The Longings of Wayward Girls (17 page)

August 29, 2003

R

ay drove for an hour and stopped at a motel near the Connecticut shore, a shingled building built low to the ground, surrounded by a salt marsh. The

motel was ray’s idea, and sadie wonders, lying in bed, what other women he has brought here. They have just had sex, yet her body still aches for him. This is the meaning of the word “cleave,” she thinks: a bond forged through violence. He props his head up in the semidarkness, his face inches from her mouth.

“sadie, sadie,” he says. “your hair is dirty.”
“I didn’t have time to wash it.”
she is sickened by what she has done—betrayed her children, her husband with his happiness and pressed shirts, his careful concern.

ray drops his head to her breast. He sighs. His hands slide along her body, find a place to settle. He has yet to explain the duffel bag, left in the truck. There was never a plan in place for this, and it didn’t even occur to her to pack a bag. They drove mostly in silence—ray deep in thought, his brow furrowed, and sadie too afraid to hear the answers to her questions:
What are you running away from? Do I even figure in your plan, or did I stumble in at the wrong time?
she closes her eyes.
If I had come an hour later,
she wants to ask,
would you have even been there?
The motel sheet is starched and cheap. she doesn’t know how she will go back, so she refuses to imagine that yet. This, like her

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escape from her neighborhood earlier, gives her an odd sense of relief. outside the summer storm has followed them with its heavy skies and thunder.

“I love this,” she tells him.

He makes a sound of agreement, a kind of grunt. she isn’t sure he understands that she means the weather, that she’s leery about admitting she loves the sex. Him.

“I used to run outside in thunderstorms with an umbrella,” she says.
“you had those cutoff jean shorts. skinny legs.” His voice is deep and thick, satiated.
“The tar road would have that smell.”
she tries not to imagine what is happening without her, but the images surface like those in the View-Master she had as a child—the 3-D scenes falling into place at the click of the button, whole little worlds opening up, ones you could stare into for a long time, so filled with detail you might never see everything. ray falls asleep. she gets up and puts on her damp skirt and blouse, a decisive action, but now that she stands at the screen door of the motel, she is paralyzed. she watches the rain puddle in the sand and ground shells of the parking lot. If she breathes in deeply she can smell the briny scent of the tidal marsh. It is nearing dinnertime. other women will have come down the path, and she imagines Max and sylvia swallowed up in the confusion of their children, all of them vying for an ice cream cup, the women settling into chairs around the kitchen table. They will have just beaten the rain, and maybe a handful will have gotten caught up in it, emerging from the woods to dash across the Currys’ wet lawn.
Kate will make them the tequila sunrises she made for sadie, Maura, and Jane earlier. she wishes, for a moment, that she could be there with the neighborhood women, sipping her drink, listening to the talk. Max would tug her arm and tell her he had to use the bathroom. she feels a small, dull ache. your sister will help you, she’d say. Go get sylvia. For every little thing that sadie does for her children she can easily come up with someone else who might do it for them. she suspects she is entirely replaceable. It is as if, after having given birth and nursed them, her use has ended. when she tries to picture returning to the scene she has left, she cannot. There is no place for her.
sadie knows Kate will give her a reasonable amount of time to have completed her errand. Maybe they didn’t carry saffron at shaw’s, she’ll think. Maybe she had to go into the next town to the A & P. she will call sadie’s house, letting the phone ring and ring. once the storm passes she’ll take the children by the hand and walk them over. she’ll peer into the front bay window and try the door, which is wide open. sadie feels her heart sink, imagining Kate stepping inside, seeing the laundry heaped on the couch—sundresses and shorts, T-shirts and pajamas, Craig’s boxers, undershirts, and socks. There is the dust on the cherry tables, toys scattered on the floor. Kate will see the house is empty and take the children back to hers.
“who wants macaroni and cheese?” she’ll say.
Max will sit dejected on the den couch. “I want ice cream.”
“Maybe ice cream after dinner,” sylvia will say. sadie realizes that sylvia will sense something is amiss, that she needs to step in and play her role. she’ll sit down beside Max and take his hand in hers. Max will swat her hand away. sylvia won’t be deterred, and she’ll take his hand again.
“who wants to play upside-down house after we eat?” she’ll say. she’ll raise her hand in the air, and Max will look at her glumly, then raise his hand too.
Kate will prepare macaroni and cheese, which sadie knows Max will not eat. He will refuse to take a bite, until sylvia says, “no game . . . ,” in her sweet, high voice, and he will relent. Afterward, the children will ask Kate for a hand mirror, and they will walk around her house side by side looking down into it, pretending they are walking on the ceiling. sadie doesn’t know what Kate will think of her children and the odd game sadie taught them. she’ll continue to call sadie’s until Craig answers, home from work. she’ll speak to him in hushed tones on the phone. Then, sadie thinks, his footsteps will sound on her slate walk, a metallic ring of his shoe soles on the slate. He will yank on the screen door, scrape his feet on the mat. Kate will hand over the children to Craig, who will stand there in the foyer clutching their hands, his eyes lost and dark, as if to say,
What now?
sadie can see his baffled expression. she knows Kate Curry will not be able to rush him out the door. His eyes will beseech her.
“Do you have family you can call?” she’ll ask him.
The streetlights will come on, buzzing to life with their pale violet beams. someone will be mowing a lawn; a group of children will play in the twilight, catching fireflies. Max will squirm at the end of his father’s hand. sylvia’s eyes will be wide with the knowledge that something is wrong, that her father, commander of the household, keeper of checks and balances, bedtime despot, is at a loss.
Craig will shake his head. “no one locally.”
“sadie’s family?”
Craig will do a short shake, almost irritated. “no.”
“Grandpa is in brightview,” sylvia will say. “It’s assistant living.”
Kate and Craig will both glance at her, surprised.
“Grandma died a long time ago,” she’ll say quietly, awkward now that their eyes are on her. “she lives with the elves and fairies now.”
“now, don’t you worry about anything,” Craig will tell her. “we’ll go home and get ready for bed and wait for Mommy.”
Max will look up at his father. “Is she having another baby? will this one come home with us?”
Craig’s face will darken with an emotion that even as a product of her imagination sadie cannot decipher. He will tug on the children’s hands and turn toward the door without any reply. sylvia will cast a longing look back at Kate. As sadie stands by the screen door of the motel, her heart feels tight.
she hopes that Kate will offer to help put them to bed, that maybe she will offer to let them stay with her. she doesn’t want sylvia or Max to cry. she can see Craig refusing out of annoyance or pride, pushing open the screen and moving down the front steps and the walkway, tugging the children along, before he stops and turns, his face white.
“I’d appreciate your help,” he’ll say stiffly.
At sadie’s house, Kate will try not to notice the evidence of sadie’s despair. she’ll take the children up the carpeted stairs. The bathtub she’ll run water into will have a ring of grime. sylvia will bring Max pajamas that look as if she has picked them up off the floor. The children are unused to someone else preparing them for bed, and they will be quiet, compliant.
“I take a shower, not a bath,” sylvia will tell Kate, who will have bundled Max up in a towel and then helped him with his pajamas and brushed his hair with her father’s old hairbrush. sadie will remember that Max’s bed is unmade, but Kate will fluff the pillow, reshape and turn down the sheets on one side. she will have agreed to read as many books to him as he’d like. It is a warm night, and he will wear little cotton pajamas comprised of shorts and a T-shirt decorated with pictures of a cartoon character Kate won’t recognize. sadie knows the room is in disarray, and she wishes she had tidied it up for him the way he likes it: deposited the toys in the old wooden box, lined up others just so on the shelves—a model car, an airplane, small plastic army men. Instead, she’s been spending her free time sitting alone on the back deck with a drink, talking on the phone, dreaming of a man who is not their father. sadie is overcome, suddenly, with regret like a flush, a warm dousing. Max will have chosen a stack of books and will be sitting on his bed, waiting. on his face will be an expression of watchfulness.
“where is sylvie?” he’ll say. His eyes will shine in the light from the bedside lamp. sadie closes her eyes, opens them. she attempts to compose herself. If she could she would fly back to Max’s room, to its neglect, its boy smell, its bedside lamp in the shape of a baseball bat and glove, the books—
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Caps for Sale.
sadie never needs to read the words—these are books she can recite—but even if Kate remembers reading them to her own son, she will have to squint in the dim light to see the print, and she will get some of it wrong, and skip pages in an effort to finish quicker.
Kate will offer to help sylvia, her face in the dim hallway pale, fringed with her dark hair, but sylvia will have dreamed up some fairy tale to make sense of the evening’s strangeness, casting Kate Curry as a witch. she’ll remember some version with the children’s victorious escape. sadie hopes she will block out all the rest—the awful captivity, the fear of the oven, the old woman’s transformation into a hobbling creature with warts and vile breath and long arthritic fingers, her bunions pressing against the leather of her outdated shoes. sylvia will shut the bathroom door and turn the lock.
sadie imagines the dark hallway, the soft carpet, her husband downstairs calling the authorities. Kate will know by now what she has suspected for hours—that sadie’s need for saffron was a ruse. There isn’t a recipe set out on the kitchen counter. sadie wonders if Kate will tell the police this when they come, if they will ask her only what sadie said or if they will solicit her opinion. Kate must know sadie has gone somewhere in secret, a place where she does not wish to be discovered, that she has for some time neglected the life she once lived and has surreptitiously forged an idea of another. she can tell this from the collected dust, the fingerprints on the storm door, the sink filled with plates from breakfast and lunch, the crumbs on the counters.
ray turns on the bed behind her. sadie hears him ease himself into a sitting position. she feels the cool rain through the screen.
“why are you by the door?” ray says. His voice is thick with sleep, confused.
“I like the rain.”
“you look like you’re going to leave.”
sadie breathes in the smell of the oil paint on the door frame. The sky is pale, the rain slowing. “I’m hungry,” she says.
she hears him move on the bed and then he is standing behind her, his body pressed against hers. He places his face in her hair and sighs, runs his hands down her arms.
“Don’t don’t don’t don’t ever leave,” he says softly.
He encircles her with his arms and she falls back against him. It is easy to give in, to pretend whatever he wants her to, be whoever he wants.
“lobster,” she says. “let’s get lobster at Cherrystones.”
This was her mother’s favorite meal, her favorite restaurant at the shore. ray laughs into her hair and spins her around. There is a moment when their eyes meet—brief, fleeting—and sadie sees something like disappointment, as if he believed he was holding someone else, someone just like her. but it is there and then gone, so brief that she cannot be entirely sure. she watches him pick up his clothes from the motel room floor and dress. she stays by the door. The rain has stopped, but the awnings drip and the air blows into the room, cool and clean.
That long-ago summer is suddenly here, in sharp relief. It has been worrying the edges of her consciousness for weeks— a fleeting, amorphous presence—and now it has arrived, fully formed. sadie realizes she has been seduced by ray, by his letters, by her own desire to find out who she really is. with ray she is becoming someone other—a new person, transformed. He grabs the key and stands by the scarred bureau. “ready?” he says.
sadie pushes open the screen door and steps outside, and lets it bang shut behind her. she feels his eyes on her as she walks to the truck. she feels the sway of her hips and brushes her hair back from her forehead. she knows she’s been playing a character, but now she suspects that character is her mother. As she climbs into the truck, she wants to laugh. This is a new script.
ray backs out of the motel lot. The shells grind under the tires. The seagulls swoop into the puddles. sadie flips down the visor mirror.
“I look messy,” she says. she tries to brush her hair with her fingers, then she pulls it all back into a ponytail. no matter what she does the face in the small square mirror is her mother’s—the way her eyebrows are positioned over her eyes; the eyes themselves, having taken on the foggy, dazed look of a harried housewife. she wonders when that happened, if ray’s nearness has prompted this alchemy.
“There you go,” ray says as she secures her hair back. He glances at her as he drives, maybe worried she is thinking of a way to get home, coming up with an excuse to explain where she’s been.
“He’s going to worry,” she says.
They have never discussed Craig, as if ray assumes he knows all he needs to know about him.
“The husband returning from work,” ray says now. He laughs softly. “Pulling his fancy car into the garage and wondering why dinner isn’t ready. what’s he drive, Cadillac? benz?”
sadie offers a flat smile. ray imagines him in a pressed suit, a man unflappable and assured of his wife’s love. The man he pictures is one from their childhood sitcoms—the kind who takes out his cigarettes after a meal, who pours himself highballs from a glass decanter and has a casual method of whistling, as if he was once a boy who walked along split-rail fences or delivered newspapers on his bike with his dog running beside him. sadie knows ray doesn’t think about her children. To him they are just a girl with wise, knowing eyes, threading daisies. A boy’s round head in his car seat. sadie is grateful she can keep these two lives—the one with Craig and the children, the one with ray—separate. she didn’t imagine herself beyond the bedroom of the old Filley house, but now that they’ve left she feels the space between who she was and who she is becoming wider with the distance.
He reaches over and puts his hand on her thigh. They have time, she thinks, before anyone comes looking. They will have this night, and then a discussion of where to go next. Time to plan it out. sadie knows he relishes the secrecy, the hiding. It excites him to imagine having her to himself in the motel room. sadie thinks he will ask her to say some lines from the play, and she will pose in the room for him, both of them pretending they’ve left nothing behind. she remembers ray and her mother running through lines together at the Filleys’ pool that summer. Her mother was always a flirt. sadie would notice her with men at cocktail parties at their house— leaning up close to them, whispering in their ears.
They pass the Italian place and he suggests they eat there.
“no,” she says. “It has to be Cherrystones.”
He laughs and glances at her. sadie finds herself giggling too and she cannot stop. The two of them, laughing, their eyes wet, pull into the Cherrystones parking lot. next door is the driving range, two boys sharing a bucket of balls. The sun has just set over the salt marsh, and the air is cool. They get out of the truck and sadie feels once again the approach of fall, sees it in the color of the marsh, the way the birds wing overhead. she sits in the truck, laughing and crying. ray glances at her, and she wonders, suddenly, if ray and her mother actually spent time alone together, what her mother was like with him. ray was just a teenager—but one her mother might have led on, enjoying the attention. The light continues to deepen over the marsh—pale violet now, with streaks of an orange the color of sherbet. she hears her own heartrending laughter and they sit in the truck a moment, until she catches her breath. she wipes her tears out from under her eyes.