by Lois Duncan
“Mom’s dead.”
Ann’s hand tightened convulsively on the receiver.
“What? Dave, she can’t be! I was over there this afternoon. She was teaching me to make chocolate cake from scratch not using a cake mix. She was just fine.”
The words were ridiculous, and she knew it even as she spoke them, yet the reality was impossible. Mrs. Brewer had been all right—a little tired, maybe, but she’d been chatty enough, even joking a little about the collection of odd recipes she was planning to give Ann as a wedding present. There was one cake you made with diet soda and another with a can of tomato soup.
“She didn’t eat much at dinner,” Dave said. “She said she was going to lie down for a while before she did the kitchen, and I told her to leave the dishes and I’d rinse and load them when I got back from the evening chores. When I came in a few minutes ago, she was lying on the bed, and I thought she was sleeping. I went over to lay a blanket on her, and I saw she wasn’t breathing.”
“Oh my god, Dave, that’s horrible!” Her heart wrenched for him. And as though she were there beside him, she saw the blue-eyed man bending worriedly over the still figure on the bed, reaching in stunned disbelief to touch the closed eyelids, speaking a name and hearing nothing in answer but silence.
“Maybe she’s just unconscious,” she whispered. “A little stroke or something. You called 911, right?”
“Someone should be here any minute now. They called for an ambulance out of Adrian, but it won’t help, Annie.”
“You’re sure.” It was a statement rather than a question.
“Can you come?”
“Of course. Kelly can drive me. She’s here now, parked out in the driveway. We were just leaving for Holly’s.”
“Oh, yeah—the party. I forgot. That’s why I wasn’t going to see you tonight.” He paused, fumbling, trying to put the pieces of life together to make some sort of pattern, yet unable to focus. “If you think you should go there first—”
“Dave, don’t be crazy. How could I even begin to think about a stupid party now? You want me with you, don’t you?”
“Yes, I want you.” His voice broke. “Annie, please come now. Hurry. I need you so much.”
“I’m on my way. Just hang on. I love you.”
“I love—you—too.” He was weeping unashamedly now, and she was also as she flipped her phone shut and hurried toward Kelly’s car.
Chapter 8
The November 6 meeting of the Modesta chapter of Daughters of Eve was called to order by the president, Erika Schneider. The pledge was repeated. The secretary, Ann Whitten, read the minutes from the previous meeting, and Madison Ellis presented the treasurer’s report.
“Ninety-three dollars and seventy cents,” she read. “And a couple of people I know had better get themselves in gear and turn in their November dues so we can buy nice material for the nursing-home curtains.”
Irene Stark observed her with satisfaction. When she’d taken on the sponsorship of the group at the beginning of the school year, she hadn’t been sure she was going to take to her. Madison had the sort of striking beauty that came across as not quite real: The hair, the skin, the figure were all so perfect that she might have stepped straight out of a TV show.
It had come as a heartening surprise to discover that beneath that surface the girl was made of steel wire.
“I broke up with Pete,” she’d announced to Irene one Monday morning between classes. “If there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s a male chauvinist pig trying to run my life for me. He was telling me what I could and couldn’t do with my spare time, like he was my dad or something!”
If only they all had Madison’s strength and self-confidence, Irene thought now, surveying the array of young faces before her. If only they were all able to stand up for themselves and demand of life the things they deserved. Here was Ann Whitten, as talented an artist as had ever come through one of her classes, blithely preparing to destroy the possibility of any sort of art career by settling down at eighteen to marry a farmer. Here was bright, levelheaded Kelly Johnson, who might make a fine lawyer someday, setting her life’s goal to be an administrative assistant. She’d spend a lifetime brewing coffee and typing letters for some demanding male boss with half the native intelligence she had.
And Tammy Carncross. What had happened to Tammy? Tammy with her dreamy eyes and sweet, expressive face was a little shy, but liked by everybody. What had caused her to act so strangely at the initiation meeting? That was a worry, and so was Jane Rheardon, sitting quiet and withdrawn with her chair pulled a little away from the rest of the circle, one of them and yet not one of them, a sister and yet strangely unreachable. Jane needed friends to talk to. Well, they were here. Why was she unable to open up to them?
And then there was Laura Snow. Laura was involved with someone. Attuned as she was to the emotions of her girls, Irene could pinpoint the very weekend it had started, for Laura had come to school the next week with an odd sort of glow about her, a dreamy, drifting look that Irene had seen on the faces of girls before. My dear, she’d thought, poor girl, you have to get a grip on things. There were girls who could handle sexual relationships during their teen years, and there were others who were not emotionally equipped for them. Laura definitely fell into the latter category.
Especially disturbing to Irene was the fact that she couldn’t figure out who the boyfriend was. Laura continued to walk through the halls by herself or with girlfriends, and at lunch she sat at a table with Erika and Paula. No boy hovered by her locker or carried her books to classes, and when school was out she waited alone at the south door of the building for Kristy Grange, who walked home in the same direction. Still, Laura had the unmistakable aura of a girl in love, and Irene was finally forced to come to the conclusion that he wasn’t a student at Modesta. This opened the door to all sorts of distressing possibilities. There were men in the world who made a game out of seducing young girls, especially those as vulnerable and inexperienced as Laura.
On Irene’s first teaching day at Modesta, she’d spotted Laura alone at a table in the school cafeteria, hunched over a wedge of chocolate cake, her jaws moving rhythmically, her eyes glued to the wall as though it were a movie screen portraying a situation far more intriguing than the bustle of activity around her. The girl’s stolid acceptance of her loneliness had struck Irene as pathetic, and it had jolted her back in place and time to another girl alone in a crowd of her contemporaries, defiantly pretending that she didn’t care.
That girl had been Irene herself. She hadn’t had a weight problem; for her there had been the simple fact that, by the standards of her day, she was ugly. In an era when pale daintiness was considered the essence of femininity, Irene’s dark complexion and black hair had set her apart. Heavy brows, a strong-boned face, and a shadow of dark fuzz across the upper lip had completed the unappetizing picture. Like Laura, she’d moved alone through a social scene of teen couples, holding herself aloof in an attempt to convince her classmates that such idiotic behavior was beyond her comprehension.
On the day that she overheard her father remark quite matter-of-factly to her mother that “We’d better get her all the education we can, because god knows she’s never going to find a husband,” Irene had decided to kill herself. This decision had lasted for the length of time it had taken her to lock herself in the bathroom and extract the razor blades from her father’s old-fashioned shaving kit. At that point there had flashed through her mind a vision of her mother, whom she loved, gazing down on her daughter’s body on the blood-drenched tiles and being carried off, shrieking, to a sanitarium. A wispy little person of a sensitive nature, Mrs. Stark had a history of emotional breakdowns.
So Irene had put back the blades, unlocked the door and kept on living. The following year her parents had separated, and her mother’s final breakdown had occurred. For cold comfort, Irene had the knowledge that she herself wasn’t responsible. She accepted her college tuition from her father and never again acknowledged
his existence.
In college, for the first time in her life, she fell in love. The man was a dreamy, bespectacled art professor, married, with children in high school. Their romance lasted several months before the professor’s wife paid a visit to Irene in her dorm room. She didn’t rant or weep; she simply sat on Irene’s lumpy bed with her legs demurely crossed at the ankles and explained that her husband was going through what she called “his midlife crisis.”
“He feels youth slipping away,” she explained, “and he compensates by cultivating young female students.” Irene, it seemed, was one of a number of those who came and went as semester followed semester.
“You’re better than that, aren’t you, dear?” the woman asked her.
Numbly, Irene nodded. Then she asked a question of her own.
“Why do you stay with him?”
“I’m used to it,” the woman told her. “Besides, what else is there for me to do? I’ve got five kids. I’ve never worked. I’m stuck.” She leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner and took Irene’s hand. “Don’t ever get stuck, dear. Take it from somebody who knows what it’s all about. You have that first baby, and they’ve got you. You’re a sharp girl, I can tell that. I used to be sharp once, too, can you believe it? But I let myself get buried, and I could never dig my way out again.”
“I’m an education major,” Irene said. “I’m minoring in art.”
“You want to teach painting?”
“I want to help kids with talent learn to express themselves.”
“If that’s what you want, go for it,” the woman said. “Don’t let them stop you.”
“Nobody’s trying to stop me,” Irene told her wryly. “I’m not exactly the type men stand in line for.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself. It’s not always a pretty face that hooks them. Sometimes it’s the challenge of trying to keep a strong woman down.” The professor’s wife uncrossed her ankles and got to her feet. “Well, good luck, dear. I’ve enjoyed our talk. I must say, my husband’s taste is improving.”
“Thank you,” Irene said politely. “It was nice meeting you.”
After her guest left, she got out her English class notebook and wrote down the entire conversation in as much detail as she could remember, because she knew that later she wouldn’t be able to believe it had actually occurred.
I should have that notebook now, she thought, to share with them—with Laura, especially, and with Ann. If they could read that dialogue, they might begin to realize what they were doing to themselves. They would learn, of course; all women did eventually. If only they could be saved from gleaning that knowledge too late!
It was Erika’s voice that snapped her out of her reverie.
“May we have the report on the sale of the raffle tickets?”
“They’re going really well,” Kelly said, consulting her notes. “I had five hundred printed, and we’ve already sold almost half of them with the rest of this week still to go before the drawing. If anybody wants extras, I’ve got some with me.”
“I need some,” Tammy said.
“That’s right, Tam, you didn’t get any, did you?” Kelly took a packet of tickets from the box in her lap and passed it to her friend across the table. “We’re charging less this year so people will buy more of them. We decided the price we asked last year was too high.”
“What are the prizes?” Tammy asked.
“We’ve got some really good stuff. There’s a charcoal grill from Williams, and Paula’s dad has donated dinner for two at the café, and Steinmetz Photography is giving a free portrait session. There’s a lot of small stuff, too. Most of the places we asked came through with donations.”
“Does the club do this every year?” Kristy asked.
“They started a few years ago when my sister was a junior,” Tammy told her. “All the school-sponsored organizations take on one project a year to benefit the school, and that year Daughters of Eve decided to raise money for the athletic fund. The raffle idea was so successful that we’ve done it ever since. The drawing takes place during intermission at the homecoming dance.”
“Why did you choose the athletic fund?” Irene asked her.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t anyone here who did it. Those girls have all graduated.” Tammy frowned, trying to recall the circumstances of the decision. “I think Marnie said something once about the principal suggesting it. The football team needed uniforms.”
“And what do they need this year?”
“I’m not into athletics. Paula probably knows.” Tammy passed on the question. “What’s on the want list?”
“Everything,” Paula said. “Wrestling mats, baseball gear, warm-up suits for the basketball guys; you name it, they need it. Coach Ferrara’s counting the days till homecoming so he can cash in.”
“What about the girls’ teams?” Irene asked. “Do they have everything they need?”
“There aren’t many girls’ teams,” Kelly said. “It’s just basketball, and they haven’t done very well. I’m sorry, Paula; I know you’re on the team. I didn’t say that to put you down, but it’s a fact.”
“Sure, it’s a fact,” Paula said irritably. “What do you expect? We never get a chance to practice. The boys use the gym every afternoon until six o’clock, and then they lock the place up.”
“Really?” Kelly said, surprised. “When do you practice then?”
“Saturdays, and whenever the guys decide to take a day off and bother to let us know. We can get the gym before school in the mornings if we want it but it’s impossible. By the time you shower and change, you’re late to first period and then you’re exhausted the rest of the day.”
“Why are practices set up like that?” Irene asked.
“It’s just the rule.”
“Why do the boys get the gym every single afternoon?”
“Well, they’re the champs,” Paula said. “They’ve been in either first or second place in the regional tournament for three years now.”
“And why do you think that is?”
“Because they’re good. They really are.”
“They’re good because they practice?”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Paula said, “That’s a lot of it, I guess.”
“If the women’s team had the same opportunity for practice, how do you think you would perform?”
“We’d be great,” Paula said. “We’ve got some good players, it’s just that we don’t play together enough to know what we’re doing. Coach says that when there are two teams wanting to use the same facilities, the one that’s doing the best job and bringing honor to the school should get first crack at them.”
“It’s a vicious circle,” Holly said. “Why aren’t there any sports except basketball open to girls here, anyway? We don’t even have a softball team. Do the guys need to use the baseball field? Is that the reason?”
“Don’t ask me,” Paula said. “I don’t organize the sports program. Modesta High’s a small school. We don’t have enough money for everything. That’s the reason Mr. Shelby asked us to support the athletic fund.”
“The point is, from what you say, it doesn’t sound as though you girls are getting much benefit from this fund,” Irene said. “Wrestling mats and warm-up suits for the boys aren’t going to help much in getting a softball team established for you or in getting you half-time use of the gym for basketball practice.”
“What do we do?” Kelly said. “Start a petition?”
“That’s one possibility. It’s been known to work. I read an article the other day about a junior-high girl in Lyndhurst, Ohio, who wanted to be involved in an interscholastic sports program. The principal told her there wasn’t enough interest for the school to implement the program, so she circulated petitions. Over half the girls in the school signed them, and the sports program has now been started.”
“I don’t think that would work here,” Ann Whitten said doubtfully. “Mr. Shelby hates petitions. Remember that time Brad T
ully started one about setting aside a smoking area? Mr. Shelby called a special assembly just to tell everybody that he’d heard that it was going around and that if it was ever turned in to him he’d burn it without even looking at it.”
“That was because of the issue,” Tammy said. “My dad didn’t like the smoking-area idea either. I don’t know that they’d feel the same way about something like this.”
“We could try it,” Kristy Grange suggested. “What is there to lose? It might work out. Like all of you were telling me about that thing with my parents, there comes a time when you have to stand up for yourself.”
“Is Pete still having fits about that?” Madison asked with a laugh.
“He and Niles are so pissed off they don’t even speak to me,” Kristy said. “Not that I miss their voices all that much. It’s nice, actually. The problem is that my dad’s mad at my mom because she’s started sticking up for me. I feel kind of guilty about that.”
“What about Mondays?” Madison asked her. “Does your mom have the guys staying home?”
“They won’t do it, and Dad’s backing them up on that, so Mom’s hired a woman from down the street to come in and pick up the place and get dinner started. Mom’s paying her every week out of her paycheck before she puts it in the college savings account.”
“So Pete and Niles are really paying the housekeeper out of their own college fund! Ha! That’s awesome!” Madison’s crow of delight was so contagious that it brought answering smiles from the faces all around her. “I never would’ve thought your mom would come through for you like that. I mean, she’s really nice and all, but she’s so conservative.”
“It seems like there have been a lot of women in this little pocket of the country who have been sleeping,” Irene Stark said quietly. “It’s like they got stuck in the beginning of the twentieth century and haven’t noticed how much things have changed.” The low, strong voice broke through the chatter and brought sudden silence as the girls turned to stare at their sponsor, startled by the intensity of her expression. “Like Kristy’s mother, these are nice women, quiet, gentle women, who have grown from being dutiful daughters to being dutiful wives and mothers. They’ve laid themselves down for men to walk on, because all their lives they’ve been led to believe that this is what women are supposed to do. Back in seventeen seventy-six, when patriots were demanding a Declaration of Independence, John Adams’s wife, Abigail, wrote to him in Philadelphia, saying, ‘Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.’ Adams wrote back to her, calling her ‘saucy’ and saying, ‘Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems.’ Times may have changed in many ways, but apparently, here in Modesta things have not. The men who live here seem to feel exactly the same way. They’re afraid to let the whip slip out of their hands.”