The Sweetheart Season

by Karen Joy Fowler

  The Tarkens’ porch light was on. Moths and gnats fluttered about it, banged into it. The porch swing rocked gently and there, level with her, were two heads, lit from behind and therefore hard to make out. It must be Sissy and her father.

  “Good evening,” Irini said. She regretted being on top of the fence, most unfortunate that she was teetering in the air, face level with the Tarkens on the porch, but she reminded herself that Mrs. Tarken sometimes wore her bedroom slippers downtown. They were in no position to throw stones.

  “Hello, Irini,” said Sissy. There was something in her voice, some tone that made Irini look more closely. Sissy wasn’t sitting with her father, after all. Instead Walter Collins was swinging in the moonlight on the Tarken porch with Sissy Tarken.

  “Hello, Irini,” he said. “You be careful getting down from there. I’m depending on you tomorrow.”

  The ground tilted and sank beneath Irini; she was about to pitch off. This was not because she was losing her balance. On the contrary, she had been stunned into immobility. It must have been the fence itself that moved, trying to shake her loose. When Walter had told her he had other women now to compare her to, she had never imagined he meant Sissy Tarken.

  Just in time she remembered to breathe. It was not easy. Thomas Holcrow and Walter between them had turned the very air around Irini’s body into a syrup of sex and confusion. It thickened in her lungs, dimpled and goosebumped her arms, jellied her legs. She was so stirred up she thought it must show, thought that anyone looking at her would see it, like the desperate sparkle of a lightning bug.

  Fortunately neither Walter nor Sissy was looking. They had resumed a quiet and private conversation. She took a fumbling step from the top of the planks to the more secure footing of the railing.

  She considered dismounting with a bold, unembarrassed leap, but she was afraid she might fall. Just as she had made up her mind to go for grace instead of bravura, to slide slowly, liquidly, sensuously to the ground, the door to her own house opened. The light from the kitchen stretched out along the steps and into the yard in a long yellow corridor. Tweed had gone to inform on her. Now she dashed back down the porch steps and out of the lighted yard into the dark. She stopped at the fence and sat abruptly, staring up at Irini.

  Irini’s father stood in the door. “Why, Irini,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you there for a moment. I mistook you for an objet d’art. I thought we had our very own statue of Venus de Milo, perched right up there on the Tarken fence.”

  “Hi, Dad,” said Irini.

  Her father had an annoying habit of having the last word, even when he wasn’t the last person to speak, which he usually was.

  17

  Among the standards that were relaxed during the war were the sexual standards. This may have been a slow, smooth sag, starting in the twenties, or it may have been an abrupt spasm, brought on by the war. I don’t really know. But clearly, men who were about to be sent overseas, possibly to their deaths, had a powerful trump card to play in sexual negotiations. They can hardly be criticized for playing it. Women were expected to supply morale and motivation to the men. They were expected to dance with them, write them letters, and keep their spirits up. They can hardly be criticized for doing their little bit. The music was hot, the dancing was the best ever, fast and close, and the situation couldn’t have been more desperately romantic. No one has ever told me this, mind you. I figured it out for myself.

  My biggest clue was the period of retrenchment after the war. Whenever you watch the movies or read the magazines, it’s hard to escape the sense of a nationwide conspiracy channeling women toward marriage as fast as possible. Without ever conceding that certain behaviors had been tolerated because of the war, Women at Home, among others, made it their business to state unequivocally that such behaviors would not be tolerated now. The shrillness and persistence of the message attests to the magnitude of the problem. But it was 1947, so they couldn’t tell you sleeping around would kill you.

  Instead they depended on the new demographics. Preliminary estimates suggested that, because of the war, six to eight million women wouldn’t get a man; this worked out to one woman out of every seven. All very scientific, all very persuasive. All put to the service of one particular illusion—that marriage was a trap for men, who had to be tricked, cajoled, or flirted into it, but an advantage for women.

  No one was saying you were more likely to be murdered by terrorists, but the message was the same. It was not the moment for any woman to give up her edge. Every issue of Women at Home ran an inspirational story about some woman who made her man wait and how grateful he was. Even little, innocent Anna Peal was co-opted into the campaign.

  Anna had the most exciting life imaginable. She hobnobbed on a routine basis with thieves and cowboys, lamas and llamas. She scaled mountains and bargained for her life with mad scientists. But her greatest ambition was to grow up to be a wife and mother. “Every woman wants to wear white. Every woman wants to care for a husband and children of her own. That’s the biggest adventure of all,” her own mother assured her periodically.

  There have always been women who have made it their business to tell other women to stay home. And a very nice business it’s become, too, with lots of travel and guest speaking and dinners that someone else has cooked, on dishes that someone else will wash and a paycheck and everything. Mrs. Peal was not one of these women. But she was a missionary with a flock to look after, and consequently she was never around when Anna needed fishing out of the briny. Plus she was often a bit on the dim side. Sometimes Anna counted on her to be just that bit dim.

  Yet this one piece of advice Anna swallowed whole. So, apparently, did everyone else. A poll of high school girls taken in 1947 reported that they expected to be married by twenty-two and to stay at home after the wedding, conceiving, delivering, and raising their four children. When asked if they expected to work, they said no. Raising four children is such a vacation.

  Why would the girls at Margaret Mill be any different? What were they going to give up marriage and children for? A better fish stick?

  Sissy Tarken was one of those girls whose sexual standards had relaxed during the war. She didn’t work in the Kitchen; the Tarkens didn’t need the money and Mr. Tarken was afraid to have his wife left alone too often or for too long. Sissy had long black hair that her mother did up for her and large, owlish eyes that blinked slowly at you in a way Irini often found irritating. Irini couldn’t remember when she had first realized that, one by one, as the boys left Magrit, they had all gone to say good-bye to Sissy. Naturally this left Sissy with abandonment issues and a reputation.

  Irini couldn’t imagine when Sissy had become that sort of girl. She hadn’t seen it happen, but perhaps, although she saw Sissy on a daily basis, she hadn’t been watching. She had a bad conscience where Sissy was concerned.

  Technically the same age as Irini, Sissy had always actually been much younger. She was Irini’s next-door neighbor. On the other side lived the Mays, a sophisticated trio who knew how and when boys could be safely kissed and what clothes one wore on a date, depending on whether you had been asked out for dinner or whether the evening included dinner and dancing. On many occasions, Irini had awakened in the morning, checked to see what age she was on that particular day, and gone left or right out of the front door accordingly.

  In point of fact, Irini preferred the company of Arlys or Margo to any of them, but the Fossums and the Törngrens lived farther away, so seeing them was something that had to be arranged in advance. Margo usually had chores and Arlys was expected to spend the weekends with her family. And although they both liked Irini, they were best friends themselves, which made Irini the expendable one. So Irini, whom everyone liked, and Sissy, whom no one liked, were often thrown together, but the truth was that Irini didn’t actually like Sissy any better than anyone else did and maybe Sissy didn’t like Irini as much as everyone else did.

  Sissy was a natural follower who tended to follow t
oo closely. When Irini bought a fake-fur coat from Sears for Easter, white and soft as sifted flour, it was only a matter of days before Sissy had done the same. When Irini decided she was really devoutly Catholic and not just formerly Catholic like her father, Sissy said that she was, too. Mrs. Tarken corrected Sissy quickly, corrected her as soon as she heard about it. The Tarkens drove all the way to Rimsey every Sunday to attend the Methodist church there. Still, Sissy’s intentions had been clear and Irini’s irritation lasted longer than her faith.

  Sissy had a good imagination, but it expressed itself in suggestibility. Fun with Sissy usually took the form of seeing how far you could go before she stopped believing you. When Wilbur Floyd told the girls at recess that Madame Nadeau had tied herself to a chair and drowned herself in Upper Magrit and that they hadn’t been able to untie one of the cords around her wrist, but had been forced to hack her hand off in order to retrieve the body, Sissy was the only one who believed him.

  “Oh, yes,” her own brother Jimmy had said. Jimmy was four years older and no more of a torment than most older brothers, which was to say that he tormented them all day long. During the winter he chased them home from school with snowballs. During the summer he made unflattering comments about their bathing suits. His aim was better with the latter than the former. “They tried to dive for the hand, because they wanted to bury it with the rest of her, but the turtles had already eaten it. I’ve seen the bones myself,” Jimmy assured her. “So that’s why Madame Nadeau still walks around Magrit at night. She’s searching for her other hand.”

  “Don’t let them upset you like that,” Irini advised Sissy impatiently. But Sissy couldn’t even listen to Wheat Theater until she was twelve. Even little Anna Peal’s wholesome and improbable adventures gave Sissy nightmares.

  One summer, when they were fourteen years old, Sissy and Irini walked out to the old Sweet cabin together. It was a spooky place and Sissy was naturally reluctant. Irini made her go. Sissy could be talked into anything.

  Jacob Sweet had deserted the cabin some twenty years back to live with his sister in Sacramento. No one in Magrit had even known he had a sister. “She’ll have to give him a good scrubbing,” Mrs. Baldish had said at the time. The joke about Jacob Sweet was that he smelled okay for a dead man, but was a bit ripe to still be breathing.

  He had last been seen getting onto the train with no luggage. This was agreed to be suspicious for someone going all the way to Sacramento. Mrs. Baldish had wanted to write the sister, but no one knew her married name. Nothing was done and eventually this inaction came to be classed under the commendatory heading, “Here in Magrit We Mind Our Own Business.”

  The cabin was west of Magrit. You found it by walking down Glen Annie Creek. Close to Magrit, where the creek was widest and deepest, you crossed on a little wood bridge. The creek was docile and pretty there. Then you hiked along it into the woods as they got darker and closer. Near the cabin the trees grew a dank white mold on their branches and even the spiders were white and bloated. By the time you reached Jacob Sweet’s place, Glen Annie Creek was covered with a greasy sheen; when you looked down into it, you could barely make out long strands of algae, undulating from the rocks.

  Jimmy had followed them for a while, Indian style. He paralleled their course, leaping out from time to time, or whistling in an eerie way. “Where is my hand?” he said in falsetto from behind a tree. “I want my hand.” He quit before they reached Jacob’s cabin, made a final, farewell appearance, pulled Sissy’s hair, and then vanished.

  The cabin had fallen into disrepair and decay. The roof had rotted away. Everything smelled of mold and sawdust. A bag of flour, purchased in Magrit two decades ago, before the war, before the Depression even, had been left on the counter. It had long ago been filled with bugs and eaten up. Next to it was the ghost of a jar of currant jelly, dried to a thin red film of ectoplasm. Properly stored in the cupboard and more resilient were a bottle of Tabasco and a jar of blackstrap. Some sort of rodent had made a nest in the corner and then deserted, just as Jacob had deserted. The nest included strips from the bag of flour and old bits of newspaper and clothes.

  Sissy and Irini were far too old to be playing Anna Peal, but that’s what they were doing. They pretended that Anna Peal was sheltering here for the night. She had been out, crossing the border on an errand for her mother, when she got lost. She wandered in the dark woods until night fell. Fortunately she came to the cabin. It was deserted. Anna cleaned out the fireplace.

  On the radio, Irini told Sissy, they crinkled cellophane to make the sound of a fire. This was hardly necessary in Magrit, where the radio reception was poor and Wheat Theater came complete with a constant crackling of static, as if the whole station were aflame. But in Jacob Sweet’s cabin, they had to pretend the sound as well as the fire. Anna cooked mushrooms and fiddleheads she had found in the forest. Neither Sissy nor Irini would have taken a single bite of a mushroom or fiddlehead in real life, but Anna could choose a few unexpected seasonings and work miracles.

  She had used the penny test to determine the mushrooms were edible. Unfortunately she had used wartime pennies! Now she needed the antidote and there wasn’t a second to spare.

  The sky outside the cabin darkened. The windows were such a smear of greases on the outside and old smoke on the inside that the girls hardly noticed until they heard thunder. They abandoned Anna Peal to her fate and ran for home. Black clouds poured over the sky, bubbled and boiled. It began to rain, great, frightening sheets of rain, and lightning lit up the whole landscape so that the after-image burned a persistent garish purple under Irini’s eyelids. The funny thing was that it wasn’t raining on them yet, but off to the side, where they could watch it, like a movie.

  Glen Annie Creek was up now, transformed in the short afternoon to a rolling broth of white water. They were running over the bridge, Irini first, when there was a sound above her, like a sudden intake of breath. Irini looked up as a sheet of lightning blinked over the sky. Two ring-necked ducks fell from the air like stones. They splashed into Glen Annie Creek. Irini’s mouth opened as she ran. A moment later, less than a moment, she slipped and went into the water. Sissy grabbed her hand just before it disappeared.

  Sissy was strong enough to hold on to Irini, strong enough to keep her afloat, but not strong enough to pull her out. There was nothing beneath Irini but water, no place she could find with her feet or her arms. The rain reached them in a torrent of small, stinging drops.

  The water in the creek was cold and rough and slapped her around. But what she noticed most was that her hand hurt where Sissy was holding it. “Let me go,” said Irini.

  “No,” said Sissy. Her mouth was pinched shut. Her eyes were wide and vacant. Lightning lit them up momentarily; her hair streamed with water. “I don’t know how long I can hold on,” she added nonsensically. The pitch of her voice was rising.

  Irini made her own voice very reasonable. “I can swim. If you just let me go, I’ll swim to the bank.”

  “I think the water’s too strong.” Sissy began to cry, so that her words came out in disconnected little spurts. “My arms are starting to hurt.”

  “Just let me go,” said Irini.

  Sissy knelt, which dropped Irini deeper into the water. Her grip tightened.

  “Let me go.” Irini tried shouting. “Let me go, you stupid girl. Let me go! You’re a stupid fat cow and nobody likes you. I hate you. I’ve never seen anyone so fat and stupid. If you don’t let me go, I’ll hurt you later. I swear I will.”

  Sissy sobbed loudly. “Help us! Jimmy! Come and help us!”

  “Everyone hates you.” Irini was screaming now. “You’re keeping me here in this horrible water. I’ll freeze and it’s your fault.” She struggled to pull her hand away. Sissy was bigger than Irini and Irini had no leverage. There was a crack of lightning. Irini could see through her open mouth all the way into Sissy’s throat. “Let me go,” she said. “I’ll be all right if you’ll just let me go. You idiot. You moron.
You fat, ugly cow.” All the while rain poured over them so that Sissy must have been as wet and as cold as Irini.

  “Help us!” Sissy’s voice was too weak and terrified for anyone to hear, even if there had been someone else in the woods in the rain. “Please! Somebody help us.”

  At last they each of them gave something up. Irini stopped shouting and struggling. She continued to call Sissy names, but her voice was too low and dispirited for Sissy to hear them over the water. They weren’t much anyway. Her anger was as exhausted as the rest of her. Sissy stopped calling, and her crying became softer and less spasmodic. She continued to tell Irini that her arms hurt, that she didn’t know how much longer she could hold on, but Irini no longer believed her. Even the rain stopped falling. Irini wept, but the only way she knew this was that the water on her face was warm. Who would have thought Sissy could be so stubborn? Sissy Tarken, who could be talked into anything by anybody. There was no way for the thing to finish until Sissy let go.

  Perhaps half an hour passed. It could even have been longer. It was probably much shorter. But however long it was, at the end of it, Irini’s father came out of the trees, over the bridge, took Irini’s hand from Sissy and pulled her out. The girls continued to cry. Irini’s father picked them up. They were not little girls, they were fourteen and Sissy was a cushioned fourteen. Still Irini’s father carried them both, one in each arm with their hands clinging to his neck, back up the path and over to the nearest house, which was the Moodey place. Mrs. Moodey ran a bath and she made both girls get in together. Then she toweled them dry with rough towels, rubbing hard to get the blood flowing. Dr. Gilbertsen arrived in a hurry. He looked them over, inside and out, gave them each a swallow of something nasty.

  Maggie Collins writes: “If medicine has a particularly unpleasant taste, hold a piece of ice in your mouth for two minutes before taking.”