita’s counter buzzed with items from the Bee whether they were correct or not; it was as if it almost didn’t matter. “It might as well be true,” she’d heard Charlotte say.
“Do you ever worry about getting things wrong?”
“I haven’t yet.”
They were as close as either would get in her life to having a best friend, although certainly at this point neither pondered such a fate. But they mutually understood that each was in need of an ally before taking on the larger world. A few years ago, Linda had tried to teach Charlotte to fish, but out in the dory, Charlotte had tripped on the anchor line and plunged overboard. “I guess I was meant for terra firma,” Charlotte had said. “Hard land for hard facts,” she had said, laughing at her own humor, as she always did.
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