The Sweetheart Season

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Then Dr. Gilbertsen sent them home to bed. Sissy could not move her right arm. She had pulled and sprained the muscles. It had to be splinted for six weeks and she couldn’t write to do her schoolwork. Irini had to take notes for her.

  Irini slept all night and half the. next day. Twice she woke, wet with sweat, and saw her father, sitting in the reading chair, watching her. He was still there, still watching, at noon when she woke up for real.

  Later Irini’s father told her he’d gone to the Tarkens’ looking for her when the rain got so bad. Jimmy had told him where to look and Tweed had actually found them. “We should have taken Tweed along,” Irini said, but her father’s opinion was that even though Tweed was mostly collie, she was still the sort of dog who, in a crisis, would save herself.

  Her father said that if Sissy had let her go, Irini would have drowned. “No question.” He coughed to steady his voice. “No question.”

  Which really made it too bad that Irini had said all those awful things to her. She felt very awkward over what to say to Sissy next. Fortunately, Sissy was prepared to be magnanimous. The Tarken kitchen was filled with cakes and casseroles, all baked in honor of Sissy. There was a short article about the incident in the Chicago paper, using Sissy’s name, but sparing Irini’s. Miss Cleveland, their beautiful red-haired teacher who looked like no one so much as Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, as depicted on the color plate on the inside cover of Irini’s Baum book, made a speech about Sissy to the whole class. If they could all only be like Sissy, she as much as said, the war would be over tomorrow.

  Sissy was a heroine, but she was still a slow-witted, uninteresting girl. The kids soon forgot she was the former, while there was always fresh evidence of the latter. Her new status lasted a little longer among the adults. Miss Cleveland might have remembered, but she married a marine at the end of the school year and moved to upstate New York. Only for Irini’s father was the change permanent. The rest of his life he never mentioned her name without adding that she was the bravest little girl he had ever known.

  Irini herself never forgot, but it was an uncomfortable memory all around. Not only the things she had said, but just the fact of having almost died. She would have preferred never to think of it again. She resented Sissy’s bringing it up, although she tried not to say so. Everyone knew that Sissy had saved her by holding her up for an hour, at least, even though Sissy had to have her arm splinted afterward and nearly died of the cold. Well and good. But no one knew until Sissy told them that the whole time she had been saving Irini’s life, Irini had been calling her a fat, stupid cow.

  “Why were you doing that?” Scott Moodey asked her incredulously.

  “She was hurting me.”

  “But she was saving your life.”

  “But I didn’t know that.” Of course, Irini didn’t know that. Fourteen-year-olds didn’t die in Magrit from anything but polio.

  Irini knew she should be best friends with Sissy now, but she still liked Arlys and Margo better. She couldn’t help it. It would have been so much nicer to be the girl who didn’t almost die, the girl who held on for more than an hour. This would have been just as hard for Irini as for Sissy, since it happened long before she developed her bread-kneading muscles.

  It might have been too hard for Irini. Then Sissy would have drowned and Irini would have been the girl who let her. This thought made the uncomfortable topic even more uncomfortable. Whenever she went to the Tarkens’ now, Sissy wanted to play some game that required putting her arm in a pretend splint. She had a collection of red and blue bandannas just for this purpose. Irini spent less time with Sissy after the adventure instead of more.

  And then, about two years later, Irini became aware of the boys. She didn’t know what to feel. She’d known these boys all her life and some of them were going off to war. Was she to blame them for the fact that Sissy, who was the bravest little girl her father had ever known, could be talked into anything?

  Sissy’s unexpected stubborn streak surfaced again after the telegram. She absolutely refused to believe that Jimmy was dead. The telegram said “presumed dead.” His unit had engaged the enemy. He had been seen fighting. No one had actually seen him die. He had gone to the same place as Amelia Earhart.

  The Tarkens held a memorial service at the Methodist church and many nice things were said about Jimmy afterward. “What a spirit he had,” said Irini’s father. “What a spirit.” Sissy was not there. She had refused to attend, although her mother had cried and pleaded and threatened. It showed an obstinacy and a strength of will only Irini knew she possessed. When Irini talked to Sissy now, Sissy wanted her to pretend that Jimmy was still alive.

  But Irini actually believed it. It was not easy, but she did. She could picture him, in his torn and dirty uniform, hiding in the jungle, jumping out at the Japanese. “I want my hand,” he said in falsetto. “Give me back my hand.” In this fantasy, Jimmy was sort of godlike, almost immortal. It was not easy to imagine Jimmy Tarken as a god. Irini did it for Sissy, to whom she owed her life. It was the best she could manage.

  And when she saw Walter there, swinging in the dark, she knew she really should have told Sissy three years ago that you have to keep a boy waiting in order to keep a boy. That boys don’t want that kind of girl, even though, under certain circumstances, they tell you they do, so it’s best to avoid those circumstances altogether. “Why would he buy the cow, when he can get the milk for free?” Maggie asked the muddled young women who wrote her on the subject. It was just as simple as that.

  But Sissy hadn’t gotten the message. Sissy had no one to tell her, because her mother was so depressed and the Mays wouldn’t speak to her, so it should have been Irini, although, of course, she would have changed the metaphor; that cow business wouldn’t have done at all.

  And for Walter Collins there were no words.

  Maggie Collins writes: “Never dispose of the scum that collects on warmed milk. It contains valuable calcium salts. Whisk it back in.”

  On the day of her brother’s memorial service, after her parents had left the house for the church, Sissy went alone into the kitchen. She pretended that the cookies, the macaroni and cheese, the homemade breads were for her. She got out a tatted tablecloth, embroidered napkins. She polished the good silver. She set the table for five.

  It was her wedding day, that was why there was so much food. Sissy Tarken went back upstairs to put on lipstick and paint her nails. She dressed in one of her mother’s dresses, pulling the extra material of the bodice around to the back and anchoring it with clothespins. She had to pretend hard. Only the color was bridal. “The food is for the guests,” she told Jimmy. “Don’t you go eating it now.”

  Her husband was handsome. Tall. She couldn’t get much further than that. He stood outside the door with Jimmy and he wanted to come in, but Jimmy wouldn’t let him. Bad luck, said Jimmy, who had to come back, had to be there, couldn’t die like this before Sissy had ever even had a chance to like him.

  “You boys,” said her mother. Such a happy voice. Sissy could hardly remember her mother speaking in such a happy voice. “Don’t you tease my Sissy now.”

  Sissy went back to the kitchen, took the place next to Jimmy’s. She lit two candles. She helped herself to the Baldish’s cold potato salad. She used a silver fork and laid an embroidered napkin over her white lap. She blew the candles out.

  18

  The night before the game, Irini imagined the smell of ozone in the air. She thought it might rain. She imagined a hundred balloons drifting down from the high ceilings of Collins House, trapped in the corners and under the chairs. She imagined flashes of lightning. She had a good imagination. Out of the clear blue came Saturday, without a cloud in the sky.

  She was surprised at how nervous she was. Baseball was just a game, even when women played it. And because they were women, no one would mind if they didn’t win. For girls there were those definite advantages to not winning. She fixed her hair and put on her lipstick, a bri
ght shade from Tangee called Red Drama. Her father was sleeping in, but he heard her in the bathroom. “You go for the fences, Irini,” he called out to her. “Go for a husband next time. Go for a home run today.”

  “It’ll have your name on it, Dad,” Irini told him. There was a knock at the door. The May girls were ready to walk to the mill. Sissy ran down the steps from her house to join them. Irini automatically took a position between Sissy and Tracy.

  She waited for Sissy to say something about Walter, maybe something intended to reassure her or maybe something intended to make her jealous, but something. Instead, Sissy was silent. Her eyes were like broken china; the whites cracked with red. “Is something wrong?” Irini asked and Sissy shook her head.

  Norma Baldish was already at the mill, with the bus hood up and her head in its mouth. “Car trouble?” asked Irini hopefully. All you could see of her was her rump. It was a large rump.

  “Just checking the oil,” said Norma. “Everything looks good.” She slammed the hood. Even Norma was wearing lipstick today. Out of inexperience and an unfamiliarity with women’s magazines, she had chosen a color too light for her. Her mouth was a ghostly mark in the middle of her face. Irini, already uneasy over Sissy’s distress, was saddened even more by Norma’s lipstick. She had never thought of Norma as someone who wanted to be married. Norma was twenty-five and already old by Irini’s standards.

  Norma was too solid and capable to be attractive, but she had always had the dignity of indifference. She didn’t read the women’s magazines: she read Field and Stream and Popular Mechanics instead. She kept her hair cut to a sensible length for hunting and other activities involving brambles. It was too curly, even for 1947, when curly hair was much admired. She ran the bar; she could mix drinks, she could unplug your toilet with one hand and bring a deer down with the other. She could wire your house for electricity in her sleep. “I don’t miss the young men at all,” Irini’s father would say from time to time. “As long as Norma never leaves us.”

  It seemed a safe enough hope. Norma would have Bumps when her parents died and the house by the Falls as well. What did she need to be married for?

  She had very pretty eyes. They were light-colored and bright in her face—unclouded as marbles, sky blue. They were her best feature. She had no waist and large thighs. The catcher’s pads were a becoming look for her. Her mouth was too narrow, too severe. Still, it was a fashion mistake to erase her lips entirely like this.

  Margo and Arlys had cleaned the bus windows, according to Maggie’s instructions, as imparted by Henry via Claire, with an ammonia solution and a window-cleaning device Henry had ordered from Chicago and was calling by the unlikely name of squeegee. “Much easier,” conceded Margo. “A real advance.”

  After the squeegee, streaks could be removed with a chamois. “I hope we’re not going to do this before every game,” Arlys said, but Claire didn’t know. The condition of the bus reflected on Maggie, Claire pointed out. Lots of people would be seeing it and making up their minds about Sweetwheats accordingly. Presentation was everything.

  Since Claire had moved into Collins House, she had begun to talk about Maggie the same way Henry did. Given the letters and suspicions, it made Irini uneasy. The unstreaked glass broke the early morning sunlight into glints and prisms. Henry had already put the balloons inside the bus. They were untethered and helium-filled, so when Norma slammed the hood, they jumped all at once, a brilliant, leaping rainbow seen through the glittering windows.

  Margo’s two little brothers defended the Margaret Mill gate, picking the girls off as they arrived with machine gun fire and grenades. There was a constant annoying ack-ack-ack coming from that direction and occasional shrill demands that someone fall down. One of them was ten years old and one only six.

  Margo was babysitting today and the little Törngren boys had been promised a trip to Yawkey on the team bus and a balloon each if they were good. Irini would have already decided about the balloon, had it been up to her.

  Henry was waiting for the girls inside the mill. He was wearing the Sweethearts baseball cap, with the wheat laurel on the brim. His ears floated on the sides like water-lily pads. The girls sat where he had pulled two tables together so each of them could eat a premeasured bowl of Sweetwheats under his watchful eye. He had had bananas shipped in from Cuba for the occasion. He sliced them onto the cereal himself, while a photographer, shipped in from Madison, immortalized the entire event.

  It was a courageous show. Gandhi had sworn again that he would never cede an inch of Pakistan, and there had been bloody riots between the Hindus and the Moslems in the Gurgaon District, just eighteen miles from Ada’s hotel. Henry hadn’t slept all night. But his hand was steady, his banana slicing cool. Every slice was the same size as every other slice. Every girl got exactly the same number of slices.

  “You know what I’m thinking?” said Henry. “I’m thinking about a cereal with the banana already in the flake. Maybe the milk as well. What about a cereal you could carry in your pocket? Cereal sticks. All the little bits of cereal held together in a stick with a sort of banana paste.”

  “How would you keep the bananas from spoiling?” Claire asked.

  “How do you keep fish sticks from spoiling?”

  “But you can’t freeze bananas.”

  “Why not?” said Henry. “Why can you can an apple and not a banana? What’s the difference, chemically speaking?” A product named Pie Quick had just come on the market—premixed crust, just add water and roll; presliced, preseasoned apples, just open and dump. The copy promised a homemade apple pie in the oven in fifteen minutes or less. But the banana cream pie was still an open field as well as being Henry’s personal favorite. “Let’s work on it next week,” Henry suggested. “Fanny, you pick a banana-preserving team. Three girls. Don’t limit yourself to freezing. Any preservation method. Think about brine, for instance. Check with Mr. Doyle on the chemistry.”

  Margo’s mother had sent a Thermos of coffee for the team. There were leftover muffins from muffin day, many of them lemon ice, and no one made coffee like Mrs. Törngren. There was a secret to it, a Finnish secret Maggie was dying for, but Mrs. Törngren wouldn’t tell. “She spits in the grounds,” Margo said once, but she was probably joking. The Finns weren’t the French, after all.

  Margo unscrewed the lid and a puff of cloud appeared above it, like the mist from Aladdin’s lamp. Irini made a wish, but it was only something she felt, not something she could articulate. Even she didn’t know what she had wished for. Perhaps a game that went well. Perhaps a day that went well. She took a large cupful of strong Törngren coffee and left it black, although this was not likely to calm her down.

  Arlys picked up a sugar lump in her fingers, lowered it into the coffee, waited until it turned entirely brown, and then, just before it crumbled away, put it into her mouth and started again with another sugar lump. It was a slow way to drink coffee and Irini would have thought Arlys was stalling if this had not been the way she always did it. And then, Arlys had the audacity to claim that she loved a good cup of coffee.

  “Irini, you’re not eating your cereal,” Henry noted.

  “I’m very nervous,” Irini said.

  “In the interests of science, I’m going to have to ask you to put that aside.”

  Irini attempted to do so. The bananas were overripe and gluey. Arlys was eating even less than Irini.

  Henry had a lab book and a stopwatch in front of him. He was observing them carefully and taking notes. No one could have an appetite under such circumstances; even the Collinses’ dogs wouldn’t eat when they were watched, but when Irini tried to point this out, Henry merely made a note of her objection in his ledger. “No one gets on the bus,” said Henry, “until there are nine empty bowls on the table.”

  It was not an incentive, but Irini’s spoon scraped the bottom anyway. “We’ll change clothes here in Magrit,” Henry said. “When we arrive in Yawkey I want you streaming from the bus, already in your unifor
ms, smiling to beat the band. I want each of you carrying a handful of balloons. You pass the balloons out to the littlest children. There may well be journalists present. If so, Arlys, I want you to eat a second bowl of Sweetwheats for the cameras there.”

  “Oh, please not me, Mr. Henry,” said Arlys. Her face pinched with distress. “Gee whiz.”

  “I’ll do it,” Tracy offered.

  “That’ll sell the cereal,” said Cindy.

  “Better than you could.”

  “Could not.”

  Irini put the last bite of Sweetwheats into her mouth. Henry thumbed the watch. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he said. “Remember that you’re playing for Maggie today. Make her proud.”

  He boarded the bus first, leaving the Kitchen to the girls while they changed. Irini hadn’t worn a uniform since she’d been a Brownie for about ten minutes once. Back then, as she remembered it, the uniform had been one of the reasons she quit.

  Each bus seat held two, except for the large seat at the back, which Henry Collins had taken for himself. He filled the space next to him with charts and magazines and Maggie’s correspondence. He was planning to work all the way to Yawkey.

  Walter stowed the batting helmets and the bats and sank into the seat next to Helen. He was wearing his Sweethearts baseball cap pulled down so that it shaded his eyes and gave him a furtive look. Inside the dark bus, he folded the brim upward. Now he looked like a goofball. He grinned at Irini, showing his beautiful teeth, the wet, pink strip of gum line.

  Irini sat with Arlys, and Margo sat with her brothers. Arlys had the window seat behind Helen. This put Irini directly behind Walter. Sissy walked down the aisle and stopped. Her eyes glassed over with tears. She held out her mitt; Irini could see from where she sat. The mitt was signed with Jimmy’s name and molded in the shape of Jimmy’s hand. Walter took it.

  “Do you think he’ll mind me using it?” Sissy asked.